In the kingdom of the vandals
Jan. 23rd, 2010 11:27 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomus
In 455AD the Vandals -- the tribal name people from the area of today's eastern Germany and Poland were called back then -- sacked Rome, which is where we get the modern sense of the word "vandalism", meaning "senseless destruction, particularly in diminution of aesthetic appeal or destruction of objects that were completed with great effort." But wait, we're jumping ahead.It's cold in Berlin. Very, very cold. Today's maximum temperature here is forecast to be minus 11c, and its minimum temperature minus 15c. This is colder than the seasonal average, and a lot colder than Osaka, my last city of residence, which today is ranging between plus 1 and plus 9 centigrade. I'm suffering from culture shock.
Dirty ice and crusty snow weighs heavy on Berlin; the pavement might have a little plowed catwalk you can mince cautiously along if you're lucky, but mostly you just have to slither and plod across it. The bushes outside my living room window were unlucky enough to develop a canopy of snow which kept getting heavier until the plants caved in completely. They now lie crushed under a massive snowdrift. Step outside and you're apparently wearing no trousers, and someone's apparently spraying hydrochloric acid in your face.In these conditions you try to avoid going out into the Muscovite murk, the Martian perma-grey. You avoid the pain and hassle of the city. When you do make a trip outside, there's a palpable sense of exhaustion; Berliners have been facing these conditions for almost two months now, and they might continue for two months more. The novelty of snow soon fades, leaving a certain kind of Siberian despair in its wake.
That's the attitude of the downtrodden-looking middle-class majority, dowdy in jeans and boots and fleece jackets. But -- compared with Japan -- Berlin is also full of "underground people" who seem, in winter, to be more mad and desperate and poor than usual. The squat types with their big dogs look more embattled, the illegal U-Bahn ticket-sellers won't take no for an answer, and the alkies are drunker and more intrusive.Coming back from my Brel interview at the BBC bureau at the Schiffbauerdamm yesterday -- on a weekday at lunchtime -- I shared a carriage with a shouty bunch of youths who'd obviously been drinking too much, because one of them vomited continuously on the floor while the others whooped with laughter, egging him on. Soon the whole carriage reeked sickeningly of the acid insides of his stomach. I got off as soon as I could only to board another train with a set of drunken youths on it. One of them sat next to me and suddenly began tugging my hat off, patting my trousers, and asking me which of the embarrassed women opposite I'd prefer to 69. "You've been drinking, haven't you?" I asked, in English. "It's not impossible," replied the geeky thug, in German.
My trips to and from the Berlin airport at either end of my Japan trip were characterised by similar encounters. On the way to Tegel in early December I was menaced by a madman who shouted (rather presciently) "Japan! Japan! Okay? Okay?" at me, but in a super-threatening way, as if I was personally insulting him. (I was dressed in Japanese style, with tenugui and cloak.) On the way back, on Monday evening, it was people shouting "Pirat!" My nerves were frazzled by 12 hours on jets, and having to lug heavy suitcases across the snow (the bus-driver decided, just two stops from the airport, for reasons of his own, to dump us at the kerbside), and I felt a sudden urge to pile into the idiots shouting at me. Six weeks in Japan had raised my standards for public behaviour to levels that Berlin doesn't come anywhere near.It isn't just random, drunk rogue males on trains who menace you here. There are also petty officials to deal with. At the building the BBC shares with Reuters and other media companies I entered by the wrong door and stood in a corridor ringing a non-functioning bell marked "BBC". A German security guard approached, seeming highly skeptical that someone like me could possibly be a BBC interviewee. Even when I'd given him the name of my contact and explained that I was here to be interviewed, his manner didn't change; I was still some kind of intruder.
When the time came to exit the building the lady at the front desk called out a challenge so peremptory, rude and familiar that I assumed it couldn't possibly be for me, and walked straight past. Alarmed that she hadn't signed me in, she was in fact demanding which company I'd been seeing. It was her tone, though, that was so brash, entitled, authoritarian. I wish I could say she's a one-off, but there are times when everybody in Berlin seems like that. You go into a shop, just back from Japan, and expect the local version of a cheerful irrashaimase! Instead you get a sort of scowl that seems to say "What the fuck do you want, you weird pirate-looking guy?" Even when you say "Guten Tag!" you may well get no response.Of course, the commercial classes mistrust the customers because the customers are often the very thugs and hooligans, alcoholics and shoplifters I've described tangling with on the trains; a class of people who, in the name of some ill-defined "anarchism" or "anti-globalism", smash shop and bank windows at any opportunity, and start drinking at breakfast.
It would be lovely to paint it as principled protest, but let's face facts: some Berliners have a self-righteousness about their incapacity, their unemployment, their non-participation in what they call the Scheisse-System. It's an attitude of arrogance-in-failure you just don't encounter in Asia. Osaka has a lot of poverty, but you sense that everybody tries their best, and that there's a warm glow of positive affect towards society, and towards collective property. The ugly tagging and name-scratching (and what could be a better symbol of the assertion of an ugly, arrogant individualism over collective property?) that blights every available surface (except, inexplicably, private cars) here is largely absent from Japan, where clear train windows and pristine plush fabric seat covers are still possible. In Berlin the council covers windows and seats with ugly patterns designed to deter taggers and name-scratchers.It's white Germans who are the worst -- totally disinhibited, arrogantly lazy, proud of not fitting in, beer bottle in hand, ready to assail and insult strangers. The immigrant quarters are oases of responsibility and industry; in predominantly-muslim Neukolln alcohol is shunned, which is already a huge step towards a more civilised urban environment.
"Goths and Vandals, a rude Northern race," wrote the poet Dryden of the sack of Rome, "did all the matchless Monuments deface." I'd love to say it was a groundless, baseless stereotype, but here they still are today, these rude northern people. They ride the trains, they grab your hat, they deface the walls and windows of all available public (but not private) property. It's odd that they get so antsy in the midst of their long, harsh winter, because winter is the time when we realise how dependent we are on society, on co-operation, and on harmony for our basic survival. Even the proudest and bitterest of us must raise our hands to the Scheisse-System, thankful for its heat.
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Re: Commoner Whimsy?
Date: 2010-01-23 07:48 pm (UTC)Re: Commoner Whimsy?
Date: 2010-01-23 08:04 pm (UTC)I love “success stories” – but hate it when people think it was all about them, their exceptional talents, and not also a social milieu that does not help the majority.
Re: Commoner Whimsy?
Date: 2010-01-23 08:22 pm (UTC)But existentialism stresses individual responsibility too, including the responsibility to make a political commitment. You're on very thin ice when you start to tell people their destinies are outside their own control. Marxism -- with, for instance, the idea that a class-in-itself must become a class-for-itself, or that labour must become unalienated, or that theory must lead to praxis -- stresses taking control, and taking responsible (and sometimes revolutionary) action. I think the emphasis on social culpability is a modern heresy, more nanny state than anything I'd recognise as leftism. Or like those Americans who sue the cafe when they spill coffee on themselves.
Re: Commoner Whimsy?
Date: 2010-01-23 08:42 pm (UTC)Re: Commoner Whimsy?
Date: 2010-01-23 08:48 pm (UTC)You'd want an objective class not to become fully aware of itself as such? That's an odd sort of "moderation". In-itself and for-itself is not something you "balance"; either a class has consciousness of itself or it doesn't.
I don’t think we should deconstruct the individual to a pure cultural artifact… but the facts are that the minority most protected and supported by “the system” are those with money and power
This seems to suggest that because money promotes agency, the poor cannot also be agents.
Emphasis on the state simply means state regulations should be changed… and of course individuals must do this, and also change, alone and collectively.
It's so hard to change a culture, and yet so easy to change cultures (just get on a plane).
Re: Commoner Whimsy?
Date: 2010-01-23 08:57 pm (UTC)I don’t think money promotes agency… it has power within limits. We are all agents, some just get more done, and have more protections.
Re: Commoner Whimsy?
Date: 2010-01-23 09:35 pm (UTC)Ha! The unconscious of class consciousness! Nice wriggle. But I was simply saying that it's silly to say "I'm a moderate, so I'm going to balance the class-in-itself with the class-for-itself." A moderate position might be to wonder what a class should do with its consciousness of its objective interests, but surely not to deny it that consciousness or say it should stay halfway there. I suspect you're just not very familiar with the idea of the class-in-itself / class-for-itself in Marxist theory.
"Class consciousness in Marxism [is] a concept which became famous with Georg Lukács' History and Class Consciousness (1923). It is seen as the process of a "class in itself" moving in the direction of a "class for itself," a collective agent that changes history rather than simply being a victim of the historical process." (Wikipedia)
And there we see the idea of agency, responsibility, control in a leftist setting. A class aware of its objective common interests is a class that can become historically responsible; an agent.
(My flat, featuring proudly-displayed Lukács book!)
Re: Commoner Whimsy?
Date: 2010-01-23 10:29 pm (UTC)To put it in semi-Derridian terms, 100% presence (consciousness) is impossible… and I imagine looking for that Holy Grail of a class which has reached the END of what it can accomplish as far as self-consciousness is concerned is a vain pursuit. That said, again, “agitate, educate, and organize”… all for that “moving in the direction” – but I think part of the consciousness would be realizing that we can’t be fully conscious!—we ARE partially victims of history; a history which we can change by opening ourselves to the (im)possible future, but which, like a billion years of evolutionary heart-beating, can NOT be fully controlled (consciously) by any agent, individual or collective.
What I mean by “radical moderate” has more to do with the global median voter… what Global Democracy held in check by Legal Minority Rights, would yield. Although not incommensurable, I think there would be some miscommunication between “My” theories, and yours, Lukacs, etc. Some overlap, but divergence as well.
Re: Commoner Whimsy?
Date: 2010-01-23 10:42 pm (UTC)Re: Commoner Whimsy?
Date: 2010-01-25 08:01 pm (UTC)Serenity Prayer: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; the courage to change the things that I can; and the wisdom to know the difference.”
Re: Commoner Whimsy?
Date: 2010-01-24 05:47 am (UTC)Re: Commoner Whimsy?
Date: 2010-01-23 08:39 pm (UTC)"Anyone who comes from a poor background and has managed to escape it knows this." What they escaped and didn't say is below!
"The non-ambitious attitudes of unemployed and poor people everywhere."
Re: Commoner Whimsy?
Date: 2010-01-24 05:57 am (UTC)Re: Commoner Whimsy?
Date: 2010-01-24 06:45 am (UTC)