The Consolations of Ambivalence: Habermas and the Public Sphere

Abstract

Throughout his work, Jirgen Habermas has sought to break stranglehold of totally administered society by exploring emancipatory potential of communicative rationality. In turning to critical function of communication, Habermas also began to break with his influential predecessors, whose bequest, however, he did not want to betray. Since only word coined by commerce, and really alienated, touches [people] as familiar, Adorno once remarked, those who would escape this pervasive commodification must recognize advocates of communicability as traitors to what they communicate.2 Explicitly assessing in his later work theory of instrumental reason, Habermas contends that Adorno assimilated communication completely to commodity form and thereby elided fact that the media of mass