Vennlig hilsen Ronny Selbfk Myhre
***************************************************************************
CyberDemocracy: Internet and the Public Sphere
Mark Poster
University of California, Irvine
Copyright(c) Mark Poster 1995
I am an advertisement for a version of myself.
David Byrne
The Stakes of the Question
The discussion of the political impact of the Internet has focussed on a
number of issues: access, technological determinism, encryption,
commodification, intellectual property, the public sphere,
decentralization, anarchy, gender and ethnicity. While these issues may be
addressed from a number of standpoints, only some them are able to assess
the full extent of what is at stake in the new communications technology at
the cultural level of identity formation. If questions are framed in
relation to prevailing political structures, forces and ideologies, for
example, blinders are being imposed which exclude the question of the
subject or identity construction from the domain of discussion. Instances
of such apparently urgent but actually limiting questions are those of
encryption and commodification. In the case of encryption, the United
States government seeks to secure its borders from "terrorists" who might
use the Internet and thereby threaten it. But the dangers to the population
are and have always been far greater from this state apparatus itself than
from socalled terrorists. More citizens have been improperly abused, had
their civil rights violated, and much worse by the government than by
terrorists. In fact terrorism is in good part an effect of government
propaganda; it serves to deflect attention from governmental abuse toward a
mostly imagined, highly dangerous outside enemy. If the prospects of
democracy on the Internet are viewed interms of encryption, then the
security of the existing national government becomes the limit of the
matter: what is secure for the nation-state is taken to mean true security
for everyone, a highly dubious proposition. Æ. For an intelligent review of
the battle over encryption see Steven Levy, "The Battle of the Clipper
Chip," New York Times Magazine (June 12, 1994) pp. 4451, 60, 70.Å The
question of potentials for new forms of social space that might empower
individuals in new ways are foreclosed in favor of preserving existing
relations of force as they are viewed by the most powerful institution in
the history of the world, the government of the United States.
The issue of commodification also affords a narrow focus, often restricting
the discussion of the politics of the Internet to the question of which
corporation or which type of corporation will be able to obtain what amount
of income from which configuration of the Internet. Will the telephone
companies, the cable companies or some almagam of both be able to secure
adequate markets and profits from providing the general public with
railroad timetables, five hundred channels of television, the movie of
one's choice on demand, and so forth? From this vantage point the questions
raised are as follows: Shall the Internet be used to deliver entertainment
products, like some gigantic, virtual theme park? Or shall it be used to
sell commodities, functioning as an electronic retail store or mall? These
questions consume corporate managers around the country and their Marxist
critics alike, though here again, as with the encryption issue, the
Internet is being understood as an extension of or substitution for
existing institutions. While there is no doubt that the Internet folds into
existing social functions and extends them in new ways, translating the act
of shopping, for example, into an electronic form, what are far more cogent
as possible long term political effects of the Internet are the ways in
which it institutes new social functions, ones that do not fit easily
within those of characteristicallymodern organizations. The problem is that
these new functions can only become intelligible if a framework is adopted
that does not limit the discussion from the outset to modern patterns of
interpretation. For example, if one understands politics as the restriction
or expansion of the existing executive, legislative and judicial branches
of government, one will not be able even to broach the question of new
types of participation in government. To ask then about the relation of the
Internet to democracy is to challenge or to risk challenging our existing
theoretical approaches and concepts as they concern these questions.
If one places in brackets political theories that address modern
governmental institutions in order to open the path to an assessment of the
"postmodern" possibilities suggested by the Internet, two difficulties
immediately emerge: (1) there is no adequate "postmodern" theory of
politics and (2) the issue of democracy, the dominant political norm and
ideal, is itself a "modern" category associated with the project of the
Enlightenment. Let me address these issues in turn.
Recently theorists such as Philippe LacoueLabarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy Æ.
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger, Art and Politics, trans. Chris Turner
(New York: Blackwell, 1990) and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community,
trans. Peter Conor et al (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1991).Å have pointed to the limitations of a "left/right" spectrum of
ideologies for addressing contemporary political issues. Deriving from
seating arrangements of legislators during the French Revolution of 1789,
the modern ideological spectrum inscribes a grand narrative of liberation
which contains several problematic aspects. First it installs a linear,
evolutionary and progressive history that occludes the differential
temporalities of nonWestern groups and women, and imposes a totalizing,
strong interpretation of the past that erases from view gaps,
discontinuities, improbabilities, contingencies, in short apanoply of
phenomena that might better be approached from a nonlinear perspective.
Second the Enlightenment narrative establishes a process of liberation at
the heart of history which requires at its base a presocial, foundational,
individual identity. The individual is posited as outside of and prior to
history, only later becoming ensnared in externally imposed chains.
Politics for this modern perspective is then the arduous extraction of an
autonomous agent from the contingent obstacles imposed by the past. In its
rush to ontologize freedom, the modern view of the subject hides the
process of its historical construction. A postmodern orientation would have
to allow for the constitution of identity within the social and within
language, displacing the question of freedom from a presupposition of and a
conclusion to theory to become instead a pretheoretical or nonfoundational
discursive preference. Postmodern theorists have discovered that modern
theory's insistence on the freedom of the subject, its compulsive,
repetitive inscription into discourse of the sign of the resisting agent,
functions to restrict the shape of identity to its modern form, an
ideological and legitimizing gesture of its own position rather than a step
towards emancipation. If a postmodern perspective is to avoid the limits of
modern theory, it is proscribed from ontologizing any form of the subject.
The postmodern position is limited to an insistence on the constructedness
of identity. In the effort to avoid the pitfalls of modern political
theory, then, postmodern theory sharply restricts the scope of its ability
to define a new political direction. This theoretical asceticism is a
contemporary condition of discourse imposing an unusual discipline and
requiring a considerable suspension of disbelief on the part of the
audience. To skeptics it can only be said that the alternatives, those of
"modern" positions, are even lessdesirable.
But there are further difficulties in establishing a position from which to
recognize and analyze the cultural aspect of the Internet. For postmodern
theory still invokes the modern term democracy, even when this is modified
by the adjective "radical" as in the work of Ernesto Laclau. Æ. Ernesto
Laclau, New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time (New York: Verso,
1990).Å One may characterize postmodern or postMarxist democracy in
Laclau's terms as one that opens new positions of speech, empowering
previously excluded groups and enabling new aspects of social life to
become part of the political process. While the Internet is often accused
of elitism (a mere thirty million users), there does exist a growing and
vibrant grass-roots participation in it organized in part by local public
libraries. Æ. See Jean Armour Polly and Steve Cisler, "Community Networks
on the Internet," Library Journal (June 15, 1994) pp. 22-23.Å But are not
these initiatives, the modern skeptic may persist, simply extensions of
existing political institutions rather than being "post," rather than being
a break of some kind? In response I can assert only that the "postmodern"
position need not be taken as a metaphysical assertion of a new age; that
theorists are trapped within existing frameworks as much as they may be
critical of them and wish not to be; that in the absence of a coherent
alternative political program the best one can do is to examine phenomena
such as the Internet in relation to new forms of the old democracy, while
holding open the possibility that what might emerge might be something
other than democracy in any shape that we may conceive it given our
embeddedness in the present. Democracy, the rule by all, is surely
preferable to its historic alternatives. And the term may yet contain
critical potentials since existing forms of democracy surely do not fulfill
the promise of freedom and equality. The colonization of the term by
existing institutions encourages one to look elsewhere for the means to
name the new patterns offorce relations emerging in certain parts of the
Internet.
Decentralized Technology
My plea for indulgence with the limitations of the postmodern position on
politics quickly gains credibility when the old question of technological
determinism is posed in relation to the Internet. For when the question of
technology is posed we may see immediately how the Internet disrupts the
basic assumptions of the older positions. The Internet is above all a
decentralized communication system. Like the telephone network, anyone
hooked up to the Internet may initiate a call, send a message that he or
she has composed, and may do so in the manner of the broadcast system, that
is to say, may send a message to many receivers, and do this either in
"real time" or as stored data or both. The Internet is also decentralized
at a basic level of organization since, as a network of networks, new
networks may be added so long as they conform to certain communications
protocols. As an historian I find it fascinating that this unique structure
should emerge from a confluence of cultural communities which appear to
have so little in common: the Cold War Defense Department which sought to
insure survival against nuclear attack by promoting decentralization, the
countercultural ethos of computer programming engineers which had a deep
distaste for any form of censorship or active restraint of communications
and the world university research which I am at a loss to characterize.
Added to this is a technological substratum of digital electronics which
unifies all symbolic forms in a single system of codes, rendering
transmissioninstantaneous and duplication effortless. If the technological
structure of the Internet institutes costless reproduction, instantaneous
dissemination and radical decentralization, what might be its effects upon
the society, the culture and the political institutions?
There can be only one answer to this question and that is that it is the
wrong question. Technologically determined effects derive from a broad set
of assumptions in which what is technological is a configuration of
materials that effect other materials and the relation between the
technology and human beings is external, that is, where human beings are
understood to manipulate the materials for ends that they impose upon the
technology from a preconstituted position of subjectivity. But what the
Internet technology imposes is a dematerialization of communication and in
many of its aspects a transformation of the subject position of the
individual who engages within it. The Internet resists the basic conditions
for asking the question of the effects of technology. It installs a new
regime of relations between humans and matter and between matter and
nonmatter, reconfiguring the relation of technology to culture and thereby
undermining the standpoint from within which, in the past, a discourse
developed -- one which appeared to be natural -- about the effects of
technology. The only way to define the technological effects of the
Internet is to build the Internet, to set in place a series of relations
which constitute an electronic geography. Put differently the Internet is
more like a social space than a thing so that its effects are more like
those of Germany than those of hammers. The effects of Germany upon the
people within it is to make them Germans (at least for the most part); the
effects of hammers is not to make people hammers,though Heideggerians and
some others might disagree, but to force metal spikes into wood. As long as
we understand the Internet as a hammer we will fail to discern the way it
is like Germany. The problem is that modern perspectives tend to reduce the
Internet to a hammer. In the grand narrative of modernity, the Internet is
an efficient tool of communication, advancing the goals of its users who
are understood as preconstituted instrumental identities.
The Internet, I suppose like Germany, is complex enough so that it may with
some profit be viewed in part as a hammer. If I search the database
functions of the Internet or if I send email purely as a substitute for
paper mail, then its effects may reasonably be seen to be those on the
order of the hammer. The database on the Internet may be more easily or
cheaply accessed than its alternatives and the same may be said of email in
relation to the Post Office or the FAX machine. But the aspects of the
Internet that I would like to underscore are those which instantiate new
forms of interaction and which pose the question of new kinds of relations
of power between participants. The question that needs to be asked about
the relation of the Internet to democracy is this: are there new kinds of
relations occuring within it which suggest new forms of power
configurations between communicating individuals? In other words, is there
a new politics on the Internet? One way to approach this question is to
make a detour from the issue of technology and raise again the question of
a public sphere, gauging the extent to which Internet democracy may become
intelligible in relation to it. To frame the issue of the political nature
of the Internet in relation to the concept of the public sphere is
particularly appropriate because of the spatial metaphor associated with
the term. Instead of animmediate reference to the structure of an
institution, which is often a formalist argument over procedures, or to the
claims of a given social group, which assumes a certain figure of agency
that I would like to keep in suspense, the notion of a public sphere
suggests an arena of exchange, like the ancient Greek agora or the colonial
New England town hall. If there is a public sphere on the Internet, who
populates it and how? In particular one must ask what kinds of beings
exchange information on this public sphere? Since there occurs no
face-to-face interaction, only electronic flickers Æ. See N. Katherine
Hayles, "Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers," October 66 (Fall 1993)
pp. 69-91.Å on a screen, what kind of community can there be in this space?
What kind of disembodied politics are inscribed so evanescently in
cyberspace? Modernist curmudgeons may object vehemently against attributing
to information flows on the Internet the dignified term "community." Are
they correct and if so what sort of phenomenon is this cyberdemocracy?
The Internet as a Public Sphere ?
The issue of the public sphere is at the heart of any reconceptualization
of democracy. Contemporary social relations seem to be devoid of a basic
level of interactive practice which, in the past, was the matrix of
democratizing politics: loci such as the agora, the New England town hall,
the village Church, the coffee house, the tavern, the public square, a
convenient barn, a union hall, a park, a factory lunchroom, and even a
street corner. Many of these places remain but no longer serve as
organizingcenters for political discussion and action. It appears that the
media, especially television but also other forms of electronic
communication isolate citizens from one another and sustitute themselves
for older spaces of politics. An example from the Clinton heath-care reform
campaign will suffice: the Clinton forces at one point (mid-July 1994) felt
that Congress was less favorable to their proposal than the general
population. To convince the Congress of the wisdom of health-care reform,
the adminstration purchased television advertising which depicted ordinary
citizens speaking in favor of the legislation. The ads were shown only in
Washington D.C. because they were directed not at the general population of
viewers but at congressmen and congresswomen alone. The executive branch
deployed the media directly on the legislative branch. Such are politics in
the era of the mode of information. In a context like this one may ask
where is the public sphere, where is the place citizens interact to form
opinions in relation to which public policy must be attuned? John Hartley
makes the bold and convincing argument that the media are the public
sphere: "Television, popular newspapers, magazines and photography, the
popular media of the modern period, are the public domain, the place where
and the means by which the public is created and has its being." Æ. For a
study of the role of the media in the formation of a public sphere see John
Hartley, The Politics of Pictures: The Creation of the Public in the Age of
Popular Media (New York: Routledge, 1992) p.1. Hartley examines in
particular the role of graphic images in newspapers.Å The same claim is
offered by Paul Virilio: "Avenues and public venues from now on are
eclipsed by the screen, by electronic displays, in a preview of the `vision
machines' just around the corner." Æ. Paul Virilio, The Vision Machine,
trans. Julie Rose (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994) p. 64.Å
"Public" tends more and more to slide into "publicity" as "character" is
replaced by "image." These changes must be examined without nostalgia and
the retrospective glance of modernist politics and theory.
Sensing a collapse of the public sphere and therefore a crisis of
democraticpolitics, Jørgen Habermas published The Structural Transformation
of the Public Sphere in 1962. Æ. Jørgen Habermas, The Structural
Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge: MIT
Press, 1989).Å In this highly influential work he traced the development of
a democratic public sphere in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and
charted its course to its decline in the twentieth century. In that work
and arguably since then as well, Habermas' political intent was to further
"the project of Enlightenment" by the reconstruction of a public sphere in
which reason might prevail, not the instrumental reason of much modern
practice but the critical reason that represents the best of the democratic
tradition. Habermas defined the public sphere as a domain of uncoerced
conversation oriented toward a pragmatic accord. His position came under
attack by poststructuralists like Lyotard who questioned the emancipatory
potentials of its model of consensus through rational debate. Æ.
Jean-Frangois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, trans. Brian Massumi et al
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).Å At issue was the
poststructuralist critique of Habermas' Enlightenment ideal of the
autonomous rational subject as a universal foundation for democracy. Before
deploying the category of the public sphere to evaluate democracy on the
Internet, I shall turn to recent developments in the debate over Habermas'
position.
In the 1980s Lyotard's critique was expanded by feminists like Nancy Fraser
who demonstrate the gender blindness in Habermas' position. Æ. Nancy
Fraser, "Rethinking the Public Sphere," Social Text 25/26 (1990) pp. 56-80
and Unruly Practices (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989)
especially Ch. 6 "What's Critical about Critical Theory? The Case of
Habermas and Gender." For a critique of Habermas' historical analysis see
Joan Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French
Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988). Å Even before the
poststructuralists and feminists, Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge began the
critique of Habermas by articulating the notion of an oppositional public
sphere, specifically that of the proletariat. What is important about their
argument, as demonstrated so clearly by Miriam Hansen, is that Negt and
Kluge shifted the terrain of the notion of the public sphere from an
historico-transcendental idealization of the Enlightenment to a plurality
and heterotopia of discourses. This crucial change in the notion of the
public sphereassumes its full significance when it is seen in relation to
liberal democracy. The great ideological fiction of liberalism is to reduce
the public sphere to existing democratic institutions. Habermas' critique
of liberalism counterposes a radical alternative to it but one that still
universalizes and monopolizes the political. Negt and Kluge, in contrast,
decentralize and mutliply the public sphere, opening a path of critique and
possibly a new politics. Æ. Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, Public Sphere
and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public
Sphere, trans. Peter Labanyi et al (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1993). The foreword by Miriam Hansen (pp.ix-xli) is essential and
important in its own right.Å The final step in the development of the
concept of the public sphere came with Rita Felski's synthesis of
Negt/Kluge with both feminist gender analysis and the poststructuralist
critique of the autonomous subject. For Felski the concept of the public
sphere must build on the "experience" of political protest (in the sense of
Negt and Kluge), must acknowledge and amplify the mutliplicity of the
subject (in the sense of poststructuralism) and must account for gender
differences (in the sense of feminism). She writes:
Unlike the bourgeois public sphere, then, the feminist public sphere does
not claim a representative universality but rather offers a critique of
cultural values from the standpoint of women as a marginalized group within
society. In this sense it constitues a partial or counterpublic sphere....
Yet insofar as it is a public sphere, its arguments are also directed
outward, toward a dissemination of feminist ideas and values throughout
society as a whole. Æ. Rita Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist
Literature and Social Change (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989) p.
167.Å
Felski seriously revises the Habermasian notion of the public sphere,
separating it from its patriarchal, bourgeois and logocentric attachments
perhaps, but nonetheless stillinvoking the notion of a public sphere and
more or less reducing politics to it. This becomes clear in the conclusion
of her argument: "Some form of appeal to collective identity and solidarity
is a necessary precondition for the emergence and effectiveness of an
oppositional movement; feminist theorists who reject any notion of a
unifying identity as a repressive fiction in favor of a stress on absolute
difference fail to show how such diversity and fragmentation can be
reconciled with goaloriented political struggles based upon common
interests. An appeal to a shared experience of oppression provides the
starting point from which women as a group can open upon the problematic of
gender, at the same time as this notion of gendered community contains a
strongly utopian dimension...." (pp.168-9) In the end Felski sees the
public sphere as central to feminist politics. But then we must ask how
this public sphere is to be distinguished from any political discussion?