Soupçon II.vi Habermas' Public Sphere
As an intellectual, Jürgen Habermas strides dense domains. Philosophy is his forte, though his ideas can be part of sociology, politics as well as media studies. He had a brilliant long career which experts divide in to four groups. At the outset, literature students need not go in to such minutiae. Suffice it here to get to know the silhouette of his notion of the public sphere.
For him, it is a vibrant and essential middle terrain between the state and the private space. An organ of the civil society, it is for him a "discursive space" where citizens may debate, analyse threadbare, discuss issues of public interest .
As he thinks of it as an open and equal arena, free of any economic compulsions or political partisanship, or any other conflict of interest or intimidation, in his opinion, the discussion in the public sphere can lead to rational influence by-n-of the public, and in the final analysis can result in a democratic check on state activities.
The quite Utopian notion is a fall-out of the post war era. It is ideally suited to Western context, to be precise, is relevant to nation states that are mostly monolingual, and are not chaotically multi-religious and multi ethnic. Unity, rather than diversity, is the base of such rational debate.
As literature students, we have yet another ambiguity built in to literature because it is simultaneously in the public arena and in the private space as subjective engagement and personal identification both by the characters and the reader(s) matter the most. Literature hence uses simultaneously almist all the linguistic functions as defined by Michael Halliday. In other words, the Habermas-ian public sphere opens up interestingly, if/when extended to literature.
Pratima Agnihotri Pune
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