Fraser - Rethinking the Public Sphere

I shall begin,  in section  one, by juxtaposing  Habermas's  account  of  the  structural  transformation  of  the  public sphere  to  an alternative  account  that can be  pieced  together  from  some
recent  revisionist  historiography. Then,  I shall  identify  four assumptions
underlying  the  bourgeois  conception  of  public  sphere,  as Habermas de-
scribes  it,  which  this  newer  historiography  renders suspect.  Next,  in  the
following  four sections,  I shall examine  each of these assumptions  in turn.
Finally,  in  a  brief  conclusion,  I  shall  draw  together  some  strands  from
these  critical  discussions  that point  toward an alternative,  post-bourgeois
conception  of  the public  sphere.


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JH's Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere
- Notion of the PubS
- crucial concept to clear up confusions regarding the difference between ST.Ap.s and PubArenas of CitDisc/Assoc.
- conflation enabled the effective institutionalization of the socialist vision in authoritarian statist form, instead of Part.Dem. form.
- Within Contem.Fems.
- Pubs - often taken to mean everything outside the domestic/familial sphere
- Conflates ST, official ECO., and Pubs
- Practical consequences of conflation - struggles over women's liberation fail to address potential resubjugation, instead of family, to ST or ECO


JH's PubS
- "designates a theatre in modern societies in which political participation is enacted through the medium of talk.  It is the space in which citizens deliberate about their common affairs, hence, an institutionalized arena of discursive interaction."
- conceptually distinct from ST - site for prod./circulation of discourses
- can be critical of the state
- distinct from ECO
- arena for discursive relations - theatre for debating and deliberating, rather than buying selling


JH's subtitle - "An Inquiry into a Category of a Bourgeois Society"
- aim is to identify the specific conditions which enabled the rise of a specific form of the PubS
- upshot: under distinct condtions, the Welfare state mass democracy - WSMD - old Pubs not feasible


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According to JH

Idea of PubS - body of private persons assembled to discuss matters of public concern / common interest
- Acquired force in early modern Europe - Bourgeois Pubs - BPubs - to serve as counterweights to absolutist states
- To mediate b/w Soc and ST - hold ST accountable to Soc thru "publicity"
- Thru:
- free access of info. re: ST functioning - subject to PubO
- later - transmission considered general interest to ST via free speech, press, assembly, then Rep.Gov.

- PubS - institutional mechanism for rationalizing of political domination - rendering states accountable to some of the citizenry
- Also referred to specific kind of interaction
- Discussion open to all
- Merely private interests to be inadmissable
- Inequalities of status to be bracketed
- Discussants to deliberate as peers
- Result to be PubO - consensus about the common good


Full Utopian Potential - Never Realized
- Open access - never made good
- Premised on SocO in which ST | Soc
- Allowed for exclusion of private interests
- Undermined when other strata of society included
- The "social question" came to fore - polarization by class struggle
- Street demos and backroom compromises replaced PubDeb
- With WSMD - Soc - ST intertwined
- Publicity - became public relations, manufacture of PubO

According to Revisionist Historiography

JH idealizes LPubS
- Official Pubs - rested on / constituted by exclusions
- especially - gender
- constructed in opposition to salon culture - stigmatized as artificial, effeminate, aristocratic
- republican PubS - as rational, virtuous, manly - masculinist gender constructs built into the very conception of the RPubs
- other exclusions
- soil which nourished LPubS - CSoc
- network of clubs/associations not accessible to all
- the arena for stratum of BMen coming to see themselves as universal class - preparing to assert fitness to govervn.
- distinctive culture of CSoc - process of BClass formation - practices defined emerging elite
- distinguished itself from both aristocracy and popular/plebian strata it aspired to rule
- also helped explains women's exclusion - distinction bw PubPri - key signifiers

Irony - discourse of publicity touting accessibility, along with rationality, suspension of status hierarchies - deployed as a strategy of distinction
- Not fatal to project itself, but does suggest complexity between publicity and status


Other PubS
- JH - will not discuss plebeian PubS - understands it to be ephemeral phenomena during FR, nor the plebiscitary-acclamatory PubS of highly dev. industrial societies.
- Women of various classes /ethnicities - constructed access routes to public political life
- For BWomen - counter-CivSoc of alternative woman-only assocations
- For less privileged women - access thru participation thru support roles of male protest activities
- In absence of formal incorporation through suffrage - variety of ways of accessing PubLife and a multiplicity of public arenas
- view of women's exclusion based on class and gender biased notion of publicity
- implicitly accepts BPubs to be the public

- Never the public
- Always competing counterpublics
- Relations always conflictual - elaborated alternative styles of political behavior, alternative norms of speech
- Emergence of BPubs - never solely defined by struggle against traditional authority and absolutism
- addressed the problem of public containment

In contrast to JH's view - exclusions not merely accidental trappings but constitutive
- Consideration of which - "a gestalt switch that alters the very meaning of the public sphere"
- Not simply an unrealized ideal - a masculinist ideological notion that functioned to legitimate an emergent form of class rule"
- Emergence of PubS - a transformation in the nature of political domination
- Reflects shift from repression to hegemony
- Like repression-based mode of rule - secures ability of one stratum to rule another
- Gramscian lesson - PubS produce consent thru circulation of discourse that construct the common sense, represent the existing order as natural/just.  In mature form, PubS permit most people most of the time to recognize themselves in its discourses - even those ultimately disadvantaged by social construction of consent.

Conclusions? Instrument of domination or utopian ideal
- Perhaps both, actually neither
- The revisionist historiography neither undermines nor vindicates the concept of PubS as such.  Calls into question assumptions central to the BMPubs
1. since inequalities can be bracketed, social equality is not necessary for democracy
2. the proliferation of PubS is a step away from democracy, one single comp. PubS better to multiple publics
3. deliberation should be limited to common good - private interests, issues not acceptable
4. the functioning of DPubS requires separation between CivSoc and ST

1. Accessibility of all to Pubs in JH's account - central meaning of publicity
- Never actually realized -> question what to make of ideal now that it can, conceivably, put into effect
- Only a matter of time before exclusions overcome - ideal remains unaffected
- Issue can't be reduced to determining whether formal exclusions are still in place - look at process of discursive interaction with the formally inclusive arenas
- individuals were to bracket out difference in order to interact as if they were peers
- differences not effectively bracketed - governed by protocols of style and decorum which were markers and correlates of status inequality
- informal impediments to participatory parity
- fem.pol.theorists - deliberation as mask for domination
- transformation of I intor we can easily mask subtle forms of control
- language used for reasoning favors one way of seeing things, discourages others
- subordinate groups are unable to find the right voice or words to express their thoughts, or when they do, discover they are not heard
- Fostering participatory parity
- Not accomplished thru bracketing of differences
- In most case, more appropriate to unbracket inequalities in the sense of explicitly thematizing them
- Bracketing seems to imply that "a public sphere is or can be a space of zero degree culture, so utterly bereft of any specific ethos as to accomodate with perfect neutrality and equal ease interventions expressive of any and every cultural ethos"
- counterfactual nature of assumption - not accidental
- in stratified societies, unequally empowered social groups tend to develop unequally valued cultural styles
- effect is that powerful informal pressures marginalize the contributions of members of subordinated groups
- pressures are amplified by the PolEco of BPubs - media which constitute the material support for the circulation of views are not accessible by subordinated social grpus
- PolEco enforces structurally what culture accomplishes informally


What is at stake - autonomy of specifically Pol institutions in relation to surrounding societal context
- LPolTheory assumes such an autonomy, and the possibility for democracy on basis of socio-economic/sexual structures that generate systemic inequalities
- Weight of circumstance suggest that deliberation as peers - the achievement of rough equality is necessary, rather than the bracketing of inequality, to counter systematically-generated relations of dominance and subordination

2.


- Past-discussion could be regarded as intrapublic relations - relations within a given PubS
- Now - interpublic relations - those among different publics

Habermas's account - singularity of the B conception of PubS - the public arena
- underlying evaluative assumption - institutional confinement of public life to single PubS is positive, desirable SOA
- and so, proliferation of publics represents departure from dem.

If full parity of participation is not possible, what comes closest to that ideal?

- In stratified societies - arrangements that accomodate contestation among a plurality of competing publics better promote participatory parity than one single overarching public
- Not only does a single PubS fail to bracket effects of inequalities, these effects are exacerbated
- subordinated groups have not arenas for deliberation among themselves about their needs, objectives, strategies
- without such venues, which lack the supervision of dominant groups, they would be less likely to find the right voice or words to express their thoughts, are more likely to keep their wants inchoate, and unmask the false 'we'

Subaltern counterpublics
- in past, subordinated social groups have found it advantageous to constitute alternative publics
- parallel discursive arenas where members of subordinated groups invent and circulate counterdiscourses - permit formulation of oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, needs
- not always necessarily virtuous - some explicitly anti-democractic, anti-egalitarian, may practice own forms of informal exclusion and marginalization
- "Still, insofar as these counterpublics emerge in response to exclusions within dominant publics, they help expand discursive space"
- Assumptions previously exempt from contestation will have to be publicly argued out

Not an argument for separatism
- the concept of a counterpublic - against separatism because it assumes an orientation that is publicist
- publics are by definition not enclaves - although these are often involuntarily enclaved
- to interact as a member of a public is to disseminate one's discourse into an ever widening arena
- members understand themselves as part of a wider public - counterfactual body "the public at large"

Dual character of counterpublics
- function as spaces of withdrawal and regroupment
- function as bases and training grounds for agitational activities directed toward wider publics
- Dialectic between these two functions -  emancipatory potential resides
- enables subaltern counterpublics partially to offset, not wholly to eradicate the unjust participatory privileges enjoyed by members of dominant social groups in stratified societies

Contestation between publics
- supposes inter-public interaction
- Ely - Pubs in stratified societies - "'the structured setting where cultural and ideological contest or negotiation among a variety of publics takes place'"
- PubSs
- PubSs situtated ina single structured setting that advantages some and not others
- discursive contestation likey to be form of deliberation


In egalitarian societies
- absence of class, racial and gender DoL doesn't mean absence of cultural differnces

Public discourse and social identities
- PubS not merely arenas for discursive opinion formation
- arenas for the formation and enactment of social identities
- participation is not the ability to state propositional contents that are neutral with respect to forms of expression
- participation - the ability to speak in one's own voice - simultaneously constructing and expressive one's cultural identity thorugh idiom and style

PubS - culturally specific institutions
- institutions may be seen as culturally specific rhetorical lenses - filter and alter utterances they frame
- can accomodate some expressive modes, not others
- institutionalization of one PubS - filtering diverse rhetorical and stylistic norms through single, overarching lens
- effectively privlege the norms of one cultural group - requiring assimilation for participation

Inter-public, comprehensive public interaction
- wider debate required for issues which affect everyone
- question as to whether participants would share enough in way of values, expressive norms, protocols to enable deliberation
- not impossible in principle, more plausible if we accept complexity of identities
- even starkly different identities may share common strands
- in conditions of equality, porousness, outer-directedness, open-endedness of PubS could promote inter-cultural comm.
- plurality of POVs presupposed in Pubs, internal differences allowed, discouragement of reified blocs
- unbounded character / publicist orientation of publis - allows for the fact that people participate in more than one public, memberships may partially overlap


3.

Scope of publicity in relation to privacy - object of contestation

Publicity can mean
- state-related; accessible to all; of concern to all; pertaining to common good, shared interest
- each aspect has corresponding notion of privacy
- private can also mean - pertaining to private property, pertaining to domestic, personal, sexual life

-pertaining to common good
- ambiguous - observer's POV - what has objective affect on all or participants' POV - what is recognized as being a matter of common concern by participants
- if idea of PubS is meant to describe an arena of collective self-determination - appeal to observer perspective to delimit its proper boundaries doesn't sit well
- while only participants can decide what's of concern, no guarantee that there will be agreement
- no naturally given, a priori boundaries
- publicity as common good/shared interest - civic republican model
- stresses people reasoning together to promote common good which transcends mere sum of individual preferences
- common good created or disocvered, participants transformed from private individuals to public-spirited collectivity, capable of acting together in the common interest
- private interests either have no place in deliberation, or are merely a starting point of deliberation
- in contrast to LPubs - doesn't assume people's preferences, interests, identities are given exogenously in advance
- these are as much outcomes as antecedents of public deliberation
- critical edge of CRPubs - conflates ideas of deliberation and common good - assumes that del. is framed from standpoint of a "we" - claims of self-interest and group interest are out of order
- less powerful are less able to discover that the sense of we doesn't adequately include them
- common good may be the outcome, as the possibility that differences are real - outcome can't be presumed in advance
- even in egalitarian societies, conflicts of interests may be real, which holds all the more for societies in which the systemic profit of some comes with the systemic detriment of others
- prima facie reason to suspect postulation of a common good


Other meanings of private - pertaining to the market or the family
- Such distinctions exclude issues of debate by personalizing/familializing or economizing them
- Enclaves certain matters - shields them from public debate / contestation - usually to disadvantage of subordinates


4.

Two possible interpretations of the need for separation of ST from CivSoc to make it effective

1. to insist on the need for classical liberal distinction - privacy is meant the privately-ordered capitalist economy
- dismissed with arguments above w/:
- laissez-faire capitalism doesn't foster socio-economic equality
- separation impedes deliberation, rather than enables it


2. civ.soc. - NGAssociations - neither economic or adminstrative
- JH - LPubS - body of private person assembled to form a public - private here meaning non-state officials
- participation in non-state capacity
- doesn't result in decisions - rather eventuates in PubO - deMa that transpires elsewhere
- serves as counterweight to the ST
- extragovernmental quality - independence, autonomy, L of PubO
- weak public
- in BPubS - expansion of PubS authority to include deMa as well as OF - threatens autonomy of PubO
- lack of distinction bw the two - loss of critical discursive check
- major structural transformation - the dev. of Parliament as a PubS within the ST
- strong public - encompass both OF and deMa
- blurs separation of CivSoc and ST
- democratic advance - force of PubO becomes stronger when body representing it is empowered to transform O into De

Relation bw StPub and WePub
- possible proliferation of StPub - as self-managing institutions
- creation of sites of direct / quasi-direct dem.
- leaves open relation of InternalPubs and ExternalPubs - what about those indirectly affected or that have a stake in their decisions

Strict division bw ST and CivSoc - makes impossible questioning of different arrangements
- whether strong internal pub requires balancing by strong external pub, supplemented with smaller weaker pub
- how should the rules for interaction / coordination among these be determined


Tasks of Critical Theory
1. should render visible ways which social inequality taints deliberation
2. show how inequality affects relations among publics - how publics are differentially empowered / segmented /enclaved / subordinated
3. show how labeling of private limits problems and approaches which can be contested
4. show how overly weak character of some pubs denudes PubO of practical force