Abstract
All the aspects and dimensions that can be rightfully identified as playing essential parts within the current tragedy of democracy do share a common reference point: the public sphere. In the absence of a public sphere, no political change can take place democratically. This introduction to the special issue, which continues the debate about the public sphere from a broadly understood critical theory perspective, tries to substantiate the two initial claims and briefly presents the line of argument inherent to this special issue and its contributions. The collected contributions intervene or elaborate on the following conceptional or practical problems within the nexus of democracy and the public sphere, such as the critical relations between cultural industry and post-truth democracy; the contested relationship between the public sphere and labour; epistemological challenges predating normative questions; the relevance and transformation of concrete constellations between speakers and listeners, fragmentation and polarization within the public sphere; communicative pathologies; the digitalization of communication; altered and threatened media system services to functioning democracies; displacement and commodification of communication; the need for new forms of techno-politics; problems and challenges of Open Access; and the potential transnationalization of the public sphere.
How can a pluralist society establish and maintain a political order based on equality and self-determination? That citizens can formulate and choose between ways in which they want to live and select particular policies directed at enabling these ways requires a set of political institutions whose systematic ensemble is commonly being referred to as democracy. ‘The promise of democracy’, as Craig Calhoun (1992: 67) explains, ‘is that citizens can make collective choices not only about short-term policies but also about the kind of institutions and future they want to share’.
According to an increasing number of diagnoses from the field of social science and philosophy, the democratic order of Western Societies has increasingly been put under pressure, even to a degree that leads critical observer to question their democratic state altogether. While Wendy Brown (2015) or Wolfgang Streeck (2015) identify a growing tendency of technocratic modes of authority replacing democratic institutions in state authority, authors like Alexander Bogner (2022) point to the growing influence of experts going at the cost of bottom-up participation in an ever more complex society. Closely related to these developments are successful mobilizations of populist parties on topics, such as climate change or immigration. While such critiques primarily point to the formal procedures and discursive pathologies of contemporary democracy, another type of critique is directed at material asymmetries in terms of income and wealth (Piketty 2014; Wilkinson and Pickett 2010) and the consequences of environmental devastation.
In this special issue, we want to provide evidence for the following basic thesis: All these aspects and dimensions that can be rightfully identified as playing essential parts within the current tragedy of democracy do share a common reference point: the public sphere. Within the broader discourse of social science and philosophy discourse, the terms ‘public’ and ‘public sphere’ are marking a diverse concept. In a comprehensive summary, Rinken (2002) identifies four aspects of this concept in relation to the nexus of ‘the public’ and political democracy.
Firstly, the term denotes the epitome of the res publica as an essential incarnation of an organized political system as opposed to an unstructured, potentially chaotic society. As a constitutive feature of a political community, the concept of the public is in this context closely related to the idea of the modern nation state, through which the people of the nation constitute themselves as the political demos. Secondly, the public refers to a particular feature of political authority. In this context, public welfare is the benchmark through which political rule is to be evaluated. Thirdly, the public serves as a vignette of political authority. The general idea that there cannot be any legal, nor legitimate political force beyond the one authorized through the people´s will. Finally, the public refers to a sphere in and through which communication and will formation are taking place among the citizens. This sphere is on one hand discursive but, as it is set up through technology and corporations (Kellner 2020), it depends also on these material dimensions. In addition, as Butler (2018) has recently pointed out, assemblies such as demonstrations, parades or rallies are an essential part of the public sphere. Their democratic character is tightly connected to the right to appear, that is, the legitimate presence of bodies within a particular space.
As the place where democratic societies identify their problems and arrange them according to their urgency and their own ability to solve them, the public sphere thus plays a threefold role for the legitimation and innovation of modern societies (Neidhardt 1994). It creates (or should create) transparency of political processes. It enables (or should enable) people to validate their impressions and opinion and contrast them with alternative impressions and opinions. And it provides (or should provide) a reference frame for collective orientation and identification (‘When in Rome, do as the Romans do!’).
As the bracketed extension ‘or should’ indicates, there is a genuine tension between the term´s implication as a normative concept and its empirical state. According to Fraser (2007: 298), the normative legitimacy (e.g. does political opinion(s) emerge from a topography of the public sphere, which allows parity of participation) and the normative legitimacy (e.g. are political decisions traceable to the public sphere) are to be evaluated in political and social theory, empirical research and activism.
To put it bluntly, in the absence of a public sphere, no political change can take place democratically. It is therefore, that the concept has been productively used by scholars from the fields of social science and philosophy, both from a normative as well as from an empirically interested angle (Trenz 2013: 2): Normatively, ‘the notion of the public sphere includes the promise of the emancipatory potential of communication and deliberation’. And regarding the empirics, ‘the public sphere has generated as host of multidisciplinary approaches to investigating the reach and effectiveness of the debating public as a fundamental agent of democratic governance’ (ibid.: 2f).
For the citoyennes, engagement in the public sphere can be stressful, or even exhausting. Not only do they have to contest each others’ arguments, the informed competition between different ideas requires constant preparation and training – such as reading the newspaper. And even if they come well prepared, public contestation can cause anger and frustration among the participants – especially if their requests remain unheard (as e.g. in the case of the climate movement). The public sphere requires curiosity, the ability to learn and a sufficient amount of time and energy to invest among its participants. Moreover, a functioning infrastructure of broadcasting stations, newspapers and distributors are a necessary prerequisite for what could be called the social construction of the public sphere (see Seeliger and Sevignani 2022).
As – under democratic conditions – the media constitute the social institution responsible for informing and representing all the different groups and factions of society, a democratic political system must create conditions, under which media organizations are able to fulfill this task. The ideal of equal and valid representation is consistently conflicting with the for-profit-logic of corporate owned media. 1 As Jürgen Habermas (1989) has noted early on in his career, this conflict is not limited to the media but expresses a permanent tension between capitalism and democracy as two principles of social integration which modern society is simultaneously based on. The standing merits of his original approach (and he followed on this very recently (Habermas 2022a, 2022b) is that he situates the democratic function of the public sphere within social analyses of marketization and commodification waves, developing media and communication technology and organizations, and changing socio-economic reference frames. In this special issue, we would like to continue this methodological approach; albeit done more modestly and fragmentary via a division of academic labour and approached from a plurality of critical theoretical backgrounds.
On a very general level, the public sphere can be understood as a third space between the state and society. Across the fields of philosophy, political theory, social science and cultural studies, the public sphere is conceptualized as a medium of collective communication among (the) citizens. The question of whether or not this communication is to take place between citizens or the citizens – understood as the population in toto – leads us to another important aspect of the concept, the (necessary but by no means guaranteed or even normatively unproblematic) emergence of orientational role of one public opinion out of a myriad of partial or counter publics (Fraser 1992; Sevignani 2022; Warner 2002).
Besides this, the collected contributions intervene or elaborate on the following conceptional or practical problems within the nexus of democracy and the public sphere, such as the critical relations between cultural industry and post-truth democracy; the contested relationship between the public sphere and labour; epistemological challenges predating normative questions; the relevance and transformation concrete constellations between speakers and listeners; fragmentation and polarization of the public sphere; communicative pathologies; the digitalization of communication; altered and threatened media system services to functioning democracies; displacement and commodification of communication; the need for new forms of techno-politics; problems and challenges of Open Access; and the potential transnationalization of the public sphere.
Starting off the first section ‘After Habermas: Developments in Critical Public Sphere Theory’, Douglas Kellner revises Habermas ideas on the publics sphere and finds, concentrating on the US, that the spirit of Habermas and critical theory is alive and well in today’s youth. There might even parallels to the global struggles in the 1960s and 1970s in which critical theory achieved a global reception and the concept of the public sphere became central to critical theory and radical democratic struggle.
Hauke Brunkhorst steps in here, and confronts different periods of productive and destructive relationships between cultural industry, elite art and truth claims within the public sphere of democratic and post-democratic societies. The 1960s still are paradigmatic for re-politization of an administered and manipulated public sphere through productively destructive mix of cultural industry, artistic avantgarde, spontaneous political protest, aesthetic actions, strong rhetoric and emancipatory struggles in a democracy of Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Lieutenant Calley and the birth of fake news. However, the age of fake news prevailed.
Nancy Fraser, in an interview with Victor Kempf and Sebastian Sevignani, elaborates on the relation her earlier work on the public sphere with her current work on an extended concept of capitalism and labour struggles. We touch upon a series of conceptional issues in critical public sphere theory, such as the relations of subaltern (counter) publics and a larger encompassing public sphere, the challenge of the rise of regressive counter publics and the politics of need interpretation, the influence of social media communication on the public sphere, the publics of boundary and labour struggles.
Heiner Heiland, Martin Seeliger and Sebastian Sevignani remind us not only on the relevance of Negt and Kluge’s work on the public sphere, another classic in Frankfurt School oriented critical theory, but also on the contested relationship between the public sphere and labour, which was more implicitly an issue in the interview with Nancy Fraser. For them it is problematic neglecting labour from public sphere theory in a twofold way: On the one hand, publics need labour to be organized and the quality of this labour has implications on the democratic value of the publics. On the other hand, labour – as a socially differentiated sphere of value production, it should not be omitted from public deliberation and democratic control; thus, introducing (strong) publics to this important sphere and assessing their quality is a timely conceptual, empirical as practical challenge.
Before establishing any normative theory of the public sphere lie epistemological questions on the practical possibility of a shared world, critique and progress, whose relevance were also already touched upon by Negt and Kluge’s strong linking of the public sphere with the organization of experience. Connecting to Habermas, Hans-Jörg Trenz interrogates the content of a theory of the public sphere as epistemology of modern society and evaluates recent transformation in the context of new and digital media from a pragmatistic epistemology perspective.
The mere meeting of speaker and listener does not constitute deliberation. Their communicative exchange must make a difference and trigger subject- and opinion-transforming (learning) processes. Thus, several questions arise concerning the concrete constellation between speakers and listeners: Who can speak, who is heard, and is communication likely to spark learning processes or not. These questions must also be answered concretely and by taking into account their social conditions (of possibility). Tanja Thomas and Fabian Virchow remind us, in this vein, that being able to speak alone is not enough to set the power-transforming potential of public spheres in motion; listeners are also needed and so, in addition to access, the structures and practices of hegemonic non-hearing must also be analysed, to consciously question and overcome them.
Victor Kempf defences the assumption that the public sphere could be a generally shared space against the recent developments and fears of fragmentation and polarization of the public sphere (spurred by digital communication, populism among others). Even the negation of communication between publics transcends itself in the direction to a shared public sphere. In his argumentation, Kempf engages with Habermas but also immanent-critically by revising some of his earlier work on communication pathologies.
Habermas’ seminal study not only lays the foundation for his normative theory of the public sphere but is also distinguished by the fact that here the normative content of the public sphere is embedded in a (historical and time-diagnostic) analysis of changing social conditions. In this sense, it deals with the socio-spatial frame of reference of the public sphere, its economic framework conditions and the technical media of dissemination; globalization, commodification and digitalization can be named as dimensions of structural change today (Seeliger and Sevignani 2022). The second section deals with this socio-theoretical embedding of a normative public sphere theory.
Claudia Ritzi engages with the challenges for democratic public spheres posed by the digtialisiation of communication. Connecting to Habermas recent diagnoses of the political public sphere, fragmentation and an increase of complexity cannot be undone but state policies should aim at integrating measures to counter such trends. She evokes a new conceptual metaphor to do justice to the ongoing transformation. Similar to the universe, the incomplete and expanding public sphere needs liberation, that is politically established points of balance.
The topic is also pursued by the next four contributions to this special issue. Otfried Jarren & Renate Fischer elaborate on the impacts on media systems and the services that journalism is supposed to provide for functioning democracies. They discuss implications for the discourse on the regulation of social media such as the justification of new norms for the global communication society.
Felix Maschewski & Anna-Verena Nosthoff challenge – following Habermas – the displacement of (normatively substantial) communication from digital publics under the current conditions of profit-driven monitoring and evaluation, that are typical for commercial media platforms. In this context, they identify the rise of a ‘cybernetic control logic’ and thereby address the problem of communication pathologies by pointing to restrictions to democracy precisely through communicative unfolding and activation.
Starting from a concrete case, the permanent suspension of Donald Trump’s Twitter account, Martin Seeliger and Markus Baum evaluate several ambivalences and paradoxes inherent to the digitalized public sphere (e.g. between private and public, autonomy and heteronomy, increasing but polarizing publics) and call for a new techno-politics about the design of the digital means of production and communication as a form of their socialization.
Maximilian Heimstädt & Leonhard Dobusch describe a structural transformation of a specific public sphere, the scientific public, which is characterized by processes of specialization, metrification, internationalization, platformization and visibilization. They conclude that Open Access publishing can only help transform both communicative spaces towards the normative ideal of a public sphere when complemented with systematic support for non-profit publication infrastructures.
In the final contribution, Michael Zürn points to the gap between transnationalized government structures and global and transnationally distributed effects of certain policies become ever more obvious, on the one hand, and the problem of democratic structures that only develop partially and incompletely, on the other hand. Zürns argues in favour of the possibility to catching up here and for the notion of a truly, democratic norms fulfilling transnationalized public sphere, which is institutionalised in the structure of the global political system.
