Abstract

According to Jürgen Habermas in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere : An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, the coffee-house culture of eighteenth-century England generated a powerful force of opposition to the political elite, propagating previously restricted knowledge through newspapers and conversation, and honing the tools of rational debate. But to what extent can we claim that vestiges of the democratizing culture of the Enlightenment survive in that major forum for information and debate in our world, the academic conference? Do our conferences contribute substantially to the Öffentlichkeit, a body of opinion and information that exists apart from the levers and priorities of official power? This question has recently gained a special resonance in my mind as the organizer of a major international conference, the twenty-eighth annual meeting of the Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies in October 2003. My experience has been that organizers of conferences on such themes will perpetually reencounter the dismaying drift back towards the ‘exoticising’ of the other – not only in the sense of making indigenous people objects of exotic display, but also in our habits of enfolding these cultures back within our own intellectual structures and assumptions. We find, that is, that our vaunted ‘public sphere’ inevitably operates not in opposition, but in covert collaboration, with the reigning hegemonies we originally sought to challenge.

DOI: 10.1111/j.1741-4113 .2004.00001.x