La Revue nouvelle reflects on individualism;
Index on Censorship finds complicity in many forms;
Revue Projet discusses trajectories of ecologism;
Syn og Segn advises men to own up to anguish;
and rekto:verso confronts monsters.
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La Revue nouvelle
2/2020
(Belgium)
La Revue nouvelle reflects on individualism
Challenging the orthodoxy that individualism is atomizing and egocentric, Vincent de Coorebyter asks in La Revue nouvelle why sociable and collective behaviours are by no means absent in contemporary society. Drawing on sociologist Paul Yonnet’s work on the effects of longer life expectancy and childrearing, de Coorebyter presents an alternative reading of individualism. It counsels us ‘not to despair of any capacity for engagement, including political engagement’, while also warning us ‘not to hope for some return to the past’.
Burnout: Thomas Lemaigre explores the growing prevalence of burnout, examining the origins of the notion, the exact nature of the syndrome, and the treatments that have been proposed for it. What does this contemporary pathology reveal about social change, in particular the shift toward greater individualism? The fact that those most commonly affected by burnout are individuals with high emotional investment in their work indicates a link with the growing emphasis on autonomy and professional satisfaction — ‘something like an illness of subjective engagement’.
Creativity: In conversation with native and exiled artists in Brussels, Malika Es-Saïdi asks whether ‘individualist’ is a positive or a negative term for an artist — and whether a ‘deficit of individualism’ stifles creativity. Guillermo Kozlowski reflects on the contradictory messages that we receive about individualism and how we came to think of ourselves as individuals in the first place.
Feminist history: Each phase in the history of feminist thought has been associated with the militant appropriation of particular media, writes editor Laurence Rosier, recalling La Revue nouvelle’s own contribution to the struggle (the journal was founded in 1945). Martine Monacelli salutes a lineage of male thinkers, including Robert Owen and John Stuart Mill, whose writings played a significant role in the advance of the feminist cause — proving that ‘nineteenth-century feminism was, far more than we might imagine, the result of a collaboration between the sexes, itself heir to a well-established tradition.’
Also: Mohammed Chourak on the exceptional case of Japan, forced to negotiate a difficult path between demographic decline and resistance to foreign labour.
More articles from La Revue nouvelle in Eurozine; La Revue nouvelle’s website
Index on Censorship
1/2020
(United Kingdom)
Index on Censorship finds complicity in many forms
‘When we are afraid, we are most at risk from the pressure that others might place on us not to speak out or criticize,’ writes Rachael Jolley in her editorial to the new issue of Index on Censorship — entitled ‘Complicity’. Lest dissent seem easier from afar, the issue offers a global range of case studies showing ‘why and when we choose to censor ourselves and give away our privacy’.
China: At the current rate, there will be 490 million CCTV cameras in China by 2021. The explosion has been accompanied by massive urban development, writes journalist Noelle Mateer. The government calls it ‘beautification’, but it is actually policing. As traditional districts are cleared and their inhabitants displaced, informal neighbourhood-watch systems have been replaced by CCTV. Yet Chinese citizens seem complicit in this process. Although demand for consumer video devices does not exceed the US market, in China private security tech has surged alongside state surveillance.
France: French journalism is famous for its cosiness with power. However, the system of special access has never seemed more problematic, writes Jean-Paul Marthoz. Controversy blew up in September 2019 when, in Le Monde diplomatique, the investigative journalist Pierre Péan accused a younger generation of colleagues of being ‘accomplices in a drama that they did not control’.
‘Journalism inevitably implies transactions and compromises. But complicity, whatever form it takes, is a scourge for journalism. It deprives the public of part of the facts that it needs to forge its “informed consent”. When it is paired with conformity and the dominant narrative, it marginalises dissident voices who may be closer to the “truth”, or may at least bring a minimum of balance in a story.’ Only 25 per cent of the French public thinks that journalists are independent, while the Gilets jaunes have turned media-bashing into a ‘contact sport’.
Also: Moa Petersén on why ‘microchipping’ — having ID chips implanted under the skin — has taken off in Sweden, and whether it is as ominous as it sounds (probably not). Victoria Pavlova on how political influence in Bulgaria’s media has seen high-profile journalists pushed out of their jobs (a topic also recently covered in Eurozine). And family discussions in China and Turkey on how taboos or censorship have changed over three generations (freedom of speech in Turkish universities; sex and relationships in China).
More articles from Index on Censorship in Eurozine; Index on Censorship’s website
Revue Projet
375 (2020)
(France)
Revue Projet discusses trajectories of ecologism
Revue Projet publishes a dossier exploring ecological thinking — its past mistakes, the complex present, and some possible futures. Climatologist Hervé Le Treut argues that ecologists need to ‘move on from the teacher-pupil relationship’ with the public. Ecology’s frequent abstractions and standard ‘danger narrative’ have led to anxiety and fatalism, something Le Treut observes even among his own students. Alongside improved public education messaging, he insists on the importance of consensus-building around key ethical issues such as personal freedom, rights and values, and looks ahead to international cooperation over the management of planetary resources.
Collapsology: In a brief summary of the long history of the end of the world, Pierre-Éric Sutter and Loïc Steffan discuss ‘collapsology’ — a growing area of ecological debate on catastrophism, widespread despair and the ‘prepper’ reaction. These compare with various ‘laboratories of civil society’ in which like-minded individuals, families and groups ‘get to grips with the earth’, adopting low-tech lifestyles predicated on ‘visions of a coming collapse of society and of worsening shortages’. Considering these different responses to ecological crisis, Sutter and Steffan argue for optimistic activism, outlining why a ‘change of world-view’ or moment of metanoia (reorientation of one’s way of life; spiritual conversion) may be the best path.
Decolonizing ecology: The decolonization agenda also applies to ecologism and environmentalism. In interview, political scientist Malcom Ferdinand explains the relationships between racism, colonialism and exploitative capitalism. By remodelling our collective colonial past, he argues, we can decolonize our misconceived — ‘doubly fractured’ — notion of what ecologism is, and fundamentally recast the environmentalist project.
More articles from Revue Projet in Eurozine; Revue Projet’s website
Syn og Segn
1/2020
(Norway)
Syn og Segn advises men to own up to anguish
The Norwegian NGO Iris Center is one of the few aid organizations with a presence in the overcrowded refugee camp on the Greek island of Chios. Interviewed for Syn og Segn by a fellow volunteer, Janne Hegna speaks of the hopelessness felt after the 2016 EU–Turkey agreement to curb migration to Europe: ‘The international press lost interest. The 70–80,000 refugees stranded in Greece have no voice.’
Conditions at the Chios camp, which is managed by the local authority, are so bad that the intention can only be to put off further arrivals. Hegna dismisses the Greek government’s proposal for new, locked camps as ‘ostrich politics’. ‘No need to see the refugee situation as a crisis,’ she concludes. ‘Some depopulated Italian villages have been renewed by an influx of migrants.’
Mental health: A 2019 report on gender behaviours in Norway’s schools showed that boys make up as much as 70 percent of ‘special needs’ pupils. Peder Kjøs argues that men find it hard ‘to be someone for somebody’ and quotes Solveig in Ibsen’s Peer Gynt: ‘You never let anyone but yourself mean anything to you’. Lack of personal commitments may be why ‘most of those who kill themselves are not 15-year-old girls in their teens but 50-year-old men’.
Oddvar Vignes agrees that ‘being honest about your anguish and bad faith can help you to emerge from feeling lonely and leading a meaningless life’. It has helped him to become the contented owner of the family farm after an angry youth and a troubled early middle age.
Misery: Novelist Maria Kjos Fonn is interested in the interaction between compulsive eating and unhappiness. In John Kennedy Toole’s posthumous classic A Confederacy of Dunces (1980), protagonist Ignatius J. Reilly ‘is not only occupied with eating, [philosophy] studies and obscene sexual fantasies but also with hating all women and all men’. Kjos Fonn’s other literary losers are self-hating voyeurs: the overweight and sex-starved Rino in Lars Ramslie’s novel Fatso (2003) and the overweight and desperately lonely ‘I’ in Ola Julén’s poetry collection Orissa (1999).
More articles from Syn og Segn in Eurozine; Syn og Segn’s website
rekto:verso
87 (2020)
(Belgium)
rekto:verso confronts monsters
Featuring beautiful if disturbing artwork, the new issue of the Flemish journal rekto:verso informs us about historical types of monsters, monsters in the movies, and monsters at the circus. But it also discusses monsters that aren’t always recognizable as such: the contemporary embodiments of monstrousness experienced in multiple ‘Others’.
Myth: Ambitious and intelligent women from Hilary Clinton to Greta Thunberg, who ‘dare to transcend the norms and values of patriarchal societies’, are often perceived as monsters. Zeynep Kubat connects their fate to the myth of Medusa. We think of her as ugly and aggressive, but she tells a story about rape culture and how to claim one’s voice. If Medusa is a feminist symbol, then the monstrous might harbour positive energies in the battle for rights and emancipation.
Colonialism: Sibo Kanobana explores the figure of Black Pete in the Dutch-Belgian tradition. There are many similar figures in cultures worldwide, but the Dutch-Belgian ‘monster’ is unusual in being a product of colonial history. Slowly but surely, however, this is changing. ‘Although Black Pete and his significance as an object of hilarity will not disappear, his colonial and imperialistic connotations will’. Monstrous and magical characters are loved and wanted and perform an important cultural function.
AI: Gaea Schoeters sees artificial intelligence as a present-day Frankenstein: ‘Once Pandora’s box is opened, we will not be able to put the monster back.’ AI is also monstrous because it is utterly incomprehensible, even for those who conceived it. However, the real question is less who understands it, but rather who owns it — because whoever does, also owns the world.
More articles from rekto:verso in Eurozine; rekto:verso’s website
