Abstract
The public sphere: between cosmopolitanism and nationalism
Born out of the 18th-century culture of sympathy, the public sphere assumes that all humans are interlocutors in an equal conversation of shared concerns (Johnson, 2001). Initially socialised in the private sphere of emotional commitments, these interlocutors enter the public domain, craving recognition from others as an acknowledgement of the bonds of humanity that bring them together into a collective body (Habermas, 1989). Similarly, the Kantian view of cosmopolitanism as the universal condition of peaceful coexistence is predicated upon free discourse among rational human beings who, through this very discourse, reveal the bonds of humanity that bring them together as a species: ‘When Kant called on Enlightenment thinkers to address the “world” or to be men of the world’, Calhoun says, ‘the public sphere was essential to its definition; the very unity and dignity of the human species was revealed, in part, by its capacity to join in public discourse’ (1992: 18).
Yet, simultaneously, the public sphere emerged within a Westphalian global order that, far from imagining all humans as equal interlocutors, divided the world into hierarchies of nation-states, where some were more equal than others. Rather than a cosmopolitan exercise in rational discourse, the public sphere was instead nationally bound, consisting of ‘the tasks of criticism and control which a public body of citizens informally … practices vis-à-vis the ruling structure organized in the form of a state’ (Habermas, 1974: 49 emphasis added). Evidently, this national body of citizens is not the world at large but the specific world of a privileged reading public that engaged in free commerce and established itself as the powerful force of a new bourgeois class. By claiming to speak in the name of humanity, this class rendered its own politics of capital accumulation the norm of the nation-state and turned political questions about who has the right to speak into moral questions about how to bring conflicting voices into consensus through the civilizing procedure of rational discourse: ‘Bourgeois could be conflated with homme’, Calhoun argues, precisely ‘because the private economy was a natural order so constructed that justice was immanent in free commerce’ (1992: 19).
Marxian and postcolonial critiques of modernity draw their argument from this unequal division in the capitalist world order, which relegated the capacity for rational speech to privileged westerners endowed with universal humanity, while de-humanizing the majority world for lacking public reason. The class character of such division granted, my interest in cosmopolitanism draws attention to the implications of the division beyond the nation-state, in the systemic asymmetry between West and the global South (Said, 1993). The implications I explore, then, stem from this particular tension in the concept of the public sphere between a cosmopolitan conception of inclusion that encompasses humanity and a nationalist conception that reserves inclusion for the few. Even though this tension has been thematized by feminist, political and cultural studies critiques, the tension has not yet been explored from the perspective of an ethics of human vulnerability. Understood as the ethico-political pressures that, particularly, distant suffering may exert upon the public body of citizens to act upon this suffering, human vulnerability situates justice and solidarity at the heart of public discourse and raises the question of the conditions under which such discourse may encompass a concern for those living outside the bourgeois prosperity of the West – for all humanity (Chouliaraki, 2006, 2012). Topical since Kant’s cosmopolitan imperative, this question has become more pertinent than ever, given the unprecedented awareness of distant suffering through the media today, when ‘more suffering is more visible than in any other phase in human history’ (Linklater, 2007: 26).
While Habermas’s work centrally engages with questions of justice and solidarity, he is suspicious of the role that human vulnerability may play as an act of cosmopolitan education, in the West. This is, I argue, because his account of the concept has underplayed the moral-aesthetic dimensions of the culture of sympathy as catalysts for solidarity, in favour of a rationalist-legalist account of the public sphere, where it is the reasoned use of language, rather than the aesthetics of the body-in-need, that raises claims to justice and solidarity. I develop my argument in two moves. I first discuss Habermas’s early reluctance to accept human vulnerability as a moral force in the public sphere, under the themes of ‘Vulnerability and the societalization of politics’ and ‘Vulnerability and the aestheticization of politics’. I then proceed to examine his more recent elaborations of the public sphere, which acknowledge shared vulnerabilities as a vehicle for a post-national world order, yet still remain open to critiques of ethnocentric rationalism, in ‘Post-national politics and the question of voice’ and ‘Media and the importance of the suffering body’.
The nationalist public sphere
The vulnerability of citizens in the face of arbitrary authority lies at the heart of the public sphere as an achievement of western European nation-states. The core activity of the public sphere, linguistic interaction, rests precisely on the capacity of speech to bind its interlocutors in a web of mutual expectations for action that can be held in check through language rules agreed by all. The speech of the public sphere, in Habermas’s terms, is ‘an action-coordinating force’ and can ‘release action-relevant consequences’ (1987: 195–6 in White, 1988: 194). However, this ‘responsibility to act in the world’, as White puts it, in ways that protect citizens’ lives, raises the question of how the theory of the public sphere engages with vulnerable others and how it promotes claims to solidarity with these others, particularly in view of historical western responsibilities for the colonial hegemony exercised over non-western peoples. Habermas does not directly deal with these questions. But his argument on the decline of the public sphere – in his historical work on The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1989 [1962]) but, particularly, in his conceptual account of The Theory of Communicative Action (1987) – entails a suggestive view of the role of human vulnerability in the context of the nation-state. The politics of vulnerability, he argues, limits rather than enhances our ‘responsibility to act in the world’: on the one hand, it turns questions of inequality into the consumption of state services for the poor and, on the other, it lends itself to media manipulation, replacing the moral force of suffering with television spectacle.
Vulnerability and the societalization of politics
Building upon his ‘refeudalization’ thesis, Habermas (1987) argued that the decline of the public sphere is partly due to the colonization of the life-world, where bonds among people take the form of empathetic commitment (in the private sphere) and political influence (in the public sphere), by a systems logic of state power and money. The attention of the state to social suffering, which placed human vulnerability at the heart of the welfare policies in modern Europe, constitutes an important example of such colonization, in that, through its empathetic attention to the poor, the nation-state marginalized the engagement of life-world rationality with social injustice in favour of its own rationalized management of poverty (Scambler, 2001). Consequently, despite its persistence, class injustice lost its relevance for the citizens-now-turned-clients of state services. With the welfare state, as Habermas says, ‘social antagonism … loses its structural-forming power for the lifeworld of social groups, although it does remain constitutive for the structure of the economic system’ (1987: 349–50).
The societalization of politics refers, therefore, to the negative implications of a politics of human vulnerability, on the grounds that such insertion is part of a systemic logic of managing the poor which weakens political responses to human suffering, placing it within the de-politicized logic of instrumental rationality. Given the nationalist framework in which this critique is developed, the argument strongly echoes similar critiques of global humanitarianism as sentimental gift-giving to distant sufferers that obscures the enduring damage of historical relations of colonialism and the continuing asymmetries between the West and the global South. Even though, as we shall see, Habermas subsequently developed a rights-driven vision of cosmopolitanism with a view to redressing global inequalities, for now, his critique of welfare moralism draws attention to a particular inflection of the culture of sympathy that he privileges. This is one that relies on bourgeois reasoning as the way to pursue questions of injustice in the public sphere, while it views appeals to suffering with suspicion as generating pre-political responses that can only forge private commitment to their cause (Johnson, 2001). This rationalist inflection of the culture of sympathy has two implications: it promotes a restricted conception of justice, as a question to be settled within the bourgeois public sphere through the deliberative procedures of public discourse, rather than a condition that regulates the very boundary of the public sphere, opening the question of who can legitimately be included in or excluded from it, in the first place (Fraser, 2007). At the same time, it also promotes a communitarian, rather than cosmopolitan, form of solidarity as a matter of the taken-for-granted mutuality of those who already speak together and, therefore, have the capacity to recognize the humanity of one another in the confines of their own life-world – thereby excluding those who do not enjoy such intimate and mutual recognition (Johnson, 2001).
Vulnerabilty and the aestheticization of politics
The colonization of the life-world by systems is responsible for the decline of the public sphere in yet another manner. Now, though, it is the commercialized media of television and the press, rather than the state, which turn rational discourse into impression management and, in so doing, corrode the deliberative potential of the life-world (Habermas, 1987). Abstracting from his earlier, historical work on the ‘refeudalization’ of the 18th-century public sphere by the 20th-century media markets, this aspect of Habermas’s colonization thesis associates the mass media with the steering media of money and power (Kellner, 2000), and in doing so, continues to gesture towards the Frankfurt School critique of mass spectacles. Echoing Benjamin’s critique that the Nazis displaced their politics of atrocity onto manipulative performances of power, so that ‘the logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life’ (Benjamin, 1968: 241), Habermas maintains a concern with the ways in which today’s corporate media turn questions of justice and solidarity from objects of rational discourse into spectacles for consumption. His critique, however, focuses less on the Benjaminian belief that art ‘in the age of mechanical reproduction’ could be a means of self-reflection which may lead to social change, and more on the diagnosis that the entertainment culture of the mass media has not only colonized the public space of communicative action but also has simultaneously marginalized art itself as a form of subjective self-expression, governed by the validity claim of authorial truthfulness (Boucher, 2011). While there is promising potential in this claim, as art can still be a resource for politicization in society, the main implication of Habermas’s separation of aesthetics from the mass media is that the latter cannot participate in the communicative processes of the public sphere. Mediated aesthetics cannot contribute to the development of critical publicity precisely because such aesthetics is already corroded by ‘the manipulative deployment of media power to procure mass loyalty, consumer demand, and “compliance” with systemic imperatives’ (Habermas, 1992: 452).
This negativity poses a problem when Habermas, in a parallel move, argues for the importance of debating atrocity and suffering in the public sphere. Even though, as earlier, his argument does not touch upon the vulnerability of the global South but that of Nazi victims, his example still speaks to the moral pressures that distant suffering exerts upon national publics: ‘these dead [Nazi victims]’, he says, ‘have above all a claim to the weak anamnestic power of a solidarity, which those born later can only practise through the medium of the memory which is always being renewed … which is at any rate active and circulating’ (1988: 44). Solidarity, a pre-political disposition based on emotional commitments of the private sphere, turns thus into public practice when we collectively engage in always-renewed acts of memory about suffering others. The question arises, however, as to how such acts can be renewed if, according to the colonization thesis, the mass media occupy a largely negative position in the public sphere as part of systemic colonization of the life-world. Given that suffering is increasingly embedded in mediated rituals of mourning and memory, it is indeed hard to imagine how bonds of solidarity might escape the symbolic economies of the media (Chouliaraki, 2006). Like the societalization argument, then, Habermas’s aestheticization of politics suggests a further inflection of the culture of sympathy. This is one that, inspired by the practices of bourgeois salons and cafés, privileges the co-presence of interlocutors as they engage in acts of deliberation while it rejects the aesthetic force that spectacles of suffering may exert upon them as acts of moral imagination. By marginalizing the role that such spectacles played in activating processes of recognition with distant sufferers, so central in the 18th-century culture of sympathy, Habermas is, once again, privileging a rationalist interpretation of the Enlightenment over a moral-aesthetic one. The implication of this privileging is dual. In separating the claim of high art to sincere self-expressivity from mediated aesthetics, it denigrates the latter as de facto inauthentic and, therefore, manipulative; also, in associating mediated aesthetics with claims to in authenticity, he does not allow for a nuanced exploration of the various strategies of media discourse, through which claims to authenticity and appeals to emotions act as moralizing forces upon its publics.
I have so far examined two dimensions of Habermas’s engagement with human vulnerability. Assuming that linguistic interaction is the means by which the public sphere coordinates action-in-the-world, Habermas regards human vulnerability as an obstacle to such coordination, in that it displaces questions of justice and solidarity onto a benevolent but de-politicized welfare state, while its mediation relies on an inauthentic visuality that sensationalizes rather than rationalizes its cause. The public sphere that is presupposed and reproduced in this process remains, consequently, restricted to the nation-state and its cosmopolitan potential is suppressed: justice is understood as a conversation among equals within the sphere of bourgeoisie in western nation-states and solidarity is understood as unmediated dialogue within the nation-state, inevitably leaving distant others outside the public’s scope of responsibility. What is missing from Habermas’s account is an assumption of language not only as a means of coordinating ‘action-in-the-world’ but also as, in White’s words, a means of ‘disclosing worlds’ – ‘its capacity to loosen our own world’s hold on us by calling attention to the ways in which our own unrecognized fictions structure the world and expose the Other who is necessarily created by our world’ (1988: 196).
The trans-nationalist public sphere
Habermas’s more recent work turned to the question of the other in the context of a trans-national public sphere, which is now not only about impartial deliberation but, through this, also about ‘a nonleveling and nonappropriating inclusion of … his [sic] otherness’ (Habermas 1998: 40). I discuss two aspects of this development, each returning to the two themes addressed above – welfare solidarity and mediated vulnerability.
Post-national politics and the question of voice
Turning away from the problematic of the nation-state, Habermas showed an appreciation of trans-national welfare policies as a means of securing citizens’ rights, under conditions of neoliberal globalization. The globalization of ‘commerce and communication, of economic production and finance … and above all of ecological and military risks’, he argues, ‘poses problems that can no longer be solved within the framework of nation-states’ (1998: 106). A sense of shared vulnerability is central to this conception of politics, which places the ‘founding and expansion of political institutions on the supranational level’, such as the European Union and the United Nations, at the heart of Habermas’s vision for a new cosmopolitan order (1998: 107). Capitalizing on the cosmopolitan potential of the public sphere to produce a self-sovereign humanity able to deliberate over its own fate, this reliance on post-national institutions thematizes, as Johnson puts it, ‘the recognition of the other as a communicative actor’ (2001: 233) and, in so doing, renders the problematic of the voice of this other more visible than ever before in Habermas’s work.
What the post-national turn does not do, however, is theorize how the historical asymmetries of voice that already structure the existing world order and its institutions may be overcome (Owens, 2008). This is because, while the idea of critical publicity and its normative universal of rational discourse continues to inform Habermas’s post-national public sphere, his emphasis on questions of the institutionalization of international law or the legality of humanitarian wars downplays the question of how such institutional discourse is, at the same time, an act of power that reproduces its ‘others’ in the name of ‘universal’ consensus – a question that, in White’s words, ‘is always concerned to chart the points at which any … norms for coordinating action – constructed under the pull of a responsibility to act – simultaneously and necessarily create and marginalize an Other’ (1988: 218).
Despite acknowledging the significance of other-oriented discourse, then, Habermas remains faithful to his priority of action-coordinated discourse. Reflecting the rationalist twist of the culture of sympathy, discussed earlier, this priority relies on a version of critical political theory, legal cosmopolitanism, at the expense of grappling with the moral-cultural question of voice and exclusion – what Fraser (2007) terms the meta-political question of ‘misframing’. Rather than focusing on the deliberative procedure by which the voices of the public sphere are orchestrated to be heard as equal, that is, as action-coordinating discourse, Fraser’s misframing poses instead the question of the criteria by which voice may be framed in the first place, as legitimately included in or excluded from this deliberative procedure – hence its meta-political character. In drawing attention to the historical asymmetry among voices, some of which still remain inaudible in the post-national public sphere, misframing points to the continuing reproduction of the historical divide between the West and ‘the rest’ as a discursive act of the power by which the West excludes or marginalizes ‘the rest’; what Fraser again terms ‘the defining injustice of a globalizing age’ (2007: 10). Paradoxically, then, Habermas’s normative ideal of rational discourse pays lip service to empirical asymmetries of voice in the contemporary world order, leaving his cosmopolitan vision open to the critique of ethnocentrism as ‘a view from Brussels, where the post-national is identified with the strength of the European Union rather than the weakness of, say, African states’ (Calhoun, 2002: 91).
Media and the importance of the suffering body
Habermas’s recent work also shows a new appreciation of the media not only as mass entertainment that corrupts the deliberative potential of the public sphere but also as catalytic in configuring trans-national communities of viewing – as constituting a ‘dispersed public interconnected almost exclusively through these … media’, able ‘to keep up to date on all kinds of issues and contributions’ (2006: 9). In the context of the September 11 2001 attacks, Habermas speaks, in particular, of the ‘universal witness’ as a position from which the world watched the event (Borradori, 2003: 25). The moral potential of trans-national witnessing granted, what remains under-theorized here is the aesthetic quality of witnessing – the variations of visual representation that selectively turn viewers into publics (Chouliaraki, 2012). This inattention to aesthetic quality reflects, once again, Habermas’s predilection for the rationalist rather than moral-aesthetic dimensions of the culture of sympathy; an attention to the linguistic rules that govern rational discourse about suffering rather than our mundane habituation into ‘the imaginative ability to see strange people as fellow sufferers’ (Rorty, 1989: xvi).
Yet, from the perspective of how trans-national viewers may become cosmopolitan publics, this predilection can be problematic. This is because the choice to express solidarity for vulnerable others cannot be only a matter of consensual decision-making but, as Rorty has argued, it is also a matter of cultivating the imagination – a matter, that is, of the stories and images about those others that the media mundanely circulate so as to habituate us into ways of feeling and acting towards them: ‘That is why’, Rorty says, ‘the novel, the movie and the TV programme have, gradually but steadily replaced the sermon and the treatise as the principal vehicles of moral change and progress’ (1989: xvi). Habermas’s reluctance to draw attention to the role of the media in producing imaginations of solidarity shows the difficulty of the rationalist approach in accounting for the performative power of aesthetics – its power to use historically specific ‘topics of suffering’ that, as Boltanski (1999) has shown, produce meaning about vulnerable others and can invite the solidarity of the West. Habermas, then, may have de-centred the mediated public sphere from its nationalist grip but he continues to tie cosmopolitan solidarity to linguistic rationality rather than (also) acknowledging the visual power of the body-in-pain to engage our imaginative capacity for empathy (Chouliaraki 2012).
In conclusion, the gradual cosmopolitanization of Habermas’s concept of the public sphere is a move from the communitarian solidarity of a nation-bound bourgeoisie towards shared vulnerability as a cause for solidary action upon all humanity. This is important, as it subjects processes of economic globalization to the force of critical reason and international justice. It downplays, however, the historical relations of power that asymmetrically distribute human vulnerability across the globe and so exclude certain voices from the deliberative processes of the post-national public sphere. It also downplays the moralizing force of mediation, which has the potential to turn the spectacle of human vulnerability into a moral claim to solidarity. The cosmopolitanization of the public sphere, I have argued, can be enhanced by challenging Habermas’s rationalist orientation with an account of the moral-aesthetic pressures that human vulnerability places upon the public sphere. Cosmopolitanism does not come about only through the force of the best argument but also through the symbolic recognition of vulnerable others, as well as through the cultivation of our imaginative capacity to engage with the ‘otherness’ of their vulnerability.