A personal story

At the University of Chicago, I wrote my dissertation on a marginal theater movement on the other side of the iron curtain. I was studying alternative theaters in a polity, The Polish People’s Republic, which officially understood itself to be revolutionary, and that was analyzed by some critics, both internal and external, as being totalitarian. Thus, I read both On Revolution and The Origins of Totalitarianism. From the point of view of Arendt scholarship, the effects of these readings were minimal. From On Revolution, I came to understand her point about the difference between the French and the American revolutionary traditions, giving me insights into the Soviet tradition, but this barely effected my thinking back then. From The Origins, along with other works, I came to an understanding of the totalitarian model of Soviet society, a model that I rejected. My dissertation was formed as an empirical refutation of the model.

But then I went to the New School, and in the spring of 1981, I came to appreciate Arendt in a much more serious way. A student kept on asking odd questions in my course on political sociology. I would use key concepts, and he repeatedly challenged my usage. “Society,” “ideology,” “power,” “politics,” “authority,” “freedom:” I would use the terms in more or less conventional social scientific ways, and he would question me as an Arendt student. From me: society as a unit of human association; for him society as the confusion of the public and the private. I understood ideology as a distinctive metaphoric system that makes an autonomous politics possible (Geertz student that I was). He saw ideology as a specific historical development, a special type of modern thinking and of doing politics that connected past, present and future, and when linked with terror the cultural component of totalitarianism. I understood power, politics and authority, as all involving the interplay between culture and coercion, based in the latter, for him, careful distinctions should be made, showing that political power, based in freedom, is the opposite of coercion. I soon realized what was going on, and although he very much challenged my authority as a young Assistant Professor (31 at the time), teaching in a graduate course in which many of the students were older than me, and quite sophisticated, I was intrigued. What he was talking about suggested a way to understand something I was observing that I knew wasn’t properly appreciated.

That summer I read just about all of Arendt’s major works. I was especially moved by her approach to the problems of the public and her conceptualization of politics as the capacity for people to act in concert. This was an unusual time in my life, an unusual time in contemporary politics. The darkness of the twentieth century was being lightened from the margins, and only a few were able to see it.

I was then observing the beginnings of major transformations in the political landscape that were developing in Poland, but yet not broadly recognized. From this century, I can say now that I was observing the forces that ultimately led to the peaceful collapse of the Soviet Empire. When Arendt wrote about dark times, she referred to the era of modern tyranny, of the totalitarianism of the Nazi and Stalinist regimes. This was a time when the illumination of public acts was dimmed. She observed that:

“It is the function of the public realm to throw light on the affairs of men by providing a space of appearances in which they can show in deed and word, for better and worse, who they are and what they can do, then darkness has come when this light is extinguished…”

But, she also noted that:

“even in the darkest of times we have the right to expect some illumination, that such illumination may well come less from theories and concepts than from uncertain, flickering, and often weak light that some men and women, in their lives and their works, will kindle under almost all circumstances and shed over the time span that was given them on earth….”

She celebrated the acts of great individuals who shed such light in her book Men in Dark Times. In everyday actions, I saw in Poland the constitution of an alternative public space for such appearance in an emerging opposition movement that was then rapidly developing, leading a few months later to the establishment of Solidarnosc, the first independent union, the broad societal movement, constituting a free and open public space in a totalitarian order.

Yes, after my summer reading I gave up on my critique of the totalitarian model, or more precisely, I refined it. I came to understand that although there can be no totalitarian society, that there were totalitarian movements and regimes and their oppositions, and that sometimes the oppositions come in the form of heroic individuals, what Arendt wrote about, but at other times they took on broader public form. Her postscript to The Origins on the Hungary of 1956 (the 50th anniversary of which was celebrated a week ago) was my guide. Hannah and I, then, became very close.

Arendt was with me as I went off to understand what was happening in “the other Europe”, as Philip Roth would name it. In that Europe, in small interactions, big things were happening. People met each other and formed spaces of appearance apart from party-state definition. They spoke and acted freely in each other’s presence, revealing themselves and constituting alternative public spaces. They did so in theaters, in underground publications, in independent unions (first very small, after 1980 nationwide), in unofficial theaters, literary salons, bookstores and clubs. As I observed these developments, Hannah was my guide. With her guidance, I understood that the end of the activities of the opposition was to create a public space. That the question of whether the activities would lead to reform of the system (no one imagined its collapse) was really secondary. The constitution of a free public space was primary. That was the major transformation itself. It made it possible for people to be free. It provided dignity. And it created power that clearly would be consequential, although the exact consequences were unknown.

I even took part a bit; Adam Michnik and I created a semi clandestine democracy seminar based at the New School in New York with branches in Warsaw and Budapest. Our first reading was The Origins. The three groups each read the book and discussed it. The discussions were recorded and the proceedings exchanged. We functioned as an opposition activity from 1985 to 1989, and for about five years after, we functioned around the old bloc as an open activity. I will be happy to describe this in detail after my presentation, if any one is interested.

At the time, there was an everyday mundane feeling about these activities. But after the fact, it is clear to me that they were truly revolutionary. They were little gems of the lost revolutionary tradition that Arendt wrote about, and they speak to our present circumstances. This is what I am working on these days. Her guidance endures.

So let’s fast forward for a moment, to the new configuration of dark times, remembering Arendt’s counsel, “Dark times…are not only not new, they are not a rarity in history, although they were perhaps unknown in American history…”. From the point of view of New York, the U.S. is an exception no longer. “Darkness has come when this light [of the public] is extinguished by ‘credibility gaps’ and ‘invisible government,’ by speech that does not disclose what is, but sweeps it under the carpet, by exhortations, moral and otherwise, that, under the pretext of upholding old truths, degrade all truth to meaningless triviality.”

I have been thinking about this since the days immediately following the attacks of September 11, 2001, thinking that led to the publication of my most recent book: The Politics of Small Things: The Power of the Powerless in Dark Times. I try to accomplish a number of different things in my small book, things I attempted to very compactly express in its title. I have already explained quite a bit in this presentation. I have a feeling that in Arendt’s sense we do again live in dark times, but that they are different from the ones she knew. There are again struggles between gigantic forces of good and evil, in which both sides, moving both between East and West (think the war on terrorism), or North and South (think Chavez and Bush), darken the spaces of appearance. But, I also think that to appear, speak to each other, develop a capacity to act together, as theorized by Arendt, but also as described by the former Czech dissident and President, in his greatest work “The Power of the Powerless,” presents an alternative, a still significant “politics of small things.” And that its power can be formed in every day interactions, both face to face interactions and virtual ones using the new media.

Mine is an attempt to find the men and women in dark times who present alternatives. I do this by using the work of Arendt and Erving Goffman to explain how the grand narratives of terror and anti terror are not the only or even the most effective ways to address the pressing problems of our times. Terrorism is not the only weapon available to the oppressed, and militarized anti terrorism is not the only or even the most rational way to fight the very real dangers of global terrorism. I can obviously not make the case here. What I would like to do is to look at some details of the argument, as Hannah is with me. In that I am looking at mico interactions as the location for alternatives to the oppressions of the new grand narratives, the key theoretical issue is how can we tell when micropolitics is really an alternative, and when it is a sort of enactment of disciplinary powers of one larger regime or another. In my book, this problem presented itself as I attempted to show that the micropolitics of the Christian right and the anti-war left and the Dean campaign in the United States were not just presenting competing partisan positions in 2004 during the Presidential elections. The alternative was between a new and efficient authoritarian unfreedom and a new and promising free democratic politics. To get at the issue and to the theoretical center of my presentation today, I propose we look at the way Arendt explains the relation between truth and politics, and the way Michel Foucault postulates the relationship between truth and power. Let me be forthcoming, I do not think that they present competing positions accounting for the same thing, but complimentary accounts of two very different, even opposite phenomena.

Alternative Frameworks: Michel Foucault and Hannah Arendt

Foucault analyzes the problem of knowledge and power as the problem of the truth regime. Truth is a production of social practices and their discourses. It produces power and is controlled by it. There is no distance between truth and the powers. There are alternative powers with alternative truths. Foucault explains: “It is not a matter of emancipating truth from every system of power (which would be a chimera, for truth is already power) but of detaching truth from the forms of hegemony, social, economic, and cultural, within which it operates at the present time.” The analytic task is to explore truth regimes. The critical task is to do the “detaching.” The people developing the alternative publics around the old Soviet bloc, thus, can be understood as engaging in this sort of bodily detachment. But what is the value of it? Why choose one truth regime over another? Foucault does not explain. Arendt is critically suggestive in answering just these questions, as was my experience in the 80s. Now I will try to explain the crucial reason why she was such a help back then and how she provides a guide now.

Arendt maintains that there are two fundamentally different types of truth, factual versus philosophical truth, which have two very different relationships to political power. Factual truth (which is not part of Foucault’s scheme) must be the grounds upon which a free politics (which is also not part of Foucault’s scheme) is based. Philosophical truth must be radically separated from politics, the possibility of which Foucault denies. Her distinctions are made to facilitate an understanding of the nature of totalitarianism and its alternatives. This is crucial for the present inquiry, both for scholarly and for normative reasons. It centers on the constitution of public freedom and the possibilities of a democratic culture. Such constitution and possibility exist in and through the domain of a free public. While Foucault cannot distinguish between totalitarianism and liberalism, Arendt reveals how in the relationship between truth and power this crucial distinction is made. And we can thus recognize dark times and places, and also recognize the sources of light as alternatives.

In order to make the contrast between the two different types of truth clear, Arendt reflects upon the beginning of WWI. The causes of the war are open to interpretation. The aggressive intentions of Axis or the Allies can be emphasized, as can the intentional or the unanticipated consequences of political alliances. The state of capitalism and imperialism in crisis may be understood as being central. Yet, when it comes to the border of Belgium, it is factually the case that Germany invaded Belgium and not the other way around. A free politics cannot be based on an imposed interpretation. There must be an openness to opposing views. But a free politics also cannot be based on a factual lie, such as the proposition that Belgium’s invasion of Germany opened WWI. Modern liberal democracy requires a separation of politics from philosophical truth, but it must be based upon factual truths, in order for those who meet in public to share a common world in which they can interact politically. In modern tyranny, factual truth is expendable as a matter of principle, while the tyranny is based on a kind of philosophical truth, an ideology, an official interpretation of the facts. When Arendt highlights Trotsky as a kind of totalitarian everyman in The Origins, she observes that he expresses his fealty to the truth of the Communist Party. But that he could be air brushed out of the history of the Bolshevik revolution, contrary to the factual truth that he was a key figure, commander of the Red Army, second only to Lenin, also is definitive of totalitarianism. This is the real cultural ground of political correctness, of official truth. The purported scientific understanding of history of the Party substitutes for the political confrontation, debate and deliberation. It is enforced by terror. As Hannah and I travel around the old bloc and as we spoke and acted with our opposition colleagues, we were involved in attempts by social actors to free themselves of the official truth and to ground themselves in the factual truth.

From the point of view of Foucault, or, for that matter, from the point of view of the sociology of knowledge and culture, there is much that is unsatisfying about Arendt’s position. The distinction between fact and interpretation, which she insists upon, is in practice hard to maintain, and empirically it is hard to discern. But, this is not the telling point from Arendt’s point of view. Rather, it is that the distinction needs to be pursued, so that a free public life can be constituted. A democratic public cannot be constituted if political questions are answered philosophically, nor can its citizens interact freely, speak and act in the presence of each other, if the grounds of their interactions is based upon state imposed lies.

The politics of race in America cannot proceed democratically if a politically correct standard of racial interaction were actually imposed. (This is of course far from the case, given the popularity of critics of political correctness) But, just as well, a democratic confrontation of the legacies of racial injustice in the U.S. could not proceed if the school texts instructed the young that blacks owned whites, rather than the other way around. For a free public life to exist, there needs to be space for speech and actions based upon different opinions, then the people, and not the theorists, philosophers, historians or scientists, can rule. And their rule can proceed on solid grounds if they share a political world together, which has some factual solidity.

The politics of truth is in the interaction. Factual truth is the bedrock of a free politics. Difference of interpretation and opinion is its process. That the factual sometimes fades into the interpretive does not mitigate against the requirement that an interpretive scheme or doctrine cannot substitute for politics. That the interpretive sometimes seems to the convinced to be the factual does not mitigate against the requirement that for people to meet and interact in a free public, they must share a sense of a factual world. That fact and interpretation get mixed up, is very much a part of the messiness of politics, a messiness, which is confronted in concrete interactive situations. This points us in Goffman’s direction, a direction I can’t go into here. For now, we need to consider a bit more closely Arendt’s position so that the historical context of our inquiry can be understood.

When Arendt first presented her diagnosis, the central critical thrust of her work involved her identification of the National Socialism of Germany with Soviet Communism. Although using traditional political categories, these regimes appeared to be opposites, one of the right and the other of the left, she underscored that in their use of ideology and terror, in their mode of governance, in their projects of total control, their similarities were much more important than their differences. They were regimes systematically organized to eliminate a free public life (her central normative concern). While The Origins can be read as a “dialectic of the enlightenment” with the teleology taken out, it is also an account of the destruction of free public space in political life. Arendt presents a sort of decline and fall of public life or as Richard Sennett has put it, a story of “the fall of public man.” Her story of decline and fall takes the reader from the heights of antiquity to the depths of totalitarianism.

She starts with her classical ideal. Pre-Socratic Greece represents for her the time when freedom beyond necessity flourished in the polis:

The Greek polis once was precisely that “form of government” which provided men with a space of appearances where they could act, with a kind of theater where freedom could appear…. If, then, we understand the political in the sense of the polis, its end or raison d’ etre would be to establish and keep in existence a space where freedom as virtuosity can appear. This is the realm where freedom is a worldly reality, tangible in words which can be heard, in deeds which can be seen, and in events which can be talked about, remembered, and turned into stories before they are finally incorporated into the great storybook of human history.

The history of Western thought, for Arendt, is the history of the decline of the appreciation of this ideal situation, with catastrophic consequences in modernity. The Greek turn to political philosophy meant that the philosopher, the intellectual in contemporary language, sought to substitute the truth for political governance. The Christian identification of freedom with free will turned freedom into a private and not a public matter. This confusion of public and private, from Arendt’s point of view, explains the identification of freedom with sovereignty as articulated by such thinkers as Hobbes and Rousseau. Structurally this is manifest with the rise of society, as the place where she sees the public and the private confused as a matter of principle. Modernity intensified this loss of a distinctively political capacity, even as independent democratic and republican political forms were invented. Arendt notes, with approval, the Anglo-American conception of political party, especially as defended by Edmund Burke. Competing parties presented alternative notions of the common good. Continental parties serving the interests of particular classes, she understands, as movements that confuse the particular interests with the public good, the interests of property, real and capital, and the interests of labor, rural and urban, with the interests of the public. Anti-Semitism, Imperialism and Totalitarianism, the three parts of the Origins, each involve developments that destroy political capacity, as they are central to the history of European civilization. Totalitarian movements and regimes are the culmination of this story of radical de-politicization.

Arendt argues that what is distinctive about totalitarianism is its unique conflation of culture and coercion, ideology and terror. The problem with her position is that it requires what appear to be utopian beliefs about the relationship between truth and politics: that interpretive truth and politics can be radically separated and that the factual truth can be the basis of politics. While her critique of the substitution of philosophy for politics may be cogent, and while it may be crucial for intellectuals and artists not to confuse their insights and imaginations for democratic deliberation and decision, her ideas about the separation of politics from truth may still seem unrealistic. Every political movement after all has its ideology, it can be observed. Further, it is quite unclear how to maintain this separation while maintaining a commitment to factual truth. In these postmodern times, we are very much aware that one person’s interpretation is another’s factual truth. Indeed, the sociology of knowledge, at least since Mannheim, points in the same direction. It would seem that Foucault with his ideas about truth regimes is on the empirical mark. Yet, as I have already tried to demonstrate, there is a normative problem with Foucault’s position. He cannot distinguish between Trotsky and Wilson, between a totalitarian and a liberal. Further, there are also empirical grounds for rejecting the Foucaultian position.

This is where small things matter. It is a question of appearances, working to sustain realities. Truth and politics, knowledge and power, do not have a general relationship in modernity, as Foucault maintains. Rather, as we have already noted, social agents constitute the relationship in concrete interactive situations. The authorities of the old bloc tried to maintain an ideological definition of the situation. They did conflate knowledge and power. They presented an official truth and demanded that people appeared to follow its edicts. But in the alternative publics in the Soviet order, the imposed relationship was questioned. In official space people pretended to believe the official ideology, but they found places where it could be questioned.

Around the kitchen table people, something I explore intensively in my book, in small gatherings of close friends and relatives, the pretense was dropped. People presented themselves to each other in a different guise. They constituted a clandestine public space where they could speak and act together, free of the demands of officialdom. A real escalation of the struggle against the official order was evident when this hidden space of free interaction came out into the open. Foucault would explain this development in a sort of value neutral way. One truth regime, that of dissidents, was emerging from another. Perhaps, we would even want to go so far as saying that the regime of the new hegemonic order of globalization could be observed in the detaching of embodied practices from the truths, that is the ideology, of the old regimes. Note how much more we observe using Arendt as our guide.

In the positions of Foucault and Arendt, we observe two distinct understandings of political culture, two different ways of understanding the relationships between power and knowledge, truth and politics. While both get us beyond the lazy use of stereotype, e.g., all Russians seek a strong central authority, Americans are flexible, the British are more formal, the French more rational, (Brazilians are not quite modern?) etc., they do so with very different formulations. Where Foucault sees an identity, Arendt sees a variable relationship. For Foucault, political culture is about truth regimes, about the particular way that power and knowledge are united. For Arendt, political culture is about how and how far power and culture are distinguished and related. I think both analytic approaches provide insights into important aspects of political experience.

In fact, I am not sure that we could decide which one is more accurate. Foucault reveals an important part of the story, generally not sufficiently appreciated. The powers are revealed and operating in the activities of daily life and there is a form of knowledge that both accounts for this and makes it difficult to inspect critically. Knowledge and truth discipline. But there are different kinds of truth and they have different relationships with power, politics, Arendt forcefully maintains. This is a critique of Foucault’s position, but more significantly, it highlights a domain that Foucault ignores. The political implication of this is great. It means that there is a domain for freedom which Foucault does not recognize. This provides the grounds for normative judgment, making it possible to contrast tyranny with freedom. It makes it possible to discern real alternatives in dark times.

Seeking Light in Dark Times

In conclusion, I would like to summarize what I have learned in my political travels with Hannah Arendt and point to some implications as they have shaped my most recent and future research:

1. After being confronted by my student, I learned to think about politics differently and appreciate the significance of the democratic opposition in Central Europe as it was developing. It then became possible to understand that there was developing a major political power emerging in opposition to totalitarianism, that this power was based on simple interactions of people set apart from the official order. A small example is the democracy seminar I took part in. The large and historically significant example was Solidarnosc. There was back then the confrontation between the totalitarian and the free world, between socialist and progressive forces and the forces of capitalism, between the geopolitical forces of good and the Evil Empire, but the political transformation from within the old order came from a political force not recognized in the grand clash however it was depicted. It was a political force in Arendt’s sense.

2. This suggests a different way to think about our present darkness, about the world of the war on terrorism and the world of globalization. It suggests that we need to look at what I call a politics of small things as it presents alternatives to terrorism and anti-terrorism, to globalization and anti-globalization. Terrorism is not the only way for the weak to resist. And militarized anti terrorism is not the way to meet the threat of the terrors of fundamentalism (of all sorts). Politics in Arendt’s sense stands as an alternative.

3. This led me to analyze how the internet, as a domain for politics in Arendt’s sense, has been used by opposition forces to the war on terror in American politics. I analyze this in my book in an ethnography of the virtual politics of the Dean campaign and the anti war movement.

4. And it is now leading me to continue my journeys in darkness with Hannah. We are spending time in the Middle East, trying to identify alternative political forces, in the Palestinian territories and Israel, in special places where Palestinians and Israelis meet as equals, speak and act in the presence of each other, revealing themselves, and creating the capacity to act together, doing politics in dark times, at the heart of darkness.

I am looking forward to talking to you further about these travels, if you have any questions.

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.

“Each sixth kindergarten child has a speech deficit” announced the Monday headlines on the front cover of the Berlin’s Tagesspiegel. The subtitle reads: despite immense investment in Berlin’s kindergartens, there is very little improvement. The biggest problem is in NeuKoelln [the neighborhood with the largest number of migrants in the city].

The opinion page, with the cover “speechless,” describes the “problem” even better:  directing the responsibility to “education politicians,” the anonymous writer says: even after many years of visiting the Kindergarten (it is free from age 3 in Berlin, and heavily , wonderfully subsidized otherwise), more than 3,700 children of Berlin, one year before they go to school, have significant speech deficits.  Among children with “non German Origin” the number is 34%. That op-ed ends with the sentence: “now time presses: society cannot afford to give up even one of these children before school begins.”

This makes me think of the classic catholic definition of Limbo, of the newborn that dies before they even get baptized by the church, but also about the excellent ethnography by Haim Hazan, the Limbo People—where he talks about the liminality of the elderly in a Jewish old age home in London. There I learned how time is organized to exclude them, over and over again, from partaking in what is otherwise life by, most significantly, obliterating the future, which in turn helps them ‘cope’ with the end of life.

Back to the Tagesspiegel article: The reader is led to conflate a child’s ability to speak at all with that ability as it is measured by the German test in the German language. The reader is also morally implicated as speechless, herself, facing the disappointing outcomes in language-abilities despite the investment. Then, proposes the newspaper op-ed, after we approach families with “remote education” problems, after we let their children register to the kindergarten when they are one year old and after we qualify teachers to better serve their needs, we need to direct our gaze to the families— “things go wrong there” (in direct translation from the German). Where do things go wrong?

We happen to be one of those families, so I can write about what a very privileged version of two “white” academics experience with a child at this age. Our five years old son speaks three languages and about a year ago was deemed as having “speech deficits” in German. We, then living in a part of town that has the least problem, in the former East Berlin neighborhood of Prenzlauer Berg, were also asked whether we heard of autism and very sensitively—that perhaps the problem is inherent in our language. Perhaps we do not speak clearly some consonants with which our son had issues.  From this we also learn that unification is finally a success story: the former East isn’t inherently a problem unless it is also poor, added Die Welt on the issue.

A few months later, we switched to a multi-lingual kindergarten across town in the former West Berlin that speaks all the languages (Hebrew, German, English) that our son speaks. We went Jewish, basically.

He loves it, but about two months ago we were summoned to the kindergarten and told that he has both speech and also social issues, that perhaps something is wrong with his brain and that he’ll possibly need another kind of school. Professionals should test him. We agreed and they did, four times, and found that the child is quite intelligent and likes to play on his own and do math. The doctor who tested our son first was perhaps the most telling. He showed culture-specific pictures that our son then needed to describe. The best example was a picture of an old man carrying a sack with round figures inside. On the right hand side was an apple tree, the left- a flower garden. Our son said—in the backpack there are flowers. The medical doctor, a cool looking guy a little bit older than me, told our son that in Germany many kids say that this the man is carrying a sack of potatoes. He then looked at me and said—perhaps your husband, the philosopher, would be able to explain your son’s answer.

It was indeed an existential question for us all (I, the sociologist, wanted to explain under which circumstances I am spoken to like that and my son fails to recognize the core of the local culture, but remained silent). The doctor then asked what we heard earlier—perhaps in your language there is no L and Sh. Then, confused, I said- but I just told you we speak English (and Hebrew). When we agreed that it would be best for our child to stay another year in the kindergarten, he asked me “will you send him there”?

I said of course. He is very happy in the kindergarten. I then heard: “well, some people with migration background (we do not name the monster “migrant,” mostly because the child in question is often third generation German born) when they hear that the child will not go to school [in the year dictated by their date of birth] say that it is too hard for them to send them anywhere.” I assured him that this will not be the case and thought what kind of a threat, and an assumption, it is on our working hours?

The unintelligibility of the migrant as a total other is so severe, so pronounced, that Berlin tries time and again to save the children from this fate, and fails. This ‘deficit’ is described in terms in language as such, and never in terms of potency, of multi lingualism. Without language these families have no history, or the wrong one. In the US and in the migrant country I come from, Israel, I know many people—some of whom teach in universities—that have no one mother tongue. But that never made their parents suspect in the way it does in Berlin. Our solution was to let the professionals assess the child, intervene, and make sure that we stay powerful enough when it comes to the definition of the situation. I cannot imagine what a less recognizably “western” mother goes through when she is first approached with stigmata—she is not catholic, she does not have Goffman and the Limbo People (even if she read them, she is not heard anyway) and she perhaps does not have time to read the newspaper articles in the very same Tagesspiegel that reveal that boys can get cured of autism.

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 that are, in fact, nationally or regionally inflected (Al Jazeera, BBC World, TV5 Monde, CNN International etc.), but aim at publics much larger than nations. In this case the model of national television is relativized from above. It is challenged by supranational television.

A second challenge emanates from the new media.  Digital public spheres subvert national space through decentered interactions often described in terms of rhizomes, networks or capillarity. In this case, the national model is relativized from below.

A third challenge comes from television broadcasts that cater to immigrant populations and help in constructing or reconstructing spectral communities, disappeared nations, forgotten empires, actual diasporas. These “transnational” televisions broadcast their programs across national borders. The national model is challenged here by the multiplicity of centers catering to the same peripheries. It is challenged sideways (Dayan 2009). Together these three challenges have resulted in a profoundly transformed situation.

The displays offered in the mediated public sphere were meant to be part of a conversation between state and civil society. The partners of this conversation keep changing. Some partners disappear. New ones emerge. Digital media allow debates within civil society. Simultaneously, the combination of supranational and transnational media is no longer addressing what Goffman would call a “ratified” partner (Goffman I981).

A concerned public was cast in the role of that “ratified” partner. But what circulates today on television screens is available to publics that are not concerned at all. These publics belong to countless societies. They cannot possibly be the “ratified” partners of all the conversations they routinely witness. In such a context, world spectators willy-nilly occupy a position that used to be that of eavesdroppers. New media configurations have placed them in a position of overhearing the deliberations of others.

This does not mean that public spheres are no longer providing an arena for debate. In fact one could speak of two spheres imbricated in each other. The first is the classical public sphere, the site of a conversation of a society with itself, the site of a critical interaction between civil society and the state. The second is incredibly larger. But is it devoted to any conversation at all? Would I be correct in characterizing it as a public sphere of overhearing? Of eavesdropping? Of spectacle?

3. Breaking into a public sphere, Putin speaks to the French

Take the case of Gerard Depardieu. He is a famous actor who belongs to the small group of the very rich Frenchmen whom the present government expects to pay 75% of their income in taxes. Depardieu could escape this enormous taxation by doing what other French millionaires do: fleeing to England, Belgium, or Switzerland. But Depardieu does not simply wish to escape taxation. He wants to protest it. In an open letter to President Hollande, he announced his decision of returning his French passport. This theatrical gesture is very much in line with some of his most famous parts (“Jean Valjean,” “Cyrano de Bergerac”). An expert at bravado antics, Depardieu recently urinated in public when denied access to an aircraft’s toilet. Returning his passport is a gesture meant to influence the French public opinion.

But Depardieu is “overheard.” Russian President Putin has scores to settle with the French government (support given to the Syrian opposition; visa requirements for Russian nationals; protests after his violent silencing of the “Pussy Riot” singers). Putin grants Depardieu a Russian passport, which he ceremonially hands over to the actor during a much-publicized encounter in Sochi on January 7^th, 2013. Putin’s gesture is of course meant to impress the Russian public sphere. But it is also directed towards the French public sphere. In other terms: A French debate is overheard by a foreign politician, and this foreign politician invites himself into the debate.

Knowledge gathered by “overhearing” a national conversation is used by an outsider to break into that conversation. Terrorist leaders excel at this. Bin Laden made a point of addressing the American nation over the head of its leaders, and the attacks on Madrid’s Atocha station took place just before the Spanish national elections. As in the case of my Swedish interview, uninvited participants are forcing their way into an ongoing conversation. They are not ratified participants. Do they need to be?

4. Is it absurd to speak of overhearing and intruding?

“No,” says Habermas’ disciple Jean Marc Ferry (Ferry I989). Concerning ourselves with events that are likely to have no impact on our lives could illustrate the philosophical norm of a rational, impartial and potentially infinite public, a public that is large enough to encompass the whole of humanity. Why should a “public” sphere stop being public as soon as one crosses the boundaries of a nation state?

“The notion of ‘public’ is part and parcel of the definition of a public sphere. Note that the public in question in no way limits itself to one nations’ electoral body. It rather includes all those who are susceptible of receiving and understanding messages that are circulated throughout the world. Virtually, this public amounts to the whole of humanity … One could describe the public sphere as the medium in which Humanity offers itself in spectacle to itself.”

And Ferry adds:

“This means that the ‘social public sphere‘ in no way conforms to the national borders of each civil society … It is not merely the site of a communication between each society and itself, but rather the site where different societies communicate with each other.”

Ferry’s point consists in reiterating a philosophical postulate. The public of the public sphere encompasses the whole of humanity. This is true if one sees the global public sphere as embodiment of universalism. Yet the reality seems more prosaic. Of course civil societies that are politically “contained within the confines of nation states,” can “easily penetrate each other.” Is such interpenetration a sign of universalism? Is it devoid of antagonism between nations or groups of nations? Does it involve the sense of a common good? Is Putin’s splashy gesture a contribution to a debate? Or is it just a blow? Is the universal public invoked by Ferry gathered around a boxing ring?

5. Is it equally absurd to speak of spectacle?

Once again Ferry disagrees. When he describes the public sphere as “the medium in which humanity offers itself in spectacle to itself,” he adds:

“The word ‘spectacle’ might … lead to a misunderstanding. The public sphere is not to be reduced to a mere spectacle, be it of images or words. It also calls on discourse, on commentary, on discussion. It aims for a ‘rational’ purpose of elucidation.”

Ferry sees the supranational public sphere as one that promotes ‘rational’ elucidation. I would suggest that speaking of spectacle is the result of no misunderstanding. Of course, some events have international consequences. Some societies are so central that whatever happens in their midst might influence all other societies. Yet there are cases in which chances of a local event having relevance to the life of other societies are indeed very slim. Why then would the media of these other societies report on this event? When the media invites you to look at “the life of others,” are they always performing a ‘rational’ exercise?

Strictly speaking their reporting is not a matter of overhearing, since the media explicitly calls for your attention as a member of a given society. Yet if this attention leads to no relevant debate, wouldn’t it be correct to define the display that calls for it as a spectacle?

Boltanski notes that those you see taking part in distant events are routinely cast as victims, perpetrators, saviors, rescuers (Boltanski 1999). In this way, the watched world becomes a succession of moral fables. Watching them is justified in the name of information (the “public’s right to know”), but also in terms of a moral endeavor (each fable provides a villain). The main issue at hand is not: Why should I watch this?’ (Does it concern me?). But: Who is the villain? A Manichean grammar transforms a public sphere of “overhearing” into a “moral” public sphere; one which does not call for debate, but for applause or booing. Is applauding or booing a matter of rational elucidation?

Remember WikiLeaks? WikiLeaks celebrated itself as a victory of democratic transparency, a tribute to the “public’s right to know.” But what was made visible was often unsubstantial. The exchanges revealed in the divulged diplomatic cables were moderately “devious.” Like most conversations, they were based on trust and confidentiality, and thus vulnerable to exposure (Brooks, 2010). Many of the alleged scandals involved no more than the dubious thrill of eavesdropping on someone else’s conversation. Without much to condemn, “surveillance” was simply another name for bad manners. Yet WikiLeaks was promising a spectacle of moral turpitude. Is the accumulation of such spectacles the instrument of “elucidation” that Ferry describes? Or is it an instrument of obfuscation?

I admire Ferry and like the type of public sphere he advocates. But saying it is desirable is not the same as saying it exists. For the time being the choice seems one between the Charybdis of overhearing and the Scylla of spectacle. The question is: With what sorts of media could we bring Ferry’s desirable public sphere into existence?

6. Robert Merton and butterflies

The exploitation of overhearing by determined intruders, as well as its “mise–en scene” by those who want to present it as an ethical endeavor are conspicuous, yet less important than the phenomenon of overhearing itself. I would like to conclude on one last point.

By reaching unexpected viewers and listeners, any conversation in any public sphere is doomed to entail consequences that are not only unintended (what the French call “perverse effects”), but also unpredictable (what we now know as “butterfly effects”). “Overhearing” is no longer one of those quirky objects that met Goffman’s insatiable curiosity. Whether it is exploited by the virtuous or the ruthless, it has become a structuring factor in the interaction of public spheres. Merton’s study of unintended consequences was prophetic.

References

—Goffman, E. (1981). Footing. In Forms of Talk. Phila, U of Pennsylvania Press, pp. 124-159

— Ferry, JM.  « les Transformations de la publicité politique ») in Ferry, Dayan & Wolton, eds. le Nouvel Espace Public. Hermes 4  I989 ; I5 :27

–Favret Saada, Jeanne  (2007) Comment provoquer une crise mondiale avec 12 petits dessins. Paris. Les Prairies Ordinaires

–Dayan, Daniel (2009). « Sharing and Showing: Television and monstration »The Annals  of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, September 2009 vol. 625 no. 1 19-31

–Brooks David (2010) « The Fragile Community » The NY Times

–Boltanski, Luc (1999) Distant Suffering, N Y – Cambridge University Press

Publics are far from constituting a monolithic ensemble, an obedient army marching in good order. The nature of their concerns allows defining at least three types of publics. First there are political publics, which could be called following Dewey’s model “issue driven” publics. Political publics are flanked on one side by taste publics or aesthetic publics, which are oriented towards “texts” or “performances.” They are flanked on the other side, by recognition seeking publics for whom the dimension of visibility tends to be a major goal (Dayan 2005, Ehrenberg 2008). “Recognition seeking publics” (such as those of soccer or popular music) use their involvement with games or performances in order to endow themselves with visible identities. They can easily turn into political publics

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.

Of course, the three types of publics outlined above are ideal types. We know they often overlap in reality. But, besides overlapping or “ morphing ” into each other, they share an important dimension. Publics have careers. They have biographies. They go through different stages, including birth, growth, fatigue, aging, death, and some -times resuscitation. Let us first address moments and ways in which publics fade, disappear, and become “non publics.”

A Matter of Life and Death

First of all, publics can die a natural death. They can become “non publics” because what brought them into life no longer exists or no longer attracts their attention. But we should also consider other, much less consensual possibilities: termination or suicide.

Publics can disappear because they have been made invisible. Sometimes there is no public to observe because a given public was denied visibility. The media who could have served as midwives turned abortionists. Potential publics went down the drain of unrealized destinies. They became “non publics” because they are made invisible, because they were terminated.

Publics can also disappear because they stopped being visible on their own; because they chose to become invisible. Instead of opting for Hirschman’s “voice” they faked “ loyalty.” They turned into “marrano” publics. They were not made invisible by others. Like Harry Potter, they chose to wear a mantle of invisibility (Dayan, 2005, Noelle Neuman I989). They were intimidated.

Most of the “non publics” discussed here tend to be publics that used to exist and exist no longer. But the temporality of  “non publics ” also includes “not yet publics,” publics that exist potentially, linger in the limbos waiting to be born. Such publics –like Sleeping Beauty – seem to be awaiting the prince charming (be it a text or an event or a conjuncture). Are they passively waiting for the kiss of life?

No. Goldfarb shows that these publics-in-the-making are far from being amorphous or idle. They not only rehearse their parts, but already enact them in improvised venues: around kitchen tables, in cinematheques, in bookstores or experimental theaters. Waiting for a chance to step on the public stage, they strike the observer by their degree of readiness. The Politics of Small Things allowed them to survive and invent substitutes to a healthy public sphere (Goldfarb 2006).

But there is yet another form of “non public.” This is what we call an “ audience.“ Such a statement calls of course for some explanation.

Full Publics, Almost Publics and Non Publics: The Question of Audiences

Publics in general can be defined in terms of the social production of shared attention. The focus of collective attention generates a variety of attentive, reactive or responsive, “bodies,” such as publics, audiences, witnesses, activists, bystanders and many others. Among such “bodies” two deserve special attention, since, in many ways, they are constructed as antonyms. “Publics“ and “audiences ” enact different roles in the economy of social attention. They also differ in relation to the autonomous or heteronomous nature of their visibility.

Publics are generally conceived as mere providers of attention, as responding bodies, as willing or unwilling resources from which seekers of collective attention will be able to help themselves. Yet publics are not always mere providers of attention. Some publics are themselves calling for attention and trying to control it. They are architects of attention, organizing the attention of other publics (towards the issues they promote).

Many publics have thus something in common with “active minorities” à la Moscovici. They purposefully act as “opinion leaders” on a large scale. Like the media, and before the media, they are providers of visibility, agents of deliberate “monstration“ (Dayan 2009). These are ”full” publics. In comparison to these full publics, audiences, no matter how active, are still confined to the reception end of communicative processes.

The question of attention is linked to the question of visibility. “Full“ publics not only offer attention, they require attention. They need other publics watching them perform. They are eager to be watched. They strike a pose. Their performance may be polemic or consensual. It cannot be invisible. Such publics must “go public” or they stop being publics. Not so for audiences. Audiences often remain invisible until various research strategies quantify, qualify, materialize, their attention. For audiences to become visible, one often needs the goggles of various methodologies (Dayan 2005).

Thus, if we use public as a generic term, and if we choose visibility as the relevant criterion, one can speak of two sorts of publics. The first sort, “full” publics, is performing out in the open. It is a collective whose nature requires the dimension of visibility. In appropriating a famous Barthes’ phrase, one could speak of “obvious“ publics. No matter how intellectually active, the second sort (“audiences”) is not publicly performing. Its habitat is the private sphere. In public terms, audiences remains invisible, unless they are made visible, materialized, conjured up as in a séance that would use statistics instead of a Ouija board. In reference to Barthes (I970) I would define “audiences” as “obtuse” publics (Dayan 2005).

Of course, one should not forget that “obvious publics“ and less obvious ones are often composed of the same people. Publics easily become audiences and vice versa. They are not separated by some conceptual iron curtain. If separated, they are separated in Goffmanian fashion. They are separated by a stage curtain; the curtain that separates public performance (“full” publics) from non performance (“almost publics”, “audiences”) (Dayan 2005). In the political domain, “audiences” become “publics” when their concern for an issue prevails over their engagement with the narrative that raised it and triggers public commitment. I suggest that it is this “coming out” in public that constitutes an audience into a full public. And of course, the same “full” public can revert to the status of a mere audience, whenever unconcerned by the issue at hand.

Audiences have been described here as “almost publics,” “obtuse publics” or “non performing publics.” Audiences seem to provide us with an interesting example of “non publics.” Yet it seems more constructive to describe them as another form of public. After all, in many languages, “public” is a generic word, covering all sorts of social bodies that provide collective attention, including what is generally understood by “audience” (Dayan 2005, Livingstone 2005).

A Genealogical View of Publics: Personae Fictae, Discursive Beings, Observable Realities

Speaking of “non-publics” presupposes of course an ontology of publics. Publics are at once discursive constructions and social realities. Must we choose?

For Schlegel, “public“ was not a thing but a thought, a postulate, “like church.” A similar awareness of possible reification is expressed by literary historian Hélène Merlin (Merlin I994), for whom the public is a “persona ficta,” a fictive being. Of course church- or, more precisely, the unity of church- is indeed a postulate. But any sociologist would point out that church is also an organized body, a political power, and an economic institution. Ambivalence concerning the reality of publics, or as it was put recently; “the real world of audiences” lingers to this day (Hartley I988, Sorlin I992).

Yet, following Hartley’s insight, it seems clear that – simultaneously, or at different times – publics do belong in Popper’s three universes: 1.) Publics are notions, ideations, or – as Schegel puts it – “postulates;” 2.) Publics also offer specific registers of action and specific kinds of subjective experiences; 3.) Publics finally constitute sociological realities that one can observe, visit or measure. Thus we might view publics as a process combining both (1) a persona ficta; (2) the enactment of that fiction; (3) resulting in an observable form of sociation. What this sequence suggests is the essential role played by the “persona ficta,” the “imagined public, “ when it comes to generating actual publics (Dayan 2005).

A public is a collective subject that emerges in response to certain fictions. Thus, as John Peters remarked a-propos Habermas’ 18th century, publics emerge through reading and discussing newspapers, where the notion of “public” is being discussed (Peters 1993). Observable realities are born from intellectual constructions. A given “persona ficta” serves as a model for an observable sociation. What is suggested here is that the observable realities differ, because the constructions that begot them also differ.

In the situation described by Peters, “public” belongs to the category of collective subjects that are imagined in the first person, by a “we.“ “Public” is then one example, among many, of “imagined communities,” the most famous of which is of course the “nation“ (Nothing surprising in this, since Anderson‘s “nations” are essentially institutionalizations of reading publics). But publics are not always imagined in the first person. Only “obvious“ publics result from autonomous processes of imagination.

In the case of other publics, imagination relies on heteronomous processes. The adopted fiction is often created by outside observers. No less than autonomous processes, heteronomous ones lead to observable realities. But they do not lead to the same realities. Different sorts of “publics” can indeed be referred to the professional bodies that produced them and to the professional or lay uses they allow.

Thus the audiences of quantitative research could be described as the result of a demographic imagination. They are the version of publics that demographers construct. Similarly, meaning-making audiences could be described as semioticians’ publics. They are produced by reception scholars either for academic purposes (extending to the speech of readers a know-how gained in the analysis of texts) or for ideological purposes (rebutting Adorno’s “great divide” and redeeming the” popular”).

Both result in observable facts. Yet a demographer’s audience and a semiotician’s audience are quite different from each other. An empirical object that consists in being counted is not the same as one that consists in being listened to. When demographers look at publics, they see age groups or classes. When semioticians look at publics, they see interpretive communities.

A last point concerning the type of public so far described as “obvious” or as “autonomous.“ It seems to be produced by the members of the public themselves, and, up to a point, it is. But of course this sort of public is also modeled by the narratives of journalism, since, beyond the publishing of polls, a large part of the journalistic production consists in what one could call “publi-graphy,“ the chronicling of publics. In a way – whether political or cultural – autonomous publics are only autonomous up to a point. They are also children of journalistic imagination.

What this genealogical analysis means is that different varieties of publics are born in the eyes of their observers. It is therefore essential to closely watch those who watch publics. Who is interested in publics? The question of “who? “ translates into the question of “why?” Why should this or that “persona ficta” be conceived at all? What purposes does it serve? Publics often start their careers as a glint in the eye of social observers.

NOTES

This text represents my attempt at summarizing a few former essays on Publics. These essays are listed in the bibliography.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

* Barthes, Roland (I97O ). “ le Troisième Sens. Réflexion sur quelques photogrammes d’ Eisenstein “. Cahiers du du Cinéma. Juillet I97O

* Callon, M. ( 2002 ) “ Lay scientists and Medical Publics “ Oral communication. * Autour de la notion de Public. Symposium “ Connaissance et Culture”. Université de Paris X Nanterre.. Dec 2, 2002

* Dayan, D ( I992 ) ” Les Mystéres de la Réception. ” Le Débat. n° I7. Paris Gallimard I44: I62

* Dayan, D ( I998 ) “ Le Double Corps du Spectateur : Vers une définition processuelle de la notion de public, Serge Proulx. ed Accusé de Réception.: Le Téléspectateur construit par les Sciences Sociales. Québec, Presses de l’université de Laval

* Dayan, D ( 2001) “ The Peculiar Public of Television “. Media, Culture & Society. London, Sage, vol 23, N° 6 November 2001.743-765

* D ayan, D (2005) “Paying Attention to Attention : Audiences, Publics, Thresholds & Genealogies “. Media practice” 6.1

* Dayan, D (2005) “Mothers, Midwives and Abortionists “ In Sonia Livingstone, ed. Audiences and Publics, London, Intellect press.

° Dayan, D, E Katz & Mario Mesquita (2003) Televisao, Publicos. Coimbra

* Dayan,D & E Katz (2011) Preface to Luckerhoff,J.and D. Jacobi Looking for Non-Publics. Montreal, Quebec University Press ””

* Fiske, J. ( I992 ) “Audiencing : A cultural studies approach to watching television, “.Poetics : 2I (I992) 345 – 359.

* Goldfarb, Jeffrey C. (2006) The Politics of Small Things. Chicago, University of Chicago Press

* Goffman, E.( I959) The Presentation of Self in Everyday life. Garden City, NY- Doubleday.

* Hartley, J. ( I987) “Invisible Fictions, Paedocracy, Pleasure,” Textual Practice, I : 2, I21-138

* Hartley, J. ( I988) “The Real World of Audiences,” Critical Studies in Mass Communications, Sept I998. 234-:238

* Ikegami,Eiko ( 2000 ) “A Sociological Theory of Publics: Identity and Culture as Emergent Properties in Networks,” Social research 67B

* Merlin, Heléne (1994) Public et litterature en france au XVII° siécle. Paris, les Belles lettres,

* Noelle -Neuman, E. (I984) The Spiral of Silence. Public opinion, Our Social Skin, Chicago, University of Chicago Press.

* Peters, John Durham ( I993 ) “Distrust of Representation: Habermas and the Public Sphere”. Media, culture and Society. I5, 4

* Schudson, Michael (I997) “Why Conversation is not the Soul of Democracy, “ Critical Studies in Mass Communication, I4(4): 297-3O9

* Sorlin, P ( I992 ) “ le Mirage du Public “ Revue d’Histoire Moderne et contemporaine 39-I992 : 86-IO2

I am embarking upon a new project, the investigation of the social condition, highlighting dilemmas that are inevitably built into the social fabric, and exploring the ways people work to address them. Some examples:

It is obviously important for a democratic society to provide equal opportunity for all young people. The less privileged should have the advantages of a good education. This is certainly a most fundamental requirement for equal opportunity. On the other hand, it is just as certain that a good society, democratic and otherwise, should encourage and enable parents to provide the best, to present the world as they know and appreciate it, to their children: to read to them, to introduce them to the fine arts and sciences, and to take them on interesting trips, both near and far. But not all parents can do this as effectively, some have the means, some don’t. Democratic education and caring for one’s children are in tension. The social bonds of citizenship and the social bonds of family are necessarily in tension. This tension, in many variations, defines a significant dimension of the social condition.

Another dimension of the social condition was illuminated in a classic lecture, “Politics as a Vocation,” by Max Weber: the tension between what he called the “ethics of responsibility” versus the “ethics of ultimate ends.” We observed an iteration of this tension in the debate about Lincoln, the movie. In politics there is always a tension between getting things done, as Weber would put it, responsibly, and being true to ones principles. Ideally the tension is balanced, as it was portrayed in the film: Lincoln the realist enabled Thaddeus Stephens, the idealist, to realize his ends in less than idealistic ways. A wise politician, Weber maintained, has to know how to balance, ideal with realism. But this tension goes beyond individual judgment and political effectiveness. Establishing the social support to realize ideals is necessary, but sometimes the creation of such supports make it next to impossible for the ideals to be realized. Making sure that educational ideals are realized, for example, equal educational opportunity, requires measurement, but the act of measurement can get in the way of real education. Making sure that funds distributed by an NGO to disaster victims can get in the way of getting the funds to the victims. Most generally, organizing to achieve some end establishes the conditions for those who have their particular interests in the organization itself to pursue their interests. NGOs often provide for a comfortable standard of living for its employees in impoverished parts of the world, sometimes this gets in the way of realizing organizational ends. But this isn’t a new development: Robert Michels described this in the early 20^th century, as “the iron law of oligarchy.” I suggest that we think of this as a dilemma built into the social order of things.

I think one of the most fundamental manifestations of the social condition animates the work of Erving Goffman. He explored the power of the Thomas theorem more intensively than any other social theorist. If people define situations as real, they are real in their consequences. Goffman was particularly interested in how in their expressive behavior people managed to define social reality.

The dilemma arises when people disagree about the reality, are ambivalent about it, or even want to flee from it. A prime example is the concept and apparent reality of race. It’s a social construction, as every college freshman comes to know. It’s a fiction, but a fiction that we cannot ignore, a fiction that we continue to treat as real. becoming a social fact. To pretend it doesn’t matter even as it does, is to flee from enduring social problems. But attending to the problems of race carefully has the unintended consequence of furthering its continued salience in social life. Recognize race and it continues to be real. Ignore race, and it is likely that you will ignore its continued negative effects. Controversies over affirmative action policies revolve around this dilemma of race.

I worry when political actors pretend that the complications of the social condition can be easily overcome, following one formula or another, with negative political consequences. This is what motivates me to explore the topic, why I feel compelled to do so. I am concerned that bad sociology also pretends that these tensions are easily resolved, often with a theoretical slight of hand. I am planning on working on this topic, developing a more adequate approach to the social condition, with my colleague, Iddo Tavory. We will start next semester by integrating the topic into our classes.

I will be teaching an undergraduate seminar on social interaction next semester and a graduate seminar on Erving Goffman. Although I regularly teach these courses, I have now my new special theme in mind. The dilemmas cannot be definitively solved, although schools of thought and political programs often purport to do so. Thus, the courses will present a critique of politics and sociology, along with an outline of a distinctive approach to the discipline.

As I teach these courses, I will be working with Tavory. We have already had some interesting discussions about the social condition and hope to continue them not only, as we already have, over coffee, drinks and meals, but also with our students. We are planning to visit each others classes next semester to this end, bringing students into the discussion.

I am particularly excited about this project. It makes the near end of my sabbatical more bearable. I think sociology can help us make sense of the human comedy and its tragedies; working on this directly with my colleague and our students makes the normal academic life well worth living. And note regular Deliberately Considered readers: this approach to sociology helps explain this magazine’s project of public discussion beyond intellectually gated communities.

It is odd in the extreme to read about a devastating storm in New York, listen to my local public radio station, WNYC, from Paris and Rome. It took a while to find out how my son in Washington D.C. and his wife, Lili, in Long Island City were doing. I also have been worried about my mother and sister and sisters-in-law, and their families, in their homes in Brooklyn, Manhattan and the Bronx. All seems to be OK, with very significant inconvenience. My friends and neighbors, my house and my community center, these I don’t know about and am concerned. The Theodore Young Community Center, where I swim and where I have many dear friends, in fact, is still without its basketball court after the devastation of tropical storm Irene. All this while I have been enjoying my family just outside Paris, taking a beautiful stroll in Paris on Monday and having a nice first day in Rome. I hurt for my friends and family as I am enjoying European pleasures topped off yesterday with a wonderful dinner with my dear colleague, Professor Anna Lisa Tota of the University of Rome.

And I push on, talking about my work with colleagues and students first here in Italy and next week in Poland. This morning, I am off to give a lecture at the University of Rome to a group of film and media Ph.D. students, on media, the politics of small things and the reinvention of political culture. I decided to post today a lecture I gave in Gdansk last year which was a variation on the same theme: the project of reinventing democratic culture. The lecture highlights the links between my political engagements of the past and how they relate to the political challenges now. I will return to Warsaw and Gdansk with a follow up next week. In all the meetings and in the “in-depth post” today, I am struck by how important a creative relationship between the politics of the central stage and of the margins is central to a vibrant democratic culture and politics. I will be thinking about this with deep concern as I speak here in Europe and look from afar at the election back home.

To read “Reinventing Democratic Culture: Then and Now,” click here.

It’s good to be back in Gdansk. It is especially good to be invited by The European Solidarity Center to give this lecture at the All About Freedom Festival. It’s a visit I’ve long wanted to make, and an occasion that seems to be particularly appropriate.

The last time I was here was in 1985. I was on a mission in support of Solidarity, to observe the trial of Adam Michnik, Bogdan Lis and Wladyslaw Frasyniuk. Adam had written an open letter to “people of good will” in the West to come to the trial, published in The New York Times. He also earlier through The Times Warsaw correspondent, our mutual friend, the late Michael Kaufman, asked me personally to come. It was a request I couldn’t refuse.

When I arrived I was under constant surveillance. I was denounced by Trybuna Ludu [the Communist Party official organ] for not understanding the nature of socialist justice, when I tried but was refused entry into the courtroom. It wasn’t a leisurely visit. I communicated with Adam through his lawyers. We planned together a strategy to keep going an international seminar on democracy we had been working on before his arrest. He asked for books. I did not have the occasion to go sightseeing. And the sights to be seen weren’t as beautiful as they are today.

That was one of the most dramatic times of my life. Not frightening for me personally (I knew that the worst that was likely to happen to me was that I would be expelled from the country), but very frightening for those on trial, and for the mostly unrecognized heroes of the Solidarity movement, the workers, the union leaders, the intellectuals and lawyers who during my visit helped me move through the city and make my appearance, and who risked imprisonment for their everyday actions in making Solidarity. While I then met Lech Walesa, as well as Father Jankowski [a Priest associated with Lech Walesa, who after the changes became infamous for his anti-Semitism], I was most impressed by those who acted off the center stage. They were so dedicated to and worked so hard for the cause of freedom, without apparent prospects that it would be won and without fame or fortune for themselves. It was clear to me that they created their freedom in their persistent actions. This is a key to my talk today.

What I saw then and what I observed and studied in my research and political activities in the 1970s and 80s throughout Poland and also among its neighbors, has shaped my entire intellectual life. It’s the touchstone of my work as a social theorist and researcher. I could explain in a four hour lecture how just about every one of my writings, certainly all of my books, have been informed by what I observed here, even when I am writing about my own country or about the Middle East, two other areas where I have done research and which I will explore with you today. I am, we are together, deeply indebted to the sung and unsung heroes of Solidarity. But today, I am concerned less with the debt, more with the insight that their actions provide.

I will focus on two theoretical points: “the politics of small things” and “the reinvention of political culture,” (the title of my two most recent books) in order to think about the project of reinventing democratic culture, a pressing one in my country, and in much of the world today. I will try to present a clear and condensed account of the theoretical points, and then think about them with you by considering instances of the project of the reinvention of democratic culture. I will compare the way things were here then, when I first visited your city, to the way things are now, in my country, and I will look ahead a bit to the way things might be in one of the centers of geopolitical conflict in the world today, the Middle East.

In retrospect, thinking about this part of the world and my experiences in it in 20^st century, I gained two key theoretical insights which help illuminate the global situation in 21th: 1. Small things matter, democracy is in the details of everyday life interaction, and 2. Political culture is not just a matter of destiny, but also one of creativity.

First my notion of the politics of small things: a concept drawn from the political theory of Hannah Arendt and the sociology of Erving Goffman, and developed by looking carefully at the day to day life in the democratic opposition and alternative cultural activities here in Poland.

When people meet and speak in each other’s presence, and develop a capacity to act together on the basis of shared commitments, principles or ideals, they develop political power. This power is constituted in social interaction. It is realized in the concerted action. It has its basis in the definition of the situation, the power of people to define their social reality. In the power of definition, in the politics of small things, there is the power of constituting alternatives to the existing order of things. When this power involves the meeting of equals, respectful of factual truth and open to alternative interpretations of the problems they face, it is democratic. As Arendt has theorized, such meeting, talk and action constitute political power as the opposite of coercion. As Goffman investigated, this power is constituted in the expressive life of the involved people. Power by acting together, expressively created, such power has been highly consequential.

In Poland, the significance of the politics of small things was apparent during the Communist experience, contributing to the quality of life in People’s Poland, and it became a force that put an end to the experience. Its importance is underappreciated in the present political environment. I will explain by providing snapshots of experience, highlighting their significance.

As I remember the day I arrived to observe the trial of Michnik, Lis and Frasyniuk, I feel as if I was moving through an American spy thriller. Met at the Warsaw airport. Taken to an apartment. Underground solidarity, broadcast equipment in the apartment, solidarity TV and radio. After an hour or so, I was put on a train to Gdansk, given instructions to go to an apartment in the old city of Gdansk. A few minutes after I arrived on that rainy night, the phone rang. Whoever just arrived, the caller reported is being following by the authorities. I was observed from the moment I arrived in Warsaw by both the authorities and the underground. The next day I tried to enter the courtroom. I walked in a cloud of solidarity supporters and activists, women pushing baby carriages were the most impressive. Each step I took during my ten days, the authorities of the People’s Republic and the network of solidarity activists surrounded me, revealing the two sides of power. The authorities had the full power of the Party State, the secret police, the nomenklatura and the Soviet alliance behind them. Solidarity’s power was grounded in the persistent capacity of people to act together. That this power persisted and was very real was confirmed when it persisted after martial law, not to mention its ultimate triumph in 1989.

Indeed I think it is important not to interpret the meaning of Solidarity by its ultimate victory. It was not only a means to this end.  The people I met in the early and mid eighties did not anticipate the defeat of Communism and present day Poland was way beyond their imaginations. Their activities, and I believe their significance for us today, are best understood as a continuation of what they had done in the past. We misunderstand if we impose teleological meaning upon them. There was a hope that the activities then would contribute to a more decent future, but there was mostly an appreciation that it contributed to a more decent present. A world where an unjust political trial was met with fear, resignation and silence was not acceptable, even if the fall of the regime was unimaginable. Acting together immediately changed the situation for the better.

Michnik himself explained the logic of this action in his classic essay “The New Evolutionism.” This essay, together with Vaclav Havel’s classic “The Power of the Powerless,” helped me imagine my idea of the politics of small things. Thus I understood the theater movement I studied here in the early 70s and Pope John Paul II’s visit to Poland in 1979.

I wrote my dissertation on a theater movement, Polish Student Theater including such groups as Kalambur and Nawias of Wroclaw, Teatr Stu and Pleonazmus of Krakow, Teatr Plastyczna of Lublin, Teatr 77 of Lodz and Teatr Osmego Dnia of Poznan. In these theaters and in their audiences the power of the politics of small things was revealed. They were not engaged with regime or anti-regime politics. Their importance was that they provided a zone of independent sensibility for their performers and audience. In these theaters a different Poland was not only imagined and performed. It actually existed. They did not support the regime or attempt to reform or overthrow it. They created a life apart from it.

Such life apart became a societal experience in 1979. I think is the way to understand the profane significance of the Pope’s visit. To be sure, he was an opponent of Communism. But when he came here and was greeted by millions, they were not engaged in a political demonstration, but in a religious and social one. People did not flock to see the Pope and celebrate mass with him as an explicitly political, anti-regime act, instrumentally directed toward the defeat of Communism. Their activities were ends in themselves, and they came to see themselves differently. Clearly seeing this laid the groundwork of Solidarity, revealed a collective shared understanding that the Polish people had a different character than that which was imagined in the official Communist press, a perception that could imagine people acting on their own independent of officialdom, as indeed occurred on a grand scale not only when the Pope greeted the public, but also in the planning of the event.

The relationship between power and culture changed, as the nature of the culture and of the power was changed. More in a moment about that. Let’s look elsewhere to understand what was involved here.

A poetry salon in Damascus, Syria, I read about last year, before the Arab Spring, reminded me of Polish student theater. Both the theater movement and the salon are examples of constituted free zones in repressive societies. They both are examples of the politics of small thing. They, further, both demonstrate the possibility of re-inventing political culture, the possibility of reformulating the relationship between the culture of power and the power of culture.

The secret police were present at Bayt al-Qasid, the House of Poetry, in Damascus, The New York Times reported in an article published last September. Yet despite the presence of a significant arm of the repressive state, this has been a place where innovative poetry has been read, including by poets in exile, politically daring ideas are discussed, a world of alternative sensibility has been created. Not the star poets of the sixties, but young unknowns have predominated. The point has not been political agitation nor to showcase celebrity, but the creation of a special place for reading, performance and discussion of the new and challenging.  The Times article quotes a patron about a recent reading. “‘In a culture that loathes dialogue,’ the evening represented something different, said Mr. Sawah, the editor of a poetry Web site. ‘What is tackled here,’ he said, ‘would never be approached elsewhere.’”

In this poetry salon and in Polish theater, people interacted with each other on the basis of common interest in the arts. On a regular basis they presented themselves to each other, developed a shared definition of the situation, and through the expressive gestures developed a setting of trust and experimentation. Art not politics prevailed. Cynics would say that the Polish theater and the Syrian salon are safety valve mechanism, through which the young and the marginal can let off steam, as a repressive political culture prevails. But in Poland, the “safety valve” overturned the official culture, even before the collapse of the Communist regime, as I explored in my book Beyond Glasnost: the Post Totalitarian Mind. And now something remarkable is developing among Syria and its neighbors.

I am not asserting that a happy ending is necessarily the result of such cultural work: the fall of Communism, the Arab Spring. But I do want to underscore that the very existence of an alternative sensibility in a repressive context changes the nature of the social order. Poland was not simply a totalitarian during the Communist era, and the Syria of a year ago was not simply repressive. That country now is in a virtual civil war. Yet, with amazing persistence, the most violent repression has been met with incredibly sustained non-violent resistance. I believe that these miracles are not conceivable without the experience of places where the possibility for dialogue was established, places where poetry and theater could prevail, and because of this, political culture can be, has been reinvented – in Syria, at least for a discrete number of people in a particular location at a particular time. But the limits of today may be very different tomorrow. This I learned as I observed my Polish friends.

As a supporter of Obama – Biden, I found the debate last night soothing. Biden performed well, better than Ryan. From my partisan point of view, it was a good night. After the first Obama – Romney debate, I had a hard time sleeping. Last night, I slept like a baby.

In form and substance, I think Biden was convincing, presenting passionately and clearly the case for re-election, providing Obama a proper introduction for a debate comeback. The contrasting approaches to the practical challenges of our times were on clear view and, I believe, Biden made the Democrats approach more cogent, while Ryan was not able to overcome the contradictions of the conservative Romney-Ryan approach.

First form: Republicans are in convinced. Biden was boorish, Gore – like, patronizing rude. Fred Barnes at the Weekly Standard summarizes their judgment: “You don’t win a nationally televised debate by being rude and obnoxious. You don’t win by interrupting your opponent time after time after time or by being a blowhard. You don’t win with facial expressions, especially smirks or fake laughs, or by pretending to be utterly exasperated with what your opponent is saying.”

Indeed Biden was highly expressive. He interrupted Ryan. He smiled, laughed and non-verbally belittled his opponent. I knew as I watched Biden’s performance that the Republican partisans would draw the Gore analogy. I worried, but was also enthused. Now that I have had a bit of time to deliberately consider the evening, I think that there was good reason for my enthusiasm.

Biden non-verbally framed the debate, deflecting Ryan’s criticisms, highlighting the thinness of the Romney-Ryan critique of the administrations foreign policy, and the contradictions of the Romney Ryan economic plans. Take a look at the embedded video. Notice that Biden’s expressive behavior was responsive to what Ryan was saying and that it is consistent with what we know about Biden, the man, how he presented himself last night and how he has presented himself in our experience.

Biden is an honest Joe, sitting at the bar, infuriated by the nonsense he is hearing, unable to control himself, wanting desperately to set the record straight. Herein lies Biden’s victory (I am thinking about the great sociologist Erving Goffman and his master essay “The Nature of Deference and Demeanor”). Far from being a weakness Biden’s expressions are at the root of his decisive victory.

Through his demeanor and his lack of deference, Biden managed to define the situation. He turned the evening in his favor. The debate started with Obama – Biden on the run. Romney had won the last debate and has been on a roll. His stock was up, Obama’s down. Romney seemed to be turning the election into a referendum over the Obama record, as he presented himself as a competent moderate Republican technocrat: no right-wing extremist he. Biden last night in his body language reversed the trend. Who are Romney and Ryan? And why are the saying what they have been saying about American foreign policy? With a puzzled frown, Biden underscored this question. And what are they saying about taxes, Medicare and Social Security? With a flash of a smile, Biden raised serious doubts about the veracity of what they have been saying.

Apart from this win, the debate was a success because each man presented his party’s position: on foreign policy, taxes and deficits, economic growth, social justice, and on the proper relationship between religious belief and public policy, including the issues of women’s rights and abortion.

As a partisan, I am very pleased that Biden made the positions of Obama and his party clear, with a full command of the facts. Ryan also presented his party’s positions effectively. As a theater critic, though, I am struck by the fact that Biden’s performance was more sincere, fluid and engaging. But I know that other theater critics, such as Peggy Noonan at that great theater review, the Wall Street Journal, with different politics, review the debate drama differently.

But theatrical performance, of course, is not really the issue. How the performance is defined by and helps define a script is. And this is why I think that not only did Biden win last night, but that Ryan and Romney lost. Their script is flawed, filled with contradictions about which they can’t, in the end, give persuasive account.

Their response to Obama’s foreign policy successes is to tell a story of weakness, of apology for America. They present a neo-conservative position, while not clearly identifying with the position as brought to us by Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld. They want to criticize Obama’s policies in North African and the Middle East, asserting the need for toughness. They criticize Obama for working through the United Nations, consulting with allies, dealing with Russia and China as they are, not as imagined Cold War enemies, but they have not presented alternative policies, which very well might not be popular. As Biden suggested: ground troops in Syria and a regional conflict, an international conflict in Iran with a global economic crisis, and continued American troops in Afghanistan.

On tax policy, Ryan claimed they had a plan but wouldn’t explain any details. Cut tax rates for the rich and middle class alike by twenty per cent, pay for it by closing loopholes and reducing deductions, with only the faintest hint of what would be closed and reduced. There’s a problem. Now Romney-Ryan want to claim that this will not affect the taxes of the middle class, but if it is born by the rich (oopps, I mean job creators), how would this lead to their supply side fantasies of an economic boom created by cutting taxes.

The Ryan plan of old was more about reducing the size of government and unleashing private entrepreneurship, unshackling individual creativity, advocating minimal government, his strong Randian inspired ideological streak, also the rallying cry of the Tea Party. Romney, the severe conservative, supported this during the Republican primaries and his choice of Ryan confirmed this support. Now the running mates are running away from this position, as is confirmed by both debates. Romney somehow pulled this off last week, a commanding performance. Ryan couldn’t.

Biden did his job. He has helped Obama by leveling the playing field for the next debate. Biden wins, and the campaign proceeds. I think with the advantage now turning in Obama’s favor.

On any given summer afternoon, light traffic hums along Route 62 as local teenagers armed with beer, and families with stocked picnic baskets, travel for a day of whitewater rafting, swimming, hiking, and waterfall-jumping in Zoar Valley, New York, a state park located thirty-five miles south of Buffalo. Few notice the grassy field where hundreds of people were laid to rest without dignity. I had made the trek from Buffalo to Zoar Valley several times each summer for nearly a decade, and never noticed the cemetery of the Gowanda Psychiatric Center (GPC) on Route 62. It is easy to miss:  the grave markers lay flat against the ground, with no sign marking the site as a cemetery. To any car cruising past, the space looks like an open pasture amongst the vast surrounding farmlands.

The prisoners of the Collins Correctional Facility, the institution that now owns the property, occasionally mow the cemetery. Riding mowers glide over the field of flat nameless grave markers, with little further maintenance from those mandated to tend to it. But as graves are tended, they are also destroyed. The combination of the weight of the mower and poor drainage had caused many gravestones to sink into the earth. Nothing, then, marks the final resting place of the nameless former inmates of GPC.

The Gowanda Psychiatric Center, a total institution housing people with mental illnesses and developmental disabilities, opened in 1898. The residents, under supervision, grew their food, prepared their meals, and buried their dead. GPC was an example of what Erving Goffman studied as a total institution:  the patients slept, played and worked enclosed within the institution’s high walls (1961:5). Every part of their lives was contained in a finite space with clear boundaries—boundaries within which they lived and often died. Those who passed away as patients of the GPC were laid to rest just beyond those high walls, beyond the view of the patients. Even in total institutions, where every act is under surveillance, death in America is kept outside.

In the summer 2007, I stepped into this space which held the forgotten, humbled with my fellow volunteers by the project presented before us. Mainly composed of employees of People Inc., a non-profit that serves the developmentally disabled throughout western New York, the volunteers of Operation Dignity met throughout the summer to try to restore dignity to the forgotten.

The gravestones are simple slabs of concrete, the cheapest materials available, and many were overgrown with grass, moss, and lichen. Several were broken into pieces by expanding tree roots or by the weight of the mower. Careful to “do no harm,” we painstakingly recorded all observable details of each stone—any visible text or number, the location of any cracks, the amount and location of any moss—and cemented the documentation with a photograph prior to restoration. Armed with stiffed bristled brushes (metal bristles were banned for fear it would aid in the disrepair), soap and water, the volunteers spent several hot summer afternoons scrubbing each gravestone until the markings were as discernible as possible—a three digit number, a symbol of religion (a cross to denote Catholicism, wreath for Protestantism, or star of David for Jewish patients) and occasionally a name and dates birth and death. The graves were divided by religion and laid in consecutive numerical order, but only the stones, of those who were buried in the 1980s, on the periphery, had names and dates. The Jewish quarter was separated by line of tall pine trees. Those who constructed the cemetery seemed to consider religion to be significantly more important that personal identity. For over a century, individuals who died in the GPC were buried anonymously.

Erving Goffman describes how the multifaceted identities of individuals are stripped upon arrival to a total institution. Individuals are processed through the bureaucratic system:  “the new arrival … [is] shaped and coded into an object that can be fed into the administrative machinery of the establishment” (1961:16). Those who died within the walls of the GPC took this quantification literally with them to their grave. Tragically, the force that produces this quantification is still at work.

After a summer of dirty fingernails, blistered hands, and sweaty brows, we restored the cemetery on Route 62. All known grave markers were made visible and scrubbed clean. A sign now stands erect at the edge of the busy road, clearly designating the pasture as a site of memory. Landscaping stones encircle three bushes of mums planted in the mulch at the foot of the wooden sign, whose bold golden letters read, “Gowanda Psychiatric Center Memorial Cemetery.” At the entrance of the cemetery, a granite headstone was erected. Also surrounded by mums, the monolith holds smooth pebbles for the deceased of Jewish faith. A dove bracing for flight, perched on a branch of flowers, is etched into the stone, which reads:

IN MEMORY OF THE FORMER RESIDENTS OF THE GOWANDA STATE HOSPTIAL / GOWANDA PSYCHIATRIC CENTER

1895—1994

REST HERE IN PEACE

“DEATH IS NO MORE THAN PASSING FROM ONE ROOM INTO ANOTHER.  BUT THERE’S A DIFFERENCE FOR ME, YOU KNOW, BECAUSE IN THAT OTHER ROOM, I SHALL BE ABLE TO SEE”

HELEN KELLER

David Mack-Hardiman, one of the leading organizers of the volunteers, explained in an interview to a Buffalo News reporter on October 26, 2009:  “Records containing the names of those buried in the cemetery were lost after the hospital shut down.” This, though, proved not to be accurate. A local archivist attended the Ceremony of Remembrance—a moving service in which the signage and monument were unveiled with the release of a rehabilitated red-tailed hawk, Jewish and Christian prayers, and speeches by advocates and self-advocates. He emerged among the reporters, activists, volunteers, and families and told Mack-Hardiman that he had a list of names that corresponded to the numbers on the graves.

Volunteers then hoped to finish their work, to use this new information for a memorial that would list the newly identified graves. But the local community, according to Mack-Hardiman, resisted the erection of a marker which would identify the names with the numbers. Gowanda is home to less than three-thousand residents, and the stigma of having a loved one institutionalized still resonates there. Many families did not want to discover that they had an aunt, cousin, or brother who was committed to the institution. They were pleased that the stones were cleaned and the cemetery respectfully marked, but the fear that a family name would appear publically associated with the institution was not communally acceptable.

Mack-Hardiman explained “Support for the restorations was slow in coming because mental illness [and disability] has long carried a stigma, and the institutionalized were deemed ‘not so worthy’ of proper burial by the state that cared for them and even by their families.” The once invisible were now seen, thanks to activist intervention, but not named. The opposition of the good people of Gowanda to the naming is a testament to the staying power of the stigma.