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 DOI: 10.1177/0090591712457662

2012 40: 802Political TheoryAletta Norval

DebateThe Subjective Conditions of Critical Public−−''Don't Talk Back!''

  

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Political Theory40(6) 802 –810

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457662 PTX40610.1177/0090591712457662Political TheoryNorval© 2012 SAGE Publications

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1University of Essex–Government, Colchester, Essex, United Kingdom

Corresponding Author:Aletta Norval, University of Essex–Government, Wivenhoe Park, Colchester, CO 43SQ, UK Email: alett@essex.ac.uk

“Don’t Talk Back!”—The Subjective Conditions of Critical Public Debate

Aletta Norval1

In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Habermas presents a remarkably prescient if bleak evaluation of the conditions for the participation of citizens in critical public discussion in modern mediatised democracies. Pre-scient, because it succeeds in capturing many of the concerns expressed so vehemently today in regard to the denigrating and demobilizing role of the media in democratic politics, and bleak because it seems to allow little scope for the development of the virtues associated with the liberal public sphere under contemporary conditions. Contemporary struggles, particularly those associated with the use of new (social) media arguably challenge these rather pessimistic assumptions. Nearly nine out of ten Egyptians and Tunisians sur-veyed in March 2011 said that they used Facebook “to organize protests or spread awareness of them.”1 For dissident groups, “digital tools allow them to bring together remote and often disparate groups and give them channels to bypass the conventional media, which is usually state controlled and unwilling to broadcast any news of civil unrest and opposition to the government.”2 Inter-net and social media organized protests have also been in the news in societies with long traditions of democracy. One only here needs to think of the recent protests against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), and the activities of hack-ivists and internet memes such as Anonymous, to note the powerful new role these activities have come to play in our contemporary world. Beyond these activities, there is mounting evidence of more mainstream use of the new media to organise political activities and participate in policy discussions. In the

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United Kingdom, Netmums, an online group formed by mothers sharing infor-mation and seeking to influence policy making, is a prime example of this sort of activity.3 Governments have, for their part, also begun to use online forums to solicit citizens’ views. The Hansard Society, for instance, in their inquiry into hate crime in Northern Ireland, conducted an online consultation that resulted in rich qualitative evidence being gathered.4 While it is clearly too early to deliver a considered judgment on the place of these new technologies in foster-ing and sustaining critical political protest activities, it is perhaps not too soon to cast at least some doubt on the more pessimistic evaluations of the effects of such media on our societies today.

In this piece, I approach Habermas’s construction of a dichotomy between “mass culture” and the “enlarged public,” between the conditions obtaining under the liberal public sphere and contemporary conditions, where the clas-sical model is no longer feasible, with a view to thinking through the place of civic virtues in the maintenance and establishment of critical public discus-sion. While Habermas certainly is correct in his analysis of the presence of disabling and manipulating tendencies in societies characterised by the pen-etration of mass media, I shall argue that the dichotomy he sets up rests on a persistent underestimation of the capacities for critical reasoning in the “mass” public, even under contemporary conditions of societies far more mediatised than even Habermas imagined. This argument will be articulated through engaging with an understanding of a non-teleological perfectionist account of the possibilities of the development of virtues associated with critical debate, fostered in and through engagement with contemporary media in political activities of “talking back.”

“Talking back?”

Under the pressure of the “Don’t talk back!” the conduct of the public assumes a different form. In comparison with printed communication the programs sent by the new media curtail the reactions of their recipients in a peculiar way. They draw the eyes and ears of the public under their spell but at the same time, by taking away its distance, place it under “tutelage,” which is to say they deprive it of the oppor-tunity to say something and to disagree. The critical discussion of a reading public tends to give way to “exchanges about tastes and prefer-ences” between consumers.5

Habermas concludes this evaluation with the argument that the “world fash-ioned by the mass media is a public sphere in appearance only.”6 The problem,

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he argues, arises in part because of the absence of the conditions to cultivate the virtues associated with the coming into being of the bourgeois public sphere. The mass media “strip away” what is valuable such that the public sphere “becomes the sphere for the publicizing of private biographies, so that the accidental fate of the so-called man in the street or that of system-atically managed stars attain publicity.”7 Habermas suggests that it is a result of the fact that the “sounding board of an educated stratus tutored in the public use of reason has been shattered” and “the public is split apart into minorities of specialists who put their reason to use nonpublicly and the great mass of consumers whose receptiveness is public but uncritical.”8

This picture resonates all too well with a world in which Fox News, Big Brother, and social network sites predominate. Habermas’s concerns are also echoed today across the spectrum of politics: the new social media are charac-terised as enabling not conversation but chaotic idle chatter. It is seen as deskilling; stripping away and undermining the ability to read and write prop-erly; there are concerns about the “cyberspace divide,”9 the encouraging of social fragmentation,10 as a result of “enclave deliberation,”11 leading indi-viduals to imagine themselves to be “participants in a combative arena,” believing that their contributions matter while they actually turn “efforts at political engagement into contributions to the circulation of content, reinforc-ing the hold of neoliberalism’s technological infrastructure,”12 rather than liv-ing up to the ideals of an inventive space of participation for individuals across the globe. Many of these commentators are, however, rather cautious in avoid-ing global judgements on the Internet and its democratizing potential, suggest-ing that we lack sufficient knowledge of ICT-enabled engagements.13

Today as we are witnessing the Arab spring, as well as the contestations around the SOPA act and other forms of more mundane citizens’ engagement online and through new social media, there can be little doubt about the possi-bility of “talking back.” Hence, we need to contest the view that the new media, and in particular social media, necessarily has a disabling effect. On the cau-tiously positive side, commentators like Dahlgren for instance note that roughly 20 percent of Internet sites defined as political fall outside of the mainstream, and is indicative of an expansion of the margins of the public sphere.14 This corrective does not, however, get to the heart of what is at stake here. Habermas’s account of the transformation of the public sphere does not necessarily stand or fall by the ability to offer alternative historico-empirical accounts of the public sphere. Here I am in agreement with Loehwing and Motter who suggest that the provision of particular historical examples as counter-examples ought to be separated from the normative justification of democracy and of a consideration of consequences of the structural transformation of the public sphere for democracy.15 Hence, powerful and necessary as historical counter-examples of

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the uses of social media may be, and while they are signifiers of what is at stake, this is not what I wish to focus on here. Rather, in re-reading The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere I was struck by the need to think about the virtues associated with the operation of the public sphere. Its bourgeois form in particular—but also in other forms, which Habermas argues continues to exist (the avant-garde, critical minorities, and so forth)—rests upon an account of virtues that are consistently contrasted to deficits in those virtues associated with the great public of the mass media.16

We may do well to remind ourselves of the critical work that the public sphere is supposed to fulfil. The critical use of public reason creates “a forum in which the private people, come together to form a public” and ready them-selves “to compel public authority to legitimate itself before public opin-ion.”17 What are the virtues associated with these functions? As many commentators have noted, Habermas does not seek to provide an account of such virtues, nor does he find it necessary. Indeed, he could be argued to be positively hostile to the need to provide such an account. Nevertheless, there are clues as to what is presumed in Habermas’s historical reconstruction of the very idea of a public and of the emergence of the bourgeois public sphere. A public critically reflecting on its culture depends upon the presence of citi-zens educated in the art of critical-rational public debate.18 So, for instance, the literary precursor of the public sphere operative in the political domain provided “the training ground for a critical public reflection,” similar pro-cesses were operative in the reading rooms and theatres, in museums and at concerts.19 Images of such educated publics are contrasted with “semi-literate masses of consumers”;20 there is, he argues, no evidence of “ever new strata” being integrated “at the margin into the circle of the urban-bourgeois reading public of the “educated class.”21 In fact, as we have already seen, “the sound-ing board of an educated stratum tutored in the public use of reason has been shattered; the public is split apart into minorities of specialists who put their reason to use nonpublicly and the great mass of consumers whose receptive-ness is public but uncritical.”22 The pessimistic end to the text draws this distinction between “public” and “mass” even sharper. A public is organised so that it can “answer back”; a mass cannot. The latter is manipulated while the former is critical.23 This resonates with another dichotomy, internal to the public use of reason that Habermas articulates at the start of his text:

In our [German] usage this term (i.e. Räsonnement) unmistakably pre-serves the polemical nuances of both sides: simultaneously the invoca-tion of reason and its disdainful disparagement as merely malcontent griping.24

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The text as a whole could be read as playing out these polemical nuances: here in the form of the public–mass distinction, there in the form of the dis-tinction between critical engagement and uncritical consumption.

“It is . . . delicious to act with great masses to great aims”25

While Habermas’s sentiments clearly mirror the disdain for mass culture found generally in the writings of other critical theorists, one has to reflect on whether they are also a sign of what Macpherson long ago has called “the liberal fear of the masses.” This is echoed in Simone Chambers’s recently articulated question as to whether deliberative democracy has abandoned mass democracy?26 Mass publics, she argues, seem to have been abandoned in favour of carefully constructed mini-publics, in which controlled critical reasoning (deliberation) can take place.27 Chambers links this question, as it should be, to the deep mistrust of rhetoric, and its associations with the masses and the “wasteland of nondeliberative politics.” However, even though Chambers raises this important question, the sentiments so clearly expressed in Habermas are re-affirmed through the introduction of another dichotomy: the distinction between deliberative rhetoric and plebiscitory rhetoric, which suffers from all the pathologies Habermas attributed to mass publics. As in Habermas, Chambers touches upon the importance of the question of how “citizens form their opinions,” arguing that it is “an integral part of a theory of deliberative democracy.”28 To think about the how is not a matter of multiplying mini-publics, but of fostering the promotion and proliferation of a multiplicity of citizen–citizen encounters. Such “face-to-face encounters of everyday talk” could promote “the skills needed to be a critical yet receptive audience.”29

Could the uses of the social media with which I started this short piece be considered cases of such interaction, if not face-to-face then in peer-to-peer networks and engagements between citizens and the state mediated via the new media? I would argue that, indeed, they could and ought to be treated as such. However, for this to become possible, and to be able to note the demo-cratic potential of such interactions, the fundamentally dichotomous thinking that inspires both Habermas’s text and deliberative accounts of democracy more generally, must be abandoned, for it is part of the problem. As Habermas notes with respect to Räsonnement, the nuances of both sides are preserved in the term. The same holds here: publics are both capable of being critical and of being manipulated; it is not the case that the virtue of the critical use of reason belongs to a particular sociological group or form of society.

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Democratic subjectivity is cultivated through participation in practices of “talking back.” It may include the education to which Habermas refers, but it also depends upon embodied practices of habituation,30 upon political imagi-nation and upon the operation of exemplars, and upon actions that manifest for us other possibilities of being and acting.31

The particular forms such “talking back” take is of lesser importance: they can take a range of forms, not all of which would correspond to a neatly ratio-nalized image of deliberation.32 But, that makes them no less valuable. Of fundamental importance is the thought that critical abilities are verified in the articulation of wrongs, as Rancière may put it.33 That is, the ability to act critically is fostered, enacted, and deepened in the very process of expressing demands and making claims.34 The fostering of virtues associated with democracy—giving voice to senses of wrong and injustice, protesting, occu-pying, listening to others, critically debating options, giving and receiving reasons, coming to see things in a different way through critical engagement with others, proposing alternatives, aspiring to higher selves and better soci-eties, to name but a few—come about in and through construction of and participation in critical, oppositional activities.35 While recognising the limi-tations of the Internet as discursive space, policy analysts and political theo-rists experimenting with these new spaces and their potential contribution to democratic politics are emphasizing the extent to which they contribute to “the broad objective of making policy debate . . . accessible and meaningful and at the same time agonistically authentic and equitable.” In particular, it contributes to the expansion of available narratives that may compel policy makers to avoid setting agendas too narrowly, enabling the promotion of non-hegemonic political alternatives and policy options and facilitating the voic-ing of views in a wide variety of ways. As Coleman argues, there are virtues to digital storytelling that fosters and values situated contingency, “acknowl-edgement of the local and quotidian, and a willingness to embrace existential ambiguity” in a pluralistic political universe.36

One becomes a democrat;37 one is not taught—from above—to be one. Intuition and provocation takes precedence over tuition and instruction.38 The emphasis Habermas puts on teaching and training in the historical analysis of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere is crucial. However, for these insights to take their proper place in thinking about democracy, they need to be democratized, opened up to possibilities that cannot be contem-plated within the strictures of the critical public–mass distinction. If we think of democracy in less restrictive terms, it becomes possible to focus on foster-ing the development of radical democratic subjectivities, that cannot be antic-ipated nor held “accountable to any theoretical formulation”; radical democratic

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utterances both proclaim and enact the coming into being of a democratic subjectivity.39 This necessary openness only becomes a possibility once one takes the fundamental abilities and capacities of all, the counted and the uncounted, seriously. Emerson, like Rancière, suggests that each of us is capable of developing judgments from a standpoint that “all and sundry” “may be expected to find in themselves.”40 Emerson is clear about the con-tinuous work on the self that this involves. He is also clear that it involves aversion to society and to the “herd.”41 Yet, this is never expressed in any other way than that those aspects of the self and of society that resemble the “herd”—the “mass” for Habermas—run through each and every one of us. Aversion to those aspects is crucial, but it is not achieved through external means, nor is it something associated with or limited to specific groups. “The virtue most in request [in society] is conformity. Self-reliance is its aver-sion.”42 Aversion opens the way to activities through which we can foster the virtues associated with a critical engagement and development of a better self and society. The perfectionism invoked here is non-elitist and non-teleological: it is a possibility open to each and all.43 It does not predetermine and prefig-ure what is possible, and along which road we must all travel. To quote Cavell, “The better world we think . . . is not a world that is gone, hence it is not to be mourned, but one to be borne, witnessed.”44 We should not mourn the loss of the bourgeois public sphere, but work on the possibilities opened up by the world coming into being.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publica-tion of this article.

Notes

1. http://www.thenational.ae/news/uae-news/facebook-and-twitter-key-to-arab-spring-uprisings-report

2. “World Development Book Case Study: The Role of Social Networking in the Arab Spring,” http://www.newint.org/books/reference/world-development/case-studies/social-networking-in-the-arab-spring/.

3. S. Coleman, “The Internet as Space for Policy Deliberation,” in The Argumen-tative Turn Revisited, ed. Frank Fischer and Herbert Gottweis (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 158.

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4. Ibid., 155-56. 5. J. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (Cambridge:

Polity Press, 1989), 170-71. 6. Habermas, Structural Transformation, 171. 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid., 175. 9. B. D. Loader, ed., The Governance of Cyberspace (London: Routledge, 1997).10. P. Dahlgren, “The Public Sphere and the Net: Structure, Space, and Communi-

cation,” in Mediated Politics, ed. W. Lance Bennett and R. M. Entman (Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 50.

11. C. Sunstein, “Deliberative Trouble: Why Groups Go to Extremes,” Yale Law Journal 110, no. 1 (2000): 75 and 100.

12. J. Dean, Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 31-32.

13. G. Smith, Democratic Innovations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 161.

14. (2001, 48).15. M. Loehwing and J. Motter, “Publics, Counter-publics, and the Promise of

Democracy,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 42, no. 3 (2009): 220-41.16. Habermas, Structural Transformation, 175.17. Ibid., 25-26.18. Ibid., 29.19. Ibid., emphasis added.20. Ibid., 172.21. Ibid., 173.22. Ibid., 175.23. Ibid., 249.24. Ibid., 27.25. R. W. Emerson, “Lecture on Slavery,” in Emerson’s Antislavery Writings, ed.

L. Gougeon and J. Myerson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 105-6.26. S. Chambers, “Rhetoric and the Public Sphere: Has Deliberative Democracy

Abandoned Mass Democracy?,” Political Theory 37, no. 3 (2009): 323-50.27. Ibid., 324.28. Ibid., 333.29. Ibid., 340.30. H. S. Mann, “Ancient Virtues, Contemporary Practices: An Aristotelian

Approach to Embodied Care,” Political Theory 40, no. 2 (2012): 196.31. Several political theorists emphasize the role of exemplarity in political action.

See, e.g., J. Tully, Public Philosophy in a New Key, vol. II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); and A. J. Norval, “Moral Perfectionism and Democratic Responsiveness,” Ethics and Global Politics 4, no. 4 (2011): 207-29.

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32. This criticism of deliberative democracy aversion to rhetoric is well rehearsed. Chambers’s is a response to these criticisms.

33. J. Rancière, Dis-agreement (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).34. Kellner and Kim, for instance, discuss the critical pedagogical role of YouTube.

See Douglas Kellner and Gooyong Kim, “YouTube, Critical Pedagogy, and Media Activism: An Articulation,” http://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/index.html (accessed June 20, 2012). See also Downing et al.’s discussion of the use of new media by the Zapatistas in J. Downing, with T. Villareal Ford, G. Gil, and L. Stein, Radical Media: Rebellious Communication and Social Movements (London: Sage, 2001).

35. Here I am following Emerson and Nietzsche for whom there are virtues, but no “final virtue." R. B. Goodman, “Moral Perfectionism and Democracy: Emerson, Nietzsche, Cavell,” in ESQ 43 (1997): 166.

36. Coleman, “The Internet as Space for Policy Deliberation,” 157.37. Emerson notes, “Life Only Avails, Not the Having Lived . . . the Soul Becomes.”

Quoted in Goodman, “Moral Perfectionism and Democracy,” 163. Goodman depicts this as the “unceasing upward and outward movement in the virtuous soul.”

38. For a discussion of Emerson’s understanding of tuition and intuition, see S. Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 36.

39. N. Ruttenberg, The Democratic Personality: Popular Voice and the Trial of American Authorship (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 16 and 17.

40. S. Cavell, Philosophical Passages (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 35.41. Goodman, “Moral Perfectionism and Democracy,” 166.42. R. W. Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” In Emerson: Essays and Lectures, ed. J. Porte

(New York: Library of America, 1983), 261.43. In contrast to the view taken by Rawls, Emersonian perfectionism is not elitist.

The ongoing struggle to perfect the self, to strive to a higher self and society, is a possibility open to all. For a fuller discussion of this matter see, Cavell, Condi-tions Handsome and Unhandsome, 1-34.

44. Cavell, Philosophical Passages, 30.

About the Author

Aletta J. Norval is Professor in Political Theory in the Department of Government, University of Essex. She is author of Aversive Democracy: Inheritance and Originality in the Democratic Tradition (Cambridge University Press, 2007). She works in the field of democratic theory and is currently writing on Cavell, Emerson, and Rancière.

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