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.

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

An image is a powerful thing that transcends words and rationalization, and elicits thoughts, ideas and connections that we make consciously and unconsciously. In Camera Lucida,  Roland Barthes defined two characteristics that give photography this ideas-eliciting nature: “studium” is that which the observer recognizes consciously about a photograph that raises his/her interests (be it because of culture, a personal exposure to what is depicted in a photo or any other sort of conscious connection to it); and “punctum” as that which “wounds” the observer by appealing mainly to the subconscious.

What do we see in this picture? Can we speak of a cultural subconscious in contemporary consumption society? A few months ago, I showed this picture to some of my friends. They almost unanimously told me it looked like a piece of United Colors of Benetton advertisement from the early 1990s. That is, the punctum of the observers. They referred back not only to a fact of materialistic consumption, but rather to a rhetoric of multiculturality as an expression of freedom (in terms of race, ideals and culture) made popular in the aftermath of the apparent end of history and the “victory” of liberal democracy.

Interestingly, though, I took this photograph not in the midst of the confusion of the early 1990s about what exactly constituted “ideology,” but during a general march by students and workers in New York City in support of the Occupy Wall Street movement, in October 2011. To me, in my studium, this is an image of the people that I saw in that march. Not revolutionaries, not hard-core left-wingers, but normal people who have been affected by the economic crisis and were angry at the fact that Wall Street institutions continued to win in spite of the so-called “99%”.

That being said, this image is not only what I intended. I intended to portray a discourse of “normality,” but what most people saw in it was a long-lasting rhetoric of diversity. This makes me wonder about the connections between the rhetoric of civil society (which became a buzz word in a post-communist world) as represented in contemporary social movements, and the punctum of popular culture (an association to an advertisement campaign). It also made me wonder how the visual language of photography can actually be a vehicle for such ideas to flow without a word being written, or a photo being rationalized.

Collective action (an example of civil society at its best) transforms participants’ identities because of the amount of emotional energy the latter put into the former, but many times the political core of the practices of a movement (such as in a march) can be re-framed in unexpected ways (like when the political was reframed through the language of soccer in Argentina, as Carlos Forment has explored). In this case, the march in support of Occupy Wall Street was not just a political act, but also an emotional one, in which all sorts of other emotional meanings were conveyed, reframing the meaning of the march.

Collective action is, therefore, never just that. It has meanings beyond its intended purpose, beyond its studium; and the solidarity they elicit in people is actually a consequence of its punctum, of their unrationalized unforeseen consequences. For me this is clear. This is revealed in the image, such as my snapshot, as it can be deliberately considered through social scientific inquiry.

Once, I heard an American journalist condemn Fox News. The condemnation was deserved, in my opinion. However, the argument meant to justify it was frightening. Why – did the journalist ask – should Fox News be allowed to exist while its position contradicts that of all other American journalistic institutions?

In my view this journalist was not attacking Fox News. He was challenging the very possibility of debate. He was pointing to a consensus and requiring that dissenting voices be silenced. Obama was perfectly right in stressing that they should not (while still being critical of their position in a Rolling Stone article. Obama’s point is essential to the very existence of a democratic pluralism. Obama was no less correct in noting: “We’ve got a tradition in this country of a press that oftentimes is opinionated.” This tradition is also ingrained in European journalistic traditions, and, in particular, in the French.

Interestingly, it is not this tradition that retained the attention of some of the most radical media critics. (I am thinking of such thinkers as Roland Barthes or Stuart Hall.) For them, the real danger lies not with those media discourses that flaunt their ideological positions, hoist their flag, advance in fanfare, scream their values. Such discourses are unmistakeably partisan. They are too strident not to be instantly spotted .

The real danger is with these other discourses that are so persuasive that they can be conflated with “reality.” It lies with discourses that seem neutral, balanced, fair, often intelligent . The real danger is with discourses that seem “self evident.” Such an evidence – present in the consensus that the journalist in my first paragraph pointed to — speaks of the power enjoyed by those groups who become the “primary definers” of the social world (Hall); of the power of constructing reality, of multiplying ‘effects of real‘ (Barthes); of the power that stems from ideology, understood not as a discrete doctrine, but as an almost spontaneous “way of seeing“ (a spontaneity that begs, of course, to be deciphered).

I tend to share the concerns of Barthes and Hall. The antics of Fox News perpetuate an opinionated tradition. But what of realistic, fair, balanced, sober news discourses? Does anyone seriously believe they are blank? Devoid of opinion? Empty of ideologies ?

I believe that social realities are not merely “recorded” for our sake by media institutions. They are recorded in order to be shown and they are shown for a purpose. Showing has a rationale and this rationale is translated into recording protocols. Showing or –as I call it , with a French accent, “Monstration“– is always an action , as opposed to the mechanical operation of monitoring machines. Showing consists of directing your gaze. Would anyone take hold of your gaze for no purpose at all? What are then the acts performed, especially when “monstrations” seem routine, banal, devoid of a special purpose?

This takes us away from Fox News as stage-villain that everybody (in our circles) loves to hate, to another form of theater. In plays such as The Exception and The Rule,  Bertolt Brecht points to the kinship between the “obvious,” and the abusive. What seems evident is often so because evidence is just another name for Power.