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 fo 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.
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