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

345Civil Society and the Political Public Spherepersonal references to system relations. Examples are found inthe legal protection pertaining to the new collective goods of the"risk society": protection from environmental destruction; protectionfrom radiation poisoning or lethal genetic damage; and, ingeneral, protection from the uncontrolled side effects of largetechnological operations, pharmaceutical products, scientific experimentation,and so forth. Law must not implement goals in theform of targets; rather, through "relational programs," it shouldinduce and enable the system that is causing the danger to steeritself in a new direction. In this way, the law functions as a catalystfor self-monitored modifications.(c) Though social integration would, according to this view, shiftfrom the level of democratic opinion- and will-formation to thelevel of intersystemic monitoring, the "essential content" of aconstitutional democracy transposed from persons to systems issupposed to remain intact. Willke speaks of the "establishment ofsocietal discourses" and even of the "attunement of autonomousactors through rational discourses."35 For the attunement processesfollow the guidelines set by (democratic?) procedures thatregulate the communication among the decentered units: "Consensusis required as a framework consensus regarding the foundationsand bounds of dissent, so that dissent, taken continuallyfurther, does not lead to the system's dissolution." At this point,Willke adds "that consensus is needed only as the continuallyreconstituted imaginary line, which is no sooner fixed than differencesand dissent can fasten on it to dissolve it"; thus, even theidealizing moment in the discourse concept of truth and validity iscaptured in the language of systems theory.36 Of course, thisformulation, which Willke's simulation of democratic consensusborrows from the intersubjectivistic vocabulary of a different theoreticaltradition, can have only a metaphorical meaning under thechanged premises.On the one hand, unlike the communicative practice of citizens,the "conversation" of functional systems no longer deals withnorms, values, and interests. Rather, it is restricted to the cognitivegoal of enhancing systemic self-reflection. Exchanges among expertswho instruct one another about the operation of theirrespective functional sectors is supposed to overcome the specific