Toward a normative conception of difference in public deliberation.

• Author: Asen, Robert

A growing, interdisciplinary literature has developed around the theme of "the end of the public sphere." Pursuing the historical and normative claims suggested by the phrase, scholars have asked whether the public sphere continues to function as an opinion-forming realm and - in any case whether it ought to be employed as a critical concept for understanding public discourse. Recalling John Dewey's 1927 observation that "optimism about democracy is to-day under a cloud" (1954, p. 110), contemporary commentators have advanced qualified, sometimes dialectical claims for and against the view of a public in eclipse and a corollary decline in its members' abilities to make judgments about practical, public affairs (e.g., Aronowitz, 1993; Goodnight, 1982; Habermas, 1974, 1962/1989; Rodger, 1985; Schudson, 1995). These and other writers also have considered what principles, if any, ought to structure the public sphere. Some accept the basic premises of a deliberative public sphere, but have called for the inclusion of less familiar, often marginalized voices in conceptual models of public discourse (e.g., Fraser, 1989, 1992a; Benhabib, 1992, 1996; Mansbridge, 1996). Others have held that the public sphere ought to be rearticulated fundamentally, if not supplanted. Various reasons have been offered in support of this position: the public sphere is an integral part of a mass media spectacle that misdirects public attention towards issues of political intrigue while occluding the socioeconomic inequities that affect the everyday lives of citizens (Edelman, 1988); the exclusions that characterize the historical practice of the bourgeois public sphere are constitutive of the concept itself (Griffin, 1996); and the public sphere assumes a self-conscious subject whose speciousness has been demonstrated by developments in poststructuralist theory (Reddy, 1992; Villa, 1992).

The emergence of difference as a key concept in social and political discourse has attached an unusual sense of urgency to these already lively debates. The demands made by new social movements and long-suppressed groups for recognition from social orders - described by Charles Taylor (1995) as the "politics of recognition" - engender an additional set of questions for those who would advance a critical conception of the public sphere. To questions concerning the values and aims of the public sphere, theorists and advocates alike now must append questions that seek to elucidate how diverse participants may be included in public debate as diverse participants rather than (as assumed by the bourgeois public sphere) universal citizens (Zarefsky, 1996; Chesebro, 1996). The issue of democratic inclusiveness is not simply a quantitative matter of the scale of a public sphere or the proportion of members of a political community who may participate in it (Calhoun, 1993, p. 279). The dilemmas entailed in these questions become clear when one considers the history of the bourgeois public sphere told by Habermas. As the "public body expanded beyond the bounds of the bourgeoisie," its new-found heterogeneity produced a fractious rather than an interactive public sphere (1974, p. 54). Habermas recounts this past not to endorse social privilege, but to point to the complexity of the questions identified above. Confronted with the legitimate demands for inclusion by marginalized groups, the bourgeois public sphere could not sustain itself. To be sure, we ignore at our peril the questions that emerge in the interstices of history, norms, and difference.

One way to solve these dilemmas might be to abandon all talk of normative frameworks with respect to the public sphere. In slightly attenuated form, some theorists - most prominently Jean-Francois Lyotard - have adopted this perspective. This movement away from legitimacy arises partially from an awareness of the ways in which norms subject people to established social orders. Foucault (1980), for instance, writes of the triangle of power/right/truth that operates through discourse and prescribes (among other things) who may speak and what may be addressed. Throughout its history, the bourgeois public sphere has exemplified this tacit form of exclusion. Abstract claims of universal access and open debate in practice have prescribed particular subjects, speaking styles, and topics of discussion. But norms are ineluctable. This is one of the crucial insights of Foucault's theory of the mutual implication of power and knowledge. Norms, like power, both constrain and enable; our awareness of their subjugating capacities ought not preclude attempts to fulfill their emancipatory possibilities. Notions of justice provide subordinated groups with potentially compelling appeals when challenging oppressive orders. It is precisely this kind of appeal that Lyotard employs when he gainsays the terror inflicted on persons threatened with elimination or actually eliminated from language games.

The challenge for theorists, then, is to articulate models of the public sphere that value difference within a common enough framework so that questions of fairness and justice may be broached by participants themselves. For this to be the case, difference must be viewed as a resource for-not an impediment to-meaningful dialogue. As Fraser (1992a) explains, this requires a reversal of a central assumption of the bourgeois public sphere. Rather than bracketing difference as a prior condition of debate, participants ought to seek and thematize it explicitly (p. 120). This dubious assumption - that participants bracket status differentials - also suggests that discursive norms may be conceived thickly or thinly.(1) Thick norms fix core rules or principals, choosing among prospective elements of discussion to prescribe its proper conduct prior to actual dialogue. For instance, a thick norm might restrict topics to matters of common concern. Thin norms identify the necessary conditions of debate that enable participants to make these judgments themselves. A thin norm, for example, might require as a discursive condition that each participant be able to question the topics of discussion. As the title of this essay intimates, difference may be valued within a model of the public sphere that remains committed to deliberation. Moreover, a deliberative public sphere demonstrates a greater commitment to difference than alternative models.

In this essay, I argue that a deliberative model of the public sphere can value difference if one articulates its normative grounds through thin norms and if one recognizes the appearance of deliberation across a multitude of dialectically related publics. Before amplifying these reconfigurations, I identify the constitutive components of the historical/critical bourgeois public sphere and consider three non-deliberative models of the public sphere: tactical, consumptive, and ideological. Though each model gainsays the suppression of difference of the bourgeois public sphere, each one ends up reinscribing it in transfigured form. A deliberative model cannot be retained by default, however. In contradistinction to these alternatives, deliberation has the capacity to engender perspective-taking, which is a form of recognizing difference. Though no model can proscribe all exclusions that may occur in practice, a reformulated public sphere suggests norms that anticipate minimized exclusions of styles, topics, and form. It also may recover public opinion as both a process and its product.

The Bourgeois Public Sphere

The bourgeois public sphere is both a historical and a critical concept. As a historical concept, it describes the emergence of a rational debating public, sustained through political pamphlets and coffeehouses, that flourished in Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Its most notable chronicler has been Jurgen Habermas, whose widely read history has been the subject of considerable debate. An especially significant aspect of this debate is the charge made by some commentators that in failing to explore the contemporaneous functioning of alternative public spheres, Habermas ends up idealizing the bourgeois public sphere (Fraser, 1992a). Historiographers counter that the exclusion of women and laborers played a determinative role in the constitution of the bourgeois public sphere. Alternative histories explicate their exclusion and participation in public life through other means (e.g., Landes, 1988; Ryan, 1990). As a critical concept, the bourgeois public sphere signifies an open forum of debate and an egalitarian community of citizens implicit in the practice of the bourgeoisie and explicit in their legitimation of the public sphere. The contemporary appeal of this critical concept turns on the extent to which theorists believe it may reflect and direct practice. Those who remain committed to deliberation and those who would supplant it begin with the idea of a bourgeois public sphere.

Habermas (1974, p. 49) defines the public sphere as a realm of social life in which public opinion can be formed. The historical bourgeois public sphere consisted of a collection of private persons assembled to form a public. Its political character arose from a world of letters, which enabled the realization of a distinctly bourgeois subjectivity. A political consciousness developed as the bourgeoisie opposed to absolute sovereignty a demand for general and abstract laws and ultimately asserted itself as the only legitimate source for these laws. Yet the bourgeois public sphere retained its autonomy, mediating between civil society and the state. Habermas explains that "in this sense its character was from the beginning both private and polemical at once" (1962/1989, p. 52). Three characteristics describe the operation of the historical/critical bourgeois public sphere: access is guaranteed to all citizens; citizens debate openly; and citizens debate matters of general interest. In the historical...