The Spaces Between Grassroots Documentary ... - Ezra Winton

essential as a foundational work. Fraser provides possibly the best summation of
Habermas’s public sphere, and the passage is worth quoting in full:
It designates a theatre in modern societies in which political participation
is enacted through the medium of talk. It is the space in which citizens
deliberate about their common affairs, hence, an institutionalized arena of
discursive interaction. This arena is conceptually distinct from the state; it
[is] a site for the production and circulation of discourses that can in
principle be critical of the state. The public sphere in Habermas’s sense is
also conceptually distinct from the official economy; it is not an arena of
market relations but rather one of discursive relations, a theatre for
debating and deliberating rather than for buying and selling. (Fraser, 1992,
p.2)
Habermas’s public sphere was predicated on exclusive privileged access, dependent on
gender class, dress, income, etc. In short, the “public” constituted mostly middle-to-
upperclass intellectual white males. Fraser points out that this is not the failure of the
“public sphere” per se, but the failure of Habermas to recognize multiple, diverse public
spheres that existed – and continue to exist – outside his bourgeois example, in what
Fraser calls counterpublics. She identifies several “competing counterpublics including
nationalist publics, popular peasant publics, elite women’s publics, and working-class
publics” (Ibid) Fraser’s account reminds that the presence of a diverse and multifaceted
(multiplicity) public remains instrumental in the struggle to resist domination regardless
of what form.
Cultural spheres that reflect structural inequalities produced by “relations of
dominance and subordination” (Ibid, p.12) are identified in the profit (or commercially-
oriented) sector, as Fraser states:
In this public sphere, the media that constitute the material support for the
circulation of views are privately owned and operated for profit.
Consequently, subordinated social groups usually lack equal access to the
material means of equal participation. (Ibid)
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