Page 74 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

Reconfigurations: The Public Sphere Since Structural Transformation 69

In societies with a low degree of differentiation, systemic interconnections are
tightly interwoven with mechanisms of social integration; in modern societies
they are consolidated and objectified into norm-free structures. Members
behave toward formally organised action systems, steered via processes
of exchange and power, as toward a block of quasi-natural reality; within
these media-steered subsystems society congeals into a second nature.
Actors have always been able to sheer off from an orientation to mutual
understanding, adopt a strategic attitude, and objectify normative contexts
into something in the objective world, but in modern societies, economic
and bureaucratic spheres emerge in which social relations are regulated only
via money and power. Norm-conformative attitudes and identity-forming
social memberships are neither necessary nor possible in these spheres; they
are made peripheral instead. 38

On the one hand, the lifeworld is progressively ‘rationalised’ to the
extent that ‘problematic’ segments are increasingly subjected to critical

scrutiny rather than remaining fixed by traditional world-views and

ideologies. On the other hand, the ‘de-linguistified’ steering media
of money and administrative power lessen the burden on citizens
inhabiting increasingly diverse lifeworlds to achieve consensus in
everyday interaction. As such, they constitute an essential bulwark

against the continuous threats of conflict and dissensus.
But modernity’s rationalisation has its dark side in the guise of a
‘colonisation of the lifeworld’. Modernity progressively uncouples
communicative action from ‘concrete and traditional normative
behaviour patterns’ placing ever greater emphasis on language as the
medium of social integration: ‘in this respect, value generalisation is a
necessary condition for releasing the rationality potential immanent
39
in communicative action’. But rather than simply compelling us to

rely on discourse to find ways of living together in an increasingly
pluralistic and individualised society, the uncoupling of system and
lifeworld also increases the scope for switching away altogether from
communicative action and increasing opportunistic, instrumental
action orientations mediated via power and money. The increasing
autonomy afforded to power and money as steering media in
modern social formations opens up more space for the free play of
systemic interaction.
The problem, for Habermas, is not the relative autonomy of

money and power per se, which keep conflict at bay and afford social
actors the space to pursue their own goals in complex differentiated
societies. The problem is the pervasiveness of these non-discursive

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