The problem with actually-existing socialism is that it did not actually exist. It may have expressed a hope for a really-better world, and acted as a polarity on an axis between present un-freedom and future attainment of a rational freedom which was taken to be the objectively given end of history - hope extends the horizon of what is imagined. But attention became fixated on the signpost; the road itself remained un-travelled except in imagination. Yet in imagination (as Joseph Beuys maintained), freedom is really possible.

 

Ernst Bloch writes that Marxism is 'the theory-practice of a better world [...] not in order to forget the existing world, as was common in most abstract social utopias', but to change the world 'economically and dialectically.'^[2] And if this inherits 'the primal intention: of the Golden Age,'^[3] then Marxism 'takes the fairytale seriously, takes the dream of a Golden Age practically; real debit and credit of real hope begins.'^[4]

 

For Bloch, real hope posits a classless society, and an end of alienation in 'naturalized value.'^[5] Then, 'Optimism is ... justified only as militant optimism, never as certain';^[6] while 'the Authentic' is not fixed 'in finished form such as water, air, fire ...' but is that 'which is not yet, which in the core of things drives towards itself, which awaits its genesis in the tendency-latency of process; ... only now founded, objectively-real - hope.'^[7] Characteristically Bloch merges an analytic and economic rationality into the poetic and almost mystical. He uses the word 'homeland' (heimat)^[8] for the envisaged end of history which he describes as a genesis, yet one occurring not at the beginning but at the end of history, 'in real democracy ...'^[9] My purpose here, however, is not to construct a critique of Bloch's theory but to draw from it a verbal analogy, to suggest that hope offers a comparative model for the realisation, one day, of a public sphere.

 

By a public sphere I mean an as yet metaphorical state in which members of a society determine that society's values and organisation by and for themselves. But if this idea is to become reality one day, is such it a fairytale or a really-existing project?

 

Much discussion of the public sphere cites precedents -usually the Agora of Athens. This follows a traditional model of argument: because a public sphere once existed it can be regained. Bloch adapts the model in looking towards freedom as a homeland to be found again at the end of history: redemption, a future genesis. But is the Agora the content of a fairytale, helpful in imagination and thus to be taken seriously, but not the historically specific precedent claimed? A second difficulty is that, from the twentieth century, and in international modernism and its legacy to contemporary urban design, the idea of a public sphere is aligned to a public realm identified with urban public spaces. The public realm was defined in the nineteenth century as a domain of civic determination in elite institutions, and housed in grandiose public spaces, to ensure the preservation of a specific social order.

Is there another way to think about a public sphere? Does it need to be aligned with any specific category of space? Can it be produced anywhere? And does reliance on the precedent of the Agora displace discussion to a model which was democratic only to a very limited extent, while tending to emphasise objectification (as if implicit in the stones of Athens) over process? Yet, if the Agora presents a fanciful image, and the historical remoteness of Athens allows almost any imprint representing a present lack, I note, still, Bloch's remark that Marxism 'takes the fairytale seriously, takes the dream of a Golden Age practically .'^[10] Can something be salvaged from the wreck of this fairytale in a period of capital's globalisation?

 

To approach this, I reconsider Hannah Arendt's argument that selfhood is produced in the condition of being amid others, in mutual perceptions and visibilities; and JŸrgen Habermas' critique of the bourgeois public sphere of post-Enlightenment Europe. In both cases, revolutions - in Britain's north American colonies in 1776; and in France in 1789 - act as ancestral reference points not unlike the Agora (which Arendt cites as well). I then summarise Nancy Fraser's critique of Habermas, and outlines some of its limitations. At this point the critique of a public sphere is fractured. In a final section of the paper, I attempt to identify elements of the concept of a public sphere which can be salvaged now; and return to the question of the status of such concepts as fairytale and/or practicality..

 

Arendt and Publicity

Arendt's thought is haunted, like that of the Frankfurt School, by the rise of fascism in Germany, and failure of the German revolutionary movement in 1918-1919. Margaret Canvoan reads Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism^[11] as an attempt to understand the 'incomprehensible experiences that ... [her] generation had been through [...] to make intelligible what seemed [...] nightmarish.'^[12] Published seven years later, The Human Condition^[13] offers a more distanced history of the possibility for liberation as an inherent quality of human consciousness, but is no less haunted.

 

In the 'Prologue' to The Human Condition, Arendt writes that technological advance implies freedom from the burden of labour - the condition enjoyed by the aristocratic class in classical Greece, and basis for a division of thought from utility - but that the fulfilment of the wish is 'like the fulfilment of wishes in fairy tales' and comes when 'it can only be self-defeating' in a society of labourers without labour when labour is 'the only activity left to them.'^[14] I cite this because Arendt justifies it on the basis that modern society no longer has the distinctions of an aristocratic leisure-class, while the lack of it seems to permeate her discussion of publicity as a form of being in public as a prerequisite for freedom.

 

For Arendt, the polis - the Greek city-state, a city autonomous in its governance - is the historical location of the public sphere. It was 'a public space within which men [sic] could reveal themselves for what they were' and where they found remembrance of their actions among the citizens.'^[15] Leaving aside the use of a universal masculine, the public space in which when men revealed themselves was actually (historically) a gendered space. Women's lives were housed in domestic interiors which combined dwelling spaces with workshops, in dense streets 'smelling of urine and cooking oil, their street walls blank and dingy.'^[16] As Richard Sennett explains, in Greek thought men had hot bodies given to their naked appearance in sunlight; but women had cool bodies given to seclusion within walls.^[17] For Arendt, the distinction is less between genders as such than between the realms produced by men's and women's different occupations of space (which she takes as a division of political from economic life). Then, for men, 'No activity that served only the purpose of making a living ... was permitted to enter the political realm.'^[18] This informs Arendt's description of private life (the life of the family and the household):

 

To live an entirely private life means above all to be deprived of things essential to a human life: to be deprived of the reality that comes from being seen and heard by others, to be deprived of an 'objective' relationship with them that comes from being related to and separated from them through the intermediary of a common world of things, to be deprived of the possibility of achieving something more permanent than life itself.^[19]

 

It is difficult to avoid the impression that publicity was the condition of being among others which was denied to Jews in Germany in the 1930s. In a study of aesthetics and Arendtian politics, Kimberley Curtis emphasises the temporal dimension of the public realm as location of memories by which lives are maintained in public consciousness, and as location of forward-looking ideas. For Curtis, '...the significance of the public realm arises [...] because it houses the mutual promising and common deliberation of the future-oriented actor but also because it is the site for these conversations with the past.'^[20] But, as Curtis notes, these actors are not unified subjects, but 'nonsovereign beings' responding to the needs of being among others, whose freedom is contingent on interaction. Arendt writes, 'the actor always moves among and in relation to other acting beings' and is both actor and sufferer; then, action establishes relationships and 'has an inherent tendency to force open all limitations and cut across all boundaries.'^[21]

 

Curtis remarks, after citing this passage, that the capacity to begin something, which Arendt identifies as the basis for freedom, is ephemeral; and that, 'Freedom is only in performance ... It has a fugitive, apparitional quality, and hardly seems real.'^[22] Hence, because this ephemerality is redeemed in public memory, the appearance of freedom in a public site is its source of reality, and is 'called forth in the theatre of display and witness.'^[23] In contrast, for Arendt, the experience of extreme physical pain is almost incommunicable, hence outside the realm of publicity: 'it actually deprives us of our feeling for reality ...'^[24] She continues,

 

Since our feeling for reality depends utterly upon appearance and therefore the existence of a public realm into which things can appear out of the darkness of sheltered existence, even the twilight which illuminates our private and intimate lives is ultimately derived from the much harsher light of the public realm.^[25]

 

Arendt, then, constructs a public realm which is the setting for human interactions and mutual perceptions, where a mature self arises and where freedom emerges through the interruptive force of interaction. This entails the unexpected but also realises the underlying; action 'corresponds to the fact of birth ... the human condition of natality' and 'speech corresponds to the fact of distinctness ... the human condition of plurality, that is, of living as a distinct and unique being among equals.'^[26] If natality is the condition of self-realisation, plurality is the prerequisite for a public sphere in which natalities enter a process of co-determination, always contingent, and agonistic. But, does the concept need the validation of a historical precedent (which bears little resemblance to modern democracy), or does precedent add to the impression of a fairytale (if one to be taken seriously)?

 

From Habermas to Fraser

JŸrgen Habermas begins the Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere by saying that the terms public and public sphere 'fuse into a clouded amalgam'in relation to the conditions of an advanced industrial society.^[27] In the era of mass media, 'publicity has changed its meaning' from a function of public opinion to 'an attribute of whatever attracts public opinion' - more like public relations.^[28] Habermas, too, looks to Greece, and a separation of the polis (that which was common to free citizens) from the oikos (that which pertained to the household). This constructs a dualism of public-private as presented, too, by Arendt. Habermas then says,

 

The public life ... went on in the market place (agora), but of course this did not mean that it occurred necessarily only in this specific locale. the public sphere was constituted in discussion (lexis), which could also assume the forms f consultation and of sitting in the court of law, as well as in common action (praxis), be it the waging of war or competition in athletic games.^[29]

 

This gives a selective picture of the Greek city state, say Athens, where 5% of the population, all adult, free male citizens in possession of a talent of silver (1000 days' pay for a labourer) could sit in the assembly (pnyx) where most policy was made. Sennett notes, 'Although the life of the agora was open to all citizens ... most of the ceremonial and political events that occurred here were out of bounds to the immense population of slaves and foreigners (metics) who supported the economy ...'^[30] He adds that by the end of the fifth century, around 40 percent of the city's inhabitants lived further than 15 miles from the centre - 'a walk on foot of at least four hours to the agora over the pitted and uneven roads of the unloved countryside.'^[31] Habermas notes that the 'political order' relied on a slave economy, so that citizens were 'set free from productive labor' but that autonomy as the master of a household enabled participation in public life.^[32]

 

This is portends the bourgeois public sphere which inherits an Enlightenment concern to protect private, economic life from the hitherto monarchic state. Habermas explains that by the nineteenth century in Europe, the public sphere has assumed another form -the liberal public sphere founded in Kant's moral philosophy.^[33] He says,

 

The critical process that private people engaged in rational-critical public debate brought to bear on absolutist rule, interpreted itself as unpolitical: public opinion aimed at rationalizing politics in the name of morality. ... the Aristoteliasn tradition of a philosophy of politics was reduced ... to moral philosophy, whereby the 'moral' ... also encompassed the emerging sphere of the 'social' ...^[34]

 

It should be noted, however, that in England a public sphere in which absolutism was not limited but rejected occurred in the seventeenth century, its primary site the coffee house and its primary means the political pamphlets which circulated in coffee houses, the proprietors often being the publishers as well. For Habermas, however, nineteenth-century Hegelian philosophy posits a decisive step - when a rational society is taken to be the end of history, in a logical trajectory which carries its intention and its potential realisation internally. Habermas writes,

 

The system-exploding consequences of a philosophy of history that implied its own political intent and effect come to the fore precisely in connection with the category of publicity. It laid claim to such publicity, for reason in its historical process of becoming actual required a union of empirical consciousness as a corollary to the intelligible unity of consciousness as such. Publicity was to be the vehicle through which the latter was linked to the former: its universality was that of an empirical consciousness in general, and Hegel's philosophy of right would bestow its name: public opinion.^[35]

 

This seeks to establish the power of citizens, or the bourgeoisie, in opposition to that of absolutism. In Marxism this shifts to an effort to unite the power of the proletariat with that of the state, in opposition to private property. In both cases it is a matter of 'the subjection of domination to reason.'^[36] A consequence, in both cases, was that the public sphere ceased to be a metaphorical location of the articulation of public opinion and became institutionalised as education and the shaping of public opinion according to rational thought and empirical knowledge.

 

Hence the rise of expertise as a politically neutral means to decide planning policy as cities expanded; and the rise of public institutions to house the learned or professional class as a bourgeois elite. Together with public museums and galleries, the buildings in which this elite operated have become the framing devices of a new kind of public, urban space now identified with democracy. Trafalgar Square, London illustrates this: the product of clearance in the 1820s, its colonnaded vistas, public monuments, and buildings housing the high Commissions of ex-Dominions, and the National Gallery, construct a site used to commemorate a naval victory in 1805 as part of the making of a national identity, and, at times, for political demonstrations (and New Year revels). the toleration of demonstrations subject to permit, however, is not a sign for the kind of direct democracy which I take to be the meaning of a public sphere, but a means to its prevention in a displacement of agitation within controlled spaces (and spaces of control in the presence of public monuments and the appropriation of history).The public realm inherited from nineteenth-century European urbanism is composed, then, of institutions in which debate takes place outside state control, but seeks to inform the policies of an enlightened state guarding what it perceives as the public interest.

 

Habermas reaches a bleak position on twentieth-century European society: 'A concept of public opinion that is historically meaningful ... theoretically clear and empirically identifiable can be grounded only in the structural transformation of the public sphere itself ...'^[37] He accepts that non-public opinion has greater sway and that the idea of a single or unified public opinion is fiction but the social welfare state is 'a process ... [in which] a public sphere that functions effectively in the political realm is realized ... ' as an evolution of the relation between state and society.^[38] Habermas concludes that public opinion is 'managed by the culture industry' which 'delivers the canned goods of degenerate, psychologically oriented literature [...]'^[39]

 

In her seminal critique of Habermas, Nancy Fraser begins by saying that, after 1989, 'there is still quite a lot to object to in our own 'actually existing democracy,'' while to develop 'a critical theory of the limits of democracy' is as relevant as ever.^[40] Fraser reads Habermas' idea of a public sphere as 'indispensable to critical social theory and to democratic practice,'^[41] but adds that Habermas limits his enquiry to problems in the historically specific bourgeois public sphere, and does not adequately probe the liberal assumptions which underpin it.^[42]

 

Fraser draws out two ideas from Habermas: the designation of a public sphere as an institutional mechanism by which the state becomes accountable; and the production of 'a specific kind of discursive interaction' as a means of accountability.^[43] Fraser then states,

 

... the public sphere connoted an ideal of unrestricted rational discussion of public matters. The discussion was to be open and accessible to all; merely private interests were to be inadmissible; inequalities of status were to be bracketed; power was to be excluded; and discussants were to deliberate as peers.^[44]

 

This compares with Richard Sennett's account of speech in the coffee house, which he describes as a 'system of spoken signs' like that used in the theatre:

 

... the talk was governed by a cardinal rule: in order for information to be as full as possible, distinctions of rank were temporarily suspended; anyone sitting in the coffee house had a rightr to talk to anyone else, to enter into any conversation, whether he [sic] knew other people or not, whether he was bidden to speak or not. It was bad form even to touch on the social origins of other persons ... because the free flow of talk might be impeded.^[45]

 

This enabled strangers of different classes to exchange information, which was the key function of the coffee house - 'insurance ... grew up in coffeehouses ...'^[46] Entry was on payment of the cost of a cup of coffee, however, an up-market commodity then; and it was gendered. If a style of speaking in long, discursive sentences was a means to suspend class differences evident in accent, it did not apply outside the coffeehouse.

 

Fraser cites feminist critics of Habermas; Joan Landes, for instance, contrasts male domination of public debate in France after 1789 with a 'more woman-friendly salon culture that the republicans anaesthetized as 'artificial,' 'effeminate,' and 'aristocratic.' - replaced by 'a new, austere style of public speech and behaviour ...'^[47] As the paintings of Jacques-Louis David show, much of that austere masculinity was drawn from a received, literary image of the Roman republic. Fraser adds to such critiques that the adoption of group identities has been more effective than efforts to enter exclusionary fora of debate. Similarly, Iris Marion Young writes, 'Contemporary participatory democratic theory ... inherits from republicanism a commitment to a unified public that in practice tends to exclude or silence some groups.'^[48]

 

Fraser interprets a refusal of assimilation as the creation of counter-publics articulated and developed through means such as, 'journals, bookstores, publishing companies, film and video distribution networks [...] festivals, and local meeting places.' as well as in academic programmes^[49] In such sites, alternative vocabularies emerge to recast the needs and identities of participants, reducing but not eliminating 'disadvantage in official public spheres.'^[50] This fractures the idea of the nation, dividing its supposed general(ised) public into sub-publics and counter-publics, producing and affected by sub-cultures and counter-cultures. The fairytale of unity is thus replaced by a claim to variegation:

 

On the one hand, they function as spaces of withdrawal and regroupment; on the other hand, they also function as bases and training grounds for agitational activities directed towards wider publics. It is precisely in the dialectic between these two functions that their emancipatory potential resides. This dialectic enables subaltern counterpublics partially to offset ... the unjust participatory privileges enjoyed by members of dominant social groups in stratified societies.^[51]

 

From this, recognising that a public sphere is a location of identity formation, Fraser problematises the division of public from private life. Then the renegotiation of these categories is necessary: so, 'democratic publicity requires positive guarantees . of opportunities for minorities to convince others that what in the past was not public ... should now become so.'^[52] What were once private interests become a new ground for public intervention, while the mechanisms of public life figure in private experience. As Fraser insists, public and private are cultural classifications which are 'deployed to delegitimate some interests, views, and topics and to valorize others.'^[53].Finally, Fraser turns to the separation of civil society's institutions from the state in Habermas' idea of a public sphere. One interpretation of bourgeois civil society, she notes, is the self-ordering of private capital defended against state interference. But if this is posturing on behalf of capital, there is another interpretation which requires more thought: civil society as 'the nexus of non-governmental ... associations that are neither economic nor administrative.'^[54] All such associations are composed of private individuals on a voluntary basis, and if this is civil society then the public sphere is 'the informally mobilized body of non-governmental discursive opinion' -a 'counterweight to the state' while, 'this extragovernmental character of the public sphere that confers an aura of independence ...'^[55] At the same time, with the beginning of representative democracy in parliament, the public sphere is brought inside the state, its opinions turning to laws (assumed to be in the public interest). It is not guaranteed, however, that publics enjoying strength and privilege will legislate for, or elect legislators to respect, minority interests.

 

For Fraser this leads to questions as to when direct democracy might be appropriate; and to questions of the role and capacity of the state as a unit of sovereignty in face of trans-national capital. Fraser ends by saying that to pose such questions is a necessary aspect of a critique of the liberal model of a public sphere. This leads to four tasks for critical theory: to make visible how inequalities are present in deliberation; to examine how inequalities shape relations between publics; to expose how categories restrict debate; and to show how weaker publics are excluded from public opinion.

 

Fraser limits her enquiry to a theoretical field but her questions are practical. There is also a difficulty, that self-selecting publics tend to become exclusionary. For Sennett, 'the only transaction for the group to engage in is that of purification, or rejection and chastisement of those who are not 'like' the others.'^[56] Young, however, sees group identity as vital to prevent the loss of voice often incurred in assimilation. Here, Fraser is closer to Arendt in differentiating the idea of a public from that of a community, as sites of discursive action or consensus: a public accommodates internal differences, antagonisms, and debates.^[57]

 

Salvaging the public sphere

I began by citing Bloch on the anticipatory character of 'the theory-practice of a better world.'^[58] Bloch fuses genesis and redemption (homecoming) and locates both at the beginning as well as the end of history. Redemption is inherent; a fulfilment of what was always there in the beginning, a light warming human history from the end. This was examined by Franz Rosenzweig in The Star of Redemption, which Bloch and Walter Benjamin read in the 1920s. In his final paragraph, Rosenzweig begins, 'And this Last is not Last, but an ever Nigh, the Nighest; not Last, in short, but the First.'^[59] I think Bloch colours his Marxism with a sense of a redemptive regaining of homeland, and this departs from the trajectory of history which Marx drew from Hegel. The realisation of homeland (or freedom) is redemption in as much as it realises a quality which was always there. One vehicle for this is art, but another - for Bloch, unusually among the circle of the Frankfurt School - is popular culture. Hence Bloch's reference to the fairytale has a layered meaning. Marxism, Bloch says, as I cite above, 'takes the fairytale seriously, takes the dream of a Golden Age practically...'^[60] The regaining of a state of hope is the realisation of a classless society and end of alienation;^[61] and is a matter of process: authentic freedom is 'not yet ... drives towards itself ... awaits its genesis in the tendency-latency of process '^[62]

But can it be realised? If hope, meaning a latent sense of being in a really better world, is inherent, then is it in effect realised momentarily in insurrection, or, from Lefebvre, in moments of sudden clarity within the routines of everyday life? Is it, in the end, a matter of being-there-among-others, for example in what seems (to me, at a distance) the transformative moment of some cases of activism?

Malcolm Miles