text:
"It may well be the region of the spirit or, rather, the path paved by thinking, this small track of non-time which the activity of thought beats within the time-space of mortal men and into which the trains of thought, of remembrance and anticipation, save whatever they touch from the ruin of historical and biographical time. This small non-time-space in the very heart of time, unlike the world and the culture into which we are born, can only be indicated, but cannot be inherited and handed down from the past; each new generation, indeed every new human being as he inserts himself between an infinite past and an infinite future, must discover and ploddingly pave it anew."
—Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future
In the preface to Between Past and Future, Hannah Arendt foregrounds the Nazi/German occupation of France. She does so in order to emphasize how intellectuals who had previously pursued only their own, private careers suddenly became involved in the greater cause of the Resistance. This period, she suggests, was one of an abrupt convergence between "deed and word." Confronted with the horror of Hitler's state of emergency, the usual careerist "masks" of "insincerity" were cast off. Then, the introduction of a real state of emergency—that of the Resistance —produced a "public space [within which] freedom could appear."
After the Liberation and the return to "normal" life, deed and word bifurcated again. As quickly as the new public intellectuals had turned away from academic detachment during the occupation, most returned to it after the war. The overall lack of a common enemy, or at least one as unifying as Nazism had been, meant the dissolution of the new public culture. The end of the war heralded the return of "innumerable cliques" and "paper wars" and the loss of the public culture that that tragedy had inspired.
Arendt articulates a temporal dimension of this shift from private to public and back to private life. There is a time, Arendt writes, that is between past and future. I call this non-time. Here is how Arendt describes this non-time: It is
an in-between period which sometimes inserts itself into historical time, when not only the later historians but the actors and witnesses...become aware of an interval in time which is altogether determined by things that are no longer and by things which are not yet.
The ascendant public awareness of the gap between the "no longer" and the "not yet" is important since it enhances the collective capacity for remembrance and anticipation. Rather than freezing "the" present in a temporal vice-grip between "the" past and "the" future, non-time plasticizes past and future, loosening its hold. Existing in such a non-time enlivens public freedom, enabling the collective ability to resist transcendentally imposed temporal imperatives. In her time, of course, this meant above all else, resisting the trans-European spread of Nazism.
For a brief period during the war and the resistance, she writes, thought had fused with action and historical and biographical time gave way to the free, indeterminate time that Arendt inflects politically as "public freedom." Her assertion is that non-time, unlike the historical time of past, present and future, is a more radically open yet situated temporality "at the very heart of time"—and at the core of public freedom as well.
Arendt, however, did not limit her analysis to the early-20th century politics of Europe. Indeed, she selected numerous instances of the transformative, freedom-enhancing capacities of non-time, including the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, as well as, in the aesthetic domain, the modernist literature of Franz Kafka. In doing so, Arendt suggested the dynamism and applicability of her concept to a wide variety of situations - including, potentially, our own.
In this way, the act of thinking slips humanity out of historical and biographical time and into a non-time that reconstitutes the world. In the midst of resisting harkenings back to "the" past or any harkenings forward to "the" future, non-time, for Arendt, emerges as a plasticity subject to intervention.
The point, for Arendt, was to bring forth "the treasure" of non-time, within new temporal conditions that situate subjects anew, such that these new subjects might in turn, resituate the new temporal conditions. As she writes: "each new generation, indeed every new human being as he inserts himself between an infinite past and an infinite future, must discover and ploddingly pave it [the 'treasure'] anew".
How might today's public, some fifty years after Between Past and Future, begin the fight for the public freedom Arendt sought? How might non-time assist in such a task?
Consider the mass media ascription of a non-transformative teleology to the Occupy movement. One refrain of critics of the Occupy movement was that it was not "really" seeking revolution at all. In its most common form, the critique asserted that occupiers were nothing more than recent college graduates confronted with mounting student loan debt and murky career horizons. What they really sought, therefore, was careers. But from the perspective of non-time, was this judgment necessarily "correct", or was it instead a bit of both?
The frequency with which the same mass media outlets publish pieces concerned with economic justice today is far less today than at the height of the movement's influence. In late 2011 and early 2012 however, journalists wrote and editors published as though they too had abruptly become aware of the gap "determined by things that are no longer and by things which are not yet." From the perspective of non-time, the plasticity of public freedom gave way to the historical and biographical time that renders it inert. It was this that allowed the ascription of a non-transformative teleology to hold sway after the decline of the new public culture.
Of course, overstating the revolutionary nature of the occupy movement would also be foolish. Zeitgeists such as those that brought forth the French Resistance, the American Revolution, the French Revolution and the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 (not to mention, of course, literary modernism), are destined to decline by definition. The occupy movement proved no exception. That said, Arendt did provide some hints regarding how the treasure of non-time might be indicated amidst new, post-zeitgeist conditions, such as our own.
In her view, if humans are to move beyond the predetermined presentism of conditions set by the past, as well as the ascribed teleologism of past conditions in the future, the task is that of producing a critical, engaged public culture not as a periodic impulse, but as a permanent habit.
Doing so requires more than just heeding the often mis-read call to change the world "rather than" interpret it (as an excuse for acting without thinking). Instead, Arendt asserted, we must change the world, and at the same time, change the manner in which we interpret it. In other words, the transcendental hallucinations of time must be transformed by the immanent materiality of non-time. Why? Because, in contrast with those who speak, predictably, of "the" past or "the" future, for Arendt, the present is always an unknown moment of struggle between the past and the future.
- Jason Adams
Amor Mundi 2/16/14
Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.
Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.
According to Rich Lowry and Ramesh Ponnuru, "The survival of American exceptionalism as we have known it is at the heart of the debate over Obama's program. It is why that debate is so charged." Mitt Romney repeated this same line during his failed bid to unseat the President, arguing that President Obama "doesn't have the same feelings about American exceptionalism that we do." American exceptionalism—long a sociological concept used to describe qualities that distinguished American cultural and political institutions—has become a political truncheon. Now comes Peter Beinart writing in the National Journal that the conservatives are half correct. It is true that American exceptionalism is threatened and in decline. But the cause is not President Obama. Beinart argues that the real cause of the decline of exceptionalist feeling in the United States is conservatism itself. Here is Beinart on one way the current younger generation is an exception to the tradition of American exceptionalism: "For centuries, observers have seen America as an exception to the European assumption that modernity brings secularism. "There is no country in the world where the Christian religion retains a greater influence over the souls of men than in America," de Tocqueville wrote. In his 1996 book, American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword, Seymour Martin Lipset quoted Karl Marx as calling America "preeminently the country of religiosity," and then argued that Marx was still correct. America, wrote Lipset, remained "the most religious country in Christendom." But in important ways, the exceptional American religiosity that Gingrich wants to defend is an artifact of the past. The share of Americans who refuse any religious affiliation has risen from one in 20 in 1972 to one in five today. Among Americans under 30, it's one in three. According to the Pew Research Center, millennials—Americans born after 1980—are more than 30 percentage points less likely than seniors to say that "religious faith and values are very important to America's success." And young Americans don't merely attend church far less frequently than their elders. They also attend far less than young people did in the past. "Americans," Pew notes, "do not generally become more [religiously] affiliated as they move through the life cycle"—which means it's unlikely that America's decline in religious affiliation will reverse itself simply as millennials age. In 1970, according to the World Religion Database, Europeans were over 16 percentage points more likely than Americans to eschew any religious identification. By 2010, the gap was less than half of 1 percentage point. According to Pew, while Americans are today more likely to affirm a religious affiliation than people in Germany or France, they are actually less likely to do so than Italians and Danes." Read more on Beinart and American exceptionalism in the Weekend Read.
In this interview, Kevin Kelly, one of the founders of Wired magazine, explains his concept of the "technium," or the whole system of technology that has developed over time and which, he argues, has its own biases and tendencies "inherently outside of what humans like us want." One thing technology wants is to watch us and to track us. Kelly writes: "How can we have a world in which we are all watching each other, and everybody feels happy? I don't see any counter force to the forces of surveillance and self-tracking, so I'm trying to listen to what the technology wants, and the technology is suggesting that it wants to be watched. What the Internet does is track, just like what the Internet does is to copy, and you can't stop copying. You have to go with the copies flowing, and I think the same thing about this technology. It's suggesting that it wants to monitor, it wants to track, and that you really can't stop the tracking. So maybe what we have to do is work with this tracking—try to bring symmetry or have areas where there's no tracking in a temporary basis. I don't know, but this is the question I'm asking myself: how are we going to live in a world of ubiquitous tracking?" Asking such questions is where humans fit into the technium world. "In a certain sense," he says, "what becomes really valuable in a world running under Google's reign are great questions, and that's something that for a long time humans will be better at than machines. Machines are for answers; humans are for questions."
Literature Against Consumer Culture
Taking issue with a commentator's claim that The Paris Review's use of the word "crepuscular" (adj., resembling twilight) was elitist, Eleanor Catton suggests that the anti-critical attitude of contemporary readers arises out of consumer culture: "The reader who is outraged by being "forced" to look up an unfamiliar word — characterising the writer as a tyrant, a torturer — is a consumer outraged by inconvenience and false advertising. Advertising relies on the fiction that the personal happiness of the consumer is valued above all other things; we are reassured in every way imaginable that we, the customers, are always right." Literature, she says, resists this attitude, and, in fact cannot be elitist at all: "A book cannot be selective of its readership; nor can it insist upon the conditions under which it is read or received. The degree to which a book is successful depends only on the degree to which it is loved. All a starred review amounts to is an expression of brand loyalty, an assertion of personal preference for one brand of literature above another. It is as hopelessly beside the point as giving four stars to your mother, three stars to your childhood, or two stars to your cat."
Vladislav Inozemtsev reviews Laurence Cockcroft's book Global Corruption. "The book's central argument is that corruption has political roots, which Cockcroft identifies as the "merging of elites." Surveying the mechanisms of top-level decision-making from Russia to Brazil, to Peru and India, as well as in many other countries, he discerns a pattern: Politicians today often act as entrepreneurs, surround themselves with sycophants and deputies, and so navigate the entire political process as they would any commercial business. The hallmarks of a corrupt society are the widespread leveraging of wealth to secure public office; the leveraging of such authority to secure various kinds of privileges; and the interplay of both to make even bigger money. Simply put, corruption is a transformation of public service into a specific kind of entrepreneurship."
George Packer takes a look at Amazon's role in the book business noting that its founder, Jeff Bezos, knew from the start that book sales were only the lure; Amazon's real business was Big Data, a big deal in an industry that speaks to people's hearts and minds as well as their wallets. Still, "Amazon remains intimately tangled up in books. Few notice if Amazon prices an electronics store out of business (except its staff); but, in the influential, self-conscious world of people who care about reading, Amazon's unparalleled power generates endless discussion, along with paranoia, resentment, confusion, and yearning. For its part, Amazon continues to expend considerable effort both to dominate this small, fragile market and to win the hearts and minds of readers. To many book professionals, Amazon is a ruthless predator. The company claims to want a more literate world—and it came along when the book world was in distress, offering a vital new source of sales. But then it started asking a lot of personal questions, and it created dependency and harshly exploited its leverage; eventually, the book world realized that Amazon had its house keys and its bank-account number, and wondered if that had been the intention all along."
Ta-Nehisi Coates, in the wake of NFL prospect Michael Sam's announcement that he is gay, considers how the concept of readiness is backwards: "The question which we so often have been offered—is the NFL ready for a gay player?—is backwards. Powerful interests are rarely "ready" for change, so much as they are assaulted by it. We refer to barriers being "broken" for a reason. The reason is not because great powers generally like to unbar the gates and hold a picnic in the honor of the previously excluded. The NFL has no moral right to be "ready" for a gay player, which is to say it has no right to discriminate against gay men at its leisure which anyone is bound to respect."
This week, the magazine Jacobin released Class Action, a handbook for activist teachers, set against school reform and financed using the Kickstarter crowdfunding platform. One of the many essays contained within is Dean Baker's "Unremedial Education," which contains one of the handbook's major theses, an important reminder for those who are interested in education as a route to both the life of the mind and the success of the person: "Education is tremendously valuable for reasons unrelated to work and income. Literacy, basic numeracy skills, and critical thinking are an essential part of a fulfilling life. Insofar as we have children going through school without developing these skills, it is an enormous failing of society. Any just society would place a top priority on ensuring that all children learn such basic skills before leaving school. However, it clearly is not the case that plausible increases in education quality and attainment will have a substantial impact on inequality."
From the Hannah Arendt Center Blog
This week on the blog, Roger Berkowitz asks "Why Think?". And in the Weekend Read, Berkowitz reflects on the loss of American exceptionalism.
Nelson Mandela & Hannah Arendt on Violence
"Having said this, I must deal immediately and at some length with the question of violence."
—Nelson Mandela
"Sometimes 'violence is the only way of ensuring a hearing for moderation.'"
—Hannah Arendt citing Conor Cruise O'Brien, On Violence
Nelson Mandela gave one of the great speeches of 20th century at his trial before the South African Supreme Court in Pretoria in 1964. Mandela's speech is best remembered for the ringing conclusion in which he articulates the ideals of free and democratic life as that "ideal for which I am prepared to die." Six months after Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his "I have a dream speech" from the Mall in Washington, DC, Mandela ended his own speech before being sentenced to life imprisonment with these words:
During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.
Mandela died yesterday and he will be rightly remembered for both his vision and his courage.
I want to focus on another aspect of his legacy, however, the question of violence. Often forgotten by those who quote only the final paragraph of Mandela's speech, much of his speech is an exploration of the need for and proper revolutionary use of violence. Indeed, after a brief introduction in which Mandela reminds the Court that he holds a bachelor's degree, that he is a lawyer, and that he was raised to revere his tribal forebears who fought in defense of their fatherland, he comes to the question of violence. "Having said this," he says, "I must deal immediately and at some length with the question of violence."
What follows is one of the most thoughtful and subtle reflections on the strategic and moral complications of violence we have. It is worth citing at length, and even this summary barely does Mandela justice. But here is Mandela's argument for a limited campaign of violence in response to the violence of the South African state:
I do not, however, deny that I planned sabotage. I did not plan it in a spirit of recklessness, nor because I have any love of violence. I planned it as a result of a calm and sober assessment of the political situation that had arisen after many years of tyranny, exploitation, and oppression of my people by the whites.
I admit immediately that I was one of the persons who helped to form Umkhonto we Sizwe, and that I played a prominent role in its affairs until I was arrested in August 1962….
In order to explain these matters properly, I will have to explain what Umkhonto set out to achieve; what methods it prescribed for the achievement of these objects, and why these methods were chosen. I will also have to explain how I became involved in the activities of these organisations.
I deny that Umkhonto was responsible for a number of acts which clearly fell outside the policy of the organisation, and which have been charged in the indictment against us. I do not know what justification there was for these acts, but to demonstrate that they could not have been authorised by Umkhonto, I want to refer briefly to the roots and policy of the organisation.
I have already mentioned that I was one of the persons who helped to form Umkhonto. I, and the others who started the organisation, did so for two reasons. Firstly, we believed that as a result of Government policy, violence by the African people had become inevitable, and that unless responsible leadership was given to canalise and control the feelings of our people, there would be outbreaks of terrorism which would produce an intensity of bitterness and hostility between the various races of this country which is not produced even by war. Secondly, we felt that without violence there would be no way open to the African people to succeed in their struggle against the principle of white supremacy. All lawful modes of expressing opposition to this principle had been closed by legislation, and we were placed in a position in which we had either to accept a permanent state of inferiority, or to defy the government. We chose to defy the law. We first broke the law in a way which avoided any recourse to violence; when this form was legislated against, and then the government resorted to a show of force to crush opposition to its policies, only then did we decide to answer violence with violence.
But the violence which we chose to adopt was not terrorism…..
I must return to June 1961. What were we, the leaders of our people, to do? Were we to give in to the show of force and the implied threat against future action, or were we to fight it and, if so, how?
We had no doubt that we had to continue the fight. Anything else would have been abject surrender. Our problem was not whether to fight, but was how to continue the fight. We of the ANC had always stood for a non-racial democracy, and we shrank from any action which might drive the races further apart than they already were. But the hard facts were that fifty years of non-violence had brought the African people nothing but more and more repressive legislation, and fewer and fewer rights. It may not be easy for this court to understand, but it is a fact that for a long time the people had been talking of violence - of the day when they would fight the white man and win back their country - and we, the leaders of the ANC, had nevertheless always prevailed upon them to avoid violence and to pursue peaceful methods. When some of us discussed this in May and June of 1961, it could not be denied that our policy to achieve a non-racial state by non-violence had achieved nothing, and that our followers were beginning to lose confidence in this policy and were developing disturbing ideas of terrorism.
It must not be forgotten that by this time violence had, in fact, become a feature of the South African political scene. There had been violence in 1957 when the women of Zeerust were ordered to carry passes; there was violence in 1958 with the enforcement of cattle culling in Sekhukhuniland; there was violence in 1959 when the people of Cato Manor protested against pass raids; there was violence in 1960 when the government attempted to impose Bantu authorities in Pondoland. Thirty-nine Africans died in these disturbances. In 1961 there had been riots in Warmbaths, and all this time the Transkei had been a seething mass of unrest. Each disturbance pointed clearly to the inevitable growth among Africans of the belief that violence was the only way out - it showed that a government which uses force to maintain its rule teaches the oppressed to use force to oppose it. Already small groups had arisen in the urban areas and were spontaneously making plans for violent forms of political struggle. There now arose a danger that these groups would adopt terrorism against Africans, as well as whites, if not properly directed. Particularly disturbing was the type of violence engendered in places such as Zeerust, Sekhukhuniland, and Pondoland amongst Africans. It was increasingly taking the form, not of struggle against the government - though this is what prompted it - but of civil strife amongst themselves, conducted in such a way that it could not hope to achieve anything other than a loss of life and bitterness.
At the beginning of June 1961, after a long and anxious assessment of the South African situation, I, and some colleagues, came to the conclusion that as violence in this country was inevitable, it would be unrealistic and wrong for African leaders to continue preaching peace and non-violence at a time when the government met our peaceful demands with force.
This conclusion was not easily arrived at. It was only when all else had failed, when all channels of peaceful protest had been barred to us, that the decision was made to embark on violent forms of political struggle, and to form Umkhonto we Sizwe. We did so not because we desired such a course, but solely because the government had left us with no other choice. In the Manifesto of Umkhonto published on 16 December 1961, which is exhibit AD, we said:
"The time comes in the life of any nation when there remain only two choices - submit or fight. That time has now come to South Africa. We shall not submit and we have no choice but to hit back by all means in our power in defence of our people, our future, and our freedom."
This was our feeling in June of 1961 when we decided to press for a change in the policy of the National Liberation Movement. I can only say that I felt morally obliged to do what I did….
Four forms of violence were possible. There is sabotage, there is, there is terrorism, and there is open revolution. We chose to adopt the first method and to exhaust it before taking any other decision.
In the light of our political background the choice was a logical one. Sabotage did not involve loss of life, and it offered the best hope for future race relations. Bitterness would be kept to a minimum and, if the policy bore fruit, democratic government could become a reality. This is what we felt at the time, and this is what we said in our manifesto (exhibit AD):
"We of Umkhonto we Sizwe have always sought to achieve liberation without bloodshed and civil clash. We hope, even at this late hour, that our first actions will awaken everyone to a realisation of the disastrous situation to which the nationalist policy is leading. We hope that we will bring the government and its supporters to their senses before it is too late, so that both the government and its policies can be changed before matters reach the desperate state of civil war."
The initial plan was based on a careful analysis of the political and economic situation of our country. We believed that South Africa depended to a large extent on foreign capital and foreign trade. We felt that planned destruction of power plants, and interference with rail and telephone communications, would tend to scare away capital from the country, make it more difficult for goods from the industrial areas to reach the seaports on schedule, and would in the long run be a heavy drain on the economic life of the country, thus compelling the voters of the country to reconsider their position.
Attacks on the economic life-lines of the country were to be linked with sabotage on government buildings and other symbols of apartheid. These attacks would serve as a source of inspiration to our people. In addition, they would provide an outlet for those people who were urging the adoption of violent methods and would enable us to give concrete proof to our followers that we had adopted a stronger line and were fighting back against government violence.
In addition, if mass action were successfully organised, and mass reprisals taken, we felt that sympathy for our cause would be roused in other countries, and that greater pressure would be brought to bear on the South African government.
This then was the plan. Umkhonto was to perform sabotage, and strict instructions were given to its members right from the start, that on no account were they to injure or kill people in planning or carrying out operations.
It is strange today to hear politicians of all stripes praising Mandela for his statesmanship when they, for years, condemned his embrace of violence and arrested those in the U.S. who—following Mandela's own tactics—chained themselves to fences to oppose the U.S. government's support of the apartheid regime in South Africa. It is true that Mandela lived numerous lives. As a young man, he was part of a royal tribal household. As a young adult, he was a lawyer. Later he was a non-violent leader. Still later, he turned to limited and rationalized use of violence. For 27 years he paid for his crimes in prison and then emerged a statesman, one committed to reconciliation, freedom, and multicultural democracy. Finally, when he stepped down from the Presidency after one term he helped assure South Africa's democratic future and became an elder statesman in the truest sense of the word.
To understand the complexities of Mandela's limited turn to sabotage (as opposed to terrorism in his words), it is helpful to consider Hannah Arendt's essay On Violence, originally published in the New York Review of Books in 1969. Violence, writes Arendt, is at root instrumental. It is a means to an end. And sometimes, violence can yield positive and even moderate results, Arendt claims, citing Conor Cruise O'Brien: "Sometimes 'violence is the only way of ensuring a hearing for moderation.'"
As did Mandela, Arendt well understood that violence can be a useful and important means in struggles for justice. She points to numerous of examples where violence has worked to promote justice: "France would not have received the most radical bill since Napoleon to change its antiquated education system if the French students had not rioted; if it had not been for the riots of the spring term, no one at Columbia University would have dreamed of accepting reforms; and it is probably quite true that in West Germany the existence of 'dissenting minorities is not even noticed unless they engage in provocation.'" Violence can, and often does, make injustice visible to a citizenry that is blind to it. Because violence can "serve to dramatize grievances and bring them to public attention," violence can serve the cause of reform and also of justice.
We must take Arendt and Mandela's point seriously. Violence is a means to an end. Violence can work. "No doubt, 'violence pays.'" Violence can yield results.
But Arendt is not an advocate for violence. Violence can pay, she writes, but "the trouble is that it pays indiscriminately." And this is where the use of violence becomes dangerous.
The danger in using violence as a means is that when "applied to human affairs," violence as a means has a tendency to overwhelm whatever good ends towards which it aims. Too often, violence will lead those in power to respond with sham reforms designed to end violence. They will seek the path of least resistance, instituting reforms that are often the wrong reforms. Arendt offers the example of the way that the student university protests of the 60s led to new courses in Swahili and "admitting students without the necessary qualifications" instead of real reform of the entire educational system.
What is more, violence—precisely because it is effective—has a tendency to promote more violence in response. If violence in the name of justice doesn't achieve its ends quickly, the likely result is not justice, but more violence: "The practice of violence, like all action, changes the world, but the most probable change is to a more violent world."
To read Mandela's speech from 1964 is to encounter someone who thought through the promise and danger of violence in precisely the rational way that Arendt call for. The question we should ask is whether the turn to violence by the ANC in South Africa—even the limited, rational, and property-oriented violence Mandela embraced—promoted or retarded the cause for reform? Was it the ANC's violence that led, 30 years later, to the reform of South Africa? Or was it Mandela's dignity in prison and his emergence as a force for peace and reconciliation? Let's celebrate Mandela as a hero this week. But let's also ask: Was he right about violence?
Take the time this weekend to read the entirety of Mandela's speech, It is your weekend read. And if you have more time, review Arendt's essay "On Violence," which is available here.
Grigore on Gypsies
Hannah Arendt Center Visiting Scholar Cristiana Grigore recently appeared on Al Jazeera America to discuss the recent uproar in Greece and France about the treatment of Gypsies. Grigore is at the Arendt Center studying Arendt's writing on Jewish assimilation and Jewish diaspora culture in connection with her own research on the Roma.
You can watch her interview here.
Amor Mundi – 7/14/13
Hannah Arendt considered calling her magnum opus Amor Mundi: Love of the World. Instead, she settled upon The Human Condition. What is most difficult, Arendt writes, is to love the world as it is, with all the evil and suffering in it. And yet she came to do just that. Loving the world means neither uncritical acceptance nor contemptuous rejection. Above all it means the unwavering facing up to and comprehension of that which is.
Every Sunday, The Hannah Arendt Center Amor Mundi Weekly Newsletter will offer our favorite essays and blog posts from around the web. These essays will help you comprehend the world. And learn to love it.
Jay Rosen at Press Think has coined the term "The Snowden Effect" to signify "direct and indirect gains in public knowledge from the cascade of events and further reporting that followed Edward Snowden's leaks of classified information about the surveillance state in the U.S." Rosen provides a helpful list of precisely what we have learned about our government's spying activities since Snowden began releasing the secret documents he stole. For example, "Did you know that the United States Postal Service "computers photograph the exterior of every piece of paper mail that is processed in the United States - about 160 billion pieces last year?"" I did not. The Snowden effect works like that. It widens the circle of people who know, even if the knowledge had been available before.Whatever may be the fate of Snowden, and whether or not you think he was right or wrong to release the documents, the Snowden Effect has initiated a much-needed conversation.
As part of its 50th Anniversary celebration, the New York Review of Books has made available Hannah Arendt's "On Violence," one of her greatest essays that was first published in the NYRB in 1969. The essay begins: "These reflections were provoked by the events and debates of the last few years, as seen against the background of the twentieth century. Indeed this century has become, as Lenin predicted, a century of wars and revolutions, hence a century of that violence which is currently believed to be their common denominator. There is, however, another factor in the present situation which, though predicted by nobody, is of at least equal importance. The technical development of implements of violence has now reached the point where no political goal could conceivably correspond to their destructive potential or justify their actual use in armed conflict. Hence, warfare-since times immemorial the final merciless arbiter in international disputes-has lost much of its effectiveness and nearly all of its glamor."
On the occasion of sending his son to a French language immersion program in France, Ta-Nehisi Coates, who is himself currently in Paris, reflects on what it means to grow up and become a parent, inadvertently touching on the challenge of entering into the wide world: "First you leave your block. Then you leave your neighborhood. Then you leave your high school. Then your city, your college and, finally, your country. At every step you are leaving another world, and at every step you feel a warm gravity, a large love, pulling you back home. And you feel crazy for leaving. And you feel that it is preposterous to do this to yourself."
Mapmaker Dennis Wood, who believes that maps are arguments about the way the world looks, discusses the ethics of cartography in that context: "I've been suggesting to the hardest-edged people of all that they could put their epistemological and ontological arguments on a really firm foundation by simply acknowledging the fact that they are making the world. And they recoil from that, viscerally and instinctively, as they continue to make the software that enables them to make the world...When someone drops a bomb on something and kills a bunch of kids, and they do that using a map that you made, you either accept the responsibility for it-a kind of well, you can't make an omelet without breaking some eggs responsibility-or you say, 'Damn it, I can't do this anymore.'" All of which reminds us of Hannah Arendt's essay, "Eggs Speak Up," where she writes, "Democratic society as a living reality is threatened at the very moment that democracy becomes a 'cause,' because then actions are likely to be judged and opinions evaluated in terms of ultimate ends and not on their inherent merits."
On the hundredth birthday of Catalan language writer Salvador Espriu, poet Rowan Ricardo Phillips considers what it meant for Espriu to write in his native language, banned for most of his lifetime by Spanish dictator Francisco Franco: "His was stubborn adherence to a language and to a culture that no matter how minimalized and denied by edict were still very obviously a reality. What gets lost at times in estimations of Espriu outside of his own language is that he was entirely a writer of his own language. His Catalan is hyper-expressive and inclusive of so many registers, idioms, and argots that it shakes free of a standardized expressive center. He is a writer of oi moiand not alas. It's almost as if the point was that the oppression of language is best met by the overflow of that language against its oppression. That all of it must rise at once and live: it is a palimpsest with sharp edges."
Pitching Humanities to the Engineers
John Horgan, pivoting off the recent release of a report to Congress on the state of the humanities, shares the pitch he gives to the future engineers he teaches at Stevens Institute of Technology on the first day of his great books course: "The humanities are subversive. They undermine the claims of all authorities, whether political, religious or scientific. This skepticism is especially important when it comes to claims about humanity, about what we are, where we came from, and even what we can be and should be. Science has replaced religion as our main source of answers to these questions. Science has told us a lot about ourselves, and we're learning more every day. But the humanities remind us that we have an enormous capacity for deluding ourselves."
Following the 7:40 pm showing of "Hannah Arendt" at the Quad Cinema on 13th St. in N.Y.C., there will be a Q&A with Roger Berkowitz about the film.
July 17, 2013
Following the 6:00 PM showing of "Hannah Arendt" at Upstate Films in Rhinebeck, NY, there will be a Q&A with Roger Berkowitz about the film.
July 21, 2013
Following the 6:00 pm showing of "Hannah Arendt" at Symphony Space on Broadway and 95th St. in N.Y.C., there will be a Q&A with Roger Berkowitz about the film.
October 3-4, 2013
The sixth annual fall conference, "Failing Fast" The Educated Citizen in Crisis"
Olin Hall, Bard College
Learn more here.
From the Hannah Arendt Center Blog
This week on the blog, Roger Berkowitz points to "The Wire" creator David Simon's recent blog post on ideology and Hannah Arendt. Jeff Jurgens examines the MOOC phenomenon through the lens of Muslim Sufi traditions. Kathleen B. Jones thinks through recent developments in Egypt in the context of On Revolution. The weekend read offers a chilling glimpse into the mind of Eichmann through excerpts of the Sassen papers.
The Fragility of Normalcy
We were prepared Monday night at the Hannah Arendt Center's NYC hideout, huddled together with candles and a portable radio, as we toasted the storm over dinner with neighbors and friends. Thankfully, the Arendt Center's two homes at Bard College and in upper NYC both escaped the wrath of the hurricane. Many of our supporters and friends were not so lucky. Bard's High School/Early Colleges in lower Manhattan and Newark have suffered greatly. People's lives have been disrupted and many who are older or immobile are stranded without power, heat, and water as the temperatures drop. Our hearts and thoughts go out to all who are struggling to salvage homes, stay warm, and put your lives back together. We hope soon that you can return to normal lives.
When nature roars and our lives are disrupted, the question of normalcy comes to the fore. People want to get back to normal. We all do. It is amazing to me how important normalcy is. This is especially true when one has children. Routines govern our lives and also help structure our days. They give to the cruel world a patina of safety, predictability, and control. Even more than the learning my daughter does in school or the teaching I returned to at Bard on Tuesday, our daily life routines assert our control over our lives. Humans are creative creatures and we build the world in which we live. Moments when nature and life assert themselves remind us that we are also earthy creatures, whose mastery over the world is as incomplete as it is tenuous.
As I wish you all a return to normalcy, I am aware that for some of you there is a kind of joy or even elation amidst the chaos. As much as we yearn for normal life, it is more often the comradeship found in extremis that stands out as the happiest and most meaningful moments of our lives.
Hannah Arendt knew this fellowship of disaster all-too well. A Jew in Germany, she was arrested twice, first in Germany and then later in France. She lived through Nazism and McCarthyism as well as the early days of the Atomic Bomb. Few knew as deeply as she did the need for the secure place of a home, a private place where one could live securely, in private, and think in solitude. The walls of our homes as well as the walls that encircle our cities and nations are, Arendt saw, essential foundations for human life. They structure our private lives and offer a space for public engagement.
And yet Arendt worried too about the numbing effects of normal life and glorified the experience of public action that accompanies natural as well as man-made catastrophes. In writing of the French resistance after the war, she was acutely aware of the way that tragedy could and often did open the door to human action. She writes of the French resistance fighters:
The collapse of France, to them a totally unexpected event, had emptied, from one day to the next, the political scene of their country, leaving it to the puppet-like antics of knaves or fools, and they who as a matter of course had never participated in the official business of the Third Republic were sucked into politics as though with the force of a vacuum. Thus, without premonition and probably against their conscious inclinations, they had come to constitute willy-nilly a public realm where - without the paraphernalia of officialdom and hidden from the eyes of friend and foe - all relevant business in the affairs of the country was transacted in deed and word.
In the midst of disaster, the French resistance found the joy of public action, of fighting and risking their lives for something that mattered. And during this struggle, the poet Rene Char saw the paradoxical situation, that the tragedy of French defeat and the victory of the Nazi's—events that not only disrupted his normal and everyday existence but threatened his life—had given his life more meaning than it had ever had. In the midst of the conflict, Char wrote: "If I survive, I know that I shall have to break with the aroma of those essential years, silently reject (not repress) my treasure".
In other words, Char knew that the treasure of public freedom found in resistance—the experience of acting publicly in meaningful and surprising ways, and thus the experience of freedom—was incompatible with a return to normal life. Once the horror of the war ended, so too would the weightiness of a life in which freedom and action were everyday experiences. And that was indeed the case. As Arendt writes: "After a few short years they were liberated [...] and thrown back into what they now knew to be the weightless irrelevance of their personal affairs."
It is something else for those who do not return, as many did not during the war and as many will not in the deadly wake of Hurricane Sandy. For them and their loved ones there is pain and loss. For the rest of us, there is normal life.
As we return, thankfully, to the welcome weightlessness of our personal lives, many of us will carry with us the aroma of even brief moments of communal fellowship, when we helped a stranger, overcame flood waters, snuggled in blankets and layers of clothes to stay warm, or struggled to start a generator. These moments, sometimes painful and even dangerous, will, if we are fortunate, become memories of our resilience and human capacities, often forgotten, to make do in extreme situations.
For those with time to reflect on the storm, here are a few of the best writings I have come across this week from those trying to make sense and find solace amidst the storm.
Walter Russell Mead has an exceptional essay reflecting on the power of nature and the fragility of human life.
But events like this don't come out of nowhere. Sandy isn't an irruption of abnormality into a sane and sensible world; it is a reminder of what the world really is like. Human beings want to build lives that exclude what we can't control — but we can't.
Hurricane Sandy is many things; one of those things is a symbol. The day is coming for all of us when a storm enters our happy, busy lives and throws them into utter disarray. The job on which everything depends can disappear. That relationship that holds everything together can fall apart. The doctor can call and say the test results are not good. All of these things can happen to anybody; something like this will happen to us all.
Somewhere in the future, each of us has an inescapable appointment with irresistible force. For each one of us, the waters will someday rise, the winds spin out of control, the roof will come off the house and the power will go out for good.
Alex Koppelmann reminds us of "Sandy's Forgotten," in an essay on the residents of The Baruch House, a public housing project that has been deeply impacted by the storm.
The people who live at the Baruch Houses were supposed to have evacuated before Sandy hit. Some did. Many did not, though, often because they had no good place to go. They are still there, without power, water, or any visible help from any government agency; city, state, or federal—other than some people from the city Housing Authority who'd come by to pump water out of flooded basements. Everywhere you walk in the neighborhood, fire hydrants have been turned into makeshift wells, with lines of people waiting, bottles and jugs in hand.
Downtown, hundreds of thousands of people remain without power. Many of them—usually those who live in buildings that stand six stories or higher, and there are plenty of those—are without running water as well. Public transportation remains limited. The subway is not running below Thirty-fourth Street, and on Wednesday night the M.T.A. temporarily suspended all bus service below Twenty-third Street; given their explanation of that decision, it seems likely that service will be suspended at night for as long as downtown remains dark. There are still very few ways for the people who live down there to get information about their situation—there is little or no cell phone service, and, of course, there is no television without electricity, though there are pay phones and some people, presumably, have battery-powered radios, though who knows how long those will last—so some are still wandering the streets inquiring of anyone who might know something. And it's getting cold; temperatures dipped into the low forties overnight, and they're not supposed to top the low fifties today.
The people I saw around the Baruch Houses seemed upbeat, an attitude noted by Reverend Leo Lawrence, who works at the nearby Dewitt Reformed Church. "It seems to me that it's the first time I've seen so much cooperation between people, stores, everything," he said. "It's much more neighborly." He thought most would try to wait the situation out. Asked why he hadn't evacuated, he seemed surprised at the question. "Where would I go?" he asked.
Michael Specter makes the connection between Hurricane Sandy and climate change:
Some people will deny anything that displeases or scares them: unusual pain in their chests, unwanted lumps beneath their skin, or the fact that humans share ancestry with apes are a few examples. Another is climate change. There are people who could watch a hurricane like Sandy blow out of the Atlantic every other day and blame it on anything but human activity. They are like those who, having been diagnosed with diabetes, eat donuts for breakfast. There's not much to do about them.
Unfortunately, that leads us to another type of denialism, more understandable, but possibly just as pernicious: the refusal to accept that we are edging up to the point where extraordinary measures will be required to lessen the impact of a climactic disaster. The best way to deal with climate change has been obvious for years: cut greenhouse-gas emissions severely. We haven't done that. In 2010, for example, carbon emissions rose by six per cent—the largest such increase on record. (The data for 2011 is not yet final, but most researchers believe the numbers have continued their upward arc.)
Roger Pielke Jr. refutes those who are too quick to assert that we are suffering a spike in extreme weather events.
To put things into even starker perspective, consider that from August 1954 through August 1955, the East Coast saw three different storms make landfall—Carol, Hazel and Diane—that in 2012 each would have caused about twice as much damage as Sandy.
While it's hardly mentioned in the media, the U.S. is currently in an extended and intense hurricane "drought." The last Category 3 or stronger storm to make landfall was Wilma in 2005. The more than seven years since then is the longest such span in over a century.
Then again, Pielke's numbers may be quite wrong, as Mark Zandi suggests today. I give you Pielke's essay not because of his climate change skepticism, but rather as one example of the ways people are trying to make sense of the world in the wake of Hurricane Sandy's devastation. For those affected by the storm, we here at the Hannah Arendt Center wish you and your loved ones a quick return to normal life.
I am adding this essay by the painter Allen Hirsch, which appeared Saturday, November 3.
The chill and gloom in the air of our SoHo loft had made little difference to my daughter ("Daddy, when will I have Facebook?!"), although now, after two days, the desperation in her voice was slowly changing to resignation. This has been the longest period in her teenage life without an Internet connection. I shrugged my shoulders in the candlelight. I myself was as cut off as she was and had no way of knowing.
The blackout reminded many of us of how drastically the Internet and our myriad electronic devices have changed our lives. When the lights went out, we felt ourselves also losing power, as if we were part of the same flowing electricity that lit up the city.
Losing this power, however, also reminded my daughter and me of what we have left. Having "nothing better to do" can be a meaningful and sobering experience. While the darkness made us feel our vulnerabilities, it also illuminated the possibilities that we forgot were always within it.
What is "Art" According to Arendt?
"That the arts must be functional, that cathedrals fulfill a religious need of society, that a picture is born from the need for self-expression in the individual painter and that it is looked at because of a desire for self-perfection in the spectator, all these notions are so unconnected with art and historically so new that one is tempted simply to dismiss them as modern prejudices."
-Hannah Arendt, "Crisis in Culture"
Today, within the context of contemporary art, post-Marcel Duchamp, post-Sherrie Levine, it's no longer interesting to ask the question "What is art?" Anything and everything can now be appropriated into art's frame or become part of an artwork. In Andrea Fraser's words, "It's art when I say its art."
When we approach contemporary art with Hannah Arendt in mind, however, we must begin by understanding what she means when she uses the word, "art." She works with a traditional idea of what art is. And she is quick to point out that what constitutes art for her may have little to do with what constitutes art for a given population in a given point in time. When we speak of art today in the current discourse surrounding contemporary art, we speak differently from Arendt. Which is reason enough to consider her definition.
One case in point is the cathedral. It is not a coincidence that Arendt chooses an ornate cathedral to exemplify her definition of art, since art for Arendt is distinguished by having no utilitarian purpose. A cathedral is a place of worship, and thus may serve a purpose. And yet a cathedral itself serves no purpose. The people of Chartres, for example, could gather and worship without their infamous building's spires and rose window. These elements were made, to quote Arendt, ad maiorem gloriam Dei [for the greater glory of God]. Chartres Cathedral possesses qualities above and beyond any functionality. Art, for Arendt, is this totally non-functional thing that exists in the world merely to appear. Art objects may—and almost always do—have other purposes, yet this is not what qualifies them as art.
Art, as Arendt understands it, must also be free from its commodification in the art market. When art is commoditized, it is subject to becoming just like any other consumer commodity, which can be purchased, consumed, and therefore destroyed. Still, I don't believe that an art object's status as a commodity necessarily disqualifies it from constituting Arendt's definition as art. As many contemporary critics, such as Diedrich Diedrichsen, have pointed out, art is not a regular commodity, and it is not assigned value or circulated in the same way, even if it is given a price tag.
"Beauty"—another fraught term in contemporary art discourse - is the quality that makes something last forever, and constitutes the world of appearance. Obviously, this quality is threatened by commodification, which, in theory, reduces art to dollar signs, making a painting's value equal to that of a luxury apartment. And like a luxury apartment, when it circulates freely in the market, it is subject to demolition. Although, even when art is not circulating in this market, it is subject to destruction.( In the example hyperlinked, it is merely art's comparison to monetary values that became "rationale" for its destruction. This museum director is what Arendt would call a "philistine".)
The term "beauty," like the question "What is art?", is contentious mainly because it has ceased to mean anything. As the idiom goes, "it is in the eye of the beholder." Not so, according to Arendt, who deploys this quality normally defined by its subjectivity and indefinability, in a super definitive and specific way. Beauty is the quality that transcends all needs and makes something last through time, and it is not a subjective descriptor. Following Kant, she argues that the person who judges whether or not something is beautiful must put themselves in the place of others who are judging the work in the same time and place, and they must produce judgments to "woo the consent of everyone else" (here I quote Arendt, quoting from Kant) in the hopes of coming to some eventual agreement about what is beautiful.
Consent about what is beautiful is important because it determines what is preserved over time. What unfolds in "Crisis in Culture," the essay from which I'm drawing and to which I will continue to refer in these posts, is what happens to art and "culture" (which I will have to save for another week) within "mass society." Or, what happens to the world of appearances, a necessary condition for politics, when everything is produced in order to be consumed (and therefore destroyed)?
-Amy Zion
Beirut's Forest: Pining Away the Public Space
At the heart of the task of political foundations and the complex task of reconstruction in postwar scenarios is the question whether such new foundations are possible. Look only at Libya, where this week bandits briefly took control of the Tripoli airport, and we see the difficulty of founding new polities on the ruins of failed dictatorships. The repeated failure to build civil society in many countries only heightens the question: is postwar political foundation in the Middle East possible?
For want of a better example one can always turn to Lebanon: A surprising textbook case of both success and failure in reconstruction, while at the same time the political foundations remain unchanged and the political terms of negotiations have remained more or less unchanged throughout almost an entire century of regional and civil wars. The reconstruction of Beirut has been plagued by fierce criticism as much as by a relatively positive reception in light of the relative order wrought among the hostile parties involved.
While the reconstruction of Beirut is almost a fait accompli and there's little room for anything but an academic debate, this refers only to the re-making of the historical downtown area around the iconic Martyrs' Square area in compliance with 1991 National Master Plan by Dar al-Handasah and IAURIF for Solidere.
Here it is crucial to place Solidere's plans for Beirut in the context of the colonial visions of French planners spanning from 1932 through 1991 and from then to present day.
The Danger Plan (1932) was prepared under the French mandate by a French consulting firm and was the first systematic attempt to lay out an urban plan for the Lebanese capital; followed then by the Ecochard Master Plan (1943, right after independence) that was never mindful of Lebanon's multi-confessional landscape and failed to account for the possible growth of the city which remained largely unregulated. The General Master Plan (1952) followed and is still considered the only planning strategy established on a legal basis.
Also based upon a French model, the master plan dealt mostly with broadening transportation networks and could hardly envision the expansion of the prosperous years 1958-1967 of the Shihab era during which Beirut experienced agitated expansion. The Plan Directoire Beyrouth et Ses Banlieux (1964) was also orchestrated by Ecochard and tried to limit the city's expansion – predicting the risk of non-regulation and environmental hazard – but it was never applied. Two later master plans were introduced in 1977 and 1992 but the 1991 directive prevailed.
In this context two particular sites of memory are important in any attempt to re-shape the public spaces of the city in a postwar context; the first being the historical downtown (Martyrs' Square) that divides the city between East and West and the second no less iconic Beirut Pine Forest (known in Arabic as Horch al-Sanawbar) that divides the city between North and South. The importance of these sites resides in that spite of the failed policy attempts to regulate and integrate them into systematic plans; they were both contested by the population of Beirut as public spaces in the broadest sense: Arenas of inter-confessional interaction.
Previously, I discussed the background of Martyrs' Square in "Beirut: Reinventing or Destroying the Public Space?" in the context of Hannah Arendt's ideas on the meaning of the public realm and the world as articulated in The Human Condition, and grounded the problem in the ambiguous legacy of the civil war in Lebanese political historiography and memory. Hereby I shall offer a brief discussion on Beirut Pine Forest and turn the discussion from the persistence of a public world to the question of enacting public spaces.
The Pine Forest originally comprised about 1.25 million square meters (now reduced to 330.000) in the 17th century and its viability as a public space precedes that of Martyrs' Square (public garden was launched in 1879) as it is known that since the 1840's the Ottoman rulers kept watch over the forest as a public entity and the Lebanese claimed administrative authority over it, turning it into municipal property around 1878.
The most relevant information on the forest – both historical and in terms of social practices – can be found in Fadi S. Shayya's paper "Enacting Public Space: History and Social Practices of Beirut Horch al-Sanawbar" (2006). He tells us about the relevance of the forest throughout modern history, mainly derived from the celebration of "Horch el-Eid" during "Eid al-Adha" when large numbers of people gathered in Horch to celebrate the occasion of Muslim pilgrims coming home from Mecca after fasting during Ramadan and after 1840, festivities and activities of recreation, sports and folklore of Beiruti Muslims moved to the park.
During the world wars and long Lebanese civil war the forest was off-limits to the public and it was bombed and burnt out by Israeli jet fighters during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. After the end of the civil war around 1995 and in the context of postwar reconstruction the forest was "re-designed" (again in a joint French-Lebanese urban planning venture) and opened to the public, but since then the Municipality of Beirut – rightful owner of the park – has kept the forest off limits to the public and accessible only with special permission.
Different political and bureaucratic issues have arisen around the issue of opening or not opening the forest to the public: At the time of Shayya's paper (2006) most of the park remained closed and only accessible on certain dates and under certain rules. In 2005 Lebanese daily The Daily Star reported that the forest was withering away after the re-design in absence of a proper team to look after it together with lack of enough security to operate it and five years later, in an extensive report published by NOW Lebanon, it was said that through the forest represents 72% of Beirut's green space, two thirds of it remain still closed to the public.
It should be noted here that according to official statistics, Beirut has fifty times less greenery than it is recommended by international environmental bodies and recently the American University in Beirut released a scientific study detailing the high levels of pollution in the city. As a part of the reconstruction plans orchestrated in the historical downtown, Solidere is scheduled to open a "Garden of Forgiveness" in the area, but this project comprises a mere 25.000 square meters and is meant to function more as a museum than as a public space that can be contested through interaction by the different communities of the city.
The approach to the reconstruction of Beirut – exemplified both by the historical downtown and the forest – is a critical example of the perverse relationship of Lebanon's political establishment to both violence and power. In her book Architects Without Frontiers: War, Reconstruction and Responsibility, Esther Charlesworth mentions three major themes that can be learnt from the reconstruction of Beirut as policy failures: Lack of public consultation, apolitical architecture and the preference of process over product.
Aseel Sawalha on the other hand (author of "Reconstructing Beirut: Memory and Space in a Postwar Arab City") argues forcefully that violence has been a major issue and guiding policy of postwar reconstruction. In his "Healing the Wounds of the War: Placing the War-displaced in Postwar Beirut" (published in the volume "Wounded Cities: Destruction and Reconstruction in a Globalized World") he discusses at length the "postwar state of emergency" in which the rush of reconstruction created internal displacement out of those who had been already displaced by the war into urban Beirut.
War-displaced residents were offered very modest compensations to move out of their homes in order to make space for the sprawling skyscrapers and luxury apartments on demand, what included also the legendary Valley of the Jews, in which there is a newly renovated synagogue but no Jews. Sawalha says: "Reconstruction means cleaning and organizing disordered spaces, repressing illegality, imposing aesthetic standards on what has become unsightly. As we will see, a lively public discourse on the war-displaced reinforces this enthusiasm for the modern, and the power relations underlying it, in many ways."
From that time on begins a discourse split between "muhajarin" (displaced victims) and "muhtalin" (opportunistic occupiers) claiming both compensation and usually ruling in favor of the latter. He speaks about the case of an interviewed displaced victim: "Now that there is a legitimate state, we do not have to seek sectarian connections and alliances, he told me. Soon, though, Ali encountered obstacles, leading him to suspect that he had not asked the right people for help. The war time militias and associated mafias, rather than being eclipsed by the state, now operated within it, he concluded."
Sawalha concludes his paper saying: "According to this article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Lebanese state and its institutions (the Ministry of the Displaced, the Central Fund for the Displaced), as well as the private developers and the public-private company Solidere, all violated the rights of Beirut's war-displaced to a decent home, privacy and reputation. In effect they created more displacement, as their projects for reconstruction generated a series of postwar emergencies".
While this is true for the private citizen, the displacement from the public space – exemplified by both Centre Ville and the Pine Forest – does not exactly help the Lebanese communities of Beirut to engage in a power-sharing argument or discussion that might alleviate the burden of violence. What role does architecture play or can play above the level of policy-making and the question is also begot of whether there is something that architects – in both cases – could have done better to prevent exclusion of the Lebanese from participating in the public space?
The question is purely theoretical. Charlesworth however brings up Foucault to say: "In his seminal essay, 'Space, knowledge and power', Michel Foucault engages in this broader debate on the social role of architects: Architecture in itself cannot solve social problems: I think that it can and does provide positive effects when the liberating intentions of the architect coincide with the real practice of people in the exercise of their freedom."
Charlesworth lays out an interesting hierarchy of categories of roles that architects play in postwar reconstruction as such: Pathologists, Heroes, Historicists, Colonialists, Social Reformers and Educators. Her argument is that different architects, policies and companies exercised all of these roles at different times and in different ways. The facts of reconstruction remain albeit unchallenged; including the fact that the reconstruction of Beirut did bring hope to many people, even if it was a false and transitory hope.
The public space however – and here is where Hannah Arendt continues to be ultimately relevant – cannot be eliminated or weakened without inflicting a deadly blow on human plurality and as such it continues to be constantly contested in Lebanon. In February 2012 it was reported by Green Prophet that Lebanese activists democratically demand access to all of the Pine Forest because it is their inalienable right to public property – not to mention that people from many socially disadvantaged neighborhoods would have access to a public space of interaction with others – and in their demands, they realize the obvious: "Without a politically guaranteed public realm, freedom lacks the worldly space to make its appearance".
-Arie Amaya- Akkermans


text:
- TNA will hold a rare Friday night Impact Wrestling taping tonight from the Impact Zone in Orlando. They will be taping the January 24th episode and likely part or all of the January 31st episode.
TNA is advertising the following for next week's Impact:
* Daniels vs. Jeff Hardy for the World Title
* Velvet Sky vs. Tara for the Knockouts Title
* Zema Ion and Kenny King vs. Rob Van Dam and Christian York
* The fallout from Taz joining Aces & 8s
* Hulk Hogan leads a war on Aces & 8s
The Hottest WWE news, photos and videos delivered to your inbox in one convenient newsletter. Sign up now and give it a try!
|WWE RAW Results - September 01, 2014
|Photo: CM Punk and AJ Lee First Wedding Picture
|Drew McIntyre on Being Vince's "Chosen One", Leaving WWE, Wrestling Getting a Bad Rap
|No WWE Guests Allow on JR's Podcast?, WWE Star Expecting Fifth Child, More
|AJ Styles Says It's Not the Right Time To Work for WWE, Comments on Where He Might Retire

subset: commoncrawl


text:
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State troopers are investigating a single-car wreck in Pamlico County that left one man dead. More>>
A driver in Pitt County struck a school bus Tuesday morning. More>>
Tuesday, the Goodwill Community Foundation continues to help some kids in the east head back to school prepared. More>>
It is back to school time and 9 On Your Side wants students and families to be prepared for a safe new school year. More>>
You've heard the saying "a picture is worth a thousand words" but what about a selfie? Some people have gone above and beyond to capture some moments on camera. More>>
"Modern Family" and "Breaking Bad" triumphed at Monday's Emmy Awards, proving that established broadcast and cable fare retains the power to fend off challenges from upstart online series such as "Orange Is the New... More>>
The City of Washington is working to make navigating the city a little easier, by putting up new wayfinding signs. More>>


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Charlottesville-Albemarle Rescue Squad
Charlottesville, VA – March 28, 2014 – Officials at Charlottesville-Albemarle Rescue Squad (CARS) today announced a successful conclusion to this year's Annual Fund Drive. The drive, which began last fall and extended into the first quarter of 2014, reached its goal of $300,000, thanks to the generosity of many area residents.
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CARS serves primarily Charlottesville and the University of Virginia, as well as Albemarle County upon request.
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Thursday morning several people asked the Flathead county commissioners to explain their decision to back out of a federal grant that would help stabilize a bluff off Whitefish Stage Road.
The sloughing out near Village Greens has been going on for years and homeowners have poured more than $100,000 of their own money into dealing with the erosion, but it's still a problem.
"I really have concern and understanding of the poor folks up above. If their house ends up in my pond, they're in a world of hurt," said Herb White, a homeowner near the bluff.
"What we hope to do is keep it out of the courts and be able to have an open discussion about the issue," said Scott Gearhart, one of the plaintiffs listed on the district court case against the commissioners.
At the commissioner's meeting it was standing room only while one person after another got up to ask the commissioners why they decided to renege on a grant from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), that would have been hundreds of thousands of dollars.
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YEESH, WHAT THE HECK has happened to technology stocks? Investors lately have developed a distinct loathing for the sector, with large-cap tech singled out for special derision. The sector is experiencing a level of disdain that hasn't been seen for eons: Bernstein Research analyst Toni Sacconaghi pointed out in a fascinating research report last week that tech shares lately have dropped to their lowest valuation, relative to the S&P 500, in nearly 20 years.
Sacconaghi writes that tech stocks now trade at 1.0 times the S&P on a forward P/E basis, a valuation last seen in March 1991 and dramatically below the historical average since 1977 of 1.31 times. This comes while the cash on tech balance sheets is at or near record levels, both in absolute terms and relative to the stocks in the S&P.
And note that whatever it is that ails tech is widespread, with similarly depressed valuations afflicting hardware, software and services companies alike. Not least, keep in mind that the valuation compression has largely taken place over just the past few years–at the end of 2007, tech stocks traded at 1.32 time the S&P multiple on forward earnings, right in line with the sector's historical average.
The obvious question is the one I asked in this column's first sentence: What the heck is wrong? Tech companies have mountains of cash; technology continues to gradually eat up more and more of corporate capital spending, and consolidation seems to be accelerating. What's not to like?
Sacconaghi has a few theories on what ails tech:
• THERE'S A PERCEPTION THAT SECULAR growth in the sector has slowed. Sacconaghi believes that the market appears to be "punishing" shares of bellwethers like Microsoft MSFT +1.23% Microsoft Corp. U.S.: Nasdaq $45.43 +0.55 +1.23% Aug. 29, 2014 4:00 pm Volume (Delayed 15m) : 19.83M AFTER HOURS $45.44 +0.01 +0.02% Aug. 29, 2014 7:59 pm Volume (Delayed 15m) : 1.78M P/E Ratio 17.08 Market Cap $374.34 Billion Dividend Yield 2.47% Rev. per Employee $677,570 09/01/14 China Gives Microsoft Deadline 08/29/14 Judge Lifts Freeze on Microsof... 08/26/14 Inside Steve Ballmer More quote details and news » (ticker: MSFT), IBM IBM +0.16% International Business Machines Corp. U.S.: NYSE $192.30 +0.30 +0.16% Aug. 29, 2014 4:02 pm Volume (Delayed 15m) : 2.81M AFTER HOURS $192.30 0.00 % Aug. 29, 2014 6:29 pm Volume (Delayed 15m) : 102,628 P/E Ratio 12.09 Market Cap $197.87 Billion Dividend Yield 2.29% Rev. per Employee $229,711 08/27/14 Ten Things I Learned About Man... 08/25/14 Apple May Sweeten MobileIron's... 08/24/14 Apple's Next Act for the iPad ... More quote details and news » (IBM), Cisco Systems CSCO +0.56% Cisco Systems Inc. U.S.: Nasdaq $24.99 +0.14 +0.56% Aug. 29, 2014 4:00 pm Volume (Delayed 15m) : 16.90M AFTER HOURS $24.95 -0.04 -0.16% Aug. 29, 2014 4:53 pm Volume (Delayed 15m) : 1.07M P/E Ratio 16.66 Market Cap $128.02 Billion Dividend Yield 3.04% Rev. per Employee $628,150 08/28/14 Fed Leaders Have Diverse Finan... 08/28/14 Yellen Still a Multimillionair... 08/26/14 TiVo Reports Higher Revenue an... More quote details and news » (CSCO) and Google GOOG +0.42% Google Inc. Cl C U.S.: Nasdaq $571.60 +2.40 +0.42% Aug. 29, 2014 4:00 pm Volume (Delayed 15m) : 1.02M AFTER HOURS $572.97 +1.37 +0.24% Aug. 29, 2014 7:54 pm Volume (Delayed 15m) : 60,905 P/E Ratio N/A Market Cap $390.26 Billion Dividend Yield N/A Rev. per Employee $1,321,030 08/26/14 Google Acquires Video and Spec... 08/07/14 Is Your Neighborhood Gentrifyi... 08/01/14 East Coast Google Barge Headed... More quote details and news » (GOOG), whose growth is, or seems to be, decelerating. The Bernstein analyst concedes that tech growth, relative to the S&P 500, has slid from pre-2007 levels, and was worse than the S&P during the economic downturn. But he points out that while tech revenue and profits have been stronger than the S&P's coming out of the recession, valuations remain depressed, even though tech outlays as a percentage of capital spending continues to climb, setting the stage for ongoing growth exceeding GDP. Indeed, Sacconaghi figures that the sector's revenue growth should be 7%-8% a year. While that's lower than the 10%-plus average over the past two decades, he contends the historically low valuations more than reflect the slower expansion.
• THE STOCKS MAY BE GETTING PUNISHED for weak earnings quality: Sacconaghi observes that of the six large-cap hardware companies he formally covers, just one– Apple AAPL +0.24% Apple Inc. U.S.: Nasdaq $102.50 +0.25 +0.24% Aug. 29, 2014 4:00 pm Volume (Delayed 15m) : 40.68M AFTER HOURS $102.55 +0.05 +0.05% Aug. 29, 2014 7:59 pm Volume (Delayed 15m) : 3.91M P/E Ratio 16.45 Market Cap $613.76 Billion Dividend Yield 1.83% Rev. per Employee $2,214,380 08/29/14 Apple's New Whiz Kids 08/29/14 Apple Bars Developers From Sha... 08/29/14 U.S. Stocks Finish August With... More quote details and news » (AAPL)—reports GAAP results. The rest exclude amortization of intangibles or stock-option expense or both. Indeed, Sacconaghi notes that 10 of the top 20 tech outfits by market cap exclude at least one of those factors, while just two of the top 20 non-tech names exclude amortization, and none – none! —exclude options expense. "This suggests that investors may be discounting tech earnings, relative to the market, due to their non-GAAP reporting," he writes.
• A PERCEIVED INCREASE IN THE RISK of overseas competition: Sacconaghi says investors fear that increased competition in services (from India), PCs (from Taiwan) and networking (from China) will drive down margins and earnings power. But he adds that these trends are not new, and that many U.S. vendors have boosted their offshore presence in recent years, helping to improve their operating margins.
• REFUSAL TO RETURN CASH to shareholders: Sacconaghi notes that, while cash balances at tech companies remain extraordinarily high, they've returned little of it. Only 10 of the top 20 techs by market cap pay a dividend, and just two— Intel INTC +0.78% Intel Corp. U.S.: Nasdaq $34.92 +0.27 +0.78% Aug. 29, 2014 4:00 pm Volume (Delayed 15m) : 30.81M AFTER HOURS $34.94 +0.02 +0.06% Aug. 29, 2014 7:51 pm Volume (Delayed 15m) : 1.50M P/E Ratio 16.87 Market Cap $172.89 Billion Dividend Yield 2.58% Rev. per Employee $501,041 08/29/14 Comcast Targeted by Entertainm... 08/29/14 U.S. Stocks Finish August With... 08/29/14 Intel Moves to Excite Extreme ... More quote details and news » (INTC) and ADP ADP -0.02% Automatic Data Processing Inc. U.S.: Nasdaq $83.48 -0.02 -0.02% Aug. 29, 2014 4:00 pm Volume (Delayed 15m) : 1.43M AFTER HOURS $83.50 +0.02 +0.02% Aug. 29, 2014 4:24 pm Volume (Delayed 15m) : 131,168 P/E Ratio 26.61 Market Cap $40.15 Billion Dividend Yield 2.30% Rev. per Employee $200,107 08/26/14 Corporate Watch 08/22/14 Strategies for a Smoother Ride... 07/31/14 ADP Considering Changes to Mon... More quote details and news » (ADP)—offer yields above the S&P 500's. "With companies seemingly hoarding cash, we believe investors may not be giving full credit to tech stocks for their high cash balances, especially for those that have historically been acquisitive or shown no interest in returning cash," he writes.
At least two of these issues could be easily addressed. For starters, techs could abandon their EPS-obfuscating preference for non-GAAP accounting and instead follow the rest of Corporate America. More significantly, they could start sharing some of their cash with shareholders.
In another report last week, Morgan Keegan analyst Tavis McCourt theorized that the mammoth amounts of cash on tech-company balance sheets are actually destroying equity value over time. He argues that:
• Large technology companies have spent more than a decade hoarding cash both overseas and domestically…
• …Knowing this, entrepreneurs and venture-capitalists have teamed up to start more companies, on the theory that if the startups found even modest success, large public companies might overbid for their assets, "as these large cash hoards create an auction environment for any company with valuable technology."
• Ergo, successful venture-capital funds and entrepreneurs generate outsized returns…
• …and start still more companies to sell to the tech giants…
• …but public-market investors catch on and start discounting the value of balance-sheet cash…
• …as it becomes clear it won't be returned to holders, but instead used to buy small rivals at unattractive prices…
• …resulting in P/E ratios for large techs below those in other industries with lower growth prospects.
To McCourt, the basic problem is that "essentially all the profits the industry generates in a given year ultimately get reinvested back into the industry, creating increased competition, lower prices and ultimately lower returns in investment." His solution: big regular dividend payouts, which could attract more investors, boosting share prices on average by as much as 77%. (Barron's Andew Bary further explores McCourt's thesis in "Tech's Payout Problem.")
A related note: Bernstein communications equipment analyst Jeff Evenson last week zeroed in on the lack of dividends from Cisco, observing in a client note that it is the fourth-largest non-payer of dividends in the S&P 500–after Google, Apple and Berkshire Hathaway BRKB +0.84% Berkshire Hathaway Inc. Cl B U.S.: NYSE $137.25 +1.14 +0.84% Aug. 29, 2014 4:04 pm Volume (Delayed 15m) : 2.73M AFTER HOURS $137.28 +0.03 +0.02% Aug. 29, 2014 6:18 pm Volume (Delayed 15m) : 170,303 P/E Ratio 16.01 Market Cap $338.21 Billion Dividend Yield N/A Rev. per Employee $625,182 08/29/14 Burger King Would Be Owed $317... 08/29/14 Buffett Gets to the Meat of th... 08/28/14 Warren Buffett's Tax Whopper More quote details and news » (BRKB)–despite boasting the third-largest net-cash balance among nonfinancials in the index. Evenson points out that CEO John Chambers has been saying for years that Cisco will pay a dividend…some day. With the stock basically unchanged since 2002–after $65 billion in buybacks by the company–Evenson thinks that time is now.
As it happens, Cisco meets with analysts Tuesday. You can bet that Chambers will be grilled about when holders will get their share of the tech giant's mounting cash pile.
Apple Blinks
The Nasdaq Composite rose 0.4% for the week, to 2243. Adobe shares jumped after Apple relaxed a policy against the firm's programming technology.
You can reach Eric Savitz at email@example.com, blogs.barrons.com/techtraderdaily or www.twitter.com/savitz