Page 146 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

Unfinished Projects: Reflexive Democracy 141

emphasise his (‘misguided’) attachment to the principles of co-
presence (as if ‘real’ communication required participants to share
a common spatial or temporal location), it is possible to see how
discourse ethics and ‘counterfactual thinking’ can, in fact, be
complementary impulses.
But what about utopian counterfactualism? It may be the case
that apocalyptic images of ecological destruction, pervasive hi-tech
warfare and acute global poverty are more persuasive given that
those developments are already in full swing. The question of how
to draw utopian energies from all this ‘may be objectively obscure’,
says Habermas. ‘Obscurity is nonetheless also a function of a society’s
assessment of its own readiness to take action. What is at stake is
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Western culture’s confidence in itself.’ What’s at stake, perhaps,
is not simply Western culture’s confidence in itself, in the idealistic

sense that implies. Rather, what may be at stake is the ability to
imagine, build and renew institutions, both formal and informal,
which can draw from the shreds of cultural fragmentation some
alliances and affiliations capable of challenging systemic as well

as lifeworld fundamentalism, and countering the fatalism which
those apocalyptic and persuasive images of destruction, coercion

and conflict seem to engender.
Habermas is so often associated with a touching, naïve and one-
dimensional faith in the healing powers of communicative rationality,
as if the world could be set to rights if only the public sphere could
be made over in the image of the philosophy seminar, and if only
unruly citizens could be helped to see through the ‘performative
contradictions’ of their less than rational, agonistic utterances. As this
discussion has hopefully shown, I think we can and should discern
a radically different legacy from the Habermasian discourse of the
public sphere. It teaches us, in fact, that critical theory must be self-
limiting yet reconstructive: rather than setting the world to rights
above the everyday struggles and conflicts of citizens themselves,

it should set its sights on casting those struggles and confl icts in
new light, suggesting where our aspirations for common ground and
resolution might take us and, indeed, where we should avoid them
taking us. If the Habermasian discourse of public sphere teaches
us anything, it is just how daunting are the tasks that befall the
democratic imagination, and just how precarious are its hopes.

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Goode 02 chap04 141 23/8/05 09:36:15