Outline of a Marxist Commodity Theory of the Public Sphere
John Michael Roberts
Sociology and Communications
Brunel University
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Abstract
In recent years, the public sphere, which represents a realm in civil society where people can debate and discuss a range of issues and common concerns important to them, has become akey area for research in the humanities and social sciences.Arguably, however, Marxist theory has yet to advance a theoretical account of the most abstract and simple ideological properties of the capitalist public sphere as these appear under universal commodity relationships. The paper thereforetentatively seeks to develop such an account.Specifically, the papertheoretically derives a peculiar public sphere under capitalism, which is mediated between at least two commodity owners who also possess distinctive personalities driven by desires to own commodities. The paper then explains in more detail how the social form of this public sphere develops through other elements of commodity relations and their contradictions.
Keywords: commodity-form; dialogue; hearer and speaker; Marxism; public sphere
Introduction
At least since the late 1980sthe public sphere has become an important area of research in the humanities and social sciences. At its simplest, the public sphere denotes spaces in society where associates, friends, and strangers can debate and discuss a range of issues and common concerns, which are important to them. Public spheres therefore help to create and reinforce democratic mechanisms in everyday life, particularly those related to ordinary people getting their voices heard in society. For Emirbayer and Sheller public spheres thus represent:
open-ended flows of communication that enable socially distant interlocutors to bridge social-network positions, formulate collective orientations, and generate psychical ‘working alliances’, in pursuit of influence over issues of common concern. Publics are…interstitial networks of individuals and groups acting as citizens.[1]
With equal measure, the public sphere likewise represents a space of argument and disagreement between different individuals and groups about common concerns and issues. This being the case, and as Somers notes, the public sphere is also:
a contested participatory site in which actors with overlapping identities as legal subjects, citizens, economic actors, and family and community members, form a public body and emerge in negotiations and contestations over political and social life.[2]
Coleman and Ross identify three further broad perspectiveson the public sphere. First, there is a liberal perspective, which argues the public sphereis a homogeneous and normative entity in which individuals leave their bias and prejudices behind them in order to construct an agreed consensus around a matter of concern through debate and deliberation. Second, the public sphere is regularly seen as an arena to educate people through mass communication. Under these circumstances, the public sphere is thought to be a place to mould people’s beliefs through mass media. Third, the public sphere is thought by many as an opportunity to allow a multitude of voices to be heard in public debates and promote different types of active and often conflicting forms of citizenship in society.[3]
Yet, while many celebrate the public sphere, it is not however without its critics. For instance, there havebeen attempts to make sense of the public sphere under a ‘new’, digital capitalism comprised by the likes of social media.For critics, digital media enable people to believe they are being active in society by contributing to social and political debate on chat forums, whereas in reality the content of their contribution becomes one of many other contents swirling around in cyberspace.For this reason, Jodi Deanargues we live in an age where messages are now disarticulated from their ‘real context’ so that they become instead part of a never-ending circulating stream of information through new media outlets. Today’s public sphere therefore creates a ‘fantasy’. Through new technology, especially social media, we feel as though we are entering a socially and politically charged public sphere,whereas on another level new media ‘functions as a fetish covering over our impotence and helping us understand ourselves as active’.[4]
Without doubt, these critics make some astute observations about the fetishism prevalent in a communicative, informational and new media public sphere.Nevertheless, it is also true to say theyunderestimatehow these insights are related to the more abstractand contradictoryqualities of the capitalist public sphere, preferring instead to explore the concrete twenty-first century public sphere. This is an importantpointbecause without understanding these abstractand simple contradictory propertiesit is difficult tocomprehend fullyhow certain inherent contradictions in the capitalist public sphere play themselves out in concrete and everyday public spheres. This paper therefore sets itself the task of deriving some of the main abstract and ideological themes of the capitalist public sphere. From a Marxist perspective, the abstract and simple starting point of analysis of capitalism is found in the commodity-form.[5]As Tinker observes, ‘(t)he importance of specifying an initial object of inquiry (the commodity) that is sufficiently broad to encompass questions of cultural reproduction and change…is repleat in Marx’s writings. The analysis applies to all areas of life experience that is susceptible to commodification’.[6]Given this, it is an entirely reasonable theoretical move for Marxists to abstract the main contradictions of the capitalist public sphere from within the abstract and simple properties of the commodity-form. Following Marx, however, it isequallyimportant to note that in abstracting the capitalist public sphere from within the commodity-form, we are not presenting a description of any actual, empirical, or historical public sphere.[7] Rather, and as the paper demonstrates, we will isolate the simplest and fundamental contradictory determinations of the capitalist public sphere through a logical presentation of its core categories.[8]
The next three sections pave the wayto develop a theory of the public sphere in commodity relationships by firstly taking to task alternative theoretical perspectives. First, a liberal approach to the public sphere is outlined. Liberal theory tends to conceptualise the public sphere as a realm of autonomy andfreedom that exists in civil society, which enables individuals to engage in dialogue with one another about matters of public importance with the aim of reaching consensus. A critical advocate of this position isJürgen Habermas. Indeed, Habermas has produced a hugely impressive and important range of work that seeks to construct a theoretically sophisticated and empirically rich account of the public sphere for contemporary societies. Arguably, though, it is also true to say the substantial amount ofHabermas’s output on the public sphere is based in a liberal account, which argues that public deliberation in civil society requires the capitalist state to guarantee its legitimacy. The next section therefore sketches out some of Habermas’s ideas in this respect and highlights some problems with them from a Marxist perspective.
Following this discussion, the paper then explores a theory of the public sphere designed to overcome some problems in Habermas’s account. This is a theory of counterpublic spheres. Counterpublics are often portrayed as rejecting the sort of homogeneous, consensus-building public sphere envisaged by Habermas. After all, argue those who prefer a theory of counterpublics, Habermas assumes that everyone has similar identities in the public sphere, and everyone wishes to reach a consensus on matters of disagreement. For critics, this viewpoint refuses to acknowledge that an array of voices exist in the public sphere based on a sense of difference, not sameness or consensus.[9]By encouraging the growth of counterpublics, critics argue that oppositional and subordinate groups can challenge such mechanisms of power in their institutional forms. For these reasons, a theory of counterpublics has been attractive to many radical, progressive, and Marxist activists. Nancy Fraser has become one of the most well-known advocates and theorists of counterpublics.[10]The paper therebyfocuses on Fraser’s work because it represents one of the leading accounts of counterpublics. While making many laudable proposals,we will nevertheless see that Fraser’s main theoretical framework fails to tackle the most abstract ideological form of the public sphere within capitalist society. As a result, Fraser’s preferred theory of the public sphere is not robust enough to understand the deeply embedded power relations at work in capitalism.
These critical remarks then provide a basis to begin to develop a distinctively Marxist approach to the public sphere. This will occur, first, by examining the pioneering work of Alexander Negt and Oskar Kluge.[11] Seeking in part to critique elements of Habermas’s early work on the public sphere, Negt and Kluge develop a Marxist account of the public that aims to give due weight to the dialectical struggle between bourgeois and proletarian public spheres. However, while they make some astute observations about this dialectical relationship it is also true to say that they tend to associate the proletarian public sphere with concrete types of discussion whereas the bourgeois public sphere is related to abstract types of discussion. Problematically, this theory establishes a dualistic account of the capitalist public sphere that underestimates the social mediation of the public sphere through both abstract and concrete forms.
Having analysed these alternative perspectives, the next three main sections start to offer up an alternative Marxist theory of the public sphere. As the public sphere is a commodified form of life it seems reasonable to begin this alternative account with the commodity-form in order to unravel the most abstract and simple contradictions of the capitalist public sphere. By starting at this point, it becomes possible to unravel a peculiar public sphere at the heart of universal commodity relationships. This public sphere is mediated between at least two commodity owners who stand in front of one another as apparent equals: one is a seller, the other is a buyer. At the same time, each is a unique individual with a distinctive personality driven by desires to own specific commodities. As a result, both must enter into dialogue about exchanging commodities with one another. If this is the case then this commodity public sphere takes the form of a dialogue between a seller who speaks about, and tries to provide convincing reasons, why a buyer should accept their (i.e. the seller’s) ‘right’ to determine commodity transactions in ways that favour the seller’s own desires. The buyer subsequently hears and listens the dialogue put forward by the seller. What follows from this is a dialogic struggle between a seller (speaker) and buyer (hearer) about the right of commodity exchange, which, in turn, isgrounded in fundamental contradictions within simple capitalist production. The paper then explains in more detail how the social form of this historically specific public sphere develops through other elements of commodity relations. In the conclusion the paper shows how the delineation of the public sphere put forward here is similar but also noticeably different to that put forward by agonist theorists like Chantal Mouffe.[12]
A Liberal Approach to the Public Sphere: JürgenHabermas[13]
Most liberal approaches see the public sphere as being part of civil society. In this account, civil society is that social sphere in which individuals come together on a voluntary basis to form a common public will in and around social and political issues. In this liberal narrative civil society is classically defined as a sphere separated from the public body of the state. Keane sums up well this line of thinking.
Civil society…is an ideal-typical category…that both describes and envisages a complex and dynamic ensemble of legally protected non-governmental institutions that tend to be non-violent, self-organizing, self-reflexive, and permanently in tension with each other and with the state institutions that ‘frame’, constrict and enable their activities.[14]
On this understanding, civil society is a discrete space comprised, in part, by a number of public spheres, which permit individuals to assert rights on behalf of particular identities they hold and thereby help to widen the boundaries of citizenship.[15]Accordingly, the public sphere has great potential to build consensus between individuals. Important in this respect is the role played by the state and law as public bodies whose primary objective is to act as mediator for these various rights. But just as important as the state is the role given over to the public sphere in ‘educating’ and ‘socialising’ individuals in the ‘proper’ skills required to take part in ‘rational’ debate in order to make a contribution to liberal society.[16]
This liberal approach is noticeable in the work of Jürgen Habermas. For example, in his first major work on the public sphere, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere,[17]Habermas outlines what he believes are the fundamental principles of ‘rational-critical’ discussion about matters of public importance in society. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Western Europe a bourgeois public sphere emerged for a short period of time that enabled a number of private (male) strangers to engage in a form of rational debate and discussion about politics, society, and the like. According to Habermas, this was a public sphere found in public places like coffeehouses, salons, in cultural forms like newsletters, letter writing, newspapers and journals, and in business organisations like the Stock Exchange,all of which entertained and fostered critical opinions. At the same time, this period saw the emergence of an increasingly privatized bourgeois family home environment where individuals could cultivate their own powers of reason and sense of morality through reading and writing. Thus, the importance of the bourgeois public sphere for Habermas is that it brought together middle-class (male) strangers in new public spaces and encouraged the formation of critical discussion about public matters in society. Such critical discussion was now also directed towards those who worked in state and government structures. Overall, then, public opinion came to be expressed through a new critical reason based on an argumentative rational discussion, access to information via an emerging newspaper culture, the pursuit of a set of general norms, and the existence of equal status between discussants.
Habermas’s early work on the bourgeois public sphere has been subject to numerous criticisms.[18]Margaret Somers in particular develops some interesting critical observations. According to Somers, Habermas’s original endeavour was to analyse the bourgeois public sphere as a structural mediator, an ‘intermediate zone’, between the private market place and the public world of politics, which leads to enhanced political debate and discussion in civil society. Yet, continues Somers, a closer reading of Structural Transformation reveals that Habermas’s account does not in fact deal with political debate as such, but rather sets out how individuals must first be socialised ‘in advance of their political participation’ through the capitalist economy. As a result, socialisation is reduced to the requirements of the capitalist economy.[19] For instance, Habermas argues that the socialisation required for debate in eighteenth century Europe was formed through the private sphere of market transaction insofar that the actions of private individuals provided fertile grounds for public debate. Indeed, when Habermas explores the role that the intimate sphere of the family played in the emergence of the bourgeois public sphere he is clear that market relations were the force guiding this social process. Somers quotes directly from Structural Transformation. ‘Although there may have been a desire to perceive the sphere of the family circle as independent…it was…dependent on the sphere of labour and the commodity’.[20]Habermas thus seems to relegate the bourgeois public sphere, and the socialisation required for critical discussion, to the imperatives of the capitalist economy.
In his later work, Habermas tries to overcome such reductionist problems by providing a more robust definition of the public sphere in contemporary capitalist societies. In Between Facts and Norms he observes:
The public sphere is a social phenomenon just as elementary as action, actor, association or collectivity, but it eludes the conventional sociological concepts of ‘social order’. The public sphere cannot be conceived as an institution and certainly not as an organisation. It is not even a framework of norms with differentiated competences and roles, membership regulations and so on….The public sphere can best be described as a network for communicating information and points of view (i.e. opinions expressing affirmative of negative attitudes); the streams of communication are, in the process, filtered and synthesized in such a way that they coalesce into bundles of topically specified opinions.[21]
For Habermas, late-modern societies havewitnessed a new civil society coming into being.For instance, ‘non-governmental and non-economic connections and voluntary associations that anchor the communication structures of the public sphere in the society component of the lifeworld’ are now more prevalent throughout the global world, and these help to establish innovative public spheres in civil society.[22]Habermas also clearly recognisesthat societies in the world face new complex processes thatnow act as a constraint over democratic endeavours (as the recent global financial crisis testifies) and any positive theory of democracy must take these into consideration.[23]