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Critique of Anthropology
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DOI: 10.1177/0308275X0102100403
2001 21: 383Critique of Anthropology
Trenholme Junghans
Hungary
Marketing Selves : Constructing Civil Society and Selfhood in Post-socialist
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Marketing Selves
Constructing Civil Society and Selfhood in
Post-socialist Hungary
Trenholme Junghans
The Graduate Center of the City University of New York
Abstract Ⅲ This article examines civil society initiatives in Hungary which urge
individuals to re-make themselves as entrepreneurs and unfettered free-agents.
These projects cast the subjects of formerly state socialist regimes as prone to pessimism,
dissimulation, and manipulation, and contrast them to a valorized
‘Western’ Self. Treating these implicit classificatory schema as a species of Occidentalism,
I discuss how the Western Self has been understood as self-authoring,
in contrast to its determined Others. Among these Others were the subjects of
state socialism, figured as the products of a totalizing system. I discuss the origins
of this figuration, and draw upon Bourdieu’s work to situate the ambivalent
responses that greet civil society projects. I suggest that in the name of bridging
differences between erstwhile Cold War adversaries, civil society projects reinscribe
the transition away from state socialism as rupture rather than as continuity;
and are part of a larger project of re-imagining Selves and Others in the
post-Cold War period.
Keywords Ⅲ civil society Ⅲ Cold War Ⅲ dissimulation Ⅲ East/West Ⅲ Hungary Ⅲ
Occidentalism Ⅲ Self/Other Ⅲ totalitarianism
Introduction
The transformation of civil society from conceptual curio of philosophers
and political theorists to omnipresent catch phrase has occurred in a little
over a decade, and has much to do with the collapse of European state
socialism and the end of the Cold War. Revived initially by dissident intellectuals
in Poland and Hungary, the concept served as a touchstone for
opposition to regimes of state power which were viewed as having colonized
society (Arató, 1981). This usage emphasized the structural conditions for
the autonomy and liberty of subject citizens: the institutionalization of
democracy and ‘rule of law’ would presumably place limits on the
encroachments of state power. In this vision the project of transition away
from state socialism was a matter of recapitulating (either as belated
development or as the continuation of an interrupted project) the historical
disaggregation of power held to have occurred in Western Europe
Article
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and to have provided the conditions for individual sovereignty and self-
constitution.
Since these first stirrings civil society has gained global currency, and
is today used to advance – among other things – challenges to authoritarian
rule, demands for local autonomy, empowerment at the grassroots, and
neo-liberal agendas. While this plurality of meanings and objectives might
be viewed as following unremarkably from the conceptual richness and
semantic elasticity of the term – that is, as an instance of different projects
drawing selectively and strategically on the civil society concept’s heterogeneous
lineages – I suspect more can and should be made of this somewhat
striking variation. More specifically, although it has become
commonplace to question the utility of the concept on the grounds that it
obscures more than it elucidates, I want to suggest that the confusion
around civil society might be productive in its own right. I’ll develop this
idea in relation to civil society initiatives in Hungary.
Although the flow of civil society techniques, dispositions and outlooks
into the countries of the former Soviet Bloc is obviously linked to the collapse
of state socialism, it is also part of a larger global phenomenon. With
the advent of global neo-liberalism, bilateral aid is increasingly being channeled
through NGOs (Edwards and Hulme, 1996), and is being dispersed
in tandem with projects of institutional reform that take culture and the
activities and dispositions of individual subjects as their object. Here we can
think of two different types of initiatives, each of which represents a different
strand of the current heterogeneous civil society revival. On one hand,
we find civil society projects which promote the expression and recognition
of minority, indigenous, or local cultures, and which are usually linked with
the leftward leaning, social movements strand of the current revival (cf.
Doane; and Medeiros, this issue). On the other hand, we see a trend to treat
civil society as the core of a uniquely Euro-American cultural patrimony,
whose successful transplant is deemed to be critical, yet not equally likely
for all regions (Hall, 1998). Two commonalities unite these differently
nuanced visions. First, each is highly congruent with the diminution of state
responsibilities which stands at the heart of neo-liberal agendas. Additionally,
each appears to be implicated in the revival and politicization of an
older, highly essentialized notion of culture, as content rather than process.
In Hungary these two disparate strands of the civil society revival intertwine
in interesting ways. Initiatives undertaken in the name of civil society
often aim both to liberate entrepreneurial energies and patterns of grassroots
association that were allegedly suppressed under nearly 50 years of
state socialism, and to reorient the behavioral and conceptual repertoires
in which the negative legacy of state socialism presumably persists. Put differently,
they often put forth a message which simultaneously emphasizes
the need for self-expression and self-actualization, and the need for conversion,
or radical self-reform. This paradoxical message commands a
certain authority, yet also violates a good deal of common sense.
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In what follows I will discuss some of the ways in which this contradictory
message comes to be articulated, together with the distinctly ambivalent
responses that greet it. In so doing I will suggest that the conjuncture
of persuasion and skepticism is an important effect of civil society projects
in East Central Europe, and can be usefully explored with reference to the
work of Pierre Bourdieu. While a detailed review of Bourdieu’s work is well
beyond the scope of this article, a highly synoptic discussion will provide
context for my analysis and an overview of my argument.
The poor logic of civil society
In his model of social reproduction, Bourdieu identifies different forms of
capital, among them economic, cultural, social, and symbolic capital.
Capital can be converted from one form to another, and in its totality has
a tendency ‘to reproduce itself in identical or expanded form . . . [and] to
persist in its being’ (Bourdieu, 1986: 241). Although social inequalities are
patterned according to the differential accumulation of capital, they tend
to be misrecognized, or regarded as natural. The benefits that accrue to
holders of cultural capital in particular are commonly thought to do so
spontaneously, as if flowing from possessors’ natural attributes:
[Cultural capital] manages to combine the prestige of innate property with the
merits of acquisition . . . [and is predisposed] to be unrecognized as capital and
recognized as legitimate competence, as authority exerting an effect of
(mis)recognition. (Bourdieu, 1986: 245)
Generally speaking conversions among different forms of capital produce
and reinforce the habitus, often glossed by Bourdieu as durable dispositions,
or socially constituted cognitive capacities (Bourdieu, 1977, 1986).
The misrecognition of capital’s circulation and accumulation is
enhanced by the operation of ‘poor logic’, which Bourdieu posits as an
axiomatic feature of everyday perception. Poor logic
. . . is able to organize all thoughts, perceptions and actions by means of a few
generative principles, which are closely interrelated and constitute a practically
integrated whole, only because . . . [poor logic] presupposes a sacrifice of rigor
for the sake of simplicity and generality. . . . (Bourdieu, 1990: 86)
Poor logic uses analogy and homology to generate resemblances and
associations which ‘are interchangeable in practice’, and united by a
‘fuzzy coherence [which] cannot withstand the test of logical criticism’
(Bourdieu, 1990: 87).1 Particular resemblances and associations generated
by poor logic, however illogical according to formal logic, become conventionalized
in historically specific contexts, that is, in relation to particular
instantiations of power (Bourdieu, 1990: 97).
Despite criticisms that this model comprises a tautological construct
which cannot capture processes of social contestation and change, I will
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argue that the model is useful – albeit indirectly – for understanding the
transitional circumstances of East Central Europe. With the destabilization
of established power relations in the region, we stand to catch a glimpse of
economies of practice in the re-making. Bourdieu’s figuration of misperceptions
about capital is suggestive of how civil society projects are insinuated
in the emergence of new economies of practice. If as a general
proposition capital is ‘a force inscribed in the objectivity of things so that
everything is not equally possible or impossible’ (Bourdieu, 1986: 241–2),
it nonetheless circulates and reproduces in ways which create a perception of
endless possibility.
Roulette . . . gives a fairly accurate image of this imaginary universe of perfect
equality of opportunity, a world without inertia, without accumulation . . . in
which every moment is perfectly independent of the previous one, every soldier has a
marshal’s baton in his knapsack, and every prize can be attained, instantaneously,
by everyone, so that at each moment anyone can become anything.
(Bourdieu, 1986: 241, emphasis added)
As we’ll see, in the name of building liberal democracy civil society promoters
likewise insist that ‘at each moment anyone can become anything’.
In so doing they present two contradictory visions of limitless individual
choice and agency. On one hand, this vision of infinite possibility is represented
as following from a rupture between the present (post-socialist)
moment and the previous (socialist) one; yet on the other hand, such individual
optimism is also presented as being the condition for severing a
tainted socialist past from a promising liberal future. In sum, the new, normatively
vaunted free subject is represented at once as both cause and effect.
These propositions belong to liberal capitalism’s own repertoire of conventionalized
misrecognition, particularly as articulated during the Cold
War. In this way the civil society vision can be regarded as ‘poor logic’ in
Bourdieu’s sense, that is, at least until it is translated into the post-socialist
context, where its fuzziness is all too apparent. Despite the interest and
attention commanded by the invitation to re-make oneself as a self-actualizing
agent, such messages also attract skepticism vis-à-vis common sense
understandings about what is possible and proper. If the promotion of civil
society is implicated in the emergence of a new habitus, its contours might
best be sought in the simultaneous yet disjunctive effects of persuasion and
incoherence these initiatives are producing.
Marketing civil society in Hungary
I conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Szeged, Hungary over a two-year
period in the mid-1990s, and during numerous shorter visits to the country
beginning in 1989. Szeged lies in the country’s southeast, within 20 miles
of the Romanian and Serbian borders. With a population of approximately
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175,000, it is the fourth largest city in Hungary. Historically Szeged has
been the economic and cultural center of the southern Great Plain, and
today has a diversified economy based on light industry, agriculture and
services. Home to numerous educational institutions, an opera and theater,
the town has long prided itself on a certain provincial gentility. As in much
of the country, privatization has spawned new entrepreneurial opportunities
and has hastened processes of accumulation and differentiation.
Additionally, since the mid-1990s the town has increasingly been regarded
by domestic and international capital as an attractive base from which to
spread east and south.
In Szeged, as in the rest of Hungary, many different types of initiatives
are advanced and sheltered under the rubric of ‘civil society’. This is, in
part, a matter of semantics: the term for civil society in Hungarian (polgári
társadalom) is much like the German bürgerliche Gesellschaft in its range of
connotations. The adjective for ‘civil’ (polgári) conveys both the sense of
citoyen and bourgeois, and thus simultaneously nods in the direction of the
political and the economic. As in the German, the term in Hungarian can
signal an emphasis on guarantees of associational activity and political participation,
and on liberal economics.2 This semantic breadth was reflected
in the wide array of initiatives in Szeged identified with civil society. Accordingly,
in my first efforts to learn about the activities that were occurring in
the name of civil society I cast a wide net, canvassing people involved in nonprofit
ventures (typically with foreign funding), profit-oriented management
consultancies, and grassroots citizen groups concerned with the
quality of local life and government. In all, I examined seven initiatives
which identified themselves with civil society.
The leading figures across this seemingly diverse spectrum of initiatives
turned out to be comprised of a small cadre of individuals, with the majority
playing leadership roles in at least two or more of the local projects
identified with civil society. This fluidity of personnel was matched by a
marked fungibility of resources: outside funding earmarked for retraining
projects and the support of grassroots citizens’ initiatives was often channeled
by way of the private ventures of local entrepreneurs. These entrepreneurs
attracted both outside funding and their private clienteles on the
basis of claims to be experts in the teaching of ‘civic’ techniques. Moreover,
the leading figures in these initiatives traced their own involvements to
prior participation in civic training projects, or to educational or business
experience in Western Europe or the United States.
A few features of this picture suggested that mastery of the language,
outlooks and practices promoted in the name of civil society could be usefully
viewed as an important new form of cultural capital.3 Once mastered,
such techniques and dispositions seemed to enhance – at least for a lucky
few – access to other resources, especially (though not exclusively) those
flowing from international sources. By the mid- to late-1990s it appeared as
if the flow of substantial amounts of foreign aid was being mediated by a
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small number of individuals who had been among the first recipients of cultural
and educational support in the years immediately preceding and
following 1989. Although it seemed to me that auspicious timing was the
most important factor in constituting this small cadre as privileged financial
and cultural intermediaries – a matter of getting in on the bottom, as
it were – their own personal narratives and professional self-presentations
emphasized their mastery of ‘civic’ techniques, outlooks, and dispositions
in explaining their success.4 To summarize: it appeared as if certain actors
were able to reap disproportionate benefits from civil society techniques
and dispositions on account of the early timing of their primitive accumulation.
Yet their ability to maximize returns on these assets depended on
disseminating the message that their successes were subject to transmission,
imitation, and reproduction.
Viewed as a potential form of cultural capital, civil society techniques
and dispositions are still nascent and unstable, because their reproduction
is not yet stabilized and automatic. According to Bourdieu, part of the specificity
of cultural capital relates to the fact that its convertibility to economic
capital is not readily apparent; rather, the benefits that accrue to its possessors
are thought to do so naturally (Bourdieu, 1984). In Szeged, however,
claimants to this new, potential form of cultural capital seemed to be
actively involved in maximizing returns on their civil society assets, and in
covering the paths whereby civil society expertise could translate into
material gain. In some cases a single individual’s participation in more than
one venture was common knowledge, but in others it was distinctly shadowed,
and disclosed only in gossip. In one instance this was clearly a matter
of keeping under wraps the fact that private business agendas were being
advanced through civic fora; in another the discretion seemed motivated
by the desire to maintain eligibility for funding earmarked for non-profit
purposes.
If civil society promoters seemed to be actively interested in sheltering
from public view the precise channels through which their expertise could
be converted into profit, so too was their message often notably opaque on
the precise means by which a ‘civic’ world view and style of comportment
could translate into material success and general well-being. Let’s take the
example of a weekend seminar offered to ‘new entrepreneurs’ at a privately
owned consulting firm in Szeged which also received funding from the European
Union to sponsor retraining programs. Participants had paid a hefty
sum to attend a workshop led by an American entrepreneur who had set up
his own consulting business in Budapest. The American had a perfectly
choreographed routine: standing in front of his audience of approximately
50 people, microphone in hand, he preached the gospel of how to be a
‘winner’. His full-time translator, also with microphone, was in perfect sync:
Don’t sell a bad product, because it’s too complicated. It’s a bad way to do
business because you fool yourself as well as the customer. As winners we want
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to get away from complication; we want only simplicity and truth. This will give
you a large income and also make you sleep better at night.
Winners are likable. This means extroversion: we like people who like others.
We don’t just pretend; we genuinely like people because it is too complicated to
pretend. We like other people because we decide to like them.
The fact that efforts to transmit the civic virtues of transparency,
honesty and generalized trust can eventuate in such familiar banalities
follows – in part – from the sociology of the large institutions from which
they issue, and from their exploitability by entrepreneurs. At a distant
remove from their international points of origin, and perhaps by virtue of
the fact that civil society projects seem to channel funding much more efficiently
than they do any coherent program and detailed vision of
implementation (Wedel, 2000), their assimilation of (or reduction to) selfhelp
programs is hardly surprising. At the same time, however, such familiar
and commodified techniques gain a different resonance when
translated into the post-socialist context, and circulated under the banner
of civil society.
In addition to making overt prescriptions, these discourses also both
grow out of and become vehicles for communicating implicit classificatory
schema. These implicit features are genealogically related to Cold War-era
discursive regimes which defined oppositions between a totalitarian socialist
Other and the democratic Self. A mapping of some of these genealogical
ties will permit a better understanding of the meanings and effects of
civil society discourses and projects in the post-socialist context.
The Totalitarian Other
With varying emphases Western commentators have often read subjects of
state socialist regimes as prone to dissimulating behavior, as conducting
themselves ritualistically as opposed to spontaneously, and as favoring
masks over ‘sincerity’ and ‘real’ expression. In a 1974 essay political scientist
Ken Jowitt claimed that dissimulating practices and orientations were
typical adaptive responses to a regime that sought to penetrate and politicize
all areas of life. Based on ‘fear and avoidance’, dissimulation is ‘ “deceptive
manipulation”, the conscious adoption of false appearances’ (Jowitt,
1974: 1184). Jowitt views dissimulation as,
. . . the posture, response, and strategy that integrates [public and private
arenas]. In such a society, one often finds a highly calculative and selective
recognition of regime authority. This stance takes the form, not so much of
political opposition, as of a strong anti-political privatism in which family and
personal interests are emphasized at the expense of regime and societal
interests. (Jowitt, 1974: 1184)
Similarly, Jowitt posited in a 1992 volume:
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As I argued eighteen years ago, dissimulation becomes the effective (and
ethically as well as politically debilitating) bond between the domineering
official and societal supplicant during the entire period of Leninist rule. For
four decades, dissimulation became the central feature of the population’s
(misre)presentation of its public or, better, visible self. Dissimulation reflected
the fear and avoidance responses of a subordinate population. . . . (Jowitt,
1992: 288)
In their well-received 1992 ethnography of Hungarian steel workers,
Burawoy and Lukács present a much more sympathetic reading of ‘dissimulation’
as tactical resistance (as opposed to Jowitt’s symptomatic pathology).
The authors adopt the phrase ‘painting socialism’ to convey how
socialist workers experienced the ideological exhortations they were routinely
subjected to as transparently artificial – as efforts to ‘paint’ reality in
ways that bore scant resemblance to lived experience. According to the
authors the overtness of these official representations bred in state socialism’s
subjects a capacity to distinguish between ‘ideology’ and ‘reality’
which eludes the subjects of capitalist regimes:
Within state socialism . . . people live in two worlds: an ideological world and a
lived world. But they are both real. What is clear is the contrast between these
worlds. State socialism engenders a heightened consciousness of the discrepancy
between ideology and reality, between proclamation and experience,
between the affirmation of justice, democracy, and efficiency and the ubiquity
of injustice, dictatorship, and inefficiency. (Burawoy and Lukács, 1992: 82–3)
Hence, even as dissimulation is recast in a heroic light, it remains a defining
mark of difference between subjects of socialist and capitalist regimes.
The conceptual template of radical difference was echoed in the
formulations of the civil society promoters I interacted with. This typically
involved a diagnosis of the ills of post-socialist society, and the claim that
individuals and organizational patterns required drastic change in order to
overcome a debilitating legacy. Among the most common contrasts put
forth in the name of civil society were those between altruism and selfishness;
positive and negative attitudes; transparency over deception; and even
attentiveness to interpersonal etiquette and personal hygiene as opposed
to their neglect.
This dichotomized rendering of a socialist self requiring reform on one
hand, and the valorized subject of a new order on the other, was somewhat
at odds with the vernacular common sense of the people to whom it was
addressed. Everyday understandings seemed to discern a common Europeanness
where the civil society vision posited essential difference. By the
same token, the civil society vision of a necessary rupture between past and
future stood in pointed contrast to everyday understandings of the temporal
and spatial contiguity of ‘Central’ and ‘Western’ Europe. If civil
society discourses suggested that individuals needed to apply themselves to
programs of self-improvement to cross a great divide, common sense proposed
that arrival was just around the corner. Despite uncertainty about
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which portal would lead to the promised land, there was little doubt about
its imminent accessibility. Ironically, the very notion that the gap to be
bridged was slight – a matter of acquiring a foreign language, getting the
right job break or sending a child abroad – also informed a widespread
interest in and receptivity to these various ‘civil’ initiatives.
Is it possible that the same common sense which predisposes actors to
attend to civil society messages in the first place might itself be undergoing
a shift in response to civil society initiatives? Are hopes and desires, and
everyday theorizations of how social change occurs, being rearticulated in
light of a new and authoritative vision which is imprinted with the implicit
classificatory schema of civil society discourses? While a definitive answer to
these questions is beyond the scope of my ethnographic research, I do want
to suggest that certain features of the civil society project might work in this
direction. Specifically, I suggest the possibility that ‘transition’ itself is being
reinscribed as rupture rather than continuity, and that folk notions of
causality and agency might be undergoing modification in the process.
From Totalitarian Other to market winner
The classificatory regimes which provide the rationale and define the
urgency for civil society’s export to the countries of the former socialist bloc
might be usefully viewed as a species of Occidentalism. James Carrier has
neatly described Occidentalism as the implicit self-imaginings by which the
West understands itself in dialectical contrast to its Others (Carrier, 1992).
Cold War-era discourses diagnosed the otherness of the subjects of state
socialist regimes in terms of their alleged inclination to selfishness, calculation,
and dissimulation. While this figuration of the Other gains explicit
definition in relation to the ‘system’ of ‘Leninist Rule’, it also comprises a
caricatured representation of responses to tensions endemic to liberalism
and market culture. These tensions concern the possibility of harmonizing
the particular and the universal; reconciling self-interest with a greater
good; and the relation between underlying motives and outward appearances.
In the figure of the Totalitarian Other, the tensions themselves are
resituated; more specifically, their vexing persistence in the ‘West’ fades
from view. A backward glance will remind us just how persistent, intractable,
and culturally salient these tensions have been in the ‘West’.
The emergence of the idea of civil society in the Scottish Enlightenment
was coincident with the disruptions of market expansion, which
rendered newly problematic relations between ‘the private and the public,
the individual and the social, public ethics and individual interests, individual
passions and public concerns’ (Seligman, 1992: 5). According to
Adam Seligman, the concept’s original promise of resolution rested on
assumptions that no longer obtain in the modern world: 18th-century concepts
of moral affections, natural sympathy and the mutuality of individual
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recognition provided an inner-worldly basis for the legitimation of private
interests. Moreover, insofar as the concept of civil society is identified with
North American political traditions, it owes a substantial debt to ascetic
Protestantism, by way of ‘a new vision of the individual as a moral and autonomous
agent . . . linked to . . . [the] introjection of grace within the orders
of the world’ (Seligman, 1992: 71). For Seligman, today’s civil society revival
is a dead end, precisely because there is nothing to stand in the place of
grace; that is, nothing to avert the problem of authorizing oneself as a moral
agent.
At a later moment the Scottish thinkers’ understanding of the arena of
exchange (and with it civil society) as an ethical arena predicated on mutual
recognition gave way to a heightened concern about the problematic space
between outward appearances and underlying motives: can an apparent
coincidence of interest be trusted, or does seeming mutuality mask darker
motives? This increasingly acute anxiety is nicely personified in that quintessential
figure of the 19th-century American imagination, Melville’s Confidence
Man: the con-man who could win a stranger’s trust by ‘sincere’
avowals of his own sterling character, only to take advantage of his trusting
new acquaintance. The danger represented by this figure’s duplicity and
hypocrisy was related to the early American elevation of sincerity to the status
of core civic virtue. Underlying this danger is an inherent instability in the
opposition between ‘reality’ and ‘appearance’, or ‘being’ and ‘seeming’. In
the words of one present-day Melville scholar:
In a society where self-authoring is as common as self-parenting – people
choose their parts then write their lines – there is no longer any source of
reliable authorization or legitimation . . . [a]ll evidence about, emanating
from, other people is potentially suspect, synthetic, improvised. . . . Just who and
how much is to be trusted? There are no self-authenticating signs; but signs are
all we have. (Tanner, 1989: xxviii–xxix)
With the collapse of state socialism, and the privatization and welfare
state contraction which have followed in its wake, the tensions presented
here might reasonably be expected to intensify. Yet today’s civil society programs
often locate such tensions in the past rather than in the present, and
dismiss them by prescriptive fiat. Quoting again from the civil society entrepreneur
I cited above:
Winners always work for something bigger than themselves. We all know
someone who works only for himself. Only thinking about yourself is bad
business; if someone really cares about himself, he cares about others, because
this has a good impact on your own income and well being.
Not only are self-interest and the common good posited to be potentially
convergent rather than conflictual, their potential synthesis is situated in
the domain of individual agency and choice (‘we like people because we
decide to like them’). To reject this recipe for self-actualization is to align
oneself with the negativity of the socialist past, and to miss the train to a
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shining future, as it were. Skepticism about the techniques being promoted
in the name of civil society becomes evidence of the problem that needs to
be fixed, a symptom of the malaise that requires a cure. In the context of
the imperative to remake oneself as a ‘winner’, failure to realign oneself
accordingly makes one a willful loser. Additionally, the entrepreneur’s
narrative presents adoption of the techniques he is promoting as both the
mark and the means of an individual’s achievement of the moral and material
bounties associated with the move away from state socialism. Much as was
the case for Weber’s Puritans, to act ‘as if’ is the best means of coping with
uncertainty as to whether or not one is among the elect. As in 17th-century
New England, in the new markets of Central Europe confidence substitutes
for certainty. The hutzpah that was dissimulation now becomes grace.
Another ethnographic vignette will highlight the ways in which this prescription
to conduct oneself as a self-actualizing agent can be problematic.
I first met Ildikó in New York in 1994 when she was visiting the US as a participant
in a two-year pilot program based in Budapest, whose goal was to
train an initial cadre of Hungarian experts in the ways of NGOs. The
program had been conceived by two Americans, who then received funding
from an American foundation. The two had proposed that indigenous
NGOs (defined in this vision to include everything from hobby clubs to new
social movements) could play a pivotal role in the building of a vibrant new
civil society in the wake of socialism’s collapse. Twelve trainees had been
competitively selected, and the vision was that after two years of intensive
training and activity in Hungary and abroad, the two American program
organizers could depart, having seeded the terrain of civil society with
twelve experts to continue their work.
Ildikó was serious, ambitious, and initially very enthusiastic. With time,
however, she became disillusioned. In her opinion all that the two program
organizers had to teach her had been imparted early on, and in Ildikó’s
estimation it fell far short of what she would need to know to do her future
work effectively. Yet when she expressed her sense of unpreparedness and
her desire to acquire more technical expertise, her mentors simply told her
not to worry, to ‘just give it a shot’. This was very offensive to her; as if she
were being instructed to pretend to an expertise, to stake a claim to power
that she did not in fact possess. Additionally, with time the dissatisfaction
of the trainees was compounded by suspicion that the whole program had
been dreamt up as a two-year boondoggle for the organizers.
This example suggests that civil society projects provide a discursive
interface which is articulating exchanges between indigenous subjects of
the ‘transitions’ and powerful foreign interests and actors, and is performing
a gate-keeping function. These initiatives also promote new styles which
simultaneously prescribe their own means of naturalization; put more bluntly, they
promise to be auto-actualizing. Taking the two examples I’ve given the
message is something to the effect of ‘Don’t scheme! Don’t pretend! Don’t
worry, just be!’ or ‘The best way to guarantee your self-interest is to pretend
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you have none’. Yet this can come across as an invitation to traffic in fictitious
cultural capital. Hence, whereas Ildikó understood success in the
field of NGOs to depend on mastery of a constituted and recognized body
of knowledge, her American counterparts seemed to suggest that it was
rather their own techniques of spontaneity and improvisation which
needed to be imitated.
The imperative to conduct oneself as a self-actualizing agent, or to
abandon concerns about what guarantees one’s expertise is, in a sense, the
imperative to regard oneself as an uncaused cause.5 Yet there is something
intrinsically paradoxical about making prescriptive propositions about
causality: whereas prescription falls within the domain of the normative
‘ought’, causality is situated in the realm of the descriptive ‘is’. On what
grounds does one jettison existing rules of causality that are understood to
obtain quite independently of individual choice or agency? How does one
constitute oneself as self-constituting?6 Since its inception in the 18th
century, the concept of civil society has addressed itself to this same
problem, and has been crucially implicated in the figuration of Occidental
subjects as self-constituting agents. Moreover, this figuration has gained
definition and coherence in contrast to the Occident’s determined Others,
among them the Totalitarian Other.
The origins and Totalitarianism
As a trope of Occidentalism, civil society has helped to tell the story of how
Western individuals have come into being as sovereign and self-constituting.
In very general terms, this is the familiar story of the fragmentation of
absolute power, a process which comes to be institutionalized in conjunction
with the differentiation of state, economy, and society, and with the
emergence of distinct public and private spheres, and new organizations of
the self. In this origin myth,7 historically determined processes precipitate
entities notably freed of the determining influences which have called them
into being. Thus, it is an origin myth which erases any fixed point of origin:
a genealogy of autogenesis, autochthony, self-creation.8
The genealogy of the Occidental self as uncaused cause is necessarily
elusive, and has hitherto been legible largely in relation to its Others, most
recently the Totalitarian Other. The circumstances of the Cold War urged
the classification of Soviet regimes as radically Other. Transposed in a particular
fashion, elements of the civil society story qua Occidental origin
myth would accomplish this, in the modeling of ‘totalitarian’ social formations.
This becomes more clear if we note differences between
modernization theory of the post-war period and the concurrently emergent
model of totalitarianism. If modernization theory was quite adept at
‘othering’ its objects, it did so in essentially evolutionary terms, leaving open
the possibility of ‘underdeveloped’ societies eventually converging with
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those of the modernized, industrialized West. Totalitarian societies on the
other hand were held to be radically Other, having different laws of physics
as it were. According to Stark and Nee:
In its classic expression, the totalitarian model portrayed the Leninist party as
bent on establishing total control over Soviet society through mass terror and
party-dominated hierarchies, destroying the boundaries between state and
society and eliminating any autonomous social institutions and processes.
(Stark and Nee, 1989: 3)
If modernization theory maintained the unity of the myth of autogenesis,
preserving both of its moments (determination and self-constitution)
through an emphasis on the gradual, dialectical processes by which social
formations resolve into self-constituting entities and individuals, the totalitarian
model sunders the myth’s two moments. Put somewhat differently,
whereas modernization theory subsumes the logical contradiction or
moment of rupture, the totalitarian model hypostatizes the two moments,
reifying them as two distinctly constituted and antithetical social formations.
In much the same way that an earlier anthropology distinguished
‘cold’ societies (locked into ritualized structures of repetition, kin ordered,
or characterized by a unity of base and superstructure, depending on authorial
orientation), likewise the exercise of power in totalitarian regimes was
held to be all determining. Following from this, the dispositions and orientations
of subjects of these regimes were seen to be directly conditioned
behaviors, adaptive reflexes, and hence both reflective and reinforcing of
the system’s totalizing logic. The model (like its supposed referent) made
objects of these subjects, viewing them as capable only of behavior and not
action, much as anthropology’s simpletons were denied the power to ‘make
their own history’ (cf. Wolf, 1982).
It might appear somewhat strange then that the totalitarian model also
spawned such a highly moralizing discourse not only about the ‘system’, but
about its subjects as well. Viewed as thoroughly conditioned, we might
expect that such subject/objects would be spared moral evaluation.
Perhaps this blurring of the evaluative and the descriptive should not be
seen so much as contravening the logic of the classificatory regimes I’ve
been discussing, but rather as being among their more significant effects.
I’ve suggested ways in which current invitations to realize oneself as an
uncaused cause demand a blurring of common sense boundaries between
the ‘is’ and the ‘ought’. Yet they also root their authority in classificatory
schema which code the descriptive ‘is’ and prescriptive ‘ought’ as separate
and distinct in relation to two antithetically imagined regimes. The determined
Other can be described; the originless Self has only a free future,
which also constitutes his authority to prescribe. The Other is describable
by virtue of his determined status, which also defines his lack of legitimate
authority to prescribe.9 Prescription by the Totalitarian Other lacks
legitimate authority precisely because it is pre-scripted: not only does the
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Totalitarian Other perform according to the script of his self-interest; the
fact that he does so is scripted by the ‘system’. He is a performer rather than
an actor, a cipher and not an agent.
At the same time that the civil society projects I’ve described root their
moral authority in the fixity of the opposition between determined objects
and self-constituting subjects, their prescriptions collapse the distinction: the
ability to be an authentic, self-actualizing agent becomes a matter of choice.
Civil society promoters often make the repudiation of common sense notions
of determination a matter of moral urgency. This presents a paradox to
common sense: on one hand the need for transformation is defined with
reference to subjects’ allegedly determined status; they are Other by virtue
of being objects rather than free subjects. And yet their transcendence of
Otherness is presented as a matter of willfully denying the power of determinations.
Like Dorothy in Oz, the subjects of formerly state socialist regimes
are now told that they have had the power to return ‘home’ all along.
Will the contours of a new habitus be discernible in the form of a disorientation
and uncertainty with respect to what was once taken for
granted? Is it possible that the logical implausibility of doctrines of personal
agency and self-determination could produce effects different from the
ones they insist on? This would be something like the reverse of the Protestant
paradox studied by Weber. Weber of course applied himself to
mapping the means by which the Calvinist doctrine of pre-destination could
yield, in the words of historian Thomas Haskell, ‘the heightened sense of
personal agency and obligation to grasp opportunity and construct the
future that characterized the capitalist entrepreneur’ (Haskell, 1996: 471).
Weber’s analysis demonstrated that the logical implications of pre-destination
were overshadowed by the psychological implications, which pointed in
the opposite direction:
The logical impossibility of ascertaining one’s own state of grace with certainty
made self-surveillance all the more important and supplied believers with an
unparalleled psychological incentive to become self-conscious, self-monitoring
agents, who conceived of their lives as careers extending from past to present
to future and who constantly adjusted their conduct so as to bring about the
closest possible fit between present intentions and future consequences. . . .
(Haskell, 1996: 473)
It is tempting to wonder if civil society’s prescriptive emphasis on personal
agency, freedom from determination, and the obligation to actively
construct one’s personal future could reorient (and diminish) agents’
sense of their ability to control the future. Similarly, the suggestion that
agents ought to regard themselves as ‘uncaused causes’ might reorient a
sense of time. Just as every new moment is severed from the determinations
of the previous one, so might the future be severed from the present. (In
this connection we can recall Ildikó’s anxiety about projecting herself into
the future with too much certainty, and her mentor’s advice to ‘just give it
a shot’.)
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While disorientation and uncertainty are often assumed to follow ‘naturally’
from the fact of these regime changes, civil society projects might
unwittingly contribute to the production of disorientation and uncertainty.
Civil society initiatives not only provide institutional and discursive interfaces
in encounters between ‘East’ and ‘West’; in so doing they are also
critically implicated in the production of the very oppositions which give
coherence to ‘transition’ as rupture, and hence to the need for mediation.
In short, civil society initiatives are involved in producing the conditions of
their own necessity.
New Others for a ‘new world order’?
With the collapse of state socialism, former subjects of these regimes now
seem to be regarded as something of an internal Other: needing tutelage
in the ways of civil society, yet having a potential that needs only be cultivated.
Strikingly, whereas the civil Self was once identifiable by its freedom
from determinations and the absence of origins, since 1989 we seem to be
witnessing a newly emphatic concern with cultural origins in identifying the
civil Self. The sociologist John Hall has recently argued that the possibility
of self-fashioning is a defining attribute of civil society, and yet that civil
society remains foreign to the ‘ideological repertoires’ of most ‘nonWestern
civilizations’:
Positively put, a civil society is one in which individuals have the chance of at
least trying to create their own selves. . . . Further, there is likely to be an
elective affinity between civil society and fashion: for all the pretensions to
which the latter can be prone, it remains the area in which many can experiment
with and try on new conceptions of their selves. (Hall, 1998: 33)
Non-Western civilizations do not have the ideal [of civil society] at the centre
of their ideological repertoires, and anyway face social problems likely to rule
out of court softer social and political life. Civil society is unlikely to spread
outside parts of Central Europe and Latin America. (Hall, 1998: 41)
Just when Central Europeans are being told that what was once dissimulation
– deceptive and manipulative self-invention – is now legitimate
self-actualization, a new group of Others is being defined according to a
‘civilizationally’ determined inability to self-invent, legitimately or otherwise.
Yesterday’s dissimulation is now recuperated as the irritating but
healthy pretense of fashion, and redeemed in relation to civilizations whose
‘cultural repertoires’ will not permit change. In the era of neo-liberalism,
the potential to achieve civil society appears to be a kind of means-testing
for entitlements in the New World Order.
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Notes
Research for this article was supported by IREX and the Wenner-Gren Foundation
for Anthropological Research. I am grateful for the comments and suggestions of
Jonathan Hearn, Carmen Medeiros, and Jeffrey Murer.
1 For example ‘man : woman :: sun : moon’ which can in turn yield ‘hot : cold ::
male : female :: day : night :: etc.’ (Bourdieu, 1990: 88).
2 See Szelényi (1988: 50–4 ) for an extended discussion of the nuances of the
Hungarian term over time.
3 Beyond being convertible into other forms of capital, the following attributes
of cultural capital are relevant in this connection. First, cultural capital is best
measured in relation to the amount of time required for its acquisition (Bourdieu,
1986: 244). Correlatively, cultural capital cannot be transferred instantaneously
(‘unlike money, property rights, or even titles of nobility’ [Bourdieu, 1986:
245]). Finally, the bearer of cultural capital displays a distance (both objective
and subjective) from necessity; cultural capital manifests itself as ‘practice without
practical function’ (Bourdieu, 1984: 54).
4 A fuller consideration of the ways in which civil society assets might be
operating as cultural capital would necessarily involve more comprehensive
research into the backgrounds of beneficiaries, especially in relation to their
holdings of various types of assets under socialism and in the pre-socialist
period (see Szelényi and Szelényi, 1995).
5 The term is Thomas Haskell’s (1996).
6 The historian Thomas Haskell’s reflections on the problem of the uncaused
cause are highly suggestive for thinking about the consequences flowing from
different styles of causal attribution:
Tacit imputations of causation enable us to make the distinctions we
depend on every day between innocence and complicity, originality and
imitation, spontaneity and deliberateness, exploitation and just compensation,
accident and design. Perceptions of causal relations permeate
everything we think, say, or do, and it could not be otherwise for the rules
of causal attribution are, after all, the rules of change itself; of being and
nonbeing, of how things come into, and go out of, existence. All our
judgments, moral and factual alike, depend on deciding what is a cause,
what is an effect. . . . How we distinguish one link in a chain or network of
cause-and-effect connections . . . holds immense practical significance for
the interpretation of human affairs. Indeed, in this regard the rules of the
attributive game, by allocating causation between the self and the circumstances
that impinge on it, quite literally constitute personhood. (Haskell,
1996: 443–4)
7 I’m indebted to Hefner’s (1998) suggestion that civil society debates be read
in relation to a mythic charter of Occidental origins, though my emphases here
are rather different from his.
8 This myth finds some of its most cogent and authoritative statements in social
scientific discourse; reciprocally it is also central to the coherence of the latter,
meaning that its traces pervade the knowledge produced by these disciplines.
Indeed, this is so much so that the two are hardly separable; many of the
organizing polarities of social science – gemeinschaft/gesellschaft (Tönnies);
mechanic/organic (Durkheim); hot/cold (Lévi-Strauss) – might be seen as
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transformations of the two moments of the myth, that is, determination and
self-constitution.
9 In his reflections on ‘the hermeneutic stakes’ of contemporary civil society
debates, Keith Tester makes a similar point:
To talk of civil society has conventionally meant to distinguish the milieu
of free humanity from the milieu of reification produced either by nature
or the state. Both of these sites of external authority were the ‘Other’ of
civil society. In these terms, to be human was to be defining rather than defined.
(Tester, 1992: 11, emphasis added)
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Ⅲ Trenholme Junghans is a PhD candidate in cultural anthropology at the Graduate
Center of the City University of New York. Her research concerns changing
regimes of power in the regions of the former Soviet bloc, with a particular
focus on Hungary. Address: 910 Riverside Drive, 6A, New York, NY 10032, USA.
[email: tjunghans1@aol.com]
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