“Talent war eigentlich nur nötig, wenn sich einer Mühe gegeben hatte, und brachte, wichtig und gutmütig, eine Freude, und man sah schon von weitem, daß es eine Freude für einen ganz anderen war, eine vollkommen fremde Freude; man wußte nicht einmal jemanden, dem sie gepaßt hätte: so fremd war sie.”

aus: Rainer Maria Rilke: Die Aufzeichungen des Malte Laurids Brigge. Suhrkamp 1991, S.136.

03/15

“Das Unglück, obenhin, unverständig, ohne Geschmack, ohne Gefühl, mit Vorurteilen oder gar mit Schalksaugen und bösem Willen gelesen zu werden – oder, wie die meisten Leser, die nur zum Zeitvertreib in ein Buch gucken – oder zur Unzeit, wenn der Leser übel geschlafen, übel verdaut oder unglücklich gespielt oder sonst Mangel an Lebensgeistern hat – oder gelesen zu werden, wenn gerade dieses Buch, diese Art von Lektüre unter allen möglichen sich am wenigsten für ihn schickt und seine Sinnesart, Stimmung, Laune, mit des Autors seiner den vollkommensten Kontrast macht – das Unglück, so gelesen zu werden, ist, nach der Meinung des besagten Autors, keines von den geringsten, welchen ein Schriftsteller … sich und die armen ausgesetzten Kinder seines Geistes täglich und unvermeidlich bloßgestellt sehen muß. Unter hundert Lesern kann man sicher rechnen, von achtzig so gelesen zu werden. …

Was Wunder also, wenn den besten Werken in ihrer Art, und in einer sehr guten Art, oft so übel mitgespielt wird? Was Wunder, wenn die Leute in einem Buche finden, was gar nicht drin ist; oder Ärgernis an Dingen nehmen, die, gleich einem gesunden Getränke in einem verdorbenen Gefäße, bloß dadurch ärgerlich werden, weil sie in dem schiefen Kopf oder der verdorbenen Einbildung des Lesers dazu gemacht werden?  Was Wunder, wenn der Geist eines Werkes den meisten so lange und fast immer unsichtbar bleibt? Was Wunder, wenn dem Verfasser oft Absichten, Grundsätze, Gesinnungen angedichtet werden, die er nicht hat, die er, vermöge seines Charakters, seiner ganzen Art zu existieren, gar nicht einmal haben kann? Die Art, wie die meisten lesen, ist der Schlüssel zu allen diesen Ereignissen, die in der literarischen Welt so gewöhnlich sind. Wer darauf achtzugeben Lust oder innern Beruf hat, erlebt die erstaunlichsten Dinge in dieser Art.”

aus: Christoph Martin Wieland: Wie man liest. Hier zitiert in: Wort und Sinn, Schulbuch. Paderborn: Schönigh, S.124.

Abb.: Klaus Staeck: Kunstkritiker beim ersten Documenta-Rundgang, 1977, Edition Staeck, im Internet.

03/15

“Unser ganzes Bildungssystem lebt letztlich davon, Gelegenheiten zu schaffen … alle die etwas lernen sollen, mit Selbstgeschriebenem zu konfrontieren, weil sie nur so auf die Ordnung stoßen, die in ihrem Kopf herrscht – wobei diese Ordnung nur ein Effekt des Schreibens ist und nicht das Schreiben ein Effekt der Ordnung …

Was wir derzeit an Bildungsreform an Schulen und Universitäten machen, ist eine groß angelegte Vermeidungsstrategie des Schreibens. Weder in den Schulen noch in den Hochschulen bleibt Zeit zum Schreiben – mit der idiotischen Begründung, dass man dann mehr Zeit fürs Lernen hätte. Das Bücher … Kulturspeicher  sind, ist ja nur die halbe Wahrheit. Man denkt dabei nur an die Rezeption – dabei ist die Produktion der Ort, an dem die Ordnung entsteht, die da gespeichert wird. Die Linearität der Kommunikation diszipliniert unser Bewusstsein, weil nicht alles sofort, nicht alles gleichzeitig geschehen kann – und vor allem nicht alles, was möglich gewesen wäre. Schreiben bringt Ordnung in die Welt – dabei dachten wir, im Geschriebenen werde ihre Ordnung nur gespeichert.”

aus: Armin Nassehi: Die Macht der Unterscheidung. Kursbuch 173 (März 2013), S. 10/11.

01/15

[as an ancient Greek concept]

“In the beginning of Western history the distinction between the mortality of men and the immortality of nature, between man-made things and things which come into being by themselves, was the tacit assumption of historiography.” S.43

“[The beginning of] history as a category of human existence … [lies,] poetically speaking, … in the moment when Ulysses, at the court of the king of the Phaeacians, listened to the story of his own deeds and sufferings, to the story of his life, now a thing outside himself, an ‘object’ for all to see and to hear. What had been sheer occurrence now became ‘history’.” S.45

“The concern of greatness, so prominent in Greek poetry and historiography, is based on the most intimate connection between the concepts of nature and history. Their common denominator is immortality … History receives into its remembrance those mortals who through deed and word have proved themselves worthy of nature, and their everlasting fame means that they, despite their mortality, may remain in the company of the things that last forever.” S.48

“The Greek notion of the heroic deed … serves as a kind of yardstick with which to measure one’s own capacities for greatness. … the Greek … did not know any ‘moral’ consideration but only an … unceasing effort always to be the best of all.” S.67

[as a Roman and Christian concept]

“According to Christian teachings, the relationship between life and world is the exact opposite to that in Greek and Latin antiquity: in Christianity neither the world nor the ever-reoccuring cycle of life is immortal, only the single living individual.” S.52

“The only story in which unique and unrepeatable events take place begins with Adam and ends with the birth and death of Christ. Thereafter secular powers rise and fall as in the past and will rise and fall until the world’s end, but … Christians are not supposed to attach particular significance to them. … To the Christian, as to the Roman, the significance of secular events lay in their having the character of examples likely to repeat themselves, so that action could follow certain standardized patterns: … The faithful following of a recognized example.” S.66/67

“The Christian calender imitated the Roman practice of counting time from the year of the foundation of Rome.” S.67

[as a modern concept]

“Our concept of history … owes its existence to the transition period when religious confidence in immortal life had lost its influence upon the secular and the new indifference toward the question of immortality had not yet been born.” S.74

“The modern computation of historical dates, introduced only at the end of the eighteenth century, … takes the birth of Christ as a turning point from which to count time both backward and forward … is presented in the text books as a mere technical improvement. … Hegel inspired an interpretation which sees in the modern time system a truly Christian chronology because the birth of Christ now seems to have become the turning point of world history. Neither of these explanations is satisfactory. … [The] … twofold infinity of past and future eliminates all notions of beginning and end, establishing mankind in a potential earthly immortality. … Nothing could be more alien to Christian thought.” S.67/68

“The central concept of Hegelian metaphysics is history. … To think, with Hegel, that truth resides and reveals itself in the time-process itself is characteristic of all modern historical consciousness. … Men now began to read, as Meinecke pointed out, as nobody had ever read before. They ‘read in order to force from history the ultimate truth …'” S.68

“In the modern age history emerged as something it never had been before …, it became a man-made process …, which distinguished history from nature … Industrialization still consisted primarily of … mechanization … and man’s attitude to nature still remained that of a homo faber, to whom nature gives the material out of which the human artifice is erected.” S.58/59

“The problem of politics regained that grave and decisive relevance for the existence of men which it had been lacking since antiquity because it was inconceivable with a strictly Christian understanding of the secular.” S.71 “The modern concept of history proved to be [extremely useful] in giving the secular political realm a meaning which it otherwise seemed to be devoid of.” S.82

“What distinguishes Marx‘s … theory from all others in which that notion of ‘making history’ has found a place is only that he alone realized that if one takes history to be the object of a process of fabrication or making, there must come a moment when this ‘object’ is completed, and that if one imagines that one can ‘make history,’ one cannot escape the consequence that there will be an end to history.” S.79

[as a contemporary non-concept]

“Today the Kantian and Hegelian way of becoming reconciled to reality through understanding the innermost meaning of the entire historical process seems to be quite as much refuted by our experience as the simultaneous attempt of pragmatism and utilitarism to ‘make history’ and impose upon reality the preconceived meaning and law of man.” S.86

“… Today, after we have been treated to one such history-construction after another, to one such formula after another, the question for us is no longer whether this or that particular formula is correct. In all such attempts what is considered to be a meaning is in fact no more that a pattern … Marx was … the first … to mistake a pattern for a meaning, and he certainly could hardly been expected to realize that there was almost no pattern into which the events of the past world would not have fitted as neatly and consistently as they did into his own.” S.80/81

“Were not the old philosophers right, and was it not madness to expect any meaning to arise out of the realm of human affairs?” S.85

“What is really undermining the whole modern notion that meaning is contained in the process as a whole, from which the particular occurrence derives its intelligibility, is that not only can we prove this, in the sense of consistent deduction, but we can take almost any hypothesis and act upon it, with a sequence of results in reality which not only make sense but work. This means quite literally that everything is possible not only in the realm of ideas but in the field of reality itself. … I can choose to do whatever I want and some kind of ‘meaning’ will always be the consequence.” S.88

“Today … we are quite capable of starting new natural processes, and that in a sense therefore we ‘make nature,’ to the extend, that is, that we ‘make history.’ … The moment we started natural processes of our own – and splitting the atom is precisely such a man-made natural process – we not only increased our power over nature … but for the first time have taken nature into the human world as such and obliterated the defensive boundaries between natural elements and the human artifice by which all previous civilizations were hedged in.” S.58-60

“The modern age … has led to a situation, where man, wherever he goes, encounters only himself. All the processes of the earth and the universe have revealed themselves either as man-made or as potentially man-made … Neither history nor nature is at all conceivable.” S.89

aus: Hannah Arendt: The Concept of History. Ancient and Modern. In: Dies.: Between past and future. Harmondsworth/New York u.a.: Penguin 1977 (1961), S.41-90.

12/14

“No one has ever doubted that truth and politics are on rather bad terms with each other. … Throughout history, the truth-seekers and truthtellers have been aware of the risks of their business; as long as they did not interfere with the course of the world, they were covered with ridicule, but he who forced his fellow-citizens to take him seriously by trying to set them free from falsehood and illusion was in danger of his life. …

The opposite of a rationally made statement is either error and ignorance, as in the sciences, or illusion and opinion, as in philosophy. Deliberate falsehood, the plain lie; plays its role only in the domain of factual statements, and it seems significant, and rather odd, that in the long debate about this antagonism of truth and politics, from Plato to Hobbes, no one apparently, ever believed that organized lying, as we know it today, could be an adequate weapon against truth. …

The facts I have in mind are publicly known, and yet the same public that knows them can successfully, and often spontaneously, taboo their public discussion and treat them as though they were what they are not – namely, secrets. …

… we find it in … countries that are ruled tyrannically by an ideological government … What seems even more disturbing is that to the extent to which unwelcome factual truths are tolerated in free countries they are often, consciously or unconsciously, transformed into opinions – as though the fact of Germany’s support of Hitler or of France’s collapse before the German armies in 1940 or of the Vatican policies during the Second World War were not a matter of historical record but a matter of opinion. …

Seen from the viewpoint of the truthteller, the tendency to transform fact into opinion, to blur the dividing line between them, is … perplexing. …

Facts inform opinions, and opinions, inspired by different interests and passions, can differ widely and still be legitimate as long as they respect factual truth. Freedom of opinion is a farce unless factual information is guaranteed and the facts themselves are not in dispute. …

During the twenties, so a story goes, Clemenceau, shortly before his death, found himself engaged in a friendly talk with a representative of the Weimar Republic, on the question of guilt for the outbreak of the first World War. ‘What, in your opinion,’ Clemenceau was asked, ‘will future historians think of this troublesome and controversial issue?’ He replied, ‘This I don’t know. But I know for certain that they will not say Belgium invaded Germany.’ …

It is true … to eliminate from the record the fact that on the night of August 4, 1914, German troops crossed the frontier of Belgium; it would require no less than a power monopoly over the entire civilized world. But such a power monopoly is far from being inconceivable, and it is not difficult to imagine what the fate of factual truth would be if power interests, national or social, had the last say in these matters. … Why a commitment even to factual truth is felt to be an anti-political attitude [?] …

What Mercier de la Rivière once remarked about mathematical truth applies to all kinds of truth: ‘Euclide est un véritable despote; et les vérités géométriques qu’il nous a transmises, sont des lois véritablement déspotiques.’ … Seen from the viewpoint of politics, truth has a despotic character. It is therefore hated by tyrants, who rightly fear the competition of a coercive force they cannot monopolize, and it enjoys it rather precarious status in the eyes of government that rest on consent and abhor coercion. Facts are beyond agreement and consent … Unwelcome opinion can be argued with, rejected or compromised upon, but unwelcome facts possess an infuriating stubbornness that nothing, can move except plain lies. The trouble is that factual truth, like all other truth, peremptorily claims to be acknowledged and precludes debate, and debate constitutes the very essence of political life. …

… because of the haphazardness of facts … factual truth is no more self-evident than opinion, and this may be among the reasons that opinion-holders find it relatively easy to discredit factual truth as just another opinion. Factual evidence, moreover, is established through testimony by eyewitnesses – notoriously unreliable – and by records, documents, and monuments, all of which can be suspected as forgeries. In the event of a dispute, only other witnesses but no third and higher instance can be invoked. …

… when the liar, lacking the power to make his falsehood stick, does not insist on the gospel truth of his statement but pretends that this is his ‘opinion,’ to which he claims his constitutional right. This is frequently done by subversive groups, and in a politically immature public the resulting confusion can be considerable. The blurring of the dividing line between factual truth and opinion belongs among the many forms that lying can assume …

Truthfulness has never been counted among the political virtues, because it has little indeed to contribute to that change of the world and of circumstances which is among the most legitimate political activities. Only where a community has embarked upon organized lying on principle … can truthfulness as such … become a political factor of the first order. …

The modern political lies deal efficiently with things that are not secrets at all but are known to practically everybody. This is obvious in the case of rewriting contemporary history under the eyes of those who witnessed it, but is equally true in image-making of all sorts, in which, again, every known and established fact can be denied or neglected … We are finally confronted with highly respected statesmen who, like de Gaulle and Adenauer, have been able to build their basic policies on such evident non-facts as that France belongs among the victors of the last war …

If the past and present are treated as parts of the future – that is changed back into their former state of potentiality – the political realm is deprived not only of its main stabilizing force but of the starting point from which to change, to begin something new. … Conceptionally, we may call truth what we cannot change; metaphysically, it is the ground on which we stand and the sky that stretches above us.”

aus: Hannah Arendt: Truth and Politics. (ursprünglich in The New Yorker 25.02.1967) In: Dies.: Between past and future. Harmondsworth/New York u.a.: Penguin 1977, S.227-264.

Abb.: Zaenal Abidin: Will to Power 2, 2014, indoartnow, im Internet.

12/14

“What will be remembered about the twenty-first century more than anything else, except perhaps the effects of a changing climate, is the great, and final, shift of human populations out of rural, agricultural life and into cities. We will end this century as a wholly urban species. … it will be the last human movement of this size and scope. [S. 1] …

In my journalistic travels, I developed the habit of introducing myself to new cities by riding subway and tram routes to the end of the line, or into the hidden interstices and inaccessible corners of the urban core. … These are always fascinating, bustling, unattractive, improvised, difficult places, full of new people and big plans. [S. 2] …

This ex-rural population, I found, was creating strikingly similar urban spaces all over the world: spaces whose physical appearance varied but whose basic set of functions, whose network of human relationships, was distinct and identifiable. And there was a contiguous, standardized pattern of institutions, customs, conflicts and frustrations being build and felt in these places [S. 3] …

The great migration of humans is manifesting itself in the creation of a special kind of urban place. These transitional spaces – arrival cities – are the places where the next great economic and cultural boom will be born, or where the next great explosion of violence will occur. The difference depends on our ability to notice, and our willingness to engage. [S. 3] …

Tower Hamlets, London, UK … The easy ability to open a small business in Britain, to get credit and purchase property and obtain restaurant licences without prejudice, allowed the Bangladeshis to avoid destitution and dependency, to accumulate capital and provide legitimate employment to new arrivals as British immigration laws toughened, and to build futures for their children over the hot tandoori ovens. Small businesses of this sort are the heart of almost any successful arrival city, and their absence, or the presence of laws that keep immigrants from opening them, is often the factor that turns arrival cities into poverty traps. [S. 28/29] …

Around the world, it appears that a good part of the success or failure of an arrival city has to do with its physical form – the layout of streets and buildings, the transportation links to the economic and cultural core of the city, the direct access to the street from buildings, the proximity to schools, health centres and social services, the existence of a sufficiently high density of housing, the presence of parks and neutral public spaces, the ability to open a shop on the ground floor and add rooms to your dwelling. [S. 32/33] …

The informal economy, previously considered a parasitic irrelevance on the edge of the “main” industrial economy, now represents a quarter of all jobs in post-communist countries, a third in North Africa, half in Latin America, 70 per cent in India, and more than 90 per cent in the poorest African countries. [S. 41] …

Kamrangirchar, Dhaka, Bangladesh … Jamar is the cable-TV man. This makes him a powerful and influential figure in the new slum, in good part because his is the first and most reliable utility to be delivered, years or decades ahead of running water, postal services and sewage. All across the developing world, in South America and Asia and the Middle East, the cable guy has become a source of influence in the slum. … To walk through the slum at night is to traverse pools of blue light and competing blasts of tinny music. [S. 48/49] … Poor people move house frequently, and arrival cities, in their early years, are places of constant movement and change. [S. 50/51] … In Bangladesh, as in many other places, the arrival city is turning women into primary headwinners, and they play a prominent and visible role in these communities. [S. 51] … As everywhere, life is a bet on the future of the children. Arrival cities are places of generational deferral, in which entire lives are sacrificed, often in appalling conditions, for a child’s better opportunity. [S. 52/53] …

In the earliest decades of the great arrival city boom, from the 1940s to the 1970s, the predominant way to acquire land was by squatting. … But the land invasion has become a much rarer activity … First, land nowadays tends to be private, with clear owners … Second, rural migrants, almost universally, do not want ambiguity in their possession of the land beneath their feet: the want clear ownership. [S. 54] …

Los Angeles, California … In the decade after Los Angeles burned, swathes of the city’s core turned from poor neighbourhoods populated by black tenants who rented from absentee white landlords into Latino arrival cities whose residents struggled to buy their ghetto homes. … While poor black Angelos were struggling to escape their neighbourhood as fast as they could and move into the suburbs, as the white working class had done a generation before, the Spanish-speaking arrivals were struggling to dig in, buy their homes and set up a shop. [S. 79] … People move through its neighbourhoods. … They arrive very poor, with poverty rates approaching 25 per cent, but … these rates fall sharply, especially during the first decade of residence, generally to less than 10 per cent. Nevertheless, the neighbourhoods themselves often stay poor or even get poorer. … The American arrival city … is constantly sending its educated second generation into more prosperous neighbourhoods and taking in waves of new villagers … the neighbourhood itself appears poorer than it really is. … [S. 82]

Parla, Spain. …A major study found that the Spanish-born children of Moroccan immigrants are becoming fully integrated into Spanish language and customs far better than South American and Central American migrants to Spain … This difference is attributed to the fact that Spanish immigration policies for Morrocans and other Africans, which were formulated a decade later, made is possible for entire families to migrate and become citizens, so that children are not raised in single-parent families or in families assembled through immigration-driven forced marriages. The Latin-American migrant process was more likely to split up families. [S. 259/260] …

Bijlmermeer [Amsterdam] … was subject … to what has been described as the most dramatic and violent act of arrival-city transformation in modern history. Build in the late 1960s …, it was a huge honeycomb of 31 very wide 10-storey apartment towers with wide spaces between them, housing 60,000 people in a commerce-free expanse of parkland and public spaces, separated from the city by a greenbelt. It never really even began to succeed …, having only a 20 per cent Dutch-born population. … Bijlmermeer was often described in the 1970s and early 1980s as the most dangerous neighbourhood in Europe. …

Finally, beginning in the mid-1990s … Amsterdam demolished all the apartment towers in two waves and replaced them with a tighter arrangement of mid-height structures that gave each apartment its own garden and ‘ownership’ of a section of the street, with loosely zoned spares for shops and businesses in between, allowing teeming and haphazard markets. This decade-long job was accompanied by a new active government role in the city’s southeast; its cornerstones are a powerful local security patrol and a municipal corporation dedicated to providing support to entrepreneurs and job-related training to youth. A new Metro link to the neighbourhood flowered into a prosperous business end entertainment hub. … What is it that the Dutch are doing with their arrival cities? First, they are increasing their intensity. … Until very recently, most urban officials believed that the greatest threat to the poor was crowding, density and confusion. … In less-desirable neighbourhoods, the poor arrivals are stuck with low intensity, high-division planning that forbids spontaneity. … [S. 297]

Around the world there is confusion about what should best be done about these neighbourhoods. [S. 306] … Often, the size of the building makes the difference, and there is a reason, why poor neighbourhoods in the developing world, when they turn into more prosperous neighbourhoods, so often evolve into long rows of five-storey buildings with shops on the ground floor. This is an almost ideal arrangement for self-managed neighbourhoods … People who arrive in cities need the help of the state. And what arrival cities need most – and what the market will almost never provide – are the tools to become normal urban communities. Sewage, garbage collection and paved roads are, for obvious reasons, vital and can be provided only from outside. But even more important, in the well-informed view of slum-dwellers, are buses: affordable and regular bus service into the neighbourhood is often the key difference between a thriving enclave and a destitute ghetto. One might think that the next priority would be electricity and running water, but in fact, these are often not considered priorities at all by slum-dwellers. They have typically arranged their own utilities, , and full-price utilities can be debilitating for poor households. Equally important, and far too often neglected, is street lighting. [S. 309-311]. …

… ethnic clustering (some would say segregation) gave the arrivals the benefit of ‘differential citizenship’ allowing them to participate in what I have described as a culture of transition. [S. 317].”

aus: Doug Saunders: Arrival City. How the largest migration in history is reshaping our world. London: Windmill 2010.

Abb.: Michael Cook: Sold (Livin’ the Dream Series), 2020. im Internet.

06/14

“Because arrival cities are so widely misunderstood and distrusted – dismissed as static ‘slums’ rather than places of dynamic change – governments have devoted much of the past 60 years to attempting to prevent their formation. It didn’t begin this way. In the two decades after the Second World War, squatter enclaves were tolerated. .. Then, as urban economies became increasingly informal starting in the late 1960s, and manufacturing economies were no longer always the main destination for rural migrants, governments and international organizations developed an obsession with ‘over-urbanization’. This coincided with a romantized, idealized view of the peasant life popular to Marxist economies and in many corners of academia. … It is worth noting that countries rarely experience economic growth while banning or restricting rural-urban migration: without urbanization, the economy stagnates, and people often starve, … Migration-control laws made life much worse for the poor while creating deep layers of corruption, since migration meant bribing officials; this, in turn, increased the criminality of the arrival city. [S. 56] …

Shenzen, China … In a city of 14 million, only 2.1 million, or 15 per cent, have a Shenzen hukou, which entitles their children to education in the city. Fei and Zhan have no hope of getting one. [S. 59] …

The past decade has seen a dramatic change in official opinions. Still, the demolition of arrival-city slums is all too common a practice in such cities as Mumbai and Manila. These bulldozings destroy the economic and social functioning of the arrival city. Even in cases where evicted slum-dwellers are given rudimentary apartments in tower blocks – a common practice in Asia and South America – it is no longer possible for them to create shops, restaurants and factories [S. 62] …

Brazil, with its hundreds of high-population slums still controlled by narco-gangs, also offers a cautionary tale. Its governments spent decades trying to prevent, remove, isolate or ignore the arrival city, and its inevitable dynamics bit back: if left to its own devices, and deprived of access to the larger political system, the arrival city will generate a defensive politics of its own. In Brazil, it took the form of the drug gang. In Mumbai, it is Hindu nationalism. In the arrival cities of Europe, Islamic extremism. [S. 75] …

Most Westerners do not understand that what is taking place in their cities is a process of rural-to-urban migration. … People move through its neighbourhoods … The downward trend for the place is the opposite indicator of the upward trend enjoyed by the residents themselves. This paradox has created a sense among outsiders that the city’s immigrant districts are poorer or more desperate than they really are, which leads to a misunderstanding of the forms of government investment they really need – a serious policy problem in many migrant-based cities around the world. rather than getting the tools of ownership, education, security, business creation and connection to the wider economy, they are too often treated as destitute places that need non-solutions such as social workers, public-housing blocks and urban-planned redevelopments. [S. 82/83] …

Los Angeles, California … Mario ..,, despite being a successful businessman, the husband of a naturalized immigrant and the father of a young American citizen, he has not yet found a way to become a legal Amercian himself. … In the past, the United States has granted amnesties to large numbers of illegal immigrants, transforming them from informal, non-taxpaying underground workers into legitimate citizens who can invest in their society. [Not any more.] Tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of other Angelos are in similar positions: afraid or unable to put their earnings into their communities, trapped in a netherworld of half-arrived despite being active in the economy. The ambiguous approach to citizenship can have damaging effects on arrival cities, turning them from opportunities into threats. [S. 85] …

Les Pyramides, Evry, France. … Something happens to villagers when they arrive in the French urban outskirts. The culture of transition, that fertile amalgam of village and urban life, is frozen in its early stages, prevented from advancing into permanency, from growing into something that contributes to the country’s economy and culture. The parents often manage the first stage adequately, keeping one foot in the village and one in the city, holding down rudimentary jobs and supporting their villages through remittances. But they are prevented from moving to the usual next stage, from launching any kind of small business, from owning their house, from meshing themselves with the larger urban community – they remain isolated. And their children, fully acculturated, find themselves stuck – in part by a well-documented racism that denies them jobs or higher-education postings on the basis of last names or post codes. … ‘The problem is, that these kids see themselves as immigrants.’ … They didn’t build Les Pyramides with Africans in mind. There are not enough rooms, no place for markets, nothing that people from villages can use to make a start … [S. 235] … In effect, the children were raised on the streets and concrete squares of Les Pyramides, by a community of other African and Arab children and teenagers in similar circumstances, a prentless world that pulled many of them into delinquency, others simply into bitterness and anomie. [S. 238] … ‘There are definitely a lot of problems with discrimination here but people don’t realize that the bigger trouble is that a lot of the people … from the banlieus, don’t have a social network that connects them to French society … And in France, it’s very important to have a network to get into school or to get a job.’ [S. 239] …

Kreuzberg, Berlin. … Compared to their French counterparts, these would seem to be ideal locations: in the centre of the city, closely tied to broader German community and economy, generously provided with social services. But Kreuzberg is not a functioning arrival city by any means. Rather than becoming urban and German, many of its residents seem to become more rural and Turkish, and increasingly removed from the centre of society. … 17 per cent said their marriages were forced – a practice that is dying infast in Turkey but was revived in Germany in response to immigration policies. [S. 244] … The Turks in Berlin are forced into a grotesque caricature of their home country’s life, one build on primitive traditions that no longer exist in much of Turkey, one that is alien to most citizens of Turkey as it is to Germans. … Women have fared better in the squatter outskirts of Istanbul than they have in the Turkish neighbourhoods of Berlin. … Something happens to Turks when they come to Kreuzberg, freezing them in a now non-existent Turkish rural past. This is not intrinsic nature of Turkish society, or the inevitable fate of Turkish villagers arriving in the West. In France, almost all second-generation Turks are fluent in French. In the Netherlands, home ownership and upward social mobility are far more prevalent. In London and Stockholm, Turkish neighbourhoods blend successfully into the city’s mainstream … What is missing from the German arrival city … is citizenship.” [S. 246]

aus: Doug Saunders: Arrival City. How the largest migration in history is reshaping our world. London: Windmill 2010.

Abb.: Michael Cook: Broken Dreams #2, 2010, im Internet.

06/14

“Le concept juste est ici la haine identitaire, la haine de l’origine, et non pas le ‘racisme‘. … Cette haine peut s’appuyer sur toute forme d’origine : biologique, ethnique, familiale, culturelle, linguistique, historique, géographique… … C’est un mode d’être haineux, un recours à la haine pour pouvoir exister.” 16

“… il y a des gens qui soudain manquent d’appui pour exister et qui, au lieu de basculer dans la déprime, se mettent à haïr celui dont ils pensent qu’il a cette appui, qu’il le leur a peut-être pris, ou volé; et dans cette haine, ils trouvent l’appui qui leur manquait pour exister. … Cette haine devient collective par un surcoît d”amour‘: on aime être ensemble à haïr le même objet. … L’abus, ce n’est pas de ‘généraliser’, c’est de haïr l’autre dans son essence, son concept, son origine.” 8

“… Le ‘racisme‘, c’est l’exclusion haineuse. On croit le réfuter en mettant le phobique-haineux en contradiction avec lui-même; il sera secoué qu’il devra regagner la voie de la raison. Or la peur et la haine c’est ce qui lui sert à combler les trous de la raison. …” 20

“… Inutile, d’entasser des raisons contre; il s’agit d’un point de folie de la raison … ‘Mais quelle raison avez-vous de haïr ces gens là? – Aucune. … – Mais d’ameuter contre eux, cela vous donne quoi? – Cela m’excite, et libère mon énergie; cela me fait exister; quoi de mieux? …’”

“En un sens, le ‘racisme’, dans ses formes modernes, est une volonté pathétique de rationaliser l’identité; de la rationner, en vain, bien sûr; la soif et la peur identitaires n’ont jamais leur ratio; ou leur ration. En même temps, le ‘racisme’ refuse la rationalité – quand elle n’est pas la sienne. Un simple raisonnement ferait voler en éclats, comme foncièrement déraisonnables, toutes ses vues. Ainsi le ‘racisme’ est juste assez rationnel pour ne pas l’être: il se cramponne à une raison qui est la sienne et il ignore l’autre raison. Telle est sa passion narcissique. …” 33

“… Et dire d’un ton très chaud : ‘Mais on est frères, enfin !’ n’empêche pas que les frères s’entre-tuent. …” 30

“Pour certains, haïr l’autre – qui n’est pas du groupe, ou qui a une autre odeur – est une chose naturelle, normale.” 30

“… dans toute phobie ou haine de l’autre, il y a besoin de fixer l’autre, de l’encadrer … ” 18 “Quelqu’un qui vous exclut, vous inclut dans un cadre qu’il a défini pour vous à l’avance. Il déclare : vous êtes ceci ou cela ; ou bien : vous ne pouvez pas penser cela sachant que vous êtes dans tel cadre. Il veut vous réduire, vous couper de votre potentiel d’être, de vos racines d’avenir. …” 372

“… Les phobiques se lèvent et hurlent de peur dès que quelqu’un risque de ‘violer’ leur cadre. Car pour eux, le cadre c’est l’être même, et non une pause ou une scansion de l’appel d’être. S’ils fétichisent le cadre, s’ils sont prêts à tuer pour, c’est que le cadre c’est eux. Ils confondent le bien et la peur du ‘mal’. A la limite, cette phobie du potentiel d’être qui pousse à la réduire à ce-qui-est, à une valeur, un principe, un cadre, un bâtiment, un emblème, c’est cela qui fait mal, au prochain et à soi-même. Le mal c’est de se donner une origine fétiche en forme de ‘cadre’ et d’y rester ; ou de faire la même opération pour l’autre, pour les autres, pour les y enfermer.” 372

“… La haine identitaire suppose les diverses origines irréductibles entre elles, et irréductibles à une même origine (humaine, universelle…). …” 18

“Souvent, les ‘racistes’ sont des gens qui ont perdu contact avec leur origine, qui ne savent comment la retrouver; ils trouvent dans leur haine un support d’être qui remplace cette origine; qui leur en donne une autre, à la place, neuve et maniable.” 34

“Une identité est tolérante envers une autre si elle se sent plus forte … le remède serait que l’identité ambiante se sente assez sûre d’elle pour n’avoir pas besoin d’humilier la minorité. Certains naïfs croient calmer la majorité inquiète en faisant l’éloge des autres : ‘Mais enfin, ces gens (de la minorité) sont cultivés, intelligents… – C’est bien pour ça qu’ils sont dangereux, ils nous éclipsent! – Mais ils apprennent votre culture, vos traditions! – Justement! un jour ils vont nous en chasser, de notre culture!'” 30-32

“Enseigner la tolérance aux enfants est un problème. Il n’est pas sûr qu’ainsi on ne les mette pas en danger. … Leur apprendre à accéder à leur richesse les aiderait indirectement à être plus tolérants, c’est-à-dire plus résistants : si leur champ de l’Autre est assez vaste, aucun autre réel ne peut l’épuiser ; et eux seraient moins contraints de le fixer, ce ‘champ de l’Autre’, sur un homme ou sur un groupe – à haïr ou à exalter.” 38

“La ligne de partage … est … entre ceux qui ont besoin de la haine identitaire comme d’un appui pour exister et ceux qui n’ont pas le besoin vital de cet appui pour structurer leur espace d’être. (Ils peuvent en passer par la haine sans y rester.)

Cette ligne de partage est souvent plus qu’une ligne, un abîme : entre ceux qui ont peur de sortir du cadre – qu’ils sont pris pour contours de leur être – et ceux qui peuvent en sortir, y revenir, le transformer ; entre ceux qui ont un besoin vital d’identité cadrée, et sans faille, quitte à la combler grâce aux cadavres des autres, et ceux qui peuvent se permettre – donc permettre aux autres – des failles identitaires dont ils savent qu’elles peuvent changer, se déplacer.” 44

“… C’est déjà bien si ceux qui vous méprisent ne passent pas à l’acte pour prouver dans le réel que leur mépris était fondé. Si ceux qui vous méprisent sont sûrs d’avoir raison, et n’ont pas besoin de justifier leur mépris, de l’inscrire, vous êtes sauvé; ou presque. …” 22

“La forme minimale du ‘racisme’, c’est de définir l’autre; la forme maximale, c’est d’en finir avec. Le deux se touchent et se nourissent de la même amertume.” 294

“Quand à prédire ce que fera un homme ou un groupe d’après ses opinions, c’est risqué. Au-delà de l’opinion, du comportement, il y a le mode d’être. Le mode d’être haineux passe à l’acte dans certaines conditions (notamment en groupe, si le chef ordonne ce passage) ; mais souvent, c’est indécidable.” 15

“Plutôt qu’en finir avec le ‘racisme’, peut-on écarter ses stigmates, faire sauter ses fixations? empêcher son coup d’arrêt? déjouer cette passion, jouer autrement de son matériau ? faire qu’un discours cesse de transmettre la peur qui l’inspire et l’horreur qui le fonde ? Plutôt de s’organiser contre le ‘racisme’, peut-on le désorganiser ? …” 124

“Il faut comprendre sous quel angle cette affaire de ‘racisme’ est sans issue, sans espoir ; oser l’aborder sous cet angle, par ce point de souffrance qui exclut bien des leurres et des attentes. Passé ce point, s’ouvrent des routes ardues, praticables, aux lisières du trop-humain, des troupes humaines…” 125

“On préconise cette ‘solution‘ contre le ‘racisme’ : que chacun – et chaque groupe – tienne à son image … mais q’il supporte celle du voisin et ne vienne pas l’asticoter. Droit à la différence, ça s’appelle … Cette solution est possible tant que l’espace de jeu est limité : ‘cultiver son jardin’ s’il est enclos … Or le problème est que les frontières vacillent; migrations de masse; les clôtures craquent; … les limites s’effacent ; les images se brassent sur le marché ; vive concurrence, haute tension d’imaginaire … Et dans ce faux contact, étincelle d’angoisse, flambée haineuse… … Le ‘racisme’ a une dimension politique ; il met en jeu le lien social. …” 136/137

“Pour certains, l’issue de l’impasse avec l’autre, c’est l’assimilation. … Les champions de l’assimlilation finissent par déchanter ; leur naïveté un peu perverse en prend un coup devant les retours en force de la différence oubliée. Car la différence, elle, n’oublie pas. … il y a toujours un reste qui échappe. … Là est le hic : on croit s’assimiler à un groupe, et l’on se retrouve assimilé à l’un des nœuds dont il est le sac. On s’assimile parfois à l’inconnu de l’autre, à ce qu’il ignore de lui-même ; à ce qu’il refoule ; et la posture bouc émissaire n’est pas très loin …” 138-141

“Certains ont l’illusion – la ‘certitude’ – qu’il faut d’abord, de toute urgence, ‘résoudre’ ces problèmes identitaires, par une identité solide, définie, cadrée, qui tienne la route, où l’on puisse se réfugier à tout moment ; tandis que d’autres font le constat, étonné ou ahuri : qu’il n’est pas besoin pour vivre d’avoir en main ‘son’ identité, qu’en un sens elle n’existe pas comme telle, sinon comme le processus de sa propre quête. … L’identité est non pas un ‘faux problème’, mais un problème ouvert, passionnément insoluble, irriguant d’autres problèmes de la vie ; que c’est une question en mouvement, où le sujet se demande non pas ce qu’est ‘vraiment’ son origine mais ce qu’il peut faire avec ; ce qu’il en fait. … Beaucoup confondent ‘perdre l’identité’ et en avoir une fragmentaire … Se dégager de ce dilemme, c’est surmonter la peur d’être sans identité – en fait, sans identité absolument définie.” 146/147

Le “‘mythe de la pureté’, c’est un fantasme de pureté ; un mythe c’est un fantasme stabilisé, habité par des foules, par des mémoires qui se le transmettent parce qu’il leur sert de point d’appui. … Ce fantasme de pureté exprime l’angoisse devant ce qui de nous-mêmes nous échappe ; angoisse et fatigue devant l’altérité: quand on en a assez de faire face aux altérations qui déferelent.” 303-305

“Dire que l’identité est un processus, c’est la penser comme un capital de départs, à partir de l’origine, d’où une pulsion d’identité opère, permettant de s’identifier à certains gestes et de s’en désintifier.

Du coup, avoir un ‘problème d’identité’, c’est mal supporter les passages à vide par où passe une identité, lorsque tantôt elle s’accroît, tantôt elle se retire sous l’effet de cette pulsion. En ce sens, le ‘raciste’ a un problème d’identité en impasse ; soluble uniquement dans une identité fermée, un retrait narcissique. … L’identité est … un processus mû par le jeu d’une pulsion identitaire (identifiant-désidentifiant) dont le mouvement est possible lorsque au départ le sujet n’est pas cloué, identifié à une situation, mais rattaché à des potentiels qui permettent de changer de lieu, … de ‘local’ psychique … Beaucoup savent ‘faire des choses’ mais n’arrivent à rien faire car ils ne peuvent s’engager dans le processus identitaire ; ils ne peuvent rien faire qui leur fasse traverser une frontière identitaire – celle du lieu, de l’institution, du groupe qui tenait lieu d’origine. …” 331-334

“Le remède-‘miracle’ qui permet ce processus de déplacement, cette capacité de compter, avec l’autre et pour l’Autre, cela s’appelle penser. … Penser, c’est pouvoir faire mouvement symboliquement, mouvement de s’exiler d’une image pour la traduire dans une autre, à travers un passage à vide. C’est faire travailler une sorte de pulsion migrante, traductrice, interprétante, qui passe par des fragments dispersés de soi-même. … Penser, c’est être capable d’accepter certaines irruptions d’étrangeté, comme des éclats d’origine, des fragments d’impensable. Car l’origine est impensable. …” 334/335

“Quand aux séries de ‘clichés’ qui ponctuent un processus identitaire, ce sont des achèvements… provisoires. Au fond, une identité est une suite de dépots identificatoires qui s’articulent dans une histoire, ou pas. Tant que l’histoire n’est pas achevée, vous êtes dans l’histoire ; quand l’identité se ferme, vous êtes hors de votre histoire. Une façon d’être hors de son histoire, c’est d’être … Identifié à un fragment de son origine. …” 336

“Comment, [le raciste], peut-il se libérer de cette peur, de cette enfermement?” 45

aus: Daniel Sibony: Le “racisme” ou la haine identitaire. Paris: Christian Bougois 1997, hier stark umgruppiert…

Abb.: Westboro Baptist Church, Wikimedia, im Internet.

08/14

“… Or cette néo-réalité est pleine de paradoxes. Par exemple, les peuples des États arabes, parfois même leurs dirigeants n’aiment pas le Hamas, ils ne veulent pas le voir déteindre sur leur pays, ni que ses semblables, c’est-à-dire les intégristes de chaque pays, prennent du pouvoir. Donc ils se réjouissent des coups que lui porte Israël. Mais ils ne doivent pas le montrer. Ils se réjouissent qu’Israël fasse le travail ; mais l’opinion « révolutionnaire » en Europe est favorable au Hamas : il a beaucoup de victimes parmi sa population, disons même qu’il fait beaucoup de morts parmi le peuple qui l’a élu. Donc l’opinion révolutionnaire ou progressiste, en Europe, est favorable à un pouvoir que les peuples arabes n’aiment pas, et dont les Gazaouites eux-mêmes commencent à être excédés. Ce paradoxe – d’ une opinion qui ne jure que par le peuple, et qui a une posture antipopulaire – ce retournement en reflète un autre : quand, dans une guerre, une des parties se sent d’autant plus victorieuse qu’elle a plus de morts parmi les siens, on est en pleine perversion.

Certes, on pourrait dire que les pro-Hamas en Europe n’entrent pas dans ses détails, ils voient mourir des femmes et des enfants, et leur cœur flambe d’indignation. On mettrait celle-ci au compte d’un profond humanisme, en s’étonnant de ne l’avoir pas vu s’exprimer à l’occasion d’autres massacres, ceux de Syrie par exemple. On s’étonnerait aussi que soit passé sous silence l’usage des femmes et enfants comme boucliers humains ; c’est un secret de polichinelle qu’on hésite à rappeler. Donc, en s’en prenant à Israël qu’ils traitent d’État assassin, sans un mot sur cette prise d’otages massive, ces grands humanistes adoptent la position du Hamas, une instance pas vraiment humaniste. … Nos progressistes et humanistes qui soutiennent le Hamas se retrouvent donc dans une posture régressive par rapport aux peuples arabes, qui cherchent toujours leur printemps …”

aus: Daniel Sibony: Quatrième lettre après Tel Aviv, 24.7.2014

08/14

“Links [is] pragmatischer … geworden. Het maakbaarheidsfetisjisme, het ‘blauwdrukdenken’ uit bijvoorbeeld de jaren zeventig, heeft terecht plaatsgemaakt voor een bescheidener opvatting van maatschappelijke verandering: de samenleving laat zich bijsturen door politieke beslissingen, maar niet kneden of vormen. …

Links en rechts lijken [wel] tegengestelde ontwikkelingen door te maken. Terwijl links een grotere nadruk legt op ‘verantwoordelijke politiek’, zingt rechts zich los uit ‘de smalle marges’. Het rechte maakbaarheidsgeloof neemt zo nu en dan zelfs de vorm aan van grootheidswaanzin, als plannen worden ontvouwd om de wereldwijde migratiestromen in te dammen door de grenzen te sluiten of de criminaliteit de wereld uit te helpen door zo hard mogelijk te straffen …

Het nieuwe maakbaarheidsgeloof van de conservatieve liberalen richt zich vooral op het corrigeren van levensstijlen, culturele gebruiken en privéwaarden, terwijl de sociaaleconomische ongelijkheid in stand wordt gelaten.

De politieke keuze om de ‘uitingsvrijheden‘ te beperken, lijkt gebaseerd op de gedachte dat ongewenste maatschappelijke ontwikkelingen de optelsom zijn van verkeerde privégedragingen …”

aus: Femke Halsema: Vrijzinnig links. in: De Helling 2004, Heft 2. Hier in: dies.: Zoeken naar vrijheid. Amsterdam: Bert Bakker 2011, S.60-68.

Abb.: Naum Gabo: Constructed Head No.2, 1916 version, Tate, im Internet.

07/14