Friday, August 10th, 2012 
As I observed in my last post, I think that an OWS focus on debt, as Pamela Brown has been advocated, makes a lot of sense. We discussed this in the Wroclaw seminar. I continue to think about that discussion and how it relates to American electoral politics.
The issue of debt provides a way to keep focus on the frustration of the American Dream as it is part of the experience of many Americans, from the poor to the middle class to even the upper middle class. It is an issue of the concern of the 99%.
Yet, there are many activists in and theorists observing the movement who council against this, such as Jodi Dean. Debt is too individualized a problem. It would be better to focus on an issue of greater common, collective concern (e.g. the environment). The issue of debt is too closely connected to the right wing concern about deficits, and criticism of student debt can too easily become a criticism of higher education.
This presents a serious political problem. There is no broad agreement on debt as the central issue, and no leadership structure or decision making process which can decide on priorities. And of course, there are many other issues of contention. Primary among them, in my judgment, is the question of the relationship between OWS and American electoral politics.
It is here where the activists in OWS, like their new “new social movement” colleagues in Egypt and the Arab world more generally, are not prepared for practical politics. Coordinated strategy is beyond their capacity. One faction’s priority, debt or the reelection of President Obama, is not the concern of another’s, or even a position which it is forthrightly against. There are too many different positions within the movement for it to present a coherent sustained position. People with very different positions were able to join with each other and act politically thanks to the new media, but also thanks to that media, they were not required to work out their differences . . .
Read more: Politics as an End in Itself: Occupy Wall Street, Debt and Electoral Politics
Wednesday, August 8th, 2012 
I am still jet-lagged, or is it a cold? I can’t tell. Whatever it is, I have not been up to par for the past few weeks. The trip to Europe, including visits with my daughter and her family in Paris and the seminar in Wroclaw, was more challenging than expected. Naomi, my wife and Deliberately Considered’s Art and Design Editor, and I slowed down in our posting. But now, we are back. I expect to regain my strength, and you, dear Deliberately Considered readers, can expect in the coming weeks more posts on Wroclaw and on American and global politics and culture. Here, today and tomorrow, my thoughts on OWS responding to the discussions at the Wroclaw seminar. -Jeff
The starting point of the Wroclaw Seminar was Occupy Wall Street. It then served as our primary case for comparative investigation throughout and informed our final conclusions. Seminar participants Pamela Brown and Sidney Rose suggested additional readings for the seminar when we focused on OWS — Rose on the link between Anonymous and OWS. She was particularly interested in the online pre-history of OWS. Brown, an Occupy activist, was focused on the present challenges and recent accomplishments of the movement.
Rose suggested a piece describing an embrace between Cornell West, the philosopher, social critic and activist, and Gregg Housh, a leading figure in the shadowy group, Anonymous, at an occupy demonstration in Boston. This informed our discussion about the virtual infrastructure that supported the embodied occupations. As we tried to understand what is special about the new “new social movements,” the interaction between virtual and the embodied was a topic we knew we needed to explore.
We discussed how events in the Middle East and North Africa, combined with virtual actions, led to Occupy Wall Street, and sparked a global social movement wildfire. Following the Arab Spring, OWS developed with an Adbusters initial proposal to occupy wall street on September 17, 2011 , supported by politicized hackers such as those associated with . . .
Read more: Politics as an End in Itself: New Media and the Persistence of OWS
Monday, August 6th, 2012 
August 1, 2012 will be marked in American history as Chick-Fil-A Appreciation Day. Typically on such celebratory, capitalist occasions business owners show gratitude to their diners by a discount or a balloon. That Wednesday was topsy-turvy. Dan Cathy’s customers reversed the tradition, showering this Atlanta-based corporate CEO with consumptive love. Lines stretched around the block, a record-breaking scene. It was a bad day for poultry; a good day for cows.
I admire Cathy’s chicken sandwich and waffle fries as much as any fried mercantile repast, even though my patronage is spotty. A business that closes on Sunday so that diners can attend church has made a financial bow to belief. One can hardly imagine Einstein’s Bagels, say, closed on Saturday.
But several weeks ago, Dan Cathy crossed a line. He didn’t change his opinions, but those opinions became newly publicized. Mr. Cathy was quoted as defending traditional marriage – for God’s sake! – suggesting that gay marriage is “inviting God’s judgment on our nation.” I am not in the business of discerning God’s judgment. My concern is more parochial.
After Cathy’s remarks were broadcast, several politicians suggested that there was no place for Chick-Fil-A in their blue-state communities. Rahm Emanuel, no shrinking violet, opined that Cathy’s values were not “Chicago values.” Surely the Daleys would not have forgotten the Catholic Church down the street. Pandering attempts to banish the chain because of politics are clearly unconstitutional, particularly in the absence of evidence that they deny service to any customer.
Citizens properly have the choice to patronize whichever business they wish. Private boycotts for political reasons fall within our rights. The question is not whether such boycotts are legal, but whether they are wise.
I am troubled by choosing consumption based on the boss’s belief. Let us take the case – the case at hand – of “gay marriage.” In the United States today we are equally split . . .
Read more: Reflections on Chick-Fil-A Appreciation Day
Thursday, August 2nd, 2012 
Social movements create publics. They make it possible for people to express and act on their common concerns together. This creativity of movements has not fully appreciated. It has a long history, and it is also a key characteristic of the new “new social movements.” We discussed this in the Wroclaw seminar, moving from history to the study of the movements of our times.
Our discussion reminded me of the work of one of my former students, Angela Jones. Her dissertation, now a book, is on the Niagara Movement, which preceded the NAACP. The movement established the first national forum for the discussion of African American concerns by African Americans. Until very recently, it has been viewed as little more than a footnote in the career of W.E.B. Dubois. Jones’s work fills in a gap in history, the first fully developed study of this early episode in the long civil rights struggle. The gap existed because of the insufficient understanding of the importance of creating free public interaction in social movements.
In the democratic opposition to Communist regimes, specifically in Poland, the goal of establishing independent publics was not overlooked. In fact, for quite a while, it was the major end of the social struggle. The constitution of a free public space for discussion and action became the primary end of underground Solidarność in the 1980s. Because the regime couldn’t be successfully challenged, the end became to constitute a zone beyond its control. The end was for individual and collective dignity, to create an area where one could express oneself, appear outside of official definition, consolidate agreement among diverse participants in an autonomous public, which could be applied at an appropriate moment. The goal was to engage in a long cultural march, as Adam Michnik put it in a 1976 classic essay, “The New Evolutionism.”
In the new “new social movements,” this movement feature has been cultivated in a new political, generational and media environment. New media forms have . . .
Read more: Politics as an End in Itself: The Arab Spring and The Creation of Independent Publics
Monday, July 30th, 2012 
New media are increasingly changing the way history is being written and memories are being forged. Perhaps it’s not an appropriate comparison, with the Olympics ongoing, but think of the London bombings in 2005. Mobile camera phones enabled a new and more instant form of witnessing and communication, as Anna Reading explains in her article on “Mobile witnessing, mortal bodies and globital time” (Memory Studies 4.3, 2011). Another revolutionary moment in the history of media was the advent and diffusion of television, in the 1950s and 1960s, which enhanced the globalization of information and knowledge. It thus contributed to the creation of collectively shared, public memories as it allowed for news to reach – for the first time – large masses of people in various geographical areas.
The impact of television on the collective memory of the 1960s is illustrated by the blockbuster Forrest Gump (1994): here the protagonist is given a place – occasionally through recourse to original footage – in a range of major historical events which most Americans will have “experienced” through television. It thus feeds upon a national and visual memory of those years in the USA. In Italy too visual media have had an essential role in the creation and circulation of memories of the country’s national history of the past five decades or so. This is also because Italy has never had a real newspaper ‘culture’, and for most Italians TV news reports have been the main means of information. Italian cinema, in addition, has something of the status of a national heritage product, as Alan O’Leary suggests in his analysis of Italian movies on terrorism (Tragedia all’italiana. Italian Cinema and Italian Terrorisms 1970-2010, 2011), which has created a number of memorable ‘screen memories’. A news report about, say, a heat wave in Rome, for example, may start with the famous fountain scene from Federico Fellini’s Dolce Vita.
But visual memories of Italy’s past can also be viewed daily on the 15-minute long program Blob, which goes on air just after the evening news at 8pm. Created by a former TV director and . . .
Read more: Media Remember: Berlusconi’s Comeback and The Genius of Blob
Friday, July 27th, 2012 
The seminar on “New New Social Movements” has just ended and our tentative findings are in: there is indeed a new kind of social movement that has emerged in the past couple of years. Our task has been to identify and understand the promise and perils of this new movement type, to specify its common set of characteristics, its causes and likely consequences. We began our investigations in Wroclaw and will continue in the coming months. This is the first of a series of progress reports summarizing our deliberations of the past couple of weeks. -Jeff
The new movements are broad and diverse. Our informed discussions ranged from the uprisings of the Arab Spring, to Occupy Wall Street, including also the protests in major Romanian cities and the mining region, protests against the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) in Poland, protests in Israel concerning issues of housing, food, healthcare and other social demands, and the protests in Russia over the absence of democracy in the conduct of the affairs of state and elections. Participants with special knowledge of these social movements presented overviews in light of the social science theory and research of our common readings. We then all compared and contrasted the movements. We worked to identify commonalities and differences in social movement experiences.
We started with readings and a framework for discussion as I reported here. I had a hunch, a working hypothesis: the media is the message, to use the motto of Marshall McCluhan. But I thought about this beyond the social media, as in “this is the Facebook revolution.” Rather my intuition, which the seminar participants supported, told me that the social form (in this sense the media) rather than the content is what these movements share.
There is a resemblance with the new social movements of the recent past studied by Alain Touraine and Alberto Melucci, but there is something else that distinguishes the new social movements of the moment: a generational focus on the creation of new publics to address major . . .
Read more: Politics as an End in Itself: From the Arab Spring to OWS, and Beyond – Part 1
Monday, July 23rd, 2012 
In my last post, concerning the inadequacies of the debate around the Jedwabne atrocities, I highlighted the distance between the informed debate and the broad understanding of the population at large, especially people far from the major cities, uninvolved in and not comprehending elite cultural debates. I pointed out that the popular distrust of official rhetoric which made a great deal of sense during the Communist period was now being applied to the important discussion about the painful past, making the debate for much of the population counterproductive. The consequences of this are becoming tragically evident now in a cultural war, spreading like wild fire across Poland, a cultural war about educational reform.
**
Educational reform in Poland has been ongoing since 1999 – each of its stages stirring controversies of a different sort. The most recent protests could be labeled as the “Occupy” stage. The protests have been coalescing around some supposedly minor changes in school curriculum that aim to integrate middle school and high school programs and also allow students to choose, for the first time, a subject track in high school.
The core reason for these protests is a new way of offering and teaching history, in particular the introduction of the new “History and Society” course for students in the science track. This course will encompass overarching topics that the teacher will be able to develop together with students. Among the list of recommended topics provided by the Ministry of Education are the following: “Europe And The World,” “War and Military Systems,” “Woman, Man, Family,” and “Motherland’s Pantheon And Motherland’s Disputes.”
Proponents of the reform believe that it succeeds in finding solutions to two major problems: first, the new curriculum provides much better continuity between middle and high school, allowing students to cover a greater swath of history. Middle school students and first year high school students will follow a unified World and Polish history curriculum, after which they get to choose their track. Second, science track students will be able to build upon the history knowledge they acquired in earlier grades, but now they will learn to . . .
Read more: A Polish Cultural War: The Battle over the History and Education
Thursday, July 19th, 2012 
 To skip this introduction and go directly to the full In-Depth Analysis of “Fake vs. Fox News: OWS and Beyond,” click here.
In December of 2011, I took part in a very interesting conference in Sofia, Bulgaria. The conference participants were asked to respond to the work of the media theorist, Daniel Dayan (my dear friend and colleague and Deliberately Considered contributor) and to answer a straightforward question – “Is democracy sick of its own media?”
I presented a mixed answer: yes, when in comes to troubling developments in television news; no, when it comes to the effervescence of television satire and the social media. I closed with a proposal to Daniel to co-author a book, linking his ideas about “monstration” with mine about the politics of small things. While a book may or may not be forthcoming, a dialogue here at Deliberately Considered will appear in the near future.
In my paper, which I present here as an “in-depth” post, focused on the American case, I argued that we live in both the best of times and the worst of times concerning the relationship between media and democracy. Fox Cable News is relentlessly confusing fact with fiction with partisan intention, and serves as a model of media success, both financial and political, while responses to Fox including by the TV satirists, the famous “fake news” journalists, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, on Comedy Central, who also have interesting imitators around the world, present important challenges to Fox and its influence on common sense.
These media developments, I sought to demonstrate, are connected to significant new American social movements: the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street. In the case of OWS, and other new “new social movements,” social media is of crucial importance. They are providing new health to democracy globally in many different political contexts.
I maintained in my Sofia paper, that the relationship between social media and OWS is a significant manifestation of the way the politics of small things have become large in our world. I see in this a . . .
Read more: Fake vs. Fox News: OWS and Beyond (Introduction)
Thursday, July 19th, 2012 Is democracy sick of its own media? I seek to address the question before us, with a clear and forceful answer: yes, and no, but with no maybes. Yes, when it comes to certain emerging media conventions, revealed most vividly in the U.S. by Fox News (and its lesser imitators of the right and the left). But no, when it comes to an opposing and promising trend, the ongoing struggle to inform and constitute publics capable of deliberate discussion and informed actions, using a variety of media forms, new and old, but especially new. This trend is observable both in the central arena and, especially, on its margins, as a global development. I think that there are troubling trends in the dominant media, but I also think that it is important to pay attention to counter trends, and to take note of a new kind media war in political culture.
The conclusion of my presentation will highlight the counter trend, the “no” side of my answer to our question, doing so by linking two of my major projects, the study of the politics of small things and of reinventing political culture. I will suggest, further, the need to carefully consider Daniel Dayan’s ideas of monstration. In my conclusion, I will make a sort of book proposal for Dayan and me to work on, so that the weaknesses of my approach can be addressed. I will move toward the conclusion first by examining what I take to be the way a cable television network contributes to the sickness of democracy, specifically in the United States – the yes side of my answer to our question. I will then make my second move, to the no side, considering how social media and other new forms of electronic media open the opportunity for a counter trend, supporting the politics of small things. I analyze both tendencies as they are tied to significant social movements that define and redefine political culture, for better and for worse: the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street. I want to be clear that I don’t see the problems and potentials I identify here as being primarily the consequence of media form, cable news, . . .
Read more: Fake vs. Fox News: OWS and Beyond
Monday, July 16th, 2012 
 I was sitting at my desk, listening to the nostalgic boom and bang of distant fireworks on this Fourth – a heated July evening prior to a heated Presidential election. Hearing the clatter of fierce and passionate conservatives, one might easily assume that this will be the final Independence Day in our seemingly fragile constitutional democracy. From deep Alaska, Sarah Palin opined, “If Obama is reelected, well, America, you will no longer recognize the country that today you truly love and can enjoy all of its freedom and prosperity and security.” “ObamaCare is a harbinger of things yet to come,” the governor warns darkly. Such alarms have been Glenn Beck’s stock-in-trade for some years. Rush Limbaugh has followed much the same path, musing on moving to Costa Rica. In four years, America will be France, Venezuela, or Cuba. Not Amerika with K, as the left once proclaimed, but America without the blue and its whites.
Of course, forecasts of profound transformation have been the technique of doom-laden partisans who, until the age of computer caches, could rely on the limited memory of their audience. This is not merely a trope of the right. Partisan rhetoric is often more similar than rivals would care to admit. Paranoia is bipartisan. The end is nearly near! In the weeks prior to Reagan’s election, dear friends promised to invite me to Toronto after they migrated, concluding that America would soon become a fascist regime. I never did receive those invitations. Some of those friends remained to celebrate November 2008 in Grant Park. I have wondered whether America in 2012 conforms to their dark imaginings of what America would look like from the standpoint of Reagan’s ascent.
Despite the science fiction cliché of the man who awakes after decades, the world changes slowly, even in the face of shocks to the system. The fact that gay and lesbian Americans can now marry in many states with the trend continuing is a real change, but it doesn’t create an unrecognizable America. The fact that income inequality has increased or that hunger has decreased over the past . . .
Read more: Partisan Change
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