Making Sense of Resistance: An Invitation to a Book Party and Discussion

I want to make sense of resistance, and more: to inform it and take part. This has been a central thread of my intellectual and political life.

My latest projects examining this have taken place in new and old forms, Deliberately Considered and my most recent book, Reinventing Political Culture. This Monday at 7pm, we are having a party for the book at The New School, 6 East 16^th Street, Room 1103, the Wolff Conference Room, co-sponsored by the New School’s Sociology Department and its Transregional Center for Democratic Studies, my two primary intellectual homes. It will mostly be a party, with opportunities for guests to buy the book, at a discount, signed, if you like, but as we gather, my dear friend and colleague, Elzbieta Matynia, and I will also use the occasion to publicly discuss some of the implications of the Reinventing Political Culture, especially as it addresses two related questions. What scholarship can contribute to critical political life? And, what is a public sociology?

I hope the readers of Deliberately Considered who are in and around New York come to enjoy the party and take part in the discussion. The wonders of the Web allow for the circle of discussion to be much broader, for New Yorkers and for those who can’t make it on Monday.

Actually, the discussion started last Wednesday. Elzbieta and I met to talk about the book and the plans for the party over a delicious cappuccino at Taralluccci e Vino on 18^th Street near Union Square. She was in a notable self-reflective mood. What is it that we do? How does it relate to what other more professionally oriented scholars do and to what those who are more involved in direct political action (in power and resisting the prevailing powers) do? She talked about some presentations she has coming up: one in a conference at Harvard on women and the Arab Spring, the title of her talk will be “Revolution and its Discontents.” The other talk will be at Scranton University, her topic, “the greening of democracy.”

I told her that I have just turned down two attractive invitations I received to lecture in Poland in May, one to the Wroclaw Global Forum, to speak in the presence of the powerful, and the other to go to the remote town of Sejny, to speak to the remarkable Borderlands Foundation, a center of resistant sensibilities and creative activities, at their 21^st anniversary celebrations. For different reasons both offers were attractive, but for the same reason, I turned them down. I need time to teach and think. I am incapable of being a jet-setting intellectual non-stop. To work, I need to be closer to home, in my study and at The New School.

Over the years, I have gone out into the world, actively protested injustice and tried in my modest ways to support people who attempt to repair an imperfect world. My sociology has attempted to explain their repair work, as I supported it. How did young people in Poland manage to be independently creative and live according to their own ideals at the margins, in student theaters in a totalitarian political order? (The Persistence of Freedom) How is cultural independence sustained despite the workings of the market and state? (On Cultural Freedom) What does the sustained independence say about the alternatives to a decaying empire? (Beyond Glasnost: The Post Totalitarian Mind). How can we avoid in America the enervating false identification of cynicism with criticism? (The Cynical Society) How will democracy be constituted in totalitarian shadows? (After the Fall) What is the special role of intellectuals in supporting democratic life? (Civility and Subversion) And what are the alternatives to unthinking terrorism, anti-terrorism and anti-anti terrorism? (The Politics of Small Things)

Reinventing Political Culture continues my exploration and engagement. It underscores that my answers to the questions I have been addressing in my previous books are predicated upon the support and cultivation of a free and diverse public life, and that a central issue is the relationship between the powers and culture. I work to reinvent the concept of political culture in these terms and to show how the reinvention of specific political cultures, of specific configurations of the relationships between power and culture, has been a significant goal of creative political action in Central Europe, North America and the Middle East (the case studies of the book).

This is the way I began to answer Elzbieta’s concerns about public and more academic sociology over our coffee on Wednesday. We will continue the discussion on Monday. And I should add that this discussion will help inform my understanding of the amazing social movements of the past couple of years, from Tahrir Square to Zuccotti Park and beyond. I was invited to speak about these movements in May in Poland, invitations I unfortunately had to turn down. But I am committed to make sense of the resistance and reinvention of the activists in these movements, and in my modest way to support them, as has been my custom.