Goin’ Fishing? Not quite, but things here at Deliberately Considered are slowing down for the summer, as I go to teach in the Democracy and Diversity Institute in Wroclaw, Poland, and then to take part in a research project on Regime and Society in Eastern Europe (1956 – 1989) in Sofia, Bulgaria. After three years of regular, often daily, publishing, posts will be less frequent until September. At that time, we will be presenting Deliberately Considered in a new form.

Here some quick thoughts on topics I would like to write about now, but don’t have the time or energy to do so thoroughly.

On Egypt: I am fascinated by the grayness of it all: the unbearable grayness of being? I don’t see heroic figures or villains. Rather I see mortals, tragic figures, facing huge challenges, beyond their capacity to address.

Most objective observers are labeling the latest turn of events as a coup, but that seems to me to be too simple. Equally simplistic is the view of those who see the events as a clear political advance. A democratically elected leader, President Morsi, was overthrown by the military, not a good thing. But there was a significant popular movement, perhaps representing more than fifty per cent of the public, demanding the resignation of Morsi and new elections, and a resetting of the political order, which didn’t include them and their opinions, and didn’t provide the mechanisms for recalling the President. Yet, a legitimate President, from the point of view of many of the over fifty percent that voted for him, has been removed by the military. While I am no fan of military interventions in politics, I know that there is a real danger when a party confuses its particular interests with the common good. Yet, while lack of inclusion was a key problem in the Muslim Brotherhood led regime, it continues to be a problem as reports today indicate a crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood.

On Obama, the NSA and Snowden: I am disappointed, dismayed and irritated. National security is the one arena in which I have been least satisfied with Obama’s Presidency. I had wanted a clear line to be drawn between the policies of Bush and Cheney, and Obama’s. The compromised civil liberties and the continued escalation of surveillance revealed by Snowden’s leaks, alas, indicate continuity rather than change. I think the leaks serve good purpose. I also think the arguments Obama presented in his national security speech provide reasonable grounds for the criticism of the administrations surveillance policies. There is, indeed, a need for a consequential national conversation on the continued ways the war on terror has compromised civil liberties in the United States and beyond. Obama seems to recognize this, but he has not facilitated the discussion, to say the least. On the other hand, I can’t stand the self-righteous, self-serving arguments of Snowden and his chief supporters, Glenn Greenwald and WikiLeaks. The demonization of the U.S. and Obama, the absolute certainty that all surveillance is about the projection of oppressive power – is not serious. As I felt after the attacks of 9/11, I find the critics of official policy as dismaying as the official policy itself. And the melodrama of Snowden’s search for asylum makes matters worse. Why didn’t he stand his ground on principle in the U.S.? Seeking asylum in countries with regimes with questionable human rights records is irritating and confuses important issues, as does the 24/7 news treatment of Snowden’s latest whereabouts and likely endpoint.

Politics and the social condition: I think the NSA revelations and the events in Egypt underscore the reasons for studying social dilemmas as they are knitted into the fabric of social and political life. Iddo Tavory and I are working hard on this over the “summer vacation.” I am leaning heavily on Hannah Arendt, he on Jean Paul Sartre. We believe that there is something missing in social science. It oversimplifies. Today I am thinking about the political significance of our project. If Obama and his critics would recognize, discuss and act upon complexity, perhaps the line between then and now, between Bush and Obama, would be drawn. Perhaps, if all parties recognized the problems of inclusion, democracy and social justice could be constituted in Egypt. I know this may sound naïve, another example of my easy hopefulness. But consider the alternative: without the recognition and understanding of dilemmas, the political challenges in Egypt and between Obama and his critics can’t be resolved.

The Ironies of Consequence: Daniel Dayan and I are talking about analyzing the interaction of what I call “the politics of small things” and what he calls “monstration.” We have had many discussions on this, public and private, in classrooms, at conferences, and in very pleasant meetings in our favorite cafes, and at our homes in New York and Paris. In our last meeting, in the spring, we agreed that our focus would be on what we are calling “the ironies of consequence.” Apparently trivial things sometimes have major consequences, while what appears to be of major significance, has little consequence. And there is also much in between. Take the recent surveillance revelations: it is striking how popular and elite European responses were strong, while the American public and political leadership responded quite weakly. The Americans responded as cynical world-weary cosmopolitans, apparently understanding the ways of the world and power, while the Europeans at least feigned outrage, appalled that a security apparatus uses state of the art methods to gather information on foreign and domestic citizens, and other states, both friend and foe. Media reporting, I believe, shapes this. I wish I had time to show it. I think as I did, I would also be showing how unstable these responses are.

This will have to wait for a couple of months. We will continue to publish pieces occasionally, deliberately, but less frequently, responding to the events of the day. In the pipeline: Helena Chmielewska-Szlajfer’s “Reflections on Al Qaeda in Mali and Other Radicals at the Gates,” and Susan Pearce’s update on the cultural shutdown in Bosnia and Herzegovina and her report on the LGBT pride parade in Istanbul.

“At the time the circumstances of my arrest in Poland seemed trivial. I hardly thought about them afterward. But now, when I consider the fall of 1989, and the fall of communism, my little run in with the Polish authorities seems highly suggestive of how things were then and what has since come to be.”

With these words, I opened my book After the Fall: The Pursuit of Democracy in Central Europe. I used a description of my brief detention in Lublin at a student theater festival to reveal the struggle for a free public in Communist times. I used my memory of the event to open my exploration of the relationships between public and private, and how the relationships formed the bases for the pursuit of democracy of post communist Central Europe.

In today’s post, I return to my experience in 1974 (drawing from the report in my book) to further my dialogue with Dayan Dayan, as we explore together the relationship between “monstration” and power. I report here first my recollections of my “trivial day” and why what seemed so unimportant at the time was of practical significance in Poland back then. I close by highlighting what I take to be the theoretical significance of my little story.

The Arrest

Disorientation is what I remember about that April afternoon in Lublin, when the People’s Militia detained me for a couple of hours. I was attending a Festival of Youth Theaters. The bulk of the theater presentations in Lublin that week were not very interesting. Some of the best theater groups of the Polish youth movement were not represented in this relatively minor festival, and others of mediocre quality were in great number. Veteran theater critics, journalists, directors, and actors were generally dissatisfied, particularly with one performance I attended, billed as a “happening.” It took place in a gymnasium and involved little more than a rock soundtrack, a colorful slide show, and some student actors playing with an orange and yellow sheet. When it ended, a group of Polish journalists wanted to make things more interesting. They grabbed the sheet and spread it over themselves. They stood on one another’s shoulders, made pyramids, and horsed around. And then they decided to go outside with their merrymaking and turn the pseudo-happening into the real thing.

The journalists under the sheet led the other members of the audience, along with the actors of the failed performance, down two flights of stairs onto a busy thoroughfare in downtown Lublin. And as soon as they hit the street, their act of ordinary horseplay became a public event. Crowds formed on both sides of the street. Theater participants mingled with shoppers, clerks, and workers in marveling at an open spontaneous public event.

But a few others, particularly one man in an oversized trench coat, seemed to be offended. He and a woman companion started shouting at those under the sheet: “You will hurt yourselves!” “Not only yourselves, but others!” “You can’t breathe properly under there!” And the like. With a refined, cosmopolitan sense of what happenings were supposed to provoke, the theater people laughed and enjoyed the couple’s contribution to the show. Others just scoffed at them and shouted back at them to leave the kids alone. The couple left. With that the interest of the passersby dissipated, and the happening moved on. The sheet-being turned up a side street and draped itself over a small Italian Fiat 850-S with German tourist license plates: my car.

Some friends coaxed me into the car with the sheet performers. When it was clear that the next logical step was to start the engine, at my Polish colleagues’ instigation, I turned on the ignition. Ten seconds later, the man in the oversized trench coat swept the sheet off my car and, with a paddy wagon behind him, showed us his identification. He was with the People’s Militia, and he politely indicated that we were to follow him.

At the militia headquarters, we had to hand in our papers. The Poles presented their personal “legitimacja,” I my American passport. Then we were taken to a secured lockup area. I presented unanticipated problems. They hadn’t expected an American to be at this obscure performance, let alone at a place where the divide between theater performance and political order had been breached. They wanted to put an end to the event in as uncompromising a way as possible. But the officers on duty did not seem to have the authority to either release us, or further process our detention.

They told us that they had to confirm our story with the theater festival organizers. But first they confiscated film from the cameras of the journalist photographers. And then we waited.

While we were locked up in the militia station, my Polish friends, veterans of Poland’s subtle politics of cultural life, assured me that nothing serious would happen. They realistically assessed our situation. If I weren’t there, some greater unpleasantness might ensue. Maybe they would be detained without being formally charged for the permissible forty-eight hours. But our little escapade on the street was not really significant, and the city wouldn’t want to risk an international incident over it. Indeed, the local party hacks might have been afraid that their actions would meet disapproval in Warsaw. It was the era of détente. Poland was experiencing an apparent economic boom based on loans from Western governments and banks. Tensions were relaxed and political muscle was not to be flexed. Therefore, the Poles predicted that we would wait for a few hours and then would be warned and released. And they turned out to be right. After two hours, our papers were returned (though not the film) and we were released with a warning not to take part again in “an unauthorized theater event.”

In spite of the benign outcome, when I returned to the festival and later to my apartment in Warsaw, I was shaken up. I had not intended to become involved in Polish politics, except to study its relation to Polish culture. I knew the relationship was intimate, but hadn’t expected to be caught up in it. Yet, the whole adventure almost immediately became the subject of jokes, and I soon forgot it. But I was to be reminded of it again.

A photographer in our group, it seemed, had somehow managed to retain a roll of film documenting what had happened. And months after the event, a weekly newspaper in Krakow, Student, published an account – not a news story, but a comic-book rendition of Little Red Riding Hood. The sheet-being was depicted as Little Red Riding Hood, and the city street became the forest in which we met the Big Bad Wolf: the undercover agent who finally showed his teeth when we were in Grandmother’s House – my car. The newspaper didn’t reveal all of the circumstances of the arrest, but it clearly showed the political police doing its work.

In retrospect, I realize that this happening was more successful than any other I have observed or read about. It crossed the divide between the aesthetic and the social, and it developed a life of its own, encompassing a large and formidable territory. These reflections included. It began inside its own repressive context: it was confined to a gymnasium, because the authorities did not permit performances outside of conventional settings. The authorities wanted only channeled innovation, knowing that without the proper channels, cultural autonomy might not easily find acceptable limits. But those in the world of theater, as well as in the other arts and sciences, pushed limits as a matter of fundamental principle; and in Lublin that day, they improvised.

This activity of the young intellectuals was part of a long struggle with totalized political regimes over the issue of free public space. The happening revealed the nature of the battlefield. On the one side were the soft and hard totalitarians. On the other side were those who provoked the rulers, who struggled for room to act on their own, who were true to their cultural vocations, and those who saw the room so created, enjoyed it, and became collaborators with their resistance.

For the authorities, youth theater was a safety valve. For those involved in this theater, well understanding their situation, it was a base for freedom and for what I call the politics of small things.

The Ironies of Consequence

I discussed this event in Paris with Daniel Dayan and his student at Sciences Po. My key reasons for recalling that long ago, far away event here and in Paris: the Polish authorities worked to keep free speech and action as invisible as possible. The project of monstration, of showing such speech and action to a public, was enacted on that day in an improvised street theater happening, leading to my arrest. The authorities worked to restrict visibility, as my Polish friends and I worked to expand it. They wanted to block the show, but months later a Polish newspaper, retold the story as a fairy tale, elliptically but clearly monstrated the repressive apparatus in action. This media institution witnessed, recorded, translated (avoiding censorship) and illustrated the workings of both the power of the Party State and of an emerging opposition to this power before this opposition was organized. Later this power developed more fully in Poland and around the old Soviet bloc, with internal and international media reporting. It is important to note that the showing on that day in Lublin and later in the Krakow newspaper in important ways made the later developments possible. A seemingly trivial event, after the fact, was consequential. Dayan and I are struck by this, by the ironies of consequence, when the small turns out to be large, and the large, small. The monstration of official politics and the politics of small thing, needs careful examination.

To be continued…

I recently returned from a very enjoyable and very fruitful week in Paris, combining business with pleasure. I spent time with family, and also enjoyed a series of meetings with my dear friend and colleague, Daniel Dayan. We continued our long-term discussions and debates, moving forward to a more concerted effort, imagining more focused work together. His semiotical approach to power will inform my sociological approach and visa versa, with Roland Barthes, Victor Turner, Hannah Arendt and Erving Goffman as our guides. At least that is one way I am thinking about it now. Or as Daniel put it a while back in an earlier discussion: my politics of small things will combine with his analysis of the politics of even smaller things.

We had three meetings in Paris, a public discussion with his media class at Science Po, an extended working breakfast and lunch at two different Parisian cafés, and a beautiful dinner at his place, good food and talk throughout. I fear I haven’t properly thanked him for his wonderful hospitality.

At Sciences Po, Dayan presented a lecture to his class and I responded. This followed a format of public discussion we first developed in our co-taught course at The New School in 2010. He spoke about his theory of media “monstration,” how the media show, focusing attention of a socially constituted public. He highlighted the social theory behind his, pointing to Axel Honneth on recognition and Nancy Fraser’s critique of Honneth, Michel Foucault on the changing styles of visibility: from spectacle to surveillance, Luc Boltanski on the mediation of distant suffering and especially J. L. Austin on speech acts.

At the center of Dayan’s interest is his metaphor of “the media as the top of the iceberg.” He imagines a society’s life, people showing each other things, as involving a great complexity of human actions and interactions, mostly submerged below the surface of broad public perception, not visible for public view. The media’s role is to go down and bring up, deciding what is important, what is worthy of attention, to show and illuminate. As Austin was interested in the fact that sometimes the mere articulation of speech – “acts,” Dayan is interested in how “media act.” By making some things apparent, and some not, they set the agenda, both forming and informing publics.

A key activity of the media, then, is witnessing, where the media record, translate and illustrate for its public. This is Dayan’s framework, as I understand it, most interesting in the details of its application as it provides a means to consider the relationship between media and power. Daniel draws on Austin here. He makes fine distinctions concerning media expression, applying to the media Austin’s terms: exercitives, verdictives, commissives, expositives and behavitives. As he explains it, this makes sense. But I have a concern, which he and I discussed at length.

Dayan focuses on the relationship between the media and power, making fine distinctions, applying Austin as a way of analyzing forms of expression and showing, but he does not make what I take to be the important distinctions between forms of power. Not only the disciplining power of the truth regime in the fashion of Foucault, and the Weberian notion of coercive power and its legitimation, but also the notion of power that emerges from the capacity of a group of people to speak to each other as equals, reveal their individual qualities through their individual actions and then develop the capacity to act in concert. In his presentation at Science Po, Dayan didn’t present in his framework how the media facilitate political power in the sense of Hannah Arendt. I pointed this out, and we discussed this extensively. We did not disagree; rather, we saw the topic of media and power from different directions, with different perspectives.

I illustrated my point by discussing gay marriage, an issue in the news that day in both France and the United States. In the U.S.: the opening hearings at the Supreme Court concerning two cases, one focused on the Federal Defense of Marriage Act and the other focused on a California referendum on gay marriage was widely reported. In France: at the same time, also widely reported, there was a mass demonstration in Paris against gay marriage, against a likely new law (since enacted) legalizing marriage equality. I noted that from the American court hearings commentators judged that it is highly likely that the official recognition of gay marriage would proceed, pushed by broad popular support, while in France, the legislation yielding the same result was meeting popular resistance. There is an interesting irony here.

Media monstration of actions in the Supreme Court revealed the relationship between official power and the power of concerted action. The popular support for gay marriage was a result of a long media monstrating march, from the Stonewall Riots to the Supreme Court, LGBT rights have been emerging as American commonsense. Gay activists meeting, talking and acting together, seen by their friends and colleagues, but also by many strangers thanks to media presentations, have appeared as normal citizens, worthy of full citizens rights. As Daniel and I might put it, the politics of small things became large, through monstration.

In the meanwhile in France, marriage equality’s road to legalization was more a consequence of big politics. It was part of the Socialist Party Platform, upon which François Hollande ran. Public opinion had not been clearly formed around the issue. More popular was the longstanding traditional commonsense that marriage, and more specifically parenting, should be between a man and a woman, and not between two men or two women. The long road of the politics of small things, shown by the media didn’t exist. While in the U.S. the story was of a conservative Supreme Court trying to keep up with changes in the society, in France official power was ahead of public opinion, at least this is the way it looked at the time of our discussion.

Dayan and I don’t completely agree on marriage equality, and more specifically on the importance of parenting equality. Yet, we both saw in this example (and others we discussed during my visit and our discussions) a platform for dialogue, about the connections among the politics of small things, big politics, monstration, and media and publics.

At our breakfast, lunch and dinner, we explored this. We discussed his ideas about media and hospitality, the analogy between media and museums, my concern that we have to consider not only the media, but also media as a facilitator of all social interaction, monstration as a sphere of gesture (thus our common interest in the sociology of Erving Goffman), the media as a system of monstrative institutions, the relationship between the new (small) media and big media, terrorism as it monstrates, our topic, and Israel – Palestine (a zone of conflict about which we disagree) and “politics as if.”

The politics of the consequential and the inconsequential: people, activities, events and monstrations, the relevance of irrelevance, this fascinates us. We will continue to work on it, and we will report here about our progress, from time to time. I will explain more in my next post.

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.

To skip this introduction and go directly to Daniel Dayan’s In-Depth Analysis, “On Un-publics: Former Publics, Future Publics, Almost Publics, Observers and Genealogies,” click here.

In today’s “in depth” post, Daniel Dayan examines publics in depth, from different analytic viewpoints, drawing upon the insights of a broad range of thinkers. Dayan considers what comes before and after “publics,” the diversity of types of publics, their relationships, their life histories, how their projects are realized, or not, how they are related to audiences. He analyzes the way publics perform and show, how they watch and are watched. It is an elegant and challenging rumination, valuable, because it clarifies how thinkers who often don’t seem to understand each other are actually talking to each other in a serious way. And I should add that the study of publics is especially important to me because it is my field, and Daniel and I have been talking about it for a long time. This piece advances the conversation.

I was struck by a number of telling observations, one particularly hits close to my intellectual home, related to my research on Polish theater, and my colleague, Eiko Ikegami’s studies of “linked poetry,” in her book Bonds of Civility.

“Aesthetic publics (the reading publics of literature, the active publics of theater, the connoisseur publics of music and the arts) have always been singled out as exemplary by theorists of the public sphere, and by Habermas in particular. Yet, despite this ostensible privilege, aesthetic publics have been often ignored, or analyzed as mere training grounds for political publics. ‘Salons’ were first celebrated, and then turned into antechambers to the streets. Interestingly the publics, which tend to be best studied, are political publics. Aesthetic publics have been often neglected. This is why approaches that pay aesthetic publics more than a lip service, approaches such as those of Goldfarb (2006) or Ikegami (2000) are so important.”

Ikegami and I examine the relationship between art and politics through the analysis of publics. Dayan approves. He notes that aesthetic publics have been an important topic over the years, and wonders why they have been celebrated, but then are reduced to being a means to an end, aesthetics on the road to politics. He notes that this is unsatisfactory, but really doesn’t explain why this has happened. Is it just an accident of intellectual history? He suggests that it is more than this, but doesn’t explain. I think a primary reason may be that from the point of view of publics the relationship between aesthetics and politics is often counter-intuitive, and it requires closer attention to cultural form, and the social relations surrounding such form, than analysts are willing or able to invest.

Ikegami focuses on how aesthetics create networks of relationships that are distance from the official hierarchies, Alternative social relationships are possible because they are not political in the official sense, but exactly because of this, they challenge official hierarchies. I noted a similar paradox in my study of alternative theater in Poland. A key to the persistence of the autonomy of theatrical works, and their political impact, was their focus on the artistic form of theater. I once noted that the political impact of theater was established by keeping politics out of the theater, as I put it, bringing politics in, by keeping it out.

A couple of years ago, I invited Eiko Ikegami to attend my class on the sociology of publics, when we were studying her book. Dayan joined us. It was the highpoint of the seminar. Here Dayan continues our discussion, pushing it forward, opening it to a broader public, as he explains the significance of such a move. I will publish at least one further Dayan post on this theme next week (I am hoping there will be another soon after), and I will respond more fully in due course.

To read Daniel Dayan’s In-Depth Analysis, “On Un-publics: Former Publics, Future Publics, Almost Publics, Observers and Genealogies,” click here.

I couldn’t sleep last night, haunted by a world gone crazy.

I dreamt that a purported Israeli, with the support of one hundred rich American Jews, pretended to make a feature length film aggressively mocking the Prophet Mohammed and Muslims in general – Islamophobia and anti-Semitism combined!

The faux film producer uploaded a mock trailer to YouTube. Along with thousands of other clips, it was ignored. But then when the film was dubbed into Arabic, the demagogues of the world all played their roles – the clash of civilizations as mediated performance art.

Radical Islamic clerics worked as film distributors (monstrous monstrators as my Daniel Dayan might put it), bringing the clip to the attention of the mass media and the masses. Islamist and anti-Islamist ideologues worked up their followers, happily supporting each other in their parts. Feckless diplomats in embassies tried to assure the public that hate-speech isn’t official American policy. Analysts identified root causes.

The clash of civilizations was confirmed. All the players needed each other, supported each other, depended on each other. A marvelous demonstration of social construction: W.I. Thomas would be proud of the power of his insight. Social actors defined the clash of civilizations as real, and it is real in its consequences.

A reality confirmed with a jolt when I awoke, knowing full well about the global attacks on American embassies and symbols, and the tragic death of a man who was determined to go beyond clashing clichés, the heroic American ambassador to Libya, Chris Stevens. The American right, including the marvelous Mitt Romney and Fox News talking heads, denounced President Obama’s purported support of the attacks and failure to stand up for American values, including the freedom of speech — this from people who worry about the war on Christmas. It’s a surreal reality this morning.

And this morning, wide-awake, I am savoring Marvelous Mitt’s recent video performance: right-wing newspeak de-constructed. At last, class warfare in America has been given a full public airing. In pitching his candidacy with his fellow fat-cats, Romney revealed his definition of job producers, the nature of dependency and the work ethic. He also showed himself to be a true student of Ayn Rand. Really, all who depend on government vote for Obama and the Democrats? No wonder he selected Paul Ryan. Identifying those who don’t pay federal income taxes with votes for Democrats is amazingly poor sociology, bordering on comedy, a point made beautifully in a letter to the editor in today’s New York Times.

To the Editor:

I woke up early this morning and drove my daughter several miles on a government-built road, all the way to a government-operated school.

I came back to my home — for which I receive a government-sanctioned mortgage-interest deduction — and called my parents, who both receive Social Security and Medicare from the government. Then I signed on to the Internet, which was developed by government-sponsored researchers.

So Mitt Romney is right, on two counts. I am “dependent upon government.” And I’m not voting for him.

JONATHAN ZIMMERMAN
New York, Sept. 18, 2012

The Democrats in the first two days of their convention manufactured news. But I think it is important to understand that it wasn’t propaganda or an infomercial, as many overly cynical academics and commentators would suggest, from Noam Chomsky to Joe Nocera. Rather, like the Republican Convention last week, it was a modern day media event, a televisual combination of demonstration and manifesto, revealing, or as my friend and colleague Daniel Dayan would put it “monstrating,” where the party stands, who stands with the party, how it accounts for the past, present and future. The first two days were particularly about the past and the present, identifying the party. Today, Obama will chart the future. This, at least, is how I understand the storyline. We will know, soon enough, if I am right.

The structure of the presentation, thus far, has been interesting and informative. There was a clear understanding on the part of the convention planners. Before 10:00 PM, without the major networks broadcasting, with a much smaller audience watching, was the demonstration slot. It was the time for showing the stand of the party and demonstrating who stands behind it. Between 10:00 and 11:00 PM, with the full prime time audience watching, the manifesto was presented by the major speakers: on Tuesday, Mayor Julián Castro of San Antonio and First Lady Michelle Obama, on Wednesday, Massachusetts Senate candidate, Elizabeth Warren, and former President Bill Clinton.

The coherence of the Democrats’ presentation was striking. This contrasted with the Republican convention, in which candidate and platform were in tension, and the personal qualities and not the political plans of the candidate took priority, and the speeches didn’t add up. The worst of it was Eastwood’s performance piece. It represented accurately the state of the party, with its pure ideological commitments and tensions, as I have already discussed here earlier during the primary season.

The Democrats revealed some differences of opinion, in symbolic floor scuffle on God and Jerusalem (pandering nonsense it seems to me), and also as the more left of center Warren gave a full throated critique of Wall Street, while Clinton more explicitly and softly appealed to the center (see video below). Yet the party was clearly united in its support of Obama and its recognition of his first term achievements, expressing its unity and diversity in the speeches in their embodied words.

Two examples, not given much attention, politically clear, elegantly presented:

Jared Polis, Member of the U.S. House of Representatives, Colorado –

My name is Jared Polis. My great-grandparents were immigrants. I am Jewish. I am gay. I am a father. I am a son. I am an entrepreneur. I am a congressman from Colorado. I am always an optimist. But first and foremost, I am an American.

And the America I believe in is the America Barack Obama believes in.

A severely wounded Iraq veteran, “one of the first Army women to fly combat missions in Iraq,” Tammy Duckworth, candidate for the US House of Representatives, Illinois, walked up to the podium on two prosthetic legs. She described how she grew up in the family of an impoverished Vietnam veteran, and explained how her family managed and she advanced herself through food stamps, public education and Pell grants. This enabled her to finish high school and college, going on to earn her command of a Blackhawk helicopter company. She testified to her work with President Obama.

President Obama asked me to help keep our sacred trust with veterans of all eras at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. We worked to end the outrage of vets having to sleep on the same streets they once defended. We improved services for female veterans. I reached out to young vets by creating the Office for Online Communications.

Barack Obama has also lived up to his responsibilities as commander-in-chief, ending the war in Iraq, refocusing on Afghanistan and eradicating terrorist leaders including bin Laden. President Obama pushed for fairness in the military, listening to commanders as we ended “don’t ask, don’t tell,” and on how to allow women to officially serve in more combat jobs—because America’s daughters are just as capable of defending liberty as her sons.

And there were many more speeches that fit a pattern which I think is of crucial importance. Each testified not only to their political support of the President, but also to the crucial difference between the major themes of the Democratic Party as opposed to the Republican: Government can and has been a part of the solution, not the primary problem.

On women’s rights this was expressed most directly by Cecile Richards,  Lilly Ledbetter,  and Sandra Fluke. Each spoke about their specific experience, highlighted the principles they drew from the experience and indicated how this points in the direction of appreciating the achievement and promise of President Obama. Experience, not abstract ideological commitment, illuminated the political approach.

Thus, the remarkable elegance of Michelle Obama’s speech.  It had an apparently traditional approach, too traditional for some of my friends. The wife of the President spoke to his human side, about her concerns for their family as he decided to run, and about her conviction that their decision to proceed on this course was good for them and good for the nation. She testified to the quality of his character, as Ann Romney testified to the quality of her husband. But Mrs. Obama went further. His political project, and her support of it, emerges from their experience and what they have in common with their fellow citizens. The First Lady, and many of the other speakers at the convention, gave substance to the classic feminist slogan: the personal is political.

This was beautifully revealed as well the keynote address by Julián Castro. He poignantly expressed his version of the Barack Obama rendering of the American dream and the American experience (the high note of Obama’s keynote address), in Castro’s case as experienced by a Mexican American: hard work, support of family, government help, including support for education, with aid from and given to community, and, thus, out of many, the singular American success story. Benita Veliz testified to this Latin American variation on the American dream, by illuminating how it is experienced by those who for no fault of their own came to the country undocumented. Congressman Luis Gutierrez applauded the President for his approach to immigration in stark contrast to Mitt Romney and his policy of “self deportation.”

President Clinton brought these strands and others together in a remarkable speech last night. If you haven’t yet, it is worth viewing in full. In form and content, it is a masterpiece. His focus mirrored the deep concerns of the American public about the state of the economy, as he argued that President Obama has been successful in addressing the crisis and also succeeded in foreign policy and addressing many other issues (the speech was long). Clinton’s criticism of Romney – Ryan and the Republicans was forceful but presented with humor. He considered the contrast. He combined analysis of policy detail, with warm humorous affect and passionate commitment.

This afternoon the media chatter is that the President is going to have a hard time distinguishing himself, as he speaks this evening in the shadows of the former President and his wife, both of whom have higher approval ratings than he. My guess is that the President Obama will conclude the convention with a passionate statement concerning his plans and expectations for the second term, drawing on the power of the previous speakers, Bill Clinton and Michelle Obama, but also the many others. If he does, he will not only have greatly strengthened his chances for his re-election, but conclude a convention that in sum has communicated where the Democrats stand, who they are and what they plan to do.  The news from Charlotte was manufactured, but it still was important.

In today’s In-Depth post, which was presented at this year’s American Sociological Association Meeting in Denver, Lisa Lipscomb extends Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz analysis of media events to the new media and the new political environment. I am struck by how the analysis of Dayan and Katz still illuminates important political developments, and also appreciate how Lipscomb extension gives a fuller understanding of media politics of our day. Their work still shows how  institutionalized democracy is significantly constituted through television. She shows how extra institutional democratic forces, contributing to what Pierre Rosanvallon describes as counter-democracy, are manifested through Digital Events of the new electronic media.

Thus, the main events of this week and last: using the insights of Dayan and Katz, it is clear that the nominating conventions are anything but empty affairs. It is true that these conventions have long ago lost their instrumental purposes: before the fact everyone knew who the candidates for president and vice president would be, and the party platforms developed and passed at the conventions are ignored by the electorate and the politicians alike. Yet, the conventions still play a very important political role, ritualistically indicating that the election contest is now entering its decisive stage, and that it is now the time for all good men and women to come to the aid of their party (to paraphrase the old typing drill).

Indeed, the nominating ritual confirms both the substantial existence and appeal of and the attachment to each of the parties. They try to refine and shape their message and appeal, and in the process, they define the terms of the American political contest and debate.  In societies of the past, such rituals occurred face to face: not only in conventions and politics, but also in processions, coronations, funerals and holidays of all sorts, reported first by word of mouth, later through the written word and the printed page. The major finding of Dayan and Katz is that since radio and television, political ritual continues through a type of broadcast, “media events,”confirming the central ideals and identities of social orders, and the competing conventional alternatives, and the alternatives to the dominant ones, as Lipscomb cogently summarizes in her piece.

But things are clearly changing. The new electronic media connect citizens in new ways. The dominance of television, which Dayan and Katz assumed when they published their book in the early 90s, is now being eroded, something that deeply concerns Katz. He is not sure that the new media environment supports a common public world, a free public life necessary for democracy. He fears that fragmentation of public orders challenge democratic practice. His are real and important concerns. I applaud this former collaborator of Paul Lazarsfeld for continuing to probe the political consequences of media. Yet, we need to understand how new media are now constituting political subjectivity and connection.

This is what Lipscomb’s post considers by examining the formation of a global protest, “a digital media event,” the case of the video of the murder of Neda Agha Soltan at the hands of the Basij, a voluntary militia that takes its orders from Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khameini and its circulation through new media and old. She shows how a community of critical capacity comes to be formed, a most important development in the times of the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street and other new “new social movements.”

To read the full In-Depth Analysis “Digital Events: Media Rituals in the Digital Age” by Lisa Lipscomb, click here.

The woman in the video was later identified by her fiancée as Neda Agha Soltan. Neda lay dying on Kargar Ave. in Tehran, Iran Saturday June 20, 2009 during a post-election protest, allegedly shot in the chest by a member of the Basij, a voluntary militia that takes its orders from Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khameini. Using a cell phone, an anonymous bystander digitally captured the moments just after Neda was shot. According to news reports, the author of the video then contacted a virtual friend he had met through Facebook who lived in the Netherlands, and asked him to post the footage. The virtual friend, known only by his first name, Hamed, uploaded the footage to the Internet and sent copies to the BBC and The Guardian as well as other media outlets. Within hours, two distinct clips surfaced on Facebook and YouTube. Shortly thereafter, the video was broadcast by CNN, thus making “Neda” a household name (Langendonck, NRC Handelsblad, 2009).

Today, I am here to talk about how mobile and social media fit in to the ongoing discussions about media’s influence on public life. I am going to make this argument in three parts. First, by offering a brief overview of Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz’s concept of the “media event,” as outlined in their book of the same name, and more recent additions and amendments to this theory. I will then define what I call the “digital event” by looking at the capture, distribution and reaction to the Neda video. Finally, by examining the online and face-to-face response to the video, I hope to persuade you that the Internet and mobile media are able to bring about public awareness, elicit ritualized response online and in the streets, and therefore, recreate the sacred through bringing together publics in the same way that media events have.

Dayan and Katz defined a certain format of television programming, which they believed provide the public with a new way of attending a ceremony. The authors describe how a “media event” brings people together to participate in a historic, political or social occasion that takes the form of a televisual ceremony. Dayan and Katz identified three types of media events: the contest, the conquest and the coronation. Some examples of these include the Olympic games, Presidential elections, religious pilgrimages, space exploration and state weddings and funerals. Media events are unique in that, “they are, by definition, not routine. In fact, they are interruptions of routine; they intervene in the normal flow of broadcasting and our lives” (Dayan and Katz, 1992, p. 5). Most often, numerous stations broadcast the event simultaneously, nationally and/or internationally, without interruption, thus monopolizing the airwaves for the duration of the event. According to Dayan and Katz, the broadcast takeover facilitates the creation of a unifying experience and ultimately an arena of sacred space (Dayan and Katz, 1992, p. 89). Furthermore, the time-sensitive nature of the event functions to unite the public – those watching at home and those who are in attendance – and share the experience of witnessing a historic moment. Media events manipulate space and time, keeping the viewer far, but also near. The medium is able to bring outsiders in to an event of great social, historical or political importance. Even though the television viewer is not physically in attendance at the event, they participate almost as fully. In fact, the viewer at home is given the advantage of an unobstructed view and voice-over narration that is not offered for those in attendance.

The media event is a highly structured and delineated process. The ceremony or ritual is planned, scripted and often times rehearsed. It requires the cooperation and collaboration of many different people and agencies including broadcasters, event organizers, the event audience, the viewer at home and many times, the state. Additionally, the media event oftentimes relies on tradition to dictate how the event is presented, for example, in the case of a state wedding or funeral. Since agents outside the media and the television studio organize media events, the role of the medium is to provide the channel for transmission. Here, the format promotes public unification and community through ritual, tradition and celebration.

Media scholars have pointed out that the media event does not account for disruptions or conflict; for example, terrorist events, natural disaster coverage or the spectacle of war (Couldry, 2003; Cottle, 2006). “Media Events” was published before 9/11 and the global “War on Terror” and more recent theories have addressed this issue, updating and expanding upon the concept of the media event. Katz himself later argues that, “media events of the ceremonial kind seem to be receding in importance, maybe even in frequency, while the live broadcasting of disruptive events such as disaster, terror and war are taking center stage” (Couldry, 2010: 33). As I come to defining my notion of the “digital event,” I see it situated within the contextual framework of Simon Cottle’s concept of “mediatized rituals.” Cottle (2006) defines mediatized rituals as “those exceptional and performative media phenomena that serve to sustain and/or mobilize collective sentiments and solidarities on the basis of symbolization and a subjunctive orientation to what should or ought to be” (p. 415). He then sub-categorizes mediatized rituals into six theoretical arguments: moral panics; celebrated ‘media events’; contested ‘media events’; media disasters; mediated scandals and mediatized public crises. As we see it, Dayan and Katz’s concept is subsumed into the category of celebrated media events. On the other hand, digital events do not fit nicely into one of these categories. Since I am relating the notion of the “digital event” to the specific mode of communication, the theoretical approach can differ depending on the situation. The Neda video could be described as a “media disaster” and a “mediatized public crisis.”

Neda’s death itself, while certainly an event, is only a portion of the narrative of this “digital event.” In this situation, I see the digital event beginning when the witness started recording the situation. After he finishes recording, he pursues making the situation public by sending the footage to a friend who is able to upload it to the Internet and distribute it to news sources. Once public, there is an outpouring of reaction from online viewers, which takes the form of ritualized digital mourning and the reproduction, reposting, forwarding and linking of the video. Those that took to the streets after her death carried the image of her bloody face printed on posters and flyers.

The digital event is digital because many of its major components take place in or are facilitated by digital media, which includes mobile media like cell phones, or digital space, including the Internet and social networking websites. Time is the obsession of television whereas space is the obsession of digital media. Space in terms of location and geography and space in terms of capacity, capacity for memory: storing, archiving, uploading, sharing, remembering. Raymond Williams’ (1974) concept of “flow” is inevitably linked to discussions about the temporal nature of television. According to Williams, “This phenomenon of planned flow, is then perhaps the defining characteristics of broadcasting, simultaneously as a technology and as a cultural form” (p. 86). Televisual flow consists of the totality of television’s contents: news programs, documentary shows, narrative programming, etc. It has been repeated many times over that people watch television, not shows or programs. When it comes to event programming, for instance, Dayan & Katz’s “media events,” flow is interrupted. Mary Ann Doane (1990) argues that we can identify media events as such when the referent becomes indistinguishable from the medium (p. 222). Alternatively, the digital event is timely, but does not interrupt flow. In the case of the Neda video, once the mainstream media picked up the footage, they packaged and delivered it to the audience in the format of a crisis (Doane, 1990). However, the ritualized public response came as a result of the video’s digital presence and the interactions protestors and supporters were having online and in the streets.

Many actors are responsible for the success of the media event, which is also true for the digital event. Both digital and media events situate the audience in a participatory role. Granting regard in the form of attendance or visual participation establishes the media event as legitimate. Examining the technology or medium used is one way of understanding the medium’s unique characteristics and social capacities. As we have seen, the media event demands a passive audience. Although McLuhan described television as a “cool, low-definition” medium that requires the viewer to extract the meaning from a program, this is clearly not the case with media events as meaning is predetermined and calls on cultural scripts familiar to the viewer. In the case of the Neda video, the cell phone was used as an instrument of witnessing. Protestors had been recording the extreme violence on the streets from the start of the protests. Pictures and videos uploaded to YouTube, Twitter and Facebook show protesters holding their phones in the air recording what was taking place with hopes that others would also see. The digital event requires a high level of participation at every level or phase of the event. Citizen journalism was responsible for the publicity of the Neda video as well as the millions of viewers on YouTube, Twitter and Facebook that eventually took to the streets in memory and protest. July 25, 2009 was declared A Global Day of Action in Paris and a hundred other cities around the world. National Geographic photographer Reza printed 500 masks of a portrait of Neda and had protestors sit in front of the Eifel Tower for a photograph.

One of the distinguishing features of a digital event is that it does not require event organizers, pre-planning or scripting. The video of Neda was recorded and distributed by two individuals and did not require the mainstream media in order for it to gain widespread attention. However, the Neda video did eventually become subsumed into the mainstream media and was played unedited on many networks. In Iran, the media is controlled by the state; however, the Internet is proving to be problematic for the government. Despite government restrictions, what is happening on in the streets of Iran is being made visible around the world by way of digital media as well as mobilizing publics in the name of ritual protest online and in the streets. Neda’s death represented some of the fundamental injustices that brought the protestors out to the streets in the first place.

The digital event takes place everywhere and nowhere. In this case, Neda’s death was only witnessed in person by a handful of people. The cell phone provided a portal to a time, place and situation that would not have otherwise been available. Spatial boundaries became fluid; those outside Iran and unconnected to the protests became witnesses with the capacity to react and respond. In fact, the video was more accessible to those outside of Iran where there are less government restrictions regarding the media and the Internet. In large part, those outside Iran came to learn about Neda through YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. The mass media referred to the post-election protests as the “Twitter Revolution” and the “Facebook Revolution” in that each of these social networking sites was instrumental in bringing attention to and mobilizing those participating in the opposition movement. Additionally, the U.S. State Department urged Twitter not to push out a scheduled update because it would interrupt service and the events in Iran were tied to Twitter as a source of information and communication in a nation notorious for censorship.

During the height of the protests, those in the U.S. and other countries outside of Iran were changing their location on Twitter to Tehran, Iran in order to confuse the Iranian government, who many believed were targeting and performing online surveillance on election protestors. When someone creates a profile on Twitter, they can specify their location by choosing a time zone, which then appears on their Twitter profile page. Those who believed the Iranian government was targeting protestors through Twitter thought that it would be harder to track down the real protestors if everyone was declaring Tehran as their location. One individual using the name FORIRAN2009 tweeted, “Change timezone to Tehran – Disrupt Basiji (secret police) from tracking iranians.” Those not initially connected with the election or even every having any previous interest in Iran showed solidarity for the protestors after viewing the Neda video. In the days and weeks after her death, digital mourners continued to post links to the Neda video and also created slideshow and montage Neda tributes, wrote poems and songs in her honor, posted messages and changed their profile images to read “Where is THEIR Vote,” a reworking of the phrase “Where is MY Vote” that was being used by Iranian protestors. A user going by the name “Green4Iran” tweeted, “People in Iran: Shoot as many videos as you can and upload it. World is watching. Make sure the date well noted!”

AngelaChenShui tweeted, “VERY Graphic RT See 4 yourself the creation of a martyr http://bit.ly/9PVfO #iranelection #gr88 #Mousavi #mousavi1388 #Pray #Prayer #Freedom.”

Jonap tweeted, “Will Neda’s death be the rallying cry that Mousavi could not possibly be? #iranelection #neda.”

Rootvetwife tweeted, “RT They murdered #neda, but not her voice: http://bit.ly/14cX6p #iranelection.”

Inspiredkk tweeted, “#Neda in the hearts of the world. The most beautiful martyr in history. Shame on the mulahs, shame on the government. Neda lives…”

These and many similar messages were posted on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube over the days and weeks following Neda’s death. In response to her death, groups on Facebook were calling for her nomination as Time Magazine’s “Woman of the Year.” In 2010, a documentary called “For Neda” was released and is available for viewing in its entirety on YouTube. To this day people continue to mourn, ritualize and honor her as a martyr.

Neda’s death and the image of her dying gaze were instrumental in creating a thread of solidarity and collective mourning for protestors online and in the streets. The decision to look, to witness, to grant regard, to capture and archive and then make visible to a wider public no longer requires the massive collaboration of broadcasters, event organizers or the state. Dayan and Katz demonstrated that the sorts of ritual practices Durkheim studied are observable in the televisual age. I have tried to demonstrate that such practices are alive and well in the ritual dimension of the digital.

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 demonstration once again of what Vaclav Havel called “the power of the powerless.” I am now facilitating a wonderful workshop on this, with young scholars, investigating this power as it is constituted in Russia, Romania, Morocco and Poland, as well as the United States. More from them in the future.

To read the full In-Depth Analysis of “Fake vs. Fox News: OWS and Beyond,” click here.