Culture and Democratic Theory: Toward a Theory of Symbolic Democracy

Abstract

Since the late 1970s, a highly productive strand of critical theory has emerged which has largely abandoned the Frankfurt School’s critique of cultural domination. Influenced by the work of Habermas, which replaces the problem of individual happiness with “a concentration on the problem of political democracy and on the analysis of institutions permitting individual autonomy and democratic interaction,” 1 this strand has turned to democratic theory and discourse ethics as a means to resuscitate the transformative potential of existing political institutions. Civil society, the public sphere, and the domain of law (as opposed to the culture industry and the critique of instrumental reason) figure centrally in reconstructive projects aimed at the articulation of institutional remedies for chronic forms of economic and political injustice. It is noteworthy, however, that in the search for post-Marxist foundations for the critique of “really existing democracy,” critical democratic theory has not adequately taken stock of the fact that the symbolic order of society, which shapes the meaning and status of social identities, is implicated in these forms of injustice. While this emergent strand of critical theory has remained distant from a critique of cultural domination, it does not stand alone in this failure to conceptualize all the significant features of modern relations of power. The constitutive force of the symbolic order of society, enacted at the macro-level through the institutions of the public sphere and at the micro-level in face-to-face interactions, is difficult to capture in the terms of existing political and social theory. Such theory, as Foucault emphasized, is capable of recognizing social injustice in only two registers: economic domination and the illegitimate exercise of sovereign authority. Consequently, the symbolic force that structures the formation and hierarchization of social identities fails to be understood as a type of political power. Because it is unequally distributed across the social order,this symbolic force is an undemocratic structural constraint on the social identity, social valuation, and symbolic practices of individuals and groups, a constraint which always already impacts the quantity and quality of individual and group participation in the political, economic, and cultural life of society. Moreover, the one-solution-fits-all approach to instances of social injustice that is favored by liberal and social democratic reform projects (legal equality and economic egalitarianism) inhibits the development of a theory which can articulate