Page 129 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

124 Jürgen Habermas

he recognises that such reactions are increasingly prevalent), but for
a politics of engagement. Nobody, even (or especially) within the
most mundane of life situations, can avoid the influence of abstract

systems: every time we eat, take a pill, drive a car, visit an ATM, board
a plane or turn on a light, we enter into a Faustian pact with the
institutions that empower us to go about our lives whilst making us
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staggeringly dependent upon opaque systems and absent others.
There is also a heightened awareness that these abstract systems, many
of which serve to protect us from biomedical, economic and other
sorts of hazard, also generate a plethora of their own, manufactured
risks. A politics of engagement, in Giddens’ scheme of things, is one
which works along the axis of risk and trust. We live in an era of
unprecedented scepticism and dependency in which issues of what
Giddens calls ‘ontological security’ come to the fore. These issues
can be addressed only through engagement: at best, they may only
be temporarily repressed when we adopt an attitude of pragmatic
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fatalism. By ‘engagement’, Giddens does not simply mean that the
new politics must strive to make expert systems more transparent
and democratically accountable. A politics of engagement is not
geared towards the eradication of uncertainty and absence but, rather,
the generation of ‘active trust’. Using Erving Goffman’s distinction
between the ‘frontstage’ and ‘backstage’ operations of institutions,
Giddens remarks:

Although everyone is aware that the real repository of trust is in the abstract
system, rather than the individuals who in specific contexts ‘represent it’,
access points carry a reminder that it is flesh-and-blood people (who are
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potentially fallible) who are its operators.
Absent relations, or ‘faceless commitments’ as he calls them,
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must be re-embedded in the context of personalised ‘facework’:
institutions must ‘front up’, so to speak. But this is not the same
thing as requiring institutions to turn themselves inside out for the
purposes of unrestricted public scrutiny. The distinction between
‘frontstage’ and ‘backstage’, rather than disappearing, becomes a
more fluid zone of contention. The contemporary world may be

populated by human agents that are, by default, willing to grant
powerful institutions their autonomy: most of us lead busy lives
and, left to their own devices, those institutions are often critical
for our ability to manage those busy lives. But the contemporary
world is also populated by increasingly savvy citizens who are capable

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Goode 02 chap04 124 23/8/05 09:36:13