Habermas, Baudrillard, and Medium
How Reading Can Save Democracy
I tend to join social networks at the tail-end of the trend. I only joined Facebook after university in 2012 as a more convenient way of staying in touch with friends (it’s so convenient, I’m struggling to kick it). So far I have made and orphaned accounts on Blogger, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
Now I find myself on Medium, after reading about it on The Atlantic. It’s not the first time I’ve heard of Medium, but it was the first time I’ve seen it constituted as a project, or as a platform with an agenda beyond profit.
As you may have gathered from my brief bio, I’m reading in preparation for my Masters in Political Economy at Kings. I’ve been preparing for nearly two years reading everything I could that I felt was missing from my subject knowledge.
I got into all this after reading Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard. He is a famous but less frequently cited continental philosopher: post-modern and post-Marxist. Suhhir Hazareesingh writes:
But the writings of the likes of Foucault, Derrida and Baudrillard if anything compounded the problem with their deliberate opaqueness, their fetish for trivial word-play and their denial of the possibility of objective meaning…
My experience of Baudrillard was very different. Growing up in Peterborough (best represented in the international press by this article from the Washington Post) I had a conventional childhood of single parenthood and comprehensive education, which lasted until 2008. My teen-aged years were particularly troubled and I was suspended from my senior school at least three times for reasons I would rather not detail here.
I was lucky enough to attend a school which offered the International Baccalaureate Diploma which provided my first formal education in philosophy via its ‘Theory of Knowledge’ module. The mistake my school made was in giving the head of Religious Studies responsibility for it, which automatically marked the IB’s underlying explanation of its own structure as an un-serious doss-lesson.
Baudrillard was the first philosopher I read first hand, more than two years ago now. The rumours I had heard about classical and modern philosophy from the periphery of my mainly historical studies had provided no answer to my underlying anxiety about the political and economic structures which surrounded me: what did they want from me, why were they there, and why was I caught in them?
Unlike undiluted structuralism or materialism, Baudrillard puts analogy at the heart of the problem of reality. He opens the first chapter of Simulacra and Simulation with an elaboration on Borges’s map, in which an empire charts itself on a 1:1 scale.
Baudrillard writes that rather than the map rotting away to reveal the territory beneath, the land disappeared. No-one noticed because the map concealed its disappearance: the model of reality now exists over reality itself, a reality which no-longer exists.
This explained so much to me as a person who felt as if the laws I lived under defied explanation. It captures how material reports of phenomena, the statistical models, replace the phenomena itself; how the bureaucratic function of an organisation can displace its original purpose; how my education had been substituted for a statistical modelling of my prospects by a government anxious to prove its competence beyond all doubt.
I finally found an author who helped me to articulate why I felt like I had been cheated out of my education, even after acquiring what was supposed to be a good degree.
Since then, I have gone on to read a number of authors. I haven’t got around to everybody (education is forever incomplete) but thus far I have read all three volumes of Marx’s Capital, Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, Heyek’s Road to Serfdom and Prices and Production. I’ve read Keynes’ General Theory, John Stuart Mill, Xenophon, and a small amount of Eastern philosophy, among others. I don’t yet feel like I’ve scratched the surface.
What I’ve been reading lately, and what has brought me to Medium, is Jürgen Habermas’s The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. I am still two chapters from the end but I feel compelled to record and apply my impressions.
Habermas’s argument thus far goes something like this: that the emergence of modern ‘capitalism’ grew out of medieval power structures which were deeply disrupted by a combination of technological and cultural change. That the bourgeoisie created a private sphere of personal liberty outside of the remit of the state which managed public affairs.
Such liberties included the rights of property, enterprise,and association. Habermas dedicates a chapter each to the social structures of the bourgeois private sphere and its political functions.
The bourgeoisie saw themselves as having two roles: that of citoyen and that of homme. In the one guise they filled their public role as merchants and political actors. In their private capacity, they cultivated themselves as individuals with a capacity for intimate connection with their fellow human beings through experimental, psychological literature.
Of how this manifested politically, Habermas writes:
For the private person, there was no break between homme and citoyen, as long as the homme was simultaneously an owner of private property who as citoyen was to protect the stability of the property order as a private one. Class interest was the basis of public opinion.
During that phase, however, it must also have been objectively congruent with the general interest, at least to the extent that this opinion could be considered the public one, emerging from the critical debate of the public, and, consequently, rational.
That is, the de-facto ruling class could only articulate their political agenda in relation to circumstances which were publicly recognisable. There was a route to legitimately challenge their interests through public discourse. Even if someone was not a citoyen they were at least an homme, entitled to state their case.
Habermas writes that this state of affairs was long ago subverted: information which was previously private became public (education, health) while information which was previously public became private (military matters, foreign policy: the kind of data that today interests Wikileaks).
The affect of extending the franchise to people outside of the literary sphere lead to the isolating of that sphere in the form of the intelligentsia. Once, a public discourse would have taken place in relation to an ‘objective’ circumstance, a circumstance Habermas calls ‘…ideology and simultaneously more than ideology’. This is no longer the case.
Here he quotes Kant:
The speeches made in plenary sessions of the parliament are no longer made to convince delegates whose opinions differ, but are directed instead… directly to the active citizenry. …[It] thus assumes a plebiscitary character.
Coming back to Baudrillard: a model of discourse, a model of our social and political reality, was articulated and subverted long ago. Today we live with the legacy of a struggle we have collectively forgotten.
The referendum coverage on whether the UK remains or leaves the EU has been defined by this contention between what our political system was imagined to be by the people who built it and what it is to the people who live with it today.
Both sides of the debate accuse one another of distorting the facts, of scaremongering, or outright lying. Those caught in the middle will probably rely on their guts when they come to cast their vote.
What we are seeing is, in my opinion, a consequence of a political system which has not kept up with attitudes and technologies which have undergone massive changes in the last few decades. Democracy has increasingly come to mean direct democracy.
This is the third referendum in only two terms of parliament, each of which were commissioned to ‘give the people their say’ or ‘let the people of Scotland/Britain be heard’. Party membership in Britain is near historic lows, and yet across the world people are getting involved with campaigns such as Black Lives Matter, student protests, LGBT campaigns…. Even Britain First, the far-right Facebook protest group, has 1.4 million likes, more than any parliamentary party.
I don’t think I am the only person for whom the political classes’ impotence and the sudden burst of idealism from both the left and right creates a sense of impending disaster.
If there is blame to be apportioned here, and I think there is, it lies with our political classes. If the public sphere Habermas describes was more than ideology because it had an external referent which served as a check on publicly exercised power, and if that sphere was subverted by the erasure of that referent, then political power as it exists today depends on the public not knowing ‘fact’ from ‘fiction’.
Habermas explicitly links book-reading and the external referent.
In the course of the eighteenth century, the bourgeois reading public was able to cultivate in the intimate exchange of letters (as well as in the reading of the literature of psychological novels and novellas engendered by it) a subjectivity capable of relating to literature and oriented toward a public sphere. In this form private people interpreted their new form of existence which was indeed based on the liberal relationship between public and private spheres.
The experience of privacy made possible literary experimentation with the psychology of the humanity common to all, with the abstract individuality of the natural person. Inasmuch as the mass media today strip away the literary husks from that kind of bourgeois self-interpretation and utilise them as marketable forms for the public services provided in a culture of consumers, the original meaning is reversed.
Which is why encountering Baudrillard was such a relief. I have come to realise that the education I received was not aimed at providing me or people like me with the liberal education the Romans considered mandatory for any citizen.
What is instead happening is a piece of data, a grade, is attached to an individual as a public codifier, shutting down what ought to be a private relationship between that individual’s mind and their field of study. What ought to be a capacity for ‘bourgeois self-interpretation’ has been replaced with an advertisement for the public service that individual can perform.
And so we arrive full circle back at social media. On Facebook every self-reflective ‘like’ or ‘status’ becomes just another advert. If the Open Web is going to fill the empty space where the Republic of Letters once was, then I’d better stick around.