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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: TM - Theory and Media
- Sprache: Englisch
Jürgen Habermas is arguably the most influential social theorist and philosopher of the twentieth century, and his imprint on media and communication studies extends well into the twenty-first. This book lucidly unpacks Habermas's sophisticated contributions to the study of media, centering on the three core concepts for which his work is best known: the public sphere, communicative action, and deliberative democracy. Habermas and the Media offers an accessible introduction, as well as a critical investigation of how Habermas's thinking can help us to understand and assess our contemporary communication environment - and where his framework needs revision and extension. Full of original and sometimes surprising insights, this book is essential reading for scholars and students of media, political communication, and democracy, as well as anyone seeking guidance through Habermas's rich world of thought.
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Seitenzahl: 245
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019
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Contents
Cover
Copyright
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 The Bourgeois Public Sphere and its Critics
Public Sphere and Private Realm
The Media of the Early Bourgeois Public Sphere
The Alleged Demise of the Public Sphere
A Public Sphere of Affluent White Males? Social Exclusion and its Critics
Summary
Recommended Reading
2 Nurturing Communicative Action
Communicative Action: Theorizing Human Activity
From Individual Communication to types of Discourses
Lifeworld and System: Theorizing Societal Totality
Summary
Recommended Reading
3 Media for Deliberative Democracy
The Political Public Sphere in Action
Media Power
Deep Media Democracy
Media Functions in the Deliberative System
Considered Public Opinions
Summary
Recommended Reading
4 Mediated Public Spheres
The Liberal Model
The Republican Model
The Deliberative Model
The Agonistic Model
Summary
Recommended Reading
Notes
5 Deliberative Qualities of News and Discussion Media
Criteria of Deliberativeness
Quality Newspapers
Television News
Political Blogs
Summary
Recommended Reading
Notes
6 Non-Deliberative Media Discourse
Which Deliberative Benefits?
Greeting, Rhetoric, and Personal Narrative
Satire, Mediated Protest, and Public Ritual
Summary
Recommended Reading
Notes
7 Counterpublics and the Role of Emotions Conclusion
Subaltern Counterpublics
Enacting Social Identities in Public Discourse
Affective Publics
Empathy And Deliberation
Moral Emotions as Justifications
Summary
Recommended Reading
Conclusion
References
Index
End User License Agreement
Figures
Figure 1.1 Blueprint of the bourgeois public sphere in the eighteenth century.
Figure 3.1 Arenas of political communication, as conceived by Habermas
Figure 3.2 Inputs and outputs of the political public sphere, as conceived by Habermas
Figure 5.1 Deliberative profiles of television news programs in the USA, Germany, and Russia
Tables
Table 2.1 Types of communication and agreement
Table 2.2 Components of the lifeworld and their reproduction
Table 4.1 Normative expectations vis-à-vis mediated public spheres
Table 5.1 Levels of deliberative performance in different media
Table 6.1 Potential deliberative benefits of non-deliberative utterances
Table 6.2 Potential deliberative benefits of non-deliberative media content
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Theory and the Media
John Armitage, Virilio and the MediaDavid Gunkel and Paul Taylor, Heidegger and the MediaPhilip Howard, Castells and the MediaJaeho Kang, Walter Benjamin and the MediaPaul A. Taylor, Žižek and the MediaHartmut Wessler, Habermas and the MediaGeoffrey Winthrop-Young, Kittler and the Media
HABERMAS AND THE MEDIA
HARTMUT WESSLER
polity
Copyright © Hartmut Wessler 2018
The right of Hartmut Wessler to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2018 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3092-2
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Wessler, Hartmut, 1965- author.Title: Habermas and the media / Hartmut Wessler.Description: Medford, MA : Polity, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.Identifiers: LCCN 2018004839 (print) | LCCN 2018031072 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509530922 (Epub) | ISBN 9780745651330 (hardback) | ISBN 9780745651347 (pbk.)Subjects: LCSH: Habermas, J?urgen. | Mass media. | Communication.Classification: LCC B3258.H324 (ebook) | LCC B3258.H324 W47 2018 (print) | DDC 302.23092--dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018004839
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My first encounter with Habermas’s work dates back to the spring of 1985, my second semester at university. In an introductory theory class I was assigned, together with a group of fellow students, to give a presentation on the “Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere.” Back then it was not uncommon for communication studies programs in Germany to have students read Habermas in the original very early on. Later I learned from colleagues in Scandinavia that the same was true in some places there, too. Such early familiarity has its strengths and I am grateful for it. But of course, as young undergraduates we also missed a lot of the wider theoretical ramifications – aspects I only discovered when re-examining familiar pieces and reading more recent ones for the first time in preparation for this book.
The most striking discovery, however, in writing this book for an English-language audience was a difference in discursive context. I realized that the productivity of Habermas’s work for media and communication studies is less obvious outside the narrow remit of my home country and must therefore be explained more clearly. Connections to other research in the field must be drawn more explicitly than would have seemed necessary at home. On the other hand it also became clear over the years that scholarly work on deliberation and deliberative democracy, which builds on Habermas in one way or the other, has developed at least as strongly and productively in the US (and other countries) as in Germany and has taken distinct routes that I needed to understand in order to grasp Habermas’s international impact.
Writing for an Anglophone audience has thus forced me to take an outside view of my subject and to question parts of what I took for granted. It turned out to be a peculiar kind of intercultural communication. It helped clarify my thinking and made me more critical on average of Habermas’s contribution to the field of media and communication studies. It helped me identify areas in which Habermas’s work on the media was in need of extension and revision and prompted me to highlight possibilities for further theoretical and empirical elaboration.
For this journey from Habermas through his reception in the English-speaking world and back to his work and its possible extensions, I feel indebted to colleagues and students on both sides of the Atlantic and beyond. On the European side I profited greatly from longer and shorter exchanges with André Bächtiger, Michael Brüggemann, Christiane Eilders, Bernward Gesang, Jostein Gripsrud, Katharina Holzinger, Otfried Jarren, Hallvard Moe, Barbara Pfetsch, Mike Schäfer, Rüdiger Schmitt-Beck, Tanjev Schultz, Jürg Steiner, and Yannis Theocharis. I am particularly indebted to my late colleague Bernhard Peters (1949–2005) for unique first-hand perspectives on Habermas. Outside of Europe I am grateful for long-standing collaborations or brief exchanges with Scott Althaus, Rodney Benson, Rose Maia, Patricia Moy, John Parkinson, and Matthew Powers. I would also like to acknowledge the Fulbright travel grant that enabled me to spend the spring of 2011 as a visiting scholar at New York University, generously hosted by Rodney Benson.
Closer to home, I am intensely grateful to the current and former members of my research team at the University of Mannheim: Manuel Adolphsen, Chung-hong Chan, Rainer Freudenthaler, Eric Hendriks, Lutz Hofer, Kristina John, Charlotte Löb, Julia Lück, Christoph Niemann-Mall, Eike Rinke, Maria Röder, David Schieferdecker, and Antal Wozniak. In relation to this volume’s topic a special thank you goes to Eike Rinke for our long-standing joint work on matters of mediated deliberation, and to Charlotte Löb and Rainer Freudenthaler for our ongoing collaboration in researching mediated public spheres. Patrik Haffner and Jonas Voljanek have helped in stemming the tide of the theoretical and empirical literature. I am especially grateful to Marianne Valigura for her unwavering office support over the years. My colleagues at the Institute for Media and Communication Studies in Mannheim deserve thanks for providing such a stimulating work environment. I have also profited greatly from discussions with students in classes at the University of Mannheim, the University of Zürich, and the Federal University of Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte (Brazil).
The foundations for my intellectual engagements were laid by my parents, Rudolf Wessler (1927–2007) and Martha-Elisabeth Wessler, and I am more than grateful for their guidance and stimulation. Last but not least, my wife, Marita Hartnack, knows better than anybody that academic work can be a real strain before it becomes a source of satisfaction and happiness. She deserves praise for enduring, encouraging, inspiring, challenging, criticizing, and supporting me beyond any expectation. I wholeheartedly dedicate this book to her.
INTRODUCTION
Jürgen Habermas is one of the most important contemporary philosophers and social theorists. His work is widely cited in international academic publications and has deeply influenced media and communication scholars around the world. His unique contribution to theorizing the media revolves around three core concepts, which are closely associated with his name: the public sphere, communicative action, and deliberative democracy. It is no exaggeration to say
that Habermas discovered the
public sphere
as a distinct sphere of social life in modern societies (Fraser 2009),
that he developed a distinctive idea of
communicative action
by synthesizing vast areas of extant research in linguistics and sociology, and
that he is the founding father of the
deliberative tradition
in democratic theory.
All three concepts will be explained in detail later in this book. At this point it is important to note that all three are intimately bound up with “the media.” Media are central to the functioning of public spheres. People use media for engaging in, and circulating the outcomes of, communicative action (as well as its opposite, strategic action). And deliberative democracy in large-scale societies is not conceivable without the widespread circulation of ideas and arguments through the media. When Habermas talks about “media” or “the media” he is mostly concerned with mass media like newspapers and television; he has written only scantily about the Internet. But this does not diminish his contribution to communication and media studies even today precisely because his view of the media is so strongly infused with these other three central concepts: Public spheres, communicative action, and deliberation are not bound to mass media. On the contrary, today’s digital network media can under certain conditions help build public spheres, can enable communicative action, and are vital for a burgeoning deliberative democracy. Habermas’s work has retained its stimulating force for contemporary media and communication research precisely because he theorizes not primarily specific types of media, but the quality of societal communication more generally.
BIOGRAPHICAL ROOTS
Before we turn to briefly summarizing Habermas’s unique theoretical contributions in the next part of this introduction, a few biographical notes seem important (for a comprehensive biography, see Müller-Doohm 2016). Jürgen Habermas was born on June 18, 1929 in Düsseldorf, Germany, and grew up in the small town of Gummersbach. He was three years old when the Nazis came to power in Germany and fifteen when World War II and the Nazi dictatorship ended. During the last throes of the war Habermas, like most young men born in 1928 and 1929, was ordered to serve as a military helper on the Western front, but fortunately, he was spared from actual armed combat. The experience of dictatorship and war made Jürgen Habermas most susceptible to the promise of freedom and democracy as it developed at least in the Western part of postwar Germany. Habermas finished high school in 1949, the year in which the Federal Republic of Germany was founded. During his university studies in Göttingen, Zürich, and Bonn in the early 1950s he became more and more politicized and critical of the restorative tendencies that marked the tenure of Western Germany’s conservative first chancellor Konrad Adenauer. Reflecting on this historical period retrospectively, Habermas wrote in his acceptance speech for the Kyoto Prize (which is seen as something like the Nobel Prize for the humanities): “The continuity of social elites and cultural prejudices through which Konrad Adenauer marshaled consent for his policies was stifling. There had been no break with the past, no new beginning in terms of personnel, no change in mentality – neither a moral renewal nor a revolution of political mindset” (Habermas 2008, 19). It was in this climate that Habermas, at the age of twenty-four, and one year before he finished his doctorate in philosophy, wrote his first public intervention, which appeared in the quality daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. In this piece, entitled “Thinking with Heidegger against Heidegger,” Habermas directly attacked Martin Heidegger, then one of Germany’s most prominent philosophers, for the unchanged publication of his 1935 lectures in which he had praised the Nazi movement for its “inner truth and greatness.” Habermas’s article stirred quite some debate in postwar Germany and established his reputation as an astute critic and strident combatant in public debates.
But there is another personal experience that has prompted Habermas’s life-long preoccupation with the possibilities of developing public voice and the benefits of discursive exchange with others. By birth Habermas has a cleft upper lip, and he had to undergo surgery at a very early age. The resulting life-long speech impediment as well as the rejection by his schoolmates deeply sensitized Habermas to how valuable – and endangered – the ability to express oneself publicly can be. “I remember the difficulties I encountered when I tried to make myself understood in class or during break while speaking with my nasal articulation and distorted pronunciation of which I was completely unaware. I had left the haven of family life and its familiar surroundings and had to find my feet in an ‘anonymous’ domain” (Habermas 2008, 15). The schoolyard is a public space much like the more abstract space of the political public sphere. And both are relatively uncomfortable spaces, which demand audacity in expressing yourself and which carry the risk of rejection. Both in the schoolyard and in the political public sphere we are, Habermas says, entangled with others “in an ever denser and more fragile network of relationships of reciprocal recognition” (Habermas 2008, 17). We run the risk that “reciprocity will be denied. The morality of equal respect for everyone is designed to absorb such risks. For it is designed to abolish discrimination and to facilitate the inclusion of the marginalized in the network of reciprocal recognition” (Habermas 2008, 17).
After a brief interlude as a freelance journalist Habermas, in 1956, became the research assistant of Theodor W. Adorno, who had returned from exile and reopened, with Max Horkheimer, the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt. Since its founding in 1924 the Institute had been the breeding ground of Critical Theory, a multidisciplinary endeavor to critically analyze the modern capitalist societies of the time. Adorno and Horkheimer as well as, among others, Herbert Marcuse, Walter Benjamin, Erich Fromm, and Leo Löwenthal are referred to as the first generation of the Frankfurt School. Habermas would later become the leading protagonist of its second generation. But before this could happen Habermas had to leave the Institute in Frankfurt in 1959, due to Horkheimer’s clandestine initiative: Horkheimer found Habermas to be “too political” and refused to accept the latter’s postdoctoral thesis, which would have earned him the venia legendi, the right to teach at the university in his own right. Habermas instead submitted his postdoctoral thesis at the University of Marburg under the guidance of Wolfgang Abendroth, one of the few openly Marxist philosophers in Germany at the time. This thesis was entitled “The structural transformation of the public sphere” and firmly established Habermas’s reputation as a leading social theorist. It also marks the starting point for his life-long preoccupation with the emancipatory potential of rational public debate.
Upon completion of the thesis in 1961 Habermas immediately became professor of philosophy at the University of Heidelberg, and three years later, ironically, moved back to Frankfurt to become Horkheimer’s successor. He held the chair of philosophy and sociology at the University of Frankfurt from 1964 to 1971. During the following decade, from 1971 to 1981, Habermas served, with Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, as the co-director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of the Scientific-Technical World in Starnberg, near Munich. This institute quickly became a hotbed of intellectual debate in Germany and beyond, and the breeding ground for many influential ideas circulating both in academia and in public debate. In Starnberg Habermas wrote his magnum opus, The theory of communicative action.
In 1983 Habermas returned again to Frankfurt, where he worked as a professor of philosophy until his retirement in 1994. By this time his book Between facts and norms had come out. After The structural transformation of the public sphere in the 1960s and The theory of communicative action in the 1970s and 1980s, Between facts and norms marks the third phase of Habermas’s thinking, spanning the 1990s and 2000s. In this volume he lays the foundations for a new brand of normative democratic theory, the theory of deliberative democracy. Habermas reconstructs democratic governance as a process of collective opinion-formation and decision-making that is supposed to ensure a more rational process of policy-making. Since his retirement in 1994 Habermas has remained very active and has published almost a dozen books and many more articles both as a scholar and as a public intellectual. He has also received numerous prestigious national and international prizes and awards.
IN A NUTSHELL: HABERMAS’S CONTRIBUTION TO THE STUDY OF THE MEDIA
Habermas first presented his idea of the public sphere in his postdoctoral thesis, entitled in full “The structural transformation of the public sphere: An inquiry into a category of bourgeois society.” It was published as a book in German as early as 1962, but only translated into English in 1989. This late translation sparked an intense discussion internationally, which is partly documented in Habermas and the public sphere (Calhoun 1992). The term “public sphere” is widely used throughout the social sciences and humanities as well as in some strands of public and media debate. Habermas uses the term in a relatively specific fashion and with a normative overtone: The public sphere is a discursive arena in which citizens discuss matters of common concern in such a way that the power of the better argument reigns instead of the socioeconomic position of the speaker. This understanding is normative becomes it carries an element of prescription: Communication in the public sphere should engender genuine discussion and help the better argument win. If defined in this way not everything that is on public display or “in the media” contributes to maintaining the public sphere – think about gossip or rumors or “fake news.” But newspaper editorials, civil forms of television and radio talk shows as well as some kinds of online discussions do. Habermas’s specific normative notion of the public sphere has been criticized, and he responded to this criticism in his “Further reflections on the public sphere” (Habermas 1992), in which he offered a number of important revisions to his early book (see chapter 1 for details). Apart from such explicit critique, the term “public sphere” has also been used rather loosely in many places and has become almost a catch-all term for anything that other people can see or hear. Whenever the term surfaces in writing it is worth ascertaining whether the original Habermasian usage is intended or not in order to avoid confusion.
The second core concept, communicative action, was developed in Habermas’s magnum opus, The theory of communicative action. This two-volume work was first published in German in 1981; the English translation appeared in 1984 (volume 1) and 1987 (volume 2). In its pages Habermas laid a new foundation for his thinking about the role of communication in modern society. The two volumes had been available for some time before Habermas’s earlier book Structural transformation of the public sphere finally appeared in English in 1989. Not many Anglophone readers of Structural transformation had read the Theory of communicative action. Therefore the implications of Habermas’s new notion of communicative action for understanding communication in the public sphere was not fully appreciated in academic discussions in the early 1990s. According to Habermas, communicative action is “action oriented to reaching understanding” and must be sharply distinguished from strategic action, that is, “action oriented to success” (Habermas 1984, 285). When we act in order to create understanding with our conversational partners we not only make ourselves understood in linguistic terms; we also aim at eliciting “rationally motivated voluntary agreement” to what we say. We consciously or unconsciously want others to accept that (a) what we say is true; our utterance (b) is in line with generally acceptable social norms, that is, norms that in principle everybody involved could agree to; and (c) our words reflect what we really think. Thus, when we engage in communicative action, Habermas contends, we involuntarily make three validity claims: We claim objective truth, moral rightness, and subjective truthfulness for what we have to say. While the Theory of communicative action shows how this complex notion of communication is fundamental to understanding human activity, the book does not offer in itself a good theory of the media. In particular, it does not sufficiently spell out what the role of communicative action could be in public arenas that transcend face-to-face settings, such as political speech, civic protest, journalism, or public relations.
It took another major book for Habermas to explicitly connect his theory of the public sphere with his theory of communicative action and offer an up-to-date account of the role of the media in democratic life. In Between facts and norms (German 1992, English 1996) he develops a conception of democracy that revolves around the notion of deliberation. Deliberation is a form of communication in which various actors exchange arguments, i.e. opinions and reasons, in order to arrive at a common solution. The institutions of liberal democracy – parliaments, governments, independent courts – as well as the actors of civil society – citizens, voluntary associations, social movements, and the media – are described as indispensable sites and drivers of democratic communication. From a deliberative perspective, democracy appears as a large-scale experiment in collective learning rather than just the negotiation of conflicting interests. In mediated public communication the exchange of ideas is performed in front of an audience, be it the big audience of the evening newscast or the small audience of a specialized online discussion forum, or anything in between. In chapter 8 of Between facts and norms, entitled “On civil society and the political public sphere,” Habermas shows under what conditions public deliberation by citizens and their associations can acquire “communicative power” vis-à-vis state institutions and other power-holders. Habermas’s idea of deliberative democracy thus rests on spontaneous bottom-up communication that puts the center of the political system “under siege” without aiming at conquering it (Habermas 1992, 452; 1996, 443).
According to Habermas (1996, 378), the media have a mandate to support the willingness to learn and the capacity to criticize on the part of an “enlightened public,” that is, an active, deliberating citizenry. This normative idea about the media’s role in democracy is further explicated in Habermas’s as yet latest account on the topic, the essay “Political communication in media society: Does democracy still have an epistemic dimension?” (Habermas 2009b). Here the media are situated at the center of a system designed to produce well-considered public opinions through a complex web of input and output flows between political actors, mass media, civil society, and state institutions (Habermas 2009b, 166). And following this idea Habermas remains highly critical of media tycoons such as Rupert Murdoch and Silvio Berlusconi, but also skeptical of the capacity of online media to contribute meaningfully to deliberative democracy.
OUTLINE OF THIS BOOK
Habermas sets out to tackle some of the most fundamental problems of social theory. His works aim at understanding the nature of human agency and the capacity of societies to learn, and in doing so they strive to integrate a lot of prior research from other authors. Fortunately, Habermas is also a public intellectual who contributes regularly to public debates in Germany and beyond, so that he is well aware of the difficulties posed by academic jargon. Therefore, his texts are sometimes spiced with metaphors that illuminate complex matters. One example is the idea already mentioned that civil society puts the political system “under siege.” Another is the idea of “sluices” through which citizens’ concerns must be channeled in order to be heard in the centers of political power. Or consider the “osmosis” by which arguments from one arena of public debate permeate into adjacent arenas so as to create a common, border-spanning discussion that transcends the parochial horizons of ever-recurring, familiar positions. Wherever possible, I will use such welcome figurative entry points in this book to explain Habermas’s ideas and the debates around them.
The first three chapters of this book trace the development of Habermas’s media-related thinking over the past fifty-five years. Chapter 1 starts with the Structural transformation of the public sphere, discusses its critics and describes the revisions Habermas offered in 1992. In chapter 2 the notion of communicative action is explained, discussed in relation to the media and contextualized in the overall architecture of Habermas’s Theory of communicative action. Chapter 3 identifies the role Habermas foresees for the media in a deliberative democracy as presented in Between facts and norms and “Political communication in media society.”
Chapters 4 to 7 then proceed to offer alternatives to, extensions of, and debates surrounding Habermas’s thinking. In chapter 4 I sketch three normative rivals of Habermas’s model of deliberative democracy, namely the liberal, the republican, and the agonistic models of democracy, as well as Habermas’s response to each. Chapter 5 systematizes the research that has used the concept of deliberativeness to empirically assess the quality of news and discussion media. I focus on quality newspapers, television news, Twitter, and political blogs, and show which of these forums offers the strongest potential for deliberative exchanges of ideas. The result is surprising.
Chapter 6 goes one step further and scrutinizes non-deliberative media content such as satire, mediated protest, and public rituals. I search for the contributions that these forms of public communication can make to genuine societal discussion and learning, even though they are not deliberative themselves. In chapter 7, finally, I consider conceptual debates about how counterpublics and mediated activism should be conceived and offer a nascent perspective on the role of emotions in mediated deliberation.
The concluding chapter aims at pointing to fruitful routes for future media and communication scholarship inspired by Habermas’s thinking. His distinctive contribution to the field lies in insisting that mediated communication must remain bound to the project of societal self-emancipation and selfregulation – even in times of increasing commercialization, growing political apathy, and populism. How this bond can be renewed is one of the most exciting and pressing issues for contemporary media and communication research.
