Europe Endless

Bunny blogging! 

This weekend several intellectuals and politicians gathered in Berlin to discuss the cultural politics of the European Union. Their goal: “To Give Europe a Soul” (auf Deutsch) , as the conference was called.

I have found little reporting on the conference (I would appreciate any links to articles that people can find), but it seems as if the participants tread on familiar ground. Former German president Weizsaecker emphasized the “mixed character” and classical origins of European culture: Rome, Judaism, Christianity, Islamic Science. Timothy Garton Ash pointed to the struggles for toleration, liberation and rapprochement. If none of these approaches are particularly imaginative, perhaps the conversation itself is a means of defining the culture.

Barista has two interesting posts. One is about the children who sang the verse of Another Brick in the Wall part II. The other is an unusual case of live journaling that is too unusual to describe. Just go read it.



Couldn’t someone have just bought her a Joy Division or Dream Syndicate records?

As I mentioned earlier, I am reading Herman Lebovics Bringing the Empire Back Home, a book about contemporary French politics after decolonization. A point that he makes is that the new regionalism, or post-colonial regionalism, arose within the context of decolonization. Retreat from the world placed greater pressures on the French metropole, especially in agricultural sectors. What is interesting is that these farmers, usually described as conservative, connected their struggle with struggles for liberation and against globalization. The larger question, which Lebovics does not enunciate, is whether or not the question of decolonization leads directly to critiques of centralization: why should the national capital monopolize power if national conflict within Europe and imperialism have come to an end?

The origin of the radical regionalism was the fight against the expansion of military bases at the expense of farming in Larzac in the 1970s. The project was conceived by Michel Debré, a nationalist who served as minister of national defense. Debré advocated unilateralist policy toward North Africa as a means of protecting French interests; the expanded base would serve as a training camp for overseas interventions and a prison for foreign fighters. (Deja-vu, anyone?)

The farmers resented Debré’s arrogance: he took little interest in the shape of the communities, their environment, or their future. The government started to buy up land in the area south of the Central Massif. The “Larzac Movement” attracted leftist intellectuals who felt that they had been shut out of the post-1968 nation, but they were tangential to the movement. Instead it produced political figures who associated the farmers’ struggle with resistance groups around the world. The farmers also took on regional identities, incorporating the symbols of Occitan (south France) into their movement.

The farmers were creative. They would break into government lands and confiscated farms with their tractors; then they plowed the fields and seeded them. On other occasions they flooded the countryside with sheep in order to block the roads to military vehicles. They also engaged in more traditional resistance: collective squatting. The state reacted by withholding infrastructure improvements to the area: they refused to build and maintain roads and telephones. It was believed that the peasants would not be able to organize to prevent the demolition of farms without them.

Eventually, the Larzac Movement was memorialized in Mitterand’s decentralization policies of the early 1980s (“Avem gardet lo Larzac”).

The Boston Globe has an article about Le Corbusier’s only work in America, Harvard University’s Carpenter Center. (And yes, I am no fan of his work).

[W]hen Sert offered him the job, Le Corbusier was still angry at what he called “American officialdom” for his treatment during the design process for the United Nations headquarters, where he had been turned down for the commission only to see his ideas incorporated into the final complex. Ultimately, though, he couldn’t turn down the chance to build in the United States, a country that early in his career had represented for him the possibility of the machine age. And the Carpenter Center’s role in both housing and embodying Harvard’s arts program coincided with his idea that architecture should synthesize all the arts, including painting, sculpture, and even music. As the architectural historian William Curtis has written, Le Corbusier wanted the building to be a “manifesto.”

Le Corbusier only visited Harvard twice, but one of his most vivid impressions of the place was the overlapping tides of students that filled Harvard Yard as pealing bells signaled the break between classes. “He was fascinated by that,” Sekler recalled in a recent interview, “how it suddenly came to life.”

… But the building didn’t turn out exactly as Le Corbusier envisioned it. The electronic tones were dropped early on. More significantly, he was forced to abandon his plans to cover the building’s external spaces with a garden, an extension of the greenery of the Yard. Unlike the manicured quads, he had wanted it to be a natural, untended garden — seeded entirely by the wind and birds and insects, watered by the rain and allowed to run riot all over the building’s several terraces. The idea didn’t particularly appeal to the Harvard administration, and a lack of safety rails rendered most of the proposed space off-limits anyway. Today only the lower front terrace has a garden, and it’s a rim of dirt thinly covered in summer with weeds.

Initially I liked the idea of placing different images for each state on the tail side of quarters. It was a means of giving variety to American currency, something interesting to look forward to and a way of learning a little something about each state. But I think the results suck.

Few of the state quarters are visually compelling (I reserve praise for Connecticut, Virginia, Vermont, and Iowa). Most offerings could be logos for banks (like Massachusetts and New York), sports teams (like Texas), or vacation bureaus (like Rhode Island, Ohio and South Carolina). Certainly the designers can do more than create a constellation of symbols with the form of the state in the background. By far the worst offender is Wisconson. Is it a dairy ad? Got milk?

Thanksgiving went well. One of the dishes I cooked up, a couscous with dried fruit, was a disaster because I added too much cinnamon (the lesson is, don’t confuse teaspoons and tablespoons). My other dish was much more successful.

We also checked out a new Tibetan restaurant in Northampton. Pretty good. When I got home, I tried to replicate the potato dish that I had with some success (using garlic and ginger sauteed in butter and simmered in a small amount of liquid).

Recently we have watched a lot of movies; all of them show the deep, complex landscapes. Down by law was great, although Benigni carried the second half. The outdoor scenes are wonderful, showing the depth of the urban blocks in Louisiana. Talk about inventing traditions, we finally watched Lawrence of Arabia. The story was paced perfectly, allowing the viewer to fall in love with the vast deserts and high mountains. Finally, the Scottish film Ratcatcher, shows the claustrophobia of youth trapped in Glasgow in the 1970s. It takes place during a strike by garbage collectors that affects the health of the large tenements in which the main characters live. Their lives evolve around an unused, infested canal that cuts through their neighborhood, taking their children and making them ill (mostly morally). The director went out of her way to show the cruelty of the children (something that bothered me). Nevertheless, an excellent film. (I wonder: do the English tease the Scots about how they speak as Americans tease Canadians?)

The death of me will be the South Park movie. Comedy Central shows it twice a month, and every time my wife and I get sucked in. We must watch at least long enough to see Cartman tell his math teacher to “suck his balls.”

Claire points out two reviews of books on Weimar Berlin, that romanticized city of decadent cosmopolitanism. The milieu of cabarets and experimental arts has made a big comeback in historical studies, especially as people have returned to the relationship of art and politics. How funny that the ewige junge Stadt (eternally youthful city) would not shape Germany for almost six decades; all the ideas would come from the south (Munich and Vienna), the east (Moscow), and west (Bonn, Frankfurt and Paris).

Whiskey River has a post about the meaning of landscape in Chinese culture and how it references specific topographic features and their symbolic use.

Tuivel is, for a rabbit, without scruples. We have discovered that he will eat almost anything.

It started a few days ago. I was hunched over on the floor, looking at a newspaper and casually eating an asiago cheese bagel. He took it from my hand and ran away with it. I could have dismissed this incident. He may have wanted the bread more than the cheese. However, my wife decided to test his limits. She brought him a small cube of gruyere, which he ate with glee.

Yesterday, my wife tried more. I had made betzels, a filled pastry from North Africa that I make with Phyllo and fry in oil. I made some for Thanksgiving dinner (so much for invented traditions), using garlic, egg, gruyere and sauteed spinach. He loved it.

Today, my wife tried something most rabbits would resist. She offered Tuivel roasted garlic. The pungence should have scared him away. But HE ATE THAT TOO.

What next?

James Drake has an interesting article in Journal of World History (15.3, 2004) (here, Project Muse subscription required) that explores how Americans came to think of themselves as (in his words) a continental society. He compares two cases, Anglo-America and Spanish America, to see how the people conceptualized their relationship with the land they inhabited as well as Europe.

The larger current has to do with geopolitical thinking. Continents became a category that interested European intellectuals, especially as they attempted to understand differences between themselves and the peoples elsewhere in the world. Europe had natural barriers that allowed civilization to flourish without excessive war, unlike other continents.

The English colonists combined the category of the continent with their perception of the relationship with the land. Drake sees the Boston Tea Party as revealing: it shows how the colonists identified themselves as the new indigenous people of the Americas. It was not just the local Native Americans that they were replacing, but a whole continent of people who, in their opinion, did little to develop the civilization of the continent. The new Americans were there to do what the old Americans failed to do.

Drake, in the process of comparing Spanish and Anglo-America, draws on an event from Mexican history that resembles the Boston Tea Party. The Spanish Mexicans never saw themselves as the replacements for the natives; they were overlords and conquerors. Nevertheless they took the identity of Indians to protest the policies of the mother country:

Under the leadership of Hernán Cortés’s son Martín, who had assumed the title Marqués de la Valle de Oaxaca, a number of colonists planned a rebellion, feeling the crown had violated their rights. As heirs of the conquerors, they saw their fathers’ rewards as their entitlement, their just inheritance. After the conquest, the Spaniards had divided among the conquerors the right to extract tribute or labor rights from the region’s Indians. This lucrative institutional arrangement, known as the encomienda, had long proven a sticking point in relations with royal authorities. Hint of its demise at the hands of royal authorities regularly ignited discontent.

When rumors circulated in 1565 that the crown intended to withdraw support for the encomienda, conquistador elites and their heirs conspired to revolt. This plan, known as the conjuración del marques, never reached fruition, but in a dramatic ritual these colonists asserted their views. Donning the garb of Mexican chieftains and Indian warriors, they paraded through the streets of Mexico City toward the house of Martín Cortés. When they arrived Cortés flung open the gates and the crowd gave him a crown of flowers. Accepting the offering, Cortés returned to his business and the “Indians” dispersed. Cortés and his fellow demonstrators had symbolically reenacted the submission of Moctezuma to the Spanish. When the leaders of the incipient revolt were later put on trial, the judges saw the meaning clearly. In marching through the streets dressed as Indians and handing Martín Cortés a crown, the demonstrators, in the words of one judge, “meant to indicate that the Marqués was to be king of this land.

Thanksgiving, for Americans, starts a long season of hyperactivity consumerism that has become the hallmark of year-end behavior. There is no denying that a ritual of shopping has emerged, and that few (even the atheists) can offer any meaningful resistance to the “holiday season.”

Sharon has already received some guff for saying that Thanksgiving is “… a classic Invented Tradition … .” (Hopefully, she won’t mind a little more.)

There are few cultural practices that originate before 1800 or whose meaning has not been radically altered since. Carnival, for instance, is by no means a modern invention, but the festivities have been better defined over the modern period than any longer duration. The evolution of Carnival (into its currently codified form) was a reaction to the process of modernization (nationalism, secularization, tourism, consumerism, etc.) as they were experienced in different contexts. In other cases, practices transcended their temporal and spatial bounds in order to achieve broader, more often national, importance.

Why should we care whether or not a tradition has been invented? Should historians judge the authenticity of culture, looking to locate the roots of practices in antiquity or folklore? Given that most of the nations of the world are young (less than two hundred years), their national festivals could be nothing other than recent constructions, nationalizations of local cultures, or secularizations of religion.

Historian David Crowe has published a new, academic biography of Oskar Schindler wherein he claims that Schindler’s persona and legend have been hyped up. His actions were actually more ambiguous than courageous, and his efforts to save Jews only a small part of a self-indulgent life. The film portrayed him falsely as a hero.

“Steve is a very wonderful, tender man,” Mr. Crowe said of Mr. Spielberg, “but ‘Schindler’s List’ was theater and not in an historically accurate way. The film simplifies the story almost to the point of ridiculousness.”

I have questions about why Crowe has taken on Schindler and the film. One of Schindler’s List’s major themes was the man who rises above his pettiness just once in order to become the hero. Crowe makes the same argument himself, but makes it seem as if the film turned him into the classical hero. Crowe’s argument goes into pettiness itself, focusing on minutiae and criticizing it for not reaching standards of “truth” that films, in general, don’t promise.

He dismissed some scenes in the film and book that are part of Schindler’s legend. For instance, in the film Schindler is shown riding with his mistress on Lasota Hill in Krakow and watching the clearing of the ghetto in March 1943, when he sees a little girl seeking shelter. The scene depicts Schindler’s moral awakening, but Mr. Crowe called it “totally fictitious.” He said that it would have been impossible to see that part of the ghetto from the hill, and that Schindler never saw the girl. Schindler’s transformation was more gradual, Mr. Crowe said, and even before the ghetto was cleared he was appalled by the mistreatment of the Jews.

Attacking the narrative devices of film is a straw man. Is it so important that Schindler had a moment or months of revelation? Certainly historians are not immune to this problem: even Thucydides inserted the legend when he had experienced the real events.

I have yet to get into this season’s Amazing Race. I even missed the first half hour, preferring to read (Governance of Europe’s City Regions–I am a nerd). The teams are competitive rather than personable. Jonathan, the abuser, should be dropped from the competition as soon as possible. His behavior should not be tolerated. At least Gruff Gus will hang around for another week.

Aidan Southall (The City in Time and Space, read a review) attempts to provide a comprehensive framework for urban history on the global scale. His periodization (Asiatic, Ancient, Feudal, and Capitalist) is based on Marxist theory: the form of cities is determined by creativity, production and wealth. More importantly, cities are sites of disparities and contradictions: intellectual freedom, the manufacturing of prosperity, and social divisions.

After discussing some early forms of urbanization (like Çatal Hüyük), which were more large settlements attached to agricultural endeavors, Southall looks at the settlements formed in Ancient Mesopotamia. These cities are more important than the ones that came before because they are a product of a rich economic milieu that leads to political organization, whereas earlier cities are isolated phenomena. In the Asiatic Mode, cities are ritual centers for agricultural regions (like Eridu). There was not clear difference between “town and country” at this point. Increasingly urban cults developed administration in order to organize agricultural production and income. As imperial expansion occurred, the cities became hierarchalized: settlements submitted to the authority of more powerful entities (like Uruk), but the indigenous political structures were not changed. Some form of political elite emerged, but society was mostly egalitarian.

The Ancient Mode is characterized by ruralization and the emergence of the polis. In the Greek city-states, rural elites withdrew from the countryside, maintaining agriculture as a source of wealth, and segregated themselves from the rest of the population. Within the city they developed freedoms that allowed genius and creativity to emerge. The shape of the city was determined by the politics of the city: the agora (public assembly), public temples, and walls. Political participation was encouraged through public venues in order to increase the loyalty of the citizenry. But the polis was exclusionary: it was based on the domination of the hinterland, the redefinition of non-owning producers as slaves, and limiting participation of women. Greece was particularly influential in that standards of urban planning appeared that were applied elsewhere in the Mediterranean world, making all cities familiar.

The Feudal Mode stands in relation to the ancient. Few new cities were built, and those Ancient cities that survived fought degeneration. Many were the targets for plundered. The buildings, for the most part, grew older: people were aware that they were living in the shells of Greek and Roman accomplishments. Gothic, of course, is one example of how cities were built up. The urban space started to become distinct from the rural. Political power was based on agricultural domination, but those forces were not located within the city but closer to the sites of production. Furthermore, feudal lords attempted to dominate the cities, but with little success. “Town and country” opposed one another. From within the walls the merchants ascended politically, laying the foundations for the next phase.

In the capitalist mode cities are centers of accumulation. They control productive regions and are even productive forces in their own right. The impulse of capitalist city is also imperial. The need to export leads to the creation of colony cities throughout the world.

Note: Southall explores differences of urbanization in other parts of the world, which are striking.

[A little theory?]

The current issue of Economic Geography (Volume 80 No. 4, October 2004) focuses on trends in French economic geography, in particular what it calls the new socioeconomic geography as represented by the GREMI group. The new approach focuses on territory as an a priori factor in economic development, a “cradle of innovation”.

Olivier Crevoisier’s article, “The Innovative Milieus Approach: Toward a Territorialized Understanding of the Economy?”, describes the spatial influences on economics: technology (as produced by intellectual organization and creativity), organization (networks related to production and capital, etc.), and proximity (relation of the territory to various resources, both physical and virtual). The territory is an innovative milieu in the sense that it mobilizes these three internal properties: its universities, its financial institutions, and its geographic relationship to markets. Cervoisier points out that cities hold “a privileged place for something new” because they combine intellectual and financial forums and because they are nodes for various global networks–it is difficult to dissociate the city from territorial development.

This article about J. Gordon Liddy and how fascism influenced his life should raise questions about how much extreme nationalism can be tamed by removing its racism. Simply put: its aggression is transferred into other realms.

This gave Liddy hope “for the first time in my life” that he too could overcome weakness. When he listened to Hitler on the radio, it “made me feel a strength inside I had never known before,” he explains. “Hitler’s sheer animal confidence and power of will [entranced me]. He sent an electric current through my body.”