Excursus 3 to Chapter 4

The Public Sphere of Knowledge

Production and the Media
Conglomerate

The constitutional guarantee of the freedom of scholarly and scientific inquiry

also contains a standard for the communication structures of the public sphere of
knowledge production: it must be organized at base as a public service, that is, it
must be accessible to everyone. The formal configuration of the universities cor-
responds to this standard in that they are public corporations with the right to self-
management. Within this legal framework, private relations have repeatedly been
crystallized—university teaching positions, the major clinics, the research pro-
jects that are supported by contributions from a third party also form quasi-private
enclaves. In spite of this, a certain publicity [Publizität] has also traditionally been
preserved in this part of scholarship. Under the priority of the public-service orga-
nization, it has nearly retained early capitalist communication structures—those
of the community of researchers—well into late capitalism. This communication
depends on contact between individual researchers, their organizations and
organs of publication, which are as a rule run as small businesses. Correspon-
dence courses, audiovisual university teaching aids, data banks, university infor-
mation systems on the industrial scale would have a lasting effect on the
character of this public sphere of knowledge production. The context within
which their work is published cannot be a matter of indifference to the authors of
scholarly or scientific works. Up until this point, the author could elude the danger
that a work might form the ornamental apex of a private reactionary edifice of
knowledge in that he has codetermined the framework for the publication of his
work within the pluralism of publishers, journals, schools, institutes, and confer-
ences. The fact that he has delegated the secondary rights to his books to the pub-
144
 COMMODITIES IN THE CONSCIOUSNESS INDUSTRY • 145

lisher, or that legal third parties can emerge in the case of scientific and scholarly
works that are financed with the contributions of a third party, has no effect on
this.1
In the phase of the media conglomerate, however, the probability now arises
that these secondary rights will be accumulated and fed into data banks, educa-
tional programs, and information systems upon whose context the authors exert
no influence. One media conglomerate is in a position to support several research
institutes. Its commercial information systems sometimes provide information
more quickly and comprehensively than those of the public sphere of knowledge
production (libraries, specialized journals, conferences, documentation services).
In the United States, such knowledge that is recorded in private-industry data
banks is out of bounds for the social public sphere because of the fact that al-
though the data banks remain formally accessible to everyone,2 using them is
dependent upon paying fees that only big conglomerates can afford. Here the
principle of public access to scholarly and scientific material apparently reaches
its limit.
The proper reaction to this danger cannot be the blocking by the media cartel of
new research that has to do with scholarly and scientific pursuits. It is hardly plau-
sible that a more effective system of distribution for research information, for
which the media conglomerate has at its disposal the economically strongest
capabilities, should be excluded simply because individual authors are protecting
their copyrights. On the other hand, the organization of a complete body of
research material within a system of information presupposes precedents that play
a key role in the development of entire disciplines. Questions of the representation
of scholarly minorities, contradictory views on teaching, and the problems of
interfacing between the disciplines are examples of this. Does the media
conglomerate make decisions in these matters according to criteria of production
or distribution technology? Does it make any difference which individual re-
searchers the media conglomerate recruits as advisors? All experience would
indicate that structurations of this type in the public sphere of knowledge produc-
tion are transformed immediately into relations of domination.
It is to be acknowledged that perpendicular to the antithesis of student protest
versus technocratic university reform, an additional antithesis has formed: the
production of knowledge at the industrial level opposes the production of knowl-
edge at the traditional level of specialized craftsmanship. These two trajectories
permeate all fronts and phenomena at today's universities. The one is supported

1. The university budgets include grants from private industry, nonprofit endowments, and so
on—in other words, funds coming out of private budgets. These appear under the heading "Third Party
Contributions."
2. The principle of public access enables the results of tax-funded research projects to be stored in
the data banks.
 COMMODITIES IN THE CONSCIOUSNESS INDUSTRY•146

by the need of researchers and scholars to apply their historically acquired experi-
ence, that is, the historical formation of their productivity, and to return in a
moment of crisis to the tried and true forms of expression that they are sure they
have mastered. The second trajectory, that of the industrial configuration of
knowledge production, proceeds, on the other hand, from the challenge to knowl-
edge production by real relations whose degree of complexity the individualistic
mode of production of traditional scholarship based on competitive relationships
does not comprehend. Both forms of knowledge production encounter certain
limits to their productivity, albeit for opposing reasons. Therefore neither of them
can be purely realized. In every university crisis, be it that the teaching facilities
are inadequate, or that the legitimation of knowledge production itself is brought
into question, regardless of whether it is a matter of qualitative questions or mere-
ly quantitative expansion—the responses are always attempted within a contra-
dictory combination of intensified recourse to the configurations of traditional
research productivity and the building up of an industrialized production of
knowledge. In the course of these expansions and attempts at crisis management,
the sluggish institutions of academic self-administration that also find themselves
in a particular dilemma of legitimation must fail. What develop are forms of
scholarly and scientific pluralism.
It is obvious to think of the pluralistic solution and thus the public-service form
of organization for the alliance of the media cartel and knowledge production.
The massive exploitation interests of the private media conglomerates that have
an especially intense interest in scholarly and scientific material would oppose it.
A guarantee of public-service structures of the scholarly public sphere even in the
phase of the media cartel would have to prohibit a wildly expanding commercial-
ization of knowledge production by the private media conglomerates. This guar-
antee would be deduced from the constitutional right established in Article 5 of
the Basic Law, which instructs the legislator to economically safeguard that
which he legally guarantees. Here the characteristic weakness of public-service
guarantees and forms of organization would quickly become apparent—the weak-
ness of any abstract, substance-excluding bourgeois public sphere vis-ä-vis the
material interests of the public sphere of production. Public-service organization
tends to bring forth from out of itself private relations of power and to priva-
tize itself, just as the private interest of the public spheres of production, that
is, that of the media conglomerates, tends to transform itself into public
authority.
It is easy to recognize the weakness of a pluralistic organization of the univer-
sity if, under present circumstances, one were to examine the overdetermination
of the universities by the private enterprise of projects, consultants, and free-
lancers. Academic authors to some extent work more for third parties—for exam-
ple, their publishers—than they do for public research and teaching at the
university itself. This situation is radicalized to the extent that a developed con-
 COMMODITIES IN THE CONSCIOUSNESS INDUSTRY • 147

sciousness industry is evaluating knowledge production comprehensively for the

first time. This is reinforced by tendencies such as the exodus of research from the
context of research and teaching.

Public Service or Private Structure of the Consciousness Industry?

Is it possible to maintain the public-service structure of knowledge production,
education, and television if, at the same time, most of the other domains of the
public sphere are being overdetermined by the private consciousness industry?
Would it be possible to at least compensate for the overwhelming influence of the
private mass media with public competitive enterprise? In political discussions of
the mass media, these suggestions constantly are heard. For each of the individual
public spheres whose public-service structure should be maintained, this means
energetic reforms, expansions, adaptations. For television, this is a matter of a
stronger emphasis on educational programming, greater flexibility in the pro-
grams; in the case of universities, it is one of developing a public media cartel
indigenous to higher education; in the case of the unions, an intensification of the
unions' own professional training and adult education programs. In each of these
public spheres—television, scholarly and scientific inquiry, the unions—what is
at stake is a bourgeois public sphere that has been carried over into concrete rela-
tions. Their specific structural flaws likewise extend into the necessary proce-
dures of adaptation. The weaknesses grow along with the strengths. Thus the
recommendation that the media conglomerates be confronted with mere prohibi-
tions or with competition that is merely compensatory do not get to the heart of
the problem.
Thus, following the ideas of the culture ministry conference and the universi-
ties, a public higher-education media cartel is being planned. With this decision in
favor of centralization, difficulties pertaining to agreement between the individual
universities are evidently bypassed; a procedure that is part magisterial, part plu-
ralistic, facilitates what seem to be practical solutions. However, with this central-
ization, the plan excludes the considerable concrete interests of researchers in a
public sphere of knowledge production that is organized in such a way that each
individual researcher has immediate access to it and that no separation of scholar-
ly and scientific production and publication opportunities occurs. A central public
higher-education media cartel separates out the specific public-sphere interests of
researchers, which nonetheless should be brought into play against the private
structure of the media conglomerates.
The public-service form of organization is an important but relatively superfi-
cial means for constructing (from out of the thought of the traditional public
sphere) a dam against an excessive concentration of private-economy media. It
should not be overlooked that a portion of our society's potential for resistance
that cannot be expressed politically is articulated in the public-service or nonprof-
 COMMODITIES IN THE CONSCIOUSNESS INDUSTRY•148

it structure; above all else, the long-term capital interest can be better expressed in
the public-service form than in an open opposition to antagonistic social forces, in
the course of which there is no eventual agreement so that the long-term capital
interest disintegrates. But the antagonisms themselves are not changed by the
organizational shortcut. Now as before they permeate the public-service organiza-
tion that appears to be uniform, but that is not, in terms of its substance. At the
same time, the price that must be paid for the formal unification of all interests in
these organizations is that they are expressed in a reciprocally devalorized, plural-
istic form. This situation is responsible for the characteristic inflexibility of the
big public-service networks, among which the radio stations are not alone. It pre-
vents them from linking the interests that are organized within them (e.g., those of
the viewers, the author colleagues, or the scholars in the case of the universities,
the workers in the case of the unions) in such a way that their energy really sup-
ports the organization. The extent of illusion in these agreements between the
organization and those who are being organized is evident in the weakness of
these organizations as soon as they come up against real capital interests.