Public Culture: Diversity, Democracy, and Community in the United States

Preface

Why Public Culture?

Marguerite S. Shaffer

This book began as part of an extended reflection about the current status of American studies. The process of redesigning the curriculum for the American studies major at Miami University and developing an introductory American studies survey forced me and my colleagues to ask fundamental questions about the field: specifically, what could American studies offer to students and scholars confronting a politically polarized, increasingly privatized, corporate, global culture? For me these are deeply personal questions about my responsibility and identity as an American studies scholar. In developing and teaching the introduction to American studies, I have struggled to promote both cultural competency and cultural agency. Similarly, in thinking about the curriculum for the major, I have wondered how to move students from detached cultural analysis to active cultural engagement. And as a scholar, I have questioned the insularity and public relevance of purely academic work. I have pondered how to integrate cultural critique with culture change—cultural analysis with cultural agency. Ultimately, these questions are about public culture.

Literary critic Terry Eagleton, in his recent book After Theory, begins with the pronouncement The golden age of cultural theory is long past.¹ Eagleton traces the development of postmodern theory from the 1960s through the 1990s, detailing a shift from a politically engaged, intellectual commitment to egalitarian social change to an increasingly insular, elitist, academic focus on subaltern subjectivity. Although his critique is aimed broadly at the humanities, specifically cultural studies and literary criticism, it is also suggestive for the field of American studies. At a time when globalization has dramatically expanded the power and reach of multinational corporations, and the war on terror and ideological and political polarization challenge the core principles of participatory democracy in the United States, American studies can benefit from a reconsideration of its organizing topics, themes, and questions. The concept of public culture presented here serves to reframe the work of American studies. Specifically, public culture has the potential to shift the focus of the field beyond its current interest in issues of difference and identity toward new and varied concepts of belonging, collective life, and community as they are played out in multiple forms within a diverse and increasingly global culture.

In The Human Condition, political philosopher Hannah Arendt provides a powerful metaphor for this concept of public culture. She writes, To live together in the world means essentially that a world of things is between those who have it in common, as a table is located between those who sit around it; the world, like every in-between, relates and separates men at the same time. The public realm, as the common world, gathers us together and yet prevents our falling over each other, so to speak.² This image of a table that connects diverse individuals in a shared endeavor elegantly encapsulates the very complicated intersections between individuals and diverse communities as they come together in the public realm. Arendt explains, Only where things can be seen by many in a variety of aspects without changing their identity, so that those who are gathered around them know they see sameness in utter diversity, can worldly reality truly and reliably appear.³ In many ways, Arendt's famous table around which people gather in public life⁴ inspired this volume and the idea of public culture it seeks to promote. What Arendt calls the public realm and others have called the public sphere,⁵ or public work,⁶ is particularly relevant to and offers a range of possibilities for the field of American studies and its ongoing effort to examine and understand American culture.

American studies scholars have long considered public questions, as evidenced by the field's originating focus on issues of national identity and its history of interest in the idea of a usable past. The field also has an established tradition of scholarship based in activism and issues of social justice. However, in the past decades as American studies scholars have moved beyond a problematic Cold War interest in American character, national identity, and American exceptionalism, and shifted toward cultural studies and ethnic studies, the field has retreated from any formal or acknowledged examination of shared public culture in the United States.

That said, the public has recently provided a galvanizing theme within the field. Michael Frisch, in his presidential address to the American studies Association in October of 2000, identified four core trajectories that have defined American studies: (1) interdisciplinarity; (2) the discourse of nation; (3) multiculturalism (including ethnicity, race, class, and gender); and (4) engagement, praxis, and activism.⁷ Contrary to the established conceptualization of American studies, which centers on a linear history that began with what Frisch called a national project informed by a limited literary-historical interdisciplinarity and then evolved into a more multidisciplinary multiculturalism informed by cultural studies and transnationalism, he argued that the history of the field is much more multivalent and prismatic.⁸ His assessment suggests that interdisciplinarity, national identity, and multi-culturalism have come to be recognized as the dominant narratives of American studies. But he went on to argue the case for the significance of praxis, which he described as "a scholarship with the intellectual capacity to both describe and engage the world more usefully."⁹

In 2001, following the September 11 attacks, then ASA president and ethnic studies scholar George Sanchez followed Frisch's lead, calling for increased public engagement in the field. Building on the conference theme of crossing borders, he noted, I am now constantly reminded that one of the most significant borders to cross is the one that separates the academic community from the wider public. He went on to conclude, The issue of preparing students for a multitude of possible interventions in public discourse should be a priority for us in American studies.¹⁰

Extending from this dialogue, the essays in this volume are a call to consider the public realm, to examine public discourse, and to define or conceptualize public culture. I use the term public culture to blend the distinctly cultural work of American studies with some of the more focused examinations of civic engagement.¹¹ The organizing concept of public culture articulated in this book is grounded in the political theory of Hannah Arendt and John Dewey and also informed by the work of a handful of other scholars, including Harry C. Boyte, Clifford Geertz, Jürgen Habermas, Stuart Hall, and Michael Warner, who are all interested, in one form or another, in the public and the process of creating shared meaning.¹² Drawing from this body of work, public culture refers to the process of negotiating shared meaning among a diverse group of individuals. As Dewey explains, publics emerge when the consequences of conversation extend beyond the two directly concerned, expanding out to affect the welfare of many others.¹³ This strand of political theory offers at least some alternative to postmodern theory, which effectively denies the possibilities of public culture in a society bounded by hegemonic forces struggling for power over all forms of cultural production, representation, and signification. As Terry Eagleton has pointed out, cultural theory in its current state actively promotes the absence of memories of collective, and effective, political action.¹⁴ From the perspective of current cultural theory, Human history is now for the most part both post-collectivist and post-individualist, according to Eagleton. He concludes, if this feels like a vacuum, it may also present an opportunity. We need to imagine new forms of belonging, which in our kind of world are bound to be multiple rather than monolithic.¹⁵ All of the essays in this book, in one form or another, draw on the concept of public culture to explore these issues of collective identity and social belonging, cultural agency and cultural change.

This book grew out of a conference held at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, in March 2003 entitled The Transformation of Public Culture: Assessing the Politics of Diversity, Democracy, and Community in the United States, 1890 to the Present. The idea for the conference emerged from a larger reassessment of the American studies Program at Miami under the auspices of an NEH Humanities Focus Grant in 2002–3.¹⁶ The driving intellectual question that had inspired our curricular reexamination focused on a central tension in American studies that existed between acknowledging and understanding the diversity of American culture and defining a collective identity for American culture. We began with a broad question: How, if at all, do the diverse peoples and groups in the United States come together to create a set of shared values, common experiences, and a shared public culture?

Our premise was that despite significant differences, Americans do come together in public to discuss, to negotiate, to debate, and to protest common values, issues, and concerns. Through this process, people form and reform collective identities and shared public cultures, though provisionally and temporally. Specifically, we sought to address issues of multiculturalism, the formation of social identities, the creation of community, and the construction of collective public identities as they have intersected in contested and complementary ways in localized and national cultures in the United States.

Although curricular interests provided the impetus for the NEH project, I was also interested in recent scholarly work addressing issues of public culture as they had evolved in the United States over the past century. I invited a group of interdisciplinary scholars from a range of fields that intersected with American studies—mass communication, cultural and social history, urban sociology, urban studies, ethnic studies, cultural studies, and American studies—to share their ideas about public culture. Specifically, I asked participants to explore the period from 1890 to the present: a historical moment notable for the rise of widespread democratic movements, the emergence of a corporate urban-industrial consumer culture, the expanding dissemination and influence of mass media, the increasing ethnic and racial diversity of communities throughout the United States, and the decline of traditional political action and notions of republican citizenship. Focusing on four defining themes—public action, public image, public space, and public identity—I hoped to generate a conversation about the shifting structure and vocabulary of public identity and public interaction. Who and what constitute the public or publics? How is public action played out in a modern, corporate, bureaucratic society? Where is the public realm in an increasingly privatized culture? And how is public identity fashioned and represented in a diverse, fragmented, mass-mediated society? Participants were invited to explore these broad questions through their specific research.

Although none of these scholars distinctly identified public culture as the central focus of his or her work, they all acknowledged that conceptions of the public underlay their research. Some scholars, such as Mary Ryan, who has written about the history of civic engagement and participatory democracy, and Ed Linenthal, who has examined issues of public memory and commemoration, have been much more explicit in claiming the public as an overarching concept in their work. Others, such as Suzanne Smith, who has written about popular culture and the construction of racial identity, and Catherine Gudis, who has examined the development of the commercial strip, felt less certain about the centrality of public culture in their work. However, the conversation that ensued was inspiring, offering a range of perspectives on how publics are formed, imagined, positioned, and defined. The essays here reflect the collective thoughts that emerged on the topic and serve as an invitation to further explore and expand the concept of public culture.

The essays also speak to the implicit tensions within American studies between the originating focus on shared national culture and the current interest in social and cultural identity and issues of race, class, gender, and ethnicity.¹⁷ American studies scholarship grows out of these dual and sometimes competing traditions. On the one hand, American studies scholarship from the post–World War II period originated in questions about the common experiences and ideas that defined and shaped a shared culture in the United States. On the other hand, a revisionist trend that has dominated the field since the 1970s has focused on issues of diversity of peoples and experiences—the multiplicity of cultures that interact with each other in the United States and the underlying debate and conflict between cultures that challenge the notion of a unified U.S. culture. For the last three decades, American studies scholars have been debating these opposing views of consensus and conflict, probing this issue of shared culture in the United States. In recent years, theories of multiculturalism and hegemony have become the norm, so that even studies of national culture look at the constructed and exclusionary process of defining a shared national identity.

The essays in this volume both add to and expand from these theoretical positions. Each essay addresses the question of how disparate Americans have come together to negotiate shared meaning. Some of the essays detail the ways in which shared meaning is circumscribed by hegemonic forces, drawing attention to the limitations of public culture; others explore the negotiations of civic engagement and the construction of collective memories, highlighting the possibilities of public culture. Together, all of the essays implicitly and explicitly build and expand on Arendt's notion that being seen and being heard by others derive their significance from the fact that everybody sees and hears from a different position. This is the meaning of public life.¹⁸

This volume is not meant to be a comprehensive overview of public culture as it has evolved in the United States. While the essays touch on a number of key issues related to the larger theme of public culture—the evolution of public action, public memory and commemoration, corporate sponsorship and mass-mediated public discourse, the market place and privatized public space, and the construction of public identity—many key topics and issues have been left out. There is no essay that overtly addresses political engagement, nor is there anything about public work. The volume also does not provide a formalized definition of public culture. Rather, it uses the concept of public culture to open up discussion and new possibilities for thinking about American studies and its responsibility to help understand, foster, and sustain a diverse and democratic culture in the United States. Finally, the volume does not seek to retheorize the idea of the public, but it does seek to examine and draw attention to the ways in which diverse groups and individuals have come together to discuss, debate, negotiate, create, claim, and control shared public meaning and discourse. I use the phrase public culture because I believe it best reflects this process as just that, an ongoing process, rather than an end in and of itself, or a tangible entity, or a concrete, identifiable thing.

The essays that follow shed light on the complicated and conflicted process of negotiating new forms of belonging in a diverse society. Divided into five sections—public culture, public action, public image, public space, and public identity—the volume provides a series of scholarly snapshots that highlight public culture as a process, taking very different stances on issues of agency, hegemony, democracy, and identity.

In What Is Public Culture? Agency and Contested Meaning in American Culture, Mary Kupiec Cayton surveys the various theories of the public, situating the concept of public culture in the larger framework of cultural theory. This essay provides a broad theoretical overview of the concept of public culture.

Part I, Public Action, examines how Americans have come together in public, looking specifically at civic engagement, collective memory, and public sentiment. In particular, the essays draw attention to the ways in which diverse individuals have acted in public in an attempt to achieve some common understanding. They reveal how social divisions and power differentials get played out in conflicting public actions and contested public meanings. Mary Ryan focuses on the Los Angeles Plaza to explore how the public has come together in collective action from the eighteenth century to the present. Edward Linenthal examines three sites of public commemoration in Oklahoma—the Washita Battlefield National Historic Site, the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, and Tulsa, Oklahoma, the site of the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921. John Bodnar traces shifting public sentiment about World War II and how the memory of the war has been used to unify the American public.

Part II, Public Image, examines the way in which the public has been imagined in the context of a modern, media driven, consumer culture. Specifically, the essays consider how mass marketing and mass media have recast the public as consumers, as audience, as spectators, and as voyeurs. In doing so, they raise questions about cultural agency and public engagement in a society that increasingly revolves around entertainment, advertising, consumption, spectacle, and image. Susan Strasser focuses on early medicine shows and the marketing of patent medicine to explore the history of commercial sponsorship and the construction of a buying public. Lynn Spigel analyzes the television response to 9/11 in order to assess the role of television in defining citizenship. And Wendy Chun examines the issue of cyberporn, exploring the ways in which the Internet has publicized private life.

Part III, Public Space, focuses on the tensions between public space and the marketplace, exploring the public view, the social space of shopping, and privatized public space. The essays included here explore the ways in which mobility, commercialization, incorporation, and privatization have redefined traditional notions of place and how individuals shape, claim, and understand public spaces. Catherine Gudis focuses on the development of the public road during early twentieth century, detailing the battle over outdoor advertising and control of the roadside landscape. Sharon Zukin explores the shifting social spaces of shopping and the role they play in shaping public identity. Hal Rothman examines the privatization of public space in Las Vegas.

Part IV, Public Identity, considers the social, cultural, and political production of public identities. Specifically, the essays examine issues of transnational identity, the intersections of race, entrepreneurship, and civic agency, and the construction of civic identity. They reveal how public identities are constantly negotiated and renegotiated in a diverse and conflicted culture. Suzanne Smith traces the history of African American undertakers, highlighting their role as professional, social, and political entrepreneurs. Rachel Buff applies the idea of denizenship to examine the public position of Latino immigrants in Toledo, Ohio. Mary Frederickson examines the role of museums as public institutions that sought to define and promote specific visions of civic identity in Cincinnati, Ohio.

Finally, in the epilogue Sheila Croucher considers these essays in the context of the larger debate about civic engagement in the United States and the possibilities for civic revitalization in an increasingly globalized culture. Her analysis points to the larger issues at stake in considering public culture: issues of democracy, diversity, identity, community, citizenship, and belonging in a postmodern, possibly postnational, world.

Although these essays range over a broad array of disparate topics, together I hope they bring the concept of public culture to the forefront of American studies scholarship.

What Is Public Culture? Agency and

Contested Meaning in American

Culture—An Introduction

Mary Kupiec Cayton

Culture is the name for what people are interested in, their thoughts, their models, the books they read and the speeches they hear, their table-talk, gossip, controversies, historical sense and scientific training, the values they appreciate, the quality of life they admire. All communities have a culture. It is the climate of their civilization.

—Walter Lippmann, A Preface to Politics (1913)

The public is one thing, Jack, and the people another.

—Spoken by the poet Lemsford to Jack Chase in Herman Melville, White-Jacket (1850)

All culture is in some sense public. Who of us would dispute it? As human beings, the meanings we attribute to our individual experiences emerge only through the use of shared codes, some verbal and some nonverbal. Culture is about the patterns of meanings we use to organize human behavior. As such, it always has a public—that is to say, a shared and suprapersonal—dimension. Meaning is never the product of individual experience considered in isolation from other human experience. What we know and experience can only be known and experienced through the prism of what we share with others, and the something that is shared is always based on shared codes and languages.

All culture, then, is by definition public.

In addition, public is perhaps the term most commonly used, at least in the Western Enlightenment tradition, to talk about what some general we—often defined in national terms—have in common in the realm of cultural interaction made visible through discursive articulation. The United States in particular, from its embodiment as a nation during the late Enlightenment, was born as a res publica, a thing of the people, a realm of human activity where the good of the whole could hypothetically be paramount. Derived from the Latin populus, the notion republic marked the discursive site where duly constituted deliberative bodies (citizens) deliberated rationally to produce a metadiscursive realm apart from everyday life—one where the variety of private concerns that comprise everyday life were defined, regulated, and protected, for the good of the whole (or alternatively, for the commonweal). Simultaneously both a place or space as well as an abstractly constituted group of people, the public represented both process and product—the place where a common good transcending the particular and private was discussed, ratified, and promoted, as well as the result of those deliberations.

It is to the nature of this public deliberation and the culture it produces—or purportedly fails to produce these days in the United States (as some significant contributors to the conversation about the vitality of the res publica would have it)—that I turn in this essay. The propositions that this public is in crisis, that this crisis in public culture has significant ramifications for the welfare of citizens, and that significant interventions into this culture are necessary to preserve or restore its health are widespread. The most visible such case in recent years has been made by Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam, whose discussion of the decline of social capital and the civic enterprise has found a receptive audience not only among scholars, but also among national leaders such as Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Tony Blair.¹ Efforts such as Putnam's emphasize the importance of civic engagement as a way of overcoming the fragmentation of values and identity associated with postmodern America—that is to say, with a perceived disintegration of public culture. Putnam's civic engagement model and those like it address the importance of civic intervention in maintaining liberal democracy as it has flourished in the United States.

They leave out, however, questions about how inequalities of cultural power get created, established, sustained, contested, and transformed—and the effect of those inequalities of power on a public realm designed to promulgate and promote the common good. Or put another way, such liberal political models of citizenship feature a totalizing rhetoric that makes citizenship a category that transcends other identity categories and which subsumes them. Such official conversations, which privilege citizenship as a transcendent category of value, obscure the degree to which national conversations utilize an open-ended set of meanings or processes, which, far from being agreed upon and uncontested, are negotiated, disputed, accommodated, and modified over time. Whatever ongoing national conversations exist now take place in many forms and forums, and most are not solely or even mainly defined by citizenship. Nor do these conversations necessarily share common cultural meanings, assumptions, or values anymore, if ever they did share them.

In a world where cultural identity proves far more complex than any simple reference to national identity or citizenship can capture, we fragmented selves mark meaning through no single, constant, shared inventory of assumptions. We use many languages and codes to identify ourselves and delineate the contours of experience in our multiple cultural communities and contexts. I am an academic, for example, but also a wife and a mother; straight (at least performatively, at least at present) and not gay, transsexual, or bisexual; a third-generation American of European descent, not an immigrant or a member of a (recognized) racial minority; a woman, not a man; an adult, not a child; progressive politically, not conservative, libertarian, or anarchist. I watch reality television, shop online, download iTunes, attend the Episcopal church most Sundays, read the New York Times, and live in a small, Midwestern college town. My telling you about myself really is a statement about some of the different subcultures to which I am cognizant of belonging at this moment in my life. (Several of them may overlap, although certainly not in their entirety). In my lifeworld, I experience myself in ways that lead me to use language and tropes generated by and associated with specific groups such as these in order to live my life. I define much of my identity with reference to them. My citizenship does not suspend the many ways I identify myself in order to allow me to speak from some abstract identity position called citizen. To the contrary, I am the variety of my lifeworlds—and they may differ enormously from those of others who also claim the right to inhabit the category of citizen.

Though we may not share common funds of lived experience and the tropes they generate, what we do share is a historically determined lexicon for speaking as citizens of the United States. That lexicon includes such concepts as freedom, equality, and justice. It suggests that these qualities must inhere in any public sphere where a common American identity is defined and (re)interpreted. It does not demand that agreement exists on the origins and nature of any crisis of the res publica, or of any public(s) that embody its deliberative processes. Neither does it require us to agree on which interventions, if any, will be most likely to restore the health of the public body, if in fact we deem it to be ailing in the first place. But our shared civic lexicon does stipulate as a sine qua non that conversations exist where issues that transcend the particular and private experiences of individuals, however these identify themselves, are admitted for consideration and deliberation. How that happens—along with understandings of how it can or should happen, and why it is not happening today as much as many of us would like—depends on the assumptions we bring to the table about what public culture is, what it does, and what might be its possibilities in a globalized, mass-mediated age.

Where Public Culture Happens: Competing Models

Public, however the notion gets deployed, nearly always signifies those places where cultural meanings are made and negotiated. Public culture most often signifies the pattern of signs, symbols, languages, and codes through which such meanings are negotiated. However, where the publics that count are located—along with questions of who might legitimately participate in them, in what ways, and what sorts of things they do that count as public actions—all of these are historically contingent and contested questions. The problem of defining public culture in a culturally useful way depends on identifying (1) the sites where contestations for meaning take place, and (2) what forms those contestations may take.

The Liberal Democratic Public

The most commonsense meaning for the public, at least in contemporary American culture, calls to mind government or quasi-governmental structures and organizations, and their various activities (for example, the state of Ohio and its official political structure, representatives, and agencies). Publicly sponsored institutions such as schools, parks, and museums may also be associated with this area of human activity. The nation-state remains the representative par excellence of public deliberation and action, but significant nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) such as the United Nations or the Red Cross, equally are meant to act to further the general welfare and might qualify as well. The descendant of the Greek polis, contemporary public institutions of this variety exist to serve the public good, however that may be defined. The public culture associated with this public is most nearly synonymous with political culture, a term that (as social historian Robert I. Rotberg puts it) describes how a society and a collection of leaders and citizens chooses, and has long chosen, to approach national political decisions.² Though Rotberg specifies political culture as inherently national, it seems to me that institutionalized political activity at both local and international levels might qualify just as easily. Or alternatively, such a culture might be viewed as synonymous with civic culture: that culture which emphasizes the nature and values of citizenship and the practice of it.³

This arena of public culture has been perhaps best described by the political philosopher Hannah Arendt, who uses the Greek polis as the model for the site where citizens actively come together to exercise agency through speech and communicative action. According to Greek thought, she writes, "the human capacity for political organization is not only different from but stands in direct opposition to that natural association whose center is the home (oikia) and the family. The rise of the city-state meant that man received ‘besides his private life a sort of second life, his bios politikos. Now every citizen belongs to two orders of existence; and there is a sharp distinction in his life between what is his own (idion) and what is communal (koinon).'"⁴ Such a concept of public implies its opposite, as Arendt indicates: that is, the private. The private realm as invoked here is the arena associated with the household, where the biological processes necessary for human existence are sustained and carried on. The public, in contrast, is the arena of communicative action where collective judgment leads to informed action that transcends private need and desire—for example, collective provisions for health and welfare, not individual ones; regulation that allows an economy as a whole to flourish, not measures that benefit a few at the expense of the many. To speak of public culture in this sense is to contrast it with something it is not—culture that principally confines itself to and concerns a more partial, private realm.

Although Arendt is fairly clear about what she means by the private sphere, her definition by no means is the only one, or even the one most Americans have commonly used in thinking of divisions between public and private.⁵ The philosophy of classical liberalism strongly influenced the thinking of Americans about their political culture throughout much of the nineteenth century, and it is still the model of choice that many Americans apply, consciously or unconsciously, when we think about what the opposition between public and private means. Only the state and institutions closely associated with it, realms of political deliberation and decision-making, are public; outside it, operating according to rules and codes of various sorts, lies the variegated territory known as the private. The public best orients itself to the common good through insuring that the realm of the private—that which is off limits to the state and no one's business but one's own—is protected from encroachment and interference. Or, as the Enlightenment philosopher John Locke put it, [M]en, when they enter into society, give up the equality, liberty, and executive power they had in the state of nature, into the hands of the society, to be so far disposed of by the legislative, as the good of the society shall require; yet it being only with an intention in every one the better to preserve himself, his liberty and property.⁶

In Aristotelian thought, the private was the realm of the personal, the passional, the particular, and the necessary, as opposed to that of the political, the rational, the universal, and the freely and deliberatively chosen.⁷ Aristotle saw the public as superior to the private, in that it represented freedom and rational choice. Classical liberalism, as articulated by political philosophers such as Locke and John Stuart Mill, turns the hierarchy of values on its head: important initiatives come from the private, and it is privileged as the arena of choice and freedom. The public, in contrast, exists to protect the rights of individuals and groups to operate free of unnecessary interference with regard to issues of family and property.

In classical liberal thought, the political or civic public stands in sharp contrast to a number of other realms normally seen as private. The domestic realm, of which the family is the primary functional unit in the private sphere, is the one Arendt identifies as the site of biological reproduction and sustenance. Economic activity and enterprises external to the household, which are necessary to their survival, are located as an outgrowth of them, as are the groups that in liberal democratic society represent interests and values of significance to the public but which arise from private concerns and efforts.

In other words, a classical liberal view of public culture would see it as the system of behaviors, codes, and languages associated with state-related deliberative action and the meanings generated there. Agency in this model involves citizens: active participants (1) who understand the political culture of the state, (2) who are prepared to make their influence felt there through rational action, and (3) who utilize the mechanisms through which such decision-making occurs to effect change. Such a view of liberal democracy implies an educational agenda that prepares free citizens (those possessing freedom and agency) to participate using the political apparatus at hand. According to this model, effective forms of civic participation in contemporary society might include such activities as get out the vote and voter registration drives, as well as forums that educate voters on the positions of candidates.

Classical liberalism assumes a cohort of informed citizens who are relatively equal in the power they have to make their voices heard in deliberative processes and to influence decision-making processes. It assumes as well that issues and problems of public concern can effectively be sorted out from those that should remain within the purview of the private citizen. Perhaps most important, classical liberalism envisions a world where systematic differences of cultural power do not exist.

Hegemonic Culture, Mass Culture, and Public Culture

The Marxian tradition, in contrast, contemplates a world where differences in cultural power do exist. These differences, not rational discourse, become the primary arbiters of decision-making and the drivers of social and cultural change. Marxian thought provides two models in particular that have influenced scholarly thinking about the shape culture assumes: Antonio Gramsci's model of cultural hegemony, and the Frankfurt School's model of the production of mass culture by the culture industry.

Gramsci's model, most famously used in historical work by scholars such as E. P. Thompson and Eugene Genovese, describes culture's role in legitimizing the power of those who own the means of production.⁸ Classical Marxist theory saw a direct relation between the rule of those in control of the means of production and the ideology that provided the codes and language through which ideas were communicated and experiences conceived. That is, those in charge of the means of the production controlled the Weltanschauung as well as the material resources of a culture. The supposed common coin of the realm, common sense, was anything but. Rather, it was a legitimation of the way of framing the world of those in power. By skewing conversations in a way that made life in the existing order seem good, right, true, natural, and inevitable, it distorted and misrepresented the life experiences of all but those with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo.

The laboring classes, dispossessed not only of their share of the wealth but also of means to challenge the legitimacy of those in power, could only come to constitute themselves as a separate group through the realization that the ideology of the bourgeoisie was specious as a purported representation of all experience. Gramsci's model modified the economic determinism of classical Marxist theory, elaborating on the ways dominant orders secure legitimacy through cultural means as well as by force. According to Gramsci, cultural hegemony—that is, the legitimization of power of the ruling classes through intellectual and moral leadership—rests not (only) on physical coercion but on social consensus, or at least on the appearance of it. Through the exercise of cultural hegemony, a ruling class both establishes its authority and makes its worldview seem commonsensical and indisputable. This hegemony was legitimized and perpetuated by the variety of cultural institutions within a society—schools, churches, arts organizations, media outlets, and the like. The revolution in social condition that Gramsci sought could only be accomplished by first building counterhegemonic cultural groups and dialogue. These could articulate alternatives to the common sense of the ruling elites. Such a movement, Gramsci believed, would be led by a self-conscious cadre of intellectuals, who would be able to articulate alternatives to the hegemonic cultural understandings provided by those in control. Intellectuals coming to consciousness from among the revolutionary classes would develop ways of talking about and explaining experience that would allow the disadvantaged (in Gramsci's articulation, rural laborers and workers) to escape the burden of false consciousness.

The differences between classical liberalism and Gramscian Marxism with respect to what does count—or should count—as public culture are immediately apparent. The difference is no longer between what is public and what is private; it is rather between the ways of seeing that power legitimates and those ways of seeing which stand as challenges to power. In this model, virtually all aspects of lived human experience become open to public scrutiny and discussion, since even the most personal parts of life are seen through the lens of a dominant ideology that supports the dominant capitalist order. Or, as the feminist critique in the 1960s and 1970s would put it, to this way of thinking, the personal is political. All parts of culture are problematized as objects for scrutiny and discussion, since all contribute to maintaining or challenging the ruling capitalist order. In order to effect significant change in the realm of public power, the counterhegemonic class will need to challenge business as usual in every part of life. Those seeking serious cultural change are challenged to help to define an ideology and praxis for the counterhegemonic class to set it in sharp opposition to hegemonic culture. Significant culture change from this frame of reference means defining oneself in opposition to the commonplace understandings of capitalist culture, not accommodating them. There is no public, there is no private—only the spaces in life where power operates, and those where the operation of power is resisted.

Several decades after Gramsci—and without apparent influence from his work—the Frankfurt School, a Marxian group of critical theorists, also focused on the power of capitalist producers to define the terms of culture. Their focus, however, was explicitly on mass-mediated culture. Theodor Adorno and his collaborator, Max Horkheimer, produced a vision of a common culture where citizens, rather than engaging in genuine deliberative action designed to solve common problems, instead merely chose between prepackaged alternatives that represented virtually no choice at all. Their most significant work, a sober examination of mass culture first published in 1947, was entitled Dialektik der Aufklärung (Dialectic of Enlightenment). In it, Adorno and Horkheimer describe the modern system of standardized production, whose aim is to transform citizens into consumers, which they call the culture industry. Everything in the world of mass culture, including ideas, becomes commodity. Adorno and Horkheimer argue that the mass culture generated by the culture industry has the power to insure capitalist hegemony, for those who hold economic power are ones with the power to establish the common language and tropes that form the basis of culture in common. Moreover, this culture industry undermines the power of critical thinking in society. By replicating the same product over and over with minor variants, it thereby deceives potential consumers into thinking they are making choices when their choices are in reality very narrow indeed.

Mass media, the focus of much of Adorno and Horkheimer's analysis, provide only the most important example of the ways in which the machine of capitalist production standardizes not only products but culture itself. In response to sociologists who see modern life as being characterized by cultural chaos and fragmentation, Adorno and Horkheimer argue that, to the contrary, culture now impresses the same stamp on everything. Films, radio and magazines make up a system which is uniform as a whole and in every part. Cultural producers churn out standardized products differentiated in only slight ways in order to satisfy different consumer niches. Neither reason nor the common good drive action, only profit. Ominously, Adorno and Horkheimer see the logic of consumerism extending to the political arena as well—in classical liberalism, the place where the individual rights are presumably protected and the common good honored: The ruthless unity in the culture industry is evidence of what will happen in politics. Marked differentiations such as those of A and B films, or of stories in magazines in different price ranges, depend not so much on subject matter as on classifying, organizing, and labeling consumers. In the end, citizen-consumers choose among prestructured alternatives that in fact offer very little choice. How formalized the procedure is can be seen when the mechanically differentiated products prove to be all alike in the end, they write. That the difference between the Chrysler range and General Motors products is basically illusory strikes every child with a keen interest in varieties.⁹ So too with politics. A system that ideally exists to solve citizen problems is replaced by one designed to maintain the status quo as the only possible alternative, with the choices offered citizen-consumers running a narrow gamut from A to B, but prepackaged to look as through they provide a wide range of alternatives.

From the perspective of Adorno and Horkheimer, the liberal distinction between public and private spheres is specious. Power inheres in those entities, corporate more than individual, that wield economic power and that have the ability to establish both common agendas and the languages and tropes through which they will be addressed. Public culture in essence becomes the patterns of meaning established by mass culture and its corollary, consumerism. Though independent spheres seem to exist, they are finally reducible in their most significant attributes to the patterns of meaning and ideation provided by the culture industry. Even state power begins to be overshadowed by that of the mass market, they imply, anticipating contemporary commentary on the shifts in power that accompany globalization.

Finally, Adorno and Horkheimer's model provides very little room for self-conscious agency within the public sphere. Hegemony (although they do not call it that) is established through the action of a market that has its own dynamic and that finally becomes systemically totalizing. A naive activism might assume that consumer boycotts and economic actions might cause the operation of the market to change ever so slightly. In the end, however, the totalizing system of commercial mass culture is self-adjusting and self-sustaining, absorbing and co-opting both vernacular culture and what Gramsci might see as counterhegemonic culture. It can take a protest genre such as rap, for example, and convert it to an engine of profit in almost the blink of an eye, or it can make a political contest not much more than an advertising duel. By the end of his life, Adorno could offer no advice to the actionist at all. The critical intellectual alone opposed the tendency of mass society to eradicate rational thought. [T]he uncompromisingly critical thinker, who neither signs over his consciousness nor lets himself be terrorized into action, is in truth the one who does not give in, Adorno wrote. Thinking is not the intellectual reproduction of what already exists anyway. As long as it doesn't break off, thinking has a secure hold on possibility.¹⁰

Habermas, the Bourgeois Public Sphere, Civil Society, and

Communicative Action

It was the pessimism of the Frankfurt School's vision of culture that impelled Jürgen Habermas, a student of Adorno's at the Institute for Social Research, to formulate his models of the bourgeois public sphere and communicative action. Although Habermas has been one of the most important and productive of contemporary philosophers and social theorists for over four decades, the heart of his work—at least as far as this examination of public culture is concerned—lies in two major works: Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit, originally published in 1962 and translated into English as The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere in 1988; and Theorie des Kommunikativen Handelns, originally published in 1981 and translated into English as The Theory of Communicative Action (1984, 1985).¹¹ Habermas moved to a post-Marxist model and away from a material determinism that viewed the means of production as socially totalizing. His work emphasizes the possibility for rational human action despite the presence of systems that limit human choice and freedom in pronounced ways.¹² Capitalism has spawned systems of organization and ideology that have colonized the lifeworld (reality as experienced and lived by persons), he posits. Yet through a process he calls "communicative