Being There, Separate and Unequal
Charlottesville in the Mediated Public Sphere
We are all in Charlottesville. We have been there before, and during, and will be there after the events of August 11 and 12, 2017. And there’s no exit. The white supremacy and racism, supported by state power, monumentalized in words and stone, and resisted through all imaginable means, started with colonial settlement (before Charlottesville there was Jamestown),1 and there are no signs that this is ending soon. The struggles for alternatives to the reprehensible persists,2 as does the project of squelching alternatives, demonstrated by the repeatedly equivocal responses to Charlottesville by the president of the United States.
We are all there, fascist and anti-fascist, racist and anti-racist, “the united right” defending the Robert E. Lee monument, and those who protested their defense and their aggressive racist and anti-Semitic slogans and actions. And among the protesters, both those who make a strong distinction between the ideals of the founders of the American republic and the history and legacies of racism and slavery, and those who see the latter as an extension of the former in Charlottesville.3
My theoretically informed observation: we are actually there much more than we realize. My political concern: we aren’t there together. We are there isolated in our mediated silos, and this has significant political consequences.
While only a small number of people involved in the Charlottesville events were physically present, the rest of us were also directly involved through our mediated experience. Such is the nature of media events.
For much of my life, my presence at such events has been televisual. When I was a kid, I remember my intimate connection with the Kennedy assassination, as well as his inauguration. I had a personal relationship with J.F.K. These encounters were much more real than when I physically caught a glimpse of him as he motored through my hometown on the campaign trail, and again in lower Manhattan when he helicoptered into Battery Park for an official ceremony, and I was on a school trip.
You were all also involved in the attacks of 9/11. You saw the same video clips of the jets striking the World Trade Center. From around the globe, you watched the buildings collapse and the world change, and even those of you who are too young to remember directly have been there in retrospect, as these clips replay not just on television but on our computerized devices.
Joshua Meyrowitz’s classic book, No Sense of Place, which combines the critical insights of Marshall McLuhan and Erving Goffman, provides an explanation for how such mediated involvement is personal involvement. As the electronic media extend our senses of hearing and seeing, our mediated interaction constitutes our social reality, and the sense of place (and time) is challenged, if not lost. For better and for worse, the distinctive places of the private and public, near and far, then and now, formal and informal, authoritative and democratic, men and women, black and white, and adults and children, Meyrowitz shows, have been broken down with the development of radio and television. The digital revolution radicalizes this.
Let’s note that there are both positive and negative consequences to mediated experience. There is no longer distant suffering. That which occurs in a refugee camp on the other side of the world also happens on our phones, along with more mundane updates from our nearest and dearest. Men’s “locker room talk” can no longer be confined to the locker room. Police brutality is no longer the exclusive experience of the brutes and the brutalized. Also the distinct contributions, responsibilities, and prerogatives of parties, professions, the sciences and the arts, universities, and religious institutions, among many others, are harder to maintain, as it is increasingly difficult to protect children from experiencing the depravity of adults.
This loss of a distinct sense of time and place very much applies to Charlottesville. The media made it relatively easy for a discrete number of extremists to see each other in mass and to be seen by others, and they thus became very real for themselves and for us. Who and how many they represented is far from certain. The way the U.S. president, arguably the most powerful person in the world responded,4 was then profoundly important. Also very important is how we, who were there, respond, both at the time of the extremist demonstration and in its aftermath.
We present ourselves to each other and define the situation of our daily life through mediated interactions. We find out about events such as those in Charlottesville on Twitter and Facebook, as we keep up to date on the latest developments and commentaries, and exchange information and commentary. We see them on TV. We hear them on radio. We turn to our phones as things are happening, and return on YouTube and podcasts, and in reading books and articles. In a very real way, we are there as we pay attention, and continue being there through paying attention, observing the images of those young, clean cut men, carrying firearms, chanting their despicable chants, along with the outraged response of the good citizens of the town and of our global village, and the provocative responses of the president. We experience all this directly. In the same way that those of us of a certain age were there in Dallas when the president was shot and at ground zero on 9/11.
We are in the middle of it.
But there is a big difference between then and now. Media events of the recent past, in the age of television, often fostered solidarity and supported a common public experience. In turn, these collective experiences supported democracy, as I have explained in a review essay5 reconsidering how the classic books, Media Events by Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz and The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere by Jürgen Habermas, illuminate the present crisis. My conclusion:
There are multiple publics that are centered into a Sphere of Publics, which attract various degrees of attention significantly broadened by ceremonial television. The media events that Dayan and Katz consider demonstrate this . . . Those who observe, talk about, and act in response to such events make up the broadest of publics. They take part in many other publics, but these media events create broad central publics to which they all have a connection. It is that connection that we are now missing, it would seem. This suggests a crisis in solidarity, along with a destructive transformation of the spheres of publics.
In an earlier media era, when television was king, the overwhelming majority of the population was tuned in, and under certain circumstances took part in ritualized media events, focused on the assassination, the inauguration, the Olympic games, and the like. The daily flow of media broadcasting was disrupted, all channels focused on the event. A mass audience experienced it together, in the same way. The united experience constituted through interactions, including those anticipating and recalling the event, brought together dispersed publics with common interactive experience, and was the sociological grounding of a common public life, despite many differences. Such experience is no longer.
This very much applies to Charlottesville. In that city, as racism and white supremacy were asserted, the ways of understanding and opposing these assertions were also publicly performed. There was broad public recognition and response, including shared interactions, but they were fragmented, as much directed between mediated fragments as responding to agreed upon developments. The situation was defined differently depending on how the experience was mediated and with whom, and the understanding of the relationship between the self and the defined situation thus radically differed. In a sense, the situation was not even the same. From right to left there were distinct accounts presented and received. The fragments depended upon their trusted sources of information, as this information was shared by friends on social media.
On the extreme right, there is white supremacy pure and simple, sometimes masked as the defense of heritage or history. There are those who use the mask to tolerate or even support racism and anti-Semitism, including the president of the United States,6 and those who would distinguish the mask from the issue of heritage. According to Breitbart,7 the violence in Charlottesville is a result of extremists on the left and the right, and largely a consequence of the police not doing their job. Those who condemn the president’s response and Steve Bannon’s commentary were dismissed as “deplorable conservatives.”8 It is essential, The Federalist emphasized, that “white supremacists were not the only thugs tearing up Charlottesville.”9 On these media platforms, the situation is defined, shared and responded to, creating a public set apart from other publics.
On the center right, there is an understanding that conservative principles and the Republican agenda should be distinguished from the extremism of the alt-right. It is divided between those who forcefully condemn the “Unite the Right” demonstration10 and Trump’s response to it, and those who remain relatively silent. This is the zone of established conservatism, taking more or less responsibility for the presence of undisguised blatant racism in American public life. This public fragment does not only depend on Fox and its media friends, though it has important connections to it.
It is notable that you, the readers of this chapter and of Public Seminar, have not been presented any of these positions. Though we have a broad range of opinion and judgment as a matter of our founding principles, we have not actually been engaging those on the right. Our debates have been left of center.
I am ambivalent about this. On the one hand, principled conservative judgment should be part of any democratic discussion, but on the other hand, an urgency to oppose racism resists such evenhandedness. It is important, even more important, to recognize critically the problem of the enduring legacies of slavery and racism (something rarely found on the right). This is not simply an editorial dilemma, but the result of a fissure in public life, what I have called a bifurcated public sphere11 as it applies to the global structural transformation of public life.
On the center-left, there is a direct rejection of the blatant racism of the “Unite the Right” demonstration, and a need to rebuke all who apologize for or remain silent about it. This is revealed in all the pieces collected here. There is an understanding that white supremacy is knitted into the fabric of American life, and that a concerted effort needs to be made to oppose raw racism as it appeared in Charlottesville12 as well as the racism that is institutionalized into normal social practices. One example is the presence of a statue of Robert E. Lee in Emancipation Park, a public park that was once named after the Confederate general. There are differences of opinion about how tight the knitting is,13 how the pattern includes the founders, and about how to unravel it.14 There is disagreement concerning the link between the foundations of the American polity, and the racism that was present at the founding15 and ever since. We act and interact in public with these disagreements in mind.
On the left, the link between the foundations of the republic and racism is more commonly recognized, as is the centrality of institutionalized racism, and further, how both developed along with capitalism is a major theme.16 While for those of the center-left, generally speaking, Charlottesville was a scandal, a stain on the meaning of the ideals of American democracy, those further to the left see Charlottesville as an instantiation of the racism inherent in American democracy, as linked to capitalism. Nothing less than revolutionary change is thus called for. Those “liberals” who don’t recognize this are sometimes seen as even more of the problem than those of the alt-right, as was suggested in Jacobin.17
There is a full range of opinion, but the configuration of the exchange of opinion is divided. That those who took part in the “Unite the Right” demonstration are now included in the general public discussion is the success of the “Unite the Right” social forces.18 That this hasn’t been decisively pushed back presents a major crisis, and it is not just about a shifting balance of power. It challenges democratic politics. Michael Weinman in considering free speech and “Unite the Right,”19 recently recalled Horkheimer and Adorno’s observation that “it is not possible to have a conversation with a fascist. If anyone else speaks, the fascist considers his intervention a brazen interruption. He is not accessible to reason, because for him reason lies in the other person’s agreement with his own ideas.”
After Charlottesville, this is the profound problem: neo-fascists, Nazis and the KKK are now part of the public debate, even as their opponents hardly see and hear each other and have difficulty coming to a common conclusion about what should be done. Political persuasion is not possible when those with different judgments and positions have little or no contact, and when we pay attention to only those with whom we agree. A significant segment of the population knows about the world through dubious sources. What we expect from news is up for grabs.20 There is “fake news” as an epithet for serious news reporting, and then there is really fake news.
And we do not only read, listen, and watch different sources of news, information, and opinion, we constitute ourselves as separate and apart, making a political solution to the enduring problems of white supremacy and racism ever more elusive.
We live in separate and decidedly unequal realities in the United States. “If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.” This is a fundamental principle of interactive sociology, presented in 1928 by William Isaac Thomas and Dorothy Swaine Thomas. Erving Goffman’s dramaturgical sociology is an extensive development of this “Thomas Theorem.” The implication of Joshua Meyrowitz’s application of Goffman, then, yields what might be called “The Mediated Thomas Theorem”: “If people define mediated situations as real, they are real in their consequences.” This is where the events of Charlottesville reveal themselves as a crisis in the republic.
The reality of Charlottesville, for the viewers of Fox News, the readers of Breitbart and other such platforms supported by social media, has little to do with the reality presented on more reliable sources of news, including MSNBC and CNN, and The New York Times and The Washington Post, but also The Wall Street Journal and The Economist.
We are all still in Charlottesville, as we do not share a common definition of our situation, and white supremacy endures. Democratically struggling against the enduring problem, American democracy now requires a fight against the central enduring problems of the mediated (re)public.
Jeffrey C. Goldfarb is the Michael E. Gellert professor of sociology at the New School for Social Research. He is also the publisher of Public Seminar. His work primarily focuses on the sociology of media, culture, and politics.
1 Mindy Fullilove, Robert Fullilove, William Morrish, and Robert Sember, “Before Charlottesville there was Jamestown,” Public Seminar, August 28, 2017.
2 Andrew Boyer, “What we really learned in Charlottesville,” Public Seminar, November 9, 2017.
3 Keval Bhatt, “Subverting the symbols of white supremacy: The wolf and the fox,” Public Seminar, October 17, 2017.
4 Leonard A. Williams, “On Trump’s response to Charlottesville: Political encounters and ideological evasions,” Public Seminar, August 25, 2017.
5 Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, “Solidarity, and the rise and fall of the public sphere: A review of Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz’s media events,” Public Seminar, April 18, 2017.
6 David Weigel, “In conservative media, an amen chorus defends Trump’s comments on Charlottesville violence,” The Washington Post, August 17, 2017.
7 Ian Mason and Amanda House, “Alt-right activists condemn violence, dispute mainstream account,” Breitbart, August 13, 2017.
8 Mike Sabo, “A deplorable conservative response to Charlottesville and Bannon,” American Greatness, August 19, 2017.
9 D. C. McAllister, “White supremacists were not the only thugs tearing up Charlottesville,” The Federalist, August 14, 2017.
10 John Podhoretz, “Charlottesville proves Trump’s doubters right,” New York Post, August 14, 2017.
11 Jeffrey C. Goldfarb, “The new authoritarianism and the structural transformation of the mediated public sphere I: Reviewing the work of Jürgen Habermas and Hannah Arendt with an assist from Nancy Fraser,” Public Seminar, August 18, 2017.
12 Melvin Rogers, “White identity and terror in America: Thinking about the events of Charlottesville,” Public Seminar, August 16, 2017.
13 Michael Weinman, “Charlottesville, Thomas Jefferson, and America’s fate: A response to Keval Bhatt,” Public Seminar, October 22, 2017.
14 Elena Gagovska, “The political landscape post Charlottesville,” Public Seminar, September 16th, 2017
15 Isaac Ariail Reed, “Jefferson’s two bodies: Memory, protest and democracy at the University of Virginia and beyond,” Public Seminar, October 19, 2017.
16 Nancy Fraser, “From progressive neoliberalism to Trump and beyond,” Public Seminar, December 21, 2017.
17 Shuja Haider, “One has to take sides,” Jacobin, August 13, 2017.
18 Jamelle Bouie, “This was a white-power movement showing its strength,” Slate, August 12, 2017.
19 Michael Weinman, “No-platforming, ‘Unite the Right,’ and new free speech debate,” Public Seminar, December 26, 2017.
20 Claire Potter, “What do we want from the news?” Public Seminar, January 3, 2018.