Capitalism and contested publicity. A conversation with Nancy Fraser

‘Subaltern counterpublics’ and the public-at-large

Q: In your seminal essay Rethinking the Public Sphere from 1990 (1992) you are diagnosing and also normatively defending the emergence of what you call ‘subaltern counterpublics’ that challenge the hegemony of bourgeois public sphere. On one hand, there is a variety of different publics rising from different social culture and political contexts. On the other hand, by virtue of being publics, they all address an encompassing ‘public-at-large’, in which they can discursively come to terms with each other. Could you explain how you conceive of the relation between subaltern counterpublics and what you call public-at-large? What is the latter? Is it something like universal discourse in a Habermasian fashion, rooted in the fabric of communicative action that integrates society as a totality?

A: I don’t myself want to necessarily get into the sort of heavy baggage of the theory of communicative action as a theory about what holds society together or what all communicative action ultimately aims at or anything like that. I think that’s another question, and I don’t think we need to get into that here. But I want to address your question from two directions. First, I will say something about the concept of subaltern counterpublics, and then about the notion of a public-at-large.

By calling certain publics subaltern counterpublics, I meant to suggest that they stand, first of all, relatively disempowered vis-a-vis some larger, more official and influential publics. They’re kind of disadvantaged in one way or another. And by using the word ‘counter’, I meant to suggest that they stand in a relation of contestation or opposition to mainstream public discourses. So, this is not just about small or even large groups of people who are all interested in chess or whatever and form a community around that. Instead, it has to do with oppositionality. The coming-about of subaltern counterpublics is sparked by the desire to get one’s perspective heard in the normal processes of communication.

Already at this point you can see that there is an orientation toward a larger discourse community. That’s where I guess the idea of the public-at-large comes in, conceived of as an encompassing space where public opinion and hegemonic common sense is formed. I’m assuming that in modern societies, where the scale of interdependency far exceeds that of face-to-face communication, there is this amorphous force of public opinion that has a kind of anonymity to it. This doesn’t mean that everyone is always actively engaged in it, but it’s a kind of force that has almost an inertial quality and also its routines and its boundaries, so to speak. Against that backdrop, it would be very normal for all sorts of people to feel unheard. For the most part, those feelings of being unheard are sluffed aside to the margins. They don’t become significant. They don’t cumulate, they don’t self-organize, they don’t attain speech. But when you have social movements forming in this oppositional relation based on a grievance about their structural disadvantage, then you have the possibility of counterpublicity, of the becoming-public of subaltern voices. This is the question that Gayatri Spivak famously posed: ‘Can the subaltern speak?’

The relation between subaltern counterpublics and the public-at-large does connect up to the concept of democracy. It’s part of our common sense that we believe, in theory at least, that everyone should have an equal say in the process of political will-formation, although we know that’s not how social reality works. But this normative idea is part of the background assumption of the formation of public opinion. If a public wants to live up to its underlying democratic aspirations, it can’t structurally prevent significant groups of people from having their voices heard.

Q: Even though it is difficult to grasp the socio-theoretical nature of the public-at-large, the usage of this concept seems to imply the idea that there is a dialogical relation among singular publics. They might contest each other fiercely, but, at least in principle, contestation is embedded within a mutual orientation to agreement that serves as a common ground and underlying basis of dispute. Would you agree that this is implied when we talk about the public-at-large?

A: It’s interesting that you ask this. We just had a memorial conference for Richard J. Bernstein last week at the New School where this whole question about dialogue and orientation to agreement came up. I mean, nobody is going to refuse that idea. It’s like saying you’re against apple pie or something, you know? But the important point that I want to make is that if you don’t contextualize that idea about orientation to agreement you can find yourself in a very problematic position. What I mean is that the pressure to orient to an agreement in a situation of structural exclusion or subordination functions as a way of mystifying or further excluding or intimidating subaltern subjects.

It seems to me that we should equally be talking about the importance of disagreement and dissent as a way of clarifying the situation (as opposed to all that seemingly ethical and ‘thus’ justified pressure to reach agreement). The situation I’m describing is one in which perspectives of marginalized or subordinated groups are, if they’re available at all, quickly caricatured and presented in a way that makes them seem quite ridiculous. An example from recent US public discourse would be the way the admittedly problematic formulation ‘defund the police’ instantly became framed as being pro-crime, where it was actually about the need to redistribute public resources between police departments, mental health programs and other institutions that address disorder. So, we should be able to articulate our disagreement before we insist that we should all be trying to find agreement.

Q: In the reply (seer Fraser 2014b) to the discussion that followed your article on Transnationalizing the Public Sphere (2007) you speak about a typical modern subjectivity that is principally opposed to all kinds of unjustified social domination and subjection. Is this the reason why social movements form themselves and why subaltern counterpublics have this orientation to the larger public sphere?

A: Let’s start with the empirical dimension of your question. I believe that subaltern counterpublics have existed for as long as publics have existed. As soon as you get into the modern framework with some kind of quasi- or pseudo-democratic orientation, then you’re also confronted with a plurality of different publics. From an empirical point of view, the model of ‘the one and only public’ is just not useful. It also casts an obscuring veil over what’s really going on from a normative perspective. The very idea of publicity includes the idea of inclusiveness and parity of participation. So, it’s not surprising that people come along and say: ‘Wait a minute! Those conditions aren’t actually realized here’. They don’t withdraw and build their own little separate world over here. There are people like the Amish or other fundamentalist religious communities that do that, but they’re not subaltern counterpublics. To describe a subaltern counterpublic is to say that people are contesting a disadvantaged, marginalized or subordinated status that they hold in society in general and in the formation of public opinion in particular. It’s about describing how they try to find a way to amplify their voices.

Q: We agree that we should be highly sceptical regarding the idea of a universal public sphere. We should indeed contextualize this idea, and we should be aware of the implicit exclusions that have been, seen historically, inherent to bourgeois universalism. We also agree that it’s not always about reaching consensus but first of all about having a communicative space in which the articulation of dissensus is possible. But in order to be not simply destructive, the articulation of dissensus must be based on an underlying relationship of reciprocal recognition in the sense that I’m willing to discuss with the other even though I totally disagree. Today we see that this normative precondition for a discursive articulation of dissensus is vanishing, given the fact that intensified political and cultural confrontations doesn’t lead to a deepening of discourse but to the creation of filter bubbles, echo chambers etc.

A: I would say that the kind of recognition we are talking about here is extremely thin. I can be in a kind of dissensual communicative relation with people whom I detest, whose views I consider abominable. When I’m in that relationship, I’m really not trying to convince them. I think that they’re beyond the pale. I’m talking to other people and I’m trying to convince them: ‘Don’t listen to these people, don’t listen to the racists, don’t listen to the fascist!’ I might agree to debate such a person – although I would worry about whether I’m giving them legitimacy by debating them. But suppose I agree, I would agree for strategic reasons, not because I want to reach mutual understanding. I would not want to assume that there’s any kind of thick recognition there.

Another wave of counterpublicity

Q: We started our conversation by talking about ‘subaltern counterpublics’ and their relationship to the public-at-large. The subjugated social position was crucial, and also their more or less emancipatory direction. However, today we are witnessing the rise of another, namely, right-wing wave of counterpublicity that promotes nationalist, xenophobic, sexist etc. agendas. How do you deal analytically with this tendency? How can we conceptually distinguish between, let’s say, progressive and regressive counterpublics? Of course, we can focus on the political content. But maybe there is a more formal way to deal with it, a way more immanent to the public sphere theory. Maybe we can make the distinction by investigating how counterpublics behave as publics and if and how they are able to deal with plurality and criticism.

A: This is indeed a relatively new challenge. When I was writing about ‘subaltern counterpublics’ in Rethinking the Public Sphere, I had in my mind especially feminist movements with which I had a lot of sympathy, although by no means uncritical identification. You’re right that today, we have a lot of racist, chauvinist, nationalist, denialist etc. movements that attain counterpublicity. Let’s assume at least for a moment that these counterpublics are really subaltern. Even though this is often a quite messy and ambiguous matter, I believe that a lot of people who participate in these nasty counterpublics do have some real grievances because they are structurally disadvantaged and marginalized in one way or another. But I want to make clear that this is not the case for all participants in those kinds of counterpublics. There are lots of other people mixed in there who are doing something else, and also coming from somewhere else, seen from a sociological point of view. We must not run two things together. One is whether these are voices of people that have not been adequately heard for reasons that have to do with their structural position in society, their subordinate or disadvantaged structural position. Another is whether the views they express are ones that we consider adequate to voice their grievances. From my perspective, there’s often a complete misdiagnosis of what your problem is. If you think your problem is caused by the existence of too many black people or gay people, or immigrants or Muslims or Jews or whatever, that’s, for sure, a misdiagnosis. But I can still say: ‘Yes, you’re right that you do have a problem, that your voice is not heard, that you are structurally disadvantaged’. So, from my point of view, these are subaltern counterpublics to the degree that they’re not simply inventions of some manipulative elites. However, the whole question of how manipulative elites function in relation to these counterpublics is another question.

Then you ask how we distinguish progressive and regressive counterpublics. I think I’m not looking exactly for formal criteria in terms of public sphere theory you just mentioned. There probably are some formal criteria. Trumpist election denialists in the United States are more unwilling to listen and debate their opponents than people in Black Lives Matter. But I don’t think a lot of people in Black Lives Matter have it exactly right either. I don’t know about the formal side of it, this is more a question of having the right theoretical analysis. I would just simply say that there’s a question about speaking from a disadvantaged position on the one hand. And then there’s the question of how you evaluate the content of what people say on the other. These are two different questions. And I would distinguish the reactionary from the progressive in terms of the content. I think there are plenty of structurally disadvantaged people who are involved in saying very regressive things. But for me, the answer is not to shut them up, but to convince them of an alternative diagnosis of what they suffer from. This is what I think the left should be doing now. You can’t just say: ‘You’re horrible, we will have nothing to do with you’. But of course, I’m assuming a distinction between principled racists and opportunistic racists within these bad or nasty counterpublics. What I mean by that is that there are some people who are just through and through anti-Semites or white supremacists, at least so far as I can see. Concerning those people, I’m really not interested in trying to convince them of anything, as I said before. But a lot of people are kind of mixed in with those views. I give you an example: Eight million (union) rust belt workers voted for Obama before they voted for Trump. That tells me these are not principled racists. They’re volatile. They’re looking for some way to express their difficult situation, their grievances.

I may be getting a little far away from your question, but I wanted to try to imbue it with a sense of our political moment since you refer to that moment in the question. How to answer your question depends in part on how we see what’s going on with people who gravitate to these regressive currents and what, if any prospects do we have for getting them to gravitate somewhere else, to the left.

‘Social media’ and the transformation of the public sphere

Q: Let’s come to another transformation of the public sphere that goes on at the moment and that has to do with the increasingly widespread use of so-called ‘social media’. Habermas (2022) has lengthy discussed this issue quite recently. He is arguing that social media is democratizing public communication, but only at the expense of commodifying and fragmenting the latter. We are wondering: What’s your take on social media and its impact on public communication?

A: First of all, I have to confess that I don’t use social media at all. I’m barely using email. That probably tells you something about my view of it, just at a personal level. I don’t know where people get the time. It’s really interesting as a huge time suck. What does that mean about our way of living? That people pour every ounce of apparently free time that they have, or every moment where they’re on a bus or whatever. There happens something interesting at the level of experience here. I do observe that there’s this almost compulsion to be connected all the time. This is above and beyond the question of the public sphere. This is really about the form of life that we are in. That it’s all wrapped up with commodification is absolutely right. The best thing I know on this subject is Shoshana Zuboff’s (2019) Surveillance Capitalism. It’s basically about data mining and the corresponding forms of commodification of experience. It’s as if what people are doing in the foreground of their social media exchanges is some kind of a side show, and there’s something else going on underneath, the extractivism of data. So, there are two levels involved.

But there’s also the question of fragmentation. To me, the issue is less fragmentation, but the way algorithms pre-select content for people who are already on that page. It’s self-reinforcing. It’s as if entrenchment is reinforced. Given and to certain extent still isolated life-worlds are reconfirmed such that their future will be like their past, but even more so. That’s a very troubling aspect of the way social media feeds work. This goes with the kind of political polarization that we have in the United States. On the other hand, we’ve also had very polarized periods long before the digital age. So, I’m not sure how much of it relates to digitalization. But there is at least that reinforcement dynamic through the operation of the algorithms.

For me, the most serious problem lies in the fact that any kind of content moderation is either absent or happens under capitalist conditions. Elon Musk has now taken over Twitter and simply eliminated the whole content evaluation that was supposed to function to mark misinformation, to recontextualize them etc. This is a very complicated issue because, on the other hand, I’m not comfortable with the idea that mega corporations should have the responsibility for deciding what’s misinformation and what isn’t. But there are many states that shouldn’t have that responsibility or that power either. It’s highly questionable if anybody can have the legitimate authority to do that. Most central to the idea of publicity is that it should all be self-correcting. There shouldn’t be any power over it to say: ‘This is misinformation, this is not’. There is no external point of view, beyond public discourse itself. There is only the force of the better argument. But we are in a quite frightening situation in the United States and maybe elsewhere where people want an external power to do that because it’s so severe.

The public sphere within an extended conception of capitalism

Q: You just mentioned the capitalist conditions under which social media operates. This leads us to another key issue, namely, the relationship between public sphere and capitalism. While you focused strongly on the public sphere in the 1990s and also afterwards, later, your focus shifted towards the elaboration of an extended notion of capitalism (Fraser 2022b). We are curious in how those two parts of your thinking relate to each other. What’s the connection between your earlier work and your recent work? What role does the concept of public sphere and of counterpublicity play in your extended view of capitalism? Where does publicity and counterpublicity come in your analysis of capitalism as a complex system based on cultural, social and political background conditions?

A: I think it’s a question of perspective. I don’t think that I’ve changed my view about the role and significance of publicity. What always attracted me to Habermas’ (1989) Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere was his way of locating publicity firmly as an institutionalized space within capitalist societies. To the degree that there was a normative argument, it emerged from this socio-institutional context. In a way, this is one of my favourite books by Habermas for that reason. It’s a book that is deeply historical and socio-theoretical. I’m in this vein. I always saw public sphere theory as a contribution to the social theory of capitalism. I would say that Structural Transformation is something remarkably different than a contribution to moral philosophy. Which is not to say that it wasn’t developed by Habermas into a discourse ethical theory later on. But I was always less interested in that development than in what I saw as a new way of doing critical social theory. And I thought and still think that Habermas made a real discovery, and that’s not a word we use often. If Marx discovered exploitation, and Freud discovered the unconscious, then Habermas discovered the public sphere as a real institution that hadn’t been thematized before.

I have gone on in my more recent work to try to rethink how to do the social theory of capitalism in the way that you just summarized. It’s very clear to me that publicity and the public sphere is part of that story. But where to locate the public sphere within capitalist society, I mean conceptually? Where does the public sphere fit in? At one level, it fits into the political, along with state powers and public goods etc. And it fits there at many other levels because it’s much less institutionally bound than other features of the political in capitalism. And that’s what makes it interesting. It’s like free molecules floating around. It affects how people understand their lives and their situations and their difficulties and their achievements in every sphere. It affects what goes on in family life, cultural life, work life, political life etc. This happens in ways that are not easy to track. Public opinion is not just what comes out of the explicit exchange of discursive arguments. There’s a whole sort of background of experience that is at work here. But public opinion also has a formative effect on experience subsequently. So, it’s a circle.

While thinking about the role and production of public opinion in capitalist society is an important task I am increasingly shifting away from this socio-epistemological question towards talking about hegemony and counter-hegemony. I see this Gramscian problematic closely related to the Habermasian problematic of publicity and public sphere. It’s just that the Gramscian problematic is more focused than Habermas was on the political problem of how to construct a block of different, differently mobilized and positioned social forces. That’s a political project that’s different from just forming public opinion. It’s taking the idea seriously that public opinion is or can be a political force, and not just an opinion. It’s got to be organized, whether it’s in political parties or in coalitions. So, I’m more interested in how public opinion is mobilized and organized, because I see how very bad forms of opinion are being mobilized and organized.

Q: We will come back to emancipatory politics of counterpublicity at the end of the interview. But before that, we want to ask a follow up question concerning the relationship between the public sphere and capitalism. You highlighted and embraced how Habermas theoretically embedded the public sphere within capitalism. But what means ‘embedded’, ‘located’ or ‘situated’ within capitalism? Also Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge (1993) looked at the relationship between capitalism and the public sphere, but they had a very different and much more materialistic view on that relationship. In opposition to the communicative turn going on in social and critical theory at that time, they tried to defend the idea that the public sphere can be, in the end, derived from the mode of production prevalent in society. For Negt and Kluge, the bourgeois public is somehow the ideological reflection and illusory synthesis of bourgeois society. And it is also confined to this role. Consequently, to overcome those social exclusions of experiences that characterize the public sphere in its bourgeois form, we have first of all to invent and make possible post-capitalist modes of production that will bring about a different public sphere where different experiences can be articulated. So, what we see here is a strong emphasis on the economic basis from which the public sphere somehow follows. This decisively differs from Habermas’ view, who says: ‘Yes, of course, there is this capitalistic context of the public sphere, and we have to be aware of this context. But, seen from the perspective of its communicative reproduction, the public sphere as a sphere follows its own logic and is thus not reducible to the economic basis’. And so, again, the question is how to think about the social basis, the practical coming-about of what’s called public here. What do you think about the materialistic approach regarding that question? Or put differently: What role exactly plays the economic factor when it comes about understanding public sphere?

A: I would reject any strict economic-determinist idea, any base-superstructure model. That’s partly the point for me of insisting on an expanded view of capitalism. The power of corporations and investors etc. is very great. You could say they determine our relation to nature in large measure and lots of other things. But their economic logic is itself stamped by the broader institutional frame in which it is located, a frame that also includes states and political powers, public goods, families, kinship relations and communities. To me, this larger landscape is very important.

Let’s talk about the division between the political and the economic. Negt and Kluge are doubtless right. The power of large capital has a lot of influence or power in politics and in the public sphere. But equally important is the fact that the very division between the political and the economic in a sense already pre-defines what is legitimately on the public agenda and what is really a matter for the market, except that that division is itself contested. This is what I mean by ‘boundary struggles’. Where do they happen? Of course, they happen in public spheres, or, more correctly, at its historical limits and social margins. People argue whether a certain issue should be something we leave to the market or is this something the state or some other political agency should care for. We have to keep more than one idea in mind at the same time. Yes, capital has enormous power. The system divides the political from the economic in ways that make it an uphill fight to argue for, let’s say, for a socialist perspective on social production and reproduction. But even this uphill fight is possible. The situation is not always the same; it depends on time and place. Seemingly private issues can become very hotly contested and themselves brought to the fore in public spheres, which is another way of showing that the public spheres, even if we think of them as pertaining to the political, have the capacity to jump locations, so to speak. Just because, from an institutional point of view, publics are mainly part of the political, this doesn’t mean that the only thing we can talk about in public is a predefined notion of what the political is.

‘Class beyond class’ and emancipatory politics of counterpublicity

Q: In your recent Benjamin Lectures (2022a) you argued that capitalist labour has three faces – exploited, expropriated and domesticated – that have to reciprocally recognize each other as part of an extended working class. What role do publics play in this process of recognition? What kind of public sphere do we need in order to facilitate this process? What kind of counterpublic politics do we need, given the necessity to address the affectual dimension of identity formation?

A: Publicity or public opinion formation is the medium not just of political decision-making, but also of political contestation and struggle. It is the medium in which boundary struggles are fought out through discursive argumentation and contestation. But it’s also the medium for political organizing, for political identity formation and transformation. In my Benjamin Lectures I respond to the problem of dispersed social movement activism of a potentially emancipatory sort. I’m suggesting a way of changing people’s self-understanding so that they actually try to think of themselves as part of an extended and multifaceted working class.

We’ve been through this phase where people have said: ‘Let’s just make coalitions of all of these particular social movements without trying to suggest any overarching identity’. Every overarching identity was considered to be hegemonizing in the negative sense. Worries prevailed that searching for an overarching identity is exclusionary and is going to normalize or privilege one aspect while treating the others as secondary. Those worries are justified. But emancipatory politics that is too preoccupied with that worries risks losing any strength and cohesion beyond this or that protest summit. It actually does not contain sufficient effective glue, so to speak. It’s not effectively powerful. It rests on the idea that we have different identities: ‘We don’t identify, we don’t share an identity, but we all know we have the same enemy: capitalism’. But that’s a purely cognitive thing. The cognitive is very important. I don’t want you to hear me as in any way downplaying that. I am offering a strong cognitive argument about how to understand capitalism structurally. But I’m trying to draw a kind of Arendtian proposal from it: We must take capitalism and what we understand as the working class into view from the perspective of at least three different kinds of labour. This is the only way we can avoid that, as in old-fashioned Marxism, the factory proletariat is identified with the working class as such. There is an identity of the latter, but this identity can only truly be grasped and articulated if we allow plurality and start to bring into conversation different faces of labour. I think that publicity is very important when it comes about triangulating the working class from plural point of views.

Q: Does the conception of publicity get transformed if we take the Arendtian perspective (see e.g. Benhabib 1997)? Seen from a Habermasian point of view, the discursive coming-about of public opinion was centre front. Seen from a Gramscian perspective, forming public forces through counter-hegemonic struggles was at the core of attention. Now, a new dimension or aspect comes in. The dimension of ‘acting in concert’ becomes important. This is what protest assemblies like Occupy Wall Street do. It’s not so much about arguing then about acting, about conquering public space together and thus expressing one’s voice collectively. Another aspect that is ill-considered in the Habermasian, Gramscian, but also in the Arendtian view is the role needs play in the coming-about of subaltern counterpublics but also regarding the content of what they express. Before they enter into public argumentation about universal validity claims, subaltern counterpublics are first of all centred around the articulation of particularly situated and suppressed needs, and their counter-hegemonic interpretation.

A: Well, assemblies are a form of publicity. I mean, we have to take publicity to be both: ontologically composed of speech and action at the same time. We are talking about speech acts, and that includes occupying a public square or all sorts of things: civil disobedience, performing abortions illegally and saying: ‘I had an abortion!’ These are all actions that speak volumes. To make the connection of action and speech, acting and arguing as clear as possible: I think an assembly is an argument. At one level, it’s a very intense argument because people are putting their bodies behind their thoughts, their conclusions. It’s like screaming in order to make your argument heard at all.

I’m glad you brought up the question of need interpretation. That issue was among my very earliest work (Fraser 1989). My reflection on need interpretation was exactly about the processes by which subaltern actors reject expertocratic or official need interpretations. They say: ‘No, that’s not what we need!’ This stays in a certain tension with what I was saying before about subaltern actors with real grievances, who, from my perspective, grossly misdiagnose the causes of their grievances. Also those need interpretations have to be contested, don’t take the first-person-perspective simply for granted! But they have to be contested not from an expertocratic standpoint, but through counter-hegemonic activism that is able to address those actors and their grievances politically and on eye-level.

Q: I want to come back to what you said a few minutes ago. You talked about the public sphere as a terrain of contestation where the forming of a counter-hegemonic bloc against neoliberal capitalism or capitalism more generally gets possible. In the process of this contestation a non-essentialist and pluralist identity of ‘class beyond class’ is eventually brought about. But what kinds of contestation are important here? Of course, there is contestation necessary of the given structures of capitalist production and of the hegemonic cultural patterns that stabilize those structures. But we think that there is also another frontier of contestation, a contestation within the expanded working class itself, among the three faces of labour, so to say. There is contestation necessary in order to have an identity that is not one-sided, not, again, implicitly exclusionary. So we need, just as a very urgent and depressing example, to address and to criticize certain daily-life forms of racism that are part of not only but also working class culture, at least to some significant extent. You’ve just hinted to that other line of contestation when you talked about contesting right-wing interpretations of subaltern needs and grievances. What should this kind of contestation should look like? Which kind of anti-racism is necessary at this point? There are quite lively and engaged anti-racist discourses at the moment. But how can we connect to this present wave of anti-racism without falling in the trap of progressive neoliberalism and the individualistic way of moralizing things that often comes along with it?

A: I can’t say too much about this because a lot of it is very conjunctional and situation specific. Quite generally, I would say it’s a good idea to avoid any sort of moral superiority and condescension. It’s very important to validate the real grievances that people have. And you should not suggest that racism within the white working class means that these people are privileged. They’re not, surely not in the United States. Their communities are ravaged by opioid addiction, suicide, unemployment and anomy. To talk about ‘white privilege’ in this kind of context is a little bit obscene, frankly speaking. So, if you really think that you are dealing with fellow members of an internally differentiated class that essentially produces all the social wealth in the world and gets very little for their trouble, then you have to find a way to validate that connection without pulling punches.