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

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

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

A Matter of Life and Death

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NOTES

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

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The playoffs are almost over, the road to the finals was long, there were upsets and defining moments, but in the end the two favorites came through. They just had the most resources and the best game-plans. The two finalists will now battle it out. Many experts expect a tight series, which will probably go down to the wire. There will be a winner and a loser, there will be euphoria and disappointment. In the end the winner will take home the trophy, the loser will regroup, switch players, adjust tactics and get ready for the next season – there is always another season.

Unfortunately, I am here neither talking about the NBA nor the NFL, neither basketball glory nor football fortunes – I am describing the US-Presidential elections that will be decided in November between President Obama and challenger Mitt Romney, between the Democrats and Republicans, the Red and Blue teams. Whatever form of media we choose today, the inflationary use of sport rhetoric in the coverage of politics has become hard to ignore. It is quite fascinating how similar politics and sports have become in the 24-hour news-cycle: Analysts speak of the “endgame” or “gameplan,” compare debate schedules to seasons or playoff-series, or they announce “win-or-go-home” states in Republican primaries. Exemplifying this overlap: In Martin Bashir’s show on MSNBC, analysts were discussing the ‘bracketology’ of March Madness in the Republican Primary.

One might argue that this stylistic closeness in coverage is only logical, since both, sports and electoral politics, are competitions. So what is the problem in mixing rhetoric? The problem is that we might lose the essential function of politics if we talk about it like sports, because sports are a specific form of competitive activity. In sports the competition is the end in itself, while in politics it should just be the means. The cultural critiques of the early Frankfurt School, especially Theodor Adorno in his analysis of the “Culture Industry,” already singled out sports as stylized forms of competition, without ‘real’ consequences, a passionate pastime, the ultimate perpetuum mobile, leading nowhere in particular, except back to the start.

I admittedly am not as dismissive of sports as Adorno, neither am I immune to its temptations. But I do see the point: While sports are highly emotionally involving for both, the spectator and participator, the outcome of the game does not matter beyond the moment of success or failure. There is always another chance, a new season. Now, what is the problem with politics becoming sports? The problem is exactly that the winner of a Presidential election does not get a trophy, shower in glory and move on to the next season. A President (or senator, congressman if you want) is elected to do something in the name of the people. They have mandates, they represent. The election is not the end, but the beginning of politics.

It is one problem if the people feel that their representatives only care about the next election, it is another if the media uses language that makes an election an end in itself. If we speak of voting as nothing else than supporting a team to win and take home the trophy, that this is the end of the game, than where do accountability, meaning and representation in the political process remain? The media in this equation should be more than an announcer of spectacle, the voter more than an audience. But unfortunately this is exactly, what the sport rhetoric transforms politics into. Language, images, discourse and rhetoric matter. It is the way we speak about politics that defines our experience of the process and finally also its functions and ends. I feel extremely uncomfortable with the end of politics being just another election-season.

An example of a memory project left undone: I remember talking to a visiting scholar from China. He was studying the Cultural Revolution with the American journalist and student of recent Chinese history, Judith Shapiro. He admired the Jewish memory work on the Holocaust and wondered why there was no similar work being done in China, confronting the atrocities of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. He asked me once: was there something about the Jewish and the Chinese political culture, or, at least, their distinctive collective experiences that explained these different approaches to collective trauma? The supposition was that to remember was to set one free.

Poland

Then there is Adam Michnik, Poland’s leading intellectual opposition leader in the 70s and 80s, and later after the changes of ’89, the editor of Poland’s major newspaper, Gazeta Wyborcza.  And also importantly for me a personal friend and a friend and colleague of many at my university, the New School for Social Research, a frequent visitor since he received an honorary degree from us at the 50^th anniversary of the University in Exile. He is memory worker, although he calls himself a historian. He uses history in special ways. He reminds his readers of something in the past and proposes it as a guide for future action, thinking between past and future, as Hannah Arendt would put it. Thus, in his classic essay “The New Evolutionism,” he remembers the so called Polish positivists of the 19^th century who proposed pragmatic reform over romantic revolt, and he remembers those who joined the communist system from Catholic parties and made small differences in the post Stalinist period. He presents such memories to his readers as he proposed in 1976 a new course of resistance to the communist system, remembering the failures of 1956 in Budapest and of 1968 in Prague. He proposes not revolution from below or reform from above, but reform from below for social change. He proposed a vision of change that anticipated, even guided, the action that became Solidarność and contributed in a significant way to the democratic postscript of the Communist experience.

And I also am very much involved in what I have called the enlightenment prejudice. In my work on the relative autonomy of culture as one of the definitive structures of modernity, I have posited a positive connection between collective memory and creative independence. I studied artists who remembered the past, a variety of artistic traditions, to establish their distinctive work apart from the orthodoxies of the old regime of previously existing socialism.  Solzhenitsyn used the officially available works of Tolstoy to create a new literary alternative to socialist realism (the post-Stalinist Lukacs not withstanding). Grotowski used Stanislavsky.  My beloved Polish student theaters drew upon the literary and theatrical imaginations of Witkiewicz and Gombrowicz. The inherited socialist and nationalist cultural traditions available because of official support for a dominant interpretation, the officially supported collective memory of the cultural past, provided the grounds for critical creative innovation.  One of my favorite quotes comes from Milan Kundera. It comes from his The Art of the Novel. He asserts “The novelist needs answer to no one but Cervantes.” (Kundera, 1988, p.144) His is an argument for a specialized collective memory as the basis for artistic creation. When this is enacted a significant support for cultural freedom is constituted. I have worked with this insight repeatedly in my comparative studies in the sociology of the culture.

With such observations in mind, why then the full title of this presentation, why am I presenting a paper not only for but also against memory, when collective memory is so important for human achievements that I deeply admire and have dedicated much of my career to studying? I now turn to some details, some small things, to explain.

It has to do with a complexity of the sociology of collective memory, much examined by specialists on the topic. I am just looking at this complexity from a different point of view, not only asking how we work to remember but also how we work to forget, understanding, as has been often been observed, that memory and forgetting are two sides of the same coin.

In order to remember together, we must forget together, pay attention to some things that happened by ignoring others. And sometimes, we need, or at least want, to change what is to be remembered and what is to be forgotten. This is what Michnik was trying to work on when he came up with his politically wise counsel: “amnesty without amnesia. It is also what happens in the various memory battles over controversial exhibits that reveal hitherto unexamined aspects of the past, as for example, Vera Zolberg has studied in the case of the controversies over Enola Gay exhibit at the Smithsonian. Or, as Robin Wagner Pacifici and Barry Schwartz, analyzed in their brilliant analysis of Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial. People go to the memorial calling a truce in a cultural war, forgetting their differences on the War, at least situationally. They remember together a shared, though differently understood, collective experience.

In the idea of amnesty without amnesia, Michnik wanted to pretend that it is possible to have it both ways: to both remember the injustices and suffering of Polish society under communist rule, and to avoid the problems of revolutionary justice. He wanted to forgive, but not forget.  There was a real practical problem with this. Poland is a complex modern differentiated society, meaning many different people, doing different things at different times. It is because of these differences that Michnik’s idea could not succeed.  It required concerted forgetting that he didn’t work on. Michnik, standing in a very privileged position in society, could come up with his subtle idea, and his informed reading public, both at home and abroad (including me), were persuaded. But when he acted following his idea and was seen by a broader, differently positioned public, the meaning of his actions was understood in very different ways. He presented his subtle position, but in his actions he appeared to the less informed, the less well connected, to just forget what happened, or worse, he seemed to want people to forget what happened because he was somehow implicated in the crimes of the past.  Beyond the political class, when he had his weekly meetings with his former jailers and publicly treated them with respect and deference, he appeared as one who didn’t remember and who was complicit in the injustices of the communist regime.

In a sense that was Michnik’s point. He wanted to act as if the wrongs of the past were forgotten so that the pressing problems of the present and the near future could be acted upon. Being too involved with the past would not allow for sensible action. Because he didn’t convince the broad public to willfully forget together in their actions, while they remembered what happened in the stories they told each other about theirs past, the problems of “lustration,” of purging those complicit in the communist regime, has haunted Poland ever since. Thankfully the party that was building its future around this theme of retribution has not too long ago lost in Poland’s parliamentary elections, and the progressive collective project of forgetting is again on the agenda.

Of course, I am being ironic using the phrase “progressive forgetting,” but only a bit. Looking closely at politics, looking at what I call the politics of small things, I have become very impressed by the importance of forgetting in developing a free politics. The politics of small things is a concept drawn from the political theory of Hannah Arendt and the sociology of Erving Goffman. 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 has its basis in the definition of the situation, the power of people to define their social reality. In the power of definition, 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 has profound democratic capacity. As Hannah Arendt has theorized, it constitutes political power as the opposite of coercion.

Israel – Palestine

But each element of this conceptualization of micropolitics has to be worked on. It is in fact much harder than my simple formulation makes it seem. Meeting and speaking to each other, developing a capacity to act in concert is no easy matter for Israelis and Palestinians. There are the physical mechanics of occupation, which are meant to separate people, and, less apparent though no less significant, there are memory problems.

Consider scenes from Encounter Point a moving film about The Parents Circle, a Palestinian Israeli organization of bereaved families for peace. The film depicts the extraordinary side of rather ordinary people on both sides of the conflict. These are people who have lost love ones in the conflict, victims of wars, military raids, suicide bombings, terror of the state apparatus and of resistance organizations. The group members are dedicated to not having their loss used to justify a politics of retribution. It started in Tel Aviv, among a group of Israeli parents. It now has both Palestinian and Israeli branches, with the Palestinian group slightly outnumbering the Israeli one. The groups operate independently and also work jointly.  Getting together, a crucial part of their endeavors, though, is not easy. Travel restrictions make Palestinian movements within Israel proper difficult if not impossible. And Israeli citizens also are restricted in their movements in the occupied territories. In the film we see a group meeting in Jerusalem. What we don’t see are the obstacles and checkpoints that had to be surmounted for the Palestinians to take part. We are shown an attempt by the Israeli group to meet a group in the West Bank, and though they finally do get through, their difficulties are clearly depicted. It includes a postscript of the Palestinian host of the gathering being arrested as a terrorist, but released from prison thanks to his Parents Circle Israeli colleagues. Road blocks, checkpoints, official regulations and fear are the group’s immediate obstacles. But memory is a more profound one.

In the report of the Jerusalem meeting we see a discussion between two families who lost their daughters to the conflict, in an anti terrorist military operation in Bethlehem and in a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv. It is a quick empathetic conversation, casual, seemingly not of profound significance. But we see more outside the meeting. We learn that the family from Bethlehem had the bad luck of driving their late model car on a shopping trip on the same day a group of suspected terrorists were driving the same model. And when their car came into view of the Israeli army, they were attacked and their daughter was killed. We see the funeral, a full martyr’s ceremony, with aggressive nationalist, almost militaristic, rhetoric and with the father actively taking part. And we see the father, later, now a member of Parents Circle, as deputy major of the city. This is a moving sequence of events. The family, of course, has not forgotten the loss of their daughter, but in their actions, they are undermining a dominant way of remembering, trying to create another way, apparently with some success. Their Israeli counterparts do the same thing. We see the father who lost his daughter to the suicide bombing go to school groups and argue not only for peace and reconciliation, but also against the linking of memory and retribution. He may not convince, but he is, at least, opening up new possibilities. Both fathers know that as they work in their own communities, they make it possible to work together, and in doing so, they are creating new political alternatives to the logic of the central authorities, by redefining their situation and acting together based on that redefinition.  As I work on such politics of small things in Israel Palestine, formally named as an SSRC project “Micropolitics: Spaces of Possibility?” I am struck by the fact that working against memory, or, at least, “re-remembering,” collectively remembering in a different way, is a first act of establishing a space of possibility. This is the case in the many examples of alternative practices in the region, which I would be happy to discuss with you in the question and answer period. Representative of these in a highly dramatic way is a movement that Yifat Gutman is studying: an Israeli Jewish group that is working to remember, in Hebrew, the Nakba, the disaster, as the moment of Israeli independence is commemorated among Palestinians. As they describe themselves on their website: “Zochrot [“Remembering”] is a group of Israeli citizens working to raise awareness of the Nakba, the Palestinian catastrophe of 1948.” They go on to describe their goal: “We hope that by bringing the Nakba into Hebrew, the language spoken by the Jewish majority in Israel, we can make a qualitative change in the political discourse of this region. Acknowledging the past is the first step in taking responsibility for its consequences. This must include equal rights for all the peoples of this land, including the right of Palestinians to return to their homes.” Note how their project of coming together is pitted against memory. It is about remembering in a different way, re-remembering. It’s not a Jewish memory of the Jewish state, but a memory for an Israel for all its people.

The United States

“Re–remembering,” a notion Toni Morrison presented in her masterpiece, Beloved. She challenged the collective memory of slavery in America. When I read the book, it helped me to find my position on the ethical question of the relationship between poetry and atrocity, first opened by Adorno. I think Morrison revealed that necessity of poetry, the necessity of artistic imagination after horror. It makes an ethical political life possible.  More specifically for this presentation, Morrison has helped me understand how memory works, and how working against memory is so important. Her idea about re-remembering is exactly my point in this paper. So I will conclude with how what I have said thus far applies to the American experience, and specifically how it relates to the American dilemma, race in America.

We are living through extraordinary times in the United States, markedly more hopeful than our most recent past: a Presidential election campaign in which the likely victor will be either an African American or a woman. As I wrote these words, and as I now utter them, I am revealing the problems I wish to raise. Perhaps I should have said “an African American man or a white woman?” The former coupling, “African American or woman,” assumes the normality of the white man, the latter, “African American man or white woman,” seems to emphasize the masculinity of Obama and, it is my sense, especially, the whiteness of Clinton.  There is a dilemma here even revealed at the moment that the issue is raised. The politicians, the media and the public are struggling with the problem of memory and with the problem of forgetting. That is my point, and part of the struggle is to work not only on collective remembering, but also on collective forgetting, not only for, but also against memory.

How do we remember gender and racial injustices and also overcome them? This re- remembering, this for and also against memory involves tough work, work that occurs in and through interaction. When we remember the significance of race and gender, we are perpetuating their continued salience. But if we don’t pay attention, if we imagine that the significance of Obama’s and Clinton’s candidacies as being about two able people who “happen to be” a black and a woman, we don’t do any better. Clearly the moment that either of them becomes President will be of great significance beyond their personal qualities. I personally think that Clinton’s case is more complicated in that she is Bill’s wife, and for me less compelling (as many know about me). So let me discuss the issues involved more closely in the case of Obama and race.

(Written on January 23, 2008) Obama has faced a dilemma, he is running to be President of the United States, not the first black President. He needs to make appeals to the public that don’t draw attention first to race and our memories of what race means in America. His candidacy is reported in the press most often without reference to race. His opponents engage him in debate, also most often as if race were not central. All are working against memory, but it is not easy. Race matters in America and although acting as if it did not, does have situational effect, the effect does not last, because we remember.

After his surprising victory in Iowa, blacks came to realize that it just might be possible that white America might elect an African American, and started moving in his direction. Whites realized the same thing, and then suddenly the problem presented itself to the fore. It was collectively remembered. Nothing crassly racist, but Clinton, the former President, called the black candidate a kid. Clinton, the candidate, said odd things about the relationship between Martin Luther King Jr. and Lyndon Baynes Johnson. What these things meant, whether they were subtle attempts to use racial attitudes to diminish Obama’s legitimacy as a serious politician, is in the eyes of the partisan beholder, much debated in the media and by the public. In the rabid Obama camp that is my family, I (the author of The Cynical Society) am the only one that thinks that this may not have been an intentional political calculation.  I actually don’t know whom this helped, perhaps Obama in the short run in South Carolina, perhaps Clinton, in the long run, on Super Tuesday. But I am here not as a talking head, not as a race track handicapper.  Rather, I want to show how working against memory is an important part of political action — note how difficult it has been to work against the memory of race and racism in the campaign.

In South Carolina, the former President attacked the press, noting that his wife may lose this primary because of the African American vote and complaining that the press is being fed a line about the Clintons injecting race into the campaign. As the New York Times observed:

Mr. Clinton also suggested in public remarks that his wife might lose here because of race. Referring to her and Mr. Obama, he said, ‘They are getting votes, to be sure, because of their race or gender, and that’s why people tell me that Hillary doesn’t have a chance to win here.’

And a little further down in the same article:

Mr. Clinton said no one in the audience in Charleston had asked him about how race was being used in the campaign. ‘They [the Obama campaign] are feeding you [the press] this because they know this is what you want to cover,’ he said. ‘What you care about is this. And the Obama people know that. So they just spin you up on this and you happily go along.’

And after this, Clinton, Bill that is, made infamous comparisons between Jesse Jackson and Obama.

Yet, I still do not think that the Clintons are rabid racists, using the race card to prevail. And Obama is not a cunning advocate of black power. But as they compete in their little gestures and sound bites, in employing political tactics as usual, they reveal how race still matters, racism still exists, perhaps because, more likely it seems to me, despite, their own intentions. It matters as they appear, as they present themselves in a highly mediated social situation, and re-produce the collective memory of race in America. It is a memory worth fighting against.

To conclude with a general observation: there is power when people come together and speak and act in each other’s presence, developing a capacity to act in concert. How we manage to actually come together, recognizing each other as equals involves the difficult challenges of social interaction, working on a common definition of a situation, which often involves a re-definition. When the definition is drawn from the inherited collective memory, which is usually the case, (Erving Goffman structured his “frame analysis” around this), it is the dynamic force that constitutes memory, for better and for worse. Redefining in our actions makes re-remembering in creative ways a possibility. It makes it possible to overcome the looming repressive implications of memory. But this is a difficult political project that requires much more than Michnik’s beautiful formulation: “amnesty without amnesia,” whether this is on the European killing fields, in the lands of Israel and Palestine, or on the American campaign trail.

P.S. This project of re-remembering plays a key role in the re-invention of political culture, something which I developed in greater detail in my most recent book, Reinventing Political Culture: The Power of Culture versus the Culture of Power.

Few words today are more worn out than “fascist.” As a mere term of abuse, particularly in the Obama era, it has lost all conceptual and political precision. Thus, Obama is a “fascist” as are Dick Cheney and a range of other people, from the Pope to the “Judeofascist Zionists,” to “Islamofascists,” to any third world satrap. “Tree huggers” are environmental fascists.  Gay men in New York complain about “bodily fascism,” the high standards of muscularity that predominate in certain gay subcultures.  “Fascist” has taken this increasingly clichéd side-road, it would seem, because actual fascist politics have virtually no relevance today, and so we have no point of reference when we say that so and so is a fascist.  Of course, there is always the old Duce, Benito Mussolini and the History Channel. But the Duce has reemerged, transformed in the eyes of many consumers of the cultural industry, which often depicts him as a generic and predictably scripted evil character, a pompous lout in the business of world-domination (Charlie Chaplin’s Benzino Napaloni remains a personal favorite).

That Obama and Cheney are “fascists” is a clear indication that we no longer know who the Duce was, and what fascism meant; namely, a catastrophic collapse of modernity under its own ideological and technological weight, a breakdown of the project of the Enlightenment itself, as Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, two German philosophers concerned with fascism, may agree.

Yet, the triteness of the word aside, I have been wondering if fascist types, the personality characteristics that Adorno unsuccessfully tried to measure with the so called “F-scale” (F for fascist),  are still around.  I wonder if the regular guy who would have fitted well in the Duce’s ranks is with us in the subway and in the supermarket.  And if so, I also wonder whether he (or she) may become politically relevant, even if by small degrees and at a local level.

In my Race and Ethnicity class, here in Abilene, the heart of Protestant Texas, I had a quiet, punctual, and occasionally agitated student who made no more than two comments throughout the semester.  Uncharacteristically, by the end of the semester, he came to my office “just to talk.”  Something was amiss, it seemed, something needed resolution and he needed to talk about it. Without ado, he straightforwardly explained the problem. His family, he said, was “very racist.” His parents were racists: his grandparents, “extremely racist,” his friends, “very racist.”  His buddies, in their early twenties as well, had some fun calling him on the phone, after he moved to the university, to mock him for sharing the same grounds with black and Hispanic students.  “I am not going to lie to you,” he said: “I was also racist.”  Hence, he needed to talk.

He was facing the uncomfortable situation of seeing family and friends as though for the first time, and in an unflattering light at that.  In one of my introductory classes we were talking about slavery in the U.S.  A hand in the back of the class went up. The student, a woman in her early twenties, explained to the class that though slavery has had a bad rap in the U.S., it actually wasn’t that bad.  After all, she reasoned, the slaves had food in their stomachs and a roof over their heads.  I have other examples, but let me leave it here.  (I must add, I have and have had here in Abilene many excellent students who are also excellent persons worthy of emulation; likewise many fine friends and acquaintances.)   I moved to Abilene almost three years ago. During this time, KKK folk have done their rounds twice, to my knowledge, distributing “literature,” as the local paper reported, to their neighbors. (“Make no mistake, we are not here to entertain you”).

To clarify, in places such as New York, for instance, when someone says that so and so “is racist,” they mean, in general and save exceptions, that so and so is inappropriate and a bit of an embarrassment.  But in this part of Texas, that so and so “is racist” means, it seems to me, that such person believes himself or herself to be a member of the superior human subspecies, and that this superior being has certain strong feelings and ideas about the world and other people. To be sure, I don’t know if these stories are isolated or if racism is actually prevalent in this area, but as a teacher of Race and Ethnicity who is in the business of discussing these things all the time, I easily bump into these sorts of narratives, from students, but also from friends and acquaintances who have witnessed such situations.

This doesn’t seem to be old school racism, however. Back to fascism, these narratives often involve properly fascist, Italian School plots and features. These expressions of racism seem to go hand in hand with strong religious beliefs, anti-intellectualism, stereotyping, sexism, including of course heterosexism, nationalism, a strong sense of “us” and “them,” and, one is tempted to add, working class pride mixed with such things as anti-unionism and what one may call a Spenserian economic sense (e.g., “some minorities are poor” because, “you know, survival of the fittest”).  What I have not found in these conversations is one of the central characteristics of the Duce’s ideology: the idolatrous faith in the role of the state. I have found, so to speak, F-scale worldviews, attitudes and ideas without the love of the state.

Again, I am not sure if these narratives are very prevalent.  And perhaps I exaggerate, but it seems to me that, as Adorno and Horkheimer feared, here in the middle of the country elements of fascism may be brewing.  The ethnographer in me tells me, in any case, that when it comes to fascism today, the Pascalian wager is worth considering. Trite such as it is, the word “fascism” is nonetheless worth taking into account when thinking about the American future.