Public Sphere - Summary

Given the new geographies of power that have emerged over the last twenty years or so in the context of globalization, it is more than timely to investigate the public sphere from an interdisciplinary perspective that brings together scholars from a range of different fields, such as history, literary studies, international relations, philosophy, and cultural geography. These scholars will meet at two conferences, one to be held at Rice University, December 15-16, 2005, the other at Trinity College in the University of Cambridge, England, July 10-12, 2006.

Since the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas introduced the notion “public sphere” during the 1960s in order to describe the symbolic arena of political life and conversation that originated with the cultural institutions of the early eighteenth-century bourgeoisie, the “public sphere” itself has become perhaps one of the most debated concepts at the very heart of modernity. For Habermas, the tension between, on the one hand, the administrative power of the state, together with its understanding of sovereignty, and on the other, the emerging institutions of the bourgeoisie—coffeehouses, periodicals, encyclopedias, literary culture, etc.—was seen as mediated by the public sphere as a symbolic site of conversation and public reasoning.

This collaborative venture between Rice University and the University of Cambridge will ask whether the “public sphere” remains a central explanatory model, focusing on political, historical and theoretical concerns that have emerged in recent years.

Although Habermas undoubtedly emphasized that the emergence of the public sphere was a relatively short-lived cultural phenomenon that immediately came under criticism from the conservative and anti-republican movements at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the concept itself has been widened substantially since its initial formulation. Historians, philosophers and social scientists alike have developed different notions of the public sphere that sought to describe the Enlightenment as a whole, or that sought to come to terms with the political tensions between state authority and private responsibility that mark liberal democracies in the twentieth century.

Furthermore, philosophers and historical anthropologists have questioned the private/public and individual/state distinctions, which stood at the center of Habermas’s concept. Most recently, the debate about the impact of new technological settings on public life as well as public policy—from the advent of lithographic printing techniques to cyberspace and hypertext as symbolic sites of public conversation—have highlighted the need to re-address the “public sphere” as an explanatory concept.

Likewise, the growing tension between the interests of the nation state and the international community has in recent times fundamentally changed the constitutional framework on which the modern state rests, as evidenced, for instance, by recent debates surrounding the draft of a European Constitution. As a consequence, it might be problematic to reduce the “public sphere” to a symbolic site that mediates between the interests of the state and that of the individual through specific cultural institutions. Considering the complexity of the intellectual and political configurations that have shaped society since the early nineteenth century, it might be necessary to redefine the public sphere along the lines of an interaction between politics, science and technology that is furthermore complicated by questions of cultural and historical identity that are marked by the longue durée structures of social memory and tradition and that can be found in literary and artistic discourse.

Seen against this background, there are three broad reasons why, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, it is timely to address the status of the “public sphere” in both theoretical and practical terms:

As a central notion of political and philosophical debate that was introduced at a specific moment in time, the 1960s, and that has become a cultural trope since then, we need to ask whether the “public sphere” can still be a valuable explanatory model within a completely different historical, political, and technological setting.
The inflationary use of the “public sphere” among historians and social scientists alike has loosened its epistemological content to such an extent that it has become questionable whether this concept itself is able to describe the complex interactions at the heart of modernity.
The fundamental changes at the end of the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century—from altered conceptions of political sovereignty and the rights of the individual to the impact of science and technology on the political—make it necessary to investigate the “public sphere” itself from an interdisciplinary angle that brings together experts in a variety of fields.

Keeping in mind these central concerns, this collaborative project between Rice University and the University of Cambridge—two of the world’s leading research institutions, which are themselves embedded in, and affected by, the fundamental changes outlined above—seeks to address the changing perception and political role of the “public sphere”, and of "making things public", along the lines of four central themes:

the role of law and political power within the public sphere, and as they contribute to the formation of the public sphere;
the tension between nation state and European cosmopolitanism, including the issue of “migration” and “multi-culturalism;”
the relationship between science and scholarship, on the one hand, and its public representation, perception and effects, on the other;
the role of art, media, and literature in shaping the public sphere at crucial historical junctures.