Critical Theory, Public Sphere and Culture. Jurgen Habermas and His Critics

Abstract

Bourgeois theory tends to separate carefully the domains of culture and politics. Its notion of the autonomy of art is particularly indispensible for countering arguments which conceive the relation between culture and politics as historically changing. One of the essential achievements of Critical Theory has been to dissolve this seeming opposition and make visible the objective link between the two. The category of the culture industry, introduced by Adorno and Horkheimer in 1944, contains this very insight. What it does not deal with is the concept of the public sphere. This question was taken up by Jiirgen Habermas in his study Strukturwandel der Offentlichkeit (Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere) (1962) and has generally defined the mass culture debate within the younger generation of the Frankfurt School. Even when Habermas has been contradicted, it is usually within the framework of his theory. The intensive and sometimes decidedly polemic argument about the history, present state and future of the public sphere has always been at the same time a discussion about the conditions and possibilities of culture in an advanced capitalist society. Habermas' theory of the public sphere offered a model for unravelling the political and social element in the concept of culture. Yet this assertion is still too general. The essentially political character of culture was certainly familiar to the older Frankfurt School. One has only to recall Herbert Marcuse's essay Uber den affirmativen Charakter der Kultur (The Affirmative Character of Culture) (1937)' and Walter Benjamin's works from the 1930s in which the political function of cultural production was emphasized. Habermas' work presupposes these studies. His theory of the public sphere must be understood as an attempt to reformulate the dialectical relationship of the socio-cultural and political system (to introduce his later terminology). The theory of the culture industry, as it was developed in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, needed historical grounding. The difference between the classical analysis of mass culture by Horkheimer and Adorno and the description of disintegration in the public sphere by Habermas is not so much at the level of subject matter and its critical

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