Between Facts and Norms - Contributions to a ... - Blogs Unpad

307Deliberative PoliticsIt is also silent about the relation between decision-oriented deliberations,which are regulated by democratic procedures, and theinformal processes of opinion-formation in the public sphere. Tothe extent that these procedures, unlike general elections, do notsimply organize the voting that follows informal opinion-formation,they at least regulate the composition and operation of assembliesthat "convene" for a "sitting" in which an agenda is "negotiated"and resolutions are passed if necessary. In setting up parliamentaryprocedures, decision-making powers (and assigned political responsibilities)provide the reference point from which sociallybounded and temporally limited publics are constituted. They alsodetermine how deliberations are structured through argumentand specified in regard to the matter at hand. Democratic proceduresin such "arranged" publics structure opinion- and willformationprocesses with a view to the cooperative solution ofpractical questions, including the negotiation affair compromises.The operative meaning of these regulations consists less in discoveringand identifying problems than in dealing with them; it hasless to do with becoming sensitive to new ways of looking atproblems than with justifYing the selection of a problem and thechoice among competing proposals for solving it. The publics ofparliamentary bodies are structured predominantly as a context ofjustification. These bodies rely not only on the administration'spreparatory work and further processing but also on the context ofdiscovery provided by a procedurally unregulated public sphere thatis borne by the general public of citizens.This "weak" public is the vehicle of "public opinion."26 Theopinion-formation uncoupled from decisions is effected in anopen and inclusive network of overlapping, subcultural publicshaving fluid temporal, social, and substantive boundaries. Withina framework guaranteed by constitutional rights, the structures ofsuch a pluralistic public sphere develop more or less spontaneously.The currents of public communication are channeled bymass media and flow through different publics that develop informallyinside associations. Taken together, they form a "wild"complex that resists organization as a whole. On account of itsanarchic structure, the general public sphere is, on the one hand,more vulnerable to the repressive and exclusionary effects ofunequally distributed social power, structural violence, and system-