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.

A review of our policy on Afghanistan is due this month.  As I have already indicated, I think this is a war that is bound to fail if the current logic of engagement does not include a planned withdrawal.  The longer American and NATO troops stay there in large numbers with great visibility, I think, the stronger the support for those who fight against occupation.   But a rapid and complete disengagement will lead to a battle between the Taliban and the highly ineffective and corrupt government of Hamid Karzai, in which the victor is not known but the victims are the Afghan people.

It is truly a dilemma.

In the face of the dilemma, I think it is important to pay close attention to the facts on the ground.  Last week, in The New York Times there is a report on an instance of what I mean by “the politics of small things,” a report on a national women’s soccer team.

They play under great restrictions.  Their fathers, brothers and uncles frequently disapprove of their activities.  They actually have to practice on a NATO helicopter landing field, because outside the military zone, they are too vulnerable to attack.  They take great pride in their physical accomplishments.  Most recently, they actually defeated the women’s team of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force.  Khalida Popal, an official of the Afghan women’s soccer federation and long a team member, noted that “We wanted to show them Afghans are friendly people, not like the stupid people they are fighting.”

These women also reveal to us and to themselves the power of Afghan women to fight for themselves against great odds, and the importance of their struggle.  And as is the case of other instances of the politics of small things, such as the poetry café in Damascus I discussed in a previous post,  Afghanistan with its national women’s soccer team is a different place than it would be without these women playing and competing.  As I write this post, the Times reports, they are showing this difference in their first international competition, in Bangladesh in a tournament sponsored by the South Asian Football Federation.

Last night in my course on the sociology of Erving Goffman, we discussed the release of classified documents by WikiLeaks.  The students generally agreed with me that the publication was inappropriate and politically problematic.  I think actually only one person dissented from the consensus.  Given the general political orientation of the students and faculty of the New School, this was surprising.  We are far to the left of the general public opinion, to the left, in fact, of the political center of the American academic community.  Our first position is to be critical of the powers that be.

Why not disclose the inner workings of the global super power?  Why not “out” American and foreign diplomats for their hypocrisy?  We did indeed learn a lot about the world as it is through the WikiLeak disclosures.  On the one hand, Netanyahu apparently is actually for a two state solution, and on the other Arab governments are just as warlike in their approach to Iran as Israel.   China is not as steadfast in its support of North Korea and not as opposed to a unified Korea through an extension of South Korean sovereignty as is usually assumed.  And the Obama administration has been tough minded in coordinating international sanctions against Iran, as it has been unsteady with a series of awkward failures in closing Guantanamo Prison.

And, of course, The New York Times, yesterday justified publication, mostly in the name of the public’s right to know about the foibles of its government, and also noted today how the leaks reveal the wisdom and diplomatic success of the Obama administration.

Most of the opposition to the release is very specific.  It will hurt the prospects of peace in the Middle East.  It shows our hand to enemies, as it embarrasses friends.  But my concern, shared with my students is that as it undermines diplomacy, it increases the prospects for diplomacy’s alternatives.

In fact, given the social theorist we have been studying, Goffman, it actually is not that unexpected that my students and I share a concern about the latest from WikiLeaks.  Goffman studied social interaction.  He analyzed how people present themselves in everyday life, and the ritual practices that surround their presentations. He investigated the framing of action, which makes social understanding possible, and he investigates Forms of Talk , the book we were discussing last night.  Most crucially in understanding why we object to the leaks, he shows how all successful group interaction has a front and a back stage.  One is no more true than the other, nor does the presence of a backstage reveal the lie of the front stage.  In fact, the contamination of the front by the back can destroy successful interaction.  This is true of the performances that occur in a family and between families, among groups of individuals, at school, at work, and indeed in international diplomacy.   The contamination of the front by the back can lead to a breakdown in interaction.  Think of our relation with our friends and opponents, on the international stage but also down the block.  In order for successful interaction to occur, people have to share some things, hide others.

We did not proceed to have a political discussion about this last night.  After all, it was a class with its front and back stages and not a political event.  We saw the problem of staging as it illuminated a pressing topic of the day, but we actually didn’t declare and explain our political positions.  There were suggestions, but not careful exploration and debate.  I try to avoid that in my classes as a matter of principle.  I just had a sense of where people stood, perhaps they can reply to this post to fully explain their political positions.

But at DC, I can be more forthright.  I believe WikiLeaks’ disclosures present a clear and present danger to world peace.  I make this bold assertion not because of any particular piece of information that may be particularly damaging, though such information surely has been released.  But because the disclosures as a whole undermine the process of diplomacy as a form of interaction, when diplomacy is what stands between us and war and is a key tool to end foolish wars.  As I indicated in an earlier post, I am becoming more and more convinced that military solutions to the problems of the day are impractical, not likely to yield the desired results.  By  weakening diplomacy, war becomes the default option.  On good peacenik grounds, I am concerned.