Abstract
The title of this book, for a start, is perplexing. You might imagine it to be about recent work inspired by Jurgen Habermas, the German social theorist. Or, perhaps, it may suggest theoretical developments since Habermas, on the assumption that his work of, say, the 1980s has been superseded by something else. In a sense, this edited collection does both. There are good summaries of Habermas's original treatment of the public sphere in his book published in German in 1962, eventually and belatedly translated into English in 1989 as The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, with the subtitle of An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Structural Transformation … is an historical account, a rise and fall narrative, delivering a very pessimistic message concerning how principles of public debate in what became liberal democracy have been eclipsed by manipulative public relations, commercial imperatives in the media and so forth. As contributors to this book acknowledge, Habermas's linguistic turn of the 1970s resulted in him becoming more abstract in his thinking on communication, the orientation to mutual understanding and the division between life world and system.
The original account of the public sphere given in Structural Transformation … has been challenged on several grounds, such as Habermas's idealisation of a phenomenon that never lived up to its claims for inclusiveness and universal applicability. For Habermas, the public sphere did occur and remains of relevance as, indeed, a prime ideal of democracy, albeit historically with a limited public, propertied men and no women. Social criticism, almost by definition, depends on such an ideal of free and open deliberation in public affairs, otherwise criticism of how politics and its mediation operate today would be without any grounds from which to make the argument that there is, at the very least, room for improvement. This is much more important than nostalgia for a preferable past either imagined or real.
After Habermas is reminiscent of Samantha Ashenden and David Owen's edited collection of just a couple of years ago, Foucault Contra Habermas, which used Habermas as a whipping boy for establishing the superiority of Foucauldian thought over Habermasian thought. Perhaps this volume should have been entitled Bakhtin (with a Dash of Bourdieu Thrown in) Contra Habermas. Bakhtin's theorising – before Habermas came on the scene though unbeknownst to Habermas until quite recently – about how people communicate with each other is not dependent on Habermas's fanciful notion of an ideal speech situation adapted from Freudian psychotherapy. Instead, Bakhtin celebrates heteroglossia, the sheer diversity of voices, rather than some strait jacket for how to speak properly in the name of transparent communication and the will to bring about mutual understanding, which is not surprising for someone sceptical of Marxist-Leninist conformity in the Soviet Union. Due recognition of how people actually communicate their diversity, taking into account irony and intractable differences, for instance, are to be encouraged but surely the baby of better communication does not have to be thrown out with the bath water of misunderstanding.
It is curious how Habermas is treated by followers compared to the treatment of other great theorists like Foucault. Habermasians are an argumentative lot: there is no adherence to a strict party line, which does, however, on the other hand, characterise the Foucauldian church. The impulse of the present collection is to bury Habermas rather than ultimately to praise him. This is symptomatic in the occasional jibe, for example, by Ken Hirschkop responding to a latter day observation of Habermas that rock concerts may constitute a site of the public sphere: ‘I'm sure many people's first reaction, however trivial or foolish, was to wonder whether Habermas had ever been to a rock concert‘. The expression of hipness or, these days, coolness at the expense of Habermas is hardly a daring stance. We all know that popular culture is not Habermas's forte.
Still, arguing with Habermas is what the game is about if it is about anything, which is, of course, a thoroughly Habermasian way of carrying on. Habermas is good to argue with. In this book, there is, for instance, an illuminating discussion by Lisa McLaughlin on feminist debates with Habermas. Other topics include the Internet, social movements and the possibility of transnational public spheres. However, there is very little on the relations between subaltern counterpublics, in Nancy Fraser's sense, and mainstream public spheres either national or international. Habermas's later ‘sluice gate’ model of the public sphere whereby campaigning and oppositional movements force issues onto mainstream agendas that would not otherwise be there at all. Critical issues to do with ecology, gender and warfare, say, are not typically promoted from scratch by big business and big government.
Furthermore, After Habermas has nothing much to say on what might be called the cultural public sphere, a notion that takes account of affective (aesthetic and emotional) communications in public, not only cognitive communications, the official stuff and nonsense of journalism. Over forty years ago, Habermas himself had something to say about that with his distinction between literary and political public spheres. The literary public sphere was not necessarily about the immediate topics of the day but explored deeper, longer run and more oblique matters than that, broadly speaking, to do with life, art and rest of it. The cultural public sphere today is not confined to the complexities of high art and literary disputation. It has its populist aspects too. Carnivalesque acting out in public demonstrations by sections of the global justice movement is an obvious case in point. Less pointedly, from a Habermasian perspective, we might think of Big Brother as a modern morality play, a disquisition on personal conduct in a post-traditional moral universe.
That After Habermas is poor on up-to-date elaboration of Habermasian thought and light on substantive case studies deprives it of usefulness for students. Which is not to say that the essays themselves are without interest. They are, in the main, perfectly well written and thoughtful pieces.