Öffentlichkeit und Erfahrung: Zur Organisationsanalyse von bürgerlicher und proletarischer Öffentlichkeit

by Oskar Negt, Alexander Kluge

English (translation)
Original German

Genres: Theory, Philosophy, Politics, Nonfiction

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1972

About the author

Oskar Negt is a German philosopher and social theorist in the tradition of critical theory. He is a professor of sociology at the University of Hannover.

He studied law and philosophy at the University of Göttingen and the University of Frankfurt am Main as a student of Theodor Adorno, and was an assistant of Jürgen Habermas.

Reviews

[Nicole]

One of my dissertation committee members told me at my defense that I should read this book, and I’m bummed that I didn’t read this in grad school. Kluge and Negt bring together Adorno’s theory of the culture industry and Habermas’s theory of public spheres—and a whole bunch of other theorists, from the Frankfurt school and beyond—to theorize the public sphere as something both producing (of culture, of interpretations of experience) and produced (by workers) in a manner that flexibly and productively gets at the really thorny questions of what a public sphere is, where it’s located, how it works, and what its politics are. They theorize experience, especially the experience of the “proletariat” (their term) as (I think) something more often than not foreclosed in the public sphere, but also potentially extremely powerful were the proletariat to form a proletariat public sphere—and I *think* they are arguing that that very experience (“the context of life”) is also-sort-of-maybe the material that could be the basis of the means of production for a distinctly proletariat public sphere, which is a mind-blowing idea and very cool. The argument sometimes made me feel exhausted and nearly hopeless, as a lot of Marxist stuff does, but the case studies in the last third were refreshingly specific and some of them super illuminating. And it’s definitely more hopeful than Adorno and Horkheimer. I almost learned some stuff about Weimar Germany (need to reread—could learn if I read more closely/took notes). I did learn a couple of things about the student protests of ‘68. Also, the foreword in the new edition is AWESOMEly helpful in situating this book in Frankfurt school debates—if I had just read that, it would have been worth the price of the book.

I’m going to reread this book this summer bc I definitely didn’t get everything that I wanted to the first time through. Not sure I understood anything fully, really, but the passages on the intellectual class were super relevant to my research interests and I suspect will be very useful one day. I’m so glad this book exists. I wish I could read German.

[Charles · Rating 2 out of 5]

An interesting and essential topic, but also a rather arid read in this case. I did not dive into this expecting to be entertained, obviously, but somehow I had pictured more than a relentless focus on worker oppression and manipulation. My bad.

[Bruce Martin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Essential in the Habermas-Warner-Fraser discussion of publics and counterpublics.

[Jim · Rating 2 out of 5]

Extremely dated, obviously!, and regardless of what the authors put forth as to its continued relevance, if there is in fact any relevance it is so skewed towards a severely academic reading of a quite specific way of defining "public sphere" that I found the book ponderous and rather uninteresting. The title gives away much of this close-focus scholarship and had I known I would be reading a discussion of Marxist principles reconstituted into conceptions of the public sphere, I would likely have skipped this completely. I skimmed major sections searching for interesting bits and for concepts or ideas that escaped the authors' framework, but found little to excite my thinking. A hard book to recommend but also not a book I would dismiss. I just know I am not the audience for it, though others may very well be.

[Giorgos Pantos · Rating 5 out of 5]

It pushes little the thought to assess what has remained public today in the enclosed mania of social media to consume and digest easily the magic of our world.

[K · Rating 3 out of 5]

chapter 1,2,4 & 6.