A Review Of Nancy Faser's Rethinking The Public Sphere

Priyanca Vaishnav,

Satish Poduval, Media and the Public Domain

13th February 2007

Report: Rethinking The Public Sphere by Nancy Fraser

Rethinking The Public Sphere is a response to Habermas' 1973 essay, later published in English as The Public Sphere in 1989. Habermas states his concept of the public sphere as both historical, and normative. It is historical both in the sense of era and region- 20th century Western Europe. He dismantles the distinctions between the public and private domain.

According to Habermas, man should be autonomous from the state and the civil society, but he feels that public-ness is degenerating due to the advent of the mass media. Mass media gives higher priority to profitability under the aegis of commercial interest. In a mass democracy opinions of political and non-governmental organizations also matter. In a Socialist Welfare State, many voters base their opinions on others' representations of their idea. The populist decision should be taken in public interest and individual concerns should retreat into the private domain.

Nancy Fraser, through this essay, demands extrapolation from Habermas, saying that his essay is inadequate and perceives the essay as a masculinist bourgeois account. She identifies four assumptions from The Public Sphere.

She begins by deriving the four assumptions:

1. Societal equality is not a necessary condition for political democracy.

2. An increase in the number of competing, debating publics causes a society to drift from its democratic nature; a single discursive arena is preferred as opposed to multiple.

3. Public discourse should be independent of private interest.

4. Civil society should be able to function separately from the state.

According to the first assumption, women, economically backward classes and racial ethnicities are excluded as peripherals. Hypothetically, the concept remains unaltered since it is plausible to solve these problems. Most modern democracies even have laws against discrimination. But Habermas' bourgeois public sphere is constantly directed by formalities, which symbolize status and class in an equal public sphere. Fraser criticizes this hierarchical, masculinist point of view, by stating that in a granular society, the subordinates are further marginalized and the stakes of the dominant groups of decision-making increase.

A society with unequal power will cultivate unequal cultures, values, and lifestyles. So social inequalities must be minimalized instead of being ignored. She speaks of "rough equalities" that render more useful than equality in absolute terms.

Her next attack is against Habermas' assumption that instead of having several publics, only one discursive public should exist. To her such a singularity means to snatch the prerogative of an individual's opinion of him. According to Freud's definition of defense mechanism, most of us like to associate with the more powerful or dominant identity, as to hide our own lack of influence. Citizens in such an arena would be forced against voicing their opinions or suggestions. She encourages segregated groups from the point of view of subaltern counter-publics as well, stating examples of women's revolutions. She points out, that multiplicity will widen the horizons as well as the audience for a variety in discourse, which, she points out, is the primary purpose of discourse. An objective, neutral culture cannot exist. It would demand a uniform approach and dictate norms for thought, which would destroy the existence of a multicultural social order.

She supports social equality, reasoning that the transparency in such a society would conduct trans-cultural interaction and polemic debates. But contrary to Fraser's beliefs, women did not form a separate, subaltern group; instead they consciously wove themselves into the mainstream