Autore: Peter Herrmann's Blog

There are so many things, lacking sufficient thinking. Yitzhak made me aware of something in a recent post where I wrote  MY apartment and THE office, indeed. I am simply stuck with the question. On the one hand it is actually MY office in terms: work, protestant ethics if you want, work as doing something that derives its meaning from some goal. And it is currently, i.e. in the current phase of my life very much an issue: end of this week I am going to Istanbul, on the way to Moscow. I decided to take the opportunity to stay two days in Istanbul just for holidays, to look around, to ‘do nothing’: we’ll see galleries, parks, the blue mosque, Bosporus …, what a place must this be? Constantinople, East meets West and West meets East – a large part of our history, the history of human kind in a nutshell. And surely part of personal history too, still ‘remembering times of which I do not have memory’: My father mentioning …, well, I do not know what exactly he mentioned; but I do remember there had been many issues around the different West meets East stories: The aggressive Russian-East; the miraculous Asian East; the unbelievable, un-spoken-off Vietnam East – and the West: heroic, anything ‘going wrong’ there more a matter of small things, or a matter of ‘The Soviets on the door-step’. – He definitely did have a firm opinion on everything, commented permanently and usually said nothing.

And although I am somewhat excited, also about going again to Moscow where I had been last year, I am wondering: ‘And? What is the point? Another gallery, another …’ And even having a ticket for the Bolshoi (Eugene Onegin) already here on the desk I am entirely torn:

Two souls, alas! dwell in my breast ….

My world, delving into the turbulence of 3,000 years (don’t we all know it?)

He who cannot draw on 3000 years is living hand to mouth

arousing me, making me ‘stimulatingly suffocating’: my personal world of 3,000 years and functioning in a world of obligations, tasks, searches for …, not the little nothings but the little meaningless-nesses. Gosh, what a word: Things that are meaningless I mean. But are they actually meaningless?

For whatever reason I sent Treasa my travel notes (still waiting for Rozenberg to bring them to the public) – and after reading it she wrote in a mail to me

I’ve been enjoying reading your collection- they are interesting stories and perspectives and its hilarious in places

Actually I still remember some of the ‘stories’ I had been writing, impressions – meaningless little tales which gained special value for me as I lived through them by feeling very much part of a large flow: a flow of prejudice, stereotypes, large researches ‘linking me to what matters’, oppositions and political quarrels, …

Do not get me wrong, it is not an ambition to play a ‘real role’ in world history or even in one part of it. But isn’t meaning, personal meaning at the end something of being meaningless in the sense of being part of something? It is a little bit a paradox I guess: We have to be in some way inside to contribute and nevertheless we can only contribute by distinction.

In some way we may apply here what – trusting Pamuk – Hesse said in his ‘Life Story, Briefly Told’:

But after a while I noticed that in matters of the spirit, a life simply in the present, in the modern and most modern, is unbearable and meaningless, that the life of the spirit is made possible only by constant reference to what is past, to history, to the ancient and primeval.

And some sense of this came to my mind when reading in Pamuk’s My Name is Red (I have The Everyman’s Library Edition) the Chronology. Stating dates (years) he has a column ‘author’s life’, ‘literary context’ and ‘historical events’. Look just at the short period from 1976 to 1980 – and even if it brings only few things together it makes me thinking so much about this time – which had been also my time and your time and the time of so many of today’s contemporaries. And what I find of special interest: you can read horizontally and vertically, from the right to the left and the left to the right. And you arrive at so many different results and you arrive at so many same results.

Yes, we are strangers – and to be stranger we have to be ‘there’: in the different place and time.

So, I can finally begin with thinking about the need, or at least usefulness of a philosophy of kerbstones as promised in a recent post.

My first thought – not so much about the philosophical dimension but very much the down to earth dimension – had been when I moved to Ireland. My biographer may one day figure out which year this was. Thinking in my usual broad time lines it had been in the years BCT, before the birth of the Celtic Tiger. And walking around: Patrick’s Street, Mc Curtin Street, South Mall, Barrack Street, around the Shandon area and also the UCC area, I frequently thought that the kerbstones had been rather high, higher than what I had been used to from my previous life. One gets used to things. After a while I didn’t think about it anymore – and if I actually did I may have said something like: ‘In retrospective it had probably not been the height of the kerbstone at all. More that fact of going different ways – and whenever one taks a new walk in life one is confronted with new hurdles.’

Years later it had been a socio-historical perspective on kerbstones, living for a short time in Florence. A most beautiful place; full of history and full of history that employed me while working on the book Social Professional Activities and the State: Matters of the Renaissance – rebirth and at the same time birth of something entirely new as it finds its expression in the height of the two high raisers: Cathedral and Palace being of the same height – power of church and power of the ‘new state’ finding their specific balance (and of course, leveling the doorsteps for the Medici to become ‘bankers of the pope’ (if you want a kind of harbinger of today’s European Central Bank).

To make space for the palace, a huge area needed to be levelled: houses of the poor being destroyed, making place for the rich and powerful and being accompanied by …, un-levelling. Building streets at the time, demarcating traffic meant, well you know it already: kerbstones. I do not pretend to know anything about the technicalities, architectural reasons …. It may be that it had been due to the horse-carts used at the time, the climate and the whish to protect the pedestrians from the rain water. It may also be that it had been a matter of behaviour: people requiring firm measures to stay in the respective realm: strict behavioural and social borders in form of physical controls because the psychological self-control had not been established (Norbert Elias wrote about all these matters of shifts of control).

Be all this as it is, I recall from the travel notes I mentioned earlier:

It is already the 28th, very early the morning when I open the door to my apartment at the Via Ardiglione in Florence. Walking there from the train station gave me the feeling of walking through the extinct city, gave me another time the feeling of estrangement. Even at this time I got the feeling of entering a place being full of life. It reminded me at the times when I lived and worked in this country many, many years go. All was a little bit unreal – streets having more the character of alley; the old plaster rather than new-stylish tarmacadam; passing Cappella dei Medici, the Duomo, crossing the Piazza della Repubblica, getting at the other side of the Arno by walking across the Ponte Vecchio, following the Borgo S. Jacopo, continuing the Via S. Spirito, turning into the Via Maffia. Only a few minutes left now to get home. The old buildings, then after walking altogether for about twenty minutes, I open the door to my apartment. I had been afraid the loud jar of the door in the hinges might wake up the other people living in the building. Everything in the house remained quite. It was nice to enter the warm rooms, to see that there had been life here as well – the fruit on the kitchen table, the news paper in the living room …, and it was nice to lay down, to fall asleep.

And that happened in that beautiful Florence – where I thought for many times about another side of this: But how do you actually move around with a pram, if you are bound to a wheelchair, if you have problems with the sight … History excluded also in this way: ‘accepting’ that groups of people: disabled, mothers are others – are not part of respected and accepted daily life (It may be worth a side remark, something I learned when my daughter visited my while I lived in Florence. We visited one of the Medici palaces and the guide showed on another building, another palace nearby, saying: this had been the place where one of the brothers lived, disabled, never been allowed to leave, never been allowed to be seen in public: the other that ‘didn’t exist’ or at least had to be made ‘non-existing’.)

We can say that kerbstones had been both: reflecting exclusion and also means of exclusion – as said in a previous post: we can only perceive what we know already, or at least: we always perceive on the basis of existing knowledge (not in the Platonist way though). This perception is also the matter of ‘walking’: we can only make those steps for which the streets, roads and and the road marks exists. The kerbstone not much more than the marking of the little poodle: a means of defining property and keeping borders straight. Too high for some, of course.

Well, coming back to earth, the third time now – and now actually approaching the kerbstones still from a socio-historical perspective but also including very much a more philosophical perspective. Walking around – though I don’t walk much: I perceive them as being high. And I also perceive the height as lacking regularity. Little bit extending the issue and including some stairs: for instance the one in the  little park I cross when walking to the shopping centre, there seems to be …, no: there is irregularity of the height. It is here on campus and also in town. And the fight or shall we say the competition between the towers of trade centres, office buildings and mosques is still going on. It can be seen as well as matter of urban renewal schemes. As much as they may be celebrated as measures of getting people out of slums, ghettoes and squatters it is very much also about erecting new borders. The urban renewal schemes present in one perspective a kind of internalisation of kerbstones. They require the acknowledgement of a new identity, or the other way round: they make it impossible to continue certain traditions. Also economic traditions. Or can you imagine where to store the cart and the various products you may sell in your informal economic activities when you live in a modern building, lets say in an apartment on the fourth flour? But going even further back: Can you imagine how to pay for the apartment not having a ‘proper job’?

All this is not just about the visible borders and obvious economic factors. Instead …., well, part of the work I am doing on precarity and development of modes or production is to look at the wider picture: how does the change of the economy link into what Paul Boccara calls modèle anthroponomique – something he wants to engage me in since some years now (and he surely succeeded though we have too few occasions to really work on it together).

Part of such wider perspective is to explore issues like attachment – detachment, enchantment – disenchantment, personalisation – depersonalisation, individuation – socialisation, objectification – subjectification (also as matter of development of agents and agency), engagement – disengagement. Dichotomies and as long as keep on to think in terms of these issues as dichotomies they are surely misleading.

All this gives the look at kerbstones a special, distinct note: the modern kerbstones …, regular …, and possibly not existing as visible demarcation. Walk along Patrick Street in Cork today. Go to Dublin, the GPO (General Post Office) and the street at one stage the location of barricades, today accident-prone as the distinction of street and pedestrian way is hardly recognisable.

Much of the fear, of scepticism towards modernisation and modernity may then come from there: we always had to deal with norms and borders that had not been (completely) our own norms; but now the challenge is to accept norms in a different way, accepting them by suggesting they would be ‘inherent’, chosen by us and based on free and rational decision.

Alain Renaut speaks of humanism as

basically the valorization of humanity in its capacity for autonomy. What I mean by this … is that what constitutes modernity is the fact that man thinks of himself as the source of his acts and representations, as their foundation (read: subject) or author. … The humanistic man is one who does not receive his norms and laws either from the nature of things (as per Aristotle) or from God, but who establishes them himself, on the basis of his own reason and will. Thus modern natural right is a subjective right, posited and defined by human reason (as per juridical rationalism) or by human will (as per juridical voluntarism).

(Renaut, Alain, 1997: The Era of the Individual. A Contribution to  a History of Subjectivity. Translated by M.B. DeBevoise and Franklin Philip. With a Foreword by Alexander Nehaas; Princeton/New Jersey: Princeton University Press [Original: L’ère de l’Individu: Contribution à Une Histoire de La Subjectivité; Paris: Gallimard, 1989]: 17 f.)

And he still overlooks (and makes us overlooking) that all this is – not completely, but still to a remarkable extent – a matter of creating illusions. The fear then of loosing power, loosing the power not as matter of controlling others but of controlling situations, controlling things we do, controlling our own life – loosing capabilities by only gaining the ability to function. The fear is about questioning of Milton’s Satan who says

Better to reign in Hell, then serve in Heaven.

(Paradise Lost, Book I)

Being a small cog in a big wheel ….

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On occasion of an earlier visit here in Ankara I wrote about the helicopters, frequently patrolling around:

a visible sign: the helicopters, nearly always present, flying their circles over the campus.

And they are surely still around – too often and probably by many not even recognised anymore. …. One of these days I am sitting in my office – hearing the noise I heard so often without fully getting used to. A little later I leave, walk to the library – hear the noise and see something different: the hovering of lawnmowers – a metaphor perhaps: the internalised sense of law and order – borders. Orderly cut grass, hedges and invisible, but permanently visible kerbstones – and also the undeniable advantage of drivers accepting the meaning of zebra crossings, accepting with this the right of people to cross the street, also people who aren’t near-olympioniques

Arpa d’or dei fatidici vati,
perché muta dal salice pendi?
Le memorie nel petto raccendi,
ci favella del tempo che fu!

(Verdi: Hebrew Slave Chorus)

Social Systems have always changed,

essentially and incidentally, throughout human history

and have given way to new systems.

No one would deny it

But has this process reached perfection in the capitalist system

and come to a dead stop?

(Nazim Hikmet: Human Landscapes from my Coutnry. An Epic Novel in Verse. Translated from the Turkish by Randy Blasing & Mutlu Konuk; New York: Persea Books, 2002: 449)

Some time now – and although it is not really a long time that I am here, I kind of settled – knowing at least the basic stuff: how to get to town, how to avoid going to town and get the groceries locally, how to get one of the washing machines working, that one should not to sit in the sun (well, I only learned that locals don’t do it, look for shadow as soon as there is even on a coldish day a snatch of sunshine, but I still love it, enjoy the warmth of this kind of deception, feeling little bit like a cat: striving for independence, expressing my own sense and still clinging to each individual sunbeam, succumbing to nature’s deception) and … how to say günaydın, merhaba, kahve sade, çay and sağ olun, being woeful but pretty certain that there will be not much more in terms of learning this language.

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In passing a short note on the learning: Actually, since I gave in and up on this issue: striving to learn, it is getting much easier to pick up things – it may show that I am beyond the stage of learning. We all know children have difficulties to learn systematically, in an enforced setting – but they easily pick up things.

And don’t we know also that older people become like children again?

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Well, knowing the basic stuff is one thing; and learning the important things is another matter … – and in any case surely all things come together in some unforseen ways. Leaving the work on the book on precarity and the other on the financial crisis aside (don’t remind me: exam papers are piling up too: done one lot from Cork, sent stuff to Kuopio already and the first lot from Budapest coming in now) – and forgetting some other sideshows – a major topic is for me the work on the book abut Social Policy and Religion. It is only another book I am editing – and the two pieces I will be contributing myself are surely not be the most important. More important surely Yitzhak’s, Mustafa’s and Hurriyet’s. And as exciting these and the other contributions are not least for me, it is especially here, in terms of space and time, the opportunity to talk with Mustafa about the topic, his special topic: FBOs – Faith Based Organisations (Hurriyet is Turkish but lives in Australia and Yitzhak in Bet El – kind of around the corner but still too far away – and actually one of the few people with whom I am against the odds (or due to them?) nevertheless permanently in touch – a virtual world made real.

I frankly admit – I understand at most half of what Mustafa is saying: the different names, the terms not only from Turkish but also from Kurdish, Arab … If there is any Liquid Modernity, as Bauman talks about, is not least a matter of liquid past – of time as container for processes. The one part of it is the simple knowledge – more or less easy to obtain simply by reading. Sure, a lot of reading is required to get a sound knowledge as we finally cannot understand today’s structures without insight into the history also of the Ottoman Empire – and this means to engage also in the history of the entire region. But as much as we read, another part will still be difficult to grasp – the part which Charles Taylor in his book on A Secular Age conceptualises as ‘social imaginaries’. And it runs through social science as permanent topic, employing us under terms as habitus, life regimes, life styles, national character and national Zeitgeist and the like.

To face it, the real difficulty is not so much or at least not only the complexity of the other. Rather, it is that we are ourselves pruned – or at least our ability to open, detached perception is limited.

A seemingly purely academic question – it seems. We need a starting point. And this is the threshold we will and have to use – it begins with language. The simple example is coming from language – simple in both directions. To learn a term in a new language we have to know it in our own language, don’t we? We make then take as example Thank You – one of the basic and simple terms. However, looking at one of the translation websites we know soon that simplicity and language don’t go easily hand in hand:

What are the services being rendered to us?

(1) sağ olun – be healthy, be strong – is used as – thank you – for a service which:

– Was not necessarily needed to be performed.

– for someone who has gone out of his way to help you.

(2) While – teşekkür ederim – thank you – [Lit: a thanking perform I – from Arabic] is used:

– In normal circumstances and receiving presents.

And this is not all we can earn from that website – but surely it makes a huge difference if we say the one or the other to somebody, possibly making the gesture with which we want to show our respect a little bit offensive, suggesting that we see the other as a kind of servant.

All this seems to lead in a Platonic quagmire: we have to know already – quasi ‘from another world’ – what A is to be able to recognise that A is actually A. Or it ends in some kind of nihilism, making us – or at least our educators – even godlike: a tabula rasa which waits to be written on. –

Thus spoke Zarathustra:

Behold, I teach you the overman! The overman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: the overman shall be the meaning of the earth!

But before getting trapped in such philosophical questions we are – facing a very basic question: who is the other.

Prejudging – pejorative versus submitting

Part of the solution is that we are indeed all ‘others’ – and as much as we wanted to avoid the trap of Platonic determinism and Nietzschean nihilism we are entering a new trap: doesn’t all being ‘others’ also mean that there cannot be any ‘we’, that there is then no society? Surely a minefield between pure individualism and even hedonism standing now against a fixed identity.

But identity may actually help us further – a matter of The Stranger, eloquently captured by Georg Simmel in his piece which had been published in 1908 as part of his opus magnum on Soziologie. Untersuchungen über die Formen der Vergesellschaftung (Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1908 [1. Auflage]) –

If wandering is the liberation from every given point in space, and thus the conceptional opposite to fixation at such a point, the sociological form of the ‘stranger’ presents the unity, as it were, of these two characteristics. This phenomenon too, however, reveals that spatial relations are only the condition, on the one hand, and the symbol, on the other, of human relations.

This of course leads to an entirely different stance

The stranger is by nature no ‘owner of soil’ – soil not only in the physical, but also in the figurative sense of a life-substance which is fixed, if not in a point in space, at least in an ideal point of the social environment. Although in more intimate relations, he may develop all kinds of charm and significance, as long as he is considered a stranger in the eyes of the other, he is not an ‘owner of soil.’

So the stranger is indeed everywhere and my contemplation on this topic is twofold: the one the theoretical work on a piece that looks some economic issues: Marxian value theory, its meaning for the middle classes and a new assessment of precarity. The middle class can in that context be very much seen as a ‘stranger in the own society’ – being even less integrated than the worker: the latter, though lacking the property of means of production s/he is at least technically owner, has the power over, the capability of controlling the process. This is something the middle class usually doesn’t have – as Bildungsbuerger – a kind of humble men of letters – the knowledge is removed from practical relevance, as ‘officer’ in the military force or the bureaucracy, knowledge and its carrier is not more than a means of others: a manager, following rules s/he didn’t develop. Or even worse: developing rules that emerge as cage that will later serve as his/her lodging: the golden cage, its floor covered with the Golden Fleece attached to medals obtained for submission under hegemonic rules.

The other side of the stranger is employing me …, in the same way, ut now in the perspective of everyday’s life.

Having said this I am hesitating, asking myself if it is really the stranger or if it is the strange: something that is unknown. And here it is the challenge of understanding the world we are living in, seeing it in some neutral perspective and striving for detachment and disenchantment – the world is not a miracle. It moves without being moved by an eternal and external power as much as it moves without our engagement.

And nevertheless, even if we accept it – moreover because we have to accept this – we have to understand the rules in order to be able to … change it. And the paradox is: in order to understand society – and also in order to understand ourselves – we need distance. And distance always has to do something with enchantment – the inexplicable, something that is seemingly bizarre, that perhaps cannot be understood and that definitely cannot be taken for granted. And nevertheless, it is the distance that actually may allow us to develop an understanding – so that all the excitement may soon be lost. A brute opening in front of us – emptiness of complete knowledge:

Ils sont parfaits, trop parfaits peut-être, enfin, ils m’ennuient. (Stendhal: Le Rouge et le Noir)*

Or the opening for new mysteries – some surely in details, as we had been making leaps of progress: from Newtonian mechanical thinking for instance to Einsteinian thinking relativity to Bohrian Quantum Theory and what followed to rest for a while in Chaos Theory. Did I write ‘in details’? The detail is about predictability – ad as much as chaos suggests at first site a lack of it, it is on the contrary: gaining insight, gaining predictability as we are not satisfied with broad brushes. Rather, we can see the details now and we can get engaged with them – if we find the actual questions rather than trying the impossible: applying the new knowledge (base) in the old fashioned ways (that is what for instance managerialism, organisational learning ad knowledge management are about).

And it is probably the historical tension we live (in), presented in the mentioned book by Taylor (page 269):

Unbelief for great numbers of contemporary unbelievers, is understood as an achievement of rationality. It cannot have this without a continuing historical awareness. It is a condition which can’t onky be described in the present tense, but which also needs the perfect tense: a condition of ‘having overcome’ the irrationality of belief. It is this perfect-tensed consciousness which underlies unbelievers’ use of ‘disenchantment’ today. It is difficult to imagine a world in which this consciousness might have disappeared.

In this sense we may live our life as Hemmingway lived words:

All my life I’ve looked at words as though I were seeing them for the first time.

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Sure: Forms are different – but underlying content is very similar

From far away, but still it sounds as if it is around the corner I hear the voice from the mosque – posing a similar question to that we kow from Christianity, asking For whom the bell tolls.

Not less sure: Content changes – and forms are stable, as we can see from the following quote

For both men and women, coffee has been at the center of political and social interaction. During the Ottoman period, women socialized with each other over coffee and sweets. Men socialized in coffee houses to discuss politics and to play backgammon. In the early 16th century, these coffee houses played host to a new form of satirical, political and social criticism called shadow theater of Turkish folklore in which puppets were the main characters (such as Hacivat & Karagoz). Over the years, Turkish coffee houses have become social institutions providing a place to meet and talk.

Finally one can have a coffee just by oneself – my daily breakfast routine: first kahve sade – the spirit and spirits being stimulated already by the smell and the lovely crockery, then çay and günlük simit.

And I will have the kahve sade even when I get back to Cork, where I still have my ‘Turkish coffee maker’, the present I got some years ago from Sibel and Kezban.

Is all this about disenchanted enchantment?

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As said in the begining: the first basic questions are answered; and it is time for important questions, time to turn to thinking about the need, or at least usefulness of a philosophy of kerbstones.

But that is for another day – the first of May should be a day of overcoming these borders and get us on the streets.

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* They are perfect, perhaps too perfect; finally I find them boring (my translation; PH)