Jesters today

Again this one:

Dear Mr HerrrmannYou received new messages in the postbox of … [name of health insurance]. Do you want to have a look right now? Then click on the following link …With kind regards your [name of health insurance]

Is it appropriate to reply sth. like

(By William Merritt Chase – The Athenaeum: Home – info – pic, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2060164)

Dear [name of health insurance], thank you so much for your kind message which I could read after about 5 mouse-clicks and successfully digging out my insurance number, followed by another mouse-click … – I have to admit that i could have saved the energy (my personal and that of running the computer) as the message does not in any way engage with the message it supposedly answered …
Are you interested in my detailed reply right now? Please, come to my flat, I have written it down and may even help you to decipher my handwriting, assuming that you lost some part of your reading skills over the years – as said, the message you sent suggests something like it.
此致

I am serious, especially today, after having met the last group of my students for examination. Part of the discussion had been the question how it is possible that we are apparently all (forced to) moving around in a system that makes us to something worse than jesters? The jester at court had been asked to be critical and provocative, transporting the critique to the kings and lords, the modern jester is being asked to accept eighteenths fooled and to pass critique on to those below … to those below …

Happy New Year

Or New Years Eve, celebrated those days when it had been linked to the vernal equinox. Some uproar in the BaseCamp because of some mates celebrating NEWRUZ … not worthwhile elaborating on this quarrel in detail (though there is much to learn about this holiday, now also internationally recognised). But I was chatting with Loay about it, and expressed my conviction that we have in general so much nationalism in our thinking, not the extreme but just the apparent need to classify everything and everybody, not least making reference to nationality: “We” (people of the country 1 or 2 or country 148 …) are so different, special, compared with the others … . It may well be about being especially good, but also about especially neglecting, neglected, poor untidy … And “they” are … and yes, so often it is about negative things: “their music”, “their meals and eating habits”, “their law”, “their attitude to work” … and one may even add: though often there is some truth in it, there are too often ridiculous prejudices, stereotypes and unjustified generalisations.

Still, I am wondering why we are so often sticking together – I still remember my time in Brussels:

Les Français avec les Français, Język polski z polskim, Na Gaeilge leis na Gaeilge, Gli italiani con gli italiani, Die Deutschen mit den Deutschen – occasionally one felt alone, not being French, Polish, Irish, German or anything … until one decides for this and other reasons it is Time to Say Good-Bye, moving forward, leaving so many behind

https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1200/1*0Y-h9R3ebygBLJMxmZ9VZA.jpeg

A lot has to do with lack of knowledge, missing opportunity to engage in deep learning. Why are we talking about deep learning for computers and any IT-“self”-driving cars, while we are forgetting over all this the need to have deep learning as part of school and university curricular?

Soon to be published, interesting in this context:

Peter Herrmann: Right to Stay_Right to Move, With a preface by Lorena Ossio
Vienna:
Vienna Academic Press.

Utilitarianism – the core of it

Mark Pendergast, writing on August 15th, 1993 in the New York Times

A Brief History of Coca-Colonization

He really brought utilitarianism down to its very core: 

Devoted employees of the 101-year-old company that makes the world’s favorite soft drink have always believed that the human being was created primarily to serve as a conduit for the dark fizzy beverage. 

Indeed, it is not primarily the utilitarian customer – it is the producer that counts. And furthermore, as a job is a utility and even an essential one, it is better to be of the same opinion as s/he is and identify with “your” firm.

Now, is that a paradox? The real producer is surely not producing, at most sitting alone or amongst other CEOs, thinking about new strategies of extending business, without considering possible negative externalities, elaborating ways of producing externalities in order to enhance profit …

Now one may wonder and take up the question recently asked here;

What is if the satisfied human actually is becoming aware of the fact that s/he is a “pig”, in the metaphorical sense? A being that established this satisfaction on deception, wrong-doing, bribery or simply not sufficiently questioning the facts … just a moron …?

success of German lesson …

A year coming to its end – most part of it I spent in Germany – after having left the country over twenty years ago for the ongoing ‘Odyssee’, only occasionally returning, for short visits …

[…] iam pridem, ex quo suffragia nulli

uendimus, effudit curas; nam qui dabat olim

imperium, fasces, legiones, omnia, nunc se

continet atque duas tantum res anxius optat,

panem et circenses. […]

Juvenal, Satire 10.77–81

https://www.stoplusjednicka.cz/sites/default/files/styles/x940-620/public/obrazky/2017/12/800px-jean-leon_gerome_pollice_verso.jpg?itok=100wvCG1

… many things are still in the olden places or are put back into place, re-establishing hope; others are obviously changed; and some of these are creeping changes, barely mentioned, while very obvious for the attentive … stranger, eternal tourist as I had been occasionally classified. One of the latter is here suggested as the

“All-Good-Model”

When it comes to politics and economic policies it is for instance veiled in proposals to regulate a little bit better, to include some special clauses and quotas, the premise however being “all is good” After having lived in Munich after my return end of 2017 for some weeks, I was getting used to the expression “all is good” – a standard phrase that didn’t to exist when I left in the 1990s – the time when the “new, large, Germany” was surely still in its infancy, the new empire already very self-conscious, though still learning to walk on its clumsy feet.

Sure, I know the All-Good from earlier, noticing something similar during my “Italian journey” – in the country where the lemons bloom, it always occured to me to be the central good (good as in what is produced and also as in what is judged as valuable) of the language: nessun problema! and so was the lifestyle – wonderful, if you had completely immersed in it, knowing that an idiot crossing the street and forcing you to emergency break is ‘una bella’ and a turbulent stock-market is un incredibile sviluppo in questi giorni and non c’è dubbio, la vita è bella – e non si dovrebbe guardare a ciò che è brutto – there is no doubt, life is beautiful – and you should not look at what is ugly; if you were there as a visitor, knowing that it is only some limited time; often difficult to handle, if you live there as a stranger in Georg Simmel’s sense – in a way where abstract time and concrete time, as Henri Bergson defined it, can never unite; and in the long run the nessun probelma is extremely dangerous as we can see in the “soft-fascist” Mussolini, in Berlusconi and M5S.

Now it arrived in Germany as All-Good – I think it is something with which we all have to engage much more strongly. In short, part of the generation change, which also paves the way to a very special field on which a new generation seems to meet with a weird mix of individualism and pragmatism about which I talked a bit more on other occasions:

• in the AboutYou essay and
• earlier, when looking at some aspects of populism (see also here)

As important as it is to set the “old class analysis” against it, I think it often lacks a rather critical reference to the way of life, making it difficult to detect the move of a new generation of an all good mood … – panem et circenses, the games go on – and for some these neo-feudal structures are most enjoyable – the Plutocrats, being even aware of what they are … – it is a matter of obtaining a space that allows the own ambitions to unfold – ‘clarity’ in their terms is what the Plutocrats stand for, and where real people do not accept this, they are victim of new strategies of cleansing, whipping Valley’s reality of extreme income polarisation out.

Many tech companies solved this problem by having the lowest-paid workers not actually be employees. They’re contracted out’, Schmidt explained. ‘We can treat them differently, because we don’t really hire them. The person who’s cleaning the bathroom is not exactly the same sort of person.

(Freeland, Chrystia, 2012: Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else; New York: The Penguin Press)

At least that changed – the previous all-good-lords did not even problenatise it, despite few:

If anything is wrong this is wrong. If we will not endure a king as a political power we should not endure a king over the production, transportation, and sale of any of the necessaries of life. If we would not submit to an emperor we should not submit to an autocrat of trade, with power to prevent competition and to fix the price of any commodity.

(Congressional Record. Senate, 1890, March 21; 2455-2473; here: 2457; http://www.appliedantitrust.com/02_early_foundations/3_sherman_act/cong_rec/21_cong_rec_2455_2474.pdf; 26/04/18)

forever …

One prime social function of a university is to inquire freely and to criticize freely And the more managed, the more planned, the more ‘efficient’ the rest of society grows, the more important this function becomes.

(from: E.P. Thompson (ed.), 1970: Warwick University Ltd. . Industry, Management and the Universities; Nottingham: Spokesman, 2014; 39)

The Most Dangerous Game

This is the title of an exhibition, showing the

Situational International en route for May ’68.

Earlier this week, well, actually already the week before, before I went to the EuroMemo conference in Helsinki last week, I was reminded of today’s understanding of occupying the streets and the meaning of the spectacle – though entirely different from the S.I.’s understanding

Germany’s “largest Festival of the Year”

showing its vedettes: So many roads closed, even part of the park between the Victory-Column and the Brandenburg Gate, the intangible power

provoking the question: what do they mean stating that this festival is

only together with you

?

There can, in some way, only be one answer: it is about the continuation and replication of how the former East had been and still is treated, prolonging the tradition of the East when that part served as corn-chamber of the West. That is what had been established also in 1989, though it isn’t about corn anymore; the new debates on the floors where the CEOs of the large national and international corporations meet in their offices and meeting rooms had been concerned with the division of work and influence and living conditions within Gemany and between Germany, the other “old Europeans” and the “newcomers”. Those years I travelled a bit across countries as Poland, Czech Republic, Ukraine, Moldova …, clearly witnessing the “occupation of the streets”, clearly witnessing a strict pattern of the positioning of the different enterprises in a well-ordered fashion, clearly showing that competition can well be about the friendly distribution of market power.

I suppose it had been around those years that I wrote on page 232 in the

Diary from a Journey into another World. Diaries against nationalism, inspired by trying to overcome personal resentments

– ‘We are the people’, this phrase still sounds in my ears – and I see the crumbling of ‘the wall’, socialism had been building – rightly or wrongly – to protect itself against… ‘We are the people’ they say now – and the walls of Tesco, Aldi, Mango, Springfield, Dell, MAC, BMW and all the others make it difficult to hear the real voices of many who are just following their own way, now whispering for instance in the thermal bath of Hajdubösösmerny.

Well, there are these two worlds, within Germany, within EUrope and Europe and globally: the one attend “happenings” and their spectacles are about spectacular money; others see

[t]heir ‘playing field’ (…) [as] the city and everyday life. It was here that they sought confrontation with the bourgeois system – aesthetically through the “construction of situations”, and theoretically through precise analyses of modern consumerist society.

The first of October … – it took me much longer to go to the House of the Cultures of the World then it took me “those years” to cross at Bahnhof Friedrich Strasse – the German State needs much protection, a huge contingent of police and private security when switching to circenses while limiting panem …  

The third of October … will it ever be a day of celebrating globalism, cosmopolitan spirit and life instead of supporting strengthened nationalism?

These days in October, very often, my experience with the police, when passing the security points to enter the gated areas “outside office hours”, may be mentionable – one example: I referred to the “Nur mit Euch” (only with you) on the poster depicted above, stating something like “it is an interesting concept: ‘Only with you’, and we are all screwed …” – Comment by the officer, though surely not an official one: “I do not have a clue what they meant by this.”

Centre-Periphery reversed

It had been a strange feeling or mood – returning Sunday around lunchtime from Helsinki – taking a longish walk from the railway station zoo through the park, passing the memorial fro Rosa Luxemburg at the Landwehr Canal, doing some text editing and having an early dinner in the canteen of the Berliner Ensemble, Brecht’s place of activity – then off to the Gorki theatre: Les Justes. En route passing the metro station at Friedrichstraße where I occasionally crossed the border for visits at the peace council an others …. a bit further the Humboldt university, where I gave one of my first public presentations as young academic …. the statue which Käthe Kollwitz made before I enter the theatre for the performance of the Albert-Camus-piece.

The is still some repercussion from Helsinki – opportunity for a short visit in the national gallery. There hadn’t been the great names – most of the names never heard outside of the country, the paintings more placid than those of the great names, depicting more the landscapes, unknown people and everyday’s life – the periphery one may say. Sure, they can also be found in other galleries  some time ago the New Pinakothek came up with a special exhibition:

L WIE LAND UND LEUTE… LANDSCHAFT UND GENRE IN DER STUDIENGALERIE DER NEUEN PINAKOTHEK

But that is the point: it is more about a special exhibition – paintings that usually do not make the way in the main halls.and even there mostly it is the depiction accepted power,

Different in the museum in Helsinki. Much could be thought and said, at the end very much concerned with the fact that the centre of power is looking too often at the periphery of culture, distracting from “ordinary life”, from the worries and joys of people in their real life, that kind of life that is not about glory and that is not reflected in income statistics, employment figures and the like. And that life in which even angels may get wounded.

(Hugo Simberg: The Wounded Angel, from the Ateneum website)

It is the normality of what actually defines life: Kaethe Kollwitz, the hesitation in Camus’ piece when it comes to revenge while facing a real human being, not just the personification of a role, a specific vulnerability that is acknowledged and offers some special strength – that kind of strength that does not need huge power centres as materialisation of control, that does not need helicopters or massive “intelligence” for its protection,

(BND – the fortress of FRGs secret service – this part of the building sowing a fraction of the entire complex)

a strength that emerges from acknowledged truth. The open centres of exhibited power

loose centrality where they loose the respect of the seeming periphery: the real life; political and imperial power moves to the periphery where the actual meaning is emerging from the way in which people shape and share every day and everywhere, where we find confirmed that

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.

And where we have to add that it is not only history but also the attraction of present power, the presentation of power in attractiveness, meaning beauty and might that takes this nightmarish character.

Still, it remains the question. often asked: can people be just in a world that is profoundly unjust? – All this surely something to reflect upon when we talk about populism.

Dead Clowns

meaning, relevance, sense – questions people who live are too often compelled to leave them to philosophers …. – like issues of production as reproduction of real life are, on the other hand left to people while economists read in tea-leaves of heroic, even quasi-divine formulas that are distant from peoples’ and people’s life — just remaining meaningless and non-sensual.

Some time ago already – after I gave a presentation at the Symposium organised by the European Academy of Sciece and Arts – looking at

Digitisation – Challenges between Changing Social Securitisation and Changing the Vita Activa

a later presenter was carried way by

the Humanoid Robot YuMi Conducts Italian Orchestra, Andrea Bocelli

Several month later, by accident, I was getting nicely aware of the misleading question of humanoid robots replacing humans, spotting by accident a clip showing

Sir Georg Solti (1912 – 1997) | Große Dirigenten bei der Arbeit beobachtet [- great conductors observed while working – with engl subs.]

Baseline? There is no real danger of human beings becoming replaced – the danger is that some Kurzweil’ig ‘systems’ are brought forward by those sigularitarian minds in their Plutocratic caves [see Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else]. The danger is that some powerful forces succeed in reducing us to mindless clowns, caught in Platonian caves – the circle of virtuality emerging as vicious circle, its life depending on he fact that no needle will be used, by nobody.

Mind, all this is not really about  Humanoid toys – it is about comedians and actors like Beppe Grillo in Italian politics, natioal citizens attacking fellow citizens from other countries, narcissistic tyrants rethinking the liberty statue and overlookin the old rebukes

Skerbischs „Lichtschwert“ vor dem Opernhaus Graz

Von Marion Schneider & Christoph Aistleitner – Eigenes Werk, Gemeinfrei, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5016791

And yes, it is also about administer-infantilisation.

Overcoming humankind, if it then happens, won’t be much else then the

The Death of a Clown

(EN) « My makeup is dry and it clags on my chin I’m drowning my sorrows in whisky and gin The lion tamer’s whip doesn’t crack anymore The lions they won’t fight and the tigers won’t roar »

(IT) « Il mio trucco si è asciugato e cola sul mio mento Sto affogando i miei dispiaceri nel whisky e nel gin Il domatore di leoni non da più colpi di frusta I leoni non si azzufferanno più tra loro e le tigri non ruggiranno »

 

 

Corporate irresponsibility ?

Tomorrow, in the framework of the ‘hour of contemporary issues’, organised at the Max Planck Institute for Social Law and Social Policy, Munich, Amalienstrasse 33, Peter Herrmann will give a presentation titled

The Comedy of Big Data, Or: Corporate Social Responsibility Today, While Corporations wither away?

The following gives some idea what the presentation is about.

Understanding Corporate Social Responsibility requires at least a bit of historical clarification: it would be surely misleading to attribute any kind of entrepreneurial ‘social activity’ to the array of Corporate Social Responsibility. However, such review will be only briefly introduced in order to classify certain activities as related to what may be called social responsibility, the emphasis on the corporation as actor. What, however, if we come to the conclusion that certain shifts in the economy lead – in some digitization industries – to forms of the classical corporation withering away, being successively replaced by a new formation of which we cannot see clear, elusive contours. Are we moving towards revived arbitrary systems of socio-charitable controls, Lidle financing professorships, Aldi and Lidl presenting themselves as supporters of social housing and Facebook controlling elections?  Or can we foster a model which leans towards inherent publicness?

Between Worlds – Between Times

It is some time ago now, I made a trip which was a bit like time travel – France – Catalonia – France and going on from there …

Well, I can say I escaped those days that massacre of Barcelona, though having been very close to the crime scene. At stake is, however, not spatial closeness – what makes me still trembling, and at times near to crying, is something else – it is the same shock that followed me for some time, after having left the French embassy in Rome on the 7th of January 2015, the day of the ‘Charlie Hebdo shooting’. It is a bit like history condensing, being forced into a nutshell, feeling the need to discard the fetters that are lurking around the corners of uneven development.

****

Indeed, it is some time ago now,I made that trip which was a bit like time travel, leaving the massacre for a while aside …

Two days or so after what happened …  sitting in the TGV, the Train à Grande Vitesse, … everything went according to plan, and I am sitting on the prenotated seat, looking a bit out of the window, trying to accommodate myself in the passing life … – again and again startled by the rattling, caused by some parts of the train. I remember the first trip I made with a TGV, many years ago: fast, not mentioning the slightest movement – and those days not the noise of neighbours playing with or loudly speaking over their phone: pling .., announcing arriving — swoosh …, accompanying the sending of a message. Then it had been a brand new train, with all comfort, cleanness and newness [today’s TGVs had been inaugurated in 1981]. I remember a friend, while looking out of the window, asking:

And when will it be driving with this amazing speed?

I replied

Don’t look out of the window, look at the speed-announcement over the door.

Yes, it had been over 300 km/h.

A few days later: the Thalys from Brussels to Amsterdam, later again, the ICE bringing me to Munich …: all of them smooth trips, comfortable actually, as they had been launched later than the TGV, a bit cleaner, still a bit more comfortable … Still, using now the CRH in China – very clean, the train seems to ‘stand still’ while driving its constant 307 km; quiet – though one has to cope with phone …. announcements of food for sale, the latter standing a bit in the way of the claimed  和谐号 – harmony, as the name of these trains suggests. – The new generation, i heard, is now moving smoothly with 400 km/h …

Possibly I will remember at some stage, several years ahead, a train trip between Wuhu and Najning, everything going according to plan, while I will be sitting on the prenotated seat, looking out of the window, trying to accommodate myself in the passing life … – frequently startled by the rattling, caused by some parts of the train when it will then be a somewhat old train, old as in some parts of the world already completely other means of transport will be in place … – or it may be more likely that I do not remember it anymore, actually it may take long enough that I do not remember anything anymore and only some people remember me, while now sitting there, thinking about the old 和谐号 – harmony, perhaps then sitting relaxed in a train called 超验 – transcendence … – seemingly transcending time and space, rarely being aware of the fact that the time we live in is already past time as soon as we are getting are of this worldly dimension if transcendence.

***

Isn’t part of being between worlds also about being between times, experiencing the accords and discords that are at the centre of globalisation that depends on unevenness, of which contradictions are permanent and necessary part – where welcome is supposed to be a threat. Yes,

we in the West need to think about a whole new relation to the so-called “Third World” if we want to prevent hate, hostility and attacks. This can also effectively contribute to fighting the reasons for flight and escape.

But even more so, we, who are ready to take globalisation seriously on the agenda, have to think about a whole new relation between the real people of the real world if we want to prevent hate, hostility and attacks. It must be a world where fighting the reasons for flight and escape equals fighting for the freedom to explore the real variety that is emerging from unity and commonality. Not simply as matter of being together but by accepting being one in time – which then also means overcoming claims towards superiority of ‘some time’. Leaving the many facets aside that stand behind massacres, some calling their own massacres unconvincingly ‘war against terror’, there is one thing that strikes me: the difficulty of historising issues. One of the explicit arguments of the murderers of Barcelona was about reclaiming part of the old Islam empire – and indeed, the Islam plaid a major role in Spain – but can that serve as foundation of any claim today? A similar notion had been put forward in Paris, rejecting the touching of the untouchable – while Charlie Hebdo claimed the right to touch, even if only with the stroke of the pencil of a cartoonist; and the various wars against terror following very much the same idea of defending a world order that is historically obsolete and moreover: of which the underlying criteria of nationality, economic growth, private property, hegemonic rights, charity etc. definitely lost their foundation [if they ever have had a stable foundation]. The good old times did not exist anywhere and need to be confronted with a world that has open eyes and ears.

Il silenzio mi aiuterà a smettere di pensare a te che sei fatto di vento.- Silence will help me to stop thinking about yourself as being made of wind. – Something cultures have to accept when looking at their history …, something that is valid and where the new generation of TGV-trains changes only very little.

L’oscurità chiude gli occhi, non mi permette di vedere e di apprezzare che le lettere di oggi saranno presto le lettere dei tempi antichi. – Darkness closes the eyes, not allowing me seeing and appreciating that the lettering of today will soon be the lettering from ancient times.

… Come together, real and close – that is what time needs – everytime …, also in order to find a way that allows dealing with the fact that some of the perpetrators are simply victims themselves, requiring to overcome the terrible pain at least I carry with me again; and even being ready at least to ask if and to which extent we as victims may be perpetrators … – we, the good-doers, teachers, administrators, opinion leaders …, not least we, who easily hastily come to conclusions and easily forget …

having difficulties to act in a genuine way …

Reflections made just before leaving the PRC, while waiting to move on to Moscow, theФГБОУ ВПО “РЭУ им. Г.В. Плеханова”

The short presentation, I made on occasion of the

International Conference of Indigenous Sports Culture in Asia Wuhu, Anhui Province, China

under the heading

The Particular and the Universal – Indigenous Sports for the Integrity of the Global Village

will soon be announced on this blog as recording should be available.