Matrize und Gerede: Potentiale der Kritik medialer Öffentlichkeit bei Anders und Heidegger im Spannungsfeld von Postfundamentalismus und neuem Realismus

In the face of recent developments concerning the public sphere (post-truth, fake news etc.), enthusiasm about the emancipatory potential of the internet and web 2.0 in particular has drastically decreased. The article re-reads two critiques of the media-based public sphere that do not focus on the dichotomy of one-to-many and many-to-many communication but address the fundamental question of what can become articulated in the public sphere in the first place: Gunther Anders’ concept of the matrix and Martin Heidegger’s notion of idle talk, which both deal with the dominance of stereotypes in public discourse. By relating those ideas to post-foundational political theory and to new realism in philosophy, the article discusses whether it is plausible to attribute recent problems of the public sphere to an unrestricted antagonism of interpretations. Contrary to the claims of new realism, it will be argued, in view of the surface pluralisation of postmodernity, public discourse is in need of in-depth pluralisation.