Small things, deep resonance Open Access

Alternatives exist. Small things can make a difference. The power of culture can, sometimes and in some circumstances, break free from the culture of power.

Through the work of scholarship, institution building, and public deliberation, Jeffrey Goldfarb demonstrates that alternatives appear if we are willing to attend to what takes place on the margins. In so doing he has demonstrated the relevance of that which is often overlooked – the significance of small things. Small Things, Deep Resonance began as a symposium celebrating not only his academic career as Professor of Sociology at the New School for Social Research, but also his work as editor of Public Seminar, co-founder of the Democracy and Diversity Institute, and founding member of the Democracy Seminar. Organised by New School colleagues Robin Wagner-Pacifici and Elzbieta Matynia, as well as former students Nancy Hanrahan, Yifat Gutman, and Irit Dekel, participants reflected on the import and impact of a life spent enacting a collaborative, radically democratic, sociological imagination.

Considering Goldfarb’s gift for fostering democratic engagement across disciplines, geographical borders, and time zones, authors in this special section focus on four themes that are central to Goldfarb’s scholarship: an enduring fascination with cultural freedom, a recurring suspicion of cynicism, theorisation of the politics of small things, and a steady insistence on the power of ‘acting as if’.

Writing within the tradition of symbolic interactionism and the phenomenological sociology of Alfred Schutz and Stanford Lyman, Goldfarb's political and cultural sociology combines theoretical depth with a journalistic clarity of expression and a playwright's eye for fine detail. This combination allows his work to remain both rigorous and attentive to the broader relevance of the often-overlooked conversations, gestures, habits, practices, and routines that shape our everyday life. It is this consistent attention to the way that seemingly quotidian social interactions can produce cultural freedom and construct political alternatives that allows Goldfarb to show how individuals are able to generate alternatives to powerlessness and resist cynicism. Indeed, it is the budding possibilities and potential hazards in his effort to demonstrate the macro-political relevance of the creative agency found in micro-interactions that are taken up in many of the articles in Small Things, Deep Resonance.

The connection between the macro and micro, for Goldfarb, is underwritten by the work of Hannah Arendt, Erving Goffman, and Georg Simmel. With Arendt and Goffman, his attention is consistently drawn to the theatrical or ‘dramaturgical’ aspects of how individuals appear to one another in public. Although his early work attended specifically to the theatre as a space of cultural freedom, Goldfarb argued that it was not only the stage that could serve as the space of mutual appearance. Expanding on Arendt's famous metaphor of the table – that familiar setting which brings people together while also separating them – Goldfarb's work has sought out and highlighted the liminal spaces wherein persons can appear in their differences and speak with one another about issues of general concern.

Like Simmel, Goldfarb is fascinated by a cultural critique of practices that are often overlooked in everyday life. Such consistent attention to what we might call, with Michel de Certeau, the ‘tactics’ through which people resist strategies of domination, means that Goldfarb's writing might feel optimistic, even sanguine – as if he underestimates the many ways that power can constrain agency. However, Goldfarb resists falling prey to such cynicism.

The four themes that govern his scholarship – cultural freedom, resistance to cynicism, the politics of small things, and acting as if – are found in nuce in Goldfarb's early intellectual life. In his first book, The persistence of freedom (1980), he drew on the case of marginal Polish theatre groups operating within a Soviet-controlled state to show that cultural freedom can be enacted even when democratic political structures are lacking. He continued this line of examination in On cultural freedom (1982), where he compared American and Polish cultures and demonstrated how art opens spaces for freedom under widely differing political regimes. Indeed, it was this comparison that led Goldfarb to conclude ‘that cultural freedom, while realized in different contexts, has an underlying universality – critical creative resistance to systematic constraints’ (1982, p. 37). With his focus on social interaction, the universality of cultural freedom does not transform into a reified ideological tool. Instead, it remains a process that can be strengthened or inhibited.

Perhaps Goldfarb's most prescient book, however, was Beyond glasnost: The post totalitarian mind (1989). There he analysed the work of Milan Kundera, Czesław Miłosz, Václav Havel, and Adam Michnik, seeing them as cultural examples of the internal disruption of a totalitarian mentality. His argument is that it was their work, rather than moderate shifts in official policy, that constituted real alternatives to totalitarianism by expanding pockets of cultural freedom. This allowed Goldfarb to anticipate the collapse of the Soviet regime before it happened. Although cultural freedom was the dominant focus of his earlier work, subsequent themes were already becoming visible within it. If Beyond glasnost addressed cynicism pervasive in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, The cynical society (1991) reveals how deep currents of cynicism moving through Western societies threatened free speech and action by inducing a ‘culture of powerlessness’ (1991, p. 14). As authors of this special section concur, Goldfarb's argument that ‘the single most pressing challenge facing American democracy today is widespread cynicism’ has lost none of its relevance (Goldfarb, 1991, p. 1).

After 1989 Goldfarb continued to think publicly about the meaning of democratic transformations, resulting in the publication of After the fall (1992) and Civility and subversion (1998). While the former examined ongoing opportunities (and dilemmas) of democratisation, the latter was a powerful call for public intellectuals to support the ongoing project of democratisation by resisting political cynicism, by civilising uncivil public debate, and by subverting problematic common sense. While these two, more public, books were important in their own ways, it was the publication of The politics of small things (Goldfarb, 2006) that served as the most important, and mature, statement of his ideas.

Goldfarb's argument is that an often-unrecognised power is generated by the modest social interactions that take place within civil society. It is this power that he calls the politics of small things. Drawing on Dorothy and W. I. Thomas’ insight that when participants in a situation define something as real it becomes real, in its consequences, the politics of small things is the struggle to collectively define a situation such that actors within it can act freely (cf. Thomas and Thomas 1928). It is, however, in his rereading of Václav Havel's (2018) famous manifesto ‘The power of the powerless’ where Goldfarb demonstrates the political efficacy of the power of small things. Havel's work is exemplary because of its insistence that macro-structures of deceit and control can, in fact, be contested and deconstructed by the small actions of a greengrocer. Goldfarb puts a similar emphasis on the political efficacy of defining one's own situation in normatively democratic fashion in Reinventing political culture (2012).

While Goldfarb's scholarship has developed, his sociological interest in democratic culture has persisted. What, after all, is his attention to underground Polish theatre as a site of cultural freedom than an inchoate instance of the politics of small things? And what is his insistent challenge to public intellectuals to resist the temptations of cynicism than a self-reflective attempt to act ‘as if’ and so redefine our own political situation? Important as it is, however, the trajectory of Goldfarb's intellectual life traces only one of his two major, public contributions. The other is his steady practice of collaboration, activism, and institution-building – particularly, as Judith Friedlander has written, his contribution to ‘renewing the legacy of the University in Exile by supporting dissident intellectuals in East and Central Europe’ (2019, p. 328).

Despite an unquestionable theoretical interest in institutions, not all sociologists prove to be positive contributors to, or constructors of them. Over the course of his career at the New School, Goldfarb proved to be both.

As Friedlander recounts in A light in dark times (2019), early in his career Goldfarb played an essential part in the revitalisation and restoration of the New School's Graduate Faculty. This project began in earnest under the leadership of Jonathan Fanton, whose 17-year presidency of the New School began in 1982, and Ira Katznelson, who served as Dean of the Graduate Faculty during the first years of Fanton's tenure. Such revitalisation was necessary because, despite being the historical home of sociologists such as Alfred Schutz and Peter Berger, in the early 1980s its status was precarious. It was through their visionary work that a commitment was made to renew the Graduate Faculty. Goldfarb and Andrew Arato contributed by suggesting the hiring of prominent Eastern European faculty. Sparked by this request, and sustained by Goldfarb's participation in the Enabling Committee, this process resulted in the renewal of the University in Exile and the appointment to New School positions of scholars such as Agnes Heller, Ferenc Feher, and Elzbieta Matynia.

This restoration of the Graduate Faculty was timely given that 1984 marked the 50th anniversary of the New School as a University in Exile. To commemorate this milestone, the New School made the decision to award an honorary doctorate to the dissident Polish journalist Adam Michnik. Since Michnik was in prison at that time, Nobel laureate Czesław Miłosz travelled to New York and accepted the award on his behalf. This meant that it was only in December 1984, when Michnik was finally released from prison, that Goldfarb and Jonathan Fanton were able to travel to Poland to present him the doctorate in person.

It was during the conversation that followed this small awards ceremony that Michnik suggested that he and Goldfarb form an international seminar to discuss the political writings of Hannah Arendt, which were then banned in Poland. It was this conversation that gave birth to the Democracy Seminar, a series of collaborative, semi-clandestine roundtables between activists and scholars who would have otherwise been separated by the Iron Curtain. Although the seminars, which initially ran from 1984 to 1994, began with discussions of Arendt's The origins of totalitarianism, the topics broadened, allowing participants to think together about democratic theory and practice. Over its first decade of operation, the Democracy Seminar formed an underground network that connected Eastern European dissidents ‘not only to intellectuals in New York but to members of the opposition in other East European countries’ (Friedlander, 2019, p. 333). After a hiatus, the Democracy Seminar resumed its publishing and organising activities in 2018.

Goldfarb subsequently collaborated with his long-time friend and colleague Elzbieta Matynia to establish the Democracy and Diversity Institute, an interdisciplinary academic forum held first in Poland and later in South Africa. For more than 30 years, the Institute has brought together international groups of scholars, students, and activists to consider the possibility and fragility of democratic political and cultural life (Democracy Seminar Oral History Project 2020, 2020).

The effects of such sustained commitment to institutional and activist engagement can be seen not only in Goldfarb's scholarly work – it is notable that Beyond glasnost was being conceived and written in the first years of the Democracy Seminar, for example – but also in his public writing. Indeed, it was in the years following the publication of The politics of small things that Goldfarb founded the website Deliberately Considered. Initially a place to share his thoughts on the Obama revolution, over the three years of its existence it became a gathering place for dozens of scholars, including the sociologist Gary Alan Fine and the philosopher Michael Weinman. In 2013, this project grew into the online journal Public Seminar, which over the last decade has continued to sustain and advance Goldfarb's lifelong project of furthering democratic debate about the pressing issues of the day.

The authors of Small Things, Deep Resonance have studied and taught with Goldfarb at the New School, participated in the Democracy Seminar, contributed to Public Seminar, or participated in the Democracy and Diversity Institute. The articles reflect on different aspects of Goldfarb's long-standing interest in democratic culture in Eastern Europe and the United States, belief in the imaginative power of theatre, literature, music, and poetry to foster common ground, the complex relationship between collective memory and the media; and critical attempts to find alternatives to repression and exclusion.

In so doing these authors take up, critique, and think about the consequences of Goldfarb's focus on cultural freedom, cynicism, the politics of small things, and ‘acting as if’. Moreover, they share Goldfarb's belief in the power of concerted action and discussion to temper the allure of cynicism and the normalisation of extremism. The special section includes articles by former students: Yifat Gutman, Zachary Metz, Nancy Hanrahan, Patrick Gilger, and Siobhan Kattago, as well as close colleagues: Claire Potter, from the New School, Daniel Dayan from Sciences Po, and Krzysztof Czyzewski from the Borderlands Foundation in Poland.

Small Things, Deep Resonance opens with Yifat Gutman's article ‘The Power of Fiction and a Shared Framework in Confronting Contested Pasts’. Influenced by Goldfarb's concept of ‘acting as if’ one was free, Gutman analyses artistic memorial interventions that pose the question: ‘what if’ past events had been different? If Goldfarb's ‘as if’ points to interaction within shared public spaces, Gutman's ‘what if’ asks how such interaction can be facilitated in situations of conflict without ignoring past violence. Sharing Goldfarb's interest in memory, tradition, and literature, Gutman draws on examples of how the Nakba is remembered by social actors in Israel-Palestine, concluding that theorising ‘what if’ allows for a new mode of memory activism that can help facilitate ‘as if’.

Like Gutman, Zachary Metz's essay confronts the difficulties of overcoming conflict. In his article, ‘The Intimacy of Enemies: Peacebuilding and the Politics of Small Things’, Metz argues that the politics of small things can respond even to the deep challenges of conflict resolution. Drawing on his own experience of working with local peacebuilding actors in post-war contexts, Metz shows that attention to small things – to gestures, intonation, and language – can open space for what he calls ‘the intimacy of enemies’. Like Gutman, Metz sees that even individuals with deeply differing commitments can nevertheless learn to ‘act as if’ they might one day exist peacefully. In contrast to what he calls the ‘politics of big things’ that so often dominates peace-making processes, Metz shows how emphasising the politics of small things allows alternatives to emerge from below, alternatives that can then solidify into ‘small zones of independence and dignity’ (Goldfarb, 2006, p. 6, quoted in Metz).

Patrick Gilger's article, ‘Sociology beyond suspicion’ places Goldfarb in dialogue with social theorists Zygmunt Bauman and Bruno Latour. Attending both to Goldfarb's scholarship and character, Gilger shows how his interactional, anti-cynical, sociology opens a way beyond the aloof, cynical, and suspicious ethos that animates so much of contemporary scholarship. It is how Goldfarb enacts this ‘critique of critique’, how he avoids being mastered by the ethos of suspicion such that his thinking remains ‘open, inquisitive and collaborative’, that Gilger seeks to demonstrate. He does so in the hope that attending to such a possibility can show others that it is possible to do critical scholarship in a non-cynical fashion and it is possible to reimagine a constructive role for public intellectuals in our thoroughly deconstructed age.

While Gutman, Metz, and Gilger emphasise the inclusive and democratic potential of public spaces and dialogue, historian Claire Potter's contribution, ‘I Can't Believe You Said That!’ addresses the way that small communities of interaction can promote less-than-democratic outcomes. She does this by turning to the illiberal aspects of social media – our impoverished imitation of a public sphere. Using Twitter as a case study, Potter asks whether Goldfarb is fully aware of how the same ‘technology that had helped grassroot movements overthrow authoritarianism [can also] put the politics of small things to the purpose of undemocratic politics’. As Potter demonstrates, as a space for interactions among those with shared commitments, social media has the potential to either foster or silence public debate, to promote democratic alternatives or antidemocratic conspiracy theories.

French sociologist Daniel Dayan's article ‘Acting as If: Political Power as Mimicry’ raises similar concerns, but places these in the French context. Like Potter, Dayan argues that small actions are neither always democratic nor inclusive. Reading the politics of small things through Austin's conception of performative statements, Dayan argues that Goldfarb's seminal work is best understood as a ‘story of struggles for the power of definition’ precisely because the power of ‘acting as if’ varies widely by context. Indeed, as he puts it, conducting a ‘politics of small things in the absence of an undisputable oppression’ ought to be undertaken only with great care. Dayan compares Goldfarb's work with Elizabeth Noelle-Neuman's ‘spiral of silence’, arguing that, its limitations notwithstanding, the promise of the politics of small things is that there are often alternatives even in the face of seemingly monolithic constraints.

At first glance, Nancy Hanrahan's article, ‘Democracy without Democratization’, may not seem to offer a response to Potter and Dayan's criticisms, but a deeper look shows a striking interrelation. It emerges from Hanrahan's recognition that, although digital transformations in the music industry are often praised for their ‘democratic’ character, in such instances the meaning of the word democratic signifies only an increase in participation. She argues that democratisation is combined with technical terms such as decentralisation, access, and participation rather than dignity, sustainability, and care. Just as, in his early work, Goldfarb defended the independence of domains of cultural freedom, Hanrahan argues that the ‘reformulation of the meaning of terms so essential to plural democracies submerges democracy into technological rationality’. Thus, although Goldfarb is an interactionalist, his work preserves a normative understanding of democracy that responds to the concerns raised by Dayan and Potter.

Siobhan Kattago's article, ‘The Art of the Seminar and the Politics of Small Things’, turns our attention to Goldfarb's skill as a teacher, particularly as a convenor of seminar discussions. Influenced by his scholarship on the importance of debate, civility, and subversion for democratic engagement, Kattago holds that Goldfarb's ‘commitment to the seminar’ is simultaneously a commitment to ‘a unique form of … democratic deliberation’. Goldfarb's seminars are spaces where students learn to practice democracy by thinking together about a shared world, remaining open to hearing diverse viewpoints, and imagining how others experience reality. Drawing parallels between Goldfarb's work and that of Hannah Arendt, Kattago emphasises Goldfarb's ability to transport these collaborative, democratic skills from the classroom to other institutions, including Public Seminar and the Democracy and Diversity Institute.

While Kattago draws on the importance of the classroom seminar table in fostering democratic debate, Krzysztof Czyzewski's ‘In the Light of Small Things’ wonders where the kind of discussion that took place around the Polish kitchen table in the 1970s and 1980s has gone. What happened, he wonders, to the kitchen table after the 1989 roundtable discussions? Where can we find such an inviting and inclusive table today? As founder of the Borderlands Foundation in Sejny, Poland, Czyzewski has worked for decades to create a space for the enacting of cultural freedom in the form of avant-garde theatre, poetry readings, and novel ways of remembering a painful past. Noting the influence of Goldfarb's work, particularly, the Politics of small things and On cultural freedom, for how the Borderlands Foundation reimagines the world, Czyzewski closes by linking Goldfarb's politics of small things with the traditionally Jewish search for a small centre of the universe.

What links Jeffrey Goldfarb's writing and institution building, convening of seminars and summer schools, is a desire and generous capacity to listen to others. As a scholar, colleague, and mentor Goldfarb is curious and inquisitive, eager to share his thoughts and share in the thought of others.

Without an ear for dialogue and the capacity to share a space in which counterparts and competitors can think freely, the public realm disappears. Indeed, without the ability to listen, possibilities for dialogue and engagement are quickly reduced to parallel conversations, monologues, or rigid dogma. Dialogue, like a lively conversation, requires a measure of civility. Indeed, as Goldfarb demonstrates, dialogue involves far more than talking. Dialogue creates the possibility to imagine a shared space in which to think freely while remaining open to the opinion of others. Although the public sphere is often linked with critique and subversion, civility combined with respect for the other's point of view matters. While cynicism is impervious to dialogue and often reinforces the status quo, Goldfarb's sociological imagination is one that creates spaces in which dialogue and social interaction might emerge, thus fostering possibilities for greater understanding. While conversation is integral for democratic debate, the art of conversation is increasingly challenged by an overload of information that all too easily morphs into entertainment, disinformation, tweets, and memes.

Without the ability for dialogue, skill in listening to those who are different and who think differently, encounters become rote and routine; the stale status quo prevails once again. Without curiosity, opportunities for deep, democratic engagement between equals withers away into parroted ideologies and parallel monologues.

Goldfarb's sociological imagination insists that alternatives can appear, a new domain of social relations can be enacted, and that there is more to a sociological life than domination and its critique. There are, in other words, small spaces of cultural freedom that persistent scholarly attention can help to sustain. Indeed, it is the depth and quality of Goldfarb's attention not only to cultural freedom, but also to the allure of cynicism, the politics of small things, and the possibility of ‘acting as if’ that resonates so strongly with the authors of Small Things, Deep Resonance.