HABERMAS in the digital age
Having a number of volumes by Jürgen Habermas in my library (incl. Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns, which is particular interest to me as a linguist, given that some academics in my field have a sometimes inordinate focus on ‘communication’ as the main driver of language) I was interested to see an article in Der Spiegel about Habermas:
Mit 92 Jahren hat Jürgen Habermas seine Theorie der politischen Öffentlichkeit mit Blick auf die sozialen Medien überprüft. Womöglich sieht er sie zu pessimistisch – aber wir müssen sehr bewusst mit ihnen umgehen.
The author of the article, Samira El Ouassil, goes on to suggest that there are ‘responsible’ journalists that can set the standards for social media content, so not all is lost – as she would, representing the high standards that Der Spiegel sets itself. If only social media like Facebook and Twitter would live up these standards then we would not have to contend with Habermas’ negative evaluation of the social media. In other words, redemption is possible when social media adopt the Spiegel model of responsible publishing content. Given that Habermas’ original thesis was that private property goes hand in hand with manipulating public opinion, one can only marvel at El Ouassil’s naivety. While business models of the likes of Facebook and Twitter have long overtaken the likes of Der Spiegel that are built on traditional models of journalism, there is of course a residual power base that Der Spiegel hangs onto: the pseudo-liberal FDP politics favoured by the Augsteins (the family ownership of the Spiegel corporation, however employees (sic) are also shareholders), and now with renewed vigour, based on the real possibility that the FDP will have its leader installed as the finance minister in the new German government (a coalition of SPD, FDP and Greens). Quite apart from this conundrum, the article serves in many ways as a lesson for Habermas’ contention that social media is a symptom of neo-feudalism.
Let us start with the on-line version of Der Spiegel which in its visual form is dominated by wall-to-wall advertising and as such is no different from the business models of, say, Facebook or Twitter, that derive their vast profits mainly from advertising. Even so, Der Spiegel tries hard to monetize individual articles which puts paid to the much vaunted free content that social media is said to rely on. Obviously click-bait is for free and then they’ve got you. In this instance one would have liked to access the actual article by Habermas which is linked to the academic journal Leviathan which in turn is accessed the link below:
Alas, the Habermas article can only be accessed if you pay for the privilege (there is however a free PDF download of an article that refers to the Habermas article – and which I will refer to in turn). In the meantime the plot thickens when the Spiegel journalist refers to another article she says is worth reading, namely one in the FAZ (another conservative news outlet, well known in Germany). So here we go:
https://zeitung.faz.net/faz/geisteswissenschaften/2021-10-27/die-wuesten-geraeusche/680581.html
The author, Oliver Weber, introduces his piece as follows:
Der Text, von dem hier die Rede sein soll, ist in mehrfacher Hinsicht schwer zugänglich. Man findet ihn zwar in einer gut versteckten Onlinebibliothek des Nomos-Verlages, doch gehört man nicht zu den Angehörigen jener wenigen Universitäten, die eine Lizenz der Zeitschrift Leviathan besitzen, zahlt man auch für die digitale Variante beinahe hundert Euro. Wem das zu viel ist, der bleibt auf die Möglichkeiten physischer Fernleihe angewiesen. Die Beiträge der aktuellen Sonderausgabe selbst durchliefen ein anonymes Begutachtungsverfahren. Und auch dieser Zeitungstext, der den Text für diejenigen zusammenfasst, die ihn nicht gelesen haben, dürfte mindestens unter sechs Augen getreten sein, bevor er dem Publikum vorgelegt wurde. Was wäre aber, entfiele diese lange Kette aus Schleusen und Prüfungsschritten?
So, ironically enough, he too bemoans the fact that the Habermas article is not accessible to the ordinary reader, as the subscription for the site is nearly a hundred Euro. Even the abridged version for journalists like himself has been reviewed by at least six anonymous peer reviewers, or so he says, adding the question what it would be like if such obstacles were not put in place for a public forum (like the FAZ presumably). The ultimate joke is of course that I cannot read his article without first subscribing to the FAZ (typically you can a two-week ‘free’ subscription but you must provide your credit card details for a $50 monthly subscription fee if you don’t cancel your ‘free’ two-week period after (or before?) time runs out), i.e. the FAZ monetizes its content via the click-bait method also employed by Der Spiegel (giving you a short taste of the article while it dims into the announcement that for the rest you have to pay).
Since I have not read the Habermas article myself, I rely on the ‘free’ Levianthan article by Staab and Thiel (2021), entitled Privatisierung ohne Privatismus, which sounds a bit obscure but actually does a good job in summarizing Habermas’ original and revised theses. In essence the 1962 Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeitmade the point that the bourgeois free market ideology had usurped the feudalistic model of manipulating public opinion, making it obviously more diverse but still in the service of private wealth. In his 2021 Überlegungen und Hypothesen zu einem erneuten Strukturwandel der politischen Öffentlichkeit, Habermas revised his thesis in that we are reverting to the feudal model. The likes of Facebook and Twitter are the new aristocrats that control public opinion by diktat. Politics as a public spectacle – as seen in Trumpism in the US – is choregraphed by clever algorithms that maximise social media click-bait for a global audience that is then reduced to consume the latest wares advertised by corporate raiders. Here Habermas’ central thesis of ‘kommunikatives Handeln’ comes into play: we ‘communicate’ to ‘act’. Those who control the channels of communication can influence the subsequent actions taken, be it as political expression in elections or more predominantly as decisions for what brands to buy and consume. Of course, it’s not at all as simple as this. As societies as a whole are made up of ‘actors’ that range from the haves to the haves-not, and taking into account that communication in itself is a bi-directional process, there is what Habermas and others have called Subjektivierung (subjectification). The argument being that every individual in this game of forming a society sees it his/her/their way, often removed from an objective point of view, i.e. having become ‘subjective’, and as such having become a creature that has a complex psychological make-up, unpredictable in some ways, malleable in others, contextualised – in other words, has become a post-industrialist/post-structuralist/post-modernist being in constant need of individual and societal de- and re-construction. People like Chomsky (also aged 92) have rubbished this obsession with terminological over-think (cf. Chomsky’s debate with Foucault), claiming instead a straightforward analysis that harks back to a simple, socialist point of view. Nevertheless, Habermas as a successor of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory (cf. Marcuse, Adorno) is also a socialist but with untold complications that seem to sustain an academic class of experts whose ‘communication’ few people can follow. Apparently a joke is that Habermas’ books have been translated into all languages of the world, except into German. When reading academics like Habermas, one is often struck by a simple idea – as enumerated above before delving into ‘subjectification’ – like social media being a symptom of neo-feudalism. However when reading on, hoping for a straightforward solution to the problem, we are confronted with a sudden complexity that defies any understanding of the problem in the first place. When reading Staab and Thiel, the initial summary of Habermas’ ideas is simple and powerful, followed only by an attempt to outdo Habermas by introducing an ever more complicated array of sub-textual pre-conditions and axioms, to do with Medialität (how information is mediated) and Akkumulation (accumulation of capital) quite apart from the Subjektivierung mentioned above, all of which are central to Critical Theory. So, while I am sympathetic to Chomsky in his critique of post-structural psycho-babble, I also try to understand the reasons behind this great project of uncertainty that seems to reflect reality more than any fundamentalist socialist program. Staab and Thiel quite rightly identify Habermas’ contention that the digital age and social media have succeeded in the technological isolation of the individual (citing the ‘daily me’ by Sunstein), giving rise to an unprecedented subjectivity that makes collective action almost impossible. Habermas in his Die Neue Unübersichtlichkeit(1985) makes the point that modernism (Neuzeit) is defined by the constant reach for the ‘new’, thereby exhausting utopian concepts (such as socialism) as mere clichés. One only has to look at the ‘news’ in digital format – be it Der Spiegel or the Guardian – and be confronted with a totally fractured view of the world. Take a typical Guardian daily on-line offering of some one hundred news article snippets, click-bait you can ‘click’ on for more and more. This is a huge structural change from the former newspaper format where every article was presented in its full content, so Habermas is quite right in saying that the erstwhile promise of the digital age (e.g. the internet) to promote democratic and social justice values was subverted by powerful digital platforms (e.g. Facebook, Twitter) to achieve the opposite. To accuse Habermas as too pessimistic – as does the Spiegel columnist – is to chime in with all the ‘deniers’ (holocaust, climate, pandemic, nuclear war, etc.) that are promoted as click-bait to rise as ‘influencers’, ending up as mainstream ‘news’ of the world. One can analyse this situation in fundamentalist Marxist terms with a sole focus on Akkumulation (accumulation of capital) and nod wisely but is none the wiser as to what will happen next. This Unübersichtlichkeit (lack of a comprehensive view) prevents us from charting a future that makes sense, relying instead on a neo-feudal make-belief characteristic of our digital age. Dire warnings (direct and indirect) sounded by sages like Chomsky and Habermas left unheeded will only hasten the demise of all of us, as predicted by another wise old man, Bertrand Russell:
After ages during which the earth produced harmless trilobites and butterflies, evolution progressed to the point at which it generated Neros, Genghis Khans and Hitlers. This, however, I believe is a passing nightmare; in time the earth will again become incapable of supporting life, and peace will return.
Both Chomsky and Habermas have real life experience of the age of the Hitlers, what with the latter painfully aware that Medialität as a German speciality seems to be abused again in our global digital age. Chomsky might critique my focus on German since English is equally capable – as are all languages of the world – of catching this virus (Russell calls it ‘evolution’), if it hasn’t already done so. It’s just that Habermas, like myself, come from a region of the world that had the fascist virus in recent history, so we should know a thing or two. It comes as no surprise that digital German media giants like Der Spiegel are in denial - again.
Staab, Philip & Thorsten Thiel (2021). Privatisierung ohne Privatismus. Soziale Medien im digitalen Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit. Sonderband Leviathan 37:275–297
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