Public Culture

The Mass Media, Cultural Identity,

and the Public Sphere in
the Modern World
Nicholas Garnham

A nyone trying to understand the significance of current world developments

is faced by a number of intertwined and conflictual tendencies. The col-
lapse of Stalinist regimes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and the return
to barracks of military regimes in Latin America can be read as the universal
triumph of the model of liberal democracy and, when linked with the widespread
acceptance of a capitalist market economy, can be hailed as “the end of history.”
At the same time, however, the growth of an increasingly integrated global market
and of global media systems appears to be undermining the key locus of democratic
power and accountability within the liberal model- namely, the nation-state.
The development of “identity politics,” including the recrudescence of ethnic
particularism in nationalistic forms and of religious fundamentalism, is posing
a challenge to the normative consensus on which liberal democracy is based. On
the one hand, therefore, one can read current world developments as the triumph
of Enlightenment reason and the end of history or, on the other, as the return
of the repressed and the beginning of the end of the grand narrative of the Enlight-
enment. In this article I attempt to think through some of these conflicts in order
to clarify what is at stake in the attempt to democratize the globe and the role
of an increasingly globalized media system in that process.
The processes of information production, distribution, and consumption have
come to play an increasingly central role in contemporary social theory. In consid-
ering the role and impact of the mass media it is necessary to take the measure
of the debate about modernity and postmodernity that currently dominates social

Public Culture 1993, 5 : 251-265

@ 1993 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.
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252 theory, Modernity refers to that world born of the economic and political revolu-
Public Culture tions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Western Europe. A capitalist
mode of economic production was linked to forms of egalitarian democratic
politics and a rationalist, secular , and progressivist culture. What is essentially
at stake in the debate between modernists and postmodernists is whether the
world is best understood as the further working out of that set of social dynamics
and thus best understood in terms of the conceptual paradigms and value systems
developed within Enlightenment thought to analyze them- in particular class,
nation-state, and universal rationality - or whether a new historical epoch, charac-
terized variously as postmodern or postindustrial or post-Fordist or the informa-
tion society has begun calling for a new set of analytical tools and new value
systems.
The main issues at stake are first ones of political and economic structure-
here the major themes are economic and cultural globalisation and the purported
parallel decline of the nation-state. Since in the modern era the nation-state has
been the main container and organiser of people’s economic and political action
as well as their social and cultural identity, its decline in the face of globalisation,
if it is a decline, poses major questions as to what forms of social structure and
legitimation will take its place across the whole range of social action, economic,
political, and cultural.
Second, the issues involve social structure and cultural identity -here the major
theme is the decline of class as the dominant structural determinant of social
identity in the face of an ever-more-complex social division of labour and accom-
panying social fragmentation. Identity politics replaces class politics, it is argued,
as ethnic, gender, religious, and an ever-more-diverse spectrum of cultural dif-
ferences become the organising and motivating focus for group mobilisation and
action.
Finally, the issues are epistemologicaland ethico-political.Enlightenmentthought
and the politics it produced, it is argued, were rooted in a notion of a shared,
universal human rationality on the basis of which human agents could, through
a process of open, rational debate, reach agreement on the ends and means of
politics, defined as the achievement of human emancipation from domination by
nature and their fellow humans. Postmodernists argue against universal rational-
ism and the political progressivism it underpins and in favour of an irreducible
and inescapable cultural relativism. Postmodernism substitutes pleasure and
difference for reason and universality. Indeed, in some versions of the theory,
the Western secular rationalist ideal is seen as not just one cultural variant among
many, but as an aggressive imperialist variant attempting to impose its false unity
on the rich diversity of cultural difference.

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Modernity, Postmodernity, and the Media 253

Media, Identity, and
The role of the mass media is central to this debate, and this debate is central
Public Sphere
to any consideration of the role of the mass media. The mass media are central
for three reasons. First, a process of open, rational public communication, the
existence of what has come to be known as a public sphere, is integral to the
modernist theory of politics. Second, with the modernist separation of social
spheres, in particular the separation of culture on the one hand from politics and
economics on the other, the question of how people endow their life-world with the
meaning that motivates and legitimates social action in the face of the rationalising
tendencies of the systems-worldof market and bureaucratic government becomes,
as Weber saw, both difficult and central. Third, the mass media, as technological
systems and economic institutions, are a product and exemplar of the rationalising
tendencies of modernity, while at the same time they are seen as one of the crucial
infrastructures of economic and cultural globalisation.
Conversely, the modernity/postmodernity debate is central to debates on the
future of the mass media for three reasons. First, debates about media development
and evaluations of that development are cast in terms of an essentially modernist
theory of democratic politics and the role of open, rational debate within that
politics. Hence, information provision is stressed and entertainment is negatively
evaluated. Second, debates about the impact of current technological develop-
ments in the media mobilise a debate within modernism between those who stress
the liberating potential of technological development versus those who stress its
alienating potential, while at the same time several variants of postmodernism see
communication technology as a crucial determinant of the shift from modernism to
postmodernism. Third, within the debate over the decline of class and the rise
of identity, the institutions of mass cultural dissemination are seen as providing
and structuring the cultural field on which these fragmented and diverse identities
are formed and reformed. Here too the question is whether the increasingly global
flow of cultural goods and services is creating a series of cosmopolitan cultural
identities at the expense of more traditional national or local cultural identities
and, if so, whether or not this is a bad thing.

The Development of Media Technology

At a surface level it is clear that a process of rapid, continuing technological

innovation is taking place, focused around the harnessing of computing to the
processing, storage, distribution,and reception of symbolic forms of all sorts -the
so-called digital revolution. The media are by definition technological constructs.
Their history is the history of the moves to extend social communication through
time and space, beyond face-to-face communication dependent on the natural

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254 endowments of voice and body language, by successively mobilising writing,

Public Culture printing, photography, electrical sound and image recording, and electronic
modes of transmission. The development and exploitation of these technologies
were clearly accompanied every step of the way by changes in social structure
and relations of power. The relations of determination and interaction between
the technical development of the media and processes of social change remain,
however, matters of controversy.
The utopian school of technologically determinist thought on media develop-
ment argues that recent and current developments constitute the third great com-
munications revolution, following those of writing and print. The cheapness,
speed, and flexibility of the new electronic modes of communication constitute,
this school argues, a quantum leap in the human species communicative capacities
that are fully delivering, at last, on the promise of the print revolution by liberating
human beings from the limitations of information scarcity and steadily undermin-
ing the hierarchies of political, economic, social, and cultural power such scarcity
underpinned. These developments herald the end of the era of mass communica-
tion and of the mass society that accompanies it and are ushering in more individu-
alised and pluralist forms of social communication. For this school then these new
technologies of communication are in Ithiel de Sola Pool’s words “technologies of
freedom. ”’
The.dystopian school of technological determinists, on the other hand, argues
that these same technological changes are a further development of the “surveil-
lance society .”*Invoking the image of Bentham’s Panopticon and Foucault’s work
on the disciplinary nature of modern society, this school draws out one of the
implications of modernity expressed by Weber’s notion of the iron cage of rational-
ity, namely, that of a society requiring ever-greater degrees of planned coordina-
tion, both in economic production and social organization. They argue that the
new communication and information technologies are giving ever-greater powers
of surveillance and manipulation to power elites. Computers can monitor network
traffic and the behaviour of production workers and of consumers in ever-greater
detail. Such sophisticated technology is characteristically in the hands of govern-
ment agencies and major corporations, not of the individual citizen or citizens’
group. It enables those agencies to extend both the reach and depth of their control
over workers, consumers, and citizens, who are increasingly socially isolated.
These two strands of technologically determinist thought intertwine with and
often reinforce parallel lines of contemporary social theory and social analysis

1 . See Ithiel de Sola Pool, Technologies of Freedom (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1983).
2. See, e.g., Frank Webster and Kevin Robbins, Information Technology: A Luddite Answer
(Ablex, 1986); Herbert Schiller, Znformation and the Crisis Economy (Ablex, 1984).

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that in their various ways are trying to come to terms with what they see as 255
epochal changes in capitalist industrial society on a global scale. Such strands Media, Identity, and
of thought are variously captured by the terms postmodernism, postindustrialism, Public Sphere
and post-Fordism. As the use of the prefix “post-” indicates they are all in different
ways concerned with the fate of a social form variously referred to as capitalism
or modernity.
The extreme postmodernist variant, as in Baudrillard, claims that we now live
in a world so saturated by mediated experiences that reality itself has become a
simulacrum, that politics and any social theory based on distinctions between
illusion and reality, truth and falsehood, and on objective social interests as a
basis for political action are now impossible. But even less extreme versions of
social theory associated with postindustrial or post-Fordist modes of analysis
now posit a major social transition toward a global social entity and away from
the old organising structures of politics and identity represented by the nation-
state. This line of analysis envisages a more flexible and rapidly changing structure
of economic production and exchange within which consumption has more to
do with status competition through symbolic possession than with the satisfaction
of material needs and within which a much more complex and shifting division
of labour has undermined old class identities and solidarities. Again there are
both optimistic and pessimistic versions of this theory. The optimists, such as
Alvin ToWer, argue similarly to Sola P00l.~They draw on the postindustrial
theories of Daniel Bell that social hierarchies and the associated political hierar-
chies based on the manipulation of physical matter and the scarcity and expense
of information and its distribution will give way to more pluralistic, pleasure-
based social systems centered around the interactive possibilities of computer
networks and the geographically dispersed possibilities of information production
enabled by telecommunication networks. The pessimists, of whom Daniel Bell
is himself now one, argue that these developments threaten to undermine the
social cohesion and discipline on which good government depends.
This debate raises two major issues in considering the future of mass communi-
cations: first, the role of the media in the formation and maintenance of cultural
and social identities and in particular the implications of media globalisation
within that wider process of formation, and second, the relation between current
development in the media and the maintenance and development of democratic
polities. This political theme is closely related to the theme of cultural and social
identities, since what is at stake is the identities that create and maintain social
solidarity and motivate political action.

3. See Alvin Toffler, The Third Wave (Collins, 1981).

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256 Media Globalisation and Cultural Identity

Public Culture
There is little dispute that the cultural sphere has been increasingly absorbed
over the last decade into a global system of capital accumulation. The names
Time-Warner , News International, Bertelsman, and Sony are representative of
the growing power and reach of multinational capital within global cultural mar-
kets. With the opening of the markets of the former Soviet block and China we
are likely to see an ever-larger proportion of the cultural goods and services
consumed by the world‘s population being conceived, produced, and distributed
by such multinational corporations -not to speak of the consumer goods and their
associated advertising that now play such an important role in the creation and
maintenance of cultural identities. The question, however, is how we should
think about and react to this process.
In recent years opposition to cultural globalisation, as expressed in particular
in the debate on the New World Information Order, has been dominated by two
intertwined strands of thinking. One, with its roots deep in the romantic move-
ment, opposes culture, located in the life-world and an expression of authentic
human values, to the capitalist market, located in the systems-world and a carrier
of alienation. The other, the media imperialism thesis, of whom the major expo-
nent is Herbert Schiller, sees the problem as one of class struggle on a global
scale, by which the independent particularity of national and local cultures, and
the possibilities for resistance and alternative social development paths that they
represent, is destroyed by an alien, commercial culture imposed by the commer-
cial and military might of an external power, usually the United States. Such a
position leads to the policy prescriptions of trade barriers against the in-flow of
foreign cultural products and to institutional and financial support for national
and local cultural production.
The opposing view has been one of “free flow of communications” based upon
the universal human right to freely impart and receive communication. This
position attempts to project onto a world stage the Enlightenment view of free
expression as a central defining element of citizenship in a democratic polity.
Its weakness has been its failure to recognise the need for positive communication
freedom and, following the First Amendment tradition, its failure to distinguish
between the rights to free expression of individual citizens and the rights to free
expression for corporate commercial speech.
In Europe, for example, this debate has been focused on broadcasting because
the public service broadcasting model, a model closely associated with the protec-
tion and propagation of national cultures, faced an institutional crisis in the face
of growing commercialisation on the one hand and of a loss of regulatory power
to Brussels on the other. Here the debate has been deeply contradictory, attempting
to mobilise arguments about media imperialism to protect Europe’s so-called

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audio-visual space against U. S. domination while simultaneously attempting to 257

break down national particularities in favour of a free flow of programmes within Media, Identity, and
Europe and the construction of a European cultural identity. Public Sphere
From a historical perspective the main problem with this defense of national
and local cultural identities in the face of media globalization is that it too easily
forgets how recent, and possibly unstable, a creation these identities are. This
is particularly true of nation-states and their associated national cultures. As much
recent scholarship has shown, the global expansion of Western capitalism in the
nineteenth century in fact led to the “invention”of those very entities and associated
ideologies, in the name of which opposition to global cultural integration is now
mounted.
The question at issue here is not whether the process of global cultural integra-
tion can be successfully opposed but in the name of what values the freezing of
a long-term process of social development at an arbitrary point in time can be
justified. In attempting to answer that question it is necessary to distinguish be-
tween questions of cultural identity and questions of political control.
From the point of view of cultural identity it is necessary to ask in whose
name national and local cultures are being defended against globalisation. So-
called national cultures are not only themselves segmented on lines of class and
other markers of social identity and stratification, but they are also structured in
dominance. They represent a hierarchy of cultural legitimation that itself rein-
forces other structures of social power. For this reason, it is difficult to avoid
the conclusion that their defense is more often in the interests of a local cultural
elite than of the population at large. Indeed the political problem stems from the
fact that, insofar as the products of global culture pose a cultural threat, it is
because they have proved remarkably popular. It was certainly the case histori-
cally in Britain that the success of American cinema and then commercial televi-
sion with a much more American style of programming in large part stemmed
from a perception by significant sections of the British working class that the
BBC represented an elite culture from which they were excluded, while American
culture in some sense “spoke to them.” I think more generally the global success
of American cultural forms has its roots in the historic symbolic role of the United
States as the representation to oppressed peoples everywhere of the possibilities
of a materially better and freer life. What perhaps now needs to be asked is how
long that imaginary role can last in the face of empirical reality.
Furthermore, the culturally progressive side of capitalist expansion needs to

4. See,e.g., Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., l%e Invention of Tradition (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1983); Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso,
1983).

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258 be taken seriously, as it was by Marx. Cultural elites have always enjoyed and
Public Culture supported cosmopolitanism. One of the effects of capitalist globalisation and the
commodification of culture has been to undermine established cultural hierarchies
and make such cosmopolitan culture available, not to all, but much more widely.
This is one of the strengths of that version of postmodernism that is seen as a
development of modernism rather than as its opposition. Of course Marx saw
globalisation as progressive because it fostered the development of an interna-
tional proletarian consciousness and because it carried forward the Enlightenment
project of the universalisation of reason.

Universal Rationality as a Cultural Principle

It is important to distinguish the epistemological question of universal rationality

as a central cultural principle from the political question of the relation between
reason and emancipation within the Enlightenment project. Epistemologically
the classic modernist position, shared by Marx and underpinning the doctrine
of free flow, is that reason is a common human characteristic that, once the
doxic hold of traditional cultural particularism is overcome, will lead to universal
agreement on the fundamental values of truth, beauty, and goodness. All humans
will then inhabit and define their identities in terms of a universal culture. The
postmodernist position, derived from Nietzsche, is that cultures are arbitrarily
different and that all values are perspectival. Thus a meeting of different cultures
leads not, as in the modernist view, to a debate and a consensus on universal
values but to a simple power struggle between incompatible value systems. From
this position the cultural implications of capitalist expansion have been the denial
and destruction of cultural difference and the imposition of an arbitrary, Western
set of cultural values in the name of universal reason.
For the purposes of debate over globalisation it seems to me impossible to
take any other than the universalist position. First one can conceive of the problem
of a national or local culture being threatened by a globalising process only from
a universalist position. That is to say, local cultures must contain values that are
considered worth preserving from outside the bounds of the culture itself. For
instance, in the Salman Rushdie affair the Moslems who support the Fatwa are
either claiming a universal jurisdiction for Islam or making a claim for the respect
of their cultural values that itself stems from a notion of cultural value and identity
that is the product of universal reason. In other words, the concept of cultural
difference on which the postmodernist position rests can only be thought from
within a universalist position that can place distinct cultures in relationship to
one another within a common set of valuations, in this case the valuation that
all differences are of equal value. Second, the very phenomenon under discussion,

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globalisation, is a universal phenomenon based on a universal symbol of value, 259

the system of money. Third, a debate is only possible if the participants share Media, Identity, and
some common set of values within which they can say meaningfully that they Public Sphere
understand each other’s positions and either agree or disagree and why. And
finally, and perhaps most important, because the participants in the global cultural
market itself show every sign of happily accepting at least that minimum of
universals on which any shared cultural space depends.

Universalism and the Politics of Globalisation

Clearly the debate on globalisation of the media has a major political ingredient.
It is not just that the concept of national culture and thus of the nation-state is
central to the debate. It is also that the issues are posed in policy terms, both in
terms of the Third World and the New World Information Order debate and in
the European debate over audio-visual policy and European identity. Many of the
participants in the debate are not merely debating cultural values. They are also
calling on political entities, in general nation-states, to act. Here universalism
takes on different implications. If in discussing culture in general universalism
favours cosmopolitanism and leads to suspicion vis-8-vis the claims of particularist
cultures to be defended against globalising tendencies, in the politics of communi-
cation then the terms of debate change. Here universalism points us to the concept
of citizenship and its close relation to an actual power structure and a related
structure of representative accountability. While globalisation calls for the devel-
opment of a parallel concept of global citizenship and representative global politi-
cal structures, at this time the only effective political structures we have are
nation-states, and our actual citizenship identities are national. Within this context
globalisation represents a loss of power and the validation of cultural particular-
ism, whether gendered, ethnic, linguistic, or religious, is in part an expression
of this felt powerlessness, a retreat deeper into the life-world in the face of
system-world colonisation. Thus so long as the dangers of elite domination, of
ghettoization, of intolerance, chauvinism, and xenophobia, are recognised, there
is clearly both a political case and a political demand for the defense of national
and local cultural autonomies against the growing domination of global networks
of cultural production and distribution such that, as a minimum, the citizens of
a polity can talk among themselves about those things that affect them and about
the collective actions they wish to take in response. Indeed one subject for such
discussion should be the extent to which they do or do not conceive of themselves
as part of a common culture and where, in a world of increasing and on the
whole healthy cultural diversity and cosmopolitanism, they wish to draw the
boundaries of that common culture.

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260 The Mass Media and Democratic Politics

Public Culture
How then, as citizens of the world, should we think the relation between the
globalisation of the mass media and the future of democratic politics? I want to
argue that the concept of the public sphere offers the soundest basis for the analysis
and political action necessary to rebuild systems of both communication and
representative democracy adequate to the contemporary world.
With regard to the relationship between the institutionalized practices of mass
communication and democratic politics, I take it as axiomatic that some version
of communicative action lies at the heart of both the theory and practice of
democracy. The rights and duties of citizens are in large part defined in terms
of freedom of assembly and freedom to impart and receive information. Without
such freedom it would be impossible for citizens to possess the knowledge of
the views of others necessary to reach agreements between themselves, whether
consensual or majoritarian, as to either social means or ends; to possess knowledge
of the actions of those to whom executive responsibilities are delegated so as to
make them accountable; and to possess knowledge of the external environment
necessary to arrive at appropriate judgment of both personal and social interests.
It then follows that the key problem is the adaption of this basic theory and of
the ideological formations associated with it to the conditions of large-scale socie-
ties in which both social and communicative relations are inevitably mediated
through both time and space.
This mediation raises two distinct problems. First, so far as the media of
communication are concerned, both the initial theory and subsequent related
ideologies were based on face-to-face communication in a single physical space.
Thus freedom of assembly guaranteed access to the channel of communication,
while the natural human attributes of speech and gesture ensured universal equal
access to the means of communication. Once communication is mediated, these
universal equalities can no longer be guaranteed. Even in a situationof face-to-face
communication it was early recognised that unequal access to the learned manipu-
lative skills of rhetoric could and did influence the outcome of democratic debate.
But in a situation of mediated communication, access to both channel and means
depend on the mobilization of scarce material resources, the distribution of which
is dependent on the very structures of economic and political power that demo-
cratic processes of debate were intended to control.
Second, what has also became mediated is the content of communication and
the subject of debate, or to use Habermas’s terminology, the experience of the
life-world. Our everyday social relations, our very individual social identities,
are constructed in a complex process of mediations.We see ourselves as husbands,
wives, lovers, fathers, mothers, friends, neighbours, workers, and consumers
increasingly in terms of ways of seeing those identities constructed in and through

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mediated communication: soap operas, novels, films, songs, and so on. And we 26 I
often act out those roles using objects of consumption provided and in large part Media, Identity, and
determined by the system of economic production and exchange. Public Sphere
Third, a mismatch has developed between our theories and practices of demo-
cratic politics and our theories and practices of communication. Politics has in
large part adapted to large-scale societies through structures of representation:
political parties, elected representatives, and full-time bureaucratic state officials.
The operation of the media, however, has never really confronted this problem
of representation. Our thinking about communication still remains largely trapped
within a paradigm of direct individual face-to-face communication. This takes
a variety of forms. One version argues that the media, through the market, are
driven by the satisfaction of individual consumer choice. This individualistic
rational-choice model of economic interaction has been widely criticized within
economics for its unreality and, in particular, for neglecting the realities of un-
equally distributed economic power, for concentrating on distribution at the ex-
pense of production, for being static and ahistorical, for neglecting externalities,
and for making assumptions of perfect information that neglect the costs to the
individual or group of information acquisition. Crucially and perhaps centrally
it is also criticised for assuming that consumer preferences are pregiven and are
exogenous to the process of consumption itself. In another version mediated
symbolic forms are seen either as the expression of a single author or as the
objective, and therefore unmediated, reflection of an external reality -the journal-
ist is seen as the witness of an event, a stand-in therefore for the individual
reader’s or viewer’s direct, unmediated experience. Here the problem is that the
complex institutional processes of mediation are ignored and along with them
the problem of the existence of media workers as a distinct socioeconomic group
with its own interests. Yet another version legitimates current technical develop-
ments in communication (based on the convergence of computing and switched
telecommunications) in terms of a desirable move away from mass communication
and back toward forms of interpersonal communication that are seen as inherently
more desirable and liberating.
This last point underlines the fact that while the rights of free expression
inherent in democratic theory have been continually stressed, what has been lost
is any sense of the reciprocal duties inherent in a communicative space that is
physically shared. The social obligations that participation in the public sphere
involves include both a duty to listen to the views of others and to alternative
versions of events and a duty, when participating in debate, to take responsibility
for the effects of the actions that may result from that debate. A crucial effect
of mediated communication in a context of mediated social relations is to divorce
discourse from action and thus favour irresponsible communication.
This question of responsibility brings us back to the central question of univer-

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262 sality. There are two different concepts of universality at stake here. The first
Public Culture is procedural and refers to the minimum set of shared discourse rules that must
constitute a public sphere. Here the question is whether the rationality claimed
for discourse within the public sphere is universal in the sense that neither the
normative nor the validity claims made are culturally specific, but the debate
concerning both ends and means is potentially capable of producing consensus
among all human beings. The second refers to the size and nature of the political
entity of which one is a citizen and with which, I want to argue, the public sphere
must be coterminous. How widely should the writ of the consensus decisions
arrived at among citizens in the public sphere be conceived as running? Are they
to be conceived of as citizens of the world, of the nation-state, of a community,
or what? Finally, what is the relationship, and what could or should be the
relationship, between the particularisms of the life-world and the generalized
rationalizations of the systems-world? My argument here leads me to argue against
the politics of what has been called a pluralist decentred postmodern world and
against the parallel validation of those developments in media technology and
media markets that are moving us toward interpersonal systems of communication
at the expense of mass communication and toward a highly segmented media
marketplace made up of interest specific market niches at the expense of more
generalized media. In brief, I want to argue against the pluralists that it is impossi-
ble to conceive of a viable democratic polity without at the same time conceiving
of at least some common normative dimension. I want to argue that at some level
cultural relativism and a democratic polity are simply incompatible. If one wants
to preserve the notion of cultural relativism, one must at the same time conceive
of a universe of plural, but mutually isolated polities, polities, moreover, that
would have to be autarchic, In my view, faced with an increasingly integrated
global economy, that is no longer a realistic option.

Universality and CuItural Relativism

As regards the question of universality and cultural relativism, there are, I think,
two issues. First, is discourse either actually or at least potentially universal;
can all human beings, as a species characteristic, arrive at a common view as
to the nature and truth of a proposition? Second, are there universal interests?
For me the answer to the second question determines the first. I would argue
that historically both the economic and political aspects of system rationality
have not only become global but are also understood as global by a growing
proportion of the world’s population, in part precisely because of the growth and
spread of global systems of mediated communication. As many recent world
events have shown, all political actors are now playing on a world stage and
employing, in spite of the problems of linguistic and cultural translation, a world

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 Public Culture

language of symbols. Increasingly, as recent events in Eastern Europe, the Soviet 263
Union, and the People’s Republic of China have demonstrated, political actors Media, Identity, and
appeal over the heads of their rulers, via the media, to a nascent world public Public Sphere
opinion. The extent to which, prior to the Gulf War, both Saddam Hussein and
George Bush used, and clearly felt they had to use, CNN in a battle for world
opinion, appealing to constituencies outside their own political realm, was strik-
ing. But, furthermore, if we accept that the economic system is indeed global
in scope and at the same time crucially determining over large areas of social
action, the Enlightenment project of democracy requires us to make the Pascalian
bet on universal rationality. For without it the emancipatory project of the Enlight-
enment is unrealisable and we will remain in large part enslaved by a system
outside our control.
This brings me back to the question of the desirability of a postmodern, plural-
ist, decentred politics. This is crucial to the discussion of the media and the public
sphere, because those social groups identified as potential elements in the shifting
coalitions of such a politics largely exist in terms of group identities created via
the forms and institutions of mediated communication (magazines, radio stations,
record labels) or via consumer taste publics that themselves use, as their badges
of identity, symbols created and circulated in the sphere of advertising.
This raises two issues. First, are these group identities and the individual
identities that subtend them the “authentic” expression of the life-world erupting
into the systems-world and using the products and systems of that world for their
own plural purposes, or, on the contrary, are they a determined symptom of that
systems world? This is the old linguistic conundrum of the relation between
langue and parole. While one can accept the relative interpretative freedom of
the meaning-creating agent in relation to any text and the possibilities of cultural
bricolage, at the same time one must also stress that they are much exaggerated, at
the expense of the recognition of social determinants, in the work of contemporary
media and cultural analysts. How much room for manoeuvre do agents actually
have in a symbolic system within which both the power to create symbols and
access to the channels of their circulation are hierarchically structured and inti-
mately integrated into a system of economic production and exchange, which is
itself hierarchically structured? There is a Left cultural romanticism, increasingly
prevalent in media and cultural studies, that sees all forms of grassroots cultural
expression as “resistance,” although resistance to what is not at all clear. The
problem here is twofold. To accept them as resistance does not avoid the problem
that both the forms and the potential success of resistance can be determined by
the system being resisted. Furthermore, it fails to take account of that element
of misrecognition that Bourdieu, for instance, has in my view rightly identified
as essential to the relatively smooth reproduction of a system of social relations
by interacting intelligent agents.

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 Public Culture

264 This brings me to the problem of rationality in another form. The position
Public Culture on the public sphere argued here can be criticized on the grounds that it overvalues
politics and a particular model of rationalist discourse at the expense of disre-
garding the modes and functions of most media communication, which is nonratio-
nalist and is concerned with psychological and imaginative satisfactions that have
little to do with politics. Such an approach, it is argued, tends to concentrate
analysis on news, current affairs, and documentaries and on the model of the
elite press while neglecting all forms of popular entertainment. There is a lot of
truth i'n this criticism and it points to a real problem, the relation between the
life-world and the systems-world and the media's role in mediating them. I am
not claiming that the properly political debates in the public sphere are only
carried by forms of media content overtly labeled as being concerned with politics.
On the contrary, what I call the entertainment content of the media is clearly the
primary tool people use to handle the relationship between systems-world and
life-world. It is on the basis of understandings drawn from those communicative
experiences and of identities formed around them that we arrive at more rational
and political opinions and actions. The dynamics of this process and the relative
weight within it of rationalized systems determinant as and of the nonrationalized
experiences of the life-world are a crucial and neglected area of media and cultural
studies research. Can we identify cultural forms or types of media practice that
favour the formation of democratic identities and others that undermine such
identities? If such research avenues are pursued they may enable us to chart the
limits of both politics and economics and at the same time to discover the media
forms and structures most likely to foster the development of citizens rather than
mere consumers.
But the central problem remains as follows. What might be the conditions for
democracy in societies such as those of Western Europe and are these conditions
reproducible in other cultural settings around the world; indeed, is democracy
in its classic form thinkable at all outside the problematic of the Enlightenment?
What is the desirable or realisable relationshipbetween the economic system and
the political system?
In short the problem is to construct systems of democratic accountability inte-
grated with media systems of matching scale that occupy the same social space
as that over which economic and political decisions will make an impact. If the
impact is universal, then both the political and media system must be universal.
In this sense a series of autonomous public spheres is not sufficient. There must
be a single public sphere, even if we might want to conceive of it as made up
of a series of subsidiary public spheres, each organized around its own political
structure, media system, and set of forms and interests. Even if we accept the
argument that debate within the public sphere is riven with controversy and in
many instances may be directed at agreeing to disagree rather than toward consen-

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 Public Culture

sus, we are still faced with the unavoidable problem of translating debate into 265
action. If, whether we like it or not, the problem faced has a general impact on Media, Identity, and
us all, for instance, environmentalquestions, then there can only be one rationally Public Sphere
determined course of interventionist political action. This course of action either
has to be agreed to consensually or has to be imposed, whether by a majority
or a minority. If market forces are global in scope, any effective political response
has to be global. The individual citizen or group cannot, except in rare circum-
stances, simply opt out and refuse to play whatever game has been decided on.
In particular we cannot ignore the continuing role of the nation-state as both
economic actor and as, in Giddens’s phrase, a “power container,” that is, as the
structure at the political level within which democratic political action, allegiance,
and identity are still largely ~rganized.~ It is no accident that such states are
associated with a dominant linguistic group, and thus discourse space, and with
national media systems. We are at present, in spite of the recrudescence of
nationalism, witnessing developments that both undermine the powers of the
nation-state, especially economically, and internationalize the media, both its
systems of distribution and its content. How therefore should we envisage the
constructionof a new internationalpublic sphere and parallel system of democratic
accountability?

Nicholas Garnham teaches communicationsand is director of the Centre for Com-

munication and Information Studies of Westminster University (formerly The
Polytechnic of Central London.)

5. Anthony Giddens, A Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism (Macmillan, 1981).

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