13 November 2007

Jurgen Habermas came of age in the aftermath of World War II and realized he had been living in a politically criminal system. His 'motif' of politics is a vigilance against any recurrence of 'politically criminal' behavior. This is the context of his ideal speech community in which individuals come to agreement through reason and discussion and without any form of coercion. Because of this, he has often been accused of being trapped in an 'iron cage of reason' because in trying to find a reason to believe in reason, he can not escape from this type of circular bureaucratic rationality.

Despite this, it does not diminish his accomplished delineation of the public sphere and the effect of mass media on that sphere. Indeed, his writings in 1991 hold remarkable relevance today. In the Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1991), Habermas identifies the incipient traces of the public sphere with the 13th Century emergence of the literary trade of news and information. Here, he identifies two public spheres:

1) the public sphere of State authority, and

2) the public sphere of the private realm.

This latter sphere he identifies as the authentic public sphere because it consists of private people and those people are addressees of public authority. He then goes on to identify an additional two public spheres:

3) the public sphere of letters, and

4) the public sphere of politics.

To him, the public sphere of letters through public opinion mediates the public sphere of politics by acting as intermediary between the state and society. Adding to these four spheres, he has a fifth, the sphere of publicity. This fifth sphere he identifies mainly in Great Britain and France and consists of bourgeouis intellectuals and the aristocracy meeting in secrecy and exhibiting three institutional criteria:

1) parity of common humanity,

2) broadened domain of common concern, and

3) more inclusive public of all private people (private people being property-owning, literate, and educated in the use of reason).

Habermas accuses mass media of transmogrifying the public sphere into a pseudo-public sphere of culture consumption that is literary no longer:

"world fashioned by the mass media is a public sphere in appearance only. By the same token the integrity of the private sphere...is also an illusion."

"consumption of mass culture...is not cumulative but regressive"

So why is the public sphere so important and how is it relevant today?

The answer lies in Habermas' ideal speech community and theory of communicative action (Theory of Communicative Action, Volume One, 1984):

Inherent in communicative action is reason and the use of language as a "means of communication which serves mutual understanding". Communicative action in the ideal speech community assumes all participants will be morally acting subjects seeking to develop their subjectivity and uniqueness and centers around the ability to realize oneself under conditions of communicatively shared intersubjectivity. Here, universality requires actors in the speech community to maintain a reflective relation and act in a self-critical attitude.

There is a reason it is called the "ideal" speech community. Despite the morality, mutuality, and means towards intersubjectivity, the self-critical aspect is where I focus as a locus of commonality with (post-modernist) thought and (cultural) intellect. Rather than maintaining the integrity of the public sphere qua communicative action, today the analysis should be placed on multiple spheres of occupied virtuality as redefining and replacing (communicative) culture.

Against Habermas' public sphere is Paolo Virno's multitude of the displaced, a multitude that rejects the public sphere for that of the private sphere (A Grammar of the Multititude, 2004).

(Quite a similar position the individual occupies today.)

Virno's multitude stems from his sense of the indefinate nature of the world as a source of permanent insecurity and mutability of forms of life. In this world, he imagines reality as repeatedly innovated causing individuals to have a direct and continuous relation to the world with an imprecise context of their own existence. The end result is anguish that evades the public sphere and imparts the individual with a sense of not feeling at home. Here, he takes from Aristotle the notion of the life of the stranger and the life of the thinker - both never feeling at home. For Virno's multitude, this is a permanent condition.

This echoes Joshua Meyrowitz's discussion of displacement that allows individuals to establish new notions of appropriate social behavior and identity where electronic media achieve a demystifying effect to socialize individuals (No Sense of Place, 1985).

Rather than public and private sphere, Virno refers back to Aristotle's common and special places. According to Virno, common places are a resource for protection from the dangerousness of the world (a sort of apotropaic). These places are common because they are indispensible and allow the existence of every individual expression and give structure to those expressions. In contrast, special places are the sphere of associative life appropriate within a specific context. The special disappear behind the common places because the former are not as reliable as the latter.

So where does the multitude fit in, and what exactly is the multitude?

Roughly described, the multitude is a combination of "social individuals" signifying a plurality, a "being-many" as a lasting form of social and political existence. It consists of a network of individuals in which the many are a singularity as a result of a process of individuation as the "final stage of a process" beyond which is nothing else because everything else has already taken place. The term multitude is thus held in sharp contrast to the cohesive unity denoted in the term people.

Civil disobedience is the fundamental form of political action of the multitude and this, Virno borrows from Hobbes. The multitude is antistate, antipeople, deprived of a voice and a public presence, the multitude is removed from the sphere of common affairs and thus survives as a private dimension. Because the multitude has no voice, it is not public.

With the multitude, Virno attempts to redefine the One. The multitude rather than being a class, is performative and fulfills the Autonomia's (erstwhile Italian political party) motto: "margins at the center".

On many fronts, the individual today shares much with Virno's multitude.

Electronic technology mediates a virtual transcendence over traditional limitations of time, space, and geography, to name just a few. Individuals are fast becoming accessorized and transformed into virtual mobile broadcasting entities unto themselves. It was once stated that "no man is an island". Today, electronic technology enables man to become that veritable island by mediating a qualitative level of transcendence, completion, and independence.

From this position, the mediated individual needs not a public sphere of communicative action. S/He can blog one in seconds.

From this position, the mediated individual needs not a common place. S/He can mediate one seamlessly and instantly.

Rather than common places, context-specific special places are actually being occupied in multiplicity within virtuality and with immediate ease.

Here again, language needs a re-assessment and an overhaul. Traditional meanings need to be re-addressed. Culture today carries not the same meaning, language, and context structure as it did pre-electronic technology and pre-mediated individual.