If you’re looking for the Frankfurt School concept map from the Habermas presentation in class on Thursday 2/11, you’ll find it here.

Outline of Habermas’ Argument:

Thesis:  What are the social conditions for rational-critical debate about public issues by private people who let argumentation, not status, determine decisions?

• Social systems of “public”
  • The Greek Model – freedom is found in the public; however, those who are able to participate in the public must be masters of their private (oikos) (3).
  • The European Middle Ages Model –
    • Characterized by “representational publicity” (8).
    • In this period public is considered something of a “status attribute” (7).
• The “Enlightenment” or 17^th & 18^th Centuries Model –
  • Divided into three separate realms (30):
    • The private realm:
      • Civil society (realm of commodity exchange and social labor)
      • Conjugal family’s internal space (bourgeois intellectuals)
      • Public sphere:
        • In the political realm
        • In the world of letters (clubs, presses)
        • Market of culture products (“town)
      • Sphere of Public Authority
        • State (realm of the “police”)
        • Court (courtly-noble society)

• Habermas’ Themes:  social structure, political functions, ideology

• The Social Structure of the Bourgeois Public Sphere:  Economics
  • Social reproduction was a matter of private people left to themselves.  This resulted in the “completed privatization of civil society” (74)
  • Personal freedoms were a result of this freedom of social reproduction and ownership of property (protection) (75)
  • For a brief amount of time – before government intervention in capitalist systems – unmitigated free trade and laissez-faire economic philosophies created a “civil society as the private sphere emancipated from public authority” (79)
  • This new economic situation viewed bourgeois as both homme and citoyen (man as owner of private property and citizen as the person who wants to protect that property order as outside the government)
    • Habermas sees this as one of the fundamental aspects of bourgeois ideology:  this belief in man must be propertied to be man is a false consciousness that Marx also identified (88).

• The Social Structure of the Bourgeois Public Sphere: Codification
  • The family is reconceived as the private sphere where the patriarch participates in the public sphere (similar to the Greek model)
  • The public sphere is constituted in the world of letters – this leads to politics

• The Social Structure of the Bourgeois Public Sphere: Institutional Bases
  • Coffee houses (London)
    • Operated without censorship from the crown
      • Abandoning censorship allowed for a new, non-revolutionary politics.  H. notes on 64 that this signaled that critical debate of the public stopped violence but also “took the form of a permanent controversy between the governing party and the opposition”
• Salons
  • Public institutions in private residences because of censorship
  • Changed after the Constitution of 1791 that allowed free communication of ideas without censorship (70).  Napoleon later reversed this policy
• Table Societies (Germany)
  • What makes these Bourgeois public sphere institutional bases special?
    • Disregarded status (36)
    • Rational argument was the basis for all argumentation.
    • There was an openness of topics for discussion (36)
    • The public was inclusive in principle if not in practice – if you had access to cultural products, then you could jump in on the culture-debate (37)
    • The bourgeois rational debate of cultural products resulted in the questioning of “absolute sovereignty” be relying on the idea that public opinion alone could discover the “natural order” (55).
      • Habermas works back to the disagreement between Hobbes (Leviathan) and Locke (Two Treatises) on the role of gov’t.
      • Early in the development of the public sphere by private individuals, critical debate was used to discover laws that were inherent to society (83 – center paragraph)

• The ideological Structure of the Public Sphere : A critique on the conception of public opinion as a reasoned form of access to truth (Chapter 4)
  • Kant:  the most developed philosophy of the bourgeois public sphere
    • Public discourse is a way to lead individuals to enlightenment (104)
      • This renders communication (read: rhetoric) fundamental in the communalization of the bourgeois subject
      • This new “world” community is really the community of the bourgeois subject and the attendant “mixed companies” that participate in argumentation for enlightenment through rational discourse.
• Hegel:  the “public” created by civil society are an ideology
  • Common sense is actually just mass opinion dispersed among people in the form of prejudices (122)
• Marx: the “public opinion” is actually just bourgeois class interests in disguise
• Mill / Tocqueville:  Develop a liberalism that treated freedom relatively
  • Wondered about the future of public sphere discourse in the face of increasing membership in said sphere
  • What to do with all the new people in the public as a result of expanded suffrage (133)
  • Both authors wondered about whether the critical aspects of public discourse would dissolve into what is “popular” and as such worried about protecting minority populations (134).
    • Is this a recognition of an argument against the public sphere or just the beginning of the disintegration of the public sphere? (135)
    • The Disintegration of the Public Sphere: On the Refeudalization of Society
      • Private organizations began to increasingly assume public power
        • This undermined the value of public discourse because of the class issues brought about by mass industrialization beginning in the 18^th and extending to the 19^th centuries.  The social inequalities eroded the principle of disregard of status (36).
• The state began to encroach on the private realm
• Instead of using rational debate to discover universal / absolute natural orders/truths, public debate began to be used for negotiation (176).  This negotiation occurs between a lot of large, non-public bodies (private bureaucracies, special-interest associations, parties, and public administration) and the public is included as something of a stamp of approval.
  • Because of the diminished role of the public in discourse, the movement toward the welfare state comes into being.  Some “social rights” or protections afforded by the state are put into place to counterbalance the obvious injuries sustained by lumpenproletariat and proletariat populations.
• The move away from rational debate toward consumptive models (think Adorno and Horkheimer here) is noted on 162.
  • Similar to A&H’s thesis, H. notes here that individual gratification replaces the rational-critical debate; further, the role of public communication technologies replaced the acts of “individuated reception” that engendered critical-rational discourse on topics (161)
• In essence, in expanding the public sphere, the form of participation by interested parties was changed drastically from a rational-critical engagement of public discourse to a culture of consumption that isn’t critical about it’s work (169)
  • This point is part of the program of the entire critical theory line of thinking that comes out of the Frankfurt School.
• Because the consumption of media is much more intimate and related to financial ability, the status issue that the original bourgeois public sphere dissolved is reintroduced and becomes “unbracketed” and impossible to ignore (172).
• This weakening of the public isn’t perceived by the public as such – in fact, they look back to their previous critical engagedness and believe that they are still practicing critical-rational discourse; rather, they are actually engaging in a recycled form of representative publicity that coerces but doesn’t critically engage (194).
• The diffusion of mass culture also has a couple of deleterious effects:
  • Most folks tastes are met; however, a critical review of those tastes doesn’t take place (174)
  • The diffusion of mass amounts of goods means that the public isn’t ever capable of focusing in on one object for critical discussion (174 – – in the example of Pamela)
• When this mass consumption removes critical-rational discourse, academics and other “thinkers” are put in the position of culture-producers and critics who stand in opposition to the mass of culture (175).
• The Modern Age:  Representational Publicity
  • The media is used to create opportunities for consumers to identify with public personas
  • The public sphere becomes a stage for corporations and other statist/corporatist regimes to develop legitimacy through popularity instead of responding to critical-rational challenges.
  • Parties move beyond critical-rational debate into mobilization regimes for ideological integration into party-lines (203)
  • Interest-groups replace non-rational-critical debating citizens because the politicians no longer have to listen to the voters – just manage the media machine that provides the consumptive qualities.  Interest-groups win (204).
  • Social integration of rational-critical discourse is ultimately the hope of communication in the future instead of mass-culture domination.  Hope for the future? (210)