Limits don’t uniquely produce exclusions, those are external features of society that aren’t unique to debate and that voting aff can’t solve—using a limited topic to develop provisional consensus through reciprocal and fallible argumentation is a better method of exposing how those exclusions function

Normatively then, the Habermasian (or deliberative)4 public sphere refers to the communicative space constituted through rational-critical deliberation over practical problems, deliberation that leads to critically (in)formed public opinion, which in turn enables the democratic scrutiny and guidance of official decision-making processes. The criteria for rational-critical deliberation are understood to involve inclusive, reasoned, reciprocal, reflexive, sincere, and coercion-free argumentation (Habermas, 2005, 2006). Communicative rationality is supported by open information flows (publicity), motivated by the aim of reaching understanding and agreement (public opinion), and moved toward this end by the “forceless force of the better argument” (Habermas, 2005, p. 384). Claims and agreements are here contingent since every claim can be met by a “no” and every deliberatively achieved agreement can be challenged and potentially undone. It is important to note that “public” here refers to the mode, rather than the content or place or medium, of communication. Thus, the public sphere may come into existence, for instance, through face-to-face or technologically mediated argumentation between individuals and within informal groups, or through the more organized discussions found in civil society associations and explicitly political organizations, or through the reflection and debate engendered by the whole range of mass media forms and contents—“news, reports, commentaries, scenes and images, and shows and movies with an informative, polemical, educational, and entertaining content” (Habermas, 2006, p. 415; see also Habermas, 1996a, pp. 373–374).

Habermas does not see rational-critical deliberation, which he also refers to as “communicative rationality,” as some sort of metaphysical ideal, but rather argues that it can be identified as an idealization implicit in the “inconspicuous daily routines of asking for and giving reasons”: It is “built into communicative action” (Habermas, 2006, p. 413). In other words, the set of public sphere criteria listed above are, and must be, tacitly presupposed by anyone engaging in any practical argument. As such, these criteria are conditions of possibility for such engagement, “constitutive of the game of argumentation” (Habermas, 2005, p. 385). These presupposed criteria, Habermas (1984) argues, can be “rationally reconstructed”—using the “presuppositional analysis” of “formal pragmatics”5—from out of everyday arguments, illuminating a universal public sphere norm that sets out “nonarbitrary standards for the identification of communication pathologies” (Habermas, 2006, p. 416). That is, the implicit idealization provides a critical ideal by which to evaluate the deliberative quality of actual public sphere communication and thereby identify communicative “distortions” or “deviations” and associated “moments of inertia,” the latter resulting from a “scarcity of those functionally necessary resources on which processes of deliberative opinion- and will-formation significantly depend” (Habermas, 1996a, p. 326, drawing on Bernhard Peters' work). Such identification of limits in turn provides the basis for reflection on the cultivation of more rational-critical deliberation. The aim of such reflection is not to set out strict procedures for deliberation, as is required in formal decision-making (on this see Habermas, 1996a, pp. 302–308), but to identify the “functionally necessary” sociopolitical resources (or positive conditions) needed to enhance—in quality and quantity—rational-critical deliberation in everyday practical argumentation (Chambers, 1996; Habermas, 1996a, p. 325). Specific resources will depend on context, but according to Habermas (1996a, 2006; see also Carleheden & Gabriëls, 1996) they will, in general, include: (first) a mass media system regulated in relation to the idealized criteria, (second) a network of autonomous civil society associations supporting communicative reasoning and public opinion formation, the emergence, reproduction, and influence of which depend on (third) “a liberal-egalitarian political culture sensitive to problems affecting society as a whole” (Habermas, 1996a, p. 488), which, in turn, requires (fourth) social rights to the provision of sustainable living conditions, and (fifth) a population accustomed to (universal) freedom and versed in critique.

This deliberative public sphere norm, as already noted, is reconstructed from presuppositions of actual argumentation. However, there is always a gap between idealization and practice: “due to their idealizing content, the universal presuppositions of argumentation can only be approximately fulfilled” (Habermas, 1996a, p. 178, see also pp. 323–326). As an idealization, rational-critical deliberation (communicative rationality) is not burdened by the demands and impediments of everyday communicative practice, which means the latter always falls short of the idealized presuppositions that are made. Habermas accepts the impossibility of realizing the always-already-presupposed idealization of communicative rationality: “the public sphere ideal is not perfectly reachable” (Habermas 1992b, p. 477). This impossibility is not just due to empirical “distortions” (which will be discussed further in the next section), but also to logical limits: Responding to his critics,6 Habermas has, particularly in recent times, argued that communicative rationality, and thus the deliberative public sphere norm, cannot be understood as an “end state,” a “final stage which can be realized in time” (Habermas as cited in Carleheden & Gabriëls, 1996, p. 10), because if realized it “would make all further communication superfluous” (Habermas, 1996b, p. 1518). In other words, the full realization of communicative rationality would mean the end of communication, and human history, as it would eliminate those negative social conditions that make communication in social life necessary, “conditions such as inadequate information, interpersonal misunderstandings, lack of insight, and so on” (Cooke, 2004, p. 417, referring to Albrecht Wellmer's work). By blocking the realization of fully rational-critical deliberation, these negative social conditions ensure that no actual deliberation or agreement can ever be fully rational, which invites challenges to any democratic process and agreement (including over deliberative criteria), and calls for ongoing argumentation. Thus, in parallel with Derridian logic, the “unavoidable moments of inertia” (Habermas, 1996a, p. 326) of everyday communication, along with the idealized criteria of communicative rationality that they limit, are conditions of possibility and impossibility of fully realizing in actual argumentation the deliberative public sphere norm.

This deliberative conception of the public sphere is seen by advocates as radically democratic—in the sense of being based solely on the will of those affected by a dispute—for a number of reasons: First, because it conceives of a rational-critical public and associated public opinion that can scrutinize, inform, and hold publicly accountable political decisions; second, because it sees all instituted processes and decisions as open to contestation by any excluded voices; and third, because it understands the criteria for guiding and judging the deliberative practice of participants as immanent to these practices.

However, poststructuralist-influenced critics, including those focusing on contemporary communication systems (e.g., Nguyen & Alexander, 1996; Poster, 1997), see the Habermasian public sphere conception failing to be as radically democratic due to its not taking full account of exclusion, both exclusion in everyday deliberative practice and exclusion resulting directly from the conception's formulation. I will now outline this critique, and examine how Habermasians have responded and might further respond to it.

The Habermasian public sphere conception and exclusion

Poststructuralist-influenced critics, generally speaking, argue that by promoting a universal rational norm as the basis for public sphere communication, Habermasians make (at least) two fundamental mistakes with respect to exclusion. First, they assume the possibility of the eliminability, or near eliminability, of exclusions in actual argumentation, so that given the right conditions we could approximate (if not fully reproduce) communicative rationality, which underestimates the pervasiveness of power and the extent of exclusions in everyday communicative interaction (e.g., Flyvbjerg, 2000; Shabani, 2003). Second, and more widely articulated than the first critique, the Habermasian public sphere norm is itself seen as exclusionary, despite its democratic aims. Poststructuralist-influenced critics, paralleling feminist concerns (e.g., Dean, 1996; Fraser, 1997; Gould, 1996; Young, 2000) and rhetorical studies critique (e.g., Huspek, 2007a; Phillips, 1996), argue that the deliberative public sphere criteria, which are supposed to define democratically legitimate communication and to differentiate between reasoned argumentation and coercion, actually support domination and exclusion (e.g., Coole, 1996; Devenney, 2009; Lyotard, 1984, pp. 65–66; Mouffe, 1999, 2000; Rabinovitch, 2001; Villa, 1992). In order to be considered legitimate deliberators, subjects must come to internalize the rules of the particular form of communication deemed to be the universally valid form of democratic engagement or be excluded from the public sphere. As such, the Habermasian public sphere conception is seen as an exemplary form of what critical theorists would refer to as ideology (a universal claim obscuring its particularity) and of what Foucault showed to be the operation of modern disciplinary power—the deliberative public sphere norm relying on the subjugation of selves through subjectivation, a normalizing that constitutes subjects as “rational-critical” communicators (Villa, 1992, p. 715). As a result, participants who have internalized modes of communication closer to what is determined valid are advantaged over others. That is, in order to be equally included, some participants must be disciplined more than others—those more accustomed to rational-critical deliberative forms of communication—so as to be capable of reproducing the idealized deliberative mode, disciplining that involves the exclusion or suppression of those voices judged “illegitimate” (irrational, strategic, private). The problem for poststructuralist-influenced critics here is not with exclusion per se, as they see norms as necessarily exclusionary, but with such exclusion being unaccounted for in relation to democratic communication and in fact obscured by the claim to universality.

I will briefly outline how Habermas and Habermasians have responded and might further respond to these two interrelated lines of critique. In response to the first line of critique—that the Habermasian public sphere conception does not adequately account for exclusions in practice—I have already noted how Habermas not only understands the public sphere norm, despite being reconstructed from everyday communicative interaction, as being logically impossible to fully realize in practice but sees “moments of inertia” as ever-present and necessary features of actual deliberation: They block the full realization of communicative rationality and yet make communication necessary in the first place. These moments of inertia include “illegitimate” exclusion: Any deliberative practice will involve exclusion, not just “legitimate” exclusion of “undemocratic” elements but exclusions defined as “illegitimate” with respect to the idealization of communicative rationality. Such “illegitimate” exclusions result from: “unequal distribution of attention, competencies, and knowledge” (Habermas, 1996a, p. 325); strategic manipulation of various sorts, including bribes, threats, or violence (Habermas, 1996a, pp. 307–308); and systemic coercion—state and corporate interests and their instrumental media of money and power colonizing more and more areas of life including those that should, for a healthy democratic society, be coordinated by public opinion derived from rational-critical deliberation (for an overview of the forms of distorted communication identified by Habermas, see Huspek, 2007b, pp. 827–830). In relation to systemic coercion, Habermas has been particularly critical of the instrumentalization of communication media: How the potential of the mass media to support rational-critical deliberation, with maximum inclusion of voices, is continually thwarted by system colonization, and particularly the “intrusion of the functional imperatives of the market economy in the ‘internal logic’ of the production and presentation of messages” (Habermas, 2006, p. 422).

As well as exclusion resulting from such explicitly “distorted communication,” Habermasian theory also considers the exclusionary effects of culturally specific (lifeworld) contexts. The interpretation and application of public sphere criteria as well as the validity and strength of arguments will always be contextually affected and historically specified (Habermas, 1992b, p. 477; 1996a, p. 324). As a result, what comes to be defined as “legitimate” deliberation will be colored by taken-for-granted meanings, leading to some voices being illegitimately (according to the deliberative public sphere norm) valorized over others, with the illegitimate marginalization or exclusion of these other voices.

Thus Habermas (2006) and adherents are fully aware of how public spheres in practice are “dominated by the kind of mediated communication that lacks the defining features of deliberation” (p. 414), “the kind of political communication we know goes against the grain of the normative requirements of deliberative politics” (p. 420). However, as we have seen, for Habermasians it is not just culture and power that determine communicative practice, as some poststructuralist-inspired critique suggests. Rather, presuppositions of communicative rationality are understood as implicit in every argument, providing a countervailing force to distorted communication and the basis for a postmetaphysical critique of exclusion and “a potential for self-transformation” (Habermas, 1992a, pp. 419–429; 1992b, pp. 476–479; 1996a, p. 374, 2006, p. 419; see also Benhabib, 1996; Chambers, 1996; Cooke, 1994). We can see this historically in the labor and women's movements, as Habermas (1996a) points out, which have been able to draw on “the rights to unrestricted inclusion and equality built into liberal public spheres . . . in order to shatter the structures that had initially constituted them as ‘the other’ of a bourgeois public sphere” (p. 374). The central purpose in reconstructing the public sphere idealization of rational-critical deliberation, as already outlined in the previous section, is to illuminate this basis for critique and transformation. Yet, poststructuralists see such a universal norm as in itself producing exclusions, exclusions that are not only unaccounted for but are, in fact, obscured by the claim to universality. This is the second line of critique outlined above.

In reply to this second line of critique, it must first be noted that Habermasians accept that there is a necessary constitutive exclusion involved in the deliberative public sphere conception. In fact, any conception of democracy must involve normative claims about what democracy is and is not, including what is acceptable as democratic communication and what is not, drawing a line between reasoned argumentation and coercion, democratically “legitimate” and “illegitimate” exclusion. It is simply not possible to call on democracy and escape invoking a norm of democratic communication with associated exclusions. The question is then whether we can, as Habermas claims, reconstruct from everyday communicative practice a universal norm of the public sphere that distinguishes between democratically “legitimate” and “illegitimate” exclusion.

According to Habermas (1992a), not only can we reconstruct such a norm, but the public sphere norm thus identified is not normalizing in the disciplinary and exclusionary sense suggested by the poststructuralist critique. Of course, any norm will require certain behavior from participants, and thus the constitution of subjectivity in particular ways. But Habermasians do not see such requirements and constitution as necessarily antidemocratic. More specifically, they do not see the deliberative public sphere norm as having to be internalized in a disciplinary and exclusionary fashion. Rather, they see it as an always already presupposed communicative structure that can be explicitly reconstructed as a critical ideal by which to illuminate “illegitimate exclusion” within deliberation specifically, and society more generally, and enable reflection upon possibilities for greater freedom and equality (Habermas, 1996a; Markell, 1997). As Chambers (1996) argues, rational-critical deliberation here is about “the endless questioning of codes,” the reasoned questioning of normalization and thus of exclusions (pp. 233–234). Through deliberation, participants presuppose themselves as rational-critical subjects (and in the process are constituted as such), able to reflexively interrogate all aspects of their situation, including the particular deliberative rules applied in practical disputes. Of course, as critics point out, subjects whose everyday communicative practice is already more in line with the deliberative public sphere norm will be advantaged over others in becoming such rational-critical interlocutors. However, for Habermasians, it is not the reconstructed norm that should be seen as at fault—seeing the reconstructed norm marginalizing or excluding voices—but the uneven distribution of the sociocultural resources necessary for engaging in rational-critical deliberation (that fall under the five general positive conditions of the public sphere listed in the previous section). This unevenness, which is in fact highlighted by the Habermasian public sphere norm in its critical role, indicates the need to provide for these resources so as to enhance and extend communicative rationality. That is, we are faced here with a sociological problem, one that the Habermasian public sphere norm illuminates and demands be addressed for the advancement of democracy, rather than a problem internal to the character of the norm.