Page 136 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

Unfinished Projects: Reflexive Democracy 131

expert systems to critically refl ect (rather than simply to capitalise)
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upon their own externalities. The unimpeded ‘logic of technique’
remains, as Zygmunt Bauman puts it, a logic of fragmentation – the
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market must artificially isolate and privatise risks and remedies. And
where risks don’t create calculable market opportunities to attract

consumers or voters, then intransigence prevails, justified by the
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absence of that fictive commodity, absolute proof. Where expert
systems do promote an internal scepticism, the tendency will still
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be to present knowledge externally with apparent certitude, and to
intensively police those frontstage–backstage boundaries. And as the
ideal of disinterested knowledge disappears from view and the public
are confronted with a blizzard of competing assertions, Beck decries
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a ‘feudalisation’ of expert knowledge which makes it impossible
to discriminate between the integrity and validity of claims offered
by the various interest groups, be they governments, corporations,
the medical profession, the Food Commission, consumer groups,
trade unions and so forth. Such a climate breeds increasing cynicism,
and not merely scepticism, towards expert knowledge itself. Expert
knowledge looks increasingly like a made-to-order commodity,
generated for and sold to those interest groups that can afford to
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fund research. Beck’s refl exive modernisation, then, proceeds in
an erratic, nature-like and most unrefl ective fashion.
A scandalised Beck nevertheless advances some ambitious remedial
proposals. The answer is not simply more centralised state control over
science and business. Such thinking falls prey to the cybernetic fallacy
and, in reality, would create new bottlenecks through which the scope

of debate and channels of problem definition, so desperately in need
of broadening, would be further strangled by the ‘economic Cyclopia
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of techno-scientifi c rationality’. What’s required, in fact, is a radical
decentralisation of powers that would enable citizens to become
more involved in the management of their local environments. But
the globalisation and deterritorialisation of risks also mean that new
institutions need to be imagined at global, regional and national
levels. Beck argues for the concept of an ‘ecological upper house’, for
example, which would include representatives of science, politics,
the legal profession, citizen and consumer groups, trade unions
and so forth. But such institutions would exist to convene and to
mediate the broader range of discourses and debates that go on below,
in the realm of ‘sub-politics’, and not to substitute for them. The
point is not to undermine the autonomy of diverse sub-political
discourses which go on in the professions, social movements, trade

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