Small things, deep resonance: A sociology for dark times Open Access

The papers published in this issue, along with the other papers that were presented at the 2022 Small Things, Deep Resonance conference, illuminate an alternative, critical, public sociology.¹ It’s a sociology that I’ve been practising for decades, though I was not fully aware of its coherence, dimensions, and promise before listening to the delivered presentations and reading the papers published here. They have been a gift. Thanks to them, I realise more thoroughly how, over many years, my research, writing, teaching, and public engagements add up – and how my colleagues’ work is informed by and extends mine. Much of this work is by former students, even though I never sought to develop disciples, and always encouraged students to answer their own questions and develop their own projects. At the conference, I observed how they responded both to my work and to each other and had developed independent but interrelated paths even though many of them hadn’t met each other until then.

Thus, for example, the editors of these papers, Siobhan Kattago and Patrick Gilger, studied at the New School decades apart. I have worked with each of them on Public Seminar and the Democracy Seminar. But before the conference, they had never met and never worked with each other. Yet, in an elegant way, their papers published here speak to each other, as they reflect on my writing and my public practices. In doing so, they outline a unique, public sociology evident not only in my work but also in theirs and their colleagues.

Kattago’s is a generous account of what she calls my ‘art of the seminar’. She fondly remembers a class and uses that memory to outline a more general approach to public life. Just as I wrote in The Politics of Small Things (2006) about kitchen tables in Communist Europe and their theoretical significance, she writes about my seminar table. Around it, she sees key principles of public life being formed: mutual respect for one another in our differences, close attention to memory, the facilitation of diverse perspectives, open discussion and critical judgment arrived at through careful listening; and embrace of the uncertainty of the dialogic outcome.

I am struck by the fact that we academics speak with ease and listen with difficulty. We often talk at our non-academic audiences, not with them, and we too rapidly move from our findings to political commitments. Thus, public sociology has tended to be partisan sociology, a progressive sociology, and a politically committed sociology. I don’t deny that valuable work has been published in this area, but it is fundamentally flawed, as Patrick Gilger’s article highlights.

Gilger notes intriguing insights concerning the direction of my writing and public engagements, particularly their relationship with the theories of Zygmunt Bauman and Bruno Latour. In doing so, I think he not only illuminates my work but also points to the consequential direction of an alternative critical sociology that moves beyond a hermeneutics of suspicion. He places me in the long New School tradition of critical inquiry while noting that I don’t completely fit within it. Unlike my predecessors, I don’t focus on unmasking and revealing underlying truths. Instead, I seek to learn from the wisdom of everyday life. Even as I realise – and am critical of – the limitations of common sense, I am not primarily interested in the history that unfolds behind people’s backs. I am concerned with the history that they face and constitute.

Gilger calls me ‘a hopeful critic’. I rather think of myself as a critic seeking hope. I am not hopeful. I am not an optimist. I do recognise the darkness of our times. But I see it as my task to illuminate possibilities. When I think, for example, about the devastating human impact on our environment and our inability to address the impending ecological disaster, I am a pessimist. When I think about intractable conflicts, such as that in Israel and Palestine, I see no reason to be optimistic. Likewise, I am not hopeful when I observe the global transitions from democracy to dictatorship, including the very real threat Donald Trump poses to the future of the American Republic. And when I, now a professor at the American University of Afghanistan (cf. Goldfarb, 2023), talk to my Afghan students and colleagues about their situation, I fight with them against despair. I don’t believe that, in the end, all our problems will be overcome. I know full well that they likely won’t be. And yet I still seek to find grounds for change. Mine is not, then, a hopeful sociology. It is a sociology that strives to illuminate grounds for hope in dark times.

These dark times are the context in which Gilger sees me realising the critical insights of Bauman and Latour. I hold that even if there is no systemic alternative to domination, and no clear grounds for commonality in a disintegrating social world, the effort to create zones of solidarity and resistance apart from total control and against anomie is important. Such efforts can generate meaningful improvements. In fact, this is the argument I make in The Politics of Small Things; the argument interrogated here by Metz, Gutman, and Kattago, and demonstrated in both the cultural theory of Hanrahan and the cultural practices of Czyżewski. I make this argument because criticism has it limits, and because facilitating an enlightened common sense and a critically aware understanding is an essential aspect of critique. Indeed, this is a theme I take up in Civility and Subversion (Goldfarb, 1998), and which is considered here not by only Kattago and Gilger, but also by Dayan and Potter.

My colleagues are also critical thinkers illuminating hope. Note, however, that this hope is not grounded in a political ideology of the left, right, or centre. Nor does it rest in a belief that any group – whether workers or intellectuals or even entrepreneurs – is the privileged agent of history. Rather, the hope is found in a free public life variously understood: a public sociology as a sociology that studies, and works to help constitute, publics.

When I first met Zachary Metz, I was struck by the fact that, in his professional life, he was looking hope straight in the face but not recognising it. He was and is a man with remarkable experiences of working towards the resolution of conflicts around the world. Given that many of these conflicts appear to have no possible resolution, Metz cannot be an optimist. But nevertheless, he sees alternatives on the margins, and his sociological investigations illuminate them. In the process, he has developed an original theory of ‘the intimacy of enemies’, which he applies to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. He closes his contribution at a grim moment, one that became only grimmer, as war between Israel and Hamas escalated. Even in such a dire context, however, Metz shows the power of the intimacy of enemies by analysing the work being done by ‘Combatants for Peace’, a Palestinian-Israeli veterans’ group that stands ‘against the occupation and ideologies of hate’.

But how are such insights nourished and developed? How do they reach broader publics? Yifat Gutman picks up this question as she creatively extends my notion of the politics of small things.

My approach is built upon a political reading of Erving Goffman’s application of Dorothy and W.I. Thomas’s notion of the definition of the situation. I am informed by the political activism and reflections of Adam Michnik (1986) and Václav Havel (2018). They explored ways of resisting the repressions of previously existing socialism. They observed that when people ‘act as if’ they live in a free society, they constitute their freedom, as long as they were not silenced. Social definition, in gestures and actions, remarkably can destroy totalitarian power, Havel’s ‘power of the powerless’. I observe that this ultimately reveals a power of societal transformation with implications far beyond the old socialist bloc.

Beyond ‘acting as if’, Gutman observes the power of cultural imagination: the ‘what if’. She shows how fictive techniques can enrich public dialogue about the past even as they colour harsh present realities. The goal is to inspire reflection, inform debate, and overcome hierarchies that make coming together on a shared common ground difficult. Gutman demonstrates this through the case of creative activists in ‘the binational city of Jaffa’. What if, she asks, the Nakba hadn’t happened? What if Israel-Palestine were fully and peacefully embedded in a completely different Mediterranean world? What if Palestinian Arab dignity was as recognised as that of Jewish Israelis? Gutman shows how such imaginative questions are used by activists to challenge the collective memories and common sense of Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs. And she demonstrates how this kind of fictive innovation can reform the lived relationship between the past, present, and future not only in Israel-Palestine, but elsewhere as well.

Gutman, in fact, is exploring the way art and creativity contribute to public life. In a less instrumental mode, this has long been a central concern of mine. Hanrahan, a distinguished sociologist of music, analyses a dimension of this concern in her essay, while Czyżewski demonstrates how this works in his social and cultural practice. Both highlight the significance of cultural freedom as an important part of public sociology and primary support for independent publics.

I have been studying this form of cultural power since 1973, when I went to Poland to do my doctoral research. My experiences there were a revelation. I learned how the relative autonomy of cultural life had greater political consequences than partisan art. The theatre movement I studied was politically significant because it established a world apart from official politics, creating a free zone for public reflection not controlled by the powers of the Communist party-state apparatus. Over time I came to realise that what I observed in Poland confirmed the position of both the Frankfurt school and Max Weber. Just as Habermas illuminated the significance of the public sphere as a relatively autonomous space for debate, deliberation, and decision-making, theorists like Horkheimer and Adorno recognised that a significant characteristic of modern society was a relatively autonomous sphere of the arts and sciences. The position of Weber and these left-Weberians became mine. And I argued that the political significance of the artistic movement I studied came from their relative autonomy.²

This Hanrahan has studied in her own sociological investigations of music, compactly expressed in her brilliant analysis of ‘the sound of money’ in contrast to music (Hanrahan, 2000). There she analyses the constraints placed upon the cultural autonomy of music and their implications. Having studied how music and music criticism in nineteenth- and twentieth-century America played a role in developing a critical understanding of the promise and limitations of democracy, in her essay here Hanrahan turns her attention to the impact of the digitalisation of music, showing how the aesthetic experience of music has been compromised and how digitalisation has hollowed out public discourse about music. She demonstrates that the purported digital democratisation of the music world has led to democracy’s opposite: the closing down of space for collective or critical reflection. I would note that, in this context, a critical sociology of music should explore the resistance to these developments.

Although Czyżewski’s practice in the Borderlands Foundation is not technologically advanced, it is remarkably democratic in the very way that Hanrahan discusses. In fact, the Foundation’s work shows how social activities and cultural practices can enact cultural freedom. Czyżewski, a veteran of the Polish theatre movement I wrote about in The Persistence of Freedom (1980), has spent decades developing free spaces for public interaction. But these efforts have gone far beyond performance. Indeed, after the radical transformations of 1989, Czyżewski and his colleagues settled together in the small town of Sejny, which lies on the Polish-Lithuanian border. Although divided between Polish and Lithuanian nationals and haunted by Jewish ghosts, because of the Foundation's presence Sejny is now an independent cultural centre. The Borderlands Foundation, which works in a renovated Jewish study house and performs in a respectfully transformed synagogue, has accomplished this through many endeavours, including staging experimental theatre that draws upon the story of Sejny and cultivates a Jewish presence in the shadows of twentieth-century horrors. Indeed, it was the Foundation that first published Jan Gross’s Neighbors (2001), the pathbreaking book that documented active Polish complicity in the Shoah.

In addition to these enactments of cultural memory, the Foundation organises klezmer classes, hip hop concerts, and poetry and prose readings given by locals and the world-renowned. All of this takes place on the grounds of the former country villa of the family of Czesław Miłosz, the Foundation’s earliest supporter. Through all of these activities the foundation has become a centre of the cultural aesthetic Miłosz revealed in works like Native Realm: A Search for Self-Definition (2002). That art empowers engagement is an insight that Gutman and Hanrahan study, and which Czyżewski and the Foundation enact.

Independent publics are not only constituted by art, however. They are composed through a variety of media forms, ranging from everyday face-to-face interactions to interactions facilitated by the printed word, radio, and digital media. This observation is the grounds of my collaborations with Claire Potter and Daniel Dayan. Potter and I have created alternative publics, while Dayan and I have been engaged in a decades-long-dialogue about the sociology of publics. The papers by Potter and Dayan presented here reveal the character of our work together and its promise. Dayan’s work on mediated gestures, particularly as they are shown (or ‘monstrated’ as he would put it) through photography, film, and television, illuminates how publics and their relationships are formed. Potter, who is not only an innovative and provocative blogger but also my long-time Public Seminar co-conspirator and current author of the Political Junkie Substack, is an historian keenly attuned to the way web-facilitated communication has changed public life.

In her essay, Potter considers the relationship between digital media and democratic politics. She tells a rise and fall story: at first, at the height of the blogging era when she was writing as ‘The Tenured Radical’ and I was publishing Deliberately Considered, the Internet was a democratic force. It opened discussion and made it possible to discuss the previously undiscussable.

It was at this time that I, in The Politics of Small Things, made an unfortunate declaration that she critically appraises: I declared that talk radio was inherently conservative, even reactionary, while the web was progressive. Radio supported the dogmatic declaration, while the web-facilitated open discussion. Potter rightly notes how subsequent digital developments skewed the Internet in a dogmatic direction, an observation also central to Hanrahan’s contribution. This leads Potter to criticise the digital totalitarianism of Twitter and other social media platforms, as they extend the logic of neoliberalism with algorithms. Clearly, she has a point. Yet, I don’t think the situation is as black and white as she maintains. Dogmatic developments are not total; there are significant countervailing forces. Indeed, there’s an ongoing struggle between the dogmatic and the democratic, and the medium itself is not the message. It is true, as she demonstrates in the history of Twitter, that what was once a technology that helped open dialogue has now closed it (cf. Potter, 2020). But her own successful persistence exemplifies how digital dialogue continues to be a basis of hope.

My task in The Politics of Small Things was to highlight how small things lay the grounds for opposing the major negative trends of the post-9/11 era. I sensed that the major trends of terrorism, antiterrorism, and anti-antiterrorism led in destructive directions. (For example, the global Islamic Jihad, the American anti-terrorist crusade, and the problematic resistance to these.) I judged that the anti-antiterrorists’ overly simplified matters, and I mapped out my position by arguing that I found hope not in Arundhati Roy’s activism, but in her novel The God of Small Things. Indeed, I thought that many radical opponents to the war overlooked the real dangers of Islamic extremism revealed in the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center – where I lost one of my closest friends.

I took this loss personally. It was thinking about friendship and intimate bonds that led me to recall Roy’s account of a love affair between high and low caste lovers. In my judgment, the fictive relationship Roy depicted had more political insight than her polemics. The form of the politics of small things revealed its potential, and it was in the relatively autonomous art form of a novel that this was revealed. These lovers created a world apart from an unjust social order – and in the process, the social order was changed, even if just a bit. It was in this way I noticed that, in the more mature development of the anti-war movement, these kinds of social relationships were being forged, and that this was facilitated by the web. I saw then, and I see now, that this is a significant force against a variety of forms of domination and repression.

Dayan understands and critically examined this point in his piece. He appreciates that my book is ‘a treatise on resistance to oppression as well as a method for creating and maintaining freedom’. Yet he has some concerns, and poses three critical questions: Is the politics of small things a value neutral or a normative endeavour? Is it an opportunity or an obligation? And what of the dangers of its misapplication? My answers to these questions in the following paragraphs include both a summary clarification of my writing and serve to express my appreciation of the preceding essays. They also point to a new public sociology for our dark times.

Value neutral or normative? Value-free ends where the normative begins in the conception of politics and the public as I learned these from Hannah Arendt. For her, politics is the opposite of coercion. It’s the capacity of people – as equals in their differences; sharing common principles and judgments – to act in concert. I sought to explore the possibility and political significance of such action in the everyday lives of ordinary people, using the dramaturgical sociology of Erving Goffman. To be sure, I understood that coercion also was a part of everyday life. While others took up this concern (those interested in the topic of microaggression, for example), this was not my focus.

Thus, I am well aware that not only the politics of concerted action is present around the kitchen table, which served as my prime example in The Politics of Small Things. Patriarchy and sexism are present as well. Yet it was the Arendtian political capacity present there which had been so often overlooked and required explanation. This much I believe Dayan understands and appreciates. But given that we have different political commitments, mine leaning left, his right, I think he wonders whether I would recognise the capacity for not only progressives but also conservatives to practice a politics of small things.

In fact, what I am looking for is the presence of political diversity; the open exchange of left, right, and centre; the existence of an open public; a space for dialogue as an alternative to monologue; a public sociology of discussion against declaration. I have judged that the threat of dogma is greater coming from the right than the left in the past few decades, though in academic politics this is not so clear most recently. Dayan disagrees with this judgement. This is the general pattern of our dialogue, agreement on the complementarity of our social theories, disagreement in our political judgments and commitments.

Opportunity or Obligation? I find particularly interesting Dayan’s comparison of my work with Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann’s The Spiral of Silence (1993). I think he is correct. Our texts do complement one other. While she demonstrates how and why people silence themselves in a setting in which they are encouraged to speak, I show how people can appear, speak together, and make a difference in contexts where they are repressed or marginalised. Here, I think, Dayan is observing two aspects of the political theory of Arendt. Although, unlike Arendt, Noelle-Neumann and I focus on the non-heroic lives of ordinary folks, hers is in a sense an application of Arendt’s notion of ‘the banality of evil’, whereas I am exploring ‘the lost revolutionary tradition’ (cf. Arendt, 1963/2006, 1968). Noelle-Neumann is in effect exploring an insight of Alexis de Tocqueville’s that, in a free democratic society, the social pressure of the majority pressures minorities and isolated individuals to be silent. I on the other hand observe that in repressive societies, but not only in such societies, there are opportunities to insert oneself, disrupt the flow of routine, and change the course of social processes by creating public spaces of recognition and deliberation. The key insight here is when individuals are able to make a difference by acting together and when we are not.

Misapplication? The complementarity that Dayan notices between Noelle-Neumann’s and my work, I believe, demonstrates that Dayan’s assertion that the politics of small things is appropriate only in repressive situations is mistaken. To be sure, the power of the politics of small things is most apparent in repressive situations because it is there that other forms of political power are not possible. Yet, in more open, liberal societies, the politics of small things remains nonetheless important – especially as these play out within social institutions. I demonstrate this in the book with my examination of the media and the institutional life of higher education. And Kattago’s essay in appreciation of my art of the seminar further demonstrates this point. The key here is that institutionalised political and social power is predicated upon its re-production in everyday life. For the normative ideals of social arrangements to be sustained they must be realised or reconstituted in social interaction. If they are not, these ideals can be understood as being at best hypocritical, while at worst they can become their opposite, as Hanrahan and Potter demonstrate. ‘The politics of small things’ can address this issue in both relatively open and closed societies.

I am tempted to close this response in a variety of different ways, each of which would point to a future project.

I could outline a manifesto suggesting the key principles and goals of this new public sociology. Or I could conclude with reflections on the significance of the politics of small things in liberal social orders. I could make the conclusion more topical, drawing on Metz’s work on the significance of the politics of small things for a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Or perhaps I could close with reflections on how Gutman’s ‘what if’ relates to ‘as if’, linking this with Dayan’s analysis of monstration. I could then show how the combination of ‘as if’ and ‘what if’ can be magnified or undermined by the way digital media functions, drawing on the insights of Hanrahan and Potter and the social practices of those like Czyżewski. I also might add a section concerning the work I have been recently undertaking with my colleagues and students at the American University of Afghanistan on civic engagement and the politics of small things.

Instead, I conclude with only these hints, trusting that what I have written here sufficiently suggests how my colleagues, readers, and I might together extend what Kattago has called my art of the seminar, and in so doing combine critique with assembly, as Gilger suggests. It all points to a public sociology that takes seriously the task of understanding how public life is constituted, defended, and extended, and suggests ways of acting upon this understanding. As such, it might serve as a sociology responsive to our dark times.

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