Receptive Publics

Today's post is by Joshua Habgood-Coote and Nadja El Kassar on their recent paper, Receptive Publics (Ergo, forthcoming). Joshua Habgood-Coote is a research fellow at the school of philosophy, religion, and history of science at the university of Leeds. Natalie Ashton is a research associate at VU Amsterdam, Nadja El Kassar is Professor of Philosophy at University of Lucerne.

Joshua Habgood-Coote

It is common to hear the following kind of complaint:

You can’t say anything these days! You never know who might get offended, or whether you’re going to get cancelled for saying something totally innocuous. Back in my day we just said it like it was, we were all a lot more thick-skinned, and we just came out and said uncomfortable truths.

This complaint makes a historical comparison: things used to be better because you could say what you thought. Both better psychologically—we weren’t spending our whole time in a defensive crouch—and epistemically—we could get to the truth, even when it was uncomfortable. And this is no longer the case.

Natalie Ashton

At this point it’s going to be tempting to contest both the historical and the contemporary part of the complaint. Hold your horses: we’re not interested in whether the complaint is true. Rather, we’re interested in the kind of criticism it makes. Like so much of the criticism of contemporary discourse, concerns about cancelling and the censorious youth are centred around what it is possible and permissible to say. The quality of speech is surely an important part of the epistemic quality of public discourse, but surely just as important a factor is the quality of public listening. In fact, we suspect that a significant reason why people complain about not being able to say anything these days is that they haven’t acquired the listening skills to process and understand the political concerns raised by minority groups.

Nadja El Kassar

In Receptive Publics (forthoming in Ergo), we try to open up a set of questions about the quality of political listening. Drawing on the history of liberation movements, we suggest that there is an important set of discursive spaces which have been established with the goal of allowing non-marginalised people to listen to marginalised people. Promoting and supporting this kind of space is a pressing political issue 

To start off with, we offer a diagnosis of what we call the listening problem. We argue that the listening problem has three parts. The first is the high social costs of speech in the public sphere, which we argue is a consequence of the unmanaged epistemic friction between different epistemic frameworks. The second is the unequal recognition and distribution of epistemic labour between marginalised and non-marginalised people. And the third is antagonistic relationships which impede the progress of new concepts into the public sphere.

Next, we suggest that within the public sphere tradition there is a lack of resources for thinking about spaces for collective political listening. Besides the main public sphere, and counterpublic groups which bring together members of marginalised groups, there are receptive publics: spaces for the reception of ideas from counterpublics, and or the development of the skills needed to listen effectively to marginalised speakers.

With the concept of a receptive public in hand, we apply it to some examples. We consider to what extent the feminist podcast the Guilty Feminist and the audio social media app Clubhouse have enabled receptive public spaces. Part of the goal of the paper is to open up a bridge between social epistemology and work in media studies which employs the notions of a public sphere and a counterpublic. We think that social epistemologists have a good deal to learn from media studies researchers—and vice versa—and research into different kinds of discursive spheres offers a good opportunity to establish conceptual connections between these research projects.