Esprit learns from the lockdown;
Springerin wonders how we’ll come together;
Letras Libres makes cautious predictions;
Czas Kultury gives a voice to teachers;
and O’r Pedwar Gwynt considers language and loneliness.
Esprit
5/2020
(France)
Esprit learns from the lockdown
We should see corona lockdown as an opportunity to better understand the lives of the less fortunate, writes Claire Marin in Esprit. This ‘time of anxious waiting, where one hopes for good news while being conscious that the threat is great, loss inevitable and death ever-present’, has long been a reality for the sick, the disabled and the elderly. The current crisis is therefore an occasion for more attention to the human side of medicine, an acknowledgement of dependency, and an appreciation of ‘health as a public good’.
Healthcare and democracy: France’s pandemic response has led to further centralization and revealed the impact upon healthcare of decades of neoliberalism, write Fabienne Brugère and Guillaume le Blanc. With policies dictated by expert committees, vertical structures of power are thriving while democratic and community healthcare policies are rolled back.
COVID-19 has reshaped the political subject, now stripped of autonomy and reduced to survival mode. Protecting this ‘non-sovereign life’ means resisting the further de-democratization of healthcare and preventing it from being ‘stripped of all existential meaning’ by the ‘technical arsenal of the hospital’.
Education: François Dubet salutes teachers whose dedication and creativity in devising ways to ‘work otherwise’ is making a real difference. When life finally returns to ‘normal’, the pandemic may serve to shake up the ‘homogeneity of the education system’ and see greater trust placed in ‘the inventiveness and enthusiasm of teachers’.
Yet the crisis has also revealed the limitations of virtual schooling, reminding us that teaching is more than the transmission of knowledge, and that home learning is no substitute for school as a collective experience. Families’ economic dependency upon regular schooling has been thrown into sharp relief, along with the many forms of inequality between students.
Also: Ramin Jahanbegloo on how Hobbes sheds light on the political situation in Iran; Jean-Luc Nancy on a new scholarly edition of the Koran; Gilles Bataillon pays homage to the late Venezuelan poet Ernesto Cardenal; and an interview with current president of the Palais de Tokyo, Emma Lavigne.
More articles from Esprit in Eurozine; Esprit’s website
Springerin
2/2020
(Austria)
Springerin wonders how we’ll come together
How we ‘come together’ will assume new significance after the pandemic, proposes Springerin: social, cultural and ethnic integration will need to be championed anew and cognitive capitalism’s tight hold on social isolation counteracted. The issue considers whether common space or radical trial and error might be more effective for future inclusion.
Failing better: Ewa Majewska calls for ‘weak resistance’ to empower the powerless. Appropriating sustainable development’s slogan ‘The future is now’, she argues that in times of crisis, we need to recognize the qualities of failing rather than veering between heroic action and melancholic despair.
Historical examples include Rosa Luxemburg, who observed lessons in ‘learning from failures, and failing better’, and Martin Luther King, whose dream of equality was all about the ‘need to practice, to fail, and to be equal better’. Weakness, writes Majewska ‘can be seen as a beginning of transformative action, as a shifting point, a moment of mobilization. Perhaps we don’t need another hero. We can act together instead.’
Commoning: Stavros Stavrides proposes commoning as a means to empower the marginalized. He takes the established notion of commons as resources for all and incorporates an active element: ‘Contemporary endeavours to re-appropriate the city are not only a product shared by everyone, but also a process developed by everyone through sharing.’ Quoting Lefebvre’s ‘right to the city’, Stavrides proposes emancipation through creative cooperation.
Leading the way are the refugees and local activists in Athens who commandeered the disused City Plaza Hotel for a self-managed accommodation and support centre; La Toma, the movement of unpaid supermarket workers in Rosario, Argentina, who ‘take’ the store and turn it into a shared socio-cultural space; and the institute for indigenous people in San Cristobal de las Casa, Mexico, which incorporates traditional wisdom to empower minoritized citizens. Shared action can fill a humanitarian gap and tackle social issues in supportive environments: ‘commoning avoids uniformity and homogeneity by offering … an inclusive, common life open to differences’.
Parallel history: Joshua Simon’s research of the MAKI Israeli Communist party’s archive reveals photographs of Arab and Jewish Palestinians demonstrating together for a two-state solution on a 1947 trip to Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. ‘Through the archive, we … have access to that parallel history that never happened and is still waiting to be forged.’
More articles from Springerin in Eurozine; Springerin’s website
Letras Libres
5/2020
(Spain)
Letras Libres makes cautious predictions
In Letras Libres, Carlos López Blanco presents a tentative sketch of what the post-pandemic world might look like. He predicts increasing reliance on digital technologies, with a shift towards remote work and education. Areas where digital infrastructure is strongest will fare best, widening the divide between developed and developing countries. Deglobalization and nationalism will gather pace, as will the dangers of authoritarianism — we must resist the temptation of the Chinese model, López Blanco warns.
A return of individual responsibility will radically alter people’s view of their role in society. Post-WWII generations, accustomed to delegating responsibility for collective problems to governments, are for the first time able to influence the course of events through their everyday actions. The measures taken to combat the virus will fuel debates around the balance between individual freedoms and collective security, and the sort of welfare state we want. The answers, writes López Blanco, will define our world for a long time to come.
Marxism: Rafael Rojas reviews the recently published anthology Sopa de Wuhan (ed. Pablo Amadeo), in which neo-Marxist philosophers react to the pandemic. Giorgio Agamben sees the official response to COVID-19 as just another excuse for a state of exception. Slavoj Žižek, in contrast, thinks that the pandemic is an ‘event’ that could inaugurate a new, communist order. Others steer a more nuanced course between ‘zombie apocalypse’ and ‘viral new dawn’. Alain Badiou emphasizes the virus’s natural and social origins and appeals to reason as an antidote to teleology, while both David Harvey and Judith Butler refute the idea that the virus affects everyone equally.
Summarizing, Rojas writes that, while Neo-Marxism fails to distinguish between democracy and totalitarianism, and tends to interpret global events in millenarian terms, it is valuable for its denunciation of exclusion and its proposals for alternative ways to structure relations between the state and the market.
Democracy: Sensationalism has focused on fistfights over toilet rolls, but the real story is the withdrawal of democratic oversight, and how little public resistance there is to the declaration of martial law, writes John Keane. Power granted is power conceded; and power relinquished is power reclaimed with difficulty.
Also: Mario Vargas Llosa argues that the value of Miguel Ángel Asturias’s novel El Señor Presidente lies less in its biting critique of dictatorship, than in its linguistic and formal creativity.
More articles from Letras Libres in Eurozine; Letras Libres’s website
Czas Kultury
1/2020
(Poland)
Czas Kultury gives a voice to teachers
Czas Kultury enters Poland’s ongoing debate about the education reforms introduced by PiS in 2017 — which are expected to bring massive job losses and to lower the quality of schooling from kindergarten upwards.
Education history: Last year’s teachers’ strikes, despite being unable to force concessions, sparked a larger conversation, writes Agnieszka Jankowiak-Maik. ‘Teachers proved that the strike is not about higher wages, but about systemic change’, she writes in conclusion to her history of Polish education from the interwar years up until the present.
Nursery schooling: Kina Kuszak explores the underappreciated role nursery-school teachers have played in the Polish education system since the profession’s emergence in the nineteenth century. An individual’s success in the economy of the future, Kuszak writes, ‘will primarily be interpersonal, social and cognitive — the skills that preschool teachers will foster in the everyday educational experience for children ages three to six.’
‘Nestbeschmutzer’: ‘In today’s Europe, and above all in Poland, Nestbeschmutzer (nest-foulers) can and indeed should appear,’ write editors Olga Szmidt and Wojciech Burek in a dossier on the subject. Jerzy Jarzębski discusses literary icons such as Czesław Miłosz to examine the attitude that nationalist compatriots display towards nest-foulers:
‘Of course, rulers always say that they accept “constructive criticism”, but the criteria by which constructive is distinguished from non-constructive are always vague, while the punishments for those who accuse their nation are quite real.’ Fostering the culture of the ‘salon’ — spaces that allow free expression without state intrusion — enables the survival of the Nestbeschmutzer, writes Jarzębski.
Secrecy: Marek Zaleski describes how dark secrets operate in society and how a community can work over generations to prevent discovery of the truth. An inconvenient secret ‘constitutes the community, becomes part of the world of intimate attachments surrounding these “mysterious truths”. You have to guard them faithfully, because their violation would be a catastrophe for the community.’
Literature: Agata Moroz explores nest-fouling in Olga Tokarczuk’s novel Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead and its film adaptation Spoor, directed by Agnieszka Holland. Are people who work to protect the environment benevolent nest-foulers when acting against others in their own community and species?
More articles from Czas Kultury in Eurozine; Czas Kultury’s website
O’r Pedwar Gwynt
1/2020
(Wales/UK)
O’r Pedwar Gwynt considers language and loneliness
‘Sometimes, there is a sense that one has reached the end of the road,’ writes Mererid Puw Davies in Welsh journal O’r Pedwar Gwynt — a sense that the language and ideas that have led us thus far have been exhausted; and that before us we see only a wall or a cliff edge. In such times, the capacity simply to describe something can be an advantage, Puw Davies writes, recalling the words of W.G. Sebald: to describe a disaster offers the possibility, at least, of overcoming it (Die Beschreibung des Unglücks, 1985).
Puw Davies revisits Birgit Pausch’s long-forgotten novella Die Verweigerungen der Johanna Glauflügel (1977) and reflects on the narrator’s use of ekphrasis — the description of artworks, in this case Diego Velásquez’s Las Meninas and Donatello’s Maddalena Penitente. If Johanna Glauflügel does not have the words to make sense of the strange world she inhabits, ekphrasis ‘allows the world to appear again, as in a bright mirror, in the peculiar dawn of the familiar and the unfamiliar’.
Land and sea: Reading the works of Horatio Clare and Marseillaise crime writer Jean-Claude Izzo, Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan remembers her 1950s childhood in north Wales, as a daughter to a merchant navy sea captain. She recollects the collision of two worlds, how her father would have difficulty adapting to life on dry land; and how other children’s fathers, who were mostly quarrymen and farmers, would have arms free of tattoos and no golden ring in one ear, ‘like a gypsy’.
Titles such as The Mālim Sāhib’s Hindustāni (1921) and Arabic for Seamen were placed next to Welsh-language literature on the family bookshelves; and after her father had returned from sea, whilst her neighbours would be spreading butter on their bara brith (traditional Welsh fruit bread), she would be tasting turrón from Spain and panettone from Italy.
Today, she understands her father’s loneliness: as Izzo writes, ‘land is the only reality for mankind; and it is only on land that we may come to know sailors — unless one sails one day on a cargo ship.’ Would Wales have voted for Brexit, Lloyd-Morgan reflects, had more Welsh men followed her father’s career path?
Language and AI: The Welsh-language intellectual community has tended, historically, to reserve philosophizing on the ‘big’ questions for the English language, and to participate in those discussions according to those terms, writes Morgan Owen. The emergence of AI adds another dimension to this problem. This old habit of adapting the English world-view could mean giving precedence to an external subjectivity, Owen argues. From time to time, one needs to disbelieve the material maps provided. The transcendent is not a retreat but a celebration of an increasingly rare quality in our world: subjective consciousness.
Also: Aled Jones Williams on the religious language of Morgan Llwyd (1619–1659); photographer Chloe Dewe Mathews follows the footsteps of Frankenstein; and personal responsibility in the time of Covid-19.
More articles from O’r Pedwar Gwynt in Eurozine; O’r Pedwar Gwynt’s website
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