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.

It’s been a tough week: the Boston Marathon Bombing on the public stage, and closer to home, the death of a friend, colleague and great scholar, Aristide Zolberg (I will be publishing tributes, including my own,  later this week), and a memorial service for my wife’s uncle Ed Gruson.

“Uncle Eddie” was an extraordinary man, sophisticated and warm, a bit of a rascal, but also a man of high moral principle in his private and public affairs (dating back to his marching in Selma, Alabama as a young man). My special relationship with Ed: he was the ideal reader, with a deep commitment to understanding the world, a trained biologist and urban planner, author of the birding book Words for Birds, who read broadly and seriously, with a sense of responsibility. Anticipating the end about a year ago, he gave me his complete collection of the works of Isaiah Berlin. Making sense of the chaos, while thinking about meaningful lives, is a challenge. Ed knew that thinkers like Berlin and Hannah Arendt, thinkers in dark times, to paraphrase Arendt’s most beautiful book, are important guides.

And as it happens, I did have a related treat planned for myself at the end of the grim dark tunnel of a week: off to see a movie, the Arendt biopic. It is a good movie, though it’s far from perfect. It powerfully and accurately depicts passionate thought. That is a real accomplishment, pushing the film form: “filmed thinking.”

As I prepare this post, I read two very good positive reviews, one in the distinguished Der Spiegel, the other in the more bohemian, Bitch Media. They highlight the film’s accomplishments, recognizing the great direction of Margarethe von Trotta and the superb performance of Barbara Sukowa, and they applaud how the film tells the story of the great controversy surrounding Arendt’s writing, her account of the trial of Adolf Eichmann and her invention of the notion of “the banality of evil,” which she uses to depict Eichmann as the modern everyman, the thoughtless bureaucrat. The film also neatly portrays Arendt’s love affair and ongoing relationship with Martin Heidegger, in my judgment properly presenting it as an unsolved puzzle.

Arendt’s thought is the hero of the film, embellished by her love of her husband, Heinrich Blücher, her friendship with Mary McCarthy, and her apartment, filled with books, wine, cigarettes and émigré conversation, including between Arendt and Han Jonas, another famous New School philosopher. He couldn’t stand her relationship with Heidegger, dating back to the times they were students together, and in the film it seems that they irrevocably estranged over her Eichmann report. After Arendt’s death, I heard Jonas’s telling improvised and unrecorded commentary on Arendt at a memorial conference at NYU. Said Jonas: “Hannah thought that if she exaggerated an insight, it would become true.”

Of course, there were compromises in the film, which I find very interesting. The most significant, but understandable, is that Arendt is defined by her major public and private controversies, Eichmann and Heidegger, while the range of her original thought is named, but not revealed. Certainly this is an effect of the limits of film and the need to appeal to viewers who don’t know much about Arendt and her cultural world.

But thinking of Uncle Eddie and Ary Zolberg, there is a more telling problem. Arendt’s thinking is a little bit too good in this film, while those who oppose her are a bit too bad.

I admire Arendt. She is my favorite political thinker, as I will explain in my next in-depth post, “Hannah and Me.” Yet, even though her insights concerning the banality of evil are extremely important, explaining the cultural support of tyranny large and small, beyond the Holocaust, Arendt’s judgment of Eichmann is not “the truth” as the film’s Hannah declares. Arendt exaggerated her position, in Eichmann and many of her other books. Her factual reports were not always sound. On these and other grounds, Ary Zolberg was highly critical of her masterwork, The Origins of Totalitarianism. And while she may have been right about how thoughtlessness and irresponsibility explain the success of the Nazi death machine, and that the Jewish leadership was implicated, her tone indicated that her feelings for the Jewish people were ambivalent. I think I remember talking to Ed about this.

The movie depiction and Arendt herself may have been right when she asserted that we best confine our love for specific people and not a people, but the way Arendt portrays the Israeli prosecutor and judge, and the masses of Jews of Europe in her text, was problematic. Her tone was wrong, while her philosophy was difficult, challenging and of lasting value. The thought in the end won me over as I will explain in  “Hannah and Me.” Her thought is there for us to consider and qualify at the end of this tough week, as we try to make sense of the Boston Marathon Bombing and the Brothers Tsarnaev, not only her notion of the banality of evil, but also her ideas about ideology and its relationship to terror.

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.

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.

If National Socialism and Communism are remembered primarily through the prism of trauma, pre-communist days or certain aspects of communism are increasingly remembered through the warm haze of nostalgia. Recalling the past through the eyes of traumatized victimhood runs the risk of projecting individual psychology onto collectivities such as nations or people. Museums that depict history though the eyes of victimhood remove historical events from time in order to focus on traumatic moments of suffering. Likewise, monuments to national suffering, while representing key moments, tend to reduce the complexity of historical events into clear visual images that appeal to primal emotions. Recent areas of memory studies that are devoted to the importance of trauma tend to divide the world into two groups: perpetrators and victims. However, what cannot be discussed in a traumatic reading of history are the gray areas of collaboration or passivity. What happens if individuals were neither perpetrators nor victims?

Nostalgia is even more attractive than trauma because it softens time by offering a beautiful image of the past. Inscribed in heritage sites and national folklore, nostalgia offers a simple and powerful image of the nation through the eyes of culture. Clearly there are problems in reading history through the eyes of trauma, because one receives a distorted understanding of the past solely from the perspective of the victim. In a similar way, nostalgia forgets the difficulties of the past by recalling only what was pleasant and what often coincides with the youth of the one remembering.

Both trauma and nostalgia engage in what Tony Judt would call a “mis-memory.” A mis-memory is not necessarily forgetfulness, nor is it an outright lie. However, a mis-memory borders dangerously on mythology by dividing the world into occupying forces and victims, good and evil. Both trauma and nostalgia are mis-memories because they fixate on particular aspects of the past and reject anything that threatens their singular definition.

Thus, those in eastern Europe, who see the past solely through the eyes of national victimhood might view the Holocaust as a threat to a pristine understanding of their national suffering as the central trauma. Likewise, those who cling to a nostalgic view of the interwar years before Soviet occupation also engage in mis-memory because those good old years are remembered through the misty haze of nostalgia. Both trauma and nostalgia offer true, but limited readings of the past. Both fixate on myths of the past that are frozen and removed from critical analysis and the passing of time. Moreover, they are incapable of addressing the difficult moral choices that individuals had to make during National Socialism and Communism. Such moral choices do not and cannot fit into the black and white framework of traumatic victimhood or a nostalgic golden age.

Perhaps the question can be phrased in a different way: Is there a collective responsibility to remember both the crimes of communism and the Holocaust as part of a common European past? It was Hannah Arendt who first raised the question of what collective responsibility meant in her essay entitled “Collective Responsibility” published in 1968. Unlike Karl Jaspers, who argued that there are four types of guilt after National Socialism, Arendt was careful to distinguish between guilt and responsibility. As she wrote, one cannot feel guilt for something that one has not done. “There is such a thing as responsibility for things one has not done; one can be held liable for them.” (Arendt 2003: 147) Originally written after the Eichmann trial and during the student demonstrations in West Germany and the civil rights movement in the United States, Arendt’s argument for collective responsibility is relevant for the question of a common European past. As she famously wrote: “Where all are guilty, nobody is.” Guilt is personal and linked to an individual. If law and morality begin from the individual, collective responsibility is political and connected with a group. According to Arendt, if we do not want to be held collectively responsible for something, we must leave the group. But, since every person belongs to a community of some sort – national, religious, ethnic and finally the world – he will always be part of a community. In the end, the community that we cannot separate ourselves from is the world that we share. The world is far larger than a single nation or a continent – the world is everything that we share. “This vicarious responsibility for things we have not done, this taking upon ourselves the consequences for things we are entirely innocent of, is the price we pay for the fact that we live our lives not by ourselves but among our fellow men…”

Europe is a collective body that people belong to. Given the different war and postwar experiences throughout the continent, it becomes more important to pay attention to the nuances as well as the common points of history. Attempts to read the past through the eyes of trauma or nostalgia risk flattening the complexity of history into simplistic grand narratives. Likewise, although only half of the continent shares a communist past, most of Europe shares some experience with the Holocaust. Thus, the tendency to view the Holocaust solely as a German or Jewish problem has moral, as well historical consequences. Judt’s lecture on Europe that he gave in 1995 seems just as relevant now, as it was then: “Discussion today of the prospects for Europe tends to oscillate rather loosely between Pangloss and Cassandra, between bland assurance and dire prophecy.” (Judt 2011: 12) Questions of how to present a more balanced European history that includes both the Holocaust and the crimes of communism are not only necessary from the point of historical knowledge and collective responsibility, but will also have consequences for what kind of a European future we can imagine: an open community that is hospitable to strangers and based on a broader understanding of citizenship or a provincial fortress that can only see history through the eyes of national suffering or nostalgia for a bygone age. So far Judt seems to be right. We do seem to be somewhere “rather loosely (sic) between Pangloss and Cassandra.”

“All truths – not only the various kinds of rational truth but also factual truth – are opposed to opinion in their mode of asserting validity. Truth carries within itself an element of coercion, and the frequently tyrannical truthtellers may be caused less by a failing of character than by the strain of habitually living under a kind of compulsion.” – Hannah Arendt (Between Past and Future. 1954, p. 243)

During the period immediately before someone leaves one city and moves to another, they seem to liberate themselves and experiment with abandon during that window of freedom, or fearfully adhere to the tired routines of a forgone order. Having witnessed the Eurocrisis unfold over the past two years from a window in Berlin, I recently thought I would have to move elsewhere due to conflict with the archaic hierarchy of a German university. I naturally rebelled and charged heedlessly into the freedom inherent in a contingent situation – refusing to comply with the hierarchy and arbitrary exercise of power so prevalent in the German university. With the comfortable order of my German life on the brink, I attempted to understand my position in German academia, as well as the European position under German hegemony. In so doing, I came to discover that the latter is not a debate between Keynesianism vs. neoliberal austerity, but a particularly virulent condition of wider academic and German culture: the need for truth.

If a traditional German university is a window into German culture as a whole, then the problem of truth becomes immediately apparent. Imagine riding horseback through the patchwork of political entities in medieval Germany, each with an independent lord holding absolute power over a small slice of territory, beholden only to the good grace of a distant and disinterested central authority. While riding through this landscape, the casual observer cannot help but notice that when moving from one lordship to another, the organization of labor and adherence to a unifying conception of community is entirely dictated by the lord. Some territories have jovial lords who interact with their subjects, interested in seeing smiling faces on their townsfolk and full bellies in the peasantry. Others sit aloof in marble palaces patronizing a small circle of followers and sycophants, while browbeating the remainder into perpetual worship and servitude. In each case, the truth is held by the lord, and the lords themselves are at almost constant war with each other, attempting to extend their vision of truth across the land. Because each professor in a German university effectively governs an entire department, with an army of student assistants, research assistants and post-docs, this medieval image illuminates the culture of a traditional German university. Unsurprisingly, the “market” for those lower but rather well-paid positions is brutal and precarious, and switching between lords becomes an exercise in switching between truths.

Extended to the German dominions themselves, certain truths are self-evident among the mainstream, functioning at the federal level. The law is sacred. The state is sacred. The economy is sacred. The currency is sacred. The four mainstream parties, the Conservatives, the Social Democrats, the Liberals and the Greens are surprisingly adept at working togetherafter accepting these truths – at least compared to the polarized American environment. Of course, the Left, emerging from the Communist East and persisting over the years, has been a pariah to the mainstream, while the recent success of the Pirates is just downright baffling. The response to these outsiders is a mixture of aggressive repudiation, particularly towards the Left (You dangerous lunatics want to bring the GDR back!), or sneering contempt (what do these pothead idiots dressed as Pirates want anyway?). In each case, the outsider is considered a threat not only in the traditional understanding of violence and theft, but also because their positions are invalid. Thus, they are simply wrong, false, in error – a threat not simply to order, but to the truth.

Brought to the European level, behind the intractable German position on austerity is not so much an essentialist identity, moralizing about hard work and responsibility, but a feeling of compulsion among the elites driven by “the truth” of the situation. After all, how can a Haushalt spend more than it takes in? What other solution is there but for Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain (“the PIIGS”) to “get their houses in order”? What can open market operations by the European Central Bank (ECB) lead to but inflation? These are truths!

Of course, there is no “German Truth” to which all citizens adhere. The political culture is quite vibrant, diverse and filled with plenty of activists who have been at the forefront of anti-fascism as well as movements similar to Occupy. Nevertheless, there is a tendency, particularly among those in positions of power, to possess a form of aggressive self-assurance that they themselves hold the truth in isolation from all others. Because it is the truth, those in inferior positions must comply. Yet, it is precisely this combination, holding the truth in isolation and expecting others to comply, which generates the result any casual observer would expect: the social isolation of that person. This alienating self-assurance manifests itself not only in the lordships of German academia, but also in the acrimonious conflicts over the Eurocrisis. The two best examples of this are probably the two most important Germans in Europe at the moment: Angela Merkel and Bundesbank president Jens Weidmann – the most powerful council member on the board of the European Central Bank (ECB).

Merkel, a consistent advocate of austerity under the folksy belief that national budgets are just like household budgets – something John Maynard Keynes laboriously tried to discredit – finally got what she deserved this summer: isolation. With the replacement of French President Sarkozy by Socialist François Hollande, Italian Prime Minster Mario Monti quickly formed an alliance against Merkel’s dominance and effectively forced her into isolation. The result was a defeat for Merkel’s beliefs and the further extension of European-level credit to troubled countries.

On the other hand, if Merkel is stubborn in her timeless wisdom, Weidmann is as unyielding as a mathematical equation. Following his interview in Der Spiegel, one wonders if this trained economist would like to see Europe in ruins just to prove true whatever macroeconomic paradigm he functions under. Although quite young and only on the job for little over a year, scarcely a month after Merkel’s defeat, Weidmann was likewise isolated on the board of the ECB. The ECB subsequently plans to move forward with open market operations – exactly what Weidmann wanted to avoid.

In the end, it is clear Europe is moving towards a new order, or, more figuratively, moving from one city to another. If “the truth” of the old order is already forgone, we can only hope that the leaders of the transition liberate themselves from its routines. But, if my personal experience with the German university is any indication, or perhaps also that of Monti and his allies, directly challenging the truth tellers of the old city is the only way to move forward to a new one. We can only hope that such a challenge brings the truth out of isolation and into rational public debate.

I am having second thoughts about my last post in which I assert that the nomination of Paul Ryan, because he is a right-wing ideologist, assures the re-election of Barack Obama. I don’t wish to revise my observations or judgment, but think I need to explain a bit more. I realize that I should be clearer about what I mean by ideology and why I think, and hope, that it spells defeat for the Republicans. My thoughts in two parts: today, I will clarify what I mean by ideology and my general political prediction; in my next post, I will consider further implications of ideological developments in American politics, addressing some doubts and criticism raised by Deliberately Considered readers.

I also want to point out that my thoughts on Ryan and ideology are related to my search for conservative intellectuals worthy of respect. In that what I have to say is motivated bya conservative suspicion of the role of a certain kind of idea and reason in politics, I wonder what Paul Gottfried and Alvino-Mario Fantini (two conservative intellectuals who have contributed to Deliberately Considered) would think. As I understand it, my last post was a conservative critique of right-wing ideology, pointing to its progressive consequences. As a centrist who wants to move the center left, I am hopeful about this, but I imagine committed conservatives would be deeply concerned. I am still having trouble finding a deliberate dialogue with them.

A brief twenty-five year old encounter comes to mind as I think about ideology and its political toxicity, trying to explain my Ryan judgment.

We were in a taxi in Prague in 1987, Jonathan Fanton, the President of the New School for Social Research, Ira Katznelson, the Dean of The New School’s Graduate Faculty, Jan Urban, a leading dissident intellectual-journalist activist, and I: the preliminary meeting between The New School and the small but very vibrant, creative and ultimately successful Czechoslovak democratic opposition. In the end, we did some good in that part of the world, starting with a donation of a computer that enabled Urban and his colleagues to more easily publish their underground newspaper, Lidove Noviny. As we were exchanging pleasantries in the taxi, I became serious and asserted that I am against all “isms”: communism, socialism, fascism, but also liberalism and conservatism. Urban turned to me and happily declared that we were comrades in thoughts. It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship, based on our deep concern about the ideological politics of the sort that is now to be found in the Tea Party on the American radical right, and also played a unfortunate role in the politics of post–Communist Czech Republic under the stewardship of Vaclav Klaus.

Urban and I agreed that true-believing politics was extremely dangerous, whether or not the beliefs were attractive. We were suspicious of systematic overall positions. We understood together that the too intimate connection between ideas and assertions of power was extremely dangerous. Ideas then blind. The difference between fact and fiction become difficult to discern. Newspeak prevails.

There was, of course, exaggeration in our agreement, the danger of ideology is not neatly summarized by suffix “ism,” but we shared a common sense, the same sense that informs my judgment of Ryan and the likely Republican fate. Ideology for Urban and for me is a term that is best understood not as the confluence of interest and political ideas, enabling political action (ideology in the sense of Mannheim and Geertz, beautifully interpreted by Ricoeur). Rather, implicit in my exchange with Urban is an understanding of ideology that draws on the position of Hannah Arendt (and more conservative thinkers such as Eric Voegelin), as she and we try to make sense of a particularly pernicious form of political ideas.

Thus in the present situation, following the ideology of the free market true-belief, constitutional fundamentalism and a theological reading of the American tradition, rich people become “job creators” by definition. A moderate Democrat becomes a “dangerous socialist” who doesn’t understand what America is. Changing the fundamental principles of Medicare and Social Security becomes “saving” them, while controlling the cost escalation of Medicare means destroying it. We also have the “failed stimulus package,” the “racist” Attorney General Eric Holder, not to mention the Muslim president born in Kenya. All of this passes for the conservatism of Tea Party Republicans, and Ryan is said to be its great intellectual leader. This is ideological politics pure and simple.

I disagree with the substance of Romney – Ryan’s positions on Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security, something that Michael Corey identified and criticized in his response to my post. He believes that the Republican and the Democratic plans for “entitlements” should be dispassionately evaluated and seems to be disappointed that I didn’t do this in my post. But this wasn’t my point. There are indeed different ways to address the problems of medical care of the old and the younger that have their strengths and weaknesses. A debate about such things is a normal part of politics. What concerns me is the Manichean way this debate is presented and understood by the new right-wing ideologues, as a grand battle between good and evil, with the very future of America in the balance. Ryan reduces all political conflict in this way, as he put it in 2005: “the fight we are in here, make no mistake about it, is a fight of individualism versus collectivism.“

I think that this is the sort of thing that a great majority of Americans reject. There may have been a drift to the right in recent years. Belief in the possibility that government can address social problems may be down, but the certainty of free market true-believers makes little sense to people as they try to get by in tough times. It’s a matter of form, not substance, and again to paraphrase Barry Goldwater in order to criticize his position: extremism in defense of freedom doesn’t win elections in America, not for Goldwater in the early sixties and not for Romney – Ryan now.

As a consequence, the Republican ticket will prevaricate. They will back down. This has defined Romney’s career, and Ryan himself, to get re-elected, has also compromised his stated principles to deliver the “collectivist” government goods to his constituents. Yet, in the glare of the national campaign this sort of thing is less likely to work. Romney – Ryan will reveal to the electorate the worst of both worlds, the repellent dogmatism of true-belief, combined with the apparent cynicism of hack politicians who will say anything to be elected.

Thus, I think that Obama will be re-elected. I also have a hunch. This may allow Obama to be Obama. Perhaps just as the decisive defeat of Goldwater established the political opportunity for the reforms of “The Great Society,” the Romney – Ryan defeat may open up the opportunity for “change we can believe in.”

The seminar on “New New Social Movements” has just ended and our tentative findings are in: there is indeed a new kind of social movement that has emerged in the past couple of years. Our task has been to identify and understand the promise and perils of this new movement type, to specify its common set of characteristics, its causes and likely consequences. We began our investigations in Wroclaw and will continue in the coming months. This is the first of a series of progress reports summarizing our deliberations of the past couple of weeks. -Jeff

The new movements are broad and diverse. Our informed discussions ranged from the uprisings of the Arab Spring, to Occupy Wall Street, including also the protests in major Romanian cities and the mining region, protests against the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) in Poland, protests in Israel concerning issues of housing, food, healthcare and other social demands, and the protests in Russia over the absence of democracy in the conduct of the affairs of state and elections. Participants with special knowledge of these social movements presented overviews in light of the social science theory and research of our common readings. We then all compared and contrasted the movements. We worked to identify commonalities and differences in social movement experiences.

We started with readings and a framework for discussion as I reported here. I had a hunch, a working hypothesis: the media is the message, to use the motto of Marshall McCluhan. But I thought about this beyond the social media, as in “this is the Facebook revolution.” Rather my intuition, which the seminar participants supported, told me that the social form (in this sense the media) rather than the content is what these movements share.

There is a resemblance with the new social movements of the recent past studied by Alain Touraine and Alberto Melucci, but there is something else that distinguishes the new social movements of the moment: a generational focus on the creation of new publics to address major concerns. We found the work of Jurgen Habermas and Hannah Arendt helpful in understanding this, as well as the approaches of my colleagues Eiko Ikegami and Elzbieta Matynia, along with my work.

The movements seem fundamentally to support Hannah Arendt’s primary thesis about politics and the public domain. In her sense, the new “new social movements” are definitively political, about people speaking and acting in the presence of each other, dedicated to their common autonomy, as equals in their differences. Politics to her mind is not a means to an end but an end in itself. She may have exaggerated this, but that it is an important dimension of political life is confirmed by the formation of the new “new social movements” as we studied them in Wroclaw.

Indeed our discussions confirmed Arendt’s position, with important variations on the theme and with specifications. Today some preliminary notes on Romania and Poland. More comparisons, contrasts and implications in upcoming posts.

Ana Maria Murg reported on movements in Romania. Demonstrations over changes in government funding of healthcare eventually led to changes in governments and public policy, and important links between the elites of the political opposition and a broad range of citizens. Most interesting was her report on how the protesters around the country (especially in the major cities) re-legitimized the idea of protest as a democratic way of manifesting citizen discontent. The protests against the government achieved their immediate ends, changes in the governing elite, but Murg believes that the most significant fact was the development of a capacity for members of the society to act in addressing their concerns, from the dangers of de-funding the social safety net, to the employment of miners, to a youth movement against proposed changes in laws about intellectual property, the movement, against ACTA. She showed us videos of demonstrating social activists, including one of her own making.

I found particularly intriguing the way Murg identified links between protests about the ruling elite, ACTA and the mines. She revealed members of a society that was coming together, or at least the potential of this, by addressing their specific concerns, not an enforced unity and the reaction against this, as was the case in Romanian during the communist era and in the demonstrations that brought this to an end, as I analyzed in the chapter on 1989 in The Politics of Small Things (see here) Murg’s report indicated to me a remarkable progress, a turning around, a revolution in micro-politics. In Romania and in the other cases we studied I found evidence of the increasing significance of the politics of small things.

Anti-ACTA demonstrations in Poland were probably the most intense in the region, if not globally. Aleksandra Przegalinska provided the seminar with an analysis. Because young Poles have become accustomed to free access to just about everything on the web, the new law created controversy as it appeared to threaten this way of life. It was a perceived attack upon what they understood as their free public domain. Przegalinska reported a provocative irony: ACTA, according to government and independent analysis, is less restrictive than existing Polish law concerning intellectual property.Yet, the secrecy of the law’s development and the lack of certainty concerning its provisions, provoked broad public resistance. Young people shared their concerns through social media. They exchanged ideas and strategies. They worked together to protest the proposed policy through cyber-activism. The constituted an independent public and independent public action. Government sites were attacked, and the state and the society took notice. Small discreet exchanges led to concerted actions, a major social protest.

Off line demonstrators all met in central squares around the country, seeing each other, sometimes simply jumping up and down together, confirming their solidarity. I noted that this reversed previous conventions, when people demonstrated in the streets, disrupting life and usual, and went home to see how it was represented on the television. Now they go to the streets to see themselves. We all agreed that this relationship between the virtual and the embodied, the politically instrumental and ceremonial, were more situationally enacted.

The Poles acted to defend their capacity to speak and act freely. They defended a free public. This resonated with their understanding of the struggles of the recent past. They were worried about the secrecy and restrictions of the present.

Romanians and Poles are in movement: forming and defending free publics as an end of political engagement.

More to come soon.

The conclusion of my presentation will highlight the counter trend, the “no” side of my answer to our question, doing so by linking two of my major projects, the study of the politics of small things and of reinventing political culture. I will suggest, further, the need to carefully consider Daniel Dayan’s ideas of monstration. In my conclusion, I will make a sort of book proposal for Dayan and me to work on, so that the weaknesses of my approach can be addressed. I will move toward the conclusion first by examining what I take to be the way a cable television network contributes to the sickness of democracy, specifically in the United States – the yes side of my answer to our question. I will then make my second move, to the no side, considering how social media and other new forms of electronic media open the opportunity for a counter trend, supporting the politics of small things. I analyze both tendencies as they are tied to significant social movements that define and redefine political culture, for better and for worse: the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street. I want to be clear that I don’t see the problems and potentials I identify here as being primarily the consequence of media form, cable news, bad, online media, good. Rather I maintain that media forms shape, support and undermine the formation of social and political movements and institutions.  The social and the political are my message, not the media.

Yes

Fox News, Rupert Murdoch’s spectacularly successful cable news network in the United States, is not just biased. It is a political mobilization machine, shaping the political landscape. Consider the criticism of a well-known social thinker.

In September, 2010, Barack Obama offered a critique of Fox in an interview published in Rolling Stone magazine. This absolutely shocked and appalled Fox shock jocks Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity, the following evenings. They, the most popular in house celebrities on Fox TV, were shocked by any suggestion that they were anything but “fair and balanced,” the newspeak slogan of the tendentious network. In their self-presentation, they provide the alternative to the kowtowing liberals of the mainstream media. They were appalled by Obama’s criticism.

Yet, their response is cynical. They pretend to be what they are not, news commentators on a news network. Obama’s critique on the other hand is on firmer ground, even if it is not clear that it was wise. Isn’t it below the President’s dignity to engage in polemics with partisan press criticism? Doesn’t it enlarge them and belittle him?  These are the questions of the talking heads on cable and on the Sunday morning shows, in the television and radio discussions that followed the publication of the President’s interview.

Yet, actually in the interview Obama was quite careful, offering a measured serious answer to a provocative question:

Rolling Stone: “What do you think of Fox News? Do you think it’s a good institution for America and for democracy?”

President Obama: “[Laughs] Look, as president, I swore to uphold the Constitution, and part of that Constitution is a free press. We’ve got a tradition in this country of a press that oftentimes is opinionated. The golden age of an objective press was a pretty narrow span of time in our history. Before that, you had folks like Hearst who used their newspapers very intentionally to promote their viewpoints. I think Fox is part of that tradition — it is part of the tradition that has a very clear, undeniable point of view. It’s a point of view that I disagree with. It’s a point of view that I think is ultimately destructive for the long-term growth of a country that has a vibrant middle class and is competitive in the world. But as an economic enterprise, it’s been wildly successful. And I suspect that if you ask Mr. Murdoch what his number-one concern is, it’s that Fox is very successful.”

Obama placed Fox in a tradition of opinionated American journalism, and noted he disagreed with the Fox opinions and doesn’t think they are good for America. While I don’t see how a reasonable person, either pro or anti-Obama, can find fault with his response, I also don’t think that Obama went far enough. Serious media innovation is occurring at Fox, with potentially deep political effects. It is probably the reason why Obama feels compelled to criticize it from time to time.

Fox News is a truly innovative media form, particularly for television.  It purports to present news, but actually it is in the business of political mobilization. I think this is a specific American case, but it may be indicative of a general trend, the substitution of media for political parties.

In the important case of the Tea Party protests, this was most clear. Glenn Beck, a particularly flamboyant Fox News commentator who later lost his job, announced a mass demonstration, the “9/12 Rally.” On the Fox News programs and discussion shows, the developments leading up to the demonstration were reported, and their significance was discussed. Together with Beck’s agitation for the event, these reports and discussions brought the planned event to the attention of a large audience. Even if the event was initially the result of grassroots organization, as were the Tea Party Protests called for “tax day,” April 15, 2009, the attention of the public to the event went well beyond its original planners and their capacity to mobilize the population.

Dayan highlights the importance of this showing in his work on “monstration.” In his research, he is particularly interested in how the experience and expressions of a particular social circle move beyond a delimited public, and is brought to the attention of broader publics, an insight that can be found both in the work of the French classical sociologist, Gabrielle Tarde and the American pragmatist, John Dewey. This act is of primary political significance in media politics, something Fox has done very well, helping the previously marginal to become part of the mainstream. What is intriguing about Fox News is how they systematically work on the act of monstration and actually connect it to the work of social mobilization. I wonder sometimes whether the Republican Party has become the Fox Party, with many, perhaps most, of the potential Republican Party candidates for president for the 2012 election to President having worked as paid employees of the television news service.

In the case of the 9/12 rally, the Fox produced media event happened. Fox was there giving it full coverage. It was the major event of the day, the story that was given wall to wall coverage, while the other news sources tended to report it as one story among many. It was a kind of sacred presentation while other news services viewed it as part of the mundane daily events. The fact that only Fox “properly” reported on the event was said to reveal the bias of the “lame stream media,” to use the language of the American media critic and Fox commentator, Sarah Palin. This format applies to major happenings, but also to the trivial, from the Islamic bias of textbooks in Texas, to the booing of Palin’s daughter Bristol on “Dancing with the Stars,” a popular entertainment show, to the networks annual campaign against “the war on Christmas.” (a particularly surreal campaign, in which the fact that public actors say happy holidays rather than Merry Christmas is said to reveal the anti – Christian bias of the liberal elites in government and the corporate sector)

Contrary to Obama, Fox is not just biased as it reports the news. It produces the news from beginning to end, conflating news reporting with the political action that is the story. Murdock’s number one concern may be to be successful, as President Obama maintained in Rolling Stone, but it is notable that the success is political as well as monetary.  Rupert Murdock and News Corp make money, while America is given a strong coordinated push to the right.

Note here: there is a way in which Beck’s rally could be understood from the perspective of Daniel Boorstein, in his classical critique of broadcast news, as a pseudo event. It was produced for television, was news only as it appeared on television. Generally, I have been convinced, along with most media analysts, that Boorstein’s work doesn’t really confront the new realities of the televisual age. Because in politics appearances are realities (Arendt), and because in the age of television, public attention to things political occurs through TV, there does not seem to be anything pseudo about such events. To play a little with the old theorem of W.I. Thomas, (i.e. “If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences”) if political actions appear as real on television, they are real in their consequences.

I think no study better demonstrates this, no book more forcefully reveals the weakness of Boorstein’s position, than Dayan and Katz’s classic Media Events. I think that theirs is a modern classic. Yet, nonetheless, I also think we must take into account that there is something pseudo about Fox and company. As in the case of the 9/12 March, they specialize not simply in broadcasting news from a point of view. They specialize in the self-conscious production of political reality, and they do this with a thoroughness that I believe is unprecedented in the U.S. They turn fiction into facts and facts into fictions, from Obama’s citizenship to non-existent death panels in healthcare legislation, to non-existent mosques that threaten America at ground zero, to the importance of political candidates.

This sickens democracy. Facts have become partisan, e.g. global warming. Science has become a matter of political debate, e.g. evolution. Republican politicians now have to explain why they would give priority to the latter in schools and why they may have once taken seriously the former before they became more enlightened, e.g. the position of the once front runner in the race for the Republican nomination to be President of the United States, Newt Gingrich.  In one of the Republican presidential primary debates, the Republican candidates for president faced a panel of right wing state attorney generals, grand conservative inquisitors, who sought to unmask any and all liberal tendencies in the candidates’ pasts, seeking reassurance of their ideological purity. This media event was produced and broadcasted by Fox.

These developments are encouraged by a media form that is extremely popular and clearly partisan, but calls itself “fair and balanced” (the networks slogan). It has helped to create a deeply polarized public, with mutually exclusive perceptions of reality.

Let me state forthrightly what I take to be the major problem and why I think it is particularly serious. In the present media environment, facts have become indistinguishable from political fictions for a large segment of the American public. The distinction between public and private concerns is disappearing. News and entertainment have become the same coin. In the case of Murdoch’s Fox News, tabloid sensation and ideological politics have been fused. I also see this creeping into other media forms: more and more another cable news network, MSNBC, has become the mirror image, on the left, of Fox. Though I often agree with the partisan stance of its reporters and commentators, they are increasingly trying to produce a counter reality to the world according to Fox, rather than a way to understand the world or to develop a particular partisan position. And even in what I think to be the best source of news in the United States, The New York Times, the present format of the week in review section, published every Sunday, makes it increasingly difficult to distinguish reporting, analysis and opinion.

Thus, I think democracy is indeed sick of its own media, and for good reasons. Yet, this trend, “the Foxification of American democracy,” and its media, centered by the intimate connection between Fox and right wing politics, is far from the whole story. There are, of course, many in the traditional media who work to maintain conventional standards, difficult, but not impossible in the print and broadcast journalism. But new electronic media now play a special role. Take an amusing illustration of a counter trend, as a movement towards my grounds for answering our question in the negative.

No

I was enchanted by the idea of the “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear” in October of 2010, produced by America’s two star television satirists.  I have enjoyed the programs of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert as an antidote for the political madness of our times, produced for another cable news network, Comedy Central. Especially during the worst years of the Iraq war, I watched them to maintain my own sanity. In their rally, they accurately highlighted the strength of their satire, looking for sanity in insane times, using the form of the day, the great Washington Rally organized by cable television, mimicking the production of Glenn Beck on Fox. As you have seen, I have principled problems with this new form of “Media Events,” but such is the world we now live in.  Stewart and Colbert claimed that theirs wasn’t a response to the Glenn Beck organized event, but it clearly was.  There is irony in their satire, which challenges political clarity, but for good cultural reasons.

I was pleased by the turn out.  It seems that more people attended the Stewart Colbert satirical event, than attended Beck’s earnest rally to restore honor. I appreciated that “we” saw ourselves as outnumbering “them,” and it felt good.  But was there any more to it than that?

There indeed was concern in this regard. The ambiguity of the event’s meaning led to significant criticism after the fact, most vividly expressed by another political satirist, Bill Maher, in his response.

The left and the right are not equally insane, Maher and other critics pointed out.  The problem is not in the media portrayal of our politics, something that Colbert and especially Stewart seem to focus on, but the politics itself. The event energized a part of the public, but didn’t lead to specific political action. This was just before the midterm elections, which promised to lead to broad Democratic Party losses and Tea Party gains, which proved to be the case. The only person to even allude to the elections was Tony Bennett in his closing performance, calling out to people “Vote!” after singing “America the Beautiful.” It was a political event about nothing according to Maher, echoes of Seinfeld here.

Stewart in his nightly show defended himself in amusing ways,which suggests to me how democracy is being healed by its media. His main point: the rally was about something, just not about what his critics wanted. Stewart is mostly concerned not with the partisan disagreements, but that we have lost our ability to disagree civilly and constructively. His critics in turn wonder whether it is possible to constructively disagree when one side of the disagreement is acting in a fundamentally dishonest way. The confusion of fact with fictions does indeed seem to be particularly a Republican ailment. Assertions about death panels, the illegitimacy of the Obama Presidency because of his non – citizenship, wild claims about the dangers of Sharia law in Oklahoma, and the crime wave and voting fraud being perpetuated by illegal aliens, all come from Republicans in engaging important debates of the day without any notable use of facts. They do not have Democratic equivalents.  How then can Stewart claim to be non-partisan?   We have to watch Colbert and Stewart’s tongues as they go into their cheeks.

This debate on the left, and the ambiguity of the event, I think, underscores a fundamental problem in American political culture. There is too clear a correlation between commitments to facts and party identification. One party is associated with facts, while the other seems to be more committed to its own fictions. Indeed, more disturbing than the disagreements about how to address the problems of climate change is that the scientific finding of global warming has somehow become a partisan issue. More unsettling than the disagreements about the details of the stimulus package is the fact that there are those who seem to deny that there really were dangers of the collapse of the financial system and a global depression on the order of the Great Depression of the 1930’s.  And though I have to accept that some are not as thrilled as I am by the fact that America has matured to the point that it has elected an extremely intelligent African American President, bi-racial, with Muslims in his family tree, it is deeply unsettling that there are those who live with the falsehood that he is somehow not really American, and that elected representatives of the Republican Party actually perpetrate this lie or do little to criticize them. One party has become the party of facts, the other of fictions. Truth shouldn’t be a partisan issue, but it has become one, in many different instances.

Stewart and Colbert and their critics disagree about how to voice objection to this situation, and about their perceived roles. But they are responding to the same political cultural dilemma. How to fight against the fictions that Republican partisans are using to mobilize their constituencies so effectively?

Enter Occupy Wall Street: Social Media and the politics of small things

The Rally was of those who oppose such politics and such media, which lightly substitute such fictions for facts. The participants and their supporters, and their liberal critics, became visible in large numbers. The next step was a more forthright organization that addresses both the distortion of media fictoids, working against the policies they justify. The need for this step was apparent at the Rally and in the discussion about it. The need has been filled with a social movement that uses irony in its rather nebulous political claims, demonstrating for the 99%, symbolically occupying the seat of American and indeed global finance capitalism. And as I tried above, they need to organize to act not only against policies they disagree with, but also against lies. As the Republicans obstructed responsible governance, I had hoped against a sense of hopelessness, to see an alternative cast against the Tea Party mobilization. And now Occupy Wall Street has appeared. A key to this will be a commitment to truth, something to which the Colbert Stewart Rally, its participants and organizers contributed.

This is where we move from the television, albeit cable, to newer electronic media. Clearly a new kind of politics is upon us. Many observers have highlighted the technological characteristics of this politics. Cell phones, and Facebook and other social media, blogs and the like, are the heroes in these accounts of the Arab Spring, the Israeli summer, and now of not only the Tea Party but also Occupy Wall Street. Yet, these accounts are often unsatisfying, when they don’t focus on the human agency of the new politics, the specific type of political action that is ascendant. We should recognize the importance of the new media, but it seems to me that what is extraordinary is the way a type of power, political power as Hannah Arendt understood it, is becoming increasingly important. People are meeting each other, now virtually and not only face to face, freely speaking and acting in each other’s presence, developing a capacity to act in concert. Arendt maintained that this type of activity defined politics, as the opposite of coercion. I think that she exaggerates her position. But I do think that this kind of politics is ascendant in what Vaclav Havel named “the power of the powerless,” the power of what I call “the politics of small things.”

I analyzed the way this power works in our world in my book, The Politics of Small Things. It points to the way the power of “the politics of small things” was common to both Solidarność in opposition to the previously existing socialist order in Poland of the 80s, and to the anti-war movement and the Dean campaign during the Bush years in America. Now, I think the power of the politics of small things is becoming a significant force throughout the world in many different contexts, and that it is important to take notice in places far and near, in North Africa and the Middle East, in South Korea, in the candle movement, which I have analyzed a bit with the help of Jaeho Kang, and in the Tea Party in the US, and in what has become the worldwide Occupy Wall Street movement. Here I will examine Occupy Wall Street and consider how media in supporting this and similar social movements contribute to the health of democracy, how these media present an antidote to the illness caused by other media.It is important to remember how small Occupy Wall Street was in the beginning and how small it remained. To begin with, it was just a couple of dozen people who met each other and planned the action in lower Manhattan. The first occupiers were in the hundreds, reaching the thousands only when the police acted out and stimulated greater support and focused broad media and public interest (pepper spraying became a particularly favored devise for this, first in New York and then beyond). Among themselves, the activists in OWP created something unusual. They developed rules of conduct and decision-making that were radically inclusive and democratic. They found common ground with simple ideas, the most compelling focusing on gross inequality in America, contrasting a power elite, i.e. “Wall Street,” with everyone else, i.e. “The 99%.” I observe in this case, what I observed studying Solidarność and the anti war movement and the Dean campaign, how consequential power can be generated when people interact with each other, committed to shared ends and how their interactions were important ends in themselves, of significance beyond the immediate group involved.

As with previous instances of the politics of small things, the form of Occupy Wall Street expresses its content. But, there are some telling special qualities of the latest developments.

First is the way social media contributes to the OWS form. Jenny Davis, in a recent contribution to my on line magazine, Deliberately Considered, makes cogent points about the role of social media in recent social movements in general and in Occupy Wall Street in particular. Digital activism in recent years, she argues, is not only a means to the end of embodied social action. It also is an end in itself, a new type of politics that can make the previously hidden visible and can contribute to what she calls “the zeitgeist,” what I would prefer calling the prevailing common sense. She is pointing to the difference between the politics of small things just a few years ago, in the anti war movement and the Obama campaign, and now. The new media can now constitute a space for free action, a public, a point made by Judith Butler in a recent lecture.

This is especially telling because the occupation doesn’t have a simple meaning or political end. The act of posting, along with the act of protesting, makes the world look differently, and looking at the world with fresh eyes, beyond the sorts of ideological clichés found at Fox and its liberal rival MSNBC, is something that is most needed at this time. It is interesting how the way this happens is structured by social media actions, no longer a monopoly of the mass media.

Another way that OWS is noteworthy has to do with the location of the occupation, intensively linked as it is with democratic culture and its enemies. The location of the practices of OWS contributed significantly to its successful monstration, in Dayan’s terms.

The actions of a relatively small number of protestors in OWS quickly became visible not only to the people involved, but quite rapidly gained global attention. This is because of the very special nature of the starting point of occupation movement. Situated in lower Manhattan, the New York Stock Market and the World Trade Center have been symbols of advanced capitalism and American economic power in the global order and have been actual centers of the order. And, thus, Occupy Wall Street is the ground zero social movement. Monstration came almost automatically.

I first saw this as a “pedestrian observation,” based on a very particular experience walking around New York. In recent months, I walked around the area on the tenth anniversary of the attack with my friend, Steve Assael, who survived the 9/11 attack.

And in more recent weeks, I walked and observed the very same area when I went to take a look and to support the occupation at Zuccotti Park, passing by the site of the so-called Ground Zero Mosque as well.

It is because the occupation is at such an intense symbolic center, the media paid attention to OWS. A relatively small social demonstration captured global attention, exciting political imagination. In the U.S., apparently the Tea Party has met its match. Reports indicate that Occupy Wall Street is more popular than the Tea Party. Occupations of public spaces spread around the country, and, as the old slogan goes: the whole world was watching, and responding. Occupations went global, emanating from ground zero to London, to Seoul, back to Los Angeles and Washington D.C., and many points in between.

They watched in Gdansk. I had a peculiar experience in Gdansk in October, giving the annual Solidarność Lecture, reporting on a recent visit to Zuccotti Park, surprised by the interest in the Occupy Wall Street demonstration when I lectured there. I was also surprised and pleased to read that an important figure from that city, indeed the city’s most important historic figure, Lech Walesa, the leader of the Solidarity Trade Union, was planning on going to NY to support the occupation.

As reported in an unlikely source, The New York Daily News:

Walesa has warned of a ‘worldwide revolt against capitalism’ if the Wall St. protests are ignored.

They are protesting the ‘unfairness’ of an economy that enriches a few and ‘throws the people to the curb,’ he said in a recent interview.

‘That’s why union leaders and capitalists need to figure out what to do, because otherwise they will have to contend with a worldwide revolt against capitalism.’

In the end, Walesa did not go to support Occupy Wall Street. But what intrigued me about this experience of mine and this report is how media of all sorts spread the news and the insights of the new social movement. This is a mediated development perhaps stronger than Fox and the great trend it exemplifies.

The news spread through mainstream media and publications. But I think it is also important how social media spread the word. I don’t read the Daily News. It’s the American classic tabloid, similar to Murdoch’s NY Post, though not as bad. I got wind of the report through a friend’s (Elzbieta Matynia’s) Facebook page. The world is watching the world as mediated by our friends and our interpretation of things. As Davis observes:

This sharing, of course, is rarely (if ever) done in a neutral manner. Rather, Tweeters and Facebookers accompany shared news stories and web links with commentary that reveals a particular bent, or interpretation of the content. The content is therefore not just made visible, but impregnated with meaning in a web of social relations.

I was amused learning about Walesa’s visit through a Polish friend in New York when I was in the city where my exploration of the politics of small things first began, but there is a serious point being revealed here. The power of showing, the power of monstration, has been radically democratized in the new media age. My experience exemplifies something that is becoming quite common.

The Ground Zero occupation is leading to a global response. An articulate critique of the global order of things is being expressed in simple bodily presence and demonstrating electronic expressions, capturing the attention of the world that is watching and acting upon what it sees, with the potential of changing the terms of public deliberations. Those who are concerned about jobs, inequality, global warming and neo-liberalism have found their voices and are making visible their very real concerns. Indeed, I believe, in the U.S., the Tea Party has been directly engaged.

Both OWS and the Tea Party reveal the power of the politics of small things. In this sense, they are quite similar, but there is a major difference. OWS is grounded in the reality based community constituted through interactions and debates on social media, while much of the Tea Party concerns are based on Fox created little fictions, fictoids, as I have been reporting in my online magazine, Deliberately Considered over the last year.

As an unreconstructed enlightenment partisan, I think this suggests the long-term power of the newest development on the global stage.

Conclusions

My yes and no answer to the question of whether democracy is sick of its own media points to the perils and promise of the media in democratic life. On the one hand, some media formats, such as that of Fox News, threaten democracy (specifically in America, but it’s not an insignificant place), with an intensification of ideological politics, conflating news with propaganda, presenting facts as opinion and opinion as facts. On the other hand, new media expanded the power of what I call the politics of small things, presenting the capacity to resist the Fox trend. This is a new kind of media culture war. Political culture, the relationship between the power and culture, is at issue. It can be reinvented in a democratic direction or democracy can be undermined, another sort of reinvention. As I put it in my subtitle of my book, at issue is the culture of power and the power of culture.

I would like to study the dynamic outlined here more systematically, if he is interested, with my friend and colleague Daniel Dayan. To do so, it clearly would be necessary to examine exactly how Fox (and other similar media outlets) and social media monstrate. I think a precise analysis of this would reveal how mediated monstration works in supporting and undermining democratic life. It would be an examination of the forms of democratic and anti-democratic monstration. I hope he is intrigued.

Actually, I trust that Dayan is interested, primarily because we have been talking about doing such work together (specifically after the Sofia conference), but also because in recent years a fascinating new way of resisting the powers, and new way of reinventing political culture, has been developing, related to his ideas about monstration and my ideas about the politics of small things and reinventing political culture. I have analyzed here media politics of cable television and of emerging social movements. Dayan and I will need to get into the formation of those movements and how they compare and contrast with movements past. Social movements have been key to such resistance and reinvention in the past and they are again, but something new is happening with promise closely connected to the topic of media and publics. In some places, in the Arab world for example, it has become pretty clear that it is through new “new social movements” and the media forms that support them that there is a democratic prospect. Far from being sick of their media, as posed in our opening question, democracy is radically dependent upon (especially new) media. This is both as a support of new movements and as ends of these movements. Constituting democratic publics is what is new in new movements, I believe, and I hope Dayan and I will study this.

I will close with a brief turn to the promise of such study. Social movements have generally been understood in two ways. They have been seen as non-institutional means of a group of people to pursue their common interests and achieve their shared goals. The traditional archetype for this is the labor movement. Alternatively, social movements have been seen as not only interest focused, but as well, and perhaps more importantly, as non-institutional means for the formation of a group with common identities, concerned with supporting the identities and acting upon them. Civil rights movements, the women, lesbian, gay, bi-sexual and transgender movements, environmental movements and the like, are understood as being newer kinds of movements, “new social movements.” To tell the truth, I never quite understood why the new social movements were considered new. They, like labor movements, emerged in the nineteenth century. They, like the traditional movements, pursue interests. And the traditional movements, like the new ones, are about identity. Yet, I know this is not central. Rather the crucial point is to note that new and old movements are not only about the pursuit of interests. Movements are important ends in themselves for the people who create and are active in them. Movements, old and new, have sought to achieve specific goals, the right to organize and strike, a fair wage, decent working conditions, equal pay for equal work, voting rights, ending racism, sexism and environmental degradation and the like. And movements have been about asserting identity and its dignity, for workers, women, gays and lesbians and many others. Clearly, this is still the case. Social activists in Tahrir Square in Cairo and in Zuccotti Park in New York have specific ends, and the demonstrations in these places also create identities that are as significant as the ends the demonstrators are seeking.

But something else is important, quite apparent in these and other such places around the globe today, as I have been suggesting here.  The coming together based on some shared concerns with different identities and even different goals has been a common feature of the movements in our most recent past. The demonstrators occupy a space and the way they do so, the way they interact with each other is an important end of the movement. The form of interaction, as well as the identity and interest content, is central. The new media facilitate the form, an independent alternative public, but it is not completely defined by them.

Coptic Christians and Muslims protect each other with mutual respect in Egyptian demonstrations in Tahrir Square and throughout Egypt. They came together with the help of Facebook and the like, but what was crucial was what they did once they were together. Radical anarchists and conventional trade unionists hung out at Zuccotti Park last fall and in Union Square on May Day.

Their political ends may be different, radical critics of “the American Dream,” along with those who want to keep the Dream alive, but they have figured out ways to find common purpose and joint actions. The new “new social movements” are first about that commonality, the creation of independent public space, in New York and beyond, people with differences working together in the name of the 99%, creating an alternative free public space.

Communicating from this space to the dominant media and mainstream publics is a fundamental challenge, the challenge of monstration, now evident for the Tahrir democratic activists and OWS. The quality of their public character, its social media constitution that facilitated the formation of the movement, also presents problems for moving beyond the newly constituted public space. Leading spokespersons are not evident, a strength but also a weakness, nor are clear ends and demands forthcoming.

Thus the Dayan – Goldfarb project of new social and political movement: 1. Understand the new form the politics of small things is taking. 2. Appreciate how this new form is facilitated and frustrated by new media, 3. Consider how these developments are affecting the relationship between power and culture, reinventing the political culture of our times. And 4, analyze how 1, 2, and 3, all are about the constitution of free and expanding publics related to other publics, which depend on monstation: showing, revealing, appearing to others, through available media, as a primary challenge.