this essay seems pertinent to some of your undergoing projects, while I WANT TO WARN you that do NOT take it as key text to shore up your theoretical framework for to borrow too much insights from sociology would be risky if not handled well.
PLUS, you know there is a thing called GOOGLE SCHOLAR which enables you to google essays ?
THIRDLY, you of course know that reading through the reference list of key essay is one important way to pin down your reading list right?
this essay is from
http://www.tasa.org.au/members/docs/2000_2/Morakhovski.pdf.
Sociological Sites/Sights, TASA 2000 Conference, Adelaide: Flinders Unviersity, December 6-8
Strangers, belonging, and the public sphere in
the era of global communication
Dimitri Morakhovski,
La Trobe University
Abstract
In the era of global communication, the concept of stranger, or ‘the other within’, becomes increasingly more valuable for analytical purposes than in earlier times when societies were more homogeneous. This is because strangers today are widely spread across the westernised world. The concept of the ‘stranger’ will be used here interchangeably with the concept of strangerhood because they both reflect the character of certain relationships between individuals. These relationships express the interpenetration of closeness and remoteness, involvement and detachment. In this paper, the claim will be made that only self-active individuals can form the basis for social solidarity of strangers. This is because in the current era characterised by global communication, social solidarity can no longer be successfully achieved and maintained either by top-down action of the state or by appeal to tradition. However, the point will also be made that individual efforts may not be enough because people with similar interests inevitably tend to create groupings. For that reason, diversity needs to be nurtured within the public sphere, which should not be limited either to local or national borders.
The concepts of stranger and strangerhood in terms of relationship
In the era of global communication, individuals are increasingly viewed as physically close, but emotionally remote. This means that they are strangers (Simmel, 1971). Strangerhood, according to Segal (1998: 273), is not a quality of the stranger, but it is ‘the other as seen from my perspective’. Consequently, ‘the use of this term presupposes a relationship between me and the other. strangerhood is a characteristic of neither the other nor me, but of our relationship’.
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In the era of global communication, when the symbolic mechanism of interaction becomes more flexible, individuals in such relations are forced to become different (distinct) from each other. Their identity, according to Albrow (1996: 151), ‘is a unique particularity recognized in the universality of the right to be a distinct human being’.
Human diversity and belonging (involvement).
Changing patterns of belonging due to “time- space compression”. Many writers discuss the notion of human diversity in various ways. A number of theorists have tried to find a framework to incorporate diversity in their discussion of the human condition in the era of global communication. Their arguments, however, often fall short because they underestimate the radical implications of the concept of stranger. For example, Tabboni (1995: 23) argues that the stranger is constituted by the will of the subject ‘to select his/her conditions of belonging’. There is, however, a difference in how the stranger can be perceived in terms of belonging: s/he could be perceived as belonging somewhere else, not belonging anywhere, or belonging everywhere. If seen in terms of belonging somewhere else, the meaning of ‘the stranger’ is close to foreigner/outsider, as opposed to local, whereas the meaning of ‘the stranger’ as not belonging anywhere, or belonging everywhere who can be ‘local’ as well, can be viewed as the stranger (Beck 1998: 126). From the position of the ‘established’ or‘common- place folk’ (Stihweh 1998), foreigners are ‘strangers’ from ‘there’; strangers are ‘strangers’ from ‘here’. However, the distinction between ‘here’ and
‘there’ becomes increasingly more vague, because society understood in terms of the general ‘compression of time-space’ which is one of the main characteristics of the era of global communication has its equivalent in the potential convergence of‘here’ and ‘there’ in individuals’ milieux (D�rschmidt 1996: 70). As a result, the‘there’ can be perceived as close, while the ‘here’- as far away. According to Bauman (1998: 2), ‘the term “time/ space compression” encapsulates the ongoing multi-faceted transformation of the parameters of the human condition … Globalization divides as much as it unites …’.
On the one hand, the notion of ‘compression’ of the world indicates that social relationships become closer. On the other, however, these are relationships between strangers and not between ‘whole’ individuals (Bauman,1990). ‘In extended milieux [policenterdness] “here” and “there” do not equal “near” and “far”; that is “familiar” and “unfamiliar”’ (D�rschmidt 1996: 70). Strangerhood, according to Harman (1988: 44), ‘is no longer a temporary condition to be overcome, but a way of life’. Bauman (1990: 63) makes an even stronger claim since he believes that the current era looks ‘like the world of universal strangerhood’. From this it follows that every individual, at least implicitly, is a stranger.
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If the above observations are correct, in a world of universal strangerhood, strangers can no longer be viewed as marginal figures opposed to ‘mainstream’; they become ‘mainstream’ themselves. Strangers can no longer be kept at distance. Therefore, the concept of stranger needs to be separated from the concept of territory at least analytically. In this case, the stranger can be viewed as belonging everywhere. However, as it was noted above, writers like Tabboni emphasise that belonging, associated with the own - group borders, still exist in a positive way. More specifically, she argues that: the stranger is no longer someone who ignores group affects and loyalties ..., s/he
is now someone who has good reason for counting on sentiments of belonging to rebuild self- esteem and to procure greater responsibilities. (1995, p. 23) Tabboni’s perspective implies that groups are relatively homogeneous, that their members are emotionally close, and that the stranger has very limited if any influence on them, because s/he is emotionally distant. This view, though, does not explicitly indicate on what conditions and in what way the stranger can count on belonging (taking into account the flexibility, or even lack, of symbolic regulation). The question can be raised: Is it possible to rebuild self - esteem on the basis of belonging? Tabboni’s answer is affirmative. At the same time she is aware of the stranger’s difficulty to find an appropriate group to belong to. In other words, she is aware of the discrepancy between the move towards certainty on the one hand, and the impossibility of achieving this goal by finding a group to belong to. Some theorists like Beck (1998) suggest that it is not only problematic to find a group to belong to, but also belonging to a homogeneous community cannot provide the basis for building self- esteem since the definition of the self becomes particularly problematic. Individualization means, after all, that the culture of one's own group fragments and becomes more differentiated. (p. 132) When the individual cannot rely on cultural patterns, the significance of belonging or involvement to one's group gradually decreases. On the issue of belonging, some writers offer a different perspective. Gauchet (2000), for example, follows Tabboni’s argument, claiming that individuals continue to:define themselves in terms of the belongings for which they had opted. It was simply a
matter of making them as deliberate as possible, and to choose them instead of being subjected to them. (p. 32)
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On this point, however, Gauchet, takes another path. He disagrees with Tabboni, correctly suggesting that the characteristic gesture of the contemporary individual is not self affirmation through involvement (as it was in an earlier phase); it is rather the new beginning ... To affirm oneself is to withdraw. (ibid.) Withdrawal is the process related to the ability of the individual to detach from her involvement thus creating critical awareness of this very involvement. Given this, it follows that the stranger is ready to change and therefore to move since she is not absorbed in such an involvement. Tabboni views the detachment of the stranger in a negative way, and, therefore, tends to deny the stranger’s difference. She indicates, that because: the stranger is defined by default and by detachment ... s/he is only a critical figure, whose cultural heritage is ignored ... [and therefore] the stranger may become the proponent of the equality of rights, but certainly not of the recognition of difference. (1995 p. 21)
It becomes clear that in Tabboni's view, the cultural baggage of the stranger is not important for the group, but she tends to overlook the fact that detachment is not an end in itself. It may be viewed not only as a break with, but as, the new beginning. The detachment of the stranger cannot be separated from her/his cultural heritage and, therefore, provides the basis not only for ‘choosing’, but also for ‘re-evaluation of taken- for - granted patterns of involvement in the world’ (Segal 1998: 277). The point can thus be made that detachment as re-evaluation is an active notion and it can be opposed to choosing which is largely a passive attitude to the changing world.
Displacement: search for ‘home’ or movement away from‘home’?
In the era of global communication, social change gains impetus, homogeneous communities are gradually displaced, and individuals become increasingly more aware that the change is perpetual. Perpetual social change leads to the awareness by individuals that uncertainty is ‘no longer seen as a mere temporary nuisance, which with due effort may be either mollified or altogether overcome’ (Bauman 1995: 5). The change implies movement. Awareness of the change means that for the individual the movement is obligatory. Whether it is the movement towards uncertainty, or towards ‘home’ remains a question for debate. Tabboni rightly grasps the (metaphorical) notion of travelling as imbedded in strangeness. But to travel heading ‘home’ is different from the travel towards the unknown. Chambers (1994: 70) argues, that ‘to travel critically means to journey not like Ulysses, on the way home, but like Abraham, cast out of the previous house
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of knowledge and destined never to return’. This travel ‘involves embracing a mode of thought that is destined to be incomplete’ (ibid.). At this point two questions can be raised: can the concept of ‘home’ be still traditionally understood? Is the idea of ‘home’ necessarily opposite to mobility?
The claim can be made that while the idea of the ‘home’ becomes different from the‘homes’ of earlier times it still is often viewed as the space taken for granted and is connected with the idea of territory, bounded either geographically or socially or both. Harman (1988: 53), however, claims that ‘there is room for “home” in the modern world, but that it must be redefined in light of a shift from spatial and social proximity to cultural proximity as providing the ground for a condition of rootedness’. The changes in the concept of ‘home’ are connected with the idea of ‘deterritorialisation’ understood in a very broad exclusive way, following Garc�a Canclini as ‘the loss of the “natural” relation of culture to geographical and social territories’ (quoted in Tomlinson 1999: 107). D�rschmidt (1996: 64) claims that ‘in terms of extension and mobility of milieux, what is considered to be “home” largely derives from the person’s ability to generate a special relationship to a place, less from the physical setting’. In this sense, ‘home’‘no longer contradicts mobility, for it derives from people's ability to make themselves feel at home at different places’ (65). This view, however, makes the idea of ‘home’ incompetitive with the idea of homogeneous community. Calhoun claims that: the idea that people need ‘naturally’ to feel at home in a taken-for- granted and internally homogeneous community contends with the creation of polities and cultural fields too large and differentiated to be organized as communities. (1999
p. 228) The idea of ‘home’ then can be viewed as misleading, if it represents the nature of the relationships between strangers as unproblematic. For Ruskin, the idea of ‘home’ as unproblematic depends on ‘the notion of a “shelter” both as figure of physical protection - “roofing over” a space - and as psychological and emotional protection, the forming of a boundary - the “threshold,” the liminal space - separating the outer world from the inner world of intimacy and subjectivity’ (Tomlinson 1999: 117). The idea of ‘home’, though, is quite different from the idea of community.
Community can be objective, but ‘home’ is always subjective as well, because it can not be simply pre- given, it is a lived space (Game 1995: 205). Game (1995) indicates that ‘home’ is not merely a ‘shelter’ from the ‘hostile society’, but also constitutes an aspect of human self as a ‘dweller’ and, therefore, the ‘home’ becomes ‘part of the embodied self- “the house is in the body”’ (Game 1995: 202) in (Tomlinson 1999: 118). Therefore, without ‘shelter’ there is no ‘dwelling’, but without ‘dwelling’, ‘shelter’ is equally irrelevant. Tomlinson (1999) claims:
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So it is not merely the privacy of bourgeois family life that is threatened by the penetration of the outer world into the inner: there is also an implied challenge to the ‘boundary’ which constitutes the self. This, however, does not necessarily have to be imagined as a threat to self-identity, but perhaps as a movement in the placing of the boundary between the ‘private self’ (say, the self of the insular familiar structure) and the self imagined in relation to a wider horizon of human belonging. The shifting of this ‘threshold’ produced by the penetration of the enclosed space of the house by globalizing technologies …thus becomes a way of thinking the ambivalent effects of deterritorialization on self-identity. (p. 118) The borders therefore are asserted. They are asserted ‘precisely because we lack them’ (Norris 2000: 286). The claim can be made that in the conditions of global communication, the individuals need a public space, which can incorporate strangerhood in order to make their ‘home’ liveable. The public space of this type can be called the space ‘in between’ and can be viewed as positive.
The positive vision of public space in terms of ‘in- between’
The difference between values of individuals needs to be communicated and debated within public space. To reflect the strangerhood of the other adequately there is a need to develop the logic ‘in between’ (Segal 1998: 273). Harman (1988) claims that:
unless the modern stranger is postulated as capable of adapting through the lens
of in between, there is a real danger that he will be seen as a compliant victim of
technology and modernization; as one who is frozen ‘with anxiety and nostalgia’.
(p. 92)
The purpose of the ‘in between’ can be viewed as reflecting the strangerhood in strangers, their existence between categories (Beck 1998: 127). It is important because a person can not act without being aware of the way s/he acts in a presence of the stranger, because s/he is ‘constantly aware of [his/her] ...own presence as mediated by the presence of the stranger’ (Segal 1998; 274). The person has ‘no basis upon which to be sure of how to act and behave in the face of stranger’. It does not mean though that the stranger can be viewed only as a threat. Strangerhood in terms of relationship, or ‘being in between is to be open to redirection’ (Harman 1988: 97). Redirection means redirection within public space.
Harman (1988: 96) argues: ‘in between holds out the possibility of many openings, but it lacks the comforts of home, of the given’. This logic implies public space necessary for the exchange of opinions, which is problematic to achieve remaining ‘at home’, or looking for home in search of unproblematic life. The acceptance of strangeness allows us to come closer to the realisation of the whole ideological project in contemporary society, which, according to Minogue (1985: 165), is ‘the creation of a society entirely without social control [in sense of
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compulsion and mystification]..., one that integrates itself spontaneously’. For such society, public space able to accommodate strangers is immanent. It is immanent for public space, according to Gauchet (2000), that the individual: learns to perceive oneself as somebody among others. ... [It does not mean simply learning] to coexist with others; we also learn to think of each of us as one of those others, as someone or other from the viewpoint of the others. This is a cognitive and symbolic training in anonymity, in the radical distancing and decentring that enables to say about oneself: ‘In fact, this has to do with me, but it could have been anybody else’. It is this learning to abstract from oneself that sensitizes us to the public, to objectivity and to universality; it allows us to adopt the point of view of the collective and abstract from our particular situation. (p.31)
In the contemporary westernised society, however, the negative concept of public space is widely used. The concept of public space can be called negative if it cannot accommodate strangers and decreases their chances to create it themselves.
Conclusion
The claim can be made that there is no longer a group where the individual can find certainty and live his or her life in an unproblematic way. This can lead to a situation where it is no longer possible for someone to feel "at home" in a society organised as a community. Society can no longer be organised as a homogeneous community because the idea of such a community becomes obsolete. The idea of bounded community is connected with the view of community as ‘idealized and associated with a disappearing past which was represented as more clearly delimited and where people knew where they stood’ (Albrow et. al. 1996: 25). People do not know where they stand because they are forced to move and, therefore, they need skills not to get lost.
The processes of globalization in an era of uncertainty and perpetual change require new skills and imply an individual like the stranger who is capable of operating actively in an increasingly complex environment, this means that the terms of reference are not pre-given. The distance between individuals is no longer stable, pre-given, and there is therefore a need for individuals to create this distance themselves. ‘Being “far away” ... demands cleverness, courage, mastering skills... The idea of the “near”, on the other hand, stands for unproblematic’ (Bauman 1998: 13-14). However, in a world best defined by multiple processes of change, rather than by a social order, when individuals are pushed to act independently, their capability to do so increases in significance. On the other hand, their capability to act independently cannot be realised in the form of individual achievement, because individuals tend to create groupings based on familiarity which are hostile to strangers.
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It is problematic, however, that the attachment to local community, viewed as‘homogeneous home’, can contribute to development of such skills. Finding ‘shelter’ in homogeneous communities based on territory can be viewed as a chimera. The idea of local ‘homogeneous’ communities is often related to the negative attitude to diversity and to the stranger. Public space is important not only for democracy, but more importantly for the improvement of the human condition. Calhoun (1999: 228) agrees, that ‘it is crucial to create public space within which people may engage each other in discourse – not just to make decisions, but to make culture and even to make and remake their own identities’. Social milieu providing public space, according to Albrow (1996: 159), is‘distinct from the emotional sociality implied in community. While the milieu involves people, it is entirely open about the nature of the relationship with them’. Therefore, there is a need for public space in society to help people to discuss and solve their problems. A territory, according to Bauman (1998: 25), ‘stripped of public space provides little chance for norms being debated, for values to be confronted, to clash and to be negotiated’. The concept of this public space needs to include the notion‘in - between’.
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