How music created a public

Criticism, Spring, 2004 by Harold Love

THE PHRASE "PUBLIC SPHERE," originating as a tool for clarifying the nature of a diffuse but perfectly genuine phenomenon, has declined into a piece of slack intellectual shorthand. Its main usefulness today is to illustrate the problems that arise when a deductive formulation is mistakenly assumed to possess explanatory power. In fact it explains nothing at all. If we wish to understand the ways in which private persons learned how to communicate with each other in a public way during the Enlightenment, or the creation of institutional foundations, independent of the state, for the critical use of reason, we need to descend, with Adrian Johns and David Zaret, to much lower levels of organization and the specific kinds of work it took to sustain them. (1) We would also need to accept that different national cultures had very different notions of the public/private distinction and that they acquired these along very different timelines. My concern here is primarily with the Anglophone working through of this distinction, which is only one strand of a much more complex story, though one that is agreed to have exercised a formative influence.

Our problems with the historical public sphere begin with the assumption that it originated from the discursive culture of the London coffeehouses and was enlarged by the freeing of journalism and pamphleteering from prepublication censorship. This seems intuitively plausible; yet it has never satisfactorily been explained how such inherently separatist institutions as coffeehouses and newspapers could have been responsible for the creation of a public. In the early seventeenth century, London and through it the nation had, indeed, possessed a single, vast clearinghouse for news and opinion in the form of Paul's walk-the central aisle of the cathedral--to which every Londoner with the itch for news would go in person every day to tap into what had been delivered by rumor, gossip, or personal witness; but this space and the secondary oral information hub of the Royal Exchange were destroyed by the great fire of 1666, and no particular venue was ever to recover their dominance. The retreat to the coffeehouses, which grew enormously in number from the 1660s, was one from the broader community of Paul's and the Exchange to a multitude of fragmented communities, defined by membership of a particular trade or allegiance to a particular political or religious viewpoint. The notion of the coffeehouse as a place of free and frank discussion between people of differing views is at odds with what we know about actual examples. Non-juring clergy headed straight to Sam's, where they were unlikely ever to meet a Presbyterian. Insurers at Lloyd's had no wish for their negotiations to be overheard by interloping ships' captains or Turkey merchants. Addison at Button's was rarely if ever buttonholed by a Tory. In essence, these were places one went to in order to avoid meeting people who might disagree with one. The turning to the coffeehouse as a primary meeting place coincided in Britain with the outburst of clubmania, which is the subject of Peter Clark's British Clubs and Societies, 1580-1800. (2) Yet clubs even more than coffeehouses were a retreat from any sense of a collective public sphere, through being composed of tightly knit groups of individuals united by a common interest, through strictly controlling entry, and through restricting discussion to matters about which members were in broad agreement. Clubs constructed upon a more eclectic basis would often have explicit rules forbidding political and religious discussion, thus removing one of the assumed engines of the public sphere. Clark specifically acknowledges the difficulty of reconciling the historical reality with Habermas's prescription without attempting to solve it. (3) If one was to look for a social concomitant to the public sphere it would be neither coffeehouses nor clubs but the ritual of the visit as it has been described by Susan E. Whyman; (4) but this, although politicized from an early stage, was an institution of urbanized gentry and pseudo-gentry rather than of the bourgeoisie, who had more pressing things to do with their time. (5) Was the British public sphere really bourgeois at all?

Another view, which has been re-enunciated from different perspectives by Zaret and Julie Stone Peters, would locate the public sphere not in "private people come together as a public" but in the printed word, as multiplied by the great expansion of newspapers and the new liberty of pamphleteering that followed the lapse of the Licensing Act in 1694 and that was to nourish the careers of Addison, Swift, and Defoe. (Zaret's concern with printed petitions takes the story back to the 1640s, but he is dealing with a different conception of the public sphere from the currently dominant one.) For Peters, the public of "right-minded and engaged citizens, eager patrons of their nation's cultural life, a powerful yet invisible body at once to be enlightened and obeyed" became conscious of its existence through being "repeatedly addressed in the newspapers and in pamphlets." (6) Intuitively, this again seems right; and yet it represents a view of early Enlightenment journalism and pamphleteering that is a construct of the reading habits of modern researchers rather than reflecting those of the writers' contemporaries. The scholar visiting a library to investigate some seminal public debate, such as the Bangorian controversy, is likely to be presented with a made-up volume containing a variety of views on the issue in contention, variously characterizable as provocations, replies, counterblasts and counter-counterblasts, and is prone to assume on this basis that contemporary readers would have patiently considered all sides of a question in order to reach an impartial conclusion. But these collections are for the most part artifacts of subsequent collection and, even when bound up closer to the date of production by a bookseller or collector, were more likely to have been employed in a partisan spirit than as a basis for judicious enquiry. Indeed, what we know about individual readers of the time suggests that they read only the publications that presented their own side of the controversy and ignored or despised those of the opposition, however defined. Samuel Pepys was one such opinionated reader. (7) Hostile annotation of books with which the reader disagreed was common: Swift would read books by authors with whom he disagreed, such as Gilbert Burnet, largely for the pleasure of filling their margins with vituperative abuse. The number of readers of opposing convictions who would ever have opened a copy of A Charge of Partiality, Imposition, and Assuming Authority in Matters of Faith fix'd on the Subscribers at Salter's Hall; and Made Good from what they have Offer'd in their own Vindication in a Letter to a Friend (London, 1719) was probably minute. Pamphleteering of this nature was public in the sense of having been printed but so narrow in its appeal as to inhabit a kind of extended privacy Many works circulated in manuscript reached a far wider readership.