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

490-- " ----------- - -""Appendix Icommunicative power at all only under conditions that exclude aconcentration of power. Autonomous public spheres could crystallizearound free associations only to the extent that current trendstoward an uncoupling of culture from class structures continue.27Public discourses find a good response only in proportion to theirdiffusion, and thus only under conditions of a broad and activeparticipation that simultaneously has a dispersing effect. This in turnrequires a background political culture that is egalitarian, divestedof all educational privileges, and thoroughly intellectual.There is certainly no necessity that this increasingly reflexivetransmission of cultural traditions be associated with subject-centeredreason and future-oriented historical consciousness. To theextent that we become aware of the intersubjective constitution offreedom, the possessive-individualist illusion of autonomy as selfownershipdisintegrates. The self-assertive subject that wants tohave everything at its disposal lacks an adequate relation to anytradition. Benjamin's youthful conservative sensibility detectedanother time consciousness in the culture revolution itself, aconsciousness that turned our attention away from the horizon ofour own "future presents" and back to the claims that past generationsmake on us. But one reservation still remains. The sobriety ofa secular, unreservedly egalitarian mass culture does not just defeatthe pathos of the holy seriousness that seeks to ensure social statusto the prophetic alone. The fact that everyday affairs are necessarilybanalized in political communication also poses a danger for thesemantic potentials from which this communication musts till drawits nourishment. A culture without thorns would be absorbed bymere needs for compensation; as M. Grefrath puts it, it settles overthe risk society like a foam carpet. No civil religion, howevercleverly adjusted, could forestall this entropy of meaning.28 Eventhe moment of unconditionality insistently voiced in the contexttranscendingvalidity claims of everyday life does not suffice. Anotherkind of transcendence is preserved in the unfulfilled promisedisclosed by the critical appropriation of identity-forming religioustraditions, and still another in the negativity of modern art. Thetrivial and everyday must be open to the shock of what is absolutelystrange, cryptic, or uncanny. Though these no longer provide acover for privileges, they refuse to be assimilated by pregivencategories. 29