Dialectics of public opinion

In 1991 the translation of Habermas' Structural transformations introduced a term that became immensely popular, that of the public sphere. Critics pointed out that Habermas missed some rather obvious historical facts, namely exclusion of a large majority from political opinion forming processes and the embeddedness of communicative exchanges in relationships of power. This critique is at once correct and misses the point completely. Habermas was very much aware of exclusion, but argued - rather awkwardly - that the interests of the bourgeoisie coincided with the universal interest to such a degree that the identification of bourgeois reason with reason as such was feasible. Later this aporia was formulated more explicity with a resurrection of Kant's regulative ideal in the form of the "ideal speech situation" that is a purely communicative situation in which the speakers do not act instrumentally but communicatively, that is with the sole aim of establishing common understanding. As with Kant autonomy and freedom this regulative ideal is a curious chimeric creature. While both Kant and Habermas nominally treat it as pure counterfacticity, that is as something that is not empirically realised nor realisable, they use it as a supposition, that is as something empirically existing. Habermas tries to save the normative potential of public opinion by sundering it from its flawed manifestation in empirical reality. This path was left opened by his critics that were not radical enough in their critique, they questioned the historical accuracy of Habermas' account but did not go on to show how the negative side of public opinion - power, exclusion, dominance - is a constitutive moment of the phenomenon. What we are left with as a result is a sterile theory of public opinion - sterile, because it proceeds abstractely, not from actually existing individuals, to borrow a phrase from Marx - and an thoughtless praxis of public opinion polling that simply - as elisabeth Noelle-Neumann has done - denounces the normative ideal of public opinion because it does not correspond to empirical reality. What is needed is an immanent critique which would not abstract away the empirical foundation of opinion, but would keep the idea of public opinion it to its word, that is develop dialectically the tension between its pretense to rationality and its constitutive irrationality.