The Decline of the Public Sphere

In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere Jürgen Habermas (1962/1990) gives a historic account of the formation of the public sphere and its decline. There he argues that in the feudal system, while public events did happen, they were merely of a representational character. Everybody was present, but in a representational capacity only, there was no public discourse, no difference of opinion was allowed and all actual power was centralized in the institution of the souvereign/monarch. The events of public life followed a strict ceremonial protocol. The rise of the bourgeois as a political class was intricately linked with the emergence of a public life characterized by rational debate, the raisonnement of the educated liberal middle class man. The century of liberalism, which Habermas somehow dates between 1780 and 1880, was characterized by the high quality of rational discussion between free individuals. However, this was restricted to males of the capital owning middle class, with very few woman and people from other classes able to participate. By the beginning of the 1960ies in Western European countries class struggle had by and large subsided and been replaced by a postwar consensus that guaranteed a state of frozen peace with increasing levels of prosperity shared more equally in society. While the newspapers, in particular mass circulation daily papers were owned by 'press barons' (a figure immortalized by Citizen Kane, but one which had existed since the 1880ies and the fast rotating press and lithography) electronic media radio and TV were state regulated to prevent any form of leftwing or rightwing extremism.1 In other words, by the beginning of the 1960ies the public as presented by mass media had become representational again, a 'spectacle' as opposed to an open public sphere where a rational debate happened which would not only be critical but also relevant for actual politics. The powers to be had been able to isolate themselves from any real political debate by holding the mass of voters as a captive audience in front of a TV screen which presented a manipulated worldview -- a situation which should only deteriorate from then on till today.

Into this situation of the Frozen Peace of the early 1960ies broke the New Left, a hotchpotch mix of non-orthodox Marxist splinter groups, the free speech movement, various civil rights and minority issue movements and the Anti-Vietnam movement, culminating in the Summer of Love in San Francisco 1967 and the student revolt of May 1968. These groups advocated grassroots participatory democracy or so called self-organisation and practiced a type of media use which was equivalent to their political ideas. Everybody should in principle also be a publisher, a radio journalist, a critique, a columnist or reviewer, in short, a producer. A participatory grassroots model for electronic media was applied by community media activists such as Deedee Halleck (2002) or the student radio during the revolutionary days in Berkeley, and later by the free radio movement in Europe.2

The poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger became the media theorist for this newly emerging paradigm of participatory media. Going back to Brecht and Benjamin he reitereated some of their demands, like the one that electronic media should be turned from a distribution medium into a communication medium. But he not only echoed some of the concerns of Brecht and Benjamin, he also updated them. According to Enzensberger, "the technical distinction between receivers and transmitters reflects the social division of labor into producers and consumers, which in the consciousness industry becomes of particular political importance." (Enzensberger 1970/1996, p. 64) He scolded the New Left for having reduced its criticism of the "development of the media to a single concept -- that of manipulation," yet agreed that "the present concept of manipulation [...] reflected the feeling of powerlessness of the Left and the objective reality that "the decisive means of production are in the enemies hands". (my emphasis) Like Benjamin and Brecht, Enzensberger believed into the emancipatory power of new media. But, shaped by the postwar experience and the rise of electronic consumer goods, he added some important qualifications. According to Enzensberger the decisive point about media was their collective structure. "For the prospect that in the future, with the aid of the media, everyone can become a producer, would remain apolitical and limited were this productive effort find an outlet in individual tinkering. Work on the media is possible for an individual only insofar as it remains socially and therefore aesthetically irrelevant. The collection of transparencies from the last holiday trip provides a model of this." (Ibid, p. 70) He went on to say that this was what the market was already aiming at. Many people were already owning Super 8 cameras and tape recorders but they could become at best "amateurs, not producers."3 Even the radio amateur movement had been tamed and reduced to a "harmless inconsequential hobby in the hands of scattered amateurs." (Ibid) Enzensberger's description of the chances offered by participatory media but also the danger of them becoming politically toothless by being kept within the confinement of amateurism or hobbyism were of an almost prophetic quality. Enzensberger also distanced himself from media determinism in the style of McLuhan and his many followers:

Anyone who believes that freedom for the media will be established if everyone is busy, transmitting and receiving, is the dupe of a liberalism, that, decked out in contemporary colours, merely peddles the faded concepts of a preordained harmony of social interests. (Ibid)
Enzensberger stressed that this was the point where "socialist concepts part company with the neoliberal and technocratic ones." No one can expect to be "emancipated by technological hardware, or by a system of hardware." To think like that would mean to fall "victim of an obscur belief in progress." (Ibid) This thesis is distilled into the dialectical formula that the "...the media demands organisation and makes it possible..." (Ibid) Enzensberger would like to see the "socialist movements take up the struggle for their own wavelengths." They should, he continues, "build their own transmitters and relay stations."4 (Ibid, p. 70) Enzensberger bemoans the fact that the "innate Luddism of Marxism has left a vacuum into which a stream of non-Marxist hypothesis and practices has consequently flowed." According to him the 'innocent' and the 'apolitical' had made "much more radical progress in dealing with the media than any grouping of the left." From Warhol's Factory to the Beatles and the Stones Enzensberger still saw an emancipatory potential in what was then underground rock culture, but also the multimedia art of the time as practiced by Pop Art.

• 1. For a more theoretic approach to the models of media regulation and different forms of media freedom cf. Barbrook 1995, Media Freedom.
• 2. According to Barbrook this was the first time that a model of media freedom emerged which matched participatory grassroots democracy or self-organisation, a model of media freedom distinctly different from prevailing models of media freedom -- the liberalist or Girondist model and the Jacobinite or state controlled model, and or a mix of the two. cf Barbrook 1995.
• 3. Web 2.0 platforms such as Flickr, MySpace or YouTube neutralise the potential of any submitted work through the way it is organized. Through the sheer fact that it is uploaded to those 'platforms' copyright is taken away from contributors and the platform owners reserve the right to censor content despite the alleged openness. Any artwork on MySpace competes with millions of images of supposedly individual expression which is in effect just an illustration of how relentlessly conformistic pressures have become. Myspace is actually Murdoch's space.
• 4. At the time when Enzensberger wrote that in Western Europe this was only possible if the state legally granted a licence to a free radio station or in underdeveloped countries such as Uruquay where the native Tupumaru tribe staged a media revolution using radio; a sort of predecessor to the Chiapas uprisal.