Thursday, March 22nd, 2012 
When I was in primary school, there were two street names in my hometown that I always got wrong. My teacher looked at me with disbelief and worry when I called the street next to the school Wolgaster Straße.
My geography skills improved dramatically after 1989, when the street names finally caught up with me. I grew up in the German Democratic Republic; call it DDR, GDR, or East Germany. The street names my teachers insisted on were Wilhelm Pieck Allee (Allee means promenade) and Otto Grotewohl Allee, named after the first President and Prime Minister of my dear republic. At home, I had learned to refer to these streets as Wolgaster Straße (Straße means street) and Anklamer Straße. Wolgast and Anklam are nearby cities. If you go to Wolgast, you leave the city via Wolgaster Straße. These street names are neat mnemonic devices; they point to nearby places. My pre-1989 teacher was not worried about my lack of knowledge. She must have known that the names I used were from a different time. For her, remembering the wrong name was worse than forgetting the (politically) correct name. After 1989, the old names returned.
Since then, I never got in trouble over street names again – that is, until I moved to Berlin a few weeks ago for part of my sabbatical. It’s my first time living in Berlin. My parents grew up in this city. In their twenties, they moved away. Their memories of the city are from the 1970s. When I talk about places, subway stops, and streets in Berlin, my mother often has no idea what I am talking about. Danziger Straße? Torstraße? Where would that be? These places are not even in the former West Berlin; they are in the East. My parents knew them and yet don’t recognize them. Danziger Straße used to be called Dimitroffstraße when my mother roamed these quarters.
The obsession with naming and renaming streets pre-dates the East German state. I recently finished reading Hans Fallada’s amazing novel . . .
Read more: Making Sense of Place: Naming Streets and Stations in Berlin and Beyond
Wednesday, March 21st, 2012 
Carducci continues his series of reflections on art in the age of de-industrialization in this post on the work of Scott Hocking. -Jeff
It was recently announced that after more than five decades of abandonment and neglect, the sprawling, decrepit Packard Automotive Plant on the east side of Detroit will be demolished by its ostensible current owner Dominic Cristini. (For news coverage, click here, here, here, and here.) Designed in the early 1900s by industrial architect Albert Kahn, the 40-acre, 3.5 million square foot complex was once the headquarters and main production site for the Packard Motor Car Company, one of the premier American luxury automobile brands of the 20th century. The plant was the first large-scale reinforced concrete industrial construction project in the world and at its opening in 1907 was considered to be the most advanced facility of its kind anywhere. The plant’s opening preceded by three years Henry Ford’s legendary Highland Park Plant (also designed by Kahn and immortalized by Louis-Ferdinand Celine in Journey to the End of the Night — for $5 a Day) and the moving assembly line by six years.
Since its closing in 1958, the complex has progressively fallen into decay with several sections in collapse as a result of exposure to the elements and a succession of fires; although, most of the buildings remain structurally sound due to their reinforced concrete construction. Much of the wiring and other building materials have been stripped by scavengers over the years. In recent times, the plant has also served as an enclave for so-called urban explorers, graffiti artists, and purveyors of the photographic genre known as “ruin porn.” Without question, the most significant work done in this environment is that of Detroit artist Scott Hocking.
Born in Detroit in 1975, Hocking has been surveying the postindustrial landscape of Detroit for more than a decade. His project . . .
Read more: Scott Hocking’s Garden of the Gods
Monday, March 19th, 2012 By Pamela Brown | 
Occupy’s six-month birthday celebration last Saturday at Zuccotti Park was first spent in celebration: the scene was joyous with friends reuniting after winter hibernation. “Spring training” regimes were conducted. The drum circle was back, and mic checks once again created a collective voice.
But when protestors undertook a spontaneous, albeit brief, reoccupation, they were met with the most violent and unrestrained NYC police force to date. MTA buses were commandeered and over seventy arrests were made. The significance and power of the park was clear once again.
Police violence was immediately challenged with solidarity marches in New York and throughout the country on Sunday. In spite of a winter predicting our demise, Occupy is alive again this spring. Not that we were ever really dead, but since the cops evicted Zuccotti the first time last fall, OWS has been struggling to find a way of staying meaningful without the spectacle of the park. Liberty Park offered a sense of commonality, a point of access, and a feeling of empowerment that has been difficult to replicate.
In fact, as the winter approached, the occupation had already started to weaken. Social problems appeared within the park. The influx of those bearing the stigmas of long-term homelessness, substance abuse and mental illness had already created divisions, cutting across the usual lines of class, race and “mental status.” Neighborhoods and maps developed to segregate social groups, restricting movement within what was established and claimed as a space of “openness.” Just after the fall storm, a woman pushed past me rushing from one side of the park to the other, and I heard her say to a friend, “Oh noooo, we don’t want to get caught in that part of the ‘hood.’ ” That comment stuck.
Many of us felt relieved that the police closed the park – that the occupation went out with a bang, rather than slowly disintegrating in front of an increasingly disinterested television audience, suggesting the movement’s ideals as being fundamentally in conflict to the wider public.
Nonetheless, the movement did continue. The loss of the park meant . . .
Read more: OWS at Six Months: Reflections on the Winter Occupation
Friday, March 16th, 2012 
The new Obama campaign video, “The Road We’ve Traveled,” is a compelling piece of political expression. It’s not art. It’s not news. It’s a form of effective political speech. The Obama campaign calls the video a documentary, and that it is: a documentary advocating a partisan position that is meant to rally supporters, and convince opponents and the undecided.
Partisan Republicans have criticized the video for being propaganda: a serious charge coming from people who often label President Obama, a moderate left of center Democrat, as a socialist, and speak ominously about the end of America as we have known it if the President were to be reelected. Mitt Romney, more lightly, perhaps in fact revealing that he is a moderate, dismissed the video as an infomercial. I understand the Republican objections. They see a political move and are trying to counter it by suggesting it should be dismissed and not watched.
Less understandable is the performance yesterday of CNN talk show host, Piers Morgan, who aggressively criticized Davis Guggenheim, the director of the film, for not balancing its advocacy with any criticisms of the President. This baffles me. Just because the video is the creation of an award winning filmmaker doesn’t mean that his political expression in this work should be measured by the same standards as his art. Guggenheim, as he tried to explain last night in his interview with Morgan, is politically committed and the work on the video is his way of being politically active.
When I go to the movies, read a novel or see an art exhibit, I think it is important to distinguished between art and politics. Works that have noble messages do not necessarily make fine art. As Malgorzata Bakalarz examined in her last post, there is a difference between good and politically important art. On the other hand, and this is central here, it is just as important to not . . .
Read more: “The Road We’ve Traveled”: A Serious Political Argument
Thursday, March 15th, 2012 
On March 11, 16 villagers including 9 children, were murdered by an American staff sergeant in the Panjwai district of Kandahar Province in rural, southern Afghanistan. The early reports told a horrifying story. The sergeant was part of a village stabilization operation. The team was trying to develop relationships with village leaders and help organize local policeman to search out Taliban leaders. It has been reported that the soldier is 38 years old with 11 years of service. He is married with two children and had been on three tours of duty in Iraq. The sergeant left his base, walked more than a mile, forced his way into three separate homes and went on a killing spree. He subsequently burned some of the bodies. A patrol had been dispatched to find him when he was reported missing, and apprehended him after the killings on his way back to the base. He hasn’t provided any explanations for his actions.
The massacre provoked official reaction. President Hamid Karzai called the act inhuman, intentional and demanded justice. President Obama and Secretary of Defense Panetta extended their condolences and promised a thorough investigation. President Obama, further, characterized the actions as tragic and shocking. The NATO spokesperson expressed his deep sadness.
It is feared that the massacre will set off riots and others forms of violence. Common reactions outside of Afghanistan are revulsion and puzzlement. How could such an atrocity happen?
According to Jonathan Shay, M. D., Ph.D., this type of outrageous killing by an isolated individual has been going on for thousands of years. Dr. Shay explored the subject in Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character. He combines an examination of Homer’s Iliad with narratives and analysis drawn from his experiences as a psychiatrist treating veterans with chronic post- traumatic stress syndrome.
Shay’s chapter 5, “Berserk,” may help explain the current atrocities in Afghanistan committed by . . .
Read more: Berserk: The Killing of 16 Civilians in Afghanistan
Tuesday, March 13th, 2012 
 6 lectures, 4 days, 3 countries, 1 collaborative consultation, weekending with my grandson and his parents: my schedule for last ten days. I spoke with colleagues and students in Berlin at Humboldt University and the European College of the Liberal Arts, in Poland, as the Wroclaw Visiting Professor, and worked with my friend and colleague, Daniel Dayan, in Paris about a book we are planning on writing together. As a children’s classic I gave to my grandson summarizes: Busy Day, Busy People.
In Germany, the primary focus of discussion was my newest book, Reinventing Political Culture. In Wroclaw, the focus was on my previous book, The Politics of Small Things. I was there for the book launch of its Polish translation and to discuss with a group of students and colleagues the key theoretical chapter in it, “Theorizing the Kitchen Table and Beyond.” I spoke about the chapter in light of the uprisings, occupations, flash mobs and demonstrations in the past couple of years. In Paris, I talked with Daniel about our prospective new book, which would be a development of the themes I raised in my Wroclaw lecture.
Our major thesis will be: the politics of small things + the media = political transformation. One possible transformation is the reinvention of political culture: changing the way people relate power and culture, challenging the bases of power, moving culture from inheritance to creativity, rewriting the story people tell themselves about themselves.
Daniel and I want to explain how the interactions between people, face to face, but especially virtual, mediated interactions, yield the possibility of large-scale social, political and cultural change. We will link his work as a student of semiotics and media, with mine as a student of micro-politics and political culture.
In Wroclaw I shared an outline of a part our project, in a very preliminary form. I reviewed my idea about the power of the politics of small things, the power of people meeting with shared principles, speaking and acting in each other’s presence, working in concert. . . .
Read more: Mid-Atlantic Reflections: On the Road, The Politics of Small Things and Media
Friday, March 9th, 2012 
These days, as I reflect on the explosive aftereffects of the incineration of copies of the Quran in a US military base in Afghanistan, I find myself re-reading chapters 1-11 of Book Two of Aristotle’s Rhetoric, where he offers his treatment of the passions (the Greek is pathē, from which we get all those “path” terms, like sympathy, empathy, apathy, pathetic, and so on). This “theory of moral sentiments” comes in the context of “a theory of rhetoric”: a reasoned discourse offering analysis and advice concerning the political use of composed speech in situations where persuasion is based on something other than “purely” rational conviction. Central to what Aristotle has to say is that human beings experience anger on those occasions when they: (1) believe that they themselves or something that they hold dear (or, especially, most dear) has been belittled and (2) cherish a wish for revenge. The paradigmatic example is Achilles, who believing himself to have been robbed of his honor (which is what was most dear to him at that time) by Agamemnon, displays his anger precisely by predicting and praying for (and then enlisting the gods’ support for his predictive prayer) the devastation of the Greek army as a punishment to Agamemnon. This is especially exemplary in that, among other things, it shows why what we euphemistically call “collateral damage” is so endemic to “the work of anger.”
The terrible events that have followed the burning of the Qurans by insufficiently sensitive and ill trained personnel, sadly, were entirely predictable in terms of Aristotle’s account. The anger, with its destructive thirst for revenge, that a believer feels in seeing the testament burned unceremoniously as refuse is immediately understandable for someone who has taken the slightest moment to conceive of how a Muslim relates to the sacred word, and how it differs from the way in which a Christian relates to the sacred word. With just the smallest degree of education—precisely the kind of education Aristotle is trying to provide in his Rhetoric—one could see at an instant . . .
Read more: On Anger, “Judeo-Christian” Values and the Quran Burning Controversy
Thursday, March 8th, 2012 
Some thirty years ago the legislature of the state of Minnesota, where I was teaching at time, decided to enact a seat-belt law. If memory serves, Congress had made the distribution of highway funds dependent upon such a revision of vehicular safety standards. Driving without seatbelts transformed accidents into fatal crashes and fender-benders into emergency room visits. Minnesota drivers and front seat passengers were to wear a lapbelt. (At first there was no fine, only a merry warning from a state trooper).
We considered this law in my undergraduate social theory class, considering the right and the responsibility of a government to restrain the freedom to choose. One of my treasured students, let us call this jeune femme fighter for liberté Marianne, informed us that she used to wear a seatbelt while driving, but as a result of the legislation, she no longer did. She sat athwart her steering wheel as an act of protest. For her, the core of freedom was to say “I won’t” to what she considered state intrusion, and there was much that she considered intrusive. While it might be a suitable coda to announce that I last saw her on a gurney, her survival paid for by fellow citizens, as far as I know she is still on the road. But principled libertarians like Marianne demand that we question the uncertain divide between community and liberty. Some of our fellow citizens instinctively reject any collective mandate.
I recall Marianne when I consider the travails of Mitt Romney and Barack Obama in their desires to defend a mandate for health care. Mandate is from the Latin mandatum, commission or order. As the opponents of mandated health care, whether in the Bay State or from coast to coast complain, a mandate orders citizens to purchase health insurance – with exceptions for those who cannot afford it – or to pay a fine. (A subtle constitutional . . .
Read more: Mandates and Their Foes
Monday, March 5th, 2012 
 Yesterday, once again, Vladimir Putin was “elected” President of Russia. Citizens could choose from among Putin, the current premier, and a group of weak opposition candidates, including well known faces such as Gennady Zyuganov and Vladimir Zhirinovsky who always run but never win, along with newer faces such as Mikhail Prokhorov or Putin’s old friend Sergei Mironov, who in addition to their doubtful independence from the Kremlin, did not offer much of a campaign or new political ideas. And while the voting took place, and Putin and his supporters started celebrating right away, social media like Facebook and Twitter bubbled over with photos and accounts of election fraud. The critical social response is every bit as important as the election results.
A couple of days before the election, thousands of independent ballot observers waited in long lines to receive their training and instructions. The observers – unpaid volunteers – had arrived from Moscow, from other cities and from the countryside. Russian newspaper editor Dmitri Surnin wrote that the atmosphere among the waiting crowds resembled the mood during a citizens’ mobilization on the eve of war. “And your political preferences don’t matter, if you’re a leftist, or right, green, liberal, monarchist or communist – when the Fatherland is in danger, everybody needs to stand together.”
The war to which Surnin refers is one between the people who want to play it by the rules and those who want to falsify the elections and obstruct Russia’s democratic course. He cynically observes that the first group will be convinced of their moral victory, with the law and the truth on their side, but the second group will steal the real triumph, with the courts, the police, and Vladimir Putin on theirs.
Indeed, Putin won. Now let’s talk about the moral victors. A number of originally internet-based groups managed to organize a citizens’ army of more than 80,000 volunteers, who enlisted to visit polling stations to be on the lookout for election fraud. As reporter Anna Nemtsova remarked, “They . . .
Read more: Putin Wins?
Sunday, March 4th, 2012 
Paul Gottfried and I disagree. He positions himself in opposition to “the post – Marxist PC left.” I suspect that my commitments to feminism, gay rights and the victories of the civil rights movement, while thinking that Marx was an important 19th century thinker, but not a guide for politics in our times, means that the phrase applies to me (even though I am not sure what it means exactly). Yet, I am pleased that I found a prominent conservative intellectual to contribute to our discussions. I have already learned something from Gottfried, and want to explore what the practical implications of an exchange of views between us, along with other Deliberately Considered contributors and readers, can be.
We certainly won’t come to agreement on some fundamentals. I don’t believe that the confrontation of our ideas will yield a higher dialectical truth. I am pretty sure that on some issues it is a matter of prevailing, not convincing. He writes about the “our oppressive anti-discrimination apparatus,” while I see only reasons to celebrate the struggle against discrimination, racism, sexism and the like. I see no possibility of compromise here. In fact, I regret that things haven’t changed as much as I think they should and welcome political action to move things forward.
Yet, I believe that there is a possibility that differences such as those that divide Professor Gottfried and me can be civilized, and not simply be about confrontation. A starting point is sharing insights, and I think I see one based on our opposing appraisals of the present state of American political culture. I see, and worry about, an ascendant know-nothing right, while Gottfried is deeply concerned about the ascendance of the post Marxist left. These differences, I believe, ironically point to a compatible understanding.
Gottfried’s diagnosis of the present political climate does indeed surprise me:
Those who oppose this [post Marxist pc] Left are fighting from a steadily weakening position. They have lost the cultural war to the state, our educational system and MTV; and as the . . .
Read more: Between Left and Right: Reflections on the Position of Paul Gottfried
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