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Public Sphere

A general definition of the public sphere is a realm within which individuals discuss the public good. Many scholars insist that a public sphere is a necessary element of democratic society, a realm wherein citizens can freely engage in discourse without interference from the state and its agents. However, public sphere is a term that has inspired much debate and multiple, sometimes competing, definitions and applications. Interest in theories of the public sphere was revived in the wake of the cold war and the demise of colonialism. Scholars of democratic theory, social movements, rhetoric, and media studies have turned to theories of the public sphere to explore and explain the dynamic changes in civil societies after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the growth of diasporas, and the continued efforts of marginalized religious, sexual, racial, and gender groups to attain equality in contemporary societies. Many of these explorations investigate the role of public discourse in these phenomena and aim to combat triumphalist narratives of capitalism's victory over other forms of sociality. Writers in search of ways to reinvigorate ideals of citizen participation, equality of opportunity, and multiculturalism in global societies have looked to public sphere theories for inspiration and to highlight concerns, including how the public sphere shapes social identity and how one's participation in the public sphere or in counterpublics shapes and reshapes one's identity.

Habermas and the Revival of Public Sphere Theory

Much of the renewed interest in the public sphere during the last three decades was sparked by Thomas Burger's 1989 translation of Jürgen Habermas's The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. In this generative volume, Habermas traces the rise of the bourgeois public sphere in the era of the European Enlightenment, and its demise in the modern era. He defines the public sphere as the arena where private persons who gathered outside of the state to discuss matters of public import, including issues concerning the state. These discussions were guided by rational-critical debate norms and required individuals to shed particularities of identity to be recognized as rational speakers. The book sparked a host of responses from scholars in anthologies, special issues of academic journals, and book-length treatises.

Critiques of Habermas

Although many writers found Habermas's thesis and history intriguing and vital, multiple critiques of the work quickly found their way to print. Chief among the concerns raised by scholars and social movement activists was the focus on a bourgeois public, the definitions of rational debate, and the bifurcation of public and private. Many respondents felt his history and theory did not contain sufficient attention to marginalized groups and did not apply to the conditions of the multicultural modern societies of either Europe or the United States. From these concerns came reformulations of Habermas's history of the bourgeois Western public to include concurrent formations of working class, women's, and other publics to account for differences in power and access to resources.

Counterpublics

Many critics of Habermas posit that counterpublics exist in opposition to majority publics or a dominant public sphere in an ever-shifting terrain of institutions, identity positions, and media arenas. Indeed, long before the English translation of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge described the emergence of working class publics in tandem with bourgeois publics. In 1992, Nancy Fraser posited a feminist public sphere emerging in opposition to the male-dominated bourgeois public. Simultaneously, Houston Baker Jr., Michael Dawson, and others gathered at the University of Chicago to delineate the contours of a Black counterpublic, pondering the ways in which African Americans created separate and overlapping public spheres in response to slavery and White supremacy. These explorations of multiple publics acknowledge the role of cultural identities in creating speech norms, setting agendas, and defining borders between public and private concerns. Many of these writers cited how multiple forms of speech, including more performative and emotive modes of engagement, could not be excluded from the realm of the public, thereby favoring certain identity groups and norms over others.

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