gonepublic by Noëlle McAfee

Connecting New Media and the Political Unconscious

November 18, 2009

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In two podcasts this week I have had the delightful opportunity to talk with colleagues from two distinct worlds about themes ranging from the political unconscious to new media.

Early this week Brad Rourke, whom I know through our mutual association with the Kettering Foundation, engaged me in a conversation on the subject of his own work, new media and civic life, picking up some of the themes in my previous post, Discerning Media. We made a couple of key points: (1) the distinction between professional media and citizen media is less helpful than the distinction between journalism (which one doesn’t need to get paid for to do) that engages the public in its work and news coverage that does not; and (2) perhaps the larger problem we face is that we live in a political culture that offers few spaces and ways for people to shape their own collective future and hence little incentive for people to seek out good journalism. Here’s a link to the podcast.

This morning fellow philosopher Chris Long of Penn State University uploaded a podcast of a conversation we had on my last book, Democracy and the Political Unconscious, the day after the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy held a panel discussion of the book. Chris has been using new media to explore what he calls Socratic Politics and to engage his students in a much deeper pedagogy that uses blogging and other new media formats extensively. Go here to hear our conversation that ranges from the phenomena of trauma and the war on terror to the role of new media in overcoming brutality and strengthening democracy. Also check around on his blog to get a virtual glimpse of his 24/7 class on ancient Greek philosophy.

Both Brad and Chris exemplify how to use new media to not only do one’s own work better but to strengthen public life. It’s an honor to have both these conversations “go public” this week.
Discerning Media

November 11, 2009

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I spent part of yesterday and today in meetings at the Kettering Foundation thinking about media and democracy. These conversations still, to my chagrin, keep getting tangled up with the debate about old school journalism versus new media. I’ve blogged about this debate before. But I keep coming back to these meetings because I think that something incredibly promising is happening in this new media environment. But it won’t happen inevitably; it won’t happen because the new technology just makes it so; it won’t happen unless we discern and aim toward using these new media to create a better environment for democratic politics.

Here’s where I think we need to go next.

First we need to understand that publicly relevant journalism is not beholden to any particular medium — not print, radio, TV, or web. Publicly relevant journalism is reportage that links information with value. By that I mean linking what the facts are on any given matter with what people’s and communities’ concerns and aspirations are. Good journalism never just reported what happened. It reported on how what happened matters to us. Events matter to us because they impinge or constrain or open up possibilities for us achieving things we care for. This kind of journalism can happen in a newspaper as well as on a blog.

Second, we need to get over this distinction between professional journalism and citizen journalism. It was a twentieth century economic circumstance that gave rise to the penny press (see James Carey on this) and the very model of professional, disinterested journalism. In the last decade or so, two phenomena have converged: (1) the old business model for print journalism cratered and (2) digital media made analogue media obsolete. Phenomenon 2 certainly exacerbated phenomenon 1. But it didn’t cause it! Well before web 1.0 or web 2.0, newspapers were in crisis. Ten years ago we lamented that two newspaper towns were becoming one newspaper towns. Now we lament that there are towns without any newspapers at all. Old-school journalism wants to blame the web. But the blame lies elsewhere.

Third, we need to understand what drives demand for good journalism. In today’s meeting, Dan Gillmor made the good point that the old model of journalism was about manufacturing a product (a news article) and distributing it to the passive masses. The old model, which sent news out to people, trained people to be passive consumers. Now with new media, Dan argues, we have plenty of content but poor demand for good quality since people are trained to wait and settle for whatever news comes at them.

That’s a good point. But Rich Harwood and I countered that it is not a matter of ginning up demand for better news but creating conditions under which citizens can engage. As I see it, people aren’t going to seek out good journalism unless they see their own connection to it.

The dominant political culture of the twentieth century trained citizens not to bother with matters of widespread, common concern. Their officials would take care of it. If their officials didn’t, well then just bitch and moan until they did. Nary was there a message that common problems call for common deliberation and action. So we just started delegating it all to officialdom. This is a recipe for apathy/outrage (two sides of one coin) not engagement.

In that kind of context, why should anyone bother reading the paper? Why should I bother reading about matters of common concern when what I think about it doesn’t matter at all — and when I have even less chance to make a difference?

Hence, fourth, and finally for this post, relevant journalism, whether it happens on the web or in print, needs to embedded in a culture — or help create a culture — that sees members of political communities as political agents. One of or guests in today’s meeting, Jeremy Iggers, who helped found the Twin Cities Daily Planet, has been focused on creating a new platform with just this task. With him, we have to start treating people as actors rather than as consumers and audiences. Good journalism calls for political transformation. Not only that, sustainable journalism calls for this. Perhaps in another post I’ll document the places and cases in which media that actually connects with communities’ democratic capacities becomes economically sustainable. Folks will pay for news when it matters to them — and when the political culture considers that what they think does indeed matter.

In short, the future of journalism lies in creating conditions in which the people engage with the news because they think that it matters to them and because they think that their own take will matter back. Also, we need to realize that good journalism knows no particular medium, though I do think that digital media open up exponentially more opportunities and spaces than analogue media ever did.
Execution Style

November 10, 2009

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No doubt John Allen Muhammad was a sociopath and a murderer. I only wish that we as a society might be better than that. I’m sick to my stomach that our collective way of dealing with such sick, sociopathic murderers is to murder them back and in the process model killing as a way to solve problems. Shame on us. Shame, shame, shame.

As reported in the New York Times:

John Allen Muhammad, the Washington-Area Sniper, Is Executed

John Allen Muhammad, the man known as the D.C. Sniper whose
murderous shooting spree in the fall of 2002 left at least 10Ex
dead, was executed at a Virginia state prison Tuesday night,
The Associated Press reported.

Read More:
http://www.nytimes.com?emc=na
Twenty years ago today…

November 9, 2009

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It was twenty years ago today that…. How do you finish that sentence? There are plenty obvious ways:

…that the wall came down.

…that the Cold War ended.

…that Communism failed.

…that capitalism (or was it democracy? or are these even interchangeable?) triumphed.

blah blah blah

Okay, it was some of all of that, though with Slavoj Zizek I agree that it wasn’t the last thing on that list.

What I think changed that day, along with the weeks that led up to it and the cushy and technicolor revolutions that followed, was the notion that politics is about what governments do. Of course it is true that governments engage in politics; but it also became true that politics and political power are what peoples can engage in and create. This is “the politics of small things” that Jeffrey Goldfarb talks about in a book of that name. It’s what happens when a group of people who have no official power get together and make a plan, as Harry Boyte and the civil rights movement he has studied discovered.

Of course, the immediate cause of the fall of the wall was some bumbling bureacrats fumbling a speech, and then people heading to the gate, and a series of coincidences that let first a trickle and then a flood of people breaching and then tearing down the wall. And behind that cause was the weakening of the Soviet Union, perestroika, Gorbachev, and all that. But a more fundamental cause, one that could capitalize on the others, was the rise of new civic movements in East Germany and Czechoslovakia, and the long tradition of Poland’s Solidarity movement, that gave lie to the idea that all power rests with the state. These movements created a kind of lateral or horizontal power, webs of power that Hannah Arendt had noted, the power of solidarity.

Before November 1989, for at least three decades, almost all political activists of all stripes on either side of the “iron curtain” focused on the state in their attempt to bring about political change. The new civic movements of 1989 showed the power of nongovermental action and civil society for creating change. Before 1989 the language of civil society was slowly entering back into the lexicon of political theory, after dusting off lots of old copies of Hegel texts. But after 1989 the language of civil society flooded into every crevice of academic, philanthopic, and development activity.

It was twenty years ago today that THAT change happened.
The Mismeasure of Woman

October 24, 2009

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On today’s New York Times op-ed page, financial editor Joanne Lipman asks how it is that women finally make up half the work force and are the major breadwinner in 40 percent of families and yet are still treated as either witches or bimboes.

Op-Ed Contributor

The Mismeasure of Woman

By JOANNE LIPMAN

Published: October 24, 2009

Somewhere along the line, especially in recent years, progress for women has stalled. This isn’t simply a woman’s issue; it affects us all….
Women in Philosophy

October 5, 2009

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Kathryn Norlock of St. Mary’s College notes some interesting pieces that have sprung up all at once about the situation of women in philosophy. Took them a while…

Here’s her post, copied with her permission from a message sent to the Society for Women in Philosophy email list:

Philosophers,

It’s a great day when the Philosopher’s Magazine, the New York Times, and the Leiter blog all notice that the situation for women in philosophy is in the news. Note that some reports are more sympathetic than others, but as my president says, I’m looking forward!

The New York Times blurb is here:
http://ideas.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/02/a-dearth-of-women-philosophers/

It draws its admittedly “women are put off by adversarial culture” –focused angle from a longer and more complex argument in the TPM:
http://www.philosophypress.co.uk/?p=615

And Brian Leiter notes its circulation as well:
http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2009/10/situation-for-women-in-philosophy-makes-the-ny-times.html

Enjoy,

Kate Norlock

I welcome comments on the pieces Kate points to and on this topic in general.
Town Hall Democracy?

September 16, 2009

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Here’ s a recipe for debate rather than deliberation. Throw a town hall meeting and put a politician in the middle of the room. In that setting, the people generally come to blame and beseech. They don’t come to do the political work of deliberation, which is to ask themselves, on whatever the issue at hand is, what are we going to do about this?

Was it Bill Clinton who took the town hall meeting and put it to the political use of meeting and greeting the public? The language of “town hall” invokes the ideal of face-to-face political decision making. But when there’s a politician in the room, all the energy goes to “what are you going to do about this?” With his political gifts, Bill Clinton could turn this into an opportunity to charm the room into seeing things his way. But that’s not what a town hall meeting is supposed to do.

In a real town hall meeting, the power is in the room, not on the stage. I attended a volatile town hall meeting in Andover, Massachusetts, when I lived there. The issue had to do with development and there were a lot of strong feelings in the room. But the energy was directed toward each other, and the live question was, what are we going to do? How will we decide? And are we going to be able to live with each other peaceably after we’re done? Someone stood up and reminded everyone that years ago, on a similar issue, what “the town had decided.” We were all here trying to work out what the voice of the town was going to be on this issue, too.

That is hard work. In deliberating, there are usually several things we want but we can’t have them all. We have to decide what to give up, and how much we’re willing to give up, to get something else. If there’s a politician in the room, it’s easy to shrug off this work and demand that the politician fix it. Worse, it’s easy to start demonizing and name-calling.

This summer of “town hall” fiascoes made me ill and the fall is turning out no better. We have this sham democracy. Politicians need to meet and greet their constituencies in order to get reelected. And on the volatile issue of health care reform, citizens have nary an opportunity to think through and work through the quintessential political question of “what should we do.” Instead they’re invited to a town hall where the only opportunity to weigh in is to voice an opinion or ask a question, not to deliberate. At its best, this is a recipe for an illusion of democracy. At its worst it’s an invitation for a mob mentality, the kind we witnessed with Rep. Joe Wilson heckling Barack Obama at a joint session of Congress and then later witnessed when hordes of right-wingers descended on the National Mall to demonize Obama and all the ills they imagined.

We need to find ways to start deliberating together, to ask ourselves, what should we do and what are we willing to give up to get what we want. We need to think about the myriad consequences and effects of various courses of action. There are people trying to do this, including folks with the National Coalition on Dialogue and Deliberation and with the National Issues Forums. Be we need more spaces for deliberation, especially online.
Digital Dialogue on Democracy and the Political Unconscious

August 14, 2009

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My book Democracy and the Political Unconscious is the subject of a podcast by Christopher Long’s Socratic Politics in Digital Dialogue:
Cultivating a Politics of Dialogue in a Digital Age.
In episode 8 of the Digital Dialogue, I am joined by Shannon Sullivan, Professor of Philosophy, Women’s Studies and African and African American Studies here at Penn State. Shannon is also the Head of the Department of Philosophy.

She has written extensively on American pragmatism, psychoanalysis, feminist philosophy and critical race theory, including two excellent books, Living Across and Through Skins: Transactional Bodies, Pragmatism and Feminism and Revealing Whiteness: The Unconscious Habits of Racial Privilege.

She joins me on the Digital Dialogue to discuss the recently publish book by Noëlle McAfee entitled Democracy and the Political Unconscious.

We focus on three specific issues:
1. McAfee’s understanding of the public sphere as a “semiotic happening” (p. 132)
2. The meaning of the political unconscious.
3. The notion of a political posture McAfee introduces briefly ( p. 84).
In the course of the discussion, we touch upon McAfee’s recognition that social media opens important possibilities for political community.
Also in the podcast they discuss how the book helps explain what’s going on in this past week’s town hall “discussions” on health care. Check back in a day or so for a post from me on this. For the podcast, go here.
Civil Society, or the Public Sphere?

July 24, 2009

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I am ready to come clean with my worry about these two terms, “civil society” and “the public sphere.” My political theorists friends (trained in political science departments) act and talk as if the difference between the two is patently obvious. I just nod, a bit hesitant to admit that I don’t quite get it. Many others use the terms interchangeably to denote a NONGOVERNMENTAL arena. Okay, yeah, I get that

Between the state and the mass of individuals there is this other, nongovernmental realm. Hegel aside, let’s suffice it to say that by the late 20th century people were returning to the idea of civil society to point out the political importance of the nongovernmental arena of associations such as labor unions, civic clubs, higher ed, churches, bowling leagues, choral societies, garden clubs, you name it. Some theorists included the market; others didn’t. (This seems to me to be a huge question that didn’t get enough attention.)

At the same time, or really earlier, with Habermas’s publication of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, the term public sphere came into vogue. Habermas’s book was originally published in the 70s, if memory serves me (this is a blog so I don’t feel compelled to look it up just now). It was translated into English in the early 1990s, just when the term civil society was hitting it big.

Both terms seemed to hit the zeitgeist in the same way. But there were some key differences. Various arenas of civil society may, at any given moment, be attending to things political, or not. But the public sphere seems to be defined as an arena that is all about political matters.

Moreover, civil society is a demarcation of entities, asssociations, not activities. But “the public sphere” is something else. In the popular imaginary, the public sphere may be a space waiting in the wings upon which people can enter and attend to things political. But in Habermas’s conception it was something else altogether. He described it (in Steven Seidman’s 1989 volume) as the space that arises whenever two or more people come together to talk about matters of common concern.

In this sense, the public sphere is not a space but an occurence. It’s not an entity; it is a phenomenon. It is the effect of two, three, or more people coming together to figure out what to do on matters of common concern.

Where civil society seems to map formal and perhaps informal associations, the public sphere maps activities. We have here the difference between substance and process ontology. In philosophy, substance ontology focuses on the essence of things, which it generally sees as having essences and properties, with things being relatively static or at least continuous over time. It might move from a focus on a thing to its relations between things, but in general it attends to the thing itself. Process ontology doesn’t see things as fixed or having essences. It sees beings as matters of being, as phenomena. The desk upon which my hands rest isn’t a table so much as it is some matter TABLING. Likewise, we could say that the public isn’t an entity but a phemonenon of people in relation taking up matters of common concern. One day they might do that, and we call them a public, and another they don’t, and we don’t call them much of anything.

I still think that civil society is a useful notion, but I don’t think it should ever stand in for the more robust and specific conception of the public sphere. Perhaps we should attend to how, in a particular moment, under certain kinds of conditions, entities of civil society, and even those not seen as qualified members therein, morph into the public sphere.

if we think of the public sphere as a process and a phenomenon, as an effect of political engagement among people who may not in any way be “authorized’ to act, we can see it as a really poweful and potentially transgressive space for politics. The idea of civil society might contain that, but only the idea of the public sphere makes this manifest.
Random Summer Thoughts

July 17, 2009

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1. It’s odd that no one paid attention to the adjective “wise” in Sotomayor’s comment, “I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would, more often than not, reach a better conclusion.” If “wise” means anything, then all she said was a tautology.

2. It’s good that some companies are making a profit, but obscene that they’ll be handing out huge bonuses.

3. The Wall Street Journal increasingly looks like USA Today.

4. The steadiest ritual in my life, for more than 20 years, is morning with the New York Times and a cup of French roast coffee and this makes life very good indeed. I don’t think it would be the same with an online version.

5. The social effects of Facebook have yet to be seen.

6. Twitter is the anti-Facebook. Where Facebook is about creating a tight circle of friends, however big, Twitter is all about broadcast with a big disconnect between who one follows and who follows you.

7. It’s not as hot this summer as it was last summer, but then again I don’t live in Texas anymore.

8. Did California ever repeal Proposition 13? Now would be a good time.

9. We want Sen. Franken to be funny, not boring.

10. And that’s the way it is, so far, in some measures, this summer of 2009.

11. Rest in peace, Walter Cronkite.