ABSTRACT
When Habermas’ influential work The structural transformation of the public sphere (1962) was translated into English and published in 1989, it soon became influential within circles of communication, media and cultural studies. The term ‘influential’ should however not only be understood positively, as Habermas’ original blueprint has been criticised from various angles. These include what a number of scholars perceive as an illusion of the public sphere’s inclusiveness, its faith in the powers of rational-critical communication and deliberation thereby not accounting for feelings, passions and the affective, its homogeneity and thereby lack of accounting for pluralistic publics, its homogenous view of mass media and the rather one-dimensional view of the dynamics of the state and the market. The irony of these reactions is that Habermas had by then been working eagerly on developing his original writings on the public sphere, exemplified in particular in his Theory of communicative action and in Between facts and norms, the latter published in German only three years after the English translation of his seminal work from 1962. In these works Habermas had already responded to much of this criticism, making his theory on public spheres and publics more suitable to the complexities of modern societies. This, however, does not mean that the original blueprint of the bourgeois public sphere has or should be abandoned. It rather means that it is important to be attentive towards the continuity of his work on public spheres and how certain elements continue to be significant when adapted to the field of digital communication. In his original work, Habermas (1989) makes an important distinction between what he calls the public sphere in the world of letters, also conceptualised as the cultural public sphere (McGuigan, 2005) and the political public sphere. Here Habermas distinguishes between critical debate in the world of letters and rational-critical debate in the political public sphere. The first is a precursor to the political one and serves as an apolitical and inclusive sphere for citizens to discuss and deliberate matters of common concern. Even though this inclusiveness of the original bourgeois public sphere has been criticised, this distinction between the cultural and the political is an important one and is further evolved in later works where Habermas works with the notions of system and lifeworld. The system is driven by instrumental and strategic actions, and contains the state and the market within its realm. The lifeworld is motivated and defined by communicative action, and contains cognitive, aesthetic-expressive and ethical
rationalities. It is in this ‘cultural realm’ of the lifeworld where knowledge is renewed and transmitted and where processes of cultural reproduction, social integration, formation of solidarity and personal identities thrive (Habermas, 1987). The system and the lifeworld influence each other through the mediating space of public spheres. In a simple conceptualisation public spheres can therefore be considered as communicative spaces, or spaces of communication – or, as Habermas frames it when discussing the political public sphere, spaces that provide ‘conditions of communication under which there can come into being a discursive formation of opinion and will on the part of a public composed of the citizens of a state’ (1992, p. 446). In modern societies Habermas detects strategic colonisation by the economic and bureaucratic means of the system towards the lifeworld and this colonisation leads to structural violence exercised by systemic restriction to communication:
In the end, systemic mechanisms suppress forms of social integration even in those areas where a consensus-dependent coordination of action cannot be replaced, that is, where the symbolic reproduction of the lifeworld is at stake. In these areas, the mediatization of the lifeworld assumes the form of a colonization.
