Ricardo Gonçalves, "Digitally Mediated Intersubjectivities and the Public Sphere: Ambivalent Democratic & Authoritarian Effects"

Sponsored by The Center for Media, Communication, and Global Change & The Center for Critical Democracy Studies

ABSTRACT
The digital transformation is reshaping the public sphere and raising critical questions about the prospects for sustaining and deepening democracy. Recent literature, inspired by the Habermasian conception of the public sphere, argues that this process has inaugurated a new structural transformation, characterized by the proliferation of multiple semi-public and semi-private spaces, fragmented and marked by centrifugal tendencies and dispersion. Much of this scholarship, however, emphasizes the interplay between technological and economic processes – such as surveillance capitalism, attention economy, and algorithmic governance – and the decline of the traditional media. This work seeks to broaden the debate by linking the hypothesis of the new structural transformation to recent diagnoses from cultural and sociological studies that address digitally mediated changes in intersubjective relations and in the very constitution of subjectivities. Drawing on Felix Stalder’s concept of the digital condition and Andreas Reckwitz’s notion of singularities, it investigates how digital transformation affects human interactions and individual and collective processes of self-expression and social recognition, thereby reconfiguring the public sphere and threatening its viability. Finally, it is argued that, by intensifying the tensions between singularization and universalization and between fragmentation and social cohesion, these dynamics generate ambivalent political effects, oscillating between democratic and increasingly authoritarian tendencies. Such tensions create new obstacles to the construction of horizons of common interests, participation, and deliberation – central elements of democracy and its fundamental link to the ideal of a functional public sphere.

Keywords: public sphere, digital condition, singularities, intersubjectivity, post-democracy.

BIO
Ricardo Gonçalves is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institut für Philosophie, Freie Universität Berlin, with an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship, and at CEBRAP – Brazilian Center of Analysis and Planning. He holds a PhD in Philosophy and Legal Theory from the University of São Paulo Faculty of Law, where he was awarded a full research scholarship by the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP). He has published papers and book chapters, with a particular focus on critical theory, the public sphere, theories of recognition, the crisis of democracy, normative orders, and multinormativity.