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

353Civil Society and the Political Public Spherevolve more than a multiplicity of self-referentially closed subsystems.The systems paradigm corresponds most closely to thecapitalist economy and to the public administration specialized inplanning and welfare. However, the inner logic with which manyhighly organized spheres, such as the educational system or science,oppose direct interventions is due not at all to a specific codeor a steering medium analogous to money but to the logic of thespecial questions addressed in these spheres. Besides, the"constitutionalization" of action systems, which is the purpose ofthe "context-steering" strategies of a supervisory state, means somethingdifferent in communicatively integrated spheres, such as thefamily or school, than it does in systemically integrated largeorganizations or networks (such as markets). In the former case,the legal constitution is only superimposed on an existing normative ·infrastructure; in the latter, it aids in the functional coordinationof social relationships that are legally created. Finally, participatoryforms of administration that bring implementing agencies intodiscourses with their clients (taken seriously as citizens) have adifferent sense than do neocorporatist bargaining arrangements.These differences must not disappear in the gray-on-gray descriptionsof systems theory.If we want to answer the questions posed at the end of the lastchapter, then we must find a route other than those of systemstheory and rational-choice theory. Elster's reconstructive analysisof the constitution-making process directs our attention to theprocedural rationality of democratic opinion- and will-formation;however, what we see there does not extend beyond the productionof communicative power. From a perspective broadened by systemstheory, Willke concentrates on an administration overburdenedwith steering problems, problems that on his analysis can be solvedonly by circumventing communicative power. But this diagnosisunderestimates what a multifunctional ordinary language canachieve precisely in virtue of its lack of specialization. Ordinarylanguage is the medium of communicative action through whichthe lifeworld reproduces itself; in it, too, the components of thelifeworld interpenetrate one another. The action systems specializedfor cultural reproduction (education) or socialization (family)or social integration (such as law) are not totally separated in