Soupçon II.vii.a Critique of the notion of the Public Sphere
The concept called 'public sphere' is much critiqued. In this series, we are going to look at two major strands; namely, the critique by the Frankfurt School and the response by the feminists.
Habermas himself belongs to the Frankfurt School, too. Neither would he deny how the public sphere is vitiated by the dual forces, of the mass media and of the consumerist culture. Add in the interference of/by the political parties, and, unmistakably, the public sphere gets re-feudalised.
Adorno spearheads the criticism of the hollowing out of the public sphere and the rational debates therein. The culprit is the culture industry, given the dominant late capitalism as the overarching mode.
The resultant commodification and, hence, the inevitable standardisation of thought processes do not encourage individuated, transformative, rational discourse as the citizen is demeaned in to being a passive conformist consumer.
The Frankfurt School argues that mass culture, through the various media, spreads and maintains the late capitalist ideology.
What can be an antidote to the reductionist false consciousness which thus dominates? In the opinion of the Frankfurt School thinkers, the radically oppositional art alone can open up the subtle but unmistakable authoritative underpinning which diminishes the potentially functional public sphere in to a mere empty facade.
Such radical oppositional art often is the contribution of the historically dispossessed, as categories such as gender, race, class or ageism (targetted against both the weaker sections, that is, children and the 'senior citizens') keep them out in the first place. Hence this eight part introduction (II.i to II.vii.b) to the concept called public sphere, which gained fresh traction due to the sad demise of Habermas, would end with an outline of the feminist response to the notion of the public space.
Pratima Agnihotri Pune
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