The Orientational Transformations in Any Public Sphere: Deweyan Thoughts on Habermas, Habits, and Free Communication

Jurgen Habermas's conception of the public sphere has been of doubtless importance for those interested in the intersection between communication, argument, and the ideal sort of community we ought to form. In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Habermas (1962/1989) recounts the devolution of the public sphere from free-wheeling and politically important coffee houses, salons, and reading societies to the highly mediated and money-saturated form evident in the mid-twentieth century west. Habermas's theme seems to be one that many might agree with. The ideal public engages freely in rational-critical debate over vital political issues of the day, and such an ideal can be thwarted by the presence of money, staged politics, and manipulative endeavors such as political advertising and spin. Habermas's (1962/1989) story presents as the main villains "parties and special interest associations" (p. 209), who tend to use the mass media to one-sidedly present attractive slogans and arguments, but not to discuss them in the maximally public sense of reasoned debate that Habermas (and many of his detractors, I might add) would find ideal. His account effectively ends with the decline of the public sphere, and with the hope of its revival lying in the actualization of two conditions: (a) "the objectively possible minimizing of bureaucratic decisions" and (b) "a relativizing of structural conflicts of interest according to the standard of a universal interest everyone can acknowledge" (Habermas, 1962/1989, p. 235). If we agree with Habermas's idealization of free communication, the stage is set for us to do something about it by challenging, critiquing, and reconstructing the form of the public arena so as to reduce distorting forces (such as money and ideology) and structural conflicts of ends and goals. In other words, Habermas's payoff seems to be a focus on reforming the material organization of society. As a pragmatist in the Deweyan spirit, I do not wholly disagree with the value of such a view. Yet I must demur as to the one-sided reading of the public sphere, its problems, and the paths to its melioration that such a common reading of this work might encourage. Lenore Langsdorf (2002) has espoused a similar worry over the lack of meliorative resources in Habermas's privileging of the representative in his communicative theory. Pragmatists will demand that any reading of the ideal of the public sphere provide a workable and comprehensive account of how the actual present situation can be meliorated. John Dewey, a figure Habermas did not read until later in his career, diagnoses a similar problem of the eclipse or decline of the public. The consonances here are so striking that Habermas (2002) later indicated that Dewey's The Public and its Problems (1927/1984) "could have been a major source for my Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere" (p. 228). In this work Dewey highlights the misuse of the press and the decline of the public in our democratic system, but he continues his life-long fascination with another aspect to the puzzle of the public sphere: the habits, attitudes, or orientations of those comprising actual communities. Part of the recovery of the public lies in how we reconstruct our habits of inquiry and interaction, a point I have drawn out of his enigmatic comments concerning the "Great Community" (Stroud, 2008, 2011a). This emphasis on the orientation of the participants in the public sphere is not absent from Habermas, but it is easily overlooked in favor of a clean, high-altitude reading of social transformation and change. In his magisterial two volume work, The Theory of Communicative Action (1984, 1987), he augments his account of the public sphere with a reading of the ever-present orientational choice in linguistic interaction--namely, between linguistic action oriented toward achieving certain goals or ends and action orientated toward reaching understanding with one's conversational other. …