Page 138 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

Unfinished Projects: Reflexive Democracy 133

that they have hitherto been denied? In acknowledging this danger,
the very concept of sub-politics must be reflexively opened up. A

settled definition of ‘sub-politics’ imperils the prefi x that signifi es its
alterity. Rather than picturing sub-politics as a particular nexus of
institutions, a radicalised model of democracy must be on the lookout
for new and unpredictable sites of sub-politics and new modes of
being political, even as it looks for ways of enfranchising and formally
incorporating the visible sub-politics of the present. As we know from
existing political cultures, today’s sub-politics can so easily congeal
into tomorrow’s systemic ‘nature’.

REVISITING THE PUBLIC SPHERE
For Habermas, of course, the fault-line between system and lifeworld
is precisely the context for much of the new sub-politics. At the
centre of Habermas’s critical theory is a belief that, in the transition
from tradition to modernity, capitalist development has engendered
a one-sided form of rationalisation, one that privileges systemic
imperatives. The result is that the lifeworld loses its capacity to shape
an increasingly autonomous system and the discourses of means and

ends pass like ships in the night. But, moreover, the reflexivity of the
post-traditional lifeworld harbours an emancipatory potential which
is squandered by the path of capitalist modernisation that we have
been following. The administrative tentacles of the welfare state have
intruded into the fabric of everyday life; political debate has become
scientifically managed; capitalism has learned to commodify and

instrumentalise education, sexuality, death, leisure, tourism, artistic
endeavour, and the myriad other sites of cultural practice implicated
in contemporary struggles for meaning. The path from tradition to
modernity has not yet, at least, turned out to be one of emancipation

from reified social structures.
Giddens has given the Habermasian grand narrative short shrift.
He finds deeply problematic the notion that communicative
action functions as a missing third term in a world caught between
tradition and ‘system’. But his disdain for the counterfactual ideals
of Habermasian discourse ethics is also problematic. On the one
hand, Giddens celebrates the ideals of ‘dialogic democracy’ but
uses this term to encompass everything from active trust in abstract
systems to the so-called ‘pure relationship’ of the intimate sphere.
On the other hand, it’s not clear how someone who values dialogue
can avoid making implicit reference to an ideal or ‘counterfactual’

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