La imagen en el comercio minorista de bienes 20

Introduction

In this chapter I continue a review of the public sphere theory by presenting the central claims of three other critical interlocutors of the public sphere. They are Calhoun, Fraser, and Kellner. In so doing, I work towards generating criteria for our analyzing of the emerging public sphere in Nigeria. My approach to these chosen thinkers is as Calhoun’s approach to Habermas’ seminal text: for Calhoun states, ‘the most important destiny of Habermas’ first book’ may be to be a fruitful generator of new research, analysis, and theory’, rather than an ‘authoritative statement’ (Calhoun, 1992: 41). Starting with Calhoun, I introduce us again to the concept of the public sphere, this time, from the perspective of Habermas’ critics.

Calhoun and the critical extension of the Habermasian public sphere

Craig Calhoun’s writings on the public sphere emerge in critical dialogue with Habermas’ historical account in Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962). Calhoun is largely noted for his critique of Habermas’ historical account, focusing particularly on the concept and function of ‘civil society’ and its relevance in contemporary discussions on American and European democracy and social life.

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The concept of civil society is central to the idea of the public sphere, even if Habermas was not deeply invested in it as a distinct historical category. In Calhoun’s 1993 article, ‘Civil Society and the Public Sphere’, Calhoun stresses the importance of maintaining a clear distinction between both concepts, especially in theoretical discussions (1993:269). Habermas tended to maintain that civil society emerged as a private realm that stood counter to the State: it ‘came into existence as a corollary of a de-personalised State authority’ (Habermas, 1962:19). A similarity in civil society and the public sphere as concepts is that they each only became fully conceptualised once the State became divested of direct human personality (such as the age of representative publicity and the personality of the King). Civil became recognisable in the relationships and organisations created for sustaining social life outside the State, and for articulating issues of interests for public discussion and (or) the action of the State. This led to educated members of the civil elite viewing themselves as publicum, a counterpart to public authority or the State, where the bourgeois public sphere was institutionalised as co-dependent on State power (Calhoun, 1992: 9).

Indeed, the extent to which citizens find a capacity for dialogue and deliberation that is the content of the public sphere depends on the ‘internal connections among people, occasions for collective action, ideologies that root popular consent’ (Calhoun, 1993:270) that is the civil sphere. Civil society, for Calhoun, is the capacity of a social community to organise itself, independent of the specific direction of State power, yet at the same time formed in relation to it

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(Calhoun, 1993:270). Emphasising their relation, Calhoun asserts that the relation between the public sphere and civil society is that the latter’s capacity in operationalizing self-organisation is registered in the public sphere as the arena for deliberative exchange, where rational critical debate determined the required actions and agreements. To Calhoun, Habermas’ public sphere functioned in relation to its social condition, which was civil society (1993: 273). In other words, without a civil society, a public sphere would be form-less, disorganized and without direction.

In the same article, Calhoun identifies certain aspects of Habermas’ historical narrative, particularly the role of the printing press. The emergence of newsletters met a demand for information on behalf of merchants, on prices and goods, later evolving as media of ‘public’ information on laws and trading practices. This process, he opines, promoted a general literacy and a distinctive set of social approaches to the published word as a source of information. Furthermore, the press was as much available and used by the State, which relayed information to the public sphere; in other words, we must not assume linear lines of communication to determine any ‘model’ we might form of the public sphere and the ‘rational’ dynamics of its dialogue and deliberations (Calhoun, 1992:8).

Calhoun concurs with Habermas in that the decline of the press as central and dominant media of the public sphere (and the concomitant expansion and commercialisation of the media), was symptomatic of the decline of the public sphere itself (Habermas, 1962:169). However, for Calhoun the degeneration of

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the public sphere is overstated: for the ‘public consequences of mass media are not necessarily as uniformly negative as Structural Transformation suggests’ (1992: 33), and he expresses surprise that Habermas does not mention other avenues through which access to the public sphere expanded (1992:24). For Calhoun, the normative public sphere may be resuscitated even though Habermas fails to find socio-economic conditions for such in advanced capitalist societies: to find ‘an institutional basis for an effective political public sphere corresponding in character and function to that of early capitalism and State formation but corresponding in scale and participation to the realities of later capitalism and States’ (1992:29). Indeed, a central weakness in Habermas’ Structural Transformation, is that Habermas does not consider the ‘classical’ bourgeois public sphere and the post-transformation public sphere (or ‘organised’ and ‘late’ capitalism) through marshaling the same criteria. Habermas’ account of the Twentieth Century omits ‘the sort of intellectual history, the attempt to take leading thinkers seriously and recover the truth from their ideologically distorted writings’; an approach that marks Habermas’ take on the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries (Calhoun, 1992: 33).

However, on a more positive note, Calhoun readily submits that Habermas successfully recovered a ‘valuable critical ideal from the classical bourgeois public sphere’, an important blueprint (open to critical modification) for the practice of democratic culture (Calhoun, 1992:29). Calhoun elucidates that majority of other criticisms against the public sphere expose forms of underdevelopment in the concept, or omission of significant issues (such as

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gender). Thus, mentioning what these omissions are indicates possibilities in improving or extending the theoretical armature of the Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, rather than collapsing it (1992:33). Issues that are ‘remarkably absent’, for Calhoun, include culture and identity (nationalism), religion1 and social movements (1992:34, 36, 37). The ‘remarkable absence’ of nationalism, Calhoun observes, ‘may be due partly to the general lack of attention to the nineteenth century public sphere’, and a part of ‘a thinness of attention to matters of culture and the construction of identity’ (1992:34). Calhoun’s subsequent paper ‘Nationalism and Cultures of Democracy’ (2007), buttresses the significance of nationalism, social solidarity and social institutions to democratic culture. For Calhoun, nationalism is a sober reminder that democracy presupposes solidarity (2007:172).

In ‘Habermas and the Public Sphere’ (1992), Calhoun points out that Habermas’ framework assumes that social identities and interests are settled and fully formed in the private sphere before being imported into the public sphere, an assumption that ‘impoverishes his own theory’ (1992:35). The abstract binary ‘private vs. public’ generates in Habermas’s historical narrative an impasse when attempting to find what constitutes general interests or not. An instance for Calhoun is that Habermas’ discussion on the literary dimensions to the early

1  _{In  Habermas’  future  essay  in  2011,  he  addresses  the  subject  of  religion  in  the}   public  sphere.  Habermas  concludes  that  religious  practices  and  perspectives   remain  relevant  to  multicultural  citizenship,  spurring  solidarity  and  respect.   However,  it  is  required  that  religious  traditions  are  translated  into  “universally   accessible  language”  to  avail  itself  in  wider  political  culture  (2011:  15-­‐28;  also,   Mendieta  &  Vanantwerpen,  2011:  4-­‐5).  

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evolution of the public sphere (where literary fiction, for one, helped facilitate a sense of identity, experience and consciousness of audience-directed communication) entailed a profound role for the private sphere. As the public realm became more emphatic, it is tempting to understand public in terms of its opposite to private. Calhoun’s problem is the relation between the sense of individual selfhood and interests emerging from a private realm and the evident power of the allegiance to general interests constitutive of a public realm fully developed. The social spaces of the public sphere (café, salon, town hall, etc.) are components in the passage between private and public to some degree, as are also the various media of the published word. Yet there remains a sense – particularly concerning the role of religious experience and faith during these periods of history – that the construction of identity, individual experience, and the allegiance to general interests, cannot be explained by an emphatic binary of ‘public v’s private’ (Calhoun, 1992:35).

Calhoun further posits that the absence of culture, nationalism and a theory of the processes by which social identities are constructed, in Habermas’ account have implication for his conception of the public sphere’s degeneration. That is, ‘even if we grant that the problem-solving functions of the public sphere are being performed less well than in the past, this does not mean that public sphere has ceased to be at least as vibrant a source of understanding, including self- understanding’ (Calhoun, 1992:34). Self-understanding is therefore a radically under-theorised component of the public sphere for Calhoun, and where it does appear as a dimension of the ‘interiority’ of the Marxist model of ‘liberal

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bourgeois’ subjectivity, it neglects to fully include its social dimension. For Calhoun, social movements were and remain vital to the formation of the agenda of public sphere debates, but also the allegiances, convictions and values of individuals. Moreover, democratic politics itself has been ‘crucially influenced’ by social movements – which are in effect a ‘subsidiary’ public (1992: 37). Further, a more socially informed understanding of public sphere debates and deliberations will see that individual issues and problems agglomerate within broader ideological confines and other forms of discursive power that structure collective attention. The omission of social movements from a theory of the public sphere is to disregard how public discourse is a site of struggle, through which the participants as much as the ‘sphere’ itself are made and re- made (Calhoun, 1992:37).

Calhoun’s central contribution to the critique and extension of Habermas’ theory lies in the emphatic emphasis on the social dimension of public life – identities, movements, ideologies and power. To some extent Calhoun is ambivalent on the role of nationalism in the formation of social conditions, registered in the way he is aware of Habermas’ unsustainable historical truism that each State possesses one public sphere yet at the same time multiple public spheres ‘will leave us groping for a new term to describe the communicative relationships among them’ (1992:37). To admit to the shifts in the public sphere in the age of nationalism’s decline as much as the rise of multi-media, mass-immigration and consumerism, the public sphere should be conceived as ‘involving a field of discursive interactions’, where there are admitted various clusters of

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communication2. These clusters may be microcosms of the whole (like major cities generating their own public discourse within countries); or they may revolve around persons, issues, categories or basic dynamics of society as a whole. We therefore need to know how, within these clusters, how focus is maintained, how they are internally organised, how they manage their boundaries as well as their internal cohesion in relation to the whole – perhaps as an articulation of sectional interests, a functional division of labour or a stand against the hegemony of a dominant ideology? For Calhoun, this trajectory of questioning will alert us to the significance of ‘a more pluralistic, open approach to conceptualising the public sphere but also to a need for analysis of its internal organisation, something almost completely neglected in Structural Transformation’ (1992:38).

Calhoun is therefore of the position that the normative public sphere may indeed be revived if it can be conceptualized with reference to the distinct socio- economic conditions of advanced capitalist societies in present-day (not the requirements of the ‘bourgeoisie’). He identifies four dimensions of social life being ‘remarkably absent’ in Habermas’s public sphere theory: culture, identity, religion, and the ‘social movement’. In extending the construct of the public sphere to a non-European society such as Nigeria, these ‘missing’ concepts are

2  _{See  also  Eriksen  who  highlights  the  complexity  involved  in  “global  conversations}   among  citizens”  in  the  21st  _{century  public  sphere.  Where  the  understanding  of  the}   public  sphere  was  linked  to  the  nation  state,  national  identities,  democratic  values,   communities  of  languages,  and  civil  societies,  what  then  becomes  of  the  public   sphere  in  these  times  of  transnational  mobility,  cross-­‐border  communications,   porous  boundaries,  and  destablised  national  identities?  (2014:  64-­‐77)    

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even of greater significance in a formulation of a concept of a public sphere. The role of ethnic diversity within culture is, as Calhoun indicates, significant.