Page 139 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

134 Jürgen Habermas

ethic. Giddens describes fundamentalism, for example, as ‘refusal
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of dialogue’. We might venture, then, that the widespread
institutional inertia of consumer capitalism also qualifies as a kind

of systemic fundamentalism, on this definition. But religious and

political fundamentalisms, at least, are rarely silent. They speak
their name loudly through television, the Internet and whatever
channels are available. Noise – and not dialogue – is the opposite of
silence. Even if we embrace ‘noise’ as an inescapable and potentially
liberating aspect of all communication (and it can be), the limit
case of fundamentalism shows, as if it were necessary, that an ethics
of dialogue must be a discriminatory one: it can’t shake off the
aspirational norms of reciprocity and openness when it confronts
the manifold shortcomings of real-life communications.
Conservative sub-politics doesn’t, of course, enjoy a monopoly
on fundamentalist tendencies and anti-democratic methods.
Ostensibly progressive elements of sub-politics, both red and green
in hue, frequently lack, or lose, even the aspirations of egalitarian
and inclusive participation, or open and frank communication.
Perhaps this is what ultimately links the earnest values of the grass-
roots activist, the anti-racism campaigner, the anti-immigration
campaigner, the self-help group, the local neighbourhood watch
group, and even the ‘keep our village tidy’ campaigner with the
postmodern tribes of identity politics, fandom, style cliques, fl ash
mobs and bloggers who range across the touchstones of self-identity,
irony, camp and the carnivalesque in preference over the pretensions
of ‘old fashioned’ politicking. In most cases they are linked by a desire
to liberate cultural praxis from the rigid parameters of consumer
capitalism and the welfare state; they all express antipathy towards
systemic fundamentalism, even where they generate alternative
lifeworld fundamentalisms of their own.
This may be a needle of connection in a haystack of difference.
What it does, though, is to underscore how the tensions between
system and lifeworld cut across radically different sites of practice that
may not only be ideologically incommensurable, but which can also
entertain radically different notions of what ‘politics’ actually means:
to the earnest activists, for example, the concerns of the postmodern
tribes look frivolous and apolitical; to the postmodern tribes, the
earnest activists remain stubbornly wedded to a politics of resistance
against top-down power which is both futile and blind to the fertile
micro-politics of everyday life. Of course, I have overdramatised this
distinction in order to make more of the connection: in reality these

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