Friday, March 8th, 2013 
 To skip this introduction and go directly to read the In-Depth Analysis, “Peace and the Social Condition: Barack Obama and the Nobel Peace Prize,” click here.
In today’s “in depth” post, I use a close reading of Barack Obama’s Nobel Lecture to examine peace and the social condition. It is a continuation of a lifetime exploration. Over the years, I have been impressed by the specific promise and limitations of the force of arms and of non-violent collective action
When I was a young man, I tried to be a pacifist, as I reported here. I was strongly opposed to the war in Vietnam, didn’t want to take part, explored the possibility of being a conscientious objector, but perceived the limits of nonviolent resistance. I couldn’t convince myself that it was possible to effectively fight against Nazism without the force of arms. I couldn’t become a pacifist.
Yet, as an adult, and as an eyewitness to the successful democratic revolutions in Central Europe, I was just as impressed by the way non-violent action could be more effective than violence, seeing the success of my friends and colleagues in the so called velvet revolutions around the old Soviet bloc, as being greatly influenced by the character of their non-violent collective action. The non-violent democratic means had a way of constituting the end, imperfect, but nonetheless, truly functioning democracies. This insight informed my explorations of “the politics of small things” and “reinventing political culture.” in the midst of the disastrous “war on terrorism.”
The means have a way of determining the ends. This is a key proposition, which has informed my political reflections in recent years, concerning the transformation of Central Europe, and also concerning the attempted transformations in the Middle East and North Africa, and to politics of Occupy Wall Street. The proposition also informs my review and analysis here of President Obama’s Nobel Lecture (Obama, 2009) as an . . .
Read more: Peace and the Social Condition: Introduction
Friday, March 8th, 2013 The means have a way of determining the ends. This is the proposition that informs my review and analysis of President Obama’s Nobel Lecture (Obama, 2009) as an exploration of the topic of peace and the social condition. I think Obama confronted complexity of the social condition, though the situation of his winning the prize was both awkward and rightly controversial from a variety of different points of view.
Obama’s Peace Prize was exciting, strange and provocative. There was political poetry and hope in it: the better part of America and its relationship with Europe and the world were being celebrated, as there was the hope that the dark side of American hegemony had passed. But there was also confusion: exactly why did Obama win the prize?
Obama’s critics saw in the prize confirmation that Obama was a cult figure, an eloquent player, but with no substance, winning the Nobel Prize for Peace before he accomplished anything on the global stage. Even his supporters were not sure exactly what to make of it. I was more convinced than most, but I understood my argument approving of his winning the Nobel Prize, published in Poland’s leading newspaper, Gazeta Wyborcza, as a provocation. Clearly, even Obama understood that there was a problem. As he noted in the opening of his lecture:
“I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge the considerable controversy that your generous decision has generated. (Laughter.) In part, this is because I am at the beginning, and not the end, of my labors on the world stage. Compared to some of the giants of history who’ve received this prize – Schweitzer and King; Marshall and Mandela – my accomplishments are slight.”
But he turned this to his advantage, at least in giving his speech. The speech became an exploration of the complex relationship between war and peace, as he put it: “the instruments of war do have a role to play in preserving the peace. And yet this truth must coexist with another – that no matter how justified, war promises human tragedy.” He further reflected upon the role of political leadership, particularly his. It was a speech about the social condition and peace and his confrontation with . . .
Read more: Peace and the Social Condition: Barack Obama and the Nobel Peace Prize
Wednesday, March 6th, 2013 
How do memorials shape who we think we are? And how do we “do” identities when we interact with memorials? As Salon.com and others noted recently, gay men have been using the signature concrete slabs of the Berlin Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe as backdrops to their profile pictures on grindr, a geo-social app that lets those have have logged on find each other that is popular with gay men. In Salon’s account, the combination of the memorial and the anticipation of erotic pleasure is “odd” and “peculiar.” The Memorial appears as a “prop” for self-presentation. The trend is portrayed as equivalent to the EasyJet airline’s 2009 fashion shoot for an in-flight magazine at the memorial. EasyJet apologized. “We realized that to hold a fashion shoot in front of the memorial was inappropriate and insensitive, and we didn’t wish to offend anyone.”
Is the grindr trend just another “inappropriate and insensitive” use of the memorial space? How are our current identities involved in claiming spaces and making calls of inappropriateness?
I was asking myself these questions, weeks after correcting the proofs of my article on two Berlin memorials and complex identities. For this article, I asked how memorials to Nazi victims deal with the complex identities of those who are commemorated, and how these memorials shape current identities. I looked at a small monument to a group of Jewish Socialist resistance fighters, and to the Monument to the Homosexuals Persecuted under National Socialism that is located right across the street from the Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe. Theorists of identities have long emphasized that in order to capture identities and experiences of discrimination, we need to stop talking about identity dimensions as if they existed in isolation from one another. We all are situated differently along axes of, for example, gender, race, sexuality, class, (dis)ability, religion, and so on. We also know that racism, for example, affects women and men differently because racism is already gendered. So goes the theory. It seems to not have made . . .
Read more: Memories of Identities, Identities of Memory
Monday, March 4th, 2013 
Several ghosts from the civil rights movement haunted Capitol Hill on February 27, but it was a little unclear how many were the ghosts of CRM past and how many were the ghosts of CRM future. The State of Alabama, where so much civil rights history was made, had built the house from which many of these ghosts came.
On one side of First Street the ghost of Rosa Parks, embodied in a 9-foot-tall statue, waited in the Capitol’s Statutory Hall to be unveiled by President Obama, her political descendant. He was assisted by both party’s leaders while some still-living civil rights activists, a few blood relatives, members of the public and a lot of press crowded the space trying to see.
On the other side, the ghosts of CRM past, present and future were duking it out at the Supreme Court. Shelby County, AL had challenged the section of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that requires covered jurisdictions to clear any changes in how they conduct elections with the Department of Justice. Its lawyers argued that ghosts of racial sins past had no place in the present. The DoJ maintained that these racial sins were not yet ghosts.
Outside, a couple hundred civil rights supporters rallied on the sidewalk. Some of the speakers soon walked across the street where they had reserved seats in front of the stage in Statutory Hall. The ghosts of CRM present could be seen in the faces of the six elected officials who sat on that stage. The two Republican leaders were both white men. The four Democratic leaders included one white man, one white woman and two black men.
. . .
Read more: Civil Rights Ghosts Haunt Capitol Hill
Friday, March 1st, 2013 
Clifton Truman Daniel’s “A Mission of Reconciliation,” describes his recent trip to Japan, honoring the victims of the atomic bomb, ordered by his grandfather. On the first day of Daniel’s trip, Nana Yamada, the Nagasaki correspondent of Japan’s largest television network, asked Daniel whether he came to Japan to apologize.
He didn’t.
“Out of respect for the survivors and their countrymen, I would not defend the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but neither could I apologize for my grandfather or my country. After all, I have shaken the hands of dozens of WWII veterans who tell me they probably wouldn’t have survived the invasion of the Japanese main islands.”
For the remainder of his visit and in his report, Daniel worked to explain and enact this complicated stance, which I appreciate. It hit close to home. As I read his account, I thought of my father.
While Daniel’s grandfather, President Harry Truman, momentously decided to drop the bomb, my dad, Ben Goldfarb, was one of the thousands of GIs who, therefore, were not part of the invasion. For my father, this was after serving in the South Pacific for four years as a conscript (who went in as a private and out as a corporal or private, I can’t remember; he told me about repeated promotions, followed by demotions connected to fighting with an anti-Semitic officer in his unit).
My father and I generally agreed on politics, though he was probably more of a leftist. He didn’t vote for Daniel’s grandfather, but for Henry Wallace. Yet, he strongly supported President Truman’s decision to drop the atomic bombs, not only because it saved him, but also because, he convinced himself following the commonsense of his times, the bombs in the long run saved more lives than they destroyed. I didn’t and don’t agree, but it was one of the very few issues that he really didn’t want to debate, our typical mode of communication once I was an adult. And as Daniel didn’t want to either defend or apologize . . .
Read more: The President and the Private, and the Atomic Bomb: Responding to Clifton Truman Daniel’s Mission to Japan
Thursday, February 28th, 2013 By Daryl Glaser | 
Mamphela Ramphele’s new “political platform,” or party-in-making, represents the latest in a series of bids for the substantial number of black voters presumed to be disillusioned with the rule of the African National Congress in South Africa. So far all bids have failed. Many black South Africans are indeed fed up with the ANC. Tens of thousands have joined often violent “service delivery protests” against ANC-run municipalities accused of corruption or neglect. Millions have stayed away from the polls. Yet, relatively few have been willing to vote for opposition parties. The last major new party to try wrest their votes, a breakaway from the ANC called COPE (Congress of the People), secured a respectable 7% at the 2009 general election, but has since descended into a shambles. The best hope for Ramphele’s outfit is that it will scoop up the black African voters poised to desert COPE, yet unwilling to vote for the main opposition party, the Democratic Alliance (DA), because of its white roots and leader.
It is not easy to give an ideological label to Ramphele’s party, provisionally named Agang (“to build” in the Sepedi language). Leftists dismiss it as a capitalist party, and their stance is lent some credence by Ramphele’s recent senior positions in the World Bank and a major mining house, and by her concern to make South African economically productive, competitive and investor-friendly. At the same time she professes concern for “workers and poor people” betrayed by a “new elite,” and her policy portfolio is for now too vague to pigeonhole. Notwithstanding Marxist rhetoric emanating from in and around the ANC, there is not all that much by way of concrete economic policy to tell South Africa’s political parties apart. No significant electoral party calls for a break with capitalism; at the same time, none dare sound like rabid free marketers in a land so conscious of its gigantic inequalities. I expect Agang to meet more established electoral parties on the broad ground of the center-left.
What Ramphele stands for is similar to what . . .
Read more: Democratic Development in South Africa? Mamphela Ramphele’s New Party
Tuesday, February 26th, 2013 
Late Saturday night, I received an urgent email from Tomek Kitlinski “Bad, disturbing, but important news again,” followed by a brief description of a recent event in Poland and his extended thoughts about its meaning. Here, his report and reflections. -Jeff
February 23, 2013, a lecture by Adam Michnik, the foremost dissident against Communism, author, editor-in-chief of Poland’s leading broadsheet Gazeta Wyborcza and regular contributor to The New York Review of Books, was disrupted by a group of Polish ultranationalists. Michnik is Eastern Europe’s most outstanding public intellectual whose books, articles, and, before 1989, writings from prison have shaped the thinking and acting for freedom in our region. Esprit, erudition and engagement in pro-democracy struggle make him an exceptional social philosopher and activist. As Gazeta reported, on Saturday in the city of Radom a group of young people in balaclavas and masks attempted to disrupt Michnik’s talk and chanted “National Radom! National Radom!” A scuffle erupted. The far-right All Polish Youth militiamen were shouting during the lecture.
The disruption of the Michnik lecture follows a pattern of aggression in Poland and among its neighbors. Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria and Russia are gripped by culture wars, as I have explored here. The Polish cultural war is ongoing.
Recently at the University of Warsaw, neo-Nazis threatened a lecture by the feminist philosopher Magdalena Sroda. Ten years ago in Lublin, while Professor Maria Szyszkowska and I were giving speeches about the lesbian and gay visibility campaign Let Us Be Seen, a pack of skinheads marched in and out of the hall, stamping their boots loudly in an effort to distract us. This pattern of disturbing university events could not be more dangerous. Michnik this week is, once again, a focal point of repressive anger.
While ultranationalists hate Adam Michnik for his message of inclusive democracy and they also loathe feminists, LGBT and poetry, Michnik often goes back to his inspiration and friend, the Nobel Prize winning poet, Czeslaw Milosz, who was the object of nationalist outrage over . . .
Read more: Michnik Attacked: The Polish Culture War Escalates
Sunday, February 24th, 2013 
To skip this introduction and go directly to read Daniel Dayan’s In-Depth Analysis, “Overhearing in the Public Sphere,” click here.
Daniel Dayan in today’s “In-Depth” post considers overhearing on a global scale. He investigates a simple formula: overhearing + global media = public crisis. He starts with a little anecdote, a personal experience at an academic conference in Sweden, and uses the anecdote to open an examination of major challenges of our times: differentiating, maintaining and then connecting public spheres, which resist the twin dangers of fragmentation from within, and global confusion. As usual, his is an elegant and provocative inquiry.
I find particularly illuminating his concise definition of the public sphere: “a conversation between a given nation- state and the corresponding civil society, with central media connecting centers and peripheries,” along with his expansive discussion of how such spheres operate. He analyzes how such spheres are de-stabilized, and how they are interrupted, how overhearing and intruding have become a normal in global public life promising a more universal public, but delivering moral spectacles. Reflecting on the case of Gerard Depardieu and his relationship with Vladimir Putin, and on the WikiLeaks dump, Dayan warns of the dangers of irrational spectacle in the world of normalized overhearing and intrusion, and he notes the illuminating transparency of things near and far lead to unintended tragic effects.
And note how Dayan’s opening story presents a concrete compact rendering of his global diagnosis. I will respond to this in my next post.
To read Daniel Dayan’s In-Depth Analysis, “Overhearing in the Public Sphere,” click here.
Sunday, February 24th, 2013 1. Overhearing, intruding, my interview & Goffman
I was once invited to speak at a conference in Sigtuna, near Uppsala, in Sweden. The conference dealt with religious sociology and a few clerics were present. One of them was a famous Danish Imam, Abu Laban. He had ignited what came to be known as the Danish scandal of the Mohammed Cartoons (Favret-Saada 2007). I had exchanged a few words with him and was being interviewed by a Swedish newspaper. Abu Laban was seated nearby. In fact, he listened to the interview. Sometimes he nodded. Sometimes he smiled. I could hardly object to his presence without being rude. But then, the Imam started answering the questions that were put to me.
Although I do not remember how I reacted, what happened on that day illustrated a fundamental distinction established by Erving Goffman, between the “ratified” listeners of a verbal exchange and those who just happen to be there.
Being present and technically able to hear everything that is said does not make you a partner in a conversation. Unless “ratified” as a listener, you are just “overhearing.” An implicit protocol expects overhearers not to listen, since listening would amount to a form of eavesdropping. As to intervening, it clearly establishes that you have been overhearing and constitutes an additional transgression. Intervening takes overhearing one step further. It is, and was in the case of the Imam and me, an intrusion.
I believe that Goffman’s distinction between ratified participants and overhearers can be transposed on a larger scale, concerning those conversations societies hold with themselves under the name of “public sphere.”
2. Destabilized public spheres
Our vision of the public sphere is predicated on the implicit model of a conversation between a given nation- state and the corresponding civil society, with central media connecting centers and peripheries. This geography of centers and peripheries has been submitted to many waves of destabilization. After having been structured for a long time in national terms and dominated by central television organizations, public spheres have grown in a number of directions, most of which involve a post-national dimension. Three such directions are particularly significant.
First, mega television networks offer world audiences vantage points . . .
Read more: Overhearing in the Public Sphere
Friday, February 22nd, 2013 
 With the Italian general elections of 24-25 February 2013 around the corner, electoral campaigns are putting the country upside down. Nothing out of the ordinary, though competition among Italian politicians always seems to go a little further than elsewhere in the Western world. Only recently Berlusconi made a “shock” announcement, promising not only to abolish the council tax Mario Monti’s government introduced if his center-right coalition wins the elections, but even to refund Italians for the council tax that has already been paid in 2012. Just this week, a letter – highly reminiscent of an official income revenue document – with details on how to claim the money back was sent to millions of voters. In a more pathetic vein, various political leaders posed before cameras or appeared on TV shows cuddling puppies in an attempt to win over the Italian electorate.
With Italian media being largely compromised by political parties, cooperative companies, media and business magnates and financial strongholds, Italians have remained with only two real outlets for their frustration and disillusionment with contemporary politics and society, the Internet and satire. Blunders, scandals and a wide array of political issues that leak out into the public sphere instantly reach the web, where people vent their anger or have a (bitter) laugh at the guilty party by leaving comments on Twitter or circulating satirical cartoons on Facebook. And then there is satire, a particularly popular means of political criticism and contestation in Italy. Of course it is not new, and has been applied for a long time in the democratic world. Yet, with the various political scandals of the past year, as well as Monti’s harsh austerity policies and rigid attitude, seemingly unconcerned with the disastrous effects of these measures on the lives of many Italians, political satire in Italy is increasingly putting the finger on the sore spots, serving as a sort of mediatized vox populi.
And political satire is increasingly becoming a site of contestation. In mid-February, for example, Maurizio Crozza – best known for the satirical impersonations of politicians during his ten minute sketch on . . .
Read more: The Upcoming Italian Elections and the Seamy Side of Satire
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