Page 55 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

50 Jürgen Habermas

later that this logocentrism is neither productive in an intensively
mediated society nor necessary for a critical perspective on the public
sphere. But one of the virtues of the Habermasian model is that it
emphasises the role of criticism within the public sphere. It invites
us to imagine how cognitive, normative and expressive utterances
might be subjected to ‘discursive testing’ more readily than they are
in the present. This means interrogating the accuracy and rightness
of claims made by power holders and by citizens themselves. But
it could equally mean debating the sincerity of an aesthetic or
expressive gesture: ‘What does that smile, that slick turn of phrase
or that sartorial finesse actually conceal?’, for example. Of course,

we cannot hope and shouldn’t want to fully ‘rationalise’ the public
sphere and purge it of all aesthetic and expressive signs. In this sense
the logocentric and scientistic tenor of the phrase ‘discursive testing’
may be counterproductive. But a more open public sphere is one
which allows for more people to participate in the production of all
kinds of utterance, for dominant rhetorical and aesthetic strategies to
be met with alternative rhetorical and aesthetic strategies as well as
with wordy debate, and for citizens faced with the aesthetic spectacles

of the powerful to find creative ways of ‘answering back’. In that
sense, we must look to democracy itself, rather than the sobriety of
discourse, to ‘rationalise’ power.
In his critique, Peters defends the ideas of Richard Sennett against
critical remarks made by Habermas.

What Sennett laments as a ‘fall’ in public life – the replacement of more or
less flamboyant forms of personal display in dress, speech and demeanor by
private, ‘intimate’ forms of sober self-expression – is for Habermas a step
towards a more democratic mode of civil society. 52

I suggest that Habermas should indeed take Sennett’s ideas more
seriously, but for a slightly different reason from that given by Peters. In
his discussion of political charisma Sennett argues that late-twentieth-
century politics became dominated by a form of personality politics

based not on the flamboyance and aura of political leaders but on
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their banal humanity – their ‘controlled spontaneity’ – training eyes
on trust and integrity as a stand-in for substantive political debate.
Rather than dismissing this ‘secular charisma’ as an irrational form
of politics, he instead invites us to consider both its rational causes
and its irrational consequences.

23/8/05 09:36:24
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Goode 01 chaps 50 23/8/05 09:36:24