Nancy Fraser
Introduction
Who she’s writing to
• Critiquing Jurgen
Habermas’s famous
1962 book The
Structural
Transformation of the
Public Sphere
What Habermas Argued
• Outlines rise and fall of the “Bourgeois Public Sphere” in
1700s and early 1800s Europe
• Market Capitalism led to institutions in-between economy
and state: this included newspapers, salons, coffee-shops,
and debating societies
• This led to the rise of public opinion in which “private
citizens” came together to engage in “rational-critical
debate” on public issues
• Decline came with immense social and economic changes,
including the rise of consumer capitalism which blurred the
lines between public/private, state/civil society and
replaced “rational-critical debate” with “consumption” and
it still exists to this day.
Fraser’s Critique
• Fraser says Habermas “idealizes the public
sphere” as the most inclusive and fair way to
solve problems
• Fraser argues that the public sphere is defined
more by who is left out than who is allowed in
• Fraser doesn’t want to do away with this
theory entirely, but wants to find a “nuanced
alternative” (62).
Habermas’s Four Flawed Assumptions
• 1) In the public sphere people can set aside their
differences in social status and deliberate as
equals
• 2) A single, comprehensive public sphere is the
best way to ensure “rational-critical debate”
• 3) The public sphere should be debating public
issues of the common good, not private issues or
private interests
• 4) A public sphere requires a distinct line
between the state and civil society
Bracketing Differences
• You can’t just pretend difference doesn’t exist and then
proceed—it doesn’t work like that. “Such bracketing
usually works to the advantage of dominant groups in
society and to the disadvantage of subordinates” (64)
• “We should question whether it is possible even in
principle for interlocutors to deliberate as if they were
social peers in specially designated discursive arenas,
when these discursive arenas are situated in a larger
societal context that is pervaded by structural relations
of dominance and subordination” (65)
Multiple Public Spheres
• In a “single, comprehensive, overarching public,” she
writes, “subordinated groups would have no arenas for
deliberation among themselves about their needs”
(66).
• Subaltern Counterpublics - subordinated social groups
like women, workers, people of color, gays and lesbians
who “have found it advantageous to constitute
alternative publics…parallel discursive arenas where
members of subordinated social groups invent and
circulate counterdiscoureses, which in turn permit
them to formulate oppositional interpretations of their
identities, interests, and needs” (67)
Common Concerns and Private
Interests
• Counterpublics are crucial to forming public opinion—they
are agitators. For example:
– “until quite recently, feminists were in the minority in thinking
that domestic violence against women was a matter of common
concern and thus a legitimate topic of public discourse. The
great majority of people considered this issue to be a private
matter between what was assumed to be a fairly small number
of heterosexual couples” (71)
• Feminists formed “subaltern counterpublics from which we
disseminated a view of domestic violence as a widespread
systemic feature of male-dominated societies. Eventually,
after sustained discursive contestation, we succeeded in
making it a common concern” (71).
Strong and Weak Publics
• Weak publics just form public opinion, strong publics can make
decisions based on public opinion
• “The force of public opinion is strengthened when a body
representing it is empowered to translate such “opinion” into
authoritative decisions” (75).
• Any public sphere where there’s a sharp separation between public
opinion and the state won’t be able to manage itself, communicate
with other publics, or make important decisions: Thus “the
bourgeois conception of the public sphere, therefore, is not
adequate for contemporary critical theory” (76).
• What we need is a new kind of public sphere that lets us imagine a
better role for public spheres than just for “opinion formation
removed from authoritative decision-making” (76).
Conclusions
• Fraser argues we need a new theory of public
spheres that 1) acknowledges how social
difference taints deliberation, 2) makes room
for multiple publics, 3) re-imagines lines
between public and private to determine what
counts as public good, and 4) makes room for
strong and weak publics (77)