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.In a world no longer supporting the kind of dynamism in which it was natural for such groups to operate, and in which they found their active place, individuals are left, bare-headed as it were, to make their own judgements and to account for their own actions and views.But, exposed in this way in their singularity,these individuals seek a surrogate cover.It is the public; and both it and the appearance it gives of being some actual grouping are a sham created by the press.It is, says Kierkegaard,‘only when no energetic association gives substance to the concretion that the press creates this abstraction, the public, composed as it is of unreal individuals who are not and never can be united in the contemporaneousness of a situation or organization, and who nevertheless, it is insisted, are a whole’.Kierkegaard remarks, in the same place, that the public is a concept that cannot possibly occur in antiquity, for then ‘a people itself had to appear en masse, in corpore, at the scene of the action.’.This substitute, limitless phantom-grouping, the public, appears nowhere, ‘it makes for no situation and no assembly’, and ‘as you would expect, the abstraction formed paralogistically by individuals, instead of helping them, makes them recoil from one another’.11eLippmann’s ‘mere phantom’ is more in the nature of animpossible ideal.The ideal as well as its impossibility arise from the distance that exists in modern societies between the governing and the governed.He says, ‘The private citizen today has come to feel rather like a deaf spectator in the back The Public Spherrow, who ought to keep his mind on the mystery off there, 47but cannot quite manage to keep awake’.12 What Lippmann, like Dewey, had in mind was the complexity of the modern commonwealth and the breadth of vision required to make informed political decisions.As we noted, Dewey was thinking from the perspective of a settler nation that has to organize itself without help or hindrance of local tradition, and he saw the public as originally a self-established entity in relation to a state that it had itself put in place.Expansion from small and local beginnings took this public out of its depth.Lippmann, speaking of various supposed remedies (‘eugenic, educational,ethical, populist, and socialist’) for this situation, says that ‘all[these remedies] assume that either the voters are inherently competent to direct the course of affairs or that they are making progress toward such an ideal’.He says, ‘I think it is a false ideal.I do not mean an undesirable ideal.I mean an unattain-able ideal, bad only in the sense that it is bad for a fat man to try to be a ballet dancer.’ Further, ‘The individual man does not have opinions on all public affairs.there is not the least reason for thinking, as mystical democrats have thought, that the compounding of individual ignorances in masses ofpeople can produce a continuous directing force in public affairs.’13Dewey, an advocate of progressive education, was cautiously optimistic on behalf of participatory democracy, seeing some promise of a public able to understand and monitor the explanations of expert administrators.Lippmann for his part was unremittingly pessimistic; participatory democracy was a romantic dream.Whatever possible grounds there may be today for cautious optimism or a qualified scepticism, in any the Publicsociety even faintly resembling our own, it is surely indisput-Onable that the possibility of a public formed of ‘perfect citizens’48is a thing of the past.14 What we educate nowadays are special-ists able to fill roles in a complex economic machine.There is, indeed, a factor that might have drawn Lippmann and Dewey closer together had they lived through recent events.We will draw attention to it later.In anticipation let us refer to another feature of modern society these early twentieth-century writers failed to foresee but which is now evident to everyone.Lippmann distinguishes ‘insiders’, as expert administrators and economic experts able to ‘make decisions’, from ‘outsiders’, those who form the public.While the former are ‘soplaced’ that they can ‘understand and act’, the outsiders are as if ‘trying to navigate the ship from dry land’.They are ‘necessarily ignorant, usually irrelevant and often meddlesome’.15But today Lippmann’s insiders are themselves outsiders in respect of a system or network of interests in respect of which they too are outsiders, a system or network by which they are at any rate constrained.All this has been noted and discussed in detail by political philosophers, as well as by political commentators.An important voice here is Habermas’s.He speaks, as we know, for a democratic society in which citizens have access to political debate and can themselves be heard in it.To him the problem is one of communication.He points accordingly to the communicative infrastructure of society as the area (or collection of areas) crucially undermined by commercial forces.It is these that hinder free and open, or rational, debate.eTo correct the situation he proposes that the influence of those areas of life coordinated by communication should be widened, and in particular he suggests, as one commentator has put it, that we ‘subordinate economic and administrative subsystems to decisions arrived at in open, critical, public The Public Spherdebate’.1649There seems an obvious problem here.The ‘we’ who sub-ordinate these subsystems to such debate must be a public already freed from the inhibiting influence of the commercialized media, or at least recruited from an otherwise passive public in sufficient numbers to acquire enough influence to counter those commercial forces.In short, how could an open and critical public debate that is effective in controlling the influence of commercial forces on the media be staged unless the communicative infrastructure had already been ‘humanized’ (as it is often put)? Indeed, the presence ofopen, critical debate in a world where the media are so essential to ‘mediating’ that debate, would indicate that the obstructive subsystems had already been brought under‘human’ control [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
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.In a world no longer supporting the kind of dynamism in which it was natural for such groups to operate, and in which they found their active place, individuals are left, bare-headed as it were, to make their own judgements and to account for their own actions and views.But, exposed in this way in their singularity,these individuals seek a surrogate cover.It is the public; and both it and the appearance it gives of being some actual grouping are a sham created by the press.It is, says Kierkegaard,‘only when no energetic association gives substance to the concretion that the press creates this abstraction, the public, composed as it is of unreal individuals who are not and never can be united in the contemporaneousness of a situation or organization, and who nevertheless, it is insisted, are a whole’.Kierkegaard remarks, in the same place, that the public is a concept that cannot possibly occur in antiquity, for then ‘a people itself had to appear en masse, in corpore, at the scene of the action.’.This substitute, limitless phantom-grouping, the public, appears nowhere, ‘it makes for no situation and no assembly’, and ‘as you would expect, the abstraction formed paralogistically by individuals, instead of helping them, makes them recoil from one another’.11eLippmann’s ‘mere phantom’ is more in the nature of animpossible ideal.The ideal as well as its impossibility arise from the distance that exists in modern societies between the governing and the governed.He says, ‘The private citizen today has come to feel rather like a deaf spectator in the back The Public Spherrow, who ought to keep his mind on the mystery off there, 47but cannot quite manage to keep awake’.12 What Lippmann, like Dewey, had in mind was the complexity of the modern commonwealth and the breadth of vision required to make informed political decisions.As we noted, Dewey was thinking from the perspective of a settler nation that has to organize itself without help or hindrance of local tradition, and he saw the public as originally a self-established entity in relation to a state that it had itself put in place.Expansion from small and local beginnings took this public out of its depth.Lippmann, speaking of various supposed remedies (‘eugenic, educational,ethical, populist, and socialist’) for this situation, says that ‘all[these remedies] assume that either the voters are inherently competent to direct the course of affairs or that they are making progress toward such an ideal’.He says, ‘I think it is a false ideal.I do not mean an undesirable ideal.I mean an unattain-able ideal, bad only in the sense that it is bad for a fat man to try to be a ballet dancer.’ Further, ‘The individual man does not have opinions on all public affairs.there is not the least reason for thinking, as mystical democrats have thought, that the compounding of individual ignorances in masses ofpeople can produce a continuous directing force in public affairs.’13Dewey, an advocate of progressive education, was cautiously optimistic on behalf of participatory democracy, seeing some promise of a public able to understand and monitor the explanations of expert administrators.Lippmann for his part was unremittingly pessimistic; participatory democracy was a romantic dream.Whatever possible grounds there may be today for cautious optimism or a qualified scepticism, in any the Publicsociety even faintly resembling our own, it is surely indisput-Onable that the possibility of a public formed of ‘perfect citizens’48is a thing of the past.14 What we educate nowadays are special-ists able to fill roles in a complex economic machine.There is, indeed, a factor that might have drawn Lippmann and Dewey closer together had they lived through recent events.We will draw attention to it later.In anticipation let us refer to another feature of modern society these early twentieth-century writers failed to foresee but which is now evident to everyone.Lippmann distinguishes ‘insiders’, as expert administrators and economic experts able to ‘make decisions’, from ‘outsiders’, those who form the public.While the former are ‘soplaced’ that they can ‘understand and act’, the outsiders are as if ‘trying to navigate the ship from dry land’.They are ‘necessarily ignorant, usually irrelevant and often meddlesome’.15But today Lippmann’s insiders are themselves outsiders in respect of a system or network of interests in respect of which they too are outsiders, a system or network by which they are at any rate constrained.All this has been noted and discussed in detail by political philosophers, as well as by political commentators.An important voice here is Habermas’s.He speaks, as we know, for a democratic society in which citizens have access to political debate and can themselves be heard in it.To him the problem is one of communication.He points accordingly to the communicative infrastructure of society as the area (or collection of areas) crucially undermined by commercial forces.It is these that hinder free and open, or rational, debate.eTo correct the situation he proposes that the influence of those areas of life coordinated by communication should be widened, and in particular he suggests, as one commentator has put it, that we ‘subordinate economic and administrative subsystems to decisions arrived at in open, critical, public The Public Spherdebate’.1649There seems an obvious problem here.The ‘we’ who sub-ordinate these subsystems to such debate must be a public already freed from the inhibiting influence of the commercialized media, or at least recruited from an otherwise passive public in sufficient numbers to acquire enough influence to counter those commercial forces.In short, how could an open and critical public debate that is effective in controlling the influence of commercial forces on the media be staged unless the communicative infrastructure had already been ‘humanized’ (as it is often put)? Indeed, the presence ofopen, critical debate in a world where the media are so essential to ‘mediating’ that debate, would indicate that the obstructive subsystems had already been brought under‘human’ control [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]