Authorship and individualization in the digital public sphere

In September 2022, 60 years after he first released the German edition of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (STPS) in 1962, Habermas published A New Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere and Deliberative Politics (Ein neuer Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit und die deliberative Politik). This “new engagement with an old theme” (Habermas, 2022c, p. 7) has been a long time coming. Not only is STPS—as Habermas wrote in the dedication when he signed my English edition in 2008—“my first and still best-selling book (a kind of self-criticism),” in this new volume he also notes that it has “remained my most successful to date” (Habermas, 2022a, p. 145). This contribution is significant both given the broad reach of the concept of the public sphere (Öffentlichkeit) and due to the growing interest in how the rise of the internet and digital media has affected public deliberation and the public realm more generally. Scholars of Habermas are used to reading long books. This expectation was confirmed in 2019 with the publication of Also a History of Philosophy (Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie), which ran a total of 1752 pages across two volumes. By contrast, this bright orange book—which comes in at a slim 109 pages—refutes that same tendency. Additionally, aside from the short Foreword, all three chapters have been published in English elsewhere with only slight modifications.1 In part, as Habermas points out, this brevity is due to the fact that he has “long been dealing with other issues” (Habermas, 2022c, p. 7) and thus is not up to date on the literature. Additionally, given that he already apologized to his readers for not writing a third (!) volume of his aforementioned study of the relationship between faith and knowledge as “my strength is simply no longer sufficient for that (dafür reichen meine Kräfte nicht mehr aus)” (Habermas, 2019, p. I.10), his advanced age is also a likely a factor, despite his continued and active participation in both scholarly debate and in the German public sphere. Habermas’ original study of the public sphere worked at three distinct, but interrelated levels. First, it told a story of the historical rise of the public sphere in 17th- and 18th-century Europe, focusing specifically on French salons, English coffeehouses and German Tischgesellschaften (table societies). Second, it presented a sociological model of the public sphere as a space for critical-rational discussion about matters of public interest to all citizens that opened between the “private realm” of self-interested bourgeois individuals and the “sphere of public authority” defined by the state and the court (the society of nobles). Finally, Habermas developed a normative political theory that sought to achieve “a systematic comprehension of our own society from the perspective of one of its central categories” (Habermas, 1989, p. 5). In this short volume, Habermas focuses on the final point, that is, on “the function of the public sphere in ensuring the sustainability of democratic political community” (Habermas, 2022a, p. 146). Although he rejects the distinction between empirical and normative research—as well as the related bifurcation between ideal and non-ideal theory—as “oversimplified,” Habermas’ concerns lie primarily in the realm of political theory, not history or sociology. However, this does not mean that these two aspects are gone completely, only that they fade into the background of his attempt to explicate a democratic theory based on “reconstructing the rational content of the norms and practices that have acquired positive validity since the constitutional revolutions of the late 18th century and, as such, have become part of historical reality” (Habermas, 2022a, p. 147). My comments focus on two aspects of this short book. I start by outlining the misunderstandings of STPS that Habermas seeks to correct in this new volume. I then 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 in 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. Despite its broad influence, STPS is controversial on all three levels. Historically speaking, Habermas’ argument regarding the rise of the bourgeois public sphere in 18th-century Europe and its consequences for politics has generated a lively scholarly debate. Whether or not the salons, coffeehouses and table societies he studied actually embodied the new ideals of humanity and public debate that Habermas ascribes to them. Similarly, his sociological model has come under attack from scholars, who have pointed out the relatively limited reach—both in terms of gender and class—of the public sphere as a space between the private realm of economic self-interest and the state. Most notably, Nancy Fraser (1992, p. 116) has rejected this model as “a masculinist ideological notion that functioned to legitimate an emergent form of class rule.” Finally, his claims about the public sphere as a space of rational debate that could both provide public scrutiny of the state and shape policy through formal institutions have often been ridiculed. For example, rather than engaging in “the search for truth through conversation,” Klein (1996, p. 37, 38) notes that the spaces Habermas identifies as the crucibles of the bourgeois public sphere instead “fostered an anarchy of misinformation and miscomprehension.” All three of the essays in this new volume seek to correct what Habermas sees as fundamental misunderstandings of STPS. First, he addresses the common critique that this ideal is a fiction. Habermas gladly admits that a public sphere, where all affected are able to discuss issues of common concern openly and freely to reach a rational decision about what to do, never actually existed and is thus something of an ideal type, to speak in Weberian language. However, this is beside the point. What is important for his purposes is not whether these ideals have ever been fully realized in practice, but whether the ideal of the “normative public sphere” has led citizens to believe that the legitimacy of their government depends on their ability to supervise their leaders and shape policy by participating in public debate. Habermas argues that the deep penetration of this ideal is visible in “the historical fact that something like a ‘bourgeois public sphere’ emerged at the same time as liberal democracy, first in England and then in the United States, France and other European countries” (Habermas, 2022a, p. 150). Second, Habermas pushes back against the claim that his conception of discourse leads to an “idealistic conception of the democratic process as something like a convivial university seminar (einer friedlichen Seminarveranstaltung)” (Habermas, 2022a, p. 151). This misreading is based on Habermas’ claim that political discourses are based on “the goal of reaching an agreement (Einverständnis)” (Habermas, 2018, p. 837). However, in Habermas’ terminology, this idea does not refer to the outcomes of debates in the public sphere or even individual policy decisions. Instead, it denotes the collective agreement to abide by majority rule within political institutions, where decisions are invariably the “fallible result of an attempt to determine what is right through a discussion that has been brought to a provisional close under the pressure to decide” (Habermas, 1996, p. 475). In this sense, citizens are bound together by a preexisting commitment “to adopt each other's perspectives and to orient themselves to generalizable interests or shared values” (Habermas, 2018, p. 875) even when they are in the minority. Finally—and relatedly—Habermas notes that “the required orientation of participants toward consensus naturally does not mean that those involved are likely to have the unrealistic expectation that they will actually achieve a consensus on political questions” (Habermas, 2018, p. 875). On the contrary—in a move meant to sap the rhetorical power of his agonistic opponents—Habermas argues that “the orientation of reasonable participants to the truth or correctness of their argued convictions adds even more fuel to the fire of political disputes,” allowing “the epistemic potential of conflicting opinions to unfold in discourse.” The whole point of deliberation within the informal political public sphere of the media and civil society is that “it enables us to improve our beliefs through political disputes and get closer to correct solutions to problems.” As a result, deliberation “is measured in the public sphere by the discursive quality of the contributions, not by the goal of a consensus” (Habermas, 2022a, p. 152). Habermas’ attempt to harness the chaotic nature of public debate displaces the notion of consensus in two ways. First, within the informal public sphere, this means that “only one thing is presupposed—the consensus on the shared constitutional principles that legitimises all other disputes” (Habermas, 2022a, p. 152). As long as this institutional, meta-consensus is in place, Habermas argues that all other disputes can be contained within the system. Second, this agonal language also moves consensus from the informal realm of opinion-formation to the formal public sphere of institutional will-formation. The system as a whole can “withstand robust protests or wild forms of conflict” (Habermas, 2018, p. 877) precisely because the informal political public sphere “only makes a limited contribution toward legitimate exercises of political rule” (Habermas, 2022b, p. xvi). As a result, strictly speaking, “an orientation to consensus is required only in the deliberations of those institutions in which legally binding decisions are made” (Habermas, 2018, p. 877). Even there, this consensus is limited to questions of fact and other epistemological issues. These corrections—which reveal the different role that political communication plays in different areas of life—ground Habermas’ understanding of democracy as a “process that as a whole is filtered through deliberation” (Habermas, 2019, p. 877). As a result, two variables—the quality of debate in the public sphere (opinion-formation, in Habermas’ terminology) and the receptiveness of state institutions with decision-making powers (will-formation) to these deliberations—emerge as key criteria for judging the state of democracy within any given polity. This sets the stage for Habermas’ new intervention. The key question is whether the increasing digitalization of the public sphere has decreased the quality and scope of public deliberation in light of the growing use of unreliable sources and the fragmentation of the public sphere into self-enclosed filter-bubbles and echo-chambers. In recent years, democratic theorists and scholars of democracy have become increasingly interested in the effects of digitalization on public discourse. Much of this literature has sought to grapple with the fact that “cafés as centers of communication and exchange have been replaced in the late twentieth century and early twenty-first century by technology, by the Internet and social media” (Pinsker, 2018, pp. 306–307). This is the impetus for Habermas’ return to the topic of the public sphere. While he admits that the exact effect of these changes on “the deliberative quality of public debate is an open question,” as “‘deliberative quality’ is…difficult to operationalise for the unregulated communication processes in extensive national public spheres,” he affirms that “the signs of political regression are there for everyone to see” (Habermas, 2022a, p. 157, 158). Habermas’ desire to use deliberative quality—and his theory of popular legitimation based on the public sphere more generally—to evaluate democratic practice is hardly new. On the contrary, it dates back to SPTS. In the second half of this original work, Habermas applied his concept of the public sphere to developments in postwar Europe at the time. As a result of the “massification” of the public sphere due to the spread of literacy, he argued that the distinction between private and public was gradually being eroded. In light of these changes the public sphere “becomes a field for the competition of interests” in which institutional will-formation “can scarcely still be understood as arising from the consensus of private individuals engaged in public discussion” (Habermas, 1974, p. 54). In 1962, Habermas attributed a twofold effect to this change. 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