Networks, Society, and Polis: Epistemological Approaches on Mediatization

Muniz Sodré 46 The public space, supposedly the natural place for the exercise of public opinion suggested by Rousseau, has always been simultaneously political and cultural, a combination of politics and Languages (in the broad, not just literary, sense of the word). Discursively, he relied on literary institutions, arenas of debate, and editorial media, as well as the press as a “cultural promoting agent”. The association between Parliament and Lan- guages was quite familiar to 19th-century intellectuals. For the political case, it was very important, if not es- sential, as Dewey maintained, “the improvement of the methods and conditions of debate, discussion and persuasion. That is the problem of the public” 2 . The historical reality of this so-called “objective spirit” of the time is also partly a discursive projection of the famous European “Republic of Letters” or “literary repub- lic”, which favored the rhetorical dialogue (instead of the logical formalism of scholastic disputatio ) and, already in the middle of the 17th century, could serve as an equivalent of the word “pub- lic”, that is, the dialogue that contemplates subjects of general interest and not merely private 3 . The conversation, which John Dewey refers to as a means of education and public debate, is the communicative way in the associations of sages or academies to increase the circulation of Studia humanitatis , in which eloquence, poetry, history, and scholarship prevailed. Although having their nerve center in Paris, celebrated as the “capital of the Spirit”, conversa- tion societies developed in dispersed circles in Europe, thanks to a humanistic form of dialectics – “civil conversation”, insepa- rable from a philosophy of customs – intended for interlocutors who were neither doctors nor versed. In fact, since the beginning of the 19th century, the journalistic activity was associated with the discursive rational - ity that, in the previous century, characterized the public sphere, materialized in cafes, clubs, and magazines. And all of this could be described by the generic term “literature” since this designa- tion had not yet established itself definitively as an “expression 2 DEWEY, John. The public and its problems . Athens, OH: Swallow Press, 1980. p. 208. 3 FUMAROLI, Marc. La République des Lettres . Paris: Gallimard, 2015. p. 120.