Acting as if: The political power of mimicry

Jeffrey Goldfarb is a man with whom I have taught classes over many years, mostly at the New School but also at Sciences Po in Paris – sometimes as part of a curriculum, and sometimes for the mere pleasure of debating, a pleasure we pursued almost uninterruptedly over more than ten years, inviting ourselves to each other's lectures or seminars; inviting our students to join our debates; to witness our nuanced disagreement. We had many reasons to become friends. We are both teachers who like to tell stories. Both of us are adept at picking up on small situations – what I would call a ‘hieroglyph’ in order to unfold its dramaturgy until it reveals its political, sociological, and aesthetic implications. Finally, we both began with theatre, which is perhaps why Jeff Goldfarb and I are interested in the power of gestures, or in the realm of ‘acting as if,’ which is a convergence of the sociologist, Erving Goffman and playwright, Luigi Pirandello.

Many years ago, I wrote a book about some of the last monumental performances of what has been called the ‘television-of the-center’. Media Events: the Live Broadcasting of History (1992) dealt with the swan-song of network television during which grand political dramaturgies were performed for millions of spectators around the world. Although the performances were gestures or even gesticulations, the performers’ status and media amplification allowed them to become turning points in history or to validate dramatic changes that were about to emerge; changes whose acceptance required momentous expression. The television performance of such gestures gathered the largest audiences known at the time. For example, when Anwar Sadat visited Jerusalem in 1977 or Pope John Paul II visited Poland. In 1979, the presence of immense crowds and world officials turned such gestures into reality. Such events resembled Johan Huizinga's concept of mimicry.

To my surprise, Jeff Goldfarb's book, The Power of Small Things: The Power of the Powerless in Dark Times (2006) also stressed the power of gestures. His arguments were a response to my own, yet he was not interested in top-down gestures performed for the world at large, by institutions of power that had just converted to a newer version of their doxa. Instead, Goldfarb's book was about the performance and consequences of smaller gestures, of gestures that quietly ran against the grain of political regimes; of gestures both subversive and seemingly inconsequential; of gestures that were not advertised, supported, or amplified by media fanfare; of gestures that were just small.

Such dramaturgies often felt like the enactment of a wish. Polish dissident intellectuals were able, in their dealings with each other, to act as if they already were standing on a national stage. They anticipated a freedom they would eventually gain even though what they did was no more than gathering around a kitchen table. They were, as Goldfarb argued, ‘acting as if’. Day in and day out, from kitchen table to kitchen table, a free society maintained an interstitial, almost invisible existence. The Politics of Small Things was a treatise in resilience, a method for maintaining a democracy alive until the advent of better days. This notion of ‘acting-as-if,’ which stems from Adam Michnik, is at the heart of Goldfarb's book. The God of Small Things, which inspires the title, is in fact a person, the Indian hero of a novel by Arundhati Roy. This man, an untouchable, is the illicit lover of a woman from another caste. Both construct around themselves a small zone of independence and dignity in which they ignore the boundaries of the caste system and live their transgressive love story.

The Politics of Small Things creates small zones of independence and dignity, which Goldfarb proceeds to turn into political theatre. He follows Hannah Arendt for whom: ‘The Greek polis was precisely that “form of government” which provided men with a space of appearances where they could act, with a kind of theater where freedom could appear … ’ (Arendt, 1977, p. 154). Essential to Arendt's formulation is the ambiguity of the verb ‘to act’ because an act may be an action or the pretense of one. While ‘acting’ may be understood in terms of action or ‘mimicry, the two are not mutually exclusive. What is at stake is a politics of gestures, a politics of mimicry and a politics in which the role of visibility is essential since it offers the spectacle of a freely decided commitment. Thus, both the ‘presentations of self’ that Arendt describes, and that Arundhati Roy illustrates in her novel, The God of Small Things involve what J. L. Austin would define as a ‘commissive’ dimension (Austin, 1955).

Even more central to Goldfarb's book is another type of performative statement which is delineated by Austin. For the English philosopher, there are certain performative statements specifically in charge of providing definitions, which are called ‘expositives’. Thus, every entry in a dictionary and every media account of a situation is expositive. Expositives are at the heart of The Politics of Small Things under the forms of ‘acting as if’ and ‘providing alternative definitions.’ The difference between the two is the difference between speech and gesture, or the difference between Austin's performative statements and Erving Goffman's ‘framing’ (Goffman, 1974). What is offered through ‘acting as if’ is what Goldfarb also describes as the alternative definition of that situation, which called for action in the first place. ‘The power of definition is a key basis for the politics of small things’ (Goldfarb, 2006, p. 144). Initially restricted to the performers themselves, alternative definitions seek to be contagious. When adopted by other groups, they may eventually succeed in replacing dominant definitions. The Politics of Small Things is fundamentally a story of struggles for definition, a Goffmanian story of gestures that enact contending definitions.

In addition to the notions of ‘acting as if’ and ‘alternative definitions of the situation’, I will address two major themes in Goldfarb’s work:

First of all, The Politics of Small Things tells the story of a damaged public sphere and shows how expressive means may allow for repairing the damage done to the possibility of free expression. But are we always willing to speak out? It is here that Goldfarb can be contrasted with Elizabeth Noelle-Neumann's theory of ‘the spiral of silence,’ which looks like its inverted image by demonstrating the banality of acquiescence (Noelle-Neumann, 1974).

Secondly, I address the question of oppression. As one of the last resorts available to the powerless, the politics of small things responds to situations of coercion and oppression. Does it risk misapplication and what is the point of a politics of small things in situations in which oppression is not really blatant?

A ‘subjunctive’ exercise: repairing public spheres.

The politics of small things addresses situations in which a public sphere is damaged, endangered, or altogether suppressed. As Goldfarb argues, it offers alternative spaces for people to ‘ … freely meet and talk together as equals, reveal their differences, display their distinctions, and develop a capacity to act together’ (Goldfarb, 2006, p. 4). The kitchen table that serves as an emblem of this substitutive sphere shares many features with Jürgen Habermas's rendition of eighteenth-century salons, which were models for civil debate and prefigured the public sphere. Goldfarb's kitchen tables, on the other hand, serve as palliatives to its collapse.

Both the salon and kitchen table are what the anthropologist Victor Turner would describe as ‘subjunctive’ spaces in which reality stops being what it is in order to become, as he writes, ‘what it ought to be’ (Turner, 1969). With regard to this utopian ambition, the dimension of smallness is important but not essential. As Goldfarb writes: ‘It is not that all small scale activity provides a normative alternative. The normative alternative appears when a space is open, in human interaction for a freedom that creates power’ (2006, p. 136). One can easily create small spaces that are, in fact, blueprints for tyranny; small spaces in which free expression is prevented by new and silencing orthodoxies, fortresses where no debate or discussion is admissible. By contrast, the kitchen table would be, as Hannah Arendt would put it, a reminder of ‘the lost treasure of the revolutionary tradition.’ (Arendt, 1963).

Although Goldfarb's politics of small things is meant to revive such treasure, there are situations in which it is willingly ignored. For example, if one compares The Politics of Small Things with Elizabeth Noelle-Neumann's theory, which discusses many of the same themes, a subjunctive dimension is absent from her book, The Spiral of Silence (1974). Noelle-Neumann does not discuss episodes of challenge but rather dramaturgies of resignation and silence. Although The Politics of Small Things and The Spiral of Silence are almost mirror images of one another, there is a problem in comparing them. Noelle-Neumann's sociological research is devoted to the emergence of majorities amongst uncommitted publics, whose activity is often limited to voting. Goldfarb, on the other hand, looks at a historical sociology of regime changes that border on revolutionary processes. Goldfarb is interested in the strategies of publics in which individuals are capable and willing to act. Why, then compare electoral processes which are so often used as emblems of healthy democracies with responses to totalitarian oppression? Because even though they answer the question in radically different ways, both theories ask the same question.

Both Goldfarb's ‘the politics of small things’ and Noelle-Neumann's ‘spiral of silence’ are concerned with expressive performance. Both focus on the public sphere as a site of political expression. Thus, for Noelle-Neumann, public opinion is the sort of opinion that may be expressed in public without risking sanctions. As she writes with respect to Alexis de Tocqueville, individuals who share a dominant point of view can express their views freely and with less risk of isolation (cf., 1974, p. 45). Those who feel their convictions are losing ground act very differently. A prevalent opinion ‘compels compliance of attitude and behaviour in that it threatens the dissenting individual with isolation, the politician with loss of popular support’ (1974, p. 44).

These fluctuations in public expression are encapsulated by Noelle-Neumann in a vignette about a train conversation over a contentious issue between passengers who hold opposing views. Those who feel their opinion is largely shared will not hesitate to speak, whilst those who believe their own views are losing ground, might abstain from expressing them, so that what began as a conversation, may end up in embarrassed silence. Her aborted train conversation stands in contrast to Goldfarb's kitchen table in which Polish intellectuals appeared in public and used their visibility as a form of commitment. Noelle-Neumann's train passengers, however, retreated from conversations and used their silence to avoid any committed position. There is an interactional process at the heart of Goldfarb's politics of small things. In other words, ‘acting as if,’ for him, means ‘interacting as if’. One should interact with those who share our views, as well as with those who oppose them. At the heart of Noelle-Neumann's ‘spiral of silence’, there is another interactionist process which involves those who speak out and those who remain silent. It is precisely this process which installs a dominant opinion and silences alternatives (Noelle-Neumann, 1989).

According to Noelle-Neumann, an individual may renounce his or her own judgment for fear of isolation. Individuals are vulnerable and social groups can punish them for not conforming. She thus starts from the premise that conformity, like a ‘social skin,’ protects us. Our acceptance of being silenced corroborates a universal principle which she refers to the famous social psychology experiments of Solomon Asch (1951) and Stanley Milgram (1961). At the heart of her ‘science of public opinion,’ is the presence of fear and the need to avoid sanctions. In contrast, the politics of small things is precisely about taking risks. Goldfarb's political actors take ‘small’ steps but, no matter how small, each exposes them to some sanction.

When Elizabeth Noelle-Neuman writes of scientific evidence, this evidence may look like a lofty alibi, a justification for giving up even when there is no oppression to start with, only internalised fear. What is at stake is the role played by subservience in reinforcing tyrannies, a role already described in the famous Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, written by Montaigne's friend, Etienne de La Boétie in 1577 (La Boétie, 1977). Noelle-Neuman sees such voluntary servitude as a fact of life. The normative tradition claimed by Goldfarb rejects it. For this tradition, Elizabeth Noelle-Neumann's story of potential majorities reduced to silence speaks of a neutralisation of democracy. Her understanding of political timidity displays an eerie resemblance to Hannah Arendt's view of the ‘banality of evil’ (Arendt, 2006). What Noelle-Neumann sees as part of human nature, or one's ‘social skin’, Arendt regards as a quiet endorsement of tyranny. In other terms, Goldfarb's politics of small things is meant to oppose what might be called ‘the banality of acquiescence’. As William Blake once put it – those who do not act are opening the gates of pestilence. Yet is acquiescence automatically guilty? Is it to be shunned when there is no obvious tyranny? Couldn't there be a risk of misapplying expressive politics?

The politics of small things offers a normative alternative to coercion. By acting as if they lived in a free society, opposition movements in central Europe presented a democratic challenge to the Soviet Empire. However, not all small-scale activities that follow the politics of small things provide this normative alternative. The politics of gestures is not always sublime. It can pursue goals that are merely tactical and sometimes ominous. While it does help maintain the possibility of democracy in dire times, ‘acting-as if’ may unwittingly undermine democracy in quieter times. The monumental television events that I researched in most cases heralded the end of interminable conflicts. Yet they had their sinister counterparts in the no less monumental terror events of the early twenty-first century. Goldfarb's small gestures might find themselves similarly flanked by unexpected doppelgangers.

There are three ways in which the politics of small things may be misapplied. The first consists in pursuing goals that are ultimately oppressive and thus incompatible with the values inherent in a politics of small things. I would speak here of ‘wrong goals’. The second case occurs whenever the situation in which an action takes place is misrepresented, for example, by claiming the existence of a context the reality of which seems open to doubt, which I call ‘wrong context’. The third concerns political actors, who pursue commendable goals, but betray the values they claim to hold by relying on means that contradict such values, which I call ‘wrong means’.

Of this triad – wrong goals, wrong means, and wrong context – the first is addressed by Goldfarb's discussion of the communication strategies of the American Christian right. For him, such strategies do not count as a politics of small things because, as he puts it, the norms involved are ‘critically different’ (Arendt, 2006, p. 135). Thus, Goldfarb speaks instead of a ‘micropolitics’ of the Christian right that must be critically distinguished from ‘the power and normative quality of a politics of small things’ (Arendt, 2006).

Here is an example of misrepresenting context. It discusses French judges affiliated with a militant union (Syndicat de la Magistrature) who devoted a whole wall in their headquarters to photographs of well-known figures whose politics they disliked. The judges gave a name to this display: ‘Le mur des cons’. (In English: ‘the wall of pricks’). Setting up this ‘wall of pricks’ was not illegal. The violence it expressed was merely symbolic. Yet le Mur des Cons was less about mocking its ostensible targets than about challenging the French judicial system through a gesture enacted by officials in charge of applying the law. Was the French legal system corrupt enough to be dismissed as if it were a farce? Was it a model of ‘oppression’ offering to citizens no legal guarantees and no appeals courts? Or was it a wrong diagnosis, a misrepresentation of the context?

Let us explore this example a bit further by imagining a situation in which the same judges would be in a position of actually sentencing those they had dismissed as ‘pricks’. Would such ‘pricks’ be entitled to a fair trial? Would they be given a chance? Would their earmarking for eventual condemnation guarantee better, non-oppressive, justice? We know that the word ‘prejudice’ comes from the Latin ‘prae-judicium,’ (Judging in advance). Our judges may have been right in their assessment of their targets. Yet, if their point was to bring about social justice, were they using the correct means?

The importance of the means that are used by activists is stressed by a movement which shares many features with Goldfarb's politics of small things: Prefigurative Politics. Both are turned towards the future. Both anticipate situations which are considered desirable. Both invite activists to trespass into eras that are yet to be born. Last, but not least, both are quite careful about how such a trespassing is done. Thus, this movement is ‘based on the premise that the ends a social movement achieves are fundamentally shaped by the means it employs, and that movements should therefore do their best to choose means that embody or prefigure the kind of society they want to bring about’ (Leach, 2013). One does not advance justice by denying it or freedom by curtailing it.

The Politics of Small Things begins as a story of Polish intellectuals resisting communism; one of the premises of the book is the existence of an undeniable oppression. This is why Vaclav Havel's idea of ‘the power of the powerless’ resonates so powerfully (Havel, 1979/2018).

Yet not all situations are equally oppressive. Creating spaces for democratic practices within tyrannies is indispensable. To do so in established and nascent democracies is much more delicate. Of course, a politics of small things may prove necessary in order to address the numerous areas in which democracies prove deficient. Yet there are cases in which a politics of small things can be misapplied. The reality of the oppression that triggers the redefinition of a society must be indisputable. Whenever it is not, we run the risk of seeing such politics acting as a midwife to tyranny.

The suppression of a public sphere may be total or partial, brutal, or subtle as in the case of Lyotard's theory of the ‘differend,’ which shows how free expression can be curtailed by the obligation of using a given vocabulary (Lyotard, 1983). It can be harsher or lighter, hesitant, or inexorable. Goldfarb's ethnography of pivotal moments in the recent history of Eastern Europe could be seen as one in which oppression was far from total. Polish repression of free speech at the time of Wojciech Jaruzelski allowed spaces, no matter how modest for ‘acting as if’.

Compare this relatively flexible form of oppression to situations in which oppression becomes absolute – to situations in which ‘enclaves’ of free expression were unimaginable. The nature of such a situation is powerfully illustrated in the testimony given by survivor Abraham Bomba in Claude Lanzmann's documentary Shoah (1985). A former barber, Bomba escaped execution by being appointed to the team of prisoners in charge of shaving the heads of inmates about to be taken to the ‘showers’. All the barbers on Bomba's team knew what such ‘showers’ meant. However, they were forbidden from divulging this knowledge, even when those they were to shave were their own brothers or sisters. Any silenced sob, any whispered farewell, condemned them to being shot on the spot.

In this context of seamless oppression, conducting a politics of small things may seem like a dangerous luxury. Yet even in this context, there were inmates who chose to act. They acted ‘as if’ they still lived in a normal world. They recited poetry to other inmates, taught them whatever they knew, kept chronicles, and drew what they saw for the sake of future generations. They even managed to save children by hiding them and transferring them from barrack to barrack whenever an inspection was about to occur. They finally could, like the famous historian Marc Bloch on his way to the firing squad, help other, younger, prisoners overcome their panic in the face of imminent death.

These inmates conducted a ‘politics of small things’ even in such contexts. As a female survivor later said: ‘there is always something you can do’. This could be another title for Jeff Goldfarb's book.

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).