Page 54 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

Discursive Testing: The Public Sphere and its Critics 49

the ideal of unrestrained dialogue evokes an aspiration for co-presence
among citizens that may have fit the ancient Greek agora but not

the conditions of large-scale, modern societies. As Peters points out,
Habermas’s more recent work discards the fallacy of co-presence,
that is, the identity of citizens and government. (Our reading of
Structural Transformation suggests, in fact, that this was always the
case.) But in that case, asks Peters, why does Habermas continue
to hold fast to a rationalist conception of communication and to
condemn the aesthetic spectacle of representative publicity as a threat
to democracy? If, in complex, large-scale societies, we cannot all be
equal participants at all times in the political process then political
communication will inevitably involve spectatorship. To condemn
outright all modes of representative publicity is to condemn the very
processes that make possible membership of and involvement in a
political community. Aestheticisation is also enfranchisement. 51
At the same time, Peters does nothing to distinguish the necessary
embodiment of representative structures from an untrammelled
aestheticisation of politics. There is, indeed, a necessary connection
between representative structures and aesthetic communication.
Once we discard the fallacy of communicative transparency in a
complex world, we see that mediated and condensed symbols of
trust, status and aura will play their part in the democratic process.
But these considerations are always relative. After all, it would
be difficult to argue that any piece of political communication
– technologically mediated or otherwise – does not carry with it
an aesthetic or expressive dimension, whether or not that is the
intention of the speaker. The sincerity or aura of the speaker and
the imaginative appeal of the visions they evoke, are invariably
subject to a certain aesthetic judgment by citizens. Habermas’s later
theory of ‘communicative action’ rests precisely upon the notion that
ordinary speech encompasses expressive, normative and cognitive
dimensions simultaneously.
Representative structures demand a certain communicative ‘short-
circuiting’ which implicates the mass media (see Chapter 4) and
the partial displacement of cognitive utterances by expressive or
emotive symbols. But this stops short of accepting the inevitability of
a predominantly aestheticised politics. The mere fact of representative
political structures and mass mediation does not, of itself, condemn
the public sphere to a politics of style without substance. Habermas
himself may be suspicious of communication beyond the written
and spoken word and Peters is correct to question that. I shall argue

23/8/05 09:36:24
Goode 01 chaps 49 23/8/05 09:36:24
Goode 01 chaps 49