To skip this introduction and go directly to read Daniel Dayan’s In-Depth Analysis, “Overhearing in the Public Sphere,” click here.

Daniel Dayan in today’s “In-Depth” post considers overhearing on a global scale. He investigates a simple formula: overhearing + global media = public crisis. He starts with a little anecdote, a personal experience at an academic conference in Sweden, and uses the anecdote to open an examination of major challenges of our times: differentiating, maintaining and then connecting public spheres, which resist the twin dangers of fragmentation from within, and global confusion. As usual, his is an elegant and provocative inquiry.

I find particularly illuminating his concise definition of the public sphere: “a conversation between a given nation- state and the corresponding civil society, with central media connecting centers and peripheries,” along with his expansive discussion of how such spheres operate. He analyzes how such spheres are de-stabilized, and how they are interrupted, how overhearing and intruding have become a normal in global public life promising a more universal public, but delivering moral spectacles. Reflecting on the case of Gerard Depardieu and his relationship with Vladimir Putin, and on the WikiLeaks dump, Dayan warns of the dangers of irrational spectacle in the world of normalized overhearing and intrusion, and he notes the illuminating transparency of things near and far lead to unintended tragic effects.

And note how Dayan’s opening story presents a concrete compact rendering of his global diagnosis. I will respond to this in my next post.

To read Daniel Dayan’s In-Depth Analysis, “Overhearing in the Public Sphere,” click here.

The Pussy Riot trial will go down in the history of injustices as the Oscar Wilde trial of the 21^st century. Against the evil powers that be, the Moscow artists acknowledged their inspirers, fellow outcasts: Socrates (this connection to the martyr of philosophy has been noticed by David Remnick in The New Yorker), early feminist, transgender George Sand, and banished by Stalin, carnival researcher, Mikhail Bakhtin. Pussy Riot performs human rights. These women artists attack authoritarianism, misogyny, homophobia In their punk prayer, they protested Putin, the system, discrimination against the second sex, and as they sang, “gay pride exiled in chains to Siberia.” And still many hate them — and because of that they hate them. Why? In Eastern Europe the political class is anti-woman, anti-minority, anti-secular, because our countries have transitioned from false Communism to false Christianity: women, minorities, gays, artists to hell!

A formidable oppositionist movement is gaining strength: the supporters of Pussy Riot who don’t want prejudices to rule their life, demonstrations and shows of solidarity in the region and glocally, indignation of PEN Russia, PEN International, rock stars and the media, petitions (spearheaded in Poland’s leading broadsheet Gazeta Wyborcza by art critic Dorota Jarecka and signed by filmmakers Andrzej Wajda and Agnieszka Holland, curator Anda Rottenberg, Ethical Art professor Krzysztof Wodiczko ). Slovenian and cosmopolitan Slavoj Zizek wrote a letter to Pussy Riot with his characteristic wit: “It may sound crazy, but although I am an atheist, you are in my prayers.”

The brutal sentence on Pussy Riot encapsulates — beyond the headlines — the predicament which women face in Eastern Europe. Women curators in Hungary have been fired, and the world-renowned New School philosopher, Agnes Heller, has also been subject to a witch-hunt. Female artists and cultural operators in Poland have been humiliated. These prejudices are a major stumbling block in the democratic transition — in fact, phobias are destroying our societies. In Russia, women rebels are being killed: countless Chechen women, the human rights activist Galina Starovoytova, the journalist Anna Politkovskaya and the conceptual artist Anna Alchuk. When Alchuk was on trial for her art exhibit at the Sakharov Center, crowds surrounding the Taganka Court chanted “Go to Israel!”

During their trial, Pussy Riot sat locked in a cage that was originally built for Mikhail Khodorkovsky, now incarcerated in a penal colony. Anti-Semitism permeated accusations again him. The prejudices against Pussy Riot bring back to life the anti-Jewish anti-intelligentsia bias from the Soviet times. Conceptual artist “Kabakov had to endure not only the difficulties faced by all Soviet citizens, but the additional burdens of living in a society hostile to Jews,” wrote Susan Tumarkin Goodman of the Jewish Museum. Pussy Riot makes the silent deconstructive style of Ilya Kabakov not only rude, but carnivalesque, Bakhtinian, bad!

Pussy Riot performed against Putin and about “the Lord’s shit” and “Mary the feminist.” I admire their all-women and queered activism, esthetics and ethics in opposition to the Russian system, to consumerism, to the unjust world order. To fight for our freedom from tyranny-misogyny-art-phobia, Pussy Riot forms a civil society badly in need of swear words, shock tactics and punk prayer. Their viscerally performative power is sophisticated and draws on philosophy and literature: from Montaigne to Judith Butler to Zizek. They sing wryly, not forgetting Derrida’s title Spectres de Marx, “Specters of Zizek washed away in the toilets.”

Pussy Riot continues the Bakhtinian tradition of holy folly and combines it with the explosiveness of punk. Esthetics for them is ethics, following in the footsteps of Dostoevsky and Brodsky and Szymborska (who recalled the equation in her Nobel Prize ceremony). Theirs is a Bakhtinian and a Kristevan madcap, topsy-turvy and humanitarian ethics: an ethics of human rights. Pussy Riot combines feminist and queer art as postulated in Seeing Differently by Amelia Jones. Iconographically and ideologically, the collective reminds me of women’s and LGBT visibility campaigns. Theirs is a socially engaged art as activism, which I’ve described as a new dissident civil society against the “moral majority.”

The women of Pussy Riot are the undesirables of our region: they incarnate nonconformity, protest against autocracy, sexual otherness. At the cathedral, they sang of the predicament of women in Russia, of the forbidden gay prides (Moscow courts have just forbidden queer pride parades for a hundred years!).

Maria Alyokhina told the judge during her closing statement: “I am not afraid of you and I am not afraid of the thinly veneered deceit of your verdict at this ‘so-called’ trial.” Nadia Tolokonnikova thinks subversively in the spirit of Socrates and Montaigne. Katya Samutsevich supports LGBT: “She has called particular attention to the plight of LGBT people in Russia, where official discrimination against so-called ‘sexual minorities’ is growing.” In a song released during the trial, Pussy Riot satirize a botoxed Putin and invite him to marry Belarus’s dictator Alexander Lukashenko. Same sex marriage for the tyrants.

In Eastern Europe, we’re not only anti-women, anti-minority and anti-secular: we are also anti-art. The women of Pussy Riot are performance artists. And as we know, artists always make trouble. That’s why they have been condemned for disrupting the public order. Homophobia, misogyny and xenophobia are countered by art. The women of Pussy Riot join many other women artists. Together they are dissidents and engaged performative actors in the public sphere, fighting a very tough and significant battle. Pawel Leszkowicz has called this art Women’s Revolt, “new art in the new state.” He tells a story of censored works created after 1989.

In Poland: the art of Alicja Zebrowska, Katarzyna Kozyra, Dorota Nieznalska and Zofia Kulik shows the religious and political pressure imposed on the body in the post-communist Poland of illegal abortion, vulnerability of women to unemployment and generally economic exclusions, sex business and phallocentrism. The artists expose and subvert the visual politics of patriarchy and the structure of gender norms. For her installation Passion which consists of a hanging metal cross with photographs of male genitalia and a video of the suffering face of an exercising body builder, a powerful study of masochistic masculinity, Dorota Nieznalska was sued and sentenced.

Nieznalska’s feminist intervention through the radical gesture highlighting the sex of Christ is at the same time a reference to Leo Steinberg’s study Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and its Modern Oblivion. Drawing on traditional religious representations, Steinberg brings to light the exposing of the penis of Jesus. Steinberg argues that the motif of ostentatio genitalium and the sexuality of Jesus is akin to displaying the wounds after the Passion, as it foregrounds the human aspect of Christ, his incarnation.

The League of Polish Families members attacked Nieznalska verbally and physically at the Gdansk gallery where her installation was being exhibited. In July 2003, a Gdansk court found Nieznalska guilty of “offending religious feelings.” It sentenced her to half a year of “restriction of freedom” (she was specifically banned from leaving the country) and ordered her to do work for a Catholic charity and pay all trial expenses. For a long time national venues refused to show her work, but Agata Jakubowska curated her one-woman show Submission and Pawel Leszkowicz featured her sadomasochist works in the exhibitions Love and Democracy and GK Collection. Currently Nieznalska supports the convicted women of Pussy Riot in the Gazeta Wyborcza’s appeal for them.

Because of the censorship imposed on art and on women and minority rights, a second revolution must happen in Poland. The first one in the 1980s, under the banner of Solidarity, was conducted in the name of the free nation and the collapse of communism. The group identity of Poles stands behind it. A second revolution, equally peaceful, should happen in the name of the freedom of women and minorities rights, opposing the danger of fundamentalism.

Abortion is illegal in Poland and calls to restrict the reproductive rights of women resonate throughout the region. A number of cultural and economic constraints are also still in place against women. This anti-art, anti-women domination underscores how post-Communist ultra nationalism blended with religion turned into an instrument of power.

Feudal serfdom survived in Russia and Poland until the 1860s: seniority, humiliations, civic sadomasochism are still intact. The revolt of 1989 was more of a restoration of the status quo ante,  of pre-Communist inequality. The transition taking place in post-Communist countries has now turned ultra-nationalist, as the majority discourse dehumanizes “Others.” The body politic privileges sexual sameness and a one-and-only model of the human: heterosexist, jingoist, fundamentalist. There are “so many devious ways of refusing the claims of humanity,” argues Martha C. Nussbaum. In her book From Disgust to Humanity Sexual Orientation & Constitutional Law Nussbaum is also one of the rare western observers to note the homophobia here. She comments perceptively: “Poland, by contrast [to the rest of the EU] still has a great deal of intense antigay feeling, as does Russia.”

The women artists intervene provocatively and shamelessly in the public sphere. Their brouhahas have a serious political message, are ludic, but not ludicrous, dignified, albeit breaking decorum, impertinent and pertinent alike. Pussy Riot neglects neither transgression nor sublimation – for they cure society, heal the ills of us all. The divine represents alterity itself, the most other otherness, and has nothing to do with national identity. Whereas in Poland or Russia the altar joins the throne in an officially holy but, in fact, unholy alliance, it is Pussy Riot who reclaim Mary-Miriam, Maryam (as she is called in the Koran).

Our anti-woman, anti-queer, anti-art prejudices have condemned and punished Pussy Riot. We’ve all sentenced Pussy Riot to the gulag. But Pussy Riot is triumphing now over tyranny, over hatred. Pussy Riot’s Socratic Apology in court is a new beginning. Eastern Europe needs this renewal – desperately.

Ms. Lyudmila Alexeyeva, legendary dissident in charge of the human rights NGO the Moscow Helsinki group told Reuters on the Pussy Riot trial: “As in most politically motivated cases, this court is not in line with the law, common sense or mercy.” Professor Piotr Piotrowski who has postmodernized art history in Eastern Europe wrote in Gazeta Wyborcza: “We must protest this repressive politics; we must defend human rights and freedom of expression everywhere where these values are threatened. Solidarity with the prosecute women artists is our moral obligation.”

It is our duty to demand immediate freedom for Pussy Riot and for all other prisoners of conscience throughout the world. It is our duty to intensify solidarity with all persecuted artists.

The performance of Pussy Riot and its repression represent the deep political challenge of post communist authoritarianism and its progressive – transgressive alternatives. This is the first of two posts by Kitlinski that have great significance for Eastern Europe and beyond. -Jeff

Don’t let Putin fool you. Banishing Pussy Riot to a penal colony allowed the Russian leader to reassert his rule. Democracy be damned. Civil rights, religious freedom, and gender equality from herein would be subject to his purview. The ex-KGB officer’s message wasn’t just aimed at Russia. It was directed at all of Eastern Europe, too.

For anyone familiar with the history of regional politics, Putin’s positioning was thick with signifiers. Pussy Riot’s sentencing would please fellow reactionaries, obviously, as well as help serve as a salve for social distress. It also confirmed that the post-Communist period was formally over. Authoritarian capitalism is the rule of the day. There’s no alternative.

The political transition in post-Communist countries has turned majoritarian, as ex-Soviet bloc states start to formalize discrimination against pro-democracy forces.  Curiously, this reaction, of what can only be described as the ancien regime, both Stalinist, and its antecedents, focuses on sexual dissidence, to broadcast its worldview.  In the Ukraine, it’s Femen. In my own home, Poland, it’s Dorota Nieznalska, an artist who was convicted of blasphemy.

It’s a familiar story, one that Pussy Riot’s Nadia Tolokonnikova was quick to point out, when, in her closing statement, she compared her band’s fate to the trial of Socrates, and the kenosis of Christ. Jesus was “raving mad,” she reminded her religiously observant tormentors. “If the authorities, tsars, presidents, prime ministers, the people and judges understood what ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice,’ meant, they would not put the innocent on trial.” Tolokonnikov also cited the prophet Hosea, in the Hebrew Bible: “For I desired mercy, and not sacrifice.” Surely, the authorities were not thrilled.

Pussy Riot’s choice of Jewish scripture is of course telling, as well as calculated. The prophets argue for forgiveness (Hosea forgave his unfaithful wife) and for social justice. Tolstoy, ultrademocratic, anarchist and religious, was also in conflict with the same Orthodox Church (and excommunicated by it) that now condemns Pussy Riot. Dostoevsky similarly emphasized the importance of forgiveness in Crime and Punishment, when Raskolnikov receives it from a prostitute. Pussy Riot are obviously traditionalists.

The forces that have condemned Pussy Riot are not religious. They are secular, despite their Orthodox pretense. Pussy Riot, ironically, respond as Christians. They protest the emptiness of consumer culture, and the lack of forgiveness on the part of their persecutors. Thus, they appropriate the figure of the Virgin Mother, to criticize authoritarianism. “Mary is with us in protest! Mary, become a feminist!” the band screamed during its infamous cathedral performance.

As a Pole, I find the entire affair reminiscent of an attack on the previously mentioned Dorota Nieznalska, at a Gdansk gallery, where her seminal Passion installation was being exhibited in 2002. The work, an exploration of masculinity and suffering, shows a cross on which the photograph of a fragment of a naked male body, including the genitalia, has been placed.

Staged by members of the reactionary League of Polish Families, the political party sued the artist over the exhibit.  In July 2003, a court found Nieznalska guilty “offending religious feelings” and sentenced to half a year of “restricted freedom” (she was banned from leaving the country.) When the judge read her sentence, members of the League packed the courtroom and applauded ecstatically. It took six years, but Nieznalska’s conviction was eventually overturned in July 2009, on the grounds that her freedom of speech had been violated.

Nonetheless, Nieznalska  suffered inestimable damage as  consequence of her successful prosecution. For years, Polish galleries refused to show her work. It took curator Pawel Leszkowicz to rehabilitate her reputation, by featuring her sadomasochist works in the exhibitions Love and Democracy and the GK Collection, claiming she was working in the S&M tradition of renown Polish writer Bruno Schulz.

I could go on. My point is that misogyny is the biggest threat to Eastern Europe’s incomplete democracies, and that it’s been a problem across the region for a good while now, not just in Russia. Abortion, for example, is banned, and a number of cultural and economic constraints on women and queers alike exist. Female artists who deal with sexuality have been especially hard hit by censorship. Pussy Riot is just the best-known example.

If Pussy Riot is what it takes to wake the West up to this situation, and help us complete our transition to democracy, so be it. Until then, as it has been said, we are all Pussy Riot. I’m sure the ‘band’, as it were, would agree with me.

The post was originally published in ‘Souciant’ (August 23^rd, 2012) under the title “Pussy Riot in Polish.” Tomasz Kitlinski acknowledges the help of Joel Schalit, editorial director of Souciant, for his assistance in preparing the English text version.

An interview recently published in the Polish online journal, Kultura Liberalna, posted here, provides an interesting insider’s view of how the political situation there is understood from the point of view of Putin’s opposition. Lukasz Pawlowski, a Ph.D. Candidate at the Institute of Sociology, University of Warsaw and a contributing editor to Kultura Liberalna, interviews Lilia Shevtsova, a political scientist and expert on Russian politics. She served as director of the Center for Political Studies in Moscow and as deputy director of the Moscow Institute of International Economic and Political Studies. Currently she is a senior associate at the Moscow office of Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She is the author of numerous publications including her latest book Change or Decay: Russia’s Dilemma and the West’s Response (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2011).

This interview raises a number of significant issues, concerning the problems of democratization and the problems of Russia. Most fundamental is that the democratization of Russia requires Russian action. Outsiders, “the West,” and specifically the United States, cannot do much about this. This is a theme we have been observing in many parts of the world. Consider, for example, how Elzbieta Matynia reflects on the issue as it applies to Egypt, Poland and South Africa.

And then the interview gets into the particulars: critically appraising the strengths and weaknesses of the democratic opposition Russia, reflecting on the Medvedev – Putin relationship, and how each of these figures challenge the democratic project, judging the short and long term prospects of democratic movement in Russia, and the necessity of change from the bottom up. One of Shevtsova’s more provocative claims is that Russia is better off with Putin than Medvedev as President.

To read the interview of Lilia Shevtsova “Do Not Democratize Russia: We Will Do It Ourselves,” click here.

Lilia Shevtsova, a senior associate at the Moscow Carnegie Center and Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, on Russian politics, democratic opposition and on why Putin may be better than Medvedev

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Lukasz Pawlowski: Why haven’t the mass protests prevented Mr. Putin from winning the presidential election for the third time?

Lilia Shevtsova: Because the protest tide was weak, it wasn’t a real tsunami. The December movement had no structured leadership and no concrete agenda. It wasn’t strong enough to force political leaders in the Kremlin even to think about some serious change at the moment. Nonetheless, it shocked them and proved the society has awakened although luckily for the Kremlin it is not that frightening yet.

In Russia there are numerous parties and non-governmental organizations working against the regime for democratization. There have been there for many years and now when they got a marvelous opportunity to achieve at least some of their goals they missed it. They have been working long to get Russian society out in the streets and when they finally managed to do that they seemed completely surprised.

Everybody was surprised, maybe with exception of some people, who – just like myself – have been telling themselves every year, every month: “it will come, it will come, the bubble will burst”. But even we were not sure, when it will happen. The number of people that took to the streets was some kind of revelation. Even sociological instruments failed to reveal, what was happening beneath the surface of the society. The most respectable survey institution, Levada Center – the best in Russia, and maybe even in Europe – before the parliamentary elections in December estimated that the Kremlin party, United Russia, will get about 55% of the votes, while in the end it got officially only 45% and in reality less than 35% of the vote. So yes, for many people in the society, even in the opposition the events that followed parliamentary elections were unexpected.

But why has the opposition failed in their hour of trial, despite the fact, that we have so many movements, groups and parties? Why have they failed to get together, to find a common platform and deliver some message to the society?

There are several reasons. Firstly, the opposition is incredibly fragmented and the fragmentation has been much supported by the authorities, because it works to their advantage. Secondly too many oppositionists come from the 1990’s and therefore lack credibility in Russian society. The Russians are tired of that period and do not want it to come back. Thirdly, it was not that the political movements were not prepared for any kind of breakthrough. They were prepared for a long period of legal struggle, but they were not ready for people taking to the streets. This latter situation calls for totally different tactics, political ones.

Are you saying that the Russian opposition is not a political movement?

A lot of demands made by Russian December movement are still moral and ethical. They are calls for human dignity, for mutual respect. This is in fact chiefly a normative agenda not a profound political agenda. So, this movement has to be politicized and the people who organize and work for it, need to understand that politization requires constant and often mundane work. The opposition cannot succeed just by organizing carnivals or happenings. It cannot be a hipster movement or a flashmob. It also cannot have too much faith in the Internet and social media. These are only tools, they can bring people out to the streets but they can also atomize them. Invited through Facebook or Twitter many people came, but then when standing on the Sacharov Prospect they saw many different people around them and began to ask themselves “What really unites us?” Some of them were there solely against Putin and if he left the Kremlin they would be satisfied, some of them would like to raise their status within the system, without changing it and making revolutions, finally some of them would like to change the system itself. It is the role of the political opposition to find a platform for unification and consolidation of those various groups. In my view the movement cannot be based solely on the rejection of the previous regime but needs a constructive element in it, a project of constitutional and political reform. We need to realize that we are not fighting Putin personally. The major problem is not the particular personality at the Kremlin, but the rules of the game – the personalized power and its close connections with big industry.

Will the opposition eventually succeed?

I’m pretty sure that this movement will continue. The first tide has subsided, but there will be second, third, fourth tide, although I’m not certain what will be the result of those tides. What will be the intervals between them? Will they succeed in Moscow and St. Petersburg in uniting people on the basis of broad liberal and democratic values, not only dignity, but rule of law and political competition?

A lot depends on whether the opposition succeeds to reach people living outside the two major cities, in provincial Russia. There are up to 45-48 million people living in the former Soviet industrial cities. They are also dissatisfied with the regime, but their protests may be provoked by another set of reasons. People who took to the streets in Moscow were moved by moral, ethical and to some extent political demands. The people in the post-soviet industrial Russia can be moved by social and economical woes. The problem though is that they might long to solve their problems by looking for a new “savior,” i.e. the leader who will promise that he can deal with all their miseries in the same way as Yeltsin and Putin had promised before. Such person would only take Putin’s place while keeping all the pathologies of the Russian political matrix. The major question is therefore how to combine all those social tides, how to find some common denominator and how, at the same time, to reach people with ethical, political and socio-economic demands, how not to leave the “second “ Russia behind.

Would it be easier for the protesters if Dmitri Medvedev continued as a president? His attitude towards the opposition seemed to have been a little more open than Putin’s.

Somehow paradoxically I believe that the return of Putin is better for the opposition. Medvedev’s second term would prolong hopes that he could make a difference, that he could finally become a reformer and modernizer we long for. The return of Putin gives us much clearer picture and it is better to have certainty than delude oneself that change may come from the Kremlin. During the last four years Medvedev has proved that he’s “Mr. Nobody.” He never delivered anything he promised, and he already looks in retrospective like Brezhnev who also increased the disparity between declarations on the one hand and deeds on the other. In this way Brezhnev in fact helped the society to understand the rotten nature of the Soviet system. So maybe the fact that Medvedev had promised too much and never delivered will eventually be his only positive legacy that will push the educated Russians to believe that no change can come from the top.

And what will happen to Medvedev now?

Who cares! Apparently because he was promised the post of the prime minister, he will become the prime minister but nobody will ever take any notice of him, because nobody respects him.

But he has been the president for four years. You cannot forget about this. How will the authorities officially refer to his time in power? You have to explain to the people why Putin has come back. Is it because Medvedev was such a bad president that Putin had to intervene?

They are not going to talk about that this way. The period will enter the Russian history as a period of a Putin-Medvedev tandem, which in fact has achieved some goals. Firstly it created a possibility for Putin’s return to the Kremlin. Secondly it has achieved another goal, very important, of seducing the West, chiefly the United States, which believed a reset in relations with Russia is possible. You know there were many people who thought that Medvedev was a new page in Russian history. So from this point of view that tandem has fulfilled some positive goals for the regime. It helped it to survive. But now, when we are approaching the end of this tandem regime, we see that it also had some drawbacks. It undermined the presidential power and started to desacralize it. Medvedev contributed a lot to desacralization of the Russian Presidency.

Especially after the overheard conversation with Barack Obama when Medvedev said he would repeat everything to Putin, we all realized he is simply a kind of liaison officer with no decisive powers. Looking from this perspective, how do you think the return of the old/new president is going to affect Russian foreign policy?

The paradigm of Russian foreign policy will not change because the system remains the same. The foreign policy is determined by the domestic agenda. So if the leader is the same, if the system is the same, if the regime is the same, how could the foreign policy become radically different? Thus Putin will continue with the same foreign policy paradigm, which is based on two pillars. The first is pragmatism. Putin understands that Russia depends on its exports to the West and the well-being of the Russian ‘rentier class’ depends on the oil prices and gas production. What is more the elite is personally integrated into the West. Their kids are in schools in London. They have accounts in western banks. They live in the West and would like to have free access to it. Therefore, Russia cannot become a totally closed country. On the other hand, we need to remember that the Russian society has moved, and Putin needs some means to control it. He will be trying to get them by launching anti-western campaigns, by constantly searching for an external-internal enemy and by being anti-American. Thus in the end, he will have to walk a very thin line, proving at the international level that he is a pragmatist who can be dealt with, while at the same time provoking anti-Western feelings inside the country. Until recently, he has been pretty successful in riding two horses in opposite directions, but my hunch is that in the nearest future it will become too complicated for him. There will be much more anti-Americanism, anti-Western feelings, and much more aggressiveness and assertiveness in the Russian foreign policy because – having no means to solve domestic problems with domestic resources – Putin will be accusing the alleged enemies to distract the attention of the public from other issues. So the foreign policy will be much more, I would say, assertive than before.

Is there anything the West can do to prevent this turn? Do you think that increasing the international support for democratization in Russia would be a good idea? On the one hand, it might help a lot of democratic and non-governmental organizations, on the other, however, it might provoke a fierce reaction of the authorities and help them present Russia as a besieged fortress.

It’s a very complicated question, and there is no unanimously accepted answer to it. I’m not sure that my opinion on that is popular even among other Russian liberals. I would say that the old model of democracy promotion that has been successful during the third tide of democratization is now outdated and has lost its effectiveness. At that time, the western foundations and governments were trying to help to promote democratic norms and rules of the game in transitional societies and in authoritarian societies as well. For instance, they tried to help those societies to build parties, to understand the importance of the parliament, democratic elections, free media etc. In my view, Russian society does not need this kind of assistance. Western money coming to Russia to support different initiatives and to support democratic cells within the society could be counter-productive, because – as you said – the authorities can always present the recipients of such assistance as a kind of fifth column and thus discredit domestic routes to democracy. True, we have different groups and organizations that have no financial means and survive using foreign funds. They are good people doing good job. They defend citizens against the authorities. They address the West when they notice human right abuses etc. If the West cuts its financial help, those groups will cease to exists, so some external support is definitely needed. Western governments should not do anything more though. It seems to me that Russian society already understands what democracy is, what party building is, what independent parliament is, what free media is. Thus we really need to rely upon our own sources and create our own movement.

In that case is there anything the West can do?

Certainly, it can do at least three things. First, it would help us if the West practices what it preaches. Hypocrisy diminishes the West a systemic alternative for Russia. Second, the western leaders when communicating with their Russian counterparts should remind them that Russia belongs to the Council of Europe, that it signed various declarations and promised to follow the rules of the game that are written in the declaration on human rights. Being a member of the Council of Europe means that Russian domestic decisions are not entirely up to Russian politicians, that the West can criticize Russia. Third, the West can significantly influence what is going on in Russia by influencing the Russian elite abroad. If western governments tried to persuade the representatives of the Russian political and business elite living and working in western countries that their possibilities in those countries depend on how they behave in Russia, it would be a great asset and assistance to democratization movements. Regretfully, western governments are ready to send money to the Russian society to support human rights activists, but they are not willing to do anything to influence members of the Russian political elite who live within their borders.

But you yourself are an analyst at a multinational foreign policy think-tank, independent, yet as it says on its official website “promoting active international engagement by the United States.” Does this affiliation somehow influence your work?

Yes, I work for the Carnegie Moscow center that is affiliated with the Carnegie Endowment, but I work with many other institutions: I am an associate of the Chatham House, member of the Davos World Economic Forum Global Councils Network (and the founding chair of the Global Council for Future of Russia), and even a key researcher for the Institute of Economy (the Russian Academy of Sciences). I expect all these institutions to give me total freedom of expression. My colleagues at Carnegie may have different views on Russia and the rest of the world. Some of them are defenders of the US-Russian reset. I am its tough critic. I’ve never experienced any pressure from those institutions, including Carnegie Endowment. The Moscow Carnegie Center has its own status and its own agenda. It is funded by many Western foundations (not only Carnegie), and it accepts funds only on the basis of having total independence in using these funds for the democratic agenda. The fact that our autonomy is respected allows us to be part of this network. It allows me to be critical of Obama administration (I was critical of Bush too) and its policy toward Russia. My personal agenda is the Russian transformation. This goal sometimes coincides with the western agenda and sometimes not.

Can a radical change in Russian political system come about only by a pressure exercised by a bottom-up movement or is at least a tacit consent of the elites needed as well? If so, which elites are likely to become tired of Putin – military, economic, political, maybe religious?

The last nearly 20 years have proven that real transformation of the Russian system can come only under pressure from the society, that is from the broad social and political movement. Just like the transformation of the communist systems that took place in the Eastern and Central Europe. Any top down changes within the Russian matrix can only either prolong its life or (ironically) start to undermine it. However, even in this latter case, we cannot guarantee a civilized and peaceful transformation, but rather a sudden collapse. That is why the organized social movement and some pressure from the bottom are needed.

Nonetheless a peaceful transformation will depend on whether the ruling elite gets fragmented, and pragmatic grouping emerge that will be interested in a pact with the anti-systemic opposition. Hopefully, this will happen. From my observations, the majority of experts working for the Kremlin understand that the system is not sustainable in the longer run. They are simply not ready to become heroes yet… They are not kamikaze. Despite that I hope such cooperation sooner or later will be established. Who will join the opposition? It is difficult to say – it depends on the degree of courage, understanding and… conformism too. Much depends also on when we will have the next tide of wrath and whether it will trigger some serious work on the political and ideological alternative. Because, you know, the worst scenario will be if the Russian system starts to unravel before the alternative is built.

This interview originally appeared in Kultura Liberalna no. 172 (17/2012), April 24, 2012, Olga Byrska, Jakub Dadlez and Konrad Kamiński providing assistance.

A couple of days before the election, thousands of independent ballot observers waited in long lines to receive their training and instructions. The observers – unpaid volunteers – had arrived from Moscow, from other cities and from the countryside. Russian newspaper editor Dmitri Surnin wrote that the atmosphere among the waiting crowds resembled the mood during a citizens’ mobilization on the eve of war. “And your political preferences don’t matter, if you’re a leftist, or right, green, liberal, monarchist or communist – when the Fatherland is in danger, everybody needs to stand together.”

The war to which Surnin refers is one between the people who want to play it by the rules and those who want to falsify the elections and obstruct Russia’s democratic course. He cynically observes that the first group will be convinced of their moral victory, with the law and the truth on their side, but the second group will steal the real triumph, with the courts, the police, and Vladimir Putin on theirs.

Indeed, Putin won. Now let’s talk about the moral victors. A number of originally internet-based groups managed to organize a citizens’ army of more than 80,000 volunteers, who enlisted to visit polling stations to be on the lookout for election fraud. As reporter Anna Nemtsova remarked, “They are bound to turn up convincing evidence of fraud, made more vivid by cell phone-camera footage that could bear on the post-election politics, including the size of protests.”

As I have written earlier, the leaders of Russia’s managed democracy have not shown any interest in letting citizens participate in a meaningful way. The strong executive branch together with the weak judicial and legislative branches deny Russians the possibility of acting in an open civil society with easily accessible institutions, where they can exercise their democratic rights and responsibilities, as is the tradition in US and European societies. However, this presumes that a democratic system operates with one, integrated political space. In Russia, by focusing on the federal level and the power struggles in the Kremlin, it is easy to overlook regional and local developments. And, as I am learning, the analysis of non-traditional forms of political deliberation, such as discussions that take place on the Internet on online forums and blogs, reveal significant democratic developments.

The existence of a real opposition, in addition to the loyal opposition parties and presidential candidates who are manufactured by and in cahoots with the current rulers, has been noted. Especially the massive demonstrations in Moscow, and some 60 other Russian cities against the election fraud during last December’s parliamentary elections, have forced observers to take account of an increasingly visible citizens’ movement. But overall, their initiatives have been judged to be powerless and their mostly suburban (upper) middle class members to be isolated.

I question this judgment of their powerlessness and isolation. Long before the biggest protests in 20 years, there have been signs of democratic practices. Both offline and online, citizens have been involved in political and social issues, and have achieved results. The political activities ranged from street protests, to local referenda, to the posting of privately produced, critical videos on YouTube. This also included many postings of recordings of earlier and ongoing election fraud. It is this kind of political energy that has gone largely unnoticed, but laid the groundwork for the recent large-scale political protests. The new social relationships that have been formed with the aid of new technologies indicate new ways of citizen participation in a transforming democracy. Also activities such as posting political comments and sharing news stories, indicate involvement with the political and attest to new social habits and routines with political consequences. In the long term, this broad public engagement will be consequential on the central political stage.

Although communication between government and citizens is limited, very recently, the activities in virtual space in the form of political deliberations in online media outlets, and online manifests have proven to be meaningful. Those people who discussed their ideas about political, economic, social and cultural issues were the same ones who attended the massive demonstrations. The volunteer observers who initially met online, came face to face with each other in countless polling stations, showing community democracy in action. Their actions show their interest in a peaceful process towards a more equal and robust form of democracy.

The pressing issue, then, is not about Russian authoritarian political culture, but whether society’s democratic values will become institutionalized into the political system. I think in the long run this is likely. The authoritarian system has not quashed the citizens’ developing democratic values. It has not been able to suppress the free exchange of democratic ideas, and it has not prevented democratic practices. Yes, many Russians have voted for Putin out of fear that a vote against him can lead to a return to the uncertainties of the 1990s. And many voted for him, because there wasn’t a real alternative. But as journalist Surnin wrote, “The uncommon numbers of people volunteering as election observers was the most surprising and happy phenomenon in today’s political life.” And on the first day after the elections, Russia is seeing again massive protests against the election fraud. To be continued.

The long-anticipated opening of the renovated Bolshoi Theater in Moscow last month was another sign that the country has transitioned from post-socialism to post-post-socialism. As one scholar observed, the post-Soviet Russia of the 1990s (not unlike its Soviet predecessor, I should add) was founded on a metaphor of “historical rupture and social rebirth,” of rejection of the past and construction of the new social, political, and economic realities. However, in the new millennium, which more or less coincided with political ascent of Vladimir Putin, a new metaphor, that of “civilizational continuity,” has emerged and the current Russian “vision of political history and social identity [is] based in continuities, at various historical depths, linking [its] present with the Soviet and pre-Soviet eras.” Such reconceptualizaiton of the distant and more recent pasts is “coupled with the reappearance of particularist ideologies that set Russia in explicit opposition to Western states, social norms, and geopolitical interests,” which no doubt is a reaction to the post-Soviet import of Western “experts” and their economic wisdom and political counsel backed by NATO troops encroaching on the Russian space.

At the theater’s opening ceremony, Russian President Dmitrii Medvedev pronounced the theater to be “one of our grandest national brands” (bolshoi translates as big or great). The six-year-long and nearly 700-million-dollar renovation resulted in extensive upgrades to stage technology (it now has 3D and multimedia capability) and at the same time in the return to the 19th-century look of the theater’s décor. Frescoes, tapestries, chandeliers, mosaic floors were restored, while the Soviet hammer and sickle throughout the theater were  replaced with a double-headed eagle, the symbol of both the tsarist and contemporary Russia.

The restoration and the opening performance attest more to Russia’s recent movement toward reconciliation with its various pasts. Guests at the invitation-only gala consisted of Russian beau monde: haute couture designers and television personalities, artists and designers, bankers and industrialists.  But it seemed that whoever was issuing invitations wanted or, likely, was instructed to put together a guest list showing that whatever momentary political disagreements Russians might have, they can be put aside to mark the return of a “national treasure,” to use Medvedev’s other moniker for the Bolshoi. Thus, the broadcast of the gala repeatedly showed that leaders of Russian parliament’s minority (if not necessarily opposition) parties were in attendance, as well as a recently fired finance minister who openly disapproved of the planned swap of leadership positions between President Medvedev and Prime Minister Putin. Invited were the last Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and the wife of Putin’s predecessor, the late Boris Yeltsin. Soprano Galina Vishnevskaya, who with her late cellist-husband Mstislav Rostropovich had been exiled abroad for 15 years until the end of the Soviet Union, was seated prominently next to the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church. Putin was conspicuously absent, but one had the feeling that if Generalissimo Joseph Stalin and Tsar Nicholas II were still alive, they would have been invited too.

The performance itself showcased different time periods from the country’s history, sometimes within the same scene: the Soviet-era Bolshoi curtain, unmistakable with its copious hammer-and-sickle emblems, served as the backdrop for the Polovtsian Dances from the opera Prince Igor, set in the 12th century. The concert’s opening number combined Soviet-era imagery and Imperial-themed chorus. Dozens of theater’s stagehands, singers, and dancers wearing hardhats and overalls reenacted the Bolshoi’s reconstruction site, complete with trucks and jackhammers, while performing the hymn “Glory, Glory to you, holy Russia!” that celebrates expulsion of foreign invaders and installment of the first tsar from the Romanov dynasty. Other performance pieces seemed to have been cleansed of their Soviet-period connotations. Swan Lake, which premiered at the Bolshoi some 130 years ago and in the Soviet years was televised during days of entertainment blackouts, such as frequent in the early 1980s state funerals and the 1991 anti-Gorbachev coup, seemed to again be just an iconic symbol of the theater received by the gala viewers with delight and near tears. Some of the Soviet-era most popular (because of their ideological correctness) opera and ballet heroes, such as Joan of Arc and Spartacus, made an appearance. Selections from Cinderella and The Flame of Paris (aka Triumph of the Republic, set in the 1791 France) gave a nod to the demos. But other elements of the gala, including a light installation of Bolshoi’s reopening after a previous renovation on the Tsar Alexander II coronation day and especially the final number—a procession of the entire troupe in evening gowns and tuxedos (not unlike many people in the audience) set to Tchaikovsky’s “Coronation March” composed for the inauguration of yet another Russian tsar—underscored contemporary Russians’ desire for continuities, on both personal and societal levels, with the earlier, Imperial past as well.

There also were signs of “the reinscription of Russian territory as non-Western space”: the gala showcased only domestic composers, with the exception of Ludwig Minkus, who spent a third of his life in Russia composing for the Bolshoi ballet. Though streamed onto dozens of big screens outside of Russia, the ceremony was largely a domestic affair. No A-list international celebrities seemed to have been in the audience. The biggest-name performer billed for the opening, Plácido Domingo, cancelled due to a scheduling conflict, and even David Hallberg, the first American ever to be a principal at the Bolshoi, didn’t take the stage. With the exception of three guest sopranos, the two-hour gala was pretty much an all-Russian affair.

One can only hope, in Russia and in the West, that the imperial music was chosen to glorify the theater as the national symbol rather than the current Russian autocrats, and that the regal gold and red of the theater’s interior won’t be enjoyed only by the country’s new aristocracy. But the tickets are now available only through scalpers who are alleged to give kickbacks to the theater administration. The danger, then, still remains for the Bolshoi to turn into another well-known Russian “national brand”—a Potemkin village.

Like a whole lot of other people, I am trying to get a handle on Occupy Wall Street. It’s obvious that this is a very special movement, but I am trying to figure out what makes it so special. The one-month-old movement is being accused of being unclear, directionless, fragmented, vague, fuzzy. Indeed, it is not made up of disciplined cadres marching with mass-produced banners. It does not have a Central Committee, and though it is an expression of what one Zuccotti Park woman veteran calls an Economic Civil Rights Movement, it stays away from specific demands. These are there, too, but not easy to list or prioritize. It is not just about jobs, not only about mounting poverty, or student debts that now total more than all our credit-card debts; it is not only about corruptibility of the political system, and not only about accountability of the banks and bankers. It is – not unlike the Civil Rights Movement – about something much more fundamental. And I think it has something to do with the way we are locked in to rigid ways of thinking and talking about democracy.

There is nothing new in the observation that we are often imprisoned by language. Language is a conventional system of signs, and if we want to communicate we have to rely on its conventional usage. But there are dimensions and usages of language that, when tweaked a bit, have the capacity either to keep us captive, or to bring in some fresh air, helping us breathe. That we are captives of language, confined within a language that does not serve us any more, is conveyed vividly by Susan George when she says that “cost recovery” is the polite way of saying “make families pay to educate their children.” Indeed, we hear it all the time: education is a very good investment. On the other hand, a pleasantly surprising example of a more refreshing linguistic game comes from Occupy Wall Street: “Yes we camp!”

Something has happened to our thinking and talking about democracy, and we academics are not without guilt here. We have put too much trust in the kind of formal democracy, procedural democracy, that our political science has tended to prefer, as it brackets sentiments and makes it easier to operationalize and easier to build a “legitimate” academic discipline around. And, indeed, one ought to be wary of what overly emotional politics may lead to. But one has to see that there are vital dimensions of democracy that in the process have been overlooked by social scientists and thus also by policy makers, a situation that can lead to inaccurate policy guidelines and often to disastrous policy decisions.

With their focus on various aspects of formal democracy, academics have facilitated the easy prescriptions for democracy that are handy for the policy experts. And American policy experts are known for peddling an easy, “one size fits all” prescription for young or aspiring democracies: you just have to fulfill 3 conditions: have free elections, a free-market economy, and civil society.

Well, these requirements may very well bring about parodies of democracy, as when democratic elections result in anti-democratic regimes like those of Putin or Chavez; or when globalized free markets bring about staggering impoverishment, unashamed, blatant economic exploitation, or bloody civil wars over resources; or when civil society is a masquerade of so-called non-governmental organizations that in practice serve as a facade for the government or are  maintained by capricious foreign donors and carry out projects that fit their ever-changing guidelines.

And what if in old democracies like ours, our political rights, the right to elect our representatives to Congress, are hostage to forces we actually have little control over, such as campaign funding? I hate to think it’s true, but I recently read that the cost of electing our next president will be over one billion dollars for each candidate! So is democracy failing us?

OWS, with its emphasis on consensual decision-making, has raised many hopes and expectations. I realize there are many ways of understanding it. I see it as a movement to recover the meaning of democracy by searching beyond the models that delineate the procedural mechanics of it, which often collapse into a minimalist view of democracy as an institutional arrangement for competing interest groups with their eye on the people’s votes. Their return to consensus is the return — at least in part — to the original meaning of the word consensus, “feeling with.” Even “participatory democracy” does not seem to grasp it for me anymore. The civic exercise of direct democracy through the “General Assembly” taking place in Zuccotti Park, and spreading to other places, arises from a strong sense of indeed being born free and equal in dignity and rights and of acting towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood — that sense which is so well captured in the first article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Again, this movement is not about serving different interests groups. It is about something else, and it is unprecedented. It is not about a change of government or even of the system. It is about 99% of the people losing trust in the workings of democracy, and therefore losing hope in the sense of their lives, and in the sense of the lives of their children. A not easily measurable goal, and yes, we do not have a language for it. We do not know how to name it. But I do think that it is asking for a fundamental change on a grand scale that would make possible the recovery of our lost capacity for the enacting of democracy.

Certain lost dimensions of democracy– described variously as deliberative, agonistic, or performative — represent a kind of political engagement — critical for any democracy — in which the key identity of its actors is that of citizens, and in which the good of society at large, and not that of a narrow interest group, is at stake. And the OWS movement gets it! Democracy, after all, is also about equality of opportunity and the promise of a better life.

The goals of Occupy Wall Street inevitably appear fuzzy because the protesters are trying to expose the many ways in which something as intangible and subtle as human dignity is being damaged, and the way humiliation is going unnoticed. The assemblies are a cry against the kind of language and the kind of politics — with its political formulas, processes, and mechanisms — that in effect disregard the citizens and their personhood, along with the related notions of agency, equality and liberty. This remarkable movement can help us to recover democracy’s lost treasures.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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