The word “public” has an ambivalent meaning. Perhaps because of that, it is one of most evocative and suggestive terms in the political discourse of the western world. Public parks, public services, public buildings, public squares, public opinions, public transportations, public universities, public interests, public persons, public enemies, public relations, public scandals, public art for the public and for the publics. Sometimes, “public” is an utterance that creates a resonance of grandiosity, an aura of light around the other words that are next to it, qualifying them as visible and open to everybody. Other times, when preceded by an article (the, a), it is an expression that denotes the presence of a unique group of people, a crowd of spectators, an audience. Both as an adjective and as noun, “public” is constantly used with ideological purposes. In this essay I will try to understand how this ambivalent term has been used in the ongoing United States’ healthcare debate and, at the same time, I will review how the term has been explained by social and communication scientists.
In such a late-capitalist democratic and massive society as the United States of America, healthcare has become a major sensitive issue during the current times of economic crisis and overwhelming corporations. Ordinary men and women require at some point of his/her life to go to the doctor, to get medication, and to have a treatment. In the land of freedom and dreams, that kind of service is not available for free or for an affordable price. Instead, healthcare is a major business run by pharmaceutical and insurance companies, it is “a system that is currently full of waste and abuse” as President Obama said during his address to the Congress some weeks ago.
It is precisely Obama’s healthcare speech what has been at the center of the ongoing debate. Some people talk about the proposal relating it to “socialism” with the snobbish gesture of a bourgeois from the 19th century (and with a bloody joker smile as well), others talk about it in relation to social justice with the progressive fashion of 21st century post-capitalists. By looking closely at Obama’s address one can discover some clues for understanding the way in which the term “public” has being used with ideological purposes. On the one hand, President Obama used the term as an adjective for describing a new health service that will be available for the Americans, a “public insurance option” administered by the government and designed for helping the people who cannot afford private insurances. On the other hand, the President used the term as a noun when he referred to the audience that was listening to him outside the Congress chamber. He said, “Finally, let me discuss an issue that is a great concern to me, to members of this chamber, and to the public – and that is how we pay for this plan.” That group of spectators outside the Congress is certainly conformed by the people who read/watch/hear the presidential healthcare address (or snippets of it), trough different media such as television, newspapers, radio, websites, and magazines.
Social and communication scientists have used the term as an adjective, attaching it to other words such as “sphere,” “opinion,” and “view” in order to highlight characteristics of openness, visibility, and availability. Jurgen Habermas, in his paradigmatic “Structural transformation of the public sphere,” attached the term to an idealized abstraction from the field of physics and mathematics. He intended to describe a unique kind of modern space, a sort of refurbished Greek agora where the bourgeois (enlightened group of people) met to discuss in rational and universals terms about their interests. This idea of rational European males creating a “sphere” while discussing –and sometimes while drinking coffee from their colonies as well- is, of course, part of the western world project of democratic regimes for massive societies. According to Habermas, the talk inside this space reaches a consensus despite the private interests of each bourgeois person. Thus, at the end, what the adjective “public” describes of the “sphere” is the openness to a selected group of people who are able to speak up in a rational and enlightened manner about their common concerns. Since the bourgeoisie believe in love, freedom, cultivation, and humanity, and since they now the rules for arguing rationally, reaching a common good would be a matter of engaging rationally in the debate.
A powerful critique of Habermas modern idealization has been made by Nancy Fraser in “Rethinking the public sphere: A contribution to the critique of actually existing democracy.” Elegantly, Fraser points out not only the limitations of the “bourgeois public sphere” but as well some of the contradictions of the model of state mass democracy. In my opinion, the strongest point of her critique relies in highlighting the existence of not only one kind of public but also multiple ones. For her, a post-bourgeoisie public sphere is an eclectic space where groups of people from different classes, races, and genres, could debate. Such call for diversity and multiplicity of people is certainly similar to Obama’s use of “public” as an adjective that describes an insurance option available to all the people who cannot afford the insurances offered by the corporations. In some sense, that service is as well a sort of open space perhaps earthier than the idealized sphere.
Besides describing the qualities of an abstract democratic space, the term “public” has also been used for qualifying people’s interaction with the mass media. It is not a coincidence that American communication and social scientists have joined persistently the words “public” and “opinion.” The development of mass media in the U.S during the 20th century seems to be scientifically and culturally engineered with the purpose of effectively spreading an ideology nationally and internationally. For example, McCombs and Shaw, in “The agenda-setting function of mass media,” use the term “public” for describing the beliefs that people have about the political reality. According to them, citizens develop their opinion as a “composite of the mass media coverage.” (185) In “The world outside and the pictures in our heads,” Lippman also uses the term “public” for describing the complex process of constructing a worldview inside people’s brain (a sort of picture/map/fiction).
Along with the theories that address the function of mass media in democratic societies is the work of Lazarsfeld and Merton entitled “Mass communication, popular taste, and organized social action.” For them, the term “public” characterizes a specific kind of “attention,” “view,” and “action,” that is visible/hearable/readable to everybody. For instance, when they explain the media function of enforcing social norms, they say that the “press, radio, and journals expose fairly well-known deviations to public view and, as a rule, this exposure forces some degree of public action against what has been privately tolerated.” (563)
Although Obama’s use of “public” as an adjective does not involve any kind of interaction or communicative process between mass media and the people, the “public insurance option” is related to a visibility. In fact, Obama’s use of the term “public” as an adjective is what perhaps has generated so much buzz. In a country with a rampant economic crisis, an open service available and visible to everybody produces not only hope among all uninsuranced people but also a lot of anxiety among the owners of the healthcare industry and the fans of laissez-fare economy. The establishment of a service that is open/available/visible to everybody is related to the ideology of a capitalist massive democratic society with social justice.
However, lets now consider the use of “public” as a noun and the different approaches to it. According to Lasswell in “The structure and function of communication in society” the group of people that is considered “the public” is a very reduced one, a very exclusive clique of leaders who can affect policymaking. As Lasswell states, “The public of the United States, for instance, is not confined to residents or citizens, (…) everyone who lives in the United States is not a member of the American public, since something more than passive attention is necessary. An individual passes from attention aggregate to the public when he begins to expect that what he wants can affect public policy.” (49) In this traditional sense, “the public” in Obama’s speech is a group of politicians, governors, Washington lobbyers, and other people with the power to affect policymaking.
A completely different understanding of “the public” is the one developed by Horkheimer and Adorno in “The culture industry: Enlightenment as mass deception.” For them “the public” is a massive and passive audience that is controlled and dominated through the consumption of popular culture. As they point out, “The attitude of the public, which ostensibly and actually favours the system of the culture industry, is a part of the system and not an excuse for it.” (136) Although, in contemporary U.S. is difficult to think of such a passive audience, imagining “the public” as a controlled mass allow us to highlight the capitalist ideology that the term implies. Along with that line of thinking, it is also Marx’s approach in “The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.” For him, “the public” of Louis Bonaparte are the French masses, the people in general.
All in all, what the different theories reveal is the profound ambiguity of the term “public” both as a noun and as an adjective. Sometimes it means a selected group of people, other times it means a blurred mass, sometimes it qualifies a space, other times it qualifies an interaction between people and media. In my opinion that ambiguity is what makes “public” so powerful in the political discourse. Whenever the term is pronounced, “the people” immediately feel involved in a sort of imaginary community as the ones described by Bennedict Anderson. “Public” carries the ruins of western civilization inside it: the broken columns of Athens’ agora, the blurred capital letters of Roman Empire’s toilets, the eroded gargoyles of Middle Ages’ fountains, the broken mirrors of Renaissance’s aristocratic courts, and the chipped cups of the modern bourgeois coffeehouses. Democratic massive capitalist societies have been organized, politically and economically, over those ruins, inspired by the legacy of a masculine Eurocentric world of polis, republics, and states. Every time a politician uses the term, he invokes the ruins, as a sort ghost calling, making them resonate. That is precisely the ideology behind Obama’s “public insurance option” and “the public”: capitalism and democracy.
References
Anderson, B. (1983). Imagined Communities. London: Verso, pp. 9-36.
Fraser, N. (1993). Rethinking the public sphere: A contribution to the critique of actually existing democracy. In Calhoun, C. (Ed.), Habermas and the public sphere. Boston: MIT Press, 109-142.
Habermas, J. (1989). Structural transformation of the public sphere. Chapters 1 and 2. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Horkheimer, M. and T. Adorno (1987). The culture industry: Enlightenment as mass deception. In Dialectic of enlightenment. New York: Continuum, pp. 120-167 (originally published in 1944).
Katz, E. and P. Lazarsfeld. (1955). Personal influence. New York: Free Press, 15-42.
Lasswell, H. (1948). The structure and function of communication in society. In Bryson, L. (Ed.), The Communication of Ideas. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1948.
Lippman, W. (1974). The world outside and the pictures in our heads. In Schramm, W. and D. Roberts, The Process and effects of mass communication. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, pp. 265-286 (Original chapter published in 1922).
Marx, K. The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (selections). Originally published in 1869.
McCombs, M. and D. Shaw (1972). The agenda-setting function of mass media. Public Opinion Quarterly, 36, pp. 176-187.
Noelle Neumann, E. (1977). Turbulences in the climate of opinion: Methodological applications of the spiral of silence theory. Public Opinion Quarterly, 41, 143-158.
