Missing Bodies: Visibility and Invisibility in the Bourgeois Public Sphere

the Public Sphere, was that it sought to provide an historically grounded account of the public sphere in relation to the rise of liberal capitalist societies. Habermas’s analysis drew attention to the existence of a ‘fourth sphere ’ alongside the family, economy, the state. The concept of the public sphere has retained its currency in contemporary debates surrounding citizenship and identity. Indeed, the explosion of myriad new forms of ‘publicity, ’ has forced a redefinition of “the spatial, territorial, and geopolitical parameters of the public sphere (Hansen 1993:183).” The classical bourgeois public sphere, as Nancy Fraser has argued, was essentially masculine; it implicitly assumed the bourgeois male as the ‘universal class’. Its presupposition, in other words, was the exclusion of women, the working class, and any others who did not correspond to this masculinist ideal. But, while many have criticized its exclusions and silences, few have traced the abstract generality of the public sphere to the ‘deep structures ’ of capitalism itself or asked why it is that under specifically capitalist conditions individuals relate to one another “immediately, as ‘abstract ’ human beings (Zizek 2000:104). ” And yet, the point of Marx’s critique of commodity fetishism was to show how the structure of commodity exchange masks the separation and appropriation of the concrete, embodied, labours of individuals by capital b