MEDEC > Upcoming MEDEC events > MEDEK seminar: Intellectuals, Media and the European public sphere > Intellectuals, Media a...
Intellectuals, Media and the European Public Sphere
10.00 - 11.00: Brian McNair, professor, University of Strathclyde,
Cultural chaos and the European communicative space - between nation and globalisation
In this presentation Brian McNair will explore the implications of current trends in communication and culture for the construction and maintenance of a European public sphere. As boundaries traditionally separating the public spheres of nation states dissolve under the influence of transnational and global communication media, what kind of common communicative space is emerging at the European level, and how does it interface with national public spheres on the one hand, and globalised information flows on the other?? As the
Brian McNair is Professor of Journalism and Communication at the
11 -11.15: Coffee-break
11.15 – 12.00: Morten Dyssel Mortensen, ph.d.,
The Intellectuals and the Question of a European Public Sphere
Many scholars have recently argued that despite of the increasing economic integration and political centralization within the European Union, we are not yet observing the development of a true European public space. On the other hand, however, not only but especially the intellectuals participate in a number of transnational networks with a more or less explicit attempt to construct a forum for common European debate across the national borders. Focusing on the role of the intellectuals, the paper therefore aims to analyse and discuss, in a historical as well as in a contemporary perspective, some of the problems related to the controversial question about a European public sphere, a question which is further connected to the close conceptual interrelations between democracy, media and identity.
Morten Dyssel Mortensen is Ph.D. student at the Department of English, Germanic and Romance Studies (
12.00 - 13.00: Lunch break
13.00 – 13.45: Henrik P. Bang, Associate professor,
Experts-celebrity citizensship – threat or challenge to public deliberation?
Today celebrities have become a well known feature of liberal politics. They illustrate how democracy is increasingly governed by a plurality of relatively autonomous elites, consisting of well educated, well experienced, well known and well off citizens, possessing a certain kind of expertise and influence within a certain policy niche. In a recent article we have chosen to term this kind of contemporary citizenship expert-celebrity citizens. In the paper we assess implications of this citizenship for public deliberation on democracy and good governance. The empirical basis for our assessment is the Danish think tank Mandag Morgen’s network Co-existence of Civilisations and we analyse how expert celebrities in this network have deliberated and collaborated in order to help facilitating the formulation and implementation of a policy of co-existence in the wake of the first Mohammad Cartoon Crisis. We analyse the working of the Co-existence of Civilisation network from its start back in 2006 and until the republishing of the most provoking Mohammad cartoon, i.e. the one where Mohammad wears a bomb in his turban, in February 2008.
Our aim is twofold. First to show how recent Habermasian notions of public deliberation are challenged by the advent of so-called expert celebrity publics, and second to assess the potential of these new publics for engaging laypeople in policy deliberations. We shall argue that one needs to distinguish the ‘old’ politics oriented approaches to the study of the democratic public sphere from the ‘new’ policy oriented ones, focusing on how to establish publics that can contribute to good governance. The ‘old’ politics oriented public sphere models assess how the public can get their demands incorporated, represented and ultimately converted into collectively binding decisions in the political system. The policy oriented public sphere models, in contrast, focus on how public deliberation enter into the articulation and delivery of certain relatively fixed policy packages and programmes. We speak of these two models as revealing an increasing tension between on the one hand concerns for deliberative and inclusive democracy and on the other hand effective ‘good governance’. For instance, deliberation on how to get people out of prostitution, drug abuse and criminality. Even though the outcome of such deliberation is succesfull it may at the same time threaten political and personal rights. This tension between ‘good governance’ and liberal rights is rapidly increasing. Those who ‘suffer’ from it seem in particularly to be laypeople, who today must struggle not only to get heard in democratic politics but also to have a stake in the formulation and implementation of deliberative policies that on a more genral level are perceived as ‘good’.
13.45 – 14.45: Peter Madsen, Professor,
Fear of Man
Søren Kierkegaard is a philosopher for all seasons. Intellectuals from all quarters hail his depth and his foresight. He is considered to be the quintessential philosopher of modernity. With a few notable exceptions a critical approach to his view of modernity is scarcely articulated. Writing in the ‘Vormärtz’ period, Kierkegaard considered democratic endeavours as ‘Fear of Man’ and an undermining of proper ‘Fear of God’. His insistence on the individual, that is so dear to many of his readers, is concerned with the freedom to choose God, not with what is usually thought of as emancipation. Love is conceived as a concern for the relation of the neighbour to God, not with what is usually thought of as concern for fellow citizens. Whatever the considerable merits of his diagnosis of modernity are, his writings are particularly foresighted in the sense that he articulates a number of conservative themes that would mark many subsequent intellectual struggles with modernity. This is particularly the case in his reactions to the public sphere, notably in the second part of the short book he wrote in his own name, A Literary Review.
Peter Madsen is a professor of Comparative Literature at the
14.45 – 15.00: Coffee break
15.00 – 16.00: Anne Fastrup, Associate professor,
Mediating le philosophe – Denis Diderot’s Strategic Self-representations
Enlightenment was (and still is) at the centre of a discursive struggle between scholarship/science/ knowledge formation, on the one hand, and journalism/the popular press/publicity & celebrity, on the other. My account of Diderot’s varied activity makes a three part story: 1st, the conceptualization of the Encyclopaedia as a medium for a distribution of knowledge that is universal, uplifting, and disinterested; 2nd , according to the Encyclopaedists and to Diderot in particular the resistance to the Encyclopaedia seems to pervert the purity of the (ideal) project of Enlightenment by propelling it into political and social strife - where every commentator’s response has equal (and degraded value) - a strife Diderot condemns as animal like in its degraded aggressiveness; 3rd, Diderot’s satiric response to the anti-Encyclopaedists in his Rameau’s Nephew is contemporaneous with his movement into the salon and the invention of a new genre of art criticism, where the thoughts, feelings and sensations of the critic’s body can stabilize an object - public painting - that saves the universality of the Enlightenment without the social and political strife that had compromised the reception of the Encyclopaedia. There are two quite striking implications of this narrative: it suggests that the 18th century already had its version of the “decline of the public sphere” (Horkheimer and Adorno/Habermas) even as it was dreaming, inventing, and failing to realize the ideal of the public sphere harboured by the philosophers who conceived and executed the Encyclopaedia. This enables me to take full account of what might be called the idealism of Enlightenment (its projects for producing truth; its universalistic claims) as well as its almost immediate problems and failures (the attacks its writing incite; the censorship it endures; the charges that its attack on absolutism reinscribes a new kind of absolutism). My account of the recourse to the aesthetic gains from its specificity: Diderot’s recourse to les salons – fine art – is an alternative to both the scholarly ambition of the Encyclopaedia and the degraded popular journalism; his recourse is a way to withdraw from disputes, rising above demeaning squabbles, but still engage the public around universals (aesthetic values), as he practices a criticism that is pre-romantic in its solicitation of nature and the sensations of the body.
Anne Fastrup (born 1963) is an Associate Professor in comparative literature at the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies. Her research interests are: the aesthetics of Denis Diderot, Enlightenment and the public sphere, gender and ethnicity in the writings of Miguel de Cervantes, Islam in European Literature. In 2007 she published a book on Diderot: The Movement of Sensibility – Diderot’s Physiological Aesthetics (Museum Tusculanum).
16.00 - 17.00: Tue Andersen Nexø, post.Doc.
Looking at the public sphere - the spectatorial pose and its attacks on politics, polemics and the public sphere
Taking their cue from Jürgen Habermas' classic book Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit, many contemporary interpretations of The Spectator – and the genre of the periodical essay – understand it to be part of the 18th-century’s enlightened criticism of absolutist power and cultural ideals. They see it as part of a new ”bourgeois public sphere” which lets its participants rationally discus the relationship betweeen the state and its subjects. If one looks at how the Spectator itself describes the early 18th century political debate, however, it becomes clear that Addison and Steele wanted no such thing. Their hugely influential cultural ideals regarding the polite and disengaged gentleman – in some ways a precursor to the ”free intellectual” – specifically attacked those who engaged themselves in matters of church and state. My paper will discus this spectatorial attack on public debate, how it was intimately connected with the media landscape of early 18th-century
Tue Andersen Nexø, b. 1974, has a PhD in comparative literature from the