Page 132 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

Unfinished Projects: Reflexive Democracy 127

steer expert systems in a particular direction. The centre of gravity is
the individual who, left to his own devices by the flight of collective

certitudes once gifted by religion, by nationalism, or by traditional
communities, must bear ultimate responsibility for his actions. We
get little sense of the scale of the battle between expert systems and
lay citizens – a scale that demands collective responses – when the

increasing reflexivity of citizens is met with a huge scaling up of
those ‘frontstage’ operations, namely sophisticated and obfuscatory
public relations. We get little insight into the intersubjective contexts
in which ‘individualisation’ develops and the actual and potential
role that public contexts, shaped by difference and confl ict, might
play. We get little purchase on the question of ‘cultural membership’
and the ‘inclusion’ of diverse individuals and subcultural groups
within the collective frameworks, such as the nation, that speak
and act on their behalf: Habermas still refers to this as the problem
of ‘solidarity’, though as recent discourse has highlighted, it might
12
be usefully reframed as ‘cultural citizenship’. My point is not that
Giddens himself is unaware of debates about deliberative democracy,
about the discursive constitution of identity, or about the questions of

solidarity and cultural citizenship. But he focuses firmly on the task of
rescuing self-help groups or the prevalent focus on self-identity, health
and diet, from blanket condemnation by those who would see this
apparent preoccupation with the ‘self’ as symptomatic of a pathetic
narcissism or privatistic withdrawal: Giddens, by contrast, wants us to
read this focus on the ‘self’ as a positive sign of increasingly refl exive
13
agency. This is not an intrinsically bad aim (though we should also
avoid sliding into a celebratory account of self-help groups and the
politics of self-identity). But what is important is that we still lack
a narrative of reflexive modernity that foregrounds the intractable

problems of the fi rst person plural.
Giddens’ ‘life politics’ gesture beyond the limited horizon of
consumer ‘politics’ in substance but fail to do so in form. The
collective action sites of self-help, voluntary and single-issue groups
are conceived less as vehicles for the radical democratisation of expert
systems and more as symbols of an ascendant culture of refl exivity
responsible for eroding institutional conceit. Too much democratisation

would conflict with the conservative bias which Scott Lash and
John Urry have correctly detected in Giddens’ overriding concern
14
with the concept of ‘ontological security’, which foregrounds the
psychological need for stability and order. What matters is that the
relationship between expert systems and lay actors has been or is

23/8/05 09:36:13
Goode 02 chap04 127 23/8/05 09:36:13
Goode 02 chap04 127