The Cultural Public Sphere

TLDR

Media research using the public sphere concept focuses on cognitive aspects of news and often neglects affective communication, while Habermas distinguished a literary sphere that allows deeper reflection beyond current events. The article aims to extend Habermas’s literary public sphere into a broader cultural public sphere encompassing all media and popular culture. It conceptualizes politics, public, and personal realms as a contested terrain mediated by affective (aesthetic and emotional) communication, and evaluates three stances—uncritical populism, radical subversion, and critical intervention.

Abstract

Media research that uses the concept of a public sphere in order to measure distortion against its ideal standard of dialogic democracy tends to concentrate upon the cognitive aspects of news and either ignores or disdains affective communications. Jurgen Habermas's original formulation distinguished between the literary and the political public spheres. While everyday news was a feature of the political public sphere, the literary public sphere was not so constrained journalistically by current events and provided an arena for deeper reflection. This article updates the notion of a literary public sphere into an expanded concept of the cultural public sphere, including the whole range of media and popular culture. This concept refers to the articulation of politics, public and personal, as a contested terrain through affective (aesthetic and emotional) modes of communication. Three typical political stances in relation to the cultural public sphere are identified and evaluated: uncritical populism, radical subversion and critical intervention.