Emancipation as resistance. Public sphere and emerging subjects in The Theory of Communicative Action of Jürgen Habermas

Abstract

The Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns presents a sociological argument that emphasizes the persistence of systemic mediatizations and internal disturbances in the public and private spheres of the modern lifeworlds, as well as the fragmentation of everyday consciousness and the cultural impoverishment of daily communicative practice. But the argument also raises the general scheme of a 'social division of powers' and the conflictual balance between the three 'sources of social integration' (money, power and solidarity). The paper argues that, if one compares this theoretical framework with the dualist framework presented some twenty years earlier in Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit, a decisive divergence is observed in the 'political displacement from the system of needs to the system of institutions'. In this displacement, new collective agents are seen as bearers of a 'new policy' that emerges from the private spheres of the lifeworld and makes an appearance in the decentralized public spheres. This perspective of the 'protest and withdrawal potentials' of the 'new social movements' is condensed in the expression ‘emancipation becomes resistance’. Along with such widening in the institutional base, political displacement leads to reconsidering the political functions of the public sphere in contemporary societies marked by the crisis of the welfare state.