Thinking through Publics beyond Habermas

ECREA 2012 continues with another round of keynotes, and the first speaker is Slavko Splichal. His interest is in the marketisation of the public sphere, and he begins by noting that the rise of the term 'public sphere' began only after the publication of an English translation of Habermas's work in the late 1980s. In addition, however, there are also many other theories of publics and public spheres; these receive considerably less exposure. This may also have something to do with Habermas's explicitly normative perspective, which may be especially attractive to some scholars; much of the other work takes a more empirical or sociological approach.

Habermas himself explicitly references Jeremy Bentham's conception of the tribunal of public opinion, and criticises Gabriel Tarde for his focus on non-normative approaches to the public sphere by emphasising the differences between he public and the crowd. Overlooked in this is perhaps John Dewey's definition of the public as 'all who are affected', or Robert Park's comparison of the public to a marketplace. Finally, Ferdinand Tönnies is also absent from Habermas's work; he made the concept of the public fundamental to the grand theories of society. Many of these discussions, then, are related to public opinion, it should be noted.

Intersecting this are concepts of publicity (making something visible) and publicness (the condition of being public: visible, accessible, legitimised), or Marx's conceptualisation of the free press as a 'third element' in society, in addition to the rulers and the ruled; Habermas's concept of the public sphere is not far removed from this, although he doesn't mention Marx in his work.

The popularity Habermas's work over these other works is related to its time of publication (in English) at the time of major political change in eastern Europe and China, and of a perceived gradual degradation of 'public opinion' concepts in the west; additionally, the potential of an online public sphere with the rise of the Web, and of a pan-European public sphere in the EU, also contributed to a greater engagement with such concepts. But the strict Habermasian view leaves out a great deal of other ideas which should also be important here.

The move from the public to a public sphere is related to the refeudalisation of publicness (moving from freedom of expression to freedom of the press; from the surveillance of power to the surveillance of citizens) and to the instrumentalisation of publicity by societal actors. A second stage is the eclipse of public opinion through hegemonisation, through a critique of the empirical unreliability of public opinion, through the adjectivisation of public opinion, through the privatisation of opinion, through the dominance of opinion polling, and through the rise of global governance (raising questions about the efficacy and relevance of nation-specific public opinion).

A third stage in the process is the conceptual emancipation of the public sphere from the concepts of the public, publicity, and publicness. This is a liberalisation of the public sphere, turning it from a more radical (actor-focussed) into a more liberal (general process-focussed) concept; a pacification of the public sphere through a thematisation of common issues and common actors; and finally the marketisation of the public sphere through an equation of discursive social integration with 'engagement in the market'. The empirical unreliability of the public sphere is also stressed here – the public sphere concept is seen as purely normative, and thus as immeasurable.

This is also related to the rise of a market society in which all products are for sale on the market, including 'fictitious' commodities such as labour, land, and money – and more recently, communication and knowledge. What we see here is a marketisation of social life, and this is harmful for humanity as such, Slavko says. Such marketisation proceeds through the marketisation of political communication, and especially of the Internet, the fragmentation of publics across different communicative spaces, the loss of autonomy of the public sphere which results from this, and finally the loss of relevance of the public sphere for political communication as a consequence.

What makes the public sphere public, then? The nature and structure of publics, the conditions of an effective public opinion, the issues discussed in public, and the importance of their consequences, the roles of professional mediators in it (who are becoming more important with the general mediatisation of society), the institutional forms of publicness, and the kinds of discourses and rhetorical forms created in the public sphere must all be considered here.