Public sphere as a communicative practice

Habermasian public sphere is in a nutshell a social space constructed with open discursive communication, maintained through the norms of rationality. How you say (rationality) it precedes what you say (specific partisan viewpoints), and also precedes who you are (class, status). “The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere” is Habermas’ earliest attempts to explain the notion of the public formed and held together by such communication. Unlike his later works where public sphere acts more and more as normative ideals rather than concrete forms, here he refers to historical examples of how such concepts have been arisen and perished. With the advent of modern capitalism, the state and the society begin to be separated. The state maintained its position as the sphere of public authority, but corresponded to the society through the mediation of the bourgeois public sphere. And this public sphere, which was initially formed through open discussions in gatherings at clubhouses, enlarged its scope from literary to the political.

However, the problem is that such an idealized form of “rationality” can be hardly applied or maintained in the real world. Thus, Habermas’ bourgeois public spheres re-feudalized. Though the institutions of bourgeois public sphere were open to the public in a literal sense, the norms of what can be considered as a rational communication is an entry barrier itself. Being able to follow such norms requires being educated in the proper way, and this in turn requires one to be part of a specific socio-economic condition. If this “rationality” can be only maintained by keeping cohesiveness among private interests and keeping public and private domains apart, it can facilitate only a limited scope of discourses and is bound to lose its connection to the vast parts of the lifeworld.

To resolve this problem, we should step back to the original meaning of public sphere itself. Though historical examples of Tischgesellschaft as a bourgeois public sphere are given, public sphere doesn’t refer to the specific space, place or institution. It refers rather to the forms of social interaction that are conducted in them. If we take this into account, it becomes clear that communication does not simply ‘play an important role’ in forming the public sphere, but ‘is public sphere itself’. It is not a question of where a public sphere is or whether it is a public sphere or not. It is a question of what elements of public sphere can be found, or should be encouraged in a specific communication practice of a community.