Foto-electrólisis: Fundamentos

The concept of the consensus object derives from my observation of

similarities between the consensus movements that arose in the United States Consensus Object (Like Us) Risk Object (Them) Boundary Object

(Both similar to and different from us)

administration in 2004. It is informed by, and builds upon, the critical theory of

Lofland (1993), and to a lesser extent, that of Hollander (1991). Both authors

are sceptical of attempts to harness the sister city model to express dissent for

U.S. foreign policies during the Cold War period. Hollander (1991) is entirely

dismissive of such endeavours, branding them expressions of a left-wing

‘adversary culture’ that routinely and naively adopts an oppositional stance to

U.S. national foreign policy. While disagreeing with his normative framing, I

find value in Hollander’s critique of the inattention paid by Cold War sister

city ‘activists’ to the significant ideological and structural obstacles that existed

at the time to meaningful communication between the residents of American

and Soviet cities. For Hollander (1991), assertions of sisterly solidarity

between populations governed by warring or otherwise conflicted macro-

political entities, based on similarities as generic as the sizes of their respective

cities or their shared hopes for a safe future for their children, border on the

surreal. In their determination to remain apolitical, thereby avoiding conflict of

any kind, Cold War citizen diplomats, he claims, confined their conversations

to innocuous topics such as foodways, families and sport. More to the point in

enactments of U.S-Soviet sister city relationships, argues Hollander, were

absent correspondences in political ideologies and enabling civil structures that

could have supported productive dialogue on topics more pertinent to the

project of averting nuclear war.

Lofland (1993) takes a similar position, but defends it with an empirically

grounded and more extensively theorised analysis of U.S.-Soviet and other

peace-focused sister city relationships of the 1980s. For Lofland (1993), sister

timid politics” that he categorises as ‘consensus movements’. Consensus

movements are “a way of safely posturing as social movements without the

problems of real conflict that genuine – that is, conflict movements – engender.

Consensus movements are subterfuge conflict movements; they are derailed

dissent, and the disguised rebellions of timid rebels” (1993:163). Lofland goes

on to identify common features which helped to sustain sister city relationships

as a consensus movement. These include:

• a kind of ideology, or “less-than-formalised collection of ideas” that

emphasised similarity, celebrated unthreatening difference and maintained the grassroots and apolitical nature of people-to people contacts;

• an emotional motif of joy, upbeat cheerfulness, friendliness, optimism, graciousness and good will;

• core activists who were slightly more likely to be female, typically over forty, of upper middle class in lifestyle orientation, engaged in occupations related to religion, care of the home, teaching and small business, and disinclined to be associated with any confrontational position, including that of peace activism; and

• supportive and enthusiastic support from the general public and by a broad spectrum of mainline city groups.

Lofland (1992, 1993) notes that the success of these kinds of sister city

relationships was partly an outcome of a wider social orientation, or socio-

cultural ‘surge’ in the United States during the period in question. “Were city

twinning the only instance of its type – the consensus movement – we could

politically dismiss it as a flotsam of false consciousness, and social analytically

file it away among the other minor eccentricities of human coping”, he argues.

“But even the most cursory acquaintance with events of the nineteen eighties

(1993:183). All were animated, in Lofland’s view, by four underlying

assumptions:

• Correct awareness causes positive social change. This was the assumption that social problems are the result of ignorance or misunderstanding. Consensus movements were premised on magical thinking that cognitive change would miraculously translate into social change. As a result, their participants focused on changing awareness rather than conditions.

• In a world of correct awareness, everyone lovingly resolves conflict. This was the assumption that if people all over the world really got to know each other, each would realise the inherent goodness of the other and any differences of opinion could be resolved peacefully.

• Other people are not our enemies, only our false awareness. This was a movement that did not perceive or want to perceive any enemies other than false perceptions.

• Traditional left and right politics are obsolete. This assumption, together with the conceptual association of politics with confrontation, led to an insistence that no political statements were being made by the movement.

Lofland (1993) identifies specific, interrelated socio-cultural conditions in the

1980s which favoured the formation of consensus movements, as well as

particular unintended consequences, which ultimately rendered them

counterproductive for the purposes of reducing international conflict. In the

interests of combining brevity and clarity, these are summarised in Table 2,

below.

Social conditions that enable and sustain consensus movements

Unintended consequences of consensus movements

A dearth of culturally and

organisationally developed political alternatives for addressing issues of social distress, combined with a widespread perception that “conflict, politics, and impersonal, distant relations are negative and to be avoided, as opposed to direct,

Consensus movements inhibit the development of oppositional movements that addressed the same purposes, by channelling off the human energies and talent that would otherwise have helped to drive them. The policies of the ruling class are thus left unchallenged and

personal interactions that achieve

consensus and get beyond politics, which are positive” (1993:188)

therefore protected.

The rise of citizen diplomacy as an organising principle. This provided popular reassurance that the national government was ‘on the right track’, despite failed peace initiatives and the dismantling of public-spirited policy “virtually across the land” (1993:189), and a sense that ordinary citizens were doing something to help.

Participants come to believe that they have already made the world a better place just by participating. The

consequences of consensus movements are even less significant for achieving social change than processes of ‘cooptation’ defined as “the process of adroitly absorbing dissident elements into leadership structures in a way that

mitigates their impact on policy” (1993:186).

A dilemma posed by the tension between (a) an aversion of negativism, especially when expressed through moral

indignation and the negative emotions of anger and fear, because of the psychic toll they imposed on participants, and (b) a desire to engage those caught up in negative thought patterns in order to counteract their negativism. Consensus movements neatly address this dilemma: “The impulse to resist noxious social arrangements persists, but attaches itself to an ideology that is bland, centrist and “mushy”, an ideology that has enough latent and implied substance to provide a sense of doing something relevant, but not enough to create overt conflict” (1993:191).

The extensive use of festivals and other spectacles of harmonious interaction by consensus movements. These can translate into “a mystified portrayal of social inequality and injustice, a “newspeak” rendering of social arrangements in which it becomes appropriate not only to feel that in doing nothing, one has done something, but to be joyous about it” (1993:187. At an intellectual level, social causation and social change are mystified, appearing to be merely matters of incorrect awareness, ignorance, or a lack of direct or personal relations.

Table 2. Causes and consequences of consensus movements in 1980s America (summarised from Lofland, 1993).

Applications of consensus objects take the timid politics of consensus

movements to new extremes. Like consensus movements, consensus objects

are products of particular historical conditions. Born of the late modern ‘risk

society’ (Beck, 2001), they also adopt a goal of altered consciousness, but the

alteration is meant to take place only in the perceptions of misguided

international urban others. A consensus object is not a movement at all, since it

is driven by no consistent goal or policy, but is rather a strategy designed to

foster a compliant and ordered citizenry. In enactments of consensus objects,

there is no dissent to derail, as potentially problematic civic input is bypassed

altogether at the point of its creation by the state. The consensus object is

superficially joyous in mood, but at its core lies a nervous anxiousness to

please. Its focus is not on the other reflected in the eyes of the self, but on the

self reflected in the eyes of the other. It is not ‘grassroots’ and spontaneous, but

top-down, strategic and instrumental.

A consensus object is similar to a boundary object, in that it mobilises

people from different social worlds - politicians and citizens - to work together

at local, national and international scales. The difference is that all participants

share the same definition of the situation, which has been pre-packaged and

superimposed from above. Accordingly, I define a consensus object as a

pseudo boundary object; a top-down, structured vehicle for public involvement

and reassurance, which mimics a boundary object by creating a misleading

impression that communication across meaningful difference is being achieved

in the interests of positive social change. Its current and perhaps only

incarnations so far, as I argue in chapter six, are U.S-Middle-Eastern ‘sister

been appropriated in order to salvage American status, credibility and security

in the wake of the U.S. led invasion of Iraq. These relationships provide local

settings within which Lofland’s (1993) ‘polite protesters’ can metamorphose

confidently and comfortably into the role of ‘polite carers’, thereby mobilising

the diffuse ‘affections of the polity’ in the service of the secure state (see

Berezin, 2002).