Sociologists face three distinct intellectual projects in their work. They are well aware of two of them, but the third remains in the shadows. The two standard projects are the study of the social construction, and the study of social effects. The third, the study of the predictable existential dilemmas we face, is the one Jeff Goldfarb and I are working to develop in our work, what we call “the social condition.”

As every undergraduate student learns after her first introduction to sociology, our world is socially constructed. People constantly give meaning, together, to a world that may not have an intrinsic meaning to it. In its deepest form, the one that Berger and Luckmann saw so well over 45 years ago, social construction is an existential drama. It is not only that, as undergraduates quickly learn to recite, identities are constructed by a social world (gender and race being the favorite examples). This is, of course, true and important. It is, rather, that our entire existence, as so far as it is meaningful, must be socially constructed and re-constructed. Like a shoddy plane over the void of meaninglessness, we construct a meaningful world—a world in which human existence, institutions and identities make sense. We may not do it actively the whole time, as, after all, we are born already into a social world that precedes us, and so into a world of meaning. And yet, meaning is always in danger of collapse. In liminal situations—when planes hit the twin towers, when children are slaughtered in their school, or simply when a loved one dies—we suddenly see how rickety our world is.

The second sociological project is that of “social effects,” the intellectual project that has come to define most sociological work. Here, sociologists note that we encounter social categories and processes as a reality that is beyond us. And this world that we encounter is far from equal. Sociologists thus study how social categories predictably affect the way different people encounter their worlds, and their chances to thrive within them. To take a particularly poignant example, Devah Pager recently showed how having a criminal record affects the hiring of black men. To do so, she trained a group of black and white graduate students, and sent them with near identical resumes to find an entry-level job. The only real difference in their resumes was that half of the white and half of the black graduate students had a criminal record on their resumes. The results were chilling, though perhaps not as surprising as we would wish. White men without criminal records were the most hired, but after them were white men with criminal records, only then came black men without criminal records, and trailing them, with almost none hired, were black men with criminal records. In a country with such high level of incarceration of young black men, her work shows not only how racism operates, but how nigh impossible it is for black men who “paid their debt to society” to become re-integrated into the legal economy.

These two intellectual projects are, of course, crucial. They are important for sociologists, for whom they are the stock in trade; but they are also crucial for any of us who attempts to understand the world we live in.

But focusing on these intellectual projects may present a picture that is all too predictable. While it is true that we construct our world and live with the effects of its construction, we also live a life that is riddled with choices, with dilemmas, with angst. These dilemmas, and the way we answer them, is often the choices we are most proud of, the moments that define our personhood, as well as the type of society in which we live.

Although how we answer the dilemmas our lives present us is not something that a sociology can answer, sociology can focus on these moments—on the predictable tensions and dilemmas that we face. These dilemmas are built into the social fabric of our being in both large and small ways. Writ large, as Goldfarb has noted (see here and here), we can, for example, think about the inherent tensions of democracy that structure our political dramas. Our institutions and ways of life are contradictory, and living through them is not following a smooth script, but a minefield of difficult choices.

I tend to think about smaller moments. And here too, I find them riddled with tensions. Take, for example, what happens when we start an activity—be it learning to box, learning the guitar, falling in love, or become religious. All these activities have a strong experiential aspect to them. When I studied Orthodox Judaism, I was struck by how powerful the experiences of newly religious Jews are. Even in the most mundane of rituals, when they had to say a blessing before having a cup of water, some of my friends felt a deep experience of the divine. In a different key, the same goes for more profane activities and relationships. And in both cases, experience slowly becomes routinized. Prayers are learnt by heart, music pours from the guitar effortlessly. On the one hand, mastery then has its own seductions—the ease, the control, how movements that were once challenging becomes almost automatic.

But these seductions are beset by challenges—for the person who had powerful religious experiences when he converted, becoming an adept means losing some of these moments. Instead of exuberance, religious experience becomes more fleeting, something felt only at intervals. Gaining mastery, then, is also losing something. And the balance of what is lost and what is gained is a hard one. Some people leave religion when experience changes; some try to take it up a notch, becoming stricter and stricter as a way to sustain the tension and excitement that they are in danger of losing.

But whatever they do, the conditions of this tension are predictable. Social research, in this key, doesn’t show solutions, but points to moments of deliberation, of uncertainty and angst. Studying the social condition cannot tell us how to solve these moments. It can, however, tell us where to expect them, and point us in the direction of describing and analyzing the existential dilemmas people traverse.

We can call this first form of political fallibilism, as our sitting President has, self-conscious humility.  Jeff has highlighted what is good and worthy in this practice, especially when compared with strident ideological inflexibility. This argument has also been forcefully put forward in a long-standing controversy about the existence and nature of an “Obama Doctrine.” Some commentators approve of this policy, and others don’t; all agree that the Administration is trying, anyway, to strike a balance between “realism” and “idealism,” between Kissingerian realpolitik and George W. Bush’s “Freedom Agenda.” In other words, the Administration’s policy in Iraq, Afghanistan, and more recently (and more tortuously) in Libya, is all about recognizing political fallibilism, even if not always put expressly in those terms. More recently, over the past weeks, with the circus over the debt ceiling raging, and political leaders competing over who can use the words “imperfect” and “necessary” more often and in closer connection, we’ve seen the “domestic” side of this form of repudiating over-confidence with the uncertainty of political events. Whether at home or abroad, this form of political fallibilism is all about the recoginition of one’s limits. Not just the limits of one’s capacity to act under a certain constellation (such as not having limitless resources, not being able to “dictate” to other nations, or serving as chief executive during a period of divided government). But also, and more importantly, the limits of one’s ability to know the truth about matters that one must act upon. Who are the Libyan rebels? What might a post-Assad Syria look like? How many jobs will be created in the next 6, 9, 12, 18 months under this or that blend of interest rate lowering and/or stimulus spending?.

So far, I suppose, I do no more than provide some contextualization to Jeff’s thoughts, if I have succeeded in doing this much. However, without undercutting this form of political fallibilism, I want to point to a second, and I believe deeper form. To uncover it, we should remember the core convictions of (philosophical) fallibilism, as developed (among others) by the great American philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce. While easy to oversimplify, the heart of this epistemological position is not hard to briefly express. Let’s put it thus: it is neither true that there exists some knowledge claim that can be asserted with absolute certainty, nor is it true that every knowledge claim can be reasonably doubted. A fallibilist, in this sense, is someone who believes in the existence—and the importance—of what Plato’s Socrates calls “true opinion,” but also recognizes that both the subject who believes and the object of that belief are caught up in a developmental process: that all truth is historical. This does not commit one to the view that nothing is true, nor must one think that all beliefs are equally fallible. But it does mean seeing the fallibility as endemic to the possibility of knowledge, and not to the psychology of the knower, or the physical conditions of things to be known. One is not saying here, “I might be wrong about this, but…” Rather, one is saying, “I might very well be absolutely right about this, but even if I am, that about which I am right might very well not be what it is right at the moment. I might be right about it relatively soon.”

A classic example of this “structural fallibilism” is the perception of what Aristotle calls “common sensibles,” most infamously, perhaps, color.  The structural and the humble fallibilists both agree that there is no certain knowledge of color as such; while the humble fallibilist attributes this to the subjective conditions of the knowledge—that the senses err, that other minds perceive color differently than we do—the structural fallibilist says that what is actually “out there” to be perceived as color is context-dependent.  So to say, it’s not our “fault” that we will never perfectly perceive what’s “there,” it’s that, in a very real sense, there’s no “there” there.

And here we see, I think, a difference between the two forms. In the quote with which I began, Jeff—rightly, to my mind—underscored the deleterious role of “true belief” in undermining the possibility of the first form of political fallibilism: one cannot be ready to make political compromises (i.e., recognize the limits of one’s ability to act, responsibly) if one refuses from the outset to recognize the limits of one’s knowledge. At the same time, the second form of political fallibilism actually embraces “right opinion,” and calibrates one’s belief in that opinion not against the limited possibility for one to be right, but against the limited possibility for events to allow for being right. In both cases, one acknowledges fallibility.  The difference is that, while in the first instance, this is based on the certainty that one cannot infallibly assert their view, insofar as any view of things can be mistaken, in the second, one is rather certain that the object of their view is itself uncertain.  This is what makes fallibilism in the second sense an anti-skeptical position.

This second form of fallibilism has an analogue in the political arena. In place of the “humility” of the first form—which is still focused on the psychological and physical conditions of the knower who would act in public, the structural form puts before us the possibility of holding contradictory beliefs, while understanding them as bound within separate spheres. Humility-fallibilism leaves you saying something like: “It is my earnest conviction that, but…” Structural fallibilism provides the space to say: “Given that it is my earnest conviction that the United States can never stand by idly as dictators murder their own people in the streets, and that it is my earnest conviction that the United States cannot use military means to ensure that all people, everywhere, can live free of such indiscriminate violence, it is clear that one or the other of these two convictions will be violated when the decision is made to intervene militarily when a dictator decides to use indiscriminate force against unarmed citizens. All the same, I am going to act, confident that I can never know if events will vindicate my decision, but also that I have acted on the best of my knowledge.” Under this scenario, the fallibilist can embrace the uncertainty of political developments as an end, and not merely as a means, of the cultivation of open societies.

The current economic slowdown constitutes a breakdown for advanced capitalism.  Its means of allocating capital – financial markets – froze up and would have collapsed completely if governments had not intervened on a massive scale.  The rates of growth of output and employment in most industrialized countries are anemic and persistent.  Does not the breakdown of capitalism require some fundamental rethinking of its explanation system, aka economic theory? Today’s troubles and the failure of most economists to predict them have given rise to a lively debate within the discipline about the sources of failure of economic theory and the ways in which it should be reformed. This is a good sign. But the current debate among economists is shallow and confined to a tweaking of its existing toolkit.  There is no indication that this debate will produce the intellectual revolution needed to respond to the theoretical and policy challenges facing industrialized countries.

The discipline of economics has been no stranger to methodological controversy. The Methodenstreit (debate over method) among German social scientists in the 1880s, the Keynesian revolution in the 1930s, the ‘F-twist’ debate in the 1960s over the importance of realism of assumptions, and the ‘Cambridge controversy’ over the meaning of capital in the 1970s are some of the most notable debates. But not all methodological discussions are created equal. Some are profound—questioning the very structure of the reigning methodology—while others are more superficial, aiming at incremental reform or merely cosmetic change. We find that the current discussion is for the most part quite shallow, and will remain so unless certain voices in the debate are given more emphasis.

The central problem is that almost nobody dares to rethink the nature of economic life and the proper scope of economic thinking. This deeper approach is precisely what we find in the Methodenstreit and in Keynes’ innovations. On its surface the Methodenstreit was a debate over whether concrete historical analysis or mathematical modeling was better suited to explain economics. But this question ultimately rested on the question of what the realm of political economy was actually like—i.e. whether it was comprehensible as a complex of generic building blocks at the level of individuals, or whether it was a network of irreducibly social institutions that individuals created and lived within. The debate led to revolutionary change —namely, a bifurcation of the discipline.  The Historical School’s philosophy of science—updated and improved by Max Weber—ultimately found a home in sociology.  The Austrian School, meanwhile, populated the burgeoning discipline of neo-classical economics, with its focus on the properties of a fully-decentralized competitive market system composed of rational and self-interested individuals functioning in a world of scarce resources.

John Maynard Keynes © IMF | imf.org

Keynes’s innovations were pitched at a similarly sweeping level, with the same revolutionary effect. Keynes introduced a new understanding of the concepts of time, uncertainty, and expectations. He argued that aggregate phenomena determine individual outcomes, a reversal of the direction of causality presumed in the dominant theory of his day. He established a new way of thinking about markets by showing how aggregate demand rather than wage flexibility created employment growth.  When wages fall, incomes and consumption drop, which can lead business to reduce rather than increase its ranks of employees.  Keynes showed how raising demand through real wage increases could thus increase employment.

The economic malaise since 2008 has generated a massive volume of criticism and self-questioning by economists in academic journals, newspapers and blogs.  But the discussion has been floating on a shallow level. Roughly, we can separate the positions in the debate into three categories.

A first group proposes that we ‘Do Nothing’ to change economic theory. This group, which includes such prominent macro economists as Thomas Sargent and Eugene Fama, claims that the theory of efficient markets has not been falsified by recent events. Either because the theory is about normal times rather than crisis, or because events don’t show any individual irrational behavior but rather a pattern of damaging economic policies, such as excessively high wages and money growth, leading up to the crisis.

The second group we refer to as ‘Add Finance and Stir.’ This eclectic group, which includes Robert Schiller, Paul Krugman, David Colander and Lance Taylor, sees the main limitation as the failure to link finance to macroeconomic theory. For this group, economics can be fixed by introducing a model of the financial sector that directly influences the ‘real’ sector of the economy.

A third group wants economics to be infused with more complexity and a richer understanding of institutions. This group ranges between those who propose more refined mathematical modeling to those who want to eliminate the use of mathematical formalization in economic theory entirely. We call it the ‘Add Institutions/Complexity’ group.

Unfortunately, these responses are shallow compared to the thorough debates of the past. They offer little hope that economics’ recent failures will be met with substantial reforms. True, some in the third group, for example Geoffrey Hodgson and Tony Lawson, are calling for a re-examination of the purpose of economics and its a priori commitment to the exclusive use of mathematical modeling to analyze economic life. But this view is not taken seriously within the profession.

It is certainly possible that the proper response to economics’ latest malfunction does not require a complete rethinking of the conceptual foundations. But we cannot simply presume that our current toolkit is entirely adequate. We need someone with Keynes’s radical spirit, including a willingness to look beyond the reigning way of doing economics. Refusing to do so is a recipe for superficial debate and cosmetic changes that simply kick the real problems down the road.

During a stop on their ‘roadshow,’ two world renown media researchers, Elihu Katz and Paddy Scannell, treated an audience at The New School for Social Research to some current reflections on “media events” and long-term television developments. It was Katz and his co-author and DC regular Daniel Dayan,  who started exploring these events in the 1970s when the surprising trip by Egyptian president Anwar Sadat to Israel and the ensuing television coverage inspired them and the world. It was the start of their long and intensive exploration of ceremonial contests, conquests and coronations that were celebrated through live broadcasts on television, resulting in one of the defining books in the field of media studies, Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History.  Recently, Katz and Scannell, the founding editor of Media, Culture and Society, have been revisiting the phenomenon. Things have changed, but media events appear to be still with us.

A telling example: Barack Obama’s inauguration in January 2009 which drew some 37+ million viewers. This once in a lifetime happening was a quintessential “media event.” The live broadcast of the meticulously scripted ceremony brought everyday life to a temporary standstill. Reporters and the vast audience were filled with awe in their celebration of the election of the first American black president. In addition to media that offered a live-streaming of the event, TVs were still the go-to medium. Television seemed to be alive, if not completely well.

As a student and collaborator of Paul Lazarsfeld at Columbia’s Bureau of Applied Social Research, Katz for many years was skeptical about the power of media to change people’s minds.  But as a co-author with Dayan, he speaks in awe and fascination about the live images of astronauts landing on the moon, of the newly elected Polish Pope kissing his native soil, and of royal weddings and official funerals. He knows that the television broadcasts of these events were performative, with real and significant social impact.

Fast forward to the current unrest in the Middle East.  There we see typical examples of disruptive, unplanned happenings that upstage the normal flow of news bulletins and ceremonial media events. In the past 10 years or so, sudden and dramatic events have been front and center on our media screens. Think 9/11, the 2003 Iraq invasion, and Hurricane Katrina, to name just a few huge ones. Katz and Scannell wonder if these kinds of happenings can also be considered media events, or if these unscripted versions belong to another genre.

The reasons why disrupting events have become ubiquitous give some insight. The institution of television, while busy broadcasting all these ‘mediathons’ about missing children, adulterous officials, natural and manmade disasters, has changed vastly. And newer forms of media have upstaged old-fashioned television. In addition to all that, Katz and Scannell also blame cynicism and disenchantment towards both the media and governments. Can it be that these developments not only lead to the redefinition of media events, but also to the matter of how people nowadays end up celebrating their ceremonies? If we can no longer watch spectacular, live media events, together, simultaneously, experiencing a sense of belonging, how and where are we going to make up for that?

What did television do for mankind? Among other things, it gave societies an outlet to celebrate themselves, as Katz and Dayan clearly showed. Although its days are numbered, it is still a bit too early to suggest that television’s time is completely over. The inauguration of President Obama was made for television! But also for a Web audience that could follow every Obama’s movement on computer screens thanks to live streaming. And the web audience was able to respond, interact, let’s say participate, in a way that the television audience could not. But as an interactive medium, as a medium partially integrated with the web, TV has its limits. An additional problem is that CNN, FOX, MSNBC, and the like, spend most of their time airing a sheer endless onslaught of disruptive events. This doesn’t leave much room for celebration.  Admittedly, broadcasters are trying to morph tales of war and terror into instances of celebration of our freedom and democracy and others’ lack thereof. But they are not in control. Terrorists, criminals, militaries, and Mother Nature are behind the scripts of disasters. The broadcasting of them on multiple rival channels has rather disintegrated society instead of bringing people together.

The mediated celebration of national ceremonies on television may truly be in a crisis. The end of television as we know it is near. But not all is lost. A more interactive successor may very well deal with future events. And there is still the marking of modest events. Although the evening with Katz and Scannell itself did not produce many answers to the questions raised by our new media order, the show turned out to be an insightful ceremony in itself, in which the making of Media Events, i.e. the book, was celebrated. And rightfully so.

This is the first of a series of posts by Daniel Dayan exploring the significance of WikiLeaks.

Is WikiLeaks a form of spying? Transferring information to an alien power can induce harm. This is why spying constitutes a crime. In the case of WikiLeaks, the transfer concerns hundreds thousands of documents.  The recipients include hundreds of countries, some of which are openly hostile. In a way WikiLeaks is a gigantic spying operation with a gigantic  number of potential users. Yet, is it really “spying?”

Spying (in its classical form ) involves a specific sponsor in need of specific information to be used for a specific purpose, and obtained from an invisible provider.  WikiLeaks “spies” eagerly seek to be identified (Julian Assange, WikiLeaks founder and editor in chief,  has been voted Le Monde’s “man of the year”). Information covers every possible domain, and there is no privileged recipient. Anyone qualifies as a potential beneficiary of Wiki-largesses and most of those who gain access to the leaked information have no use for it. Spying has become a stage performance.

On 9/11 a group of Latin American architects hailed the destruction of The Twin Towers as a sublime event. The pleasure of seeing Rome burning had been made available for the man of the street. It was –suggested the builders – a democratization of Neronism.  In a way, WikiLeaks, could also be described as a democratization of spying.  It offers a form of  “public spying.” Distinct from mere spying (a pragmatic activity), it proposes “spying as a gesture.”  This gesture concerns other gestures. What WikiLeaks discloses is less (already available) facts than the tone in which they are expressed.

Content or gestures?

If the Assange leaks reveal nothing that we did not know already, what counts is less their  propositional content than the enacted speech acts.  The vocabulary of WikiLeaks gestures starts with the noble gestures of war.  Many commentators tell the WikiLeaks saga in military terms. For the Umberto Eco, it is a“ blow:” “To think that a mere hacker could access the best kept secrets  of the world’s most powerful states is in fact a considerable blow to the state department.”  For David Brooks it is a declaration of war: “the group celebrated the release of internal State Department documents with a triumphalist statement claiming that the documents expose the corruption, hypocrisy and venality of U.S. diplomats.”

The journalism of investigation, the journalism of  disclosure, and the journalism of intrusion

By inflicting enforced visibility, WikiLeaks adopts a family of gestures that characterize contemporary trends in journalism.  In a way WikiLeaks is “investigative journalism” pushed one step further. Yet “investigative journalism” is a misnomer, since, in principle, every sort of journalism should involve investigation.  If sources and facts were not checked, journalism would be no more than gossip or propaganda.  The real name for what is usually called “the journalism of investigation” should be the “journalism of disclosure.”  In a way, then, WikiLeaks “enforced visibility” is a new step in the journalism of disclosure.

Like a journalism of disclosure, it displays a paradoxical virtue. WikiLeaks can cause a scandal without revealing anything new.  The journalism of disclosure, can astonishingly survive without disclosing anything at all. At that point it turns into a journalism of mere intrusion. “Intrusive journalism” may wish to become a journalism of investigation, a journalism of denunciation. Yet, the process fails because the offered revelation just doesn’t occur. What is left, is the trappings of denunciation; the denouncing gesture without an actual content.

Thus Michael Moore bursts into the building of a large corporation, finds no one to challenge, and harangues a closed door.  Or, to take a French example, Sarkozy is being filmed, without knowing it while he awaits the beginning of an interview to be aired  on channel FR 3. Sarkozy is waiting for his turn to get on the air; he exchanges small talk with people around him, muses about new subjects for TV shows.  The video is mildly boring. Apart from its intrusive nature (and the dogma of Sarkozy’s detestability), it reveals nothing of interest. All it has to offer is the gesture of filming someone who is not aware of being filmed.  Yet the video turns into a trophy circulating on websites.   It reveals nothing about Sarkozy, but says a lot about  the use of visibility, about a new form of “surveillance” that denies the president the right to a “back region.”  All it really displays is its own intrusive nature.  What is mostly interesting about this example of “intrusive journalism,” is that it is has provoked heated controversies, and turned the cameraman who recorded the non-event into a hero. Like Assange, this hero is a crusader for  a new visibility ( which I plan to address in future posts), a “transparentizer.”

In these past few days, I have read and heard many responses to President Obama’s speech at the memorial service at the University of Arizona, including that of Jeff Goldfarb here at Deliberately Considered. While I agree with many of the encomiums to that speech – praise for its sincerity, civility, appeal to democracy, appreciation for individual lives – I am in a distinct minority in feeling that it was not altogether successful as a moment of high and consequential political rhetoric.

It was not the Gettysburg Address. Of course, it may seem unkind to compare Obama’s speech to that one of the ages by Lincoln, but I believe the tasks of that speech were similar to those of Lincoln and that it fell short of the mark. Public ceremonies of this type have unique challenges – memorialize the victims of violence, appeal to the better angels of the nation, re-establish the authority of the state, indicate a way forward.

The main issues involve choices of genre and structure. For me, Obama’s speech oscillated without adequate accounting or warning between the genres of private lamentation, religious homily, and political oration. Without an overarching structure that linked these genres together, their coming and going unsettled me as a listener. Was so much reference to scripture appropriate in a civil ceremony? Was so much detail about individual personalities befitting a national oration by a head of state?

The speech caused me to reflect on prior moments of national traumas that challenged leaders to make sense through collective reckoning. Traumas like wars and assassinations that resonate upwards, from individuals through families and communities, to the larger social and political collectivity call forth formal responses by heads of state. And these responses transform the traumas into history. Hegel linked history itself to the state: “It is the State [he wrote] which first presents a subject-matter that is not only adapted to the prose of History, but involves the production of such History in the very progress of its own being.”   The state thus views itself as the central character of history, with an agency and a political body of its own, capable of being wounded.  The lives of individuals, whether caught up as soldiers in war, or as workers in a ruptured economy, or as victims of terrorist attacks, find themselves and their individual points of view eclipsed by that of the state itself. And this is true regardless of how central to the state’s very progress these individuals are.

The speech by President Obama last Wednesday night made me reflect specifically on Lincoln’s magnificent “Remarks” at the ceremonies dedicating the Soldiers’ National Cemetery at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.  In his brilliant analysis of The Gettysburg Address, Garry Wills writes of Abraham Lincoln’s adaptation of the Greek Epitaphios or Funeral Oration to the task of dedicating a military cemetery on the site of the former American Civil War battlefield at Gettysburg.  Of this classical template, Wills writes that it provided a “prose form of the Greek orations that was meant to be bracing after the sung lament (threnos) of the burial rite…The prose form is itself a return to political life, a transition from family mourning to the larger community’s sense of purpose.”  Lincoln built his speech up from a series of oppositions – life and death, word and deed, nature and society – and managed to extol the individual soldiers and their deeds without naming or describing them. And he ends with the transcendent frame of “the government of the people shall not perish from the earth.”

From sung lamentation to prosodic oratory, the State claims its transcendent purview. The State thus has its genres and can, at moments like that at Gettysburg, deploy them effectively. But we need to assess other historical moments of crisis, like that of the last weeks after the shootings in Tucson, in which the line between the purview and prerogatives of the state and those of individuals and families is not so clear cut, when the “right” genre for representing historical events does not so easily present itself, and when the confusion is largely a function of discord over the meaning of an event in real time.

The task then becomes doubly difficult – to fashion a language of interpretation that moves to that collective level of history but that also takes seriously the work of threnos (lamentation).  Greek tragedy, another genre, found that middle way, largely because the families whose actions were performed were literally the families heading the state. And tragedies like Antigone were especially tuned to this combining, focusing on the conflicting demands of family and state. But the language of “family” can be expansive or restrictive as given society chooses to interpret it.  Bifurcating the prerogatives of the private sphere and those of the public sphere can ultimately entail a loss of sympathy and collegiality in the most expansive meaning of the terms, that is in terms Hannah Arendt would put forward. Rather, it is possible to highlight the trajectory from threnos (lamentations of the family) to epitaphios (funerary oration) that carries forward the apprehension of the singularity of the one who is missing or mourned even in a genre that expresses the needs of the collectivity. I believe that this was Obama’s aim, and why he spent considerable time reflecting on the details of the lives of the individuals killed in Tucson. For many listeners, Obama’s speech hit the mark, moving them emotionally and drawing them together collectively. With the Gettysburg Address in the back of my mind, I found myself wanting more.

Gary Alan Fine is a Guggenheim Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and teaches at Northwestern University. He is the author of Difficult Reputations: Collective Memories of the Evil, Inept and Controversial.  He considers here a very difficult example of what has been one of his ongoing research concerns.  Jeff

Although I feel abashed admitting it, I find my sympathy for Jared Lee Loughner is swelling. Mr. Loughner is, as every sentient American is aware, the young man who pulled the trigger – again and again – killing six, wounding others, including his local Congresswoman, Gabrielle Giffords in a mall in Tucson, Arizona.

Note that I do not say that he is an accused assassin, killer, or murderer, which legally he certainly is under our rule of law. I am entirely prepared to accept that Mr. Loughner was, last Saturday, a violent man, who deserves whatever a jury or set of juries (both federal and state) will eventually determine. I will not call for parole in 2061. I am also prepared to admit that a court may determine – although it probably will not, given American attitudes – that this young is not fully culpable for his violence because of mental illness.

What I am not prepared to accept is how from the moments after the attack, Mr. Loughner’s identity has been taken from him to be used as a political football by smart people who are willing to be ignorant. Again and again we see that we do not truly care about the self-imagined identity of this 22-year old, but only about what we need for him to be. Perhaps we need him to be a tea party manqué boisterously inspired by Sarah and Rush, perhaps an out-of-control, drug-crazed Goth worshipping at the altar of a skull, perhaps a follower of Hitler or Marx, or perhaps we just need for him to be, as is often stated, “a nut job.” But these are what we need for Mr. Loughner to be, and not what he is. The truth is that Jared, we hardly know you.

So we search through the shards and debris of a life to find those oddities that make our case. We scrape away complexity to build a reputation. We forget that to know someone is to know contradictions, moods, and ambivalence. Perhaps when the dust settles we will discover that Mr. Loughner was a boy scout, volunteered at a soup kitchen, or fed pigeons (not poisoning, following Tom Lehrer). Perhaps he was in pain. Or perhaps not. But only with time, justice, and fairness will the self of Jared Loughner appear. Selves are multiple, not singular. As Louis Zurcher pointed out selves are mutable and multiple.

Jared Loughner is neither the first nor surely the last “unintended celebrity” that the public maw transforms according to their need. In my book, Difficult Reputations, a study of a set of public figures with evil, inept, or controversial reputations – and few today have a more difficult reputation – I found that when poorly known figures splash onto the public scene a set of reputational entrepreneurs will see it as being in their interest, using resources at hand, to construct a meaningful self for this stranger, however much it strays from what we eventually come to know. In the days in which Americans cared about the treason of Benedict Arnold, the claim was that as a child he spread broken glass on the sidewalk to harm innocent children. Surely it was more myth than reality, but myth becomes reality.

I offer no brief for Jared Lee Loughner. His killing spree was repellant and might, no matter how idiosyncratic, prove to be another step by which elected officials separate themselves from their voters. But I also see that actions that might otherwise be considered odd and harmless – a sense of creepiness without any particular threat – have been made into markers of madness. We claim that angry words are taken as inspiration for violence, even though these words occur in a Civilizing Society where there is less public anger, rather than more – and in which the tools of violence are held by the state as social theorist Norbert Elias pointed out. Strange acts and hot words might or might not be linked to the violence in Tucson, but we treat them as persuasive while we scurry for a past that makes sense of the present. In the case of Mr. Loughner and in the case of all challenging reputations, we read history backwards. We search for clues that perhaps have different meanings, but that now can serve to support what we knew all along. Even if we show no mercy, we owe it to ourselves to let Jared be Jared.

In a democracy, power becomes an “empty place,” to use an expression of French political philosopher Claude Lefort. This does not mean that nobody occupies the place of power. Rather it means that those who occupy the place, do so circumstantially, and as a result of the periodic outcomes of the democratic, electoral struggle. That power is an empty place means that nobody can occupy it permanently, that nobody can “embody” it, and that no social group can claim to be entitled to rule.

My question is: in America, can we still consider political power to be the circumstantial result of the democratic electoral struggle?

Obama’s short political journey so far has proven two apparently contradictory facts related to the empty place, in my judgment. On the one hand, he has shown that the American electoral process is still able to make room for unexpected victories, for political actors defying political machineries and early financial disadvantages. On the other hand, however, his victory, together with his party’s victory, giving them ample majorities in both chambers of Congress, have indicated, in my opinion—and in that of most of those behind the famous “enthusiasm gap” between the parties—that neither decision-making nor legislative processes seem to be closely related to the electoral outcomes any longer.

The New York Times’ columnists Frank Rich and Nicholas Kristof have been using the word “plutocracy” in their columns to describe the problem I see. Would it be too strong of a claim to say that we have to take seriously the hypothesis of an at least partial plutocratic re-embodiment of power in America?

I am thinking about this today because of an article I read in The New York Times this morning on the opposition to the possible awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo, a heroic advocate of the a democratic reforms in China. Predictably the Chinese government has warned the Nobel committee that the awarding of the prize to Liu would damage governmental relations between China and Norway.

Surprisingly, there is a petition of exiled dissidents opposing the award.

According to a group of strong anti- regime exiles, Liu maligned fellow dissidents, abandoned members of the Falun Gong and was soft on Chinese leaders. “His open praise in the last 20 years for the Chinese Communist Party, which has never stopped trampling on human rights, has been extremely misleading and influential.”

The vehemence of their opposition to Liu despite the fact that at this moment he is serving an eleven year sentence for advocating democratic reforms, reveals  that they view him not as an opponent, who has a more moderate pragmatic approach to democratic reforms than they, but as an enemy.

It suggests that if they were in power, they might not be that different from the regime which they so passionately oppose.  In politics, as Arendt observes in one of her most beautiful books, Between Past and Future, the means are ends.

A reasonably deliberate reader of the New York Times might have been flummoxed by an article that appeared last month on the front page.  The article, titled, Using Microsoft, Russia Suppresses Dissent, tells many moral tales simultaneously – none of them thoroughly, none of them systematically.

Beginning with the story of a raid by plainclothes Russian police on the environmental group, Baikal Environmental Wave’s headquarters (confiscating the group’s computers to search for pirated Microsoft software), the article presents no fewer than five topics and themes for the reader to consider.  Among these are political corruption and abuse of power in contemporary Russia, capitalism’s dilemmas dealing with piracy, Microsoft’s complicity with authoritarian governments in trumped-up “crackdowns” on software piracy, problems of unemployment in Siberia and the re-opening of a paper factory in Irkutsk, and the pollution of Lake Baikal, the world’s largest freshwater lake, by just such factories.

A long article, continuing on an inside page and including three photographs (one of dead fish on the banks of the lake) and one chart, the article promises an in-depth report of a significant story.  But what is the story?

Normally, newspapers neatly divide the world of news into pre-ordained categories of experience – International News, National News, Sports, Business, Health and Science, Home, Arts and Leisure.  These divisions give us readers an illusion of clarity and coherence when absorbing information about real-world events.  But events are complicated and don’t come in pre-packaged categories.  So on the one hand, kudos to the New York Times for short-circuiting the readers’ expectations.

But on the other hand, the story also short-circuits the reader’s ability to make critical connections among the issues inelegantly tumbled together (capitalism, authoritarianism, unemployment, and environmentalism), or the ability to move upward to a higher level of analysis, and to critique the assumptions of a world-view that, in spite of its acknowledgment of political dissent, is never troubled by the imperatives of capitalism itself.

Here, David Harvey’s book, Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference is a useful interlocutor.  Harvey aims to do precisely what the article avoids – to ask questions that connect Siberian workers’ need for industrial jobs with the dangers of pollution of Lake Baikal, with the global dominance of Microsoft, with capitalism’s contingent complicity with political authoritarianism.  Through an analysis of the philosophical and political roots of both socialist thought and environmentalist thought, Harvey sets out to answer the question: “how did we arrive at this seeming impasse in which the struggle for emancipation from class oppressions appears so antagonistic to the struggle to emancipate human beings from a purely instrumental relation to nature?”

Of course, Harvey’s question allows us to make sense of the “Using Microsoft, Russia Suppresses Dissent” article in one way only.  There are other angles of vision, to be sure, including that exploring ongoing challenges for “post-authoritarian” societies to be truly post-authoritarian.  The point is that deliberate readings of confusing media reports take effort and time and a willingness to engage in a reconfiguring reading.  They require, in other words, theoretically informed deliberation.