The public sphere in Habermas’s early work is associated with institutions of the media: newspapers, public opinion, democratic or parliamentary debate etc., while his later philosophical development of the public sphere examines how speech acts and “communicative action” function in the public sphere. But he does not ground this later account of the public sphere on a phenomenological footing. In other words, in Habermas’s work on the public sphere he does not address the experiential dimension of the public sphere and there is little to no analysis of the class relations of power that underpin the basis of the public sphere. We thus have no discernment or distinction in how interaction with the public sphere uniquely affects the working class and the middle class, and nor does Habermas’s analysis lend itself to the creation of an alternative public sphere that might rival and overcome the interests of capital that make up the bourgeois public sphere to which we are all beholden.
Alexander Kluge and Oscar Negt have written what I consider to be the most compelling Marxist response to Habermas in their 1972 work Public Sphere and Experience: Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere. They write that “we first need a public sphere, a public sphere in whose production process the historical movement of dead and living labour allows itself to be converted into experience” (p. 130). Indeed, to study the power dynamics of the public sphere leads one to see the necessity to generate a Marxist praxis for our time.
The problem of the public sphere is a class problem that calls for a political response. The public sphere that we live with day-to-day is formed on a bourgeois set of interests that is formed on a particular intelligence that is dominated by the instrumentalized interests of capital. The public sphere cannot therefore cultivate a consciousness of the interests of labor because its interests are geared around the sensations and the knowledge of the re-production of the capitalist production process. Relying on the work of sociologist and linguist Basil Bernstein who argued that working class culture develops “restricted code” speech and that bourgeois media stresses bodily and sensual requirements of proletarian consciousness, Kluge and Negt argue that proletarian experience is manipulated and appropriated in the very structure of the bourgeois public sphere.
This means something highly pernicious and gaslighting at the very root of the bourgeois public sphere takes places: the public sphere is a parasitic domain that robs the sensuousness and expression of the working-class and then transmutes that experience in instrumentalized and reductive ways. The ‘social sensibility’ of the bourgeois public sphere has a fundamentally destructive outcome for proletarian experience. The bourgeois public sphere is alienating for working-class people precisely because their experience is treated as dead labor, which, as Marx put it, “weighs on the present” as an alienated consciousness. The bourgeois public sphere is thus not capable of producing an emancipatory collective experience.
Kluge and Negt are anti-structuralists in alignment with thinkers ranging from E. P. Thompson, Raymond Williams to Sartre, who each centered the problem of experience in their work. Only after a thorough critique of the bourgeois public sphere can we as Marxists begin to understand how to organize a proletarian public sphere so as to maintain a standard of living and experience, i.e., the proletarian and working-class person needs the organization of their experience in order to change their living conditions (p. 183). The task of organizing the public sphere is thus a political demand that will have ideological and educative effects. The cultivation of a proletarian public sphere is reminiscent to what in Queer Studies is called a “counterpublic” and as I have written elsewhere, the concept of counterpublic calls for the development of a political strategy. See my work on how counterpublics function in Muslim public spheres.
The cultivation of a proletarian counterpublic sphere is something we find in Gramsci’s cultural writings where he writes of the need to develop “good sense” among the working class. If the working-class is deprived of their experience in the bourgeois public sphere and that experience is fetishized and then commodified but drained of the capacity for knowledge to transmit the sensuousness of their experience, this means that the public sphere conditions us to a habitus that is terminally bourgeois. The bourgeois public sphere functions to reproduce acquired characteristics of experience, but these characteristics are manufactured and divergent from the sensuous experience of living labor. Our interaction with a public sphere is where we develop habits that serve interests which are out of our control. Marx:
“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”
There is a dialectic at the heart of the bourgeois public sphere that is formed around living and dead labor. The proletarian engages with a bourgeois public sphere such that their experience is liquidated as dead labor, a fact that leads Kluge and Negt to pinpoint a crucial insights into socialist education and class emancipation. They write, “no class can feel itself in the undisputed possession of dead labor practically” and thus if a strike is the “temporary conscious separation of living labor from the resources of dead labor,” a general strike “presents the functional incapacity of dead labor as entirely sensuous and manifest.”
The bourgeois public sphere produces a form of consciousness bound up with the production process, what they call a “fetishized historical movement out of dead labor.” Another way to say this is that the bourgeois public sphere is composed of alienated consciousness, but this alienation is only discoverable through the development of a proletarian public sphere. For if “no class can feel itself in the undisputed possession of dead labor practically” this means that the proletarian public sphere is a political relation capable of producing consciousness of the production process that is not equivalent to the fetishized historical movement of dead and living labour that composes the bourgeois public sphere. This draws us back to the debates about reification, Adorno and Lukács, an area I am currently writing about.
It is not merely the development of an alternative proletarian public sphere that is at issue here. That would be like suggesting that the solution is utopian and involves alternative economies and alternative public culture spaces. No the task would have to incorporate rival counterpublics that delegitimize and isolate the class function of the bourgeois public sphere. The development of a proletarian counterpublic sphere would have to play the primary function of the organization and re-direciton of the deep reservoir of the alienated sensuousness and re-direct it towards a project of proleterian consciousness. Moreover, any counterpublic would only truly develop on condition that a socialist party coordinate and make possible the assimilation of the real-life interests of the workers in a coherent manner as political interests. To seize the alienated sensuousness of the production process, harness those libidinal and affective forces towards the development of political interests. In the bourgeois public sphere these interests have only “spasmodic” expression. This is why the liberal bourgeois public sphere is anarchist and why the bourgeois parties are effectively the parties of anarchy. The Leninist party model is the socialization agency capable of forging an embryonic shaping of a new proletarian will. Only the party can set the direction in which development of a proletarian public sphere might proceed. Without the development of a party that aims to organize the collective material interests of the working-class in the service of its capacity to dissolve itself as a class, history will continually overpower the resolve of the agency of the working-class, and the forces of the bourgeois public sphere will only further compound the passivity and liquidation of working-class experience.
In the second major work of Kluge and Negt, History and Obstinacy published after Public Sphere and Experience, they argue somewhat naively that the Internet develops outside of industrial professional intelligence information, and that it relies on what they call a market in the primary sector of experience that is not bound to the professional sector. They thus see the Internet as operating on the production of an intelligent product that does not become dead labor, but rather liquefies into living labor (p. 191).
While History and Obstinacy is a remarkable text in its own right that I intend to review in the future, what is clear to me is that their first major work Public Sphere and Experience is the text for our time. Reading it makes clear that a major political task of our time is the development of a proletarian public sphere that will grow from the development of a socialist party. All of this is connected to what Lukács calls the “proletarian standpoint” History and Class Consciousness. The core lesson is this: the proletarian needs the organization of his or her experience in order to change their living conditions. Kluge and Negt help us to see that the problem of the public sphere revolves around the way that the working-classes experience becomes separated between the means of production from expression. Without developing institutions that can foster alternative forms of expression the proletariat will continually face a crisis of its political agency.
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