Page 94 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

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Mediations: From the Coffee House
to the Internet Café

Media institutions and technologies shouldered the burden of
extreme hopes, expectations and fears throughout the twentieth
century, and this shows little sign of abating in the digitised twenty-

first. From the point of view of democracy and citizenship, the media
have in some quarters been painted as agents of depoliticisation and
mass consumerism, and as harbingers of better democracy in others;
they are expected to expose, hold to account and dilute power; or

they are vilified for their distortions and deflections. The pervasive
role of mediated communication in contemporary social, political
and cultural life is, however, rarely in dispute.
It’s necessary for any serious investigation of the public sphere
to foreground the issue of mediation. This is something Habermas
has been rightly criticised for failing to do. As I touched on in the

first chapter, there is an implicit logocentrism lurking in Habermas’s
theoretical frameworks, an unproblematised communications
hierarchy that privileges speech and the printed word. In Structural
Transformation, the electronic and audio-visual media were greeted
with a certain contempt: in Habermas’s subsequent writing they
became little more than an afterthought, encapsulated in the vague
claim that they represent a ‘compromise’ between a dialogically
conceived communicative action and the non-discursive steering
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media of the ‘system’. In the absence of any serious investigation
of the role of communications media, The Theory of Communicative
Action suggests a problematic binary between action ‘mediated’ by
non-discursive steering media, on the one hand, and ‘unmediated’
discourse, on the other. Now, this is clearly not Habermas’s intention.
He knows that even speech is mediation – he has taken the linguistic
turn, even if he has not followed his post-structuralist counterparts
down quite the same road. Habermas doesn’t subscribe to the fallacy of
transparent communication. In order to address this tension, we need
to assess, first, whether Habermas’s theory actually falls over when it

confronts the realities of pervasive mediation in the contemporary
world; and second, what kind of critical purchase, if any, it offers

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