The Unofficial View of Tirana (50)

Posted on by Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei

Herman: Ivaca, please have a seat… on this giant black dildo


 
The 50th post! Now that numerical perfection should hold the promise of some rhetorical fireworks. Still half-jetlagged and waking up at 11 instead of my customary 8, I have only just returned from the US to find myself a paralyzed witness to the proceedings of Gay Pride Week in Belgrade. My initial ideas about this post revolved around a praise of Albanian vegetable and fruit culture, after having to deal with multiple chemically sterilized apples, Fukushima vegetables on plastic bagels, and coffee made from Ganges water. It’s a miracle that whole country hasn’t already suffocated in its own corn syrup… ANYHOW… It’s Pride Week in Belgrade and as my better half is joining the proceedings of communal exchange, diplomatic banter, NGO lunches, and blasphemous exhibitions, I’m here behind my computer hoping no one gets hurt.
 
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Fascism revisited: The banality of what?

Posted on by Nick Skiadopoulos

 

Some of the readers of this blog may have wondered why I still haven’t written anything on the rise of the “national socialist” party in my country (Greece). Why I haven’t reported their hate-activism and their “miniature” pogroms, along with the extreme tolerance shown to them by the Greek society, the media, the political and the judicial system. Of course I am shocked and stupefied. And I could go on for pages analyzing the situation, both to myself and to the readers of this blog. Like most Greek or foreign posts on the subject, I could talk about the history of extreme conservatism in modern Greece, how it remained well alive under the guise of materialistic values that the former governments and the media invested into the social body. And I would menton the negligence of the left, the provocative stance of the police and an inherent racism that has been sleepwalking around the European continent for decades and has been violently woken up in Greece, not simply with the advent of the financial crisis but mostly through the way it is being dealt with.

 

But every time I try to explain the phenomenon in such terms, either to myself or to friends, I feel at great unease. Everything sounds second-handed: already known, already seen, a replay of memories not lived, a rerun of some of the cheapest moments in the history of my country. My tone becomes ex-post apologetic, in the sense that, in the final analysis, I am providing excuses in the guise of explanations. And worst of all: while every part of my account does indeed hold and is in fact true –on the whole it remains banal, trivial and ineffective.

 

For such explanations always imply given positionings. And it is the positioning, rather than the content of such an account, that is suspicious (potentially at least as much as fascism itself), as it implies a very specific structure of utterance:  a) A Greek addressing readers from some other country who, in one way or another, display feelings of sympathy towards what is happening in some faraway land; b) some of them happen to be fellow European citizens, whose countries might soon face the same danger; c) while a complex multi-national European government can be partly located in Brussels, the rise of fascism is located in one of its nation-members; d) while I can vaguely appeal to “Brussels” for the relaxation of austerity measures that I consider responsible for the phenomenon, I am nonetheless inclined (as a citizen of my country) to assume responsibility for something that takes place in my country, through its political system, within a localized society that has its own peculiar history.

 

In short: as the effects of otherwise multi-national decisions are being localized in nation-states, the limits of political action are also confined into countries and states. A situation that well allows for local protests against local (national) governments –but almost in principle excludes the possibility of protesting as a European against an elite of indirectly elected technocrats. Within a union of nations, the privilege of transcending your nationality is mostly reserved to those who govern. And the only space for a political action that transcends nationality is mainly confined to institutions such as the European Parliament or the ECB. Beyond the worn-out myth of the Lumières, the only thing that unites European citizens is nothing but an economic motive.

 

Within such a peculiar framework where the dream of federalism is essentially backed up by economic incentives and liberalist policies, where political-constitutional unification is presented as an accessory to the financial (see fiscal) unification, the concept of a European political subject (be it a class or not) is excluded. The conservation of national characteristics, under the alibi of cultural pluralism, essentially blocks any possibility of a bottom-up constitution (let alone emergence) of any such political entity. When at the same time a centralized European governance becomes more powerful than ever.

 

Hence, by alarming the reader about the rise of nationalist socialism in a given European state, I cannot but evoke a reaction that lately has become increasingly common: the transformation of political vigilance into a spectacle (to watch Tahir Square and dream of 1789; to witness the rise of fascism in a European country and think about the decline of of the Weimar Republic; or, if Greek, to relive the possibility of a new junta.  It is so ironic to think that fascism, once the aestheticization of politics (Benjamin), has now turned into a spectacle sponsored by liberal –oh, too liberal- democracies.

 

And all this be keeping it local. In the here and now of a society faced with the bully of fascism, with the leaders of the European Union “worrying” about a situation that politically is rather convenient: at the end of the day, memorandums are way preferable to fascism. And from the financial dilemma “drachma or euro” we have now passed to the political question “fascism or democracy.” And finally to “Europe or non-Europe” (as if E.U. is unimaginable on a radically different basis).

 

As much as I am appalled by fascism, I am much worried about phenomena such as the re-election of a pro-memorandum government in Greece, or the liberals’ win in the Netherlands elections. What I consider dangerous (as well as disgusting) is the transformation of European university departments into “think tanks” that expertise in social engineering, continuously promoting updated forms of indirect, “main invisible” steering methods applied to citizens that remain silent and obedient, but essentially intolerant and envious.

 

Quite recently I browsed through a research project run by a European research center. It focused on creating “compliance” tactics in favor of E.U. implementation in different member-states. My conclusion was simply: we are not reliving the decline of the Weimar Republic.

 

We are deep into Cold War.

 

 

 

 

Aesthetics in the 21st Century

Posted on by jamie

Much appreciation and respect to the organisers of the Aesthetics in the 21st Century conference in Basel.  Great to meet up with Graham Harman, Katherine Hayles, Joseph Nechvatal and Steven Shaviro… among many others.  continent. and our great friends at Speculations together presented a dialog on the Aesthetics of (Para)Academic Practice, as introduced here… Thanks to all and everyone and every thing.

The Aesthetics of (Para)Academic Practice
continent. + speculations in Basel

Kujdes, fashistët po trokasin në derë

Posted on by Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei


Për ca kohë, u mësuam me praninë e partive fashiste ose neo-fashiste në Evropë. Për shembull: Partia e Lirisë në Hollandë, Partia Popullore e Austrisë, Lidhja Veriore në Itali, Partia Radikale e Serbisë, ose, kohët e fundit, Agimi i Artë në Greqi, i cili është përgjegjës për sulme mbi emigrantë (përfshirë shqiptarë) dhe homoseksualë, duke përdorur një gjuhë të ndezur e të urrejtshme. Sipas filozofit francez Filip Laku-Labart, fashizmi është mobilizimi i ndjenjave të njëjtësimit të masave. Unë do ta përdor fjalën “fashizëm” në këtë kuptim. Fatkeqsisht, një fashizëm i tillë ka mbërritur edhe në Shqipëri. Emri i tij: Aleanca Kuqezi (AK).
 
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Ideology, identity, moussaka.

Posted on by Nick Skiadopoulos

 

Summer is slowly fading away in exotic Greece and, from a certain point of view, it was about time. Because I’ve seriously grown tired of the usual conversation with the occasional foreign-spender who pops in to get a cheap slice of heaven and quickly head back to her lowsy job. Not that I am xenophobic or nationalist. On the contrary, I have always felt a stranger to my own country: its institutions, its mentality, its sick appropriation of a civilization so complex and a language so versatile that it always requires a small-time dictator to make some sense out of it. Call me a snob, but I fervently resist being defined by any nationality or by any nation state. Call me an oldfashioned pomo, but I believe that everything is language, and as long as I am able to learn more of them, the more I transform myself into something that evades the institutional boundaries of a nation state.

 

Yet here I am writing about Greece, once again. But do not be fooled: I’m writing about it only seemingly. Consider this a small note against a conformist conception of ideology. You know… the whole motto of how ideology evokes us as subjects in the boring immanence of a gangbang of signifiers. And the whole “yeah, fuck it” attitude when we’re usually confronted by it. To be more specific: I am talking about the occasional tourist, addressing me as if I were Greek, as if I silently concede being Greek, or somebody defined a) by his nationality, b) his job, c) his age, d) his social status, “and so on and so on…”

 

 It usually comes down to something like this: “Oh but your country is so different than what we are told in the news…” (as if I were sick and had a friend come up and tell me “oh, you don’t look that bad, at least as Mary described you… but you know Mary, she’s always exaggerating…”) Or: “What do you think brought your country to this state?” Or: “Me and my husband always supported this land and will continue to do so no matter what” (a heroic statement about how cheap a vacation deal they can get).

 

Am I supposed to reply? Am I supposed to say “fuck it, let’s play Greek now”? Need I feel evoked by some sneaky address and its train-conversation signifiers? God, I hate ideology (whatever that means). To my mind, speaking to a Greek taxi driver about “the situation” and trying to explain that “situation” to the foreign tourist is the same exact thing. It puts me on the same gdamn spot. And we’re all supposed to be ok with it.

 

And of course we are. Because in that respect, ideology is purely a matter of economy. We want change, of course. Something must be done, things cannot go on this way. But at the same time, we want to remain as we are, as who and what we are (tourists, Greeks, students, employees, taxi drivers, prime ministers, technocrats, Europeans). We want an event that will affect everything but us. The most characteristic emblem of this carefree conformism is hedging: choose any portfolio you like –be certain: you’ll get your money back. In the history of the social and governmental sciences it has its analogue in the complete domination of (calculated) risk over (impossible to calculate) uncertainty. In sum: the rot of keeping on being who we are.

 

Under a noon exhaustingly eternal, but with the lights still on.

The Unofficial View of Tirana (49)

Posted on by Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei

Aleanca Kuqezi's Facebook group header. Leader Kreshnik Spahiu, "towards the Albanian nation." Note that Ulqini is in Montenegro, Prishtina in Kosova, Janina in Greece, and Shkupi in Macedonia.


 
In previous posts on this blog I have written about the upcoming nationalist movement Aleanca Kuqezi led by Kreshnik Spahiu, their propaganda about a “Historical Albania,” resistance to including ethnicity in the national census (in order to safeguard the myth of ethnic homogeneity of the Albanian nation), and the appeals they make for the “ethnic Albanians” in Çamëria, both in conjunction with the PDIU, and by calling for an Albanian consulate in the Greek district.
 
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Save the Environment: Support the Spanish Coal Miners

Posted on by Gullick

For two months Spain’s coal miners have been on strike; they famously marched on Madrid to take their protest directly to the conservative government; more recently they have been subjected to brutal police repression, fighting back with home-made rockets and dynamite. Their dispute hinges, as do all politics at the moment, on austerity measures. The Spanish government decided to cut the subsidy to the coal mining industry by €450 million, from €703 million to €253 million. To put this in perspective, this sum amounts to 0.45% of the €100 billion bailout for Spanish banks agreed last week. Or more polemically, the European (and global) ruling classes are willing to bail out the hegemonic section of their class, financiers, by 95.55% more than they are willing to bail out the 8000 miner’s directly involved in the coal industry, and the (at least) 45000 who are indirectly dependent. The equation is quite literal: the few bankers of Spain are worth astronomically more than the near 60000 people in the coal mining industry. Two more points of demographics:

 

1) Spain was famously one of the countries to suffer a speculative housing bubble collapse. Who leant for the construction of properties, and at the other end of the “transaction”, who leant to the purchasers (often buy-to-let purchasers)? Banks, not just Spanish of course, but this is why we talk about classes, not nations.

 

2) The fate of 60000 workers during a depression resonates much more loudly than it does in times of boom. 60000 workers loosing their jobs in a country in which 50-60% of youth are unemployed (and most of the rest are underemployed by many accounts), and in which the official unemployment rate is about 25%: all this is a major event, without even considering the humanitarian consequences to particular miners and towns (as in many traditional mining areas, the pits support small towns which have no other independent industries).

 

This is, of course, mere “creative destruction” to Spain, and Europe’s elite; creative of profits, destructive of, well, who gives a f..? Quantitative easing for the 1% has its reverse correlation in the qualitative uneasing of everyone else.

 

Two political arguments come up: firstly, why subsidise anything? Second, why support a fossil fuel industry given the environmental stakes? The first of these question should hopefully not need answering; it is the Hayak-Pinochet-Thatcher-Reagan question.

 

The second question is interesting, a node of “contradiction” within left-wing causes, or, why should the class dispute of these miners take precedence over ending reliance upon a dirty fuel? The main answer is: it doesn’t, but we need to weigh up how the environmental causes can be reached. Firstly, ending coal mining in Spain will not end its neoliberalised energy industry’s reliance upon coal power stations; as with Britain, which lost its mining industry in the 1980s, coal will simply be imported. There used to be a saying in the UK, like the American one “selling ice to an Eskimo”: “sending coals to Newcastle” – Newcastle, along with Durham and North Yorkshire, understood as sitting on the largest coal fields in the world, and having myriad coal mines. Well, indeed, today coal ships (mostly from Latin America and China) dock in Newcastle, supplying the region’s power stations with imported coal. So the first point is that closing Spanish pits will in no way make Spain “greener”, but it will make up to 60000 people unemployed; it will increase dependence upon imported fuel, mined with less environmental regulation, and shipped thousands of miles.

 

Directly linked to this is again, the class issue. Have neoliberal regimes, i.e. a capitalist elite, genuinely “greened” any economies? No, and they are very unlikely to do so given their aversion to spending upon national infrastructure. Moreover, they are very likely to try and privatise energy industries (along with everything else), and as California discovered with Enron, to say the least, very little is reinvested in energy infrastructure! (So-called “natural monopolies”, i.e. realms in which “real” competition is basically impossible – you should only really have one electricity cable going into your house – when privatised functionally disincentivise re-investment of profits in infrastructure).

 

The other side of the class issue is the “universal nature” of the proletariat; that is, the miner’s fight is the fight of all who oppose austerity, and who will be ravaged by austerity. Our rulers are visiting destruction, poverty, immiseration and injustice on our homes, children, communities, workplaces, friends. Nobody will come out of the fallout from the 2008 financial crisis unscathed. This includes the bourgeoisie, given that they are immiserating their workforces, and that, however gated their communities become, they still have to share this rock with those immiserated subjects.

 

In the fight-back against austerity every battle is crucial, and every battle is part of a broad front. If you’re facing a school closure, an arts funding cut, unemployment, underemployment, privitisation, outsourcing, or whatever, the Spanish miner’s fight is your fight; they are fighting against the same logic as you, the same regime – this is the flip-side to the meaning of globalisation. On the left we call it internationalism. Fights join in “chains of equivalence” as Laclau calls them. Self-immolation in Tunisia sparks the Arab Spring; Tahrir Square sparks #Occupy, the Indignadas, et al. Dictators have fallen; the EU is still worrying that Syriza will be elected when the current Greek government inevitably falls (again); the British government have done a volte face on every major bill they have tried to pass, and those that have passed have been completely re-written through confrontation. In all of this, the miner’s struggle in Spain is becoming a lighting rod, a test case throughout Europe (and really the world) over whether a population can resist the onslaught of a rabid, crisis-strewn neoliberalism.

 

Environmentalism can, by no means, escape this greater chain of equivalences; environmental destruction is obviously chained to capitalist growth. The fights over coal-tar sands, fracking, new coal power plants, the transport industries etc, all suggest that, contra Al Gore, the two cannot by unchained. But a political force which thinks in terms of production for use, not profit; in terms of progeny rather than short-term financial or electoral gain; a political force which knows not (and does not have the means) to try and buy its way out of crisis – this is a force which can, and does, take environmentalism seriously, and this the force in which the Spanish miners are currently leading. They need your support, solidarity, your money, to sustain them in this struggle, because their victory over State austerity will be our victory generally; it will let us know what can be done, just as the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Icelanders, the #Occupiers, and so many others, have been letting us know that another world is not possible, but necessary.

The glow of California sunlight, decades later

Posted on by Tim Gilman-Sevcik

Richard Diebenkorn Ocean Park #79, 1975 Oil on canvas 93 x 81 in. (236.2 x 205.7 cm) Philadelphia Museum of Art, Purchased with a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and with funds contributed by private donors, 1977 ©The Estate of Richard Diebenkorn Image courtesy The Estate of Richard Diebenkorn

 

A retrospective show of the renowned Ocean Park Series by the California Abstract Expressionist painter Richard Diebenkorn is running until September 23, 2012 at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.

 

The grand and old-fashioned Corcoran Gallery in Washington D.C. is currently hosting the traveling retrospective of the celebrated American painter Richard Diebenkorn, (1922-93). He came to prominence in the 1960s and enjoyed major recognition during his lifetime, but this marks the first major museum exhibition of his best known series, which dominated his practice for the last 20 years of his life. Lit by the diffused skylights throughout the gallery, the abstract paintings that make up the Ocean Park body of work reduce the Southern California landscapes of the neighborhood where he lived and worked to scrubby blocks of pale, drained color that show an instant aging that catch worn out, fatigued surfaces and long bleaching in the sun. His move to the scenic area coincided with a break in his established representational painting style, and a shift into simple abstract geometry with edges that are clear, but settled, firm but not hard. Each work seems to have demanded a prolonged, laborious effort, not light but yet untethered, a puzzle at rest that was put together long before and then left in place, an old urban geography, a very much human space with heavy inflections of natural light and color.

 

There are variations in volume, in how loudly the colors vibrate, and the louder tones move your eye more, pushing it through the lines of the composition. There are roads and paths and edges, blocks in the sense of actual streets defining neighborhoods and fields in the abstract sense. There are large shifts in scale without details to solidify them, and the perspective is both vertical and horizontal intermingled in tension. This is a very modernist observation that seems to be demanded by the work, not to look at it from a contemporary perspective, but to see it as the subject matter on the painter’s mind at the time. He seems to desire and possibly deserve timelessness, or perhaps that is just a reflection of the age of the paintings now. The haze of 30-40 years is neither too old to be historically contextualized, nor too young to be contemporary. If he tried to knock them out of time with his bleached tones and aged surfaces then they have not yet landed in the restrictions of an era or context. They are highly linked to their contemporaries, they look so much like California and American postwar abstraction you can picture Willem deKooning, Barnett Newman, Clyfford Still, and Mark Rothko and the other big names of the day standing in front of and accepting these pictures. You can see the historic predecessors, Matisse in particular, lying in the foundations of the work, so much so that the effort to be modernist, to take part in a clear lineage, is almost a self-awareness, not a critique, but a demand. That unhesitant assembling of tradition reveals the era, the comforting possibility of having a sense of one’s place in history may be responsible for the general satisfaction that radiates from the work. They do not agitate, they are comfortable in their own skins without being either audacious or uncertain. Such a feeling of groundedness is hard to imagine feeling today. His consistent work ethic and focus make the series feel like the pages of a diary, flipping from page to page as the days pass with both variation and repetition. Certainly only someone bound by stability could maintain a series, as he says, steadily “cooking” for so long.

 

Each work displays so much evidence of its own making: the clear tape lines, the contradictory pencil marks sketching and delineating shapes that remained or were reworked, the bleeding turpentine along the edge of the thinly painted color fields. He never obscures the work of painting, essentially creating no illusions except for the mellow light that emanates from bright patches of some of the paintings, at times held in place by the denser, darker tones. The paintings’ power lies in the soft effect of an atmosphere of the presence of light that he must have felt, soaked up while taking long walks through the area, before returning to his work room. It is not distant from a feeling of nostalgia, but it more one of specificity, of quiet enthusiasm, of capture.

 

The works on paper and even the tiny cigar box paintings he made as gifts for friends prove that his effort and attention, though successful on the grand but human scale of his big paintings, lose little power when forced onto decreasingly small formats. The notebook and postcard-sized lids that line one of the final rooms of works in the show hold the same energetic density, the same confidence of order. The smaller they get, as if they are moving away from you, disappearing into the distance, the more they draw you along with them, leaving you in pursuit of their space in the past.

 

Tim Gilman-Ševčík

The summer of the signifieds.

Posted on by Nick Skiadopoulos

 

There is a certain beauty in disintegration. I know I am exaggerating, but had you lived here you’d have probably looked for it too. This beauty has nothing to do with economics, politics, society, not even with everyday reality –exactly because reality is by necessity an everyday thing. I might be broke, but I’ve read my books and from the ivory tower of my parents’ house, 35 years of age, I still afford the luxury to contemplate and marvel at the ethereal essence of our hardest cores.

 

Ok, off with the lyricism. What I am witnessing, in ironic awe, is nothing more than the disintegration of my society, the violent unhooking of signifieds from their signifiers, with a little (or more) help from the visible hand of a deus absconditus –the evil God of tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes and, oh, financial disasters. I hate to sound like a moralist, but contemplating on people’s lives (including mine) is not necessarily a practice in moral philosophy. Those lives, from the ones about to be re-invented to the ones thrown off of windows, are violently, abruptly and fiercely been ripped off from even more essential belongings than those of their private economies. For, along with the houses, the cars, the businesses and the weddings, people have been also being deprived of their own meaning. Greeks run around like headless chicken, their bodies fleeing in panic while their heads lie there screaming repeatedly like a broken record.

 

In contrast to the silent promises of bank loans, disjoint heads scream promises exotic, sometimes recalling a glorious nationalistic past, sometimes evoking the vision of a just society be it left, right or middle, exempt from any accused share (an even newer Atlantis, haven’t we grown tired already?) and sometimes announcing the coming of a disaster that is both unprecedented and foretold. They scream while their bodies jump from balconies, bleed from sneaky stabs on the back, drive furiously in abandoned roads or line up in tax offices that would ridicule any kafkian nightmare. And they sweat, oh how they sweat under that ruthless July sun, mixed with smog, tobacco and fried olive oil.

 

Why are they doing all this? They don’t know. For whom? They look at their children, their wives, their husbands, all the mother-in-laws and all the grandpas and the uncles and they don’t recognize them. What have they become? A question that cannot be answered if a certain historical, personal -and in both cases ruthless- distance is not yet assured. All that can be collected as evidence are the traces of what they had, objects that will be either confiscated or not replaced for a long time (cars, houses, vacations, tv sets, x-boxes, sport watches, shoes (lots of them) but also degrees, studios, hair-salons, fast-foods, movie theatres and wedding vows).

 

The issue here is not consumerism, the old and tired critique of a society of factice affluence. The issue here is individualism, the thought that our societal facade was founded somewhere “out there”, that we had nothing to do but feed it with aspirations, loans and other paraphernalia and that in return (a very important economic term), it would protect us from anything that could threaten it, not by virtue of a perennial natural state of suspicion , but through the peaceful guarantees of market cohabitation, the “good for you” carelessness of Montesquieu’s doux commerce. But now that the water is gone, we found out that there is no soil either. We are desperately looking for it, only in order to find out that there never was any, our anger for this lacuna being essentially self-destructive, because we will never forgive ourselves for having invented us.

 

However, I cannot reserve a nietzschean laughter for this spectacle. Even I, trying to steal away my anxiety through this probably nihilistic contemplation, I find myself disjoint and torn. However necessary, the realization of this lacuna is never of the order of beauty. It is a terrifying everyday experience of a sublime that can be tamed only though the Christian practice of turning your gaze away from temptation. Leaving your head behind screaming, while you walk with the sometimes tragic, sometimes comic (for Nietzsche there is a common, manic and irrational root) assurance that you have one –but with no insurance whatsoever.

 

Hoping that someday you’ll get out of here, again.