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13ГРАЖДАНСКАЯ СФЕРА VS ПУБЛИЧНАЯ СФЕРА / Телемост с Джеффри Александером Civil sphere vs public sphere / Telebridge with Jeffrey Alexander;
Higher school of economics (Moscow, Russia) -Yale university (New Haven, USA), 10 February 2010
Джеффри Александер (род. 1945)
Один из бесспорных лидеров современной социологии, профессор Йельского университета, заслуженный профессор Калифорнийского университета в Лос-Анджелесе, совместно с Р. Айерманом возглавляет Центр культурной социологии Йельского университета. Представитель неофункционализма (термин «неофункционализм» был введен в научный оборот им самим в 1985 г.). Учитывая критику функционализма 19601970-х годов, дополнил концепцию Т. Парсонса достижениями других социологических школ, прежде всего идеями, связанными с конфликтом и феноменологией. Среди последних работ Александера: «Значения социальной жизни: Культурная социология» (2003), «Гражданская сфера» (2006).
Participants
JA - Jeffrey Alexander, Yale University
NP - Nikita Pokrovsky, HSE
AB - Alex Boklin, HSE
DP - Dmitry Popov, HSE
SL - Sergei Lebedev, Moscow State University
JA: I would start with some background introduction to my work on the civil sphere. «The civil sphere» draws out of different trends of my work but what is most distinctive about it is its cultural sociological dimension.
Cultural sociology is something that I began to define in my own particular manner in the middle and late 1980s. This is an effort to put meaning, pat-
terns of meaning and meaning-making at the center of social science, to make meaning into an independent variable to give culture relative autonomy.
The background of this goes back to Durkheim. In the early 1980s I said that we needed to make a distinction between the middle theory of Durkheim and late Durkheim. Late Durkheim is especially in «The elementary forms of the religious life», which is a study of the symbolic classification system of the Australian aborigines, the rituals, the division of symbols into the sacred and profane, the energy that circulates among the aborigines, and the importance of culture. That book by Durkheim, published in 1912, was taken as a foundational text for anthropology but not sociology. Sociology focused on «The division of labour in society» (1893), «Suicide» (1897) and «The rules of the sociological method» (1895). My interpretation of Durkheim was that those middle period works of the 1890s were too functionalist and too mechanical; it was really Durkheim toward the end of his life who emphasized symbolic and emotional energy which we should focus on.
In doing so, I wanted to argue against the idea that traditional and modern lives are radically different in terms of the role of emotions, tradition, and meanings. This is one of the most pernicious divides that marks modern social science. Of course, there is a big difference between a traditional and a modern society, there is no doubt about the role of science, urbanism, education, rationality etc, but does that mean that modern people have given up irrational feelings and commitments to belief systems that can't be proven by science? The assumption of Marx, Weber, early Durkheim, also Simmel in many respects, and many others since is that there is this radical break between tradition and modernity: for example, when anthropologists study traditional societies, they might use the tools of symbolic analysis, but when they study modern societies, they have to focus entirely on the economic organization, on the role of demographic variables, on society as purely bureaucratic.
In the 1980s, I tried to develop conceptual tools for studying culture, meaning, codes and narratives inside the modern societies. For instance, I wrote an article on the computer, «The sacred and profane information machine» which is in a book called «The meanings of social life: A cultural sociology». I said that the computer is, of course, a piece of immensely efficient and rational technology, but it is also a gigantic symbol that people have very irrational feelings about; they look to the computer as a vehicle of salvation and a machine that threatens damnation, that threatens to bring an apocalyptic end of the world.
In the late 1980s I was studying politics, in which I have always been interested, and wrote an essay on the Watergate crisis in the US, which was created by president Nixon. One of the things I realized, as I was beginning to learn about symbolic structures, is that late Durkheim has to be updated and connected to semiotic theories - for example, Barthes, Lévi-Strauss, later on Foucault and also to the hermeneutical theories of Dilthey and others, and - in the contemporary context - to the great symbolic anthropology of the late 20th
century - for example, Mary Douglas, Clifford Geertz, and Victor Turner. So basically my concern as a cultural sociologist was to synthesize these different elements in a way that would produce models of analysis that could be subjected to rational empirical methods and come up with strong and robust findings.
In the late 1980s and 1990s, I studied the history and contemporary contours of political, social, economic, governmental, racial, gender, religious conflicts that occur in the public sphere of the United States particularly, but other countries as well. And instead of thinking of those conflicts as conflicts primarily over the material resources or social capital (such that the actors had nothing in common with each other - in other words, a game theoretical model), it seemed more true to me that the actors often actually spoke a common language. Even while they were in a very serious conflict with each other, they articulated their different interests in terms of a shared public language of which they were not really aware. I decipher this language as a binary code which I call «the discourse of civil society». I decided that was the language about motives, relations and institutions that had highly polarized quality of the sacred and profane, good and bad, and that what people were fighting over was not only material interest but the symbolic construction of themselves and others and that if they could construct their opponents in a polluted manner then those would look to the public audience as if they were undeserving of opposition in the civil sphere and were not worthy people in civil terms.
Once I had that insight, I built a new theory of the civil sphere and in doing that I could take on board not only cultural theories, but also institutional theories which were a bit of Durkheim, partly Weber, a lot of Parsons. Weber and Parsons developed a theory of different value spheres and different institutional worlds, and they develop a basic notion of systems - so you could talk about the relative autonomy of different spheres (civil, political, sphere, family, religious, ethnic or racial) from each other. It seemed to me that I could develop a more sociological understanding of democracy - that democracy exists to the degree that civil sphere assumes relative independence from other spheres. And I define the civil sphere as a sphere organized around an ideal of solidarity where each person has strong feelings of identification with every other member of the society, but the identification with people defined as autonomous individuals. So it is an attempt to combine individual with the communal and this is quite close to Durkheim's understanding of «the cult of the individual» or to what Parsons called «institutionalized individualism».
I don't believe that civil solidarity has been given nearly enough attention in social theory or in social sciences. Social sciences have mainly talked about the nation, the state, a bit about the legal order, of course, economic inequality a lot, ethnicity etc, but the sphere of civil solidarity is rarely the object of social analysis, so my aim was to develop a new object of study. What I wanted to lay out was, in a kind of Mertonian way, a middle range theory of the civil sphere, not simply a meta-theory in a philosophical or normative sense of which
Habermas' work «The structural transformation of the public sphere» is an example. But my aim was very sociological - I wanted to elaborate a set of concepts which would enable people to do research and to develop explanations.
I have two main levels: the level of the discourse of civil society which I have described in a set of complex languages and then the institutional level which I divide into the communicative and the regulative. The communicative gives a central role for mass communication, for public opinion polling, and for civil associations, and the regulative has more to do with using the discourse of civil society to develop coercive instructions to the state and to the individuals in the society. Of course, the key to a democracy is if the people on their own can regulate state power. That is the critical issue, because if they can do that to a significant degree, then they can also regulate economic, religious or patriarchal power. For example, if you have a relatively autonomous mass media, that is tremendously significant in affecting public opinion and social consciousness, and people who are in power have to answer to this public opinion. That is why when a society moves away from democracy, it is extremely important for authoritarian powers to gradually gain control of newspapers and television stations and why professional journalism is one of the least studied but most significant institutions in a civil society.
It is a shame - I don't know what it is like in Russia but in the United States - the study of mass media is in specialized schools that are called «media schools» or «journalism schools» and it is rarely a part of the social science -sociologists rarely study newspapers or televisions. Anyway, the communicative institutions are critical - another example is polls. The more a society becomes authoritarian the less is public polling important. Polls seem as if they are purely scientific - they take random sampling to develop public opinion, but polling provides a public force that can shock people in a moral manner - for instance, it can say that the public doesn't like what the president of the United States is doing. If Obama is doing something and people think it is popular, and then public opinion polls reveal that actually there is skepticism among the majority of citizen about President Obama's health care plan - well that kind of stops him! There is no institutional regulation, but then the journalists say: «How do you respond to the fact that the public doesn't like what you are doing?» and he feels compelled to answer in a way because he is under obligation of solidarity. Of course he is also worried for his own material interest and that gets to the regulatory institutions, because every one, two, three or four years there are elections. The electoral system (free and fair voting) is a critical regulation: every once in a while public opinion translates into a vote which means
that people can be kicked out of the office.
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One of the things that I struggle with in developing this theory is the relationship between civil sphere and public sphere - there is a mess with the terms and I address this when I talk about the civil society. In the literature you must
have met mostly civil society; I wanted to try to develop a distinctive way of speaking of civil society as a sphere that is vis-à-vis other social spheres whereas the traditional political theory and social theory way of thinking about civil society is all spheres outside of the state or all social issues outside of the state. For me, the civil sphere is different than the public sphere; many of the performances in the public sphere are oriented towards the extensions or contractions of civil society and civil obligations, but many are not. This is the argument that I have made.
The Habermasean perspective, which is very powerful today, traces its roots back to Plato and Aristotle and the ideas of Socrates - back to the Greek polis in republican Greece. «Publicness is identical with democracy» - that is Habermas' argument. I don't agree with that because what I see is that public-ness is a performative space in which people - political actors, social actors -can make arguments against democracy that can be projected to everybody. In the 1920s and early 1930s in Germany, the Hitler movement and the Nazi movement performed on the public stage as very effective actors and increased anti-Semitism, nationalism and eventually succeeded in gaining the most votes in 1933! And in the United States I see many very conservative actors making effective performances on the public stage.
Hannah Arendt is very interested in the public as well and she also, as Habermas does, takes her interest back to the Greek polis and to the classical writings of the ancient philosophers. But Arendt has a much more cultural and symbolic understanding of the public sphere. Habermas' understanding of the public sphere is very rationalistic: he believes that people are compelled to present good reasons, that there is an urge to reach consensus, that you are bound by certain norms of transparency etc, whereas Arendt realizes that the public sphere is a sphere of what she calls «agonism» and she uses the notion of per-formativity - the sphere of speaking and acting individuals. I feel that my understanding of the public sphere is closer to Arendt's.
In the last decade, I have tried to develop a theory of social performances. Social performances are ways that actors try to get results in interaction, but they do so culturally and symbolically, not through rational action. The idea of social performance tries to embrace a more pragmatic dimension and connect it to a cultural dimension - that is why I call it a theory of cultural pragmatics. If you look at the history of post-World War II sociology you see the work of Erving Goffman and his first and most important book «The presentation of self in everyday life» published in 1956. It is all about presentation, performativity, and there are a lot of other developments like the work of John Austin with the notions of ordinary language and performance. So I try to bring theater studies,
performance studies into cultural theory.
* * *
AB: My question will generally refer to the relation between the civil sphere and Internet technologies. We may point out quite a number of negative
intrusions that can be made into civil sphere - by capitalism, by state, by religion etc. But as far as I understand there is at least one danger that comes from within - this is the problem of commercialization or bureaucratization of civil sphere. If we take what is called «independent mass media» or trade unions fighting for workers' rights, they all imply inequality within their organization (including unequal distribution of power), they all need some funds in order to keep on existing. And this may turn to noncivil institutions which demonstrate these features. So the question is: how would you evaluate the potential and the role of Internet technologies - in particular Wikipedia which helps to share information for free and can be contributed to freely, or Youtube which was the only channel for information from Iran when all other media were blocked by authorities after the election, or social networks like Facebook? I suppose, these could be really useful instruments for constructing and sustaining civil sphere.
JA: Concerning the first point about commercialism, I would say that spheres outside of the civil sphere including economic and private capitalism are not necessarily anticivil, but they are noncivil. I identify three ideal-typical modes of relation between civil and noncivil: facilitating input, destructive intrusion and civil repair. I argue there it is up to the society at particular time to decide if something is a destructive intrusion or not - in other words, whether it is anticivil. It is not objectively anticivil: for example, the patriarchal arrangements of a traditional family where a male was in power over the female was not regarded as an anticivil institution for most of modern societies. If you look at Habermas' book, he actually argues that patriarchal family was essential to the vigorous public sphere and ethics, but in our days - at least insofar as we accept feminism as a strong moral argument - we often feel that that family was anticivil, that it does not give facilitating inputs to the civil sphere, but is something that the civil sphere needs to reconstruct to give more rights to women so to protect them.
I would say, the same is with business. The history of the relations of private capitalism and the civil sphere is always changing and always dynamic. For example, the safety and the conditions of workers in factory, which are fairly regulated now, used to be unregulated. Is there unemployment insurance for people when they are fired? Is there right for workers to organize their own trade unions? These are continually negotiated.
The issue of independent media is also very important. On the one hand, the media is made for the purpose of making profit and one would say this is anticivil. But I would argue that that it really depends more on the profession of journalism - to what degree does it form a self-regulating professional organization - and the freedom of the people who write the scripts and the news. How much do they control? How much do the people who own the media control? These are big issues to study.
The second part of your question that was about all the new, let's say, «social relations media». Definitely in a society which is very state-controlled, where there is a suppression of the autonomy of media, you find that these so-
cial networking tools are absolutely essential because they are the only way people can communicate directly with one another and public opinion can form, and broader solidarity constructed. In a society like the Unites States, however, networking media do are not as crucial, for there are other, more professional, and more deeply institutionalized communicative institutions in the civil sphere.
It is quite a challenging problem, for example, to figure out what the relationship is of blogging to the communicative media of the civil sphere. If you look at the blogging you see blogs are very partisan and very «prejudiced». Blogs are organized nationally around right wing and left wing opinions; they don't correspond to the utopian ideology or the utopian discourse of the Internet. As a cultural sociologist I would look at the Internet not as an objective thing (although it does have objective possibilities), but there has also been a utopian discourse in a company of the introduction of the Internet - a utopian discourse of freedom, solidarity, democracy.
For example, people say: «The Chinese government will not be able to maintain its authoritarian control once that Internet comes to China» as if a purely technological development has a gigantic cultural meaning attached to it, and thus its effects are inevitable. But as we see in China, the Internet will be controlled to a high degree by the state and we experienced a tremendous conflict between Google and the Chinese Communist Party. As I understand, in Russia it is not like that and there is still complete freedom of the Internet use. All of these social networking technologies are a new kind of communicative institution and they should be written about, but in a manner that is careful not to endorse them as an inherently democratic institution.
SL: I would like to bring up again the topic of mass media and communication. Could you please expand on how they produce ideology, myths and in this way influence society and act as a means of power?
JA: In the United States and Europe there has been a very long standing debate about the relationship between mass media and mass public opinion. Basically, there are two very well established standpoints - one is that the mass media is a manipulator of opinion, independently of society, but the other side of research says that is not true, that ideologies or narratives of the mass media are filtered through the primary and secondary groups of the civil society. Projection and reception may be not synchronized, and you can have a state mass media projecting things which people just do not believe. Of course, when the mass media are controlled not by the civil society but by the state or by a rapacious capitalist and are not affected by independent journalism, they are an anticivil force - but it does not mean that they have complete control of what people think; there are other ways for people to form opinion. Even in the darkest days of the Soviet Union, from my observation, it was not clear that the mass of the people believed the propaganda machine of the state, and there were independent circulations of opinions, there were artists, there were intellectuals.
Here is the way that I think of this: let's say a giant company hires an expensive advertising firm and they design a huge advertising campaign to con-
vince people of X, Y or Z - they do not necessarily succeed and convince. There are many studies of such failures. So we can't assume that all the messages that come in are accepted. It depends on what other opportunities people do have to form opinions and on what is the role of informal communication. What about religion? Is religion a form of public opinion formation that has autonomy vis-à-vis the mass-media? What is the media's relation of family structure or ethnicity? What region are you from? Does this affect your opinion of things apart from the media? There are many ways to sustain counter opinion that can be quite separated from mass media.
DP: You are talking about mass media as a means of creating civil definitions, but it can also become a tool of creating simulacra, in terms of Baudrillard, so this might be just another type of controlling the society, another way of making people believe something what those who control the mass media want them to believe. The question is, in other words, if civil sphere can be simulated? Is it a real threat, from your point of view?
JA: I like the way this question puts Baudrillard's, post-modern, and Neo-Marxist critique of contemporary society in contact with my theory of the civil sphere.
Once you have a society where mass media is present, then performativ-ity has a central place. None of us will ever meet personally and have a chance to evaluate in a face-to-face way those who are in power over us. 99.9% percent of us will never meet these people really - that is the fundamental condition of a large-scale modern and post-modern society. But that means that our understanding of who they are and their moral stature is a matter of projecting performance. When we evaluate performances we are always answering if they are fake or authentic, so a simulacrum is a judgment that the performance is fake. Baudrillard worked with the idea that there is an authentic reality which he knows as an analyst and a fake reality which he also knows, and that puts him close to Frankfurt critical theory. He sees mass media as culture industry and argues that in a post-modern society most of performances in the public are fake.
All public lives, all representations of power are matters of performativity and it is up to the public or what I call «citizen audience» to attribute authenticity and sincerity or to make a critical judgment that the performances are fake or not. In fact, the currency that circulates through a civil society, through its public spaces, is judgments as to «that is fake», «that is authentic», «he is moral», «he is pretending». Yes, other social conditions would make it more easy to pretend to be somebody whom you are not, and the answer would be if the mass media are controlled by a government or a corrupt capitalist class or businessmen people who are in league with the government, and if there is no competition between media and between political parties - that makes it harder for the public to reach an opinion about authenticity.
I wrote about this problem in a book that I have recently completed: The performance of politics: Obama's victory and the democratic struggle for
power (Oxford University Press, 2010). I said it would be technologically possible, for example, for the Obama or the McCain campaign to fake every single image, that they could pretend there were giant crowds when there were just a few people, they could pretend that people were applauding when they were not. There are immense technological possibilities. So the question is: why does not that happen in more or less competitive democracy? There is a chance to manipulate, so why don't political candidates go all the way towards a real simulacra? I think it is because if you did that, you would be exposed in a day, or a week, or a month by the other side, by other media, and you would be exposed as violating the normative constraints of the discourse of civil society which demands honesty, responsibility, sincerity. You could be impeached, arrested or put in jail.
NP: How would you see the role of a sociologist in such conditions -whether a sociologist should demonstrate the authenticity of the process? Do you think the sociologist should be involved in analyzing the situation or a sociologist should be outside of those things? What would be a specific role of a sociologist in civil sphere?
JA: There are two different roles: there is a role of an intellectual and the role of a professional sociologist. Certainly, sometimes a person is both a public intellectual and an academic sociologist, but often not. Intellectuals can play different roles. One is very partisan - right-wing intellectuals, left-wing intellectuals. The role of such an intellectual is to speak not on behalf of the civil sphere but on behalf of particular interests. Yes, they are on the public stage, but they are people who formulate ideologies.
On the other hand, there is an intellectualist ideal, that goes back to Socrates, of people who speak on behalf of critical discourse of the civil sphere: Sakharov or Solzhenitsyn in the history of Russia, Habermas in Germany, Sartre and sometimes even Foucault in France. The key to this role is the word «disinterest»: «disinterested» means somebody who does not have a particular side and can step back therefore from a contest. I think that is the role of the academic intellectual as well. In a civil society an academic could enter a debate and say: «This is a fixed election, this is a simulacrum, this is not democracy», because the authority of a sociologist or an academic can be that we are speaking from a more universalistic point: «I am making a general remark about this entire situation, I am not for the left, I am not for the right, I represent myself from the point of view of the public».
NP: If I speak as an intellectual like Sakharov or Solzhenitsyn, but being a sociologist myself, I should first of all announce my role and status as an interested moral speaker, although I am a sociologist, but I am speaking on behalf of the society as a citizen. But in other case I should represent myself as a professional, disinterested, neutral value-free sociologist and say «I am speaking as a medical doctor to you, I am telling you your diagnosis». Is it true that you or myself or any other colleagues of ours should definitely represent themselves either as citizens or sociologists and not mix up those two roles?
JA: Those are ideal types, and in concrete reality we all mix those roles. An economist, a constitutional lawyer, a medical expert or an expert in public health might say: 'I am an expert in this and I am telling you that the Russian economy has so much corruption' (I am purely hypothetical here!). «The level of corruption is 55%, and if we don't lower it to 20%, we will not have a productive economy» - that is a person speaking as an expert but obviously also as a citizen, because why would he care about corruption? Because he cares about solidarity, about obligations to others, about honesty - so we do mix these two roles together. But it is possibly different from saying «I am a member of a liberal party and therefore I want you to do this or that».
NP: Then definitely you are not an expert, but a representative of the political party.
JA: And a lot of intellectuals like to do that.
* * *
AB: To what extent does iconic experience affect modern society, what is the influence of it and whether it is a universal process which we may find in all the cultures and societies all over the world?
JA: For me, the critical issue is this: is iconic experience and iconic representation also present in a mechanical society, a modern society or it is only part of a religious society or a traditional society? For example, Russian orthodox churches are famous for icons, but undoubtedly the Soviet Union was filled with icons too?
As I said at the beginning of this seminar, I am very critical of the idea that there is a major break or epistemological difference between traditional and modern societies. Roland Barthes, in his collection of essays called «Mythologies», wrote a short and brilliant essay called «Einstein's brain». To speak of the image of Einstein is to see the significance of iconic representation, because that image is a way of communicating a whole set of descriptive meanings about the modern world - the role of physics, the role of mathematics, the mystery of science, positive and negative possibilities. So for me, the iconic means that we represent cultural meanings not only through our discourse, in written and spoken languages, but also through the material culture meaning through the aesthetic constructions of the surfaces of things.
I don't know any of you except Nikita (I had a pleasure of him coming into my house in New Haven). But I am looking at you and I see your faces, your hairstyles, how you are holding your hands, how you dress, and I am making - unconsciously largely - inductions about how you are thinking, feeling, who you are. I may probably be mistaken about 95% of the things I am thinking. But that is the role of surface, of representation, so my answer is that iconic experience is very important everywhere - that is why we have pictures of our beloved leaders on billboard.
NP: Jeffrey, why do you say you are 95% mistaken? Because you are from a different culture. When I look at my students, I am not 95% mistaken,
because I belong to this culture and I have the power of interpretation and reading the iconic, right?
JA: Exactly. Of course, to the degree that your students and I are a part of the global culture where there is an international sense of style, then I have more security and can make more judgments better than 95%.
AB: You have already said that from your standpoint, iconic experience is truly important for different cultures in all historical periods. What is the role of emotions in iconic experience and, in general, in social and cultural systems?
JA: It is difficult for me to understand emotions without thinking of their symbolic representation. Say, ideas of pollution, fear of things stigmatized, feelings of shame or an embarrassment - emotions are attached to cultural codes, these social codes are patterned, they are institutionalized, and they are nor something that we possess as individuals. Why do we wear clothes instead of walking naked? It is a pretty significant thing and it is obviously about the coding of the emotions. Anger, joy, sadness - these are connected to narratives and brought forth by text - by progressive, tragic or melodramatic narratives. We should not study emotions in isolation from cultural sociology.
AB: You write that contact with iconic goes through our senses and transmits meaning, but at the same time that is a transmission without communicating. You also point out that iconical is about experience and to be iconi-cally conscious is to be able to understand without knowing. How do you think, is reflection about why we worship icons or why somebody wants to be an icon, somehow kills or stops «iconic consciousness»? Schütz wrote that at the very moment we start reflecting on dreams or fantasies, we are no longer dreaming or engaged in the sphere of fantasies.
JA: Reflection is not the same as iconic experience - it is an attempt to step outside of the flow of iconic experience, but being able to engage in reflection is itself partly stimulated by iconic attachments. For example, if you become attached to your sociology professor as an iconic figure and you learn to imitate him or her and you internalize his critical thinking in education - that iconic experience can allow you to be reflective and non-iconic vis-à-vis society. For example, in a radical social movement it is quite common to admire, even to worship a popular mass leader. This means there is iconic experience, so membership in the group is often a very unreflective set of emotions. But the members of that movement have critical reflection towards, let's say, business or capitalist media.
I don't think that there is a danger that reflection ends iconic experience forever: you can have reflections on dreams but you are still going to dream every night. You don't stop yourself from dreaming, you wake up and you try like Freud did in the interpretation of dreams to gain some independence from the act of dreaming, but it does not mean you are not going to dream. You can think and write a book about love, but it does not mean you are not going to fall in love. And when you fall in love, you have lost your ability for reflection.
