Hi With apologies to the author I am summarising/ making public some arguments from an unpublished / incomplete seminar paper ( "Was there a public sphere in Keralam?Were Malayalam media ever a public sphere?") by Nizar Ahmed.I don't think this such papers should forever remain in my "private' collection!!
1.Public sphere historically is the sphere wheres those who have hitherto been treated as just the addressees of the public authority come to form themselves as a public in order to engage in "a debate over the general rules governing relations in the sphere of commodity exchange and social labor". They are private people in the sense of having not been allowed to enter into decision-making in the public affairs before. Historically, i.e: in the seventeenth century Europe, these people are modern bourgeoisies whose mercantilist enterprises though a privatized affair ( commodity exchange and social labour) are considered to be publicly relevant. " Public" referred to "the functioning of an apparatus with regulated spheres of jurisdiction and endowed with a monopoly over legitimate use of coercion". This public authority was the emerging form of modern state. As against this, there was the private realm consisting of civil society ( realm of commodity exchange and social labor) internal space of families. Public sphere emerged in between these two realms. The newly emerged political realm, the world of letters (clubs and press) , and town-centered realm of cultural products were public spheres. Private realm was truly a modern phenomenon that arose during the mercantilist phase of capitalism. 2.The emergence of modern media is almost simultaneous with the mercantilist expansion of the 17th century in Europe. Postal services and press were there to institutionalize regular contact and communication. Stock market originated in Europe almost at the same time. Initially press mostly served mercantilist purpose. Merchants needed journals and journals needed merchants. By the end of seventeenth century regular supply of news became public. As Habermas notices, "traffic in news developed not only in connection with the needs of commerce, the news itself became a commodity. Commercial news reporting was subject to the laws of the same market whose rise it owed its existence in the first place." 3.The public authority of the new State needed legitimization from the civil society for its mercantilist policies. 4. If news, ideas, viewpoints etc are made known to the readers, viewers or listeners through a medium then it can not constitute a public sphere, even when there is a public who gather around that medium however discretely in space and time. Though it is true that information in the broadest sense of the term is passed through the medium to the people who receive this information, unless and until the people involved engage in these activities of generating opinions, criticism, view points, information etc, the medium cannot be considered as their own sphere. 5.Media as a public sphere is not a rout for one-way traffic. Public is not conceived of as a mute listener. Public is not a mass. Public cannot remain just as an addressee. A public is constituted when it is active, when it can address itself or what it counts as the other. When people are active as a public then media traffic is two-way. 6.When the people are generalised , i.e: when the term is used to refer to the whole, it has two implications: 1)it does not distinguish with in the private, and 2)the motivation for abstracting the public itself should come as a private move.that is, ther is no apriori level of generality at which the public can be conceived.In other words, there is nothing beyond the private, other than the virtual order of abstraction, to be claimed as public. The act of selecting from the private the features that charecterise the public is an arbitrary act. If we theoretically accommodate the private/ public dichtomy we may fail to appreciate the arbitrariness of the public.In fact the modern bourgeoisie created the public in its own image.The language of dichotomy conseals or suppresses this history. The private/ public model is tailored to suit the rational negotiation of interests that would invariably favour the group that has at ityys disposal the technical means, material resources and institutional support.What we call private is a multitude of perceptions, views or images that are mutually incommensuarble and represent different practices that will not lend themeselves to any abstraction.There will, then , be no public.Incommensurable principles of practices leave evry thing social as indeterminate. 7. Who were the public in Keralam where towards the middle of the 19thcentury print media appeared in Malayalam for the first time? This question by itself is highly misleading. It assumed that Keralam also should have a public. The specific historical sense in which the public was thought to have existed in Europe may not have been retrievable in the context of Keralam. -- Dileep R I thuravoor --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Green Youth Movement" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/greenyouth?hl=en-GB -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
