Oskar Negt - Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere

The public sphere is the site where struggles are decided by other means than war.

Alexander Kluge

The belated English-language publication of German debates on the public sphere is itself an example of the vicissitudes of the public in a postmodern age. Now that Negt and Kluges study, Public Sphere and Experience, appears in translation twenty years after its initial publication in 1972, its temporal, political, and geocultural coordinates are just as much in question, if not more so.

How dated is it? How German is it? Instead of adjudicating upon the books relative anachronism or contemporaneity, I will try to encircle the question of its current relevance through the back door of its historicity, its pivotal relation to the German seventies. Undoubtedly, the particular imbrication of Public Sphere and Experience with the historical moment will transport the reader through a time warp, with the added twist of cross-cultural comparison. But the books historicity not only creates nostalgic or anachronistic effects (depending on where you were and how old you were at that time); it also suggests indirect routes of relevance to issues of the 1990s.

What may ensure the book more than a merely archeological interest is the unusual mixture of discourses, questions, and perspectives it mobilizes in pursuit of its subject. This is to some extent due to the different backgrounds of its authors, not only because they come from different academic disciplines and cultural professions but also because each individually had already strayed from the narrow paths of disciplinary and professional discourses. Oskar Negt, trained as a sociologist, had written an influential study on working-class culture, Social Phantasy and Exemplary Learning: On the Theory and Practice of Workers Education (1966). Alexander Kluge, known in this country primarily as a filmmaker and promoter of independent German cinema, got his doctoral degree in law, with a minor in religious music. By the time Public Sphere and Experience appeared, he had completed four feature films and several shorts, had published two volumes of stories, and was deeply involved in political battles over the Federal Film Subsidy Law. What brought them together was the context of the Frankfurt SchoolNegt was an assistant to Habermas, Kluge a friend and disciple of Adornoand debates in the wake of the student movement about the relation between Critical Theory and social practice. If Negts focus was on the problem of political organization and the role of culture and education in fostering working-class consciousness, Kluges work revolved around the problem of an alternative film and media culture and the political and economic conditions that made such a culture both necessary and possible. Their concerns overlapped in the question of how social experience is articulated and becomes relevantin other words, by which mechanisms and media, in whose interest, and to what effect a social horizon of experience is constituted. For Negt and Kluge, this question was at the core of, if not synonymous with, the problem of the public sphere. More precisely, it challenged the very possibility of defining the public (and attendant divisions of public and private) in any singular, foundational, and a historical manner.

In a number of ways, Negt and Kluges project has an affinity with recent debates in the United States. To be sure, nothing is new about the concept of the public sphere as such. There is a vast literature on the topic in American political and social thought, ranging from John Dewey, Walter Lippmann, C. Wright Mills, and Hannah Arendt through Jean Elshtain and Richard Sennett. Since the end of the 1980s, however, the term public has cropped up with a new urgency and concurrently in different disciplines and contextshistory, cinema and television studies, art criticism, feminist, gay and lesbian, postcolonial, and subaltern perspectives, to mention only a few. The term is now proliferating in titles of books, articles, and college courses. The Center for Transnational Cultural Studies (University of Pennsylvania) began in 1988 to publish its biannual bulletin under the title Public Culture. In 1990, the journal Social Text devoted a special issue (no. 25/26) to the Phantom Public Sphere, containing critiques of Habermas as well as sections from Negt and Kluges book. By alluding in their subtitle to Walter Lippmanns polemic of 1925, The Phantom Public, the editors signaled their attempt to bridge the American discourse on the public sphere with the German debate, whose reception had been limited by and large to more specialized journals like New German Critique.

What distinguishes this recent concern with the category of the public from traditional approaches is a greater degree of disciplinary promiscuity, prompted in turn by a more direct engagement with contemporary political issues and social developments. These seem to fall into, roughly, three overlapping areas of contestation: (1) gender and sexuality, specifically, struggles over reproduction, child-rearing, and the regulation of forms of sexual expression and intimacy; (2) race and ethnicity, specifically, the backlash against civil rights, the increase of ethnic-racial violence, separatism and nationalism, the question of identity politics; and (3) cutting across all these areas, the ineluctibly changed and changing relations of representation and reception, marked, on one level, by the accelerated globalization of the media of private and electronic consumption and, on another, by national controversies surrounding federal funding for the arts and the question of multiculturalism in the humanities.