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CHAPTER 2. THE PUBLIC SPHERE 41
By contrast, the nondeliberative zones provide opportunities for exploring mutuality,
agenda-setting and affiliation and community-building (Barber 1984). These
informal 2 zones include the associations and organizations which comprise what
Fraser (1992) termed “weak publics.” 3 , including organizations representing
group interests, associations and cultural establishments, public interest groups,
and churches and charitable organizations. These associations, which “specialize
in issues and contributions and are generally designed to generate public influence,
belong to the civil-social infrastructure of a public sphere dominated by the mass
media.” Habermas does not include those “third places” (Oldenburg 1989) or “free
spaces” (Evans & Boyte 1986) or “micromobilization contexts” (McAdam 1988)
– autonomous place in which private persons can discuss issues of public importance
free from the pressures imposed by the market or the state – which represent
the primary opportunity for citizens to converse with other citizens. These places
– the 20th century equivalent of the much -celebrated salon society – also belong
to the informal zone of the public sphere.
Inside these informal zones, public opinion comes into being and first acquires
its shape. Informal zones “develop more or less spontaneously,” suggests Habermas,
and lack a formal structure. As such, the informal public sphere has certain
advantages over its more formal counterparts:
Here new problem situations can be perceived more sensitively, discourses
aimed at achieving self-understanding can be conducted more widely and
expressively, collective identities and need interpretations can be articulated
with fewer compulsions than is the case in procedurally regulated public
spheres. (Habermas 1996, 307-308)
Here, Habermas is suggesting that the informal public sphere is more likely to provide
opportunities for reflexive or reciprocal political talk (Barber 1984). As Barber
(1984) suggests, a strong democracy requires political talk that fulfills these
functions. Habermas supports this view:
2 Habermas (1996, 314, 485) refers to the “general” public sphere in his text, but indexes the
concept as the “informal” public sphere, a labelling that will be used here.
3 A weak public is one “whose deliberative practice consists exclusively in opinion formation
and does not also encompass decision making. . . . the bourgeois conception seems to imply that an
expansion of such publics’ discursive authority to encompass decision making as well as opinion
making would threaten the autonomy of public opinion, for then the public would effectively
become the state, and the possibility of a critical discursive check on the state would be lost”
(Fraser 1992, 134).