Page 92 - Democracy and the Public Sphere

Reconfigurations: The Public Sphere Since Structural Transformation 87

argued to be a male-centric model of morality, favouring relations
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of ‘justice’ over relations of ‘care’. Habermas now conceives the
dialectic of solidarity and justice as something which demands
of citizens a simultaneous orientation towards the generalised and
the concrete Other. But, at best, he want us to apply only a thin
crust of constitutional concrete and still does not seem to take rich
interpersonal bonds and relationships as seriously relevant to the
public sphere.
Habermas’s model does not really allow for the rich encounters
of difference that could meet his own demand for a suffi ciently
concrete and motivating public culture; it does not allow for rich
connectivities between ‘Others’ that can develop – with work and
with mishaps along the way – without shattering the integrity of our
mutual otherness. He seems to treat identity as if it were some delicate
glass ball of singularity, to buy into Habermas’s own telling penchant
for spherical metaphors. It does not allow for what Donna Haraway,
who shares with Habermas a mistrust of identity politics (they share
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little else), has called a ‘politics of affi nity’ between citizens who

find and mutually reconfigure points of connection or common

ground. In stark contrast to Haraway’s ethic of solidarity, Habermas,
despite emphasising the rationalisation and reflexivity of the
lifeworld, ends up foregrounding a politics of boundary maintenance.
The point here is not to totalise or unequivocally celebrate the
‘decentred citizen’: some citizens will be more ‘decentred’ than others

(though affluence and privilege are not the only determinants); and
decentred identities can yield vulnerability and anxieties as well as
the advantages of multiple social connectivities. Nor is the point to
embrace the wholesale collapse of boundaries as Haraway is wont to
do. But it is to argue for a more open conception of citizenship and
solidarity than Habermas provides. And it is to argue for a critical
theory that seriously considers the decentred activist networks for
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whom tactics prevail over strategy and for whom the rhizome,
rather than the acorn and the oak tree, is the operative metaphor;
the ‘Buy Nothing’ day campaigns and the culture jammers; but also
the online networks; the neighbourhood watch groups; the single-
issue campaigns of local communities; the self-help groups; the new
religious groups; the xenophobic campaigns trying to prevent asylum
seekers being housed in a local community; refugee support groups;
the cellular terrorist network; hacker groups; the whole gamut of
diverse, contradictory but decentred micro-publics and networks
that increasingly comprise the political life of civil society. Habermas

23/8/05 09:36:29
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Goode 01 chaps 87 23/8/05 09:36:29