Culture ’ s Public Face

an the public sphere be understood as a cultural phenomenon? Perhaps, C although an approach through the social seems less circuitous. This may be due in part to Habermas’s lucid formation in The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere ([1962] 1989). The term “public sphere” conjures in the mind an image of place, whether we see the coffee houses, salons, and debating clubs of seventeenthand eighteenth-century Europe, or computer stations interconnected by filamentous networks, or something hazier and more diffise an arena between the state and the private realm in which citizens openly debate matters of public concern. The language of place shades imperceptibly into that of institutions, whose connection to economics in turn accords them a privileged position. From its lofty perch, economics seems to underpin all cultural phenomena, as if it were itself acultural. Two approaches to the public sphere as social