I recently read a fascinating and disturbing article in The New Yorker, by Jon Lee Anderson, on the rise and defeat of Islamists in Mali. I was struck by two particular descriptions of the Islamists’ behavior:

“In the central square, Idrissa had witnessed the beating of one of the jihadis’ own men, who had been accused by his comrades of raping a young girl. The spectators loudly criticized the jihadis for a double standard. “Everyone was angry because they didn’t kill him,” Idrissa said. Afterward, the jihadis had gone on the local radio station and warned that anyone who spoke badly about their men would be killed.”

The other:

“Then, on day two, the Islamists came,” he recalled. He had asked the leader what he wanted. Naming the northern towns of Mali, he had said, “Timbuktu, Gao, and Kidal are Muslim towns, and we want to make Sharia in them. We are not asking. We are saying what we are doing, and we’re here to make Sharia.”

What I found so troubling was not only “the usual” Al Qaeda-related atrocities, but even more so the Islamist’s clearly voiced goal of destroying an existing social system through violence, devastation of cultural heritage (vandalizing local temples and libraries). This was tied together with the idea of creating a different social order based on sexual control, and the replacement of any traces of modern knowledge by radical interpretations of old religious texts. The irony is that these readings are just as contemporary as the lifestyle the Islamists try to erase.

In my opinion, these two quotes illustrate the power of violence combined with unquestionable certainty, able to undermine an entire civilization—its customs, morals, social order, and authorities. They fall apart in the presence of arrogant brutality. The people are too “civilized,” too cultured to defend themselves. The Islamists reject a civilization they claim is morally corrupt, and instead attempt to replace it with a modern essentialist take on an imagined Golden Age of religious purity.

The case of Islamists in Mali is an extremely vivid example of a contemporary violent essentialism we can witness in many different places and with changing force. There are the extreme right-wing nationalists and Christian religious fundamentalists in Europe and the US, the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn activists in Greece, the Le Pen nationalists in France, the Tea Party in the US, as well as the Polish nationalist youth, with neo-Nazi and pagan ties, who recently tried to interrupt Zygmunt Bauman’s lecture at the University of Wrocław.

All these groups seem to play on a fantasy of a bygone era of a harmonious society formed solely by “us,” without outsiders or deviations from the unanimously accepted norms, “inventing” their traditions, as Eric Hobsbawm would have named it. The past is idealized into the present in a form deeply conservative but also modernly total, one in which men rule and women obey; the “we” are the masters, the “others” are the slaves. There is no space for sexual freedom or mental sickness. Foucault’s descriptions of these freedoms in the Middle Ages seem, on the contrary, extremely modern.

In this sense, the current fundamentalist movements are essentialized ideas of a glorious past, devoid of any ambiguity. They are definite, brutal and all-encompassing in a way only an extreme mixture of Enlightenment and Totalitarianism could lead to. They are belief systems based on a logic of the elimination of “otherness.”

The past to which they refer, never was. The refusal to acknowledge the ambiguous, heterogeneous, histories of cultures, religions, ethnicities, and civilizations, makes these movements arrogantly, violently contemporary.

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.

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.