The phenomenon of the isolated self is best understood within the more general phenomena of communication struggles, breakdowns, and failures that characterize much contemporary debate.1 While in many ways the isolated self can be described on the basis of theoretical frameworks alone, there is also more to the story. Failures in communication fuel the psychological need for reinforcement and self-affirmation (especially by like-minded others), which in turn lead to a kind of factionalism2 that understands one’s group as pure and righteous, and those whose views differ as at best mistaken, or at worst, evil. The pseudo-confidence accompanying this phenomenon ensures that isolated selves live within their own reality, cut off from those holding different perspectives. It appears that this overall condition has, in part, stemmed from the basic human desire for certainty that seems proportionate to the relative uncertainty of the modern world.3 But this is not all. The transformation of the public sphere of rational-critical debate into a commodity–to be consumed like any other–has led to its own problems and complexities, not the least of which is the role it has played in the emergence of the isolated self. To this, I now turn.
The rise of the public sphere is closely bound up with the development of the printing press, with the published word, and the increased rate of exchange of information.4 One of the earliest examples of this involves the long-distance trade of early capitalism, the traffic in commodities, and news.5 This was followed closely by the expansion not only of a formally educated class but also of general levels of literacy and education within society as a whole. “Society,” writes Hannah Arendt, “is the form in which the fact of mutual dependence for the sake of life and nothing else assumes public significance and where the activities connected with sheer survival are permitted to appear in public.”6 Thus, the rise of rational-critical debate between private persons, indirectly in the world of letters, but also directly in the form of debates carried out in public–in the coffee houses of England, the salons of France, the table societies (Tischgesellschaften) of Germany, et al.–fueled the fires of public criticism.7 This ultimately led to the political transformation of early-modern Europe, in which the eclipse of aristocracy and monarchy steadily began, and ultimately bowed to the rising tide of democracy. “The bourgeois public sphere may be conceived above all as the sphere of private people come together as a public; they soon claimed the public sphere regulated from above against the public authorities themselves, to engage them in debate over the general rules governing relations in the basically privatized but publicly relevant sphere of commodity exchange and social labor. The medium of this political confrontation was peculiar and without historical precedent: people’s public use of their reason.”8 The history and evolution of this overall process has been brilliantly captured by Jürgen Habermas in his book The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, which was not translated into English until nearly thirty years after it was first published. I will quote from it at length in what follows.
The early public sphere of rational-critical debate (in coffee houses, salons, table societies, etc.) was marked by many historically unprecedented characteristics. First, it was inclusive in ways that the court of nobility or aristocracy could never be: “However exclusive the public might be in any given instance, it could never close itself off entirely and become consolidated as a clique; for it always understood and found itself immersed within a more inclusive public of all private people, persons who–insofar as they were propertied and educated–as readers, listeners, and spectators could avail themselves via the market of the objects that were subject to discussion. The issues discussed became ‘general’ not merely in their significance, but also in their accessibility: everyone had to be able to participate. […] The public of the first generations, even when it constituted itself as a specific circle of persons, was conscious of being part of a larger public.”9 Moreover, a “public sphere from which specific groups would be eo ispo excluded was less than merely incomplete; it was not a public sphere at all.”10 Corresponding to this inclusiveness is the fact that the relevant institutions of debate “preserved a kind of social intercourse that, far from presupposing the equality of status, disregarded status altogether. The tendency replaced the celebration of rank with a tact befitting equals. The parity on whose basis alone the authority of the better argument could assert itself against that of social hierarchy and in the end carry the day meant, in the thought of the day, the parity of ‘common humanity.'”11 “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 craftsmen and shopkeepers. Ned Ward reports that the ‘wealthy shopkeeper’ visited the coffee house several times a day, and this held true for the poor one as well.”12 “In the salon the mind was no longer in the service of a patron; ‘opinion’ became emancipated from the bonds of economic dependence. […] There was scarcely a great writer in the eighteenth century who would not have first submitted his essential ideas for discussion in such discourse, in lectures before the académies and especially in the salons.”13 In this new environment characterized by inclusiveness and free expression among equals, the common concerns of the public–which were once the exclusive domain of church and state authorities–became accessible and debatable by the public itself.14
The evolution of the public sphere was led by Great Britain in the seventeenth century, and was later followed by much of continental Europe. With the Licensing Act of 1695, the “elimination of the institution of censorship marked a new stage in the development of the public sphere. It made the influx of rational-critical arguments into the press possible and allowed the latter to evolve into an instrument with whose aid political decisions could be brought before the new forum of the public.”15 Around the same time, “the first cabinet government marked a new stage in the development of Parliament. It was a first step along the long path toward the parliamentiarization of state authority that led ultimately to the point at which the public active in the political realm established itself as an organ of the state.”16 The more active role of the public in governance, in terms of critical public debate, “took the form of a permanent controversy between the governing party and the opposition. […] The opposition, as the party of the country, always appeared to be in the right versus the party of the court corrupted by ‘influence.’ From the early part of the eighteenth century on, it became usual to distinguish what was then called ‘the sense of the people’ from the official election results. […] The ‘sense of the people,’ ‘the common voice,’ ‘the general cry of the people,’ and finally ‘the public spirit’ denoted from this time onward an entity to which the opposition could appeal”.17 “Public debate was supposed to transform voluntas into a ratio that in the public competition of private arguments came into being as the consensus about what was practically necessary in the interest of all.”18
This was the high point of the public sphere, in Habermas’ view. Of particular note is the fact that, at this point in time, the “rational-critical debate of private people in the salons, clubs, and reading societies was not directly subject to the cycle of production and consumption, that is, to the dictates of life’s necessities. Even in its merely literary form (of self-elucidation of the novel experiences of subjectivity) it possessed instead a ‘political’ character in the Greek sense of being emancipated from the constraints of survival requirements.” It was pure, so to speak. It was also non-instrumental, in the sense that–although many of the topics debated would have been practical–the debate itself existed for its own sake. But, like all truly great points in history, it was not to last. “The identification of the property owner with the natural person,[19] with the human being as such, presupposed a separation inside the private realm between, on the one hand, affairs that private people pursued individually […] and on the other hand, the sort of interaction that united private people into a public. But as soon as and to the degree that the public sphere […] spread into the realm of consumption, this threshold became levelled. So-called leisure behavior, once it had become part of the cycle of production and consumption, was already apolitical, if for no other reason than its incapacity to constitute a world emancipated from the immediate constraints of survival needs. […] When the laws of the market governing the sphere of commodity exchange and of social labor also pervaded the sphere reserved for private people as a public, rational-critical debate had a tendency to be replaced by consumption”.20 What this means today is that our relationships with friends and family are more likely to be characterized by consumer activities than informed rational-critical debate.
In other words, the “public sphere in the world of letters was replaced by the pseudo-public or sham-private world of culture consumption.”21 “Since the middle of the nineteenth century, the institutions that until then had ensured the coherence of the public as a critically-debating entity have been weakened.”22 “Today, their place is taken by the popular advertiser-financed illustrated magazines distributed by subscriber services–themselves witness to a culture that no longer trusts the power of the printed word, their official goal of raising the level of book sales notwithstanding.”23 “In the course of our century, the bourgeois forms of sociability have found substitutes that have one tendency in common despite their regional and national diversity: abstinence from literary and political debate. On the new model the convivial discussion among individuals gave way to more or less noncommittal group activities. […] The characteristic relationship of a privacy oriented toward an audience was also no longer present when people went to the movies together, listened to the radio, or watched TV. The communication of the public that debated critically about culture remained dependent on reading pursued in the closed-off privacy of the home. The leisure activities of the culture-consuming public, on the contrary, themselves take place within a social climate, and they do not require any further discussions.”24 As public rational-critical debate has receded, it has been replaced by consumption activities that–while they are social in nature–require no cultivated appreciation of culture and thus eliminate the need to be educated and informed. Rational-critical debate in public has given way to the lifestyle enclave.
Yet so-called rational-critical discussion or debate has not altogether disappeared; rather, it has been transformed. In the twentieth century, so-called “debates were formally organized and at the same time compartmentalized as an element of adult education. Religious academies, political forums, and literary organizations owe their existence to the critical review of a culture worthy of discussion and in need of commentary; radio stations, publishers, and associations have turned the staging of panel discussions into a flourishing secondary business. Thus, discussion seems to be carefully cultivated and there seems to be no barrier to its proliferation. But surreptitiously it has changed in a specific way: it assumes the form of a consumer item. To be sure, at one time the commercialization of cultural goods had been the precondition for rational-critical debate; but it was itself in principle excluded from the exchange relationships of the market and remained the center of exactly that sphere in which property-owning private people would meet as ‘human beings’ and only as such. Put bluntly: you had to pay for books, theater, concert, and museum, but not for the conversation about what you had read, heard, and seen and what you might completely absorb through this conversation. Today the conversation itself is administered. Professional dialogues from the podium, panel discussions, and round table shows–the rational debate of private people becomes one of the production numbers of the stars in radio and television, a salable package ready for the box office; it assumes commodity form even at ‘conferences’ where anyone can ‘participate.’ Discussion, now a ‘business,’ becomes formalized; the presentation of positions and counterpositions is bound to certain prearranged rules of the game; consensus about the subject matter is made largely superfluous by that concerning form. What can be posed as a problem is defined as a question of etiquette; conflicts, once fought out in public polemics, are demoted to the level of personal incompatibilities. Critical debate arranged in this manner certainly fulfills important social-psychological functions, especially that of a tranquilizing substitute for action”.25
To briefly summarize, while at one time the precondition for rational-critical debate in the public sphere was a certain amount of education–of deep reading and reflection, the exchange of letters, public dialog and debate with family, friends, acquaintances and strangers–the “educational precondition” has now come to be prepackaged. In other words the very debates that continue to take place today are largely fueled–not by the same sort of deep reading and reflection or the exchange of letters and personal dialog–but by opinions that have been ready-made to consume.26 And the “consumption” (or adoption) of such opinions takes place within the privacy of ourselves. Where before, the formation of an opinion took place via the public sphere of rational-critical debate during episodic spans of leisure. Today, our leisure moments are spent watching sports or playing board games with each other. Once upon a time it was said that “iron sharpens iron”; now the iron is for sale–and we are told it is already sharp.27
Habermas continues, to “the degree that culture became a commodity not only in form but also in content, it was emptied of elements whose appreciation required a certain amount of training–whereby the ‘accomplished’ appropriation once again heightened the appreciative ability itself. It was not merely standardization as such that established an inverse relationship between the commercialization of cultural goods and their complexity, but that special preparation of products that made them consumption-ready, which is to say, guaranteed an enjoyment without being tied to stringent presuppositions. Of course, such enjoyment is also entirely inconsequential. Serious involvement with culture produces facility, while the consumption of mass culture leaves no lasting trace; it affords a kind of experience which is not cumulative but regressive.”28 In a word, it is hollow. Thus, it becomes clear “how the social-psychological criterion of a culture of consumers, namely, noncumulative experience, goes together with the sociological criterion of a destruction of the public sphere.”29 At the high point of the bourgeois public sphere, “‘people’ were brought up to the level of culture; culture was not lowered to that of the masses.”30 Perhaps the iron for sale isn’t that sharp after all?
The destruction of the public sphere can be further observed in the ratchet-effect that the consumer mentality31 has had on both the content and the dissemination of the news. “Public affairs, social problems, economic matters, education, and health–according to a categorization suggested by American authors, precisely the ‘delayed reward news’–are not only pushed into the background by ‘immediate reward news’ (comics, corruption, accidents, disasters, sports, recreation, social events, and human interests) but, as the characteristic label already indicates, are also actually read less and more rarely. In the end the news generally assumes some sort of guise and is made to resemble a narrative from its format down to stylistic detail (news stories); the rigorous distinction between fact and fiction is ever more frequently abandoned. News and reports and even editorial opinions are dressed up with all the accoutrements of entertainment literature, whereas on the other hand the belletrist contributions aim for the strictly ‘realistic’ reduplication of reality ‘as it is’ on the level of cliches and thus, in turn, erase the line between fiction and report.”32 “What in this way only intimates itself in the daily press has progressed further in the newer media. The integration of the once separate domains of journalism and literature, that is to say, of information and rational-critical argument on the one side and of belles lettres on the other, brings about a peculiar shifting of reality–even a conflation of different levels of reality. Under the common denominator of so-called human interest emerges the mixtum compositum of a pleasant and at the same time convenient subject for entertainment that, instead of doing justice to reality, has a tendency to present a substitute more palatable for consumption and more likely to give rise to an impersonal indulgence in stimulating relaxation than to a public use of reason.”33 This latter quote, it seems to me, is a rather complicated way of saying that the “newer media”, or mass media, is characterized both by ambiguity and shallowness. Hardly the preconditions for rational-critical public debate. Thus, Habermas concludes, the “world fashioned by the mass media is a public sphere in appearance only.”34 Still this world–and it is in many ways the world we occupy today–exercises enormous power.
“Radio, film, and television by degrees reduce to a minimum the distance that a reader is forced to maintain toward the printed letter–a distance that required the privacy of the appropriation as much as it made possible the publicity of a rational-critical exchange about what had been read. With the arrival of the new media the form of communication as such has changed; they have had an impact, therefore, more penetrating (in the strict sense of the word) than was ever possible for the press.”35 The “penetration” that Habermas is talking about, is, it seems to me, demonstrated by the way that radio, film, and television “feed” information to us. In this way, we are in large part passive recipients of the information we are exposed to. While the printed word requires a certain amount of “activeness” on our part–reading allows us to maintain a “distance” from it in the way we attempt to comprehend and understand it; we pause, reflect, consider, reconsider–the passivity associated with the “new media” (disseminated in “real time”) eliminates the “distance” that allows us to reflect. It is always “in our face”, so to speak. Thus, within such a medium “active thought” is greatly inhibited, and if we are not aware of it, can be eliminated altogether. “Under the pressure of the ‘Don’t talk back!’ the conduct of the public assumes a different form. In comparison with printed communications the programs sent by the new media curtail the reactions of their recipients in a peculiar way. They draw the eyes and ears of the public under their spell but at the same time, by taking away its distance, place it under ‘tutelage,’ which is to say they deprive it of the opportunity to say something and to disagree. The critical discussion […] tends to give way to ‘exchanges about tastes and preferences’ between consumers–even the talk about what is consumed, ‘the examination of tastes,’ becomes a part of consumption itself.”36 It should go without saying that, with the advent of the internet, the “new media” has achieved a new crucible of power and influence.
Indeed, the world of the mass media has led to a situation in which “the private activities of reading novels and writing letters as a precondition for participation in the public sphere of the world of letters [have been largely] suspended. Concerning the conduct of the bourgeois reading public it may be considered an established fact that the frequency of book reading in the expanded public of the mass media has been decreasing rapidly. The custom of exchanging personal letters appears to have disappeared to at least the same extent. It is replaced in many ways by the participation in the letter exchanges carried on by the editors of newspaper and periodicals and by radio and television stations with their readership. In general, the mass media recommended themselves as addressees of personal needs and difficulties, as authorities for advice on the problems of life.”37 Again, the historical preconditions of genuine rational-critical debate–deep reading and reflection, the exchange of letters, dialog, and debate–have been replaced by a buffet of ready-made opinions furnished at the table of the mass media.38 “This phenomenon once more sums up the disintegration of the public sphere in the world of letters. The sounding board of an educated stratum tutored in the public use of reason has been shattered; the public is split apart into minorities of specialists who put their reason to use nonpublicly and the great mass of consumers whose receptiveness is public but uncritical. Consequently, it completely lacks the form of communication specific to a public.”39
Thus, the transformation of the public sphere of rational-critical debate into a commodity–especially with the emergence of the internet in general and social media in particular–has led to a situation in which opinions are “consumed”. Consumed, in the sense that they are adopted, taken in and made one’s own. The ready-made quality and scope of the commodification of critical debate ensures that–like many documentary films–the arguments offered are structured in such a way that contradictory evidence or opposing views remain unacknowledged and unheard.40 In other words, they appeal directly to one’s theoretical framework. Similar to the experience of dining at a buffet–in which I choose to eat only what I desire from a wide range of options–the vast “public sphere” of commodified opinion offers exactly what I need to reinforce my theoretical framework and quiet the unquiet within. All else may be safely ignored. It, therefore, provides the ideal environment for the isolated self. At the historic apex of the public sphere of rational-critical debate, active debate was fueled by a multiplicity of educational and cultural preconditions. Furthermore, active debate was itself the precondition of forming an educated opinion. Now, the opinion takes the form of a consumer item. And we fool ourselves again and again into believing that by adopting it we are educated and informed. Inevitably, we encounter others whose views differ from our own. But because we have been seduced by opinions in the form of commodities, we are ill-equipped to engage in genuine rational-critical debate. We seemingly have no alternative but to find refuge in the company of others (people, media, etc.) whose views are the same as our own. But in a world where most of our views have been provided for us in the form of ready-made opinions, how, in fact, do we know that the views we have adopted are actually our own?
Notes:
1. See, for example, my previous essay, The Isolated Self and the Limits of Communication, Part I.
2. Here I refer to the partitioning of society into like-minded groups that are inherently suspicious of each other. Groups of “isolated selves” brought together by their shared isolation and common viewpoints.
3. I mean the general conditions of modernity, such as individualism, capitalism, et al., but also contemporary events, such as those witnessed in 2020 and early 2021.
4. I am speaking of this development in western Europe during the early modern period.
5. Like the written word itself, printing and the printed word seem to first be utilized for commercial purposes. See Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, p 15.
6. See Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, p 46.
7. See Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere.
8. Ibid, p 27.
9. Ibid, p 37.
10. Ibid, p 85.
11. Ibid, p 36.
12. Ibid, p 33.
13. Ibid, p 34.
14. Ibid, p 36. Although Habermas does not here concern himself with America, this emerging public sphere of rational-critical debate in Europe would appear to be equally applicable to the British colonies in America. Differences notwithstanding, the precondition for the American founding and independence would seem to require such a state of affairs.
15. Ibid, p 58.
16. Ibid, p 59.
17. This in many ways mirrors the situation in contemporary America. Of course, election results were “taken to provide an approximate measure” of the sense of the people. The concept of “the sense of the people” is an early instantiation of what will become known as public opinion. The term public opinion was not introduced into Parliament until 1792. See Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, p 64-65.
18. Ibid, p 83.
19. Note that this situation would have excluded many, most notably the poorest in society as well as slaves. In this sense, there has never been a truly public sphere, since it has never had–and perhaps never will have–universal access. This may be possible in small-scale societies, but it seems unclear how such a thing could develop in large ones.
20. Ibid, p 160-161.
21. Ibid, p 160. See also “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” in Dialectic of Enlightenment by Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno.
22. Ibid, p 162. Among many, perhaps the most notable is the family. “For along with its functions in capital formation the family increasingly lost also the functions of upbringing and education, protection, care, and guidance–indeed, of the transmission of elementary tradition and frameworks of orientation. […] To a greater extent individual family members are now socialized by extrafamilial authorities, by society directly.”
23. Ibid, p 163. I would like to point out that The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere was published in 1962. This is true even more so today, albeit in more diverse forms.
24. Ibid, p 163.
25. Ibid, p 166. Emphasis added.
26. In other words what we believe to be our own opinions are merely those that have been fed to us. We did not arrive at them through continued study or critical debate with others–we read a news article and agreed with it. We then parrot the position when the opportunity presents itself–because we feel we should have an opinion on almost everything. But if we are put to the question by someone who is informed and educated on the topic, we quickly realize our folly. We cannot give comprehensive reasons for our position, we don’t know them. Our intellectual life is fueled by a kind of intellectual fast-food. We can either admit to ourselves (and others) that we don’t know what we’re talking about, or we can dig in our heels and succumb to our own pride. The latter is the path of the isolated self.
27. See Proverbs 27:17. Depending on the translation you will find, among others: “As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another.” (New International Version.) “People learn from one another, just as iron sharpens iron.” (Good News Bible.) “Iron sharpeneth iron; so a man sharpeneth the countenance of his friend.” (King James Version.)
28. See Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, p 166.
29. Ibid, p 167. It is important to understand that Habermas‘ understanding of the public sphere is very much classical. Although today we engage in consumer activities publicly, Habermas does not seem to view this as characteristic of a genuine public sphere. See also, Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition.
30. Ibid, p 166.
31. I touched upon consumer culture in my essay, An Introduction to Consumer Society.
32. Ibid, p 170. As I will show in my next essay, cliches are very much a form of sociological propaganda.
33. Ibid, p 170.
34. Ibid, p 171.
35. Ibid, p 170.
36. Ibid, p 171.
37. Ibid, p 172.
38. Although genuine rational-critical debate continues to exist today in many places, it has become relatively rare among the vast majority of people. This would appear to be bound up not only with specialization but also the general phenomenon that people seem to have less and less time and ability to critically engage with each other. See also my essays, A Sketch of The Workaday World and An Introduction to Consumer Society.
39. Ibid, p 175.
40. Contradictory evidence or viewpoints, therefore, do not exist. To be sure, this is not always the case. But it does hold in general and for the most part.