Page 107 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

102 Jürgen Habermas

For Nicholas Garnham, however, the aspirations of the democratic
imagination, however utopian, must be conceived in straightforward
terms even amid this daunting complexity:

In short, the problem is to construct systems of democratic accountability
integrated with media systems of matching scale that occupy the same
social space as that over which economic or political decisions will impact.
If the impact is universal, then both the political and media systems must be
universal. In this sense, a series of autonomous public spheres is not sufficient.
There must be a single public sphere, even if we might want to conceive of
this single public sphere as made up of a series of subsidiary public spheres,
each organized around its own political structure, media system, and set of
norms and interests. Thus even if we accept that debate within the public
sphere is riven with controversy and in many instances may be directed at
agreeing to disagree rather than toward consensus, we are still faced with
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the unavoidable problem of translating debate into action.
In the context of globalisation, however, Garnham’s vision of a global
public sphere is susceptible to the dangers of a bad universalism,
namely one that takes the universal as the foundation rather than the

orientation of diversified public discourses. That would be to neglect
the uneven and entropic consequences of globalisation including, of
course, an increasing vocalisation of demands for greater political and
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cultural autonomy. A radical democratic framework which seeks
to link the mediascape to questions of empowerment points up the
need to envisage, in tandem, the role of both particular micro-publics,
where experiences, identities, inequalities and differences can be
articulated in diverse, irregular, and relatively open ways, and more
universal channels, where those diverse discourses and cultural forms
might encounter each other in common communicative space.
A key premise of Thompson’s perspective can be summarised as
follows:

Social life is made up of individuals who pursue aims and objectives within
social contexts that are structured in certain ways. In pursuing their objectives,
individuals draw on the resources available to them; these resources are the
means which enable them to pursue their aims and interests effectively, and
thereby to exercise some degree of power. 32

But what of the contexts in which those aims and objectives actually
develop? If we accept that individuals do not exist in a vacuum

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