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Unfinished Projects: Reflexive Democracy 135

‘postmodern’ and ‘earnest’ orientations are not mutually exclusive
and often inform groups or individuals simultaneously. The real point,
however, is that the tension between system and lifeworld speaks to
the necessary reflexivity of sub-politics. If we follow Habermas’s theory

of system and lifeworld to its conclusion, we see that it doesn’t simply
alert us to the dangers of bracketing off questions of political culture,
but that it embodies a partisan preference for a refl exive political
culture which never ceases to ask: ‘What and where is power?’ and,
therefore, ‘What and where is politics?’

But what it doesn’t do is to justify a wholesale conflation of culture

and politics. Conflicts over cultural autonomy and difference are
not only political in the vague sense that culture is political when
it becomes a site of contest and power play. These issues are also
political in a narrower, perhaps even old-fashioned, sense. Material
poverty; a lack of collective space (physical or mediated) which
isn’t commercially or politically administered; a welfare state which

normalises lifestyles and biographies; the fiscal impoverishment of
the unemployed; the temporal impoverishment of the employed:
these are precisely the kinds of material factors that constrain
the development of autonomous life forms and which demand a
politics prepared to engage with legislative reform and questions
of distributive justice. The general idea that cultural freedom is a
political issue is hardly new in this sense.
But the most vexing question, of course, in the wake of postmodern
debates (and the question most easily avoided by simply collapsing the
distinction between culture and politics) is how demands for cultural
autonomy can be politicised in the sense of being fi ltered upwards
into the formal arenas of democratic will formation and policy
formulation without violating those very principles of autonomy and
difference in the process. One response would be cultural separatism
– the fatalistic declaration of radical incommensurability. On the one
hand, this does nothing to counter the inequitable distribution of the
sorts of resources just mentioned and, in the anarchism of a cultural
marketplace, encourages marginalisation and disenfranchisement.
On the other hand, a conservative counterpart to this – in the guise
of communitarianism – fares even worse insofar as it attempts to
unify political communities under the auspices of a common good,
a common cultural and ethical identity, which actually militates
against reflexive critique and difference.

To assume that ‘communities of fate’ could ever be anything other
than ‘communities of difference’ is utopian in the worst sense. What

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