Publics, Politics and Participation

Traboulsi 51

abermas views public spheres primarily as arenas of peaceful H
rational-critical debate, in which are emphasized language, discourse,
deliberations, opinion formation and education, all contributing to his
famous concept of “discursive interaction.” Perhaps the most succinct
characterization of Haber mas’s public sphere is contained in Nancy
Fraser’s definition: “a theater in modern societies in which political
participation is enacted through the medium of talk.”^4 But let us quote
Habermas himself:

The public sphere is a social phenomenon just as elementary as

action, actor, association, or collectivity, but it eludes the con-

ventional concepts of “social order.” The public sphere cannot

be conceived as an institution and certainly not as an organi-

zation. It is not even a framework of norms with differentiated

competences and roles, membership regulations, and so on.

Just as little does it represent a system; although it permits one

to draw internal boundaries, outwardly it is characterized by

open, permeable, and shifting horizons. The public sphere can

best be described as a network for communication, informa-

tion, and points of view (i.e., opinions expressing affirmative

or negative attitudes); the streams of communication are, in

the process, filtered and synthesized in such a way that they

coalesce into bundles of topically specified public opinions...

the public sphere is reproduced through communicative action,

for which mastery of a natural language suffices... 5

abermas further insists on the bourgeois nature of the public H
sphere, implying that it is permanently threatened by the possibility of
the nonbourgeois social strata (namely, the subaltern classes) to gain
access to it. That initiates the debate about the dialectics of inclusion/
exclusion in Habermas’s conception of democracy: namely, his exclu-
sion of class and gender, as many critics have reproached him. Habermas
explicitly warns against “populist movements” which represent “the fro-
zen traditions of a lifeworld endangered by capitalist modernization,”
movements that he considers as basically “antidemocratic.”^6 In fact, his
main contention here is that such intrusions would blur the necessary
distinction of state/civil society.