La Gira

Social Systems have always changed,

essentially and incidentally, throughout human history

and have given way to new systems.

No one would deny it

But has this process reached perfection in the capitalist system

and come to a dead stop?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What are the services being rendered to us?

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

– Was not necessarily needed to be performed.

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

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

– In normal circumstances and receiving presents.

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

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

Thus spoke Zarathustra:

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

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

Prejudging – pejorative versus submitting

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

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

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

This of course leads to an entirely different stance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_____________________________

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?

_____________

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)

OR: PHOTOS NOT TO BE TAKEN
Already on the previous occasion when I had been in the city centre, I had been somewhat surprised by the amount of police around – sure it is the time before elections, the candidates just nominated; there had been demonstrations too … – and as I do not understand the language to the degree that would allow me to know what the demonstrations had been about, I feel a little bit surprised of my spontaneous disagreement, rejection. Though I am not really Hegelian, didn’t he see in his Philosophy of Right the police as particularly important in representing the even the universal?

In any case, this day I felt very much tempted to make a photo of the young women, standing next to the police bus, holding the machine gun at the ready. – But I know from a similar occasion in Ireland – a colleague from Slovakia wanted to take a photo of the guards protecting the money transport from BOI – that such photo shots are not the best idea (not in Ireland, not in Turkey and not in any other place – I have the vague feeling I know why, not least as I heard the other day that the office of the German headquarter of attac had been visited by these people in green*: they had been looking for some documents which the office could obtain and containing some information relevant with some finance market stuff ).

Another photo not taken: I am sitting already in the minibus, going back back to ODTU. The driver is first – while managing driving through the dense traffic in the centre and at the same time dealing with the money – moving the rosary through his fingers; then, after the traffic ceased a bit, he is frequently moving his fist against somebody whom he considers being in the way, or he is symbolically pushing somebody out of the minibus while stopping at one of these non-existing bus stops, thus asking by this gesture the words he doesn’t say: “Can’t you move faster?”

Or perhaps should I have taken the photo from the young woman who enters the minibus: made-up and smartened, showing with every movement, every look and with every gesture her discomfort: “This is not the place where I should be. A private limousine would be much more appropriate.” The driver is now driving most appropriate for a training session for a formula 1 competition – and the young woman’s real fear – an accident – seem to mingle with the fear of loss of status.

Well, no imagery of pretended, self-nominated nobility – finally I didn’t (even feel tempted to) take a photo of one of the many shoe polishers – some of them surely cleaning the shoes of those people who – though possibly only metaphorically – give them a kick in the …, well, a kick somewhere with the same shoe they get cleaned.

But the photos are not really my concern. Nor the deep impression the situations left behind.

It is more the road marks I mentioned in a recent post and the question they evoked: “Where is the energy of the Turkish people going to harmonise/ maintain incompatibility of the contradictoriness or to move to modernisation, the road-markings you mentioned?”

Yes, as I answered then – while making reference to army-helicopters, so frequently flying across the campus and mushrooming shopping centres – I will come back to it – and I will make another reference, one that may seem far-fetched, bizarre and it is surely not comprehendible at first sight: the reference to three of my current ‘projects’: (1) editing a book on social policy and religion, (2) preparing the workshop on Human Rights in the framework of the Forum “Human Rights in a Globalized World – Challenges to The Media” (Human Rights, a topic that will also be the focus of my later work at the MPI and (3) editing another book, looking at the question of precarity.

What all this is about is a frequent topic here – coming up when talking to colleagues and friends: hegemony, integration, control. The mode of regulation can definitely show different forms – and while writing these lines some ideas come up on how to tackle this topic later academically (I promised in Munich to link the question of “human rights beginning at the breakfast table” as Féilim apparently emphasises with the much more fundamental question of how is the breakfast table actually defined by existing accumulation regimes as there is surely a difference between the full Irish, the continental and South American etc.).

As offensive, mind-bugling it is to look after so many years again in the barrel of a riffle, it is somewhat similar offensive and mind-bugling to walk through shopping malls, seeing people who are not able to cross the glass ceilings of political institutions, hierarchies in business and go beyond the glass walls erected between affluence and poverty, put up in front of them as mirror in which they, the poor or at least not well-off, see their alleged failure, standing upright as spur to contribute to a suggested growth of the Wealth of the Nation.

In the first case Moral Sentiments are added as possible tools to clean up after the bloodshed, in the second case these very same Moral Sentiments as as reminder, aiming on evoking incitement: consumo ergo sum as moral quality of the bourgeois, suggesting ethical life by hoping for Hegel’s Sittlichkeit for the citoyen.

As said it is a topic frequently coming up, and I said for a couple of times: oppression, disguised as free market, should not be underestimated – a strong hegemonic power – not using weapons of physical violence, even if it is only by showing the potentiality of the use; not using the call of commandments: a multitude of norms reduced on ten simple rules. Instead it is using the expostulation: you are point of departure and point of destiny of all your acts – if there is any practice left it is only the aggregation of a multitude of individuals.

– It is surely a slippery ground, possibly belittling the brute violence, still bringing people into arrest in this country: people who are democratically saying their opinion, aiming on contributing to a debate and facing the odd reality: a country that does not provide space for debate, does not provide space for debaters either. And still, what is the answer on my statement: “Don’t underestimate the opressive side of the market as hegemon. A power in every day life we are not aware of, just following the flow, without considering what it actually does to our entire thinking – taking the energy out of everybody and anything we do.” You can imagine the answer of the colleagues and friends here? Well, after surely saying something like: “We know what oppression, what brute force is about.” a little surprise follows: “You say in your countries you do not mention the violence, the force of strict control. When we are there we definitely mention it … – we as foreigners.”

It is a surprise, distraction from what I mean and confirmation nevertheless too: follow the rule, be one of us – and it also asks: be ONE of us, do not be any kind of group: just an individual: behaving rationally with all the information you are given (but don’t ask for more, for really complete information) and behave to achieve your own happiness – this then will bring happiness for all. The foreigner is possibly foreigner also because s/he is not just ONE, not (yet) reducible on the one utilitarian being. And is seems simple then: if the one control mechanism doesn’t work, the other has to be used.

There is another dimension to some parts of these little excerpts from life: from beautification to militant oppression. This kind of beautification: the strive for the “Western look”, the imitation of a mirage surely contributes to an increase of GDP and looking at the armed forces and administrative units of the country we surely find the same: GDP in excess … . At least in terms of simple calculation these are all activities, part of a process of production, that cont as contribution marble, bricks and iron. If we look at the armed forces alone, this must add up to a huge amount. And if we look at the glass and concrete of the new buildings, the mirrors of the shops in the malls there are more contributions to the raise of that figure: artificially boosted figures, though only abstract, on paper and not translating into the life of the many. So the other bricks, moved by the people themselves, the polish that emerges from people’s hand, delivered on the streets remain artificial too although this is true in an entirely different way: they remain outside of the calculation of the GDP, and they remain outside as well as they will not translate into purchases of the goods of the posh high street.

Driving home, for a short second only, the question appears why the shields of the modern armed forces, though not made from glass, look like it: transparent, clean and …, repelling: you will not see any blood on them, not for long at least: who on the public would like to see private victims taken from the partners? But perhaps there is still a way: not allowing to be captured but to capture: PPP, suggested as public private partnership, and frequently being an instrument to lull citizens may then also be understood as People – Power – Participation.

I am back in the apartment, boot the computer – the humming of the machine, taking a few seconds only – mingles with the chant coming from the Mosque located off-campus. A lasting chant – a call. Excluded? Being at the ready for a conservative come back?

Contradictions, tensions. Diversity in unity, unity in diversity, naivety – sheepish

– At the end, back from the little excursion, entering the campus again, showing my card. I take my UCC-staff card now as I am sitting very close to the door through which security staff enters. And indeed, he looks closely …, and understands. It is not in any way a valid record. But why bother – he pats me on the back, knowing, and also knowing that I know … – sure there is hegemony; and not less sure: there is – even and at least – in small things some kind of resistance – reminiscence !?.

I remember words Antonio Gramsci said, something like:

One has to educate sober, patient – people who do ot despair when facing the bold terror, people ahow are not getting exciting by every stupidity. Pessimism of mind, optimism of volition.

* colour of uniforms of German police force