Habermas’s Rise of the Public Sphere: “News Paper” & Novel Consumerism in 18th Century England

Solely by the act of translating Habermas, and in articulating “why now?” for multiple rhetorical spheres/readerships, this translation in its introduction (1) sets itself up in said public sphere (which publications such as The Atlantic as recently as last week have articulated questions such as Is the public square dead?). At the time that Thomas Burger translated The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (1991), a digital revolution–the Internet–was underway and would upend the world by further evening the rhetorical playing-field than the printing press had done in the eighteenth century, which Habermas articulates as the launch point of the “structural transformation” of the public sphere “into a category of bourgeois society.” One of the lenses Burger recommends to view inquiry into the public sphere through, is the lens of feminist novel scholarship–females being regulated to private (domestic) spheres/concerns, men’s role being in the public sphere.

“The reading of novels” was after 1750 “customary in the bourgeois strata … now held together through the medium of the press and its professional criticism” (51), Habermas writes. The rapidly evolving press and new habitus in eighteenth-century print culture made Richardson’s career in printing as well as novel-writing possible. Richardson took knowledge from his career in printing and applied it to create the bestselling novel of his time, and one of the earliest if not the earliest at that.

Pamela, a psychological novel, is often read through the lens of affect theory. It is interesting to note that “Certain changes were taking place in the structure of the houses newly built” (44) at the same time that Samuel Richardson’s novel Pamela, the “best seller of the century,” (44) benefited from the depiction of the interior rooms in which Pamela moved; the perspective changed as she moved room to room, house to house–drawn from prison to prison psychologically by her predatorial master, Mr. B. During the timeframe of the eighteenth century in which the domestic and public spheres were blending in new, unheard of ways, so too did the physical and social architecture morph to accommodate it. Pamela, a “domestic,” higher-level house servant, became the wife of a “public” figure, a judge and baronet. As Habermas puts it (when referring to the architectural changing trends), “The line between private and public sphere extended right through the home” (45). In other words, the domestic (private) joined with the public self; because Richardson’s Pamela would not allow her master to possess her sexually, and unofficially (non-publicly) he married her to possess her officially, making a public declaration that she was the same level as him. The equalizing factor elevating Pamela from the servant to the upper/gentry class was her writing skills in her private journals and letters–which Mr. B. made public by sharing them with his sister, and cementing her worth into the family by publicizing her intellect. That this novel was the most popular, during the time of publication of journals, newspapers and criticism, speaks volumes.

“It is no accident that the eighteenth century became the century of the letter; through letter writing the individual unfolded himself in his subjectivity,” Habermas writes (49). He articulates the formation of letter-writing from “just the facts, ma’am” to outpourings of emotion and self-expression when he states:

“In the initial stages of the modern postal service–chiefly a carrier of news reports–the letter soon came to serve scholarly communication and familial courtesy. But even the ‘well worded’ family letter of the seventeenth century … still had its mainstay in dry communication. … In the age of sentimentality letters were containers for the ‘outpourings of the heart’ more than for ‘cold reports’ which, if they get mentioned at all, required an excuse. … The letter was considered an ‘imprint of the soul,’ a ‘visit of the soul’” (49). … Pamela in fact became a model, not indeed for letters, but for novels written in letters” (49).

That changes in news consumerism, novel consumerism, and letter-writing took a turn from seventeenth-century formalism to usher-in nineteenth-century subjectivism leaves the eighteenth century as a pivotal time, a bridge between cold facts and warm subjectivity (which some might consider a fictional construction, fantasy or illusion) of extreme self-reliance/independence as depicted by Emerson and other romantic-era writers/thinkers on both sides of the Atlantic.

During the eighteenth century, Habermas writes, “The relations between author, work, and public changed. They became intimate mutual relationships between privatized individuals who were psychologically interested in what was ‘human,’ in self-knowledge, and in empathy” (50). During this time of expanding empire, sense of self, and blending between fact and fiction in literary genres, the novel supplied material to fulfill that demand. Habermas expounds upon this point beautifully when he writes: “The psychological novel fashioned for the first time the kind of realism that allowed anyone to enter into the literary action as a substitute for his own, to use the relationships between the figures, between the author, the characters, and the reader as substitute relationships for reality” (50). In this rapidly changing society transitioning from one life to dual existences/projections–during the division of the public and the private self–the novel assisted a rapidly changing “public” in their own self-fashioning.

Notes

The following Notes chart eight key steps within Habermas’s Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society which take the reader from a close reading of the broad terms of “public” and “public sphere,” articulating this bourgeois society category from Roman law to the middle ages in Europe in which this division between public and private was not so well-drawn, into its birth in the eighteenth century coinciding with capitalism, news consumerism, consumerism in general, coffee shops, and literary/art criticism to Richardson’s Pamela and the development of the psychological novel it ushered-in. (Yes, of course coffee is intimately and in more ways than one, associated with the production of writing to include the novel, and news papers/consumerism.)

1 Habermas’s introduction starts off with a close reading of the terms “public” and “public sphere” which, though “they fuse into a clouded amalgam,” must in multiple fields of study, including sociology even, continue with broad terms such as “public opinion” (1) due to there is no better way to form to this abstraction.

2 Habermas states, “During the middle ages in Europe the contrast drawn in Roman law between publicus and privatus was familiar but had no standard usage. … Opposition between the public and private spheres … did not exist” (5). In the eighteenth century, “the first visible mark of the analogous polarization of princely authority” occurred in “the separation of the public budget from the territorial ruler’s private holdings” (12).

3 “Until [the end of the seventeenth century] the traditional domain of communication in which publicity of representation held sway was not fundamentally threatened by the new domain of a public sphere whose decisive mark was the published word. There was as yet no publication of commercially distributed news; the irregularly published reports of recent events were not comparable to the routine production of news” (16-17).

4 “The exchange of imported raw materials for finished and semi-finished domestic goods must be viewed as a function of the process in which the old mode of production was tranformed into a capitalist one” (18-19).

5 The press “developed a unique explosive power. The first journals in the strict sense … appeared weekly at first, and daily as early as the middle of the seventeenth century” (20). “Only a trickle of this stream of reports [about Imperial Diets, wars, harvests, taxes, transports of precious metals, and, of course, reports on foreign trade] passed through the filter of these ‘news letters’ into printed journals. The recipients of private correspondence had no interest in their contents becoming public” at this time.

6 “For the traffic in news developed not only in connection with the needs of commerce; the news itself became a commodity … It was therefore natural to increase the profits by selling to more people” (21).

7 “The coffee house not merely made access to the relevant circles less formal and easier; it embraced the wider strata of the middle class including craftsman and shopkeepers” (33). The link between coffee and increase in industrialization, in writing and in capitalism warrants a creative nonfiction essay (32-33).

8 The Globe (the theater) and “art criticism including literary, theater and music criticism” gave rise to “public opinion” (38-41). “As instruments of institutionalized art criticism, the journals devoted to art and cultural criticism were typical creations of the eighteenth century” (41).

Works Cited

Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, translated by Thomas Burger with the assistance of Frederick Lawrence. MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass: 1991.