Page 89 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

84 Jürgen Habermas

The corollary has been a focus on decentred and fragmented cultural
identities: the globalising mediascape, diaspora and migration,
heightened concern with gender, sexual and ethnic identities – all
these have helped to problematise the sociological norm of the self-
identical, stable subject and shifted attention towards the instability,
the contradictions, the complexities and the reflexive aspects of

identity constitution in the contemporary world. Globalisation has
shown itself to be an overwhelmingly entropic dynamic and the social
sciences have been engaged in a project to develop new vocabularies
and tropes that can help to map some of the new complexities:
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Manuel Castells’ ‘space of flows’ in the ‘network society’; Arjun
Appadurai’s topography of globalisation as ‘financescapes’,
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‘ideoscapes’, ‘ethnoscapes’, ‘mediascapes’ and ‘technoscapes’;
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MacKenzie Wark’s ‘virtual geographies’ of the ‘vector’: these are
just some of the sociological attempts, each problematic in its own
way, to engage the complexities of globalisation.
Yet Habermas, critical eyes trained on the problem of
constitutionalism and citizenship with a capital C, displays a cavalier
disregard for the decentred network tropes of recent social theory.
Implicitly, Habermas’s world seems to be one in which self-identical
and centred citizens inhabit a series of totalities ordered as concentric
circles and project their identities rather like stones thrown in a
pond: the private sphere is not only co-original with, but is also
contained by the public sphere; so too, the micro within the macro;
the local within the national within the supranational within the
global. In fact, this reductive ‘Russian doll-ism’ does not sit well with
Habermas’s own intersubjectivism, with his critique of the liberal
model of the pre-political self, his explicit acknowledgement of a
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‘network model’ of identity constitution, or his emphasis in The
Theory of Communicative Action on the importance of feminist and
ecological movements in resisting the encroachment of administrative
or corporate logic into areas of life where it is unwelcome – something
which already hinted at decentred tactics and at the possibility
that the term ‘new social movement’ would be misleading in its
gesture towards lofty, stratospheric ambitions. It certainly does not
sit well with the reality of geographic, cultural, occupational and
informational mobilities (both enforced and voluntary) that have
so many of today’s citizens juggling memberships, responsibilities,
affiliations and ontological ‘locations’.

So why retreat back into the safety of a state-oriented model of
centred, territorially anchored citizenship? One major factor must

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