The Public's Fear, or Media as Monster in Habermas, Negt, and Kluge JUirgen Habermas's The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1989)
Oprah. Today's subject of debate: the labeling of records and CD's for imputed obscenity. The two most interesting guests: the infamous Tipper Gore, champion of labeling practices; the infamous Ice T, a rapper whose songs have been targeted by Gore as particularly immoral. In the middle, Oprah, liberal mediator, voice of reason. The "discussion" starts. It breaks down. Everyone talks over everyone else. Debate turns into a tactical game of who can talk louder than an opponent. Audience members join the yelling. Oprah watches confusedly, helplessly, waiting, so it might seem, for a commercial break to arrive to give her a chance to restore some order. Finally, Oprah demands that Tipper be given the floor. Tipper begins calmly, with seeming reasonable liberalness (her own self description is as "liberal" Tipper suggests that the function of bringing all groups on a show like Oprah's can be to open up dialogue, to allow views to be heard and evaluated rationally. She is willing to talk rationally with Ice T. We must get beyond strife, she argues, we must all work together to. She is cut off as the image cuts to the program credits. The show is out of time. The very call for a space of open public discussion is closed by the structural demands of that media form in which most discussion today takes place. Reason reveals itself to be what it really is: a show, a spectacle in which truth is not a content but, ,i la Russian Formalism, a device, an alibi, to get excitement going, to make a scene. One watches really more for the excitement, the good fight, than for the enunciating of reasoned positions within the society. I saw this episode of "Oprah Winfrey" as I was reading Juirgen Habermas's The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, the translation (by Thomas Burger, with Frederick Lawrence) of his 1962 Habilitationsschrift, and the relation of the book and the show seems to me highly symptomatic of the simultaneous relevance and anachronism of Habermas's analysis for cultural study today. On the one hand, the Habermas book seems made precisely to explain what happens to the rational intervention in an age of media dominated by shows like "Oprah." The media here are readable as a degradation, and