Session IV: Types and Forms of Discourse
January 30, 1998
Session I: The Question of the Media and the Public Sphere: The Idea of the "Public Sphere"
Session II: Media Systems and Technologies in History
Session III: The Concept of "Media" and "Mediation"
Jeffrey Goldfarb:
Today, we formally call this session Types and Forms of Discourse. What we are going to hear is Robin Pacific-Wagner and Josh Gamson speak about their recent, and in some cases, or one case, not so recent work, on the analysis of the discursive practices of media. I think it will have something to do with how it effects our understanding of the relationship between public and private. We are all friends so I don't feel I need to speak about their great accomplishments, so I won't. These are both parts of books. In Robin's case, the book was published in 1994 on MOVE. In Josh's case, a book that is coming out in May, Freaks Talk Back: Tabloid Talk Shows and Sexual Nonconformity, by University of Chicago Press.
Joshua Gamson:
What we tried to do, even though our work is pretty dissimilar on the face of it, was to look for common themes in my work and Robin's work. So what I want to do is to go over a couple of background things as reminders of talk shows, show some clips, and then put three or four things on the table that I think are shared with Robin. We will each talk in our own way about each of those things, or at least a couple of them.
The general issue for me is what has happened with talking in public and the process of going public. I don't know if people read the background of the historical chapter, but I just want to remind you of the basic argument of that, which is that talk shows are built as class hybrids and that, for me, is really the key to understanding how most things play out on them. So they always draw simultaneously on elements of, I'm going to make this vulgar statement, of middle-class cultures that are polite, public participation, sober and rational, and things that are much closer to the sort of Habermasian rational public sphere stuff; and on elements of working class cultures where public participation is relatively wild and more reverent and more emotionally based, which, obviously, are not natural categories. These are categories which get defined historically but talk shows always join them together and exaggerate them over time, and then this is the main argument which I think the video clips make, too. Over time, one version has come to supersede the other, and this I'm telling you because I assume that not everyone watches talk shows.
So although the staple strategy for attracting audiences is always a big conflict in the first, more Phil Donahue [talk show] style, version that most people here are probably familiar with; the kind of conflict was much more [based on] social issue controvers[ies], and the people on the shows were recruited through organizational networks and the audiences in the studio were instructed in a [certain, high-minded] respectfulness, whether they need it or not. They usually don't. In the newer version, which I really think of as starting with Ricki Lake, which you will see a little bit of, the focus is almost exclusively on interpersonal conflict and the guests are recruited almost exclusively through toll-free numbers. They are not affiliated with organizations for the most part. They are much less white, they are much less middle class, and they are encouraged to be rambunctious. And I know this partly from going to the shows and knowing that at [the] Ricki Lake [Show] you're checked for beepers and in Donahue you just get the chocolate chip cookies and go in. It [Donahue] is canceled now, but you just go in and raise your hand and everybody is very nice.
So the later version, the one that targets younger audiences with interpersonal conflict, and really heightened interpersonal encounters, is really what has taken over now. Over time, the class basis, and the class representations, and the type of emotion and the tone of emotion, and the coloring of the audiences, has really changed a lot. What I tried to do in that background chapter was [describe] how this effects representations of sexuality. I'm not going to talk about that now, but I'll just start off with these clips. I tried to separate them into one version and the earlier version.
[Gamson begins showing clips from a number of American talk shows to demonstrate his distinction between the earlier version of the talk show (Donahue) and the later version (Ricki Lake). The clips include episodes which deal with the interpersonal conflict such as issues of homosexuality and bisexuality. The issue of choosing one's sexual orientation is debated].
I just want to put four things on the table for possible discussion and see what Robin has to say about them. The first set of things are three issues related to the meanings of public and public sphere that I think my thinking about talk shows has made me think about more. First is something which has come up in here before which is breaking down the notion of public sphere in a more. . . thinking about the multiplicity of public spheres rather than thinking in terms of a totalizing, singular concept of public sphere. Some in that multiplicity of publics, and public spheres, operate differently, operate as nondeliberative, perhaps, but are nonetheless public and part of the public sphere and that needs to be figured out. Talk shows are certainly, for me, making that visible: that there are these distinct stereotypes of publics that are competing for space on these shows, as far as I can tell, and that talk shows are sort of a for-profit translation of differently lived and differently constituted public spheres; one, for example, with different notions of cultural authority, which I want to talk about in a second; different roles for the personal and private, different ways of relating them; different place for emotions which I also want to talk about. So, I think one of the things is thinking about how you understand the relationship between, say, emotionally based, sort of sensation based public spheres, and class and rationality based public spheres. That is to put it simply. I've heard that sort of come up here in various ways but has not been really addressed.
Also, this is still part of this breaking-down of the multiple spheres kind of thing. I don't have thoughts on where to go with this, but there seems to me to be an important relationship between those multiple spheres and the national, overarching national, homogenizing, commercialized public sphere which I think is important to figure out as well.
The second relevant piece to rethinking public sphere ideas to me is the relevance of competition over the representation or constitution of what is public and what is the public sphere. Especially, I think, more carefully thinking through agency, the agency which is taking place behind the changes behind the public sphere; and how often that is concrete political battles over ownership over public space. By ownership, I mean symbolic ownership-not obviously in talk shows: when they changed hands, it was a change symbolically, not a change of real ownership, but those symbolic battles about space that is; and the terms of those battles need to be thought through and talk shows, I think, have some concrete access to that because you see, in the chapter that I gave you, the active strategies by movement activists, not just gay and lesbian activists but feminist activists, to redefine publicness, sort of messing with public and private lines which for a while coincided with the active programming strategies of television producers to profit from this new symbolic relationship between the public and the private. And then a change in which the activists' success in making use of the public space of televised public space for their own agendas then meets up with these changes in the niche strategizing of producers, who were then going for the younging of the audience. And the success of the activists in their savvy which then shifts the representations of public sphere, of the public space, in a way that you get this emphasis on interpersonal conflict and you get unaffiliated guests who are saying all kinds of things that organized gay activist guests object to, and that is just to me one of the examples of the ways the competition over who owns this space then happens through the deployment of new public-private relationships and is very much about concrete activity. And sort of mundane activity a lot of the time.
The second way that I see this happening is the things which I write about, the anxieties for some people about the changes in symbolic ownership. About public space which gets linked to notions of impropriety, people behaving badly in public, and the notion that coming out is invasive and improper. That again, I think, is a concrete access to the ways which these competitions over public space refigure the public sphere.
The last issue related to the meanings to the public and public sphere obviously has to do, for me, with the different meanings of public, I think, or the difference between the public and the private. Different versions of that need to be taken into account more carefully where you have public versus personal, public versus domestic, public versus individual rather than collective; and there may be interactions between these meanings, different uses of these different meanings of public versus private, being deployed by different actors with different effects, and that may matter a lot. Which version people are deploying may matter a lot for how transformations in the public--I'm really thinking about public space--I'm not really thinking public sphere in that big, broad sense, but the way that media professionals, movement activists, individual people just seeking TV affirmation, viewers, political actors, and so forth all are making use of these different versions especially right now; with this Clinton thing I see that happening quite a bit. Yes, the personal is political gets turned around. That was all one set of things.
The last few things are shorter, I think. Emotion, in the public sphere, I think, should be raised obviously by talk shows. It is something that I haven't seen discussed that much here and I think it would add a lot. I'll see what Robin has to add to this, but just to remind you of what I think is going on in the talk shows, is that you've got hard-core and soft-core versions of the use of emotions by talk show producers and participants. The whole genre is obviously emotionally based in the way that it seeks profits. These various versions of the use of emotions by talk show producers and participants, so that you get various combinations of rational, emotional discourse on the shows. You get rational, but emotionally charged deliberation, debate, and deliberation about social issues, emotionally volatile social issues on the Donahue style show. You get emotional, but rationally tempered discussion of volatile, emotional, personal issues centering especially on personal disclosure, and this is the heightening of, and this is the soft-core version, the heightening of emotions such as grief on Oprah revelation shows. And you get these more spectacular displays of heightened emotion, centering especially on interpersonal conflict and on emotions such as anger on the Springer shows. That to me is at least breaking that--unleashing the ways in which emotional and rational are interacting in these settings and how that changes and how the emotional, and how one would think about public sphere as including emotions, and as including emotions in various different ways because of the particular ways, because of the particular actions of these media producers, and how they interact with political activity and with, and I'm not sure what I would call it, but the affirmation needs of the guests.
The second emotional thing I think about on talk shows, is just disclosure in public as a political tool, which I talk about some in that chapter. And something that I haven't made sense of is the discourse of humiliation as the flip side of the emotional disclosure. I don't know what to do with that. In any case, this sort of disclosure as, I guess as what Robin talks about as rupturing, and calling forth reparation, as a reparative mechanism. But I think a lot of what the disclosure does is explicitly try to disrupt, maybe unintentionally, but sometimes intentionally, try to disrupt public, private lines and to disrupt normal and abnormal boundaries, and then there is a response to both of those which I talk about.
The third major issue which I think Robin and I have in common has to do with cultural authority and expertise and the way that plays out in the kinds of spaces. In talk shows, in particular, I think you see these kinds of reversals of the terms of cultural authority and of expertise. Let me give you one story. When I took my media class to the Ricki Lake Show this year--I always take them to a talk show because I want them to see cultural production in action--the warm-up guy was talking to these two young African-American kids in a few rows ahead of me. Sort of ribbing them, she was very quiet so he said something like I hope she's better in bed then she is at talking, more vocal in bed. Everybody laughed, and it did work to warm people up. And then he saw a friend of a student of mine with a book in her lap and said what are you doing reading? And she said, no, I'm writing down what you just said because I was deeply offended by it, by your misogynist comment. And the whole place was completely silent. Then I hear from up front, I see it is an African-American woman say, she's got to go. And there often is in these settings this feeling of the white person who doesn't belong here. The person who usually has the cultural authority elsewhere is completely demolished here and later in that same show when the show was being taped, one of my students stood up and told [. . .] Well, there was a panel of a stepfather and a stepmother and their kid, and a white group and then a black lesbian, as always, there is always a lesbian or something on these shows, and her lover and her kid and my students stood up and told the stepfather that nobody asked him to be the kid's father so he should back off. And this black lesbian on the panel just pounced on this white kid from Yale and said, "I've raised five children and when anyone steps in to help anyone at all that is a good thing." She completely demolished this student of mine. I mean completely slammed him and the whole place erupted in favor of the idea that any parent is a good parent. It was another one of these moments for me where, okay, it is the black lesbian tell[ing] the white Yale kid what family responsibility is about. I don't see this happening elsewhere, this reversal of authority. On that last clip, I think, it was "What is your profession?" It's an interesting reversal and I'm trying to understand why that happens and why it is limited to these particular spaces and what the relationship is to emotion. What the relationship is to these sort of class representations which are simultaneously, genuinely the lives of people and exaggerated versions.
In the last piece, which has to do with the idea of the normal in these settings. I don't know if in the sections I gave you I said much about that, but I have things to say about that. Basically, what happens, how people perform normality as a means of legitimizing their place on the public stage or getting to become a public speaker, and/or perform abnormality as a way of gaining entry into the public space, which is basically the term right now for most talk shows of entry, and getting on stage, and the mixed ways that that plays out in the mixed ways, which effect changes that may effect changes in normal and abnormal boundaries that are getting displayed. So any of those I think are worth talking about.
Robin:
I'm going to assume that most everybody has read the chapters that I've sent around to you. So I don't want to rehearse the M.O.V.E. here. The work I did largely out of the analysis of the transcripts and the video tapes and the hearings which were held as Watergate style. One of the really interesting things about the hearings as a setting was first of all that they were publicized over public radio and television in the same way that Watergate was publicly accessible as the hearings went on. In a way it is somewhat similar to the settings which Josh examines, although not obviously or immediately so. They brought together a really diverse constituency to talk about this event. So you had a lot of different kinds of people on stage as it were, policemen, firefighters, neighbors of M.O.V.E., and M.O.V.E. members and city administrators along with all of the usual experts in ballistics and incendiary devices. So it was a kind of talk show quality to it in that you had a number of different people coming together talking about this event in very different ways.
Josh and I identified a number of themes, as he mentioned, which we saw as running through both of our works even though obviously about radically different situations and fora. I'm just going to talk about three of those, and they are the same ones that Josh mentioned, but say a few things about how they kind of played themselves out in my own study. Then I think we can open it up to discussion.
The first one has to do with what it means to be normal. This is where Josh ended up. I think one of the things that really struck me throughout the hearings, throughout the event itself, the whole history of M.O.V.E. in Philadelphia, the event, then the hearings and all the write-ups about it, was how critical it was for the city to figure out who was normal. At some level you can say MOVE was about many, many things, but if you dig down to the deepest level it's who gets to be considered to be normal. What do you have to be in society in order to be considered to be normal? And who gets to be normal without even working at it, and who has to really work at being acknowledged as normal. And when I see normal I want you to see quotation marks around that, because what I'm really talking about is a social construction of normalcy here. So you have these alternative sort of radically extreme alternatives, who get to be normal without doing anything, and typically it turns out to be white, upper-middle class people who live in the suburbs; and who has to really work at being acknowledged as normal, and it turned out to be the uncertain class. I say uncertain because the city just couldn't figure out if the neighbors were working class, middle class, lower middle class. They just kept oscillating back and forth on that, so the uncertain class was African-American who lives in west Philadelphia in an urban setting. They are forced to profess their normalcy.
So I was really interested in trying to discern, and MOVE as well was trying to profess its normalcy, or at least intermittently tried to do that, and then resisted it. It had a much more ambivalent relationship to the profession of normalcy. So I was interested in just sort of discerning the mechanisms by which normalcy is professed or acknowledged or taken away from people in the public settings in the kinds of hearings that I studied, created. And what available discourses are there by which different groups, members of different groups in society, are able to profess normalcy. I think the most obvious, and it seems to me fundamental, discourse of normalcy is the domestic discourse, what I call the discourse of domesticity in which one insists on one's normal relationship to others in what is considered a normal family. That is a heterosexual family in which, a nuclear family in which you live in one house and you cook dinners every night and you celebrate the holidays that the calendar has written on it. And you adhere to an organized and acknowledged religion and you articulate your normalcy through your attention to all of the details of this discourse of domesticity, and how in these kinds of public hearings that come after a crisis and are supposed to heal the crisis and heal the rift there is an attempt to find, to locate the precise ways of articulating that normalcy through these various acknowledged means of familial and religious orientation and membership.
This runs through a series of crisis. I'm now looking at a series of standoffs that you all are probably familiar with, the Branch Davidians, and Ruby Ridge and the Republic of Texas, and Wounded Knee. What is interesting is that you find this same kind of after-the-fact articulation of normalcy on the part of those who are in the business of healing the rift, or of trying to show that they were just slightly on the side of the established authority side of things and that they shouldn't have been impugned for cohabiting with the so-called enemies of the state. In several interviews with FBI officials, after Waco, these officials were trying to justify their own actions after the fact in the way that things ended in Waco. Each of them begins their interview with something like, "I was getting my family ready for church on the morning of February . . . when I was notified by the branch office that such and such was happening." Just this insistence that we were going about our normal business of being God-fearing Americans when this happens which pulls me out of my normal life. So you find it everywhere. The stakes are really high, that is the thing about this. It would be trivial and mildly interesting that people in these situations of crisis and after crisis try to prove how normal they are. If the stakes weren't so high, I think that is what makes it really, really crucial is that if you do fall off of the edge of the normalcy line, chances are the state will bring its arsenal against you.
The second topic is emotions, and again Josh and I found this to be a common theme. I heard a really good talk by a French sociologist named [ ] earlier this year and it was on Princess Diana's funeral and an analysis of Princess Diana's funeral. Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz have written a book together called Media Events and this analysis was of the funeral of Diana as a media event. They had a whole series of analytical frameworks which is really interesting. But one of the things which really struck me about his talk was the outpouring of emotion and the incredible persistence of grief displayed in public in England in particular but also around the world which forces the analyst and the politician to take emotion seriously. In other words what does it mean to have to take emotions in the public sphere seriously and not just write it off as epiphenomenal or trivial and not the real business of the public sphere. Certainly in the MOVE case, emotions were a very slippery topic. They were clearly, there was an attempt to find an emotional center during the MOVE hearings themselves of an event which seemed to lack all coherence and to have led to such horrible tragedy without anybody comprehending how. So an attempt to find an emotional center. This often comes to rest on the images of children, and the images and imagery of children. [end of tape] That it is okay to talk about emotions when you talk about children in the public sphere, but it is much more difficult to talk about adults and emotions at the same time. So children become a useful siphon for all the emotional work that needs to get done that people intuitively feel has to get done in the public sphere but can't handle when they are talking about adults and adult behavior. However, because there were adults who made decisions that led to the deaths to children, the MOVE commissioners felt it necessary, and I don't know whether you read this chapter, but felt it necessary to ask each of the city administrators when they went to testify whether and what kinds of emotions they had felt when they made the decision to bomb the MOVE house knowing that there were children in the house. And the persistence of this question was very revealing because it came in the middle of a long series of questions just purely about bureacratic chain of command decision making and kind of appeared there without any logic but would be dropped into each of these testimonies as a kind of little emotional bomb. The answers were as unsatisfying as the questions themselves were. One of the respondents, the managing director of the city, saying that he may have had an emotion but he wasn't sure, but that he may have had an emotion when the final decision to drop the bomb was made. What is so fascinating about his response is it is like some kind of contaminent that comes into you that you experience like a bacteria but you can't even name it. You don't even know what kind of emotion but you may have had, not felt an emotion not fear, anger, grief or guilt, which I guess is what they were really looking for.
So, I think one question for us to maybe talk about is what is the relationship between emotionality and rationality in discourse in the public about the public and particularity around critical and crisis events in the public sphere. Finally, credentials and expertise also plays a role in the MOVE case with really important questions about who gets to be a mediator and interpreter of events that affect the public. And how do we portion responsibility for the mediation of these events. The claim in the book was that it has become more and more the case that only those with bonified credentials that are formulated by institutions of various kinds, are able now to be identified as proper mediators, and for me this really raises the question of what happens to experience when credentials take over, and what is the relationship between experience and credentials when we are choosing who it is we want to be mediators. You [Gamson] mentioned the Clinton thing, I'm just going to refer to it as that, and I'm sure that you have all watched Larry's interviews and it is fascinating to me who they trot out to be experts on these kinds of things. By their choice of experts in advance, and usually they are lawyers, they determine in advance how any event is ultimately going to be defined. The experts speak out of their own expert discourses.
In the MOVE case there were what I called organic mediators who attempted out of their experience in the neigborhood to use a less restricted, less narrow, less credentialized discourse and a much more hybridized discourse. They were unsuccessful in the MOVE case, completely unsuccessful. Perhaps they found their edge in the talk show world. So maybe for us the goal is how do we bring the talk show and the public hearing together. In other words, what would be a forum that would have elements of both but wouldn't collapse into either. So that might be one question for us to look at.
Jean Cohen:
I didn't get to read much of the material but I'm wondering about your [Gamson] notion of these reversals or how you interpret the media through these talk shows. Obviously, we see that these have lots of meanings. I'm not sure whether the way you are interpreting the reversal, I mean the so-called cultural phenomenon: do you see this as a reversal of authority that has undermined the potential, or do you cast it more in the form of-whether you see it as carnivals where there were reversals but since they were contained they served to reinforce?
Gamson:
I guess I see it closer to the last one. I guess I am centered in between those because they are so obviously narrow and restricted. This is one response to the relationship between what Robin finds and what I find is that where do you get these reversals in the most trivialized, laughable kinds of spots. But they are, and I guess the carnival does this as well, there is a bit of optimism in me with them in that there is a kind of rupturing, and I especially see it when it comes to discourse on sexuality where there is the fact that people and the interest of the producers and of this reversal, this experiential authority and personalized authority, coincide, I think, leads to and messes with categorization processes and I think it can have an effect. I don't think it has any real, I don't think there is any real empowerment going on if that is what you mean. I don't think some talk shows have made some shift. It's more about, for me, the environment that sort of channels that reversal into a different setting.
Cohen:
One thing, and I don't think it has to be addressed, the old line about any [?] is a liberatory form of unrepressing. I don't believe that in the form that it is presented, but it is a proposition that I think needs to be addressed but the group.
Goldfarb:
I've been disturbed by these sessions in a good way. In our seminar when Paolo spoke about the form of television undermines the capacity of society to deliberate in an old-fashioned sort of ways, in ways that have been traditionally linked with ideas about participatory or deliberative democracy, and the idea that somehow the publics that occur or the publicity that occurs in a living room is somehow substituting for the publicity in parliaments and in representative insititutions, competition to take part in representative institutuitions, this concerns me because maybe my dreams about democracy are to some extent poetically rendered by Hannah Arendt when she talks about the Greek polis. I'm not being quite as romantic as she perhaps. I look at representative insititutions and feel that well, this is the best that we can do and not too bad considering the alternatives. Now I think, I'm challenged by Paolo's theoretical presentation and by particularly Josh's writings and a few things he said today to summarize his writings. In fact television is, and these talk shows has, as an accomplished fact, has broken down our conceptions of distinguishing between public and private so that the pleasures and accomplishments that can occur in private that shouldn't be publicized in order for them to occur. That is an ideal. Television challenges that but on the other hand it creates new types of publics, publics that appear in living rooms where they are on the television set and then in your living room as in these talk shows. I feel both, because in some ways it is very encouraging thing because it is Tocqueville observing the spread of democracy. It is inclusive. Not that Tocqueville would see one of these programs and be encouraged, from what we know about his sensibilities, but still his sense of the providential quality of democracy, I think, in some ways is revealed in this because democracy is spreading. On the other hand, what is going on in the public. It is the same criticism that I have had with some of Bill's [Hoynes] work on public television where the concern is with representation: presence and inclusion, but not with what happens in between people, and okay, it is an advance. Emotions are included. We are challenged to consider emotions seriously but on the other hand, does this allow us or help us, in what way does this help us to govern ourselves. Enlightenment thinkers can say that we govern ourselves through reason. Okay, well we know that that isn't completely it, but your idea of bringing the two discourses together in some ways helps us to break through the Socratic discourse and including, but can it be reasonable? Can it help us govern ourselves in a way that we would view in some ways as being desirable?
The last thing, and I hope that I'm being clear: Tocqueville thought that democracy and cultural refinement were conflicting and that one of the consequences of democracy was that refinement was going to decline. There is something very funny about that when he wrote it because he wrote it, in the 1830s, I've said this many times, but he wrote that at the time that is often called the American Enlightenment or the American Literary Renaissance. Exactly at that moment he said that literature is going to decline in democracy, in democratic times. There is a tension between refinement and democracy, between informed deliberation and democracy that is given. But I don't think it is necessarily the case that with this type of inclusion necessarily, that deliberation or kind of publicity in an ideal sense is to decline. So I'm saying that I'm disturbed and challenged and I'm trying to figure out what are the alternative consequences. Is it possible to both include in public life more aspects of things that have been considered private, but still understand when private issues shouldn't be part of public, or shouldn't define public discussion. I would then also refer, I think, about this thinking about that Clinton thing.
Heloisa Pait:
I would like to say something to Gamson. You've talked a lot about the public and the private and about the notions . . . I felt in reading your book that what really interested me was the first part when you discussed the role of the social . . . I think this is something that was left out in our seminar. When you touch on that, I think you could then deal with questions that we are trying to deal with. The image that I was left with was this image of this two-headed woman who. . . she is part of the show, she's kind of a bizarre attraction, but I don't know if you said or I inferred that she is also you in a way in that you are both attracted to the talk shows and disturbed by it. Trying to deal with this tension. What you do in the book is not to choose one side or the other side which is what we have been doing but try to leave with this tension. I believe that this tension is not only something that we enlightened in the social sphere, I think it is a more wide-spread view of people who watch trash and they are very critical of the trash they are watching. I think the polls about Clinton say a lot about this ambiguity. So it is not that we know this is trash because we have read a couple of books. I think a lot of people feel the same way.
The way this methodological approach helps us to deal with theoretical questions, I think, is that we have here people believe that media has this inherent capacity to expand democratic values or at least the public sphere or transform it in a positive way. We have people who feel that because of economic issues the media has an inherent power to impoverish public discourse. We have people who feel that it depends on the issue that are being talked about. It depends on the practice of the dialogue and I think you have a fourth alternative which is this tension is in every discussion. It doesn't depend on the particular issue that is being discussed. It's not that it depends on the way we use the media but we are always disgusted and in love with it. We are always bringing issues to the public sphere that should be there but were excluded before but, well, now I'm getting lost but this tension is the essence. . .
Gamson:
I guess that is what I really think but I don't know where that leaves you at or what it really means. That's my only criticism of what I've done so far, that is organically developed for me two weeks after I'm done is--okay the book ends with, you don't see it, but okay, you don't see it, but what living with that tension or with those paradoxes that emerge from those tensions mean for those groups who are trying to become visible in order to change their political status which is ultimately what I really care about. It ends with this sort of, I think, I would say something like it's a metaphor of a tightrope and various people who are pulling at you trying to make you fall and these are the lessons of it, but all you can do is climb the ladder with these things scribbled on your hand, basically what you just said scribbled on your hand, to do it. I would read that and say where does that really leave you and that is why I think discussions like this, why these can be helpful for me because I agree with you on the way things really look and on what we are really grappling with and that it isn't an either/or choice. I guess it is also a contingent option there. That it is historically contingent and you look at each version of this tension but I'm not sure that helps Jeff [Goldfarb] or me. There is a step but I don't know what it is that comes after the recognition of the paradox. Do you know what I mean?
Heloisa Pait:
Yes, but go ahead, you are going to kill one of the heads. I think then you are at a real dead end whereas here you are not.
Arato:
Well, I don't think we need one actually. I think it is there. I mean, I think, to some extent to construct the idea of the public sphere as even normatively, truly rational would I think be wrong. I think you just have to use some extreme statements of the case for the public, like in Rawls where you are not supposed to use other public-regarding reasons and, granted, what takes place in the talk shows and even in the hearings cannot be described as people only using public-regarding reasons and being rational. I think that on the whole, even this early, more utopian conception of the public is compatible--with the idea that emotions should be compatible with the idea that emotions should be present in it. And I think that now as we develop in our discussions toward a more pluralized conception to which you referred to, it is obvious that there are going to be publics which will be much more emotional and others which will be less so, and that empirically we can point to cases where to be emotional would be wrong, whereas in other cases to be unemotional would be wrong. Then the criteria of those specific publics basically determines how much emotion there would be in each case. Well, there is nothing wrong with that so far. What happens though, is that when . . .
Gamson:
Can I stop you for one second? What is obvious about, I mean how are those criteria obvious?
Arato:
Well, in a courtroom you could not use [emotions] if you are trying to convince a judge, not jurors but a judge. Well, if the judge dismisses the case from the outset then the case doesn't get to the jury. On the whole you would have to use arguments even of the Rawlsian type if it is about issues of that type. Whereas on one of those talk shows, as you said, your Yale students get shouted down in two seconds because they just bring in what they learned from class. As far as that public is concerned, it is right that they should be, because that would introduce the notion of discussion that would exclude everyone else there. So they are not wrong in doing it because they are fighting for their public. They are fighting for their context. I think basically the fear that Jeff [Goldfarb] expresses, and I share also, and I think there is nothing in say Paolo's perspective to guard agains that. That ultimately when it comes to decisions and it comes to fundamental cultural understandings, that it is somehow the emotional publics which are to some extent planned and manipulated by entertainment industries come to dominate. That would certainly be inconsistent with the 18th-or-19th century idea of the public sphere.
I must say that I'm not so pessimistic about them though. The Clinton affair indicates pretty well why not. I mean, on the whole, if the polls can be trusted at all, the popular response is hyper-rationalistic. Whereas the media circus is anything but. I mean if we come to all see what--I read everything and so I have thought about it, so that by now on Newsweek and even in the New York Times had a real stake of producing guilt because we have gone so far in producing its illusion that they are now in fact committed to it. And how poorly that works in the [wider] population. Granted there is another effort on the part of the President. I think Tuesday was a great public relations triumph for them in the morning and the evening were unbelievable. That would not work in the context of what is going on in the media, unless to some extent very ordinary people, even the majority of the Republicans are judging these things in terms of other criteria and very prosaic criteria which have to do much with their emotions. I don't think anybody really has come to viscerally like Clinton as a result of all this, but because they judge it in terms of political interest, and on that level he is going to win.
Experts: I've been also watching Burden of Proof everyday, in fact today at 12:30 I'm going to miss it and at 4:30 too because I have to take my son to play tennis. It is an extremely interesting program because it has a talk show format. I had never watched it before. It is a CNN program which is on at 12:30 and 4:30 where two quite smart lawyers, one former prosecutor and one defense attorney, discuss issues of the day with expert panels. There is not much audience particpation, there is an illusion of it because they also put some people on the panels who look like audience types but they don't get to speak. It is the experts who get to speak. Now, this is an issue they raised. Now, in fact, it may be in times [that] it would create lines of inclusion and exclusion that would be unfortunate, but in this case and others like it really very much help the deliberate process of the population. Because what is going on, There is a media circus going on. People don't really know who's right and who's wrong and what really happened. They are told by, I think on the whole, a preponderance of legal opinion, that by a legal point of view very little happened and that very little could be proven even if in some conceivable sense that Clinton could have committed [this act]. That helps in a certain sense public orientation. Now, not so many people watch that program perhaps but although probably its ratings have gone up. That's an interesting point: that people hate it but the ratings go up. In the polls people say they hate the media circus, but actually the programs are becoming unbelievably watched during this period. This means that their emotions are important in their deciding. There is an interest in all of that. It is really fascinating stuff. But their judgement is not totally clouded by that. I think there expert opinion has helped the orientation of their judgement. I don't know how it is all going to turn out but I think we can already see that-the idea of at least Paolo's, that to some extent now image and medium have become everything, and everything else in terms of what actually happens is just constructed through that kind of process which is visible in the media--I don't think that is really right. In that sense, especially in this case, where there is such a strange mix of rationality and emotion, I think it is not too optimistic to say that in spite of all that, rational considerations have a chance to ultimately dominate the discussion. Or at least in the end be the decisive criteria. And that would not be so if we simply, if nothing else, we watched the programs, and nothing else the news programs. I don't know if people have watched Sam Donaldson in all of this. He is like in front of the lynch mob. I mean, this is news, but he is one of the people trying to promote a lynching, almost. People watch it all the time and I don't think he has put them in that kind of mood.
Maybe you can say that is because Hillary's message is more effective. One message beats out the other message. I think it is probably because, obviously I'm biased, but the rational arguments are on one side. People don't think it is right to massively tape somebodies, two people's private lives in this kind of massive way. People don't think it is right that there is a constant inquisition running against the President. And people don't think that a President who is successful in the political level who they consider, maybe some of us don't, but they do consider him very successful, should be removed because of a sexual scandal. I think those are farely rational considerations. I don't think this is the message of the media at all and yet I think that is the message that is at the moment dominant.
William Hoynes:
Can I start with Clinton and then come to a question. I was in a department meeting last Thursday or Friday and we were all discussing this "Clinton thing"-- is that what we are calling it? "The Bill and Monica Show." Anyway, everyone, including myself, chimmed in was commenting on the call-in programs that you listen to, like Larry King or CSPAN. Who are these people that are calling? It doesn't really matter; But not what Ted Koppel thinks or what other legitimate experts think. I myself, it is the only part that I have been interested in is what the people have been saying. Again bracketing who these presumed people might be. But I guess what struck me, Josh, when you were talking about the ways in which there is a broader industry, culture surrounding participatory talk via media on radio, tabloids and other publications. and I wonder to what degree these talk shows are part of; I'm not suggesting that they are causal, but part of a kind of participatory culture that throws up into the air questions of culturals authority, and in so doing actually throws also up into the air the kinds of questions of normalcy--who's normal and who's not. The kinds of questions that Robin is raising. The two are really connected. I guess the one part that disturbs me, and this is confessional, the one part that disturbs me is the ways in which abnormalcy becomes credential in the particular genre you are talking about. I haven't figured out what to do with that in terms of my own, probably far too rational, but my own sense of the ways in which this is participatory and sort of opening up the boundaries and pushing out what we think is normal. That is more inclusive, etc. It strikes me as not only important that that is happening, that there is this sort of potential expansion of bringing people in, but also, and I don't think this is just with talk shows, this seems to be--it is interesting when I teach at Vassar [College]--this is the probably the best currency to legitimacy to suggest that one is not traditional and standard. I know we are talking about college students and a liberal arts college, but the kind of opposition to traditional cultural authority becomes a very powerful resource in limited arenas. So I'm curious about where are there other arenas where this is happening.
Gamson:
Well, the first part of what you said should have been my response to Jean's question, because that is where my sense of where I think this can matter comes from. It is not from the actual reversals of authority on the shows that are affecting some broader reversals of cultural authority, of even reflecting that much of one. But from the fact that they contribute, they are parts of larger conversations, not just literally the ways that people watch the shows and talk about them afterwards, but they are more amorphous parts of the images that people are getting and taking with them, of drag queens or whatever it is, that become mundane and real, more serious conversations about sexual politics. I think they really are part of that. Those kinds of ruptures, discursive, whatever, things that mess up are important for that reason.
Hoynes:
So that is the basis for your optimism?
Gamson:
Yes, but it is still limited. I don't quite understand why it is disturbing. To me it is a relief to see, well, in college settings maybe not, but in these settings it is a relief for me to see abnormality as a kind of calling card and as a status enhancer. Maybe I missed what the disturbance was.
Hoynes:
What I am disturbed by is that I have a hard time figuring what to make of it.
Gamson:
I think it is very limited. Yes, college campuses, yes, adolesence, which is one of the reasons it is disturbing to me is because it is easily labeled as adolescent behavior when it is adults doing it on TV and I think that is what happens for the most part.
Hoynes:
Does it just reaffirm lines, though? And lead to marginalization?
Gamson:
There is no doubt that there is a reaffirmation of lines and that especially with gender, male and female categories and that sort of thing, that the clampdown is really strong at the cost of a lot of people. Again, I think that this is again the two-headed monster. I do think things get turned around. It's not predicable to me how they get moved around exactly but in this setting, for example, they get moved around so that someone like me can go on a show like this and can seem totally unremarkable in a way ten or fifteen years ago I couldn't have gone on TV and said, gay-Yale professor or however I want to identify, and caused yawns from everybody the way it does with students now as the boundaries get pushed out, and I think these are part, this is part of the process of the talking back which is happening simultaneous with a response, a clampdown, and a predictable need to hold onto categories some of the freaks and by the people who are viewing it and the people who are producing it. Again, I don't know quite where you go from that point but it is at least a different point than automatically what happens is this is carnival and carnival means an interruption that, a reversal that only goes to affirm. I don't think it is really that simply.
Wagner-Pacifici:
I think it is also important to appreciate this cultural authority as universal because a talk show culture is very American phenomenon. I'm not sure that in European television you find this same kind of democracy. Even though there is an importation phenomenon, too. . . I think you also have to appreciate the national characteristic of the political culture and television and entertainment culture.
[an example from Italy is given of what a talk show format is like there]
Vera Zolberg:
I think this business would be very interesting to do a comparison with various European countries of the sort that [?] did with Dallas for example. When I was in the Netherlands you could see Oprah Winfrey on reruns twice a day. It had an effect because there were developed programs like that which were sort of talk, audience, participatory talk shows. But they still had much more of the kind of expert people rather than democratic types sitting on the stage with the possiblity for the audience to participate. It was much more stayed and respectful than the trashy kind of things then you are discribing. Nevertheless it had qualities which you never would have seen a few years ago because it was much more open in discussion than I had imagined. The other part about mixing science and expertise with very popular things is very typical of French television. When they have, there are often shows where they show a very popular movie, often an American movie, a stupid, science fiction thing. Then they have experts from the University [?] sitting and making very great disquisitions about this dumb thing that was being shown. So you have a purgatory effect without calling it at the time.
Goldfarb:
There is a Hungarian, ex-patriot group, I don't know if it exists any longer. Some people around the room know about Squat Theater [name of theater group] and offshoots of it. So when they first came--we actually produced a Squat Theater production here today because of this window. I don't know what is going on down there at the end of the hall but down at the end of the hall, it looks like, first of all, in terms of color multi-color people are walking down the hall. It must be something having to do with Milano school or another graduate program here. A group of them, early 20s, late teens, black women were watching us looking at those talk shows and thinking it was very peculiar. This is what Squat Theater did. They would have these theaterical productions at least here in New York, which were done inside a store and the window looked out to the street, and they would open up the window and they would do very odd things and the production would challenge the kind of normality of the street and the publicity of a theater event, and then it was also a very challenging theater in terms of sexual conventions and so forth. It seems to me that that sort of work, when I saw this pig-child fire [reference to a scene from one of the talk shows which Gamson showed], I think it was called, they really worked on the difficulty of different kinds of publics and the tensions which exist between them. I think that actually is the challenge in our discussion. That, my concerns, at least one of the concerns of the seminar has to be not only an instrumental one, or a nostalgic one for publics of the past, but in a kind of active sense a constitutional one. How do we constitute publics that can, in terms of their relationship to democracy which can facilitate our governing of ourselves. One of the things is to be inclusive and so 'ourselves' is broadened and that is clearly going on in these shows. It is something that television does, it brings us into political life, public life. We know ourselves much better from speaking to Andrew before the State of the Union Address, his take on who we are and the fate of reasonable politics [end of tape] It is very exciting in terms of governing ourselves.
Arato:
You are wrong. You find out in three days.
Goldfarb:
But we can kind of react. There is a sense in which that--one of the great things about the fact that we are social beings is that we can be smarter in the presence of others. There is something to common sense. The sense that we have in common. How it informs us. The informing of the common sense and then learning ourselves about who we are went on this week. And it went on this week in a continential nation-state, multi-cultural nation-state, and we all know who we are better than we did at the beginning of the week in some profound way.
Arato:
I really think we should. It was really instructive.
Goldfarb:
But there is still a problem and that is your Sam Donaldson problem which is at the center of Robin's analysis of MOVE as I read it. That we have these different types of discourses next to each other. I agree with Eloise that we not only refine people who watch these people and see, yes, that is very amusing, and some of us confess to enjoy watching that and some of us don't, but we are all enticed in some way, but we all know it is trash. We kind of live with that ambivalence. The people who are taking part know it too. They are playing. It is a performance which they enjoy but they have a rational, critical self that says okay, yes, but. The difference between that and serious journalism which we both know and don't know, are concerned about and aren't concerned about, really, is being challenged. When Sam Donaldson, who supposedly is a serious, I didn't see this, but supposedly a serious journalist and becomes a circus entertainer.
Arato:
You have to see this from both sides. Clinton begins his State of the Union Address with the reference to the fact that Sonny Bono and the other person who just died. So he is not at all, he realizes, that he is going to give a very rational message. He hits the emotions first. That was an unbelievably clever move. Hilary, and her complete acceptance of her husband and that really hits a lot. So it really happens on both sides.
Goldfarb:
I'm glad that I had this moment to say this because I wanted to go back again to Robin's work. We have these different types of discourses: rational, bureacratic, reasonable, and pathetic. The problem is how do they connect. How do we connect them? Look what happens in crisis when we can't connect them. So the bureacrat can say I was horrified, I was frightened, I felt shame, I believe I had an emotion. How to relate these different discourses. How to do the work that Squat Theater does artistically, politically is an incredible challenge and a pressing one. In the sense that the sort of tradition, there was a tradition for better or worse of connecting these different types of publics, different types of discourses, and now it is open for grabs and can we be sure that we can still recognize the reasonable and not only the rational, in terms of its instrumental results but in terms of how we constitute and reconstitute democratic life.
Gamson:
I think it is even more complicated than that because it is not only how do we put these multiple discourses together but how do we reconcile that with multiple spheres. It might be that certain types of publics have more difficulty in combining complicated discourses. I know that when I was reading your [?] work and probably Robin's as well. The movement activists who were willing to make almost any sacrifice to get the public visibililty because it is such a large public. For television, mainstream television is organized almost by a sort of politics of visibility where the time frame is so minute. That the problems of combining discourses together is particularly acute. It may be easier in smaller publics. Serious journalism still exists, it just doesn't exist on television. So the question is. . .
Goldfarb:
The Times is different.
Gamson:
The New York Times?
Goldfarb:
Yes.
Gamson:
It's different but it depends on how far back you go. If you go back to 1960 then I think you could probably argue that it is better than now. So maybe it was just a brief window where it was the kind of journalism that I don't really like. But television does seem to be something different. It seems to present particular challenges because it is so hard to get that visibility, and therefore people are willing to make more sacrifices to get that visibility. There is a need to make their point in the most extreme fashion, to try to resonate with a larger public for getting some type of memory. So that people will remember your fifteen seconds on the air which makes it more difficult than to combine these extreme discourses that you see on television with the more reflective discourses that you still sometimes see in the newspaper or certainly in the news magazines.
David Slocum:
I think, building on that, part of what is striking, particularly if you look at the disjuncture and how the media has presented the Clinton situation and sort of the polls: so quickly the media is writing articles on the media coverage, much more quickly than they would have five or ten years ago. I think part of the phenomen of the ratings skyrocketing even though people dislike the coverage is that it goes back to some of your earlier work, Josh, about--people are recognizing, people are watching because they are interested in the construction of the media message. That is part of the appeal. That is part of the draw. It's not just a complete wholesale acceptance or rejection of what they are getting. But there is actually an interest in the process itself and how it is created.
Vera Zolberg:
That's actually a point that I've been wondering about because I think one assumes that people watch things or expose themselves to media because they approve of what they think is coming toward them. This doesn't jive with things that have happened in recent years, for example this sitcom which I never watch but which I understand, Ellen, which was sort of on the skids and was planned to cancel it during the season and so on. Suddenly, there was a rumor and then it was hyped by the television people that Ellen was going to come out and that there would be a whole lesbian text which had apparantly been a subtext, I don't know I never saw it, I suppose it was a subtext, would now be exposed. Well, given that probably if there were, public opinion polls, and there are public opinion polls which show that a lot of people in the US would not want to have anything to do with this subject, had the biggest viewership which was absolutely amazing and which revived the show. It is apparantly doing extremely well. They have a lot of sponsors because a lot of people want to get on this money-making machine. Now, does this mean that the general public has changed its view or is it that they are looking, are they uncertain? What does it mean? I don't think we really know.
Arato:
I think that what goes on is that they resist and they really enjoy the process of getting into that situation where they resist. What do they resist? The whole media is based on an assumption of the public outside. It's based on the assumption that Americans are not like French people, really think that the private is really important in judging a politician. That the sexual life of politicians is really something on which we can really make a fundamental judgement about them. [They say] that's what you are like and that is why we are giving you this stuff because that is what you want and that is what you are like. In getting all this stuff, one has an intuitive feeling that is one is supposedly getting what one wants but in fact there is also the response that I am not like that. So in interview after interview people say, it is always hard to tell [. . .], but I talk to ordinary people about it, because as you can see I'm fascinated, and a lot of people tend to be either lower-middle class or on the other side [. . .] culturally, these are the types of people that it is easiest to talk to actually in the United States if one is an academic. You get a very large, maybe it's only in New York, but I'm not sure, but it's a very large amount, "his private life is his private life so why are you bothering me about it." They apparantly love to be bothered about it because they are watching every single program in which that private life is discussed, down to the most intimate, anatomical issues, so they are absolutely fascinated. But they are disgusted by being understood as people who are fascinated by it and they are rejecting it in fact. So that is why the two numbers, the ratings is very high, but the number of rejection is equally high. That might change depending on what else comes out, but that fascinates me.
Zolberg:
It's not crazy, sure.
Arato:
I think there is an actual act of resistance involved in it because the media, of course the people who are making this show hate, they know that they themselves do just as much or more than the President. Their moral point of view is actually an irrevelent issue. If they have any legal sense at all they also know that by the criteria of what is criminal behavior in the United States this is at the marginal end of what could be criminal. The people who make these things know that. They are doing that because they think it is popular and it is popular but it is resented that that is how they should think and that is how they should actually understand the issue.
Goldfarb:
I feel like I have taken on this role which is very uncharacteristic of me--usually people accuse me of being overly optimistic--but I keep feeling "yes, but." That is, this is an easy issue. Yours is an easy issue. The Clinton thing is easy. But what I am concerned about, and there is judgement involved, and one could be encouraged that judgement is revealed, that the two heads of the lady are seeing each other and they can, the end result is at least at the end of the week is encouraging. But there is the question of in fact what is revealed by the elite's response: the cultural elite, the media elite. The media elite has actually defined this as a serious public problem. I don't think it is out there because they are out to get Clinton. I don't think it is only because they are trying to cover their tracks because the story is making it a serious problem. But I think it really has to do with the fact that there is confusion in the political culture about what is a political issue and what is a private issue. And on what is--what you say on the margins of legality, it is still a crime. They are inflating that not using judgement to realize that this is not high crimes and misdemeonors, and that kind of unsteady judgement is, I think, what these shows actually incite. In the confusions in the MOVE, in the handling of the MOVE movement and then the enactment of the MOVE hearings are revealed. I am still wondering that in the age of television, can that type of public judgement be sustained? The struggle is to understand the ambiguity, but try to understand also how such sound judgement can be sustained. It then becomes even revealed in the way an activist uses one of these programs. How much will you, how much of your judgement about what the public good is and your own group interest is, will you sacrifice in order to enter such a public sphere? What does it mean when you enter this public sphere, not only for the realization of your group interests which are very contradictory but also for the constitution of the polity of the whole? For the possibility of governance.
Wagner-Pacifici:
It does strike me that through this whole thing--that there is a search for moral authority. I think the media are opportunistic and interested in ratings and interested in a good story but I also think that there is, if not on their parts at least through their aegis, a kind of search for moral authority. A real, complete incomprehension of where that is and what it looks like. And that is where I would join you in a kind of pessimistic stance in spite of a certain reasonableness on the part of the American public, not to exaggerate this, but at the same time I don't think there is any good sense of anything but ambiguity and that is slightly disturbing. Not that moral authority of the Presidency is impugned by his having had sex with an intern in the Oval Office but not that it isn't impugned by that either. Not to assume at the outset that that does something devasting but not to presume at the outset that it doesn't do something devasting either. I don't know where that voice is, or agreement on moral authority is, at this point.
Gamson:
I was thinking that the fact that the news media has shown themselves to be so out of touch with where their audience actually thinks the moral authority lies is [a cause] for celebration. I'm glad about that.
Wagner-Pacifici:
Where is the moral authority Josh?
Gamson:
I don't know what you mean by that.
Wagner-Pacifici:
I mean if we have an idea about leadership. If we have an idea about public symbols. If we have an idea about any kind of morality at all. Whether it be of a traditional kind or of a less traditional kind. Is it possible to locate it and articulate the contours of it anymore? Do we need it? Maybe we don't need it anymore.
Gamson:
It's not an it.
Arato:
If you put that in terms of evaluating Clinton, then it is going to remain ambiguous because obviously there are things involved in this issue that from the point of view of any of us, according to the average American too, are very unattractive and that there are problems. But if you look at another aspect of it, I mean the Right opportunisticly, to be sure, but suddenly they are asking feminists why are they not taking their judgement seriously in this case. Suddenly, sexual harrassment is something the Right too is using opportunistically, so there is, even though there is not, you cannot find this moral authority in the President or in persons, but there is a kind of line. Think of Josh's programs; I don't know if those are the only programs that have made a difference, but I think today they show that homosexuality is not what it was twenty years ago, and I don't think it was on the whole discussions in the US Congress that made the difference or discussions in the superintellectual milieus of Yale or even the New School. I think it is programs like this that has made difference in some way. Now, of course, these programs from their own point of view are very neutral; if Oprah could put together a program of mass murders wearing hoods on their heads and speaking outrageously or people who engage in cannibalism she would do it and they would do it. That would not have the effect obviously, but precisely that would not have the effect in this culture of putting the issue of cannibalism and mass murder on a different footing than it was before. Whereas in the case of this issue there has been a change in terms of issues, concerning women there has been significant changes as well, so somehow I don't think we are witnesses of an absence of moral developement in the midst of all this. Someplace it is not a negative story. Even the public/private thing in relation to Clinton; it is true that the press in the case of other people uncovering these things, but now they are uncovered. It, too, killed off Gary Hart rather easily. I might have killed off somebody five years ago. Clinton's candidacy was in much doubt the first time these things came out. There is also a kind of learning in relationship to that boundary so that the thing won't kill him off. I think most people think he actually did it. I think on that level the majority opinion thinks he did it and that he is in no position not to lie about it. That is why the things are so contradictory. [. . .] In any case, there is some ground for optimism in these matters, too. If emotional publics or public where emotion plays a very different role than intellectual argument, then it plays a major role in this all to the better. Of course, I'm judging that from a normative point of view and if it were an emotional public that was rehabilitating cannibalism I would have some problems. But from a universal perspective of what is involved is in fact profoundly positive anyway. What, emotion is one of the things to which those things can become convining. I think it is ultimately--I would be really putting myself out on a limb if I really wanted to make a thesis of it, but I think what is particularly powerful is when emotion and rational argument come together in some way.
Gamson:
What is particularly powerful?
Arato:
It is particulary powerful in cultural terms when those two things turn out to reinforce one another.
Goldfarb:
My mother would say it is all a matter of taste. Which is my way of saying that yes, emotions and rationality but also aesthetics, and it probably isn't an accident that it came to my mind to think of that man's theater from years ago. That indeed the way these things are mediated publically informs--and it used to be that the way this would be mediated and informed you would just say, "fine, do what you want on the side but don't let anyone know about it." Not only that: "fine, do whatever you want on the side, we journalists won't let everyone know about it." The public knew that things like that could be going on, but they just didn't want to know about it. So that was a tasteful way of doing things, two cheers for the closet. It was a tasteful way of doing things which allowed on the one hand a kind of openly agreed upon morality to persist which everyone knew wasn't being enacted, but at least there was something that people could have agreement about.
Gamson:
Of course, that made it easier for powerful men to take advantage of powerless women.
Goldfarb:
All I'm saying, I'm not celebrating that but know that that's how it worked and then probably when we are looking for alternatives it probably has to do with constitution of a difference in tastes, a different sense of an elegant solution, or what constitutes a set of elegant solutions to this dilemma.
Arato:
The older people get with their experience with Watergate for people who were privately plotting to subvert the republic. In some sense you cannot go back to the previous regime where we leave, you are quite right that according to all the different meanings of private, if we leave everyting that used to be called private in the closet you are going to be in terrible shape. So now we are at another stage of reflection where we are trying to figure out what is it that should be private in the old sense and protected, and what is it that used to be private and is public, and we are trying to rethink it and that is very difficult process. Clearly, a very difficult process because we just ran into something that should have remained private and people agree that whatever relationship Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton had should have probably remained private and it would have been better for them and better for the republic, maybe not better for a little group of right-wing plotters, but for everybody else. But there were other things that had been called private, violence in the home, and all kinds of things which should not remain private. So we really have to rethink it, but I don't see that that is being hampered by what is going on. Maybe it is not going to happen in one night.
Goldfarb:
Our next two sessions are on the
one hand a return to the question of legal institutions, ownership of media
and regulations, which really does provide the context for all of this.
Afterall, Josh's presentation is a presentation within the context of a
certain type of ownership and showing that everything occurs within that
context. Then we have a special conference on political personality and
the construction of charisma one day, on Friday, and then media, identities,
and social movements, where the types of issues that we are dealing with
today are again at the forefront. Thanks Robin and Josh for a really stimulating
presentation.
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