On Systematically Distorted Communication: Bourdieu and the Socio-Analysis of Publics

In this chapter I consider the potential of the work of Pierre Bourdieu as a means of extending and deepening Habermas’ critique of the public sphere. Bourdieu is not widely recognized as a theorist of the public sphere, perhaps because he does not often name the public sphere as such in his analyses. Nevertheless, much of his work on the media, artistic, educational and political fields involves a powerful analysis of the publics constituted therein. Publics, if we read Bourdieu in this way, are plural. They are differentiated across a range of sites of discursive production. But they are no less important for that. In recent work, for example, he has spoken out in defence of various fields of public discourse which, he argues, are being undermined by increasing economic encroachment (Bourdieu, 1998a; Bourdieu and Haacke, 1995). Like Habermas, but with more of an eye on the economy than on the state, he invokes an image of a process of colonization which compromises the autonomy of fields and thereby the rational debate and critique they might otherwise generate. This form of critique rejoins another which we find much earlier in Bourdieu’s work, however, a form focused upon the manner in which the artistic and political fields in particular are shaped by social inequalities which they, in turn, help to perpetuate. Thus, again like Habermas, Bourdieu’s defence of the public sphere against its colonisation is a defence of fields which he takes to be flawed prototypes of the communicative forms and channels adequate to a properly democratic society. The importance of Bourdieu’s work is not restricted to this considerable research output, however. It offers an important framework or problematic for further research. More specifically, it effects a framework in which we can realise, both empirically and theoretically, an analysis of ‘systematically distorted communication’, such as was deemed central to critical theory by Habermas (1970a,b) in his earlier work. This latter point must be briefly unpacked. ‘Systematically distorted communication’ is central to Habermas’ early definition of critical theory (Habermas, 1972). The epistemology of critical theory, he suggests, should be akin to that of psychoanalysis. And the epistemology of psychoanalysis centres upon ‘systematically distorted communication’. The