Reflections on Democratic Regression This essay was originally published on May 3 2015. Let me start by describing how communism died. The first thing to perish was the communist faith. And this faith had two dimensions. It was a faith in the project of a just world, a world of solidarity and freedom. And it was a conviction that people had finally deciphered the secret of world history …
A keynote address from the Dramaturgies of Resistance conference This is a shortened version of the keynote address delivered at the conference Dramaturgies of Resistance — International Artistic Positions on Freedom and Repression, Greifswald, January 26, 2018 Democracy Dies in Darkness It was a year ago, in late February 2017, when the Washington Post appeared in the newsstands displaying a disturbingly unfamiliar motto: “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” Though it had been …
A Review of Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz’s Media Events Twenty-five years after its publication, Dayan and Katz’s classic study of ceremonial television, Media Events, has continued relevance for understanding the politics of media. With the proliferation of cable television and digital media explosion, television is no longer the hegemonic media form it once was, and the media events they studied exist no more in the form that they studied …
The new always appears in the guise of a miracle This is the prepared text answering the question “What do we really know about transitions to democracy?” for the General Seminar of The New School for Social Research, March 19, 2014. It was a quarter of a century ago, in 1989, that a new kind of revolutionary imaginary emerged, one that promises a new beginning, and demonstrates the …
For some time already, I have been thinking about the stimulating image of a world of civility that I found in a novel written in the middle of the twentieth century by the Yugoslav writer Ivo Andric entitled The Bridge on the Drina. The bridge as envisioned by a 14th-century builder is not just a river overpass between Bosnia and Serbia, as it suddenly doubles in width in …
