La Gira

And we want to know everything – but still, we just don’t want to know it, want to allow things and people carrying us away …; and we want to maintain the unknown as space to which we can send things: the pasha – Lord, the vizier – counsellor, minister. We want – in order to like it or in order to repudiate it – look at the ready product, in its unknown status, allowing us in its miraculous appearance …., yes, allowing us in that form to abstract from contradictions. We know ‘our’ counsellor: not being there to represent us, not being there to give us advise, not being a political bureaucrat, not being accessible to common sense outside of the standardised and standardising framework. With our own counsellor we have to deal as a reality. The vizier, even more so the وزير‎; (arabic for vizier) invites us to follow mystifications: tempting us to lift the veil and still also tempting to follow our ideals, prejudices, virtues. We may project them: the child in us, still dreaming being a prince or princess, a magician who can do , extramundane, out-worldly wonders or the genius engineer, able doing the worldly mysteries.

And so we enjoy strolling along the lanes of the pazar, feel attracted by the smells of oriental herbs, absorbed by the the fascinating colours, overwhelmed by the bizarre sounds of the music … – and complain about the marketisation evidenced by the shopping malls, the hubhub roaring from the speakers int he supermarkets …

As said on another occasion, we have in my current homeland so many ways to say Thank You, and even more ways to show gratefulness. And we have in another of my homelands 14 terms for snow, and in another again, trusting Fáilte Ireland, we find about 40 shades of green.

It is playing with these differences – and speaking of play, I a may come back to J. C. Friedrich von Schiller, again his Letters upon the Æsthetic Education of Man. Letter VI. But now it seems that playfulness disappeared when we read

I do not overlook the advantages to which the present race, regarded as a unity and in the balance of the understanding, may lay claim over what is best in the ancient world; but it is obliged to engage in the contest as a compact mass, and measure itself as a whole against a whole. Who among the moderns could step forth, man against man, and strive with an Athenian for the prize of higher humanity?

Whence comes this disadvantageous relation of individuals coupled with great advantages of the race? Why could the individual Greek be qualified as the type of his time? and why can no modern dare to offer himself as such? Because all-uniting nature imparted its forms to the Greek, and an all-dividing understanding gives our forms to us.

People so nice, ask for the way ….; and the shopkeeper, seeing in me the foreigner, the alien, showing his respect – respect for the other, and for him it means:

Je vous remercie Monsieur. Et une bonne journée.

At least I have to try:

Güneş parlıyor. Ve bu zaten iyi bir başlangıçtır.

Acknowledging the other – the magic around the other and the magic of being part; the temptation to know the standard, to delve into another world; and the temptation of leaving it afar. The tension we face, choosing between the small, local place in the alley way – sitting on a stool for a tea – and reducing our communication to those we know: limited by knowledge of language, of culture and the lack of a wireless internet connection – and the star pubs, the shamrock pub and the coffee shop we know from Barcelona, Munich, Helsinki, Budapest, Taipei, Melbourne, Rome – and even the Campus of the university in Cork: One world as we always wanted it, the security of knowledge, of knowing, of accessibility – the world present in this place, wherever it is located; and the rest of the world also present: free internet …

The temptation of looking at the beauty of a somewhat perfect: a standardised and streamlined world, united by an underlying though invisible law.

And knowing the standards and laws allowing us doing magnificent things [forget the name at the end ;-)]

Indeed,

it is simultaneously frightening and impressive!

And at the end it is about something very simple, so difficult to achieve

RESPONSIBILITY not least as courage to see how we answer the conditions of reality rather than obfuscate things – something I am looking at in one of the contributions of the book God, Rights, Law and a Good Society. Overcoming Religion and Moral as Social Policy Approach in a Godless and Amoral Society which is soon going to be published by Rozenberg.

And it surely is difficult to find the measure, the standard, the balance of difference in unity and unity in different – to find responsibility – res-ponsibility, an answer to realitiy: a reality in which we live and that is made by the way we live, the answers we give – and thinking about it, we should never forget the words by Martin Niemoller

First they came for the Communists …

First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist

Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist

Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist

Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew

Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me.

Kerbstones – Stepping Stones  —  living between the known and the unknown — and aiming seeing the magic still inside of everyday’s life.

And so …, well a holiday does not mean not doing anything, it is, for me, not filled by strolling around – though this is surely part of it. And this is how I begin the day – its outdoor part: meeting Baerbel at Taksim Meydanı. While I am just looking for her telephone number – we never met before, somebody is waving at me: You are Peter? – I am, indeed. A short hesitation: But we never met or did we? – No, but your photo is on the website of the Jury-platform. – Of course. I remember now. And although we really never saw before it is – after a blink of an eye – a kind of immediately intimate relationship – I a not sure if this is the correct word. In any case it is strange that I am only getting after a while really aware of the fact that the reason I know her is actually the fact that I knew Joerg. We stroll around, a short way only, sit down in the European part of the city: a little bit Bohemian, the arts-quarter,the quarter of second-hand book shops, the quarter that may be called ‘scene’. Chatting about Paris, about Istanbul, about what brought her here: not least the tightness, the lack of space to breath freely, to find her own space now. And crossing the border: walking down the hill, looking at the tower of the old Venetian palace, the symbol of previous European stronghold …, taking the tram and ‘leaving Europe’. The Egyptian market, the old train station, made famous not least by Agatha Christie. The touristy part in the new – or the old? – world: the world across the Bosphorus. Of course, the obligatory visit: the Sultan Ahmed Mosque – the Aya Sofya, a short – arts, religion,comparison, the meaning of faith today and new searches for meaning – and …, we left these historical places behind, after a short walk we sit down in a very traditional hotel, an old timber building – the beguiling smell of the Turkish coffee, the refreshing water. Can we talk briefly about the price? She asks. Sure – not only briefly. And it follows a more or less lengthy conversation not just on the price – bringing also for me memories up, going at least 25 years back now, the work, the meetings during which we discussed memoranda on economic policies: in Germany, then in Europe … – and the need to develop right now …., a centre of the left in the realm of economic thinking.

It is about 5 o’clock – the call from the mosque is unmistakable. And the call from another world is not less unmistakable: We need another world, at least we have to look for instruments, … and the people, to build it. And if they are not there we have to educate them. Academic schools are and can only be schools of thought – not of administrative establishments. Indeed, you may say with John 1:1

In the beginning was the Word, …

But the word can only be the work of creating a world as response to the given reality – a response as matter of accepting responsibility, lifting the veil …

‘Write a draft, please. Your idea is really good. I will have a look as soon as I get it – and I find the time.’ – We get up, walk down the hill, walk across the Galata Köprüsü, the Tünel brings us up the hill. and we finally arrive again at the place where we met. A fleet of yellow taxis and Dolmuş.

Societies consist of communication, and communication is an extremely unlikely event – though it permanently happens. I do not remember exactly the words Niklas Luhmann used. I remember him saying them, and I remember our discussions: In the beginning had not been the word. And reality did not consist of words, but of a given reality which we, people, changed and are permanently changing.

Life as matter of exercise: pedantic and arduous work of bringing data, information and creative thinking together, aiming on merging the different veins – allowing us to explore the unknown in order to immerse in new realities. – Before joining Mathilde in Stenhdal’s Le Rouge et le Noir in saying

Ils sont parfaits, trop parfaits peut-être, enfin, ils m’ennuient.
(They are perfect, perhaps too perfect – they are boring (my translation,PH)

At the end, taking the title of a contribution for a book on Creative Research to which Ananata Giri invited me. It is about Research as Searching for Nescience: looking for what we do not know, accepting the worlds diversity in order to explore and explain it with PSS: powerful stepping stones in complex understanding rather than pruning reality, modelling the world so that it fits into PPP powerful presentations of …., peanuts, small nullities, perhaps tasting nice, but taken just on their own causing terrible stomachs.

We need them: complexities as stepping stones to a dance …..

– for Hurriyet Babacan – friendly, caring freedom.

And we really should turn them around, trying to be playful with ideas – finally we know from Schiller

For, to speak out once for all, man only plays when in the full meaning of the word he is a man, and he is only completely a man when he plays.

…, the play, this play had been beginning today, arriving by bus from the airport at  Taksim Meydanı – Taksim square. Going there I feel some estrangement: It is so attractive, driving along the coastline which is in some way the opening to the world – the Bosphorus Strait as hub; then, after passing the roundabout it is getting so busy, so vivid and having its own character: certain rules that are surely here also in place are covered by other rules – the bus stop is one thing, the quick exchange with the driver is another thing, both having the same result: the bus stops; but it is happing in different places. Ad character of this vivid cenre is only given by the fact of being actually only located at the periphery.

Byzantium and Constantinople – places well known from history: shifting boarders: kerbstones, marking different periods. The city, it is said: today the 2nd largest city in the world [but can we really trust this source, giving two different assessments on the same subject (in any cases a good place to get attuned to Moscow next week, supposedly there are 16 Million people living there – supposedly as information on this varies), had been characterised by being part of different countries, reference for different entities: the Roman Empire, the Ottoman Empire, but also functioning as a kind of bridge – or should we say: extended arm: East meets West, and West meets East. A clash of civilisations and also a conflation.

As said: Playing – becoming real … – and if we turn the kerbstones around we find them as stepping stones: not the exclusionary and excluding borders but points where we can merge in different worlds, reach higher insides and possibly virtues? Like a dancer, reaching out into some new arrays, some form of ne heights of feeling, thinking and understanding. Sure, this needs rehearsal: Taksim Meydanı

A kerb- and stepping stone: then and now marking also historical changes. Being the centre of an empire – and “changing empires” means also: being centre of different historical eras. Hegemonies may be created in different ways – and just reading about the changing and emerging class structures throughout the history of the Ottoman empire and modern Turkey shows that hegemonies are indeed complex developments. But they are always manifested in some kind of centre as this city with its historical square.

A kerb- and stepping stone: And walking around is just showing this also for today: West meets East does not equal Modernity meets Tradition. But this part of the city definitely shows exactly this. The modern shops – be they Turkish retailers or part of international or even global chains and a small step aside, arriving at the other side. Sure, this other side is only the other side for us – as much as we come from the other side. The never ending story …

…, walking through the small alleys, sitting down for a tea.Looking at the haste and rest. Hookahs on the tiny tables, just leaving enough space for a glass with tea, … and the menu with the Spanish name and the obvious art nouveau ornament – a new style, the Style of Youth*, the modern style**, the style of liberty ***. People at the neighbouring tables playing, chatting – manifestation of different cultures, languages, as exhibited in the displays of the books shops, second hand books shops, offering not for everybody but for many something that can be understood and will be of interest.

May be later the stories told here in the alleys will be read: stories of anger and love, of harshness and tenderness, of conflict and understanding – timeless and always new, always different. Seemingly without system, not following the standard of which I learn this day from a friend

When you get your statistical results (in our days a lot of numbers) you only need to change the wording of your analysis. The key words are: larger than, less than, equal to. Grew by, decreased by, stayed the same, etc.

I look around – ne is sitting there, on his own – a book on the table, and a notebook, the pages filling fast, the nib of the exclusive writing utensil filling the white papers. He occasionally pauses for a moment, continues filling the paper. What seems to be first a kerbstone: a white expanse, repulsive, saying Beware of Trespassing by being just a blank page  …, it emerges to a stepping stone, invites as

mind bender.

May be he writes for his work: a book, an article – perhaps he is a journalist; may also be he writes already these stories: stories that are seemingly always the same and still do never repeat. May be he writes papers

that make one think, arouse discussion, if one has the patience to read him.

What he writes about may look as if it would repeat but

his work is not repeated but expanded upon. New knowledge may come about, not new information.

The art nouveau as matter of crossing boarders, playing with them – and respecting …, well, respecting the need to overcome them. A matter of time, a matter of enchantment: the joys of exploring new worlds. And a matter of disenchantment: the cumbersome analysis of details, also figures at times, the chagrin of seeing the lack of reason, the lack of understanding, seeing the Inability to Grieve, evolving to an Inability to Communicate.

Still, at and around Taksim Meydanı – a kerb- and stepping stone: as history and hegemony; the question of progress is of course also and not least – hic at nunc – a social question: the old social question, though it may be brought forward in very different forms.

This square had been surely a place where all these tensions came occasionally to outbreaks: the bitterness of history, the tedious ‘small print of history’ – small, as we too often look only at the large results, easily forgetting the how we got there.

All the successes though we can say that there had been successes, are not least a matter of enchantments and disenchantments; matters of the small print which leaves us with illusions, seeing stones as kerbstones or as stepping stones, making it so extremely difficult to see them together. As part of the history of which we are part, the history we all are making.

Isn’t it true? – We surely should not forget to ask!

______________________________

______________________________

*German: art nouveau Jugendstil

** Spanish: arte modernista

*** Italian: stile liberty

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

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

Two souls, alas! dwell in my breast ….

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alain Renaut speaks of humanism as

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

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

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

Better to reign in Hell, then serve in Heaven.

(Paradise Lost, Book I)

Being a small cog in a big wheel ….

_____________________

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

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

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

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

(Verdi: Hebrew Slave Chorus)

Social Systems have always changed,

essentially and incidentally, throughout human history

and have given way to new systems.

No one would deny it

But has this process reached perfection in the capitalist system

and come to a dead stop?

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

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

———–

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

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

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

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

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

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

What are the services being rendered to us?

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

– Was not necessarily needed to be performed.

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

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

– In normal circumstances and receiving presents.

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

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

Thus spoke Zarathustra:

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

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

Prejudging – pejorative versus submitting

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

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

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

This of course leads to an entirely different stance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is all this about disenchanted enchantment?

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

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

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