sunday’s sociological blogs appraisal (1): macon’s “stuff white people do”

I already wrote on the difference of culture-making and culture-preserving strategies. In starting and maintaining a blog culture, you ought to start ritualizing certain practises (I think, Rebecca Blood would appreciate such an approach). At Odradek I usually post a “sunday citation” of my current readings. Here I want to go for a different ritual: I will link and appraise a blog tackling with sociological problems I find worthwhile to read.
I want to start this tradition-to-be with a US American blog called

“stuff white people do“.

As i understand, this blog is online for about one year. Macon, its host, aggregates and discusses texts, social phenomena and everday’s trivia from a point of view interested in the counterpart to to the racialized “other”: whiteness.

This is a not an easy way of analyzing social constructions. From what I know, there are still dicussions whether gender studies are a progression or a regression vis a via women’s studies or not. And even childhood sociology relies mostly on the construction of the child and its concept of the child as an actor, less is said on the construction of adultness. The adultocentric imperative works in wicked ways. The same goes for the category of whiteness.

But as Antonio Gramsci knew, hegemony operats via the culturally dissemination of a interpretion of the world: people are not only to be convinced to accept a social order, but the images and ideas of normalcy have to get culturally unconscious or opaque in order to get hegemonic. You have to forget to be white, male and adult (and of course middle or upper class) to make this position powerful – read powerful as in the typical Weberian meaning: as a chance to make one’s own will or porpuses real. The first mean to call a dominant structure into question is to show, on which elements of common sense it is based.

Macon is chasing after such everday traces of making “being white” a culturally unconscious element of America’s common sense. Thank you.

Home sweet home – the private as a gendered and generational ordered space

Go and take a look at lisa’s blog (part of the ASA contextsblogs), devoted to the sociologocal analysis of images, which features a youtube snippet of a wilkinson ad, which will come in handy at my summer semester teaching course on “public and private as categories of growing up”:

The video shows how the idea of the private space is organized: as a familial space (the owned house, populated by a core family, a pet), a clearly gendered parent arrangement (mother loves and nurtures, father is supposed to enjoy his spare time at home) as well as a generational ordered space (the child doesn’t have any function exept “being loved” by its mother therefore center of the family’s affection and a thread to the parental relationship). Because the father is no longer king in his castle, the private sphere becomes a contested terrain, a classical topic since second wave feminism – only here it’s not the woman (all passive, reacting knee-jerkingly to soft skin) who demands changes of the man, but the child.

(another example for the threatened masculinity: yesterday I stumbled upon Burger King’s current “communication campaign” Mancademy, rallying a cry for the reconquering of masculinity. Unsurprisingly, there is a forerunning campaign of in the US claiming “Men Eat Meat“).

Ironically, the message sent out in the wilkinson ad demands shaving (the elimination of body hair is another topos of emasculation). The man here is depicted as willing to change for his wife, only to fortify the generational front. By shifting the focus towards the child, the generational order is highlighted (although the child is clearly gendered by its transformation into a fighting machine).
The means the child uses to train are toys, the training ground is the child’s room. The child’s space is therefore one which is secluded and secret. Even the dog as a private listener and observer of the child is being punished for intruding into the architecture of childhood. Even the fight for kisses takes place without the mother (who is nothing more than the occasion) on a typical backstage: the bathroom.

A digital Rome? or What costume does the cultural shift of the net wear?

Iconographic remarks on the re:publica.

(This is the text i presented at the session “Shifting Culture! – Shifting What?” at the re:publica09, which took place in Berlin, April 1st-3rd.)

Here is the accompanying presentation:

“And just when they seem involved in revolutionizing themselves and things, in creating something that has never before existed, it is precisely in such periods of revolutionary crisis that they anxiously conjure up the spirit of the past to their service and borrow names, battle cries and costumes from them in order to act out the new scene of world history in this time-honoured disguise and this borrowed language.”
K. Marx (1978): The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Peking: Foreign Language Press, pp. 9-10.

Since Marx we know, that even revolutions have their dramaturgic compositions, that their protagonists costume themselves and invent traditions, serving as a historical horizon for the revolutionary claims.

In the case of the French Revolution, this horizon was antique Rome. And regarding the failing revolts of the nineteenth century, Marx critizised them for only copying the French Revolution – transformed into a delivered narration.

The event we all attend here wears this stigma, too. The headline of my talk evokes, that the re:publica on the one side invokes the antique polis as a ideal public sphere – and on the other side this invocation is a performance and masquerade. How does the re:publica dress up and which forms of public spaces serve as models for the images the re:publica tries to communicate?

In order to answer this question, I took a good look at the photos uploaded at Flickr, tagged as followed: re-publica,  re:publica, republica07, re-publica07, re:publica07, republica08, re-publica08, re:publica08. Still some thousands of images.

At first I wanted to elaborate a typology of different representations of the public sphere and its historical references, but due to my fifteen minutes i will confine myself and only show a few.

But first of all, I would like to come back to the performance of the French Revolution, because it is the Urbild (original image)  in representing modern social movements and the enthroning of a new civic/bourgeouis culture.

You surely know the picture by Delacroix : “Liberty Leading the People”  or the “Storm of the Bastille”. They are part of a first type of the representation of the French Revolution – of the revolutionary act itself. They center on the documentation and performance of the overthrowing of the ancien regime.

A second series of pictures is devoted to the representation of the postrevolutionary social order. Those pictures span the historical phase between the execution of Louis XVI and the takeover of Napoleon. They idealize the new order by festivities, civil uniforms or allegories of moral behaviour.

But there is one picture in which both representations concur: the picture of the decapitating of Louis XVI.  To borrow a distinction of Walter Benjamin – if the revolutionary act fits the law-making violence, then the glorification of the postrevolutionarxy order fits the law-preserving violence. Both moments superpose each other in this picture.  The execution itself is part, if not the crest, of the revolutionary act (law-making violence), but the organization of the execution takes place already under the sign of the new order (law-preserving violence).

Now, if the guillotine is the revolutionary machine of the eigteenth century, and we can agree upon the computer as the revolutionary machine of the late 20th and early 21st century, what may be concluded for the representation of the public sphere in our net culture? As for one of the main aims of re:publica is the representation of the net culture grounded on the use of computers as revolutionary machines. Therefore i will later speak of culture-making and culture-preserving.

There are some changes: First of all, computers are not able to decapitate bodys.

If you take a look at the image of the execution, the guillotine marks its center. Few are in possession of the revolutionary machine, a larger passive crowd attends the event. So the public scene consists of two groups: a center stage where the actual execution takes place – and a crowd serving as the audience.

The images of the re:publica also show us this distinction.

A series of pictures shows us the revolutionary machine in all its glories; or a stage, where a few handle the machine and announce information on its uses. One, two, five persons at most stand or sit on a raised plattform and talk, show, perform. They are the executioners, politicians, tribunes, teachers, critics – in short: the avantgarde.

On the other hand, you find a settled, apprantly passive audience rapt in contemplation, there to be educated and entertained. But this is as far as the analogy goes. Because if you take a closer look, the location of the revolutionary machine has dramatically changed. You’ll find it on both sides, in the hands of the avantgarde as well as in the hands of the audience. Crowd and avantgarde are no longer identifiable via the possession of the revolutionary machine or the worn laurel wreaths. Only the temporary spatial order signifies both groups.

But there is a further difference. Contrary to the image of the execution, in which you can identify both the culture-making and culture-preserving acts, the representation of re:publica does show neither of those moments. The representation of the uses of the computer doesn’t give any hint, wether an old order is attacked, a new order is installed or preserved and idealized. In the representation of the uses of the revolutionary machine the net culture-making vanishes as well as the net culture-preserving.

In the performance of re:publica the difference of the revolutionary re-organization of net culture via the computer and the post-revolutionary use of the revolutionary machine is gone.

The public sphere, expressed in those images shows us the egalitarian notion of its user as a citoyen/netizen.

But in the images of private conversations, in the portraits of the key speakers and organizers or popular figures of the blogosphere, a net-bourgeoisie is also depicted. A net-class with a high affinity to the revolutionary machine, in possession of the means of production, aestheticizing themselves on the very same terrain as the public sphere.

But the public sphere is more than a spectacle or the spatial organization of avantgarde and crowd.  Juergen Habermas and Richard Sennett have both argued, that the structures of the public sphere undergoes processes of change. Habermas documented a retreat of the bourgeoisie into the privacy, while Sennett spoke of a tyranny of intimacy, of a supercoding of the public by the private. Although both analyses relate to historical transistions  preceding the informational revolution, they provide a fertile soil for the restructuring of the relationship of public and private spheres by the informational revolution.

Actually, there is a second way in the representation of the public sphere in its relation to privacy, which does not refer to the antique polis or the French Revolution. Until now, I don’t have any term applicable to this last picture, which expresses this configuration.

What do we see? Three men, lost in contemplation with the revolutionary machines. We cannot say, if those men communicate with each other or if they share this corporeal closeness by chance. Are they three different knots of even the same net? And if so, do they share weak or strong ties, to paraphrase Mark Granovetter. We don’t know. Nevertheless they share a certain intimacy and build a group, communified by their physico-spatial closeness and the common use of the computer.

If the representation of the revolutionary machine doesn’t allow us to distinguish between culture-making and cultur-preserving interactions, this picture doesn’t allow us to distinguish between the net-bourgeois and the netizen, between the natives of the net culture and the cultivated individual of the net. It is by no means clear, if this scene shows us a private circle or a random arrangement of strangers in public sphere. This is no coffeehouse table, no club, no scholarly dispute, no private conversation, no tete-a-tete… or is it? The core of this problem is the inability to depict the online-relationship between its protagonists offline. They are ‘only’ connected by the use of the revolutinary machine. The ‘how’ of the use (and that is what the term ‘culture’ ususally refers to) cannot be televised.

So we can conclude the poles of the performance of the public dimension of re:publica. On the one hand, it is based on the spatial arrangement of avantgarde and crowd. But this representation fails to grasp the new possibilities of the public sphere online: digital Rome.

The counterimage enables us to see why: the use of the revolutionary machine is neither clearly public nor clearly private. There is no common representation of the egalitarian participation offline and the individual communication online. The individual costume and the invocation of the antique polis are no longer congruent. this is not because all users behave individualized or uniformed, rather the individual and the common are realized on different levels. By this, the description of the net culture in the terms of the societas civilis with its distinction of bourgoeis and citoyen is more valid than ever.

The images of the re:publica may show us, that people using the revolutionary machine are able to come together at some place. But they can’t show us the commonalities and differences of the uses.

For those who speak German…

Tina Guenther of Sozlog , whom I had the pleasure to organize a session with at the Republica09 last week in Berlin, wrote her summary on that event. Thank you very much.

Strategies of “culture-making”: the case of Orientalism.

When I looked for a working analytical frame for my dissertation, i found the book of Edward W. Said on Orientalism quite useful. Sure, it is a contemporary classic, often cited and a corner stone of postcolonial studies. If you distinguish between culture-making and culture-preserving strategies, constructionists approaches usually tend to highlight the making-part of inventing culture. But Said, as an historian, is more interested in the persistance of orientalism over the time span of several centuries. Nonetheless, in the first chapter of the second part of his book (pp. 113-123, dealing with the drawing of frontiers and the secularization of christian topics into scientific knowledge) he identifies four elements central for eighteenth century orientalistic discourse structuring their imagination of oriental cultures:

1. an expansion of European exploration of the world, moving eastwards as well as southwards: think of scientific excursions, travel literature (a typical classicist genre), utopic novels etc.
2. an historical confrontation, comparing the exotic with other and older civilizations:  cultural forms were newly interpreted not only in terms of christianity, but in relation to Greek antique, Rome or Egypt. Comparative methodology was now based on original  sources, not on hand-down myths.
3. a selective identification or sympathy with the orient: not everything oriental was appreciated. Rather, artists, historians, novelists etc. related to specific cultural forms, to different qualities of the orient: its supposed babarism as well as its  humanity and enlightenment. Think of Mozart’s operas, of the different characters in Lessings “Nathan the wise” or look at Emily’s blog for her dissertation on the representation of Orientalism in the works of John Frederick Lewis.
4. finally, a classification of mankind: different cultures, races or civilizations are hierarched in a naturalistic approach, typified and described in the taxonomical manners of Carl Linnaeus (the writer of the  “Systema Naturae”). Suddenly you have inferior and superior cultures, embodied in characters, morals, temperaments etc.

So far, these categories are ment to describe the orientalists’ knowledge in the eighteenth century, the high tide of European enlightenment. As i am no historian but interested in contemporary phenomena of modern societies, you may ask of how much use such an analysis can be. My main problem in applying this analysis is the methodological a priori of Said to focus on the definition of culture via the construction of the other. Orientalism is essentially about the construction of the orient as the other of Europe.  But my interest lies as much in the work make the culture from within. After a second reading of my material, mostly the speeches of the so-called Berlin Conference 2006 i developed the following analytical frame for the trivial constructions of culture:

1. Instead of an expansion as the mode to define European culture in a globalized world, i suggest to look at the ways to articulate common substances, underlying the culture-made. Such a common substance might be a specific quality (being judeo- christian, enlightened, devoted to a specific aesthetic or common moral values etc., characterized by a mentality or even race). This category therefore includes Said’s description of selective identity and sympathy, for such claims  highlight only parts of what may be included in a description of European culture: e.g. institutions and values of the liberal state are mentioned more often than the effects of social movements.
2. Furthermore i propose to generalize the concept of historical confrontation and speak of constructed temporal horizons: For it includes the invention of tradition, the imagination of a shared history, the narration of a homogenic but empty time,  organized and structured by filling it with dates, historical events and developments. See again the books of Hobsbawm/ Ranger and Anderson in the reference section, as well as the “Theses on the philosophy of history” by Walter Benjamin. When Ferrero-Waldner talks about the roots of Europe, citing Athens, Rome, Jerusalem or the ever-occuring reference to the fall of the Berlin wall, time is organized, structured and made applicable to a general narration of European history.
3. My third category is called cultural frontiers and is located somewhere between all four of Said’s variables: by this, i want to identify strategies which construct a cultural classification, a positioning in a cultural drop, a qualification of cultures as progressive or regressive, its description as pure or hybrid, as enlightened or mythical. By refering to the outside, alliences are made, possible goals are developed and projects to be realized are defined: politically as well as economically.
4. My last category i named cultural dynamics. This is an element lacking in Said’s analysis, although it is mentioned now and then, e.g. in the occuring of the orient as a thread to civilization. The invocation of culture as a strategy of its making usually depicts a certain necessity for its installment. Such necessities may be identified in a crisis (e.g. the constitutional crisis of the EU, the citizen’s lack of  identification with the political regime), in a historical challenge (globalization, terrorism) or even in a desired social order to be established. Part of the construction of such a cultural dynamic is the identification of possible allies, the proposal of an agenda and the elaboration of any means to face such challenges or critical developments. Further examples of articulated threatening cultural dynamics might be the fear to loose one’s identity by a wave of migrants or the fear of a vanishing cultural memory in the current youth. The whole concept of the threatened and threatening child (developed by Philippe Ariés) as it is revived in recent debates on children as tyrants or on computer-games leading to young people running amok are other ways to problematize cultural dynamics.

These four variables allow me to analyze the culture-making strategies in my material on the level of discourse. But those categories do not aim at the social formation, those strategies take place in. The position of the speaker is to be identified as well the social constellations, ressources of legitimation and the dynamics of power within this arena. In order to grasp that, one needs a different set of categories, which i will save for a further post.

References:

Anderson, B. (1983): Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso.

Ariès, Ph. (1962): Centuries of Childhood. New York: Vintage.

Benjamin, W. (1999): ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in: H. Arendt (ed), Illuminations. London: Pimlico.

Hobsbawm, E. / T. Ranger (eds) (1983): The Invention of Tadition. Cambridge: Canto.

Said, E. W. (1994): Orientalism. New York: Vintage (25th Anniversary Ed.).

From violence to culture? Dimensions of inventing culture.

Last friday, i had the opportunity to speak at the re:publica09 on the problem of the cultural representation of the public sphere in the web 2.0. The title of my talk was “A digital Rome? or What costume does the cultural shift of the net wear?” You may find the presentation on slideshare here (but it may be of little use without the accompanied talk…). It was concerned with visual ways, in which the event itself represented an offline public sphere of an online culture. In this paper, i traced out an argumention, which draws a distinction between images presenting the installment of a new culture and images presenting the preserving of a new culture. I want to inquire this problem further.

I call those moments acts or processes of “culture-making” and such of “culture-preserving”. This distinction is a modification of the catogories coined by Walter Benjamin in his essay ”On the Critique of Violence” (dt. “Zur Kritik der Gewalt) published 1921. Benjamin speaks of a “violence of law-making” and a “violence of law-preserving”. Both forms of violence are essential for the constitution of the modern state. Whereas law-making violence establishes a new order, the law- preserving violence works on the maintenance of the political order. If you take a look at the images of the French Revolution, you’ll find both violences represented: the revolutionary act itself as a law-making violence and the new post-revolutionary order as law-preserving violence. Just compare the “Storming of the Bastille” (law-making violence) with the pictures of the phase between the execution of Louis XVI and the enthroning of Napoleon (some nice pictures for this phase are printed in Richard Sennett’s “Flesh and Stone”), glorifying the revolutionary virtues, festivities and public performances, therefore depicting law-preserving violence. Benjamin refers to the double function of the police as an institution of a law-making as well as a law-preserving violence.

If you want to analyze, how a new culture is established, we can use this distinction, too. Sociology ususally tends to understand culture as a describable quality of any society or social form. Based on social anthropology and ethnology, culture is seen as a specific way to cope with universal existential problems. Think of death rituals, religious ceremonies, different family structures, patterns of consumption or changes in the media use etc. (typical for this approach is Clifford Geertz’s “thick descriptions”.) There is a second but similar concept, which identifies the central norms of a society, more or less fix stars for acceptable action. This functionalist perspective was prominently articulated by Talcott Parsons. If you take look at the current discussions on the amoral anomic behaviour of speculative investors leading to the current financial crisis or the claim for a mutual trust of the banks to cope with the crisis, you’ll usually find a cry for new moral values to base the economical regime on.

But culture is more than just different ways of doing this or doing that; and it’s definitly more than a moral framework. Culture nowadays is a social sphere on its own, which may be economically exploited, political governed, occupied by clubs or festivals, materialized in consumable and distinctive goods.

And therefore i think it is necessary to write a history or genealogy of culture. If culture is invented or imagined (terms used by Eric Hobsbawm and Benedict Anderson) you may differentiate between culture-making and culture-preserving strategies. They may be coupled with violence (yes, there is a violence of culture: think of censorship or the guaranteed prominence of the churches in the Germany’s public television and radio, but also assimilation politics aimed at migrants etc.), but not necessarily. Culture making is therefore not identical with the concept of “doing culture” as conceptualized in the tradition of ethnomethodology or the Cultural Studies. Such a concept, although still in the clutch of the ethnological concept of culture, includes both culture-making and culture-preserving strategies. Culture-making, as i understand it, refers to actions, strategies, politics etc. which powerfully define culture. Culture-preserving strategies are hence such actions, which support and conserve specific definitions of culture already articulated.

I just want to sketch out two examples to illustrate both strategies.

In my corpus of texts I analyze for my dissertation, there is a speech of the Comissionar for Foreign Affairs of the European Union, Austrian Benita Ferrero-Waldner. She calls some central problems challenging the European Union as a body politic. Under the wings of globalization, terrorism, irregular migration and the inacceptance of the European Union by its citizens threatens the process of European integration. To cope with this critical processes, the comissionar calls for an invocation of the moral basics of European culture: She defines it as a culture of diversity, freedom, law, and conflict resolution as the main moral values. Furthermore she argues, those values are an heritage of the antique cultures of Athen, Rome and Jerusalem. In her statements, culture is both already present and in need of strenghtening. The definition of its substance, its coordinates is typical for culture-making. On the other hand, this strategy develops an historical trajectory, making the construction plausible via references to an selected past. These are two features amongst several, which establish a concept of culture.  For those who are interested, a pretty good analytical framework for culture-making strategies may be found in the classic work on Orientalism by Edward Said.

The second type of strategies – culture preserving – may be found in the work of Dario Gaggio.  He currently investigates the making of the ”landscape beautiful” in the case of rural Tuscany. In a paper presented last September at the International Forum of Sociology in Barcelona, he discusses the ways of iconicity and branding of this lanscape. He reconstructs not only the making of this landscape, but furthermore, how this landscape is turned into both an icon and a brand. Whereas icons are symbols able to preserve the presence of their origins, brands are able to accumulate a surplus on the market. Both iconization and branding are strategies to sustain a defined cultural value. Gaggio argues, that the iconization of the tuscan landscape works via the ongoing production and dissemination of an imagined relationship between a geographic morphology of the territory and its untouched rural civilization taken for truth. This strategy was then accompanied by conservating politics reacting on a cultural tourism interested in the local wines, the idyllic peasantry and its architecture. For example, a special law in the late seventies forbade the building of new houses and supported the restoration of unused ruins, which in return made high prices on the market, appreciated by foreign investors. The author concludes that the Val D’Orcia as the icon of tuscan landscape is the effect of a huge market of agro-tourism.

Further reading:

• Anderson, B. (1983): Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso.
• Benjamin, W. (1996): ‘Critique of Violence’, pp. 236-252 in M. Bullock and M. W. Jennings (eds) Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume I, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
• Geertz, C. (1973): Thick Descriptions: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture. New York: Basic Books.
• Hobsbawm, E. / T. Ranger (eds) (1983): The Invention of Tadition. Cambridge: Canto.
• Hoerning,. K. H. / J. Reuter (eds) (2004): Doing Culture: Neue Positionen zum Verhältnis von Kultur und Sozialer Praxis. Bielefeld: transcript.
• Parsons, T. (1964): Social Structure and Personality. New York: Free Press of Glencoe.
• Roddey, R. (ed.) (2000): Doing Science + Culture. New York/London: Routledge.
• Said, E. W. (1994): Orientalism. New York: Vintage (25th Anniversary Ed.).
• Sennett, R. (1994): Flesh and Stone: the Body and the City in the Western Civilization. New York: Norton.

Why not English?

So, while my current German blog “Odradek” is down, i’ll try to install an alternative space where i will write in English.  So most of the postings will be related  to my profession: Sociology, especially Sociology of body, of culture and of family and childhood.

Right now, i am knee-deep in my ongoing dissertation on the formation of  european and german culture as political and/or economical projects. Besides, i frequently work on questions concerning the blogosphere and its problems of representation.

Hopefully, my post-PhD project will tackle with the problems of the professional construction and regulation of the private sphere of the child in cases of child maltreatment and neglect.  At least, that’s the plan.

If in any case some readers will happen to know my german blog: this is not a substitute for Odradek, rather a more focussed notebook for my work (something which Odradek was supposed but didn’t turn out to be).