The Orientational Transformations in Any Public Sphere: Deweyan Thoughts on Habermas, Habits, and Free Communication

Abstract

Jurgen Habermas's conception of public sphere has been of doubtless importance for those interested in intersection between communication, argument, and ideal sort of community we ought to form. In The Structural Transformation of Public Sphere, Habermas (1962/1989) recounts devolution of public sphere from free-wheeling and politically important coffee houses, salons, and reading societies to highly mediated and money-saturated form evident in mid-twentieth century west. Habermas's theme seems to be one that many might agree with. The ideal public engages freely in rational-critical debate over vital political issues of day, and such an ideal can be thwarted by presence of money, staged politics, and manipulative endeavors such as political advertising and spin. Habermas's (1962/1989) story presents as main villains parties and special interest associations (p. 209), who tend to use mass media to one-sidedly present attractive slogans and arguments, but not to discuss them in maximally public sense of reasoned debate that Habermas (and many of his detractors, I might add) would find ideal. His account effectively ends with decline of public sphere, and with hope of its revival lying in actualization of two conditions: (a) the objectively possible minimizing of bureaucratic decisions and (b) relativizing of structural conflicts of interest according to standard of a universal interest everyone can acknowledge (Habermas, 1962/1989, p. 235). If we agree with Habermas's idealization of free communication, stage is set for us to do something about it by challenging, critiquing, and reconstructing form of public arena so as to reduce distorting forces (such as money and ideology) and structural conflicts of ends and goals. In other words, Habermas's payoff seems to be a focus on reforming material organization of society. As a pragmatist in Deweyan spirit, I do not wholly disagree with value of such a view. Yet I must demur as to one-sided reading of public sphere, its problems, and paths to its melioration that such a common reading of this work might encourage. Lenore Langsdorf (2002) has espoused a similar worry over lack of meliorative resources in Habermas's privileging of representative in his communicative theory. Pragmatists will demand that any reading of ideal of public sphere provide a workable and comprehensive account of how actual present situation can be meliorated. John Dewey, a figure Habermas did not read until later in his career, diagnoses a similar problem of eclipse or decline of public. The consonances here are so striking that Habermas (2002) later indicated that Dewey's The Public and its Problems (1927/1984) could have been a major source for my Structural Transformation of Public Sphere (p. 228). In this work Dewey highlights misuse of press and decline of public in our democratic system, but he continues his life-long fascination with another aspect to puzzle of public sphere: habits, attitudes, or orientations of those comprising actual communities. Part of recovery of public lies in how we reconstruct our habits of inquiry and interaction, a point I have drawn out of his enigmatic comments concerning Great Community (Stroud, 2008, 2011a). This emphasis on orientation of participants in public sphere is not absent from Habermas, but it is easily overlooked in favor of a clean, high-altitude reading of social transformation and change. In his magisterial two volume work, The Theory of Communicative Action (1984, 1987), he augments his account of public sphere with a reading of ever-present orientational choice in linguistic interaction--namely, between linguistic action oriented toward achieving certain goals or ends and action orientated toward reaching understanding with one's conversational other. …