Online Discussion Spaces as Rational and Carnivalesque

The next speaker at ECREA 2012 is Maria Bakardjieva, who begins by noting the legacy of the public sphere concept – it has been enormously influential, especially also on central and eastern European scholars after the fall of the Iron Curtain.

In the current environment, an important question is the evaluation of the deliberative quality of online discussion spaces. Mainly, hopes for rational critical debate in such spaces have been disappointed: nothing close to the Habermasian ideal has been observed here, and it needs to be understood why this is the case.

But the approach in such studies has almost always been top-down, deductive, starting with the Habermasian ideal and finding these spaces lacking; perhaps the very norms proposed by Habermas also need to be questioned in such work. More attention must be placed on actual, embodied, lived interests; the abstract, disembodied, rational subject which the model assumes must be replaced by a more realistic perspective.

The model privileges rational discourse, but even the early modern public spaces which Habermas describes were not only spaces of such discourse, but of a multiple, incomplete, heteroglossia. As Bakhtin has pointed out, indeed, language is a living discourse which is imbued with historical and cultural significations; it is characterised by speech genres that are situation-specific, and communicative rationality is perhaps just one speech genre amongst others. How it interacts with other speech genres then also becomes important.

Bakhtin's work on carnival and the carnivalesque, for example, points to a version of the Habermasian public sphere, too – carnival enables people to step out of the ordinary, to ignore authoritarian hierarchies, and to otherwise transgress everyday life; indeed, there are echoes of such boundary-crossing in how people engage in many online fora as well. These spaces are diverse, but each also enables a kind of unity, by extracting individuals out of their private layers and bringing them together in a shared space.

Carnival enables prevailing ideas to be transcended, and new perspectives to be found. Considered in this light, the messy online discussions which are so often frowned upon can then nonetheless be considered as a valuable form of communication which create the background against which new ways of thinking can be found. Online fora are carnivalesque in several different senses, but can also be seen as the source of an alternative form of rationality.