Mediating vulnerability: cosmopolitanism and the public sphere (original) (raw)

2013, Media, Culture & Society

The public sphere: between cosmopolitanism and nationalism Born out of the 18th-century culture of sympathy, the public sphere assumes that all humans are interlocutors in an equal conversation of shared concerns (Johnson, 2001). Initially socialised in the private sphere of emotional commitments, these interlocutors enter the public domain, craving recognition from others as an acknowledgement of the bonds of humanity that bring them together into a collective body (Habermas, 1989). Similarly, the Kantian view of cosmopolitanism as the universal condition of peaceful coexistence is predicated upon free discourse among rational human beings who, through this very discourse, reveal the bonds of humanity that bring them together as a species: 'When Kant called on Enlightenment thinkers to address the "world" or to be men of the world', Calhoun says, 'the public sphere was essential to its definition; the very unity and dignity of the human species was revealed, in part, by its capacity to join in public discourse' (1992: 18). Yet, simultaneously, the public sphere emerged within a Westphalian global order that, far from imagining all humans as equal interlocutors, divided the world into hierarchies of nation-states, where some were more equal than others. Rather than a cosmopolitan exercise in rational discourse, the public sphere was instead nationally bound, consisting of 'the tasks of criticism and control which a public body of citizens informally … practices vis-à-vis the ruling structure organized in the form of a state' (Habermas, 1974: 49 emphasis added). Evidently, this national body of citizens is not the world at large but the specific world of a privileged reading public that engaged in free