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Oskar Negt (in German) and Alexander Kluge are sociologists who are connected to Critical theory and the Frankfurt School. This project got its inspiration from
the text called
Their work has originally been published under the German title "Öffentlichkeit und Erfahrung: Zur Organisationsanalyse von bürgerlicher und proletarischer Öffentlichkeit" in 1972. The study
was seen as a critical response to Habermas' "The Structural Transformation of
the Public Sphere". It was also a polemical response to Jürgen Habermas' influential work, which had been published a decade earlier. During the interim, Negt had been Habermas' assistant, and Kluge had worked in a variety of capacities with Adorno. Habermas' text is subtitled "An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society," Negt and Kluge's "Toward an Analysis of the Organization of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Spheres." Clearly, the plural here indicates what they want to contend from the outset: that there is more than one public sphere, and that the category is not the exclusive property of the bourgeoisie. They contend rather that there are at any one time a range of public spheres that exist simultaneously, formed by different and often competing constituencies, often constituting themselves in contexts that are not usually recognized as legitimate public spheres. These include phenomena such as labor strikes,
football matches, the routines of family life, the public sphere of children,
etc. These officially unrecognized public spheres exist and operate outside the
usual parameters of institutional legitimation, responding to the contingent
needs of all of those groups whose self-expression is excluded or, as Negt and
Kluge put it, "blocked" from the usual arenas of public discourse.
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Overview on Public Sphere(s)
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