Page 95 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

90 Jürgen Habermas

for dealing with extant modes of mediated communication. I aim
to provide an introduction to these questions in this chapter. I’ll
conclude by suggesting not simply that the Habermasian public-
sphere framework can and must accommodate the realities of pervasive
mediation but that if it were to critically embrace mediation it would
be a greatly enriched framework.
2
Unlike John Durham Peters, then, who elegantly critiques the
tendency for communications theory (Habermas included) to
privilege the Socratic ideals of dialogue and reciprocity over the model
of scattered, one-to-many communications, my argument is oriented
instead towards deconstructing the binary of mediated (‘bad’) and
unmediated (‘good’) communication. Like Peters, I will also begin by
discussing mediation as mass mediation. But I will then move on to

a broader definition of mediation, one that encompasses putatively
dialogic media forms (implicating so-called ‘new’ media in particular),
but one which also encourages us to think of mediation as something
other than simply a tradeoff between intersubjective discourse and

the non-discursive influences of money and power.

THE FALL OF THE AGORA
Probably the crispest critique of the Habermasian public sphere as
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a media-blind anachronism was developed by John B. Thompson.
What distinguishes Thompson’s critique from others that target the
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logocentrism of the Habermasian public sphere is the way it retains
Habermas’s focus on the democratic imagination and the problems of
legitimacy and power in contemporary society. Because it raises such
salient issues, I shall devote some space to it here. Thompson calls on
those concerned with the problem of democracy to bid a fond farewell
to that cherished dream, an arena of dialogical public deliberation
and participation which nostalgically gestures back to the citizens’
assemblies of the ancient Greek agora and to an idealistic symbiosis
of lexis and praxis, word and deed. Where the Greeks sought to create
reciprocal speech relations (among male slave-owning citizens)
coterminous with the social space over which decisions impacted,
the problem for democrats in the modern world is of a radically
different order. ‘We live in a world today’, Thompson reminds us, ‘in
which the sheer scale and complexity of decision-making processes
limits the extent to which they can be organised in a participatory
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way.’ Modern ‘communities of fate’ are too large and too complex,
and the consequences of political and economic decisions are too

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