By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, April 24th, 2013 Contrary to the suggestion of my informal title, I did not study with Hannah Arendt, nor were we ever colleagues, although I missed both experiences only by a bit. I was a graduate student in the early 1970s in one of the universities where she last taught, the University of Chicago, and my first and only long term position, at the New School for Social Research, was her primary American academic home. But when I was a Ph.D. candidate, she was feuding with her department Chair in the Committee on Social Thought, Saul Bellow, (or at least so it was said through the student grapevine), and she was, thus, not around. And I arrived at the New School, one year after she died. Nonetheless, she was with me as an acquaintance at the U. of C., and soon after I arrived at the New School, we in a sense became intimates.
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 . . .
Read more: Hannah and Me: Understanding Politics in Dark Times
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, April 15th, 2013 
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 . . .
Read more: Spring Break with Daniel Dayan: the politics of small things meets the politics of even smaller things
By Irit Dekel, March 20th, 2013 
“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 . . .
Read more: Speech Deficits: A Young ‘Other’ and his Mother in Berlin
By Daniel Dayan, February 24th, 2013 1. Overhearing, intruding, my interview & Goffman
I was once invited to speak at a conference in Sigtuna, near Uppsala, in Sweden. The conference dealt with religious sociology and a few clerics were present. One of them was a famous Danish Imam, Abu Laban. He had ignited what came to be known as the Danish scandal of the Mohammed Cartoons (Favret-Saada 2007). I had exchanged a few words with him and was being interviewed by a Swedish newspaper. Abu Laban was seated nearby. In fact, he listened to the interview. Sometimes he nodded. Sometimes he smiled. I could hardly object to his presence without being rude. But then, the Imam started answering the questions that were put to me.
Although I do not remember how I reacted, what happened on that day illustrated a fundamental distinction established by Erving Goffman, between the “ratified” listeners of a verbal exchange and those who just happen to be there.
Being present and technically able to hear everything that is said does not make you a partner in a conversation. Unless “ratified” as a listener, you are just “overhearing.” An implicit protocol expects overhearers not to listen, since listening would amount to a form of eavesdropping. As to intervening, it clearly establishes that you have been overhearing and constitutes an additional transgression. Intervening takes overhearing one step further. It is, and was in the case of the Imam and me, an intrusion.
I believe that Goffman’s distinction between ratified participants and overhearers can be transposed on a larger scale, concerning those conversations societies hold with themselves under the name of “public sphere.”
2. Destabilized public spheres
Our vision of the public sphere is predicated on the implicit model of a conversation between a given nation- state and the corresponding civil society, with central media connecting centers and peripheries. This geography of centers and peripheries has been submitted to many waves of destabilization. After having been structured for a long time in national terms and dominated by central television organizations, public spheres have grown in a number of directions, most of which involve a post-national dimension. Three such directions are particularly significant.
First, mega television networks offer world audiences vantage points . . .
Read more: Overhearing in the Public Sphere
By Daniel Dayan, February 8th, 2013 The Diversity of “Non-Publics”: Former Publics, Future Publics
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 . . .
Read more: On Un-publics: Former Publics, Future Publics, Almost Publics, Observers and Genealogies
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, December 13th, 2012 
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, . . .
Read more: The Social Condition
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, October 31st, 2012 
 To skip this introduction and go directly to the In-Depth Analysis, “Reinventing Democratic Culture: Then and Now,” click here.
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, . . .
Read more: Thinking About the Storm and Political Culture: An Introduction to my Solidarity Lecture
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, October 31st, 2012 A Paper Prepared for Presentation for The European Solidarity Center, Gdansk University, Gdansk, Poland, October 6, 2011
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 . . .
Read more: Reinventing Democratic Culture: Then and Now
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, October 12th, 2012 
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 . . .
Read more: Biden Wins: So What?
By Ariel Merkel, October 4th, 2011 
Total institutions – asylums, prisons, the military and the like – fundamentally re-form their inmates, distancing them from the world outside. Here we see how this persists even after death, a product of neglect and willful stigmatization of the mentally ill, even as dis-Ability advocates fight against the injustice and indignity. -Jeff
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 . . .
Read more: In Death as in Life: Stigma In and Beyond an American Total Institution
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