Page 53 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

48 Jürgen Habermas

RATIONALITY AND EMBODIMENT

Habermas’s rationalism is, indeed, a target for many critical
commentaries. Most operate at the level of formal philosophy. Here
I will focus on just two critiques that engage rather more directly
with the politics of the public sphere. Both link the question of
rationality with that of bourgeois impulse towards disembodiment.
The privileged place of the printed word and of the principle of
indifference towards identity both underscore this linking of
rationality and disembodiment. Habermas, though, has been
reluctant to problematise this link.
John Durham Peters questions Habermas’s disdain for the
‘representative publicity’ of both pre- and post-bourgeois formations
and the way in which he pathologises politics functioning as a
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spectacle as opposed to a participatory forum. Öffentlichkeit in
Structural Transformation connotes the openness associated with
rational discussion of matters of state rather than the shadowy secrecy
concealed behind either the showy displays of status associated with
feudalism or the public relations-fest of advanced capitalism.

Representation, in both the political and aesthetic senses of that term,
has a curious place in Habermas’s theory of communication. First, in STPS
Habermas is suspicious of representative government. STPS’s model of
democracy … is participatory: democracy is the identity of the citizens and
the government … Ideals of participatory democracy often go together with
a distrust of aesthetic representation; the two attitudes have an elective
affinity. Habermas prizes conversation, reading and plain speech as worthy
forms of discourse for a democratic culture and is frankly hostile to theatre,
courtly forms, ceremony, the visual, and to rhetoric more generally. 48

Peters believes Habermas’s preference for a particular form of political
culture betrays a Protestant asceticism. ‘“Communication” for
Habermas is a resolutely sober affair … He slights the Dionysian side of
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language, its dangers and irrationalities and its creative bursts.’
But the point of Peters’ critique is not simply that the Habermasian
public sphere is culturally skewed. Habermas’s particular preference
serves, in fact, to undermine his own ideal of inclusive democracy.

In the first instance, it conjures up a rather empty, formal ‘utopia’ of
rational discussion that leaves critical theory ill equipped to address
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the motivational deficits of contemporary democracies. (We will
revisit this problem in subsequent chapters.) But, more importantly,

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