Communication, Democracy, and Intelligentsia

In the early 1990s, a group of Russian and American scholars teamed up to investigate the impact of Gorbachev’s reform on Soviet society, focusing especially on the role the intelligentsia played in fomenting glasnost and perestroika. Results of this collaborative study were published in a volume Russian Culture at the Crossroads: Paradoxes of Postcommunist Consciousness (Shalin, 1996a). The contributors worked on the assumption that perestroika was an irreversible achievement, that distortions the reforms wrought in Russian society would be smoothed out over time. Today, this assumption appears overoptimistic. After nearly twenty years in power, Vladimir Putin dismantled key democratic institutions, badly weakened other, and established a personalistic regime that reversed many political gains brought about by his predecessors. An international team assembled for the present project starts with the premise that we live in the age of counterperestroika. Our focus is still on the intelligentsia and its contribution to dismantling the Soviet system, but now we want to explore the unanticipated consequences of social change threatening the existence of the intelligentsia as a distinct group. Our team includes prominent scholars, writers, and civil rights leaders who illuminate the political agendas and personal choices confronting intellectuals in today’s Russia. Contributors look at the current trends through different lenses, they disagree about the intelligentsia’s past achievements and looming future, yet they all feel the need to examine its local and world-historical significance. This essay aims to place the debate in historical context and elucidate its relevance to the field of communication studies. I begin with the communication-specific conditions fortifying democratic institutions and show how distorted communications have hobbled the Russian intelligentsia throughout history. Next, I review the social context within which the intelligentsia emerged, the special place it occupies in Russian discourse, and the acute distress counterperestroika inflicted on Russian society in general and public intellectuals in particular. After examining the systematic distortions that communication suffers in repressive societies, I zero in on the intelligentsia’s role in modeling emotionally intelligent conduct and scrutinize the communication sphere as the condition of possibility for a viable democracy. I close this introduction with a brief survey of the articles collected in this volume and reflections on the prospects for a communication theory in the pragmatist key

Introduction

We would like to bring to your attention the Erving Goffman Archives (EGA). Located on the web site of the UNLV Center of Democratic Culture, this web-based, open-source project serves as a clearing house for those interested in the dramaturgical tradition in sociology and biographical methods of research, http://www.unlv.edu/centers/cdclv/ega/index.html. The EGA collect critical studies and biographical materials about Erving Goffman and his era. Postings on the EGA web site are divided into several overlapping sections: “Documents and Papers,” “Biographical Materials,” “Critical Assessments,” and “Comments and Dialogues.”The biographical section contains previously published materials, as well as new interviews and memoirs

Critical Theory and the Pragmatist Challenge

Habermas\u27s theory breaks with the Continental tradition that has denigrated pragmatism as an Anglo-Saxon philosophy subservient to technocratic capitalism. While Habermas deftly uses pragmatist insights into communicative rationality and democratic ethos, he shows little sensitivity to other facets of pragmatism. This article argues that incorporating the pragmatist perspective on experience and indeterminacy brings a corrective to the emancipatory agenda championed by critical theorists. The pragmatist alternative to the theory of communicative action is presented, with the discussion centering around the following themes: disembodied reason versus embodied reasonableness, determinate being versus indeterminate reality, discursive truth versus pragmatic certainty, rational consensus versus reasonable dissent, transcendental democracy versus democratic transcendence, and rational society versus sane community

Erving Goffman as a Pioneer in Self-Ethnography? The “Insanity of Place” Revisited*

This paper was presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association, Atlanta, August 14, 2010. I wish to express my profound gratitude to all those who have helped preserve the memory of Erving Goffman by contributing a memoir to the Erving Goffman Archives. I am especially grateful to Frances Goffman Bay, Esther Besbris, and Marly Zaslov for providing family documents and invaluable recollections about Erving Goffman’s formative years, as well as to EGA board members whose practical assistance and good cheer sustained me throughout this project

Marxist Paradigm and Academic Freedom

The Russian October Revolution dealt a devastating blow to Marxism from which Marxist sociology did not begin to recover until recently. Stalin\u27s contributions to Marxist theory and practice had a particularly adverse effect on the fate of Marxism in the West. Whatever hopes were generated by the de-Stalinization campaign in the Soviet Union proved short-lived. By the time Soviet tanks entered Prague and Soviet authorities resumed show trials, few intellectuals in the capitalist West could speak of Soviet Marxism without acute resentment or at least tacit embarrassment. In Mills\u27s words, . . . marxism-leninism has become an official rhetoric with which the authority of a one-party state has been defended, its expedient brutalities obscured, its achievements proclaimed. \u27 Any attempt to revive the Marxist creed under these circumstances must have entailed a denunciation of what has come to pass for Marxism in the Soviet Union. Not surprisingly, the Marxist renaissance in the West was marked by the virtually unanimous rejection of Soviet Marxism

Introduction: The Leading Indicators Project

Policy makers of all ages have sought to ground their decisions in sound knowledge. As early as 1790, President George Washington told Congress that “Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness. In one in which the measures of government receive their impressions so immediately from the sense of the community as in ours it is proportionably essential.” In our time, generating and disseminating reliable information has become a passion. This modern attitude is captured in buzzwords like “knowledge-based interference,” “data-informed decision making,” “information-driven needs assessment,” and it finds a powerful expression in the Leading Indicators (LI) movement that has been gathering momentum for several decades

The Genesis of Social Interactionism and Differentiation of Macro- and Microsociological Paradigms

This paper presents an historical outlook on the macro-micro distinction in modern sociology. It links the genesis of social interactionism and microsociology to the rise of Romantic philosophy and attempts to elaborate methodological principles dividing macro- and microscopic perspectives in sociology. Six ideal-typical distinctions are considered: natural vs. social universality, emergent properties vs. emergent processes, morphological structuralism vs. genetical interactionism, choice among socially structured alternatives vs. structuring appearance into reality, structural vs. emergent directionality, operational vs. hermeneutical analysis. The complementarity of the languages of macro- and microsociological theories is advocated as a foundation for the further elaboration of conceptual links between the two levels of analysis

The Art of Dissent: Parody, Travesty and Irony in Late Soviet Culture

Irony is the favorite tool of Russian postmodernists fighting discourse totalitarianism. They wield it like a crowbar to pry open in the simulacrum, to tear down the Potemkin portable villages built by forced discursive labor. Every new blow the ironist strikes against the official reality reaffirms his intonational freedom amidst the most coercive discourse. An ultimate weapon of the spiritual proletariat, irony proves to the intellectual that he is a subject rather than an object of discourse. Alas, ironic vigil takes its toll. The self busily disclaiming identity with itself loses track of what it really is. It knows not how to commit, empathize, make believe. Deconstructive irony is a radical epoche whose subject lost control over his destiny and no longer knows how to throw the parodic stick shift into reverse. Irony is indeed a double-edged sword: its corrosive edge cuts those who evade pathos and greets with cynicism constructive engagement. Irony can be construed as a dissimulative gesture signaling to the audience that the individual\u27s face is but a mask, that discursive performance is not to be taken literally. Along with this gesture comes a deep aversion to direct speech. The postmodernist is someone who can\u27t say I love you without immediately putting quotation marks around his words. He wants to distance himself from direct speech, ostensibly to protect himself from discourse\u27s totalitarian proclivities and poshlost, but in the process he does violence to his own voice, suppresses its non-ironic modalities

Introduction: Continuity and Change in Russian Culture

This project on Russian culture goes back to the Spring of 1990 when several American and Russian scholars converged at the Russian Research Center at Harvard University and decided to join forces in a study of changes sweeping the Soviet Union. From the start, the participants agreed that they would not try to chase fast breaking news from Russia -- a hopeless task given the pace of recent changes, but rather would focus on the continuity and change in Russian culture, on the long-term social forces that compel the Russian people to reexamine old ways and reevaluate old values

G. H. Mead, Socialism, and the Progressive Agenda

Mead is known today primarily for his original philosophy and social psychology. Much less familiar to us is Mead the reformer, a man who sought to balance political engagement with academic detachment and who established himself as an astute critic of contemporary American society. This paper examines Mead\u27s political beliefs and his theory of the reform process. Drawing on little known sources and archival materials, it demonstrates that Mead shared socialism\u27s humanitarian ends and that, following the dominant progressive ideology of his time, he sought to accomplish these ends by constitutional means. An argument is made that Mead\u27s ideological commitments had profound effects on his substantive ideas, particularly on the dialectical premises of social interactionism. The final section of the paper discusses the legacy of Mead and the Progressive movement