Traboulsi 59The transition to democratic society
Many critics have made the point that Habermas treats the question of
public spheres as if the capitalist market and the capitalist state were
immutable and final. The best that can be achieved is counteracting
their worst effects on democracy—the maldistribution of income and
of government services on the one hand and the ills of bureaucracy on
the other. For that purpose, Habermas has recommended three models.
First, the siege model in which the state is besieged by the public sphere
in order to counterbalance the power of money and bureaucracy. This is
the more modest and passive model. Second, the sluice model, in which
public opinion influences decision-making through the inner periphery
of power—universities, charitable organizations, foundations, etc.—and
thus acts on the administrative center.^15 Third, and in the worst of cases,
Habermas admits civil disobedience as the ultimate recourse for the
opposition by popular forces.
n the interest of expediency, we can disregard the debate on the I
“End of History” and on the fate of capitalism and the market. But we
should at least mention that many a critic of the notions of civil society
and the public sphere has pointed to the systemic incompatibility between
capitalism and democracy. What is meant, of course, is that the former
keeps the latter incomplete and partial. Michael Hardt, following Deleuze,
anticipates the “Withering of Civil Society” as late capitalism moves from
the disciplinary mode to the control mode in which power relations now
fill all social space.^16 Slavoj Žižek’s critique elaborates on a more struc-
tural causality: the discrepancy and noncontemporaneity, he maintains,
are to be seen as structural necessities of capitalism. The critique is lev-
eled against Habermas’s notion of “modernity as an unfinished revolu-
tion,” based on precisely the same assumption of an existing contradic-
tion between capitalism and democracy. The task of accomplishing that
revolution—which is simultaneously that of democracy—is to bring its
two facets together: instrumental reason (i.e., the scientific-technological
manipulation and domina tion of nature brought about by capitalism)
on the one hand, and intersubjective communication free of constraints
on the other. Žižek maintains that bringing the project of modernity to
completion by actualizing the potential of the second facet, as Habermas