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| Ethical Perspectives |
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| Issue : 7/2-3 (June - September - 2000) |
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| Power and Social Communication |
| Ernesto Laclau |
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Page : 139 - 145 |
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Discussion about the viability of democracy in what can broadly be called our `postmodern', technologically dominated age, has mainly turned around two central issues: (1) does not the current dispersion and fragmentation of social actors — deriving partly from the overriding presence of the media in our civilization — conspire against the emergence of strong social identities which could operate as nodal points for the consolidation and expansion of democratic practices?; and (2) is not this very multiplicity the source of a particularism of social aims which could result in the dissolution of the wider emancipatory discourses considered as constitutive of the democratic imaginary?
The first issue is connected with the increasing awareness of the ambiguities of those very social movements about which so many sanguine hopes were conceived in the 1970s. There is no doubt that their emergence has involved an expansion of the egalitarian imaginary to increasingly wider areas of social relations. However, it has also become progressively clear that such an expansion does not necessarily lead to the aggregation of the plurality of demands around a broader collective will. Even more: does not this fragmentation of social demands make it easier for the state apparatuses to deal with them in an administrative fashion — which results in the formation of all types of clientalistic networks, capable of neutralizing any democratic opening? The control of the media by powerful financial conglomerates is only one aspect — albeit a crucial one — of a far more general phenomenon.
As for the second issue, its formulation runs along parallel lines. With the breaking up of the totalizing discourses of modernity, we are running the risk of being confronted with a plurality of social spaces, governed by their own aims and leaving any management of the community — conceived in a global sense — in the hands of a techno-bureaucracy located beyond any democratic control. With this, the notion of a public sphere, to which the very possibility of a democratic experience was always linked, is seriously put into question. |
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