Public sphere/contact zone: Habermas, early print, and verse translation

Criticism, Spring, 2004 by A.E.B. Coldiron

CAN WE INDENTIFY AN early modern public sphere, a "space for critique freed from the constraints of church and court"? (1) If so, what forms it, what is its character, and what is its relation to literary practice? First, I would propose that the arrival of printing presses in England initiates not only an information revolution, and not only the "marketplace of print" explored by Alexandra Halasz, but also a certain kind of literary public sphere. According to Halasz, "print permanently altered the discursive field not by bringing books to the marketplace (medieval scriptoria did that) but by enabling the marketplace to develop as a means of producing, disseminating, and mediating discourse independent of the sites and practices associated with and sanctioned by university, Church, and Crown." (2) If this is so, then the process also created a sphere for poetry independent of those institutional sites and practices, a sphere more public than was previously possible. I am calling this new space for English poetry the "public sphere of early print."

However, there are real problems with this application of Habermas's concept. We know that the concept of the "public sphere" is elastic: in recent discussions of the Internet and the digital information revolution, it has succeeded well beyond the historical arc it was originally designed to describe in 1962, in Struhturwandel der Offentlichheit. (3) But is the concept elastic enough to apply retrospectively to a previous information revolution, that of print technology, and to its associated poetry? The public sphere of early print that opens for poetry in the half century after 1476 is temporary, limited, and so peculiar and particular that it may stretch Habermas's notion beyond a reasonable shape. It is a dynamic, socio-techno-literary sphere, created largely of foreign elements. In fact, the foundational foreignness of the public sphere of early print may complicate the scholarship following Richard Helgerson's Forms of Nationhood. This site of nation formation, this public sphere of early print, is richly, constitutively foreign, providing a central paradox to our accounts of early modern English national and literary identity. An examination by way of Habermas promises to raise some new issues in English Renaissance poetics.

The present essay begins skeptically, however, by questioning the very applicability of the term "public sphere" to the earlier Tudor world and by asking how free from constraint the public sphere of early print was and what sorts of elements composed it. Next, the essay recovers a material and literary variant of Habermas's concept: a public sphere that includes not only poems, authors, and readers but the translators and printers who brought printed poetry, before expanding audiences, the materials they used, and their processes and techniques. In England, this teeming text-world begins in the secular presses operating after Caxton (1476) and before the Royal Charter of the Stationers' Company (1557); thus it occupies a time and place somewhat freer of regulatory intervention while still involving larger potential readerships than scribal publication had permitted. Then, the essay explains that the public sphere of early print is founded on alterity, on Otherness, on the non-English and even the anti-English. Like the colonial borderlands Mary Louise Pratt describes in other contexts, the public sphere of early print is "a space where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other and establish ongoing relations," in other words, a "contact zone," in this case, one that is indirectly and pervasively rather than openly or literally colonial. (4) Finally, the essay considers how this foundationally foreign public sphere shaped English poetic practice and what the implications of all this might be for those of us trying to write the literary history of the early Tudor period.

I. Questioning the Applicability of the Term

Many scholars have objected to Habermas's "Offentlichkeit" (and the "'Strukturwandel" he posits around it). Feminists' objections have been among the most persuasive and generative efforts to reconceive the original notion) It is certainly a bourgeois construct (as Habermas's subtitle indicates), probably an idealized one, or perhaps, as Halasz suggests, a nostalgic back-formation based on a particular philosophical agenda. (6) Habermas himself calls the public sphere "a child of the eighteenth century" and has since then revised his thinking on the subject more fully. (7) One might also object that it is anachronistic to claim that a phenomenon so clearly connected with democratic deliberative and civic processes was operating in a pre-democratic era. And after Foucault can we believe at all that some magically free public space exists apart from ideological forces? The nature of social structures and the nature of language itself would render such a free space theoretically impossible. From Piaget's work in the early twentieth century on assimilation and accommodation to the more recent work of relevance theorists such as Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, we have accumulated considerable evidence about contextual constraints on cognition and communication. (8)