Page 76 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

Reconfigurations: The Public Sphere Since Structural Transformation 71

commodification of culture) or a combination of the two (e.g. science

and technology). This bleak picture of modernity draws inspiration
from Weber who

saw the noncoercive, unifying power of collectively shared convictions
disappearing along with religion and metaphysics … A reason restricted to
the cognitive–instrumental dimension was placed at the service of a merely
subjective self-assertion. It is in this sense that Weber spoke of a polytheism of
impersonal forces, an antagonism of ultimate orders of value, a competition
of irreconcilable gods and demons. 42

Society can only reconcile these competing demons under a blanket
of systematisation. For Habermas this results in ‘a technicising of the
lifeworld that robs actors of the meaning of their own actions’. 43
But Weber’s iron cage may not be locked on all sides. Alternatives
exist not in new universal ideologies but in practices and institutions
that challenge the omnipotence of ‘system imperatives’ by carving
out spaces of articulation and discursive deliberation. For Habermas,
many recent ‘social movements’, including environmental and
feminist movements, decentre questions of the distribution of
wealth and power and bring conflicts around ‘the grammar of forms

44
of life’ into the foreground. Challenging the expansive scope of
instrumental rationality may take conservative or fundamentalist
forms which valorise traditional ways of life; or they may take
discursive, critically reflexive forms that gesture towards cooperative

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methods of debate, decision making and action. In normative terms,
what Habermas’s theory of communicative action gestures towards
is the (re)invigoration of public spheres rooted in the lifeworld,
and a dynamic interplay of cognitive, normative and expressive
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discourses. The point is not to break up the expert cultures that
have grown up around science, morality and law, and aesthetics,
nor to underestimate the advances their mutual independence has
brought about. Rather, the point is to imagine mechanisms for re-
embedding these expert cultures into the lifeworld and to fi nd ways
of reconnecting them to each other as well as to the public.

THE POLITICS OF THE OTHER
In Habermas’s more recent writings, we can identify some key

shifts in emphasis. The first of these is an increased concern with
the problem of law and its relation to morality. In particular, he

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