Page 73 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

68 Jürgen Habermas

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within which communicative actions are “always already” moving’.
Social actors approach every situation from a particular horizon of
understanding: ‘Every new situation appears in a lifeworld composed
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of a cultural stock of knowledge that is “always already” familiar.’
The conservatism of the lifeworld is disturbed only to the extent
that new encounters (with the social, objective or subjective worlds)
render ‘limited segments’ of the lifeworld problematic, explicit and

open to reflection and critique. 35
Despite being tied to this horizon of understanding, and despite
the idealist bent of the philosophical traditions from which Habermas
develops the concept (hermeneutics and phenomenology), Habermas
alerts us to the material basis of the lifeworld: the lifeworld develops
not only in a symbolic environment but also materially ‘through
the medium of purposive activity with which sociated individuals
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intervene in the world to realise their aims’. The lifeworld, then, does

not simply float in the ether of ideas but also encompasses meaningful
activities and practices. In that case, Habermas’s argument that the
public sphere has migrated to the ‘system’ and needs to be brought
back into the meaningful horizon of the lifeworld seems quite at
home with the open conception of praxis- as well as discourse-laden
public spheres that we discussed in Chapter 2.
The term ‘system’ is used by Habermas to capture the ‘unintended
consequences’ of social action, that is, to account for the ‘coordination’
of action in complex societies through non-discursive ‘steering
media’. Here,

Media such as money or power can largely spare us the costs of dissensus
because they uncouple the coordination of action from consensus formation
in language and neutralise it against the alternatives of achieved versus failed
agreement … Media steered interactions can be spatially and temporally
interconnected in increasingly complex webs, without it being necessary
for anyone to survey and stand accountable for these communicative
networks … If responsibility means that one can orient one’s actions to
criticisable validity claims, then action coordination that has been detached
from communicatively achieved consensus no longer requires responsible
participants … The other side is that relieving interaction from yes/no
positions on criticisable validity claims … also enhances degrees of freedom
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of action oriented to success.

For Habermas, system and lifeworld have become uncoupled in
modernity with ambivalent consequences:

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