The public sphere in the mode of systematically distorted communication

The contemporary proliferation of “filter bubbles” and “echo chambers” seems to render obsolete the notion of a public sphere in the singular. In my article, I would like to argue against this view: Following Jürgen Habermas, “the public sphere” can be understood as the concomitant horizon of communicative action, while the latter permeates society as a whole. On the basis of this socio-philosophical approach, the omnipresent tendencies toward fragmentation appear as reactive attempts to ward off this socially established and context-transcending context of discussion. Habermas himself, however, has never adopted this perspective. Instead, he interprets the various symptoms of the decline of the public sphere—including its fragmentation—as the result of a “colonization of the lifeworld” by economic, bureaucratic, and technological system logics. However, on the basis of the concept of “systematically distorted communication,” which was still crucial for Habermas’s early work, it is possible to reconstruct how the lifeworld context of communicative action, out of which the public sphere emerges, is not only corroded and cut through from the outside by system logics but also exhibits its own dialectic of the refusal of discourse and the overcoming of this refusal. The fragmentation of the public sphere that we are confronted with today can be theoretically interpreted and politically addressed as a precarious standstill of this dialectic.

The notion of a public sphere in the singular seems to be losing more and more of its plausibility.As early as 30 years ago, Nancy Fraser criticized the widespread discourse about "the public sphere" from a feminist and socialist perspective on the grounds that it simultaneously presupposes and conceals sexist and economic exclusions.She argues in addition that this homogenizing discourse masks the existence of "subaltern counterpublics," which have enjoyed increasing prominence since the 1970s as a result of emancipatory social movements (see Fraser 1990).Against a unitary model that she perceives as rigid and tacitly exclusive, Fraser emphasizes the plurality of public spheres, which she welcomes as providing possibilities for articulating emancipatory politics (see ibid.: 67).In Fraser, however, this plurality is still sublated into a comprehensive "publicat-large," understood as an overarching public sphere in which the various publics engage in controversial and conflictual communication, while nevertheless adopting a shared orientation to reaching mutual understanding (see ibid.: 67f.).
The thesis that a plurality of public spheres exist seems only to be confirmed by contemporary experience, although its affirmative tone is increasingly giving way to a more ambivalent assessment.The plurality is continuing to grow with the formation of right-wing populist, nationalist, anti-feminist, conspiracy-theorist, and other counterpublics (see Rocha and Medeiros 2021) and amounts to a fragmentation and antagonization of the public sphere, so that the universally shared space of understanding that Fraser still imagined is becoming increasingly intangible and chimerical.In view of this fragmentation, which is manifested by the formation of "echo chambers" and "filter bubbles" together with the associated "alternative truths" (see Rosa 2022: 25f.), any notion of the public sphere that seeks to view it historically as a social whole is in danger of missing the mark.
In this essay, I will develop the thesis that, notwithstanding the aforementioned development, the notion of a generally shared space of the public sphere can be defended in social-philosophical terms.I do not mean to deny the tendencies toward fragmentation mentioned, since they cannot be dismissed out of hand.However, they must not be hypostatized.Rather, they should be situated in the general social context in which the public sphere unfolds, a development that is repeatedly blocked and propelled forward in enduring processes of exclusion, of overcoming this exclusion and of reactive retreat into filter bubbles and echo chambers.Viewed that way, it becomes apparent how interconnected the individual public spheres are, notwithstanding their fragmentation and encapsulation, and how much they contend with each other, even if only in the mode of defense and avoidance.Even when the individual publics no longer communicate with each other or only excitedly talk past one another, this can be reconstructed as an expression of avoidance of communication, and thus as an inherently precarious condition that potentially pushes beyond itself.As a result, we arrive at a more dynamic and dialectical picture that does not simply register the contemporary fragmentation as an immutable fact of plurality (see Rocha and Medeiros 2021: 3), but deciphers and actuates it in a reconstructive fashion as a crisis-ridden expression of a suppressed totality of communicative socialization.
I will develop my reflections through an engagement with Jürgen Habermas's theory of the public sphere.My underlying interest is not in Habermas as a normative thinker who merely serves as a point of reference for advocating the ideal of a public sphere united around discourse-ethical standards and invoking it against a deviating reality.Rather, I draw upon Habermas as a social philosopher who reconstructs the public sphere as a claim and a universalistic reference space of social practice itself.More than anyone else, he has successfully conceptualized the public sphere as an ever-present horizon of communicative socialization.On his account, we expose ourselves to the public sphere in the emphatic sense whenever we communicate with each other about something with the aim of achieving mutual understanding.By the "public sphere," properly understood, we mean the open discourse to which we constantly expose our communicative action in accordance with the validity claims inherent to it, unless "special measures" (Habermas 1996: 361) are taken to avoid discourse.
I will begin by outlining and defending this ambitious and, at first sight, excessively universalistic conception of the public sphere.This will take the form of a dialogue with Michael Warner's poststructuralist approach, which asserts that the public sphere is constitutively limited in ways that can only be opposed, but not really overcome, through counterpublics (1).In the second step, I will reconstruct Habermas's understanding of the restrictions and systematic distortions that block or repel the social unfolding of the public sphere.My argument is that Habermas's one-sided focus on economic, bureaucratic, and technological system logics that allegedly "colonize" the lifeworld, and thereby also undermine the unfolding of the public sphere, fails to take account of the practices and structures of discourse avoidance that arise within the lifeworld itself in the course of communicative socialization (2).In the final two steps, I want to remedy this blind spot by appealing to the notion of "systematically distorted communication."This concept can be found in Habermas's early work, but he subsequently retired it and never fully exhausted its empirical scope and complexity to analyze the public sphere and the blockages to which it is subject (3).It can be used to reconstruct how the lifeworld context of communicative action from which the horizon of the public sphere emerges is not only disaggregated and cleaved by systemic logics from the outside, as it were, but also exhibits an intrinsic dialectic of the refusal of discourse and the overcoming of this refusal.The fragmented plurality of public spheres can be interpreted and politically addressed as a precarious condition in which this dialectic has ground to a halt (4).

The public sphere as the horizon of communicative socialization
Jürgen Habermas first developed the concept of the public sphere in the context of a historical analysis.He examined how the "representative public sphere" of the court, through which the rulers confirmed their sovereignty toward their subjects, was successively supplanted by a new type of "bourgeois public sphere" in the course of the Enlightenment.The "bourgeois public sphere," according to Habermas, emerged in the bosom of a civil society liberated from the shackles of feudalism.It asserted itself as a sphere of deliberation that overturned the previous relationship of subordination by henceforth subjecting the rulers to its reasoning.Unrestricted discussions between free and equal citizens, Habermas writes, were supposed to lead to a "rationalization of rule" (Habermas 1973a: 68) that, through the mediation of political involvement, affects society as a whole (see Habermas 1989: 27-28, 54).He describes how this novel sphere of deliberation emerged from the midst of bourgeois milieus in the form of salons and dinner parties.At the same time, however, the public sphere harbors the claim to be "in principle open to extension" (ibid.: 37; translation amended) that points beyond the boundaries of this milieu.Committed exclusively to the discursive clarification of political and social matters, traditional status differences were no longer supposed to play any role in the public sphere.On the contrary, the rationalizing power of the bourgeois public sphere, according to its own self-understanding, lives precisely from the fact that it can include all perspectives and that only the "authority of the better argument" (ibid.: 36) decides.Habermas makes it abundantly clear that, given the exclusion of women and workers from the bourgeois public sphere, this universalistic claim was never fully realized.However, he insists that it was nonetheless effective insofar as it represented an institutionalized idea that those who were de facto excluded could appeal to in their social struggles (see ibid.: 36, 48).
This idea of a normative surplus that generates social and political effects has been contradicted most emphatically by Michael Warner.Warner does not directly dispute the universalistic claim that is inherent in every form of publicness.If one follows his literary studies approach, publics emerge through the circulation of texts within a "stranger sociability" (Warner 2005: 75) that cannot be demarcated sociologically in advance by any group affiliation (see ibid.: 74, 90).In this respect, the public sphere for Warner represents, on the one hand, the risky enterprise of an event of circulation that radically eludes sovereign control and controllability.On the other hand, Warner tries to show that the universalism of any existing public sphere is always also constitutively limited by the concrete form of circulation (see ibid.: 106).In order to get going in the first place, the unrestricted circulation must run through concrete channels, and this circumstance simultaneously restricts the circulation to a specific target group.The channels in question are the result of the choice of certain communicative styles and a specific habitus of address and discussion, which results in a "covert content" (ibid.: 107) and thus an implicit exclusivity of the respective stranger sociability.
Warner clarifies this exclusivity with reference to the fate of the "She-Romps," a queerfeminist group in pre-Georgian England.The She-Romps addressed a letter to the Spectator (see The Spectator, No. 217, Nov. 1, 1711), the central organ of the bourgeois public at the time, 1 with a request to be permitted to introduce their own lifeworld and culture of discussion into the comprehensive circulation context of this public sphere (see Warner 2005: 109ff.).However, the Spectator firmly rejects this request in view of the undisciplined and ruthless style of communication and mode of interaction of the She-Romps.The impetuous She-Romps, stubbornly eager to rid themselves of the prevalent prudishness, did not have the necessary restraint and "decorum" to communicate with all participants in stranger sociability, according to the lesson delivered by the Spectator (see ibid.: 112).With this case, Warner points to the striking paradox of exclusion being justified precisely by appeal to the universalism of stranger sociability.Consistently with this, Warner argues, the She-Romps and other marginalized groups have to create their own stranger sociability in the form of counterpublics (see ibid.: 113, 120ff.).They have to form, as he puts it, their own circulation context by means of "poetic world-making" (ibid.: 114).The relationship between their stranger sociability and corresponding communicative styles and the stranger sociability of the bourgeois public sphere is thereby conceived as a competition of circulation contexts running in parallel that does not admit of any further communicative mediation (see ibid.: 120).
Habermas has objected to such contextualist notions on the grounds that the bourgeois public sphere is always already connected to its "others"-he, too, refers to the feminist movement-through a "common language" (Habermas 1992: 429) or shared "structures of communication" (ibid.: 425).With reference to those universal "structures of communication," Habermas's aim is to situate his concept of the public sphere on a deeper level of social-theoretical analysis-namely, in a "rational potential intrinsic in everyday communicative practices" (ibid.: 442) that transcends all bourgeois constraints.Habermas defines this practice elsewhere more precisely as "communicative action," through which subjects situated in the lifeworld communicate with one another in language about something (see Habermas 1995: 588).Here the goal of communication is not merely understanding the meaning of a linguistic utterance that one can simply brush off or to which one merely submits oneself strategically; rather, it is the recognition of the claim to validity that is associated with this utterance (ibid.). 2 Habermas's notion of communicative action is often understood as an ideal that is belied by real social conditions.But this criticism fails to recognize the social-theoretical stakes bound up with this concept.Habermas argues convincingly that the practice of communicative action permeates society as a whole and ultimately ensures social integration (see Habermas 2009: 258;Habermas 1995: 104).Even economic and bureaucratic processes, which operate via "delinguistified media of communication" (Habermas 1987: 180)-money and power-, and thus do not require mutual understanding in actu, are on the whole linked back to practices of communicative action that stabilize their social acceptance (see ibid.: 184-5).Those practices not only take place among people of the same status, but are also at work in asymmetrical social relations, insofar as the latter can only be "enduringly established in the medium of recognized interpretations" (Habermas 1995: 104), that is, by reaching and maintaining an agreement, however tenuous, with respect to, for example, assumed necessities or religious beliefs.
But how is "the public sphere" related to the nexus of communicative action that pervades society as a whole?In Between Facts and Norms, Habermas reformulates his theory of the public sphere, conceiving of it as an irreducible and always concomitant horizon of communicative action.He writes: "Every encounter in which actors do not just observe each other but take a second-person attitude, reciprocally attributing communicative freedom to each other, unfolds in a linguistically constituted public space" (Habermas 1996: 361).How should we understand this?By "public space" Habermas means more than just the lifeworld space of shared meanings to which we always refer in our linguistic utterances. 3Rather, by this he means the space of discourse to which communicative actors unavoidably expose themselves when they raise claims to validity, and in which they must be prepared to defend these claims against objections with arguments.No matter how asymmetrical the social relationship mediated by communicative action may be, the validity claims crucial to this form of action always involve the meta-claim that they can be redeemed in discourse (see Habermas 1995: 597).Even the most ideologically imbued offer of communication contains the "guarantee" (ibid.) that the "truths" expressed are not merely subjective, but that, in the event that they meet with contradiction, they can be shown to be generally valid-because only then do they acquire at least the appearance of being intersubjectively binding.
But, to articulate an obvious doubt concerning Habermas's conception, how meaningful is this guarantee in situations of communicative action marked by material power asymmetries (think, for instance, of capitalist class antagonism or the patriarchal gender order) (see Celikates 2010: 281)?Doesn't it turn out to be a pure illusion in such situations?Against this objection it can be argued that, although material power asymmetries can in part restrict the possibility of making the transition to discourse (i.e., of critically questioning claims to validity), they cannot eliminate it in principle.One could argue that, if such structures of power are not to forfeit their at least rudimentary legitimacy, they have to be repeatedly normatively suspended in the course of communicative action, so that the possibility of discursive discussion arises at least momentarily.A claim to validity that is imposed purely by material power is a contradiction in terms and would immediately forfeit its socially integrative power.Even in asymmetrical social relations, therefore, the orientation towards mutual understanding brings a basic moment of unconstrainedness into play.In this respect, every situation of communicative action refers in a not merely feigned sense to the space of discourse in which validity claims that are accepted naïvely for the most part could, if necessary, be tested with arguments (e.g., in the form of a critique of class antagonisms or of gender relations, which are all too often accepted in everyday life as given and somehow justified).
This space of discourse, to which communicative action always points, should be understood as "public" insofar as it is, as Habermas adds, "open, in principle, for potential dialogue partners who are present as bystanders or could come on the scene and join those present.That is, special measures would be required to prevent a third party from entering such a linguistically constituted space" (Habermas 1996: 361).This passage is also in need of explanation.Here, Habermas is pointing out that the discourse into which a concrete situation of communicative action can mutate is not simply under the sovereign control of those directly involved in this situation.Communicative action whose claim to validity becomes controversial in a concrete situation does not come to a halt at the boundaries of this situation, but is embedded in a society-wide nexus of communicative action.Through the mediation of this nexus, the controversy also reaches and affects other subjects.They are connected with the concrete situation of communicative action that has been transformed into discourse and they can-in principle-intervene in this "matter of common concern."A dispute over standards of decency that flares up, for example, between a middle-class couple can expand into a controversy within their circle of family, friends, and acquaintances in which still others-employees, colleagues, neighbors, etc.-become involved at least temporarily as bystanders.
The public sphere is the space of discourse in which, as a general rule, all those subjects can become involved who are communicatively addressed and connected by controversial, or at least contentious, claims to validity, whereby just being communicatively addressed and connected in this way already means that they figure as potential discourse partners.This space is concretized in various communicative "encounters" that merge along the nexus of communicative action and are "expanded and rendered more permanent in an abstract form for a larger public" (ibid.).The decisive point is that these higher-level arenas of the public sphere (talk shows, opinion magazines, political gatherings, etc., facilitated by the mass media) emerge from contexts of discourse that, when it comes to their possible extension, are as universal as the nexus of communicative action.According to Habermas's model, this universalism of the public sphere is the starting point that is concretely established by communicative socialization and can only be blocked by taking "special measures" (ibid.) to prevent third parties from entering the discourse.These special measures will be discussed in detail later.They provide the key to an analysis of the public sphere that, although not conceiving of it as constitutively limited, nevertheless focuses on its real limitations as an evolved, but also precarious, condition.
In response to Warner, one can now draw the following conclusion: the bourgeois public sphere does not create its stranger sociability ex nihilo in the sense of contingent "poetic world-making" (Warner 2005: 114).Rather, it emerges through an encounter and movement in the "linguistically constituted public space" of discourse that is already posited by communicative socialization and is now consciously accepted, appropriated, and shaped as a challenge.The bourgeois public sphere cannot sovereignly immunize its stranger sociability.Although it privileges certain channels and styles of communication, it is also situated within further references and connections of communicative socialization that are not under its control, insofar as they impose themselves in everyday practice.Through these references and connections, the bourgeois public is haunted by the She-Romps.They are all too familiar to the milieu of the Spectator: these are mothers, sisters, recalcitrant wives who make use of the communicative channels that exist anyway in practice to intervene directly in male-dominated dinner parties and salons.Or they write, with the intention of provoking discourse, the said letter to the Spectator, which at least feels compelled to respond (see ibid.: 109f.).
As a matter of historical record, the Spectator dismisses the offer of discursive engagement with reference to certain mores and communicative styles that, it claims, are indispensable prerequisites for participation in the stranger sociability of the bourgeois public sphere (see ibid.: 112).But to identify this as a constitutive limitation of that stranger sociability is something of a historical inversion.Instead, this repudiation is evidence of a reactive attempt to curtail it, that is, to restrict it to a communicative style that is supposed to banish the real proliferation of the nexus of communicative socialization. 4 It is not that the She-Romps' letter to the editor and the practices, experiences, and perspectives it describes could not circulate and be received within the stranger sociability of the Spectator because of their communicative style.Warner's diagnosis of a general lack of habitual fitness [Anschlussfähigkeit] (see ibid.: 106, 111) fails to recognize the immense currency and translatability of the "common language" of communicative action.It is not a matter of such a lack of fitness, but that the She-Romps are not to be included in the Spectator's stranger sociability because its male readership do not want to or cannot face a critical debate about the bourgeois gender order and the communicative style appropriate to it.Warner's diagnosis of a fundamental incompatibility of communicative styles (ibid.: 108ff.)loses sight of the fact that the exclusion of the She-Romps points from the outset to a social conflict whose discursive expression is to be avoidedspecifically from a concrete, male-defined perspective and interest situation. 5Antifeminist, but also other forms of exclusion from the public sphere, must be explained in the light of this suppressed conflict.
Instead of following Warner's thesis of the relativity and constitutive closure of conflicting public spheres, therefore, it is more plausible from a reconstructive perspective to locate the public sphere at a deeper socio-ontological level, as it were, and to assume that it constitutes a concomitant horizon of communicative socialization that is first curtailed by "special measures"-from intimidation to denigration and beyond.The public sphere is curtailed in this way because, according to the obvious explanation in the case of the She-Romps, it is not deemed desirable that certain validity claims could be discursively thematized from a certain direction, insofar as this would endanger established consensuses sedimented in the lifeworld.Taking this social-theoretical foundation as a starting point, we must now, to speak with Habermas himself, pursue "in the dialectical course of history the traces of the violence that has distorted the repeated attempts at dialogue and has forced them again and again out of the paths of unconstrained communication" (Habermas 1969: 164).Is Habermas successful in this?

The colonization thesis
I would now like to examine how Habermas conceives of the social conditions that prevent the public sphere from unfolding.It is striking in this context that he does not focus so much on the "special measures" of discourse closure that systematically curtail the space of the public sphere in order to avoid conflict and stabilize ideological consensus.Strangely ignoring the conflicts immanent to the lifeworld and the attempts to suppress them, he focuses instead on the bureaucratic, economic, and technological system logics that threaten the lifeworld space of the public sphere from the outside, as it were, and impair it as a whole.This one-sided focus runs through the various stages of his theory of the public sphere, from his early analysis of a "structural transformation of the public sphere" under conditions of depoliticized postwar capitalism to his most recent diagnosis of a "renewed structural change" of the public sphere in the neoliberal era of "social media".
In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Habermas reconstructs the following major development: whereas in the 19th century, civil society was still able to reproduce itself predominantly from its own resources, in the 20th century the state increasingly had to intervene in it actively in order to mediate its inherent class antagonism and to cushion the associated functional and legitimation crises of capitalism.In the course of this state interventionism, a "refeudalization of [civil] society" (Habermas 1989: 142) occurs, so that civil society forfeits its relative autonomy as a precondition for a functioning public sphere (see ibid.: 157).In addition to the weakening of the preconditions of the public sphere in civil society, Habermas continues, its own internal communicative organization as a sphere of discourse is destroyed.A "commercialization" (ibid.: 169) of the public sphere into a site of private amusement leads to a general suspension or dissolution of social and political discourse.Moreover, political influence on, or instrumentalization of, the public sphere for purposes of "acclamation" (ibid.: 176) prevails, so that the bourgeois principle of the "rationalization of rule" (Habermas 1973a: 68) through discourse increasingly loses its efficacy and yields to a bureaucratic manipulation of the public sphere.Habermas pessimistically dubs this renewed inversion of the direction of influence a "structural transformation of the public sphere." Over the following two decades, Habermas would spell out further the distinction he had already made implicitly in 1962 between bureaucratic and economic power complexes, on the one hand, and the overall societal context of communication geared to discourse, on the other, and systematize it into a dualistic theory of society.According to this dualistic account, the sphere of communicative action is perforated by the complexes of bureaucratic and economic power, by which it is re-functioned and brought under control as a whole.At the latest in The Theory of Communicative Action, the public sphere, as a self-reflexive expression of the lifeworld that reproduces itself through interrelations of communicative action, stands over against the political and economic functional systems (i.e., the state and the market) (see Habermas 1987: 180ff.), which perform their daily processing via "delinguistified media of communication" (ibid.: 180), that is, precisely by bypassing practices of intersubjective understanding.It should be noted, however, that they can dispense with those practices (and the associated permanent "risk of dissension") in actu only insofar as a certain historical level of intersubjective understanding as a whole has been achieved and is maintained.This is because the systems are only set going and made possible on the basis of a certain "rationalization of the lifeworld" (ibid.: 173); moreover, their operation is always tied back to the "basic institutions" of public and civil law and thus to consensus structures of the lifeworld (ibid.).
As Habermas explains in greater detail in Between Facts and Norms, the function of the public sphere within this dualistic societal structure is to influence the political system-and thereby indirectly also the economic system-by intervening in the discursive process of lawmaking.This occurs, according to Habermas's model based on the research of the sociologist Bernhard Peters, by means of a "circulation of power" (Habermas 1996: 354) that transforms the "communicative power" generated consensually in the public sphere into "administrative power" (ibid.: 146ff.)by way of parliamentary legislation.This circulation of power has institutional "sluices" (ibid.: 356).However, Habermas is not specifically interested in which communication contents and subjects are systematically "trapped" by these "sluices" and thus are excluded from the public sphere.Rather, adopting the more abstract perspective of a dualistic theory of society he speaks of a "countercirculation" (ibid.)originating on the side of the system that reverses the aforementioned circulation of power and thus thwarts its democratizing thrust.Habermas refers to forces of the political system that specify topics and define them narrowly in technocratic terms (see ibid.: 380f.), as well as the manipulative economies of attention of professionalized journalistic media systems (see ibid.: 376f.).Once again, his analysis boils down to the rather sweeping-and socially and politically not further differentiated-assertion that the public sphere is undermined by the interventions of administrative and economic power.
The same general pattern of analysis can be found in Habermas's recent comments on the "renewed structural transformation of the political public sphere."Once again, Habermas explicates the public sphere as a space in which the citizens engage in democratic deliberation (see Habermas 2023), which should actually influence the political system via the aforementioned circulation of power.However, this model is impaired by a loss of confidence in the political system, which in the context of globalized markets is no longer able to guarantee the social equality of all citizens as a basic prerequisite of the public sphere.The public sphere, which has been weakened at the sociostructural level by undesirable economic and political developments, is now also affected by the technological shift toward social media that is itself being driven by capitalist valorization imperatives.The democratization of the author role associated with "social media" does lead to a dissolution of social boundaries, which Habermas welcomes in principle.Problematic, however, is the fragmentation being generated by platforms such as Twitter or Facebook, which do not provide any editorial mediation of contents.Instead of bringing divergent positions into constructive conversation with one another, "commodified" communication is being steered by an economy of attention that is giving rise to "independent semi-publics" that are self-enclosed and immunized against dissonance.
The three analyses of a "structural transformation of the public sphere" focus on different phenomena at different times, but on the whole are in a similar vein.They consistently represent the hindrances blocking the unfolding of the public sphere as follows: first, the preconditions of the public sphere in civil society are threatened or undermined by economic and political developments; then the already weakened social basis of the public sphere is also afflicted, as it were, by the encroachments of economic, political, and technological systems that destroy, or overwrite its internal communicative organization; this manifests itself in turn as the reification, manipulation, and fragmentation of the public sphere.Habermas famously describes this global process as the "colonization of the lifeworld," a process involving the conspicuous suppression of contexts of communicative socialization and their replacement by systemic mechanisms of behavioral manipulation (see Habermas 1987: 322;Habermas 1969: 82)-for example, through the "conversion" of spaces of discourse into sites of cultural consumption, infotainment, and privatized self-adulation.
Habermas's colonization thesis has the undoubted merit of avoiding the "idealism" (Habermas 1987: 110) of a social theory centered purely around the concept of communicative action by taking into account the destructive effect of economic, bureaucratic, and technological systemic logics on the communicative infrastructure of the lifeworld.Indeed, it is only by combining lifeworld and system perspectives that we can acquire a complete picture of society (see ibid.: 110f.).However, an excessively one-sided focus on systemically induced colonization tendencies fails to recognize that not only the historical unleashing of the systems, but also the forms assumed at any given moment by their reproduction and intervention mechanisms (forms of property, commodification, juridification, "mediatizing" and strategic ways of influencing lifeworld contexts), can be traced back to the lifeworld and its normative, cultural, and political development.It is surprising that a theory that presents convincing arguments for assuming this primacy of the lifeworld (see ibid.: 173) confines itself in its analysis of contemporary developments in the public sphere entirely to systemic encroachments, and thus attributes a strangely passive victim role to the lifeworld.As a result, Habermas's theory peculiarly fails to measure up to its own possibilities.Instead, it would be more fruitful to decipher the aforementioned colonization tendencies themselves as corresponding to a lifeworld development of the public sphere.The systemic interventions in the public sphere do not simply affect it from outside of the lifeworld.Rather, they should be understood, as it were, as technical conversions or translations of attempts to avoid discourse originating in the lifeworld itself.In other words, an inability or unwillingness to allow unrestricted discourse, which must be concretely determined in each historical case, is reflected in systemic interventions in the public sphere.These interventions should not be regarded so much as undermining, destroying, or reifying the public sphere as a whole, but rather as concrete curtailments and restrictions of the horizon of the public sphere, each of which has a specific political content.This always concomitant horizon of communicative action is systematically curtailed in relation to certain topics, perspectives, and subjects, and sometimes this curtailment is also expressed in the form of systemic interventions.
Thus, the "commercialization" and bureaucratic manipulation of the public sphere that Habermas diagnosed in 1962 (see Habermas 1989: 169, 176) can be understood at least also as an expression of the avoidance of class conflict.The smoldering class conflict must be prevented from becoming a subject of discourse, and this is achieved through the commercialization and bureaucratic manipulation of the public sphere, for example, in the form of "rewards conforming with the present system" (paid in the currency of increasing possibilities of consumption) that allow even members of working-class milieus to retreat more or less comfortably into the private sphere (see Habermas 1973b: 56ff.).Both tendencies ensure a suspension or the redundancy of moral-practical discourses that could in principle identify capitalist class society as such and call it into question.Although Habermas does emphasize this historical connection (see Habermas 1970: 110f.), he then interprets this development one-sidedly as a process by which technocratic system logics get out of hand in ways that are fatal for the communicative reproduction of the species as a whole (see ibid.: 112f.).However, it is important not to attribute false causality to the systemic mechanisms of manipulation and commercialization.The intention of avoiding conflict and the associated exclusion of certain topics and political perspectives already occurs within the lifeworld and its communicative reproduction-for example, in the form of widespread anti-communism and the associated boom in privatistic values (see Taylor 1985)-and is supported and amplified by systemic interventions in the lifeworld.The "colonization of the lifeworld" is ultimately a self-reification for the purpose of avoiding conflict.
Analogously, the fragmentation of the public sphere associated with the new social media, which Habermas diagnoses in his recent essay, can be understood as an expression of the avoidance of conflictual discourses that revolve, for example, around questions of the binary gender order, structural or everyday racism, or the colonial past and present.Subjects and themes that for a long time were successfully excluded from the public space of discourse have gained access to it; but thanks to fragmentation, it seems that they are being successfully excluded from "one's own" discourse again.The algorithms through which the new social media are largely controlled (see Koster 2020) function in many respects like a mostly opaque, but popular, tool of discourse avoidance.Habermas completely disregards these sources of conflict proper to the lifeworld and the corresponding intention to avoid discourse, so that he fails to paint a complete picture of the structural transformation of the public sphere.By focusing exclusively on systemic colonization tendencies, he draws a superficial and, to a certain extent, trivializing image that overlooks the underlying conflicts over the public sphere in the lifeworld.In the following section, I suggest how this blind spot can be overcome by drawing on Habermas's early work.With the help of his notion of "systematically distorted communication," I want to reconstruct the dialectic of discourse avoidance and its overcoming that arises historically in the process of communicative socialization itself and finds expression in the restriction, extension, and reactive fragmentation of the public sphere.

The notion of systematically distorted communication
Thus far I have shown that the idea of a public sphere in the singular that accompanies the process of communicative socialization like an ever-present horizon can be rendered plausible from a Habermasian perspective.With its validity claim, communicative action permeates society as a whole, for even the "the ultimately physical force of strategic influences and the material force of functional constraints … can gain permanency only through the medium of acknowledged interpretations" (Habermas 2001: 85).The public sphere is the space of discourse to which communicative actors expose themselves in order to account for their claims to validity.This space of discourse is difficult to identify and can never be brought to a standstill.It assumes concrete form as intertwined and interwoven individual discourses, while nevertheless remaining as a whole amorphous and anarchic.Yet it is in principle as comprehensive and context-transcending as the nexus of communicative socialization and the universalistic validity claims that sustain it.It also involves those who, although socially subordinated, are subordinated through an at least rudimentary practice of mutual understanding, from whose egalitarian internal structure the powerful emancipatory promise of discourse cannot be erased.Against this background, the shielding of a "bourgeois public sphere" from its supposed other-for example, the radical women's movement-is not to be regarded as a constitutive restriction of the public sphere and a reflection of its fundamentally exclusive character, but rather as the reactive result of the narrowing and refusal of discourse.
Habermas has dealt extensively with the social distortions and blockages that prevent the unrestricted development of the public sphere.However, he has not examined how factors operating in the lifeworld process of communicative socialization itself can lead to the suppression of discourse.Instead, he focuses on different historical phases of "systemic" colonization that generally displace and undermine this process.What interests him in the historical elaboration of his theory of the public sphere is not the "special measures" immanent to the lifeworld that are taken "to prevent a third party from entering" the public sphere (Habermas 1996: 361), but rather those "systemic" processes that suspend or hollow out the latter as a whole.Thus, he fails to recognize that the fragmentation of the public sphere he diagnoses is not only due to systemic tendencies of commodification and technicization, but must be interpreted as at least also the result of barriers to communication originating in the lifeworld.
In his early writings, however, Habermas still attempted to reflect on these phenomena under the title of "systematically distorted communication" (Habermas 1980: 190;Habermas in Habermas and Luhmann 1974: 120).He is fully aware that, empirically speaking, the validity claims circulating via the nexus of communicative socialization often do not stand up to scrutiny in unrestricted discourse.Historically, it is the rule rather than the exception that behind the claims to validity of communicative action, which are geared to intersubjective recognition and generalizability, are concealed particular interests and claims to power that must be shielded against contradiction (see ibid.: 119f.).With communicative socialization, on the one hand, the possibility of expressing contradiction is posited in a quasi-transcendental manner.On the other hand, this possibility is repeatedly blocked, at least partially, in order to make possible a "pseudo-consensus" (Habermas 1995: 265) that is necessary for social reproduction.Habermas speaks in this context of ideologies whose apparent validity can only be secured by "barriers to communication" (Habermas and Luhmann 1974: 259) in the sense of "systematic restrictions on communication leading to will formation" (ibid.: 258f.).He writes: In such cases, the validity of the legitimations is secured by a mechanism that excludes or restricts public thematization of the validity claim of the legitimations and critical discussion of their contents.This barrier has a single function …: to prevent a process of enlightenment from taking place.If the systematic restrictions on communication were loosened, then the individuals and groups involved could become aware that the prevailing legitimations are connected with substitute satisfactions through which suppressed needs not sanctioned by the institutionalized values are virtualized.(ibid.: 259) The "barriers to communication" on which Habermas focuses ensure that, for instance, needs and related interpretations that would call the universal validity of an ideology into question cannot be voiced.The prevention of the articulation of these needs is intended to ensure that the nexus of communicative action does not become contentious at a certain thematic point or social location and threaten to spill over into an open discourse that would end in dissent.Habermas speaks in psychoanalytic terms of the exclusion of subversively connoted needs and motives (see ibid.: 255ff.), or of the topics and objects of conversation associated with the latter, as well as of the substitute satisfactions and symbols that are ideologically produced (see ibid.).Of particular interest here, however, is the case, which Habermas does not discuss in particular, in which along with these refractory objects of communication also certain subjects or subjectivities 6 are prevented from passing from communicative action, in which they are already involved, into the "public space" of discourse, in order to bring their concerns and perspectives into the general discussion.Accordingly, also the already discussed attempt to exclude feminist critique is historically implemented as the exclusion of at least certain women from the public sphere, namely those who, like the She-Romps, prove to be too recalcitrant and critical from a male-bourgeois perspective. 7 But how exactly do such barriers to communication work, which in the modern era kept or maneuvered not only feminist women, but also socialist workers, self-aware queers, and people of color, out of the public sphere?Habermas provides only a very vague and incomplete answer to this question.Taking his lead from the psychoanalytic study of individual processes of repression, he refers to the fate of "Little Hans," who in the family environment suffers an intolerable conflict which he then represses.This defence is connected with a process of desymbolization and of symptom-formation.The child excludes the experience of conflictive object-relations from public communication (and thereby renders it inaccessible even to his own Ego); it splits off the part of the representation of the object that is charged with conflict and, in a way, desymbolizes the meaning of the relevant object.The gap that appears in the semantic field is closed by a symptom, in that an unsuspicious symbol takes the place of the symbolic content that has been split off.(Habermas 1980: 193) If one wants to transfer the psychoanalytic model of individual processes of splitting off traumatic experiences to the displacement of entire social groups and their speech acts from the public sphere, some modifications are necessary.Habermas did not make them himself, since he confines himself in his discussion of the concept of systematically distorted communication to the familial, still partially pre-social context (see Habermas 1995: 226-270).The "desymbolization" of collectively shared communicative contents and forms does not go hand in hand with their complete erasure from the field of intelligible meanings, as in Habermas's reference to Freud.While Little Hans, faced with the inescapable, overwhelming power of his father, cannot help but erase the symbol for his inadmissible need from his conscious memory, the She-Romps, for example, find a countercultural space of articulation (cf . Fraser 1990: 61).Their queerfeminist subjectivities, intentions, needs, and objections, which are desymbolized within the narrow bourgeois public sphere through practices of ostracization and denigration, of shaming and insulting, can endure (in ciphered form) in this alternative space of articulation and thus escape their own worldlessness and insignificance (see Arendt 1998: 52ff.).In this respect, such cases of relative desymbolization do not necessarily involve the formation of symptoms, since no "semantic gap" has arisen in the consciousness of those affected that must be closed.Against the background of a merely relative desymbolization, the countermovement of "resymbolization," which Habermas addresses in connection with the psychoanalytic studies of Alfred Lorenzer (Habermas 1980: 193), must also be conceived differently.The therapeutic procedure of "scenic understanding" on which Lorenzer focuses (ibid.;Lorenzer 2000: 138ff.)first has to use depth-hermeneutic explanatory models in order to theoretically decode the desymbolized content that has completely degenerated into fragments of private language.By contrast, ostracized social groups, far from being disarticulated to the same extent, often already devise their resymbolization on their own.In practice, this takes the form of "subaltern counterpublics" (Fraser 1990: 67), which render superfluous the avant-garde position of the theorists in the process of enlightenment still assumed by Habermas (see Habermas 1973Habermas [1963]]: 28-32, 37).
In each case, practices of relative desymbolization involve a concrete attempt to curtail, seal off, and particularize the horizon of "the public" regarding certain topics and subjectivities.Of decisive importance is, firstly, that the associated barriers to communication do not represent a constitutive, but rather a reactive restriction of the public sphere.The manifold practices of desymbolization do indeed produce the profound effects of "othering" that have been extensively analyzed by subaltern studies (see Spivak 1985).But the "constitutive other" of discourse generated in this way (see Mouffe 2009: 21;Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 122-124) is by no means constitutive of discourse.Instead, it is better understood as a fictitious liminal figure that only arises in the course of the suppression of a more inclusive discourse context already implicit in the nexus of communicative socialization.It is important to understand, secondly, that this suppression of discourse is not the result of systemic encroachments on the lifeworld as a whole. 8Rather, it is a result of the process of communicative socialization and the associated challenge of consensus stabilization itself: the elimination of sources of dissent through barriers to communication is precisely a reflection of the genuine dependence of communicative socialization on consensus.By eliminating dissent, however, communicative socialization becomes entangled in a self-contradiction, since the "pseudo-consensus" (Habermas 1995: 265) that now holds sway can typically only preserve its universalistic appearance under the precondition that a universal discourse is prevented.And the more emphatically practices of desymbolization are counteracted by those of resymbolization, the more clearly the self-contradiction comes to light and tears down the barriers to communication.

The dialectic of desymbolization and resymbolization
Taking this as our starting point, the history of the public sphere can be reconstructed as a dialectic of the refusal of discourse and the overcoming of this refusal.The concept of systematically distorted communication not only makes it possible to detect barriers to communication synchronically and to problematize them normatively by recourse to universalistic discursive ideals (see Biskamp 2016).This concept also enables us to paint a more dynamic picture: we can reconstruct how discourse-constraining practices of desymbolization are challenged by practices of resymbolization that unblock the public sphere once again.The relationship between desymbolization and resymbolization does not describe a simple and endless back-and-forth, but a dialectical movement (see Habermas 1969: 17;Habermas 1971: 58f.) that points with a certain degree of necessity toward overcoming the boundaries of the public sphere (see Kempf 2022).The pluralization of different publics, which nevertheless stand in a communicative relationship to one another (in Fraser's sense), can be interpreted as the unfolding of this dialectic.The fragmentation of the public sphere that is increasingly evident today suggests that this dialectic has ground to a precarious standstill.In conclusion, I would like to offer a rough outline of the aforementioned dialectic (1), its unfolding (2), and stasis (3).
(1) The concrete historical dialectic exhibited by the public sphere begins with the erecting of barriers to communication whose aim is to establish sovereign control over the public sphere and its amplified risk of dissension through practices of desymbolization.
But the conditions of systematically distorted communication associated with desymbolization should not be understood as a context of total delusion.Rather, the selfcontradiction of a form of intersubjective understanding that can be superficially upheld only by restricting the possibility of articulating dissent leads to a precarious condition that is potentially constantly threatened by the return of the repressed.Habermas illustrates this precariousness using the example of individual neurosis, whose rigid behavioral patterns are torpedoed by private-language interjections that bring back to the fore the suppressed needs and desires in unintelligible ways (see Habermas 1980: 192).On the collective level, however, the situation is different.The suppressed contradiction does not return more or less automatically in accordance with a quasi-natural "causality of split-off symbols" (Habermas 1969: 17;Habermas 1971: 58f.), but only in the course of resymbolization processes with highly demanding preconditions.But since these processes draw upon a countercultural space of articulation left open to them by a merely relative desymbolization, the returned has never lost its intelligibility entirely.
However, this should not obscure the fact that even relative desymbolizations profoundly impair the possibility of publicly expressing certain intentions, perspectives, and subjectivities.Even if the latter can fall back on a countercultural refuge of their own, their self-confidence is convulsed by experiences of shaming, slander, and denigration, and their ability to express themselves is unsettled, to such an extent that they first have to rediscover a language that can be spoken with the necessary pride in the subaltern context and beyond (see Eribon 2016: 19-24;100-111).For "desymbolization" means significantly more than what is currently widely discussed as "cancel culture" (see Norris 2021).It does not signify merely the intensified and vociferous criticism of certain contents, nor merely being banished from the main stage.Rather, it means the attempt to destroy the very ability to articulate oneself self-confidently, which leaves its mark even when it is only partially successful.It may still be possible to speak the desymbolized within the counterculture, but with a bowed head, as it were, since the speaking subject herself has lost the social support of a general worthiness of recognition.
The laborious historical process of resymbolization, which is accomplished in socalled safe spaces through forms of conscious raising that ultimately lead to subaltern counterpublics, must also be understood against this background (Fraser 1990: 67f.).This process is so laborious because it does not only concern the resymbolization of communicative contents (see ibid.).On a more fundamental level, the primary task is to reconstruct and reconsolidate the subjectivities that have been desymbolized within the public sphere as self-conscious standpoints of speech.In every respect, resymbolization has a historical dimension, for it is a matter of bringing back to light and working through the original conflict in the course of which the ostracization was pronounced, the subject was undermined through insults (see Eribon 2016: 19-24), and thus the public sphere was restricted.Only by returning to this original historical conflict can the insult be seen through, its spell broken, and the previously disavowed subject restored to a selfconfidence that stands by its dissonant experiences and is able to articulate them publicly. 9 (2) Successful resymbolization, which brings the suppressed subjects and objects of communication back into speech, resumes the discourse at the point where it was historically suppressed.Although what is resymbolized must first impose itself on the perlocutionary level, that is, by affective means of agitation, it cannot be conceived as "the complete other" of discourse. 10Rather, it is intelligible and discussable precisely insofar as it brings back to the fore a historically shared conflict.This can be illustrated once again by the example of feminism.The subaltern counterpublics associated with feminist struggles do not actually break into the public sphere from the outside, but should be understood as being part of a communicatively constituted public space from which they have simultaneously been excluded for the purpose of avoiding discourse and suppressing conflict.Their resymbolizing achievement, which concerns various points of contention in the modern gender order, leads historically-and with a certain degree of necessity-to the negation and retraction of patriarchal barriers to communication.For the refusal of discourse was possible only as long as desymbolization was successful.Now that the previous consensus has been shamefully exposed as a pseudo-consensus that was ultimately imposed by force, one's own universalistic claim to validity demands that joint discourse be finally permitted.This enforced opening is evident from the manifold discursive references currently being established and permitted between the bourgeois public sphere and subaltern counterpublics, which lead to the emergence of a "left-liberal" or post-bourgeois public sphere that is frequently a target of conservative criticism (see Stegemann 2021).
(3) The emergence of subaltern counterpublics sets a pluralization of perspectives in motion that exposes the historically occluded horizon of the public sphere.However, this dialectical process involving a negation of negation can be brought to a standstill insofar as the discourse-expanding pluralization meets with countervailing tendencies toward fragmentation that seek to avoid the increased social pressure of debate and the consequent risk of dissension.This is evident today in the rise of right-wing populist counterpublics (see Rocha and Medeiros 2021), which use "fake news" (e.g., regarding migrants), accusations of fake news (e.g., to deflect accusations of racism), and ressentiment-laden denigration of the ("leftliberal") media in an attempt to restore structures of systematically distorted communication that have already been debunked, and thus to evade the confrontation with contradiction once again.By using such immunization strategies to dissolve once again, or block from the outset, the interrelation of discourse brought to light by pluralization, the need for openness just asserted seems to be empirically nullified.This would also call into question the theoretical approach advocated here of speaking in terms of a dialectic of discourse avoidance and its overcoming that is more than an aimless back-and-forth.
However, these attempts at immunization are proving to be crisis-ridden in the extreme and to be the absolute opposite of a sovereign attitude, anchored in autarkic traditions and self-enclosed identities.The emergence of filter bubbles is often interpreted as an expression of a currently rampant "nihilistic" socialization, in which claims to validity are being blithely stripped of their universalistic intentions and assimilated to the particularistic imperative of sheer self-assertion (see Brown 2018;Jaster and Lanius 2021).What speaks against this widespread post-truth thesis, however, is precisely the aggressive zeal mobilized to repulse approaching debates.The unwillingness to acknowledge-for example-postcolonial social connections that is typical of right-wing populist filter bubbles, and the associated discrediting of postcolonial subjectivities (e.g., "asylum seekers" who "also make claims"), are not evidence of indifference to universal truth (see Brown 2018: 70).Rather, it is exactly the act of denial that reveals the enduring importance of truth claims for a socialization based on intersubjective understanding, to which there is no alternative even for the most isolated bubbles.
But the formerly self-evident truths that are re-established in these bubbles through discourse avoidance can only be upheld in an awareness of their invalidity.This is at least the case if the resymbolizing activity of subaltern counterpublics remains combative and intrusive, thereby ensuring that the articulation of contradiction remains virulent.From the Habermasian perspective adopted here, this awareness becomes a practical problem for the actors situated in the bubbles themselves.With the difficult-to-suppress insight into one's own inability to engage in discourse, the consensual contents that were supposed to be secured by retreating into the bubble also lose their authority and binding force, with the result that the bubble itself begins to disintegrate.The more confidence in one's ability to engage in discourse collapses, the more cynicism spreads inside the bubble, undermining the binding force of communicative action.In this way, the ever more desperately affirmed group cohesion increasingly assumes the form of a "racket" 11 that can find its fragile unity in the end only in contingently converging particular interests.In this sense, the reactive attempt to withdraw into a defensive posture is a precarious condition that points beyond itself and is difficult to sustain in the long run.
The persistence of attitudes in specific milieus may cast doubts on such a drastically exaggerated theoretical conclusion.But the tenacity of right-wing populist attitudes that is certainly apparent in many cases should not be misinterpreted as evidence of relatively self-enclosed cultural identities that are impervious to criticism. 12It has more to do with the fact that an important precondition for the crisis proneness of filter bubbles is often not met.The reactive defense mechanism can be sustained and normalized if the other side acts in a mirror-image way by defensively withdrawing into its safe spaces.Safe spaces are an essential prerequisite for the subaltern practice of resymbolization.The discourseexpanding power of this practice dries up, however, when it no longer engages confrontationally with its social counterpart, but remains within its own safe space.This is occurring in many "left-liberal" contexts today, a phenomenon that is certainly connected with understandable symptoms of fatigue.But this currently popular move of avoiding conflict means that the manifest inability of right-wing filter bubbles to engage in discourse does not itself become a concrete experience for those in these bubbles that would undermine their own self-understanding.This in turn means that large sections of society can remain comfortably ensconced in their narrow-mindedness.To avoid this, it is indeed necessary to "speak with those on the Right."This approach in the politics of discourse already came up for discussion a couple of years ago (see Leo et al. 2017).However, the orientation toward reaching understanding [Verständigung] inherent in speaking with one another tended to be misinterpreted as preemptive understanding [Verständnis] of the seemingly "legitimate concerns" of "ordinary people" and, in response, was rightly rejected by left-liberal activists. 13But the orientation toward reaching mutual understanding can also be understood in a different way-namely, as the subversive imposition of a discourse situation with right-wing counterpublics, in which the latter are persistently besieged by the contradictions that destroy their obsolete pseudo-consensus.
Translated by Ciaran Cronin
Warner regards it as a central journalistic actor in the nascent bourgeois public sphere that was able to decisively shape its specific culture of discussion (ibid.: 98ff.).2. Habermas develops a typology of different validity claims.He distinguishes between truth claims that refer to the "objective world" and claims to rightness that refer to a "social world" of intersubjective and normatively imbued relations.In addition, there are claims to authenticity that refer back to the "subjective world" of inner experience (see Habermas 1984: 15-22).It is crucial for Habermas that society reproduces itself essentially through processes of raising and recognizing such validity claims.3. See Wittgenstein's argument against the possibility of private languages: Wittgenstein 2009: § §243-315; Habermas 1995: 65f. 4. See also Eley 1992; Calhoun 2010 on the exclusion of proletarian subjects from the bourgeois public sphere in the early 19th century. 5.At one point Warner also states that the motivation underlying the exclusion of the She-Romps is the Spectator's "male fear" (ibid.: 110).However, it is striking that he quickly loses sight of this politicalsocial motivation and focuses exclusively on the aesthetic level of different, seemingly incompatible styles when he tries to explain the supposedly constitutive exclusivity of the bourgeois public sphere.6.One and the same subject, understood as the personal and uniquely identifiable agent, can have or assume different "subjectivities" with different political, ethical, and cultural constitutions.7. Interestingly, Habermas declares the view that he still took in his early work on systematically distorting barriers to communicative action immanent to the lifeworld to be outdated.In his Theory of Communicative Action, he argues that modernity has witnessed a momentous "rationalization of the lifeworld" (Habermas 1987: 86), which can be seen in particular in the shattering of religious worldviews in the course of the Enlightenment and the subsequent differentiation of autonomous "expert cultures."Emancipated from the claims, reservations, and limitations of a holistic point of view, these "expert cultures" began to reflect on the true, the beautiful, and the good independently and thus without reservation (cf. ibid.: 195ff.).According to Habermas, this advance in rationalization ensures that ideological validity claims, that is, claims that cannot actually be redeemed discursively, can no longer hide behind the "authority of the holy" (ibid.: 77), by which they were for a long time successfully immunized against contradiction (ibid.: 77f., 196).The authority of the holy could still act as a genuine barrier to communication, insofar as it made the "godless" criticism of heretics appear to be beyond the pale of what could be seriously entertained (cf. Habermas 1996: 23f.;Habermas 1987: 194).
With the disappearance of this authority, however, communicative action is freed from religious restrictions to such an extent that it can become a topic of discourse anywhere and without risk of excommunication (cf.Habermas 1996: 25;Habermas 1987: 196).For Habermas, this finding informed by a theory of progress paves the way for an overly idealizing view of the modern lifeworld, which henceforth can only be colonized from the outside, but cannot be distorted by internal barriers to communication (see ibid.).
Habermas's phasing out of the concept of systematically distorted communication promptly met with criticism.James Bohman (1986) insisted that-contrary to Habermas's theory of progress-barriers to communication constructed in the lifeworld continue to exist in modernity.Religious taboos and thresholds for thematization may be disappearing before our eyes; at the same time, new kinds of specifically secular barriers to discourse are emerging (see ibid.: 348f.).Bohman argues that the differentiation of spheres of validity, which Habermas onesidedly affirms as an advance in rationalization, can also have the effect of blocking discourse.This is the case, for example, when the appearance of pure objectivity attaching to scientific findings means that their tacit normative-political premises can no longer be questioned (see ibid.: 342, 350).I would like to take up this criticism and add that it is precisely the successful rationalization of the lifeworld through the dissolution of the authority of the holy that releases a "risk of dissension" (Habermas 1996: 25) of new proportions, which is mastered not only by transferring certain processes of social reproduction to the functional systems of the state and the economy, but also by barriers of communication erected in the lifeworld in the shape of thematic and social exclusions from the public sphere.The typical modern anti-feminism experienced by the She-Romps is just as much an example of this (see Federici 2004) as the different varieties of "enlightened" racism (see Balibar and Wallerstein 1991) that would be thoroughly misunderstood as archaic or pre-modern residues.8.The concept of systematically distorted communication is often mistakenly understood in this way (see Celikates 2015: 161f.).But "systematic" does not mean the same thing as "systemic."9. Didier Eribon performs-practically and theoretically-a comparable movement of "return" (Eribon 2018;Eribon 2016: 40-53;Kempf 2020).10.On the postfoundationalist logic of the "constitutive outside" of discourse, see Mouffe 2009: 21;Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 122-134. 11.This concept, entertained but never actually theorized by Max Horkheimer, denotes a radically de-normativized form of socialization sustained by a mixture of opportunism, coercion, and violence.The paradigm is that of the "gang."For a more detailed account, see Fuchshuber 2019.12.In my opinion, Andreas Reckwitz's talk of a currently ignited "cultural conflict" being fought out between "hyperculture and cultural essentialism" (Reckwitz 2021: 24ff.;cf. Reckwitz 2020) tends toward such a view.To be sure, Reckwitz's sociological analysis by no means essentializes the cultural-essentialist milieus or identities (right-wing populism, conservatism…), but situates them in complex sociocultural, historical, and economic contexts.But at the same time, he describes the cultural-essentialist identities that have evolved in this way in relativistic terms as self-contained and thoroughly particularistic horizons of values and norms that stand over against a universalistic "hyperculture" in an unmediated, and thus also normatively impervious, way.The theoretical perspective proposed here, by contrast, suggests that these seemingly particularistic identities would be better understood as themselves resting on universalistic claims to truth (to this extent, the typical right-wing populist appeal to "common sense" should be taken quite seriously); it is the reactionary preservation of these truth claims that first leads the corresponding identities into the paradoxical situation of self-isolation that tends to undermine itself.13.See the discussion between Per Leo and Benjamin Moldenhauer in Leo and Moldenhauer 2019.