Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy

Journal : Duke University Press (1990)

Page: 56-80

Author: Nancy Fraser

Context:

• Jurgen Habermas's work 'Structural Transformation of Public Sphere' is helpful in theorizing the limits of democracy in the late capitalist societies. 
• It countered the inability of progressive social movements (Socialist & Marxist traditions) to appreciate the distinction between state apparatus and public arenas of citizen discourse/association. It assumed that economic control to the socialist state means surrendering it to the socialist citizenry. The conflation of state and public sphere resulted in an authoritarian state, thereby jeopardizing the idea of socialist democracy. 
• The contemporary feminist discourse's use of 'public sphere' is also problematic as it is used to describe everything outside the domestic/family sphere. It conflates three distinct things - the state, the official economy of paid employment and arenas of public discourse. It creates political consequences where often the liberation task is handed over to the oppressors. 
• Habermas's public sphere overcomes these problems by designating a theatre in modern societies in which political participation is enacted through medium of talk. It is an arena of discursive interaction where citizens deliberate about their common affairs. It is critical of the state and not governed by market relations, which distinguishes it from state and economy.
• The critique of late capitalist democracy is not possible without making use of Habermas's public sphere. However, it's critical interrogation and reconstruction is necessary. 
• This liberal bourgeois public sphere is no longer feasible under the altered conditions of 20th century 'welfare state mass democracy'. A new form of public sphere is required. 
• Habermas fails to problematize dubious assumptons that underlie this bourgeois model and also doesn't offer an idea of post-bourgeois public sphere. 

The public sphere: Alternative histories, competing conceptions

• Bourgeois public sphere is a body of private persons assembled to discuss matters of public concern or common interest. It came as a counterweight to absolutist states of early modern europe. It mediated between the society and state by by holding the state accountable to society through publicity. 
• Initially, it meant that information about state functioning be made accessible for critical scrutiny and force of public opinion. Later, it meant that general interest of bourgeois society be transmitted to the state via legally guaranteed methods of free speech, free press, free assembly and parliamentary institutions. 
• On one hand, this public sphere designated an institutional mechanism to rationalize the political domination by rendering states accountable to the citizenry, while on the other hand, it designated an unrestricted rational discussion of public matters. It was open and accessible to all, mere private interests were inadmissible, status inequalities were bracketed and discussants were to deliberate as peers. 
• The full potential of bourgeois public sphere was never realized in practice as it was based on a social order where the state was sharply differentiated from the newly privatized market economy (society). Entry of nonbourgeois strata into the public sphere brought social questions of class struggle into the public sphere. It fragmented into a mass of competing interest groups. 
• Society and the state became intertwined with the rise of welfare state mass democracy. Publicity based on critical scrutiny was replaced by public relations, mass-mediated staged displays, manufacture and manipulation of public opinion.
• Revisionist scholars such as Joan Lendes, Mary Ryan and Geoff Eley accused Habermas of idealizing the liberal public sphere. It was ridden by significant exclusions, especially gender. For example, the republican public sphere in France came as an opposition to the woman-friendly salon culture. Artificial, effeminate and aristocratic traits of salons were countered using the austere, rational, virtuous and manly republican public sphere. It also had an etymolgical connection inspired by classical traditions. For example, public and pubic (penis), testimony and testicle. 
• English and German public spheres too faced the question of gender exclusion, which is rooted in the processes of class formation. Liberal public sphere characterized with civil society and voluntary associations was in fact not accessible to everyone. It was a power base of a stratum of bourgeois men who regarded them as 'universal class' and preparing to assert their fitness to govern. 
• Liberal public sphere contained new gender norms associating domesticity with feminine and sharp separation of private and public spheres. It also corresponded to lower and higher social strata. 
• Ironically, the discourse of publicity espousing accessibilty, rationality and suspension of status hierarchies is itself deployed as a strategy of distinction.
• Habermas fails to examine other nonliberal, non-bourgeois, competing public spheres, which casued the idealization of liberal public sphere.
• According to Mary Ryan, the elite bourgeois women built counter-civil society of alternative woman-only voluntary associations, imitating the all-male societies built by their fathers and grandfathers. They also brought private issues of domesticity and motherhood into public sphere. Less privileged women played supporting roles in male-dominated working class protest activities (street protests and parades). 
• Liberal public sphere rested on the class and gender biased notion of publicity, which makes it ideological. There were many competing counterpublics - nationalist, popular peasants, elite women and working class publics. They proposed alternative styles of political behaviour and norms of public speech, always conflciting with the liberal public sphere.
• Bourgeois conception of public sphere was not simply an unrealized utopian ideal, but a masculinist ideological notion sought to legitimize the emergent form of class rule. 
• The bourgeois public sphere is an institutional vehicle for changing nature of political domination. Points to a shift from a repressive mode of domination to a hegemonic one. A shift from a rule based on acquiescence to superior force to rule based on consent supplemented with some measure of repression. 
• Hence, is the bourgeois public sphere an instrument of domination or a utopian ideal with emancipatory nature? - Neither. It is based on four assumptions:
• Assumption that interlocutors in a public sphere could bracket their status differentials and deliberate as social equals. 
• Assumption that existence of multiple competing publics drifts away rather than towards a greater democracy. 
• Assumption that public discourse should be restricted to the deliberation about common good, excluding private interests completely. 
• Assumption that a functional democratic public sphere demands a sharp separation between the civil society and the state. 

Open access, participatory parity and social equality:

• Public sphere excluded women of all classes and ethnicities based on ascribed gender status, excluded plebian men based on property qualifications, excluded women and men of racialized ethicities on racial grounds. 
• The ideal of public sphere of open access remains unaffected despite all these exclusions, as it can be overcome in principle. It only stressed on bracketing the inequalities of status instead of their elimination. But it wasn't bracketed in reality as the discursive interaction within bourgeois public sphere was governed by the style of decorum that reflected status inequality.  
• This factually point to the informal exclusion of women and plebian classes that prevents participatory parity despite formal/legal license to participate. 
• For example, men tend to interrupt women more in mixed sex faculty meetings in deliberative bodies. Men tends to speak more, take longer turns and women's interventions are often ignored. Here deliberation masks subtle forms of control (Jane Mansbridge). The language used for reasoning favours one perspective and discourages the other. 
• Hence, we should unbracket the inequalities and thematize them explicitly, which resonates with Habermas's later communicative ethics. 
• The liberal public sphere assumes that it could be a space of zero degree culture, where multiple ethos could be accomodated with perfect neutrality. In stratified societies, unequally empowered social groups tend to develop unequally valued cultural styles. it leads to the development of powerful informal pressures that marginalize the contributions of members from subordinate groups to the everyday life contexts and public spheres. 
• Political economy enforces this marginalization at a structural level, as the media that provides material support for the circulation of views are privately owned and operated for profit. Subordinate groups are denied equal access to the material means of equal participation. 
• This puts autonomy of political institutions strongly endorsed by liberalism at stake. The problem of democracy becomes the problem of how to insulate political processes from non-political/pre-political porcesses such as family, economy and informal everyday life. Liberals explore how to strengthen the barriers separating political institutions from economic, cultural and socio-sexual institutions generating inequality. 
• Social inequalities should be eliminated instead of merely bracketing. Not everyone having same income, but require a rough equality that is inconsistent with systemic dominance and subordination. Modern democracies cannot ignore this. 

 Equality, diversity and multiple publics:

• Here author scrutinizes the normative assumption that a single, overarching public sphere as a desirable state of affairs and the proliferation of multiple publics indicates a departure from democracy. Both stratified and egalitarian societies are studied. 
• In stratified societies, realizing full parity of participation in public debate/deliberation is not possible and hence, look for what form of public life comes closest to approaching that ideal. 
• In this singular bourgeois public sphere, the subordinate groups will be silenced and supervised by dominant groups, lack arenas for deliberating and defending their interests. 
• Subaltern counterpublics (women, workers, people of colour, gays and lesbians) should be constituted where counterdiscourses are invented and circulated, permitting them to formulate oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests and needs. For example, US feminist subaltern counterpublic invented new terms for describing social reality - sexism, the double shift, sexual harassment, marital/date/acquaintance rape. This helps to reduce the extent of disadvantage in official public spheres. 
• It is possible that some of these counterpublics might not be democratic, egalitarian or inclusive enough. However, their existence will expand the discursive space and challenge dominant publics. Unquestioned assumptions will now be publicly argued out. 
• These counterpublics militates against the separatism of political institutions envisioned by liberalism. It assumes an orientation that is publicist against formation of enclaves. Hence, interacting discursively as a member of a public meant disseminating one's discourse into ever widening arenas. Habermas already agrees to this. 
• Counterpublics in stratified societies have a dual character - functioning as spaces of withdrawal and regroupment, at the same time function as bases and training grounds for agitational activities directed towards wider publics. This dialectics between two functions offer the emancipatory potential for offsetting unjust participatory privileges of dominant social groups. 
• Geoff Eley suggests that we think of the public sphere in stratified societies as a structured setting where cultural and ideological contest or negotiation among a variety of publics takes place. This single structured setting advantages some and disadvantages others. Discursive relations among differentially empowered publics take the form of contestation rather deliberation. 
• Egalitarian societies, which are classless and lack gender/racial divisions of labour need not be culturally homogenous. They are inhabited by social groups with diverse values, identities and cultural styles. Would a single comprehensive public sphere be preferable to multiple publics in this context? 
• It is important to understand the relationship between public discourse and social identities. Public spheres are not only arenas for the formation of discursive opinions but they are arenas for the formation and enactment of social identities as well. 
• Participation means speaking in 'one's own voice' thereby simultaneously constructing and expressing one's cultural identity through idiom and style. 
• Public spheres are not spaces of zero degree culture where it is hospitable to any possible form of cultural expression. They consist in culturally specific institutions (journals, social geographies etc). They are lenses that filter and alter the utterances they frame. They accomodate some expressive modes and not others. Hence, a single public sphere is not practical here. 
• A single public sphere lacking a culturally neutral lens favours the expressive norms of one cultural group over others. This makes discursive assimilation a condition for participation in public debate. The result would be the demise of multiculturalism. 
• It doesn't preclude the possibility of a comprehensive arena in which members of different, more limited publics talk across the lines of cultural diversity. It will have to debate on policies and issues affecting everyone but whether the influence of values, expressive norms and protocols of persuasion ensure quality of deliberations aimed at reaching agreements through reasoning needs to be studied. 
• It is posible for cultural diversity and social equality to coexist in a participatory democracy as the communication across lines of cultural difference is possible, granted multicultural literacy is acquired through practice. 
• Different strands woven together to form various cultural identities will have something in common. Differences should not be bracketed but openly recognized. 
• Plurality of perspectives as the basis for public sphere allows internal differences and antagonisms, thereby discouraging reified blocs. Unbounded character and publicist orientation of publics allows people to participate in more than one public and memberships of different publics may partially overlap. This makes intercultural communication conceivable in principle. 
• Also, this is not an endorsement for postmodern celebration of multiplicity. 

Public spheres, common concerns and private interests:

• The contestatory relationship between subaltern counterpublics and dominant publics includes a question on the boundaries of public sphere - what counts as a public matter in contrast to the private?
• There are several different senses of publicity embedded in bourgeois public sphere - state related, accessible to everyone, of concern to everyone, pertaining to a common good or shared interest. Each of these corresponds to a contrasting sense of privacy. 
• In addition, there are two senses of privacy - pertaining to private property in a market economy, pertaining to intimate domestic/personal life (including sexual life). 
• How to define an issue of concern to everyone? - It refers to what objecvtively affects everyone as seen from an outsider's perspective, on the one hand, and what is recognized as a matter of common concern by participants, on the other hand. Only the second criteria matters but there is no guarantee that all of them will agree. 
• For example, feminists who argued that domestic violence against women is a matter of common concern and a legitimate topic of public discourse were in minority as majority considered it as a private matter. Only after subaltern counterpublic of feminists via sustained discursive contestation, disseminated a view that domestic violence as a widespread systemic feature of male dominated societies, it became a common concern. 
• Hence, there are no naturally given boundaries here. Only a discursive contestation can decide what count as a matter of common concern. 
• A democratic publicity gurantees opportunities for minorities to convince others that what in the past was not public or a matter of common concern, should now become so. 
• Habermas's public sphere is a civic republican model as opposed to a liberal-individualist model. It stresses a political view of people reasoning together to promote a common good that transcends the mere sum of individual preferences. Participants are transformed from a collection of self-seeking, private individuals into a public-spirited collectivity. 
• The civic republican view does not assume people's preferences, interests and identities are exogenous of public discourse and deliberation. They can be both outcomes and antecedents of public deliberation, discursively constituted in and through it. 
• According to Jane Mansbridge, this contains a serious confusion that blunts its critical edge. It assumes deliberation must be deliberation about the common good. It upholds an 'all-encompassing we', thereby ruling claims of self/group-interest out of order. It prevents participants from clarifying their interests, especially if it conflicts the majority view. Thus, a scope for solution to a pressing problem is eliminated. 
• As discovery of a common good cannot be predicted in advance as an outcome of the deliberation, strictures on what topics to be discussed cannot be justified. 
• Terms 'public' and 'private' cannot be simply considered as societal spheres but they are cultural classifications and rhetorical labels. It is frequently deployed to delegitimate some interests, views and topics and to valorize others. Categorizing issues of private property (economic privacy) and personal/sexual (domestic privacy) life as private matters is part of this ideology to disciminate subordinate groups. 

Strong publics, weak publics: On civil society and the state

• The assumption that a functioning democratic public sphere requires a sharp separation of civil society and the state can have two interpretations depending on how one understands 'civil society'. 
• First, if civil society means a privately ordered capitalist economy insisting on its separation from state, signifies defending classical liberalism. Limited government and laissez-faire capitalism is a necessary precondition for a well functioning public sphere. Only a politically regulated economic organization and redistribution can help subordinate groups to achieve participatory parity (rough socio-economic equality) necessary for realizing a fully democratic public sphere. Hence, state cannot be separated from this civil society. 
• Second, if civil society means the nexus of nongovernmental or secondary associations that are neither economic or administrative, we can support its separation from the state. In this case, we assume that the private persons coming together as a public are not state officials or are not participating as part of their official capacity due to the risk of exposure to state power. Contrarily, outcome should be a public opinion and a critical commentary on authorized decision making.  It should be an informally mobilized body of nongovernmental discursive opinion which counterweighs the state. This extragovernmental character confers the public sphere with an aura of independence, autonomy and legitimacy. 
• Effectively, it promotes weak publics as its deliberative practice is confined to opinion-formation and does not include decision making. Any attempt to extend its purview to decision making shall threat the autonomy of public opinion itself as public would be merged with the state. 
• With the emergence of parliamentary sovereignty, the public sphere undergoes a structural transformation as parliament itself becomes a public sphere within the state. They can be called strong publics as their discourse authorizes both opinion-formation and decision-making. Here, the line between civil society and the state is blurred. 
• It establishes a stronger democratic political arrangement where the force of public opinion (weak publics) is strengthened when a body (strong publics) representing it is empowered to translate such opinions into authoritative actions. However, the dynamics of relations between these two publics and their role should be explored further. 
• However, there lies instances where these strong publics proliferates to become self-managing institutions. Ex: workplaces, child care centres, residential communities etc. It will only have internal institutional public spheres to form opinions and make decisions. Only members belonging to these institutions (strong publics) are part of deliberations to determine its design and operation. However, they are also accountable to external members (weak publics) who are affected by the operations of these institutions which they are not a part of. They have a legitimate claim for a say in its design and operations. 
• It prompts us to analyze in which contexts direct democracy or representative democracy is the best option. We need to explore the best possible institutional arrangements to ensure accountability of democratic decision making bodies (strong publics) to their weak publics.
• Should we think central parliament as a strong super-public with authoritative discursive sovereignty over basic societal ground rules and coordination arrangements? Does that mean a single weaker super-public existing in addition to other smaller publics? Is nations state still be regarded as unit of sovereignty in the context of global interdependence and international division of labour? 
• Any conception of public sphere that requires a sharp distinction between civil society and the state will be unable to imagine the forms of self-management, inter-public coordination and political accountability that are essential to a democratic and egalitarian society. 
• We need a post-bourgeois public sphere to envision greater role for public spheres than mere autonomous opinion formation without decision making power. It will make us think about strong and weak publics, including various hybrid forms. It allows us to explore various democratic possibilities beyond the limits of actually existing democracy. 

Conclusion:

• Hence, bourgeois conception of public sphere described by Habermas is inadequate to critique the limits of actually existing democracy in late capitalist societies. All four assumptions of bourgeois public sphere were challenged and alternatives were explored. 
• This work also exposed that in late capitalist societies:
• How social inequality taints deliberations  within publics?
• How inequality affects relations among publics?
• How publics are differentially segmented or empowered?
• How some publics are involuntarily enclaved and subordinated to others?
• How labelling of specific issues/interests as private limits the range of problems?
• How overly weak public spheres denude public opinion of practical force?