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The Politics of Small Things The Power of the Powerless in Dark Times
By Jeffrey C. Goldfarb The University of Chicago Press Copyright © 2006 The University of Chicago
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-30108-2
Chapter One Theorizing the Kitchen Table and Other Small Things
What we need ... is a political philosophy that isn't erected around the problem of sovereignty, nor therefore, around the problems of law and prohibition. We need to cut off the king's head: in political theory that has still to be done. Michel Foucault, "Truth and Power"
To be political, to live in a polis, meant that everything was decided through words and persuasion and not through force and violence. In Greek self-understanding, to force people by violence, to command rather than persuade, were prepolitical ways to deal with people characteristic of life outside the polis....
For us, appearance-something that is being seen and heard by others as well as by ourselves-constitutes reality.
... The distinction between private and public coincides with the opposition of necessity and freedom, of futility and permanence, and finally of shame and honor. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition
Without something to belong to, we have no stable self, and yet total commitment and attachment to any social unit implies a kind ofselflessness. Our sense of being a person can come from being drawn into a wider social unit; our sense of selfhood can arise through the little ways in which we resist the pull. Our status is backed by the solid buildings of the world, while our sense of personal identity often resides in the cracks. Erving Goffman, "The Underlife of a Public Institution"
* * *
As we embark on our exploration of the grounds for an alternative to the politics of despair and terror, I must clarify what I mean by the politics of small things. I do not have in mind micro-interaction in general, nor all attempts at acting locally while thinking globally. Rather, I want to highlight something built into the social fabric, by active people, a potential component of everyday life. In this chapter, I will demonstrate what I mean by presenting three snapshots of the politics of small things, discuss how the events they depict contributed to one of the major transformations of our times, and interpret the snapshots from the theoretical viewpoint of three major social theorists. This will set a theoretically informed stage for the subsequent historical and empirical investigation.
Snapshots of the Politics of Small Things
Our first picture is of a general but significant location: the kitchen table in Poland and elsewhere in the old bloc. During the Soviet period, small circles of intimate friends were able to talk to each other without concern for the present party line around the kitchen table. This free zone, where one could speak one's mind without concern about the interaction between the official and the unofficial, produced unusually warm and intense ties among family and friends. Here Communist Party members would complain about "them," meaning the party, without consciousness of contradiction. Here personal and collective memories were told and retold in opposition to official history. This was the private place that was most remote from official mandates and controls, although in the worst of times, attempts were made to invade even this space, as children were called upon to denounce their parents. A keen appreciation of this private space begins to explain, for example, the initially good-humored wariness toward feminism on the part of women (and men) from the former Soviet bloc. Any denigration of private space was viewed with suspicion. Any attempt to make private questions political seemed exactly wrong.
* * *
The shield and lessons of this privacy, with its free interaction, did expand public freedom. A private apartment in a typical socialist housing bloc, for example, became a bookstore of illegal literature. Nothing about the apartment suggested that this was a commercial establishment. Its owner was a bibliomaniac whose passion, widespread in intellectual circles, was to buy and read everything published, officially or unofficially, on controversial themes. Officially he was an educational researcher, in fact he was a bookseller. He pretended to work and they pretended to pay him, as the old joke went.
Books, to him and many others like him, were prize possessions, indicating where people stood in the cultural and political world. This attitude was not uncommon, but there was something uncommon about this apartment. One approached it with first a brief telephone call and then a ring on the doorbell. The door opened. Polite regards from a mutual friend were exchanged, followed by a query concerning the latest number of an underground publication. It was available and produced for the customer. The price was stated, then paid. The buyer and seller acted like buyer and seller. They were not oppositionist heroes. This was the everyday life of the opposition, which included a nice profit for "bookstores," and for publishers and writers.
* * *
In another apartment we find a poetry reading, "Walendowski's Salon." The atmosphere here was one of much greater tension. Weekly, in this unusually large Warsaw apartment, intellectuals and artists met for unofficial readings, lectures, and discussions. Monthly, with only some irregularity, there were interventions by the authorities, ranging from physical harassment to arrests. On this day, a famous actress was reading the poetry of a well-known dissident, Stanislaw Baranczak. Two weeks earlier, a number of students exiting the apartment had been severely beaten.
Nonetheless, the reading was a decidedly normal affair. Before the show began, people socialized as at a large party or in the lobby of a theater during intermission. Old friends exchanged pleasantries and gossip, new participants were introduced. I met some very famous dissidents and some young students who were new to the scene. One thing was striking in all the interactions. The people there conducted themselves as they would at any cultural gathering. When a famous professor or independent intellectual figure came in, the less famous maneuvered to get a good look and perhaps enter into a momentary conversation, all the while affecting the studied nonchalance necessary to show one belonged. They watched, and emulated, the bearing of the renowned. The audience for the reading, as is usual, worked at both appreciating the recited words and signaling to each other that they appreciated them. There was a studied normality to their interactions, intended to show themselves and each other that they were not engaged in a political (i.e., anti-Party) activity, even though the authorities would define it as such, using the official ideological frame of definition.
* * *
These are snapshots drawn from my memory. There are thousands of others, which also reveal the interactive constitution of an emerging alternative public and politics within previously existing socialism in the 1970s and '80s. Taken together, they tell a story of political transformation. These small events contributed to the transformation-indeed, the transformation could not have happened without them. The major theories of transformation draw upon these little lessons, centering on the revived appreciation of civil society. The major strategy of Solidarity applied them. In these snapshots, the relation between interactive dimensions of a free public is revealed, having very much to do with the relation between politics and truth. Erving Goffman, Hannah Arendt, and Michel Foucault can help us understand these dimensions and relationships.
Theoretical Perspectives
Erving Goffman was one of the great sociologists of the twentieth century. He analyzed and described how people presented themselves in everyday life and through that presentation constituted social reality. Looming behind his account of the normal life of civil society, though, was the life of those in total institutions, where such presentation is taken out of people's hands and they are destroyed as independent selves, robbed of the capacity to make their social reality.
Arendt was a great political thinker of the twentieth century who considered the human condition in dark times, reflecting upon the experiences of the past and imagining possible futures, trying to understand the confusions of her present, confusions which tragically included the horrors of modern tyranny, of totalitarianism, the origins of which she tried to analyze, the phenomenology of which she tried to describe. She understood that the alternative to totalitarianism was to be found in man's political capacity, the capacity to appear and speak in the presence of others, as an equal, based upon the principle of freedom. The power of politics she understood as opposed to coercion, as the capacity for people to act in concert. The interaction between people is for Arendt, as it is for Goffman, "where the action is."
Foucault was also a major thinker of our recent past. He too was interested in everyday actions and interactions. But for him the central question is not about situational definitions (Goffman) or freedom (Arendt) but about discipline. He wanted to understand how power, both of words and deeds, disciplined and punished, accounting for what has been uniquely modern. Freedom and enlightenment are not definitive of the modern age for Foucault. The modern, rather, is a unique regime of truth and power. When he calls for a new sort of political theory, he proposes to study not freedom but its opposite.
Toward the end of his life, however, Foucault became concerned with his relationship with the Enlightenment and the role of the intellectual in the contemporary age. It is in his reflections on these issues that Foucault seemed to try to account for his own free agency as a political actor, and for the role of critique and critical action in the contemporary social order.
These three thinkers worked separately. Although Arendt and Goffman were contemporaries, there is no evidence that they read each other's works. And Foucault makes only passing references to his predecessors. Still, they do speak to each other in interesting ways, and the exchange illuminates the elusive domain we are attempting to understand.
Seeking an understanding of the domain of the politics of small things, I will (1) present a synthesis of Arendt and Goffman on freedom and (2) contrast Goffman-Arendt with Foucault on political culture, which will lead to (3) a sharp contrast between Goffman-Arendt and Foucault on the politics of everyday life. This latter contrast I take to have crucial political significance. It will give clear definition to the politics of small things. We embark upon these theoretical steps by closely analyzing the three snapshots of everyday life.
The Snapshots in Theoretical Perspective
In each of the snapshots-of the kitchen table, the apartment bookstore, and the underground salon-power is enacted, revealing the subject of political theory as a site with the "king's head cut off," as Foucault would have it. The regime of truth of socialism is nonetheless present in the daily lives of its subjects. At the kitchen table, friends and relatives are relatively free to discuss narratives of their lives that are distinct from the official truth. Yet they must take into account that truth as they move beyond the table, and this they must be aware of and discuss. Adults discuss the meaning of the latest twists and turns of party policy and how it will effect their lives. Children are taught what can be said only at home. The official rendering of the order of things is taken for granted, just part of life.
While power does not directly intervene in these interactions among friends and family, it is present. It controls even what is articulated against the powers. The distance from the party state and its official demands may be understood as a distancing from power, creating space for discussion and reflection. But it is also the case that public compliance with the official order is insured in the interactions that occur around the table. Most people are aware of the existence of dissidents, as they are publicized as rogue elements in the official press. If they didn't exist, the state would have to create them.
At the bookstore and in the literary salon much more is present: alternative literatures and arts, alternative political and social programs. But these too are channeled, hidden. And those who are not actively committed, know that their presence excites disciplinary responses from the regime.
These elements of the snapshots might have been part of an account Foucault would have given, an account that emphasizes the intimate connection between power and knowledge. The official knowledge, its truth and its power, disciplines those around the kitchen table, and it is very evident in the bookstore and the salon. It encloses different ways of doing things and assures that they are held in check. The escalating critical task is to disengage the truth from the specific truth regime.
Arendt would present a very different view. For her, appearances are realities, and that which does not appear is politically insignificant. The household and the public sphere are distinct locations in the Athenian world: the former, the realm of necessity, the latter, the realm of freedom. But something changes in the totalitarian context. The "origins of totalitarianism" is a story of the destruction of public space to the point that the totalitarian order is without any public space. The snapshots, though, disclose a public capacity within the private arena. Beyond the kitchen table, people cannot appear openly, speak to each other, and defend their freedom. But around the table, they do just that. They can tell each other stories about what is happening in the wider world, can add critical commentary, and discuss alternative courses of action in their lives and the lives of their compatriots.
The bookstore and the salon further develop this public space in which critical reflection and independent creation can appear. The general principle of action around the kitchen table is now extended beyond the bonds of intimate trust, to the written word and its distribution and to the spoken word. People appear before each other, speak to each other, and develop capacities to act in concert. They create alternative institutions and these institutions develop. The buyer and the seller in the bookstore meet each other and in a small way contribute to the development of an alternative literary public sphere in Poland. When we think of the great dissident movements of the former Soviet bloc, we think of the heroes of the center stage, of Sakharov, Solzhenitsyn, Brodsky, Havel, Michnik, Kuron, and other such figures. But these heroes acted with the support of others who helped constitute interactive supports for their actions. The buyers and sellers of illegal books, and the way they bought and sold the books, sustained the action of heroes. Arendt focused on the heroes and did not adequately understand the social constitution of heroism. But it was very much there and supported the principles that most concerned her.
When friends and relatives met in their kitchens, they presented themselves to each other in such a way that they defined the situation in terms of an independent frame rather than that of officialdom. Clear social rituals were observed. Almost immediately, they would ask each other about the latest jokes. They would exchange bits of information about the doings of the powers that might suggest the direction of things to come. Then there would be singing, of folk songs, popular tunes, and sarcastic renditions of Stalinist agit-prop songs from the late 1940s and early 1950s. Intimate grammatical forms were the rule. When "newspeak," the public language, the language of officialdom, was spoken, it was with a raised eyebrow or distancing tone. In this way friendship was forged and a general orientation established. Bonds of trust developed, enabling each individual who took part to forge an identity, a self, that was strikingly different from his or her institutionally defined persona. This was public life hidden in a private space. It was a space defined as outside the frame of party ideology, a space wherein a countervailing frame was developed. In this way, we can understand the snapshots through the sociology of Goffman.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Politics of Small Things by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb Copyright © 2006 by The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission.
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