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CHAPTER 2. THE PUBLIC SPHERE 16
arenas. As such, it is in some way analogous to a physical place. Second, the
public sphere is created, or brought into being, by its members or participants; it
is not a place created by others to which members go. And third, the public sphere
requires interaction among the members, and this interaction requires members to
make use of their discursive abilities.
At the same time, it should be made clear that not all discourse is to be considered
part of the public sphere. This is not to say that all discourse is not political;
it is clear that language use and construction reflects a social and political structure,
and that all discourse thus has a political character (Corcoran 1990). Rather,
the distinction to be made here is between discourse that contributes to the public
sphere, and discourse which is confined to either the governmental (or state)
sphere, on the one hand, or the market or intimate realms of the private sphere, on
the other. Pitkin (1972, 204) distinguishes four regions of discourse: philosophical,
moral, scientific and political:
Political discourse is surely not personal dialogue among two or a very few
persons directly affected by an action one of them took. . . . [P]olitical questions
[are] of larger scope and scale, addressed to a larger audience, cast
in a more general and impersonal mode. Unlike moral dialogue, political
discourse is characteristically public speech, both with respect to its participants
and with respect to its subject matter . . . There is no such thing as
private politics, intimate politics.
Using Pitkin’s model, a discourse can be considered political if its content is addressed
to questions of large scope and scale, if its participants address larger
audiences than themselves, and if the participants cast their discussion in a general
and impersonal mode. The defining characteristic of political discourse is its
publicness:
Other regions of discourse do exist and have an impact upon individuals,
collectively and publicly. But they are not characteristically and necessarily
public; indeed the opposite is true. (Pitkin 1972, 72).
The importance of audience is underscored by Gamson (1992), who notes how
the awareness of audience transforms sociable interaction into what he terms “sociable
public discourse.”