Can We Still Refer to the Public Sphere - Essay Example

Can we still refer to the public sphere? Some account of what we have come to call the public sphere has for all time existed as an addition to democratic theory. The development of mass-based democracy in the west corresponded historically with the appearance of the mass media as the leading institutions of the public sphere. As the political as well as cultural significance of traditional and localized arenas continue to retreat in the wake of social transformations as well as media developments, the idea of the public sphere moves to the fore and takes on a predominantly normative valence. It becomes a focal point of our yearning for the good society, the institutional sites where popular political will should take form and citizens should be able to comprise themselves as active agents in the political process. democratic character and consequently in a sense the most instantly visible indicator of our admittedly flawed democracies (Hallin, Daniel C, 1994). The notion of the public sphere can be used in a very general as well as common-sense manner, as, for instance, a synonym for the processes of public view or for the news media themselves. In its more ambitious appearance, however, as it was developed by Jürgen Habermas (1993), the public sphere ought to be understood as an analytic class, a conceptual device which, while pointing to a definite social occurrence can also help us in analyzing and researching the experience. For Habermas, the idea of the bourgeois public sphere indicates a specific social space, which arose under the development of capitalism in Western Europe. As an analytic category, the bourgeois public sphere comprises a vibrant nexus which links various actors, factors as well as contexts together in a consistent theoretic framework. So why should we listen to a philosopher, even one so distinguished as Richard Rorty, who still believes in a democratic role for journalism— at least, why should we listen in any frame of mind other than one of ironic knowingness about the fate of philosophy in the real world? (Hall, 1982) “I think that contemporary liberal society already contains the institutions for its own improvement,” Rorty wrote in Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. “Indeed, my hunch is that Western social and political thought may have had the last conceptual revolution it needs. s private lives alone and preventing suffering” while “discoveries about who is being made to suffer can be left to the workings of a free press, free universities, and enlightened public opinion. t we dismiss in an especially derisive tone of ironic knowingness any such vision of intellectual history at its end? Rorty, it turns out, has anticipated and subverted our irony with irony of his own. An ultimate ironist, according to Rorty, knows that even if liberal democracy has had the last conceptual revolution it needs, it has not had the last revolution possible. That is because a world in which democracy is fully realized is a world constituted and maintained by a particular language—a language that enables its citizens to articulate their loathing of injustice as well as their love of liberty. The ultimate ironist also knows that such a world can never be entirely secure because its language is a contingent rather than necessary development in human history. Anything, including both suffering and freedom, can be “made to look good or bad, important or unimportant, useful or useless, by being re-described.” Thus the ultimate ironist lives with the terrible realization that, whenever language hostile to justice or liberty is spoken by the adversaries of democratic values, no ultimate philosophical weapon—no knowledge of what is fundamentally real and no vision of what is truly human—is available to the defenders of democratic values. The defenders can only exercise, and strive to enhance, the descriptive and persuasive powers of their moral language (Glasser, 1998). S position on the constitutive yet contingent character of language coincides with the position taken by sophisticated observers of that peculiar language game known as journalism. News, as James Carey wrote, “Sizes up situations, names their elements and names them in a way that contains an attitude toward them” and thereby “brings a world into existence.” To insist on this position, however, is not to argue that the concept of truth has no meaning in journalism and beyond. For this reason telling the stories of those who suffer pain or injustice is especially important. “The liberal novelist, poet, or journalist is good at that,” Rorty concluded. “The liberal theorist is not.” This vision of a role for journalism in ongoing discussions about what is true and good provides a point of departure for a study of the language by which journalism brings a world into existence. Specifically, our concern is the vocabulary used by journalism when, in the form of investigative reporting, it earnestly tries to enact the role that Rorty assigned: telling stories about people who suffer injustice and the villains who work that injustice. Such terms for the description of misconduct transform moral claims into claims that seem to be entirely empirical and allow journalists to maintain their pretense of dealing in facts but not values. s interest in the misconduct that has been uncovered. Then journalists may turn to a rhetoric of irony that reveals the misconduct to be not only technically wrong but terribly wrong—a true moral outrage. The great value of irony to journalism is that it can moralize without appearing to sermonize. It allows investigative reporters to elevate the illegal, the unethical, and even the merely improper to the outrageous and yet retain the formal features of objective reporting. “The rhetoric of irony,” as Thomas Rosteck argued of Edward R. s See It Now report on Senator Joseph McCarthy, “saturates the objective discourse of journalism with meanings, while, at the same time, it disguises this connection. ” But more than that, irony does not merely operate within the constraints imposed by the conventions of journalistic objectivity; it transfigures those conventions into a moralistic vocabulary for condemnation of the villains to whom we have foolishly entrusted our public affairs. For journalists who must honor objectivity yet evoke outrage, ironist rhetoric holds great stylistic appeal, but as the ultimate ironist understood, such rhetoric also holds moral peril. Although Rorty was able to come to personal terms with what he took to be the ultimate irony—the need to construct a life with meaning and values but without philosophically certain foundations—he worried about the ability of society as a whole do so. “I cannot go on to claim that there could or ought to be culture whose public rhetoric is ironist,” he wrote. “I cannot imagine a culture which socializes its youth in such a way as to make them continually dubious about their own process of socialization.” (Glasser, & Ettema, 1993) Private life is the proper domain of ironist rhetoric, Rorty concluded, for there it can remind all of us that we could be other than what we are and so motivate each of us to enrich the “final vocabulary” that constitutes the individual self. Public life, on the other hand, must be protected from the potential of ironist rhetoric to degenerate into a vocabulary of morally corrosive cynicism. Simultaneous appeal and perils great appeal to historians, for example, is that “characterizations of the world cast in the Ironic mode are often regarded as intrinsically sophisticated and realistic,” according to historiographer Hayden White. 9 Such characterizations are so regarded because they acknowledge the constitutive and contingent character of language. “Irony thus represents a stage of consciousness in which the problematical nature of language itself has become recognized,” White argued. “It points to the potential foolishness of all linguistic characterizations of reality as much as to the absurdity of the beliefs it parodies”. s peril for historians. Even as irony promises to be a mode of thought that is genuinely enlightened, it casts doubt on any effort to capture the truth of things in language. “As the basis of a world view,” White concluded, “irony tends to dissolve all belief in the possibility of positive political actions … and to inspire a Mandarin-like disdain for those seeking to grasp the nature of social reality in either science or art”. s estimation, but who eventually succumbed to “debilitating skepticism about reason itself”. s threat to their public discourse— nor perhaps even to their own final vocabularies. Far from ultimate ironists, investigative reporters are probably best described as earnestly moralistic ironists. s self-serving characterizations of reality but never to call into question their journalistic characterizations of reality—which they take to be the really real. They use irony to lend an aura of sophistication and realism to their language even as it disguises the moral basis of their entire language game. For these journalists irony seems to threaten neither their final vocabularies with debilitating skepticism nor their public discourse with corrosive cynicism attempts to contribute to public discussions about what is true and good (Anderson, Dardene, & Killenberg, 1994). (113) A common strategy of investigative journalism is to hoist public officials on the petard of their own words, but hypocrisy alone is not ironic. s story, however, is about much more than mere hypocrisy. Their story is not simply that officials have misled the public, nor even that the revised tax code is unfair. Their story is that the “self-styled reformers” who promised to fix the tax code in fact have made it worse. “It is ironic when we meet what we set out to avoid,” as Muecke noted in his catalogue of ironies, “especially when the means we take to avoid something turns out to be the very means of bringing about what we sought to avoid. ” The situation uncovered by Barlett and Steele is outrageous for exactly this reason: a promise of justice has yielded further injustice. This juxtaposition of word and deed—the abridgment of hope for reform by the actions of the reformers—is a motif that the reporters used throughout the series to introduce the specific results of their investigation. s fundamental story line: the dynamics of hope abridged. Unlike many wartime memoirs, however, this journalism does not intend to speak in the terms of a cosmic irony that would describe all hope as forever abridged. Rather, it intends to speak in the terms of particular irony that corrects naive expectations by revealing the true state of affairs. Irony can work as a corrective, however, only when writer and reader share a clearly articulated moral vocabulary. Journalistic irony, as a force for civic reform, depends on such key terms in the vocabulary of democratic ideals as fairness in public policy and honesty in public service. (Ettema, & Glasser, 1994) But even as Richard Rorty celebrated the historical success of the vocabulary of democratic ideals, other observers began to sense that this vocabulary had begun to lose its coherence and expressive power. With a certain Gallic flamboyance the French sociologist Jean Baudrillard captured a sense of decay in both public discourse and public purpose with the argument that, in an era of unrelenting “hyperinformation,” the public has fallen silent—in fact, disappeared—as a meaningful entity. Thus the public has collapsed into merely an aggregation of irritated and confused media consumers who, in response to their sense of uncertainty, “take their revenge by allowing themselves the theatrical representation of the political scene. ” Even as media audiences consume politics as theater, Baudrillard argued, they sabotage the efforts of politicians as well as journalists, pollsters, and social scientists to tell meaningful stories either to them or about them. “Where the whole population of analysts and expert observers believe that they capture [these audiencesThrough the theatrics of derision, reversal, and parody the audiences disappear into “those simulative devices which are designed to capture them,” and in doing so audiences come to realize “that they do not have to make a decision about themselves and the world; that they do not have to wish; that they do not have to know; that they do not have to desire. ” (Baker, 1992) Even if the public-as-audience has not yet fallen completely silent or entirely disappeared, many individuals in the audience are reduced to the inchoate mutterings recorded by Nina Eliasoph in her study of the styles adopted by ordinary citizens for presentation of their political self-image. The mode that she labeled “cynical chic,” for example, is a strategy for presentation of the self by which “speakers capitalize on ignorance and powerlessness, making them seem intentional. ” The mode of cynical chic suggests that speakers “have not been fooled into wasting their time on something that they cannot influence, and cannot be held responsible for whatever happens. s happening,” said one such speaker concerning the Iran-Contra hearings. re doing. s respondents present themselves as they do; perhaps the more traditional terms of apathy or alienation or just plain fed up will suffice. 53 Nonetheless, in the encounter with these withered political personae we can hear the vocabulary of democratic ideals, with its terms of public virtue, giving way to the language of cynicism with terms that Baudrillard would readily recognize as those of “derision, reversal and parody. ” Are those the terms in which investigative reporting will be understood by more and more of its audience? Term “re-described”—to transform them from moral outrages to cynical jokes. And these villains can easily be reversed, if not into heroes at least into mere rascals—guys about whom a cynical chic audience might even be, well, “googy.” (Barber, 1984) The paradigmatic ironies of the tax reform story, on the other hand, constructed as they are from a more potent mix of official hypocrisy with taxpayer self-interest, seem more stable and thus less easily re-described as parody. The victims of these ironies are, of course, the taxpayers who are victimized, not only by the alleged unfairness of the tax code but also by the infuriatingly ironic joke that produced the code—or, rather, the victims are those confidently unaware taxpayers so naive as to believe that the process of “reform” really would produce a simple and fair tax code. The object (that is to say, ultimate target) of these ironies is not merely a particular attempt at tax reform but the whole idea of reform. The understated ironies of the mortgage lending story, coaxed as they are not only from the stories of victims and villains but from the weighty materials of federal regulations and bank lending records, also seem stable. We can imagine that these outrages might be re-described as parody precisely because they have been so painstakingly constructed around suspects who are so very usual: big banksters cast in the role of sneering villains and downtrodden minorities in the role of sympathetic victims. A media savvy, cynical chic audience might, then, see through the transparently moralistic “simulative devices” designed to capture them possibly. However, the outrages against racial equality presented in “The Color of Money” depend the least heavily on the devices of irony. They are outrages made real to the audience not only in the stories of victims and villains but also in the quantitative documentation and systematic explanation of bias in lending. In this story, as compared to the others, irony seems least threatening to belief in the possibility of justice; yet in this story irony still amplifies indignation at the reality of injustice. s warning about the line between irony and cynicism in public discourse. Irony has been important in the moral vocabulary of investigative reporting because it adapts so handily to the constraints of objectivity, and it seems so sophisticated and realistic in its descriptions of the cruel world. s paper, and glib assurances about the future in the company newsletter. Moral earnestness from— “Yeah, right! ”—a cynical chic knowingness? The ultimate ironist knows that the language of politics can change— and not necessarily for the better. In a somber conclusion to a study of the origins of political reporting Thomas Leonard argued that, through stories about the decay of party politics, the muckrakers of the Progressive Era effectively eroded what had been taken to be the proper basis for political action. By turning the virtue of party loyalty into a vice, they undermined the rituals of political participation, leaving their readers disengaged and disaffected. “Overall political participation declined in America as this reporting gained strength,” Leonard concluded. “For all the new constituencies we may credit to the progressives, for all their skill in mobilizing protest, it remains true that this age of reform was an age of voter apathy. So progressive journalism presents the irony of a more enlightened yet less active electorate. Conclusion about the consequences of journalism in the Progressive Era—yet another argument about the irony of journalism—we find precedent for a melancholy irony of journalism in an era now emerging (Barber, 1984). Moral descriptions now seem vulnerable to derisive re-description. The stable and particular irony that has been an essential feature of journalistic language threatens to destabilize and universalize—to go cosmic in a blaze of hyper-information—and thence to condense and harden into a cynicism that holds all hope forever abridged. When, at last, the ironies of victims and villains can generate no indignation but only derision, investigative journalism will have no vocabulary with which to discuss the true and the good or to express human solidarity. References Anderson, R., D. Robert, and M. Killenberg, (1994). The Conversation of Journalism: Communication, Community, and News. Westport, Conn.: Praeger. Baker, M., (1992). “Defining the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century France: Variations on a Theme by Habermas.” In Craig Calhoun, ed.,Habermas and the Public Sphere, pp. 181–211. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Barber, B., (1984). Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age. Berkeley: University of California Press. Ettema, S. (1994). “The Irony in and of Journalism: A Case Study in the Language of Liberal Democracy.” Journal of Communication 44, no. 2: 5–28. Glasser, L. & Ettema, (1993). “When the Facts Don't Speak for Themselves: A Study of the Use of Irony in Daily Journalism.” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 10: 322–38. Glasser, L., (1998). The Idea of Public Journalism. New York: Guilford. Habermas, J, (1993). Justification and Application: Remarks on Discourse Ethics. Translated by Ciaran P. Cronin. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press. Hall, S. 1982. “The Rediscovery of ‘Ideology’: Return of the Repressed in Media Studies.” In Michael Gurevitch, Tony Bennett, James Curran, and Janet Woollacott, eds., Culture, Society, and the Media, pp. 56–90. London: Methuen. Hallin, C, 1994. Keeping America on Top of the World: Television Journalism and the Public Sphere. New York: Routledge. Read More