Rethinking the Public Sphere: Enlightenment Messages for a Post-Covid World

Supported by CEMS KCL, the Centre for Enlightenment Studies at King's (CESK) is delighted to announce its first event of 2022, which will take place in the Strand Building in the early evening of Thursday 20 January. This will be an experimental 'salon' exploring the meaning of the Enlightenment public sphere for us today.

Next year will mark the sixtieth anniversary of the original German publication of Jürgen Habermas’s Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere (1962). This book, particularly since its translation into English in 1989, has had a huge interdisciplinary influence on our thinking about the public sphere, and on the significance of the Enlightenment-era emergence of a ‘bourgeois public sphere’ in these contemporary debates. The current academic year seems to be a very apposite time to revisit this seminal book and its multidimensional impact. The Covid pandemic has led to an unprecedented shift from public to private spaces, and from embodied to online interactions. Are we living through another ’structural transformation of the public sphere’? If so, what pertinent insights might reflecting on the eighteenth-century public sphere - and its spaces, institutions, conventions, preoccupations and exclusions - have to offer us?

CESK plans to focus its 2022 programming on these questions. To initiate our exploration of the meaning of the Enlightenment public sphere for us today, we would like to invite you to an experimental ‘salon’ on this subject, which will be both an intellectual and a social event, combining two ten-minute presentations designed to stimulate our reflections with an opportunity for social mingling among academics, students and cultural sector professionals interested in these questions. It is our hope that the further agenda for our consideration of the legacy of Habermas’s book will be informed by the ideas and responses that emerge at this event.

Our two speakers are:

Frances Carey, an independent curator and academic advisor, and formerly Head of National Programmes and Deputy Keeper of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum, on ‘Back to the Future: 1751, 1962 and 2022: Enlightenment, Habermas and the Public Sphere’.

Marie Kolkenbrock, Branco Weiss Fellow in the Department of German at KCL, and a scholar of Viennese Modernism and of post-1900 cultural history and theory, on ‘The Conflicting Cultural Politics of Distance: Stabilising and Challenging the Public Sphere’.

The event will take place from 5.30 pm to 7.30 pm on Thursday 20 January, in the History Department ‘open space’ on the eighth floor of the Strand Building, King’s College London. (This room venue might possibly change, in which case an email with the updated location will be sent to all registered participants in early January. We will also let you know nearer the time of the College Covid protocols applicable to the event.) All those with interests in this area are welcome; wine and other refreshments will be provided, and there is of course no charge but advance registration is essential. The presentations from Frances and Marie, preceded by a few words from CESK co-director Adam Sutcliffe on the CESK ‘public sphere project’, will be at about 6 pm, and will not last more than 30 minutes in total.

CESK would also like to propose a reading group, or possibly more than one reading group, based on Habermas’s book and its wider impact and relevance. If you would be interested in participating in this, please let us know by completing this brief online form.

If you have any questions, whether about the event or the reading group, please do get in touch via either the CEMS or CESK email addresses ([email protected] or [email protected]).

We hope to see many of you for a long-overdue gathering of C18-istes, as well as others.

Image: Nicolas André Monsiau, Molière Reading Tartuffe at Ninon de Lenclos's (1802).