Cybersalons and Civil Society: Rethinking the Public Sphere in Transnational Technoculture

Jodi Dean

Recently, I checked out the discussion lists on Borders Books’s on-line magazine Salon. I had enjoyed Salon’s commentary on the Monica Lewinsky scandal, so I was optimistic about their discussion groups.1 There were hundreds of options. I could chat about the challenges of mothering, debate current events, or analyze television shows. I joined the group on current political and cultural events. Again, there were abundant possibilities: gay parents, gays in the military, gay schoolteachers—the very range of options on queer matters suggested the prevalence of contemporary cultural anxieties around perceived threats to straight sex, anxieties that easily exceeded the ostensible terms and terrain of debate. After noticing that most of these “discussions” were voyeuristic excuses to gay bash or painstakingly detail a variety of sexual practices and positions, I went to a group considering the pros and cons of establishing English as the official language of the United States. I found it difficult to follow—or find—the logic of the discussion. Few of the comments seemed relevant, and few offered reasons to justify a position or arguments to counter an opposing viewpoint. One thread concerned why Germans like to watch American blockbuster movies and whether James Cameron’s 1997 film Titanic would be a hit in Europe. Other remarks were “Hi,” “Jimbo’s remark was lame,” and “Later.”

This brief foray into Salon’s discussion list is not an exhaustive account of talk on the Net or life in cyberspace. Rather, it highlights the salon as a form of computermediated discussion, of communication among persons linked not by proximity, tradition, or ethnicity, but by an ability to use and an interest in networked interaction. The cybersalon provides a link, as it were, to the networked complexities of communication, interaction, and information exchange in late capitalist technoculture.

Before clicking on this link, I want to contrast this salon with two other salons, those offered by Jürgen Habermas and Seyla Benhabib. In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Habermas presents the salons of eighteenthcentury France as instances of the newly emerging bourgeois public sphere. There, bourgeoisie, nobles, and intellectuals only recently removed from their plebeian origins met on equal footing. As Habermas writes, “In the salon the mind was no longer in the service of a patron; ‘opinion’ became emancipated from the bonds of economic dependence.”2 The salon provided a space apart from the economy, a space where people could exchange ideas and voice criticism on matters of shared interest or concern. The vitality of the exchanges was such that new works and great minds first sought legitimacy in the salons.

Habermas associates the salons with the Tischgesellschaften (table societies) and coffee houses of Germany and England to abstract the following characteristics of this new form of interaction, of what for him is the newly constituted sphere of private persons come together as a public. First, there was disregard of social status, a fundamental parity among all participants such that the authority of the better argument could win out over social hierarchy. Second, new areas of questioning and critique were opened up as culture itself was produced as a commodity to be consumed. Third, the newly emerging public was established as open and inclusive in principle. That is to say, anyone could have access to that which was discussed in the public sphere. These abstractions lead Habermas, fourth, to conceptualize the public sphere in terms of the public use of reason.3

Benhabib’s version of the salon comes from a rather different, and largely feminist, angle. In “The Pariah and Her Shadow,” her essay on Hannah Arendt’s biography of Rahel Varnhagen, Benhabib views the salon as “a space of sociability in which the individual desire for difference and distinctiveness could assume an intersubjective reality and in which unusual individuals, and primarily certain highly talented Jewish women, could find a ‘space’ of visibility and self-expression.” 4 Contrasting Arendt’s conception of the public sphere in The Human Condition with her account of the salon in the Varnhagen biography, Benhabib brings to the fore the feminine, ludic, and erotic components of the salon. She highlights the world-disclosing aspects of the language used in the salon, the joy and magic of shared speech. She emphasizes the play of identities at work in the salons, the ways in which self-revelation and self-concealment disrupt the public sphere’s ideal of transparency.

With this reading of Arendt, Benhabib counters Habermas’s vision of the salon as a rational public sphere with the notion of the salon as a sphere of civic friendship. Accordingly, she presents the ideals of the modern salon as the joy of conversation, the search for friendship, and the cultivation of intimacy. But even as she foregrounds the difference, desire, and dissonance of salon interactions, Benhabib finds embedded in Arendt’s vision of the salon one key element of overlap with Habermas: both Arendt and Habermas find in the salon a disregard for status and fundamental equality based on shared humanity.

Three Salons

I have introduced three salons: the cyber, the rational, and the friendly. All three are empirically drawn and historically informed. Habermas’s has been supplanted for the most part by a less situated and more abstract vision of the public sphere, by the discourse ethics’ ideal of communicative action. Benhabib’s account functions as a supplement to some of the criticisms leveled against the rational public sphere model she has accepted in the past and provides a different, albeit similarly abstract, vision of the ideals of modernity.5 My argument is that the cybersalon highlights the inability of Habermas’s and Benhabib’s concepts of the public sphere to deal adequately with the complexities of the information age.

Hubertus Buchstein has brought the rational and friendly salons—that is, the abstracted ideals of the public sphere important to second- and third-generation critical theory—to bear on the cybersalon. Buchstein challenges advocates of computer-mediated democracy to defend their claims that the Internet can serve as a new critical public or counterpublic sphere.6 He notes that, according to those “optimists” with high hopes for computer democracy, “The new technology seems to match all basic requirements of Habermas’s normative theory of the democratic public sphere: it is a universal, antihierarchical, complex, and demanding mode of interaction. Because it offers universal access, uncoerced communication, freedom of expression, an unrestricted agenda, participation outside of traditional political institutions and generates public opinion through processes of discussion, the Internet looks like the most ideal speech situation.”7 Despite the similarity of the metaphors used by Net enthusiasts and critical theorists, Buchstein nonetheless concludes that the Internet is not a new public sphere, that it fails to live up to these norms, and that computer interaction in fact may well distort citizenship.

While I agree with Buchstein’s conclusion that networked interactions fail to live up to the norms of the public sphere, I claim that this tells us more about the limitations of the notion of the public sphere as we grapple with the complexities of transnational technoculture in the information age than it does about the political and democratic potential of cyberia.8 As I have argued elsewhere, to territorialize cyberia as the public sphere is to determine in advance what sort of engagements and identities are proper to the political and to use this determination to homogenize political engagement, neutralize social space, and sanitize popular cultures. Such a territorialization, moreover, configures those excesses of the Internet that resist compilation into a normative vision of the public sphere as pathologies and exceptions that do not apply to, that are outside of, that bound this public sphere and so continues to reassure the public sphere’s claims to freedom and democracy.9 Why, for example, should Salon, an on-line magazine that provides opportunities for consumption as well as discussion, be measured against a public sphere ideal that will judge precisely which exchanges are rational, valid, or authentic? Indeed, public sphere norms of accessibility and inclusivity seem to say more about how to market Internet services and personal computers than they do about the politics of the information economy. Just as Theodor Adorno’s negative vision of mass culture inflected Habermas’s valuation of the bourgeois public sphere and consequent story of the fall into merely commercial and instrumental interaction, so does the normalizing discourse of the public sphere occlude potential freedoms and dangers in the information age.10

In light of the possibilities and dangers posed by the new digital technologies, I suggest that critical and democratic theorists jettison the idea of the public sphere and adopt a more complex model of civil society. Whereas the ideal of the public sphere relies on abstracting norms of equality, inclusivity, publicity, rationality, and authenticity from a few, usually elite, social locations, the notion of civil society embeds interaction in the media, associations, institutions, and practices that configure contemporary politics. Too simply put, the regulatory fiction of the public sphere privileges a theorization of political norms. Struggles that contest, resist, or reject its idealizations are excluded from the political terrain as remnants of tradition, say, or manifestations of a terroristic irrationalism. In contrast, civil society privileges the concrete institutions in which the subjects of politics come to practice, mediate, and represent their actions as political.11 Such a model of civil society, I argue, is not only more appropriate to the networked interactions of cybersalons but also better accords with the complexities of power, communication, and information in contemporary technoculture more generally.

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Notes

A version of this essay was presented at the conference on the Future of Critical Theory at Cornell University, 3–4 April 1998. I am grateful for the engaged responses from the participants, in particular Leslie Adelson, Eva Grossman, Peter Hohendahl, Martin Jay, and Christophe Menke. I am also indebted to Hubertus Buchstein, Claudette Columbus, Paul Passavant, and Lee Quinby for suggestions on earlier drafts of this essay.

1. 1. http://tabletalk.salon.com/webx
2. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989), 33–34 (Habermas’s emphasis).
3. Although Habermas’s concept of the public sphere may well be the most influential, it is, of course, not the only one. For another important theory of the public sphere published in German several years prior to Habermas’s, see Reinhart Koselleck, Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988). Rather than emphasizing the constitutive role of salons, Koselleck emphasizes the importance of secret societies such as Freemasonry in challenging absolutist authority by creating a set of moral alternatives with political effects. Margaret C. Jacob has done further work on the impact of secret societies on the rise of a bourgeois public sphere. Jacob, Living the Enlightenment: Freemasonry and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). See also Hannah Arendt’s agonistic conception of the public sphere in The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958). For critical assessments of the Habermasian conception, see the contributions to Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992).
4. Seyla Benhabib, “The Pariah and Her Shadow: Hannah Arendt’s Biography of Rahel Varnhagen,” Political Theory 23, no. 4 (February 1995): 17.
5. In “The Pariah and Her Shadow,” 23–24, Benhabib emphasizes (in a footnote) that she is not claiming that the salon can serve as a normative model today, but that it is a precursor to some of the potential of civic society.
6. Hubertus Buchstein, “Bytes that Bite: The Internet and Deliberative Democracy,” Constellations 4, no. 2 (October 1997): 250.
7. Buchstein, “Bytes that Bite,” 251.
8. I take the term cyberia from Arturo Escobar, “Welcome to Cyberia: Notes on the Anthropology of Cyberculture,” in Cyberfutures: Culture and Politics on the Information Superhighway, ed. Ziauddin Sardar and Jerome R. Ravetz (New York: New York University Press, 1996). I use cyberia to invoke the processes, flows, connections, and communications that exceed the Internet, extending out into the ether of cell phones, financial transactions, advertising, and media culture more broadly. For an account of some of the problems of territorialization in cyberia, see my essay “Virtually Citizens,” Constellations 4, no. 2 (October 1997): 264–82.
9. Dean, “Virtually Citizens,” 265–66.
10. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1982).
11. As Jean L. Cohen and Andrew Arato emphasize in their conceptual history of civil society, from the term’s earliest appearance as politike koinonia in Aristotle it “presupposed the existence of a plurality of forms of interaction, association, and group life.” Cohen and Arato, Civil Society and Political Theory (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992), 85. Moreover, Norberto Bobbio makes clear that, even in its competing modern theorizations against the state (as a continuation or perfection of the state of nature, as in John Locke and Immanuel Kant) or within the state (as the institutionalization of the system of needs or the interests of the ruling class, as in G. W. F. Hegel and Karl Marx), the concept of civil society is a vehicle for concretizing the state, for understanding the forms of production and social relations as they appear historically to repeat and reinforce particular interests within the state. Bobbio’s argument is especially interesting as a discussion of the way this dilemma appears as a puzzle in Antonio Gramsci’s thought: although Gramsci claims to rely on Hegel’s notion of civil society, “civil society in Gramsci does not belong to the structural sphere, but to the superstructural sphere” (Bobbio’s emphasis). Bobbio, “Gramsci and the Concept of Civil Society,” in Civil Society and the State: New European Perspectives, ed. John Keane (London: Verso, 1988), 82.