Ideology and Simultaneously More than Mere Ideology

• In Event: Habermas's Structural Transformation of the Digital Public Sphere

Abstract

Habermas’ complex, coherent, and impressive theoretical framework has been critically accompanied from a hegemony- and ideology-theoretical perspective since The Structural Transformation. It has been argued against Habermas that the public sphere he envisages remains bound to the ideological. Following on from such problematisations, I will critically examine the extent to which the formation of public opinion conceptualised by Habermas can come into conflict with his own goal of developing people's communicative agency and competences, and what role social media and digital communication might play in this. For Habermas, a successful, an emancipatory public sphere and public opinion-forming requires and promotes the development of communicative competences – i.e., reading and, now in the current digital constellation, authorship – which are supposed to unfold in the course of media development. However, although he speaks of an “editorial tutelage” in the pre-digital media age, he underestimates the problematic aspects of institutionalised (mass) communication. He sees “sluices” and “gate-keeping” in the process of public opinion-forming as positive and necessary because they increase the discursive quality or relieve the burden on citizens, thus enabling an overall rationalisation of the lifeworld and thus representing a historical achievement. However, communication can not only dissolve domination but also solidify it, a problem that Habermas spotted early but then neglected in its following work. However, this persistent problem also has consequences for the development of communicative competences or the possibility of emancipatory public learning, which will be elaborated on in this contribution.

In this paper I examine his claim that the rise of the Internet has led to “a new structural transformation of the public sphere.” In order to do this, I focus in particular on his comparison of the revolution caused by digitalization to the printing press. Whereas first of these historical turning points turned everyone into potential readers, he argues that the second has made everyone into potential authors. My basic thesis is that while Habermas is right that digitalization has resulted in a new structural transformation, the problem of deliberative politics today is to be found not so much the transition from readers to authors – as he contends – but in the increased individualization of the public sphere, which prevents citizens from creating the common world necessary for politics.

Author

• Sebastian Sevignani