Gutenbergs World Habermas on the Rise and Fall of the Public Sphere

1
Gutenbergs World Habermas on the Rise and
Fall of the Public Sphere

• Giovanni Navarria
• 22/01/2007
• Centre for the Study of Democracy MA
  International Relations and Political
  TheoryPolitics, Power and the Media

2
Todays Lecture

• aims at making clear to all of you
• The Gutenberg World and print culture
• The Structural transformation of the Public
  Sphere
• The importance of the concept of public sphere
  within the framework of the relationship between
  media and politics

3
Elizabeth Eisenstein

• The printing press as an agent of change 
  communications and cultural transformations in
  early modern Europe (1979) the widespread of the
  printing press, especially in the period from
  1460 to 1480, when printing presses became rather
  common, lead to a radical change in the way
  knowledge was preserved and conveyed.

4
Print Culture change of mentality

• The capacity of printing to preserve knowledge
  and to allow the accumulation of information
  fundamentally changed the mentality (the culture
  in other words) of early modern readers, with
  repercussions that transformed Western society.
  The world shifted from a system of written
  communication rooted into a distinctive literary
  culture which was based on hand copying, to a
  system based on print.

5
(No Transcript)
6
One of the most important consequences

• of the spread of the printing press was not just
  the facilitation or increase of new literature,
  but was that for the first time it was possible
  to compare sources, to work out a critique of
  knowledge based on a multitude of texts on the
  same subject easily accessible because easily
  reproducible.

7
Images of scarcity

• the system of modern communications media that
  has prevailed since the invention of the printing
  press has been dominated by images of scarcity.
  This fact must be kept in mind when reconsidering
  the subject of public life remarks John for
  time lags, transportation difficulties across
  geographic space and high production and
  distribution costs have constantly dogged the
  public circulation of opinions and information
  among individuals, groups and organizations.

8
The Public Sphere

• Strukturwandel der Öffenlicheit (1962),
• The Structural Transformation of the Public
  Sphere (1989)

9
State
Civil Society
Public Sphere
10
Civil Society (Habermas)

• this much is apparent the institutional
  core of civil society is constituted by
  voluntary unions outside the realm of the state
  and the economy and ranging from churches,
  cultural associations, and academies to
  independent media, sport and leisure clubs,
  debating societies, group of concerned citizens,
  and grassroots petitioning drives all the way to
  occupational associations, political parties,
  labour unions, and alternative institutions.
  (Habermas, 1992 454)

11
The rise of the Public sphere is rooted into

• a new form of state based on taxation in which
  the bureaucracy of the treasury was the true
  core of its administration. Within this context,
  Civil Society was precisely the genuine domain
  of private autonomy and stood opposed to the
  state (Habermas, 1989 12)

12
The Kings two body

• It was the corollary of a form of state that was
  no more simply represented by the divine body of
  King, a personalised state, on the contrary it
  was becoming a depersonalised state embodied
  rather into the bureaucratic bodies of his many
  apparati its standing army symbol of power and
  coercion its jurisdictional bodies and
  functions its administrative power.

13
The Public Sphere

• the sphere where private people come together
  as a public to engage them in a debate over
  the general rules of governing relations in the
  basically privatized but publicly relevant sphere
  of commodity exchange and social labour. The
  medium of this political confrontation was
  peculiar and without historical precedent
  peoples public use of their reason.1
• 1 Habermas, 1989 27

14
PS Institutions

• The Coffee Houses (in England), Salons (in
  France) and Tischgesellschaften (Germany),1
  were the main places of aggregation and
  gathering2 that quickly spread throughout the
  main cities in England, France and Germany,
  between 1680 and 1730

15
Rights

• NB The flourishing of the public sphere implies
  also the rising importance of a certain sets of
  rights such as freedom of press, freedom of
  speech, freedom of assembly, etc. that
  starting with the first amendment of the American
  Constitution would soon become pillars of every
  liberal democratic constitution.

16
PS Admission Criteria

• Property Ownership
• Education

17
Property Ownership

• property ownership1 would set the members of
  this forming debating public free from the heavy
  chains of submission derived from economical
  needs, hence free from the dangerous influence of
  power that is, the state or the representative
  of a political authority . 1 In cases where
  he must earn his living from others, he must earn
  it only by selling that which is his, and not by
  allowing others to make use of him. (Kant, 1970
  78 quoted in Habermas, 1989 109)

18
Education

• The private individual needed education to be
  able to take active participation in the critical
  debate with his peers. Without education
  newspapers, the journals, and the books, would
  have been out of reach for the bourgeois male.
• Being educated meant also good manners, that is
  being able to set properly into the mise en scene
  of the public sphere, hence to be able to deal
  and debate with those that were admitted within
  that realm where ideas were exchanged and
  discussed, according to the rule of rational
  debate, reasonably, as violence was never
  tolerated.

19
Who gets what? When? And how?

• In brief, the bourgeois public sphere was a
  whole, a dominant culture, which in its
  political context monitored the use of power by
  the State and publicly questioned who gets what
  when and how.
• By a whole, rather than a totalizing unbreakable
  and solitary sphere, in a deserted land of
  political spheres, it must be understood what
  Habermas has recently addressed as hegemonic
  public sphere a dominant culture (Habermas,
  1992 42526) in a context where the other
  spheres were just the passive echo of that
  culture.

20
Negotionation

• The lack of autonomy of its members (as also non
  propertyowner were admitted in) led to the
  replacement of the notion of the objective
  general interest, with one of a fairly
  negotiated compromise among interests. The
  functioning of the public sphere thus shifted
  from rational critical debate to negotiation.