Afterword:AHistoriography of the Proletarian Dream
Historical fissures–crises,war,capitulation, revolution, counterrevolution–denotecon-
crete constellations of social forces withinwhichaproletarian public spheredevelops.
Sincethe latter has no existenceasarulingpublic sphere, it has to be reconstructed
from such rifts,marginal cases,isolated initiatives. To studysubstantive attempts atapro-
letarian public sphereis, however,onlyone aim in our argument: the other isto investigate
the contradictions emergingwithin advanced capitalist societies for their potential for a
counterpublic sphere.OskarNegt and Alexander Kluge,Public Sphereand ExperienceIn theirinfluential studyonÖffentlichkeit und Erfahrung.Zur Organisationsana-
lyse von bürgerlicher und proletarischer Öffentlicheit(1972,inEnglish asPublic
Sphere and Experience:TowardanAnalysis of theBourgeois and ProletarianPub-
lic Sphere), Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge introduce“proletarian”and“public
sphere”with the samepolitical interests that, more than one hundredyears ear-
lier,prompted Marx and Engels to distinguish between the descriptive and ana-
lyticalterm“workingclass”and the politically and emotionallychargedterm
“proletarian.”Making productive use of that distinction,Negt andKlugeconcep-
tualizeacritical position from which to acknowledge the long history of working-
class struggles and to imagine alternatives to the bourgeois public sphere in the
Federal Republic.Yetinorder for these potentials to be realized, they acknowl-
edge,the proletarian public sphere hasto be reconceived–which also means, it
has to berediscovered through the interpretative practices that distinguish the
humanities from the social sciencesand thatconnect new social movements
to the class mobilizationsofthe past.Few studies from the 1970sexpress so
clearlyasNegt and Kluge’sdothe theoretical, academic, and politicalgoals
that propelledadiverse group of scholars and activiststoclaim working-class
cultureasasubject of critical inquiry and, ultimately, an example ofGegenöffent-
lichkeit(counterpublic sphere).Andfew contributions associated with Critical
Theory and the New Left are as insistent in using what theauthors call the
first historical“attempts ataproletarian public sphere”¹to communicatethe
Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge,Public Sphereand Experience:Towards an Analysis of the
Bourgeois and ProletarianPublic Sphere,forewordMiriam Hansen, trans. Peter Labanyi,Jamie
Owen Daniel, and Assenka Oksiloff (London:Verso,2016), xliii.Foracontinuation of these argu-
ments,see, by the sameauthors,Historyand Obstinacy,trans. RichardLangston et al., ed. Devin
Fore (NewYork: Zone,2014). Foranearlycontribution on debateonaproletarian counterpublic
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110550863-023