Page 52 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

Discursive Testing: The Public Sphere and its Critics 47

proceed with caution here. Habermas himself actually develops a
model of democracy that can be neatly equated neither with a liberal–
individualist nor a civic–republican model. In Structural Transformation
it was already clear – with the inclusion of plural publics and interest
groups as components of an imagined post-bourgeois public sphere
– that the ultimate incommensurability of interests in large-scale
societies must be given its proper place. It becomes much clearer in
Habermas’s later work that he uses the notion of the ‘common good’
in a very particular way. Habermas is actually concerned with the
orientation rather than the outcome of public discourse. The model
works only on the premise (which cannot always be assumed) that
participants engage in public discourse with a degree of good faith
and countenance at least the possibility that they may be persuaded
to modify or even set aside the views they started out with: this
is where Habermas’s deliberative model departs both from models
of democracy that reduce the public sphere to nothing more than
an arena for the clash of views or the thrashing out of grudging
compromises, and from the hubris of Enlightenment humanism.
The public sphere in the Habermasian sense is an arena in which
44
the possibility of understanding and agreement is tested. It’s not
the achievement of a consensus that is the test of ‘rational–critical’
debate. Rather, it’s the extent to which the procedures allow for the
possibility of an uncoerced consensus to be tested. The pursuit of
greater parity within the public sphere and the impulse to shed light
on the interests that underscore competing positions is precisely the
basis on which Habermas imagines a public sphere that can chip

away at the mystifications of false consensus. For Habermas, the
public sphere itself, rather than critical theory, must become the

very locus of ideology critique. This emphasis on reflexivity is often
lost on Habermas’s critics. Bruno Latour, for example, caricatures
the Habermasian public sphere as a ‘club’ where ‘men of good
will assemble with cigars … and leave their gods on hooks in the
45
cloakroom’. But in fact it’s not so far removed from Latour’s own
sense of a ‘constructivist cosmopolitics’ wherein a shared cosmos
is precisely the energising potential and not the precondition of
globalised discourses – a bottom-up cosmopolitanism, in other
words, as opposed to a ‘fundamentalist’ cosmopolitanism which
graciously invites ‘Others’ to join a Western club of ‘unencumbered’
and ‘rational’ humanity. 46

23/8/05 09:36:24
Goode 01 chaps 47 23/8/05 09:36:24
Goode 01 chaps 47