Habermas and cultural consumption-posted by Chris Eaton

Habermas argues that as the sphere of private autonomy expanded, via public status, beyond the owners of private property to include everyone, the public shifted from culture-debating to culture-consuming (161). “The world of letters,” he writes “has turned into a conduit for social forces channeled into the conjugal family’s inner space by way of a public sphere that the mass media have transmogrified into a sphere of culture consumption” (162). Culture, no longer an inaugurator of critical debate, has become a passively received commodity merely signifying profits for other private interests.

The shift from public cultural production to private cultural commodity occurred because “the characteristic relationship of a privacy oriented toward an audience was also no longer present when people went to the movies together, listened to the radio or watched TV” (163). Private peoples themselves became an inwardly oriented audience of the media instead outwardly oriented members of public debate. Furthermore debate itself became a business, another cultural commodity (164). New media reached beyond the educated strata to everyone because it became cheaper economically and psychologically, that is, more accessible to psychological appropriation (166-7).

I agree with Habermas that market forces wishing to sell cultural commodities thus commercialized the public sphere of media and “this expanded public sphere, however, lost its political character to the extent that the means of “psychological facilitation” could become an end in itself for a commercially fostered consumer attitude” (169). This mechanism hides politics behind identifiable personas and fads thus privatizing the public sphere and denying political knowledge to the private. A disempowering gesture for sure.

On the other hand, Habermas’s theory seems to perpetuate social division and subsequent hegemony. By stating that the mass media makes products more psychologically accessible to the masses Habermas subordinates both the masses and contemporary culture to the modern bourgeoisie and its culture. He excludes the possibility of other kinds of intelligence and other ways a cultural product can be smart.

Possibly, his thoughts on the commodities themselves will point to a different way of thinking: “To a degree that culture became a commodity not only in form but also in content, it was emptied of elements whose appreciation required a certain amount of training- whereby the “accomplished” appropriation once again heightened the appreciative ability itself” (166). Because he puts accomplished in quotes, perhaps Habermas understands there are methods of training beyond classical pedagogy. Furthermore, and again perhaps, subjects have moved beyond mere consumptive appropriation of culture to involvement with a culture of continuous reproduction and processing simulacrum as cut and paste users in our media saturated world.

Questions for the class.
Does Habermas’s discourse perpetuate social division and the subsequent domination?
How important is his conception of media to the new conception of society and the dissolution of the public and private?
How does the new mass media to Josh’s interest in architecture and the structure of the private sphere? Habermas’s discussion of architecture after the dissolution of the public and private might be of interest (157-159)
posted by chr15 at 10:01 PM

Habermas--

--During Habermas’ discussion of the bourgeois family in section 6 of Structural Transformation, Habermas presents a rather conflicted picture of the private sphere as centered in “the patriarchal conjugal family” (43). Citing architectural changes in the organization of bourgeois homes, Habermas notes the “process of privatization” that oriented family space more towards a collection of separate areas for each individual family member, leaving “less room for the family as a whole” (45). The introduction of the salon – “[t]he most imposing room in the distinguished bourgeois home” – as a reception space for social gatherings caused an intermingling of once-separate realms, with “[t]he line between private and public sphere extend[ing] right through the home” (45).

Along with this spatial interconnection/division, as Habermas notes, the family sphere’s status as purely private was complicated in other ways. Habermas: “Although there may have been a desire to perceive the sphere of the family circle as independent, as cut off from all connection with society, and as the domain of pure humanity, it was, of course dependent on the sphere of labor and of commodity exchange—even this consciousness of independence can be understood as flowing from the factual dependency of that reclusive domain upon the private one of the market… [The family] was a private autonomy denying its economic origins…” (46). Based on the seeming triadic foundation of voluntary establishment, community of love, and the cultivation of personality, the family was “supposed to inhere in humankind as such and truly to constitute its absoluteness: the emancipation… of an inner realm, following its own laws, from extrinsic purposes of any sort” (47).

This foundation, however, was problematic. The family itself played an integral role in the reproduction of capital. Habermas: “As a genealogical link [the family] guaranteed a continuity of personnel that consisted materially in the accumulation of capital and was anchored in the absence of legal restrictions concerning the inheritance of property” (47). The family was “an agency of society… through which, in spite of the illusion of freedom, strict conformity with societally necessary requirements was brought about” (47). On top of this, “the contractual form of marriage… was largely a fiction,” as most civil unions were entered into with considerations of preserving and augmenting family capital – i.e., marriage for reason as opposed to marriage for love (47). Personal cultivation was itself jeopardized in the interest of family preservation, as the need for wages via “a training that provides mere skills” supplanted any opportunity for personal development (48).

Despite such a shaky foundation and self-image, as Habermas explains, “the ideas of freedom, love, and cultivation of the person that grew out of the experiences of the conjugal family’s private sphere were surely more than just ideology… these ideas were also reality. In the form of this specific notion of humanity a conception of what existed was promulgated within the bourgeois world which promised redemption from the constraint of what existed without escaping into a transcendental realm” (48).

From this discussion, a series of questions arise:
-With the increasing expanse/infiltration of publicity and surveillance (which may or may not signal the “collapse” of the public sphere that Habermas discusses on p.4) into the perhaps non-existent private/familial/intimate sphere – through the ever-decreasing sense of personal privacy resulting from such factors as the formation of “today’s urban mode of dwelling and living” constructed from city blocks, suburban communities, and apartments with “[t]hin walls” (157), as well as the commodification of leisure time and the general interconnectedness between the realms of work and home (length of workdays increasing, a large number of people working from their homes), and the progressive invisibility of surveillance technology – one wonders whether the concept of a “promised redemption” outside of the escape into transcendence is even conceivable for the modern/contemporary individual. Can/does such a promise still exist? If so, where? In the face of an increasing governmental/institutional involvement in familial affairs (with state laws protecting rights of children, government regulations on child support, health, safety, welfare, etc., as well as preventative measures taken against domestic violence, or the publicized trials of children divorcing parents and foreign governments instituting limitations on reproduction), one wonders if the family is even capable of maintaining its former status as a venue for “the intimate relationships between human beings who… were nothing more than human” (48). But if the notion of family-as-redemption has dissolved, where might one locate such a promise today?
posted by josh_g at 6:56 PM