Date: Sun, 28 Apr 1996 11:57:12 -0400 (EDT)
From: Kenneth Archer <karcher-AT-emerald.tufts.edu>
Subject: HAB: creating a market public sphere


        My name is Ken Archer.  I am working on Habermas and the market.  
Can communicative action arise through new forms of industrial 
relations as well as retailer-consumer relations?  The following is an 
abstract.  Any readings, by Habermas or others, as well comments (i.e. 
'this paper is awful', etc.), would be greatly appreciated.

                     ----- ABSTRACT -----

	Urban planners tell us that no major public squares have been 
built in the world in the last fifty years.  Arendt explains that this is 
due to the absorption of the public sphere by the private sphere of 
market-dictated demands.  This expansion of the private sphere has 
reached into our consciousness, and asocialized us, such that we have lost 
the linguistic tools with which to create a public sphere through 
discourse.  Arendt and Habermas seem to diverge when it comes to 
recommendations to get us out of this mess.  While Arendt glorifies 
Sparta and seeks to forge again those bygone spaces, both architectural and 
cognitive, autonomous from the demands of the market, Habermas is more 
forward-looking.  Habermas seems to have struggled with the claims of the 
poststructuralists that discourse is not even possible - a claim unaddressed 
by Arendt - and concluded that, through a certain mode of discourse, an 
intersubjective reality can be realized by diverse participants.  This 
paper views Arendt's desired marginalization of the market as an 
antiquarian project, unsuited to the present situation.  Are there ways, 
this paper asks, of ariving at an intersubjective reality through the 
dominant form of interaction today, the market.  Can new rules, and 
habits, of (a) industrial relations and (b) retailer-consumer relations, 
be promoted that are conducive to discursive interactions that reveal 
common experiences and common goods transcending individual,private 
interests?  

Ken Archer
229 Carmichael Hall, Tufts University
Medford, MA 02155
karcher-AT-emerald.tufts.edu