I have been long impressed by the relationship between theater and politics, and am impressed once again in considering the posts and discussion at DC this week. Theater is the art form, according to Hannah Arendt, that most closely resembles politics, and as such it can be of great political significance, for better and for worse.

I have based my intellectual career on this. Theater opened Polish society to major changes, and in the process, it changed my life. It presented alternative visions; it constituted an alternative space, for the Poles and also for me.

The theatricality of public events, particularly when televised as a “media event,” can at least momentarily express the solidarity of a nation state, as was evident to the British this week in the royal wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton, real not only for British subjects, but as well for the global audience.

But the relationship is not always a happy one, as events of this week and our discussions at DC show. Theater, broadly understood, especially bad, base theatrical entertainments, can present fundamental challenges to democratic life. Rafael Narvaez examined this in his post. Kitsch entertainment created junk politics in Peru. Like junk food, it provides its immediate pleasures, as Lisa pointed out in her response to Narvaez. But it can also have quite serious negative consequences. In Peru, it was implicated in the political culture of corruption. And perhaps it’s not surprising that the role model of the Peruvian exotic dancer turned politician, Suzy Diaz, was Cicciolina, the porn star turned parliamentarian in Italy, the European country that also has been marked by corrupt anti-democratic politics. Of course, these entertaining figures do not cause the corruption, but are manifestations of it.

Matters are in a way worse in the U.S. The reality show star Donald Trump, who has used his theatrical skills of self promotion to make and lose fortunes, has been playing at being a Republican Party candidate for President of the United States. It seems impossible to take him seriously, but his performance as demagogue has been quite impressive, leader of the Republican pack at this point. DC contributor, Gary Alan Fine, might call this pungent politics. The Trump spiel, as all Americans know all too well, has focused on the eligibility and competency of President Obama, “the worse President in the history of the United States.”  First, Trump took on the mantle of Birther-in-Chief, pushing the issue until the President relented and released the generally unavailable long form birth certificate.

The official document, the short form, released at the time of the election, was not enough for the birthers. But of course for those who can’t imagine a black President now the long form is not enough. Some are convinced it’s a forgery, while others, with Trump as their leader, now turn to the question of whether Obama was a good enough student to deserve admission to Columbia and Harvard Law. Never mind that the Obama graduated Harvard Law magna cum laude and that he was elected president of the Harvard Law Review. Just not smart enough. There are those who are driven by suspicion which will never be satisfied. It has Shakespearean qualities, as Paul A. Kottman explored in his post. Suspicion is a powerful force, more powerful than facts, whether it be in the form of Desdemona’s handkerchief or Obama’s long form birth certificate.

One of Obama’s great tasks is to redefine the American Dream by overcoming the great American Dilemma, the legacy of slavery in a democratic society. For a stubborn twenty or twenty five percent of the population, there is resistance led by Trump the clown. This is high drama mixed with comedy. Fine theater reveals the tragedy of racism. It does battle with mediocre theatrical form.

And this battle is not only on the stage, it also appears in everyday life, when we look closely. One of the “closest lookers” died last week. Iddo Tavory’s post on Monday remembered and honored the distinctive sociology of Harold Garfinkel. He died last week, but his intellectual project, avoiding abstractions that turn away from the complicated details of how people make their worlds in interaction, lives on. It is not a disease named racism that denies the President’s eligibility and competency to be President, but it is racism as it is created and recreated in the dramas of everyday life.

Last week, Harold Garfinkel, one of the greatest sociologists of the second half of the 20th century, died. He was 93. Garfinkel, actually, would have scoffed at the idea of being called a sociologist. When he came of age, sociologists were too engaged in abstractions, in attempts to make sweeping generalizations. Though Garfinkel himself was the student of one of the greatest systematizers of them all, Talcott Parsons, he took a radically different stance.

Instead of allying himself with this way of doing sociology, Garfinkel turned to the New School, and the work of exiled philosopher Alfred Schutz, as a way out of grand abstractions. Instead of looking at society in the abstract, he slowly built up a language that would allow him to study what was going on in the here-and-now, the way people actually made sense of their world as they went along in the business of living. Instead of Society, with a capital “S,” he became immersed in the methods people use to make a situation what it is. In his apt, and often misunderstood, term, he became interested in ethnomethodology.

In the context of the 1960s, ethnomethodology became a banner for studying the actual way people navigate their lives. Intellectuals that were disillusioned with abstract sociology, people like Harvey Sacks, Emanuel Schegloff, Mel Pollner, and even the writer Carlos Castaneda, became allied with what was emerging as a movement on the West Coast of the USA, with its headquarters in UCLA, where Garfinkel did some of his most important work.

Though Garfinkel’s thought is rich and complex, and evolved throughout his life, there are a few themes that he stayed true to since his groundbreaking 1967 Studies in Ethnomethodology. One is how inherently fragile our world was, how much work went into sustaining it, work that was not natural, but could be always undone. In John Heritage’s terms, order was constructed in the making, like The Beatles’ “Yellow Brick Road.”  To show that, and to show how we constantly work to sustain our work, Garfinkel engaged in “Breaching Experiments,” unleashing his students on an unsuspecting world, wrecking interactional havoc. From simple assignments, such as asking them to haggle for prices at the supermarket, or blatantly disregard the rules of children’s game, he showed both how much work it took to sustain seeming order, and that this work was never-ending.

Thus, to be an ethnomethodologist, Garfinkel advised students to focus on actual action, to look at the minutiae of action in the making. To study how people played the piano, it wasn’t enough refer to “socialization” or “learning,” rather how people learned to put their fingers on the keyboard needed to be investigated. In order to study astrophysics, students needed to become immersed in the world astrophysicists created in their work. Almost in direct opposition to most sociology, he reiterated his disgust at abstraction, at the identification of abstract “social forces.”

But for all that, Harold Garfinkel had a profound influence on world sociology. The call to pay attention to actual action, to the ongoing production of order, is seen everywhere today—from the field of Conversation Analysis that attempts to perform an ethnomethodology of everyday conversations, to the study of organizations and the relationships between myths and practicalities of bureaucracy in the new institutionalism.  Anthony Giddens was inspired by Garfinkel in his stints at UCLA; Pierre Bourdieu read Garfinkel carefully, and the two had their own shouting match at the house of a mutual friend. Indeed ethnomethodology is so inscribed in sociology that it often becomes transparent, the greatest achievement a theory can have.

Garfinkel was active to the very end, re-organizing his life’s work, thinking of writing another book. It is a great loss that this book will not be written.