Television and Everyday Life

THE SUBURBANISATION OF THE PUBLIC SPHERE
The appearance of, and the subsequent decline in, or erosion of, the public
sphere within capitalist society, and of the media’s role in both its rise and fall,
are subject to much debate. It is clearly not going to be possible to address all
the issues or provide a fully satisfactory account here. Nevertheless the
continuing status of the public sphere: a culturally and politically defined public
space where the democratic process, the to-ing and fro-ing of informed and
enlightened discussion, can be pursued unhindered and unfettered by the forces
of the State or the compromises of the market, is of great importance both at a
macro and a micro political level. At issue, among other things, is the quality
of the politics of everyday life, of broadcasting and television’s role,
contemporarily, in providing a framework for that politics, and above all, from
the point of view of my argument here, of the quality of suburban politics, and
the politics of the suburb, that can be seen to have emerged during modern
times. At issue too is the nature of privacy, and of privatisation, for the public
and the private can only be defined in relation to each other. Public and private
shift their character and their balance as social, cultural, and economic changes
affect the institutionalisation and dynamics of power at both a structural and a
quotidian level.
The starting point for any discussion of the emergence and supposed decline
of the public sphere in capitalist society—for it is argued that the public sphere
is a specific product of capitalism—must be the writings of Jürgen Habermas.
Habermas (1989) describes the emergence, initially in eighteenth-century
Britain, of what he calls the public sphere as a direct consequence of the material
and cultural freeing of the bourgeoisie with the advance of capitalist society.
This new class gained the time and the material resources to engage ‘in

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Television and Everyday Life
public’—in literature, in newspapers, in coffee-house discussions—with the
world of affairs: their affairs. This public sphere occupied a space between the
increasing domination of civil society by the State and the private realm of
economic and personal relations, the latter of which became progressively
privatised and withdrawn. The public sphere, or at least Habermas’ idealisation
of it, provided both the opportunity and the resources for the involvement of
the private individual (all private individuals in principle) to engage in a politics
of rational discussion, a politics in which the business of the State (and the
state of business) could be subjected to analysis and debate. Central to the
vitality of such a public sphere was the newspaper, originally a presenter of
information, increasingly, during the eighteenth century, a forum for the
expression of opinion.
Habermas argues that this brief flowering of the public sphere began to
decline as the other institutions created by capitalism assumed greater
dominance. The increasingly interventionist State, which took on more and
more of the traditional responsibilities of civil society (welfare, education)
and the increasing power of the market and of monopoly capitalism, squeezed
the public sphere into insignificance. The commercialisation and ‘massification’
of culture, the control of information, the profound inequalities of access to
public fora were the result. Citizens became consumers; the public sphere
became refeudalised. The mass media, at first the essential support for free
public debate, became the instruments of its suppression, as ‘new techniques
were employed to endow public authority with the kind of aura and personal
prestige which was once bestowed by the staged publicity of the feudal courts’
(Thompson, 1990, 113). The private citizen, the individual actor on the public
stage, was relegated to the wings of a uniform and isolated domesticity:
The shrinking of the private sphere into the inner areas of a conjugal family
largely relieved of function and weakened in authority—the quiet bliss of
homeyness—provided only the illusion of a perfectly private personal
sphere; for to the extent that private people withdrew from their socially
controlled roles as property owners into the purely ‘personal’ ones of their
noncomittal use of leisure time, they came directly under the influence of
semipublic authorities, without the protection of an institutionally protected
domestic domain. Leisure behaviour supplies the key to the floodlit privacy
of the new sphere.
(Habermas, 1989, 159)
The phrase ‘floodlit privacy’ in this quotation perfectly captures another aspect
of suburban life to add to Williams’ ‘mobile privatisation’. The suburb is
reinforced as a social and cultural oxymoron. In this case it is manifested,
architecturally in the dialogicality of the picture window, and politically, less
in terms of a focus on the politics of the State than on the politics of status
(Veblen, 1925).

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The suburbanisation of the public sphere
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There are a number of obvious criticisms of Habermas’ characterisation
of the public sphere, as well as a number of strengths. Its strengths, as
Garnham (1986) points out, are those of insisting on the importance of a
separate sphere distinct from the economy and the State, and the correlative
importance of a strong and independent media, which can provide the
essential support for a significant democratic politics. Its weaknesses are
historical and sociological. The public sphere was never public in the sense
that all members of the public had equal access to it. It was restricted, for all
practical purposes, to bourgeois males. It is also individualistic in that it
presumes both that the individual has full access to all the relevant
information and debates, and equally that there are no mediating institutions
within the public sphere whose task it is to manage or to control the
movement of information within it (ibid.).
More substantially, however, Thompson (1990) challenges not just the
historical accuracy, but also the present relevance of the Habermasian position.
Whereas others (e.g. Elliott, 1982; Lodziak, 1986) have taken it as sufficient
to provide the basis for a thoroughgoing critique of the ‘politics of consumerism’
within modern society, Thompson suggests that Habermas has not just got the
history wrong, but that the present media environment provides for the
continuing sustenance of the public sphere, though not in quite the terms that
Habermas defined it. Since Thompson’s arguments are important for my own
position in relation to the suburbanisation of the public sphere, I will briefly
review them.
He makes four points. The first is that Habermas’ notion that the
commercialisation of the mass media has led to a refeudalisation of the public
sphere is belied by the contradictions embedded in modern communication, in
which increasing visibility, multiplicity of channels and a better informed
electorate, offer both increasing reach for the communicators but also increasing
possibilities for resistance among their audiences. Second, Thompson
(following much of recent media scholarship), suggests that Habermas
underestimates the active engagement of media consumers, treating them as
entirely vulnerable to the media’s influence, and equally underestimating the
new kind of fragility which political processes acquire in the era of mass
communication.
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Third, Habermas misunderstands the nature of ideology,
seeing it exclusively (at least in his early work) in terms of false consciousness
and the depoliticisation of everyday life. Finally the relevance of Habermas’
version of the public sphere to contemporary society comes under scrutiny.
Here Thompson suggests that Habermas’ notion of the public sphere was
grounded exclusively in an understanding of print-based culture. Electronic
means of communication have radically altered the conditions under which
public debate takes place. In addition, the complexity of national and
international politics have made participatory opinion-formation at that level
impossible, though participatory democracy at other levels can be maintained.

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Television and Everyday Life
Thompson attempts to sustain a notion of the public sphere despite the
significant changes which he notes have taken place in the political, cultural
and technological life of modern society:
Television and other media have generated a new type of public realm which
has no spatial limits, which is not necessarily tied to dialogical conversation
and which is accessible to an indefinite number of individuals who may be
situated within privatized domestic settings. Rather than sounding the death
knell of public life, the development of mass communication has created a
new kind of publicness and has transformed fundamentally the conditions under
which most people are able to experience what is public and participate today
in what could be called a public realm.
(Thompson, 1990, 246)
The public sphere alive or dead? Participation real or imagined? A new kind of
publicness or an old kind of pseudo-publicness? These questions are not easily
resolved and Thompson does not resolve them. He does not, above all, identify
what that public realm consists of, nor does he consider what kind of power
can be exercised within it.
What remains at issue is the compatibility or incompatibility between the