Lurid and scandalous

A lurid and scandalous
symbolic public sphere

Joan Ramon Rodriguez-Amat (PhD)
Media Governance, Media Organization and Media Industries
University of Vienna
mon.rodriguez@univie.ac.at

(Research)
Under the belly button
• Public Sphere
– Beliefs of commonality, collective identity.
– Scandal as disruptive publicity of transgression.

• Media analysis
– Lurid and scandalous publications (contents)
– Smuggler and exile press (structure)

• Media ecology
– Illegitimate heir of the “serious press”.
– Transmedia environment.

Lurid and scandalous (dec‘11) mon.rodriguez@univie.ac.at

The repressive hypothesis
16th C. 17th C. 18th C. 19th C.
Literary sphere Impolitical sphere Political sphere
Press
Public Sphere
Coffeehouses Citizen Citizen

People
People
Private business sphere Bourgeois Bourgeois
Private Sphere

Nation
Nation
Emancipated Emancipated
Intimate sphere
man man

Promise of liberation Settlement in law
“Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit” (1962)
Epistemic rupture


…But were afraid to ask

“The most radical revolutionary
will become a conservative
the day after the revolution”.
Hannah Arendt

“Habermas’ treatment of the earlier period doesn’t look at “penny
dreadfuls,” lurid crime and scandal sheets…”.
Craigh Calhoun (1992)

“Scandal is the public event par excellence, and
any theory of the public sphere is sorely lacking
without an understanding of its nature”.
Ari Adut (2005)


Nous, Autres Victoriens

Rupture: but triple imposition (repression).

- Knowledge. Reason

but: myth, madness, feeling

- Subject. Individual

but: intimacy, desire, sex (the obscure beach)

- Law. Legitimacy

but: identity, culture, nation.


Illegitimate Heir

“The commercial press came on scene not as the ideological
opponent of the opinion press but as its illegitimate heir.
Under the pretext of delivering information to the public
sphere at a reasonable price, it presented the news as if it
were a consumer product”. (Hohendahl, P.1989:325)


Selling, talking, reading
• Increase of press – scandal press
“New York newspaper editors in the 1830s, ahead of all others, achieved
astounding circulation growth. By 1850 the US had 240 dailies with a circulation
of 750,000 copies. (Roger Fischer, 2004: 287)

By the time of the crime described above (1888) the Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper
published between 500.000 copies (1872) and 1,000,000 (1896).

• Increase of readership
National(ized) languages; fiction and news mixed; prose vs poetry, etc.

• Oral-written discussions coffeehouses
«Taverns facilitated the convergenceof the oral and print aspects of the public
sphere by providing patrons access to conversations and newspapers, gossip and
books, lectures and pamphlets» (Burrowes, 2011:29)

Scandal stimulated debate and conversation on moral and identity.


Always, here, together
Time:
“The narrative of the Western nation which Benedict Anderson so
perceptively describes as being written in homogeneous, serial time”
(Bhabha, 1994)

Everyday life described:
"I should have heard it had there been any, I think," said Mrs. Green, when
interviewed, "for I have trouble with my heart, and am a very light sleeper.” (Lloyds
weekly Newspaper, 1888)

Space
– Symbolic places: Whitechapel, Baker street 221B.
– Referents of proximity: London, Manchester, city versus rural.
– Referents of distance: the exotic colonies, Orient, etc.

The stories were told through pamphlets, newspapers, sheets, in images and
fictional forms: Transmedia narratives.

They were consumed by broad layers of society: united the readers.


Naturalising the norm

“If these accounts were allowed to be printed and
circulated, it was because they were expected to have
the effect of an ideological control – the printing and
the distribution of these almanacs was in principle
subject to strict control. But if these true stories of
everyday history were received so avidly, if they
formed part of basic reading of the lower classes, it
was because people found in them not only
memories, but also precedents; the interest of
“curiosity” is also a political interest”
(Foucault, 1995:67)


Imposed freedom

• Technologies of liberation/domination:

“Rationalist and universalist claims of history
where also the technologies of colonial
governance:
Evolutionism, Evangelism, Utilitarianism.
(Foucault, 1970, 369)


Concluding:
Symbolic Public Sphere

• Scandal press stimulates debate
(oral, written, fiction, news)
• Reproduces a particular sense shared of place/time
• It works in a medium (as environment) of narratives
• Therefore it contributes to a collective (national) identity.
• Scandalous press is part of the Public sphere.
– (by acting under its belly button)
– (Not –apparently- helping the rational debate).
• Symbolic public sphere
– Integrates the individual (from its otherness)
– Integrates the State of Law (from its otherness)

• Scandalous press was an integrative
component of the Public Sphere.

Bonus track
• Postnormal network futures

“Network thinking is historically deeply influenced by ecological science. (…) We
may then begin to make out a politics beyond the network where human and non-
human, living and non-living are connected to mutual benefit” (Cubit, 2010)

• Networks can build collective beliefs of belonging.
– Provide a sense of time/ space: forms of Here and Now.
– Stimulates a debate that extends: oral/written; fiction/news;
stereotypes?
– Provide a transmedia narrative of shared reality
– Normative effects of normality (postnormality)
– Creates (new) forms of readership (as publicum).

Can we talk about a public self aware as a condition
for –e-democracy?


References
Adut, A. (2005) “A theory of scandal: Victorians, Homosexuality, and the fall of Oscar
Wilde” in: American Journal of Sociology, 11.1(july):213-48.
Bhabha, H. (1994) The location of culture. London: Routledge.
Burrowes, C. (2011) “Property, Power and Press Freedom: Emergence of the Fourth
Estate, 1640-1789”. In: Association for Education in Journalism and Mass
Communication.
Calhoun, C. (1992) Habermas and the public sphere. Cambridge (EUA), MIT Press.
Cubitt, S., R. Hassan, I. Volkmer (2010) “Postnormal network futures: A rejoinder to
Ziauddin Sardar” in: Futures 42 (2010) 617–624
Eley, G. (1992) “Nations, Publics, and Political Cultures: Placing Habermas in the
Nineteenth Century”. In: Calhoun, C. (1992) Habermas and the public sphere.
Cambridge (EUA): MIT Press.
Foucault, M. (1970) The order of things. An archaeology of human sciences. London:
Pantheon Books
Habermas, J. (1981) Historia y crítica de la opinión pública. La transformación
estructural de la vida pública, Madrid: Gustavo Gili, 1st ed.
Hohendahl, P. (1989) Building a national literature. The case of Germany 1830-1870.
New York: Cornell University Press.
Newlyn, L (2003) Reading, Writing, and Romanticism. The anxiety of reception. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Roger Fischer, S. (2004) A history of reading. London: Reaktion books.
Thompson, J. (1995) The Media and Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press


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