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December 14, 2004
Jurgen Habermas on political public space. This Kyoto Prize speech is a sketch of the biographical roots of his concern about public spaces and the political.
He usefully distinquishes between publicity and the self-promotion and presentation of the celebrity for their fans on the one hand; and on the hand, public discourse, which is the process of reaching of an agreement on a particular public issue, or clarifying reasonable dissent. In the latter we have the triad of public space, discourse and reason operating.
Unlike a nomadic Bataille Habermas approaches this in classical Aristotlean terms: we are a zoon politikon, a political animal embedded in a public network of social relationships and a shared public culture. We become educated (bildung) by learning from one another within these relationships and culture and communicating to one another through language.
The political space Habermas experienced from the 1950s to the 1980s was demarcated by conservatism (Junger, Heidegger, Schmitt etc) and the democratic impulse. We face the resurgence of conservatism today; one that is tr reinventing a single, centralized story of human progress called the West. It is a narrative that displaces the global rebellion against European colonialism and imperialism that had rendered the very notion of a single, centralized story of human progress problematic.
The need to contest one nation imperial conservatism highlights the importance of public spaces for citizenship, the process of formation of public opinion, civil solidarity, and will formation. Habermas says:
"....the critical state of a democracy can be measured by the taking the pulse of life of its political public sphere."
On that critieria we citizens should have grave concerns about democracy in Australia as the pulse of life in our political public sphere is weak indeed. Very weak. It lacks a diversity of public spaces; there is a process of dampening down of critique in civil society by a conservative government through withdrawing funding from ngos; and the limiting of public discursive space due to the ongoing concentration of the media.
Habermas finishes his speech by reflecting on public intellectuals:
"Intellectuals should make public use of the knowledge they possess---for example... as a philosopher... and they should do so of their own initiative, in other words without being commissioned to do so by anyone else. They need not be neutral or eschew partisanship..[but] they should endeavour to improve the deplorable discursive level of public debate...they betray their own authority if they do not carefully separate their professional from their public roles. They should not use the influence they have by dint of words as a means to gain power, thus confusing "influence" with "political power", that is authority tied to positions in a party organization or government. Intellectuals cease to be intellectuals when they are in public office."
Well, we do need to confront with the slipshod use of language in the op ed commentary and editorials.
And the rest? Hmm.
An obvious point. Mark Latham was not a public intellectual when he wrote 3 books on politics whilst a backbencher in the ALP? But he would have been one if he wrote these tests from within a corporate university? That is an odd and narrow understanding of a public intellectual. What has happened to all those intellectual workers who perform an intellectual function in postmodern society?
A forum on public intellectuals.
Habermas seems to assume that the professional academic is divorced from politics, because the university is outside of politics and the market. But that was yesteryear, before the liberal university was transformed into a corporate one by the liberal state. Today, public intellectuals inside univeristies would, and should be, seriously address the way that a corporate agenda is now driving the university ansd making them an instrument of wealth creation.
I reckon that we also need to question the ideology of academic professionalism, and to consider whether there was any disjunction between democracy and university, given the privilege of the scholar and critic who inhabit these elite institutions. Do we not need to challenge the "unreconstructed nationalism" that stil grips the Angglo-American academy?
Is there not a need far a radical questioning of the institutional structure of the Australian university, because if its complicity--including that of the humanities--with the more repressive aspects and power structures of Australian society?
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