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Re: Monday, April 9, 2007
I think you might get a kick out of the work of this interesting character named Jürgen Habermas. Dude is a German philosopher, works at the Goëthe Universität in Frankfort am Mein, IIRC, and moonlights at Northwestern in Evanston. Wikipedia has a decent article on him, which features a picture of him talking to the (new) pope. Anyway, his work is about the possibilities of a special kind of action he calls "communicative action." He wants to found a "discourse ethics" on the basis of action taken at the level of communication, by which he does not just mean "talking." Rather, proper communicative action is action that expands the efficacy and openness of discourse communities, especially the so-called "public sphere," a phrase he brought to its present currency. Unfortunately, because of reasons best summarized under the name "modernity," the possibilities for such "ideal speech situations" are limited, as the rationalized, systematized world increasingly overlaps with the individual lifeworld. The book you might be interested in in particular is a very old one called The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, in which Habermas sets the agenda he has worked on for the past forty years or more. It's a history. Basically, then, he sets out two poles: First, back in the early eighteenth century, in the (especially London) coffeehouse, Habermas recognizes a place where anyone can go (well, men, anyway, who have leisure time) to read and discuss the vast numbers of tiny, polemical newspapers and broadsheets available for public reading therein. But the structural transformation he describes comes when the newspaper becomes larger and rarer, with only a few papers per city, and each can pretend totality and objectivity, which had not even been a goal of the previous works. Why I bring this up (you might have been wondering): advertisement is key to this shift. Without the invention of advertising around the turn of the nineteenth century, this never happens. I think this is required reading for meditations on the pervasive Google=Internet paralogism. Nick
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