La Gira

Critique as confirmation …

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

How criticising can confirm that the criticised is at least in part correct

The book is only in part worthwhile reading – the argumentation is too often unconventional. Adam quotes frequently authors as the visionary Herman Oberth or the japanese physicist Michio Kaku and his adventurous visions of the future. that do not really represent the academic mainstream.

In question is the book Kampf gegen die Natur. Der gefährliche Irrweg der Wissenschaft and the review by Gottfried Plehn in MaxPlanckForschung 1/13, page 90. I did not read Adam’s book – in question is the consideration of the reviewer: no representing the mainstream is problematic. With such disqualifying expression Plehn stands in the rows of those who one stood applauding against the thesis that the planet earth moves. Indeed, the thinking of the Plehns obviously did not move a single inch. Sure, Gottfried Plehn is probably not sufficiently important to be mentioned. However, he is part of a mafia in academia that push towards suicide of science.

Wie verkommen …?

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

Wie verkommen muss man eigentlich sein, um ernsthaft die Besprechung eines Buches wie folgt zu schliessen?

Lesenswert ist das Buch nur in Teilen, zu oft ist die Argumentation eigenwillig. Adam zitiert häufig Autoren wie den Weltraumfantasten Hermann Oberth oder den japanischen Physiker Michio Kaku und dessen kühne Zukunftsvisionen, die nicht gerade den Mainstream der Wissenschaft präsentieren

Es geht um das Buch Kampf gegen die Natur. Der gefährliche Irrweg der Wissenschaft und die Besprechung von Gottfried Plehn in MaxPlanckForschung 1/13, Seite 90 Was auch immer von dem Buch zu halten ist, was auch immer die Referierten Oberth und Kaku von sich gegeben haben: diese Art der Kritik ist nur eine Bestätigung, dass die Mainstream-Wissenschaft mit vielem kämpft, aber nur begrenzt mit den eigenen Problemen. Mit dieser unqualifizierten Ausdrucksweise reiht sich Plehn in jene Reihen, die seinerzeit applaudierend gegen die These standen, dass sich die Welt doch bewege. Es geht hier nur um die Art der Auseinandersetzung: und die zeigt, dass sich der Geist Plehn’s tatsächlich nicht bewegt hat. Er ist vermutlich zu unwichtig, um hier eigentlich erwähnt zu sein. Aber seinesgleichen sind es, die zum Selbstmord der Wissenschaft treiben.

PRECARITY – AN ISSUE OF CHANGED LABOUR MARKET AND EMPLOYMENT PATTERNS OR OF CHANGED SOCIAL SECURITY SYSTEMS

da Peter Herrmann's Blog, posted in contemporary socio-economic situation, social quality, works, projects, publications

A new working paper had been published under the heading

PRECARITY – AN ISSUE OF CHANGED LABOUR MARKET AND EMPLOYMENT PATTERNS OR OF CHANGED SOCIAL SECURITY SYSTEMS

Reading the abstract may raise your interest in reading the entire paper, prepared for this years EUROMEMO-workshop in London

The fact of an increasing precarity of employment is widely analysed and discussed although we surely face various different definitional approaches. An important part of the differences in the definitions (as matter of the conceptualisation of precarity as analytical and political issue) is due to not tackling sufficiently consensual the following question: Is precarity a matter of dissolving the standard pattern of entering the social security system (i.e. fundamentally rejecting the right to work) or is it a matter of ‘lacking flexibility’ and even retrenchment of social security systems?

The contribution will, first, discuss some of the conceptual and definitional questions. Second, some broad outline of the situation will be given by empirical statements. A final third section will formulate policy demands in a long- and a short-term perspective.

The presentation is connected with editing a book in this area. The relevant individual countries that will be looked at in the book are Hungary, Italy, and Russia.

Partikularität und Ganzheitlichkeit: Gedanken zum Gezi Park

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

Gastbeitrag[1] von Mehmet Okyayuz[2]

Die unverhältnismässige Gewalt, die am 31. Mai von den Sicherheitskräften gegen Menschen angewandt wurde, die zusammenkamen, um gegen die Transformation des Gezi Parks in ein Einkaufszentrum zu protestieren, hat nach diesem Datum die bis heute andauernden Proteste gegen die Regierung noch intensiviert. Im Verlauf dieses Prozesses haben viele bis dato apolitische Individuen, die den repressiven Aktivismus der AKP-Politik in all seiner Direktheit am eigenen Leib erfahren mussten, die existentielle  Wichtigkeit des “Politisch-Seins” erfasst. In diesem Zusammenhang scheinen die Vorfälle auch die Möglichkeit eröffnet zu haben, dass gegen die Auswirkungen einer seit 10-15 Jahren praktizierten neoliberalen Politik, Widerstand möglich ist. Lassen wir einmal diejenigen, welche diese Politik verteidigen oder diejenigen für die eine Zusamenarbeit mit ersteren profitabel zu sein verspricht, draussen vor; so ist die Hoffnung auf Veränderung dieser Zustände so weit fortgeschritten, dass es in vielen Städten in der Türkei Proteste gab und gibt, in denen die Legitimität der Regierung in Frage gestellt wird. Die an diesen Protesten teilnehmenden Menschen handeln auf der Basis eines Wissens, welches Herrschaftslegitimität nicht auf Wahlergebnisse und/oder auf eine blosse – meist von Rechtsstaatlichkeit losgelöste – Gesetzlichkeit reduziert.

Es ist dieses theoretisch-politische Bewusstsein der protestierenden Menschen, welches Erdoğan soweit in Alarmstimmung oder gar in Angst und Schrecken versetzt haben muss, dass er in einer Rede vom 9. Juni auf dem Esenboğa-Flughafen in Ankara – wieder einmal auf Wahlen und Wahlergebnisse abzielend – als Antwort auf die Proteste davon sprach, “dass der Ort der Abrechnung des Volkes die Wahlurnen (seien), (dass) das Volk uns an die Macht brachte und das Volk es ist, dass uns abtreten lassen wird. Keine Macht ausser dem Volk wird dies tun können”. Am gleichen Tag sprach er in einer Rede in Altınpark/Ankara Drohungen gegen die Protestierenden und deren Unterstützer dergestalt aus, dass “diejenigen, die der Herrschaft des Volkes keinen Respekt zollen, den Preis dafür zu zahlen haben”. Diese Worte zeugen von der Angst der AKP, die zu Recht befürchtet, dass sich eine zivilgesellschaftliche Bewegung zum Schutz der Natur in eine “Volksbewegung” wandeln könnte. Eine Angst, die in emotional-demagogischer Rhetorik gegen die Protestierenden ihren Ausdruck findet.

Meine bisherigen Feststellungen speisen sich bis hierher aus einer Hoffnung, die ich –  womöglich mit unbegründeter Beharrlichkeit – fortzuführen gedenke. Wobei ich zugeben muss, dass nach mehr als 10 Jahren ununterbrochener AKP-Herrschaft, auch wirklicher Bedarf nach solch einer Hoffnung besteht. Gesteht es mir deshalb zu, dass ich diese meine “optimistische” Betrachtungsweise – zumindest anfänglich – weiterführen werde.

Die Gezi Park-Bewegung hat nun den auch faktisch, parallel zu den Forderungen nach einem Abdanken der Regierung, den Schritt weg von einer rein zivilgesellschaftlichen Bewegung zu einer politischen Bewegung “alten Stils” vollzogen. Als Resutat des weiter oben erwähnten theoretisch-politischen Bewusstseins, ist man sich der Beziehung zwischen Naturzerstörung, sozial-ökomischer Politikinhalte im Rahmen von Neo-Liberalismus und den Versuchen,  Lebensstile der Menschen autoritär zu determinieren, bewusst. Ein weiteres Indiz für diese verstandene Wechselwirkung ist der trotz aller Repression “lange Atem” der Protesthandlungen. Auch wenn diese Einheit aus Bewusstsein und “langem Atem” bislang nicht dazu geführt hat, dass die allbekannte Rhetorik von Erdoğan, an die wir uns spätestens seit den Vorfällen an der METU (Middle East Technical University) vom Dezember letzten Jahres gewöhnt haben, sich geändert hat, so haben doch in Reihenfolge Regierungssprecher Hüseyin Çelik und Präsident Abdullah Gül – nicht zuletzt um diese Einheit zu zerstören – das Bedürfnis verspürt, auf die Wichtigkeit von Naturschutz und den darauf abzielenden “begründeten” Forderungen hinzuweisen. Jedoch haben weder die Drohungen von Erdoğan noch Besänftigungsstrategien von Regierungsmitgliedern und Präsident, die auf eine interne “Arbeitsteilung” der Herrschenden hinweisen, dazu geführt, die Proteste zu beenden und die Protestierenden zu befrieden. Der bis zu einem gewissen Grade vergesellschaftete Widerstand geht weiter. Der Grund, warum ich von “gewissem Grade” spreche, liegt darin begründet, dass diese “Vergesellschaftung” (noch) nicht zusammen mit den anderen gesellschaftlichen Kämpfen und deren Forderungen verbunden ist, oder – anders und hoffnunsgvoller ausgedrückt: dass diese Vergesellschaftung augenblicklich noch partikular ist.

Es existiert eine breite und heterogene Masse, die sich sowohl gegen die Transformation von jedweden gesellschaftlichen Räumen – und Taksim und Umgebung wurde zum best bekannten Symbol solch einer Vorgehensweise -, als auch gegen einen moralisierenden Diskurs, sich konkretisierend in Alkoholverboten und Versuchen, den Frauen die Verfügungsgewalt über den eigenen Körper in Form einer neuen Abtreibungsgestzgebung zu nehmen, wendet. Wäre diese “Heterogenität” in “normalen Zeiten Grund für (natürlich notwendige) theoretische Strategiedabetten, so hält man sich im Augenblick verständlicherweise damit zurück, da die unterschiedlichen Gruppen innerhalb der Protestbewegung zwar unterschiedliche Methoden und Forderungen an den Tag legen, dies aber dennoch ihren gemeinsamen oppositionellen Charakter nicht verdeckt.

An die bislang ausgeführten Punkte ist eine “internationale” Dimension zuzufügen. Damit meine ich nicht diejenigen Presseorgane ausserhalb der Türkei, die je nach eigener konjunktureller Interessenlage agierend ständig ihre inhaltliche Position derselben anpassen, sondern die Tatsache, dass die Protestbewegung in der Türkei teilweise auch das politische Handeln der Menschen in anderen Ländern beeinflusst hat. So nahmen beispielsweise am 22. Juni in Köln mehr als 30.000 Menschen an einer von der Alevitischen Gemeinde organisierten Protestversammlung gegen die AKP-Regierung teil. Die im Gezi Park ihren Anfang genommen habenden Proteste sind für diese Menschen zum Symbol für eine demokratische, freie und säkular-humanistiasche Gesellschaft in der Türkei geworden. Nähert man sich der Sache in diesem Lichte, so sind die “Ausländer”, die an den Gezi Park-Protesten in Istanbul und auch später an anderen Orten teilnahmen, nicht Teil eines – wie die Regierungsrhetorik vorgibt – internationalen “Komplotts” gegen die Türkei, sondern Teil eines die nationalen Grenzen überschreitenden Transformationsprozesses, sozusagen eine Art “Türkei-Zweigstelle” der “occupy”-Bewegung.

Vor dem Hintergrund der von neoliberal-islamistischer Politik geprägten gegenwärtigen gesellschaftspolitischen Konjunktur in der Türkei, können die Vorgänge in diesem noch fortdauernden Prozess mit gutem Grund einerseits als gesellschaftlicher Aufbruch gelesen werden. In diesem Zusammenhang besteht – zumindest derzeit – meines Erachtens kein Grund, die Protestbewegung mit “klugen” theoretischen Analysen (und ein bisschen mit der Arroganz eines Aussenstehenden) zu sehr zu kritisieren. Denn “derzeit” ist – wie schon weiter oben erwähnt – der Erfolg dieser Bewegung an eine breite opposionelle Basis gebunden. Auf Dauer aber müssen die verschiedenen Gruppen, ihre Handlunsstrategien und inhaltlichen Forderung selbstverständlich einer Analyse und Kritik unterzogen werden. Dies sei vorausgesetzt. Noch ist es aber so, dass die Forderungen der unterschiedlichen Gezi Park-Akteure, von nationalstaatlichen Gruppen (“Ulusalcılar”) bis hin zu den Feministen, trotz all der Unterschiede in einem allgemeineren oppositionellen Rahmen gesehen werden (sollten). Die “Spreu” wird sich so oder so im weiter währenden Prozess vom “Weizen” trennen. Diese Annäherungsweise ist nicht zuletzt Voraussetzung der gemeinsamen Basis eines oppositionellen Bewusstseins der Protestierenden gegen neoliberale Politik, im Zusammenspiel mit dem oben erwähnten “langen Atem”.

Trotz all dieser die Hoffnung auf Veränderung nährenden Proteste sollte aber andererseits nicht vergessen werden, dass die AKP-Regierung als ein Herschafts-“Projekt” ausgelegt ist, also mehr als nur die technisch-bürokratische “Verwaltung” von politischen “Sachen” ist. So schien denn die Vorstellung einer politischen Überwindung der politischen Kader, welche ihre politisch-gesellschaftliche Hegemonie im Sinne einer neoliberalen Transformation der Türkei mit Instrumenten wie der Verfassungsneugestaltung sowie der möglichen Einführung eines (semi)-präsidentialen Systems vorantreiben, seit geraumer Zeit fast schon nicht mehr realisierbar. Niemand konnte sich die AKP und Erdoğan – und auch sie selbst nicht – so wirklich in Opposition vorstellen. Dies macht eben “erfolgreiche” Hegemonie aus.

Das vielleicht wichtigste Resultat der Proteste war und ist es, diese – fast schon resignative – Vorstellung zum Wanken gebracht zu haben. Das grundlegende Bewegungsgesetz der Linken, die Idee, dass “von Menschen gemachtes auch von Menschen verändert” werden kann, ist selbst zu vielen vormals apolitischen Individuen vorgedrungen und hat sie politisiert.

Dies war und ist die Hauptfunktion der Proteste. Und deshalb mögen wir die Intelligenz und Kreativität der protestierenden Menschen, und in diesem Zusammenhang auch (wieder) die Menschen in den 20ern, von denen wir es gewoht waren sie als apolitisch zu bezeichnen. Ich halte dies für besonders wichtig, denn es gibt viele Gründe für Erfolg und Erfolglosigkeit gesellschaftlichen Widerstandes. Einer besteht zweifelsohne augenblicklich darin, dass die Solidarität zwischen den Generationen (wieder) konkret Gestalt angenommen hat. So “mögen” denn – um von meinem eigenen Arbeitsbereich zu sprechen – Akademiker ihre Studenten wieder mehr als zuvor, was sich auch in solidarischen Presseerklärungen und Unterschriftenaktionen äussert, also nicht nur eine abstrakte Attitüde ist.

Mehr als klare analytische Vorbringungen habe ich bis zu diesem Punkt im Rahmen dieses Textes versucht, die Dinge, die mir zu den Protesten durch den Kopf gehen, zu Papier zu bringen. In diesem Zusammenhang möchte ich auch ein wenig auf den Punkt meiner (weiteren) Erwartungen kommen. Diese könnte man am besten mit dem Stichwort “Ganzheitlichkeit” umschreiben. Das Wesen der Proteste liegt im Widerstand gegen die “Verwüstungen” einer neoliberalen Politik begründet. Die Menschen sind sich bewusst darüber, dass jeder von ihnen früher oder später ein Opfer dieser Politik werden kann. Sie sind sich bewusst darüber, dass Verarmung Deprivation, dass Wettbewerb Vereinsamung, dass eine moralisierende Rhetorik und Politik die Regulierung von Leben, und dass Kriritkunfähigkeit gedankliche Verödung bedeutet. Es is aber wichtig, dass dieses Bewusstsein auf allen Ebenen, insbesondere der Ebene des eigenen Arbeits- und Lebensumfeldes, seine praktische Anwendung findet. Dergestalt beispielsweise, dass den Menschen bewusst sein muss, dass die Institutionen in denen sie arbeiten, als Ergebnis nationaler neoliberaler Politik im Rahmen eines globalen neoliberalen Prozesses schrittweise transformiert werden. Wenn die protestierenden Menschen auf den Plätzen diesen ganzheitliche Dimension zu begreifen beginnen werden, dann werden wie sie noch mehr “mögen”. Letztendlich sollte die Basis der Parole “Her yer Taksim’dir” (Überall ist Taksim) eben auf diesem ganzheitlichem Blick beruhen.

Betrachtet man die Gezi Park-Bewegung unter dem Aspekt eines Hin und Her von Partikularität und Ganzheitlichkeit, so ist es vielleicht nicht falsch, sie möglicherweise als einen Klassenkampf ohne Klassenbewusstsein bezeichnen. Denn ein nicht kleiner Prozentsatz der Protestierenden handelt im Bewusstsein, dass eine keine Grenzen kennende autoritäre Staatsführung in ihre Lebensführung intervenieren und diese regulieren will, und dass man dagegen etwas tun müsse. Diese Menschen, die immer noch davor zurückschrecken sich politisch an Organisationen zu binden (wobei das Bewusstsein solch einer Notwendigkeit durchaus vorhanden ist) definieren sich mehrheitlich als politisch liberal oder links-liberal. Hierzu haben die Ergebnisse einer empirischen Untersuchung der Istanbuler Bilgi-Universität haben gezeigt, dass die grosse Mehrheit der Protestierenden, die als Hauptgrund für ihre Teilnahme an den Protesten die Notwendigkeit eines Zeigens eines anti-autoritären Reeflexes gegen Bevormundung angaben, keine “organische” Verbindung zu irgendeiner politischen Partei aufweisen. 82% der Befragten verstehen sich als politisch liberal; 92% gaben an, ihre Stimme bei den letzten nationalen Wahlen nicht der AKP gegeben zu haben.

Die Frage danach, ob und inwieweit diese Menschen, die in breitem Rahmen eine Transformation der Türkei und im besonderen das Erodieren der eigenen – oftmals nicht detailliert zu beschreibenden – Werte befürchten, zu einem Klassenbewusstsein gelangen können, ist in diesem Zusammenhang wichtig für einen langfristigen, d.h. auch bleibenden anti-hegemonialen Widerstand gegen die AKP. Im Hinblick auf die türkische Linke sei vermerkt, dass deren “Entdeckung” der historisch-gesellschaftlichen Wichtigkeit der (oft vernachlässigten) Mittelschichten geradezu von historischer Signifikanz ist. Es scheint mir in diesem Sinne wichtig zu bemerken, dass das Bewusstsein und der gegenwärtige Aktivismus der Mittelschichten in Verbindung gebracht werden sollte mit der geschichtlich determinierenden Funktion derjenigen, die im Produktionsprozess stehend ihre gesellschaftlichen Kämpfe führen Jedoch scheint trotz diese möglichen Bemühung eine klassenpolitische wirkungsvolle Handlungsweise in engem Sinne – zumindest in naher Zukunft – noch nicht in Sicht. Die Forderungen der Gezi Park-Initiative orientieren sich dazu (noch) zu sehr fast ausschliesslich an Umweltproblemen, der effektiven Verhinderung von Korruption und Vetternwirtschaft, sowie des Kampfes gegen Polizeigewalt, wobei die Wichtigkeit diese Themen für sich genommen nicht bestritten werden soll. In der deutschsprachigen Wikipedia werden die Forderungen der Initiative in Form von Themen wie Presse- und Versammlungsfreiheit sowie der Verteidigug und dem Schutz des Laizismus aufgelistet. Auch wenn diese Forderungen keine klassenspezifischen in engem Sinne darstellen, so sind sie doch die Voraussetzung für jedwede langfristige Transformation. Zudem sollte nicht vergessen werden, das einige wichtige Gewerkschaften und die “traditionelle” Linke in der Bewegung von Anfang an vertreten sind.

Die Linke hat es bislang klugerweise verstanden, in die Handlungsweisen dieser “neuen” Mittelschichtsbewegung nicht von “aussen” zu intervenieren, sondern mit ihnen zusammen zu agieren, wobei diese Vorgehensweise keineswegs eine Abkehr von “klassischen” gesellschaftlichen Widerstandsformen bedeutet.

Was während der Proteste als eines der bestimmendsten Handlungsmuster auffiel, war die Rolle der sozialen Medien, die die Proteste nicht unmassgeblich begleitet und gelenkt haben. Von nahezu jeder Protestaktion wurde man über den Weg des Internets informiert. Eine weitere wichtige Organisationsform sind Foren, die in den Vierteln verschiedener Städte organisiert werden, wo individueller Protest direkt zur Sprache kommen kann. Neben eines ständigen Informationsflusses spielt hier das (Neu)Entstehen eines gesellschaftlichen Gedächtnisses, welches seit dem Militärputsch von 1980 den Menschen genommen worden ist,  eine wichtige Rolle. In unserem Land ist Nicht-Vergessen und Nicht-Vergessen-Lassen für sich genommen bereits eine revolutionäre Handlung. Die Dynamik der Gezi Park-Bewegung speist sich aus diesen Dingen.

[1]                   Ursprünglich hier erschienen

[2]                    aufgewachsen in Deutschland. Studium der Politikwissenschaft, Philosophie und Soziologie in Paris, Berlin und Heidelberg. Magister-Abschluss in Heidelberg, danach Promotion in Marburg.

Seit 1995 Hochschullehrer an der Universitat des Mittleren Ostens in Ankara mit Lehr- und Forschungsschwerpunkten in Politischer Theorie, Geschichte der Arbeiterbewegung, Politikanalyse und Migration.

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