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Images & the Public A844 2.1.3.1 Exercise Preparatory to Habermas

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Edited by Steve Bamlett, Sunday, 18 Nov 2018, 19:09

To begin thinking about the public sphere, consider the following questions and either write down your answers or type them into the box below; you will come back to them in 1.3.4.

  • How would you define the ‘public’, ‘public opinion’ and the ‘public sphere’?
  • Do these definitions depend on historical specificity? In other words, does the notion of the ‘public’ change over time?
  • Who would be an image’s public?
  • Does it depend on the image?
Public in these examples (‘public opinion’ and the ‘public sphere’) is used adjectivally in which case it appears to invoke its binary antonym, ‘private’. Yet a private opinion whilst functioning in a similar binary relationship with public opinion is not the sole or probably the main usage of the term ‘public opinion’. As a known ‘the public’ might in part be synonymous with the ‘public sphere’ (or even ‘public domain’ but not quite, since it implies other spheres or domains. The public seems to name a ‘thing’. In that latter sense it relates to notions of the communal. But it isn’t the same either because we can’t define public without its binary private. In fact, the public is a splendid invention for capitalist and other societies where privilege, ownership and wealth are unequal. To talk about the public is to imply, and perhaps defend the notion of the private particularly in relation to issues of ownership, entitlement and access. This is so even where private means ‘subjective’ and ‘secret’ or ‘reserved’, although the relationship between meanings is nuanced. We have public entrances only to distinguish and justify the need for need for private entrances. We train administrators of bureaucracies and large enterprises ‘deal with the public’ since that ‘sphere’ needs to be constrained lest it or any part of it feels it has a right to demand access to what is reserved as private. Public then is a constrained or constricted area where the public is maintained in prescribed or permitted roles that do not allow the appearance of either the private or fully communal, where the private is perceivable as unnecessary.


Of course, these like all definitions are historically specific and will vary according to numerous historical and other factors. The major one here may be the discourses available to any period which may generate neologism and then vary the meaning of generated words by varying its contextual uses by the forces of conventions, accrued practice or ‘rules and laws’. The notion of multiple publics may emerge when we talk of specific groups.

For an image ‘having’ or possessing a public, seems to me a vague concept. In a sense here ‘public’ may suggest a determining bottom-up force that helps create or sustain an image in its present form and interpretation. This might be true of the ‘image’ associated with celebrity, although ere as elsewhere the determining factors are probably much more complex. But it could be applied to religious images or images of gender, race, disability and so on. In that sense are some 'publics' more influential and / or entitled than others. Do women for instance have public entitlement over images of them or are images of women as we have them in current society the possession and entitlement of those who use and abuse them, maybe men. The possibilities are endless.

The image is unlikely to have force to determine its public alone, since it feels impossible to attribute agency to an image. But the point remains that some images do have agency attributed to them – from religious icons to pornography. Is this a function of how those susceptible to that belief (in the magical power of the image (Freedman) become that images ‘public’ (those Catholics who visit Lourdes for instance or even followers of celebrity).

COURSE PROVIDED Discussion

In what follows, we will consider some of these questions in relation to historical shifts, and of course in relation to the image.

Habermas’s seminal book examines in depth the emergence, brief flourishing and decline of a bourgeois public sphere, which was based on rational-critical debate and discussion. For Habermas, it was specific circumstances in the eighteenth century that allowed for a new civic society to emerge: new markets and commercial arenas; new spaces such as the coffee house where news and matters of concern were exchanged, discussed and critically engaged with; and novel forms of publicising news and debates in the emergence of the newspaper and journal. (For our concern with the image, the use of satirical prints to critique authority, often found in those publications, is especially relevant.)

In Habermas’ words:

The bourgeois public sphere may be conceived above all as the sphere of private people come together as a public; they soon claimed the public sphere regulated from above against the public authorities themselves, to engage them in a debate over the general rules governing relations in the basically privatized but publicly relevant sphere of commodity exchange and social labor.

(Habermas, 1989, p. 27)

It is important to note that for Habermas the bourgeois public sphere is a historically specific phenomenon, created out of the relationship between capitalism and the state in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and thus relying on a largely Marxist interpretation of this time period. Thus, for Habermas, it was tied to changes that saw the solidification of the middle class into a ruling class. The other key idea is that the public sphere has a ‘two-sided constitution’, which for Habermas is about the ‘quality or form of rational-critical discourse’ and the ‘quantity of, or openness to, popular participation’ (Calhoun, 1992, pp. 4–5).

All of this might feel a bit unfamiliar to you, but it will start to make more sense as you read the rest of this subsection and Habermas’s text.

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