Habermas Is Dead (He's Not, But Still)

Jürgen the Bear

 By Kerry Mitchell 

Ever since Jürgen Habermas, the public sphere has been pretty boring. I’m not talking about the drama that plays out in the public sphere. That drama can be as exciting as anything that happens. But the public-ness of the drama, the way in which the drama is given shape as public as opposed to private, that is a boring process. To be clear, I’m not talking about the process being boring. One can be excited to look at how that process works or not. Rather, I’m talking about the process doing the boring—not being boring, but boring. I’m talking about the process of making public as a process of boring.

Often such a line of thought highlights the civility of public discourse, the rationalization and sanitization of its subject matter, the seriousness and normalcy that it lends. Of course one could counter that making public often sensationalizes, shocks, or calculatingly manipulates to generate interest. To one who would argue in such a way I say, Jesus, God! Are you completely fucking stupid?

Notice how the counter to the counter does not bore. It excites with outrage, transgression, aggression, not so much appealing to the passions as slapping them—completely inappropriate for the public sphere. To employ such vulgarity does not bring the question into the public in an operable way. One can only leave those who utter such vulgarity to work out whatever issues they have with whoever volunteers to engage them further. But whatever and whoever are not the public. The public is everything and everybody. Vulgar exchanges are for private disputes, and their place in public is transgressive: the ones who shout death threats at each other beneath one’s window on an early morning city street. No, the proper counter to the counter, the counter to the counter made public, made appropriate for the public, belonging to the public, is the one that says yes, of course, the process of making public also excites, but within limits, is a balance of sanitization and excitement, but weighted more toward one side than the other.

Now that’s boring. Or more precisely, that bores. In the tradition of public discourse any tension that arises is enveloped and mitigated in a self-replicating and self-mollifying series of argumentative involutions. All of which brings me to the Badlands National Park Twitter Feed. 

Is Donald Trump a Human Being?

By Finbarr Curtis

Donald Trump will likely win tonight's presidential debate against Hillary Clinton. By win I do not mean that he will make more cogent arguments or demonstrate a superior grasp of political reality. He will certainly not do that. Rather, Trump can consider his performance a victory if he can convince 2-4 percent of American voters that he is merely plausible.

The reason he needs only to be plausible is that his critics have warned of his monstrosity. Commentators have struggled to find a language that can communicate the outlandish quality of the preternatural threat he poses to American democracy. It seems unreal that someone can insult the disabled and prisoners of war, can make overtly bigoted statement after statement, can believe something as extreme as birtherism and disbelieve something as obvious as global warming, can funnel campaign donations to his own businesses, can pattern his campaign after a fantastically corrupt Ukrainian oligarch who made no pretense of seeking power for anything other than his own enrichment, and can inspire a general atmosphere of fascist violence throughout his campaign performances. We are repeatedly reminded that this is not normal.

But this begs the question of what one means by normal. After each time Trump says or does something that goes too far, you think this cannot be happening. But it does happen. The news cycle goes on, and you get used to it. What was previously shocking then seems like no big deal when the next outrageous event happens. All of this is either terrifying or thrilling depending on who you are. It is possible that the Trump phenomenon is as unbelievable to Trump's supporters as it is to his detractors. He inspires such messianic devotion because he redeems people who felt like they had to code or conceal their racism and sexism, and now cannot believe their own freedom to speak their minds openly without shame or apology.

Newt Gingrich Does Not Want to Party Like It's 1899

Newt Gingrich, Innovator

by Finbarr Curtis

It's not clear why Newt Gingrich hates the 1890s so much.  Maybe he's still seething over the decade's proliferation of agrarian populists and urban progressives.  Maybe he has been too busy to revise speeches he wrote in the 1990s that employed a familiar rhetorical trope of attacking policies by denouncing them as a century out of date.  Whatever the sources of Gingrich's 1890s loathing, his love letter to innovative education focuses mostly on how much the schools sucked.  As he explains:

Teachers lecture, students sit and some listen. Class happens at the same time, with the same material, and at the same pace for everyone. This is an 1890s model of education -- teaching to the "average" student, rather than the individual.  In an age when most information and knowledge is transmitted digitally and is increasingly personalized—think about how Netflix, Pandora, Twitter and Facebook work— we should be able to do much better than that.

Well, I'm thinking about Netflix, Pandora, Twitter, and Facebook, and Gingrich has a point that these work nothing like education in the 1890s.  Now that I think about it, they work like no model of education anywhere at anytime because these corporations do not do the difficult work of teaching.  Some of you might object, of course, that a lot of important conversation happens in these spaces.  You could probably get pretty snarky and note that the only reason you are reading this piece right now is that you followed a facebook or twitter link posted by yours truly.  And you'd be right.  People can make all sorts of interesting uses of different media.  What Gingrich cites as worthy of emulation, however, is the most anti-intellectual quality of Netflix, Pandora, Twitter, and Facebook: the apocalyptic promise of "increasingly personalized" knowledge.  While we have access to more information than in the 1890s, our social media habits sort through all this to help us live at the center of our own mediated worlds.  By using your tastes to shape what you see, networks of surveillance and distribution bring you information in familiar narratives that confirm your biases, assumptions, and prejudices.  The leviathan is you.