In Search of the Private, Public, and Counterpublic: Modernity, Postmodernity, and Postsocialism

Abstract

The aim of this article is to once again analyze the development of the private and public spheres in the three latest stages in the evolution of human society—modernity, postmodernity, and postsocialism—with a focus on the last. The evolutionary nature of social development makes necessary a retrospective analysis, for it would be almost impossible to sketch the contemporary shape of the private, public, and counterpublic in postsocialism without analyzing them in the modern and postmodern world. Indeed, those shapes have served as models and inspiration for Eastern Europeans dreaming for and demanding changes for half a century. Building on Michael Warner's structural intersubjectivist definition of publics and counterpublics—the self-defining and the defining of others as members of them—as the best way of determining the places where counterpublics in postsocialism can be found, and also analyzing their relationship with the rising private sphere and the initially receding but later returning ubiquitous, state-dominated public sphere, I find these counterpublics at the Eastern European intellectuals.

Notes

¹ See for instance Vladimir Tismaneanu, “Fighting for the Public Sphere: Democrat Intellectuals under Postcommunism,” in Sorin Antohi and Vladimir Tismaneanu (eds), Between Past and Future: The Revolutions of 1989 and their Aftermath (Budapest and New York: Central European University Press, 2000).

^*For comments, suggestions and support, I am deeply indebted to Professors Herbert Reid and Theodore Schatzki, as well as to the two anonymous reviewers and the editor of NPS. Robin Rice helped with copyediting. The responsibility for any flaws and misconceptions rests with me.

² Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2002).

³ Analyzing the modernity debate, Rengger notices two senses of modernity: modernity as mood and modernity as socio-cultural form. The former, captured by a definition of William Connolly, has almost a personal character; the latter, referring to Anthony Giddens, is defined as “modes of social life or organization which emerged in Europe from about the seventeenth century onwards and which subsequently became more or less worldwide in their influence. This associates modernity with a time period and with initial geographic location.” Only modernity as socio-cultural form interests this essay. See N. J. Rengger, Political Theory, Modernity and Postmodernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), pp. 39–41; Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), p. 1. A more detailed definition of the socio-cultural form of modernity is given by Turner when he defines modernity as “the consequence of a process of modernization, by which the social world comes under the domination of asceticism, secularization, the universalistic claim of instrumental rationality, the differentiation of various spheres of the lifeworld, the bureaucratization of the economics, political and military practices, and the growing of the monetary values. Modernity therefore arises with the spread of western imperialism in the sixteenth century; the domination of capitalism in northern Europe, especially in England, Holland and Flanders in the early seventeenth century; the acceptance of scientific procedures with the publication of the works of Francis Bacon, Newton and Harvey; and pre-eminently with the institutionalization of Calvinist practices and beliefs in the dominant classes of northern Europe.” Bryan S. Turner, “Periodization and Politics in the Postmodern,” in Bryan S. Turner (ed.), Theories of Modernity and Postmodernity (London: Sage Publications, 1990), p. 6.

⁴ Like the case of modernity, there are several (sometimes competing) definitions of postmodernity. However, for the purpose of this essay, I employ a definition given by Eagleton: “Postmodernity is a style of thought which is suspicious of classical notions of truth, reason, identity and objectivity, of the idea of progress or emancipation, of single frameworks, grand narratives or ultimate grounds of explanations. Against these Enlightenment norms, it sees the world as contingent, undergrounded, diverse, unstable, indeterminate, a set of disunified cultures or interpretations which breed a degree of skepticism about objectivity of truth, history and norms, the givenness of natures and the coherence of identities. This way of seeing, so some would claim, has real material conditions: it springs from an historic shift in the West to a new form of capitalism – to the ephemeral, decentralized world of technology, consumerism, and the culture industry, in which the service, finance and information industries triumph over traditional manufacture, and classical class politics yield ground to a diffuse range of ‘identity politics.’” See Terry Eagleton, The Illusions of Postmodernism (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), p. vii.

⁵ See Christian Joppke, East German Dissidents and the Revolution of 1989: Social Movement in a Leninist Regime (New York: New York University Press, 1995), pp. xii, 1–29.

⁶ Some definitions that try to extend beyond this narrow focus include that of Sakwa, which states that postsocialism “defines an epoch that claims to have moved beyond the ‘extremism’ of ideological politics and its associated ‘metanarratives’ towards a more open and ‘discursive’ type of politics.” See Richard Sakwa, Postcommunism (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1999), p. 1. By the same token, Outhwaite and Ray note that “when we speak of ‘postcommunism’ we use the term … to denote states, but also the wider postcommunist global condition. By the latter we mean the complex political, social, and intellectual transformations brought about by the collapse of the ‘socialist’ alternative to capitalism.” See William Outhwaite and Larry Ray, Social Theory and Postcommunism (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), pp. 22–23.

⁷ John Dewey, The Public and its Problems (Athens, OH: Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 1954), pp. 12–14.

⁸ John Dewey, The Public and its Problems (Athens, OH: Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 1954), p. 15.

⁹ John Dewey, The Public and its Problems (Athens, OH: Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 1954), p. 16.

¹⁰ John Dewey, The Public and its Problems (Athens, OH: Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 1954), p. 17.

¹¹ John Dewey, The Public and its Problems (Athens, OH: Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 1954), p. 18.

¹² John Dewey, The Public and its Problems (Athens, OH: Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 1954), p. 21.

¹³ John Dewey, The Public and its Problems (Athens, OH: Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 1954), pp. 27–28.

¹⁴ John Dewey, The Public and its Problems (Athens, OH: Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 1954), pp. 31–32.

¹⁵ Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 1991), p. 4.

¹⁶ Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 1991), p. 3.

¹⁷ Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 1991), p. 7.

¹⁸ Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 1991), pp. 18–19.

¹⁹ Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 1991), p. 23 (original emphasis).

²⁰ Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 1991), pp. 141–142.

²¹ Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 1991), pp. 142, 146.

²² Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 1991), p. 152.

²³ Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 1991), p. 161.

²⁴ Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 1991), p. 181.

²⁵ Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 1991), p. 197.

²⁶ Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 1991), pp. 208–209.

²⁷ Habermas, op. cit., p. 177; Dewey, op. cit., p. 28.

²⁸ Dewey, op. cit., p. 39.

²⁹ Habermas, op. cit., pp. 227, 229.

³⁰ Dewey, op. cit., pp. 62–63.

³¹ Zygmunt Bauman, In Search of Politics (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 154.

³² Dewey, op. cit., p. 37.

³³ Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Volume I (New York: Vintage Books, 1978), p. 98.

³⁴ Michel Foucault, “Society Must be Defended”: Lectures at the College de France, (New York: Picador 1997), pp. 27, 29.

³⁵ Foucault, The History of Sexuality, op. cit., p. 93.

³⁶ Foucault, The History of Sexuality, op. cit., p. 98.

³⁷ Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” in Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (eds), Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 2^nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), p. 224.

³⁸ Habermas, op. cit., pp. 164–165.

³⁹ Habermas, op. cit., p. 169.

⁴⁰ Habermas, op. cit., p. 175.

⁴¹ Habermas, op. cit., p. 177.

⁴² Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), p. 365.

⁴³ Warner, op. cit., pp. 66, 68.

⁴⁴ Warner, op. cit., p. 112–113.

⁴⁵ Clifford Geertz, The Interpretaion of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973).

⁴⁶ Lisa Wedeen, “Conceptualizing Culture: Possibilities for Political Science,” American Political Science Review 96:4 (2002), pp. 713–728, at p. 724.

⁴⁷ Warner, op. cit., p. 88.

⁴⁸ See Christian Joppke, East German Dissidents and the Revolution of 1989: Social Movement in a Leninist Regime (New York: New York University Press, 1995), p. 6.

⁴⁹ See Christian Joppke, East German Dissidents and the Revolution of 1989: Social Movement in a Leninist Regime (New York: New York University Press, 1995), p. 6

⁵⁰ See Vladimir Tismaneanu, Fantasies of Salvation: Democracy, Nationalism, and Myth in Post-Communist Eastern Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998).

⁵¹ Michael Kennedy, “The Intelligencia in the Constitution of Civil Societies in Post-Communist Regimes in Hungary and Poland,” Theory and Society 21:1 (1991), pp. 29–76.

⁵² Tismaneanu, “Fighting for the Public Sphere,” op. cit., p. 155.

⁵³ Thus, this definition tends to give a sharper distinction of intellectuals from “counter-élite,” which includes a category of professional experts. See Joppke, op. cit., p. 9. Members of such a counter-élite can be found among intellectuals as well as among the nomenklatura; indeed, by recruiting the counter-élite to mid-level administration, the Communist Party bureaucrats institutionalized and instrumentalized it, but did not “enlarge the sphere of democratic participation.” See Peter Ludz, The Changing Party Elite in East Germany (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1972), p. 409.

⁵⁴ Warner, op. cit., p. 158.

⁵⁵ As Michnik points out, the intellectuals living in Communism often embrace nationalism because they “have a complex about their own guilt and weakness, their isolation from their own people.” See Adam Michnik, “Nationalism,” Social Research 58:4 (1991), pp. 757–763, at p. 760.

⁵⁶ Kennedy, op. cit., especially p. 32.

⁵⁷ This is an ironic historical twist, since it was a Marxist thinker, Antonio Gramsci, who envisioned the struggle for hegemony in civil society—a social sphere distinct from both the state and economy—as a tool that could be used by socialists against the bourgeois state. See Sakwa, op. cit., p. 16.

⁵⁸ Rudolph Bahro, The Alternative in Eastern Europe (London: New Left Books, 1978).

⁵⁹ Warner, op. cit., p. 158.

⁶⁰ Jon Elster, Claus Offe, and Ulrich K. Preuss, Institutional Design in Post-Communist Societies: Rebuilding the Ship at Sea (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 24.

⁶¹ Sakwa, op. cit., p. 48.

⁶² While some authors have noticed the cross-class alliances against the communist authorities in Eastern Europe (see for instance Kennedy, op. cit., especially p. 31), so far the regime retentionist class-alliances have attracted much less attention.

⁶³ See Valerie Bunce, “Political Economy of Postsocialism,” Slavic Review 58:4 (1999), pp. 756–793; and Venelin I. Ganev, “The Separation of Party and State as a Logistical Problem: A Glance at the Causes of State Weakness in Postcommunism,” East European Politics and Society 15:2 (2001), pp. 389–420.

⁶⁵ Tismaneanu, “Fighting for the Public Sphere,” op. cit., p. 155.

⁶⁴ See Valerie Bunce, “Political Economy of Postsocialism,” Slavic Review 58:4 (1999), pp. 756–793; and Venelin I. Ganev, “The Separation of Party and State as a Logistical Problem: A Glance at the Causes of State Weakness in Postcommunism,” East European Politics and Society 15:2 (2001), pp. 389–420

⁶⁶ Tismaneanu, “Fighting for the Public Sphere,” op. cit., p. 157.

⁶⁷ Quoted from Tismaneanu, “Fighting for the Public Sphere,” op. cit., p. 154.

⁶⁸ For an argument about the inspiration that Eastern European intellectuals have found in the Western liberal tradition, see John Ehrenberg, Civil Society: The Critical History of an Idea (New York: New York University Press, 1999), pp. 173, 189–190. However, from a different angel, referring to the Havel case, Sakwa notes that “dissent under communism helped preserve values that Western societies had themselves abandoned.” See Sakwa, op. cit., p. 55.

⁶⁹ Referring to Noam Chomsky, “[s]pecialization is no proof of progress; it has often meant displacement of penetrating insights in favor of technical manipulation of little interest.” That definition helps explain the contemporary differences between the highly specialized Western European scholars and the keen social and political involvement of Eastern European intellectuals. Noam Chomsky, Language & Thought (Wakefield, RI: Moyer Bell, 2004), p. 15.

⁷⁰ Volker Heins, “Orientalizing America? Continental Intellectuals and the Search for Europe's Identity,” Millennium Journal of International Studies 34:2 (2005), pp. 433–448.

⁷¹ Tismaneanu, “Fighting for the Public Sphere,” op. cit., p. 155.

⁷² Benjamin Barber, A Place for Us: How to Make Society Civil and Democracy Strong (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998), p. 73.

⁷³ Ralf Dahrendorf, Reflections on the Revolution in Europe in a Letter Intended to Have Been Sent to A Gentleman in Warsaw (London: Times Books, Random House, 1990).

⁷⁴ Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, op. cit., p. 355.

⁷⁵ Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, op. cit., p. 355

⁷⁶ See, for instance, Michael Roskin, The Rebirth of East Europe, 4^th ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2002), p. 108.

⁷⁷ Bauman, op. cit., p. 158.

⁷⁸ Kennedy, op. cit.

⁷⁹ For the effects of markets on artists, creators, and writers, see Jeffrey Goldfarb, On Cultural Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).

⁸⁰ Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of the Mechanical Reproduction,” in Edmund Jephcott (ed.), Reflections, Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings (New York: Harcourt Brace Janovich, 1978), p. 242.

⁸¹ Stalin called Marxist-Leninist writers “engineers of human souls.” Quoted from Jakup Mato, Rinush Idrizi, Vangjush Ziko, and Anastas Kapurani, “Socialist Realism,”  < http://www.revolutionarydemocracy.org/rdv6n2socialreal.htm>.

⁸² Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, op. cit., p. 164.

⁸³ About the reclusiveness of Eastern European intellectuals, see Barrington Moore, Soviet Politics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1951), Ch. 3; Gabriel Almond, The Appeal of Communism (Princeton: Princeton University Press); Martin Malia, “What is Intelligencia?” in Richard Pipes (ed.), The Russian Intelligencia (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), p. 11; J. P. Nettl, “Ideas, Intellectuals, and Structure of Dissent,” in Philip Rieff (ed.), On Intellectuals (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1970), p. 96; Zygmunt Bauman, “Intellectuals in East-Central Europe: Continuity and Change,” East European Politics and Society 1:2 (1987), pp. 162–186; Michnik, op. cit.

⁸⁴ Warner, op. cit., p. 158.

⁸⁵ Tismaneanu, “Fighting for the Public Sphere,” op. cit., p. 159.

⁸⁶ Bauman, In Search of Politics, op. cit., p. 161.

⁸⁷ Tismaneanu, “Fighting for the Public Sphere,” op. cit., p. 159.

⁸⁸ Tismaneanu, “Fighting for the Public Sphere,” op. cit., p. 160.

⁹⁰ Tismaneanu, “Fighting for the Public Sphere,” op. cit., p. 168.

⁸⁹ Tismaneanu, “Fighting for the Public Sphere,” op. cit., p. 167.

⁹¹ Tomaž Mastnak, “The Reinvention of Civil Society: Through the Looking Glass of Democracy,” Archive of European Sociology 46:2 (2005), pp. 323–355, at p. 334.

⁹² Some left-wing authors have spoken out against the corporate and military domination of US universities. Ross, for example, calls for resistance to corporate (private sphere) and military (public sphere) domination in US universities. Although his concern comes from a different socio-political context, it reflects a sensibility on that issue in a country that has already entered the postmodern era. Apparently, those are problems that would plague also the postsocialist society as it begins to move toward postmodernity. See Robert Ross, “The University of the Future,” Social Policy 2:4 (1970), pp. 36–37.