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.

1. Art representing Roma, gays and Jews has been banned and destroyed in Lublin, Poland, twice host to Transeuropa Festival. Stop Toleration for Toleration, a far-right soccer hooligan march, with hate speech chants, has lashed back against the social-artistic campaign Lublin for All, led by Szymon Pietrasiewicz. The campaign included bus tickets with the images of national and sexual minorities who have shaped this city for centuries as a hub of Jewish, Romany, Protestant and queer cultures. City Hall, under pressure from the soccer hooligans, censored and shredded this art. As the municipal authorities have caved in to the extreme right, Lublin — it appears — is not welcoming at all.

The destruction of art crushes the human geography of Lublin: this is a blow to the heritage of this intercultural city and to the current art activism working to make Lublin hospitable.

We need to reclaim Lublin from the far-right soccer hooligans. That’s why the ground breaking Holocaust scholars Jan T. Gross and Irena Grudzinska-Gross of Princeton, Poland’s leading feminist Kazimiera Szczuka, and this country’s only out gay MP Robert Biedron have all signed an open letter “Let’s not give Lublin up to intolerance, aggression and social exclusion,” authored by Agnieszka Zietek, a political activist and lecturer at Maria Curie-Sklodowska University in Lublin.

2. “Lublin free of fags!” “Run Pietrasiewicz out of Lublin!” “F … Gazeta Wyborcza [Poland’s progressive newspaper]!” “A boy and a girl are a normal family!” “Lublin, a city without deviations!” These were the chants of the soccer hooligan marchers. As editor-in-chief of the local branch of the Gazeta Wyborcza broadsheet Malgorzata Bielecka-Holda writes, the catcalls were received with sympathy by City Hall. This is just one element of the rise of the far right in Lublin. Other ominous developments: the mobilization of the National Radical Camp (ONR) and the hosting of these Brown Shirts by the local Solidarność trade union, evictions and layoffs of the underprivileged, the predicament of refugees and women, refusing abortion to the fourteen-year-old rape victim Agata, and attacks on those who are reviving Jewish life.

3. Activist for Jewish Lublin, Tomasz Pietrasiewicz, 57, has been assaulted with swastikas sprayed on his flat and with an explosive device. In 1990, he established Grodzka City Gate Centre-NN Theatre, devoted to the commemoration of Jewish culture in Lublin through plays, exhibitions, a publishing house and workshops for high-school students. Pietrasiewicz was also attacked with anti-Semitic posters that were pasted in his block of flats and in bus stops throughout Lublin. The perpetrators have not been found. As Pawel P. Reszka reported in Gazeta Wyborcza, the National Radical Camp (ONR), at a press conference hosted by Solidarność, insinuated that Pietrasiewicz attacked himself.

4. In 2006 Tomasz’s son, Szymon founded Tektura Space for Creative Activities, a squat with concerts, exhibitions and campaigns for human rights, women, LGBT, the homeless and seniors. This alternative collective opposes consumerism and neo-Nazism. Tektura is often threatened by skinhead raids, but, significantly, it is also not respected by economic neoliberals because of its stance for fair trade, the redistribution of goods and social justice, countering Poland’s widespread belief in the infallibility of the free market.

5. This year Szymon Pietrasiewicz started the Studio for Socially Engaged Art Rewiry, responsible for the campaign Lublin for All. The Rewiry has worked intensively in the deprived areas of Lublin, involving their residents in art activism. Pietrasiewicz’s Studio has also invited such artists as Joanna Rajkowska and Rafal Betlejemski to work with the local residents. The Rewiry is planning to bring the representatives of the international scene like David Cerny as well as Svajone and Paulius Stanikas to Lublin, too.

6. Tomasz Pietrasiewicz was a dissident in the 1980s, active in alternative theatre and underground publishing. Now two generations of nonconformists run the Grodzka City Gate Centre-NN Theatre and Tektura that champion independent culture. NN and Tektura hosted Transeuropa Festival which foregrounded LGBT, intercultural Lublin and refugees.

7. Chechen asylum seekers have told us at Transeuropa Lublin that they don’t feel that they’re treated as human beings here. A country of traditional emigration, Poland doesn’t welcome refugees. In October 2012 over 70 refugees in detention centers throughout Poland held a hunger strike against the legal and material conditions to which they had been condemned. A woman journalist from Georgia, Ekaterina Lemondzawa, wrote a dramatic letter to Gazeta Wyborcza, in which she described the humiliations that she had been subjected to as a refugee in Poland. The broadsheet later reported: “Poland is allegedly the only country in the European Union, where refugees, including children, being held for months in detention centers, are called from their rooms by whistle to stand at attention.” Helsinki Human Rights Foundation representative Karolina Rusilowicz confirms that “these detention centers hold a penitentiary regime.”

At Transeuropa Festival, Chechen refugees shared their problems — in fact hardships — with us. Generally, asylum-seeking should be decriminalized and immigration facilitated in the European Union. Migrants and refugees must not be treated as criminals. The Seyla Benhabib-inspired Lublin political scientist Sylwia Nadgrodkiewicz writes that one needs to go beyond the logic of exclusion in order to make immigration easier.

8. International experts, in a report on Lublin as an intercultural city, indicated that refugees should be more visible in this city. Szymon Pietrasiewicz’s campaign Lublin for All attempts to present Lublin’s coexistence of different cultures and the need for acceptance and cooperation; these images embody the ethics and aesthetics of diversity and equality. The censorship, ban and destruction of the bus tickets hurt the cause for an open Lublin.

9. The art expert and political economist Mikolaj Iwanski writes ironically: “Lublin’s leadership have begun a race to see who can condemn the action [Lublin for All] faster … It turns out that a smiling black man shouting Motor [the name of the club] is a deadly threat to the city, to this second-league club and to the municipal transportation.” On a serious note, Iwanski adds that “anti-Semitism, homophobia and ethnic prejudices are still present in Polish stadiums.” The Lublin area is very poor. Amidst economic hardships, scapegoating, conspiracy theories and prejudices are rampant.

10. Submitting to the far right could not be more dangerous here. That is why an MP Michal Kabacinski, 24, protested against Lublin City Hall’s submission to the soccer hooligans. “The mayor has failed to respond to these events. This was show of hate speech, a presentation of anti-Semitic and xenophobic positions. A scandal. We must not accept these events.” On the door of Lublin city hall Kabacinski hung a picture of the mayor next to a portrait of Adolf Hitler and an image of the Ku Klux Klan. The MP explained how he had intended to demonstrate that City Hall agrees with the promotion of ideologies which these figures represent.

11. Lublin has been a city of women, minorities and migrants. Let us remember the residents of Lublin: Jews, Roma, Ukrainians, Russians, Italians, Greeks, Germans, Armenians, Scots. Nowadays we must encourage contemporary migrants, including economic ones. Lubliners have enjoyed hospitality abroad, and metaphysically we are all migrants to this world. We must not allow prejudices in our region — that is why social change is badly needed. Let’s find within ourselves more than toleration: acceptance, more than integration: recognizing otherness as value, more than dialogue: cooperation among cultures. Zygmunt Bauman recently spoke about such a collaboration at both the Grodzka City Gate Centre-NN Theatre and at the Catholic University of Lublin.

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.

Social movements create publics. They make it possible for people to express and act on their common concerns together. This creativity of movements has not fully appreciated. It has a long history, and it is also a key characteristic of the new “new social movements.” We discussed this in the Wroclaw seminar, moving from history to the study of the movements of our times.

Our discussion reminded me of the work of one of my former students, Angela Jones. Her dissertation, now a book, is on the Niagara Movement, which preceded the NAACP. The movement established the first national forum for the discussion of African American concerns by African Americans. Until very recently, it has been viewed as little more than a footnote in the career of W.E.B. Dubois. Jones’s work fills in a gap in history, the first fully developed study of this early episode in the long civil rights struggle. The gap existed because of the insufficient understanding of the importance of creating free public interaction in social movements.

In the democratic opposition to Communist regimes, specifically in Poland, the goal of establishing independent publics was not overlooked. In fact, for quite a while, it was the major end of the social struggle. The constitution of a free public space for discussion and action became the primary end of underground Solidarność in the 1980s. Because the regime couldn’t be successfully challenged, the end became to constitute a zone beyond its control. The end was for individual and collective dignity, to create an area where one could express oneself, appear outside of official definition, consolidate agreement among diverse participants in an autonomous public, which could be applied at an appropriate moment. The goal was to engage in a long cultural march, as Adam Michnik put it in a 1976 classic essay, “The New Evolutionism.”

In the new “new social movements,” this movement feature has been cultivated in a new political, generational and media environment. New media forms have played an important role, for better and for worse, and the creation of new autonomous publics has been put forward as a primary end.

Tahrir Square and Zuccotti Park were places where all sorts of people met. Many came to know each other virtually, and then being together became the important feature of square and the park. The demands in the square centered on ending the Mubarak regime and its corruption, and in the park the rally cry was for the 99%, but the meeting of Coptics, Muslims and secularists together in the square, and the coming together of students, unionists, young and old, employed and unemployed in the park were at least as significant as the ends of their actions. Indeed, the ends were not all that clear: An Islamic or a Secular Democratic polity, a rejection of the American Dream or the restoration of its promise? As the movements couldn’t answer these questions, they opened up opportunities for new sorts of public expression and action. They expressed a simple but powerful point: the way things have been is not necessarily the way they will be, as the people in these movements revealed themselves to each other.

Wroclaw seminar participant Fernanda Canofre of Brazil wrote her master’s thesis on the Arab Spring and Moroccan films. When we discussed the Arab Spring, she suggested that we review twenty of videos from Morocco posted on globalvoicesonline.org. The videos add up, pointing to the diversity of those who support the protests in Morocco and the breadth and depth of their concerns, and the importance of constituting a free public life. The videos present “the February 20^th movement” in action.

The first video presents the demands of the movement made by one of its young leaders, Oussama Lakhlifi. It stimulated a fierce debate about the planned demonstration on February 20th. A week before the demonstration, activists released a well-produced film, the second video clip, in which a variety of Moroccans, from apparently secular students and labor activists to a religious woman in traditional dress, explain why they will join the movement. (See video embedded below.) They want to have a chance at a decent life. They call for a constitution and democracy, an end of corruption, and a chance for a job and the dignity of labor, and lower food prices.

Other videos respond to the unfolding events. The videos counter official propaganda, document official violence and the response of officials to movement demands. Attractive videos include an animated cartoon Einstein giving a lesson on the power elite and music videos of Moroccan pop band, Hoba, Hoba, Spirit and rap video “Mellit!” (I’m fed up!).

An official referendum on constitutional reforms was held and the opposition presented video parodies of the enthusiasm shown on official media. Two other videos call for a boycott. Another documents fraud on the day of the referendum.

After the reforms were overwhelmingly approved. Videos followed, one expressing continued international support for the movement from a gathering of activists and bloggers at a meeting in Tunis. The last video shows a lonely singer with a group of accompanying musicians all but ignored on a busy city street. The post concludes: “What role will the February 20 movement be able to play next year as revolutionary fatigue begins to gain ground? Will it be able to be creative enough to keep pace?”

The February 20^th movement changed the course of Moroccan history even though the social order was not fundamentally changed. Reforms were enacted, though the King was very much still in charge, relatively popular, not a Mubarak figure. The demands for the most radical change were not realized. But in this far corner of the Arab world, the accomplishments of the Arab Spring are well documented in these videos.

We see from the inside an independent public, with links to similar publics in the region. They have established the important political fact of their existence. As long as they keep speaking, showing and sharing, their world is fundamentally transformed.

Canofre’s discussion of the movement, and the Arab Spring more generally, was not at all pessimistic. Her interest in the videos, and in film as well, is not only as they document a historical development, but also as they make history. When the Wroclaw seminar participants questioned her about her interest in the videos, it became clear to us that a fundamental transformation in Arab politics is revealed and enacted in them. The fundamental relationship between culture and power has been transformed.

More on this, extended to the case of Occupy Wall Street, in my next post.

The conclusion of my presentation will highlight the counter trend, the “no” side of my answer to our question, doing so by linking two of my major projects, the study of the politics of small things and of reinventing political culture. I will suggest, further, the need to carefully consider Daniel Dayan’s ideas of monstration. In my conclusion, I will make a sort of book proposal for Dayan and me to work on, so that the weaknesses of my approach can be addressed. I will move toward the conclusion first by examining what I take to be the way a cable television network contributes to the sickness of democracy, specifically in the United States – the yes side of my answer to our question. I will then make my second move, to the no side, considering how social media and other new forms of electronic media open the opportunity for a counter trend, supporting the politics of small things. I analyze both tendencies as they are tied to significant social movements that define and redefine political culture, for better and for worse: the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street. I want to be clear that I don’t see the problems and potentials I identify here as being primarily the consequence of media form, cable news, bad, online media, good. Rather I maintain that media forms shape, support and undermine the formation of social and political movements and institutions.  The social and the political are my message, not the media.

Yes

Fox News, Rupert Murdoch’s spectacularly successful cable news network in the United States, is not just biased. It is a political mobilization machine, shaping the political landscape. Consider the criticism of a well-known social thinker.

In September, 2010, Barack Obama offered a critique of Fox in an interview published in Rolling Stone magazine. This absolutely shocked and appalled Fox shock jocks Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity, the following evenings. They, the most popular in house celebrities on Fox TV, were shocked by any suggestion that they were anything but “fair and balanced,” the newspeak slogan of the tendentious network. In their self-presentation, they provide the alternative to the kowtowing liberals of the mainstream media. They were appalled by Obama’s criticism.

Yet, their response is cynical. They pretend to be what they are not, news commentators on a news network. Obama’s critique on the other hand is on firmer ground, even if it is not clear that it was wise. Isn’t it below the President’s dignity to engage in polemics with partisan press criticism? Doesn’t it enlarge them and belittle him?  These are the questions of the talking heads on cable and on the Sunday morning shows, in the television and radio discussions that followed the publication of the President’s interview.

Yet, actually in the interview Obama was quite careful, offering a measured serious answer to a provocative question:

Rolling Stone: “What do you think of Fox News? Do you think it’s a good institution for America and for democracy?”

President Obama: “[Laughs] Look, as president, I swore to uphold the Constitution, and part of that Constitution is a free press. We’ve got a tradition in this country of a press that oftentimes is opinionated. The golden age of an objective press was a pretty narrow span of time in our history. Before that, you had folks like Hearst who used their newspapers very intentionally to promote their viewpoints. I think Fox is part of that tradition — it is part of the tradition that has a very clear, undeniable point of view. It’s a point of view that I disagree with. It’s a point of view that I think is ultimately destructive for the long-term growth of a country that has a vibrant middle class and is competitive in the world. But as an economic enterprise, it’s been wildly successful. And I suspect that if you ask Mr. Murdoch what his number-one concern is, it’s that Fox is very successful.”

Obama placed Fox in a tradition of opinionated American journalism, and noted he disagreed with the Fox opinions and doesn’t think they are good for America. While I don’t see how a reasonable person, either pro or anti-Obama, can find fault with his response, I also don’t think that Obama went far enough. Serious media innovation is occurring at Fox, with potentially deep political effects. It is probably the reason why Obama feels compelled to criticize it from time to time.

Fox News is a truly innovative media form, particularly for television.  It purports to present news, but actually it is in the business of political mobilization. I think this is a specific American case, but it may be indicative of a general trend, the substitution of media for political parties.

In the important case of the Tea Party protests, this was most clear. Glenn Beck, a particularly flamboyant Fox News commentator who later lost his job, announced a mass demonstration, the “9/12 Rally.” On the Fox News programs and discussion shows, the developments leading up to the demonstration were reported, and their significance was discussed. Together with Beck’s agitation for the event, these reports and discussions brought the planned event to the attention of a large audience. Even if the event was initially the result of grassroots organization, as were the Tea Party Protests called for “tax day,” April 15, 2009, the attention of the public to the event went well beyond its original planners and their capacity to mobilize the population.

Dayan highlights the importance of this showing in his work on “monstration.” In his research, he is particularly interested in how the experience and expressions of a particular social circle move beyond a delimited public, and is brought to the attention of broader publics, an insight that can be found both in the work of the French classical sociologist, Gabrielle Tarde and the American pragmatist, John Dewey. This act is of primary political significance in media politics, something Fox has done very well, helping the previously marginal to become part of the mainstream. What is intriguing about Fox News is how they systematically work on the act of monstration and actually connect it to the work of social mobilization. I wonder sometimes whether the Republican Party has become the Fox Party, with many, perhaps most, of the potential Republican Party candidates for president for the 2012 election to President having worked as paid employees of the television news service.

In the case of the 9/12 rally, the Fox produced media event happened. Fox was there giving it full coverage. It was the major event of the day, the story that was given wall to wall coverage, while the other news sources tended to report it as one story among many. It was a kind of sacred presentation while other news services viewed it as part of the mundane daily events. The fact that only Fox “properly” reported on the event was said to reveal the bias of the “lame stream media,” to use the language of the American media critic and Fox commentator, Sarah Palin. This format applies to major happenings, but also to the trivial, from the Islamic bias of textbooks in Texas, to the booing of Palin’s daughter Bristol on “Dancing with the Stars,” a popular entertainment show, to the networks annual campaign against “the war on Christmas.” (a particularly surreal campaign, in which the fact that public actors say happy holidays rather than Merry Christmas is said to reveal the anti – Christian bias of the liberal elites in government and the corporate sector)

Contrary to Obama, Fox is not just biased as it reports the news. It produces the news from beginning to end, conflating news reporting with the political action that is the story. Murdock’s number one concern may be to be successful, as President Obama maintained in Rolling Stone, but it is notable that the success is political as well as monetary.  Rupert Murdock and News Corp make money, while America is given a strong coordinated push to the right.

Note here: there is a way in which Beck’s rally could be understood from the perspective of Daniel Boorstein, in his classical critique of broadcast news, as a pseudo event. It was produced for television, was news only as it appeared on television. Generally, I have been convinced, along with most media analysts, that Boorstein’s work doesn’t really confront the new realities of the televisual age. Because in politics appearances are realities (Arendt), and because in the age of television, public attention to things political occurs through TV, there does not seem to be anything pseudo about such events. To play a little with the old theorem of W.I. Thomas, (i.e. “If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences”) if political actions appear as real on television, they are real in their consequences.

I think no study better demonstrates this, no book more forcefully reveals the weakness of Boorstein’s position, than Dayan and Katz’s classic Media Events. I think that theirs is a modern classic. Yet, nonetheless, I also think we must take into account that there is something pseudo about Fox and company. As in the case of the 9/12 March, they specialize not simply in broadcasting news from a point of view. They specialize in the self-conscious production of political reality, and they do this with a thoroughness that I believe is unprecedented in the U.S. They turn fiction into facts and facts into fictions, from Obama’s citizenship to non-existent death panels in healthcare legislation, to non-existent mosques that threaten America at ground zero, to the importance of political candidates.

This sickens democracy. Facts have become partisan, e.g. global warming. Science has become a matter of political debate, e.g. evolution. Republican politicians now have to explain why they would give priority to the latter in schools and why they may have once taken seriously the former before they became more enlightened, e.g. the position of the once front runner in the race for the Republican nomination to be President of the United States, Newt Gingrich.  In one of the Republican presidential primary debates, the Republican candidates for president faced a panel of right wing state attorney generals, grand conservative inquisitors, who sought to unmask any and all liberal tendencies in the candidates’ pasts, seeking reassurance of their ideological purity. This media event was produced and broadcasted by Fox.

These developments are encouraged by a media form that is extremely popular and clearly partisan, but calls itself “fair and balanced” (the networks slogan). It has helped to create a deeply polarized public, with mutually exclusive perceptions of reality.

Let me state forthrightly what I take to be the major problem and why I think it is particularly serious. In the present media environment, facts have become indistinguishable from political fictions for a large segment of the American public. The distinction between public and private concerns is disappearing. News and entertainment have become the same coin. In the case of Murdoch’s Fox News, tabloid sensation and ideological politics have been fused. I also see this creeping into other media forms: more and more another cable news network, MSNBC, has become the mirror image, on the left, of Fox. Though I often agree with the partisan stance of its reporters and commentators, they are increasingly trying to produce a counter reality to the world according to Fox, rather than a way to understand the world or to develop a particular partisan position. And even in what I think to be the best source of news in the United States, The New York Times, the present format of the week in review section, published every Sunday, makes it increasingly difficult to distinguish reporting, analysis and opinion.

Thus, I think democracy is indeed sick of its own media, and for good reasons. Yet, this trend, “the Foxification of American democracy,” and its media, centered by the intimate connection between Fox and right wing politics, is far from the whole story. There are, of course, many in the traditional media who work to maintain conventional standards, difficult, but not impossible in the print and broadcast journalism. But new electronic media now play a special role. Take an amusing illustration of a counter trend, as a movement towards my grounds for answering our question in the negative.

No

I was enchanted by the idea of the “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear” in October of 2010, produced by America’s two star television satirists.  I have enjoyed the programs of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert as an antidote for the political madness of our times, produced for another cable news network, Comedy Central. Especially during the worst years of the Iraq war, I watched them to maintain my own sanity. In their rally, they accurately highlighted the strength of their satire, looking for sanity in insane times, using the form of the day, the great Washington Rally organized by cable television, mimicking the production of Glenn Beck on Fox. As you have seen, I have principled problems with this new form of “Media Events,” but such is the world we now live in.  Stewart and Colbert claimed that theirs wasn’t a response to the Glenn Beck organized event, but it clearly was.  There is irony in their satire, which challenges political clarity, but for good cultural reasons.

I was pleased by the turn out.  It seems that more people attended the Stewart Colbert satirical event, than attended Beck’s earnest rally to restore honor. I appreciated that “we” saw ourselves as outnumbering “them,” and it felt good.  But was there any more to it than that?

There indeed was concern in this regard. The ambiguity of the event’s meaning led to significant criticism after the fact, most vividly expressed by another political satirist, Bill Maher, in his response.

The left and the right are not equally insane, Maher and other critics pointed out.  The problem is not in the media portrayal of our politics, something that Colbert and especially Stewart seem to focus on, but the politics itself. The event energized a part of the public, but didn’t lead to specific political action. This was just before the midterm elections, which promised to lead to broad Democratic Party losses and Tea Party gains, which proved to be the case. The only person to even allude to the elections was Tony Bennett in his closing performance, calling out to people “Vote!” after singing “America the Beautiful.” It was a political event about nothing according to Maher, echoes of Seinfeld here.

Stewart in his nightly show defended himself in amusing ways,which suggests to me how democracy is being healed by its media. His main point: the rally was about something, just not about what his critics wanted. Stewart is mostly concerned not with the partisan disagreements, but that we have lost our ability to disagree civilly and constructively. His critics in turn wonder whether it is possible to constructively disagree when one side of the disagreement is acting in a fundamentally dishonest way. The confusion of fact with fictions does indeed seem to be particularly a Republican ailment. Assertions about death panels, the illegitimacy of the Obama Presidency because of his non – citizenship, wild claims about the dangers of Sharia law in Oklahoma, and the crime wave and voting fraud being perpetuated by illegal aliens, all come from Republicans in engaging important debates of the day without any notable use of facts. They do not have Democratic equivalents.  How then can Stewart claim to be non-partisan?   We have to watch Colbert and Stewart’s tongues as they go into their cheeks.

This debate on the left, and the ambiguity of the event, I think, underscores a fundamental problem in American political culture. There is too clear a correlation between commitments to facts and party identification. One party is associated with facts, while the other seems to be more committed to its own fictions. Indeed, more disturbing than the disagreements about how to address the problems of climate change is that the scientific finding of global warming has somehow become a partisan issue. More unsettling than the disagreements about the details of the stimulus package is the fact that there are those who seem to deny that there really were dangers of the collapse of the financial system and a global depression on the order of the Great Depression of the 1930’s.  And though I have to accept that some are not as thrilled as I am by the fact that America has matured to the point that it has elected an extremely intelligent African American President, bi-racial, with Muslims in his family tree, it is deeply unsettling that there are those who live with the falsehood that he is somehow not really American, and that elected representatives of the Republican Party actually perpetrate this lie or do little to criticize them. One party has become the party of facts, the other of fictions. Truth shouldn’t be a partisan issue, but it has become one, in many different instances.

Stewart and Colbert and their critics disagree about how to voice objection to this situation, and about their perceived roles. But they are responding to the same political cultural dilemma. How to fight against the fictions that Republican partisans are using to mobilize their constituencies so effectively?

Enter Occupy Wall Street: Social Media and the politics of small things

The Rally was of those who oppose such politics and such media, which lightly substitute such fictions for facts. The participants and their supporters, and their liberal critics, became visible in large numbers. The next step was a more forthright organization that addresses both the distortion of media fictoids, working against the policies they justify. The need for this step was apparent at the Rally and in the discussion about it. The need has been filled with a social movement that uses irony in its rather nebulous political claims, demonstrating for the 99%, symbolically occupying the seat of American and indeed global finance capitalism. And as I tried above, they need to organize to act not only against policies they disagree with, but also against lies. As the Republicans obstructed responsible governance, I had hoped against a sense of hopelessness, to see an alternative cast against the Tea Party mobilization. And now Occupy Wall Street has appeared. A key to this will be a commitment to truth, something to which the Colbert Stewart Rally, its participants and organizers contributed.

This is where we move from the television, albeit cable, to newer electronic media. Clearly 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, blogs and the like, 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 often unsatisfying, when they don’t focus on the human agency of the new politics, the specific type of political action that is ascendant. We should 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, freely speaking and acting in each other’s presence, developing a capacity to act in concert. Arendt maintained that this type of activity defined politics, as the opposite of coercion. I think that she exaggerates her position. But I do think that this kind of politics is ascendant in what Vaclav Havel named “the power of the powerless,” the power of what I call “the politics of small things.”

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 Solidarność 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. Now, I think the power of the politics of small things is becoming a significant force throughout the world in many different contexts, and that it is important to take notice in places far and near, in North Africa and the Middle East, in South Korea, in the candle movement, which I have analyzed a bit with the help of Jaeho Kang, and in the Tea Party in the US, and in what has become the worldwide Occupy Wall Street movement. Here I will examine Occupy Wall Street and consider how media in supporting this and similar social movements contribute to the health of democracy, how these media present an antidote to the illness caused by other media.It is important to remember how small Occupy Wall Street was in the beginning and how small it remained. To begin with, it was just a couple of dozen people who met each other and planned the action in lower Manhattan. The first occupiers were in the hundreds, reaching the thousands only when the police acted out and stimulated greater support and focused broad media and public interest (pepper spraying became a particularly favored devise for this, first in New York and then beyond). Among themselves, the activists in OWP created something unusual. They developed rules of conduct and decision-making that were radically inclusive and democratic. They found common ground with simple ideas, the most compelling focusing on gross inequality in America, contrasting a power elite, i.e. “Wall Street,” with everyone else, i.e. “The 99%.” I observe in this case, what I observed studying Solidarność and the anti war movement and the Dean campaign, how consequential power can be generated when people interact with each other, committed to shared ends and how their interactions were important ends in themselves, of significance beyond the immediate group involved.

As with previous instances of the politics of small things, the form of Occupy Wall Street expresses its content. But, there are some telling special qualities of the latest developments.

First is the way social media contributes to the OWS form. Jenny Davis, in a recent contribution to my on line magazine, Deliberately Considered, makes cogent points about the role of social media in recent social movements in general and in Occupy Wall Street in particular. Digital activism in recent years, she argues, is not only a means to the end of embodied social action. It also is an end in itself, a new type of politics that can make the previously hidden visible and can contribute to what she calls “the zeitgeist,” what I would prefer calling the prevailing common sense. She is pointing to the difference between the politics of small things just a few years ago, in the anti war movement and the Obama campaign, and now. The new media can now constitute a space for free action, a public, a point made by Judith Butler in a recent lecture.

This is especially telling because the occupation doesn’t have a simple meaning or political end. The act of posting, along with the act of protesting, makes the world look differently, and looking at the world with fresh eyes, beyond the sorts of ideological clichés found at Fox and its liberal rival MSNBC, is something that is most needed at this time. It is interesting how the way this happens is structured by social media actions, no longer a monopoly of the mass media.

Another way that OWS is noteworthy has to do with the location of the occupation, intensively linked as it is with democratic culture and its enemies. The location of the practices of OWS contributed significantly to its successful monstration, in Dayan’s terms.

The actions of a relatively small number of protestors in OWS quickly became visible not only to the people involved, but quite rapidly gained global attention. This is because of the very special nature of the starting point of occupation movement. Situated in lower Manhattan, the New York Stock Market and the World Trade Center have been symbols of advanced capitalism and American economic power in the global order and have been actual centers of the order. And, thus, Occupy Wall Street is the ground zero social movement. Monstration came almost automatically.

I first saw this as a “pedestrian observation,” based on a very particular experience walking around New York. In recent months, I walked around the area on the tenth anniversary of the attack with my friend, Steve Assael, who survived the 9/11 attack.

And in more recent weeks, I walked and observed the very same area when I went to take a look and to support the occupation at Zuccotti Park, passing by the site of the so-called Ground Zero Mosque as well.

It is because the occupation is at such an intense symbolic center, the media paid attention to OWS. A relatively small social demonstration captured global attention, exciting political imagination. In the U.S., apparently the Tea Party has met its match. Reports indicate that Occupy Wall Street is more popular than the Tea Party. Occupations of public spaces spread around the country, and, as the old slogan goes: the whole world was watching, and responding. Occupations went global, emanating from ground zero to London, to Seoul, back to Los Angeles and Washington D.C., and many points in between.

They watched in Gdansk. I had a peculiar experience in Gdansk in October, giving the annual Solidarność Lecture, reporting on a recent visit to Zuccotti Park, surprised by the interest in the Occupy Wall Street demonstration when I lectured there. I was also surprised and pleased to read that an important figure from that city, indeed the city’s most important historic figure, Lech Walesa, the leader of the Solidarity Trade Union, was planning on going to NY to support the occupation.

As reported in an unlikely source, The New York Daily News:

Walesa has warned of a ‘worldwide revolt against capitalism’ if the Wall St. protests are ignored.

They are protesting the ‘unfairness’ of an economy that enriches a few and ‘throws the people to the curb,’ he said in a recent interview.

‘That’s why union leaders and capitalists need to figure out what to do, because otherwise they will have to contend with a worldwide revolt against capitalism.’

In the end, Walesa did not go to support Occupy Wall Street. But what intrigued me about this experience of mine and this report is how media of all sorts spread the news and the insights of the new social movement. This is a mediated development perhaps stronger than Fox and the great trend it exemplifies.

The news spread through mainstream media and publications. But I think it is also important how social media spread the word. I don’t read the Daily News. It’s the American classic tabloid, similar to Murdoch’s NY Post, though not as bad. I got wind of the report through a friend’s (Elzbieta Matynia’s) Facebook page. The world is watching the world as mediated by our friends and our interpretation of things. As Davis observes:

This sharing, of course, is rarely (if ever) done in a neutral manner. Rather, Tweeters and Facebookers accompany shared news stories and web links with commentary that reveals a particular bent, or interpretation of the content. The content is therefore not just made visible, but impregnated with meaning in a web of social relations.

I was amused learning about Walesa’s visit through a Polish friend in New York when I was in the city where my exploration of the politics of small things first began, but there is a serious point being revealed here. The power of showing, the power of monstration, has been radically democratized in the new media age. My experience exemplifies something that is becoming quite common.

The Ground Zero occupation is leading to a global response. An articulate critique of the global order of things is being expressed in simple bodily presence and demonstrating electronic expressions, capturing the attention of the world that is watching and acting upon what it sees, with the potential of changing the terms of public deliberations. Those who are concerned about jobs, inequality, global warming and neo-liberalism have found their voices and are making visible their very real concerns. Indeed, I believe, in the U.S., the Tea Party has been directly engaged.

Both OWS and the Tea Party reveal the power of the politics of small things. In this sense, they are quite similar, but there is a major difference. OWS is grounded in the reality based community constituted through interactions and debates on social media, while much of the Tea Party concerns are based on Fox created little fictions, fictoids, as I have been reporting in my online magazine, Deliberately Considered over the last year.

As an unreconstructed enlightenment partisan, I think this suggests the long-term power of the newest development on the global stage.

Conclusions

My yes and no answer to the question of whether democracy is sick of its own media points to the perils and promise of the media in democratic life. On the one hand, some media formats, such as that of Fox News, threaten democracy (specifically in America, but it’s not an insignificant place), with an intensification of ideological politics, conflating news with propaganda, presenting facts as opinion and opinion as facts. On the other hand, new media expanded the power of what I call the politics of small things, presenting the capacity to resist the Fox trend. This is a new kind of media culture war. Political culture, the relationship between the power and culture, is at issue. It can be reinvented in a democratic direction or democracy can be undermined, another sort of reinvention. As I put it in my subtitle of my book, at issue is the culture of power and the power of culture.

I would like to study the dynamic outlined here more systematically, if he is interested, with my friend and colleague Daniel Dayan. To do so, it clearly would be necessary to examine exactly how Fox (and other similar media outlets) and social media monstrate. I think a precise analysis of this would reveal how mediated monstration works in supporting and undermining democratic life. It would be an examination of the forms of democratic and anti-democratic monstration. I hope he is intrigued.

Actually, I trust that Dayan is interested, primarily because we have been talking about doing such work together (specifically after the Sofia conference), but also because in recent years a fascinating new way of resisting the powers, and new way of reinventing political culture, has been developing, related to his ideas about monstration and my ideas about the politics of small things and reinventing political culture. I have analyzed here media politics of cable television and of emerging social movements. Dayan and I will need to get into the formation of those movements and how they compare and contrast with movements past. Social movements have been key to such resistance and reinvention in the past and they are again, but something new is happening with promise closely connected to the topic of media and publics. In some places, in the Arab world for example, it has become pretty clear that it is through new “new social movements” and the media forms that support them that there is a democratic prospect. Far from being sick of their media, as posed in our opening question, democracy is radically dependent upon (especially new) media. This is both as a support of new movements and as ends of these movements. Constituting democratic publics is what is new in new movements, I believe, and I hope Dayan and I will study this.

I will close with a brief turn to the promise of such study. Social movements have generally been understood in two ways. They have been seen as non-institutional means of a group of people to pursue their common interests and achieve their shared goals. The traditional archetype for this is the labor movement. Alternatively, social movements have been seen as not only interest focused, but as well, and perhaps more importantly, as non-institutional means for the formation of a group with common identities, concerned with supporting the identities and acting upon them. Civil rights movements, the women, lesbian, gay, bi-sexual and transgender movements, environmental movements and the like, are understood as being newer kinds of movements, “new social movements.” To tell the truth, I never quite understood why the new social movements were considered new. They, like labor movements, emerged in the nineteenth century. They, like the traditional movements, pursue interests. And the traditional movements, like the new ones, are about identity. Yet, I know this is not central. Rather the crucial point is to note that new and old movements are not only about the pursuit of interests. Movements are important ends in themselves for the people who create and are active in them. Movements, old and new, have sought to achieve specific goals, the right to organize and strike, a fair wage, decent working conditions, equal pay for equal work, voting rights, ending racism, sexism and environmental degradation and the like. And movements have been about asserting identity and its dignity, for workers, women, gays and lesbians and many others. Clearly, this is still the case. Social activists in Tahrir Square in Cairo and in Zuccotti Park in New York have specific ends, and the demonstrations in these places also create identities that are as significant as the ends the demonstrators are seeking.

But something else is important, quite apparent in these and other such places around the globe today, as I have been suggesting here.  The coming together based on some shared concerns with different identities and even different goals has been a common feature of the movements in our most recent past. The demonstrators occupy a space and the way they do so, the way they interact with each other is an important end of the movement. The form of interaction, as well as the identity and interest content, is central. The new media facilitate the form, an independent alternative public, but it is not completely defined by them.

Coptic Christians and Muslims protect each other with mutual respect in Egyptian demonstrations in Tahrir Square and throughout Egypt. They came together with the help of Facebook and the like, but what was crucial was what they did once they were together. Radical anarchists and conventional trade unionists hung out at Zuccotti Park last fall and in Union Square on May Day.

Their political ends may be different, radical critics of “the American Dream,” along with those who want to keep the Dream alive, but they have figured out ways to find common purpose and joint actions. The new “new social movements” are first about that commonality, the creation of independent public space, in New York and beyond, people with differences working together in the name of the 99%, creating an alternative free public space.

Communicating from this space to the dominant media and mainstream publics is a fundamental challenge, the challenge of monstration, now evident for the Tahrir democratic activists and OWS. The quality of their public character, its social media constitution that facilitated the formation of the movement, also presents problems for moving beyond the newly constituted public space. Leading spokespersons are not evident, a strength but also a weakness, nor are clear ends and demands forthcoming.

Thus the Dayan – Goldfarb project of new social and political movement: 1. Understand the new form the politics of small things is taking. 2. Appreciate how this new form is facilitated and frustrated by new media, 3. Consider how these developments are affecting the relationship between power and culture, reinventing the political culture of our times. And 4, analyze how 1, 2, and 3, all are about the constitution of free and expanding publics related to other publics, which depend on monstation: showing, revealing, appearing to others, through available media, as a primary challenge.

I am preparing my class on the new “new social movements” this week. I will be giving it at The New School’s Democracy and Diversity Institute in Wroclaw, Poland in July. I am excited and challenged about the course, happy to be returning to our institute, which has a long history, related to the topic of my class. The seminar, also, will be an attempt to thoroughly address the complex issues in my May Day post.

In that post I noted the media obstacles OWS faced on May 1^st. Neither the serious, nor the sensational media portrayed a meaningful popular demonstration, a national commemoration of May Day demanding social justice. While some might see this as a kind of conspiracy, I, as a matter of principle, don’t, or rather won’t until I consider alternative explanations. In the summer seminar, I hope to explore the alternatives with an international student body. Here’s an overview, which is informing my preparation.

Social movements have generally been understood in two ways. They have been seen as non-institutional means of a group of people to pursue their common interests and achieve their shared goals. The traditional archetype for this is the labor movement. Alternatively, social movements have been seen as not only interest focused, but as well, and perhaps more importantly, as non-institutional means for the formation of a group with common identities, concerned with supporting the identities and acting upon them. Civil rights movements, the women, lesbian, gay, bi-sexual and transgender movements, environmental movements and the like, are understood as being newer kinds of movements, “new social movements.” To tell the truth, I never quite understood why the new social movements were considered new. They, like labor movements, emerged in the nineteenth century. They, like the traditional movements, pursue interests. And the traditional movements, like the new ones, are about identity. Yet, I know this is not central. Rather we need to note that new and old movements are not only about the pursuit of interests. Movements are important ends in themselves for the people who create and are active in them.

And clearly, this is still the case. Social activists in Tahrir Square in Cairo and in Zuccotti Park in New York have specific ends, and the demonstrations in these places also create identities that are as significant as the ends the demonstrators are seeking. But something else is important, quite apparent in these and other such places around the globe today. The coming together based on some shared concerns with different identities and even different goals has been a common feature of the movements in our most recent past. The demonstrators occupy a space and the way they do so, the way they interact with each other is an important end of the movement. The form of interaction, as well as the identity and interest content, is central.

Coptic Christians and Muslims protect each other with mutual respect in Egyptian demonstrations in Tahrir Square and throughout Egypt. Radical anarchists and conventional trade unionists hung out at Zuccotti Park last fall and in Union Square on May Day. Their political ends may be different, radical critics of the American Dream, along with those who want to keep the Dream alive, but they have figured out ways to find common purpose and joint actions. The new “new social movements” are first about that commonality, the creation of independent public space, in New York and beyond, people with differences working together in the name of the 99%, creating an alternative free public space.

Communicating from this space to the dominant media and mainstream publics is a fundamental challenge, now evident for the Tahrir democratic activists and OWS. The quality of their public character, its social media constitution that facilitated the formation of the movement, also presents problems for moving beyond the newly constituted public space. Leading spokespersons are not evident, a strength but also a weakness, nor are clear ends and demands forthcoming. The new sensibility and purpose of the new “new movements” can get lost, as it was in New York on May Day, as is happening as the Egyptians are about to go to the polls to elect a president.

The summer seminar will be an exploration of this. We will try to discover any common cause of the movements. Is it the state of global capital and the breakdown of neo-liberalism? While I have my doubts, we will discuss the works of observers suggesting this. I think that there is a generational dimension to the emergence of the new movements: we will discuss my depiction of the “wisdom of youth” and reconsider the sociology of generations. We will analyze precedents such as the American civil rights movement and Solidarność in Poland. The old distinction between new and traditional social movements revealed as much about the old as the new, and we will consider the way the creation of independent publics were central to movements past as well as movements now.

And herein lies the irony of the course being given in Poland. It is the fruit of the alternative public of a major social movement past. The Democracy and Diversity Institute is an outgrowth of the Solidarność underground. Members of The New School, led by Democracy and Diversity founder and director, Elzbieta Matynia, and I worked with Adam Michnik, the great Polish “dissident” intellectual and later editor of Poland’s major newspaper, Gazeta Wyborcza, on a clandestine “Democracy Seminar” in Budapest, Warsaw and New York in the 1980s. The seminar was a small activity of the underground Solidarność cultural world. The Democracy and Diversity Institute built upon its legacy. I have always thought of my class as being explicitly a continuation of this activity, starting my classes where the discussions of the Democracy Seminar left off. This history continues in July, taking on very new concerns and experiences.

I have no doubt that the works of Jan Gross, and the writing of many Polish journalists, historians and sociologists, contribute to the foundation of democracy in Poland.  They advance the project of freedom for Poles and for other nations, to echo the famous slogan of Polish patriots of the 19^th Century.  They address the Jewish question; for me, they address my mother’s question, with their dignity.  There has been an extended debate, an official apology by the President of Poland and an official inquiry and correction of the public record.  All of this has been noted and admired abroad, even as it sparks controversy.

On the other hand, there was much that was said and written in response to the revelations about Jedwabne, that brought me back to my Polish American compatriot’s “Jew down” remark, as reported in my first “Why Poland?” post, and much worse.  It has been very hard for me to read the primitive, but also the more refined, anti-Semitism, which is now very much a part of Polish public discourse.  I realize now that my travels in Poland back in the seventies, and my intensive work with the democratic opposition and underground Solidarność, though extensive and long enduring, were in important ways limited.  I knew how Jews and anti-Semitism were symbolically central to modern Polish identity, but I thought there had been a significant collective learning process that had put its more pernicious aspects into the past.  Now, I am not as sure of this as I once was.  Apparently there were broad segments of popular opinion that I did not perceive.

I wonder now whether I really understood the nature of the problem then, whether I really understand it now.  Did I really confront Polish complicity in the Holocaust?  Clearly, I didn’t.  Only after reading Gross do I begin to understand the dimensions of the problem.  Did I really understand the meaning of the Kielce pogrom?  Perhaps I did, but it is so much clearer after reading Gross’s latest book, Fear. I suspect that my learning was not that different than that of many of you in this audience, although we may have started from a different place.

I have not been easy on Poles, or Europeans in general, when it comes to anti-Semitism.  I have had few illusions about my European roots.  I, as a Jew, represent the other in the European tradition: vilified through the dominant interpretation of Christian doctrine, at least until Vatican II, and the subject of folk beliefs that are horrific, fantastical and ominous. And it was not just a matter of simple folk who knew no better, great works of European literature as well are saturated with anti Semitic assertions and allusions. I understand that some pretty articulate anti-Semites opposed genocide, some openly, some secretly.  I know that there is a significant distance between the traditional anti-Semite and the genocidal killer, but I understand, as well, that the former in some way is a precondition for the latter.  I am not sure how much different Polish Christians were from other Europeans.  But that does not absolve either group.  I understand the wisdom of my grandparents’ flight from Europe.  I owe my life to it.

But apart from such melodramatic reflection and accusation, how do we, Poles and Jews, get beyond this?  I think I saw people of good will trying to do so in 1995, as they commemorated the memory of the liberation of Auschwitz.  But, finally, they failed.  There were obvious problems, which have become clearer in the debates over Jedwabne, and in revelations and accusations about Kielce.

I must start with the most obvious, something I have been guilty of until this point in my presentation: the very idea of Poles and Jews.  The language makes sense, Polish memory as distinct from Jewish memory.  I think the greatest contribution of Gross is to show how this common sense and usage, which implies that there is a distinct separation between the Polish Jewish and the Polish Catholic experience, is not only ethically problematic but also historically misleading.  Polish Catholics and Polish Jews cannot really understand their pasts without confronting their very mixed up connections.  Thus it is highly problematic that there were separate ceremonies at the Auschwitz memorials in 1995.

I find this all so depressing. My years as a Poland watcher taught me to expect more, although my recognition of the wisdom of my mother’s “Why Poland?” question should have prepared me.  Permit me to reflect back and forth between what gives me hope to what disgusts, from what angers to what puzzles, to what gives me hope again.

The official ceremony honoring the victims of the Jedwabne atrocity, unlike the commemoration of Auschwitz, was a noble affair.  Every effort was made to do the right thing, to correct the official record, to honor the victims and the righteous.  Not everyone supported the memorial.  Some notably chose not to be there, but those at the event made significant progress in transcending the problem of Polish versus Jewish memory.

As I was preparing this presentation, I spoke to an Israeli sociologist, Natan Sznaider, who happened to be at the event.  His father in law was the Israeli Ambassador to Poland at the time.  He remembers the grace of President Kwasniewski in his impeccable address:

We know with certainty that among the persecutors and perpetrators there were Poles.  We cannot have any doubt that here in Jedwabne, citizens of the Polish Republic perished at the hands of other citizens of the Republic.  People prepared this fate for people, neighbors for neighbors…We express our pain and shame; we give expression of our determination in seeking to learn the truth, our courage in overcoming an evil past, our unbending understanding and harmony.  Because of this crime we should beg the shadows of the dead and their families for forgiveness.  Therefore, today, as a citizen and as the president of the Polish Republic, I apologize.  I apologize in the name of those Poles whose conscience is moved by that crime.  In the name of those who believe that we cannot be proud of the magnificence of Polish history without at the same time feeling pain and shame for the wrongs that Poles have done to others.

But as you know, better than I do, this was only one response to the Jedwabne revelations.

I read an interview with Cardinal Glemp by the Catholic News Agency (KAI). It astonished me, dripping with anti-Semitism.  He is so unreflective about this, like my Polish American colleague so many years ago, that I doubt he even realizes it, as she didn’t.  Polish Jewish conflicts in the thirties had no religious basis, according to the Cardinal.  Asked if he thought that Jews experienced a rise in attacks during Holy Week because of accusations of God-killing, he expresses astonishment.  “This statement strikes me as improbable.  The first time I ever heard of this rise in anti-Jewish feeling was in Mr. Gross’s book.  Clearly the book was written ‘on commission’ for someone.”

What could he be referring to?  Is Gross in the pay of the Zionists, or the international Jewish conspiracy, or is it the Jewish lobby, or perhaps even “The Elders of Zion?”  Near Churches, it has been reported, literature about all of this has become available in democratic Poland. A radio station makes its niche on the listening dial with this kind of stuff.  The Cardinal goes on: “Polish-Jewish conflicts did occur in those times, but they had an economic basis.  Jews were cleverer, and they knew how to take advantage of Poles.”  In American English: they could “Jew them down,” I guess.   He does qualify this point. I think realizing that it was not quite politically correct, adding: “In any case, that was the perception.”  Why was the church commemorating the atrocities on May 27^th and not July 10^th?  The 10th was not convenient.  The major lesson of Gross’s inquiry is lost on Glemp.  He and many others were not open to learning.  Arguing for the exhumation of the site of the atrocities, contrary to a request by Jews to honor religious law and refrain from desecrating the graves, he defends his position by asserting “Jewish law is not binding in Poland.” As if that were the issue, not realizing that it is a matter of honoring and respecting customs other than your own, so that you may honor and respect people who you don’t consider to be of your own.  Poles versus Jews, yet again.  He wants to do this “because it is important to know the number of victims.”

I know that this is an issue that Glemp and many respected Polish academics and scholars think is central.  As a matter of principle, I am in favor of trying to understand the truth in the details. I’ve dedicated my life to this.  It is a major theme of my recent work on “the politics of small things”.  But that the number of victims is an issue, with great moral and political importance, escapes me.  Does it change the moral challenge if “only” 400 people, “Jews,” were brutally murdered by their neighbors, “Poles,” instead of 1600?  Glemp goes on and on, wondering why Jews slander Poland, “when Jews had it relatively the best with us, here in Poland.” And further: “We wonder whether Jews should not acknowledge that they have a burden of responsibility in regard to Poles, in particular for the period of close cooperation with the Bolsheviks, for complicity in deportations to Siberia, for sending Poles to jails, for the degradation of many of their fellow citizens, etc.”  In his reflections on Jewish cleverness, there are the Jewish banker and lawyer, the capitalists.  In his reflections on the Soviet occupation, there are the Jewish communists.

The leader of the Church in Poland does not stand alone, clearly.  In the Church there are strong and articulate alternative voices, I know.  I read a moving piece by Rev. Stanislaw Musial just after I read the Glemp interview.

But in the reaction to the Jedwabne revelations, there is also much that is worse than is revealed in the Cardinal’s interview, with vile and more aggressive anti-Semitism.  And, it seems to me, these are given support by the manifestly less pernicious and refined refusal to face the legacies of the past.  They open a space for refined and vulgar anti-Semitism. There are those who worry about the numbers, who think the evidence of the murder is still not in. There are those who ask “Is the hubbub surrounding Jedwabne intended to eclipse the responsibility of Jews for communism and the Soviet occupation of Poland?” And there are those who question Gross’s approach to survivors’ testimony: i.e. take them to be truthful unless proven otherwise.

Gross wisely makes this recommendation because of the profound and systematic ignorance of Polish complicity in the murder of their Jewish compatriots when the more normal alternative skeptical approach prevails.  He is suggesting a way of restructuring historical practice so that it encourages a systematic examination of dark corners in the national past, instead of systematically ignoring them.  Prominent historians defend their professional ethics and accomplishments.  Gross and his supporters question how it is possible that they have for so long overlooked the anti-Semitic atrocities both during and after the war.

I find myself engaging the debates, moved and heartened by some contributions, dismayed by others.  Reading anxiously Gross’s next book, Fear, I realize how radical is his challenge and am convinced by his careful analysis of the post war pogroms and individual murders of Jewish survivors after Auschwitz.  Some of his explanation for how this happened I find persuasive: the legacies of totalitarianism and the continuities between Nazi and Communist practices, the brutalization of the population, the normalization of stealing from and the murder of Jews that was part of the landscape during the Nazi occupation and for some time afterward.  I am not convinced by his arguments completely.  The projection argument, his thesis that Poles couldn’t face the survivors because of their own complicity, I am not sure about.

I have read others who make a significant contribution to my understanding of my mother’s Polish question, the Polish Jewish question, and their relationships.  Joanna Tokarska-Bakir, Jerzy Jedlicki, Hanna Swida–Ziemba, Jerzy Slawomir Mac, Marta Kurkowska Budzan, among others. The depth and seriousness of their reflections on the cruel facts of Jedwabne mark a noble confrontation with the past.

In light of all of this, the noble and the base, I am deeply ambivalent.  Let me be honest, the ascendance of anti-Semitism in Poland after the fall of Communism has been a great disappointment to me, revealing the limits of what I called at the beginning of this presentation “the wisdom of youth.”  If I had kept in mind the experiences of my grandparents and parents a little bit more, I may have been less surprised, less disappointed.  But on the other hand, the seriousness of the Polish debate about the legacies of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, I know, is very impressive.  A Polish president distinguished himself and honored the memory of my ancestors in a way that would have astonished my grandfather who had very bitter memories as a soldier in a Polish army unit in the First World War.  I am not sure that this would happen today, that the present Polish president would have so astonished my grandfather, but it did happen.  The debate in Poland has negative voices, but very importantly they are being confronted.  In sum, the three parts of this presentation add up to democratic or at least liberal progress.  There is more free discussion and open debate, and Polish Catholics and Polish Jews, and the international Jewish community benefit, as the weaknesses of the demos are revealed.

Yet, I must conclude with a note of concern.  As I have been writing and rewriting this lecture, I have wondered how you will receive my observations.  I wonder whether I have breached the boundaries of the politically correct or polite.  I made some of my observations with some reluctance.  Are my critical comments unnecessarily provocative, or are they just obvious?  Did I go too far, or not far enough?  Should I have expressed my concerns about the Church authority as bluntly and personally as I did?  I have thought about these questions not because I am afraid to reveal to you what I take to be the truth, but because I am well aware that in dealing with difficult problems with the other, the embodiment of discourse is important.  It is not just about words, but who says them, when and where.  I thus deeply appreciate Kwasniewski’s words.  It really depends who says what to whom.

In this light, I understand that I have an obligation here to express my appreciation of the great and often heroic efforts of my Polish friends and colleagues, some with Catholic background, some with Jewish background, some with both, in addressing the continuing problems of anti-Semitism in Polish political culture.  And I express my criticism of the limits of the address with reluctance.  But I must go a bit further, having to do with the limits of democracy in the appraisal of these events by many of the most sympathetic observers.

They advise that the most rabid anti-Semitism is a marginal phenomenon.  I want to believe them, but I am struck how it keeps on coming up, and how significant cultural and religious authorities, and political leaders, some with ascendant power, keep on using anti-Semitism, including members of today’s governing coalition. (Remember this lecture was given in 2007. This is no longer the case) It is so central that it persists for decades even with the absence of Jews and even with open democratic discussion about that embarrassing fact.  I think this is at the center of the most provocative of Jan Gross’s contributions to the consideration of Polish-Jewish relationships in Jedwabne.

Toward the end of his book, reflecting on the two memorials then in Jedwabne, he notes that one propagates the lie that the Nazis killed the 1600 Jews of the town. The other reads “‘To the memory of about 180 people including 2 priests who were murdered in the territory of the Jedwabne district in the years 1939-1956 by the NKVD, by the Nazis and the secret police [UB].’ Signed ‘Society’ [spoleczenstwo].”   He observes that Jews were killed not by Nazis, Soviets, or Polish Stalinists, but by that same “society.”   And the number 180, apparently does not count Jews as people.   The controversy has been about his blaming of society, apparently the accusation of collective guilt.  Yet, it is clear that the first memorial was a political lie, and that the second reveals a deeply problematic common sense definition of humanity.

Objecting to collective guilt has been an important part of my answer to my mother’s question.  But I think that Gross is onto something beyond such accusation.  Anti-Semitism is not in the mother’s milk of Poles (this is a vulgar, an obscene accusation) but it is in a kind of cultural code of Polish society.  Those who are critically appraising the role of Polish anti-Semitism during and after the Holocaust, and also after the fall of the Communist regime, are making significant contributions to transforming the code.  Those who deny the strong tradition of Polish anti-Semitism and its tragic consequences, or approach historical and sociological questions doubting its significance, are helping to reproduce the code.  Speaking as if Poles and Jews are mutually exclusive categories, thinking about Polish and Jewish history as being apart, nurturing collective memory as distinct, bracketing my mother’s question while studying the development of the democratic opposition (my little contribution), all help to reproduce the code.

Two components of democratization of the Polish Jewish question must confront each other.  The post communist inclusion of anti-Semitism into Polish political life, as the conviction of a portion of the population, must be subjected to open and forceful democratic critique and democratic persuasion, with an honest appreciation of the dimensions of the appeal of anti-Semitism.  The outcome is not a foregone conclusion.  The positive result would mean that the symbol of the Jew would come to be less important in Polish political culture, and anti-Semitism won’t be continually reproduced.  I sincerely hope that some day it will be possible, indeed normal, to be a Polish patriot or a Polish liberal without using the symbol of the Jew.  The pious patriotic Catholic would enact patriotism and religiosity without reference to Jews.  And Polish liberals also would be able to reveal their positions on all other issues without Jews somehow playing a central symbolic role in constituting their identity.

I enjoy reading Adam Michnik on such things.  He moves the Polish audience away from the clear categories, as he challenges the Jewish audience abroad.  His mixed up identity, self identified as a Pole primarily, Jewish secondarily, identified by others, not so gallantly, as a Jew, lends a special quality to his observations on the debate.  In the U.S., he had a notable exchange with Leon Wieseltier, the book review editor of The New Republic. I was very much in Adam’s corner, but there was something to Wieseltier’s critical thrust.  There is something overly exquisite about the opening of the debate about Jedwabne in the elite media of your country and mine.  History is corrected.  Public discourse is enriched and is much wiser.  But something is missing.

As Karolina Smagalska has observed, common sense, in the understanding of Clifford Geertz, for far too many people, has not been subverted – that anti Semitic common sense that has a long and deep tradition in Poland and in Europe. Somehow the democratic public discussion has not undermined the anti-Semitic common sense, the cultural code that could either act on its own, or be incited by the Nazis in Jedwabne, that was manipulated by the Communist party or was the work of indigenous Kielce locals.  The communist period helped fortify this common sense with its cynical use of anti-Semitic sentiment, and its ideological ignorance of the Holocaust.  It is the common sense of every day practices that has deep and enduring effects.  It comes in relatively benign forms.  One can “Jew down” people after all without being directly implicated in the Holocaust.  But if you do “Jew people down” in your daily life, if you are without awareness that Jews perhaps didn’t have it so great here, you cannot yourself be free, let alone understand history and constitute a collective memory that supports democracy and decency.

Now my final words, concerning my continuing project of answering my mother’s question.  I confirm the truth of what I had assumed as a young man.  Simplistic unitary characterizations of a people or a culture are not acceptable. Human groupings are too heterogeneous.  And in the case of Poland, the heterogeneity is not just accidental.  Along with the tragic history of my people on these grounds, there are broad humane currents in the culture, recently epitomized by the work of Jan Gross and the many people who have informed his work and have been informed by it, and those who add insights beyond it.  The fresh attempts to address the problem is what I choose to focus on, the work of honorable Poles seeking alternatives in the details of their interactions, what I now call the politics of small things.  And so focused, I recognize that the alternative project is incomplete.

Monday morning, I took a bit of a break from my plan for the day. I decided my class preparation and work on some overdue papers would wait. After I replied to Corey Robin’s response to a critical passing comment I made about his book, The Reactionary Mind, on Facebook, I put off until later in the week my search for interesting conservative intellectuals. I decided to ignore the Republican madness, and not worry about the ups and downs in the upcoming Presidential race, and didn’t read the reports on the Super Bowl (the annual sports media event that I usually ignore but did tweak my interest this year, New Yorker that I am). Instead, I opened my computer and watched the video of the Flying Seminar meeting with Bill Zimmerman (which I missed because I was at that time at a conference in Sofia). It was a particularly interesting meeting, very nicely captured in the video (thank you Lisa Lipscomb). I entered a different world, beyond the mundane, considering the connection between radical hopes and practical projects.

This is what the Flying Seminar is. Recall, Elzbieta Matynia and I developed the Flying Seminar in response to Occupy Wall Street. OWS reminded us of our days observing and participating in the Solidarity (Solidarność) movement in Poland, and the great independent academic project of Solidarity times, the Flying University of the Polish underground. We started with a meeting with activists in Shiroto no Ran (Amateur Revolt), a counter-cultural anti- nuclear movement which came to take part in the occupation of Zuccotti Park. We then arranged a meeting with Adam Michnik, the outstanding Polish critical intellectual and political activist, who also visited the Park. Our third meeting was with Zimmerman, an old New Leftist (it takes one to know one), author of the recent book, Troublemaker: A Memoir From the Front Lines of the Sixties. Last month, after a technical delay, we posted the video recording of that meeting.

The seminar discussion got me thinking about a crucial problem: the relationship between challenging social movements and the broader public. This issue is most apparent in the Arab uprisings, in Moscow, Bucharest and in Warsaw in democratic movements, and in New York and beyond in OWS and related occupations. We have been reflecting upon these developments in each of these locations at Deliberately Considered, but there is a general problem common to all of them, which was discussed at the Flying Seminar. The starting point in the discussion with Zimmerman was the anti-war movement in the sixties.

Zimmerman and the seminar participants covered many areas. He reflected on the problem of a radical anti-war movement, too distant from the judgments of the general population to lead a popular movement against the war. They discussed election initiatives, legalizing marijuana, prison reform, the racist quality of the war on drugs, the need to treat drug abusers rather than arrest them, and the protests against U.S. intervention in Latin America. Zimmerman explained a variety of different innovative strategies he has used to reach the public, to make his radical commitments consequential. The use of the ballot initiative and the production of anti-war and anti-Bush and Company T.V. ads, made for moveon.org, were particularly interesting.

Zimmerman discussed a series of innovative victories in his long political struggle. “I have been struggling against capitalism for fifty years.” He celebrated the Internet, the only limit to reaching the public now is our imagination, he asserted. He was thinking particularly about the costs of emailing versus the cost of postage. He recalled throwing $100 bills on the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange back in the day. Wall Street was then and is now both the symbol of the problem and site of the problem itself. His was an earlier innovative dramaturgic act in the belly of the beast, meant to show radical criticism to a mass audience. Zimmerman applauded OWS for its major discursive success. “It has stimulated a broad public to fundamentally question capitalism.”

There were differences of judgment at the meeting. All knew that connecting with the public is important, but there were different opinions about how this could be achieved. Some saw a global capitalist order on the verge of collapse, confidently sensing that people are waking up and a significant victory is on the horizon. Others were less optimistic, more concerned, believing that the forces of the old order are still alive and very able to defend their interests. Some were less sure of popular support.

The discussion sometimes lingered on generalities that make me impatient and uncomfortable (specifically broad criticisms of capitalism and celebrations of socialism), but they moved beyond empty rhetoric, impressed as the participants were both by Zimmerman’s long history of bringing major issues to the public’s attention, leading to political action, and by the recent successes of OWS in doing the same thing. The discussion was among colleagues. The OWS people say comrades, a term that makes me feel uncomfortable given my experiences around the former Soviet bloc.

The relationship with more conventional politics was an issue, as was the intersection of race and class in and out of the movement. One seminar participant, Jan Gross, strongly argued for a position that I find attractive. Prevailing political institutions, in the close connection between the government and the corporate powers, enforce inequality, but the system is open to cooptation (unlike the situation in authoritarian dictatorships). The liberal order’s democratic qualities can be utilized for progressive change. Lawrence Weschler passionately argued for a specific course of direct action, a mass boycott of under water loans mortgages and student loans, and extensive discussion about the boycott. Radical pragmatic action would both engage the public and address some severe problems, which affect many people. This led to the discussion about the relationship between the social movement, and class and race. An African American OWS activist forcefully argued that the problem of the poor is not about student loans and mortgages but community schools and drug arrests. Class and race divides society and social movements, but he suggested also the people around the Flying Seminar table. The problems of the middle class and the poor are related, but they are also different.

A constitutional amendment was discussed (money does not equal speech), as was a national student strike. One person declared that capitalism had to be saved from itself, while others reflected on the “S” word, socialism. (This reminded me of discussions on the left in the 1930s.) The broad strategy of building alternatives “on our own” was measured against active engagement with more conventional political institutions and the possibility of a third party.

Different tactics reveal different commitments, Zimmerman observed in his closing reflections. But, acting together is the key imperative. The path to power and radical change is paved by organizing, to which he has dedicated his life.

I regret missing this interesting discussion. As I was watching the video, I imagined how I might have spoken up. I may have expressed my conviction that all the talk about socialism, as some kind of systemic alternative to capitalism, is silly. I might have asked people to explain how it is they imagine a modern economy can be organized. But that probably would not have improved the discussion. But there are issues I would have liked to discussed: how a protest movement can move from saying no to injustice to figuring out how to do something about the injustice, what role do political leaders play, and what social activists can accomplish and how that relates to more conventional political agents in parties and states?

There is a proposal before the OWS General Assembly in New York today concerning a statement of solidarity with Occupy Oakland. In it, there is the declaration:

“We affirm Occupy Oakland’s freedom to use whatever means necessary to further
your [and our] struggle. A diversity of tactics is necessary, and it
means that there is no correct method to resistance. We trust our
comrades to make your own choices for your own community.”

Really by any means necessary? Aside from the questionable ethics of such a statement, I wonder how the people who consider it think it relates to the broad American public. How does the movement, which speaks in the name of the 99%, relate to the 99%? I think that the statement will be rejected. But it highlights the importance of the issues and experiences discussed at the last meeting of the Flying Seminar, and it suggests what we should examine in our next meeting.

It seems to me that it is crucial to think about the relationship between the movement and more conventional politics. I think that the relationship between OWS and Obama and the Democrats is similar to the relationship between the Civil Rights movement and Kennedy and Johnson and the Democrats, and some Republicans. It would be interesting to reflect upon how that worked. I am hoping that we will discuss this at the next meeting of the Flying Seminar, perhaps on the legacies of the Civil Rights and Black Power Movement as it might inform the future actions of OWS.