Abstract
Hartmut Wessler’s Habermas and the Media accomplishes three things that are rare in themselves, much less in a single volume. First, per the title, this is the most complete extant book about Habermas and the media; but it really summarizes and condenses the trajectory of most of Habermas’s theory relevant to communication. Second, Wessler identifies problems and holes along the way, with the eye of a careful and sympathetic critic, making an original contribution to the theory of emotion set within a revised Habermasian framework. Finally, he has produced a book that is remarkably clear, complete, concise, and readable, good to teach anyone from undergraduates to scholars in the field who need a guide to Habermas’s work.
Wessler divides Habermas’s contribution into three major divisions: the idea of the public sphere, the theory of communicative action (TCA), and his later work revising and synthesizing both through the theory of deliberation. The fourth section synthesizes his work on the media and communication system proper, and the fifth consists of a critical evaluation of the theory of emotion applied to Habermas, and Wessler’s original contribution.
The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (STPS) has been seminal to the Anglo-American field of communication since it was published in English in 1989, oft cited but rarely read fully or carefully. Wessler offers a careful reconstruction of its major arguments, showing the close relationship between the private and the public spheres in the context of the media of the early public sphere. The second half of STPS traces its demise. Wessler contextualizes this pessimistic reading in the context of its time (authored in 1961–1962) and also Habermas’s later revisions to the earlier narrative, incorporating, for example, Hall’s three modes of reception.
A major critique of the book has been that Habermas’s model is based on White, male, and bourgeois speakers. Wessler acknowledges and addresses these criticisms, but also reminds us what a critical resource it was to those in Eastern European nations under Soviet domination until 1989. He also rightly re-emphasizes the feminist elements in the original analysis, Habermas’s critique of the exclusion of women and their confinement to the conjugal family. In a particularly useful device throughout the book, Wessler breaks out short, clear excurses on the construction of the major arguments in text boxes.
The middle sections on the TCA, which has been all but ignored by the field of communication, stand out. Wessler masterfully reconstructs the micro-level analysis of action in TCA Volume 1 around the central question: what is required for people to agree with each other? He then unpacks the three validity claims that are at the center of Habermas’s answer (truth, normative correctness, and authenticity), links them with the “three worlds” (objective, social, and subjective) that form their bridge to social life, and addresses the central distinction between strategic and communicative action. He then moves to the “macro” Volume 2, to explain the system–lifeworld distinction, and its linkage to social discourse and institutions and clarifies the misunderstandings surrounding Habermas’s earlier use of the term “ideal speech situation.” The entire book is worth this chapter alone.
Wessler then turns to the media in (broadly) two dimensions: media for deliberative discourse, and non-deliberative media discourse. Habermas’s deliberative turn in Between Facts and Norms, his second masterwork, fundamentally revises the theory of the public sphere. Habermas reconceptualizes the public sphere as organized around a center-periphery axis, in a system of “sluices” which channel public opinion, and he distinguishes between routine and crisis modes of problem solving, based on Bernhard Peters’ work, which Wessler has translated into English in an excellent edited volume, Public Deliberation and Public Culture (2008). Habermas’s lesser known concept of “media power” is juxtaposed to democratic decision making in a reconstruction of the idea of “deep media democracy” through a reading of Habermas’s 2009 essay, “Political Communication in Media Society.” In a subsequent chapter, Wessler reconstructs the concept of the mediated public sphere through Habermas’s framework of deliberative democracy and includes the critical model of agonistic democracy, often counterposed to it.
This leads into two rich chapters, the first on the deliberative qualities of news and the second, an original contribution on non-deliberative media discourse, including “greeting” (from Iris Marion Young), rhetoric, personal narrative, and satire, noting that Habermas has had little to say about this. These forms increasingly pervade society and challenge the very theory of deliberative democracy, but Wessler argues that they can perform democratic functions, including drawing attention, showing solidarity, highlighting values, and offering solutions and alternatives.
Finally, in a brief, penultimate chapter, “Counterpublics and the Role of Emotions,” Wessler unpacks the problem of a “myriad of isolated online publics,” summarizing the rich literature on subaltern counterpublics, especially Nancy Fraser and Michael Huspek. He addresses Zizi Papacharissi’s notion of “affective publics” and, in contrast, critically reconnects the notion of affective publics to a deliberative framework of civic engagement by asking, “which kinds of emotions are being expressed . . . and what functions do they perform . . . ?” His own response is that empathy and solidarity are positive emotions linked to public discourse. In the second section, he demonstrates how moral emotions underpin both judgment and justification. It is a brief but important reframing of a central question.
This is the best single book on Habermas and the media, and one of the best contemporary critical summaries and evaluations of his work writ large. It is both a superb teaching resource and opens new avenues of thought for scholars of communication. No small achievement.