Rethinking the Public Sphere

## Citation

Fraser, Nancy. "Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy." *Social Text* no. 25/26, 1990, pp. 56-80.

## Summary

### Introduction

Fraser begins by acknowledging the usefulness of Habermas' conception of the public sphere - a way of distinguishing between the public and the state, which is a distinction that was not always clear or apparent in socialist, Marxist, or feminist thought. Fraser defines Habermas' public sphere as **"a theater 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. This arena is conceptually distinct from the state; it is a site for the production and circulation of discourses that can in principle be critical of the state."** (57)

Fraser argues that Habermas' conception of the public sphere is incomplete, only applicable to a category of bourgeois society (per the subtitle of his book) and in need of rethinking in order to be put to use in critical theory today.

### The Public Sphere: Alternative Histories, Competing Conceptions

The public sphere is made up of "'private persons' assembled to discus matters of 'public concer' or 'common interest.' [...] These publics aimed to mediate between 'society' and the state by holding the state accountable to 'society' via 'publicity" which at first meant requiring accessibility of information about the state's functions so it could be open to public critical scrutiny, and later by the state guaranteeing "free speech, free press, and free assembly, and eventually through the parliamentary institutions of representative government" (58).

In contrast to Habermas' account, Fraser draws on a range of scholars who perform revisionist historiography to show the shortcomings of H's theory. For example, the public sphere "rested on, indeed was importantly constituted by, a number of significant exclusions" - for example, gender, in which the public sphere was "constructed in deliberate opposition to that of a more woman-friendly salon culture" (59). (Etymological links between public and pubic, or testimony and testicles)

Also, H's idealization of the liberal public sphere is based on a neglect of other public spheres that were nonliberal or non-bourgeois. For example, "Mary Ryan documents the variety of ways in which nineteenth century North American women of various classes and ethnicities constructed access routes to public political life, even despite their exclusion from the official public sphere. In the case of elite bourgeois women, this involved building a counter-civil society of alternative woman-only voluntary associations, including philahropic and moral reform societies [...] us[ing] the heretofore quintessentially 'private' idioms of domesticity and motherhood precisely as springboards for public activity. [...] **Ryan's study shows that, even in the absence of formal political incorporation through suffrage, there were a variety of ways of accessing public life and a multiplicity of public arenas. Thus, the view that women were excluded from the public sphere turns out to be ideological**" (61). - A good reminder that participation in society is not an all-or-nothing thing, that voting is not the end-all-be-all of civic participation.

**"The official bourgeois public sphere is the institutional vehicle for a major historical transformation in the nature of political domination. This is the shift from a repressive mode of domination to a hegemonic one, from rule based primarily on acquiescence to superior force to rule based primarily on consent supplemented with some measure of repression. The important point is that this new mode of political domination, like the older one, secures the ability of one stratum of society to rule the rest. The official public sphere, then, was - indeed, is - the prime institutional site for the construction of the consent that defines the new, hegemonic mode of domination."** (62)

What to conclude - "Is the idea of the public sphere an instrument of domination or a utopian ideal? Well, perhaps both. But actually neither. [...] I shall argue that the revisionist historiography neither undermines nor vindicates [...] but that it calls into question four assumptions that are central to a specific - *bourgeois masculinist* - conception of the public sphere, at least as Habermas describes it. These are:

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 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." (62-63)

### Open access, participatory parity, and social equality

Lack of open access - women of all classes and ethnicities excluded based on gender, plebian men excluded by property qualifications, and women and men of racialized ethnicities of all classes excluded on racial grounds.

In theory, the public sphere proceeds "as if" social inequalities did not exist, bracketing them; in practice, not just because of systematic exclusion, this isn't really possible - for example, men interrupting women.

Also the presumption that the public sphere is a culturally-neutral space, "But this assumption is counterfactual, and not for reasons that are merely accidental." (64)

"For liberals, then, the problem of democracy becomes the problem of how to insulate political processes from what are considered to be non-political or pre-political processes, those characteristic, for example, of the economy, the family, and informal everyday life." (65) Compare with Arendt on the public vs. private, and Crowley's *Towards a Civil Discourse* on the split between fundamentalism and liberalism.

"One task for critical theory is to render visible the ways in which societal inequality infects formally inclusive existing public spheres and taints discursive interaction within them." (65)

### Equality, diversity and multiple publics

Habermas' theory presumes that there is a singular public sphere, and that additional publics are fragmentary, signs of a departure from, not advance towards, democracy.

Fraser's argument - where there is societal inequality, "deliberative processes in public spheres will tend to operate to the advantage of dominant groups and to the disadvantage of subordinates," and this problem is exacerbated in societies with only a single public sphere, since there are no arenas specifically for the subordinated groups to perform their own deliberations. (66) For example, in late 20th century America, the development of feminist public spheres led to the development of feminist terms and vocabulary that gave feminists more ability to articulate their wants in the comprehensive public sphere.

> Let me not be misunderstood. I do not mean to suggest that subaltern counterpublics are always necessarily virtuous; some of them, alas, are explicitly anti-democratic and anti-egalitarian; and even those with democratic and egalitarian intentions are not always above practicing their own modes of informal exclusion and marginalization. Still, insofar as these counterpublics emerge in response to exclusions within dominant publics, they help expand discursive space. In principle, assumptions that were previously exempt from contestation will now have to be publicly argued out. In general, the proliferation of subaltern counterpublics means a widening of discursive constestation, and that is a good thing in stratified societies. (67)
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-One way of accounting for the alt-right and its increasing normalization? Obviously it is normalized by the comprehensive public sphere choosing to adopt its language, but still - one way of thinking about how it has developed, and how it sees itself (as do many other subcultures) as being apart from or in opposition to mainstream society?

"In my view, the concept of a counterpublic militates in the long run against separatism because it assumes an orientation that is *publicist*. Insofar as these arenas are *publics* they are by definition not enclaves - which is not to deny that they are often involuntarily enclaved. After all, to interact discursively as a member of a public - subaltern or otherwise - is to disseminate one's discourse into ever widening arenas. [...] In stratified societies, subaltern counterpublics have a dual character. On the one hand, tehy function as spaces of withdrawal and regroupment; on the other hand, they also function as bases and training grounds for agitational activities directed toward larger publics. It is precisely in the dialectic between these two functions that their emancipatory potential resides." (67-68)

Fraser proposes a question - "under conditions of cultural diversity in the absence of structural inequality, would a single, comprehensive public sphere be preferable to multiple publics?" (68) Presuming a *Star Trek*, Gene Roddenbery-esque Earth or similar society, how many public spheres should we have? Since public spheres are not culturally neutral, and because they are a space for people to "find their own voice," it would seem that "public life in egalitarian, multi-cultural societies cannot consist exclusively in a single, comprehensive public sphere. That would be tantamount to filtering diverse rhetorical and stylistic norms throug ha single, overarching lens. Moreover, since there can be no such lens that is genuinely culturally neutral, it would effectively privilege the expressive norms of one cultural group over others, thereby making discursive assimilation a condition for participation in public debate. The result would be the demise of multi-culturalism (and the likely demise of social equality)." (69)

### Public spheres, common concerns, and private interests

"What counts as a public matter and what, in contrast, is private?" (70)

Publicity can mean "1) state-related; 2) accessible to everyone; 3) of concern to everyone; and 4) pertaining to a common good or shared interest. Each of these corresponds to a contrasting sense of 'privacy.' In addition, there are two other senses of 'privacy' hovering just below the surface here: 5) pertaining to private property in a market economy; and 6) pertaining to intimate domestic or personal life, including sexual life." (71)

#3 is especially ambiguous, depending on whose perspective we are seeing from. Necessarily, it is a participant's perspective, but there is no guarantee that all participants will agree what is of concern to everyone. (For example, feminist perspectives on domestic violence as a matter of public concern was only relatively recently recognized and accepted by the comprehensive public sphere)

Civic republican view of public sphere - that individuals with divergent interests come together to form a public that deliberates on matters of shared concern to act in the common interest. Advantage over liberal-individualist model in that it recognizes "that preferences, interests, and identities are as much outcomes as antecedents of public deliberation, indeed are discursively constituted in and through it." But it also presumes that deliberation must be deliberation about the common good - "Consequently, it limits deliberation to talk framed from the standpoint of a single, all-encompassing 'we,' thereby ruling claims of self-interest and group interest out of order." (72)

"In general, critical theory needs to take a harder, more critical look at the terms 'private' and 'public.' These terms, after all, are not simply straightforward designations of societal spheres; they are cultural classifications and rhetorical labels. In political discourse, they are powerful terms that are frequently deployed to delegitimate some interests, views, and topics and to valorize others." (73)

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

The public sphere is not the state, and thus "promotes hat I shall call *weak publics*, publics whose deliberative practice consists exclusively in opinion-formation and does not also encompass decision-making. Moreover, the bourgeois conception seems to imply that an expansion of such publics' discursive authority to encompass decision-making as well as opinion-making would threaten the autonomy of public opinion - for then the public would effectively become the state, and the possibility of a critical discursive check on the state would be lost." (75) This is Habermas' position.

But with the development of parliamentary sovereignty, we get "*strong publics*, publics whose discourse encompasses both opinion-formation and decision-making." (75)

What relationship between strong and weak publics? How to make strong publics (like parliament) accountable to weak ones that they are supposed to represent?

> "Any conception of the public sphere that requires a sharp separation between (associational) 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. **The bourgeois conception of the public sphere, therefore, is not adequate for contemporary critical theory. What is needed, rather, is a post-bourgeois conception that can permit us to envision a greater role for (at least some) public spheres than mere autonomous opinion formation removed from authoritative decision-making.** A post-bourgeois conception would enable us to think about strong *and* weak publics, as well as about various hybrid forms. In addition, it would allow us to theorize the range of possible relations among such publics, thereby expanding our capacity to envision democratic possibilities beyond the limits of actually existing democracy." (76-77)
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What about critical theory in the age of affect or post-criticism? How to reckon with Massumi's claim that ideology is too dispersed to be a useful structuring concept?

### Conclusions: Rethinking the public sphere

Four tasks on the critical theory of actually existing democracy:

1. Render visible the ways in which social inequality taints deliberation within publics in late capitalist soceities.
2. Show how inequality affects relations among publics in late capitalist societies, how publics are differentially empowered or segmented, and how some are involuntarily enclaved and subordinated to others.
3. Expose ways in which the labelling of some issues and interests as 'private' limits the range of problems, and of approaches to problems, that can be widely contested in contemporary societies.
4. Show how the overly weak character of some public spheres in late-capitalist societies denudes' public opinion' of practical force." (77)