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7 dialogic democracy
Giddens’s call for a “dialogic democracy,” for a strong public sphere where differences are displayed and consensus is not the goal, points to a new politics of representation, and to the end of the nation as a homogeneous order:
- “The potential for dialogic democracy is... carried in the spread of social reflexivity as a condition both of day-to-day activities and the persistence of larger forms of collective organization. Second, dialogic democracy is not necessarily oriented to the achieving of consensus. Just as the theorists of deliberative democracy argue, the most 'political' of issues, inside and outside the formal political sphere, are precisely those which are likely to remain essentially contested. Dialogic democracy presumes only that dialogue in a public space provides a means of living along with the other in a relation of mutual tolerance—whether that 'other' be an individual or a global community of religious believers” (1994, 115).
A dialogic democracy is incompatible with obligatory membership in a community—either enforced from without (as when Nazis required Jews to identify themselves as Jews) or from within (say, when a religious cult does not permit its members to abandon membership). But voluntary communal identity is not at issue within a dialogic democracy, as long as individual members of the community act as strangers when they enter into the public sphere. This latter idea has a couple of main features.
A dialogic democracy does not support the delegation of expression. A person may claim leadership in a community, but this does not add weight to the voice she or he brings to the public sphere. Another member of the same community with a different opinion carries the same weight (ideally). Second, the interests of the group are always seen as competing with the public interest. There is no possible complete coincidence of community interest with that of the public. And so an expression of the group’s interest as such is liable to critique of the conflicts between this and the larger public interest. Individuals who carry group markers into the public sphere may be suspected of not participating with an adequate distance from the interest of the group.
- “These endemic problems do not, I think, account for the travails of liberal democracy in the present day—for the fact that its emergence as the only game in town coincides with its ailing condition even in those societies where it is most firmly established. Nor do they provide much of a clue about how democratization might be further advanced; here the well-established debates pitting participation against representation offer little purchase”
(Giddens 1994, 112).The public sphere (like the democracy within which it operates) is not a gift from the government to its citizenry. It is, rather a task that citizens and residents take upon themselves. The misrecognition of media corporations and government ministries as “shepherd” for this practice (and of the mass of the population as its sheep) inserts what Foucault called a “pastoral governmentality” into the public sphere. But the public sphere is a place for active democracy, the space from which the future of liberal democracy will be determined. The “well-established debates” about representation and participation are founded on notions of modernity that are no longer (if they ever were) capable of describing democracy as a feature of nations within the emerging transnational cosmopolis. Notions such as that of a “dialogic democracy” enable us to imagine alternative forms of democratic action in late modernity.
