The multiple Mr. Dewey: multiple publics and permeable borders in John Dewey's theory of the public sphere.

• Author: Asen, Robert

John Dewey held an expansive view of democracy. He believed that democracy did not proceed exclusively through aggregative behaviors such as voting, nor did it take shape solely through formal institutions such as parliamentary government. John Dewey did not delimit his vision of democracy to a properly political domain. A democratic spirit and a concern for the social and political problems of contemporary societies animated his writings even as he discussed ostensibly non-political subjects (Westbrook, 1991, pp. x-xi; see also Caspary, 2000; Ryan, 1995; cf., Willard, 1996). Dewey advocated a far-reaching, fundamental, and yet personal view of democracy: democracy constituted a way of life. In an 1888 essay titled "The Ethics of Democracy," Dewey gainsaid instrumentalist conceptions that regarded democracy as an institutional framework established to secure social stability and consensus. The significance of democracy lay not in a predetermined end, but in the means of public life. In language revealing his early adherence to idealist philosophy, Dewey explained that democratic and aristocratic theories of governance shared the same goal--the mutual fulfillment of the individual and the social organism. However, democratic ends could not be obtained for citizens by others; citizens themselves had to achieve democracy. Its achievement could be envisaged because the democratic ideal was "already at work in every personality, and must be trusted to care for itself" (1888/1969, p. 243).

Fifty years later, Dewey continued to advance an expansive yet quotidian notion of democracy. In a 1939 essay titled "Creative Democracy--The Task Before Us," he defined democracy as "a personal way of individual life." As such, democracy signified "the possession and continual use of certain attitudes, forming personal character and determining desire and purpose in all the relations of life" (1939/1991, p. 226). This definition of democracy highlighted the indispensable role of publics in establishing and sustaining democracies. Fundamentally, this definition relied on an optimistic assessment of human potentiality, one that could not be circumscribed by "race, color, sex, birth and family, [or] material or cultural wealth" (1939/1991, p. 226). Specifically, it prescribed a strong link between efficacious democratic praxis and vigorous public engagement: democracy could not function properly if citizens did not participate actively in public life. The need for public participation, in turn, depended crucial ly on an optimistic assessment of citizens' capacity for public deliberation and judgment. Dewey explained that "democracy is a way of personal life controlled not merely by faith in human nature in general but by faith in the capacity of human beings for intelligent judgment and action if proper conditions are furnished" (1939/1991, p. 227). Dewey protested that his views were not utopian, for they arose from a "democratic spirit" animating his surroundings. Moreover, a faith in human intelligence was absolutely required of advocates of democracy. To doubt citizens' capacity to participate in democratic methods like public deliberation was to doubt the very possibility of democracy itself.

Still, Dewey tempered his optimistic assumptions with critical assessments of actual democratic practices. In important respects, Dewey's pragmatism compelled these assessments. He believed that a worthwhile philosophy was a practical philosophy. In Reconstruction in Philosophy, Dewey recounted a history of philosophy not as a speculative search for absolute knowledge that transcended human experience, but as an intellectual practice embedded in the realm of human affairs. This alternative history enabled a necessary reformulation of the scope and aim of philosophy: "The task of future philosophy is to clarify men's [and women's] ideas as to the social and moral strifes of their own day. Its aim is to become so far as is humanly possible an organ for dealing with these conflicts" (1920/1948, p. 26; see also Rorty, 1982, pp. 160-166). This new aim for philosophical inquiry raised the stakes of critical assessment and brought into sharp relief the significance of an engaged public that could utilize the results of scholarly inquiry.

Yet Dewey's critical assessments also tested his faith--perhaps nowhere more so than in his most extensive inquiry into the present condition and future possibilities of the public sphere, his 1927 book The Public and Its Problems. In The Public and Its Problems, Dewey wrote of a public in eclipse. Born in local communities, American democratic practices had expanded on a vast scale, and this vastness reconfigured societal relations on impersonal, perplexing bases. At the same time, technological developments had increased social complexity, such that citizens no longer could discern the indirect consequences of human actions nor judge confidently issues affecting them. Dewey observed that "the public seems to be lost; it is certainly bewildered" (1927/1954, p. 116). He described a public that had become too large, too diffuse, too scattered to enact collective judgment. The problem, Dewey explained, "is not that there is no public, no large body of persons having a common interest in the consequences of soci al transactions." Instead, the opposite situation prevailed: "There is too much public, a public too diffused and scattered and too intricate in composition. And there are too many publics." Increased social scale and complexity had created an age in which each consequence of human action "crosses the others and generates its own group of persons especially affected with little to hold these different publics together in an integrated whole" (1927/1954, p. 137).

To contemporary readers, Dewey's diagnosis of a public in eclipse may seem both timely and dated. The timeliness of Dewey's eclipse thesis finds support in the many similar decline theses that have appeared since the publication of The Public and Its Problems. Some contemporary commentators characterize public argument as a "lost art" that has been replaced by passive public processing of mass mediated texts (see, e.g., Edelman, 1988; Lasch, 1990). Calls for reviving the public sphere often advocate cultivation of argumentation and discussion skills in citizens (see, e.g., Zarefsky, 1998). The datedness of Dewey's thesis ostensibly arises from his prominent references to "too much public" and "too many publics" in explaining the public's eclipse. These references run counter to recent public sphere scholarship that has embraced multiplicity as a solution to some of the public's problems, not censured multiplicity as a source of public woes. An embrace of multiplicity has been motivated partially by a desire t o recognize various modes of publicity and to elucidate how prevailing norms and practices regulate participation in specific discursive forums.

In this context, detailed investigation of Dewey's articulation of the relationship between the eclipse of the public and the role of multiple publics takes on particular significance. If "too much" and "too many" publics have undermined efficacious participation by citizens in democratic life, then The Public and Its Problems may be no more than a noteworthy precursor to present-day diagnoses of the public's woes. If the existence of multiple publics is not necessarily tied to diminished publicity, then Dewey's reflections on the condition of the public and his prescriptions for the public's recovery may serve as an important resource for contemporary public sphere studies. In this essay, I argue against reading The Public and Its Problems as asserting a necessary connection between multiplicity and diminished publicity. Dewey's analysis of the public in eclipse evidenced a historical not a conceptual judgment. He did not reject multiple publics per se, but focused his critique on existing relations among pu blics: he did not object to multiplicity but to uncoordinated multiplicity.

Reading Dewey as a theorist of multiplicity foregrounds his potential contributions to public sphere studies. Most directly, Dewey's theory of the public sphere stands as an important antecedent to contemporary models emphasizing multiplicity (e.g., Hauser, 1999; Warner, 2002). His theorizing may help fill in a history of public sphere scholarship and unsettle the sometimes disproportionate focus in this scholarship on Habermas' account of the bourgeois public sphere in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (see Goodnight & Hingstman, 1997). Habermas too recognized the existence of multiple publics even as he focused on the publicity of the bourgeoisie. Yet, importantly for communication scholars, whereas Habermas' sociological approach situated the rise and fall of the bourgeois public sphere amid familial, economic, literary, and political domains, Dewey's pragmatic approach highlighted the crucial role played by communication in the formation and re-formation of publics. Indeed, Dewey identifi ed communication as the problem of the public: "The essential need, in other words, is the improvement of the methods and conditions of debate, discussion and persuasion. That is the problem of the public" (1927/1954, p. 208). Moreover, Dewey conceived of communication as an artful and fluid social process. Although Habermas decried the exclusions of the bourgeois public sphere, he nevertheless expressed dismay over the interpenetration of private and public interests--a refeudalization of the public sphere--characterizing the contemporary mass public sphere. He worried that competition among a plurality of interests raised doubts about "whether there can ever emerge a general interest of the kind to which a public opinion could refer as a criterion" (1962/1989, p. 234). In viewing some interests--including economic issues--as properly outside of the public's purview, Habermas betrayed an a priori view...