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

Aesthetic publics (the reading publics of literature, the active publics of theater, the connoisseur publics of music and the arts) have always been singled out as exemplary by theorists of the public sphere, and by Habermas in particular. Yet, despite this ostensible privilege, aesthetic publics have been often ignored, or analyzed as mere training grounds for political publics. “Salons” were first celebrated, and then turned into antechambers to the streets. Interestingly the publics, which tend to be best studied, are political publics. Aesthetic publics have been often neglected. This is why approaches that pay aesthetic publics more than a lip service, approaches such as those of Goldfarb (2006) or Ikegami (2000) are so important.

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

A Matter of Life and Death

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NOTES

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

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

University of Illinois Chicago political scientist Kelly LeRoux (who got her PhD at Wayne State University here in the D) and co-author Anna Bernadska recently published a study, funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, that shows a positive correlation between participation in the arts and engagement with civil society. They analyzed more than 2700 respondents to the 2002 General Social Survey, conducted biannually by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago and generally considered one of the primary sources of data on American social trends. Their analysis found that people who have direct or indirect involvement with the arts are more likely to also have direct participation in three dimensions of civil society: engagement in civic activities, social tolerance, and other-regarding (i.e., altruistic) behavior. These results hold true even when factoring in demographic variables for age, race, and education.

Most studies on the social impact of the arts address economics and related externalities such as improved educational outcomes and general community well being. (See, for example, the work of Ann Markusen of the Project on Regional and Industrial Economics at the University of Minnesota summarized in my blog post here.) The study by LeRoux and Bernadska is different in that it empiricially investigates ties between the arts and citizenship. Instead of seeking a market rationale for arts patronage, the authors stress the benefits for civic virtue. The study is also noteworthy because rather than looking at the direct impact of community and other arts projects, such as mural painting, theatrical productions, and the like, it takes an audience-studies approach more typically associated with media and communications analysis.

It’s important to note that the authors demonstrate correlation not causation. In statistics, correlation establishes the dependence of certain variables on one another, which is useful in predictive modeling. But the relationship, either positive (the more of one variable, the more of the other) or negative (the more of one variable, the less of the other), doesn’t necessarily mean that the one is specifically the cause of the other. There may be other factors at work (called intervening variables) not measured in the analysis. While that may be the case, the study is still useful in suggesting additional ways in which the arts benefit society.

Not the least of these is the development of the critical function, which is fundamental to the advancement of discourse and building consensus on matters of common concern within the public sphere, which civil society theorists see as key to a viable, participatory democracy. Indeed, German social scientist and political philosopher Jurgen Habermas in his important study, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (MIT: 1991 [1962]), cites the development of the field of literary criticism and aesthetics over the roughly 150-year period in Europe starting in the late 17th century as laying the groundwork for citizens to think independently and thus reflect upon their role in society and ultimately act as political agents. More recently, French philospher Jacques Ranciere in books such as The Future of the Image (Verso: 2009), Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics (Continuum: 2010), and The Emancipated Spectator (Verso: 2011), has established the link between aesthetic practice and political action.

This also explains why anti-democratic forces in American society have worked so hard, starting with the so-called Culture Wars of the 1980s, to eliminate public funding for the arts. It turns out, that Big Bird really is potentially subversive.

This post also appears in Motown Review of Art.

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.

I spent the early evening of November 8^th wandering around the Occupy Philadelphia (OP) encampment. I was trying to clear my head before a scheduled talk by well-known social movement scholar (and one of Glenn Beck’s “most wanted”), Frances Fox Piven.

Ten minutes before the talk was scheduled begin, I moved to the stage area and found a surprisingly large group of people had begun to gather. I was immediately struck by how out of place they looked based on my experience. They lacked the all-weather, busy or exhausted appearance that characterizes a lot of people I encounter at OP. But they also didn’t seem curious or confused. Their gaze took in the camp with understanding. They were nearly all white, young, and dressed similarly, most likely, college students.

I found a spot off to the side of the crowd as Piven was introduced and began to speak. Moments later, I was approached by a black couple, a woman and man, both in their late teens or early twenties, standing arm-in-arm, carrying shopping bags, with glowing faces. They appeared to be on a date and were clearly happy to be together, even in love.

Gesturing toward the stage, the young woman asked me, “What’s all this?” I began to reply that she, Piven, is an academic, but I was interrupted. “No,” the woman corrected me, “all this,” sweeping her arm across the entire encampment. I told her it was Philly’s answer to Occupy Wall Street, “You know, in New York.” She stared back at me, shaking her head slightly. The young man quickly said, “Oh, yeah, I think I heard about that, but I didn’t realize it was here too. Well, this is good because there are problems. I just didn’t know about it cause I didn’t see it on the news or anything.” I asked where they lived. “North Philly, like 21^st and Cecil B. Moore.” This is less that 2 miles from where they stood now. Indeed, they live only blocks from Temple University, where Piven had spoken earlier in the day.

That evening, I encountered a lot of young white college students who seemed to be supportive of and conversant in the occupation, and a young black couple who were very supportive and interested, but unaware of its existence in Philadelphia. Why is that?

In my experience thus far, the demographics, geography and even the basic character of the daily interactions that occur in OP’s universe are deeply reflective of the city itself, of its history, geography, problems, tensions, and dynamics. I raise this point not to suggest that Philadelphia, and its occupation, are particularly unique in this regard. Rather, I feel that the Occupy movement as a whole, particularly now, faces the problem of connecting global and national level rhetoric with the specific, daily experiences of the 99%, in their diverse localities.

Dan Sherwood addressed this in his post a few days ago., making a crucial point about the Occupation movement:

“The OWS movement is not about a specific policy agenda or in defense of a particular social group. The OWS movement is a desperate amplification of a silenced and ignored expression of broad based and deep social suffering. The metastasizing ills and injustices of social inequality can be ignored no longer. Although born of desperation, OWS has peacefully organized an open structured movement that threatens to create a public space of discussion in perpetuity. It is precisely the perpetuation of public discussion that has been so threatening to elites.”

I couldn’t agree more. That “amplification” is exactly what the Occupation Movement is ultimately about, or anyway, what it has come to be about. But this is also what I feel OWS represents. What does that couple-in-love, heading home to one of many historically impoverished and underserved neighborhoods in Philadelphia, feel that OWS (or OP) represents?

The issue of voicelessness highlighted by OWS is a very real problem. However, this critique must also be a reflexive one. Jurgen Habermas, the world famous social philosopher and student of the public sphere, was famously criticized for his framing of the business-minded social interactions of white, moneyed men as “public,” without recognitizing the many de facto criteria for participation in this public. OWS has to address this problem. We need to seriously examine what it is “amplifying.” OWS needs to work to make sure that its microphone is really reaching into the most disenfranchised and abused communities of the country. And this public must remain vigilant in insuring it is truly open, without becoming lost in its own rhetoric of universality. We must push our outreach efforts harder to ensure that more people not only know about OWS publics around the country, but that they feel welcome and capable of participating.

Indeed, in my Philadelphia experiences, the occupation’s effort at promoting individuals’ right to democratic expression appear to be butting up against individuals’ ability to express themselves in this sphere. This is not for lack of intellect or will. Rather, the most sinister effect of political disenfranchisement and the loss of participation in a democratic public is the “deskilling” that accompanies it.

Over successive generations, Americans have simply forgotten how to talk to one another about these issues, how to connect their lives with the machinations of global and national political and economic systems. Declining voting rates in federal elections, even steeper declines in in local and state-level political participation, the simplified and pandering rhetoric of national political debates, and the sheer animosity that currently infects the American political debate, all speak to this trend of the increasing absence of ordinary Americans in American politics.

Indeed, while speaking with that young couple and explaining some of the issues OP is organizing around, the pair nodded, asked detailed questions and appeared to agree with most points raised. However, as that evening’s general assembly got underway just a few feet away, and I began to explain how it worked, the couple expressed confusion about the link between the grievances behind the occupation and the democratic decision-making process used across the OWS movement. The young woman said to me, “It’s nice to get to tell your story about how some bank screwed you over or vote about moving to a new camp, but how’s me doing that gonna help, like, my block? You might wanna close a bank, but I want my block fixed and the city won’t pay for it and the government in Washington is just gonna listen to whoever’s the loudest.”

This point was further highlighted in a conversation I recently had with a blind Hispanic man who has been trying to promote ideas for reorganizing OP around issue areas (e.g. prisoner rights, environmentalism), rather than working groups which tend to form around skill sets (e.g. facilitation, messaging, coordination, outreach). His point was that “people who come to OP looking to get involved, but aren’t familiar with this form of political organizing, are thrown into a confusing system that speaks a language they don’t understand,” leaving potential supporters feeling excluded and disconnected, even resentful.

In this context, David Brooks’ now oft quoted observation that OWS has “changed the conversation,” begs the question: whose conversation? Returning to Dan Sherwood’s comments, I have to ask: is the form of public discussion that is currently surrounding the OWS movement really all that threatening to elites?

The OWS movement has accomplished a lot, and I have nothing but hope for the future. But, OWS must continue to root out the power of elites in society, in all its hiding places. While this movement has done a great deal to counter the imposed voicelessness that left nearly all Americans out of “the conversation” before September 17th, OWS must move beyond focusing on the conversation. Indeed, the true power of elites lurks within the conversation itself, in its language, medium, and framing as universal and relevant to the real lives of individuals. While it was amazing to see how someone like Tim Pool was able to shine a digital light through the darkness of media blackouts and police violence, it is important to recognize that this light is digital, and it cannot be seen by everyone.

At this important moment, following a day of unprecedented action across the country, the OWS movement must remain focused on raising political consciousness. We must do more than simply change the conversation. We must move to create conversations where they haven’t existed in a long time and in forms that have never been seen before.

I started to write this post at 37,000 feet, between New York and Paris, flying to see my grandson, Ludovic, and his parents Michel and Brina (my daughter). Preoccupied by the private purpose of my visit, I tried to think about recent public events and their meaning. I was looking forward to private pleasures, working on public matters.

My trip is very much a family affair, no lectures, no meetings planned with colleagues. I am not even sure we will see any sites: Paris without the Eifel Tower or the Louvre, maybe a hardware store or two as Brina and Michael are in the middle of some serious home renovations.

But as I hurtled through the sky over the Atlantic, I wondered about how the private is linked to the public, aware of the fact that generally the French and Americans, and more particularly the French and American media, have dealt with this in very different ways, revealed in recent scandals.

Americans are more likely to look for the truth of the public by examining the private. The French are more convinced that private matters are not public issues. Both have important insights and blind spots, apparent in this week’s news and in the discussions here at DC.

Gary Alan Fine welcomed the candidacy of Tim Pawlenty. Fine, who enjoys what he calls pungent political discourse of the likes of Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, also recognizes the importance of serious political debate, seeing this possibility in Pawlenty. But there was another such candidate presenting serious alternatives to the Democrat’s positions, with a record of accomplishment. Many informed Republican partisans thought Governor Mitch Daniels of Indiana would be an even more significant candidate. But the twice married to the same woman politician with an apparently complicated private life, chose not to run. His family, specifically his daughters, vetoed his run. Fear of public exposure of what should remain private deprived the Republicans of a candidate. Public debate and contestation has been diminished by the apparent confusion of public and private virtues.

Fine also likes scandals and humorously thanks Dominque Strauss-Kahn for providing the latest, one that radically underlines the problem of absolutely distinguishing public from private. But DSK’s scandal is particularly serious. He is charged with a most serious crime, and the French reaction to the news has been quite instructive.

First, there was denial, linked with a variety of conspiracy theories. Then, there was outrage, not directed at DSK, but at the NYC police for the perp walk. Next, there was some realization that Strauss Kahn might not just be a womanizer, but a sexual predator. This led to a series of revelations about silence, and reflections that some things left in the shadows should see the light of day, some private matters need to be exposed, and are matters of public concern, and that a general sensibility that strongly distinguishes public and private may systematically impede this.

More about the specifics of the Strauss-Kahn controversy, I hope, next week from Daniel Dayan. But for now a quick observation from Brina and Michel’s kitchen table: Talking to them, and reading the news, upon our arrival, I am convinced that the difference between the French and the American media approach to public and private will not be so great in the future.

Tim Rosenkranz’s report on Habermas’s latest public intervention also is about the relationship between public and private, in a slightly different sense of these terms. Habermas fears that the private opinion registered in “pubic opinion polling” leads to political leadership with short horizons and undermines the political significance of elections. Politicians driven by the quick shifts of public mood can’t develop serious solutions to pressing problems and these aren’t properly debated as part of the election process. While I wouldn’t categorically dismiss polling, Habermas, with Rosenkranz’s final note, shows that there are dangers, which are evident in the U.S.

A prime example: any move to address the crisis in our healthcare system leads to partisan attacks, and necessary change becomes extremely difficult. This problem has persisted for a century. “Obamacare,” a reform that resembles Republican proposals and programs in the recent past, including Mitt Romney’s great accomplishment as Governor of Massachusetts, is attacked as socialist and as pulling the plug on grandma, scaring many in the vulnerable public. The Republican program to privatize Medicare into a kind of Obamacare for the elderly is likewise attacked, becoming a key to the rising prospects for the Democrats in Congress in the next elections. The polls inform the politicians and are directed and interpreted for partisan purposes. Commitment to serious solutions to pressing problems becomes next to impossible. This is the measure of the accomplishment of health care reform thus far, which is likely to become as popular as Medicare, it seems to me, once it is fully enacted. I think this will be a story with a happy ending.

The same problem is evident in American policy towards the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, where there are few signs of a happy ending. President Obama openly, i.e. in public, said the obvious. Any peace deal starts with the 1967 borders between Israel and the Palestinians, with mutually agreed upon land swaps. Gershon Shafir this week strongly supported this move, and suggested that a door was opened and that its now time to walk through, to actually endorse or at least not vote against a U.N. resolution recognizing an independent Palestinian state. I tend to agree with Shafir, with a strong sense that the only way Israel will survive in the long run is through a negotiated settlement pushed forward by outside parties, especially the U.S. But this is highly unlikely given the Republican attacks on even the modest step Obama took, and given the impact this is likely to have on public opinion as measured by the polls.

Just when it would be good to be bold, the American leadership will follow the polls. The politicians will hold to inflexible positions, concerned that they may be defined as being “anti-Israel.” This is a matter in which the question of who owns the polls is very important, indicated by IrisDr’s report on her experience with a group calling itself the Republican – Jewish Coalition. Obama’s sustained pro-Israel policy (for better and for worse) can be undermined by such attacks, perhaps insuring that a reasonable peace won’t be achieved. Instead of serious public deliberation about these matters by responsible parties, there are politics directed to satisfy the prejudices of private individuals and their personal fears and opinions (named public opinion).

The French are learning that the distinction between public and private is hard to sustain, and that it’s a good thing too. Sometimes it is important to critically evaluate private matters in order to make sound public decisions. The individual moral character of a political leader matters.

But we need to make a distinction between passing individual private opinions, even when collected in a public opinion poll, and legitimate public decisions and deliberations that are connected to elections and concerted political action.

The public – private distinction: we cannot live thoroughly with it, can’t live democratically without it.

Tim Rosenkranz reports on the significance of a recent article by the German philosopher and social critic Jürgen Habermas. –Jeff

On April 7, 2011 Germany’s political news magazine “Süeddeutsche Zeitung” published a piece by Habermas in which he openly attacks Chancellor Angela Merkel for her “opinion-poll dominated opportunism.” While the article focused on the problem of European integration and the continuing democracy deficit of the institutional frame of the European Union, Jürgen Habermas points his finger at significant systemic problems of today’s democratic political process – between civil society, the public sphere, political elites and the media-sphere – the problem being the loss of larger political projects in a process driven by the short-term politics of public opinion polls.

While Habermas is still a vocal figure in the academic landscape, at least in the last decade, he limits his editorial participation in larger public debates in the media. If he does speak up, it is mostly concerning the problems of European integration and its democratic process. The recent article “Merkels von Demoskopie geleiteter Opportunismus” (“Merkel’s opinion-poll dominated opportunism”) is not an exception. What caught my attention, however, is that Habermas rarely criticizes German politicians directly in person. It is also unusual in that the article is a theoretical expansion within his larger intellectual frame of “deliberative democracy.”

Very atypical for him, Habermas condenses the larger theoretical problem in one paragraph, which I would translate accordingly:

In general, today’s politics seemingly is transforming into an aggregate condition defined by the abdication of perspective and the will to create (Gestaltungswille). The expanding complexity of issues demanding regulation compels [the political actors] to short term reactions within shrinking scopes of action. As if politicians have adopted the unmasking view of system theory, they follow without shame the opportunistic script of opinion poll dominated (demoskopiegeleitet) power pragmatism.

Habermas uses two recent examples of Merkel’s politics to illustrate. The first being her flip-flopping after the nuclear disaster in Japan to suddenly abandoning nuclear power plants in Germany, a process she actually put on hold before. The second, Merkels’s prolonged attempt this past March to keep her Minister of Defense, Theo von Guttenberg, in office even after evidence of the severe plagiarism of his PhD thesis. Shortly after the nuclear meltdown of Fukushima, the public opinion polls showed an overwhelming demand for change within German energy politics towards an exit from nuclear power.  In the second example, Guttenberg received positive approval ratings, despite the plagiarism scandal that shook the ethical standards of German academia and the ethics of politics to the core.

In the larger framework of Habermas’ criticism, these specific issues are not that significant, but what is important are two interrelated processes that are challenging for the mediation of the public sphere and the normative importance of political parties. These two issues are hidden in Habermas’ terminology “opinion poll dominated (demoskopiegeleitet) power pragmatism.” First, opinion polls reduce rational, public debate to mere statistical measures. Second, they have the potential to mimic electoral political participation.

Opinion polls reduce rational public debate to mere statistical measures: This issue actually goes beyond the fundamentals of Habermas’ analysis of the decay of the media sphere: beyond his criticism that the independent sphere of public opinion has been turned into a medium of advertisement, in his words “colonized by the market” and “re-feudalized” through the state/political sphere. Even if opinion polls are statistically “representative,” the expression of “yes or no” on a specific issue is not for public debate. Instead, it is a snap-shot of quantified individual opinion of a certain group of people at a certain time. There is a significant danger if public opinion polls become a substitute for editorial debate of rational, critical public opinion. The media refrains from presenting opinions and information, but instead frames the debate in terms of numbers. It basically hands over the power of the public sphere to bureaucrats and opinion poll professionals.

Opinion polls have the potential to mimic electoral political participation: Following the first issue one might ask: What’s the problem? Is it not good that the people of civil society can express their voice in statistical form and be heard? In his article, Habermas provides an answer:

To the extent that politics defines its action to correspond to mere public feelings, which it chases from election to election, the democratic process loses its purpose. A democratic election should not merely express a naturalistic spectrum of opinion; it should be the result of a public process of debate.

I actually would go further than Habermas: Democratic elections also lose their function if they are not conceived as the one significant political act of legitimation and representation, but as one among many. Polls are no elections, but they do appear through their new centrality in the media sphere as pseudo-political participation of the individual in the democratic process. This undermines the importance of election for the voter, but further it puts the political process in a spiral of, what I would call, hyper-campaigning. As Habermas points out in the article: Political parties in the mere attempt to please and reflect short term spectrums of opinion, refrain from programmatic work that goes beyond short-term reaction to events. They do so because opinion polls take on the function of election results.

Interestingly, all these issues do not foster electoral participation. While the media debate in the U.S. seems extremely opinion poll oriented, electoral turnout was up in the last elections and in general is on a steady, but low, level throughout the last 40 years. In contrast, Germany sees a steady decline in voter turnout over the same time, even though it is still significantly higher than in the U.S. The points Habermas raises and I elaborated are part of transformational process and open up important questions.

–          If politics means ad-hoc policies dominated by a situationally expressed public opinion spectrum based on mediated polls, how can the political sphere address long-term challenges of global warming, economic transformation, systematic problems of the financial markets, etc?

–          If opinion polls replace information based reasoning of public debate in the media sphere, who controls and owns the polls?