Stephen Turner and the Philosophy of the Social

Posted on April 3, 2022 by Luke Ford

Here are some highlights from this 2021 book:

* Tocqueville claimed that when he visited the US in the mid-nineteenth century most people did not genuinely believe in God or in Christian dogmas. However, as most people also believed that atheists and agnostics were
small minorities, and consequently did not want to pay the social price of non-conformity (namely probable ostracism), most professed publicly that they believed in God and behaved as if they were true believers (for example, by regularly attending church or temple). Tocqueville also suggested that some groups might be entirely hypocritical, in the sense that, in these specific social contexts everybody knew that everybody was no longer a true believer. However, due to the social stigma attached to atheism, conformity to the general norm persisted.

…. In the Russian case, people were chronically scared and intimidated by policy security agents, but they could trust their friends and relatives. In the German case, people suspected that even certain relatives and certain friends could be secret policy security agents. In the Russian case, people dared to express their intimate opinions in private; in the German case, they dared not and, as a result, everyone was quite possibly mistaken about the nature of the intimate beliefs of everyone else. Similarly, with regard to contemporary Islamic countries, observers have noticed more and more frequently that the people’s relationships to Islam are far more diverse than is often thought.

* Like Tocqueville half a century earlier, [Max] Weber was struck by how many Americans, especially businessmen, declared belief in God and behaved ethically as Christians, but nevertheless did not seem to be genuine in their
beliefs. Weber claimed that the reason American businessmen were often affiliated with very demanding “sects” (Weber’s wordings), such as the Baptists, Anabaptists, and Quakers, was that these affiliations were seen as guarantees of trustworthiness, a priceless quality in business. Thus many members of these sects were arguably not motivated by ethical rationality (what Weber would have called Wertrationalität) in their affiliation but by pragmatic or means-end rationality (Zweckrationalität).

* The sexual revolution followed the pill and appeared to be rapid; in contrast, the removal of the threat of hell in most people’s minds, which the Victorians thought would unleash moral chaos, had little effect. In these cases, the mistake was probably this: we mistook the justificatory (and condemnatory) language people used, and the theories that justified it, for the real determinants of behavior.

* operating within the niche of religious people who speak and respond non-verbally in a particular way, and do so consistently, reorganizes their brains in a particular way, just as living within the niche of a university and academic discipline does. How powerful these effects are, meaning how much they differentiate people from people in other niches, seems to me to be an empirical question, and thus the question of “how social” are these determinants of cognition is also empirical.

* In the study of race relations in the US, for example, there have been a few outstanding moments where the facts were able to settle important issues. I would rank Charles Johnson’s report on the 1919 Chicago race riots as perhaps the best (1922). The people studying the topic, agreed, and had an audience that agreed, on what was relevant, and on what mattered or was salient. A century later there is no such agreement. What is relevant now is contested, or disagreed about, and in ways that the data can’t settle. Is it capitalism, Whiteness, crime,
stigma, racism, structure, culture, policing, or something else?

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The Existentialist Moment: The Rise of Sartre as a Public Intellectual

Posted on March 31, 2022 by Luke Ford

Cambridge sociologist Patrick Baert writes in this 2015 book:

* There is fourthly the authenticity bias. We are referring to those studies of intellectuals that assume that intellectuals have a clear sense of their identity and values, with these self-notions guiding their work and the choices they make. Again, the authenticity bias is integral to a particular genre of intellectual biography that attributes particular significance to the author’s self-description as a guide for understanding the various intellectual moves that he or she made.

The very same bias is present in Gross’ notion of the intellectual self-concept. According to this notion, intellectuals tell stories about themselves to themselves and to others, and those stories, which tend to be typological, shape their creative output.15 In what follows we dissent from this view. We do not think it is fruitful to conceive of intellectuals as pursuing authentic projects that correspond to their views about their identity and values.16 Whether within the academy or outside it, intellectuals operate within competitive arenas, struggling over symbolic and institutional recognition and scarce financial resources. It makes a lot of sense, therefore, to recognize the extent to which their interventions – whether through books, articles or speeches – are an integral part of this power struggle rather than an expression of some deeper self. By emphasizing how intellectual production and the struggles over scarce resources are intertwined, we take it as essential to establish a critical distance vis-à-vis the way in which most intellectuals portray themselves to their audience. Indeed, as Bourdieu pointed out, as one of the components of what he coined the ‘scholastic fallacy’,17 intellectuals have a tendency to depict their own intellectual trajectory as untainted by these material, symbolic
and institutional constraints. For instance, there are remarkably few intellectual autobiographies that acknowledge the full extent to which considerations of this kind interfered with the intellectual choices that were made. This is because autobiographies too – just like other intellectual products – position their authors, their allies and opponents.

* While there is some currency in the general idea that an individual’s formative years have a considerable effect later on, it still does not do proper justice to the complexity of his or her trajectory. Indeed, it is rare for intellectuals to stick to a single self-concept or coherent project throughout their lives; they sometimes reinvent themselves, articulating new outlooks and taking on new positions. Gross’ own biography of Rorty underlines our case: while he elaborates on how from an early stage onwards Rorty saw himself as a progressive pragmatist, Gross’ own analysis shows how Rorty presented himself quite differently while establishing his academic career in philosophy. Positioning theory is able to capture shifts of this kind. Of course, Bourdieu and Gross are right in so far as intellectuals’ orientations remain relatively stable – they do not change their stance constantly – but we hope, with positioning theory, to provide a more convincing explanation.

* Following Wittgenstein, speech-act theorists pay attention to how words, rather than representing or mirroring the external world, accomplish things. By the early 1960s, Austin, for instance, was intrigued by ‘performative
utterances’; these are utterances which are neither true nor false, but which nevertheless do something.19 Promises, compliments or threats are examples of such utterances. At the time, Austin’s interest in performativity put clear blue water between his philosophy and that of the logical positivist tradition: the latter took propositions as depicting the external realm (and therefore either true or false), whereas Austin was keen to explore their performative aspects.

Through the second half of the twentieth century, fewer and fewer philosophers thought it fruitful to conceive of language as copying the external world. Many philosophers and theorists, belonging to otherwise different intellectual orientations, became committed to the idea that language is an act which, like any act, does something.

* When accounting for the intellectual realm, a performative perspective explores what intellectual interventions do and achieve rather than what they represent. This might be prima facie counterintuitive. Indeed, we tend to think of intellectual tracts as somehow representational: we see them as reflecting on the world (or reflecting on the representations of others) rather than acting on it. In contrast to other interventions – say, policy briefings, music performances or military actions – intellectual interventions seem to have a more passive ring to them. The tendency to conceive of intellectual interventions as such tends to be greater when intellectuals seem to operate in a semi-autonomous realm, more or less separate from, say, the world of politics or economics. So we tend to think of a journal article in a highly specialized academic journal as representing something, whether through words, models or equations. We tend not to see it as something active, partly because it does not seem to have a visible, immediate impact on the external world.

The basic intuition underlying our theoretical perspective is that even this esoteric journal article does something. The article might not have obvious direct repercussions for the broader world, but it nevertheless does a wide range of things, for the author, for the authors cited, for the discipline, and so forth. The key notion that captures this activity is ‘positioning’. This indicates the process by which certain features are attributed to an individual or a group or some other entity. Initially introduced in the context of military strategies,
marketing experts have used the concept of position to indicate how the right kind of representation of a product, company or brand can fill a previously untapped niche in the market.

* Our starting position rests on a simple idea: intellectual interventions, whether through writing or speaking, always involve positioning. By intellectual intervention we are referring to any contribution to the intellectual realm, whether it is in the form of a book, an article, a blog, a speech or indeed part of any of these (say, a passage or a sentence). The basic intuition underlying our theory is that any such intervention locates the author(s) or speaker(s) within the intellectual field or within a broader socio-political or artistic arena while also situating other intellectuals, possibly depicting them as allies in a similar venture, predecessors of a similar orientation or alternatively as intellectual opponents. According to this perspective, then, any
intellectual move brings about two types of effects. The first type is the positioning itself…

* second type of effect: within a given context, certain types of positioning might help to diffuse the ideas and enhance the agent’s career and material prospects. Other types of positioning might have adverse effects, limiting the further dissemination of the ideas proposed or halting the author’s professional progress…There are also plenty of examples of how positioning can help bring about symbolic and institutional recognition, sometimes belatedly, as in the case of Hayek who was ignored for several decades during the Keynesian aftermath of the
Second World War, but achieved success later on. He inspired a revival of monetarist policy and collected numerous honours, including most notably the Nobel Prize, the Order of the Companions of Honour and the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

* Another example of the positioning of institutions and concepts, from a very different political vantage point, would be Carl Schmitt’s attack on liberal democracy for promoting a neutral state that resolves differences, thereby allegedly failing to do justice to what he thought to be the natural enmity between people. Positioning may take place subtly. For instance, intellectuals’ publishers, journal outlets and their choice of references might give subtle hints about what type of intellectual they are and where their allegiances lie. Sometimes, however, positioning is achieved overtly, and indeed intellectuals often use, just as we are doing now, the
introduction or concluding part of their text or speech to situate their intellectual intervention and themselves in relation to others.

* Equally explicit is the use of labels, which can act like brands. Intellectuals often use labels to flag their own position. These labels tend to capture the core idea in a succinct fashion. This is obviously the case for Sartre’s ‘existentialism’ and his notion of the ‘engaged intellectual’ but also for, say, the ‘reflexive turn’ in anthropology, the ‘strong programme in cultural sociology’ or the ‘new historicism’ in literary studies. Of course, intellectuals use labels not just to refer to themselves but also to others, sometimes with the aim of criticizing or ridiculing their work. Take, for instance, ‘humanism’: whereas in the mid-1940s in France it had clearly positive connotations (used to full effect by Sartre, as we have seen), over the next couple of
decades it gradually became a negative reference point, often used to denigrate any assumption of a coherent or transparent self.30 Said’s notion of ‘orientalism’ (and the related accusation of ‘essentializing’) provides another potent example: initially introduced in the specific context of literature, it caught on, spread to various disciplines and has invariably been used to denigrate allegedly flawed attempts to generalize about other cultures. The introduction of a label can facilitate the dissemination of ideas, but the clarity of its meaning and its distinctiveness might be undermined once others start subscribing to the same label. The term ‘existentialism’, which was initially used by journalists and then adopted by Sartre, was also used to refer to the ideas of a variety of other intellectuals (including Heidegger, Jaspers, Camus and de Beauvoir) and, eventually, to a broader culture of malaise or angst. After it had become so nebulous, Sartre himself abandoned the label. In a similar fashion Charles Peirce’s ‘pragmatism’ demonstrates the precariousness of labels. Once William James, F. C. S. Schiller and literary figures started to adopt the term he had coined, Peirce switched to ‘pragmaticism’ to distinguish his intellectual orientation.31 Likewise, Hayek adopted the term ‘catallaxy’ to
refer to the spontaneous order produced by market interactions, after his earlier terms like ‘free market’ and ‘liberal economics’ had been adopted by the Chicago School, which had very different underlying philosophy and methods.

Positioning can take two ideal-typical forms: an intellectual intervention may involve what we call ‘intellectual positioning’ or ‘politico-ethical positioning’. Intellectual positioning locates the agent primarily within the intellectual realm. It might identify a specific intellectual orientation, defend that stance and elaborate on its significance. Claims about the importance often come down to claims about the originality or intellectual power of the intellectual orientation. Intellectual positioning can situate the agent and work within a broader tradition, linking it to important figures in the field, including possibly a mentor. ‘Politico-ethical positioning’, on the other hand, refers to a broader political or ethical stance which surpasses the narrow confines of the intellectual sphere.

* Intellectuals often locate themselves in relation to a sacred realm, in opposition to the profane world of the market, party politics and everyday life… in the modern university system, for instance, academics also often invoke a sacred realm when appealing to higher academic values such as intellectual autonomy, truth and excellence.

* An intellectual intervention in itself does not involve a particular positioning; positioning only takes effect because of the agents operating within a particular context. There are three aspects of this relational logic. Firstly, the effects of an intervention in terms of positioning depend on the individuals who bring it about, on their already established status and positioning within the intellectual field…

Secondly, the effects of intellectual interventions depend on those of the other individuals at play within the same field. Shifts in the positioning of other individuals affect our positioning and self-positioning. In particular, the position of an intellectual intervention might be undermined or reassessed because of an effective countermove or more subtly by the fact that a significant number of intellectuals have now moved onto different topics or issues. We have seen, for instance, how, in the mid-1940s, intellectuals became increasingly convinced of the writer’s political responsibility and how this made Gide’s notion of art for art’s sake untenable. Further, once similar ideas were used in defence of collaborationist intellectuals, this notion and the people associated with it were conceived as pernicious. Another example from our discussion concerns a later period, when a new generation of intellectuals, born after the First World War, treated Sartre as increasingly insignificant and turned to different authors or proposed different interpretations of the same authors. Foucault, for instance,
found inspiration in Nietzsche46 and Lévi-Strauss relied on Durkheim and Saussure. Once even Sartre’s previous allies, such as Merleau-Ponty, moved on to different intellectual traditions, his philosophical programme started looking outdated.

Thirdly, the actual effects in terms of positioning depend very much on the specific intellectual or socio-political context in which the intellectual intervention takes place, on the historically rooted sensitivities.

…by arguing in Elements of Law and Leviathan that the sovereign is the sole judge to assess a threat, Hobbes positioned himself in line with Charles I in the context of the ship-money crisis, defending not only the king’s
right to tax people in a military context but also his right (and not the public’s or their representatives’) to judge whether the Dutch were a sufficient threat to the crown to warrant increased military expenses.

Given the significance of context, it follows that, through time, the same types of intellectual interventions might bring about different positioning even when the same people are involved. It also follows, crucially, that the same intellectual intervention might generate different positioning when transposed to different contexts. For instance, authors’ self-presentation within the local field that is familiar to them might acquire different meanings and connotations in a different context. Therefore, even when intellectuals are involved in carefully constructed or calculated positioning and self-positioning, not all effects of their intellectual interventions are within their control. Indeed, intellectual interventions can amount to very different forms of positioning and self-positioning once they reach different audiences.

One extreme scenario is when intellectual interventions (and the intellectuals behind those interventions) are posthumously reassessed by others in pursuit of their own intellectual agenda. As Gary Taylor pointed out, what appear to us now to be iconic literary figures or key intellectual interventions were not necessarily considered as such at the time; it was sometimes only at a later stage that those intellectuals and interventions were identified as important.48 Those who have been crucial in this process of ‘remembering’ often had their own agenda, positioning themselves in the competitive intellectual or political arena at the time.

* at the end of the war, Sartre used the alleged non-engagement of previous novelists as a foil to earmark his
own intellectual agenda.

* Analytic philosophy provides another interesting case, especially because it is supposedly unconcerned with past
philosophers. For all their disdain towards the history of philosophy, earlier British analytic philosophers showed a remarkable interest in this sub-discipline: they repeatedly positioned their own intellectual agenda in opposition to what they saw as the dangers of foreign strands of thought, thereby coining the term ‘Continental philosophy’.

Revealing a certain amount of smug patriotism, Russell, Ayer and several others depicted the alleged muddled thinking of Hegel and Heidegger as causally related to the emergence of totalitarian regimes, linking their own preoccupation with precision, logic and science to more responsible and liberal forms of government. Even subsequent British-based philosophers such as Berlin55 or Popper, who did not, strictly speaking, operate within the framework of analytic philosophy, made their case for piecemeal liberal democracy by depicting several German philosophies as pernicious, either because they allegedly promoted a problematic notion of liberty or because
they proposed closed, utopian schemes that were immune from empirical refutation.

* It is rare for a single intellectual intervention to bring about the desired effect. In most cases several interventions – often repeating the same position – are necessary to get a message across. However, even repeated sole interventions would not be sufficient because one’s positioning depends on so many other agents. Firstly, positioning depends on broader intellectual networks. The networks of an intellectual comprise a large number of agents, who engage with him or her and confirm his or her positioning, even if they disagree or are overtly
hostile. The status and recognition of intellectuals is dependent partly on where they are acknowledged (in which journals or book series), and who precisely acknowledges them (what is their positioning and status).

* Secondly, positioning is likely to be more effective when accomplished in teams.61 Teams are narrower than networks: teams of intellectuals actively cooperate in positioning themselves, for instance, by grouping around a school or research programme, often using a label which makes their work and agenda immediately recognizable.

* Teams are effective but they come at a cost: with the exception of the intellectual leaders, members of teams find it more difficult to position themselves as having an independent voice or as innovative. Ultimately the writings of the leaders will be remembered while the other works gradually fade away, unless other team members break away and actively reposition themselves as dissenting from the team leader. Team membership is, however, crucial because positioning rarely goes uncontested. An intellectual might be able to position him- or herself for a certain period of time, but eventually rival intellectuals will mount a challenge, portraying him or her as outdated, insignificant, pernicious, erroneous, or as misrepresenting his or her self-proclaimed position. Even individuals who carefully position themselves may end up being pigeonholed differently by others and having to extricate from labels attributed to them.

* Teams capture the cooperative side of intellectual life, but what we call ‘individualization’ is equally intrinsic to the realm of intellectuals. By intellectual individualization, we refer to the process by which
intellectuals distinguish themselves from others, making themselves look different from them and possibly unique. Individualization is achieved through careful self-positioning and positioning, differentiating oneself from others. It may involve conflict because the act of differentiating tends to take place through criticisms of others. This is not to say that individualization and teamwork are necessarily mutually exclusive: intellectuals might collaborate with other team members to emphasize their distinct stance and to elaborate on how this stance differs from that of others.

* Almost every formal presentation of new intellectual work begins with a ‘position statement’ identifying the
work on which it builds, the work that complements and supports it, and the work by other authors that it contradicts or supersedes.

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Intellectuals and their Publics: Perspectives from the Social Sciences

Posted on March 31, 2022 by Luke Ford

Professor Jeffrey Alexander, a sociologist at Yale, writes in this 2012 book:

* Being a public intellectual, in other words, is not just a matter of telling the truth and of being separate and free-floating and truly representing the universal. It is a matter of performing as if one were all these things.

* Politicians win power by convincing voters to believe, becoming symbolic representations of the hopes and fears and dreams of collective life. After they take hold of the reins of power and gain control of administration in the state, the new rulers cannot just order people about, expecting them to obey or else. They need to make government meaningful, to align administration with the stories citizens tell each other about what they hope and what they do and where the best of society should be. So the powerful couch their commands as requests and frame their administration as the last, best hope of humankind. If they cannot, and end up just issuing commands, the people will not see government as a symbol of their values and, in a democracy, they will take the rulers’ power away.

* Individuals, organizations, and parties moved “instinctively” to hook their actions into the background culture in a lively and compelling manner, working to create an impression of sincerity and authenticity rather than one of calculation and artificiality, to achieve verisimilitude. Social movements’ public demonstrations display a similar performative logic. Movement organizers, intensely aware of media organizations’ control over the means of symbolic distribution, direct their participants to perform in ways that will communicate that they are worthy, committed, and determined to achieve acceptance and inclusion from the larger political community. Social actors, embedded in collective representations and working through symbolic and material means, implicitly orient towards others as if they were actors on a stage seeking identification with their experiences and understandings
from their audiences.

* The struggle to re-fuse speaker and audience, to connect with the members of civil society through felicitous performance – this is what the democratic struggle for power is all about. Those who want power must be elected, and they will not get votes unless their performances are successful, at least to some degree. This is why politicians and their advisors must put their heads together, run focus groups and conduct polls, and do daily interpretive battles with journalists as well as those on the other political side.

* To become a hero, one must establish a sense of great and urgent necessity. The moment is precarious and burdened with terrible significance. America has fallen on tough times; the Dream lies in tatters. The nation has fallen off the hill. We have been desecrated and polluted by the second Bush presidency. We must be purified, and for this we need a new hero. Obama presents himself as having overcome great personal adversity on the road to auditioning for this position of national hero. Born into a deeply polluted racial group, he was inspired by an earlier African- American prophet- hero whose rhetoric about the dream of justice had become deeply etched in the collective consciousness of American civil society. After Obama secured the nomination, on June 4, joyous proclamations of imminent salvation were offered by African- Americans and circulated by the communicative
institutions of American civil society. His victory seemed to presage an end to race hatred and the realization of the true solidarity promised by American civil society. In Africa, Obama’s Kenyan relatives and their countrymen described his ascension as signaling redemption, the possibility of global solidarity.

* To become a hero is to enter into myth. It is to cease being merely a mortal man (or woman) and to develop a second immortal body in Kantorowicz’s sense (Kantorowicz 1957), an iconic surface that allows audiences an overpowering feeling of connection with the transcendental realm of a nation’s idealistic political life that lies just underneath. Obama has begun to grow this second body. He is no longer just a human being – a skinny guy with big ears, a writer, an ordinary man – but a hero. As an iconic hero, this symbolic body will not die. It will be remembered no matter what happens to the living man. Most political figures cannot grow such second skin. They are
respected or liked, or even deferred to, but their second body, the mythical public body, is weak and puny, so they remain politician rather than myth. Overshadowed and wimpified by their opponent, they are “wounded” in political battles, revealing their mortal natures. Jimmy Carter was wounded by Ted Kennedy’s late primary run, and injured further by Teddy’s overwhelming and vainglorious speech at the Democratic convention. Carter faltered in the general election campaign, watching helplessly as the once mundane Ronald Reagan grew a sacralizing and mythical second body. Bill Clinton versus George H. W. Bush ran this play in reverse. Decades before, Richard Nixon’s five o’clock shadow, not properly covered by makeup, darkened and polluted him, allowing John Kennedy to shine like a bright young god during their decisive presidential debate (Greenberg 2004).

* The blogger is not just a new kind of factual gatherer, but a new kind of interpreter, one that speaks openly and ideologically and personally even while supposedly on behalf of the people themselves.

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How Did Russia Vs Ukraine Become A Battle Of Good & Evil? (3-31-22)

Posted on March 31, 2022 by Luke Ford

00:00 Impurity and Torah, https://www.lukeford.net/essays/impurity_torah_HIV.html
01:00 This week’s Torah portion, https://www.chabad.org/parshah/article_cdo/aid/1545/jewish/Tazria-in-a-Nutshell.htm
03:00 Porndemic, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porndemic

20:00 Jeffrey Alexander on “The Double Whammy Trauma”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nRALGmAmKoQ
1:01:20 Kino Casino vs Nick Fuentes, Ethan Ralph, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YxhSFkh0lo
1:37:00 Conflict in the Academy: A Study in the Sociology of Intellectuals (2015), https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=143168

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Watergate As Democratic Ritual

Posted on March 31, 2022 by Luke Ford

Professor Jeffrey Alexander writes in his 2003 book, The Meanings of Social Life: A Cultural Sociology:

* In June 1972, employees of the Republican party made an illegal entry and burglary into the Democratic party headquarters in the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C. Republicans described the break-in as a “third-rate burglary,” neither politically motivated nor morally relevant. Democrats said it was a major act of political espionage, a symbol, moreover, of a demagogic and amoral Republican president, Richard Nixon, and his staff. Americans were not persuaded by the more extreme reaction. The incident received relatively little attention, generating no real sense of outrage at the time. There were no cries of outrage. There was, in the main, deference to the president, respect for his authority, and belief that his explanation of this event was correct, despite what in retrospect seemed like strong evidence to the contrary. With important exceptions, the mass news media decided after a short time to play down the story, not because they were coercively prevented from doing otherwise but because they genuinely felt it to be a relatively unimportant event. Watergate remained, in other words, part of the profane world in Durkheim’s sense. Even after the national election in November of that year, after Democrats had been pushing the issue for four months, 80 percent of the American people found it hard to believe that there was a “Watergate crisis”; 75 percent felt that what had occurred was just plain politics; 84 percent felt that what they had heard about it did not influence their vote. Two years later, the same incident, still called “Watergate,” had initiated the most serious peacetime political crisis in American history. It had become a riveting moral symbol, one that initiated a long passage through sacred time and space and wrenching conflict between pure and impure sacred forms. It was responsible for the first voluntary resignation of a president.

How and why did this perception of Watergate change? To understand this one must see first what this extraordinary contrast in these two public perceptions indicates, namely that the actual event, “Watergate,” was in itself relatively inconsequential. It was a mere collection of facts, and, contrary to the positive persuasion, facts do not speak. Certainly, new “facts” seem to have emerged in the course of the two-year crisis, but it is quite extraordinary how many of these “revelations” actually were already leaked and published in the preelection period. Watergate could not, as the French might say, tell itself. It had to be told by society; it was, to use Durkheim’s famous phrase, a social fact. It was the context of Watergate that had changed, not so much the raw empirical data themselves…

Political life occurs most of the time in the relatively mundane level of goals, power, and interest. Above this, as it were, at a higher level of generality, are norms—the conventions, customs, and laws that regulate this political process and struggle. At still a higher point there are values: those very general and elemental aspects of the culture that inform the codes that regulate political authority and the norms within which specific interests are resolved. If politics operates routinely, the conscious attention of political participants is on goals and interests. It is a relatively specific attention. Routine, “profane” politics means, in fact, that these interests are not seen as violating more general values and norms. Nonroutine politics begins when tension between these levels is felt, either because of a shift in the nature of political activity or a shift in the general, more sacred commitments that are held to regulate them. In this situation, a tension between goals and higher levels develops. Public attention shifts from political goals to more general concerns, to the norms and values that are now perceived as in danger. In this instance we can say there has been the generalization of public consciousness that I referred to earlier as the central point of the ritual process.

It is in light of this analysis that we can understand the shift in the telling of Watergate. It was first viewed merely as something on the level of goals, “just politics,” by 75 percent of the American people. Two years after the break-in, by summer 1974, public opinion had sharply changed. Now Watergate was regarded as an issue that violated fundamental customs and morals, and eventually—by 50 percent of the population—as a challenge to the most sacred values that sustained political order itself. By the end of this two-year crisis period, almost half of those who had voted for Nixon changed their minds, and twothirds of all voters thought the issue had now gone far beyond politics…

What must happen for an entire society to experience fundamental crisis and ritual renewal? First, there has to be sufficient social consensus so that an event will be considered polluting (Douglas, 1966), or deviant, by more than a mere fragment of the population. Only with sufficient consensus, in other words, can “society” itself be aroused and indignant. Second, there has to be the perception by significant groups who participate in this consensus that the event is not only deviant but threatens to pollute the “center” (Shils, 1975: 3–16) of society.

Third, if this deep crisis is to be resolved, institutional social controls must be brought into play. However, even legitimate attacks on the polluting sources of crisis are often viewed as frightening. For this reason, such controls also mobilize instrumental force and the threat of force to bring polluting forces to heel. Fourth, social control mechanisms must be accompanied by the mobilization and struggle of elites and publics that are differentiated and relatively autonomous (e.g., Eisenstadt, 1971; Keller, 1963) from the structural center of society. Through this process there the formation of countercenters begins.

Finally, fifth, there has to be effective processes of symbolic interpretation, that is, ritual and purification processes that continue the labeling process and enforce the strength of the symbolic, sacred center of society at the expense of a center that is increasingly seen as merely structural, profane, and impure. In so doing, such processes demonstrate conclusively that deviant or “transgressive” qualities are the sources of this threat…

In the first weeks that followed the breakin at the Democratic headquarters, “Watergate” existed, in semiotic terms, merely as a sign, as a denotation. This word simply referred, moreover, to a single event. In the weeks that followed, the sign “Watergate,” became more complex, referring to a series of interrelated events touched off by the break-in, including charges of political corruption, presidential denials, legal suits, and arrests. By August 1972, “Watergate” had become transformed from a mere sign to a redolent symbol, a word that rather than denoting actual events connotated multifold moral meanings.

Watergate had become a symbol of pollution, embodying a sense of evil and impurity. In structural terms, the facts directly associated with Watergate—those who were immediately associated with the crime, the office and apartment complex, the persons implicated later—were placed on the negative side of a system of symbolic classification. Those persons or institutions responsible for ferreting out and arresting these criminal elements were placed on the other, positive side. This bifurcated model of pollution and purity was then superimposed onto the traditional good/evil structure of American civil discourse…

In the 1960s struggles, the Left had invoked critical universalism and rationality, tying these values to social movements for equality and against institutional authority, including, of course, the authority of the patriotic state itself. The Right, for its part, evoked particularism, tradition, and the defense of authority and the state. In the postelection period, critical universalism could now be articulated by centrist forces without being likened to the specific ideological themes or goals of the Left; indeed, such criticism could now be raised in defense of American national patriotism itself. With this emerging consensus, the possibility for a common feeling of moral violation emerged, and with it began the movement toward generalization vis-à-vis political goals and interests. Once this first resource of consensus had become available, the other developments I have mentioned could be activated.

The second and third factors were anxiety about the center and the invocation of institutional social control. Because the postelection developments described above provided a much less “politicized” atmosphere, it became safer to exercise social control. Such institutions as the courts, the Justice Department, various bureaucratic agencies, and special congressional committees could issue regulations in a more legitimate way. The very effectiveness of these social control institutions legitimated the media’s efforts, in turn, to spread Watergate pollution closer to central institutions. The exercise of social control and the greater approximation to the center reinforced public doubt about whether Watergate was, in fact, only a limited crime, forcing more “facts” to surface. While the ultimate generality and seriousness of Watergate remained open, fears that Watergate might pose a threat to the center of American society quickly spread to significant publics and elites. The question about proximity to the center preoccupied every major group during this early postelection Watergate period. Senator Baker, at a later time, articulated this anxiety with the question that became famous during the summertime Senate hearings: “How much did the President know, and when did he know it?” This anxiety about the threat to the center, in turn, intensified the growing sense of normative violation, increased consensus, and contributed to generalization. It also rationalized the invocation of coercive social control. Finally, in structural terms, it began to realign the “good” and “bad” sides of the Watergate symbolization. Which side of the classification system were Nixon and his staff really on?

* The televised hearings, in the end, constituted a liminal experience (Turner, 1969), one radically separated from the profane issues and mundane grounds of everyday life. A ritual communitas was created for Americans to share, and within this reconstructed community none of the polarizing issues that had generated the Watergate crisis, or the historical justifications that had motivated it, could be raised. Instead, the hearings revivified the civic culture on which democratic conceptions of “office” have depended throughout American history. To understand how a liminal world could be created it is necessary to see it as a phenomenological world in the sense that Schutz has described. The hearings succeeded in becoming a world “unto itself.” It was sui generis, a world without history. Its characters did not have rememberable pasts. It was in a very real sense “out of time.” The framing devices of the television medium contributed to the deracination that produced this phenomenological status. The in-camera editing and the repetition, juxtaposition, simplification, and other techniques that allowed the story to appear mythical were invisible. Add to this “bracketed experience” the hushed voices of the announcers, the pomp and ceremony of the “event,” and we have the recipe for constructing, within the medium of television, a sacred time and sacred space.

* Through television, tens of millions of Americans participated symbolically and emotionally in the deliberations of the committee. Viewing became morally obligatory for wide segments of the population. Old routines were broken, new ones formed. What these viewers saw was a highly simplified drama—heroes and villains formed in due course. But this drama created a deeply serious symbolic occasion.

* Administration witnesses appealed to loyalty as the ultimate standard that should govern the relationship between subordinates and authorities. An interesting visual theme that summed up both of these appeals was the passive reference by Administration witnesses to family values. Each witness brought his wife and children if he had them. To see them lined up behind him, prim and proper, provided symbolic links to the tradition, authority, and personal loyalty that symbolically bound the groups of backlash culture.

* What was the symbolic work in which the senators engaged? In the first instance, they denied the validity of particularist sentiments and motives. They bracketed the political realities of everyday life, and particularly the critical realities of life in the only recently completed 1960s. At no time in the hearings did the senators ever refer to the polarized struggles of that day. By making those struggles invisible, they denied any moral context for the witnesses’ actions. This strategy of isolating backlash values was supported by the only positive explanation the senators allowed, namely, that the conspirators were just plain stupid. They poked fun at them as utterly devoid of common sense, implying that no normal person could ever conceive of doing such things.

This strategic denial, or bracketing in the phenomenological sense, was coupled with a ringing and unabashed affirmation of the universalistic myths that are the backbone of the American civic culture. Through their questions, statements, references, gestures, and metaphors, the senators maintained that every American, high or low, rich or poor, acts virtuously in terms of the pure universalism of civil society. Nobody is selfish or inhumane. No American is concerned with money or power at the expense of fair play. No team loyalty is so strong that it violates common good or makes criticism toward authority unnecessary.

Truth and justice are the basis of American political society. Every citizen is rational and will act in accordance with justice if he is allowed to know the truth. Law is the perfect embodiment of justice, and office consists of the application of just law to power and force. Because power corrupts, office must enforce impersonal obligations in the name of the people’s justice and reason.

* Narrative myths that embodied these themes were often invoked. Sometimes these were timeless fables, sometimes they were stories about the origins of English common law, often they were the narratives about the exemplary behavior of America’s most sacred presidents. John Dean, for example, the most compelling anti-Nixon witness, strikingly embodied the American detective myth (Smith, 1970). This figure of authority is derived from the Puritan tradition and in countless different stories is portrayed as ruthlessly pursuing truth and injustice without emotion or vanity. Other narratives developed in a more contingent way. For Administration witnesses who confessed, the committee’s “priests” granted forgiveness in accord with well-established ritual forms, and their conversions to the cause of righteousness constituted fables for the remainder of the proceedings.

* In terms of more direct and explicit conflict, the senators’ questions centered on three principle themes, each fundamental to the moral anchoring of a civic democratic society. First, they emphasized the absolute priority of office obligations over personal ones: “This is a nation of laws not men” was a constant refrain. Second, they emphasized the embeddedness of such office obligations in a higher, transcendent authority: “The laws of men” must give way to the “laws of God.” Or as Sam Ervin, the committee chairman, put it to Maurice Stans, the ill-fated treasurer of Nixon’s Committee to Re-Elect the President (CRETP), “Which is more important, not violating laws or not violating ethics?” Finally, the senators insisted that this transcendental anchoring of interest conflict allowed America to be truly solidaristic—in Hegel’s terms, a true “concrete universal.” As Senator Wiecker famously put it: “Republicans do not cover up, Republicans do not go ahead and threaten… and God knows Republicans don’t view their fellow Americans as enemies to be harassed [but as] human being[s] to be loved and won.”

In normal times many of these statements would have been greeted with derision, with hoots and cynicism. In fact, many of them were lies in terms of the specific empirical reality of everyday political life and especially in terms of the political reality of the 1960s. Yet they were not laughed at or hooted down.

* The reason was because this was not everyday life. This had become a ritualized and liminal event, a period of intense generalization that had powerful claims to truth. It was a sacred time, and the hearing chambers had become a sacred place.

The committee was evoking luminescent values, not trying to describe empirical fact. On this mythical level, the statements could be seen and understood as true—as, indeed, embodying the normative aspirations of the American people. They were so seen and understood by significant portions of the population.

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