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Mediations: From the Coffee House to the Internet Café 103

but within the symbolic networks through which identities and
aspirations emerge, then how are we to critically distinguish
between different symbolic contexts? Are citizens simply conceived
as opportunists, strategically motivated individuals whose aims and
interests are worked through within a relatively closed private domain
and largely fixed prior to engaging in the public arena? Is the process

of opinion formation public only to the extent that the mass media
facilitate quasi-interaction and imagined bonds with absent others?
Or is there some value to be gained from envisaging more spaces of
public dialogue in which citizens’ values, and not just those of public

figures, are subjected to ‘discursive testing’, in which, in other words,
public discourse, though it may never actually settle into comfortable
(and dangerous!) consensus, still constitutes something other than the
mere aggregate of privately (or ‘quasi-publicly’!) generated opinions,
feelings or desires? These are the questions Habermas’s critical theory
seeks to pose, in constrast to the rather reductivist and, ultimately,
utilitarian framework sketched by Thompson.

[The] struggle over the increasing de-moralization of public conflicts is in full
swing. This no longer takes place under the sign of a technocratic conception
of society and politics; where society has become so complex as to be a
closed book, only opportunistic behaviour towards the system seems to
offer a way of finding one’s bearings. However, large-scale problems actually
confronting the developed societies are scarcely such that they could be
resolved without a mode of perception sensitive to normative demands,
without a reintroduction of moral considerations into the issues under public
discussion … These problems can only be brought to a head by rethinking
topics morally, by universalising interests in a more or less discursive manner
in the form of liberal political cultures which have not been stripped of all
their powers … It helps to perceive the way one’s own interests are bound
up with the interests of others. The moral or ethical point of view makes us
quicker to perceive the more far-reaching and simultaneously less insistent
and more fragile ties that bind the fate of one individual to that of every other
– making even the most alien person a member of one’s community. 33

According to this argument, then, even large-scale problems can
only be ‘re-moralised’ in a more or less ‘bottom-up’ fashion anchored
in varied modes of discourse. The objection that localism necessarily
implies parochialism and insularity is, as I intimated in the previous
chapter, of limited validity here. Lifeworlds will, of course, always be
rooted in time, and in physical, social and, we should add, mediated,

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