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A Note on the ‘Public’ in Public Sphere

A public sphere is an abstract idea or domain of our collective life, where we can come together to create and recreate opinions.
Introduction

When we become a citizen in a democracy, it does not guarantee making a difference between the private/personal and the public. As much as the privates comprise a public, the latter can also directly affect the former as the evolution of democracy in the 21st century has shown us. For a cursory distinction, we have the realm of our family life in the private sphere while the public sphere consists of the abstract system in which we as citizens can hold free discussions and debates. Media plays an important role in amplifying the importance of this public sphere, albeit there is more to this articulation than meets the eye. We can start with what the public is.

Why the Public

Oja Angomcha Bimol Akoijam from the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi often gives me easy-to-understand examples of the private and the public. He would say that if one person does not get a job, it is a private matter. However, if a substantial number of people have this problem, then the issue becomes public. Likewise, sometimes on an individual level if we are fortunate, we might find a way to go to our workplace that is easier to commute and different from the usual route that is clogged with traffic, but this can never be a solution to the public issue of traffic jam. All the people will start using only that route. In simpler words, we cannot have, as he reasons, private solutions to public issues.

Meantime, in August 2022, the Bombay-based Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE) released a report citing unemployment rate in India had touched an annual record high of 8.3% in that month. In the previous month it was 6.8%. For today, this is pretty self-explanatory that there can be no private solutions, albeit in a place like Manipur, the State authority would merely wax eloquent about the significance of start-ups because, no surprise, the state government is simply not equipped to provide employment to everyone in this province where faux socialism seems to be the trend as it always has been. Here is a news report from 1 September:

Cabinet Okays Manipur SSC Rules, Start-up Fund
The state cabinet chaired by chief minister N Biren approved the Manipur Staff Selection Commission Rules 2022, the creation of posts for the commission and the constitution of Manipur Venture Fund for Startup among other resolutions. The cabinet meeting held at the CM's secretariat discussed 33 agendas and approved 32 of them (Source: People’s Chronicle).

In our present deliberation, the action, or for that matter, the inaction of the government is not an issue. Rather, how does the people form this idea of a public? This concept is built on a simple idea that if the very people can form an informed public, then they will be able to sort out half of the public issues. For all it is worth, the ideas of We the People and Vox Populi Vox Dei (the voice of the people is the voice of the god) have been the foundation of democracy and almost all the modern nation-states. The trend of widening gap between the ruler and the ruled is a totally different story. Very briefly, the people and the public can bring a revolutionary change in every aspect of our collective lives, provided they want it and work for it. This is easier said than done, no doubt; but still, it does not change the fact—howsoever idealistic it sounds—that the people have every right to live up to their common aspirations.

There are also arguments that some societies do not have the prerequisite conditions for a democratic system. To quote Louis Althusser: ‘The ultimate condition of production is the reproduction of the conditions of production.’ Similarly, the ultimate condition of democracy (to exist) is the reproduction of the conditions of democracy. While, to take the example of the frontier state of Manipur again, the ultimate condition is based on social contract and mutual cooperation over decades and centuries. The state had been completely oblivious to this system. To put it bluntly, its politics and more significantly, its economics became a part of the global system not by choice but under compulsion with successive rules of the British and now the Indians. Just as it never realised its formation of a nation-state—when in 1949 it was forcibly merged into the union of India—apparently, its present-day predicament as a State or a society still lies in the inability of the transition.

Well, it takes no effort to pass the buck, and we might never get a solution, but the important thing is to make things right. This is all the more reason to why having a proactive public is essential for building a peaceful and developed political entity through informed and critical discourses. This is where the concept of public is situated, not necessarily in the context of this slowly moving Indian vestigial state, but the public in general with their dormant power of bringing social change.

Habermas and the Place of the Public

Almost half a century ago, German sociologist and well-known member of the Frankfurt School, Jürgen Habermas came up with the concept of public sphere and drastically change the meaning of the public and its sphere. He wrote Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit: Untersuchungen zu einer Kategorie der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft in German in 1962 and became a seminal book on the topic, with an English translation titled as The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society that was released in 1989. By taking the examples from Britain, France, and Germany, Habermas conceptualised the idea of bourgeois public sphere that had its origin in early 18th century to delineate the private and the public. One of the takeaways from the Structural Transformation is the understanding that the higher the quality of discussion and participation of the public is, the better a public sphere is in a democracy.

In Habermas, the Public Sphere, and Democracy: A Critical Intervention, Douglas Kellner wrote:

The public sphere thus presupposed freedoms of speech and assembly, a free press, and the right to freely participate in political debate and decision-making. [...]the bourgeois public sphere was institutionali[s]ed in constitutional orders which guaranteed a wide range of political rights, and which established a judicial system that was to mediate between claims between various individuals or groups, or between individuals and groups and the state.

A public sphere is an abstract idea, or again an abstract domain of our collective life, where we can come together to create and recreate opinions. Our ability to debate and discuss through effective communication, according to Habermas, determines the standard of a society. No money or gun or bomb is involved here, and it is strictly based on volunteerism. This sphere is strictly built on the concept of a marketplace of ideas from/with which a public can even make or break a government.

In fact, this location gives the legitimacy to a government through a process like an election in nation-states that follow democracy. In the process, this public sphere becomes an important area for negotiation and resolution of any kinds of conflict. Often the sole problem lies in the mismatch between the ideals written in black and white, and the aberration on ground realities and realpolitik.

In the damnation of abstract ideas and theories, a society can miss the finer points by completely getting rid of the foundation created by the idea of a public and its sphere. That was not an issue for Habermas. His concern is based on the fact that the disciplines of advertising and public relations have taken over the public and bank on the sheer interest of capitalist organisations. His ideal is that of an Öffentlichkeit (from which the term public sphere is loosely translated) or a sphere of critical publicity devoid of domination by private mass media organisations. From a public, we have become merely a consumerist society. He was already critical of media because it is simply not equipped to carry out or even take responsibilities for a whole society.

That argument will take us into another trajectory. Commercialisation and media have diverted the direction, however for us, the most significant idea, as Habermas sees it, is about the capacity of the public sphere to bind a society and the public discourse—reconceptualised in his later work as communicative action—has the power to manage the difficult relationships of the State, individual and all things economic, political, social, and cultural. This also brings back the ultimate question: what can the public do about it?

Where Is the Public?

Shrewd people and people persons who have an acumen in trade and business, and an inkling of power are the people’s representatives in a democracy. From shanty towns all over India to the high rises in the US—though unnecessarily respectful—this layer of society has the same kind of people, such as the present Indian PM Modi and former US President Trump who are a specimen of a kind of human beings and who swear by right-wing ideologies. Without an argument, anybody in their right mind will acknowledge that their politics is conditioned by religions, identities and the so-called post-truth rhetoric. Very briefly, the rise of right and far-right populist political parties, which we are seeing from India to Brazil, is an antithesis to the idea of a public.

With the kind of imposition and intimidation in the present zeitgeist dominated by market-loving and private-party enthusiasts, who know well how to impose and intimidate, they also know that it is only natural for people to fall in line, consciously or not because people are followers by nature. Unfortunately, on the other side, people voicing their views and demanding their rights, are also one of the major indicators of an effective public, and a more proactive public sphere, or otherwise. In a Democracy Index ranking by The Economist Group (of The Economist), India falls under the list of flawed democracy based on the score of 60 indicators grouped into five categories: (i) electoral process and pluralism, (ii) civil liberties, (iii) functioning of government, (iv) political participation and (v) political culture. Many Indians will speak up and out, especially if they swear by the politics of a specific generation.

Earlier it used to the Indian National Congress for decades and now, from 2014 onwards, it has been the BJP; but then, it hardly makes a difference unless there is an informed public, which is again paradoxical in an ineffective democracy. This is not to negate that there are publics in these democracies that are according to the Economist Group, flawed, and hybrid or authoritarian regimes. Their existence is merely as good as the liberal politics of the establishment. It is even worse when the government and its frontal organisations are witch-hunting its opponents using all the legal provisions that it enjoys as a part of the State, just as the government of India is excelling right now.

In a Democracy Index ranking by The Economist Group, India falls under the list of flawed democracy based on the score of 60 indicators grouped into five categories: (i) electoral process and pluralism, (ii) civil liberties, (iii) functioning of government, (iv) political participation and (v) political culture.

The Public with a Little Help from the Media

This is where the media comes into the picture. In the division of power in modern nation-states, we have the executive, legislative and the judicial branches as the three estates, which trace its origin to the 18th-century European concepts of the clergy, nobility and the commoners. As a fourth estate ideally, the media enjoys a chunk of freedom to make its own decisions. However, regardless of their independence and just as the quality of an estate is determined by that of the other two estates or the other way around, the effectiveness of media is also highly dependent on the quality of the three estates.

Sometimes, media can also be entirely independent on the other three estates. The Arab Spring of the early 2010s is the best example from recent times. In fact, this privilege is one of the reasons why it is one of the estates in the first place. Nobody can deny the potential of media albeit it is open to interpretation because an ideal is one thing while the praxis is completely another.

For a long time, media was called as the press because of the sole existence of print media for a good number of centuries. This nomenclature should be a nonissue, but rather it will be significant to locate it in an establishment; and even more in today’s context, to find how much space it has for a public. If we take the instance of India, it is interesting to note that both right and left-leaning media houses have their own audiences. However, are audiences a synonym for a public? Unfortunately, the answer is not in the affirmative. The public, as noted earlier, is political—not in terms of parochialism but as a rational group in a State, or in a full democracy to be precise.

Conclusion

There has been no last word on the dichotomy of the private and the public. In fact, it is ever too mutable. In contemporary world we can see it in the blurred lines between them on social media that has also been termed as the fifth estate. Perhaps it is because of the multiple and mutually exclusive elements that make up a private, or for that matter, a public. Yet, when it comes to a public sphere, it is doubtlessly a major force, as Habermas noted, a platform for the marketplace of ideas which can make or break a government despite all its constraints. In simple words, the public can create its sphere for common welfare. This is easier said than done but it is not impossible. A couple of factors that can help produce tangible results are in improving media literacy and the political consciousness of the public.