Publicness beyond the public sphere

1 Doutorado em Ciências da Comunicação e professor de Estudos de Comunicação na Universidade da Madeira. É investigador no Labcom e autor de The principle of publicity A socio-anthropological perspective, publicado em J.C. Correia, & R. Maya (Eds.) (2011). Public sphere reconsidered Theories and practices. Covilhã: Labcom Books. Abstract: This paper contends the public sphere is a restrictive approach to public action. Despite the dysphoric development of the public sphere in post-modern societies, public action and communicative activity can easily be discerned if one recognizes that rational-critical deliberation is not the exclusive means to exercise it. I propose to separate what is an historical and idealized construct – the public sphere – from the socio-anthropological principle – publicness. The former consubstantiates a specific normative principle of legitimate political decision-making, as well as a peculiar space of communication and an ensemble of specific publics. The latter cannot be reduced to the strict formulation of the public sphere. Publicness is, first of all, a matter of cohesion and consensus on values in a society, reached through a communicative process that occurs in almost every social interaction. It does not absolutely depend on a capital Public or on a public sphere model to emerge and be felt by all members of a society. By t racing a br ief panorama in the three main models of the public sphere (Habermas, Arendt, Negt & Kluge’s models), the paper suggests going beyond the public sphere by envisioning publicness as a socioanthropological principle characterized as being an empirical reality, as being prepolitical and pre-institutional, as well as a process linked to social imaginaries.


Abstract:
This paper contends the public sphere is a restrictive approach to public action.

Introduction
Becoming known to each other is as old as the human being. Publicness has not emerged in the modern world even if a critical and rational publicity (conceived as a public sphere) is something that rose with Enlightenment (Habermas, 1989). Being before the eyes of our fellows is as old as social life itself (O'Donovan, 2000, p. 18) but a coinage with political dimensions only emerged in the late eighteenth century.
The structural transformations of the public sphere (Habermas, 1989) entail multidimensional transformations that simultaneously prevents us to see them as a simple unidirectional degradation but as a complex mutation. The public sphere is today related to the increasing diversity and overlapping of publics that may -or may not -be in conflicting relations.
But also, to the expansion of social life that mass media (both electronic, analogic and digital) brought and its potentialities for the virtualization of the public sphere (Ferreira, 2019).
On other hand, the processes of both globalization and glocalization (Robertson, 2003) encompass the possibility of transnational public spheres (Fraser, 2014). They are separated but in connection with national, local publics (Bohman, 2007) as well as subnational publics and sphericules (Gitlin, 1998). There are signs that the characteristically dynamic tension between the public and the private is now largely politicized (Livingstone, 2005), and is the object of intense contestation and redefinition (Fours, 2008, p. 96). Lash (1979), for instance, advances a "tyranny of intimacy" and "public narcissism" to describe the coincidence of the terms, while Mateus (2010) calls for the oxymoron "public intimacy".
The general perspective of the structural transformation of the public sphere is a pessimistic one (Bauman, 1999;Fenton, 2018;Pfetsch, 2018), emphasizing the negative sides of strategic action (Habermas, 1976;Murdock, 2018) over the normative one, rational and ethical dimension of the public sphere (Habermas, 1996;Blumler, 2018). It is well-known that Habermas (1989) presents the 20 th century as a re-feudalization of the public sphere in which public opinion tends to be directed by the technification of politics, at the same time citizens tend to be alienated from their prerogatives (Esteves, 2019). This distrustful approach 1 to democracy and the public sphere is indebted to key authors such as Lippmann, who, in his The Phantom Public, rejected the hypothesis of a wellinformed and competent citizen in a mass society. According to him, the public is not fit to express its opinions but to align itself for or against a proposal. That's why a qualified understanding of public affairs should 1 For clarity's sake, it should be stated that this distrustful attitude is characteristic of the first Habermas. As it is well known, Habermas (1996) later reconsiders the role of mass media and the public sphere through the notions of counterfacticity and plurality -as in, for instance, Between facts and norms (Habermas, 1996). What should be retained in this passage is the strong fragilities of the concept of the public sphere in a (post)modern world. This does not mean it is today irrelevant. In contrast, remembering the public sphere's difficulties, vulnerabilities and dangers is intended in this paper to emphasize how "short" and insufficient the concept still remains. That's why, one needs to look into publicness and not just to the public sphere. Failing to do so is to mistake the tree for the forest.
Publicness is a forest of modelizations and articulations. The public sphere is the main articulation of the publicness but must not be confused with exhausting the whole publicness principle.
be left to specialists, and the role of public should be circumscribed to choosing among perspectives in a world where citizens are compared to a disenchanted and passive spectator (Lippmann, 1925). Similarly, in the same epoch as Lippmann, Schumpeter ascribes only a minor role to public participation since the "will of the people" could be manufactured and manipulated. Genuine public participation is an illusion (Schumpeter, 2010, pp. 54-72).
In brief terms, the transformations of economic, civic, political, cultural and technological life put in jeopardy the very foundations of the public sphere: a communicative forum accessible to as many as possible, where opinions can be freely expressed and debated through rational and critical discussion (Verstraeten, 1996, p. 348). This means that political choice is strongly dependent of the possibility of the public sphere. It offers clear insights in the issues and offer possible alternatives from which to choose (Murdock, 1992).
Also, the public sphere is, from the start, a central element on the political communication process enabling politics to be accountable and the public to critically check on government policies (Papadopoulos, 2010). Habermas (1989Habermas ( , 1996 had already identified two fundamental attributes of the public sphere: it functions as an institutional space for public opinion formation and criticism; and it operates as legal framework which normatively secures its autonomy from politics but that, at the same time, is aimed to extend public control over political decision-making (Rodger, 1985, p. 205).
Answering the challenges to a normative political theory of the public sphere, the Internet seems the mass medium most adequate to take on the institutional complexity and cultural diversity for democratic decision making (Dahlberg, 2007) (Coleman & Blumer, 2009;Dahlberg, 2001;Dahlgren, 2005). Internet makes easier to build communication networks enabling collective action (Torres & Mateus, 2015). "With the advent of the Net, civic interaction takes a major historical step by going online, and the sprawling character of the public sphere becomes all the more accentuated" (Dahlberg, 2007, p. 149 (Hindman, 2008, p. 269).
In fact, the universal access to virtual public forums is not a sufficient condition to perform deliberative activities (Ferreira, 2019, p. 194). The diversity of voices in online environments per se does not guarantee true discussion and contestation of points of view (Esteves, 2019, p. 271). There may be technological opportunities to a strong normative public sphere, but it's the use citizens give to Internet that will determine its quality to foster communicative encounters (Downey & Fenton, 2003;Dahlgren, 2001). For example, Huckfelt and Sprague (1995), as well as Schäfer and Taddicken (2015) and Winter and Neubaum (2016) found that there is a tendency of people to interact preferentially with those with the same opinion. Concomitantly, an empirical study concluded that social media users tended to ignore contrary political arguments and concentrated their online interaction in posts that did agree with their own points of view (Hampton et al., 2014). There is, thus, the risk of social media to become no more of overwhelming platforms to gather information that do not necessarily culminates in dialogue and that favour private or particular processes of public opinion formation (Ferreira, 2019, p. 198).
Besides, Internet supports anonymity minoring the responsible expression of opinions that tend to replace truth and objectivity as core values of public discussion -ultimately ending in fake news (Allcott & Gentzkow, 2017 , 1996).
And trying to fix it in a historical point is an unfortunate task doomed to failure as several works have demonstrated (Calhoun, 1992;Fraser, 1992;Baker, 1992  The idea of the public sphere as physically space has been properly criticized (Baker, 1992;Belina, 2011) and even distinguished (Low, 2017 (1984,1987,1991,1992,1996), trying to answer all the historical, feminist and social theory criticisms.
In these works, he gives additional commentaries to the Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit, namely, the existence of a cultural public sphere (McGuigan, 1996)  She, too, ponders the changing relations between the public and the private sphere although inspired by Ancient Greece, instead of 18 th 5 Indeed, by inheriting the legacy of Critical Theory, Habermas tends to conflate the functioning of the public sphere to reason and make reason and critique a crucial dimension of the public sphere and sociability. The public sphere is defined by Habermas as "the public of private individuals who join in debate of issues bearing on state authority" (Calhoun, 1992, p.7) and it entails three forms of critiques: (a) the critique of the absolutist state, (b) the critique of the democratic state, and (c) the critique of the public sphere as a mediating force between state and society (Habermas, 1989, p. 9). It is also very inspired by Kant's Critique of Pure Reason: "Our time is the time of criticism, to which everything has to be submitted. Religion, for its holiness, and legislation, for its majesty, also want to subtract themselves from it. But then they rightly arouse suspicion against them and cannot aspire to the sincere respect which reason grants only to those who can sustain its free and public examination" (Kant, 1997 The listing of criticisms received by these three models of the public sphere is gigantic. Its idealized situation (Castells, 2008, p. 80), and its exclusionary nature on the basis of class and gender (Fraser, 1992) (1977), Habermas (1989), Negt and Kluge (1993) or Arendt (1998). And with the emergence of new media environment of a network society (Bruns, 2008), the unitary character of the public sphere tends to become an amalgam of sphericules (Gitlin, 1998;van Dijk, 1999, p. 164) in which the public and the private are becoming increasingly blurred (Splichal, 2018  Given these six instabilities on the core framework of the model of the public sphere, we suggest going beyond the concept of "public sphere".

Simply, publicness
As far as a model of public sphere is difficult to apply in today's mass media and mass democracy societies   (Mateus, 2011a, p. 167) In other words, publicness happens whenever and wherever two or more individuals -having previously acted singularly -assemble to interrogate and discern on their own interactions which are already embedded in wider relations of social power (Keane, 1984, p. 2 burg, 1969, p. 196 Since it is pre-political, publicness is also pre-institutional 9 , laying aside substantial concepts such as Public Opinion, Civil Society, Public Sphere, Assemblies, Media, Governments, Parties, Deliberation, or even Democracy (publicness is not dependent of forms of political organization).
These are institutions of (or related to) the public sphere, not institutions of publicness as Goodsell (2017, p. 478) claims. The promise of a communicative effort concerned with cohesion and consensus on shared values may well be hiding in plain sight. The promise of a strong public life is given 9 Rodger (1985, p. 210), interestingly, does take on the pre-institutional level of the public sphere but he is still conceptualizing within the public sphere modelization of the public action and social experience.
by publicness and its many forms of visibility (in a visual or in a symbolic sense) (Mateus, 2017 (Mateus, 2013, p. 44) Public Imaginal (Mateus, 2013) is, thus, an expression that resumes the multitude of different social imaginaries in the public world. Publicness enables the collective sharing functioning and a kind of enriched communicative substratum, from which word-views can thrive.
The five points enumerated are seminal research lines on the publicness concept.
All we have to is to manage "the latent potentialities available in the existing forms of social life" (Fours, 2008, p. 100). This means to be capable to articulate the diverse symbolic strategies that publicness foster, regardless of its public sphere model. More importantly, it means to be able to recognize its empirical, pre-political, pre-institutional, unbounded, social imaginary status.

Conclusion
Publicness: a communicative ideal situation or a social reality?
This could have been this paper's sub-title. By now, it is clear this paper  (Habermas, 1989), and a central aspect to debate facticity and normativity (Habermas, 1996). This paper intends to discuss publicness beyond normativity and that is why the public sphere theory is only superficially alluded to.
As such, I highlighted the connection between publicness and social imaginaries. Each one feed on the other: publicness is a process of dissemination of social imaginaries and, at the same time, social imaginaries need publicness to become acknowledgeable, recognizable, and shared.
Publicness is not imperishably subjugated to functionalist imperatives and condemned to death. Publicness precedes public models of social life and goes beyond the public sphere. Long live publicness.