The public sphere

This is an academic paper written for my media studies course in "Digital Media and Society" focusing on the idea of the public sphere.

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Introduction

South Africa has a long-standing history of colonialism and other forms of oppression, the effects of which remain embedded within our society even today. Our context as a country and as a people is characterised by a socio-economic structure gripped by coloniality, neoliberalism and communicative capitalism. One of the ways in which these afflictions rear their heads is through the inner workings of our ‘public sphere’ and political-economic systems. The emancipation of the country, which occurred in 1994, was the first step on the road to constitutional democracy (Malila, 2013). This newfound ‘freedom’ came with it the promise of inclusivity in the political and democratic process of our society, which had previously been inaccessible for the vast majority of people in the country (Malila, 2013). The historically subaltern peoples of South Africa were promised the full privileges of the previously hoarded rights of the citizenry. However, the democracy of today does not fully resemble that promise. This essay will look at how that came to be, with reference to Jurgen Habermas’s notion of the “public sphere” and what it is supposed to represent in a democracy.

Coloniality

Firstly, we must lay out the contextual legacy of the aforementioned aspects that affect our society, chief amongst which is coloniality. Coloniality is essentially the successor of colonialism, as it represents present-day power relations in nations that have experienced colonialism such as South Africa (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2015). However, it is important to note that there is a difference between colonialism and coloniality. Colonialism refers to a socioeconomic relationship where the sovereignty of a nation or its people is beholden to the power of another nation (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2015). This is the nature of the South African context, as the country became a colony of the British Empire in 1806. Whereas, coloniality is a term that is used to describe extensive patterns of power that define culture, labour, intersubjective relations, and knowledge production beyond colonial administrations, making it a generational byproduct of colonialism (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2015). In today’s South Africa, we can see it being kept alive in the Westernised stories that we read, the unequal and discriminatory criteria that exist for academic performance, the Eurocentric ways of understanding culture and common sense, and the globalised conceptualisation of people’s identities and other aspects of the modern experience (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2015).

It is clear to see that there are elements of coloniality in our everyday lives whether we are aware of it or not. What we can gather from this point is that coloniality is an invisible power structure and epistemological design that lies at the centre of the present Euro-North American-centric modern world (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2015). For example, in South Africa, as it is in many other places blemished by colonialism, social-political institutions of knowledge, such as churches and schools serve as sites for the reproduction of coloniality (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2015). This is because they preach and teach theories of equilibrium; what it is supposed to look like, as well as the methodologies of how world powers have supposedly achieved it (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2015). This has resulted in a people alienated from their Africanacity looking up to elitist Western and Northern societies that reject them as people completely (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2015). Unfortunately, although anticolonialism saw a victory in 1994, decoloniality has not been achieved as our state has failed to truly upend the asymmetrical world order that continues to hold us back. This is because South Africa fell into the clutches of Neoliberalism.

Neoliberalism

Neoliberalism is a globalised philosophy about what should constitute our socio-political reality, reorientating the understanding of ourselves, society and government (Wilson, 2018). A neoliberal society is one governed through a focus on socio-economic machinations. Therefore it is essentially social conditioning on a nationwide scale based on key beliefs about the market. Firstly, it posits that the only acceptable form of freedom is the choices presented to people within the market (Wilson, 2018). Adopting this belief, for a nation like South Africa where the majority of people were treated as nothing more than tools to the market, was basically inevitable and persists to this day. The second belief is that cultivating competition within the market is the best way to establish a natural order in society (Wilson, 2018). We see this in the South African government's extensive support of the private sector and how most of the employed population of the country works within it. Lastly, in this society, the individual is responsible for their own outcomes, not the structures that govern them (Wilson, 2018). South Africa has many social welfare policies in place however it is not mandated to do so like a welfare state but is rather structured around what the economy can handle. All of the aforementioned beliefs indicate the point of view that neoliberalism holds on the position of the market, the state, and the human in the functioning of a society.

The neoliberal context looks at the market as the appropriate metric for understanding social life, knowledge and truth (Wilson, 2018). The previously longstanding ideology was that the government had the ability to socially engineer the public towards a desirable future (Wilson, 2018). This was the governing style of the previous state regime. The apartheid government practices this style through tyranny instead of democratic ideals, which is why it is once again no wonder why the country would try and lean away from this notion. South Africa consequently veered toward the neoliberal way that stated that because the market cannot be planned for, managed, or known, it must be allowed to develop through private enterprise and competition, relatively unhindered (Wilson, 2018). However, the problem with following this ideal of re-regulation and autonomy as well as the belief that equality must be earned is that it has perpetuated the economic gap between those who can and cannot compete in the market, especially in South Africa as a country with such a high unemployment rate. Therefore we can see that in such a society people's social standing is based on their human capital and those that have or add value lag behind the rest of society (Wilson, 2018). This essentially means that the country's people and the country itself are at the mercy of economic demands and competition (Wilson, 2018). All of this is the essence of capitalism which is the ideology that almost all societies have fallen victim to. This brings us to the capitalisation of communication and the public sphere.

The Habermas Theory

Jurgen Habermas describes the public sphere as a conceptual tool for combatting issues that stand in the way of exercising true democracy (Fraser, 1990). It is a mechanism where political participation occurs through the facilitation of a medium for rational discursive interaction about the citizenry’s common affairs (Fraser, 1990). According to Habermas, the public sphere is where individuals assemble to mediate between society and the state for the sake of public interest (Fraser, 1990). Here the state is separated from the market in order to ensure that the private sector does not supersede public opinion. Therefore, this sphere was designed to be open and accessible to all in order for public opinion to be used for the common good. However, this was not put into practice effectively as the narratives of the private sector bled into the public sphere through the rich (Fraser, 1990). This led to competing interest groups between social classes, with public opinion being shaped to reflect private interests. Therefore the model needs to evolve if it is to produce true democracy now.

This is one of the critiques put forward by Nancy Fraser (1990) for the historically specific bourgeois model that Habermas presented. Looking at the model critically one can see that its foundation is very exclusionary in that it is built on a hegemonic and patriarchal political system that creates discriminatory distinctions between people in order to perpetuate a non-existent universal standard for socio-economic class (Fraser, 1990). Therefore we can see that the system was never truly open as the division was never abolished in the public sphere as was the claim. This meant that societal participants created their own public spherules divided into the premises of class and gender biases that already existed in society (Fraser, 1990). The essence of the bourgeois public sphere constituted classist and masculinist rule over the rest of society making it similar in form to the political domination that it was supposedly built to combat (Fraser, 1990). The South African contextualisation of all of this is reflected in much the same way presented by Fraser. We have a public sphere facilitated by ‘big communication’ however it is not truly a place where all of our interests are considered equally valuable or impactful. In fact, there are those whose interests are not represented at all because they cannot afford to participate in the public sphere or they are subjected to forms of discrimination like women and the youth (Mutsvairo & Ragnedda, 2019). Then there is the question of whether or not any of our opinions matter to the government at all.

Conclusion (Communicative capitalism)

In the arena of communication in our capitalist society, there exists the democratic idea of everyone’s freedom of speech however that does not mean that that speech can change state policy (Dean, 2009). The discussions that take place within media mediums are separated from the political and state components of society when, in actuality, they are supposed to work in tandem (Dean, 2009). This goes against the fundamental ideals that true democracy is built upon and is exactly how the public sphere runs in South Africa. The people who hold power are not held accountable for their decisions. Instead, they simply become participants in the content-based communication of opinions that the public sphere then becomes (Dean, 2009). The financialisation of communication and politics that comes with neoliberalism is an example of communicative capitalism. Everything, including political participation and common experience, is monetised in some way or another. This is especially evident in settings where media proliferation is being pushed like South Africa, as the value of messages is lowered by the sheer mass of producers and consumers of information (Dean, 2009). Therefore we can conclude that our public sphere, like Habermas’s, requires reforms.