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Imagining a Radicalized Public Sphere in a context of global capital and digital networks A seminar organized by Goldsmiths' Centre for the Study of Global Media and Democracy. Lincoln Dahlberg (Co-editor of Radical Democracy and the Internet, 2007, Palgrave).Dept. Journalism and Communications, University of Queensland June 2nd 2009, 5-7pm Goldsmiths, University of London, Richard Hoggart Building (RHB) Room 308 The concept of the public sphere has become central to understanding and imagining the role of media in democratic societies. In particular, Jürgen Habermas’ deliberative conceptualization of the public sphere has become influential in media and communication studies. The concept is a popular point of departure for media- democracy research and theory given that it provides a critical, post-positivist and communication centred understanding of the role of social actors and institutions in political processes. More specifically, Habermas’ public sphere is defined as constituted through attempts to resolve breakdowns in social consensus by way of deliberative processes based upon norms of communicative action embedded within everyday ‘post-conventional’ communication. The actualization of such public sphere deliberation is now seen by many media-democracy commentators as increasingly possible given global digital communication networks. Despite this popularity within media studies, the Habermasian public sphere has come under sustained criticism, particularly from feminist and post- structuralist theorists, for excluding voices that do not ‘fit’ the universal normative criteria deemed to define idealized deliberation. In this lecture Dahlberg examines how we might be able to re-imagine the public sphere concept so as to account for the politics associated with such exclusion, and therefore be able to continue to deploy the concept in a radicalized form for critical media-democracy analysis. He will read the limits of the Habermasian public sphere through Laclauian discourse theory. He will then propose that a radicalized public sphere conception can be conceived of through the articulation of discourse theory’s understandings of discourse and radical democratic ethics, as well as counter-public sphere theory. The claim is that this articulation accounts for the politics of exclusion, the democratic possibilities of such politics, and the normative role of the media there-in. However, a significant question remains, developing out of a political economy critique of both Habermas and discourse theory: how adequate is the proposed discourse theoretic radicalization for conceiving of radical democracy in the context of global capitalism, where politics is being increasingly colonized by instrumentalized and individualized logics. In fact, imagining a discourse theoretic public sphere could be read as leading to further ideological exclusion in the sense of overlooking politics related to material economic relations. I conclude by exploring this question, focusing upon the culture/economy binary, the democratizing possibilities arising from dislocations in capitalism, and the opportunities afforded by contemporary media, particularly digital networks. The aim is to imagine a radical public sphere developing against the anti-democratic, depoliticizing aspects of global capitalism and consumer society. Followed by a wine reception. All welcome.