Sphères de surveillance (French Edition)

However, the advent of big datasets that contain imprints of actual behavior and social network information — social interactions, conversations, friendship networks, history of reading and commenting on a variety of platforms — along with advances in computational techniques means that political campaigns and indeed, advertisers, corporations and others with the access to these databases as well as technical resources can model individual voter preferences and attributes at a high level of precision, and crucially, often without asking the voter a single direct question.

Strikingly, the results of such models may match the quality of the answers that were only extractable via direct questions, and far exceed the scope of information that could be gathered about a voter via traditional methods. In other words, just access to a fraction of Facebook data, processed through a computational model, allows for largely correctly delineating Republicans and Democrats without looking into any other database, voter registration file, financial transactions or membership in organizations.

While parts of this example may seem trivial since some of these, such as age and gender, are traditional demographics and are usually included in traditional databases, it is important to note that these are being estimated through modeling, and are not asked or observed from the user. This means that that these attributes can also be modeled in platforms where anonymous or pseudonymous postings are the norm.

This type of modeling also furthers information asymmetry between campaigns and citizens; campaigns learn about a given voter with the voter having no idea about this modeling in the background. Crucially, this type of modeling allows access to psychological characteristics that were beyond the reach of traditional databases, as invasive as those might have been considered. In other words, without asking a single question, researchers were able to model psychological traits as accurately as a psychologist administering a standardized, validated instrument.

Given that social media data have been used to accurately model attributes, ranging from suicide rates to depression to other emotional and psychological variables De Choudhury, et al. Campaigns do not want to spend resources on people who are unlikely to vote and pollsters need this data to weigh their data correctly. Previous voting records are also tenuous predictors — besides, there are many young voters entering the rolls.

Gallup, whose likely voter model had long been considered the gold standard, asks a series of seven questions that include intent, knowledge where is your voting booth? However, even with decades of expertise, Gallup has been missing election predictions, due to its inability to correctly predict likely voters through survey data. The gravity of the situation such that Gallup became a punch line: This resulted in a targeted, highly efficient persuasion and turnout effort which focused mostly on turning out voters that were already Obama supporters rather than spending a lot of effort persuading voters who would not end up voting.

In , Obama campaign staffers told a gathering at the Personal Democracy Forum that in key states, they were able to go deep into Republican territory, to individually pick voters that they had modeled as likely Democrats within otherwise Republican suburbs, breaking the lock of the precinct at voter targeting. The advantages of stronger, better modeling, an expensive undertaking that depends on being able to purchase and manipulate large amounts of data, can hardly be overstated.

Finally, big data modeling can predict behaviors in subtle ways and more effectively oriented toward altering behavior. For example, for years, the holy grail of targeting for commercial marketers has been pregnancy and childbirth, as that is a time of great change for families, resulting in new consumption habits which can last for decades. Previously, retailers could look at obvious steps like creation of a baby registry; however, by then, the information is often already public to other marketers as well, and the target is well into the pregnancy and already establishing new consumption patterns.

In a striking example, Duhigg recounts the tale of an angry father walking into Target, demanding to see the manager to ask why his teenage daughter was being sent advertisements for maternity clothing, nursery furniture and baby paraphenelia. The manager, it was reported, apologized profusely, only to receive an apology himself when the father went back home to talk with his daughter, who was, indeed, pregnant. Data modeling ferreted out facts that a parent did not know about his own child living under his own roof.

These predictive analytics would not be as valuable without a corresponding rise in sophistication of behavioral science models of how to persuade, influence and move people to particular actions. Developing deeper models of human behavior is crucial to turning the ability to look, model and test big data into means of altering political behavior. The founder of public relations, Edward Bernays, himself had posited that people were fundamentally irrational.

All this changed thanks to research which emphasized the non—rational aspects of human behavior, and with attempts to measure and test such behavior modification within political contexts. Just as behavior analysis became more sophisticated, for the first time in modern political history, an influx of scholars from the behavioral sciences moved into practical politics, starting with the Obama campaign.

Increasingly, however, elections are fought at the margins in part because of pre—existing polarization, a winner—takes—all system in the case of United States, and low turnout. Under these conditions, the operational capacity to find and convince just the right number of individual voters becomes increasingly important [ 7 ]. In such an environment, small differences in analytic capacity can be the push that propels the winning candidate. Combining psychographics with individual profiles in a privatized i.

Public Sphere in Modern Societies

However, research shows that when afraid, only some people tend to become more conservative and vote for more conservative candidates. Campaigns, though, until now had to target the whole population, or at least a substantial segment, all at once, with the same message. Experimental science in real—time environments: The online world has opened up the doors to real—time, inexpensive and large—scale testing of the effectiveness of persuasion and political communication, a significant novelty to political campaigns.

Empirical discussions about politics would, at most, focus on surveys and there has been surprisingly little testing or experimentation in political campaigns Gerber and Green, But most importantly, field experiments are costly and time—consuming, and money and time are the resources on which political campaigns already place the highest premium.

In spite of these obstacles, some experiments were conducted; however their results were often published too late for the election in question. The field experiments conducted in , demonstrating that face—to—face canvassing was most effective for turnout, were published three years later Green, et al. These experiments increased awareness that many methods that campaigns traditionally spent money on for example, slick mailers or phone calls were not very effective.

Doing Social Sciences

A culture of experimentation was encouraged and embraced. The rise of digital platforms allowed incorporating real—time experimentation into the very act delivery of the political message. The results are measured in real time and quickly integrated into the delivery as the winning message becomes the message. Methodologically, of course, this is traditional experimental science but it has become possible because campaigns now partially take place over a medium that allows for these experimental affordances: The Obama campaign had incorporated experiments into its methods as early as For example, in December , when the Obama campaign was still in its early stages, the campaign created 24 different button and media combinations for its splash page the first page that visitors land on.

Each variation were seen by 13, people — an incredibly large number for running a field experiment by old standards, but a relatively easy and cheap effort in the digital age Siroker, Through such experimentation, the Obama campaign was led to predominantly feature his family in much campaign material. The increasing digitization of political campaigns as well as political acts by ordinary people provides a means through which political campaigns can now carry out such experiments with ease and effectiveness.

Power of platforms and algorithmic governance: These platforms operate via algorithms the specifics of which are mostly opaque to people outside the small cadre of technical professionals within the company with regards to content visibility, data sharing and many other features of political consequence. These proprietary algorithms determine the visibility of content and can be changed at will, with enormous consequences for political speech. Similarly, non—profits that relied on Facebook to reach their audiences faced a surprise in — The implications of opaque algorithms and pay—to—play are multiple: Second, since digital platforms can deliver messages individually — each Facebook user could see a different message tailored to her as opposed to a TV ad that necessarily goes to large audiences — the opacity of algorithms and private control of platforms alters the ability of the public to understand what is ostensibly a part of the public sphere, but now in a privatized manner.

Campaigns can access this data either through favorable platform policies which grant them access to user information. These private platforms can make it easier or harder for political campaigns to reach such user information, or may decide to package and sell data to campaigns in ways that differentially empower the campaigns, thus benefiting some over others. Further, a biased platform could decide to use its own store of big data to model voters and to target voters of a candidate favorable to the economic or other interests of the platform owners.

Such a platform could help tilt an election without ever asking the voters whom they preferred gleaning that information instead through modeling, which research shows is quite feasible and without openly supporting any candidate. A similar technique could be possible for search results. Ordinary users often never visit pages that are not highlighted on the first page of Google results and researchers already found that a slight alteration of rankings could affect an election, without voter awareness Epstein and Robertson, Big—data driven computational politics engenders many potential consequences for politics in the networked era.

In this section, I examine three aspects: First, the shift to tailored, individualized messaging based on profiling obtained through modeling brings potential for potential significant harms to civic discourse. Howard and Hillygus and Shields had already presciently warned of the dangers of data—rich campaigns. However, these can be double—edged for campaigns in that they elicit significant passion on all sides. Hence, campaigns aim to put wedge issues in front of sympathetic audiences while hiding them from those who might be motivated in other directions Hillygus and Shields, ; Howard, Until now, the ability to do just that has so far been limited by availability of data finding the exact wedge voter and means to target individuals Barocas, Prevalence of wedge issues is further damaging in that it allows campaigns to remain ambiguous on important but broadly relevant topics economy, education while campaigning furiously but now also secretly on issues that can mobilize small, but crucial, segments.

It can also incorporate psychographic profiles modeled from online social data — data collected without directly interfacing with an individual. Hence, fear—mongering messages can be targeted only to those motivated by fear. Unlike broadcast, such messages are not visible to broad publics and thus cannot be countered, fact—checked or otherwise engaged in the shared public sphere the way a provocative or false political advertisement might have been.

This form of big data—enabled computational politics is a private one. At its core, it is opposed to the idea of a civic space functioning as a public, shared commons.

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It continues a trend started by direct mail and profiling, but with exponentially more data, new tools and more precision. The second negative effect derives from information asymmetry and secrecy built into this mode of computational politics. While the observational aspect is similar, computational politics is currently exercised in a manner opposite of the panopticon.

The panopticon operates by making very visible the act and possibility of observation, while hiding actual instances of observation, so that a prisoner never knows if she is being watched but is always aware that she could be. Modern social engineering operates by making surveillance as implicit, hidden and invisible as possible, without an observed person being aware of it [ 10 ].

While browsers, cell phone companies, corporate and software companies, and, as recently revealed, the U. This model of hegemony is more in line with that proposed by Gramsci which emphasizes manufacturing consent, and obtaining legitimacy, albeit uses state and other resources in an unequal setting, rather than using force or naked coercion. Research shows that people respond more positively to messages that they do not perceive as intentionally tailored to them, and that overt attempts are less persuasive than indirect or implicit messages.

Political campaigns are acutely aware of this fact. As advisor and consultant to the Democratic party, Hal Malchow puts explicitly: When they see our fingerprints on this stuff, they believe it less. The public is constituted unequally; the campaign knows a great deal about every individual while ordinary members of the public lack access to this information. Even when identity information is not embedded into a platform such as Twitter where people can and do use pseudonyms , identity often cannot be escaped.

Modeling can ferret out many characteristics in a probabilistic but highly reliable manner Kossinki, Commercial databases which match computer IP to actual voter names for an overwhelming majority of voters in the United States Campaign Grid, ; U. Federal Trade Commission are now available. Thus, political campaigns with resources can now link individual computers to actual users and their computers without the consent. Big data makes anonymity difficult to maintain, as computer scientists have shown repeatedly Narayanan and Shmatikov, Given enough data, most profiles end up reducing to specific individuals; date of birth, gender and zip code positively correlate to nearly 90 percent of individuals in the United States.

On the surface, this century has ushered in new digital technologies that brought about new opportunities for participation and collective action by citizens. Social movements around the world, ranging from the Arab uprisings to the Occupy movement in the United States Gitlin, , have made use of these new technologies to organize dissent against existing local, national and global power [ 11 ]. Such effects are real and surely they are part of the story of the rise of the Internet. However, history of most technologies shows that those with power find ways to harness the power of new technologies and turn it into a means to further their own power Spar, From the telegraph to the radio, the initial period of disruption was followed by a period of consolidation in which challengers were incorporated into transformed power structures, and disruption gave rise to entrenchment.

The dynamics outlined in this paper for computational politics require access to expensive proprietary databases, often controlled by private platforms, and the equipment and expertise required to effectively use this data. At a minimum, this environment favors incumbents who already have troves of data, and favors entrenched and moneyed candidates within parties, as well as the data—rich among existing parties. The trends are clear. The methods of computational politics will, and already are, also used in other spheres such as marketing, corporate campaigns, lobbying and more. The six dynamics outlined in this paper — availability of big data, shift to individual targeting, the potential and opacity of modeling, the rise of behavioral science in the service of persuasion, dynamic experimentation, and the growth of new power brokers on the Internet who control the data and algorithms — will affect many aspects of life in this century.

More direct research, as well as critical and conceptual analysis, is crucial to increase both our understanding and awareness of this information environment, as well as to consider policy implications and responses. Similar to campaign finance laws, it may be that data use in elections needs regulatory oversight thanks to its effects on campaigning, governance and privacy.

Starting an empirically informed, critical discussion of data politics now may be the first important step in asserting our agency with respect to big data that is generated by us and about us, but is increasingly being used at us. The political advertisement climate, and the need to advertise on broadcast, arguably, has a stronger effect in determining who can be a candidate in the first place, and not so much in selecting a winner among those who make it to that level. In contrast, an online depository of books by leading large research libraries in the world contain a mere 78 terabytes of information in total Anderson, As Bryant and Raja astutely point out, this kind of analysis can be double—edged sword.

The number of votes that needed to flip to change outcome in the Presidential election was about a mere , distributed in the right states. An piece published just as this paper was about to go to press suggested a similar scenario, and called it digital gerrymandering Zittrain, While the latest NSA revelations due to leaks by Edward Snowden may change that, the level of surprise and outrage they generated speaks to both lack of awareness of surveillance as well as efforts to keep it hidden.

Kramer, Cameron Marlow, Jaime E. Settle, and James H. Anthony Bryant and Uzma Raja, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, Campaign Grid, , at http: Social movements, new technology, and electoral politics. Critical Studies in Innovation , volume 27, number 1, pp. Robert Epstein and Ronald E. The birth of the prison. Translated from the French by Alan Sheridan.

Gerber and Donald P. The roots, the spirit, and the promise of Occupy Wall Street. Gerber, and David W. The structural transformation of the public sphere: An inquiry into a category of bourgeois society. Translated by Thomas Burger with the assistance of Frederick Lawrence. Sunshine Hillygus and Todd G. Wedge issues in Presidential campaigns.

Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Stanford University Press, pp. They were not really friends. They fought; they made up; they hid the details of their lives and then suddenly, loudly and openheartedly, would reveal everything. Yevgenia Nikolaevna wanted to draw this. Not the objects, not the people, but the feeling they stirred in her. This feeling was complicated and hard to describe; even a great artist could not express it. It united the awesome military power of the state and people with this dark kitchen, this poverty, gossip, and pettiness.

It combined the destructive force of military steel with kitchen pots and potato peelings. The expression of this feeling destroyed lines, blurred edges, dissolved into what seemed from outside to be a meaningless connection of broken images and spots of light. The old lady was timid and obliging.

She wore a dark dress with a white collar. Her cheeks were always rosy, even though she was always on the verge of starvation. In her head lived the memories of pranks that Lyudmila had played when she was in first grade and funny expressions that Marusya said when she was little. She remembered how two-year old Mitya would burst into the dining room in his bib and waving his hands, would shout "dinder!

Now Zhenni Genrikhovna worked for a woman who was a dentist. She did housework and took care of the dentist's sick mother. Her employer would often leave for five or six days to work in regional clinics, and then Zhenni Genrikhovna would spend the night in her house looking after the helpless old woman who could barely move her legs after a recent stroke. She had absolutely no sense of property.

She constantly apologized to Yevgenia Nikolaevna, asking her permission to open the transom in connection with the comings and goings of her motley-colored cat. Her greatest interest and anxieties concerned this cat, whom she feared the neighbors would hurt. One of the neighbors, the engineer Dragin, a factory manager, would look at her wrinkled face, her girlishly slender, dried-up waist, her pince-nez hanging on a black string, and give a nasty sneer.

His plebeian nature was offended by the old lady's loyalty to the past, by the ridiculous innocence of her smile when she talked about taking her prerevolutionary charges on a drive in their carriage and accompanying "madame" to Venice, Paris, and Vienna. Many of the "babies" she had pampered ended up with the White Army or were killed by Red troops, but the only thing that mattered to the old lady was the memory of the scarlatina, diphtheria, and colitis they suffered from when they were little.

Believe me, she is kinder than anyone who lives in this apartment. Dragin, looking intoYevgenia Nikolaevna's eyes with a man's frank and impudent gaze, would reply:.

You, comrade Shaposhnikova, have sold yourself to the Germans for living quarters. Apparently Zhenni Genrikhovna did not care for healthy children. Her favorite subject was the frailest of her charges, the son of a Jewish factory owner. She kept his drawings and notebooks and would start crying every time when she reached the part of her story where she had to describe his quiet death.

Many years had passed since she lived with the Shaposhnikovs, but she remembered all the children's nicknames and she cried when she found out about Marusya's death. She kept writing, in her uncertain hand, a letter to Aleksandra Vladimirovna, but she could never finish it.

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She called pike roe "caviare" and liked to tell Zhenya about her children's prerevolutionary breakfasts: Her own rations she fed to her cat, whom she called "my dear, silver child. Dragin kept asking her how she felt about Hitler: She was hopeless at everything. She couldn't wash clothes, couldn't cook, and when she went to the store to buy matches the busy clerk would tear off of her ration card the monthly allotments of sugar or meat.

Contemporary children in no way resembled her charges of that long-ago age that she called "peacetime. In "peacetime," little girls played hoops; they spun rubber diabolos on strings attached to lacquered sticks and played with a soft, painted ball that they carried in a white net bag. But today's children played volleyball, swam the crawl, and in the winter, dressed in ski pants, they played hockey, yelling and whistling.

They knew more than Zhenni Genrikhovna about alimony, abortion, illegally obtained certificates of employment. They knew about senior lieutenants and colonels, who brought their mistresses fats and canned food from the front. Yevgenia Nikolaevna liked it when the old German lady told stories about her own childhood—about her brother Dmitry, whom Zhenni Genrikhovna remembered particularly well on account of his whooping cough and diptheria.

outside the sphere of influence - French translation – Linguee

Monsieur was with the Finance Minister. He would pace the dining room and say, "Everything is ruined, estates are being burned, factories have stopped working, hard currency has lost its value, vaults have been robbed. Monsieur, Madame, and Mademoiselle left for Switzerland, my little boy volunteered to serve with General Kornilov, and Madame cried "We're spending entire days saying goodbye. This is the end. One evening the local policeman brought Zhenni Genrikhovna a summons.

The old German put on her hat with its white flower and asked Zhenya to feed the cat. She was going to the police, and from there to her job with the dentist lady; she promised to be back a day later. When Yevgenia Nikolaevna returned from work, she found the room in disarray.

The neighbors told her that Zhenni Genrikhovna had been taken by the police. Yevgenia Nikolaevna went to inquire about her. At the police station, she was told that the old woman was exiled to the north with a group of Germans. A day later, the police officer came with the building superintendent and removed a sealed basket of evidence: Zhenya went to the NKVD to find out how to send the old lady a warm shawl. The man behind the window asked her:. First she got one foot in, then she told the right people who the old woman was, and now she's taken over the room. A fourth voice said: The cat's fate was a sad one.

While the neighbors argued over what to do with him, he sat in the kitchen, sleepy and dispirited. Dragin unexpectedly announced that he would help feed the cat. But the cat didn't live long without Zhenni Genrikhovna. One of the women either by accident or because she was annoyed splashed boiling water on him, and he died.

For the American historian Peter Kenez, for example, the strength of the propaganda left Soviet citizens with no alternative: The increasing fragmentation of society produced by the substitution of horizontal relations that favored the exchange of ideas and opinions and the emergence of critical thought by vertical political communication, assured the success of Soviet propaganda. Although studies on propaganda generally adopted a top-down approach, research on popular opinion took place in the wake of a social history that took the opposite view. Their support was presented above all as a means to an end: Her insistence on the capacity of individuals to elaborate a critique on the basis of the very terms of the official discourse corresponds to one of the postulates of subaltern studies: Using the same archival sources, other historians tried to approach public opinion from the point of view of rumors 12 , but the limits of the svodki soon came to light as concerned knowledge of what people were thinking.

The approach of agents of the political police led to a classification of opinions in three categories: The pressure on agents to identify enemies during the epoch of repressions and to produce numbers, drove them to translate the words of the population into the language of the political police, which would have meaning for the authorities, even to invent certain remarks.

The choice of subjects for these reports was dictated by the priorities of the regime and did not necessarily coincide with what was important for individuals. Briefly, these reports said what the authorities wanted to hear and not necessarily what individuals were thinking Confronted with these obstacles, the neo-revisionists, using other sources, proposed a new explanation of the relations between the authorities and society and the mechanisms underlying the formation of public opinion.

For Kotkin, there was no alternative to this language during the inter-war period: The use of these documents also produced the effect of a magnifying glass focused on those who opposed the regime: The sole focus on opposition however, as in the work of Sarah Davies, made social links difficult to perceive. With attention focused on a resisting society, revisionist studies were incapable of explaining how and why the regime lasted. Coercion alone provided a limited explanation — if only because it was no longer as strong during the post-Stalin period.

These letters certainly give one an idea of the variety of opinions in the population, but they only document an infinitesimal part of it: The feeling of being politically engaged enough to send a letter to the authorities was not at all common to the whole of the population The German historian Jochen Hellbeck took a stand in the debate, pointing to the tendency to overestimate the importance of resistance in Soviet society — the result of projecting the liberal optic of political choice on a non-liberal society. In particular, documents written in the first person show the desire to have a Soviet biography, to be integrated into society, also the fear of being left on the sidelines of history and being crushed by it.

According to Sarah Davies, all rich peasants resisted Soviet authority, while Jochen Hellbeck claims that it was not at all uncommon for the son of a kulak to want to become a perfect Soviet citizen at all costs In asking whether the people of Magnitogorsk believed in the "truths" incessantly produced and disseminated by the Bolshevik state, he chooses an ingenious approach borrowed from the French historian Lucien Febvre.

Rather than inquiring into what members of Stalinist society believed in, he maps out the limits of unbelief- the boundaries of critical thought beyond which nobody living within the Soviet system could think. A combination of factors - such as the compelling nature of the regime's "revolutionary truth," the Stalin cult, and most important, the crisis of the capitalist world and with it, of a credible alternative to socialism - combined, according to Kotkin, to preclude the emergence of systemic unbelief toward Stalinism. Yet abandoning his methodology halfway, Kotkin falls back on a psychological, ahistorical understanding of belief.

Thus he writes of individuals "struggling" to hold to their "cherished beliefs," of their "attempts" to "convince" themselves, and of their "problems" in confusing the official, revolutionary truth with their own observational truth pp. Kotkin's distinction between "believers," "half-believers," and rare non-believers reinrroduces the possibility of an essentially pure and non-ideological subject by conceptual- izing belief as an instance of contamination by Bolshevik ideology.

The author's approach obscures the fundamental implication of all Magnitogorsk subjects in the Stalinist matrix of meaning, regardless of their beliefs.

Integrating Spheres

Even when individuals criticized the regime, the terms of their argument remained determined by the Stalinist language. Thereby they inadvertently contributed to its legitimization. Furthermore, Kotkin ignores the cases of those contemporaries who experienced their inability to accept the official truth as an instance of personal inadequacy, rather than as an indication of the system's shortcomings.

Discussing the rare instances when Magnitogorsk workers came forth publicly to criticize aspects of the Stalinist order, Kotkin writes of "moments of catharsis" p. The cathartic act, he implies, was experienced as a release of pressure accumulating in a world of deception and blatant lies. Indeed, as private diaries from the era show such moments of letting off steam and denouncing the official system of truth were not infrequent. Kotkin is correct in stating that such instances of criticism far from undermined the Stalinist system.

Indeed, they were a constitutive part thereof. Yet what Kotkin terms as moments of "catharsis" might be better understood as instances of personal crisis. Rarely, if at all, did individuals experience articulations of critical thought positively. They could not help but regard their propensity to criticism as sinful, the token of an impure soul and an impediment to salvation.

In the final analysis, Kotkin's portrayal of the subject strikes us as ahistorical. It is as if he invites the reader to project himself into the urban jungle of Magnitogorsk and identify with the protagonists. Behind this empathie narrative lurks a presupposition of a transhistorical subject with a universal response to external challenges of any sort. Taking Kotkin's agenda to its logical conclusion, it should be possible to map out the worldview of the Stalinist subject.

Private sources that have become available in recent years allow for insights into the system of values, attitudes, and emotional responses that characterized the Stalinist subject. Much more complex than the simple reaction to the ideas of the authorities or to events, public opinion should be thought of in relation to experiences of personal transformation. For historians of subjectivities, ideology is not so much imposed on society as produced by it — rather by individuals than by groups which poses a problem with Habermasian theory, in which discussions and exchanges of opinion are indispensable for the formation of public opinion.

The ideology does not pre-exist the subject: In that sense, it is constitutive of subjectivity, and appears as a vector of social inclusion, a way of thinking and acting that makes one part of a society These studies on subjectivities made it possible to transcend the State-society opposition, also to renew analysis of the mechanisms of public opinion formation.

By envisaging individuals at the crossroads of their vertical communication relations relation with official discourse and horizontal ties interpersonal correspondences , Malte Griesse, for example, showed how the exchange of letters could become a place of fermentation of criticism This kind of thinking was nonetheless criticized for its lack of capacity for generalization: Farmers whose personal diaries were found were not all working on themselves and often limited themselves to a remark or two on the weather, without wondering whether they were or not part of Soviet society Also, what about those who did not write daily?

If we assume, along with Sandro Landi 23 , that opinion can also be expressed by silence, behavior and non-verbal acts must also be taken into account. Son livre le plus connu, Die Schweigespirale: These new resources in fact constituted fertile ground for the formation of critical opinions concerning the government, and made the liberal rationale of political choice more likely. Scholars using the concept of the public sphere in their studies on Soviet-type societies tried to take these changes into account. The reception of the Habermasian theory of the public sphere by specialists of Soviet society can be seen as a huge misunderstanding.

As a result, the aim of the majority of studies is to show the gaps between historic reality and the conceptual tool forged by Habermas. This partial reading neglects the distinction made by Habermas between different types of public sphere: Despite this effort at historical classification, historians working on the USSR focus their attention only on the bourgeois public sphere, which they judge on the basis of Soviet empirical sources. They take into account neither the above classification nor the last section of the work, devoted to the decline of the bourgeois public sphere.

Either they assume it still exists in Western societies, or at best, they engage in diachronic analyses applying the model of the bourgeois public sphere to Soviet society — which is all the more surprising coming from historians who, precisely, have a tendency to find fault with philosophers for their abstract thinking, detached from local social and historical contexts. Finally, the last and most explicit symptom of this misunderstanding is that authors aiming to demonstrate that the use of the concept of the public sphere is possible for Soviet society, nonetheless take the precaution of saying that the concept has none of the characteristics of the public sphere as defined by Habermas.

Use of the concept therefore causes problems: Whatever the case may be, these studies defined the Soviet public sphere in both a narrow and a broad sense. In the latter case it refers to a multitude of practices and spaces, both formal and informal resistance niches included. As both agents and objects of official discourse, members of the public sphere during the Stalin era could not question it Habermas sums up the decomposition of Publicity thus: A priori, the observable processes in Russia after the Bolsheviks came to power present all the signs of a plebiscitary-acclamatory public sphere: One might say that the Bolsheviks did in fact plan to create a socialist public sphere with a maximum capacity for integration and that would allow all persons to participate in public debates — the place where the will of the people, which would orient political choices, would be expressed Partisans of the narrow definition consider that Stalin was able to create a new type of political public sphere, founded on forms of participation inherited from the imperial regime, and allowing him to have control over social relations — by modifying or destroying them.

In the regular meetings of the activists of Communist Youth Organizations considered a public sphere where communication played a crucial role , militants had to practice the art of Bolshevik rhetoric, to self-criticize rather than question the foundations of the policies conducted by the authorities. Physical presence that produced situated communications as in village communities played an essential role in these organizations, for which distance and depersonalization — typical features of the public sphere in a liberal democracy — were impossible.

Even the Soviet media were not distance-oriented: As places for horizontal social control, these organizations were in charge of transforming each and every individual into a conscious builder of communism and at certain periods, of dealing with deviants and non-conformists and of involving the largest possible number of Soviets in what they considered the political life of the country: However, the question of its role and precise responsibility in the repressions remains a moot point among scholars.

For some, these meetings made it possible for the authorities to better spot flaws in the system and potentially suspect persons, who then became victims of repressions. Meetings were seen as performances — performative acts for the description of reality and mobilization into action. Describing oneself as loyal to the regime meant proving it by acts: Public and the actors were a united whole — there was no place for non-engaged spectators.

Meetings were places where the abstract concepts of propaganda were filled with concrete meaning The rejection of this narrow definition is linked to a historiographic approach which does not see the evolution of the Soviet system solely in terms of political processes — in other words, the visible part of the iceberg.

Partisans of the broader definition seek to include all social manifestations of the public sphere and reason above all in terms of public spaces.