I recently returned from a very enjoyable and very fruitful week in Paris, combining business with pleasure. I spent time with family, and also enjoyed a series of meetings with my dear friend and colleague, Daniel Dayan. We continued our long-term discussions and debates, moving forward to a more concerted effort, imagining more focused work together. His semiotical approach to power will inform my sociological approach and visa versa, with Roland Barthes, Victor Turner, Hannah Arendt and Erving Goffman as our guides. At least that is one way I am thinking about it now. Or as Daniel put it a while back in an earlier discussion: my politics of small things will combine with his analysis of the politics of even smaller things.

We had three meetings in Paris, a public discussion with his media class at Science Po, an extended working breakfast and lunch at two different Parisian cafés, and a beautiful dinner at his place, good food and talk throughout. I fear I haven’t properly thanked him for his wonderful hospitality.

At Sciences Po, Dayan presented a lecture to his class and I responded. This followed a format of public discussion we first developed in our co-taught course at The New School in 2010. He spoke about his theory of media “monstration,” how the media show, focusing attention of a socially constituted public. He highlighted the social theory behind his, pointing to Axel Honneth on recognition and Nancy Fraser’s critique of Honneth, Michel Foucault on the changing styles of visibility: from spectacle to surveillance, Luc Boltanski on the mediation of distant suffering and especially J. L. Austin on speech acts.

At the center of Dayan’s interest is his metaphor of “the media as the top of the iceberg.” He imagines a society’s life, people showing each other things, as involving a great complexity of human actions and interactions, mostly submerged below the surface of broad public perception, not visible for public view. The media’s role is to go down and bring up, deciding what is important, what is worthy of attention, to show and illuminate. As Austin was interested in the fact that sometimes the mere articulation of speech – “acts,” Dayan is interested in how “media act.” By making some things apparent, and some not, they set the agenda, both forming and informing publics.

A key activity of the media, then, is witnessing, where the media record, translate and illustrate for its public. This is Dayan’s framework, as I understand it, most interesting in the details of its application as it provides a means to consider the relationship between media and power. Daniel draws on Austin here. He makes fine distinctions concerning media expression, applying to the media Austin’s terms: exercitives, verdictives, commissives, expositives and behavitives. As he explains it, this makes sense. But I have a concern, which he and I discussed at length.

Dayan focuses on the relationship between the media and power, making fine distinctions, applying Austin as a way of analyzing forms of expression and showing, but he does not make what I take to be the important distinctions between forms of power. Not only the disciplining power of the truth regime in the fashion of Foucault, and the Weberian notion of coercive power and its legitimation, but also the notion of power that emerges from the capacity of a group of people to speak to each other as equals, reveal their individual qualities through their individual actions and then develop the capacity to act in concert. In his presentation at Science Po, Dayan didn’t present in his framework how the media facilitate political power in the sense of Hannah Arendt. I pointed this out, and we discussed this extensively. We did not disagree; rather, we saw the topic of media and power from different directions, with different perspectives.

I illustrated my point by discussing gay marriage, an issue in the news that day in both France and the United States. In the U.S.: the opening hearings at the Supreme Court concerning two cases, one focused on the Federal Defense of Marriage Act and the other focused on a California referendum on gay marriage was widely reported. In France: at the same time, also widely reported, there was a mass demonstration in Paris against gay marriage, against a likely new law (since enacted) legalizing marriage equality. I noted that from the American court hearings commentators judged that it is highly likely that the official recognition of gay marriage would proceed, pushed by broad popular support, while in France, the legislation yielding the same result was meeting popular resistance. There is an interesting irony here.

Media monstration of actions in the Supreme Court revealed the relationship between official power and the power of concerted action. The popular support for gay marriage was a result of a long media monstrating march, from the Stonewall Riots to the Supreme Court, LGBT rights have been emerging as American commonsense. Gay activists meeting, talking and acting together, seen by their friends and colleagues, but also by many strangers thanks to media presentations, have appeared as normal citizens, worthy of full citizens rights. As Daniel and I might put it, the politics of small things became large, through monstration.

In the meanwhile in France, marriage equality’s road to legalization was more a consequence of big politics. It was part of the Socialist Party Platform, upon which François Hollande ran. Public opinion had not been clearly formed around the issue. More popular was the longstanding traditional commonsense that marriage, and more specifically parenting, should be between a man and a woman, and not between two men or two women. The long road of the politics of small things, shown by the media didn’t exist. While in the U.S. the story was of a conservative Supreme Court trying to keep up with changes in the society, in France official power was ahead of public opinion, at least this is the way it looked at the time of our discussion.

Dayan and I don’t completely agree on marriage equality, and more specifically on the importance of parenting equality. Yet, we both saw in this example (and others we discussed during my visit and our discussions) a platform for dialogue, about the connections among the politics of small things, big politics, monstration, and media and publics.

At our breakfast, lunch and dinner, we explored this. We discussed his ideas about media and hospitality, the analogy between media and museums, my concern that we have to consider not only the media, but also media as a facilitator of all social interaction, monstration as a sphere of gesture (thus our common interest in the sociology of Erving Goffman), the media as a system of monstrative institutions, the relationship between the new (small) media and big media, terrorism as it monstrates, our topic, and Israel – Palestine (a zone of conflict about which we disagree) and “politics as if.”

The politics of the consequential and the inconsequential: people, activities, events and monstrations, the relevance of irrelevance, this fascinates us. We will continue to work on it, and we will report here about our progress, from time to time. I will explain more in my next post.

As I celebrate the glorious re-election of President Barack Hussein Obama, and as New York and my friends and family are still suffering from Hurricane Sandy, and a snowstorm follow-up, I have been in Europe, spending time with my daughter, and her family in Paris, giving a lecture and visiting Rome for the first time, and taking part in public talks in Warsaw and Gdansk on the occasion of the Polish translation of Reinventing Political Culture, offering my commentary on the American elections informed by the book. In Gdansk, I was honored to receive a medal from the European Solidarity Center for my work with Solidarność, and continuing work inspired by its principles.

I have been enjoying the joys of citizenship and patriotic hope, the love of family, and recognition for personal and public achievement. I have learned a lot in many very interesting discussions. I have been very busy, torn with mixed emotions, including a frustrated desire to put my thoughts down for Deliberately Considered. Some quick summary thoughts today; next, a close critical response to the election results and the President’s speech. In brief: Obama excelled once again as “story teller in chief.”

Election Day from afar: having cast my vote weeks ago. In Warsaw, I discussed the events of the day and the project of the reinvention of American political culture. As I have explained in previous posts and analyzed carefully in my book, I believe that Barack Obama is an agent of significant reinvention, changing the relationship between culture and power: the way he has used the politics of small things, his eloquence as an alternative to sound bite political rhetoric, retelling of the American story as one centered on diversity, as he embodies this, and his challenge to market fundamentalism, are the major contours of his transformational politics. On Election Day, I explained that as a social scientist I thought that the transformation that he has started would successfully push forward, Nate Silver enthusiast that I am. But I also confessed that as a citizen I was worried. Obama’s accomplishments to date were in danger and his promise has not yet been fulfilled. I am now hopeful.

Earlier in Rome, I spoke to a group of media students about the relationship between media and the politics of small things. We had a particularly interesting discussion about how the power of gestures work in different types of mediated settings. I explained how I think Obama has managed to use long form rhetorical skills to constitute power in the age of twitter and sound bytes. Specifically in the first debate with Romney, this wasn’t enough, but in his victory speech, he showed how this works once again. He is the most powerful person in the world thanks to his speech making.

I also told my Rome colleagues that I was pretty sure that the re-election of Barack Obama would make it likely that the next President of the United States would be Hillary Clinton or another woman nominee of the Democratic Party (I will explain my grounds for this conviction in a future post)

This led to an intriguing discussion. A post doc in the audience observed that the power of Obama’s speech is informed by a specific tradition of oratory, that of the African American civil rights leaders coming from the African American church. She wondered whether there is a comparable tradition among feminist political leaders, supposing that there wasn’t. The voice of African American authority empowers Obama, while the feminist authoritative voice is one of contemporary invention. This led me to wonder about a discussion I had with feminist friends during the Democratic primary season in 2007-8. Which would be the more significant breakthrough Hillary Clinton or Obama? I thought that given the legacies of slavery, the election of Barack Obama would be, but perhaps I was wrong.

In Warsaw, I spoke with two groups, associated with two cultural journals, Kultura Liberalna and Respublika Nowa, the former was an informal meeting in a private apartment, the latter, a meeting at the journal’s offices, which included a cultural center. These groups are part of a reinvigorated intellectual scene in Poland, young intellectuals seeking alternatives in a highly problematic political environment. In both meetings, we talked about possible collaboration with Deliberately Considered.

In the Election Day meetings, I reflected on the fact that what I had to say that day would be speculative, while in my next meetings in Gdansk, if I was right, they would appear as having been inevitable. Before the results and after, I observed how the project of reinventing American political culture was proceeding. How changes in attitudes toward questions of American identity and the relation between the state and the market, the rejection of market fundamentalism are advancing.  I expected Obama to win and he did. I explained before the fact that as a social scientist, I judged Nate Silver’s prognostications to be sound and thought it was highly likely that Obama would win.  The changes he has advanced are compelling, and they are backed by hard demographic, economic and political realities.  But I confessed that I was worried as a citizen, so much was on the line.

I knew when I left home that how comfortable I would feel at home when I returned depended on the outcome of the elections. By the time, I had my meetings in Gdansk, I felt very comfortable.

The first meeting, the day after election day, included a formal ceremony and discussion of the Polish translation of my book as it informed an understanding of the outcome of the elections and Obama’s Presidency. The second meeting, was the first session at a conference on the future of Europe, with focus on the Eastern half, in and outside of the Euro zone. I was asked, among other things, what was the significance of the election results and what America could contribute to an understanding of the crisis in Europe.

I answered both questions by highlighting the great transformation occurring in the United States, facilitated by the President.  In 1789, an American republic centered on the idea of liberty, in the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln reinvented the idea of America, or more precisely, he gave voice to the reinvention that was developing, by making the principle of equality also central. He turned the Declaration of Independence into a central normative text, as Garry Wills powerfully has demonstrated. I think, and explained in Gdansk, that Barack Obama has also added a new critical note, using similar means. Diversity is becoming a central American principle and the basis of identity.  Obama in all his major speeches and in his actions is  charging the great seal motto E pluribus unum with new meaning and application. Diversity as the basis of our unity is now defined as central to our identity, concerning race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, gender identity, sexual orientation, and much more. This is new, powerfully pushed forward by Obama and supported by American opinion and by demography. This is the renewed American story and recognized strength. I will explain more fully in my next post.

Sergio Tavolaro is a sociology professor at the University of Brasília. He presents today his account of Barack Obama’s recent visit to his country. -Jeff

It is nearly impossible to speak of one Brazilian approach to the United States, given Brazil’s domestic diversity and complexity. Indifference, suspicion, admiration, anger and interest can all be found among Brazilian citizens when invited to reflect upon the North American giant partner. Yet, by and large, it is fair to say that President Obama’s first visit to Brazil was widely welcomed. More than a mere encounter of two heads of states simply complying with protocol obligations, the meeting had a great deal of symbolic charge. To be sure, the historical importance of Obama’s rise to the presidency was greatly appreciated by Brazilians from the very beginning. As the rhetoric tone of his campaign was closely followed by the local media, a significant portion of Brazil’s public opinion shared the excitement experienced by Americans when Obama was sworn in.

But many additional ingredients contributed to the success of this diplomatic event. To begin with, as President Dilma Rousseff herself highlighted, one should not underestimate the privilege of witnessing the encounter between the first US Afro-American president and the first Brazilian woman president – especially if one remembers how filled with racial problems both societies are and the subordinate status of women in Brazil.

National Congress of Brazil, Brasília © Rob Sinclair | Wikimedia Commons

Besides, there are signs indicating that Brazil – US relations are now changing in a positive way, in comparison with the recent past. One ramification of President Lula’s independent and bold foreign policy was a distancing between the two countries on a varied set of issues. The divergence over the recent political crisis in Honduras was just one manifestation of mounting diplomatic rifts, which also included different views regarding Venezuela, Bolivia and, for sure, Iran’s nuclear policies. The US reluctance to legitimate President Lula’s ambition to grant Brazil a permanent seat in the UN Security Council contributed even more to sour relations. Under these difficult circumstances, President Obama’s decision to come to Brazil prior to Dilma’s visit to the US, unprecedented in the diplomatic history of the two countries, was much praised as a demonstration of Brazil’s increasing prestige in the global scene. Thus, expectations are high that other improvements will follow. First of all, Brazilian entrepreneurs rejoiced with President Obama’s recognition that the US must treat economic relations with Brazil as seriously as it has with China and India. Moreover, though no open support has been made, many saw as a quite positive step what appeared to be a more considerate position towards Brazil’s UN ambitions.

On March 20th, President Obama delivered a touching speech in Rio, in which he highlighted the historical commonalities that bring Brazil and the US together. He mentioned that both countries are former colonies that fought for political independence. Both countries developed through the contributions of immigrants, and that both countries are concerned with the consolidation of democracy. President Obama envisions a prosperous future for both societies as they succeed in increasing their ties in a variety of areas. His words were deeply appreciated.

Yet, one day before, while still in Brasília, he authorized the coalition attack on Libya. As usual, this facet of the US foreign policy raises concerns among Brazilians. The Dilma administration’s criticisms of the coalition actions, coupled with her government’s abstention from supporting the military intervention, demonstrates that the US, if it is truly interested in having Brazil as a partner in the international arena, will have to accept Brazil’s independent positions.

While I have been observing  Feisal Abdul Rauf’s actions and reactions to the public controversies surrounding his work as the the chairman of the Cordoba Initiative and the imam of the Farah mosque in Lower Manhattan, I have been thinking a lot about my book, Civility and Subversion: The Intellectual in Democratic Society.  I think that in democracies, intellectuals are talk provokers who help the general public confront and address serious political problems by informing discussion.  I think that they do so by civilizing differences so that enemies can become opponents and opponents can become collaborators, and by subverting commonsense that hides problems, so that these problems then can be discussed.  I, of course, know that no one intellectual is always a subversive, and no one intellectual is always an agent of civility.  Yet, certain key intellectuals have primarily played one or the other role.  This for example is how I think about the intellectual work of Malcolm X versus Martin Luther King Jr.

The tragedy of Feisal Abdul Rauf is that he has intended and has dedicated his life to the role of civility, while more brutal figures in our public life, perhaps Newt Gingrich is the primary culprit, have intended to turn the persistently patriotic imam into a subversive.  He has been labeled an agent of Islamic, indeed radical Islamist, subversion of the good moral order, just when he has done everything in his public pronouncements and actions to support the good pluralistic moral order that he understands, along with many of his fellow Americans including his President, to be the great American achievement.

Thus consider deliberately Feisal Abdul Rauf’s words in his recent op-ed piece. He is even willing to see this episode in which he has been systematically and viciously slandered as a positive development in the project of civil religious interactions:

“Lost amid the commotion is the good that has come out of the recent discussion. I want to draw attention, specifically, to the open, law-based and tolerant actions that have taken place, and that are particularly striking for Muslims.

President Obama and Mayor Michael Bloomberg both spoke out in support of our project. As I traveled overseas, I saw firsthand how their words and actions made a tremendous impact on the Muslim street and on Muslim leaders. It was striking: a Christian president and a Jewish mayor of New York supporting the rights of Muslims. Their statements sent a powerful message about what America stands for, and will be remembered as a milestone in improving American-Muslim relations.

The wonderful outpouring of support for our right to build this community center from across the social, religious and political spectrum seriously undermines the ability of anti-American radicals to recruit young, impressionable Muslims by falsely claiming that America persecutes Muslims for their faith.”

Yesterday, in an interview on the ABC news program, “This Week,” the imam expressed his dilemma.  He is damned if he does, damned if he doesn’t, and therefore he states if he had known the controversy he has provoked would happen he would have never proceeded.   He wanted to civilize differences, instead he has provoked them. He has against his own sensibility revealed the ugly virus of hatred, as he was trying to nurture civilized understanding. This is tragic for him as an individual, but reveals something critical for us, his fellow citizens.

In order for us to be true to our principles, Park 51 must be built, as President Obama suggested in his most recent remarks at his news conference.

“With respect to the mosque in New York, I think I’ve been pretty clear on my position here, and that is, is that this country stands for the proposition that all men and women are created equal; that they have certain inalienable rights — one of those inalienable rights is to practice their religion freely. And what that means is that if you could build a church on a site, you could build a synagogue on a site, if you could build a Hindu temple on a site, then you should be able to build a mosque on the site.”

I fear that this clear message we should tell ourselves and others about ourselves may not be sent.  American civilization warriors, those who seek a war with a world religion, may get their way.  It may be suggested that moving the mosque just a bit uptown is a reasonable compromise, a small price to pay for social peace at home.  This is the “modest proposal” (in the sense of Jonathan Swift in my opinion) of Governor David Paterson. (link)

But as an American, as a New Yorker, as someone who works in lower Manhattan and lost a dear friend in the World Trade Center, I think this is exactly wrong and not moderate at all.  We will not only be less safe as a result, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf’s major concern, we will also be diminished as a country dedicated to fundamental civil and democratic ideals.