Date Awarded

2023

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (M.A.)

Department

American Studies

Advisor

Elizabeth Losh

Committee Member

Simon Stow

Committee Member

Charles McGovern

Abstract

However infirm “the public” may be as a political body in America today, its presence as idea in American life is still potent. This thesis seeks to take a first step in developing an idea of what a contemporary American public looks like and how it functions, using concepts developed by Jürgen Habermas, Chantal Mouffe, and Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari. The Habermasian “public sphere” is a major reference point for popular thinking about the public, and The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere is indeed an exemplary historical and critical account of the wide range of forces that cohered in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to form the liberal bourgeois public sphere, whose remnants exist in the constitutional governments of today. Yet later thinkers have critiqued Habermas’ account of its transformation into a contemporary public sphere as containing a normativity that idealizes the bourgeois character of the original public sphere. This thesis uses the public presented by the 2022 American film Kimi, directed by Stephen Soderbergh, to highlight the ways the public sphere has difficulty accounting for the specific undemocratic forces—which deter the type of rational communication the public sphere needs to function—that are most prevalent today. The thesis then spotlights an especially prevalent explanation for the sphere’s normative idealism—that the public sphere’s bourgeois class function facilitates a unity of opinion at its center, which is then explained by the collective exercise of innate human rationality—and the alternative conception of a public that most explicitly factors this critique into its structure: the agonist public, or one in which disagreement among participants is built into political proceedings. Although agonism is perceptive in diagnosing the problems posed by the public sphere’s idealism, its argument that the sphere’s necessary unity is the cause of this idealism (which can therefore be excised it by facilitating disagreement through the concept of the “adversary”), is less convincing—much more potent are the claims that the structure of “the public” as an idea requires some sort of normativity to exist. A more fruitful comparison between the public sphere and the agonist sphere can be done by mediating their relationship through the lens of the fascicular. This notion, formulated by Deleuze & Guattari, describes the tendency to maintain a fundamental unity even as it splits and forms new connections in seemingly rhizomatic ways. The arboreal characteristics of liberalism are well described in Structural Transformation and are thus built into the object of the public sphere (and account for much of the previously described critiques); because the “root” of the agonist sphere is in these same characteristics, they cannot be overcome to achieve the sort of democratic goals agonism intends to foster even as it explicitly addresses them. The nature of fascicular tendencies can be more clearly seen in Kimi, where the fascicular weakness of screen-based communication allows Soderbergh to continue his career-long tendency to comment on the norms of Hollywood cinema and the medium of film itself. The conclusion of this thesis suggests a shared goal of the seemingly incongruous Habermas and Deleuze & Guattari, “to escape the abstract opposition between the multiple and the one,” and identifies areas where a further partnership between these two sets of thinkers about the public can proceed.

DOI

https://dx.doi.org/10.21220/s2-mfgq-k597

Rights

© The Author

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