Page 118 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

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they might productively contribute to a more discerning orientation
towards mediation itself, one that acknowledges the inescapability
of mediation but refuses to allow one form of mediation to have
the last word – a sceptical spirit that recognises that the mediations
of the public sphere, though they may resemble a ‘second nature’,
might always be different. Multiple mediations may help us develop
a heightened sensitivity to the partiality, the construction and the
unfinished nature of mediated discourses. Cross-referencing against

sources which construct radically different versions of reality can, of
course, be productive; drifting through sources that share dominant
frames but differ in shade and emphasis can still help to nudge us
out of our default tendency to view things in black and white; even
seeing the same chunk of text, image or sound pasted into different
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sources – digital culture is increasing modular, as Manovich points
out – may help attune us to the systemic constructions of mediated
discourse. In this sense, we should perhaps radicalise the notion of

reflexive publicity by seeing it as something not only demanded
by the institutions of the public sphere, such as the media, but as
something that should also be turned on ourselves as citizens. These
are modest and tentative claims. Digital culture can surely engender

cynics as well as reflexive sceptics; and it may even engender an
arrogant rather than decentred cosmopolitanism, one that mistakes
multiplicity for transcendent panopticism and communicative
transparency. But the argument here is merely that we take seriously
and critically interrogate digital culture, as we seek to investigate and
deepen our understanding of the public sphere, not simply in terms
of its capacity to inform or to misinform, to fragment or to unify,
to engage or distract, but also at a deeper level in terms of the very
constitution of citizenship and the different orientations citizens
might take up in its midst.
Throughout this book, our encounter with the Habermasian politics
of the public sphere has foregrounded a series of sociological and
phenomenological ‘fault-lines’. These fault-lines include: the public
and the private; system and lifeworld; experts and citizens; anonymity
and embodiment; the universal and the particular; the moral and the
ethical; the global and the local; proximity and distance; presence
and absence; the ‘generalised other’ and the ‘concrete other’. I have
tried to rescue these ‘fault-lines’ from becoming essentialist binaries,

and I think this is a fair reflection of Habermas’s own intentions,
particularly in his later work. In any case, I hope I have at least
shown how Habermasian theory unavoidably scratches at these fault-

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