“The public sphere is for us a process of production rather than an object that pre-exists and that you can then cater to with your own output… counter-public for us is a process of igniting solidarity among people who might otherwise have very different ideas…The bourgeois public sphere, in contrast, is something like a pre-given foil” (Krause, 121). The concept of the public that Negt proposes here is one that is continually produced, but this production is not a homogenizing force. A counter-public is not produced by subsuming various, perhaps marginalized, identities under a general category. It is less a production of yet another “group” than it is an attempt to create relationships, engender solidarity amongst groups that, superficially, do not resemble one another. It seems that Negt is opposing the Kantian conception of the public, specifically in his repudiation of the “bourgeois public sphere”. Kant’s notion of the public sphere presupposes a bourgeois, that is “individualist and rationalist”, subject (Krause, 119). The public sphere, for Kant, is always already in relation to the private, despite the distinction between the two. One cannot betray one’s civic duties, one’s responsibility towards one’s work. So it is clear that the private sphere is “pre-given” in the sense that Negt uses the word. But is the public sphere any less restrictive? It is only the scholar who has any substantive authority in this sphere, catering to the public with his own output. Negt, on the other hand, calls for an expansion of the “concept of interests” that belongs not only to scholars, but to workers— “They need to extend their concept of work, the concept of interests, of their political mandate, their cultural mandate, which means they need to develop more than workplace interests (Krause, 125). What is especially important in Negt’s formulation is that it avoids romanticizing the worker: the worker is not primally innocent, he is responsible not only to himself and his comrades, but to members of society outside the trade union.

“This disturbed balance between ‘is’ and ‘ought’, the hegemony of being” (Krause, 123). Krause here touches on a problem that is constitutively important for political theory. What can a people hope for? Can the “hegemony of being” which in our contemporary context, must be understood as the hegemony of capitalism be disrupted? Negt seems to resist the idea of a unilateral revolution and the naive notion that one can use a “single point” to somehow “unhinge the whole system” (Krause, 123). There is no Archimedean point— there is a multitude of them in the same sense that there is no public, only (counter) publics. This is again opposed to the idea of obedience that is espoused by Kant, one that refuses to engage with the concept of revolution. “Because the pressure not only to look intelligent but also to say intelligent things has put students under so much stress” (Krause, 124). I wholeheartedly agree with this sentiment, but this is something that is probably very difficult to get right. For example, how is a professor to ensure this “silent anonymity” while also ensuring that a student is engaged in an “intensive process of learning” rather than merely “appropriating contents”? (Krause, 125). “The problem in Iraq, just like in Afghanistan, is that as long as production is not built up to a level that can compete in the world market, it will never be a land capable of peace, even if soldiers remain there for 200 years” (Krause, 127). A shocking conclusion to an otherwise great interview. Who is responsible, in this discussion, of defining peace? Is Iraq and Afghanistan in disarray because of their inability to produce according to demands of the world-market, or is it precisely the demands of the world-market that Negt suggest Iraq and Afghanistan acquiesce to, the root of their problems? This is a market that can only exist if there exists countries that are structurally subservient to it; it is not one that grants sovereignty to those countries that meet its demands. This point is made all the more incoherent when one considers that it is completely antithetical to the spirit of a counter-public— are counter-publics fully realized when they become international servants of capital? Then the prefix “counter” is not really needed. Negt also argues that the problem with capitalism is that it cannot produce its own competition— as though the structural crises endemic to capitalism would disappear once the playing field were leveled, as it were. This is made all the more ironic given Negt’s preoccupation with the “hegemony of being” and his attempt to avoid reproducing this hegemony.