The coloniality of representation and black African subjectivity
3.4. Nationalism, citizenship and the coloniality of the public sphere
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In what makes him centre the media in this public sphere, Habermas argues that what is important or pivotal to the public sphere is deliberation. In deliberation, it is envisaged that people engage as equals. For Calhoun, Habermas traces the transformations in the public sphere, revealing the internal tensions and factors that led to the decline of the bourgeois public sphere and, then, showing the elements of truth and emancipatory potential that were contained at this public sphere despite its contradictions (1991:2).
Goode notes that there is a paradox in the reception of Habermas’s ideas around the public sphere
“on the one hand, it seems like well-trodden territory. In fact, it is now increasingly dismissed as idealistic, Eurocentric and unwittingly patriarchal” (Goode, 2005: 1). On the other hand, Goode insists the theoretical propositions of Habermas around the public sphere “continues to be routinely invoked in debates around democracy, citizenship and communication” (2005: 1). Within Euro- American critical theory, Habermas is seen as over-idealising the bourgeois public sphere and hence smoothing over its exclusions of large numbers of people as it was composed of only the educated and propertied men (Calhoun, 1991:3; Fraser, 1990:62). Calhoun sees these men as conducting their business in a way not “only exclusive of others but prejudicial to the interests of those excluded” (1991:3). Fraser argues that the bourgeois public sphere was constituted by exclusions along gender, class and ethnicity (1990:62). Mouffe (1999), whose intellectual project is to salvage Marxist thinking, not only criticises the deliberative democracy foundations of Habermas and his followers’ but offers what she calls an agonistic model of discourse and politics as an alternative. The agonistic model, unlike the deliberative model, does not take out or smooth over conflict, but proceeds from the basis of difference. Mouffe’s main criticism of Habermas’
(1964/1974) deliberative model is that it emphasises rational dialogue and consensus which she sees as impossible because of differences in people. She argues that agreement in opinions is preceded by agreement on the language (Mouffe, 1999:749). Language is used in a broad sense to embrace all communicative acts. Consensus is, therefore, seen as limited in that some views are not only “subordinated” in a fair contest in the public terrain, but are from the start, excluded.
Mouffe’s agonistic model emerges out of the theoretical bases of her work with Ernesto Laclau (1985), which acknowledges the dimension of power and antagonism and their ineradicable character (1999:752). The agonistic model is built through paying attention to the differences between “the political” and “politics”. “The political” refers to the dimension of antagonism that
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is inherent in all human societies and “politics” refers to the “ensemble of practices, discourses and institutions” that seek to “establish order and organise human coexistence in conditions that are always potentially conflictual because they are affected by the dimension of ‘the political’”
(Mouffe, 1999:754).
As a way of crossing over to the decolonial critiques of the concept of the public sphere, it is important to locate Habermas within the Frankfurt School. Habermas’ concept of the public sphere is regarded as the Frankfurt school’s most influential concept (Beebee, 2002: 187). The Frankfurt School is credited for initiating western critical theory. Habermas is the most famous of the second generation of the Frankfurt School. Habermas’s thesis in the public sphere matched with his mentors – Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer – the idea of the “totally administered” society but departed from it by installing discursive reason as central to society (Beebee, 2002: 187).
However, the concept remains the intellectual progeny “of the critical theory of the Frankfurt School” (Beebee, 2002: 187; Kellner, 2002: 31; Bettig, 2002). However, the Frankfurt school and Habermas have been criticized for ignoring the realities of colonialism in their work. Challenging the blind universalism of Eurocentric theory, Allen (2016) focuses on the critical theory of the Frankfurt School and the later thinkers it inspired including Jurgen Habermas whose concept of the public sphere has become hegemonic in Eurocentric ideas of press freedom. What has been pointed out as the challenge to this brand of critical theory is its silence on colonialism and race and how these are co-constitutive with modernity (Allen, 2016; Ciccariello-Maher, 2016).
Although Baum admits that, set against its lofty goals of human emancipation, critical theory fails to acknowledge the history of colonialism, he still believes that in its critique of antisemitism, the Frankfurt School Critical Theory offers analytical resources “with respect to confronting racism and colonialism” (2015: 420). In response, Ciccariello-Maher (2016) notes that the failures of the Frankfurt school are writ in its Eurocentrism that makes it blind to the fact that the holocaust was a colonial horror coming back home. Here Ciccariello-Maher, draws our attention to Aime Cesaire’s observation that, in the holocaust, European modernity faced the horror it created in colonisation as ‘colonial methods and concepts returned suddenly and unexpectedly to European soil’ (2016: 133). Allen (2016)’s tactic of decolonising theory involves the double play of refusal and inheriting. It is a refusal ‘to remain faithful to its core doctrines or central figures’ and inheriting it, that is, taking it up “while simultaneously radically transforming it” (Allen, 2016:
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xiii). This is the tactic I propose for the building of decolonial Marxism: to refuse its limitations as far as colonialism is concerned while retaining its critical edge especially in exposing capitalism.
Allen also notes that, contrary to its stated aims to pursue emancipation, critical theory fails to engage “substantively with one of the most influential branches of critical theory, in the broader sense of that term, to have emerged in recent decades— postcolonial studies and theory” (2016:
xiv). According to Allen, the failure for critical theory to engage with post- and decolonial theories, is located in the way it grounds normativity (Allen, 2016: xiv). Normativity is seen as either lying in ideas of historical progress or centred on a foundationalist conception of practical reason (Allen, 2016: xiv). This becomes problematic “given the deep connections between ideas of historical progress and development and normative foundationalism and the theory and practice of Eurocentric imperialism” (Allen, 2016: xv). In the Global South academy, western critical theory, then appears as entangled in the colonial project. As has been argued above, to argue, in the liberal sense, that freedom to publish in the context of a free market allows for a diversity of viewpoints making the press a representative institution is to ignore colonial history and to ignore the ravages of the ‘market’ in the postcolony.
Specifically, on the public sphere, Santos (2012) suggests that the decolonial critique of the concept of the public sphere should build on the critique of the concept within the Euro-American critical theory tradition. It should also build on work on the racism of capitalism and the coloniality of gender. Santos notes that the “theoretical and cultural presuppositions” of the concept of the public sphere “are entirely European” (2012: 43). In that these presuppositions are “not necessarily universally valid” it is important then to decolonise the Eurocentric concept of the public sphere so as to account for “the epistemological diversity of the world” through developing other theories anchored in “other epistemologies – the epistemologies of the South that adequately account for the realities of the global South” (Santos, 2012: 43). Santos suggests “intercultural translation, understood as a procedure that allows for mutual intelligibility among the diverse experiences of the world. Such a procedure does not endow any set of experiences with the statute either of exclusive totality or homogenous part” (2012: 43). He argues that in the African context, there is a need for two moments in the implementation of this intercultural translation of theory. To Santos, the first task is to identify the Eurocentrism that lingers in theory inherited from the colonial heritage, some kind of an intellectual audit of the theoretical resources available to African scholars
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(2012: 43). The second task is to engage in the “reconstitutive challenge” of building theory through “revitalising the historical and cultural possibilities of the African legacy, interrupted by colonialism and neo-colonialism” (Santos, 2012: 43). The Eurocentrism of the concept of the public sphere lies in that it centres Europe’s 18th century history while expressing the emergence of the European bourgeois political subject in the context of European “practices and institutions”
such as coffee houses and clubs (Santos, 2012: 44). Santos notes that “its theoretical and cultural presuppositions are entirely European” (Santos, 2012: 44). For the Global South the question that arises is “assuming that the public sphere has become a hegemonic concept, is it possible to use it in a counter-hegemonic way?” (Santos, 2012: 45). We now turn to discuss representation, subjectivity and coloniality.