Thumbing Our Nose at the Public Sphere: Satire, the Market, and the Invention of Literature

Abstract

This article identifies a major contradiction in Jürgen Habermas's theory of the emergent public sphere. In his account, Habermas gives pride of place to Swift and his fellow Tory satirists. Their assault on the Whig oligarchy, he suggests, is emblematic of public-sphere debate—even though Swift and Company are also the public sphere's fiercest critics. This contradiction is not simply Habermas's; it is the Tories' own. The defining challenge facing the Tory satirists is to conduct a critique of the public sphere—that is, a critique of critique itself—from within that sphere's institutions. We might best understand such satire, then, as a kind of publishing that is not public, a genre that circulates freely in the print marketplace while renouncing the standards of public rationality. Tory satire will bestow this project on the category of literature that emerges later in the century—the project of a public textuality that operates outside the public sphere.

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