DC Week in Review: Theater and Politics

By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, April 30th, 2011
handkerchief © Unknown | JohnLewis.com

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 . . .

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April 30th, 2011 | Tags: , , , , ,

In Memoriam: Harold Garfinkel

By Iddo Tavory, April 25th, 2011
Harold Garfinkel © Arlene Garfinkel | Garfinkel family

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 . . .

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April 25th, 2011 | Tags: , , ,