Page 56 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

Discursive Testing: The Public Sphere and its Critics 51

Secular charisma is rational; it is a rational way to think about politics in a
culture ruled by belief in the immediate, the immanent, the empirical, and
rejecting as hypothetical, mystical or ‘premodern’ belief in that which cannot
be directly experienced. You can directly feel a politician’s sentiments; you
cannot directly feel the future consequences of his policies. 54

The suggestion is that perhaps contemporary politics, tabloid sex
and corruption scandals notwithstanding, is all too sober and all
too rational such that the ‘real issues’ (which are complex) are
obscured by personalities and reputations and only rear their heads
too late: once the consequences of policies can be felt directly. The
rational ends of democracy depend paradoxically on our willingness
(or our ability) to embrace something less than purely rational.
What’s required are leaps of imagination, and ‘political fantasies’
through which we can disengage ourselves from the immediacy of
personality-based politics and address those issues that exceed the
banal immediacy of contemporary political culture. Here is a worthy
challenge to Habermas’s sober rationalism and I shall be revisiting
the notion of political imagination (as ‘counterfactual thought’) in

the final chapter. Habermas and Sennett both share a critique of
personality-dominated politics. What Sennett alludes to (and what
Habermas would no doubt find uncomfortable) is ostensibly a more

‘visionary’ mode of politics that focuses the mind on the ‘what ifs’
of policies and decisions.
Peters writes that ‘beyond all symbolic politics, for Habermas, lurks
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the king’s body, which must not be resurrected’. This may be a
plausible reading of Structural Transformation, less so of Habermas’s
more recent work in which, for example, he engages with questions of
identity-formation and cultural renewal. But regardless of this, Peters
gives the misleading impression that, if we take Habermas’s ideal of
rational political communication seriously, we must be indiscriminate
in our condemnation of ‘symbolic politics’, and that our only
alternative is to be indiscriminate in our embrace of aestheticisation.
Would we then find it difficult to distinguish between the media

gossip around politicians’ sexual indiscretions and the images of
violence or suffering in one of the world’s many conflict zones? Both

function as aesthetically loaded symbols that stand in for cognitive
insight: often, such representations are mind-blowingly superfi cial or
downright misleading. And yet some symbols are more relevant than
others to the formation of democratic mechanisms of control: some
energise public discussion and further scrutiny of public policies and

23/8/05 09:36:25
Goode 01 chaps 51
Goode 01 chaps 51 23/8/05 09:36:25