Page 128 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

Unfinished Projects: Reflexive Democracy 123

that two of the most fundamental fault-lines of the ‘old’ politics
of modernity – capital–labour relations and the public–private
dichotomy (manifested especially in conflicts over the welfare state,

family law and issues of gender equality) – both seem unlikely to
disappear from view. They have, however, been decentred and must
now compete for attention with other fault-lines.
What, then, of the ‘new’ fault-lines? Giddens offers us a way in

to this. The official polity is increasingly ill equipped to mediate the
power relations of contemporary life because it remains territorially
anchored and localised, whilst social interactions and connections are
continuously and increasingly ‘deterritorialised’. Communications
media, transportation, migration, the mobility of fi nancial capital,
the global scope of ecological problems and biomedical hazards:
all highlight the limitations of social democratic (not to mention
Marxist) models of the cybernetic society where the state functions
as a political nerve centre. The ascendant model is one based

instead upon a network of ‘flows’ in which the state must shed
its omniscient pretensions and adopt an increasingly reactive and
disciplined orientation towards crisis avoidance – this is the end of
the dream (or nightmare) of ‘organised capitalism’, in other words.
‘The revolutionary changes of our time’, Giddens claims, ‘are not
happening so much in the orthodox political domain as along the
3
fault-lines of the interaction of local and global transformations.’
‘Action at a distance’ becomes routine as the increasing elasticity
of social relations stretched across space and time helps to foster
an awareness that local events can be globally consequential, and
vice versa. The Green cliché ‘Think global; act local’ attributes a

political significance to that awareness. But what Giddens claims is
that globalisation is not something that merely extends or stretches
social relations; it also has ramifications for the individual at the

deepest levels of consciousness and self-awareness. It paves the way

for a reconfigured selfhood that is more attuned to complexity:
utopias, blueprints and fatalistic religious narratives are treated with
increasing disdain, something that Lyotard famously captured as the
‘incredulity towards metanarratives’ characteristic of the postmodern
4
condition. But, in contrast to the nihilistic drift of most postmodern
discourse, Giddens also sees this reconfigured selfhood as one that

is more attuned to the task of making the best possible decisions in
a context of ‘radical uncertainty’.
The intrusion of abstract systems into the fabric of everyday
existence calls not for a politics of resistance, Giddens argues (although

Goode 02 chap04 123 23/8/05 09:36:13
23/8/05 09:36:13
Goode 02 chap04 123