Categoria: thoughts on life and its philosophy

Is there a life after? – or: To Cycle or to Scooter, that is the real question

da Peter Herrmann's Blog, posted in general, joys - what we usually take for it, Peter's Log, thoughts on life and its philosophy, works, projects, publications

For Marijke

and with special thanks to the library staff at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

It had been some time back – I still stayed in Budapest. To be precise it had been the last day of this years academic stay. There are two ways of appreciating something like that, the one: panicking, thinking about all things that had been not done and still have to be done at some stage. In Ireland it is the pre-Christmas disease, in Italy the pre-holiday disease, both posing the same basic question which reads

Is there a life after?

The other way is more realist, assuming that there definitely is a life after which leaves sufficiently time to look after those things, and suggesting that if there is actually really no life after it doesn’t matter anyway to start working on all the pending things. Carpe diem even if the auto-correct suggested right now carpet diet, which may be giving a hint: stay on the carpet, walk on sound ground where actual life takes place every day.

After having been in Budapest for a substantial time without going to the real place, I chose that as appropriate for the last day, limiting the work dimension for the time being on deciding to which bath I will go. Result: the Széchenyi Gyógyfürdő és Uszoda. It is a reasonably long, but this day pleasant walk: along the Andrássy út, somewhat enjoying the “historical alienation”, imagining the historical contradiction: the aspiring bourgeoisie at the turn of the century, probably crowned by the opening of Budapest’s first line of what would be later the cities metro network; accommodating governments later, those of other countries: embassies and ambassadors, and now hosting remainders of the blaze of glory: the reappearance in the new clothes of the new richesse.

  • The one thing coming to mind are the obvious hegemonies and their change over time – sure, one may add two things. The one is that hegemony is exactly not about the obvious “ruling” and it’s incarnations in somewhat obvious structures. Of course, the standard for understanding hegemony is set by the definition given by Antonio Gramsci, later elaborated by Nicos Poulantzas.
    The other question that may be posed is, if one wants to call it this, a matter of political history – and as such it is a matter of assessing change: What is about the years between 1947 and 1989? Had that been socialism and is socialism – at least for some interim time – the re-construction of overcome patterns with(in) a different context. The phrase of the withering away of the state is rather complex as already the new state would actually not be the same as the old institutional system had been although it appears to maintain the same or at least a very similar institutional framework. We may have to speak of an emerging system that establishes itself only with the intention of giving birth to something else by (not before or after, sic!) self-destruction.
  • The other point is about the hegemonies in daily life – and though it is also a complex issue, one facet is that we are not least asked to look at free spaces.

*****

All the same, talking about governing, governance, hegemony …, we are always confronted with the actual question of self-determination. Leaving brute violence aside, “following something/somebody”, “part-subordinating” is not least about some form of freedom of decision. Now, such freedom can – and in someway is – a matter of …, the matter with which the decision is concerned: the well-known exit-voice-loyalty option suggested by Albert Otto Hirschman. It deserves some special attention that Hirschman’s contribution had been made in particular in the context of firms – such situations can be usually seen as under-complex in their very nature, as they consider the problem Hamlet put forward with his famous question as answered or irrelevant: in any case the being, the existence is taken for granted – and it is simple existence that is seen as relevant.

The question Shakespeare did not look at may actually be only recently – and temporarily – be of particular and peculiar relevance. The question is

to cycle or to scooter.

In this formulation it is of course posed against a special personal background: having lived for short time in Rome – where using the scooter seems to be part of the genetic code – and having spent again some time in Amsterdam – I’m sure that one day a tiny DNS-string will be found determining that people in that place use the bike.

Ops, but that is exactly the point …, and I will come back to it.

Sure, cycling or using the scooter are not the only options, another option is that of swimming, to be more precise: going to a bath. Why do we commonly forget how people live, how they shape, “design” their socio-personal life.

One reason is surely that we are – in daily small talk and scientific political analysis – more interested in differences instead of similarities. And paradoxically this means to look at the uniqueness of political-institutional systems. To the extent to which this is not about the concrete-individual case but the general-abstract, this can be captured by looking at the frameworks, leaving the actual life and living outside of considerations – go to any gallery and you will find so many paintings that are apparently hidden beneath a heavy frame.

And such a heavy frame seems to be at first glance dominant: a most beautiful bath, clear in its overall outline, complex in its internal structure with the various small pools with the different temperatures, shapes etc.; this frame is actually underlined by “something” that appears to be content: guests, bathers. There is obviously a difference between “framing guests” and those that truly belong to the content – and it is exactly this twofold meaning of content: being a matter of substance but at the very same time a matter of being content. You may say: appropriately filling the frame. And anything that really fills a frame must fit into it, must be appropriate by appropriating the available space, i.e. making it its property.

In this light, the bath culture in Hungary is something specific, mediating between different worlds: the world of nature which provided a vast wealth of hot springs; the world of a country that had been shaped by being historically a border country between Orient and Occident; the specific “encapsulation”, typical for a nation without or with limited state due to colonialisation and subordination under foreign – in this case Hapsburgian – rule … . – One could surely go on, looking at the details of a social space in the midst of the old Ottoman Empire which had been dominated by men and masculinity, though it left most decisive niches for women where they could actually hide in some way – also in the bath: talking and negotiating about their own business which included arranging marriages, thus being in a way the core ante-chamber of society building.

And indeed these baths are the places where wars are made and lost and won. Only on few occasions of my visits in one of the baths I did not see people playing chess, very often the board game, but frequently just in a metaphorical way: building governments, based on strategic alliances, elaborating policies and making declarations: never completely moving beyond the walls, but entering the public via a detour as part of the war of manoeuvre. – People who are swimming …, yes, but few and many of them are the tourists, the “framing guests”.

*****

Being that day in the Széchenyi Gyógyfürdő és Uszoda, looking at things to come during the next few days: the short visit in Vienna, interrupting my journey for a business meeting in the Kunsthistorische Museum, then moving home to Rome, the eternal city as they say: permanency of the timelessness. And it is a short thought only: Did Lenin also think about access of all these privileged places for the proverbial cook when he said that every cook should be able to rule the state? Behind all this is finally a question that is easily lost out of sight, that is not even consciously articulated. Aren’t we dealing with the intermeshing and oscillation of different realities? Borders between utility goods and luxury goods are blurring, means of ordinary communication are changing their position in the overall systemic structure, emerging as symbols of governing, oppression, compromise and accommodation; and from there they are returning into daily life: alienated forms of a supposed overcome reality: the

circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living

as Marx put it into words in his 18th Brumaire.

Perhaps we may usefully speak of an alienated trickle-down effect: things taken out of their context and simultaneously with this de-contextualisation gaining a new, pacified meaning – and with this, again simultaneously, pacifying meaning.

… It is about the Knot of Governing[1] – it is also a matter of artefacts, multiplied and in some form imitated and mass-produced …

Si nous nous concentrons sur la stratégie commerciale, nous comprenons pourquoi les historiens ont normalement associé la question de la production de masse ou sérielle au problème du marché : la plupart de ces production, par leur coût relativement modéré, leur standardisation et leur modularité, s’adresse à des acheteurs anonymes plutôt qu’à des commanditaires. Il est vrai que les études des dernières années invitent à raison à ne pas opposer trop fortement le commanditaire à l’acheteur.[2]

And as such they are gaining access into peoples’ living rooms

Het was een voor Europese begrippen bijzonder fenomeen dat schilderijen in de loop van de zeventiende eeuw een onmisbaar element waren geworden in het interieur van de gegoede burgerij. Men had het voor het kiezen, want het aanbond was zeer divers, zowel als het gaat om kwaliteit als om typen schilderijen. Niet al die kopers waren kenners of fijnproevers met verstand van kunst; schilderijen weden door veel mensen beschouwd als een aardigheidje aan de wand waar weinig woorden aan behoefden te worden vuilgemaakt. Het was vooral de omvang van de vrije markt voor anonieme kopers die toen in Europa uitzonderlijk was.[3]

*****

Looking at the role of women is well worth a side remark.

One prominent and fruitful tendency, which has very much affected the selection of textual sources in this book, has been the growth of interest in types of object traditionally considered as ‘decorative art/. The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (quattrocento and cinquecento) in Italy saw changes not only in the styles, format sand subjects of what we think of as ‘fine art’, but in the reorganisation of urban environments and of the ecclesiastical and secular buildings. Many such buildings were on a very large scale, ad by the later sixteenth century they came to be filled with a huge number of furnishings and other artefacts, …[4]

And in this context the role of women gained a new place. As pointed out elsewhere:

In historical perspective this meant indeed mass production. Everly S.Welch in her book Art in Renaissance Italy 1350-1500 (Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 1997: 75) points out that this had also been an entrance for women into the sphere of this craft: though mainly undertaken by monks, the copying and skilful ‘illustration’ had been also undertaken by women.

Well, actually it is worthwhile to spend more as a side remark on this topic though it is again something that cannot be carried out on this occasion.

*****

Some weeks later, I am going to work – admittedly it is not in any kind usual work: not for most of the people and also not for me. I walk through the revolving entrance door at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. And I walk through the checkpoint

– Hoi, goedemorgen. Hoe gaat het vandaag?.

– Je bent heel vroeg vandaag.

Indeed, I am early. Actually too early for the library where I work these days. So I take a detour, walking up the main staircase, being on my own, turning around the corner, walking thorugh the large hall.

Monumental, indeed: van Rijns Night-Watch. It is just me, standing in front of the painting, I’m the only person in the room,[5] looking in the eye of history, facing this monumental incarnation of the at the time when van Rihjn painted this work, aspiring burgers of the aspiring new trade-nation. Leaving the earlier, Italian, roots of the new capitalist mode aside you may say: I am standing alone in front of this impressive showcase of the early stage of the emerging imperialism: old capitalism, expanding trade, moving towards the new capitalism which later became “pure imperialism” as highest stage of capitalism. And all this in a specific way stablished on the foundation of a capitalist and caitalising agriculture if we can trust J.L. Price.

*****

I remember a much earlier, similar experience: I had been privileged enough to see without anybody else in the room Picasso’s Guernica. An equally impressive peace of art.[6] And it did what probably a good piece of art always should do – and what proves a piece of art being a good one: in some way it draws the viewer into its ban, fascinates him or her simply by its power of expression – be it beauty, aversion, the specific distance it creates from every day’s life by dissociation. But at the same time there is the other side, namely the mobilisation emerging from the energy it entails, thoughts, wishes, dislikes and critiques the painter did not just express but for which s/he used the artefact as mediator.

And as such it is also – being a good work – mediating between times, not obliterating contradictions and dynamics, but making it by subtle, at times barely consciously detectable hints possible for the viewer to retrace the tensions within the Zeitgeist.

On the canvas worked on by van Rijn the glamour of the ancient regime, as lieutenant Willem van Ruytenburch still standing next to the centre, but, though dressed in a golden drapery, already pushed to the side, apparently degraded, a gofer behind the emerging power of the global trade, in personam Fans Bannng Cocq, who took over the lead: on the canvas we see the signs of time: determination, pride, failure, grief – the dynamic of a war-scenery metaphorically showing the real battles going on: with other means, though still about a power game of expansion – if nothing else, the East and West India Trade Companies witnessing the pattern.

And this makes it so important that we are looking at a genuinely dynamic painting. As such it is completely different to the commonly known portraits of the time, depicting people lined up in a seemingly static hierarchy.[7]

Picasso’s manifestation against the war, the accusation of the invader of the small town in the Basque country. But also the expression of those who actually suffered: the victims who are now at the centre. And here we find also the many hints: the lost past, destroyed by the supposed superiority but equally by the lack of their power.

Lost pride – as the ground that had been lost …, Werner Hoffmann says

society, possessed by collective madness, celebrates its suicide.[8]

And he traces it back to Goya:

Physical suffering is one of the great themes of modern painting of modern painting, and I call ‘modern’ the period which starts with Goya. His ‘Tres de Mayo’ is a painted manifesto. Until the 18th century history painting was content to tell the story of dramatic events ….The defeated seem to deserve their fate as in a sporting contest when the stronger will win without the moral complications or frustrations. The suffering of the victim is not a theme in itself.[9]

Still, one can easily agree with Rachel Wischnitzer’s assessment. Though as much I personally read it as antifascist statement, an assertion against fascist violence, there is another dimension to it: the generalised notion of rejecting that ‘suicidal notion’ of modernity and the positive movements. In Wischnitzer’s words:

Picasso does not refer to the Fascists, the Nazis, or to Franco at all. Guernica is concerned only with the situation in the Loyalist camp. France and England keep neutrality, Russia lends support, the survivors express hope and confidence.

That is how Picasso wants to see and present the situation.[10]

If this is correctly reflecting Picasso’s overall line of thought may be left open – it would be speculation. However that it is part of the artists reflection, or a reflection the viewer may feel encouraged to undertake, may duly claim evidence. To point on one issue, we may refer to Gijs van Hensbergen who writes

In Guernica, the raised arm of a woman holding a candle tight in her grip pushes from the right-hand side of the canvas and helps to illuminate the scene. Symbolic of liberty and truth, she enlightens the world while forcing us to survey tragic drama played out in front of our eyes.[11]

May be that this had been the reason that, standing in front of the accusingly monumental painting I felt something keeping my upright, maintaining my strength – a guiding arm, holding a light. Wischnitzer – with reference to Reinhold Hohl, points out that the arm is a kind of ‘reincarnation’ of the arm of Agnolo Bronziono’s Venus, Cupid, Folly, and Time – and looking at that painting from the middle of the 16th century this may well be true.

Most convincing, however, is Hohl’s discovery of the model for the huge arm carrying the lamp in Guernica, in Bronzino’s allegory: Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time, c. 1546 … In Bronzino’s painting Time lifts the curtain with the majestic movement of his powerful, muscular arm. Truth, the figure on the upper left, helps holding up some folds of the drape. The central figures are Venus with Cupid on the left and Deceit (rather than Folly) on the right. Two masks are on the ground on the right.[12]

But times changed – and accepting a coarse simplification it means the allegory ‘Time’ changed and is in Picasso’s piece female. It is time for something that may be called ‘reinvented matriarchy’.

*****

And as much as it is a privilege to be allowed to stand alone in front of any of these paintings, it is an additional privilege having experienced both of them. For me personally there had been years between the two occasions, perhaps decades, and surely a long time of experiences, ventures, own successes and failures, hopes and disappointments. However, it had not been such a long period as it had been for the raise and fall of nations, empires and systems as the two paintings express: in this way two facets of an experience that makes history immediately palpable, appreciable.

And it may be suggested that there had been the from Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel known cunning of reason secretly at play, forecasting the dark side:

At least since the cleaning of the picture in 1946-7, it has been evident that the scene takes place in daylight, with the sun streaming down from the top left. A further cleaning completed in 1980 showed that the tones are predominantly cool. The traditional title The Nightwatch which dates from the late 18th century, is therefore incorrect but it would be absurdly pedantic to suggest changing it now.[13]

– Reviving in my memory the two viewing experiences and combining them, empathising the large lines of historical development: glory and decay, I remember the recent phone conversation, talking to Paul who told me about his new publication – the first volume now in print: It is about the crisis, the systemic crisis, that is not only structural, but goes far beyond, concerning also the civilisation and of politico-environmental perspectives.

– It had been easy to agree on our common interest and work, and though it surely sounds a bit bizarre it is about scooters, bikes and baths.

*****

Later I leave the library, the usual ‘Hoi’ and I go this time through the exhibition halls.

The paintings I see now are very much my own paintings, part of my daily life. And I feel – at least here and now – a little bit like the cook who actually does not need a museum or a bath if governing really means to possess all these artefacts as life’s real facts. …

After having entered earlier that day the library through the backdoor, the servants entrance, and now leaving through the exhibition halls, it is strange to see the people around: standing in front of the paintings staring at the exhibits as they had been earlier standing on the balcony of the reading room, looking at the old books and …, looking at me, so many times I had been the only person sitting there and doing what the name of the room suggests: reading. Sure, at this stage – in my life and the life of our societies it is a privilege being able and taking the liberty to follow the vision, Marx suggested in the German ideology:[14]

… finally, the division of labour offers us the first example of how, as long as man remains in natural society, that is, as long as a cleavage exists between the particular and the common interest, as long, therefore, as activity is not voluntarily, but naturally, divided, man’s own deed becomes an alien power opposed to him, which enslaves him instead of being controlled by him. For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic. This fixation of social activity, this consolidation of what we ourselves produce into an objective power above us, growing out of our control, thwarting our expectations, bringing to naught our calculations, is one of the chief factors in historical development up till now.

Indeed, as long as such ownership is not given we see waste produced – it is the case when we see the cook who wants and actually needs all this, even if it may well take the form of knickknack, the form of art in its own right. And it surely is a provocation, saying that the educated classes, ownership being reduced on intellectual simulation and understanding, is not really doing much better.[15]

*****

It is time now to keep the promise. Above I stated

I’m sure that one day a tiny DNS-string will be found determining that people in that place use the bike.

Ops, but that is exactly the point ….

– and I promised to come back to it. This supposed DNS-string is, of course, not really such encoding. It is not a given but it is the knot of governing which may be tightened by pulling at the wrong end, or which can be loosened by developing a considered strategy, applying both, a radical slicing of the knot as we know it from Alexander’s victory, and at the vey same time a circumspect and dialectical adjournment, dealing with all the different tiny fibres that are making up the strings. – Surely something that I have to consider more seriously in the book on which I had been working these days.

– It will take a long time to make Amsterdam a city of scooters although their current number suggests different. And if it shoud happen one day we will have to sit down to make the calculation of pros and cons.

For the time being it will remain an open question – as much as it is an open question if my visit and work in the Rijksmuseum’s library will result in my presence n many photoalbums worldwide, put side by side with photos from paintings, books and other exhibits, perhaps with a little note

Peter, reader, early 21st century – please, do not feed

or if it will contribute in one or another way to a real reading culture, seeing books not as something to be consumed by individuals but being part of a real culture of communication and honest dispute. It si similar to the other question on byke, scooter and bath, just a matter of appropriate, i.e. ‘appropriated’ culture.

[1]            Frigga Haug introduced recently some ideas under the catchword ‘Herrschaftsknoten’, furthering her thoughts on the Four-in-One-Perspective – http://www.rosalux.de/documentation/48090/am%E2%80%90herrschaftsknoten%E2%80%90ansetzen.html – and http://williamthompsonucc.wordpress.com/2012/03/08/four-in-one/

[2]            Tomasi, Michele, 2011 : L’art multiplié : matériaux t problèmes pour une réflexion ; in : L’art multiplié. Production de masse, en série, pour le marché dans les arts entre Moyen Âge et Renaissance. Sous la direction de Michele Tomasi ave la collaboration de Sabine Utz ; Roma :Viella:7-24 ; here : 14

[3]            Boers, Marion, 2012: De Noord-Nederlandse kunsthandel in de eerste helft van de zeventiende eeuw; Hilversum: Uitgeverij Verloren: 9

[4]            Women and the visual arts in Italy c. 1400-1650. Luxury and leisure, duty and devotion. A sourcebook/Selected, translated and introduced by Paola Tingali and Mary Rogers Manchester/New York Manchester University Press 2012: 1

[5]            Of course, security is there too – After a brief moment of a kind of ‘inner devotion’ on my side we begin to chat. I am another time in some way surprised by seeing that such jobs are at least for many not so much about security but about living in the middle of art work and history – though they are not allowed to ‘govern the state as Lenin’s cook’, they are allowed to look in some ways on what had been going on I history on the back stage …

[6]            It had been commissioned by the Spanish Republican Government for the World’s Fair in Paris in Paris, 1937 – on that occasion it had been by and large unrecognised and ignored.

[7]            Cf. Schama, Simon: Rembrandt: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJYlzyNQjpc – 14/08/2013: 8:10 ff.

[8]            Hofmann, Werner, 1983: Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ in its Historical Context; in: artibus e historiae. Rivista internazionale di arti visive e cinema; IRSA-LiCOSA. Nr 7(IV); Venezia-Wien: 141-169; here 149

[9]            ibid.: 141 f.

[10]            Wischnitzer, Rachel, 1985: Picasso’s Guernica. A Matter of Metaphor: in: artibus e historiae. Rivista internazionale di arti visive e cinema; IRSA-LiCOSA. Nr 12 (VI); Venezia-Wien:153-172; here: 165

[11]            van Hensbergen, Gijs, 2005: Guernica: The Biography of a Twentieth-Century Icon; London: Bloomsbury: 105

[12]            Wischnitzer, op.cit.: 163 f.; with reference to Reinhold Hohl, 1978: Die Wahrheit ueber Guernica; Pantheon, 36, Jan. 1978: 41-58

[13]            Galleria Dep Art Milano Italia A.Biasi Dadamaino Simeti Wilding: The Night Watch (1642)ENCYCLOPEDIA OF ART EDUCATION © visual-arts-cork.com http://www.visual-arts-cork.com/famous-paintings/night-watch.htm – 14/08/2013

[14]            Supposedly this text had been added by Engels, with a mocking undertone.

[15]            Just briefly contextualising this by pointing on marketisation, commodification and the loss of meaning of education in its humanist understanding.

Human Rights – “Lives Rights” – Children’s Rights

da Peter Herrmann's Blog, posted in social quality, thoughts on life and its philosophy, works, projects, publications

[1]

Abstract

The article attempts to add a new direction to the debate on human rights by looking at it from four perspectives: practice, development, everyday’s life and political responsibility of social work. This aims not least on working towards the foundation of a fourth generation of human rights, supplementing the generally accepted three generations. At stake is the genuine acknowledgement of social human rights in everyday’s life.

Human rights are often looked at if they are – be it in reality or by way of perception – breached. To speak of perceived or real breaches is certainly often superfluous, because it is obvious that certain actions and situations are even a matter of disrespecting the most fundamental and inalienable human right: the one to live, i.e. to mere existence of the human being. However, in many cases the situation lacks such clarity: definitions and practices are controversial, and furthermore it is often controversial whether certain issues, though they may be obviously being inhumane, are actually human-rights-related questions. The reason for such statement, possibly surprising for some of the readers, is simple:  human rights have their origin in protecting citizens against arbitrary abuses of the states’ power against the (world) citizens. In other words human rights had been linked to the state, as Weber says the only entity upholding the claim to the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force in the enforcement of its order.

In such a reading private actions – and these are also acts of companies in global markets or actions of fanatical fundamentalist religious communities[2] – are strictly irrelevant to human rights. There is another dimension to the fact that these rights are nearly only issued in case of violation: both, the rather abstract reading of human rights and the consideration of individual violations reveals again and again that addressing these rights is bay and large detached from everyday’s life. At least apparently they do not affect the ordinary insanity: conflicts repeatedly preventing in different ways in everyday’s life that people can develop with all its facets of personality.

Admittedly this is a rather complicated and complex situation. But it is also a fundamental question, concerning the fundamental difficulty of defining human rights. Narrow definitions look at very obvious “cases” – even if one has to admit that the two declarations of human rights claiming universality (resolution 217 A [III] of the General Assembly on 10 December 1948: Universal Declaration of Human Rights; http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/index.shtml – 7/8/13; Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam, Aug. 5, 1990, UN GAOR, World Conf on Hum Rts, 4th… sess, Agenda Item 5, UN Doc A/CONF.157/PC/62/Add.18 [1993]; http://www1.umn.edu/humanrts/instree/cairodeclaration.html – 7/8/13) are in fact not really universal. This is also true and clearly the case for the UN Declaration, which contains a strong affirmation of the capitalist mode of produciton (see below and Presentation Narrowing the Gap Between the World’s Richest and Poorest Contribution for the German wave GLOBAL MEDIA FORUM 2011). However, a broad definition runs not only the risk of including too many aspects, but at the same time it also opens the door for arbitrariness. Anyway, it is important to focus on the importance of human rights in every day’s life, going beyond the protection of mere existence. The development up to now is commonly seen as characterized by three generations:

The first generation concerns “negative rights,” in the sense that their respect requires that the state do nothing to interfere with individual liberties, and correspond roughly to the civil and political rights.

The second generation … requires positive action by the state to be implemented, as is the case with most social, economic and cultural rights. The international community is now embarking upon a third generation … which may be called “rights of solidarity”

(Vasak, Karel, 1977: A 30-Year Struggle. The Sustained Efforts to Give Force of Law to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights; in: The UNESCO Courier. A Window open on the World; Paris: UNESCO: 30/11: 29/32; here: 29; cf. Herrmann, Peter (forthcoming): Justice and Law Today: On the Translation of General Ideas on Justice into Claims for Security and Responsibility; in: Herrmann: God, Rights, Law and a Good Society [Writings on Philosophy and Economy of Power, 2]; Bremen/Oxford: EHV Academic press, 2012)

It is fundamental that a fourth stage is missing – and such stage is actually difficult to imagine within contemporary paradigms of social sciences in general: the social law and the socio-economic self-FORMATION law in a very genuine sense. It is justified to see the debate on human rights as being firmly based in the tradition of positive law – be it in a positive or in a negative way. However, it has to be seen that

[p]ositive law assumes an ordered social context that exhibits certain deficiencies: it envisages more desirable – an ideal – ordering of the context; it prescribes the steps to be taken in order to move the actual towards the ideal; and it orders that these measures be instituted. That is, positive law is at once expository, normative prescriptive, advisory, and imperative. But it is positive law as a means to an end …

(Jenkins, Iredell, 1980: Social Order and the Limits of Law. A Theoretical Essay; Princeton: Princeton University Press: 75)

This can only be understood in the context of society and socialization. Significant is the statement of Norbert Elias, who points out that people can only be understood as a process in its ongoing development, and he also suggests that this orientation is constantly undermined by the overwhelming tendency to push all processes into some form of structures (see Elias, Norbert, 1980/81: Social Process Models on multiple levels, in: Elias, Norbert: Essays On Sociology and the Humanities III; Dublin. University College Dublin Press, 2009: 40-42).

******

Of course, structural thinking knows as well thoughts about development, but these are fundamentally shaped by a very particular and peculiar understanding: it assumes an indispensable link between two areas:

  • First it is stated that there is a (more or less) straightforward development to “modern” societies – this is idealised as enlightenment, in reality it is about the development of capitalist modes of production;
  • Secondly, development is then also increasingly about development of human rights. On the one hand this is seen as development of human rights themselves – i.e. they are taken as dynamically expanding, steadily albeit very slowly; on the other hand “successful development” is indentified with modern societies and it is suggested that they are guaranteeing human rights – certainly is not denied: “unfortunately” we would find “slips” within and even caused by the capitalist system, but this is just considered as an exception and mostly seen as “bad practice”, which can actually only be found in the countries of the global South.[3]

Important is not so much the accuracy of the proposed relationships – which is of course highly questionable. A key point is more a question of the methodology (see Herrmann / O’Leary, in preparation: Human Rights – Search for a Fourth Generation): Apart from the fact that the underlying understanding is highly individualistic – thus following very much the tradition of European Enlightenment – another problem has to be seen in the fact that certain human rights are faded out by a structural-methodological pattern. First, these are everyday issues – as mentioned earlier, human rights issues are only then on the agenda where we find breaches in extreme situations. Secondly, however, the concept of development itself implies a certain ignorance: underdevelopment means lack of development of human rights or lack of human rights awareness and therefore “underdeveloped people” need to be “developed” in order to be able to accept and live these rights.

Of course, this is an exaggerated and simplified version of a complex problem. But such simplification is useful to clarify extremely important questions:

  • Human rights are in this way conceptually reduced and seen as passive rights – and only “fully developed human beings” can really take full advantage of these rights (of course it is left open who these “fully developed human beings” are;
  • they are only taken individualistically – as only the capitalist formation represents such “full development” and provides completely developed awareness in terms of the underlying idea of man.

Just a quick note on the last point must do suffice: The UN Declaration points in Article 25.1 out:

Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.

In other words, realistically, the only way of full involvement is to participate in the global capitalist system.

******

Formulated provocatively, social work is facing an impossible task – the squaring of the cycle. On the one hand it is of course important to recognise the basic human rights in the given understanding, aiming on securing their realisation. But at the same time we are facing the necessity of engaging in the balancing act of criticizing these rights at the level of the underlying methodology and the subsequent definitions. Two aspects have to play a particularly important role – in the following they are only addressed as questions for future research and action:

The first is development of practice: human rights must be understood more as matter of social human practice. This means in a global perspective the need to acknowledge other modes of production; in national perspectives it means to allow other ways of life – not only as matter of multiculturalism, but more in the sense of different understandings of the production and reproduction of everyday’s life. Obviously, this includes especially the recognition of such modes of work and lifestyles as they are claimed by some ethnic minorities. And importantly we are here also facing the particular issues and conflicts: are such rights compatible with requirements of gender equality – as for instance some issues of gender equality in the modes of production of Gypsies, Islamic communities, etc. – Mentioning the possible tensions is here only meant to raise issues, not more and not less.

The second issue is development. It is a challenge as we have to ask and answer how we are dealing in this light with “non-development” and “not-developed people”. In this formulation, this seems to be sufficiently provocative to clarify the issue at stake: the conceptual difficulties that do exist in dealing with interpretations presented by certain groups. These are considerations that are partly already arising in official discussions in connection with the so-called rights of the third generation. In the present case, however, the solidarity rights must be understood correctly: we are talking about the right to develop and practice the social, and not only realise oneself within a defined social context. That means both “rights for the weaker members of society”, but it also means to overcome fundamentally the concept of weakness, gong much beyond ideas of support. One of the issues that is obviously conflictual is the religious requirement of self-determination, which then potentially threatens the right to life under certain circumstances. Children are just one important group that requires solidarity in this sense.

Thirdly, it is about daily life: All these considerations need to be anchored in everyday life – not only with regard to the daily lives of the many whose rights are obviously violated, but also the matters that are still leading to structural “hidden disadvantages”. Actually these infringements are not so secret at all. An example that is not sufficiently seen as breach of basic human rights is the disadvantage of women as it finds its expression unequal pay. A permanently occurring question has to ask if it can be justifiable that collective agreements are not possible anymore and it has to evaluate in which ways they are increasingly undermined.

Fourth, the question of political responsibility must be re-visited. This refers in particular to processes of education. The responsible citizen, capable and ready to participate is certainly a widely used catchword. But it is at the same time also a question that needs to be considered in normal daily life of social work practice. This means as well that it is about the normal daily life of people – even the ordinary people. Change of society should not be moved to infinity by the fact that one cares first only about “really serious cases”. Just because a negative comparison is ridiculous, it is important that such extreme breaches can not least happen, because we easily ignore minor injuries – and this means also that we have to take the violations of the small ones, the children more serious. We easily assume a natural superiority of the West, the adult , the men of the professions etc. And we forget them equally easily, because we often emphasise the rights of “the disadvantaged” without further reflection: multiculturalism, anti-globalization, freedom of religion, transsexuality, the conflictuality  – important issues to reflect upon without neglecting the highly conflictual, and often explosive content.

And yet it moves – Galileo Galilei supposedly said those words. It does not matter whether he said it or not. Social work, generally, the social professions have finally (again) realise that they have to move more and they have to move in more fundamental ways.

[1]            Rough translation of an article, published in Sozial Extra 7|8, 2013

[2]            One may think of gender policies in the name of Roman-Catholic fundamentalism – this saves from reflecting on more or less distant regions, for instance dominated by Islam.

[3]            Such regionalisation is indirectly suggesting that the real reason can be found within these countries.

Elfin Dances, to be Performed by Elephants

da Peter Herrmann's Blog, posted in general, joys - what we usually take for it, Peter's Log, thoughts on life and its philosophy

After it had been Time to say Good-bye and after it had been Time to say Goodbye. Again some time later …

…. – it surely had been a strange feeling, coming back to the country in which I lived for so many years, on the occasion of a conference concerning EU-issues – the Symposim “Drives of Regionalism and Integration in Europe and Asia“.

However, returning meant not least to go for the first time to the Gate Theatre in Dublin, where Ibsen’s The enemy of the people had been performed.

The program booklet interestingly states as “main topic” the question of democracy and the right of one indvidual claiming the right of cicil disobedience.

But then, for me, something came up on a deeper level.

Quoting Ibsen from the Gutenberg-text on the Internet

Peter Stockmann. A man with a family has no right to behave as you do. You have no right to do it, Thomas.

Dr. Stockmann. I have no right! There is only one single thing in the world a free man has no right to do. Do you know what that is?

Peter Stockmann. No.

Dr. Stockmann. Of course you don’t, but I will tell you. A free man has no right to soil himself with filth; he has no right to behave in a way that would justify his spitting in his own face.

And we find also the following section:

Mrs. Stockmann. Well, one would not give you credit for much thought for your wife and children today; if you had had that, you would not have gone and dragged us all into misfortune.

Dr. Stockmann. Are you out of your senses, Katherine! Because a man has a wife and children, is he not to be allowed to proclaim the truth-is he not to be allowed to be an actively useful citizen—is he not to be allowed to do a service to his native town!

Mrs. Stockmann. Yes, Thomas—in reason.

Aslaksen. Just what I say. Moderation in everything.

Mrs. Stockmann. And that is why you wrong us, Mr. Hovstad, in enticing my husband away from his home and making a dupe of him in all this.

Sure, there are various layers, food for thought.

Not least the integrating role and function of the family. And looking at Ibsen’s play, we learn about the two sides: integrating, i.e. requiring subordination; but also integrating by way of “integer solidarity”, unconditional love and trust, the production and provision of integrity.

The question is also about democracy and opportunism and the meaning of individuals fighting for something that they see as their “individual conviction”, against marjority rule and “exceptionalism”- as said this is stated in the (by the way: completely overpriced) program booklet. We read – and hear also in the play:

After all, we are a democratic country. Now, God knows in ordinary times I’d agree a hundered per cent with anybody’s right to say anything. But these are not ordinary times. Nations have crises and so do towns …’

And indeed it can be seen – probably not only in Irland – as matter of

our own broken little country, at a time when leadership and integrity are called upon, an inconceivable time when the many must take the consequences for the risks taken by the few.

There is then at least a third point – a question:

Who is actually the “enemy”. Aren’t we all – at least occasionally – claiming to be exactly that: individuals, not opportunistically subordinating ourselves but doing things our own way? Somewhat stubbornly following what we think is the right thing to do?
It surely comes back to the point mentioned earlier, with reference to the program booklet: the question if “one” can claim superiority, if an individual can claim to be right, ignoring the right of the majority …, the right to be wrong.
But in its simple statement this easily overlooks one matter, admittedly one that does not allow being answered in a simple way:
Isn’t this majority in many cases simply reduced by charismatic leaders to an amalgamation of individualists?
Perhaps the most telling is in Ibsen’s play the quasi-appeal to the common wealth, well presented in the Gate’s performance, adding the speech by the mayor who clearly “sells” the idea of individual wealth as matter of a collective good.
Now, if any economist needs teaching material on the plausibility and wrongness of liberalism, if any applied social science academic needs proof of the shortsightedness of the own liberalist thinking, I can only recommend a visit to the Gate theatre’s performance. – The task: learning how to be able to enjoy a “we-meal”.

May well be that we all think we are standing up – while we can be easily convinced that we are sitting in the same boat. Perhaps we should more think about sitting around the same table, for the said “we-meal”, however easily accepting as unquestionable that some get substantially more while others are actually sitting also around the table, but they are sitting on the floor, only allowed to pick up the bread crumbs.

It is true – alluding to some expression in Ruppert’s Beethoven-biography: that sometimes elfin dances – the differentiated academic analysis – needs to be performed by elephants. There is indeed always the danger of a traitor – and there is alwyas the question if we recognise early enough if it isn’t oursevles who are respnsibile for The Taking of Christ. (Yes, the National Gallery of Ireland is surely worth visiting.)

The Gate showed with a really fine performance that a bold message – the dance of an elephant – can well provoke the fine-tuned questions of elfs.

SPACETIME

da Peter Herrmann's Blog, posted in joys - what we usually take for it, Peter's Log, thoughts on life and its philosophy

Of course, even if thinking and especially academic thinking is characterised by its systematic and strategic analytical dimension, it is surely also influenced by coincidences – contingent occurrences that are determined by what is happening around us, what is actually by our mere positioning in the world visible, perceivable to us.

And one of these coincidences may well be my recent return from a multi-million city, the 2nd largest city of a multi-million country and occupying a rank of 5 to 10[1] on the list of the largest cities of a multi-billion world.[2]

But it is not simply this experience that brings space in some specific way my attention – others are since some time engaging in social science: be it the geographer David Harvey, or the (amongst others:) urban theorist Mike David, looking at the Planet of Slums.

*******

It is early July now – I booked the ticket for the Museum of Fine Arts some time back. If I would not have this ticket, determining even the time slot of my visit, I probably would not go there – well, Egon Schiele is actually not my favourite artist, and his rather blunt view on nudity and exhibition of himself[3] would not invite me to leave to Hősök tere on this nice summer day. Or are his 170 self-portraits actually more about honesty than about exhibitionism? Honesty ablout the search for identity at times when society itself lost identity?

Anyway, the ticket is booked, and it is also a little bit of an obligatory act for the art historian that is dormant in me 😉

And there I am: the bright, sunny day left behind the doors through which I entered the gallery – behind the doors now being outside.

I am actually fascinated, drawn to or even into the painting that is right opposite of the door through which I enter the even darker room on the ground floor of the eclectic neoclassical building:

Self-Portrait with Chinese Lantern Plant from 1912

It is well known and, having seen it frequently in books, on post-cards and on the internet, I always asked my self why it is such a widely reproduced painting. Seeing now the original, and seeing it stepping out of the dark surrounding, I know immediately what causes the fascination: space.[4]

There is something that goes much beyond the painting which is actually a rather simple small composition: the painter depicting himself against the background of a lantern plant; the person captured with its contradiction of a relatively bright appearance of the distorted and grave face.

The upper body stands sharp contrast – in the bold dark suit against the shiny background, a space that has something playful, given by the lantern flower.

And after the recent visit this flower adds surely to the fascination – a kind of call from another world.

Not these contrasts but the order of space cause an irritation that arouses an utmost positive sensation of the view.

It is difficult to grasp – photography fails to picture it, and words surely fail too. It is a dialectical tension of mutual capturing and conquest. The question is if the person occupies, surrounds the space or if the space surrounds, occupies the person. Is it this loss of clarity about space and its occupation, these ‘blurring borders’ of hegemony that cause this outstanding face?

In the words of the Museum of Fine Arts’ smart phone application we look into

[a] face filled with torment, dishevelled hair standing on end, and hands clenched in anguish.

It is the question – but nevertheless it is a question that is not asked and that still seems to be answered without a single word.

Space then becomes more and actually different to what geography proposes. It emerges as immediate social space in its genuine meaning:

In the decade preceding World War I, Vienna was still an imperial city enjoying an Indian summer of refined sensual pleasures for the privileged few. However to later generations it appears rather as a laboratory febrile ‘end-of-the-world experiments’ (Karl Kraus) then a model for a multicultural, pluralistic and incredibly multifaceted society.

(Sármány-Parsons, Ilona: Vienna, City of Eros and Thanatos; in: Egon Schiele and his Age. Masterpieces from the Leopold Museum Vienna. Exhibition Catalogue. 26 June -29 September 2013; Budapest: Museum of fine Arts; 9-37; here: 10)

Strolling through the exhibition, I am another time convinced: Social science can hardly do without looking at arts as a mirror of society, surely not showing the entirety , but depicting some important elements of the Zeitgeist. And playing with it – turning space and time around, against each other …; moving in space and being moved by spaces … – and thus exploring the dialectical tension of mutual capturing and conquest of space, movement in space and thus time.

Look at The Hermits, also from 1912; or the Klimtian Portrait of Henryka Cohn by Richard Gerstl (1908)

Sure, all this is about Early Viennese expressionism – and we learn from the exhibitions comment

The secession was still enjoying its golden age when the new generation appeared on the scene in Vienna, who’s members were eager to move on from the kind of stylised art that smothered everything in ornament and refined elegance, and which was turning the Secession, in a majority of cases, into nothing more than decoration. The desire to replenish form with content – symbols and emotions – flooded forth with elemental power where som artist were concerned (Richard Gerstl, Oskar Kokoschka) but trickled as more of an undercurrent with others (Egon Schiele, Max Oppnheimer). By replacing the gently curving contours with robust field of colour, the new generation broke the dominant trend that ruled around the year 1900. Carefully evaluated balances of colour and form were discarded, and in their place, in Schiele’s art around 1910, came an expression of form that was motivated by feelings and instincts that welled from deep within.

*******

The lantern flower from Schiele’s portrait had been mentioned – and there may be more to it: aren’t lanterns also offering guidance? Aren’t they also offering security, hope – the hope of moving towards the light at the end of the tunnel, its perception always suggesting that it is not the light of the train entering from the other end.

So we return to the catalogue from which we learn that

[a]fter 1903, and more pronouncedly after 1905, Viennese art was more influenced by the many foreign works that were shown at exhibitions in the city than had been the case earlier. These works unveiled stylistic trends which could no longer be judged according to traditional critical categories based on mimesis. The principal yardsticks for judgement now became originality and the boldness of a picture’s formal experiment.

(Sármány-Parsons, Ilona: Vienna, City of Eros and Thanatos; in: Egon Schiele and his Age. Masterpieces from the Leopold Museum Vienna. Exhibition Catalogue. 26 June -29 September 2013; Budapest: Museum of fine Arts; 9-37; here: 22)

Thus we may say that Schiele is only looking for the light, being caught by the lack of direction; Anton Faistauer only a little bit later (in 1913) being confronted with the answer, with one answer. At least this is what he suggests in his painting

Street towards Duerstein (1913)

But this one answer is actually only focussing the diffuse helplessness – confronting us with the alternative of the coming and the going. Facing the original we are challenged to decide: are we coming, or are we actually going? What is the end, the goal – and (how) can determine it … – glimpses only can be seen, vague, very vague. But at least these glimpses of Cubism can be seen, shining through while the era is facing in reality the loss of hope, answering with the roar of a wounded animal.

What happened a short time later did give one answer: the answer that is most definitely a non-answer, an option we should never consider again as it will not lead us anywhere!!

And cum grano salis this also the question I had been facing recently – not as question of war, of such a war.. – but the question of the clash of cultures: standstill and development and development in which way ….? The question Lv, Xuxiang and their mates will have to answer …

The question that stands in multi-million cities and villages of a view people alike.

*******

I return to the office, walk buried in thoughts along the Andrássy út, the noble street, street of the former nobles, then and now the street of embassies; the street that celebrated the turn of the century by opening the first metro in the year 1896; the street that, today divides the Pest of the ordinary people and the heroes by its stretch of noble shops: the international brands, spacetimes of today’s nobility: global efforts of maintaining hegemony; global efforts of tying down the not of governance that needs to be opened with a complex strategy, taking up four ends at the very same time: the four-in-one strategy, that constitutes hegemony and counter-hegemony alike – Frigga Haug worked extensively on such strategy.

It is  long walk – listening to Ludovico Einaudi’s Divenire is accompanying me ….

[1]            The ranks are extremely difficult to determine – relevant lists show different figures without allowing an insight in clear definitions of relevant criteria.

[2]            According to http://countrymeters.info/ the data are as follows:

07-07-2013 20:56:26: 7 105 642 573 (Current world population); 3 583 606 273 (Current male population); 3 522 036 300 (Current female population); for China: 1 361 022 180 (Current population); 706 618 530 (Current male population); 654 403 665 (Current female population)

[3]            says the blogger … – … Hic Rhodus, hic salta!

[4]            Admittedly it is also the way of exhibiting the painting. I saw it earlier in Vienna, without being caught in the same way.

Once upon a time – and everything changed … !?!?!?

da Peter Herrmann's Blog, posted in academic life - living in academia, contemporary socio-economic situation, joys - what we usually take for it, Peter's Log, social quality, thoughts on life and its philosophy, Uncategorized

A day at the end of June, 8:36 a.m. – high-speed train G7381 with the name “harmony” brings me from Shanghai to Hangzhou.

Apparently it had been Marco Polo who said

下来有苏杭

上 有天堂

and indeed, it seems to be heaven on earth. I am moving there on the ground, at the earthly speed of nearly 350 km …

… outside the built-up areas, the fields, the streets and the huge green-house areas – passing like images of a dream, appearing and disappearing like the clouds one may see when looking out of the window of an aircraft … 350, 300 …

… 250, 200, 180, 140, 90, 80, 55, 30, 20, 10, 9, 7, 4 … the train stops …

********

… it is a while ago that I lived in a town in Germany – mind, not a village, not a city: a town. There had been approximately 25,000 inhabitants and occasionally we went to a city nearby: a place with probably 100,000 inhabitants. Well, we thought it would be a city. At least there had been an opera house and theatre and I had been privileged, occasionally being able – finding transport and having the money – to go there. I had been a child then and this is one of the memories I am fond off; one of the things I thoroughly enjoyed during my childhood; perhaps I enjoyed it so much because it was a little perforation in an environment that seemed to be smooth and that actually had been smooth, any attempt to escape only leading on slippery ground that did require permanent movement, but did not allow progressing.

A bit later this tiny, seamless world had been bursting – for me in the same way as for the many who turned to the streets at the end of the 1960s: against the aggressors in Vietnam, against the German media-giant Springer who had been one of the gofers of the aggressors in the far-east; against the Gaullist system in France; but also in favour of matters: of Bloch’s notion of the Principle of Hope and Marcuse’s realist utopia, proposing

You should sleep nine hours without dreams. Then you have the day for dreams.

And we had been moved in favour of A.S. Neill’s ideas on education, seeing

[t]he function of a child is to live his/her own life, not the life that his/her anxious parents think he/she should live, nor a life according to the purpose of the educators who thinks they knows best

and seeing this not only as right of children but as right of human beings in general. And those of us, who had been more radical, saw it as particular right of the oppressed: the working class, women, migrants …

Another short while later, after laying down sound foundation stones of my future academic life, I actually lived …, well in a city you may say, probably nearing 200,000 inhabitants …

… and another bit later I began floating around … – real cities, reasonably spread across the globe. After a while I stopped bothering about numbers – perhaps an exception being the time I worked in Taipei which I found remarkable not really because of the number but because of a kind of de-pressing tightness; and an exception at some stage Munich – the first time when I lived there I have had the impression that this would be the real eternal city: eternal vividness if one accepts that 24 hours, exactly one day, is eternity. There seemed to be no real rest: some time the entire city comes to a respite. Moscow perhaps had been another exception at some stage – but it may well be that I had been actually impressed by the seize of the building of the university in which I lived: one of the Vysotki, the “seven sisters” is surely something remarkable …

… travelling, moving on …, at least moving from one place to another, between large places and small spots … and though there is a lack of stability when it comes to the side to which I actually had to leave the bed, there had the stability of my brain: never really loosing the direction, always answering the wake-up call in the hotels in the correct language (even when talking to an automated system), and indeed always leaving the bed to the right side – knowing that it has to be at the end lead to the left side anyway.

********

A day at the end of June – Shanghai is now left behind – I spent only a short time there, about two weeks, teaching at SHU – but still it allowed me to explore a little bit of the city …, no: time to explore the contradictions of a place which surely is a city. Apparently one cannot rely on figures when it comes to its population – but what does it matter if it is 20 million or 24 million. Aren’t a few million people at the end small differences in such place? The really exciting part is actually another: that this city – probably like any other city – is a multitude of social places where

the social is an outcome of the interaction between people (constituted as actors) and their constructed and natural environment. Its subject matter refers to people’s interrelated productive and reproductive relationships. In other words, the constitutive interdependency between processes of self-realisation and processes governing the formation of collective identities is a condition for the social and its progress or decline.[1]

And they do it in very different ways.

The baseline is that many of these are Chinese citizens, but not registered in Shanghai. The baseline is that there are many foreigners – not allowed to work but nevertheless working, even paying taxes. The baseline is that this mega-city is gigantic hub, lacking clarity though its different nods of traditionalism and modernity, poverty and affluence, paralysis and vividness are entangled by an amazing network of a progressive metro system with 13 lines (though line 12 does actually not [yet] exist), covering 439 kilometres.

Any move that is guided by some basic attentiveness discourages us to speak of a city as living space. Although people move around, although the clash of poverty and affluence is permanently present, the actual life is taking part in some other regions – and it is surprising …

********

Actually the original plan for these months had been to live in Rome, the so-called eternal city. And instead of settling in a new life, I continue floating around. So instead of change there is continuity in my life: travelling, occasional concerts, galleries.

I am so lucky that Lv and Xuxiang show me around. Or should I say, allow me to live a little bit with them, joining their life.

Lv herself is one of these sweet Asian girls – matching every prejudiced expectation: looking like the blossom of lotus, her voice being like the sound of the flute she played the one night when I got known to her, and having eyes shining like jade [actually I am so ignorant that I do not even know the colour of her eyes for a long time; and then it turned out that they are actually brown … – yes, there is brown jade]. Well she is really good looking and a really lovely person, leaving poetical embellishments aside. And this young woman showed me so many places: galleries, concerts, the small old shopping centres, most beautiful gardens and a modern department store.

Though she knows exactly where we are going, it is more strolling around – and going may mean walking, going by taxi, taking the metro are sitting in the back of the Rikscha (though not a real one, but its motorised version).

… and it is surprising indeed …:

While being a modern and fast developing place, the tradition cannot be overlooked. Of course, it is the tradition of temples and the ornaments of some of the buildings. The parks still being a spot for many – and actually walking through them gives occasionally the impression of too many going there. But even if they are busy they are a kind of oasis – an oasis by contrasting the busy hassle and bustle of this multi-million project of togetherness; an oasis by contrasting the smoothness of the straight-lined modern business centre with the romantic bridges across the small ponds, never just a line from one spot to another – instead they are angular constructs that allow engagement with space, provoking playful rendezvous with nature and the self and others. Sometimes music is playing in the background, coming from loudspeakers – or is it actually the singing of birds? Or even only an illusion: the memory of the flute play of the one evening, of the tender sound of the Guqin?

And the parks, the small tables on the streets in the quartiers are an oasis as they let us forget the ere seize of the mega cities, show us where life simply flows like the water after having left the spring and forming a little trickle before it is getting lost in the large streams.

In some way all is of special attractiveness where it is remarkably “dislocated” from real life of contemporary realities and still visible as its vivid part. As the middle-aged woman, sitting in front of the house in the presumably poor area near the posh 1933 shopping and arts centre. Somebody else – her mother, a woman from the neighbourhood …? – holding the sheets of music. And the woman sitting on a simple chair, holding the instrument – a pipa – on her lap and creating a harmony that is simply “round”, content and resting in itself – resting in order to allow permanency of movement.

Exotic one may say. One may also say it is just the visibility of the daily tensions and the beauties that are even entailed in what we usually assess as something negative: tensions.

Some time during my visit I will have the opportunity to look at the sheet of music for the Guqin – it looks a little bit like a technical construction plan, the instruction for an arithmetic equation. It is so different from Western sheets of music – and it makes me think about “hearing maths”, something I had been reading some tome ago in a Russian journal.

For the layperson it may look like a plan that presents the blueprint for one of these monumental metro stations – some of them are surely as large as the core of the small village that served me once as home.

And it is this a paradox of continuity of personal life and societal life alike. As much as

the territorial state emerged concurrent with the deterritoriali- zation of political economy and geographical imagination,[2]

as much we can see that we are personally increasingly defensive of our own little territories, many of us having lost the sense and ability of genuine sociability. I will come back to it later – under the title the bowl of rice for every one but not for all.

We see this difference also in the new ways of life and living – still the old patterns of communities – but as they loose their strong inherent coherence that defines their closure from inside, that are now increasingly defined as gated communities: the inner wall replaced by the outer wall, the knowledge and compliance with moral requirements and orders, the acquaintance with a common and more or less unique language …, all this replaced by a single piece of metal or a chip or a PIN, opening the gate. And still there are the same things happening inside: the play of chess or card games, making music or listening to it …, and match making, different in forms but following this language that is written between the lines, the meaning that is standing behind the words – and cannot be found in any dictionary. But still

the interaction between people (constituted as actors) and their constructed and natural environment

follows different rules and although

[i]Its subject matter refers to people’s interrelated productive and reproductive relationships

this does not say anything about the concrete forms that it takes.

Recognising the increasing meaning of the patterns of the Westernly-enlightened world, does not necessarily suggest levelling of difference. On the contrary it is – be it pleasing or scary or both at the same time – of special interest in which way the different offers merge, evolve into something new as dance on the squares: unconditional participation and equally unconditional dedication; the understanding of rights and duties, or righteousness and wrongness … – it is also the matter of bringing the different resources together: many shops actually being workshops in the true sense – selling the repair of nearly everything, the perfection of recycling and ideally the interaction with the customer who is present while the way of repairing is looked after and the actual work undertaken. This is where productivity is so limited – and where the social character of production is so genuinely present. And this is where productivity is so high – where the social character of production is so genuinely part of what is produced …

– … like in water heavens – but this is something that will retain our thought much later.

********

Continuities in a life – hearing and reading in e-mails about the post that arrives home, in Rome. Being there in the Far East, I look forward to going home though it has to wait another couple of weeks – and then I will be there only for few days: Arriving home, i.e. in Rome, like I came home to Aghabullogue in my previous life: short meetings, changing clothes, checking post – that is what a director, even an academic director does, right?

– Anyway, after having been strolling around in the megacities different villages with my friend, I look also forward to spending the other day again together with her and her friends. We will go to Suzhou … continuities of explorations and excitements.

But before going there, I am attending a one-day conference at SHU: sitting in some large place: the conference hall that is part of the library building, listening to presentations and at the same time writing – multitasking-abilities of the equipment being increasingly mirrored by the need of the operator to follow in the same mode. Well, in this case the presentations had been more than boring and I do not have a clue why they invited these people to speak – all somewhat Americans: “genuine” Americans from the “second generation” (i.e. the ones who are successors of those who conquered the country about 200 years ago and drove the Indians to the deserts and mountains, if they did not completely genocide them – well, even if language does not fully appreciate the fact: genocide always had been and will always be something that is done, and should be expressed by a verb) or people who settled there, as the Oz-Italian yank whose words had been so shallow that even dust would not have been able to find a place underneath.

********

So nothing changed? Or everything changed? What did really change? This moment, sitting there in the hall, I have increasingly (mind: italics) the impression that my “real life” is not real at all. Living in such a world where it is true what I came across long time ago as a joke, somebody saying to me on departure

Had been good meeting you. Look forward reading you.

A joke I thought as the person I met actually meant he would read more articles and books of me instead of actually seeng me. Yesterday somebody saying

Best regards from Nadia

– short hesitation. Yanfang saw it, mentioned the surname:

I just exchanged mails with her and she … .

And right now receiving a mail from Poznan, somebody asking me to join some board: I listened to your presentation in Moscow and …

I would be honoured if you agree to accept my invitation …

No, it is not about being real “player” in this global world – what actually really changed is that I feel like a cue ball on a playing field that is much too large for me and probably too large for all the other players, feeling somewhat crunched between and by different players. And having the feeling that it is not just me who is crunched but that there is something and so much going on that is completely out of control – though processes of controlling are mutually exercised.

During this conference I had been approached by somebody – a “low-position assistant”, asking a question on logistics – and I answered, showing her the staff card with my name …

I know who you are …

Well, then she obviously knows more than I do: perfectly trained. But also: You are your name and well, I will come back to it later – they are so meaningful here, every word well chosen: the meaning and what do I want my son/daughter be, that is what is expressed by the name – not looking back as the O’s and von’s and van der’s; not looking at the profession of the forefathers of the Thatchers and Muellers. We are looking into the future, seeing that

you are wisdom, reflecting before you act

– I think that is the full name of this one queen I can call my friend…; and Yanfang actually being with her name a “queen”, but I know only the first part of her name …

Anyway, I had been sitting in the conference hall, writing my article against “knowledge from books” and I should possibly have added some sentences against approaches suggesting one could learn creativity from books, fancy power point presentations and shallow-fancy phrases. Then I had to stop before the conference came to an end as I had to watch the time, having been asked to join for a special dinner (very formal and not the best for me as vegetarian). But I stopped writing at that stage anyway as there had been another beautiful music performance at the end – classical Chinese music … – after that a very short break and some Chinese youngsters playing pop music …: loud, though it had been in some way soft rock music (well known songs – the Western charts), it had been somewhat like hammering it in the brains …, and the Americans around, cold when before the beautiful music had been played, now moving their body, underpinning each bar, seeing their culture hammered into the minds of people, into a culture, like they are building skyscrapers in Pudong, pillars that are keeping up the MacD-, Starbucks- and KFC-culture on the ground.

Yes, pillars maintaining their foundation …, a world standing on its head. No, I didn’t cry though I had been actually near to it; I didn’t scream though I felt like a scream being possibly a means to maintain sanity – and I did not even kick the guy sitting next to me: an Indian-American, hammering with the others against his knees – though I had been near to kick. Even much, much worse, I mentioned my body moving too … .

********

… and I walked a little later, on the occasion of another ceremonial event, across the carpet – yes, a red one, perfectly ignoring the flashes of the cameras, smiling and waving: somebody telling me what to do …

It is only a show …

again I did not cry, scream, kick …; I tried to enjoy the show of which I had been one of the involuntary players.

While being driven to one of these events, another small facet comes to my mind. The colour of the cars –those vehicles used on such official occasions: black. As black is also the colour of moaning in so many cultures, I am wondering if it used for these events as an expression of government bodies, officialdom, academia, business etc, expressing the wretchedness of the loss of ground.

So far I came across only one exception when it came to these cars: Cuba. An old car, the driver probably having many other jobs. I also remember that we discussed the upcoming meeting with the driver while he brought us from the ministry of culture to the meeting of the Centro de Investigaciones de Política Internacional  – government buildings, by the way, that would surely not have been recognised as such (though I have to admit that I know this also from other countries: the actual work of ministries done in houses and quarters where one would not expect it).

********

Sure, all this is so far presented in a black and white kaleidoscope, a burning glass that does not even allow seeing shadows let alone the truly colourful joys of honest academic debates.

Such debates I experience actually one of these days in Hangzhou – finally meeting a colleague with whom I had been in contact for a long time.

I am collected from the airport and the first thing after arrival is that one of the students in the “office of the professor” – while he does not use it after moving to another campus, two master students can use it for the work on their varied topics – offers me something to drink.

You want coffee of tea?

I decide for the tea, of course, and I am told about the special green tea here in the city. I get it from a paper cup. Not the moment of celebrating tea, but still admittedly a really lovely taste of the Longjing tea. I assume somewhere there is a special language – as there I a special language for wine. Being ignorant of such a language, I can only try to grasp the by the words fully flowered, tasting sweet-bitter. I take great pleasure in this refreshing taste and also enjoyed chatting with An – a very open young student, telling me about her work but also asking about what my interests are.

It is not long and my colleague arrives – my expectation from the previous cooperation is not matched: a joyful, more or less young man, very energetic, stretching his hand out to me and greeting me with a warm, welcoming laugh. He tells me a little bit about the program of the next two and a half days: the work, the lunches and dinners, the excursion to the garden and the West Lake, and he presents the structure of the departments, schools and institutes to me. I am standing in front of the large organisation chart: public administration, private and cooperative economy, governance … – mixing in ways that are unknown from my usual Western environment.

– One thing may be remarkable in a side remark: the party is part of it – as party cell of the university. But it is not mentioned.

Later it will be mentioned – when we sit for a formal lunch. Formal means that the various representatives are present. For me is surprising what the locals probably do not even recognise: the presence of students and administrative staff. Formal means that we are eating together – my neighbour Xian-guo, Dean and professor, makes me aware of the actual meaning of something that I always get pleasure from without having yet thought why it is so delightful: the we-eating, the different dishes, permanently new ones being brought, exchanged by other dishes, all standing on the large glass in the middle of the table, turned around according to gusto, the “power” as matter of taking the liberty to look for whatever one wants, the “power” as matter of consideration on the wishes and doings of the others. – I cannot refrain from making a side remark, remembering several similar occasions when some Westerners had been sitting around such “rotating table”, keenly looking on what they yearned for, forgetting everything around them, as much as they forgot that communication is not about telling stories bunt about the

interaction between people (constituted as actors) and their constructed and natural environment.

Earlier I wrote that we might come back to the bowl of rice for every one but not for all. It may well be the bowl of rice we all like to have as coming with the meal. This, and the bowl of soup, is in the Asian concept of meal apparently the only part that is “belonged” by individuals, personal property that we Westerners had been extensively clinging on after the curse of the apple, bringing individualism and the claim of property rights over humankind; and after this blight had been multiplied by the capitalist enlightenment – an enlightenment that allowed citizenship only as precondition but not as actual consequence of freedom.

Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité

– even Kant with his categorical imperative would and could not have dared to think first of the brother or sister. And liberty had been first needed – even if it had been only in order to abandon it, to treat it as freestyle and thus as residuum as soon as equality of the contracting parties had been reached.

********

Back to the lunch, having been a formal lunch meant many toasts – I had to learn that it sometimes has to do suffice to take the glass without actually drinking. Toasts, clinking glasses – another we-experience but also a matter of individuals: somebody getting up from the other side of the table, welcoming somebody else, cheering each other up … – and finally allowing now the party coming into play: after the exchange of 12 name cards between 12 people and at least 24 toasts later, the topic changes: we talk about the Great Chairman. Yes, ever present – and yes, also a matter of critique, debate, search for solutions – and questioning.

There is a tiny detail, worth mentioning. It is abut the name cards – in the West we are usually talking about business cards, right? But there is so much in a person; and here is so much in a name – although it may be a wish, a dream the parents have for their children. And although these wishes are of course about wealth, security, saturation, they are still very much about the wisdom of matching the silk hair with the silk shawl – just wait a while and I will explain ….

********

– This critique, debate, search for solutions – and questioning is surely not the same as I mention, coming back to Lv and Xuxiang. And actually earlier the week comments by my students gave me some insight into expectations – and disappointments. Few of them follow here:

  • As through several classes, we’ve already have our own understanding about social, social quality and the structure. For justice and quality, so many years I do not recognize the difference between them, because they always been translated to the same word, now I finally catch the subtle nuance. The whole class ,I guess it not only has been an interesting thing, but also the way to teach us how to theorizing what we observed, and this is the serious part.
  • The way Peter teach is quite different from the Chinese way, it gives us more chances to present what we think, but not take it all from the book. I think it’s more flexible, through this we learn the course more rapid.
  • This foreign teacher is serious and earnest, the theory and opinion he gives is not just other people’s, part of them maybe came from his own observation and contemplation, so its quite fresh and original.
  • The summer semester is short, but I’ve learn things, especially the theory about social equality and social responsibility, these are the hot issue through the country, what we learn in class make us rethink the social policy in our own country, not daily discussion but to theorizing the events.
  • The first time to take a English course, and I followed it through, as a student from engineering, the most important thing Peter gives me is the way to analyze the incidents in our daily life, from a social scientific perspective.
  • This class has been useful. Now I have a general idea about these several definition like society and sociology. Also, we learned a new way of thinking.
  • It is not everyday we have a chance to get a lesson, especially everyone was given chance to do a presentation. I hope our professors in SHU could give more lessons like this.

Sure, this says more about the students and their experience in the educational system … – and also about what they experience in and want for life, it says more about this than it says about me and my teaching. And it leaves me with some contradiction. Though such statements are surely indicating some strive to break open conventional ways, I see also that many of the ways are actually already open. This critique, debate, search for solutions is surely much more open than what I experienced for so many times in these so-called open-governance circles of pseudo-critical Western lefties, where left is more about having left reason behind, having left the ground of proper consideration, instead of being a matter of political positioning.

I know, the following may easily be misunderstood – supposedly whitewashing many breaches of rights, apparently denying the problems of this country, be these the ongoing problems of what is still so often called a developing country or the new problems of an overdeveloping BRIC-country – one of these countries where bric may stand for brick: as building block or as instrument that falls on peoples’ head, neck, back or feet, striking without any care, but with its destroying energy the life of so many people. – These days I think frequently of Arrighi’s work and his analysis of “progress”: the move of the centre from Asia to Italy, to The Netherlands then, before reaching England, later taking off from there to the United States of Northern America – had not all these emergences being accompanied by these huge forces of corrosion? Not the Schumpetarian creative destruction (if we should consider something like this being real), but the destroying force of a steamroller of alleged progress. Not least a progress brought to the fore by the old superpowers. Nobody talks about the breach of human rights by capitalism – I do not mean just the obvious use of child labour etc., it is just the power of capitalism that moves into every pore of life – just as we know it already from Marx, pointing in the first volume of The Capital out that there exists a General Law of Capitalist Accumulation:

It establishes an accumulation of misery, corresponding with accumulation of capital. Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery, agony of toil slavery, ignorance, brutality, mental degradation, at the opposite pole, i.e., on the side of the class that produces its own product in the form of capital. [..] This antagonistic character of capitalistic accumulation is enunciated in various forms by political economists, although by them it is confounded with phenomena, certainly to some extent analogous, but nevertheless essentially distinct, and belonging to pre-capitalistic modes of production.

And there is another point that strikes me time again – it is not the first time but I remember the same happening when I visited Cuba, Moldova, Russia, Taiwan, Turkey and others: the thinking of the Westerners. It is apparently so easy to forget – forget what one criticises in the “own” country; and so easy to forget what one acknowledges when looking at the host country from the outside. – And some may even wrap their forgetting nicely; transforming the “critique of imperialism” into the “right of the oppressed to adore the oppressor”. Sure, many find by going this way an excuse for their own lack of more fundamental critique.

********

Theatre, stages of producing oneself, not least by producing the other – without consideration, accepting the reality only to the extent to which it is result of the construction by oneself. But also without consideration of the fact of the self being equally constructed – by the constructed other. Reality is indeed more Kafkaesque the even Franz K could imagine …

– So I still dream, looking at what seems to be the only real world that is left for me: a lovely walk with the girl whose name is “you are wisdom, reflecting before you act”, and I look forward to next Saturday: I will return from Hagzhou, meet this wisdom and her friend at the people’s square and we will go to a concert, before I leave the morning, well, just after midnight, to Moscow. Lv, when we organised this, said

You will be tired.

I could only nod, but I am more tired from permanently leaving, from living between Ireland, Italy and Hungary and Greece and France and Germany and The Netherlands and China and … . No, I am actually not so much tired from travelling and calling at times a suitcase my home. It is more about being tired to live on this stage of mutual constructions, where everything has to be calculated, emerges as part of the theatre, a matter of roles to which the book had been written not just by somebody else, but even worse by an unknown author, now disguising him- and herself, claiming to be “I” and “we”, though leaving “me” and “us” actually in a world that seems to be without real exit …

…, only allowing few escapes – admittedly beautiful escapes like those to the heaven of tranquillity in the midst of 20 million+ people – a heaven of harmony in a hidden teahouse …

No, it is not paranoia (yet?); and perhaps it is not even really that anything changed. Perhaps it is just the continuation of a Diary of a Journey into Another World.

********

I am dashing across the train station, finally the silk fever got hold of me: I see a beautiful shawl in the window of one of the shops – pure silk. Seeing it, I see immediately that it is a nice present for a nice person. Actually I do not even think about the person, do not have to visualise her. I just see both matching. I look at the price tag, think about ..

… no, Sir, we do not accept credit-cards …

I ask for an ATM – and though the words are not understood, the matter at stake is understood. Soon I am nearly flying through the lines of people waiting for their train, trying not to loose my new guide out of sight: the sales person does not only show me the way to the next ATM – mind the emphasis on ATM, not so much on next (if next is understood as something that is near), she also shows me how to jump the queue, pass security gates without major stops; and she makes sure that I find the way back: the way to her shop, well the shop in which she works.

What is the link between such hunt across the main train station of a 24 million city and the following words, I quote in a new text I am working on:

Time gains a new meaning insofar as it has to be made part of considerations in its meaning of a (très) longue durée.[3] Instead, time is meaningful, not as a matter of historical consciousness, but as part of immediate practice – histoire événementielle interwoven with and welding with the longue durée and vice versa.[4]

It is rather simple: even in something like this scene, which may well be seen as buying binge on my siede and rip-off on the other side, there is at times an amazing harmony: the perceived beauty, the expected match, the transposition into market relationships and the strive for natural survival for which income – coming out of the pockets of people like me – is needed. At least it seems that life, living is not taking place outside of this relationship but is immediate part of it. It is difficult to define, de-fine…, fine with its two meanings, find …

It is something that occupies frequently my mind these days. Here in China – perhaps more in general: in Asia – the idea of harmony plays such an important role. It is guiding social policy as much as it is already a principle that is guiding arts – I will come back to painting at a later stage. But here I am – again – simply stuck by the ideas, the feelings …: listening to the soft sounds that are so characteristic for the traditional local music, the harmony of the gardens that play such an important role also today, the silk that is so common here for dresses of different kind and the long soft hair of my friend that I felt the one day on my arm, when we stood in the museum, looking closely at the scrimshaw of the traditional exhibits.

– Only a matter of the past and the diehards? Only a matter of wealth and for the wealthy? Something else comes to my mind – from the same text I am working on, concerned with Green Growth: the attempt to emphasise the temporal dimension of dialectics.

Rather than understanding dialectics in the (simplified) triangular relationship of thesis, anti-thesis and synthesis (which, of course, remains as basis principle in place) it is here fundamentally historicised by way of looking at past, future and presence. With view on the organisations and the sector in question it means to acknowledge that they are

  • in principle rooted in pre-modern frameworks – as matter of the past

  • anticipate potentially post-contemporary features and requirements – as matter of the future

  • and – equally potentially – implementing these under the (at times recalcitrant) conditions – as matter of the presence.

And what is in this new text said in regard of CSO’s and the so-called third sector is cum grano salis probably also true for any kind of social action – and we remember the social being defined as

outcome of the interaction between people (constituted as actors) and their constructed and natural environment. Its subject matter refers to people’s interrelated productive and reproductive relationships. In other words, the constitutive interdependency between processes of self-realisation and processes governing the formation of collective identities is a condition for the social and its progress or decline.

Sure, the instruments are different, but the tune is not so different at all … And we have to look at the many untold, even unknown histories on every day’s culture: tea and coffee, silk and wool, eating with chopsticks or cutlery, haircuts and the way of walking – actually all these hi–stories are not untold and surely well known. But then they had been nicely wrapped, making us forget how much they are reflecting out daily life, i.e.

people’s interrelated productive and reproductive relationships.

********

Finally I arrive in the hotel – a modern place next to the university. And I am not so sure anymore about what I just wrote before. Is it really just about different instruments, playing very similar tunes? I enter the room – the soft beat of the song, asking to

Take me to your heart

sounds as strange as the Lipton tea tastes strange.

Hiding from the rain and snow

Trying to forget but I won’t let go

Looking at a crowded street

Listening to my own heart beat

…

The recent chat with Xiaohong on painting – comparing European and Asian arts – comes to my mind. Talking with him, I mention what Lv told me, commenting on a painting we saw in Sozhou:

It is so difficult. It takes a long time to learn this kind of painting.  One has to learn to breathe every stroke with the brush.

And as Xiaohong, an elderly man, develops: it is part of a complex cultural pattern.

This painting is modest in colours and forms, modest in the use of space. It comes from the utmost inner of the artist and is not about exploring, let alone about encapsulating space. It is about devotion, developing an inner harmony – a harmony between humans and the environment in which they live.

********

The evening before my flight leaves Shanghai Pudong International, I experience this so vividly – when I go with my friends to the Water Heavens by Tan Dun; a bit more then an hours drive outside of Shanghai. I am admittedly a bit nervous – finally I have to get the flight few hours later.

Still, it is truly the experience that

music can be seen and architecture can be heard.

This is what Water Heavens is about. I may add to this sentence, that I red in the program brochure, that the move of the bodies plays melodies and the melodies emerge from the amalgamation of bodies and environment.

Sure, this harmony (or disharmony) of mergers and exclusions, of enrichment between different cultures and the difficulties can sometimes be easily translated into very trivial problems. For instance the eating with chopsticks. Not that it would cause problems for me. However, when it comes to the point of spreading butter, imported from Denmark or New Zealand, with chopsticks on the Délifrance-bread, it requires some creativity. And it is surely much less exciting than the eating of Lotus-flowers as little snack as I did while we had been strolling around the streets of the mega-cities.

********

A day at the end of June, 1:45 p.m. – Aeroflot flight SU207, nameless, bringing me from Shanghai to Moscow. We are moving with a groundspeed of exactly 349 kilometres – the plane is taking off. Heaven on earth will soon be underneath. Underneath also the built-up areas, the fields, the streets and the huge greenhouse areas and the cities. – Now all is passing in the memories, if I will manage to sleep? Thoughts blurring with dreams – those that are not kept for the days when we are going to change life, lives and living conditions. Dreams like those that bring us solutions rather than asking us to work towards them – and surely they have their genuine right too:

You know, when I was in primary school my dream was playing the flute and sitting on a cow near west lake when it was raining, because I always think there will appear a handsome god, make your dream come true.

What still stays with me is small, and still this megacity and the ultra- development cannot easily destroy it: the souvenir of the soft voice of a young woman who is searching, full of energy, her way in this mix and blurring of different worlds – and finding it not only for herself; the memory of the soft sound from the Guqin, played by her boyfriend when we visited together the tea house: still determined to go the harsh way of studying abroad, studying for himself, for contributing to the advancement of science and his fellow citizens. And what still stays with me is … – si, un mazzo di fiori … – and even if it will soon be withered, remembering the smell, remembering the two friends may be one of the contributions helping to move on, and helping to slow down …. – making stages to spaces of real life again.

********

谢谢

– I look on the tray in front of me; I look up, the airhostess looks friendly at me …, and I correct myself

спасибо

… she smiles at me …

Opening another chapter of this book of which we are all part though frequently forgetting this somewhat funny feeling of living in a history book – the book of which everybody is him- and herself author.

[1]            van der Maesen, Laurent J.G/Walker, Alan, 2012: Social Quality and Sustainability; in: van der Maesen, Laurent J.G/Walker, Alan [eds.]: Social Quality. From Theory to Indicators; Houndsmills: Palgrave 260

[2]            Steinberg, P. E., 2009: Sovereignty, Territory, and the Mapping of Mobility: A View from the Outside. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 99[3]: 467–495: here: 468

[3]            Understood quite in line with the work presented by the École des Annales

[4]            Herrmann, Peter, forthcoming: Green Growth – Critical Perspective on Third-Sector Development; in: Anastasiadis, Maria [ed.]: ECO-WISE. Ecologically oriented Work Integration Social Enterprises; there quoted from: Herrmann, Peter, forthcoming: Do we really need Human Rights; Rodrigue, Barry et altera [eds.]: NN; University of California Press

Variations*: Omne ens habet aliquod esse proprium

da Peter Herrmann's Blog, posted in academic life - living in academia, general, joys - what we usually take for it, thoughts on life and its philosophy

– every entity has a singular essence(Johannes Duns Scotus, Opera Omina [1266 à Duns 1308] quoted in: Suarez-Nani, Tiziana: Pietro Pomponazzi et Jenas Duns Scot critiques de Thomas d’Aquin; in: Biard, Joel/Gontier, Thierry (dir.): Pietro Pomponazzi entre traditions et innovations; Amsterdam/Philadelphia: B.R. Gruener Publishing, 2009: 29-67; here:  33)

or: About Academic Responsibility between Dynamics and Statics.
*****

Recently I had to go to Rome – and if ever possible I take it as opportunity at least for a short visit to the Villa Borghese. It is actually not really about visiting the palace and the multitude of exhibits, most of them surely admirable objects in their own right. My visit there is usually solely dedicated to Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s statue Ratto di Proserpina – the rape of Proserpina.[1]

It surly is the most dynamic statue I ever saw. For me it is actually not about rape or abduction. Instead, I see it as visualisation of abhorrence of power: the questioning of power and apparent superiority. A woman challenging the given reality by facing it and at the same time refusing to accept it – she turns away from it. Of course, it is easy to see the historical newness – in sculpting and also in societal realities. Bernini’s work is the dialectical repeal of earlier sculptures as for instance Michelangelo di Ludovico Buonarroti Simoni’s masterpiece David.

Supposedly David had been the first free-standing sculpture: firm, independent, disjointed from the environment …. – the beauty and arrogance of the claim of the emerging new era:

Omne ens habet aliquod esse proprium

– every entity has a singular essence

However, paradoxically it had been this new era – the Renaissance and later also the enlightenment – that needed something completely new and even opposing, the upcoming era needed a Proserpina: aware of the abduction, ready to confront herself with this fact because only this allowed to resist. It had been not really about a new moral, about taking a different position. What – in my opinion – Bernini actually expressed is about the opposite: dynamics, allowing the emergence of traction, pulling forces, attraction and surely also the acceptance of possible failure.

In other words the singular essence of every entity is only emerging – and this is the apparent paradox – from the very relationship in which this entity is located and locates itself. And in this light every singular essence is about the dynamic and/or static the entity engages in.

NB: Mentioning dynamics here, I am speaking of statues – not of installations as they are now dominating the arts world. I know that I stand somewhat as a loner in the world of critics, seeing the latter very much as frantic attempt to dynamise the static – frantic like the attempt to use administration as substantial tool. Frantic like using grades and degrees and computerised quotation indices as means of assessing qualification.

*****

Now, something apparently completely different. Recently the German minister for education had been asked to resign – and she even dared to refuse (though finally she had to step back). The background is apparently simple: plagiarism.

But Ulrike Baureithel on the 6th of February in Der Freitag points on a much wider and deeper meaning of the entire debate on an increasing number of leading politicians being caught in comparable scandals – her article is titled Core of the Spectacle. She notes that doctoral dissertations had been for long times already subject to critical disputes. However, in earlier times these disputes had been about substantial matters, highlighting (or searching) political positions that are contestable in terms of political correctness. Baureithel states:

Today politicians do not have to fear to be criticised because of questionable politicial statements they made in works that are already forgotten for long time. Instead, they have to fear the detection of the fact that their statements are not traced back to the original author. This is in an era in which copyrigth is increasingly under pressure and in which blithe transfer of knowledge is advancing to a political flagship rather remarkable.

[Heute müssen sich Politiker nicht mehr vor verdächtigen Inhalten einer längst vergessenen akademischen Arbeit fürchten, sondern davor, den Inhalt nicht auf ihren Urheber zurückgeführt zu haben. Das ist in einer Ära, in der das Urheberrecht wie nie zuvor zur Disposition steht und der unbekümmerte Wissenstransfer zum politischen Aushängeschild avanciert ist, doch immerhin bemerkenswert.]

And indeed it highlights a shift of academic consciousness that marks the fundamental reference of work: it is not about daring ideas, bringing thinking forward, developing original ideas – rather it is about forms. Following this line we easily end in at most positivist research … at most … .

Thus we come now back to the earlier statement:

In other words the singular essence of every entity is only emerging – and this is the apparent paradox – from the very relationship in which this entity is located and locates itself. And in this light every singular essence is about the dynamic and/or static the entity engages in.

And it is exactly here where we find in current academia a new self-localisation. At surface level it is of course about commonly known and accepted matters: the overwhelming influence of management, the financial dependencies and obligations, the constraints within research projects emerging from the conditions for obtaining grants etc.

All this is surely true. But all this is at the end very much about blaming “the other” – a kind of trading indulgences, fading out important parts of our own responsibility as academics – and on this occasion I do not refer primarily to our positioning but to our thinking.

*****

Few of you know me well enough, are aware of the very fact that I am easily getting lost in time, in figures – in general such “hard data” are somewhat meaningless for me. Academically this in some respect of course wanton – isn’t science something “positive”, something that deals with facts as they can be expressed in figures? Sine ira … as Weber said. Still, this “getting lost” has also something that I want to defend – it allows abstractions, something that

separates things out, isolating them from our concerns as social beings immersed in particular cultural practices. As Locke once put it: “Words become general by being made the signs of general ideas: and ideas become general, by separating from them the circumstances of time and place, and any other ideas that may determine them to this or that particular existence.” The problem, however, is that we tend to be interested in things as they exist in a context with others. Indeed, the very word “interest” comes from the Latin inter-esse, which means “to be between,” while the Oxford English Dictionary tells us that the root of “abstraction” denotes a “drawing away from” and that the root of its opposite, “contextual,” means “woven together”.

(Blattberg, Charles, 2009: Patriotic Elaborations: Essays in Practical Philosophy; Montreal/Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press: 45; with reference to John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979], bk 3, ch. 3, sec. 6)

Very much the same is stated in the comments of an exhibition, I recently visited in Copenhagen:

On the one hand, details cannot be ignored if one wishes to depict reality in a convincing manner. On the other hand, however, focusing on a detail threatens to impede our understanding of how it fits into the overall whole.

(from one of the explanations on the wall of the exhibition ‘detaljer’ in the Statens Museum for Kunst)

All this allows us bringing things together – matchmaking if you want; matchmaking even if the matches are extremely distant. Distant as the German ex-minister is from the Kunsthistorische Museum Wien. Distant in time as my visit there – and distant as the time with which I had been confronted when entering a special exhibition: I had to walk up onto a scaffold close to the wall pantings which had been presented by one of the most contested artists of the early 20th century: Gustav Klimt. To cut a long story short: I stepped up, the leverage of the scaffold covered by a black cloth. Arriving on the platform of the exhibition “face to face”, I had been forced to turn around – a crossroads of which I took the option to rue to the right. Now, not concentrating on stepping up the stairs, I could also lift my head. I experienced a kind of numbing, looking into the eyes of the work of this artist: a goddess, not despising, not inflicting but sending a chill down my spine. Only once before I experienced the very same awe, standing just on my own in front of Picasso’s Guernica (At the time of my visit even the security guards keeping in the background.)

I said before “to cut a long story short” – and I know that this is a frequent mistake: we cut long stories short, we squeeze complex issues into power point presentations. And as much as we are in danger to loose the ability to read handwriting as we a dominated by computer scripts, we are in danger to loose the ability to listen, to look – be it at others or at ourselves. And we loose the ability to bear somebody looking at us. Somebody as the history of Guernica! Somebody as Pallas Athena.

Of course it is challenging – not so much to understand but to accept that understanding actually means that we are permanently questioning ourselves, our practice. And we have to do this not as academic exercise but as matter of questioning what we are doing, how we are acting. Things and people come back, even if they leave us. I read recently, in connection with the death of one of the examiners of my doctoral thesis, Hans Heinz Holz, a statement, contending that the important question is not

… ob man prinzipiell damit einverstanden ist, dass nicht in erster Linie Ideen den Lauf der Dinge bestimmen, Kopfgeburten, sondern die ökonomischen Bedingungen –

… if one is in general agreement that not ideas determine history, …, but the economic conditions –

Important is

ob man auch bereit ist, im Sinne von Gleichheit und Gerechtigkeit Schlüsse daraus zu ziehen

if one is ready to accept practical consequences in the sense of equality and justice

– I write this as something that employed my thinking very much over the last years, a matter that I saw and see as permanent challenge. It is the challenge to develop a truly historical perspective. It is about capturing presence not as such but in a light of history – past, present, future – but as matter of exploring history in the light of the presence and future. It had been exactly this responsibility that I felt while standing in front of Picasso’s Guernica and Klimt’s Pallas Athena. The … – yes, it has been a kind of trauma – this trauma did not come from an explicit or implicit accusation. Instead, it emerged from the implicitly asked question:

What do you do? Are you able to relate or are you only following the relations that are put in front of you? Is your strength about the resisting static self-positioning within a hostile dynamic of the environment or is it about the dynamic movement against a more or less static block as it is characterised by Antonio Gramsci. Stephen Gill, in his work on Power and Resistance in the New World Order (Palgrave, Macmillan – 2002, p. 58) captures it, saying

An historical bloc refers to an historical congruence between material forces, institutions and ideologies, or broadly, an alliance of different class forces politically organized around a set of hegemonic ideas that gave strategic direction and coherence to its constituent elements. Moreover, for a new historical bloc to emerge, its leaders must engage in conscious planned struggle. Any new historical bloc must have not only power within the civil society and economy, it also needs persuasive ideas, arguments and initiatives that build on, catalyze and develop its political networks and organization – not political parties such.

Or, coming back to Hans Heinz Holz: the question of not being

ready to accept practical consequences in the sense of equality and justice

And this surely means to look for new Berninis – for new dynamics that are transcending the given system by openly facing the challenges from within by positi0ning ourselves in a fundamentally critical position – fundamentally critical also meaning: taking positions that may fail but that are open to contest.

*****

Well, nobody said it is easy – and I leave it to you, better: invite you to think about the connection and disconnection between the steady David, supposedly the first statue standing on its own and the dynamics of the Bernini’s Ratto di Proserpina – the woman courageously facing the situation in order to draw away not by way of abstraction but by its opposite: inter-esse, drawing things together by tearing them apart.

Still, I do not want to conclude without some reflection on the issue by myself, directing this matter in particular to an academic audience I may conclude by the following – drawing a very broad line. When I studied we had been captured by the idea of a scientific community. Although we had been – part of and inspired by the revolutionary movements of the late 1960s – critical about such elitist community, we maintained the fundamental notion. And we joined in this critical spirit the various movements that engaged for democratic progress. Moreover we joined in this critical spirit the trade unions and the working class. Sure, this had been an imagined community, and it had been a community that had been full of contradictions. But looking back I think it is fair to say that it had been a community that had been by and large a disputatious community. Personally I remember these contests with and against Luhmann, Offe, Kaufmann, …, to name but a few, people that many of you will also know at least by name. Actually it had been an interesting development at the time: a new science developing and claiming to be acknowledged. Though heated debates took place with conservative colleagues, it had been very much about claims against them – the ongoing quest against the  “mustiness of 1,000 years covered by the gowns of academics” (Unter den Talaren – Muff von 1,000 Jahren). Part of this contest had been surely successful: positions taken, contests taken into the system and finding a stable foundation. However, the crux of history, like Hegel’s ‘cunning of reason’ emerged, cutting the dialectical of enlightenment short of the emancipative side.

So, academia replicated the development of modern society: structures, in the beginning surely necessary, became an “independent force”: a structure, obedient to its own rules, having lost out of sight that it can only then be justified if it maintains practice.

Sure, this is the same as a society that maintains a structuralist take on citizenship, perverting it to such an extent that citizens, the original sovereign of the modern state, are incapable to act. And it is even defined by its structural position, any consideration on practice being pushed aside (see in this context for instance Lister, Ruth, 1997: Citizenship. Feminist Perspectives; Palgrave Macmillan; Houndsmills, 20032: 42; cf. Oldfield, Adrian, 1990: Citizenship and Community. Civic Republicanism and the Modern World; London: Routledge).

Coming back to the two paintings – Athena/Atlas and Guernica: facing history as actual reality, as genuine presence, can hurt – it can severely hurt. Still, it is probably easier to deal with such injuries than to deal with the permanent intoxication, causing a slow death, still leading first to the suicide of social science, then to the suicide of people.

I do not mean this literally. I speak of the danger of accepting to be buried in structures, being battered to death by what had been once necessary, that could claim legitimacy: a steadfast claim of liberty – now perverted into an iron cage of commodification ….: dispute seemingly only possible by taking the form of war. That is the dimension of suicide Carin Holmquist and Elisabeth Sundin do not mention, it can be grasped as discerping the quadriga of social science

  • self-critique,
  • critique of the other,
  • critique of processes and
  • critique of structures.

In any case we can see a wide bracket: academic performance – and the lack of it – is measured in PhD-cases and the de-recognition of the degree on grounds of formal rules: originality is only a matter of sufficiently and clearly making reference; impact is measured in computerised citation indices rather than in actual debates; and publication-output is in this narrow-minded attitude only relevant if it is squeezed in the suicidal framework of peer reviewed articles. Books don’t count and subsequently contributions to books do not count – and …

… and the murderers a still free, in well-paid positions in academia and parts of the publishing world with its vested interests …

… and fortunately some woke up, repeal their admiration of the form. It is so to say the move from David to Proserpina, the move from a rigid position to the readiness to move again. Many universities are turning their back against rankings, are looking for innovative publications and are demanding the publication of ‘work in progress’, fostering open source software etc. Those stubborn David’s – having concrete blocks where there should be a creative brain, will at some stage have to face the fact that their static version of enlightenment only pretends vision. However, in reality, at the end of a single-line tunnel the light at the end of it turns out to be the light of the train driving towards us.

It should not be a surprise that under these conditions live becomes deception – we find a line from

  • disavow of historicity to
  • personal self-deception to
  • subordination under form to plagiarism to
  • the loss of responsibility.

With the shift of references to different individualities, thus the loss of social references we loose of course responsibility – not as moral decay but as absurdity of today’s realities. A lengthy statment from Theodor W. Adorno’s Minima Moralia (published 1945 – here refering to the 1951 edition to which Adorno addded a dedication, and taken from the dedication) regains importance:

What the pilosophers once knew as life has become the sphere of private existence and now of mere consumption, dragged along as an appendage of the process of material production, without autonomy or substance of its own. He who wishes to know the truth about life in its immediacy must scrutinize its estranged form, the objective powers that determine individual existence even in its most hidden recesses. To speak immediately of the immediate is to behave much as those novelists who drape their marionettes in imitated bygone passions like cheap jewellery, and make people who are no more component parts of machinery act as if they still had the capacity as subjects, and as if something depended on their actions. Our perspective of life has passed into an ideology which conceals the fact that there is life no longer.

But the relation between life and production, which in reality debases the former to an ephemeral appearance of the latter, is totally absurd. Means and end are inverted.

(Theodor W. Adorno, 1951: Minima Moralia. Reflexions from Damaged Life; translated from the German;London: Verso, 1978: 15)

[Was einmal den Philosophen Leben hieß, ist zur Sphäre des Privaten und dann bloß noch des Konsums geworden, die als Anhang des materiellen Produktionsprozesses, ohne Autonomie und ohne eigene Substanz, mitgeschleift wird. Wer die Wahrheit übers unmittelbare Leben erfahren will, muß dessen entfremdeter Gestalt nachforschen, den objektiven Mächten, die die individuelle Existenz bis ins Verborgenste bestimmen. Redet man unmittelbar vom Unmittelbaren, so verhält man kaum sich anders als jene Romanschreiber, die ihre Marionetten wie mit billigem Schmuck mit den Imitationen der Leidenschaft von ehedem behängen, und Personen, die nichts mehr sind als Bestandstücke der Maschinerie, handeln lassen, als ob sie überhaupt noch als Subjekte handeln könnten, und als ob von ihrem Handeln etwas abhinge. Der Blick aufs Leben ist übergegangen in die Ideologie, die darüber betrügt, daß es keines mehr gibt.

Aber das Verhältnis von Leben und Produktion, das jenes real herabsetzt zur ephemeren Erscheinung von dieser, ist vollendet widersinnig. Mittel und Zweck werden vertauscht.]

++++++++++++++++++

* This is very much another approch to questions that had been recently issued in another post.

[1]            The translation is not quite clear. It is sometimes also translated as ‘abduction’, not ‘rape’.

It all starts with a form – and a remark by Albert Einstein

da Peter Herrmann's Blog, posted in academic life - living in academia, contemporary socio-economic situation, general, thoughts on life and its philosophy

In fact continuing an earlier post)

Well, at least all this shows that things can apparently still be taken with humour – as written in one of the mails

The last time I saw a person from Buildings and Estates in Carrigbawn he told me that the internal building was laughable, it was so poor. That was nearly two years ago.

Sure, never forget to approach things in a humorous way – though some people go even with a smile to the gallows. Of course, the question is then why do in this case the victims go to the gallows – and not the perpetrators? The definition of gallows says that it is

for the hanging of criminals.

The only reason I can imagine for feeling criminal is bringing me back to Plato who said

One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics, is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.

May be that ‘being governed’ by administrators who need to fill in a form to switch on the heating is a gallows-like penalty.

Or it is the good laugh we may get out of it: at least taken from the one mail the state of some buildings seems to be a joke – herfe it is quoted again

The last time I saw a person from Buildings and Estates in Carrigbawn he told me that the internal condition of the building was laughable, it was so poor. That was nearly two years ago.’

– Though I can understand the colleague from buildings I am not entirely sure if the laugh is so good that one comes near to suffocation, thus having another form of gallows … .

There is another thing: all this had been and is an excellent example: My entire social policy teaching yesterday had been based on this little incidence. In class we talk currently about rights and law – you may refer to this concise definition by Kant, stating:

Right is therefore the sum of the conditions under which the choice of one can be united with the choice of another in accordance with universal law.

(Kant, Immanuel, 1797_E: The Metaphysics of Morals. Translated and edited by Mary Gregor. With an Introduction by Roger J. Sullivan; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996: 24)

And of course, the problem is the reflexive (or we may say tautological) character, typical for ‘modern societies’ and in very simple terms already criticised by Einstein, saying

we cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.

The challenge then is to overcome the permanent tension, immanent in law of the modern capitalist society, a political system that is characterised by liberality of economic activity based on private property executed by individuals within the framework of the nation state …

Of course, the limitation is already visible in the claim of general moral and intellectual virtues as spelled out by Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics:

  • prudence, justice, fortitude, courage, liberality, magnificence, magnanimity, temperance
  • justice, perseverance, empathy, integrity, intellectual courage, confidence in reason, autonomy.

One of the very fundamental flaws with it can be grasped by the inherent naive individualism and protectionism which then later could serve as fertile ground for individualism – and as such it is about a paralysing effect of a normative system that claims to inform individual, however is reduced to permanently reproducing itself within this idealist gist without being able to emerge as actual social force.

What remains in this perspective as solution is limited: the self-construction of individuals, the justification of the Leviathan as personification of the social and evidencing its individualist stance: the superpower, allowed to do everything, by Weber (in his Politics as Vocation) said to have the

monopoly of the legitimate use of violence

and with all this lacking the fundamental force of genuine relational sociability. The state based on righteousness emerging as state based on law. The state as ré-total instead of being a ré-publique – already outlined in much earlier writing by Emanuel Joseph Sieyes.

And the only legitimate power can then even come along and deny the rights: class education, institutional racism, gender inequality. Of course, it is the social science that occupies the part of the five-start-university’s infrastructure that are in the worst conditions; of course it is the working class that is still hugely underrepresented in third-level education; of course it is gender that plays a role when it comes to the choice of subjects and of positions in the hierarchy of academic positions; of course it is the working class that is still largely left outside of the equation when it comes to reflecting on social policy which limits itself on administration, good-doing and injustice rather than talking about class conflict – and of course we decry the discrimination of individual students on ground of ‘race’ without however honestly contesting the fundamental parochialism of our Western societies that allow capital to move freely within a globalised economy (that is still hugely structured by centre-periphery inequalities), a parochialism that consoles ‘ordinary people’: as long as they adopt the culture of wingless consumers: chicken nuggets, wrapped in tight seats of low-fare airlines, allowing the illusion of also living in the global village. Sure, those who do not adopt the rules have to adapt to other rules: detention, deportation and/or permanent control and oppression … – all part of the of picture which the German writer Bert Brecht once characterised by the words: ‘The lap is still fertile that allowed this to grow …’ (Brecht had been reflecting on fascism – at a time what it had been overcome, but its roots had still been in place). And just while writing these lines I receive the news that some German parliamentarians lost their immunity because they participated in a protest action against a gathering of fascists in Dresden.

All these ‘injustices’ and ‘social imbalances’ remain within the outlined system – legitimate as long as they are geared towards spaces for this self-construction. Surely a painful process – even if self-construction is about self-deconstruction of those victims who are blamed to be responsible for their situation: suicide, addiction, consumerism, criminality, the victims made to those ‘perpetrators’ that become ‘clients’ of social professions. And it is a painful process even if it is only the pain of a cold office, or the pain of

‘part of the roof of Carrigbawn (the decorative wooden bit, complete with nails sticking out) which fell off during last night’s storm’

and which had been picked up by Angela and luckily did not hurt anybody.

Dyl Ulenspegel clould not beat it

da Peter Herrmann's Blog, posted in academic life - living in academia, general, thoughts on life and its philosophy

You know, I can gain some pleasure from some foolish acts – and I also think that much of what we are teaching, be it on rights, politics and policies etc. can be literally found in any day-to-day situation within institutions like for instance any university. Finally I still think there is some meaning in making such follies of public services public (you think it is a play with words? – Not really!) [well, all this shows there had been something I learned from one of my teachers, Rudolph Bauer – and I am still grateful for his teaching many years back and his ongoing friendship over the years].

So, here another little story.

***********

I sent a mail to “buildings office” – after suffering in a lecture room and after seeing the students suffering even more (at least I could move a bit around while lecturing). So here is the text of the mail sent on the 24th:

Dear …, I had been teaching today from 11 to 1 in the Distillery, room G01. The students complained about the lack of heating – and I only made the session myself as I had been able to stand and move at least a little bit – not keeping warm but at least maintaining a temperature that allowed me teaching. However, students said as well that they had been over long phases not in a position to concentrate.

Be it as matter of citizens rights to education provided by the Irish state or by way of customers of UCC as service provider, this is an unbearable and unacceptable condition. I am writing not least as this is not the first time it happened, though it had been previously in different venue.

I hope that this issue will be investigated in a sincere way and the issue will be corrected.

Thank you very much,

Peter

I then received on the 28th of January an answer by the Buildings Office Helpdesk – yes, I received one.

Just an attachment – a form

WORK REQUEST/ORDER

NO: 62025

Requested by: Herrmann, Peter

Dept.: … Location: ….

Description of work request:            turn on heating in G.01

One page (A4) with different sections:

To be completed by Supervisor

To be completed by Assignee

For Office Use

…

Mind, especially the stuff noted under Safety Notice:

All works is to be undertaken by suitably qualified and competent persons, and in compliance with the Buildings and Estates Office Safety Statement and College Safety Procedures.

Work should be supervised as appropriate by the relevant foreman.

What is said in respect of qualification and competence may be questioned when it comes to the folks that is engaged with defining the admin side of a simple act: switch the heating on before teaching commences.

**************

May be … – if Kafka would be still around, he surely would write another of his famous stories based on this. And this story could surely be sufficient for Erving Goffman, Norbert Elias and the like to get them an hour and more exploring phenomenology of institutions and the Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations of the Process of Civilisation … .

One point may be added: Norbert had been strong believer in the process of civilisation – and although he had been (as Jew) forced by fascism to leave Germany, he had been until the end of his life convinced of such civilisational progress, rejecting any proposals to talk about de-civilisation and even remerging barbarism. Later, such discussions emerged by people who based their arguments on his work. Though I assume he would not have agreed. He had been just too gentle to think that we can step back. And with all conviction I still try to maintain such gentleness that I have had the honour to experience during our meetings, not possibly getting seriously damaged by being forced into such an iron cage (as Weber would have had it).

You see? Such a little story, and so much in it … – Occasionally I feel myself being seen as a very abstract thinker – but there is something I learned from somebody else who had been teacher and somewhat mentor: Niklas Luhmann, showing me that these apparently very abstract terms, categories and relationalities are just in front of us in tiny pieces – and it is up to us to leave it there on the ground: scattered and dangerous with the sharp edges of the heap of shards; or if we draw attention: allowing us to detect the essence of what all this is actually about: simplicity of oppressive hegemonic of which we are all part.

There could be an endless chain of examples we may add:

  • Grants for conference participation given to full time staff – maintaining establishment – rather than promoting with the meager means colleagues who may be in precarious situations, just starting careers … – sorry, didn’t older colleagues have enough time to establish themselves to be invited and get the conference fees covered by the organizers?
  • Issues of teaching and learning decided by administrative rules (or administrators as rulers?) rather being assessed in the light of needs of students – and staff that are preparing relevant material, sessions and excursions
  • publications rated on grounds of quantity and of ‘reviewed’ quality instead of quality and quality emerging from collective disputes

Well, we may leave it with the trinity – sure, in this light we come to the conclusion – taken from Marx’ ‘Grundrisse‘ – that

[t]he concrete is concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations, hence unity of the diverse. It appears in the process of thinking, therefore, as a process of concentration, as a result, not as a point of departure, even though it is the point of departure in reality and hence also the point of departure for observation [Anschauung] and conception.

PS: in this context perhaps of interest my publication

More recent and relevant:

And finally:

  • Research on demand. Academics between self-consciousness and self-chastisement; forthcoming in the documentation of the ÖFEB-annual meeting)

Guest Contribution: Children’s Rights in Social Care Setting under Irish law: Reality or Myth??

da Peter Herrmann's Blog, posted in general, thoughts on life and its philosophy, works, projects, publications

Lucy O’Leary *

Children’s Rights in Social Care Setting under Irish law: Reality or Myth??

Introduction

The recent Irish referendum has given the impression that children’s rights in Ireland will be placed on some sort of an equal footing with that of their parents. However, the reality is somewhat different. The social care setting is an area of law that is of particular controversy due to the inability of the courts to look at these children as independent entities from their biological parents, foster parents and social workers. Their opinions and feelings are largely framed in terms of the opinions of the social work profession and despite the referendum, aimed at placing children at the forefront of all matters concerning them, this will not change. This is due to the lack of a child based approach in the courts and the adversarial nature of this arena.

This article shall look at the reality of children’s rights in the social care setting in Ireland in light of the referendum, and see what, if any, changes have been made to place the child at the forefront of these disputes. It shall place particular emphasis on the right of the child to have a say in where and who shall take responsibility for their everyday care. It shall also look at the impact that both European and international standards play or should play in the voice of the child being properly heard in these cases.

The Irish Perspective

Children’s rights in Ireland have been the source of debate for decades, especially given that Ireland signed and ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child as early as 1992, and 20 years later, children’s rights had still not been placed within the constitutional framework of this jurisdiction. While the legislative provisions protecting children and potentially giving children a voice are vast[1], the ‘inalienable and imprescriptible’[2] rights of the marital family are regarded as the “fundamental law of the state and must be taken as overriding any pre-existing law inconsistent therewith”[3].

The reality of the marked absence of a child centred approach in the courts has led to much criticism of how Ireland[4] effectively regards the independent rights of the child, as a separate consideration from that of their parents, social worker, foster parents and all other interested parties. The rights of the marital family have led to some extremely contentious decisions by the courts[5], where the best interests of the child were clearly contrary to the outlook of their parents, but due to the hierarchical system that exists within the Constitution, and the placement of article 41 at the top of that system, the rights of the child were outweighed by the rights of their parents.

This was thought to have changed in light of the recent referendum on children’s rights in Ireland. During the campaigning for the yes vote, many criticisms were made about the language of the new article 42A and how this would not, in reality, change the previous hierarchical system[6]. Despite these assertions, there were also fears that the new amendment would dilute the rights of parents to ‘parent’ their children[7]. The reality however is far removed from these fears. The Supreme court has stated time and time again, that the “sanctity of the family and the enduring existence of parental authority seem….to be guaranteed by the provisions [of article 41 and 42]…..and that the framers of the Constitution considered, and enacted, that the best interests and happiness of the child would be served by its being a member of the parental household”[8]. It is very difficult to see how this will change, given the wording of the new article 42 A.

The wording of the amendment, while it does provide some rights to children, is restricted to cases of guardianship, custody and access[9], and is preceded by the words “provision shall be made by law”, as is every insertion of the various provision of article 42A. This means that legislation will need to be implemented, in order to give effect to the rights of the child as asserted by this amendment. The Child Care Acts 1991-2011 and the Children Act 2001 provide for all matters regarding children. These are the legislative provisions available to children in Ireland and therefore, it could be said that this amendment offers nothing new to the realm of children’ rights in Ireland.

It could be said that the most important right for a child to have, is the right to have their views taken into consideration in all aspects of their care, a provision that is contained in the Guardianship of Infants Act 1964, s 25[10], a provision that has not been commenced yet, and which has been described as a ‘relatively mild obligation as it leaves the discretion to the court in relation to the child’s capacity to understand’[11]. While the amendment provides that legislation must be enacted in order to give this provision effect, in the absence of a child centred approach by the courts and the adversarial nature of the system, it could be said that a radical overhaul of the court process would need to be implemented, in order to give proper enjoyment of these rights to children.

The social care system is a further barrier to overcome for children that find themselves encapsulated within it. Not only do they have to try and be heard by their parents and the courts, they also have to try and be heard by their social workers. While the social worker will try and ascertain the views of the child, their obligation is to act in the child’s best interest, which may not correlate with what the child actually wants. This can lead to a further ostracising of the child and a feeling of helplessness in an environment where they already feel loss of control. It has been well established that involvement in the decision making process can increase a child’s “sense of identity, self esteem and personal autonomy”[12]. However, the absence of this approach within the system, can only serve to be of further detriment to the child.

_______________________

* Lucy O’Leary
BCL 2009 in Griffith College Cork
Studied H Dip in Social Policy 2011-2012, UCC
Currently studying LLM Child and Family Law in UCC 2012-2013

This contribution had been written in preparation for publication in SOZIALEXTRA (issue 4/2013). As it is dealing with the situation in Ireland and gives at the very same time an insight into questions that are of general relevance it is worthwhile to be published also in English, not only in the German translation in the journal.

See on this topic also my own post.

[1] Child Care Act 1991-2011, Children’s Act 2001

[2] Article 41.1.1 Bunreacht na hEireann

[3] Re O’Brien (an infant) (1954) IR 1 at 10, per Davitt P

[4] Concluding observations of the UNCRC, CRC/C/IRL/CO/2, 29 September 2006, p.2

[5] N v HSE [2006] 4 I.R, Northern Western Health Board v H.W and C.W, (2001) 3. IR 622.

[7] ibid

[8] Re O’Brien (an infant) (1954) IR 1 at 10

[9] Article 42A.4.1º ii

[10] As inserted by Children Act 1997

[11] Annual Review of Irish Law 2004 (Dublin: Round Hall Sweet and Maxwell, 2005) as cited in O’Callaghan, “ Realising the Child’s Right to be Heard in Private Child Contact Disputes: Progress in Practice?” (2010) Irish Journal of Family Law at 9

[12] J.E Timms, Children’s Representation: A Practitioners Guide (London: Sweet and Maxwell, 1995),p 440 as cited in O’Callaghan, “ Realising the Child’s Right to be Heard in Private Child Contact Disputes: Progress in Practice?” (2010) Irish Journal of Family Law at 1.

Details

da Peter Herrmann's Blog, posted in contemporary socio-economic situation, general, joys - what we usually take for it, Peter's Log, thoughts on life and its philosophy

or leaving me aside. Leaving me aside – my excitement when experiencing Russian history n a nutshell, really compressed in a short paragraph, a long sentence if you want: Compressed to the imagination of walking along the Nevsky Prospect on the pavement of which once Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin walked …., a Zeitgeist that drove Fjodor Michajlovitsj Dostojevski to gambling; allowing me now to think in similarly eccentric ways as Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy did, when he may have visited this city that has now the name Saint Petersburg; thinking about the greatness of Peter and the likes who, when time matured had been dwarfs standing in the way of the largess of a new society which chased them away, following the call coming from the Aurora and standing at the beginning of conquering the Winter Palace – the storm that later still required The Mother taking rigorous steps, standing up when she had been called.

Details are often forgotten while looking at the large picture. Or is it more that we are blinded by some grandeur?
There are surely the great politicians, the large lines and also the large crimes. And even if one should be careful with premature joys or anger, one should not take the required circumspection as an excuse for holding back with political judgement. And this is a matter of current governments here (yes: HERE) and there (for instance the ridiculous sentence for Berlusconi and the reduction of even this modest conviction. Nevertheless, leaving this major lines aside, looking at something that is more hidden it is sometimes the really small things that make huge differences.
When I went  he other day by train with Viacheslav to Petersburg – and while we had been comfortably sitting in the fast train, we had been chatting with Natasha (who is Natasha  – It could be a long story now like the many stories usually told from the transsib, even if the train trip took definitely much less time than one of those famous (or infamous?) trips in the “old times”. At some some stage we talked, of course, also about politics – Natasha recalled pre-Perestroika-times (“What are you talking about? When was that?” Viachselav intervened, half jokingly). The woman continued undeterred, though with a little smile:

You know, those times, before Gorbachev. We had been … – we. You,

she pointed on me, as on somebody coming from another world, the world of old capitalism

you start you sentence with I. And you write it with a capital letter, even in the middle of the sentence. it had been different here. It had been about us, about we …

Viacheslav intervened:

Peter knows. He studied also in

Looking at me I helped:

Leipzig – when it still had been in the GDR, although the Campus had been near Berlin.

Yes, the times and the circumstances had been different. But there seems to be more to it. One could speculate about this “it” constituting the we and the I … – and as much as times and circumstances matter, something seems to be still alive here where pure capitalism is on the advance to complete final victory. I thought about this “we” the evening when visiting with Viacheslav and Olesya the Mariinsky theatre, enjoying Glinka’s Ruslan and Lyudmila … – in the program brochure so many details had been listed, the soli in the orchestra even if they seemed to play a minor role. It seems to be a paradox: but here, where it is still about a “we-society”, the I becomes much more important than in societies that pretend individuality and can only do so by limiting it to a sole mate, who has lost the soul.
And in actual fact, the detail gains grandeur when being really part of the we. – And history is a little bit like a love story – a love story being felt like the “story line of history” …