"The Public Sphere and Experience": Selections

Abstract

system. To everyday experience this yields a confusing picture, wherein the life-context is simultaneously integrated into production and the public sphere, and yet is at the same time excluded because in its concrete totality it is not recognized as an autonomous whole. 10. Marx says that, for the nineteenth-century proletariat, the abstraction of everything human, even of the semblance of the human, has in practice been achieved. The old and new public spheres of bourgeois society can respond only with palliatives; they provide, without any real change in the class situation, the semblance of humanity as a separate product. This is the foundation of the culture industry's pauperism [Pauperismus], which destroys experience.25 In the consciousness industry, but also in the public practice of aggrandizement and the ideological manufacture of the other production public spheres, the consciousness of the worker becomes the raw material and the site where these processes realize themselves. This does not alter the overall context of class struggles, but augments them with a higher, more opaque level. The position is fore it was possible after 1975, for example, to drive Volkswagen competition from American markets with the aid of safety regulations for automobile production. The most consistent exploitation of public norms is the so-called syndicate structure, which during the Third Reich represented the typical form of economic organization. Within this system the structuring of branches of industry adequate to the interests of the concern is accomplished by setting up statutory semistate institutions via which redistributions of economic wealth and attenuations of production and distribution take place. Organized on a private basis, such syndicates would come up against the ban on cartelsin statutory form they are perfectly feasible. An example of this is provided by the first piece of Federal legislation in the field of media policy, the so-called Film Subvention Law. In this case the legislative division of competence between federal and provincial levels was exploited by particular interests in the commercial cinema in such a way that the medium, which comprises cultural and economic dimensions, was to be subsidized in an abstract economic fashion, since federal legislation has competence only for the economic side of film. The result of this is the so-called schmaltz-cartel [Schnulzen-Kartell], a law which favors only certain films financed by concerns while bracketing out independent productions as merely cultural. In the Film Subvention Bureau set up in the wake of the Film Subvention Law, representatives of parliament, the churches, and television work together with certain sectors of the film industry so that there arises a mixture of public and private power that is completely inscrutable. What is characteristic of this is the confusion of areas of responsibility: Bundestag deputies become, as presidents of this bureau, representatives of economic interests, thereby being subject to the legal monitoring of ministries which they themselves, as parliamentary deputies, control. Such constitutional nonsense would not have been possible in the classical public sphere; in supranational organizations above all, it becomes the norm. 25. See Jiirgen Habermas, Die Dialektik der Rationalisierung. Vom Pauperismus in Produktion und Konsum, in Merkur, vol. VIII (1954), pp. 701ff. Reprinted in Arbeit, Erkenntnis, Fortschritt, Amsterdam, 1970, pp. 7ff. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.138 on Sun, 26 Jun 2016 07:16:09 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms