February 13, 2005

Nancy Fraser - "Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy"

Fraser, Nancy. 1992. "Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy" in Habermas and the Public Sphere (Craig Calhoun, ed.). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 109-142.

Notes:

In this essay, Fraser seeks to problematize Habermas' notion of 'public space'. She views this as necessary in order for critical theory to actually deal with the public because "Habermas's concept of the public sphere provides a way of circumventing some confusions that have plagued progressive social movements and the political theories associated with them" [109] in part because of a tendency for socialist progressives to conflate issues like the state apparatus and the public sphere.

By referring to "private" as "everything that is outside of the domestic or familial sphere," Habermas conflates "the state, the official economy of paid employment, and arenas of public discourse" [110]. This is in part because he primarily views the public sphere simply as a "theater in modern societies in which political participation is enacted through the medium of talk" [110].

In section 2, Fraser offers an exceptionally cogent overview of Habermas, so much so that i must repeat it here:

According to Habermas, the idea of a public sphere is that of a body of "private persons" assembled to discuss matters of "public concern" or "common interest." This idea acquired force and reality in early modern Europe in the constitution of "bourgeois public spheres" as counterweights to absolutist states. These publics aimed to mediate between society and the state by holding the state accountable to society via publicity. At first this meant requiring that information about state functioning be made accessible so that state activities would be subject to critical scrutiny and the force of public opinion. Later it meant transmitting the considered "general interest" of "bourgeois society" to the state via forms of legally guaranteed free speech, free press, and free assembly, and eventually through the parliamentary institutions of representative government.

Thus at one level the idea of the public sphere designated an institutional mechanism for rationalizing political domination by rendering states accountable to (some of) the citizenry. At another level, it designated a specific kind of discursive interaction. here the public sphere connoted an ideal of unrestricted rational discussion of public matters. The discussion was to be open and accessible to all, merely private interests were to be inadmissible, inequalities of status were to be bracketed, and discussants were to deliberate as peers. The result of such discussion would be public opinion in the strong sense of a consensus about the common good.

According to Habermas, the full utopian potential of the bourgeois conception of the public sphere was never realized in practice. The claim to open access in particular was not made good. Moreover, the bourgeois conception of the public sphere was premised on a social order in which the state was sharply differentiated from the newly privatized market economy; it was this clear separation of society and state that was supposed to underpin a form of public discussion that excluded "private interests." But these conditions eventually eroded as non-bourgeois strata gained access to the public sphere. Then "the social question" came to the fore, society was polarized by class struggle, and the public fragmented into a mass of competing interest groups. Street demonstrations and back room, brokered compromises among private interests replaced reasoned public debate about the common good. Finally, with the emergence of welfare-state mass democracy, society and the state became mutually intertwined; publicity in the sense of critical scrutiny of the state gave way to public relations, mass-mediated staged displays and the manufacture and manipulation of public opinion. [112-113]

Fraser's next turn is to complicate Habermas' account.

Scholars have argued that Habermas' account "idealizes the liberal public sphere" even though "the official public sphere rested on, indeed was importantly constituted by, a number of significant exclusions" [113] (namely race, gender, property ownership). The public sphere was really a way for bourgeois men to see themselves as "a 'universal class' and preparing to assert their fitness to govern" [114]. Of course, they were successful in that the norms of the public sphere eventually became "hegemonic, sometimes imposed on, sometimes embraced by, broader segments of society" [115]. "A discourse of publicity touting accessibility, rationality, and the suspension of status hierarchies is itself deployed as a strategy of distinction" [115].

By marking the domestic sphere as private, they were able to exclude issues central to women. "The view that women were excluded from the public sphere turns out to be ideological; it rests on a class- and gender-biased notion of publicity, one which accepts at face value the bourgeois public's claim to be the public. In fact, ... the bourgeois public was never the public" [116]. "The relations between bourgeois publics and other publics were always conflictual... [they] deliberately sought to block broader participation... the public sphere was always constituted by conflict" [116]. In essence, "we can no longer assume that the bourgeois conception of the public sphere was simply an unrealized utopian ideal; it was also a masculinist ideological notion that functioned to legitimate an emergent form of class rule" [116].

There's, in fact a "Gramscian moral from the story: the official bourgeois public sphere is the institutional vehicle for a major historical transformation in the nature of political domination. ... The official public sphere, then, was, and indeed is, the prime institutional site for the construction of the consent that defines the new hegemonic mode of domination" [117]. !!!!

Fraser's next move is to articulate four assumptions that are central to Habermas' "bourgeois, masculinist conception of the public sphere" [117-118]:

  1. The assumption that it is possible for interlocutors in a public sphere to bracket status differentials and to deliberate as if they were social equals; the assumption, therefore, that societal equality is not a necessary condition for political democracy
  2. The assumption that the proliferation of a multiplicity of competing publics is necessarily a step away from, rather than toward, greater democracy, and that a single, comprehensive public sphere is always preferable to a nexus of multiple publics
  3. The assumption that discourse in public spheres should be restricted to the deliberation about the common good, and that the appearance of private interests and private issues is always undesirable
  4. The assumption that a functioning democratic public sphere requires a sharp separation between civil society and the state

The remainder of the essay convincingly defends these observations.

On #1. People are impeded from participating and "deliberation can serve as a mask for domination" [119]. Furthermore, efforts to turn the 'i' into the 'we' homogenize and subordinate groups are often disempowered by not having the proper voice [119]. "Social inequalities can infect deliberation, even in the absence of any formal exclusions" [119]. Given that inequalities affect, there's no way to have participatory parity; the only way to achieve this is the elimination of systemic social inequalities [121].

On #2. "In stratified societies, arrangements that accommodate contestation among a plurality of competing publics better promote the ideal of participatory parity than does a single, comprehensive, overarching public" [122]. "In stratified societies, subaltern counterpublics have a dual character. On the one hand, they function as spaces of withdrawal and regroupment; on the other hand, they also function as bases and training groups for agitational activities directed toward wider publics" [124]. "In stratified societies the discursive relations among differentially empowered publics are as likely to take the form of contestation as that of deliberation" [125].

"Since there can be no such lens that is genuinely culturally neutral, [one public] would effectively privilege the expressive norms of one cultural group over others and thereby make discursive assimilation a condition for participation in public debate... [resulting in] the demise of multiculturalism and ... social equality" [126]. Multiple publics is necessary.

On #3. Public often refers to: "1) state-related, 2) accessible to everyone, 3) concern to everyone, and 4) pertaining to a common good or shared interest" while private refers to "5) pertaining to private property in a market economy and 6) pertaining to intimate domestic or personal life, including sexual life" [128]. But things like common concern can only be decided by the participants. For example, domestic violence was considered private until women, as a separate public, demanded that the broader public make it a concern to them. It's hard to find a common good and it's not something that is known on the outset which means that it shouldn't be structured. Public/private are not obvious words - they are "cultural classifications and rhetorical labels" [131]. Notions of private are usually used to restrict, to keep people out and to keep their (special) interests out. In other words, private in a common public is usually used to maintain hegemony.

On #4. "Laissez-faire capitalism does not foster socioeconomic equality and that some form of politically regulated economic reorganization and redistribution is needed to achieve that end" [133]. The assumption is that the public would become the state, but in fact, it should be conceived as a counterweight to it - "a critical discursive check" [134]. This would be lost if the public became the state.

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