Duration
13 Sep 2023 - 15 Sep 2023
Already in the early 1960s Jürgen Habermas, in a book that has become a classic, diagnosed a profound change and a crisis in the formation of political public opinion. As an extension of this diagnosis, numerous studies have analyzed the transformations of the public sphere under the effect of new information and communication technologies and the development of an expressive genre to the detriment of the normative genre and even of "communicative action" as conceived by Habermas. Beyond the "re-feudalization" Habermas speaks of, the representative mode of politics is increasingly supplanted by a presentative mode that also constitutes a relapse in pre-modern political representation.
But what exactly is opinion? How is it formed? From what resources and by what mechanisms? These questions intersect with a problem to which the political context of recent months – the pandemic, the electoral campaigns, especially the American and French ones, the invasion of Ukraine – has given a particular acuteness: that of the vassalization of public opinion by the media and propaganda.
The conference aims to take stock of the different approaches to this issue, based on Siegfried Kracauer's propaganda theory, the works on propaganda and public opinion carried out by the Frankfurt School during its exile in the United States (in collaboration as well as in competition with American approaches) and more recent work on new media.
Conference programme can be downloaded HERE.