Making things political

In this short essay we focus on the everyday situations in which people politicize or depoliticize issues. By “politicizing” we mean action, collective or individual, that makes issues or identities into topics of public deliberation or contestation. Depoliticizing means making once-salient issues or identities inaccessible to deliberation or contestation. Until recently, political scientists and sociologists examining political culture have

focused either on society-wide traditions or on consciousness. Research on society-wide traditions has emphasized the role of shared values or widespread discourses of the good citizen or good society (Almond and Verba 1963; Bellah et al. 1985). Studies of consciousness have emphasized propaganda, agenda-setting, or subtle media effects (Lukes 1974; Gaventa 1980; Hall 1977; see Gramsci 1971). Both approaches, at bottom, have assumed the conventional definition of power as A’s ability to make B do something against B’s will, or to prevent B from even thinking of alternatives. Our definition of political culture, in contrast, is a communication-centered and

setting-sensitive definition. Rather than conjure up a society’s culture in general, we focus on situated communication. Rather than make individual or collective actors the subjects of politics, we focus on relationships and speech genres in settings that actors usually can recognize and “typify” already (Cicourel 1981), using their own understandings. While we could not possibly deny the horrific power of the media to convince people of half-truths, neither do we reduce political culture to ideological domination. Our research shows that people can express and think thoughts in one situation that they cannot easily express or even think in another. Similarly, we do not deny that a relatively few political and moral discourses may circulate widely in a society, but people in complex, diverse societies use them in too many different ways, in different settings, for the notion of shared traditions to be very useful for research purposes. The differences between two societies may very well be in how they distribute situations, how people learn what it is possible to say and do in a union versus a political party versus a charity group, or even in different kinds of political parties (Faucher-King 2005). Focusing on how people in various societies learn the proper etiquette for a political party versus a religious charity is different from asking how different societies create a certain kind of taken-for-granted consciousness in people. On this point our

view differs also from some uses of Foucault’s work which equate power with the creation of subjectivities, without talking about how the creation, maintenance, and transformation of identities vary from one situation to another. Rather than assuming that some issues or groups are inherently more political than

others, we call for examining how and where, if at all, people acting in concert make things political. We argue that before asking, “Who is wielding power over whom,” researchers have to take a prior step, to ask how people, groups, or institutions politicize and depoliticize issues or people. Rather than reading off amounts of power from people’s race, class, gender, or other social positions in the same way wherever the people go, and rather than assuming that these categories mean the same thing and weigh the same everywhere, we investigate how and where, if at all, inequalities are not just reproduced and transformed, but also formed in everyday interaction. We investigate how inequalities materialize differently in different everyday situations. That is why our approach to cultures of politics focuses on interaction in everyday situations, whether in institutions, formal organizations, or informal settings. With our focus on interaction, we say that cultures of politics are shared methods of

politicizing or depoliticizing. Like other cultural sociologists, we maintain a “strong” sense of culture as a relatively autonomous force in social life-symbolic patterns that cannot be explained away by relations of domination and subordination. We agree with cultural sociologists who say that symbols exert their own enabling and constraining influence on action. We depart from some cultural sociologists, however, when we follow culture’s effects all the way down to the level of everyday interaction.