It is odd in the extreme to read about a devastating storm in New York, listen to my local public radio station, WNYC, from Paris and Rome. It took a while to find out how my son in Washington D.C. and his wife, Lili, in Long Island City were doing. I also have been worried about my mother and sister and sisters-in-law, and their families, in their homes in Brooklyn, Manhattan and the Bronx. All seems to be OK, with very significant inconvenience. My friends and neighbors, my house and my community center, these I don’t know about and am concerned. The Theodore Young Community Center, where I swim and where I have many dear friends, in fact, is still without its basketball court after the devastation of tropical storm Irene. All this while I have been enjoying my family just outside Paris, taking a beautiful stroll in Paris on Monday and having a nice first day in Rome. I hurt for my friends and family as I am enjoying European pleasures topped off yesterday with a wonderful dinner with my dear colleague, Professor Anna Lisa Tota of the University of Rome.

And I push on, talking about my work with colleagues and students first here in Italy and next week in Poland. This morning, I am off to give a lecture at the University of Rome to a group of film and media Ph.D. students, on media, the politics of small things and the reinvention of political culture. I decided to post today a lecture I gave in Gdansk last year which was a variation on the same theme: the project of reinventing democratic culture. The lecture highlights the links between my political engagements of the past and how they relate to the political challenges now. I will return to Warsaw and Gdansk with a follow up next week. In all the meetings and in the “in-depth post” today, I am struck by how important a creative relationship between the politics of the central stage and of the margins is central to a vibrant democratic culture and politics. I will be thinking about this with deep concern as I speak here in Europe and look from afar at the election back home.

To read “Reinventing Democratic Culture: Then and Now,” click here.

It’s good to be back in Gdansk. It is especially good to be invited by The European Solidarity Center to give this lecture at the All About Freedom Festival. It’s a visit I’ve long wanted to make, and an occasion that seems to be particularly appropriate.

The last time I was here was in 1985. I was on a mission in support of Solidarity, to observe the trial of Adam Michnik, Bogdan Lis and Wladyslaw Frasyniuk. Adam had written an open letter to “people of good will” in the West to come to the trial, published in The New York Times. He also earlier through The Times Warsaw correspondent, our mutual friend, the late Michael Kaufman, asked me personally to come. It was a request I couldn’t refuse.

When I arrived I was under constant surveillance. I was denounced by Trybuna Ludu [the Communist Party official organ] for not understanding the nature of socialist justice, when I tried but was refused entry into the courtroom. It wasn’t a leisurely visit. I communicated with Adam through his lawyers. We planned together a strategy to keep going an international seminar on democracy we had been working on before his arrest. He asked for books. I did not have the occasion to go sightseeing. And the sights to be seen weren’t as beautiful as they are today.

That was one of the most dramatic times of my life. Not frightening for me personally (I knew that the worst that was likely to happen to me was that I would be expelled from the country), but very frightening for those on trial, and for the mostly unrecognized heroes of the Solidarity movement, the workers, the union leaders, the intellectuals and lawyers who during my visit helped me move through the city and make my appearance, and who risked imprisonment for their everyday actions in making Solidarity. While I then met Lech Walesa, as well as Father Jankowski [a Priest associated with Lech Walesa, who after the changes became infamous for his anti-Semitism], I was most impressed by those who acted off the center stage. They were so dedicated to and worked so hard for the cause of freedom, without apparent prospects that it would be won and without fame or fortune for themselves. It was clear to me that they created their freedom in their persistent actions. This is a key to my talk today.

What I saw then and what I observed and studied in my research and political activities in the 1970s and 80s throughout Poland and also among its neighbors, has shaped my entire intellectual life. It’s the touchstone of my work as a social theorist and researcher. I could explain in a four hour lecture how just about every one of my writings, certainly all of my books, have been informed by what I observed here, even when I am writing about my own country or about the Middle East, two other areas where I have done research and which I will explore with you today. I am, we are together, deeply indebted to the sung and unsung heroes of Solidarity. But today, I am concerned less with the debt, more with the insight that their actions provide.

I will focus on two theoretical points: “the politics of small things” and “the reinvention of political culture,” (the title of my two most recent books) in order to think about the project of reinventing democratic culture, a pressing one in my country, and in much of the world today. I will try to present a clear and condensed account of the theoretical points, and then think about them with you by considering instances of the project of the reinvention of democratic culture. I will compare the way things were here then, when I first visited your city, to the way things are now, in my country, and I will look ahead a bit to the way things might be in one of the centers of geopolitical conflict in the world today, the Middle East.

In retrospect, thinking about this part of the world and my experiences in it in 20^st century, I gained two key theoretical insights which help illuminate the global situation in 21th: 1. Small things matter, democracy is in the details of everyday life interaction, and 2. Political culture is not just a matter of destiny, but also one of creativity.

First my notion of the politics of small things: a concept drawn from the political theory of Hannah Arendt and the sociology of Erving Goffman, and developed by looking carefully at the day to day life in the democratic opposition and alternative cultural activities here in Poland.

When people meet and speak in each other’s presence, and develop a capacity to act together on the basis of shared commitments, principles or ideals, they develop political power. This power is constituted in social interaction. It is realized in the concerted action. It has its basis in the definition of the situation, the power of people to define their social reality. In the power of definition, in the politics of small things, there is the power of constituting alternatives to the existing order of things. When this power involves the meeting of equals, respectful of factual truth and open to alternative interpretations of the problems they face, it is democratic. As Arendt has theorized, such meeting, talk and action constitute political power as the opposite of coercion. As Goffman investigated, this power is constituted in the expressive life of the involved people. Power by acting together, expressively created, such power has been highly consequential.

In Poland, the significance of the politics of small things was apparent during the Communist experience, contributing to the quality of life in People’s Poland, and it became a force that put an end to the experience. Its importance is underappreciated in the present political environment. I will explain by providing snapshots of experience, highlighting their significance.

As I remember the day I arrived to observe the trial of Michnik, Lis and Frasyniuk, I feel as if I was moving through an American spy thriller. Met at the Warsaw airport. Taken to an apartment. Underground solidarity, broadcast equipment in the apartment, solidarity TV and radio. After an hour or so, I was put on a train to Gdansk, given instructions to go to an apartment in the old city of Gdansk. A few minutes after I arrived on that rainy night, the phone rang. Whoever just arrived, the caller reported is being following by the authorities. I was observed from the moment I arrived in Warsaw by both the authorities and the underground. The next day I tried to enter the courtroom. I walked in a cloud of solidarity supporters and activists, women pushing baby carriages were the most impressive. Each step I took during my ten days, the authorities of the People’s Republic and the network of solidarity activists surrounded me, revealing the two sides of power. The authorities had the full power of the Party State, the secret police, the nomenklatura and the Soviet alliance behind them. Solidarity’s power was grounded in the persistent capacity of people to act together. That this power persisted and was very real was confirmed when it persisted after martial law, not to mention its ultimate triumph in 1989.

Indeed I think it is important not to interpret the meaning of Solidarity by its ultimate victory. It was not only a means to this end.  The people I met in the early and mid eighties did not anticipate the defeat of Communism and present day Poland was way beyond their imaginations. Their activities, and I believe their significance for us today, are best understood as a continuation of what they had done in the past. We misunderstand if we impose teleological meaning upon them. There was a hope that the activities then would contribute to a more decent future, but there was mostly an appreciation that it contributed to a more decent present. A world where an unjust political trial was met with fear, resignation and silence was not acceptable, even if the fall of the regime was unimaginable. Acting together immediately changed the situation for the better.

Michnik himself explained the logic of this action in his classic essay “The New Evolutionism.” This essay, together with Vaclav Havel’s classic “The Power of the Powerless,” helped me imagine my idea of the politics of small things. Thus I understood the theater movement I studied here in the early 70s and Pope John Paul II’s visit to Poland in 1979.

I wrote my dissertation on a theater movement, Polish Student Theater including such groups as Kalambur and Nawias of Wroclaw, Teatr Stu and Pleonazmus of Krakow, Teatr Plastyczna of Lublin, Teatr 77 of Lodz and Teatr Osmego Dnia of Poznan. In these theaters and in their audiences the power of the politics of small things was revealed. They were not engaged with regime or anti-regime politics. Their importance was that they provided a zone of independent sensibility for their performers and audience. In these theaters a different Poland was not only imagined and performed. It actually existed. They did not support the regime or attempt to reform or overthrow it. They created a life apart from it.

Such life apart became a societal experience in 1979. I think is the way to understand the profane significance of the Pope’s visit. To be sure, he was an opponent of Communism. But when he came here and was greeted by millions, they were not engaged in a political demonstration, but in a religious and social one. People did not flock to see the Pope and celebrate mass with him as an explicitly political, anti-regime act, instrumentally directed toward the defeat of Communism. Their activities were ends in themselves, and they came to see themselves differently. Clearly seeing this laid the groundwork of Solidarity, revealed a collective shared understanding that the Polish people had a different character than that which was imagined in the official Communist press, a perception that could imagine people acting on their own independent of officialdom, as indeed occurred on a grand scale not only when the Pope greeted the public, but also in the planning of the event.

The relationship between power and culture changed, as the nature of the culture and of the power was changed. More in a moment about that. Let’s look elsewhere to understand what was involved here.

A poetry salon in Damascus, Syria, I read about last year, before the Arab Spring, reminded me of Polish student theater. Both the theater movement and the salon are examples of constituted free zones in repressive societies. They both are examples of the politics of small thing. They, further, both demonstrate the possibility of re-inventing political culture, the possibility of reformulating the relationship between the culture of power and the power of culture.

The secret police were present at Bayt al-Qasid, the House of Poetry, in Damascus, The New York Times reported in an article published last September. Yet despite the presence of a significant arm of the repressive state, this has been a place where innovative poetry has been read, including by poets in exile, politically daring ideas are discussed, a world of alternative sensibility has been created. Not the star poets of the sixties, but young unknowns have predominated. The point has not been political agitation nor to showcase celebrity, but the creation of a special place for reading, performance and discussion of the new and challenging.  The Times article quotes a patron about a recent reading. “‘In a culture that loathes dialogue,’ the evening represented something different, said Mr. Sawah, the editor of a poetry Web site. ‘What is tackled here,’ he said, ‘would never be approached elsewhere.’”

In this poetry salon and in Polish theater, people interacted with each other on the basis of common interest in the arts. On a regular basis they presented themselves to each other, developed a shared definition of the situation, and through the expressive gestures developed a setting of trust and experimentation. Art not politics prevailed. Cynics would say that the Polish theater and the Syrian salon are safety valve mechanism, through which the young and the marginal can let off steam, as a repressive political culture prevails. But in Poland, the “safety valve” overturned the official culture, even before the collapse of the Communist regime, as I explored in my book Beyond Glasnost: the Post Totalitarian Mind. And now something remarkable is developing among Syria and its neighbors.

I am not asserting that a happy ending is necessarily the result of such cultural work: the fall of Communism, the Arab Spring. But I do want to underscore that the very existence of an alternative sensibility in a repressive context changes the nature of the social order. Poland was not simply a totalitarian during the Communist era, and the Syria of a year ago was not simply repressive. That country now is in a virtual civil war. Yet, with amazing persistence, the most violent repression has been met with incredibly sustained non-violent resistance. I believe that these miracles are not conceivable without the experience of places where the possibility for dialogue was established, places where poetry and theater could prevail, and because of this, political culture can be, has been reinvented – in Syria, at least for a discrete number of people in a particular location at a particular time. But the limits of today may be very different tomorrow. This I learned as I observed my Polish friends.

Occupy Wall Street reminds my friend, colleague, and frequent “co-conspirator,” Elzbieta Matynia, and me of our long term engagement in the democratic opposition and alternative cultural movements in East and Central Europe. There and then, we coordinated an international seminar, before and after 1989, between scholars and activists, concerning the theoretical and practical problems of democracy, “The Democracy Seminar.” As we observe Occupy Wall Street with a great deal of interest, appreciation and in support, we are moved to act.

We therefore have proposed to The New School community and the activists in OWS the creation of a new seminar, as a place for mutual learning and discussion that can inform action, The Flying Seminar (the name inspired by a dissident academic program during the late 70s and 80s in Poland). The idea came out of an informal chat with one of OWS’ outreach people at Zuccotti Park.  Tomorrow at 3:00 pm, we will have a planning meeting and a first conversation, as part of an Occupy Wall Street Teach In at The New School.

We propose to organize a series of portable conversations with key participants and dedicated observers in various movements and actions in the United States and beyond, which could help to crystallize the differences and parallels between projects of resistance then and now.  We had in mind, for example, the Civil Rights Movement , SDS, the 1968 movements in Europe, the second wave feminist movement in the States, the Solidarity Movement in Poland, The Anti-Apartheid Movement in South Africa (its peaceful and its militant side), the Green Revolution in Iran, and the Arab Spring.  Our goal will be to facilitate discussion about movements past, from here and elsewhere, as a way of guiding the future of movements present. The hope is that this discussion could help address the key question of what is to be done now.

We agree with many of our colleagues, along with our university president, David Van Zandt, that the New School should be an active part of and site for the OWS. Using our specific resources, and in recognition of the special horizontal, open-ended character of the movement, and its fresh language for opposing the status quo, we hope to make our modest contribution. The exact form the seminar will take, and its specific ends, will be determined by those who participate. Our hope, though, is that it will be a place of collective learning that will facilitate common actions, making them more visible, in New York and far beyond.

A few additional thoughts concerning yesterday’s post on the Republicans, Obama and Occupy Wall Street: I asserted that the Obama makes sense, while the Republicans don’t. I had in mind specifically the contrast to the situation in the early 80s. While I strongly opposed the “Reagan revolution,” I knew that it made sense to Americans. They agreed with the idea that government was the problem not the solution as they reflected upon the inefficiencies of the welfare state. The challenge for progressives then was to present an equally compelling opposing story. They failed. Now things are reversed. Even though the Tea Party somehow managed to gain significant and passionate support, the idea that the Great Recession has been caused by government regulations is not compelling to most Americans. Occupy Wall Street suggests a much more sensible diagnosis of our times and has successfully changed the conversation, as Paul Krugman also underscored today. Obama’s account makes sense in this environment. It is for this reason that I think my prediction that Obama will not only win the election, but it will actually make a big difference in the way the American ship of state navigates through rough waters, is not premature as Scott suggested in his comment to yesterday’s piece.

The question of Obama’s chances has been discussed extensively on my facebook page in response to yesterday’s post. Let me underscore, I think because of the Republican disarray, which has to do with the weakness of the specific candidates, but, crucially beyond personalities,  also with their nonsensical positions, not only improves Obama’s chances, but also Democratic candidates for the Senate and the House. And, in my judgment the long term significance of the OWS is that those who are elected are going to be pushed to address concerns centered on jobs and the problem of gross inequality in America.

On a different kind of interpretation from afar: I received an interesting response to yesterday’s post from Daniel Dayan in an email message. It was a theoretical and not a political response, which I appreciated. He noted:

“The ‘Occupy Wall Street’ movement has much more echo around the world than the largely undecipherable ‘Tea Party Movement.’ I like both the ample political landscape you describe, and the theoretical gestures you use, including: (1) (thanks!) ‘monstration,’ (2) the role of sacred, or symbolic, space as one of amplifying small gestures into world gestures, whispers into cries, and (3) Arendt’s ‘lost treasure’ of revolutionary engagement….I am intrigued by your view of certain spaces as microphones. This adds a new twist to Turner.”

Dayan and I are fascinated by how the politics of small things, the sacred, monstration (the problem of showing) and visibility in the new media landscape, and the reinvention of political culture (my way of putting it) are now developing. My post and his response encapsulate where our conversation is now and where possible joint research is going. Our task will be to understand the way politics and media relate. This is an important scholarly problem, but also a pressing practical one, which I hope will be investigated in the Flying Seminar.

I am on the road from Gdansk. It’s been an intense few days. Last Tuesday, I joined the Occupy Wall Street demonstration for a bit. By Wednesday, I was in the Gdansk shipyards, where Solidarity confronted the Party State in 1980, ultimately leading to the collapse of the Soviet Empire. I was interviewed for the Solidarity Video Archive, giving my account of the work I did with Solidarity and my understanding of the great labor movement. Immediately after which, I was taken to Gdansk University, where I gave my talk, this year’s Solidarity Lecture, “Reinventing Democratic Culture.” It opened the All About Freedom Festival. Over the weekend, I visited my family in Paris, and now I am flying over the Atlantic on my delayed flight to Newark, hoping I will get back to New York in time to teach my 4:00 class, The Politics of Everyday Life. It has been a packed week.

Unpacking my thoughts is a challenge. A new social movement is developing in the U.S., with potentially great impact. In Poland, a new generation is confronting the Solidarity legacy, trying to appreciate the accomplishments, while also needing to address new problems. Yesterday’s elections in France and especially in Poland were important. Yet, just as important for what was not on the ballot as for what was. Everywhere, there seems to be a political – society agitation and disconnect, with the politics of small things potentially contributing to a necessary reinvention of democratic culture.

I have many thoughts and will need more time to put them into a clear perspective. Here, just a start. I have a sense that things are connected: not falling apart, rather, coming together.

In the U.S., the central ideal of equality has been compromised in the last thirty years. From being a country with more equal distribution of income, property, education and respect, than in other places, which Tocqueville took to be definitive of the American democratic condition long ago, it has become a country of gross and increasing inequalities. With dramatic flair, the Occupy Wall Street movement is making the issue visible, resetting the terms of public debate, from the conservative issue of taxes and debt to the more progressive problems of unemployment and gross inequality. There have been, of course, many individuals and groups who have been trying to bring these issues forward, from the respected Nobel Prize winning economists Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman, to labor unions – transit workers, public employees, the AFL-CIO. It is intriguing that a relatively small but dramatically inventive social movement has focused the issue. Its political potential points to the importance of imaginative gestures in getting media attention and changing public debate, very similar in this regard to the Tea Party.

In Poland, Solidarity is gone and forgotten, but also constantly present. The two major parties emerged from Solidarity. The leaders have in common experience in the opposition to the Communist regime. The major parties are to the right of center, one based on patriotism, identification with Catholicism and nation and skepticism about Europe, PiS, Law and Justice. The other party is the pro-Europe, pro-business and pro-market PO, Civic Platform. The election presented a clear 19^th century choice, between Conservatives and Liberals. Only minor parties presented 20^th century social democratic alternatives.

My hosts, and the professors, students and the members of the general public in my audience repeatedly expressed dismay about their choices. It’s not that they felt that there were no differences between the parties. It’s that the differences didn’t seem to address the problems of our times.

Following my talk, during the question and answer period, a young woman expressed the problematic situation. She saw that there was a serious debate between the parties, but she couldn’t understand how the debate included her. She may have been put off by the ultra nationalism of one party and the market fundamentalism of the other, but neither party addressed her and her peers concerns. She didn’t know what to do.

I, of course, told her that I wouldn’t advise her on voting (which she actually seemed to be asking for), other than to make the general statement that I am a strong believer of choosing the bad over the worse, with the proviso that I wouldn’t choose between two competing faces of totalitarianism (two Nazi Parties, I think I said). But then I returned to the theme of my talk, linking the politics of small things to the challenge of reinventing political culture. The Solidarity movement revealed the power of the politics of small things.

I highlighted my basic theoretical position as it emerged from my observations of Solidarity.

When people meet and speak in each other’s presence, and develop a capacity to act together on the basis of shared commitments, principles or ideals, they develop political power. This power is constituted in social interaction. It is realized in the concerted action. It has its basis in the definition of the situation, the power of people to define their social reality. In the power of definition, in the politics of small things, there is the power of constituting alternatives to the existing order of things. When this power involves the meeting of equals, respectful of factual truth and open to alternative interpretations of the problems they face, it is democratic. As Arendt has theorized, such meeting, talk and action constitute political power as the opposite of coercion. As Goffman investigated, this power is constituted in the expressive life of the involved people. Power by acting together, expressively created, is a power that has been highly consequential.

My talk was about how I saw this in the 1980s, specifically when I was last in Gdansk to observe the trial of three Solidarity leaders, Bogdan Lis, Wladyslaw Frasyniuk and Adam Michnik. I used my reflections on that experience to show how such power is playing a key role in the politics in the U.S. and the Middle East today, drawing upon analysis that is systematically developed in Reinventing Political Culture.

The irony was that this applies to Poland now as well, as the population and the political leadership seem to have lost sight of what was accomplished in the Solidarity Movement. I tried to answer the Polish student’s question, and quite a few others developing this point. Actually existing democracies, such as Poland and the United States, need recurrent social movements to keep them alive. As the conflicts in Polish politics is being played out by people who were involved in the struggles of those times, the principles of those struggles provide untapped resources for those who are critical, or feel disaffected from the present political scene.

During my weekend in Paris, I thought of this as well, as I talked about the primary elections in the Socialist Party and the upcoming general elections. Politics seems inadequate, as the problems the democracies of Europe face seem quite profound. The popular movements and disruptions in Spain, Greece and England were not particularly creative, as Solidarity was, but they are a clear expression of a fundamental problem, not only economic but also political.

And in this light, from a distance, I read with appreciation Ermira Danaj’s contribution to Deliberately Considered. Here, in a most dramatic way, we see concerted action making democracy possible in a pretty extreme circumstance.

In Gdansk, I also took part in a public discussion of a brilliant documentary film, Cyril Tuschi’s Khodorkovsky. It is an excellent work. The film portrays the kind of neo-Soviet state with a democratic opposition that Russian has become. It also presents a great study of an amazing character, the richest man in Russia, turned into a prisoner, turned into a dissident, locked in battle with an equally impressive character, Vladimir Putin. The power of small gestures was remarkably revealed in the film. This power of gestures in the new media age is quite important.

Final note: the power of mediated gesture is what I saw on the first day of this intense week, in the Occupy Wall Street movement. It is in the creative gesture that the alternative to the order of things and mindless disorder is to be found. More about this in my next post. I will try to work on it after I teach in a few hours and after a good night’s sleep.

A new kind of politics is upon us. Many observers have highlighted the technological characteristics of this politics. Cell phones and Facebook and other social media are the heroes in these accounts of the Arab Spring, the Israeli summer, and now of not only the Tea Party but also Occupy Wall Street. Yet, these accounts are unsatisfying, because they don’t take into account the human agency of the new politics, the specific political struggles. We should clearly recognize the importance of the new media, but it seems to me that what is extraordinary is the way a type of power, political power as Hannah Arendt understood it, is becoming increasingly important. People are meeting each other, now virtually and not only face to face, speaking and acting in each other’s presence, developing a capacity to act in concert.

I analyzed the way this power works in our world in my book, The Politics of Small Things. It points to the way the power of “the politics of small things” was common to both the Solidarity Movement in opposition to the previously existing socialist order in Poland of the 80s and to the anti-war movement and the Dean campaign during the Bush years in America. Recently a Korean translation of the book was published. I wrote a special preface, including some thoughts on how the politics of small things worked in a social movement in South Korea, the Candle Movement. Now, those reflections are helping me understand what I am seeing in lower Manhattan and considering its potential. I think the power of the politics of small things is becoming a significant force throughout the world today in many different contexts, and that it is important to take notice in places far and near.

My general understanding as an outsider and non-expert of the Candle Movement:  Using a popular electronic public forum, Agora, a fourteen year old middle school girl called for a candle light vigil at the Seoul City Hall Public Square to protest against the resumption of American beef imports in early April of 2008. Initially, most protesters were teenagers from middle and high schools, between fourteen and seventeen. A group of text messaging Korean girls was discussing the dangers of mad cow disease, the need to act and then acted. The demonstrators shared their concerns among themselves in ever wider social circles and decided that they must do something about it. In relatively small gatherings, they met to demonstrate their concern, and there was robust response to the demonstrations as they became visible to the larger society. There followed a series of ever larger candle light demonstrations at the square and around the city and country, leading to massive nationwide candle light demonstrations around the country on June 10^th, with one million people taking part.

Intriguingly, the response to the Candle Movement was first from unconventional social actors, women’s groups of various sorts primarily among them, and then more conventional oppositional political parties, democratic activists and civil society actors of various sorts. The beef was the first issue, but then a number of unpopular plans and policies of the new administration were criticized: privatization, the Korea – United States Fair Trade Agreement, the Grand Korean Waterway, the educational reforms, the predominance of the wealthy in the new cabinet, and overly pro-business public policies in general.  What began as little more than a group of teenagers acting out became a mass societal movement, strong enough that it greatly and negatively affected the popularity of the newly elected President, Lee Myung-bak, led to the resignation in mass of his cabinet the day after the largest demonstration, and provoked a systematic response from the police, unseen in the country in over twenty years, presenting for all to see a repressive side of the political order. Small things added up.

It is notable how major events in our times follow this pattern. First, people with common concerns find each other. Then, they talk to each other. Then, they act, and sometimes people notice. The noticing, of course, is not random. There is a pattern to it. Big media, what is called these days, the mainstream media, play a role, as do cultural resonance and political inventiveness. Whether, and how, the mainstream media report on the concerted action matters. So does how a larger public understands the movement. In Korea, it is significant that women’s groups responded first and then the larger world of conventional political actors took notice. The teenage girls’ movement became a broader societal wide movement as women passed the message on. The message was positively received because it resonated with a broad skepticism about the unequal relationship between the U.S. and South Korea. The meat of the issue was not the meat itself.

I think of this as I am looking downtown at the ground zero social movement, Occupy Wall Street. Lower Manhattan, since 9/11/01, is central to the American imagination about who we are and what we stand for. This led to an outrageous flight from factual truth in the case of “The Ground Zero Mosque.” In the case of the Occupy Wall Street movement, it is empowering those who want Americans to look clearly at the facts of inequality in our country.

The movement started smaller than planned. Adbusters the organization that first promoted the protest, imagined initial participation in the thousands, and instead there were only hundreds. Yet, the movement sustained itself through the simple act of persisting at a symbolic center, Wall Street, when the values of that center are broadly questioned. The movement was taken over by those who participated. They became the leaders. Now others are taking notice, because of the political cultural creativity of the protest, first a hand full of celebrities, but now, crucially, trade unions. The police seem to be cooperating, creating periodic controversies that attract mainstream attention: last week pepper spray, this Saturday, mass arrests on the Brooklyn Bridge. A visible social movement is coming into view. A candle is being lit.

The ambivalence around the WikiLeaks mission and especially its recent disclosures are understandable (see Jeff’s previous post). On the one hand, it does make us feel that we no longer have to live in a fog called the diplomatic game, that we need no longer be treated like children who for their own protection are excluded from family secrets, and that we the citizens of the world deserve not to be patronized and paternalized by our own governments, and need not concede so much discretionary power to our government officials.

On the other hand, as someone who is living at this moment in post-apartheid South Africa, and works in the archives (of which only a small part is available to the broader public), and who has studied the processes that led to the dismantling of Soviet-style autocracy in Central and Eastern Europe, an apparently widespread schadenfreude about exposing everything to everybody brings shivers. Two very different, but in both cases repressive, regimes in Poland and in South Africa, would not have ended peacefully as they did, if not for lengthy and secret conversations that laid the groundwork for the official public negotiations.  Imagine that the secret meetings between Church officials, leaders of the outlawed Solidarity movement, and General Jaruzelski’s government in Poland had been exposed in 1987…….Or that the “talks about talks”, and the meetings between exiled leaders of the ANC and certain members of the ruling nationalist party, had been exposed by WikiLeaks.

Nelson Mandela in 1937

In each case, the negotiations that led to fundamental systemic change and the launching of democratic rule were preceded by an overture, made of many secret meetings. The South African overture began roughly with a meeting in Lusaka, Zambia, where most of the ANC leaders lived, and was followed by twelve clandestine gatherings in England, gradually building a fragile trust between the key enlightened Afrikaner intellectuals and ANC leaders. And it took four years !

In Poland, even during the actual negotiations there were still side-bar meetings conducted privately in rather inaccessible backstage rooms outside of Warsaw. It was there that the sharpest disagreements were softened, making possible a return to the big and public roundtable negotiations. And indeed – no matter how problematic at the time — it was these intensely private encounters, discussions, and conferences among South Africans and Poles that influenced and shifted mutual perception on both sides.

As somebody who celebrates talk in public space as the very condition for democracy to emerge and to function, I also recognize that the very important work of rebuilding trust and reopening paths of communication may have to start in private, with privacy protected.

The air in Johannesburg (Joburg to the locals) is full of discussions on this year’s Nobel Peace Prize.  When I heard about Liu Xiaobo, I thought about events that took place in Poland 30 years ago, and about a message written by workers on strike in the Gdansk Shipyard in August 1980.

One of their most prominent graffiti, written in huge, uneven letters on cardboard and mounted high up on a shipyard crane, was the statement, uncontroversial elsewhere, “A Man is Born and Lives Free.” This year’s Nobel Peace Prize given to a Chinese political prisoner brings the spirit of this graffiti to China, re-inserting it in a landscape “freely” filled with billboards advertising Western luxury brands like Lancôme or Mercedes Benz. Will the Chinese notice the message?

There are those moments in history when the Nobel Prizes turn out to be truly performative.

When Czeslaw Milosz, whose poetry was forbidden in communist Poland, received the Nobel Prize in Literature in October 1980, it seemed to lend further legitimacy to the democratic aspirations of the workers as articulated in the Gdansk shipyard.  The poems of Milosz had only been published underground and the workers had come to know them through their strike bulletins. And now the workers, who had demanded a constitutional guarantee of freedom of speech, press, and publication, won their strike, and the poems — arrested till then in the Office of Censorship — became widely available. I have no doubt that the award given to the poet who wrote about freedom and captivity further encouraged the human rights agenda of the Solidarity movement, and contributed – even if only for the 16 months of Solidarity’s legal existence — to the unprecedented sense of emancipation in the country.

Those 16 months of Solidarity were a time when Poles experienced the dignity of personal freedom. They were months of intensive learning that paid off in 1989 when the society launched a deliberately peaceful process of dismantling the authoritarian system.

But 1989 brought not only the joyous image of the Berlin Wall being taken down, but also horrifying images of the Tiananmen Square massacre, where tanks charged defenseless students demanding democratic reforms.

Would the Nobel Peace Prize awarded to one of the students at Tiananmen Square, Liu Xiaobo, bring new strength to those who sat there with him, those who looked on, and those who are  younger and know little about the students trying to stop tanks?

While I was finishing this note, trying to return to my reflection on performativity, I received an email with a piece on the Nobel Peace Prize written just a moment ago in Warsaw by Adam Michnik, one of the Solidarity movement’s leaders, for today’s Gazeta Wyborcza, the second-biggest newspaper in Poland.  I opened it quickly, as I know that he traveled to China this July, and I’d like to end with a brief excerpt by this seasoned political thinker, lifelong dissident, and former political prisoner:

“I was struck in China by a vast change that is rarely reported on by the world’s media — the newly independent public opinion, and the embryonic civil society emerging there.  Liu Xiaobo, the Laureate of the Peace prize and a political prisoner, was one of the creators of this public opinion and civil society. He paid a high price for this – the price of discrimination, loneliness, and imprisonment. Liu deserves admiration and respect, as he is one of those people who restore a belief in the existence of elementary values.”