Russell Berman (“Cultural Studies & the ‘Cold War’ on the Left”) is the Walter A. Haas Professor in the Humanities at Stanford.  He received his B.A. from Harvard (1972) and his Ph.D. from Washington University (1979) in German Literature. He joined the faculty of Stanford in the same year. His books include The Rise of the Modern German Novel: Crisis and Charisma (1988) and Enlightenment or Empire: Colonial Discourse in German Culture (1998), both of which won the Outstanding Book Award of the German Studies Association. Recent books include Fiction Sets You Free: Literature, Liberty and Western Culture (2007) and Freedom or Terror: Europe Faces Jihad (2010). In his other books and articles he has written widely on German literary and cultural history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, critical theory, and cultural dimensions of trans-atlantic relations.  He has served in numerous administrative capacities at Stanford, and he is a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. He is the editor of Telos, and he will become the President of the Modern Language Association in 2011.

Michael  Bérubé (“The Left at Bay”) is Paterno Family Professor in Literature at Pennsylvania State University, and the author of several books, including What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts?, The Employment of the English, Life as We know It (which was a New York Times notable book and NPR book of the year), and The Left at War.  He has contributed to numerous magazines and writes a popular blog, Airspace, at michaelburube.com.

Gabriel Noah Brahm (“The Post-Left at War & the Cultural Studies Approach to U.S. Foreign Policy & International Relations”) is Assistant Professor of English, specializing in the History of Criticism and Theory, at Northern Michigan University, and a Schusterman Research Fellow in Israel Studies at Brandeis University.  His published work has appeared in Critical Studies in Media Communication, Democratiya, Nineteenth-Century Literature, Poetics Today, Rethinking History, The Encyclopedia of Literary and Cultural Theory (Wiley-Blackwell 2011), and elsewhere.

Jeff Bloodworth (“The [Heterodox] Left at Peace: Or, Breaking Up is Hard to Do”) is an assistant professor of history at Gannon University. His articles have appeared in the Wisconsin Magazine of History, Pacific Northwest Quarterly, The Journal of the Historical Society, and The Chronicles of Oklahoma. He is currently completing a manuscript detailing the history of American liberalism from 1968-1992.

Bruno Chaouat (“Have French Jews Veered to the Right?”) is Associate Professor of French and director of the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies at the University of Minnesota. He has edited one volume of essays on shame, and another volume on terror. He has published a book on the 19^th-century French writer, François-René de Chateaubriand, as well as numerous articles on 19th-, 20th- and 21st-century French literature and thought. His articles have appeared in France and the U.S. in journals such as Modern Language Notes, Diacritics, Critique, L’Esprit Créateur, L’Arche, and Yale French Studies. He has reflected on French debates concerning Jews in France, the memory and the representation of the Holocaust, and the impact of the Middle-East conflict in literature and theory. He has a book forthcoming on the different literary and philosophical responses to what he perceives as a malaise in liberal democracy in the aftermath of the Cold War. And he is finishing another book on Jews as a trope in French thought from literary theory in the1960s to contemporary debates about the Middle East conflict and the “new antisemitism.”

Nick Cohen (“The New ‘Manichean’ Left & the Old Right: Tolerating the Intolerable”) is a columnist for the London Observer. He is the author of several books including What’s Left? (2007) and Waiting for the Etonians: Reports from the Sickbed of Liberal England (2009).

Elizabeth Faucett (reviewing Kristiaan Versluys’s Out of the Blue: September 11 and the Novel) is an M.A. student in English at Northern Michigan University, where she is completing a thesis on the post-9/11 novel.

Paul Hollander (“Toward a More Rational Left?”)  is professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and associate at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies of Harvard University.  He is the author or editor of fourteen books, the latest one entitled The Only Super Power: Reflections on Strength, Weakness and Anti-Americanism (2009).  His next book, Extravagant Expectations: New Ways to Find Romantic Love in America, will be published in Spring of 2011.

Gregory J. Lobo (“For Liberalism & Thinking Politically Again: Reflections Inspired by Michael Bérubé’s The Left at War“) is Associate Professor in the department of Lenguajes y Estudios Socioculturales at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia. He teaches courses in cultural theory and studies in the department’s pre- and post-graduate programs, and his research attempts to unravel the nexus of culture and power both in Latin America and beyond. He has been invited to speak on his work by universities in both Colombia and the United States, and was recently named International Visiting Scholar by the Northern Michigan University. His writing has appeared in various international venues and in 2009 he published the book Colombia: algo diferente de una nación (Bogotá: Uniandes, CESO). He is currently working on an expanded, updated English version.

Ted McAllister (“Can the Left Govern?”) holds the Edward L. Gaylord Chair of Public Policy at Pepperdine University, and is an intellectual historian specializing in modernity and its critics.  His published works include Revolt Against Modernity:  Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin and the Search for a Post-Liberal Order (Kansas 1995).  He writes widely on the history and philosophy of American conservatism, on the philosophy of history, and the historicity of human culture and identity.  A regular contributor to the online magazine, Front Porch Republic, his current projects include a book on Walter Lippmann and, subsequently, a history of the Baby-boomers.

Scott R. Paeth (“The Need for an Augustianian Left”) is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at DePaul University in Chicago, IL. He works in the fields of Christian Social Ethics and Public Theology. He holds a Ph.D. from Princeton Theological Seminary and a Master of Divinity from Andover Newton Theological School. He is the author or editor of five books, including Public Theology for a Global Society: Essays in Honor of Max Stackhouse (Eerdmans 2010); Exodus Church and Civil Society: Public Theology and Social Theory in the Work of Jurgen Moltmann (Ashgate 2008); Who Do You Say That I Am? Christology and Identity in the United Church of Christ (United Church Press 2006); Religious Perspectives on Business Ethics (Sheed & Ward 2006); and The Local Church in a Global Era: Reflections for a New Century (Eerdmans 2000).

Luke Thominet (“Operation New Dawn: The Iraq War Debate Seven Years Later”) earned his BA in International Relations and Creative Writing at the University of Southern California, and is currently an MFA student in English at Northern Michigan University, working on his fiction thesis entitled, Falls.

Elhanan Yakira (“Whose Left, Which War? A Comment from Jerusalem”) is currently Schulman Professor of Philosophy, and Chair of Philosophy, at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.  He holds a doctorate from the Sorbonne in France.  He is author of Post-Zionism, Post-Holocaust: Three Essays on Denial, Forgetting, and the Delegitimation of Israel (Cambridge 2010).  He is working on a book about Spinoza.

What follows are nine essays inspired by Michael Berube’s book of 2009, The Left at War (NYU Press), prefaced by Nick Cohen’s shot at dealing in brief with some of the same issues, which he takes on at greater length in his book of 2007, What’s Left? (Harper Perennial).  Our interview with Berube was conducted in light of his reading of these pieces, and his own piece—a “response to the responses,” titled “The Left at Bay”—which comes after.

When we first conceived of an issue of Politics & Culture devoted to evaluating, weighing, assessing, appreciating and critiquing Berube’s latest—a book we believe to be of major significance, for a multiplicity of reasons, which this special double-issue of P&C spells out—our ambitions were mighty.

We’d get Christopher Hitchens—after all he defined the left at war (with itself!), if anyone did. Sadly, our recent conflagrations’ most brilliant and controversial public intellectual was both ill and a bit sick of the subject, it sounded like, when we reached him—nonetheless, he graciously wrote back both to say no-thanks and encourage.  We humbly dedicate what follows to him, a great man in an age of mere persons.  For another take on the “left at war” question, we strongly recommend the indispensible anthology of his war-time writings paired with those of his interlocutors, compiled by Simon Cottee and Thomas Cushman (eds.), Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left (NYU 2008).  We confess that it left us first shaken, then stirred, and finally sobered.

We’d get the last of the NY Intellectuals, Paul Berman—whose landmark book, Terror and Liberalism (Norton 2004), had done so much to shape debates, and events, and whose latest, The Flight of the Intellectuals (Melville House 2010), promised to be equally as significant for the battle of ideas yet to come.  We got the Brooklyn sage, indeed, to write from a sojourn in Paris—reporting that he was occupied with things over there, and wishing us bon chance.  We’d get the iconoclastic author of Freedom or Terror: Europe Faces Jihad (Hoover 2010), Russell Berman—and we did!  We’d invite the eminent sociologist of left dysfunction, Paul Hollander—he accepted!  We’d ask one of Israel’s top philosophers, whose incendiary must-read text, Post-Zionism, Post-Holocaust (Cambridge 2010), has been in Israel at the center of debates (which it also is helping to redefine), over what it means to be “left” in that context—Elhanan Yakira; and he agreed as well.  We were on a roll.

We’d ask the notorious, never-nebulous Nick Cohen—author of 2007’s cause célèbre, What’s Left? (Fourth Estate)—and he sent us something related, which we could use if we wanted….  Well, okay; cool.  It’s good stuff!  If anyone knows how to talk about “what’s left” nowadays—and what’s not—it’s him.  His own trenchant comments on Berube’s “Manichean left” provide a remarkable prolegomena to what follows.

Meanwhile, as we were surveying the British landscape, we naturally thought of Alan Johnson—the force behind the short-lived but influential social-democratic journal, Democratiya (now merged with its American older cousin, Dissent); but he was writing his own much-anticipated book and made “no promises.”  We promise not to hold it against him—and look forward to the book, eagerly.  Speaking of Dissent, the American liberal political scientist, Andy Markovits, offered us sage advice, but that was all—for he was occupied illuminating the politics of sport (in his latest on the subject, Gaming the World: How Sports Are Reshaping Global Politics and Culture [Princeton 2010]), while we were bearing down on the dismal sport of politics, in part guided by his seminal essay, “The European and American Left Since 1945” (Dissent 2005).

We wanted a discussion that was ecumenical—not hermetic, as too many debates internal to cultural studies, or any subfield, can be.  So, although we couldn’t resist trying to interest the estimable Michael Ryan (maybe he’ll take an interest in what we produced, we hope), we determined in advance not to focus on the cult studs establishment—although, and in part precisely because, the focus was to be on Michael Berube, one the discipline’s most respected leaders.  What about Peter Minowitz, then, who had just defended Leo Strauss (of all people) from charges hurled, as a virtual matter of course, by many among the “left at war,” in his sensational and closely reasoned tome, Straussophobia (Lexington 2009)?  He at first kindly agreed, and we were delighted; but unanticipated family obligations unfortunately prevented his participation.  We wish him well.  And while we were cruising the West Coast, listening for voices not congenitally hostile to the much-demonized Strauss, for a change of pace if nothing else—what about finding out what the original mind of the self-described “bohemian conservative,” intellectual historian and professor of Public Policy, Ted McAllister, might do with Berube’s book?  We’re pleased to report—we did.  So now so can you.

Progressive theologian Scott Paeth argues from the Midwest for an “Augustinian left,” to thwart the excessively dualistic us-versus-them, we-the-spotless-versus-them-with-dirty-hands, “Manichean left” (the main target of Berube’s critique), who tend to concentrate on the coasts.  His persuasive argument almost made one of us want to convert (almost).   Gregory Lobo, writing from Latin America, argues that Berube is more Marxist and more materialist, not less, than some who—like Slavoj Zizek and Alain Badiou—loudly claim the mantle.  While Gabriel Brahm fitted Berube’s “Manichean left” into his own schema and terminology for identifying what he prefers to call the “post-left”—or the left that sold its soul after 1989 to associate with any pseudo-revolutionary force in town, even anti-Semitic Islamism.  By contrast, Jeff Bloodworth stands up for an invigorated liberal-left, and he’s got the historical chops to prove his point—the extremists and fanatics don’t own the left, they never have.  Luke Thominet too, makes this clear, in his judicious balancing of the pros and (neo)cons of war.

But most of all, we thought—what if Michael Berube himself participated, reading and responding to our transdisciplinary critiques, culled from across the political spectrum, and did a follow-up interview?  He generously agreed to both!, and (despite the crush of Finals Week’s grading and the rigors of the Holiday Season) the stimulating results are a fascinating, essential part of what follows.  We wish to here formally thank him for making this project possible. Were it not for his infectious love of conversation, discussion, reasoned debate and genial disagreement—as it comes across in the truly liberal and genuinely democratic style of his prose—we never would have thought of the idea.  Were it not for his gracious sharing of his time and energy, it never would have happened.

What follows, thus, is a set of essays gathered in hopes of adumbrating how a more relevant left might become less “Manichean” and impotently moralizing, more genuinely democratic and properly political.  Our hope, in other words, is similar to—as we understand it—that which inspired the book these essays respond to.  For that book, and our call which resulted in the essays that follow, stem from a shared dissatisfaction with the fact that left “theory” seems to have opted somewhere along the line for the easiest of moves—self-marginalization, and what Richard Rorty calls somewhere “self-mockery and self-disgust.”  A left like that, he predicted long ago, addicted to the “need to stay as angry as possible,” would inspire few, and soon become an object of ridicule.  Berube, following in his one-time teacher’s footsteps (although not uncritically so), initiates a more truly secular—post-Politically Correct—discussion about this world that we are in, not understood blindly as the best of all possible worlds, save for a few miscreants, but not as an unalloyed debacle either (Manicheans take note).  It is an attempt—perhaps quixotic given the long history of left internal strife—to reimagine a left that seeks to contribute to the building of a better world on the basis of this one.  We found this to be an inspiring idea, and wondered how others might feel.

Toward a Post-Manichean Left: Five Imperatives for Self-Overcoming

In hopes of finding out—and to conclude these prefatory remarks (our special double-issue of Politics & Culture devoted to Berube’s book awaits!)—we feel inspired as well to take one more step forward, and proffer a few brief notes on what we, the editors, take away from this encounter.  We stress that these are not Berube’s words but ours.  Nor do we imply agreement on these statements (although we would welcome it) between us and the other contributors to this volume.  We do hope, however, that readers of this journal special-issue might find in the articles collected here some good reasons to consider seriously the following propositions for post-Manichaean progressives.

1.       While distinguishing between Islam, the great world religion and Islamism, the violent, misogynist, homophobic, anti-Semitic totalitarian agenda—oppose Islamic radicalism or “Islamism.”  Reject terrorism as a violation of human rights, dignity and decency.  Support liberal secular institutions around the world in opposition to theocratic dictatorial regimes.

2.       Support a just two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  Reject “post-Zionism” and the anti-Israeli fantasy of a “one-state solution.”  Whether such a vision of an end to Jewish sovereignty, were it achieved, would prove utopian or genocidal, the unrealistic scenario only makes it more difficult to reach a pragmatic, workable settlement in the region.  If that makes sense to you, then why not even try defending Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish and democratic state once in a while?  A post-Manichean left will liberate the signifier “left” from its presumed hegemonic link with the signified, “anti-Israel.”

3.       Stop thinking of powerlessness and improbable levels of moral superiority as badges of pride.  Think instead from the point-of-view of one who has (actually or potentially) some power and so some responsibility to exercise it responsibly—maybe that way you’ll get some eventually.  The alienated pose is too easy, clichéd, tired and ineffective.

4.       Criticize freely.  In other words, drop the knee-jerk anti-Americanism and reflex-Third Worldism; jettison the absurdly modest Cultural Relativism (nobody’s really buying it); and instead oppose bigotry, corruption, and lack of freedom and equality wherever these are found.  Oh, and another thing—especially when scrutinizing the very real imperfections of Western secular states—recall that criticizing freely won’t mean anything unless one also criticizes responsibly, that is to say, with a sense of priority and proportion, and some feeling for what’s worth defending as well as attacking.

5.       Speaking of which.  Criticism isn’t enough.  Situations vary greatly around the world, but take the U.S. for example (since Berube’s book deals largely with the American context).  In spite of widespread cynicism about politics and politicians, most Americans still want to feel good about their country.  And they have a right to, for perfectly good—some of them “left”—reasons.  A post-Manichean left will understand this.

On the other hand, a left that does not understand these things, but continues to embrace Third Worldist obscurantism and faux (anti-Western) multiculturalism, will continue to raise such questions as those addressed in our lead editorial.  There Bruno Chaouat asks, How is it that the contemporary French “left” seems to have veered lately to the right, in spirals of perpetual guilt-ridden confusion about Israel and the Jews?

So!  Along with a series of scintillating articles shedding light in various ways on the above—contentious, we know, but that’s half the fun—and other matters, we are in addition pleased to present, as a fitting coda, two fine, informative book-reviews of two important recent books on literature’s specific role in the post-9/11, “post-postmodern” universe.  Elizabeth Faucett presents a careful, balanced assessment of Kristiaan Versluys’s Out of the Blue: September 11 and the Novel (Columbia 2009); while Tore Rye Andersen explains deftly what he sees as the major significance and durable value of the first full-length study of Jonathan Franzen, written by a leading young critic of the contemporary novel, Stephen J. Burn’s path-breaking monograph, Jonathan Franzen at the End of Postmodernism (Continuum 2008).

Tim Kaposy

When we have to change an opinion about anyone, we charge heavily to their account the inconvenience they thereby cause us.

-Friedrich Nietzsche, “Beyond Good and Evil”

In lieu of amplifying that denunciation of biography some of us hear regularly–that history’s venerated figures tend to be its unacknowledged criminals–this issue of Politics and Culture is compelled by the techniques, theories, and traditions available for its interpretation. The study of biography, whose forms radiate out today beyond discrete expressions in books to montage biopics and multi-media retrospectives in museums, renews the questions many of us have concerning how a person is lionized and how such an ascent carries with it presumptions we affix to human identity.

An identity that accrues attention is different from a life that receives it or one that is impelled by it, which is not to say these qualities are always exclusive. Telling the difference requires an understanding of the details of a life in addition to reckoning with the claims identity make upon it. So, similar to the way documentarians are instructed to give their subjects an added uncomfortable minute to speak, in anticipation the interviewee will talk offhandedly and ditch the formalities of the conversation, attentiveness to intellectual biography is an invitation for unexpectedly revealing ideas to emerge from relatively familiar voices.

Archives are where most intellectual biographies begin and where they gain plausibility. But these materials and contacts are rarely if ever donated directly by the person studied. A thornier trespassing often occurs on behalf of biographers and many a well intentioned project is spurned by legal or familial stipulations. Of the biographers whose recent work is reviewed here, from Detlev Claussen to Sheila Rowbotham to Andrea Weiss, a majority of them characterize their research as unlikely, in pursuit of details along indirect routes and under duress, and culminating in a narrated life disseminated unto an unpredictable reading public. The relevance of an entire project is regularly dismissed without a second opinion. In a manner allegorical of the episodic quandaries of identity itself, one could say the biographical subject is imperiled by the risk of having to be found, represented, and legitimated anew. Scarcely audible are theories that inform such an undertaking, but a brief consideration of intellectual biography might prove valuable for countering the form’s noiseless integration into a mere commodity.

“Corpus” is a concept used by Jean-Luc Nancy to denote a representational space analogous to the body of a person examined. Primary in his conceptualization of “corpus” are the temporal trajectories of these bodies and their interrelation. Without getting too detailed, Nancy’s oeuvre is a meditation on the difficulty of locating the subject’s body per se. Not because of its physical movement, spiritual ineffability, or affective elusiveness (despite the respective importance of these aspects), but because a body is a locus of contradiction and action par excellence. He writes, “[e]ither it is by the body and through it that signification occurs, and then signification falls within its boundaries and is worth only what a shadow is worth in a cave, or it is from the body and on it that signification takes shape and is deposited, and signification never stops reaching toward this proper locus where it should endlessly curl up into itself.” [1] Nancy focuses on acts that problematize the category of “act” itself, aligning him with other artists and critics who are indebted to anti-metaphysical thought and studies of everyday life. Sleeping, listening, reading, and care-giving (to name a few) are acts assumed to have a habitual, passive, or reactive bodily valance that nevertheless signify and are traceable well after their immediate conduct.

How these less valued ‘acts’ register among the tattered material of archives is open to debate. For example, what effect does one’s sleep have on the way one is potentially catalogued? What of the sentences read or mouths fed? What of sounds savored or unheard? Nancy raises these questions to make a simple point: historical identities tend to be evaluated and written-up in a preordained way that differentiates the acts of that person according to their ability to reproduce or suspend a previous set of intelligible circumstances. In the rare instance that an act defies the rationale by which it may be interpreted, one enters a realm where new vocabularies and strategies are needed for its understanding. But are not iconoclasts, heroes, code-breakers, and outliers the usual subjects of biography?

Is it not also naive or misguided to assume new vocabularies or concepts always follow and correspond to an unprecedented set of historical situations? In this sense “corpus” is not an ideal of intellectual biography: it is rather a cautionary concept that leaves one skeptical of the belief that the dead are necessarily “updated” with each retelling of their life.

Another type of thinker, perhaps one prone to elegy, is drawn to the idea of a corpus because it mediates the definitive contradictions of community:

“What reconciles me to my own death more than anything else is the image of a place: a place where your bones and mine are buried, thrown, uncovered, together. They are strewn there pell-mell. One of your ribs leans against my skull. A metacarpal of my left hand lies inside your pelvis. (Against my broken ribs your breast like a flower.) The hundred bones of our feet are scattered like gravel. It is strange that this image of our proximity, concerning as it does mere phosphate of calcium, should bestow a sense of peace. Yet it does. With you I can imagine a place where to be phosphate of calcium is enough.” [2]

Mindful of the complexities of a corpus, a minimum of two conceits – the inadequacy of the historiographic form and the inconsistency of its subject – loom between the sentences of numerous intellectual biographies. The reviews in this issue cite this dual difficulty again and again, and they are aware of the trouble that arises with the biographical form’s breadth and investigative tenor. So often biographers snatch a corpus from its supposedly “proper place” and relegate or appropriate it for immediate recognition. Integral to biography are problems of historicity (or “existential time”), in a period where Being and Nothingness have been diminished from variable angles and seem unavailable to one another today as coordinates of our shared ontological issues. If only existence were a topic biographers, curators, directors, and philosophers could claim as their exclusive jurisdiction!

To describe the impetus behind this issue, “On Intellectual Biography,” enumeration of a few key tropes of biographical narration limns the form as it might be interpreted today. As with most cultural products, intellectual biography is beholden to the fads and fashions of publishing houses, the print media, universities, and prize systems. These institutions claim the symbolic and monetary values whose accumulative consequences exceed and standardize the conditions for assessing an identity’s authenticity or a work’s veracity. Diagrams of social differentiation akin to those imagined by Pierre Bourdieu in his 1979 magnum opus Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste should be redrawn to predict those of us set to have details of our life dramatized and reconstructed. Yet another diagram could be etched to analyze the milieus and dispositions of readers and writers who reproduce the republic of biographical letters in and against the “aesthetic of necessity.” A visit to the library or museum reveals an entire apparatus of endorsement–called “consecration” by Bourdieu–prefacing the books, providing walk-through commentaries of the exhibitions on headphones, and all effusive of artifacts supposedly the opposite of bare utility.

“Intellectual” biography might therefore sound patrician and subsequently denied inclusion into the annals of social or popular history. Such a hypothetical exclusion is unfounded for many reasons. For one, the possessive individualism of political culture, borrowing from C.B. Macpherson’s genealogy from the nineteenth century forth, having undercut long-standing social affiliations and political solidarity, has veered intensively into the so-called “disinterested” realms of thought and foreclosed viable means for imagining social life in all genres (see Minard’s review of a recent biography of Ayn Rand). [3] Where most intellectual biographies circulate, the divisions between “intellectual” and “rudimentary” are prefigured by an international division of labor, vast material processing and monocrop yields, which go unidentified (indeed negated from the realm of “acts” by many historians) and are presumed to persist endlessly. What better way to challenge the ordinary possessive imaginary adopted by subjects (along with their damaging effects) than to counter the growing bodies of work (e.g., Ron Chernow’s biographies) and narrative techniques fertilizing and recycling the myths of “great men” in our midst?

A last point. The adjective “intellectual” also marks a temporal delay or buffer between archive, author, subject narrated, text, and reader. Contemporaries of, say, Thelonious Monk or Simone de Beauvoir were readily able to hear “I Surrender Dear” at Washington D.C.’s Bohemian Cavern in the late 1950s or witness the scene at Cafe de Flore in the 1960s, but familiarity has always included a deafness or a way of precluding interpretation of Monk’s place in the soundscape of jazz piano and de Beauvoir’s contribution to generations of feminist struggle and philosophy. Contemporaries make for limited biographers. A period of gestation is required between an intimacy with the person and the reception of how their life translates back in the form of acclaim. The historical loop that encircles biographers invites them to double as chroniclers of narrated historicity, sift through its details scattered like gravel, and locate how and where historicity trades and travels.

The conditions generative of and degrading a life, as well as the material elements conducive for its reprise, indicate that intellectual biography and its analogous expressions take shape among many unorthodox issues of identity. For the purpose further provocation and inquiry set against biographies of possessive individualism and recapitulations of the lives of heroic men, we might investigate how biography is conceptualized against ideas of daily mimetic play with others, collectives, the Unconscious, and vanquished lives. The note below offers cursory speculations for each. [4]

Notes

[1] Jean-Luc Nancy, “Corpus” in Thinking Bodies. Ed. Juliet MacCannell. Stanford U.P., 1994. p.20.

[2] John Berger, And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief As Photos. Vintage, 1992. p. 101.

[3] C.B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: From Hobbes to Locke. Oxford U.P., 1962

[4] (a) One’s double: figural representation of the double or doppelganger dramatizes a tension between one’s mimetic play with others and the compulsive desire for a singular, coherent personhood. Any empirical contention with likeness confounds clear and distinct notions of what composes a subject but the points of identification for this tension are inconsistent. Biographical writing does not employ the dialogic sentences and recurrent episodes of resemblance primary in Dostoevsky’s writing. Dialogue (rare in biography) is particularly suited to dramatize the aural and face-to-face engagement of neighborhood coexistence. Encountering one’s double arises by happenstance and by following one’s nose through the gamut of impressions, turns of phrase, rapidly edited screens, and scenarios of similarity. Two examples that complicate Dostoevsky’s immediate encounters push this idea further. Orhan Pamuk’s Kara Kitap (1990, translated as The Black Book) alternates between chapters written by the protagonist Galip and the writer Celal who Galip suspects has become reacquainted with his current lover Ruya. As a jealous fan of Celal’s reportage, Galip soon reads himself into Celal’s writings to the degree the reader has trouble determining one from the other. Jose Saramago’s O Homem Duplicado (2001, translated as The Double) also recreates the uncanny appearance of one’s self, but in this case, the divorced insomniac Tertuliano Maximo Afonso sees a man identical to himself in a rented VHS film. Seeking out the identical looking actor, Alfonso becomes embroiled in lives he otherwise would ignore. All three narratives are allegories of male protagonists struggling against their and others’ narcissism. The difficulty of recreating the tension experienced by a subject with its doubles, no matter how consistently they turn the corner and glimpse uncanny commonality, has been brought to a banal resolution with the fetishism of avatars. Replacing mimetic play and the upset of the norm that “everyone’s different” is the insistence of cute dictums such as “I am other” or forms of representation (especially film and online gaming) that invite a replication of the ego. Biographies rarely narrate as regularly as novels an explicit tension between their subject and his or her doubles, but this problem underlies the quandaries its subjects face, whether startlingly reminiscent or pre-packaged. (b) Collectives: I offer few ideas where to go here, but a quote from Paolo Virno may be where to begin. He reminds us in Grammar of the Multitude that “[u]nity is no longer something (the State, the sovereign) towards which things converge, as in the case of the people; rather it is taken for granted, as background or necessary condition precondition. The many must be thought of as the individualization of the universal, of the generic, of the shared experience.” This quote grasps the way representations of collectivities oscillate between individualizations (Obama’s America, Lula’s Brazil, etc.) and notional concepts that ring true to the ear but have inadequate narratives supporting its charm. Biographies also do not tend to broach collectivity as such, but millions of people populate and condition the lionized; (c) The Unconscious: Julia Kristeva concludes her intellectual biographies of Melanie Klein, Hannah Arendt, and Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette (a troika on the topic of feminine genius) by taking an account of the way “each of them, against that background of common condition, modulated an original and unprecedented advance” (Colette, p.425). Emblematic of psychoanalysis, philosophy, and literature, Kristeva narrates their lives to critique ideation, which is a process often misidentified as the medium or product of psychical life. If the Surrealists tried their hand at writing an unconscious intellectual biography, it has yet to make a significant claim to the form. Nevertheless Kristeva’s texts draw inspiration from Sigmund Freud’s brief biographical essay on Leonardo DaVinci (1910) and she extends its scope and viability. In Kristeva the subject’s psyche is misunderstood by the biographer, but not because Arendt, Colette or Klein lack a lucidity of self-expression. The subjects of Kristeva’s biographies are, in other genres of analysis, regularly made synonymous with their ideas. We recognize Klein’s “paranoid-schizoid position,” Arendt’s “banality of evil” adage and Colette’s narration of desire, but more importantly Kristeva diverges from the usual way the ideas of a thinker are said to define her life story. Ideas are illusory markers of a life or, put differently, they are products neither of private intention nor context. Questions of intention and context will undoubtedly hound biographers in the future and they stand to benefit, as do readers, from the form’s innumerable problems.

Tim Kaposy is managing editor of Politics and Culture and Assistant Professor in the Cultural Studies Program at George Mason University.

Almost twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, it is not too far-fetched to argue that Eastern European women have carried the burden of the post-communist transition. The transformative paradigm shift caused by the collapse of communism left the political and social positions of women in shambles. And while the Soviet system undoubtedly offered a number of state-protected privileges to women, unparalleled in the Western world, those privileges where often ideologically masked to represent a closely-controlled and fabricated sense of emancipation. This was meant to restrict the role of women in society to those directly benefiting the state-namely, the production of goods and the reproduction of population growth. As Azhgikhina (1995: 3) aptly pointed out, ‘in effect, the declaration of emancipation condemned women to a double burden – the new power demanded that she should take an active part in developing industry, and at the same time, the national mentality insisted that she fulfill all the traditional women’s duties in the home’.

Nevertheless, women’s participation in Soviet social and political life was strongly publicized and used as a propaganda tool, particularly so, in the channels of mass communication. In fact, the gender equality debate found itself at the helm of the communist propaganda machine, pedaling ideologically motivated images and portrayals of the communist woman as the ultimate benefactor of the revolution. As Kotzeva contended (1999), the press maintained the representation of the communist woman as an epitome of successful emancipation, articulating the idea that women had mastered control over the ‘parasite’ needs of leisure and aesthetics and over, the decadent trend of self-indulgence through fashion and beauty, and instead, has focused narrowly (and appropriately) on functional, productive-driven activities. Azhgikhina (1995: 4) argued that Soviet culture, ‘generously subsidized by the state, became a sort of ‘dream factory,’ while the press, and the media in general, were a ‘bazaar of dreams’, ‘tirelessly drumming new myths and images in public consciousness, creating another reality, which many Soviet people perceived as more real than reality itself’.

2. Constructing mediated women

These ideological constructions of womanhood were further solidified by the constant barrage of representations of mythical heroines next to real women-tractor-drivers, pilots, mechanics, and political functionaries, thus, building a very strong, and fairly stereotypical, public perception of what the woman and more specifically women politicians should look like. As Kotzeva explained (1999: 85), ‘the visual space of the socialist society was inhabited by the new Amazons-they were labeled “doers”, “fighters”, “functionaries”, “laborer”, “activists”, and so on’. More importantly, the socialist gender ideology (while proclaiming the triumph of woman in taming the revolutionary energy), showed that ‘women’s appropriation of a progressive masculine discourse was not to their benefit but rather functioned to curb a “transgressive femininity”,’ (Kotzeva, 1999: 85), leading in turn to a manufactured and controlled idea of femininity that had nothing to do with women’s self-expression and everything to do with the party line on gender equality.

Today, the representation of the communist functionary-female politician is a remnant of a political past relegated to history books. And while female politicians in Eastern Europe have made some significant steps towards challenging existing cultural and politician norms of gender equality, I argue that Eastern European politicians face another obstacle in their strife to assert a leading position in society-a growing and noticeably ubiquitous gender bias in the media. This certainly is not a new trend. Female politicians worldwide have had to face the problem that their media coverage is more negative than that of their male counterparts, that it focuses more on appearances than on issues, reinforces masculine and feminine stereotypes, and constructs a difference between ‘feminine soft’ news and ‘masculine hard’ news (Gidengil & Everitt, 2003; Herzog, 1998; Kahn, 1994a, 1994b, 1996; Ross & Sreberny, 2000; Sreberny & Van Zoonen, 2000). This essay argues that in Eastern Europe, however, these trends have been amplified by a media system in transition, which meanders between sensationalism and the complete rejection of state control over content and distribution, where intellectual journals are now easily found nestled among pornographic magazines and where the cultural norms of patriarchy are making a strong comeback in rethinking gender relations. As Havelkova (1999: 146) pointed out, ‘we must therefore, take into the account the entirely non-standard and unprecedented situation, in which the media have for years been operating in the unbalanced context of hypertrophied interest on the one side, and in almost complete vacuum on the side of the civic sector’. This again points to the uniqueness of the redefinition of gender relations, and their political consequences, in the climate of the post-communist transition.

This topic is important because gender biases disseminated by the media can have electoral consequences-a fact well exemplified by the current political campaign turmoil which has come to define the presidential race in the United States, featuring the first ever female Republican candidate for the vice presidency, Sara Palin, as well as Hillary Clinton’s run for the Democratic Party nomination. At a time when world politics is thoroughly ‘mediatized’ and ‘mediated’, information (and entertainment) received from the media does matter. As Corner (2003: 75) suggested, the media have become the public sphere in which the identity of the politician as a ‘person of qualities’ is constructed. The strength of these media-performative criteria is that they can disqualify certain candidates either from becoming public political figures at all or at least from competing for high office. This is a particularly alarming trend in Eastern Europe where the loss of state protection and welfare privileges, combined with decreasing political representation for women, might lead to a dramatic shift in the social positioning of women in the post-communist transition. Havelkova (1999: 146) contended, ‘the public has also began to regard politics as an area where the whole social transformation is turning out to benefit men rather than women, and it is in fact one of the first areas in which there is a serious public perception of undesirable gender differentiation’. Finally, the degree to which women move forward in securing a notable and active presence on the political scene, will become the litmus test of the success of the post-communist transition.

3. Stereotyping and ideology

Throughout the Soviet period, the representations of women were extremely didactic and had a most important ideological function to perform. At the same time, a look into the popular female images and stereotypes throughout the history of the communist regimes allows us to outline the specific features and paradoxes of that era and to understand one of the most dramatic social and political experiments of this century. As Azhgikhina (1995) argued, its main contradiction – that between image and reality, between declaration and the real state of affairs – can be traced back to the very first decrees of the Soviet government, which included the equality of men and women. In the case of Bulgaria, it must be noted that prior to the arrival of socialist rule in 1944, the emancipation of Bulgarian women received very little attention. Although franchise was extended to women in 1937, the existing women’s organizations focused primarily on cultural activities and charity (Kostova, 1998). Yet, as part of the socialist doctrine of equality, the Bulgarian Assembly passed a special bill in October 1944, officially proclaiming equal opportunities for both sexes. As a result of this new law, women were elected to the National Assembly for the first time in 1945 and women’s opportunities in educational and professional development were substantially expanded (Kostadinova, 2003). Women made a massive entry into some very prestigious professions, that were previously an exclusive masculine sphere, including the realm of politics. The number of women in the labor force reached 48 percent of all employees by 1982. That percentage stayed the same both in 1994 and 1996 (Kostadinova, 2003). Similarly, the political involvement of women peaked during the late 1980s, when women constituted 34 percent of the members of the local government bodies (Kostadinova, 2003). However, while statistical data from the socialist period shows that women were (reasonably proportionally) involved in the leadership of various political organizations, they were nonetheless left with very little opportunity to organize themselves outside the Bulgarian Communist Party or to define their own interests (Kostova, 1998). Even when women were seen occupying important political positions, those were mostly symbolic gestures of inclusion, or as Einhorn (1993) called them, ‘tokenism of the worst kind,’ as the real decision making power was limited to the Politburos of the Communist Party, which were almost exclusively reserved male territory.

At the same time, the press adhered closely to the ideological construction of the ideal woman of communist Bulgaria as a ‘political woman’- an enthusiastic and politically active member of society, whose main goals where always in alignment with these of the Communist Party. This concept was further propagated by the state-sponsored newspapers, who constantly printed articles about young women, embarking on political careers at the local and regional governmental level, while at the same time, attending to their family and social responsibilities. Reports of young women who manage to juggle their personal lives and take on the huge responsibility of representing their constituencies in government abounded in the press, accompanied by photos of them, working in the field, operating complex machineries or tending to the needs of sick children, all while smiling and looking content. A typical ‘political woman’ was devoid of any playfulness or coquetry, let alone sexuality. Azhgikhina (1995: 5) explained that ‘of all feminine manifestations, only motherly love in moderate quantities was tolerated; women actively mastered men’s skills, acquired education and took part in public life,’ dressed in conservative clothes, lacking any fashion sense and appearing utterly asexual.

4. Representing the communist woman and beyond

This stifling ideological control over the public image of the communist woman soon proved to be difficult to maintain, as public discontent with the repressive ideological communist system grew and eventually brought about its colossal demise. In the years immediately following the collapse of communism, a dramatic shift took place, transforming not only the political process for women, but also their very representation in the public sphere. The representation of the fashion model and beauty queen came to reign in the media, immediately and successfully replacing the ‘political’ woman. This change came almost ‘natural’ as a backlash against the socialist aesthetics and the artificial stereotypes of womanhood maintained by the communist party. The consciousness fostered by the totalitarian regime and expressed in the mythical heroine of the past was rejected and replaced with a full display of beauty, sexuality and hyper-femininity. This trend was readily embraced by the mushrooming of independent media outlets, which flagrantly used female representations of liberated, rebellious, and of young women bursting with sexual energy, in order to visually symbolize the rejection of the communist past and its stifling mores. For instance, the main opposition newspaper, Democratsia, used a topless beauty contest to drive a political point. While publishing the first ever photo of a half-naked young woman in a daily newspaper (the winner of the competition), the newspaper also commended the new sense of liberation that was directly expressed by ‘stripping the clothes and the burden of the artificial morals of the communist past’.’

While the grasp over power of the communist party was slowly dissolving, so was the role of Bulgarian women in the political process. In fact, the first democratic, multi-party elections in 1990 registered a drastic drop in women’s parliamentary representation – going from nearly 21 percent to 8.5 percent. In fact, immediately following the fall of the Berlin Wall, the political representation of women dwindled significantly. Kostadinova (2003) explains the trend as a result of changes in the electoral system that favored popular candidates and the highly competitive nature of politics in the first years of the post-communist transition. During the 1991 elections, however, the proportion of women MPs increased to 14.1 percent and fluctuated slightly until 2001, when it jumped to 26 percent. It is important to note, however, that the 2001 elections were not characteristic of Bulgaria’s political dynamics (Ghodsee, 2003). In 2001, the former Bulgarian king in exile, Simeon Saxecoburgotski, returned to Bulgaria, creating his own political party, the National Movement Simeon Second (NDSV), which attracted a huge following among women, young, successful Bulgarian expatriates and influential figures from the world of business and finance. Because Simeon Saxecoburgotski registered his political movement with the Bulgarian Women’s Party before the 2001 elections, he was committed to bringing a number of women into parliament. He compiled a list of women from varied walks of life and experiences, including both highly respected business women as well as inexperienced fashion models. NDSV’s sweeping election victory made it the largest parliamentary group in the 39th National Assembly and brought an impressive number of women MPs into Parliament: 26 percent of members of parliament and 35 percent of NDSV’s members were women.

The last parliamentary elections took place on June 25, 2005 and included candidates from more than 22 parties and coalitions (see  www.parliament.bg). While the elections had registered the lowest voter turnout since the fall of the Berlin Wall (56 percent of registered voters participated), they brought 21 percent of women MPs to the 40th National Assembly. This number, although fairly high compared to other nations in Europe and the world, was nonetheless alarming, considering that the 2005 elections saw a dramatic increase of the number of women running for office – in 2001, 243 women were on the election ballots, compared to 713 female parliamentary candidates in 2005 (UN Human Development, 2005). The Coalition for Bulgaria (CB) won 84 seats while NDSV won 53, with 22 women in its parliamentary group. The number of women in key leadership positions was modest. The 40th National Assembly has only one female chairperson of a standing committee (the committee of culture) and out of the eighteen ministers (including the Prime Minister) in the government, only three are female – Emel Etem, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Disaster Management Policy; Emilia Maslarova, Minister of Labor and Social Policy; Meglena Kuneva, Minister of European Affairs. Additionally, three ministries have currently no female representation (Danova, 2006).

And while the political representation of Bulgarian women in parliament meandered between success and stagnation, the public discourse on their role in social and political life was directly affected by the transformation of the mediascape. With the emergence of the market economy, feminine representations turned out to provide a most profitable commodity in the bustling new competitive media market. The media quickly blossomed in the new era of post-communist uncertainly and deregulation. Thrown into the world of a market economy, all media – both established media (supported by the state) and new media outlets – faced new competitors. Among those, the tabloid press, which flourished in the atmosphere of rejecting communism in favor of capitalist business models, ran on sensationalism, politically provocative articles, racy news with even racier imagery, nudity and misogyny as an indispensable strategy for success. This trend was further amplified by the general public sentiment of rejecting any form of state control (and press censorship as the ultimately manifestation of it) leading to a wide acceptance of and strong encouragement to challenging existing norms, including those guiding gender relations. Ironically, the long awaited freedom of the press found a new expression in the boom in the number of pornographic publications. ‘This phenomenon is easily explained by the fact that for decades, sex was taboo, and besides, a talk about anything erotic was understood as the freedom of self-expression’ (Azhgikhina, 1995: 11).

As a result of this trend, images of the female body accompanied by gender-stereotypical comments, combined with a market ideology represented women and their sexuality as yet another available commodity (Kronja, 2006). Partially-clad women and nude ‘page 3′ models of the daily papers have become a regular diet for the Bulgarian reader and become accepted as a routine. As Siklova (1993: 76), a well-known Czech dissident and a women’s right advocate, said: ‘As the enforced false ideology breaks down, many people welcome the freedom to return to traditions once forbidden. . . Freedom takes on different forms. This may give the impression that we are returning to patriarchy, but it is more a reaction to our recent past’. In this vein, freedom of speech in Eastern Europe, for example, has indeed been interpreted to be both the liberating idea of speaking one’s mind and also, to do so, in a direct, sensationalist, and often, unflattering manner. This is particularly true in the case of covering female politicians and MPs, who are often ridiculed for their inept and naive political behavior and are even more frequently reduced to being women first, and politicians second. For example, in a July 2008 article featuring a new political coalition, which was being formed between notable female MPs and a the male leader of a new political formation, the front page of the two most widely circulated newspapers in Bulgaria, Trud and 24 Chasa, were adorned by a photo of a line of crossed female legs, with ‘elegant shoes and perfect manicures’. Female politicians are often featured talking about their fashion choices, their family responsibilities and their relationships with male colleagues, caught in the midst of embarrassing moments, wearing revealing or ill-fitted outfits, or even more frequently, juxtaposed against rough and stumbling male MPs who look stunned to be in the presence of such beauty. Ironically, even among forward thinking women such as the female MPs of the Bulgarian parliament, as Roman (2003: 56) pointed out, an ideal has settled in, ‘a provocative feminine mystique of Western origins stressing beauty as a paramount goal’. And while this could be interpreted both as a reaction to the asexual, communist functionalist representations of the political woman of the past, it could also be attributed to the media’s insatiable need to create ‘a sensation’ or to ‘spice up’, and in this case, ‘sexy up’ the political news which for forty five years has been nothing but reprints of endless pages of communist leaders’ speeches and repetitive cycles of artificially-fed party lines.

5. Conclusion

The lack of a more balanced diet of media portrayals of women politicians is indeed a troubling sign of the growing pains of a media system in transition, but also the direct result of an aggressive push towards market-oriented journalism that thrives on circulation and neglects professional norms in the interest of increased advertising revenues. As Underwood pointed out (2001), it seems that the intertwining of news with marketing goals is everywhere, transforming news as a product to be sold, and turning citizens into consumers. This trend becomes even more alarming when it is internalized not only by the reporters, but also by the female politicians themselves, who not only do not condemn this style of reporting, but often actively seek it, in order to receive much needed publicity. A society brought up on stereotypes, with a collective memory which lacks a solid foundation in reality, and gender relations still caught in the limbo of the post-communist transition, needs balanced, honest, sincere and diverse representations of women in politics for a palpable change in the public consciousness to take place. For this process to ensue, both media practitioners and politicians alike must commence a much-needed public dialogue on ‘gender in politics’ and ‘politics in gender’. As Havelkova (1999: 163) said: ‘as yet, discussion has not shifted from the purely cultural level to the level of the theory of democracy and active citizenship, let along the context of social policy’. Perhaps this is finally the time to do so.

References

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Ghodsee, K. (2003) It takes a king? Simeon Saxecoburgotski and women’s political participation in post-communist Bulgaria. Washington: IREX. Retrieved October 13, 2005 http://www.irex.org/programs/stg/research/03/ghodsee.pdf.

Gidengil, E., Everitt, J. (2003) ‘Talking tough: Gender and reported speech in campaign news coverage’, Political Communication, 20: 209-232.

Havelkova, H. (1999) ‘The political discourse of women in mass media discourse in the Czech Republic 1990-1998′, Czech Sociological Review, 7(2): 145-165.

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Kahn, K. F. (1994b) ‘The distorted mirror: Press coverage of women candidates for statewide office’, The Journal of Politics, 56(1): 154-174.

Kahn, K. F. (1996) The political consequences of being a woman. New York: Columbia University Press.

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Roman, D. (2003) Fragmented identities: Popular culture, sex, and everyday life in Post-communist Romania. Lanham: Lexington books.

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Uderwood, D. (2001) ‘Reporting the push for market-oriented journalism: Media organizations as Businesses’, in: W. L. Bennett and R. Entman (Eds.) Mediated politics: Communication in the future of democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 99-117.

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Bio

Dr. Elza Ibroscheva (Ph.D., Mass Communications and Media Arts, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale) teaches publication layout & design, visual media analysis, and media campaigns. Dr. Ibroscheva was at Southern Illinois University Carbondale prior to joining the faculty in Edwardsville. She has worked as a TV reporter in Bulgaria and as an interpreter at the Bulgarian Telegraph Agency. Her research interests include international communication, globalization and culture, media effects on society and media stereotypes.

As far as film studies are concerned, researchers used to attack these silencing practices, indicating how particular institutions (e.g., film censorship boards) were legally founded, how they operated, how they banned or mutilated movies (e.g. cutting images or complete scenes), how they prevented controversial or revolutionary movies from being seen by mature citizens. Researchers restricted themselves to investigating censorship in major film production countries (e.g. in the US, the UK or France, see Hunnings, 1967; Randall, 1970) or in totalitarian regimes such as in Nazi-Germany (e.g. Wetzel & Hagemann, 1978), fascist Italy or the Soviet Union (e.g. Taylor, 1998).

This more traditional research on the history, structure and legal basis of film censorship is still a lively part of the field (e.g. Bertin-Maghit, 2008; Müller & Wieder, 2008; Wittern-Keller, 2008), but in recent years, the nature of censorship research has changed dramatically. New approaches argued, for instance, that the State does not wield absolute power, and also that censorship institutions are run by flesh-and-blood people with their own sensitivities, norms and values. Censorship institutions do not operate in a completely autonomous or authoritarian manner, nor are they disconnected from society. This includes the existence of negotiations between the censors, the industry and film makers. When Hitchcock wanted to include the shower scene in his landmark Psycho, he had to take care of, and negotiate with the internal Hollywood production codes, turn to some forms of self-censorship, and find creative solutions in order not to upset the norms and values set by various disciplining forces in society, such as the powerful Catholic Legion of Decency. But at the same time this process of transformation and negotiation also offered him new possibilities to bypass these disciplining forces, to look for more indirect or latent forms of criticism, and to deal with sensitive social issues in a more metaphorical sense, etc. Detailed work on concrete censorship practices revealed, from this perspective, that the day-to-day practice of censorship was much more complex than traditional research often acknowledged. In short, the relationship between the censor and the censored was more contingent than often assumed.

Inspired by Foucault’s analysis of power in society, research on censorship became more sophisticated, leaving behind the traditional strand of thinking that focused on an institutionalized, interventionist censorship (Caïra, 2005; Müller, 2004; Post, 1998). The academic view on film censorship also shifted significantly, from a conception of a mainly repressive apparatus and ‘censorship as a problem’ – what Annette Kuhn (1988) has called the ‘prohibition/institutions’ model – to a more culturalist notion of film censorship as something that has productive aspects as well (see also Staiger, 1992; 1995). These productive aspects became apparent in Kuhn’s ‘eventualization/diagnosis’ model, which assumes that film censorship does not only consist of a top-down dimension. Although censorship often takes place within the practices of concrete institutions, such institutions should not be seen in isolation. These institutions should be regarded as both active and acted upon, being embedded within a wider set of practices and relations. Seen from this eventualization/diagnosis approach, practices of film classification/censorship boards can be considered highly revealing manifestations of hegemonic views on social, ethical or political matters. This shift indicates that film censorship is a form of social disciplining which can be regarded as a ‘significant social response to representations’ (Staiger, 1995: 15-6), rather than as an imposed decision of an alienated institution.

A closer look at concrete censorship acts then become a highly revealing act of research, not only in terms of creative choices, limits of artistic expressions, but also in terms of the negotiations about social, ethical and political issues. The praxis of banning or cutting a movie is often not self-evident; concrete cuts are essentially meant to hide significantly troubling images for a society which is often engaged in a process of change. Research on cuts and banned images indicate that they often reveal more than what is allowed or not allowed to be shown. Censorship thus becomes a keen and sharp indicator of what a particular hegemonic group in society can tolerate at a particular moment. Censorship becomes a much more complex, fascinating and meaningful activity of negotiation around particular movies and images. And as such, it becomes a fascinating issue for studying a society in flux. This might be a change in political or ideological terms (e.g., can we show Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin?), in religious terms (e.g., what about the controversial poster of Costa-Gavras’ Amen, where a cross takes the shape of a swastika?), in terms of representing sexuality and morals (what about the developments in relation to pornographic images?). From an international perspective, it is interesting to see how particular movies have caused trouble anywhere, whereas other pictures only caused a stir in particular national contexts.

In recent years, more sensitive approaches to the history of film censorship came along. Within these new approaches, researchers do not limit their account to an institutional approach, nor do they tend to (merely) denounce the banning, cutting and all what happens in the process of censoring movies. Paul Lesch (2005), for instance, who has worked on censorship in the Grand-Duchy of Luxemburg, emphasized that the national censors were often responsible people, open for negotiation and sensitive to wider (national) interests.

This type of censorship research also indicates how the film industry often complied with the control of, and consensus on public values, because they had a lot to gain from safe, non-provocative films (e.g. Vasey, 1997). Especially during the early years of film classification, family films that did not damage the reputation of the medium, turned out to be more profitable in the long run than the short-lived commercial successes of controversial films. Furthermore, film censorship constituted a challenge for writers, directors, actors and other creative people within the film industry, who intended to explore the limits of acceptable representations.

This more sophisticated research on censoring, disciplining (e.g. Caïra, 2005[1]) or policing (Grieveson, 2004) also includes a more sophisticated approach in terms of methodologies, where censorship is considered to be a discursive act, to be found in treatments, scripts, creative decisions and finally in the movies themselves. (New) censorship research therefore insists on using textual analysis, in particular for examining those delicate points of negotiation.

Apart from studying these specific textual features, the new film censorship research also looks for ‘the wider social and cultural ideologies determining those group’s activities’ (Staiger, 1995: 14). It asks for an examination of the specific process of negotiation between industry, filmmakers, censors and their respective discourses, trying to achieve some form of consensus on the acceptability of certain images, scenes or films. This negotiation process, which can be revealed through historical reception analysis (Staiger, 1995), makes it rather unlikely that film classification boards would take decisions going completely against societal sensitivities. In this regard, research into ‘images that are troubling’ is extremely fruitful to reveal the boundaries of acceptable representations, within specific ideological constellations.

Note

[1] See also my own work, Biltereyst (2005)

References

Bertin-Maghit, J.-P. (Ed.) (2008) Une histoire mondiale des cinémas de propaganda. Paris: Nouveau Monde éditions.

Biltereyst, D. (2005) Youth, moral panics and the end of cinema. On the reception of ‘Rebel without a Cause’ in Europe, in: J. D. Slocum (Ed.) Rebel without a Cause: Approaches to a Maverick Masterwork. New York: SUNY, pp. 171-189.

Caïra, O. (2005) Hollywood face à la Censure. Paris: CNRS.

Grieveson, L. (2004) Policing Cinema. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Hunnings, N. M. (1967) Film censors and the Law. London: Allen & Unwin.

Kuhn, A. (1988) Cinema, Censorship and Sexuality, 1909-1925. London: Routledge.

Lesch, P. (2005) In the name of public order and morality: cinema control and film censorship in Luxembourg 1895-2005. Luxemburg: CNA.

Müller, B. (Ed.) (2004) Censorship & Cultural Regulation in the Modern Age. Amsterdam: Rodopi.

Müller, R., Wieder, T. (Ed.) (2008) Cinéma et regimes autoritaires au XXe siècle. Paris: PUF.

Phelps, G. (1975) Film Censorship. Letchwork.

Post, R. C. (Ed.) (1998) Censorship and Silencing. Los Angeles: Getty.

Randall, R. S. (1970) Censorship of the Movies: the social and political control of a mass medium. Madison: Wisconsin UP.

Staiger, J. (1992) Interpreting Films. Studies in the Historical Reception of American Cinema. Princeton: PUP.

Staiger, J. (1995) Bad Women. Regulating Sexuality in Early American Cinema. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press.

Vasey, R. (1997) The World according to Hollywood. Exeter: Exeter University Press.

Wetzel, K., Hagemann, P. A. (1978) Zensur. Verbotene Deutsche Filme 1933-1945. Berlin: Volke Spiess.

Wittern-Keller, L. (2008) Freedom of the Screen: Legal Challenges to State Film Censorship, 1915-1981. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.

Bio

Daniel Biltereyst is Professor in film, television and cultural studies at the Department of Communication Studies, Ghent University, Belgium, where he leads the research centre Film and Television Studies (www.wgfilmtv.ugent.be). His work deals with film and screen culture as sites of censorship and controversy. He has published in international journals (including Media Culture & Society, European Journal of Communication, European Journal of Cultural Studies, Historical Journal of Film, Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema, Radio and Television, Journal of Communication Inquiry, Communications) and in readers such as Understanding Reality TV (Routledge), Rebel without a Cause (SUNY), Communication Theory and Research (Sage), Youth Culture in Global Cinema (University of Texas Press), Going to the Movies (Exeter UP), and International Encyclopedia of Communication (Blackwell). He is editing The New Cinema History (Blackwell, with R. Maltby and P. Meers) and preparing a book on film censorship in Europe.

In the age of mediatized mass democracies, political discourse in the media is an important means for ordinary people to encounter politics (Lauerbach & Fetzer, 2007). This is particularly true of political debates and interviews, in which political information is transmitted in dialogue-anchored forms. Against this background, different discourse genres, such as political interviews, panel interviews or talk shows provide the opportunity, first, to translate politics, which has been frequently conceptualized as a macro structural phenomenon, into text and talk (Chilton & Schäffner, 2002); second, to transfer macro-domain oriented politics to the micro domain; and third, to personify party-political programs, agendas and ideologies. Furthermore, the dialogic nature of these genres allows for the presentation of symbolic politics (Sarcinelli, 1987) as a language game composed of questions and answers, in which the politician’s and journalist’s argumentation and their underlying reasoning and negotiation of meaning are made explicit. This sort of contextualization facilitates and supports the comprehension of macro politics, making it more accessible to the general public.

Political parties tend to focus on the production of politics, which takes place behind the scenes, while politicians tend to focus on its presentation, which takes place in the public stage. On that stage, public agents co-construct, negotiate and contextualize politics, and it is the job of the politician to use all possible means inherent to the contextual constraints and requirements of mass media to present her/his political agenda in a credible and responsible manner to a heterogeneous audience, whose members are potential voters.

Political discourse also feeds on a differentiation between politics as an ideological system and the management of politics in society (Charaudeau, 2005: 34). The latter considers political action, political decision-making processes and the traditional fields of action and control, such as law-making procedures, party politics and the relation between legislative and utive branches, and the administration, as well as the fields of public participation and opinion formation in politics (Wodak, 2008: 297). But politics is no longer a clear-cut domain. Its boundaries have become more and more blurred as they intersect with mass media and economy.

2. Hybridities in context

The concept of hybridity has not only been well established in postcolonial studies but also in dialogue-centered, critical-discourse-analytic and sociopragmatic approaches to language and discourse (Fairclough, 1995; Lauerbach & Fetzer, 2007; Linell, 1998). While the former focus on the connectedness between discourse, participant and context, dialogue-centered approaches examine how polyphony or multi-voicedness is reflected in the production and interpretation of text. Critical discourse analysis considers the dialectic relations between discourse and society, paying particular attention to conditions of production, reception and access, as is reflected in social practices and generic chains. Socio-pragmatics looks at how participants produce and interpret language in social context, accounting for communicative strategies, direct and indirect communicative action, and contextualization.

In the late modern discursive formation of political discourse, access to political decision-making processes and political action are no longer the sole privilege of the traditional domain of politics and its political agents. The major transformations in the public sphere concern the role and actions of civil society and its citizens who thus take part in the formation of political opinions. Because of that traditional politics and traditional politicians require the media to make their political actions more transparent. Against this background, the formation of public opinion takes place in the media and through the media. There are, however, different logics that control the public media space, namely those of technologization and commercialization. First, the technologization of communication enables the agents to have a greater number of mediated encounters using diverse genres, such as forum discussions, chats and weblogs. As a consequence, the contexts in which political topics emerge multiply (Charaudeau, 2005: 30) furthering the distribution of politics. Second, the media tend to be based on economic principles according to which they need to produce attractive and well-selling products, contributing to the commodification of politics (Fairclough, 1992). In this process, the task of the media to entertain has become as important as its task to inform. From a reception point of view, the public does no longer constitute a homogeneous construct (Lauerbach & Fetzer, 2007), but varies according to its options to access and its willingness to participate in encounters provided in and by the media, selecting topics ranging from local to global, and national to supranational.

3. The dynamics of political media discourse

Communication in general and political communication in particular is a dynamic endeavor, as has been examined above. This is particularly true of political discourse in the media, which is not only produced for, but also within a particular media event. At the same time, it is part of a larger chain of political discourses, in which it becomes recontextualized in the form of sound-bites, quotations, summaries or represented discourse (Fairclough, 1995; Fetzer & Lauerbach, 2007; Lauerbach, 2004).

In the process of communication, participants do not just produce utterances at random, but they produce utterances in accordance with the contextual constraints and requirements of a larger, more stable frame of reference: a discourse genre, which – depending on the methodological frameworks employed – is referred to as communicative genre (Luckmann, 1995), activity type (Levinson, 1979), macro speech act (van Dijk, 1981) or communicative project (Linell, 1998).

Changes within the social practices of a speech community manifest themselves in changing contextual constraints and requirements anchored in these larger frames of reference. To account for them, a dynamic framework is required, accommodating a top-down perspective considering the genre as a whole, and a bottom-up perspective considering the constitutive parts of the genre. The former is informed by the sociocultural context in general and by discourse identity, discursive style, medialization (Fairclough, 1995) and turn-taking in particular. The latter considers local-level language use as is reflected in communicative strategies and other semiotic practices.

In a sociology-anchored outlook on communication, the larger frame of reference is called communicative genre which represents a ‘universal formative element of human communication’ (Luckmann, 1995: 177) operating ‘on a level between the socially constructed and transmitted codes of ‘natural’ languages and the reciprocal adjustment of perspectives’ (ibid.). In pragmatics it is the activity type which is ‘a fuzzy category whose focal members are goal-defined, socially constituted, bounded events with constraints on participants, setting and so on, but above all on the allowable contributions’ (Levinson, 1979: 368). In the discourse genre of a political interview, for instance, the fuzziness of a genre allows the traditional dyadic political interview to accommodate the multi-party configuration of a panel interview. Closely connected with the cognitive concept of fuzzy category are inferential schemata, which guide participants in their production and interpretation of communicative meaning.

Political discourse in the media has undergone a process of hybridization in which hybridity also emerges locally with respect to structural configurations, for instance deviations from the strict question-and-answer sequences in political interviews, where members of the audience take on the interviewer role and ask the politician political questions. These can be performed directly, or they can be mediated – that is ‘translated’ – by the professional interviewer. The deviation from the prototypical structural configuration has consequences on the construction – and status – of the discourse identities and on the discursive styles employed. For instance, in a political interview, private-domain anchored members of the audience take on a temporarily professional public discourse identity, thus assigning relevance to the non-professionalized, private domains of society (Fetzer & Bull, 2008). This also holds for the discourse topics in political media discourse, which have become more and more private-domain anchored, and for the discursive styles which display more and more instances of conversationalization and more and more instances of meta-talk (Fairclough & Mauranen, 1995; Fetzer, 2006).

4. Hybridization and taken-for-grantedness

The hybridization of discourse genres makes manifest their multi-layered status, blurring taken-for-granted boundaries thus turning a once predictable event into a fuzzy, locally non-predictable media encounter. By acting in dis-accordance with constraints, for instance by presenting themselves as multiply voiced, social agents that transcend boundaries and go beyond linearity and predictability. In those local non-defaults, the staged performance of the encounter is surfacing. An example par excellence is the political interview between the renowned British journalist Jeremy Paxman and the then British Prime Minister Tony Blair in the year 2003 dealing with Britain’s stance towards the war on Iraq. Paxman asked Blair about his religious beliefs, whether he prayed together with George W. Bush, the US American President, and how he felt about the whole situation. In his response, Blair answered to the point, but presented a rather non-prototypical response, viz. he smiled at the interviewer. That non-default reaction was taken up by the interviewer and turned into an object of talk. Additionally, hybridity and multi-layeredness are reflected in staged antagonism (Lauerbach & Fetzer, 2007; Schegloff, 1989), in conversationalization and medialization (Fetzer & Weizman, 2006), in acts of confiding (Fetzer & Johansson, 2007), in the presentation of self (Johansson, 2008) and in small stories told in political speeches, interviews or election campaigns (Duranti, 2006).

Political discourse in the media is a multilayered dynamic process which requires the explicit accommodation of different genres which provide political agents and audiences with a conventional format to construct and interpret political meaning. This does not only hold for the communication of direct, explicit meaning but also for indirect, implicit meaning. It is at the interface of micro-meaning construction, constrained by the formal requirements of genre, which has become blurred through hybridization, where the multilayeredness of political discourse in the media surfaces, recontextualizing old formats and opening new ones.

References

Charaudeau, P. (2005) Le discours politique. Les masques du pouvoir. Paris: Vuibert.

Chilton, P., Schäffner, C. (2002). ‘Introduction: themes and principles in the analysis of political discourse’, in: P. Chilton and C. Schäffner (Eds.) Politics as Text and Talk: Analytical Approaches to Political Discourse. Amsterdam: Benjamins, pp. 1-41.

Dijk, van T. (1981) Studies in the Pragmatics of Discourse. The Hague: Mouton.

Duranti, A. (2006) ‘Narrating the political self in a campaign for U.S. Congress’, Language in Society 35: 467-497.

Fairclough, N. (1992) Discourse and Social Change. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Fairclough, N. (1995) Media Discourse. London: Edward Arnold.

Fairclough, N., Mauranen, A. (1997) ‘The conversationalisation of political discourse: A comparative view’, Political Linguistics, Belgian Journal of Linguistics 11: 89-120.

Fetzer, A. (2006) ‘”Minister, we will see how the public judges you”. Media references in political interviews’, Journal of Pragmatics 38(2): 180-195.

Fetzer, A., Bull, P. (2008) ‘”I don’t mean you personally, forgive me, I mean generally”. The strategic use of pronouns in political interviews’, Journal of Language and Politics 7(2): 271-285.

Fetzer, A., Johansson, M. (2007) ‘”I’ll tell you what the truth is”: the interactional organization of confiding’, Journal of Language and Politics 6(2): 147-177.

Fetzer, A., Lauerbach, G. (Eds.) (2007) Political Discourse in the Media: Cross-Cultural Perspectives. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Fetzer, A., Weizman, E. (2006) ‘Political discourse as mediated and public discourse’, Journal of Pragmatics 38(2): 143-153. Johansson, M. (2008) ‘Presentation of the political self. Commitment in electoral media dialogue’, Journal of Language and Social Psychology, in press.

Lauerbach, G. (2004) ‘Political interviews as a hybrid genre’, Text 24(3): 353-397. Lauerbach, G., Fetzer, A. (2007) ‘Introduction’, in: A. Fetzer and G. Lauerbach (Eds.) Political Discourse in the Media. Amsterdam: Benjamins, pp. 3-30.

Levinson, S. (1979) ‘Activity types and language’, Linguistics 17: 365-399.

Linell, P. (1998) Approaching Dialogue. Talk, Interaction and Contexts in Dialogical Perspective. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Luckmann, T. (1995) ‘Interaction planning and intersubjective adjustment of perspectives by communicative genres’, in: E. Goody (Ed.) Social Intelligence and Interaction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 175-188.

Sarcinelli, U. (1987) Symbolische Politik. Opladen: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag.

Schegloff, E. (1989) ‘From interview to confrontation’, Research on Language and Social Action 22: 215-240.

Wodak, R. (2008) ‘The contribution of critical linguistics to the analysis of discriminatory prejudices and stereotypes in the language of politics’, in: R. Wodak and V. Koller (Eds.) Handbook of Applied Linguistics ‘The Public Sphere’ (Vol. IV) Berlin: de Gruyter, pp. 291-316.

Bios

Anita Fetzer is a Professor of English Linguistics at the Leuphana University of Lueneburg (Germany). She has had a series of articles published on rejections, context, political interviews, and intercultural communication. Her most recent publication is Political discourse in the Media (2007, co-edited with Gerda Lauerbach). Her research interests focus on the interdependence between natural-language communication and context.

Homepage: http://www.leuphana.de/englishstudies.

Marjut Johansson is Professor of French Language at the Department of French Studies, University of Turku, Finland. Her research interests lie in the areas of pragmatics, interaction analysis and foreign language teaching and learning at the university level. She has been working on different genres of mediated interaction, especially on political media interviews. She is also interested in multilingualism, language policies and ideologies concerning language practices.

Our problem here, however, is quite different. What we want to point at are the power relations that are at stake within the concept of post-communism, and in the relation towards its outside. It seems clear in the Polish case that this very concept is in a pivotal position towards a larger discourse that is organizing and legitimizing the gargantuan transformation we have witnessed. Post-communism has become a catch-all term, just as many other concepts like world terrorism, crime and disorder, security, globalization, etc. And even if such concepts fail to grasp the complexity of social realities, up to a point where it becomes hard to consider them scientific, their performative potential is non-negligible. As any concept ‘historically at work’, it does not need to describe things – it does things. This kind of notion does not have to be well-constructed – it does not even require coherence. On the contrary – the contradictions and internal tensions it carries within itself, contribute to solidifying its course and improving its overall performance.

We cannot grasp the social and political content of the discourse on post-communism, if we ignore the very specific context from which it has emerged. From the late 80s, Polish society is subjected to a revolutionary change: a radical deindustrialization results in high unemployment and a rapid decrease of living standards; old social bonds linked to the former forms of production and exchanges dissolve. Government itself calls these policies a ‘shock therapy’. Social resistance (although it is relatively strong with a large number of strikes) remains extremely dispersed and lacks a political agenda. All the workers’ struggles are qualified as merely ‘economic’ claims without any ‘political’ content. When the ancien regime implodes, the process is total and unprecedented. Political and social forces originating from the apparatus of a mono-party and other ‘communist institutions’ (like trade-unions, associations, administrations, …) seek to secure their interests but at the same they fully adhere to the new system and its political axiology.

But this lack of political opposition is a problem as much as it is an advantage. The revolutionary transformation cannot limit itself to abolishing the old system – it has to build up a new one. This task requires a permanent mobilization, affirming new values and effectively producing new institutions, a new culture and a New Man – which is radically different from his socialist predecessor usually referred to as the ‘homo sovieticus’. At the time, it is often repeated that the transition can only be fulfilled when the old generation, the one that was perverted by communism, finally perishes. In addition, transition was supposed to follow two contradictory logics: the logics of restoration coincided with the logics of radical change and novelty. These two logics became intertwined in the early 90s, but later they split into separate and antagonistic ideologies, although the frontiers between both of them are not always clear. What is to be restored is the ‘natural social order’ based on ‘natural law and values’. These values are usually identified with pre-war Poland – an idyllic and flourishing country where natural hierarchies were respected. (‘Unfortunately’), these hierarchies were erased by the communists. At the same time, transition is aimed at modernization, which implies the adjustment to the necessities of a neoliberal world market. The objective is to reach the status of a developed industrial nation, with the image of the USA in mind, rather than using Western Europe as a model (which seems obvious insofar as the USA claims to have reconciled the affirmation of tradition and ‘natural values’, with the imperative of a constant capitalist modernization). This status is seen as something that Poland (for historic reasons) deserves, and that it was of deprived when communism was imposed on it from the outside. Interestingly, both the ‘modernizers’ and ‘restorers’ (despite their harsh political antagonist positions) found the notion of post-communism handy. The first would argue that true ‘decommunisation’ is only possible through a radical and accelerated process of modernization, the latter claimed that true modernization is only possible through a radical and accelerated process of ‘decommunisation’. That is why ‘post-communism’ has a certain integrity which goes beyond simple partisanship.

No wonder that in order to achieve such an immense task, each fraction of the Polish elite needed to have an important adversary. Vast projects cannot be confronted with only technical or purely objective obstacles. Such situations undermine the splendor of power and subsequently its legitimacy. Yet, there was no enemy which stood for the preservation of the status quo, nor was there an enemy that advocated the reversal of history’s course (former communists would limit themselves to ‘justify’ their past political positions by referring to the bare geopolitical necessity at the time and their responsibility for the ‘national integrity’). The new elites found themselves in a delicate situation. After all, this very society was until now praised for its intransigent resistance to communist oppression and ideology. The society was being glorified as the one who made the communist monster fall. This discourse was generally accompanied with the (rather contradictory) discourse about the deep perversion of society by 40 years of communist domination, which made it morally disoriented and economically disabled. This society had to be protected against its own vices and structurally transformed.

The constitutive moment for the political discourse on post-communism is establishing continuity between post-communism and communism itself. This requires a subtle epistemological shift. This continuity can hardly be grasped at the level of social phenomena – even the proponents of post-communist discourse admit to this. The continuity is rooted in the metaphysical identity between communism and post-communism. This identity can manifest itself in several heterogeneous entities. No wonder that if we stay on a purely empirical level, we fail to understand the nature of both. Communism is referred to as the ‘empire of evil’, according to the famous words of Ronald Reagan and put on the same level as Nazism (which seems particularly odd from a Polish perspective). Not only are the use of violence and political authoritarianism denounced (which would be perfectly understandable from a liberal-democratic perspective), this denunciation goes far beyond this with claims like: ‘Nazis wanted to enslave our bodies – the communists wanted our souls’. Consequently, all social and civilization achievements of the old regime are being dismissed as irrelevant or simply denied.

The fact that for 30 years after world war II, Poland (as most of Europe) experienced an unprecedented rise of living standards (including life expectancy, health care, education, …) cannot be seen to undermine this vision. Everything that could be considered an achievement happened in spite of, or against the regime. And all this despite the fact that the regime itself is defined as a totalitarian regime. More often though, the heritage of ‘real socialism’ is simply denied from a purely metaphysical standpoint. The socialist economy was seen to be unable to provide ‘real’ economic value as it was founded on the immoral and unaccountable principles of state property and central planning.

In what way then does post-communism manage to impose itself as the continuation of its predecessor? It undeniably has a kind of ‘vampiric’ power, leading an afterlife in various incarnations. The first one is the post-communist mentality. The post-communist mentality is the one of the homo sovieticus – a notion developed in Poland by priest and philosopher Josef Tischner. The homo sovieticus used to be a client of the past regime, and he only contested the regime if he found that his social and economic rights were not respected by the rulers. In this way, he contributed to the fall of the regime but later did not know how to deal with his own freedom. In short, he is unable to live freely in the free market economy. The post-communist mentality is the one of the working class (even if this term is carefully avoided). It is collectivistic, egalitarian, assertive in claiming its ‘privileges’, and always ready to trade freedom in exchange of security. The perseverance of the post-communist mentality is the major obstacle in building a free and self-responsible middle-class. Although the homo sovieticus cannot be held responsible for his pitiful condition and moral misery (after all, he is a victim of communism), the duty of the government and the elite is not to be indulgent towards him. The post-communist mentality results in social protests driven by self-interest – they undermine the common good and threaten the economic prospects of the whole nation.

While the post-communist mentality is mostly an affair of the masses, the post-communist plot penetrates the elites, in particular the economic elites. The fundamental assumption here is that the functionaries of the old regime (the nomenklatura and members of the secret services) orchestrated or controlled the regime change and that they managed to accumulate most of the benefits of that change. They have maintained a network of relations that guarantees their dominant position. The existence of such network cannot be verified (by virtue of its secrecy), and it can only be exemplified. Since there are no hard data to support the thesis that the former elite is overrepresented in the new Polish capitalist class – it is argued that it largely co-opted people from outside without undercutting its own very integrity. Poverty and social exclusion are due to the activity of this network, resulting in structural corruption. The denunciation of the post-communist plot is a substitute of a social critique, focusing on economic decisions and paradigms. Moreover, it often supports deregulation and other neoliberal measures, as this web of informal connections can, according to the neoliberal doxa, only persist due to the ‘muddy waters of bureaucracy’. Others (mostly nationalists), though, would rather recommend more direct ways of dealing with this conspiracy. They call for firm police action and the reinforcement of the state’s control apparatus (under the condition that this apparatus is constituted by ‘true’ patriots – preferably coming from their own ranks).

The third manifestation of post-communism is the most heterogeneous, and its relations with historical communism are the most oblique. We could call it ideological post-communism. The discourse on ideological post-communism is by large imported from American conservative and neo-conservative sets of ideas. The first group that was exposed to post-communist bashings, were lawyers and human rights activists, protesting against an upsurge in the state’s repressive policies against crime. Lawyers were a particularly good target, as they could be accused of collusion with criminals (being a ‘defense front for criminals’ – according to the future president Lech Kaczynski). They were soon to be joined by emerging feminist movements, fighting for the right to abortion (abortion was legal in Poland from 1956 to 1993), denouncing domestic violence and gradually developing claims for gender equality. Then came the gay-rights activists and eventually the pacifist, ecologist and leftist factions. How can all these various movements be identified with post-communism? Being socially conservative, Bolshevik communism would severely persecute all those kinds of petty-bourgeois deviations. Still, they are seen as rooted in the very same philosophical gesture (together with the Bolsheviks) that consists of questioning religious morals, natural hierarchies and opposing the repressive common sense. In this last version, the affinity with communism is not personal, nor is it political. Rather, it is metaphysical and spiritual.

It is obvious that although all these articulations of post-communism are connected, they do not always go together in one political narrative. In fact, the nuances and vicissitudes of the post-communist discourse are quite often at stake in Polish political debates. Post-communism is not articulated as a rigid ideology, but it is a discourse that defines the realm of what is legitimate and reasonable.

Bio

Michal Kozlowski (1974) is an assistant professor at the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Warsaw. He is the co-editor of the quarterly journal Bez Dogmatu (Without Dogma) and the Polish edition of Le Monde Diplomatique. He has published several articles on issues of power, subjectivity and contemporary capitalism. He is currently working on a book on Spinoza and politics.

In a city like Brussels, where different communities live together and interact, participatory media practices can play an important role in the construction of a democratic and communicative urban network. Analyzing one of these participatory urban media organizations – the digital storytelling organization BBOT-BNA (a combination of abbreviations of the Dutch[1] ‘Brussel Behoort Ons Toe’ and the French ‘Bruxelles Nous Appartient’, both meaning ‘Brussels Belongs To Us’) – allows for a closer look at the construction of a Brussels urban community. Since 2000, BBOT-BNA has been facilitating inhabitants of Brussels to record and upload their conversations in an online open-access database.

The participatory project BBOT-BNA is operating in a difficult political-ideological context. Brussels – as a city – is an urban community, but this is not translated into a political-institutional reality. Brussels is governed by a collage of institutions, and has to deal with different levels of government, which limit and sometimes contradict the construction of an urban community. For an organization like BBOT-BNA, this creates a rather awkward situation, as the financial stability of BBOT-BNA is dependent on different political institutions with sometimes diverging objectives (based on different language politics). At the same time, the bilingual BBOT-BNA is addressing the citizens of Brussels, on the basis of their urban identities, focussing on the experiences of living in the city, and not focussing on the linguistic identities which are privileged by some of the political institutions that operate in Brussels.

This article aims to analyse how BBOT-BNA deals with the tensions between its participatory-democratic objectives and its focus on the Brussels’ urban community on the one hand, and the requirements imposed by the subsidizing institutions that target specific language groups on the other hand. Through the analysis of a subvention application, this article sets out to study the coping strategies of this organization that are aimed at guaranteeing its survival whilst at the same time achieving its objectives.

2. Democratic urban spaces and the communicative city

Within a globally interconnected world, cities obviously constitute important places in society. Cities play a major role as nodes of a globally interconnected network, at the same time facing the global-local paradox. The economies, cultures and politics of scale on the global level are combined with a parallel process of downscaling because of the growing importance of local socio-cultural characteristics (Boudry et al., 2003: 48-49). Structurally embedded within these contrasting levels of globality and locality, a city is more than ever a space of meaning production, identity construction, contestation and struggle. It is a crucial site for the political to be organized (not limiting the political to institutionalized politics – see Mouffe (2000: 101)) and for citizens to participate in the many social spheres that affect their everyday lives. In considering the city as a key location for cosmopolitan citizenship, Stevenson notices:

‘The city has traditionally acted as a place where different groups have come to escape the surveillance and order of small communities, to engage in the delight of difference. One of the cultural reasons why cities remain popular is that they provide spaces for citizens to experiment with their identities and participate in a more disorderly existence.’ (2003: 59)

The disorderly nature of city, structured by differences and as a place for experimentation, opens up interesting horizons for citizen participation, and for articulating the city as a democratic city. An important impulse to this articulation, and a necessary component of the democratic city, is the (concept of the) communicative city that Kunzmann (1997: 27-28) has theorized within urban geography. He describes the communicative city as follows:

‘New information and communication technologies could and should be used more skillfully to meet local and regional information needs, and to supply regional residents with the kind of civic information they require to live comfortably in an active community. Both access to information and opportunities to use various communication technologies are required to initiate and maintain critical discussions on the future of a city region, to create local identity and civic pride, and to enhance participation in and commitment to urban development.’ (Kunzmann, 1997: 28)

Although this description is still very much focused on urban planning, it does highlight a number of dimensions that characterize the communicative city. A first aspect refers to the social dimension of communication, where the residents of the city enter into ‘discussions’, interactions and dialogues, facilitated by ‘various communication technologies’ in a variety of interconnected communicative urban spaces, a process that generates social cohesion and ‘active communities’. Second, Kunzmann’s description of the communicative city also incorporates a political dimension. Of course, the emphasis on ‘critical discussions’ already articulates the communicative city as political. Moreover, the political dimension in Kunzmann’s definition is strengthened by his reference to a needs-based perspective of civic information provision, and to the processes of access and participation (or ‘opportunities to use’). On the downside, Kunzmann’s approach to the political is also restrictive, as participation is very much limited to urban development, and needs to be expanded on a number of levels.

This required definitional expansion first of all relates to the broadening of the scope of participation, combining the presence of a participatory network of public spaces with a participatory and decentralized decision-making structure. Second, the organized nature of the ‘active community’ also needs to be made explicit, avoiding a neoliberal citizen-state dichotomy and increasing the weight of civil society in the communicative city. Third, the political dimension of the communicative city needs to be complemented with two other (related) dimensions: the ethical and the spatial. The ethical-political dimension refers to one of the other conditions of possibility of the communicative city, which is that its needs to be tolerant, open and respectful towards diversity. The communicative city has an urban community that is no longer characterised by the old community-as-Gemeinschaft principle – a romantic notion once introduced by Tönnies – but is constituted by a disorderly and fluid collage of social groups that still experience a sense of belonging and negotiate their conflicts through agonistic practices (Mouffe, 2005). The spatial-political dimension refers to the spatial component of this openness and to the interconnectedness with non-city spaces. The communicative city’s walls need to be porous, as its communicational focus transcends the city in order to establish (communicative) connections with its outside, without losing its city identity, as is captured by Appadurai’s (1995) concept of the translocal (see Carpentier, 2008).

3. Participatory media practices

The communicative city, with its social, political, ethical and spatial dimensions, provides excellent support to validate local participatory media initiatives, as they intensify the appropriation of the city by its inhabitants. There are of course many possibilities for interventions – Libois, Hustache, and Versaen (2005: 134) for instance refer to people’s interventions in changing their streets and thus their everyday living environment – but in this article we want to focus on participatory media organizations, that are defined in this context as local and alternative sites of media production.

The local nature of these media organizations can be situated on a diversity of levels. They can focus on local themes, interpreting the world through a local perspective or by using a local language (Girard, 2000: 1). Local media organizations can also communicate local needs and concerns. But also the local production of media content, what Simpson called the ‘artisanal production’ (cited in Beltran, 2005: 21), can be seen as part of this local media identity. Although not all local media organizations are participatory or alternative media, the more participatory local media organizations also facilitate access, interaction and participation of local citizens and civil society organizations.

The second characteristic, their alternative nature, refers to a high degree to their participatory objectives, which (together with the tendency for producing counter-hegemonic discourses) renders them an alternative to the mainstream (Bailey et al., 2007). As Downing (1984: 35) remarked, these (participatory, local and alternative) media (which he calls ‘radical media’) flourish in the wasteland left by mainstream media. Even if he wrote this within the specific context of the 1980s, these alternative media organizations still address an important democratic hiatus in many of the world’s media landscapes[2].

The concept of alternative media embraces a wide variety of participatory practices: including a horizontal organization, alternative content production and the orientation toward a community (which can be a local community, or a community of interest). From this perspective, alternative media play a crucial role in the democratization of the media and the democratization through the media (Wasko and Mosco, 1992: 7; Lindblad in Hagen, 1992: 23). The more ‘open’ media structure (Berrigan, 1977: 17) allows people to participate in media organizations themselves, which at the micro-participatory level implies that citizens can be active in one of the many (micro-)spheres relevant to daily life and to put their right to communicate into practice. These forms of micro-participation are also important, because they allow people to learn and adopt a democratic and/or civic attitude. Participation through the media deals with the opportunities that alternative media create for citizens to participate in public debates and to represent themselves in public spaces, thus, entering the realm of enabling and facilitating macro-participation. Rodriguez, in her book on citizen media, uses the concept of the empowerment of communities to describe a radical-democratic variation of citizenship (2001: 158). Here, citizens claim space for voicing their views publicly, intervene tenaciously, shape their identities, and circulate socio-political discourses and cultural codes. This process of empowerment is described as follows by Berrigan (1977: 18):

‘[…] media are capable of activating people, of stimulating people not only to take part in the media process, but to become more active in society. They believe that media have a role in forming attitudes, in developing critical awareness, in informing people about the realities of their situation and in stimulating them to improve or change it.’

If we take a closer look at these participatory media organizations in an urban context, their role in sustaining a democratic-communicative city unfolds on different levels (Carpentier, 2008). First of all, due to their local embeddedness and alternative nature that privileges participation, these media can generate a political space through which discussions, debates and deliberations between inhabitants are enabled. Secondly, the interactions between the multiple urban spaces generated by participatory media organizations create social cohesion within the city. Finally, these organizations sustain local identities and show local everyday lives, through the access and participation of the city’s inhabitants.

4. Brussels as a contested urban community

In this article, we will focus on Brussels, and on how participatory media organizations (try to) contribute to the establishment of a Brussels democratic-communicative city, within the difficult and complicated political context that characterizes Brussels and that affects the work of many of its (civil society) organizations.

From the 14th century onwards, Brussels had two city walls. The first 12th century wall protected the old inner city, while the second wall encircled what is now the city centre. Demolished in 1760 and 1780 (Doucet, 2008), few parts of these walls survived. The Hallepoort is one of these remaining parts, and the pattern of the second wall is still visible as it has become the pentagon-shaped motorway around the city centre. Originally, city walls symbolized the spatial and political unity of a city, and their dismantlement often implied their integration into a larger political entity, whilst still safeguarding (at least part of) its local autonomy. Interestingly, in the case of Brussels, today, the city that once had two walls, has no walls left, and little political unity or local autonomy.

The political-institutional structure of Brussels was strongly determined by the ongoing Belgian regionalization process. The status of the city has been (and still is) one of the most contested elements of the successive state reforms. Being the country’s capital, geographically situated in (some would say ‘surrounded by’) Flanders, the Northern region, but with a majority of French-speaking Belgians (the language spoken in Wallonia, the Southern region)[3] explains the contested nature of the city.

Without elaborating too much on the Belgian state reforms, these reforms did decide on the structure (and complexity) of the Brussels’ city administration. One of the main principles of the state reforms was the construction of two types of political entities: Regions (based on a territorial principle, with competences as agriculture, economy, energy or housing) and Communities[4] (based on a linguistic-cultural principle, with cultural and persons-related competences, such as education, youth and also media). Although it took Brussels 10 years longer than the other two, three Regions were eventually created: the Flemish Region (the North of the country), the Walloon Region (the South of the country) and the Brussels Capital Region. For each of these Regions, parliaments and governments were established, although the Capital Region administration was attributed less and different competences than the other two Regions.

On the level of the second political entity (the Communities), the situation was (and is) very different, as there was no political agreement to recognize Brussels as a separate Community. Only three linguistic-culturally based Communities were created, excluding Brussels: the Flemish Community, the French-speaking Community and the German-speaking Community (the latter is in the East of the country), again each with their respective parliaments and governments[5]. In the case of Brussels, both the Flemish and the French-speaking Community exercise their linguistic-cultural competencies on the territory of the Brussels Capital Region. A bi-communitarian public authority, the Common Community Commission, is responsible for matters that affect both Communities (such as health policy and assistance to individuals – see Belgische staat, 2004: 70213). The political-institutional complexity is increased further by the absence of a single Brussels’ municipality. To be more exact, Brussels consists out of 19 municipalities (which each have a mayor) and 6 inter-municipal policing zones. In addition, the presence of the European institutions, and the status of Brussels as capital of Europe adds another layer of complexity.

This combination of European, Federal, Regional, Community-level, and Municipal institutions, all competent on a number of matters, creates a considerable institutional fragmentation in Brussels (Maskens, 2008: 1-2). Especially the lack of a Brussels’ Community, and the authority of the Flemish and French-speaking Communities at the linguistic-cultural level in Brussels’, undermine Brussels’ political autonomy and have not always guaranteed political decisions that were in the interest of the city, despite the efforts of a number of individual politicians and administrations. The language and identity politics of the Flemish and French-speaking Communities have not always served Brussels’ interest, partially because the two Communities have different approaches. The French-speaking Community considers Brussels as an urban setting with a predominant francophone population, while the Flemish Community defines Brussels as a capital region where both language communities should be treated equally, independently of the numeric (dis)proportion of Dutch-speaking Belgians (Detant, 2001: 351). The end result seems to be a Brussels divided in two homogeneous language groups, ignoring internal differences and the language diversity (including the Arab and English  languages) that characterizes the city. This complex institutional constellation also strongly contrasts with the everyday life in the city, where a wide variety of very different people do constitute an urban community and still live in a translocal city with its own (now permeable and imaginary) city walls.

5. A Brussels dialogue: BBOT-BNA (‘Brussels Belongs To Us’)

The institutional fragmentation of Brussels in combination with the language politics of the Flemish and French-speaking Communities raise questions about the conditions of possibility of a democratic-communicative Brussels. A number of organizations do attempt to support this democratic-communicative utopia, but also have to function within the complex institutional context described above. An important moment for them was the year 2000, when Brussels became the Cultural Capital of Europe. As the central theme of this event also referred to bringing citizens and artists together (Interview with Decleire), a number of (especially cultural) initiatives, united in a platform called Brussels 2000, of which many were experimenting with participatory methods, received a substantial amount of financial support. One of the initiatives that grew out of this bilingual Brussels 2000 platform is BBOT-BNA. As a small non-profit organization, BBOT-BNA created an online and bilingual database to collect urban conversations, recorded by ordinary people living in Brussels. In a folder, the organization presents its objectives as follows:

‘Brussels Belongs To Us, it’s almost as simple as saying hello. It’s choosing to take the time to talk with someone close to you or to a stranger, to listen to him, to discuss, to introduce your point of view, to communicate your feelings. To record and to distribute that conversation. To participate in that immense mosaic of a city narrated by its inhabitants. The same streets, but not the same trajectories. The same city but not the same lives.’ (BBOT-BNA, 2006: 22 – the authors’ translation)

One of the central objectives of BBOT-BNA is to facilitate the participation of the inhabitants of Brussels, by stimulating them to talk to each other and to record these conversations. Participants also edit the conversations themselves and then upload them into the database (together with the necessary metadata). The audio files are posted anonymously and everybody can freely create a login to access all audio files. Participants can themselves select the theme of the conversation, but BBOT-BNA does require that the participants are inhabitants from Brussels, and that they use Dutch and/or French. Today, almost 2000 digitalized conversations have been stored in the BBOT-BNA database (Interview with Claes), and not surprisingly, the city itself is a popular topic.

Two permanent and one temporary collaborators manage the database, set up collaborations with for instance local artists, organize workshops and generate new projects. BBOT-BNA also has a physical location, a so-called ‘Magasin’ (‘Shop’), where the recording material can be obtained and where the uploading facilities are located. If necessary, participants are also trained in using the technologies that are made available to them.

BBOT-BNA not only focuses on individual ‘ordinary’ inhabitants. Mainly artists, but also other local organizations, are encouraged and actively approached to use the available audio material for their own work. As the initial BBOT-BNA project was developed by two theatre groups, Dito’Dito and Transquinquennal (one Dutch and one French-speaking group)(Interview with Decleire), this continued artistic focus does not come as a surprise. One of the BBOT-BNA staff members, Van Wichelen, explains this as follows:

‘We see everybody that comes in as a potential participant and as a potential artist. It is the idea to encourage as much as persons as possible to do something with this Brussels’ material, with what people say to do something artistic with it.’ (Interview with Van Wichelen – the authors’ translation)

For example in 2001, BBOT-BNA participated in the installation THE ROOM of artist Alexandra Dementieva, which consisted of an interactive room filled with BBOT-BNA conversations. In 2005 and 2006, BBOT-BNA collaborated with an artists’ laboratory (called the Kronik Brusseloise) in a project entitled Nadine. Being organized in several municipalities, Nadine aimed to bring inhabitants and artists together to talk about everyday life in Brussels. And in 2007 Walk the Walk, an audio promenade about how people walk and fall in the city, was created together with artist Ann Van De Vyvere.

Also other projects have been organized by BBOT-BNA, for instance to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Brussels’ 1958 world exhibition. One Expo ’58 project was a blind date website[6] to bring people in contact with persons who had been to Expo ’58 (and of course record their conversations). One ongoing project is the collaboration with the alternative (university) radio station Radio Campus, which broads a mix of Dutch and French conversations, although it is only licensed by the French-speaking Community.

Through the online database and its projects, BBOT-BNA aims to facilitate the production and diffusion of oral urban stories, which represent the diversity of the Brussels urban community, crossing linguistic-political frontiers. Secondly, BBOT-BNA’s participatory digital storytelling practices also value a bottom-up approach, which allows inhabitants to record, edit, and upload their own stories, conversations and self-representations. Although the database could be made more user-friendly, the reach of the organization remains fairly limited and the power balance between BBOT-BNA staff and participants requires permanent care, these core principles still make BBOT-BNA an alternative media organization, which empowers inhabitants to produce their own media content, and which diffuses a counter-hegemonic representation of Brussels as a urban community (and not as a linguistically divided city).

Both core principles are (politically speaking) not to be taken for granted, which then raises questions on how BBOT-BNA, being dependant on government subventions, legitimizes its continued existence in a political context which is potentially hostile (or at least insensitive) to BBOT-BNA’s core objectives. This is not an obvious situation, as even the name of the organization is not considered neutral and creates difficulties at the level of interpretation:

‘You can’t deny that the name is a huge statement, a statement that is often wrongly interpreted. We, us, you? […] But in fact we mean us, everybody, we always have to explain that.’ (Interview with Claeys – authors’ translation)

6. Negotiating for subventions

From a policy-perspective, BBOT-BNA is working within the domain of ‘person-related competences’, areas for which the Flemish and French-speaking Communities are responsible. Both Communities make subventions available in order to finance civil society organizations to implement (some of) their policy objectives. Many of these subventions are project-based, and BBOT-BNA has in its eight years of existence, never managed to acquire structural (non project-based) funding.

When Brussels 2000 came to an end in 2001 (and with it the financial resources related to Brussels 2000), BBOT-BNA became dependant on subventions for small projects from both the Flemish and French-speaking Community. This is in itself already an uncomfortable situation (with hardly any financial security and a continuous search for money as a result), but the potential conflict between BBOT-BNA’s core principles and the Communities’ policy objectives make the situation ever more hazardous. Before dealing with BBOT-BNA’s coping strategies, we first need to elaborate the institutional context – this time specifically in relation to the subvention policies – in which BBOT-BNA has to operate.

6.1. The Communities’ subvention policies

Subventions are of course one of the many policy instruments the Communities have at their disposal. This also implies that the political objectives of a Community’s institutions will be translated into these subvention policies. In this part of the article, we will focus on the Flemish Community, and not go into the similarities and differences with the French-speaking Community. Two important texts that regulate the Flemish Community subventions’ policy in Brussels will be used here to briefly sketch the Flemish Community’s institutional position. The first document is the 2003 Subvention guide of the Flemish Community (called Subsidiegids Vlaamse projecten voor Brussel) and the second one is the Declaration of Policy Priorities for Brussels for 2007- 2008 (called Beleidsbrief Brussel. Beleidsprioriteiten 2007-2008), by the Flemish minister responsible for Culture, Youth, Sport and Brussels.

In order to be eligible for Flemish Community subventions, initiatives must first of all reinforce the Flemish presence in Brussels and secondly strengthen the recognition of Brussels as the capital of Flanders (Anciaux, 2003: 3). As Brussels is not seen as a separate entity, but always in relation to Flanders or to the international community, transcending the local is deemed important. Stimulating the visibility of Flanders in Brussels and the meaning of Brussels for Flanders, are inscribed as important policy objectives, and legitimized by the hostilities between the different governmental levels. In the Policy Priorities document of the Flemish minister for Culture, Youth, Sport and Brussels, the following legitimization can be found:

‘Different than the situation in Flanders, the Flemish government is put in a competitive position in the capital. Her competences, although entirely legitimate, are not evident. Namely because some other governments have similar competences. The Brussels Regional government, in symbiosis with the municipalities enters onto the terrain of the Community. Moreover, the other [non-Dutch speaking] media produce a very stained image of the Flemish Community.’ (Anciaux, 2007: 5 – authors’ translation)

Nevertheless, in the same document we also find the minister’ intention to pay attention to projects that are aimed at bilingual cooperation. But for these types of projects, the other Community’s co-financing of the project remains a requirement (Anciaux, 2003: 4), which is not easy to obtain, given the different policies of both communities.

6.2. BBOT-BNA’s strategies

In this part of the article we want to analyse the strategies used by BBOT-BNA to deal with the requirements generated by the institutional context (the Flemish and French-speaking Communities’ policies on Brussels), without giving up on their core principles (related to participation and the Brussels’ urban community). How do they negotiate their position between the utopia of a Brussels democratic-communicative city as an urban community and the language (and media) politics of both Communities?

6.2.1. Strategy 1: The organizational structure of BBOT-BNA

First of all, BBOT-BNA has created a double organizational structure, just as several other organizations that work with both Communities have done. There are two different legal entities behind BBOT-BNA, each recognized by one of the Communities. Because there are actually two non-profit organizations, applications for subventions can be sent to one of the two subsidizing Communities. Because of the absence of clear regulation concerning bilingual and bi-communitarian organizations, a regulatory vacuum exists, which BBOT-BNA puts to its benefit.

‘It is crazy because Belgium is still a bilingual country. […] But in some sectors we got answer as: “But you are a bilingual organization, we cannot give you structural financial support.” […] Then we tell them that it is the Flemish organization that asks for subventions and then they opprobriously say “ah, the trick with the two organizations.” When we reply that we have no choice in Brussels, they say that they of course know. (Interview with Van Wichelen – authors’ translation).

But the double organizational structure causes several difficulties. As the same people work for both organizations, their workload is increased because of the need to split their administrations and accounting systems, which is worsened by the existence of different regulations (for NGOs and for project applications). This creates frustration as it reduces the time that can be spent on the actual projects. A rather paradoxical consequence of choosing for a bilingual organization is that it also indirectly restricts the organization to those two languages. Due to the shortage of financial support and permanent collaborators (and the need for them to master the used languages), BBOT-BNA claims that it is too difficult to incorporate more languages in the database.

6.2.2. Strategy 2: Searching for financial resources in unlikely places, and adapting to the requirements

A second strategy that BBOT-BNA uses is to look for financial resources in unlikely places, as there are not always specific funds available. For instance in the Flemish Community, little attention (and support) for participatory (alternative or community) media organizations exists. Moreover, funds that stimulate the development of a Brussels’ urban community are (for reasons discussed above) absent.

The chameleon strategy that BBOT-BNA uses is to produce project applications that fit into the realm of other specific subvention funds, that (with some tweaking) still allow for the (at least partial) realization of the organization’s objectives. Through the years, BBOT-BNA has applied with several subvention funds (and in the past years was granted funding on several occasions).

In the case of the Flemish Community, these funds were the fund for social-artistic work and (more recently) the heritage fund. In the case of the French-speaking Community, these funds were the fund to aid radiophonic creation but also the fund for permanent education. Each of the applications required different angles, and a translation of the organizational objectives to fit into the policy objectives in which the specific funds are embedded. This strategy has not always worked, as the different administrations that manage these funds (and the subvention application evaluators) have questioned the eligibility of their applications and redirected them to other institutions. In other cases (like the 2006-2007 socio-artistic fund application) their application was simply rejected, as they could not always perfectly meet all requirements in a satisfactory way (interview with Van Wichelen).

6.2.3. Strategy 3: Chameleon strategies to please the Community

Whatever subvention channel BBOT-BNA is using, the organization still needs to find ways to (seemingly) comply with the Communities’ policy objectives (as discussed above). As BBOT-BNA also wishes to realize its own objectives, BBOT-BNA has to find a way to frame its objectives in a way that is acceptable for the Communities’ administrations. Like a chameleon, the organization has to take on the right colour in order to survive.

To illustrate this, we can take a closer look at the last subvention application of BBOT-BNA for the year 2008, submitted with the heritage fund (BBOT-BNA, 2007). This rather technical proposal concentrates on improving the database. More specifically, the proposal aims to expand the database’s metadata possibilities, which will allow to spatially map the database’s information, and to facilitate the sharing of the database’s architecture.

Remarkable is that the critique of the Flemish Community administration on an earlier (but rejected) proposal is included in the proposal. This critique questioned the relevance of that earlier project for Flanders. The critique also refers to the too strong local focus of the project. In the new proposal, BBOT-BNA first mentions that these earlier critiques will not be addressed, but then does explicitly argue why the new proposal is relevant for Flanders (when explaining that the database architecture is relevant for the entire ‘heritage field’). Also, all project partners (with the exception of a federal institution and the two bilingual organizations that will provide technical support) are either from the North of Belgium or from the Netherlands.

In the proposal BBOT-BNA makes strategic changes to the way it presents its identity. The bilingual organization’s focus on the Brussels’ urban community is less present. Within the subvention negotiation process, the organization includes several discursive elements that are necessary in order to fit into the institutional logics of the Communities. BBOT-BNA’s proposal for instance focuses on the (further development of the) ‘innovative’ database as a tool of international relevance, both by resorting to international open source frameworks and standards (Dublin Core system, Bricks, JeromeDL, …) and by suggesting the applicability and exportability of the database for/to other (international) organizations. Moreover, the proposal has an economic rationale, by pointing to the limited costs (and the many that will benefit) and to the previous investments made by the Flemish Community. In contract, the increase of the participatory potential of the database is only briefly discussed, and covered by a focus on technology development and innovation. Still, this chameleon strategy does leave enough room for the organization to protect its own objectives. One detail that symbolizes BBOT-BNA’s opportunities is that they continue to use its bilingual abbreviation, and not their official Dutch name ‘Brussel Behoort Ons Toe vzw’.

7. Conclusion

The objectives of media organizations like BBOT-BNA that address a Brussels urban community and want to stimulate its inhabitants’ participation, and the subsidizing institutions that are active in Brussels, do not always match well. It is highly unfortunate that the construction of a democratic-communicative city is (amongst a series of factors) hindered by the city’s institutional structure and logics. Despite the cultural reality of a Brussels’ urban community (with its many differences and conflicts), working across linguistic-cultural and political-ideological frontiers seems to remain extremely difficult in Brussels.

This does raise strategic questions for participatory bilingual organizations like BBOT-BNA. These media organizations (despite the many problems they face on a daily basis) remain crucial for reinforcing the democratic potential of an urban community, but especially the Flemish Community shows little interest in the democratic role for participatory alternative media. Secondly, BBOT-BNA’s acknowledgement of the existence of an urban community, which needs to have its voices heard as a community, also finds little echoes at the institutional level. In contrast, sometimes there is institutional resistance against the development of an urban identity.

Given these difficult political-institutional circumstances, and still being dependant on government funding, BBOT-BNA has developed a number of chameleon strategies when addressing these subsidizing institutions. In the discourses launched at the subsidizing French-speaking and Flemish Communities, BBOT-BNA’s engagement to the development of a Brussels urban community is not made explicit. Secondly, although one of the main objectives of BBOT-BNA is to enhance citizen participation, this objective is often reframed to fit into the existing subvention channels. BBOT-BNA then becomes a social-artistic project, an oral heritage project, a radio project or a permanent education project. Its formal objectives need to change according to the facet that one of the administrations is emphasizing. Although one can wonder why no combined funding has been implemented, the chameleon strategies remain time-consuming activities that only show the lack of (formal) appreciation for BBOT-BNO’s core principles and objectives.

At the same time the organization does seem to be able to use the institutional complexity (which sometimes resembles chaos) to its advantage. The absence of a (clear) definition and delineation of the Brussels urban community also generates the freedom to create it, and to build a communicative city in the urban underground. When borders are not clearly fixed, it does become possible to shift them.

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Wasko, J., Mosco, V. (Eds.) (1992) Democratic Communications in the Information Age. Toronto and Norwood, NJ: Garamond Press & Ablex.

BBOT-BNO case-study data material

Interview with Van Wichelen, A., 6th of February 2008, Brussels.

Interview with Claeys, M., 27th of March 2008, Brussels.

Interview with Decleire, P., 27th of March 2008, Brussels.

BBOT-BNA (2007) Levend geheugen in de virtuele realiteit: ontsluiting van (meta) verhalen. Subsidieaanvraag Vlaamse Gemeenschap 2008.

Notes

[1] Dutch refers to the language spoken in the North of Belgium (an area called Flanders) and the Netherlands. The word ‘Flemish’ (sometimes also used to refer to the language spoken in the North of Belgium) is reserved in this article for the official name of two of Belgium’s political institutions, namely the Flemish Community and the Flemish Region.

[2] Community-oriented and participatory media content can also be generated by mainstream and commercial media organizations (Deuze, 2006: 272), although the participatory intensity of this process remains often limited.

[3] Recent research showed that French is spoken by 95% of the inhabitants of the city. English comes second with 35%. Dutch only comes third, being spoken by 30% (Van Parijs, 2007: 6-7).

[4] When referring to the political entity, ‘Community’ (with a capital) will be used. When referring to the sociological notion of community, no capital will be used.

[5] In practice, the institutions of the Flemish Region and Flemish Community are grouped into a single parliamentary and a single governmental body.

[6] http://www.blinddate58.be/Public/blinddate/

Bios

Maaika Santana graduated from the Communication Studies Department at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) in 2007 with a MA thesis researching the discourses of resistance used by different alternative Peruvian radios. She joined the VUB research centre CeMeSo in November 2007, and continues to study alternative media with a research project focusing on citizen participation in regional and alternative media in Brussels. The aim of this project is to investigate the construction of political identities through the media practices of these Brussels’ media and to conceptualise how they organise different forms of participation.

Nico Carpentier is an assistant professor working at the Communication Studies Department of the Free University of Brussels (VUB). He is co-director of the VUB research centre CeMeSo and a board member of the European Communication Research and Education Association (ECREA). His theoretical focus is on discourse theory, his research interests are situated in the relationship between media, journalism, politics and culture, especially towards social domains as war & conflict, ideology, participation and democracy.

One of the main objectives of this issue is to bring together a number of publications that span Europe. After the Iron Curtain aka the Wall had come down, and the USSR disintegrated, there was hope that the academic communities that had existed on both sides of the Curtain would find each other. The ideological megalomania of the Cold War had cheated these academic communities (with some notable exceptions) from the opportunities to collaborate and to be exposed to each other’s paradigmatic and theoretical richness. Almost 20 years later, this hope has only partially materialized. The communicative lines have not been opened sufficiently, and the different national and regional academic spaces have remained too closed, sometimes even too isolationist. The materiality of the Wall might have disappeared; but there is still an immaterial divide that keeps these academic communities apart, based on sets of restrictive ideas of what Europe and European academia is (and is not). This issue can only offer a very humble contribution to overcoming this divide, for instance by including texts from Bulgaria, Poland, and the Czech Republic, some of which explicitly thematize the post-communist configuration (see for instance Reifová’s review of ‘Past for the Eyes’ and Kozlowski essay ‘Out of post-communism’).

These inclusions bypass a mere token representation of the Eastern European countries. Many of the texts deal with issues that are related to the question of what kind of Europe will eventually come into being through the different integration processes. A first cluster of articles focuses on notions of citizenship and participation, continuing the search for new and deepened articulations of the European democracies. The Santana / Carpentier essay, the review of ‘Citizenship and Consumption’ (by Kaun), and the ‘Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything’ (review by Fuchs) all deal with the renewed role (and its problems and limitations) of citizenship. This is complemented by the emphasis on govermentality, and how in a neoliberal context new forms of (self)regulation appear. Here I need to mention the reviews of ‘Discipline and liberty’ (by Boddin) and of ‘Better living through Reality TV’ (by Vandenbrande).

A second cluster deals with issues of representation. Ibroscheva’s essay on the mediations of gender, Dietze’s essay on occidentalist visual politics, Reifová’s review of ‘Past for the Eyes’ and Dhaenens’ review of ‘Screened Out. Playing Gay in Hollywood from Edison to Stonewall’ look at the representational processes that circulate in Europe (and beyond), linking them to analyses of their emancipatory potential. Also Biltereyst’s chapter on new censorship studies, looking into ‘the boundaries of acceptable representations’, touches upon these logics and their problems.

These texts, together with the Fetzer / Johansson essay on political media discourse, and the reviews on ‘Magic in the Air’ (by Garmendia Larrañaga) and ‘The International Handbook of Children, Media and Culture’ (by Ponte) offer a broad perspective about the potentialities and the threats of the new and expanded Europe. They offer us horizons and utopias that might not always be achieved, but are worth pursuing and articulating.

By Evelyn Nien-Ming Ch’ien

Evelyn Ch’ien is the author of Weird English (Harvard University Press, 2004)

English is getting weirder. Many of the same catalysts for the stretching, breaking, and reconstruction of English is happening to all utterance that we call speech and mark-making that we call writing. In the 21st century, technology has been the driving force of English proliferation. Our fascination and love for all that is aesthetic about language and communication, by our immersion in the linguistic experience, can be enhanced by technology and thus render us creators of linguistic worlds. To be a teaching world literature at this moment, and writing about weird English, is to not only teach the texts and the stylistics that are evidence of this change, but to conceive of how our subjectivities are changing, to see that the human race is thinking, feeling and designing the mental world differently, and that new linguistic tools are being invented to help in that architectural project. It is to acknowledge that only is English getting weirder, but so are we.

If the inception of language is the manifestation of our subjectivity, then we can look at the conditions of the twenty-first century that surround us and make their way into our writing. We have witnessed the epistolary works of the eighteenth century, in which people felt obliged to communicate the whole of their subjectivities in extended letter-writing practices. We have also witnessed the terrible aloneness of post-war alienation, in which novels seemed like patchworks of aphasia, signaling a loss of control over one’s subjectivity and an angst for regaining it. In Weird English I wrote about the ushering in of a global subjectivity, in which the diaspora consciousness caused a number of writers to relate their experience polylingually. I wrote about how such consciousness has been most obvious in immigrant and postcolonial writings, which were often writers not merely creating text but transcribing language that was previously uniquely oral. Along with the digital music revolution, our enthusiasm for the importance of sound quality and reproducing certain atmospheres has improved our drive to privilege the experience of others (and to reproduce the aesthetic elements of their lives, in this case, the accents, pronunciation and song of their languages). This has contributed to the survival and generation of weird English literature.

In terms of the content of what we teach, students enjoy weird English as a language. They want to read new language, whether it is the adventure of exploring old English, Klingon, hip-hop sounds or weird English. I read to them in weird English, rap to them in lecture, because this is the acoustic form of teaching weird English; this is my responsibility to present the live version of English, the only rules being that language communicate and express the subjectivity from which it came. This criteria for judging the quality of weird English – that it simply be strong expressive stuff, sounds similar to the criteria for judging a good cup of coffee; but in all seriousness good expression is transporting, or caffeinating. And reading feels good even if it hurts, saddens, or angers us. When we are reading, the most important emotion we can feel is that of others, and the stronger the expression the better the writer’s emotion comes through. Thus the quality of weird English is determined by its pressure on the distinction between strong expression and orthodox writing. This is probably why experimental work is often criticized for being unintelligible or too zany to be held to the same standards as orthodox writing. The criticism of orthodox writing is that it limits expressiveness and the capacity to describe settings and experiences that are outside the realm of the orthodox. A great challenge is not simply to teach world literature and weird English literature, but to explain the difference between subversive writing that demonstrates skill and strategy and an experiment with language that does not show a gift for language. Weird English is not merely broken or radical, but a form of art; it requires a strong ear to be reproduced well. The interesting thing is that weird English demands to be read aloud, because if it cannot be rendered into a recognizable acoustic form, then the transcription is probably flawed. Is weird English a bridge language that will led to multilingualism, or will the hybrids we see now absorb more languages and be even more varied than presently? Or will it be an urban trend that resides within the borders of internationalized cities that have populations mixed enough to require hybrid languages that become iterative hybrids? The computer and the computerized subjectivity now makes urban culture available to everyone, and the universal language is a combination of icons, words and characters. But the acoustic mixing will be something that we can train our students to hear, to transcribe, and to believe in as a trend of democratization of language(s). The act of presenting them with multiple weird Englishes in the classroom is permitting them to recognize the work required in listening to another culture. So far, much of the creation of weird English is by authors who are immigrants, postcolonial subjects, or whose immediate family members are immigrants, so the transcription process is possible.

In Weird English I pushed forward the idea of multilingualism, vernaculars in the hope of emphasizing the need for variety of expression above all else. Such assertion of expression is part of the phenomenon of global citizenship, where the consequences of global imagination included hybrid language, the presumption of audiences as multilingual and the book as an inclusive interface between communities. The capacity to transcribe and record the oral as well as the capacity and the motivation we have to reproduce the sounds that make up a multilingual, multi-vernacular environment combine to generate weird English literature. But the act of transcription is as local as it is global, as individual and personal an act as a universal gesture of dignity. English permits and demands renovation and refurbishing, because of this vacillation between global spread and local entitlement and linguistic proprietariness.

Translated to the classroom, how do we speak to these subjectivities and reach them? In teaching weird English to the classroom, how do we make that a global environment such that weird English is the norm, the way we need to think instead of a persistent monolingual environment? The question for the twenty-first century is what status written language will occupy and how it will be used. And for those in departments of literature, what will be the effects on those creating, reading and teaching literature? If we are texting and emailing and rapping all the time, what kind of writing will we produce in our spare time (though, that’s shrinking too: as someone I know once put it, “When I can’t think of anything else to do, I check my email.”) Will orthodox writing as we know it become as arcane as handwriting, or as anachronistic as calligraphy? I sometimes ask my students if they find certain vernaculars difficult to read, and this generation appears more adept at it than older ones. In response to whether he found a book difficult, one of my students said reading The God of Small Things was “like reading the newspaper.” Given the complexity of what this college generation listens to—rap, MTV, new vocabulary that surfaces every day in relation to the internet—their context for creativity is rhythmically very different than previous ones. It is not that people did not listen to dirty beats back in the old days, but technology has made it possible to subsist in an acoustic and virtual environment of our own making for our social and psychological needs. And this is what, as English professors, we strive to illuminate and critically interrogate in the classroom: the status of human subjectivities and how to convey them through language. We are not simply interrogating subjectivity as manifested in the human body. Our subjectivities are now our computers, our phones, our ipods. Our brains float through chatrooms, making connections as disembodied personalities. Perhaps due to generational difference, my students skilled with socializing in this manner; they mySpace eachother and use hosts of acronyms and nutty grammar. Emotionally, they get across that line of etiquette pretty fast. They are comfortable with a subjectivity that lives and breathes on a computer; one of my students declared that his computer had “qi” or energy flow.

The capacity to perceive a computer as a prosthetic, as an extension for our bodies, is becoming more real. This does not mean that virtual environments script our lives, or that globalization really means computerization—it did not mean corporatization before and there is no need to exaggerate the loss of the human touch, etc. But in terms of language, gesture is returning to the screen, literally, as pinching and stretching our fingers now can control (the Mac Air and iTouch and iphone all respond now to small hand gestures directly on the screen, to open, zoom etc on the screen). These micro-gestures are a new sign language for the twenty-first century. Even this small example makes us rethink our own mental frames in terms of gestures and visuals, discarding language or command codes and promising a more organic relationship to computers.
If our subjectivities are now extended by computers, how will this influence our language use? In a conversation with a programmer, it occurred to her that computer language being English was a serendipitous and “the fact that these computer languages are somewhat based on English…I mean what if someone in France is programming in Java, do they just learn all the words, you have someone from Japan and they write all their programs in English, and so does this even have any meaning to them at all?”

Computers are multi-tasking machines with sophisticated levels of compartmentalization. My computer-oriented students have trouble conceptualizing a paper and one theme—and prefer multiplatform presentations. They require the acoustic versions of literature in the classroom, and respond to it more than monotone lecturing. They also enjoy synthesis of technology and writing; writing one’s thesis and persisting on it—obsessing, as they might say—is an increasingly foreign concept; they would rather share, swap and trade information and engage in group projects. For me, a lecture has become a performance and multimedia show, while a seminar for undergraduates has morphed into various group sections and group projects. It’s not the paper they are scared of, it’s the solitude that the paper requires. They are more social than I remember my generation being, because at times we had to be alone, and this generation never does, and almost never is. Recently in a college magazine a writer bemoaned the ever-presence of cellphones. Professors now have to deal with the ubiquity of parents, whom students can call immediately after meeting a professor to ask opinions about majors, grades and research. In previous generations students had to find their way independently, alone-ly.

In terms of general quality of life, I can’t blame students for wanting a platform to share ideas together. I encourage it. The solution is to combine the virtual world and the weird English world, and to communicate to them their active role in building both. To be teaching world literature is to be teaching the world and how to exist in it as 21st century citizens. These students may be hesitant to be alone because there are no rules or limits, just the strength of their expression that leads them to both a community and a survival. It is acceptable to voyage with prosthetic subjectivities and weird language if this is the case.

January 21, 2008