“Völlig willkürlicherweise behauptet man …, daß Kriege ein abnormales Vorkommnis im Lebenshaushalt der Menschheit seien, da sie doch im Buch der Geschichte auf jeder Seite verzeichnet stehen als ein nicht weniger normales, ja vielleicht normaleres Ereignis denn der Friede. Der Krieg strengt an, aber er erschöpft nicht; er ist eine natürliche Funktion, auf welche der Organismus der Menschheit eingerichtet ist. …

Die Erschöpfung, die sich Europas bemächtigt hat, ist …. sehr verdächtig. Denn es handelt sich nicht darum, daß ihm der Wiederaufbau mißlänge, den es vorhat; das Merkwürdige an der Sache ist, daß es ihn gar nicht vorhat. … Das beredste Zeichen der Zeit ist meiner Meinung, daß für ganz Europa das Morgen keine Verheißung birgt. … Das ist noch nie in Europa geschehen. Noch über den heftigsten und traurigsten Krisen stand mit dem tröstlichen Schein neuer Hoffnung der Umriß eines begehrenswerteren Daseins.

Heute verwirft der Europäer das Vorhandene … Aber was wünscht er sich statt … [seiner]? Im heutigen Europa wird nicht gewünscht. … Europa leidet an einem Ermatten seiner Wunschfähigkeit, das man nicht dem Krieg zuschreiben kann.”

aus: José Ortega Y Gasset: Aufbau und Zerfall einer Nation. Vorwort zur zweiten Auflage 1922. Stuttgart: DVA 1952, S.60-61.

Abb.: aus: Frans Masereel, die Stadt, 1925.

07/14

“Der Andalusier lebt in einem üppigen Land, das bei geringer Mühe herrlliche Früchte trägt. Überdies ist das Klima so milde, daß der Mensch von diesen Früchten sehr wenig braucht, um sein Dasein zu fristen – er lebt wie die Pflanze, die sich auch nur zum Teil von der Erde nährt und den Rest von der warmen Luft und dem wohltätigen Licht empfängt. …

Der Andalusier hat an die viertausend Jahre gefaulenzt, und er befindet sich nicht schlecht dabei. … Die berühmte Trägheit des Andalusiers ist die Form und Formel seiner Kultur. … Wenn wir dem Leben ein Maximum an Intensität geben wollen, wird … [das] einen maximalen Kraftaufwand von uns verlangen. Aber beschränken wir uns von vorneherein auf das vitale Problem, streben wir nach einer ‘vita minima’, so werden wir mit kleinster Mühe zu einer Lösung gelangen, die derjenigen des unternehmenderen Volkes an Vollkommenheit nicht nachsteht. Das ist der Fall des Andalusiers. … Anstatt sich anzustrengen, um zu leben, lebt er, um sich nicht anzustrengen, und macht aus der Vermeidung der Anstrengung das Prinzip seines Daseins.

Es wäre ein Irrtum, ohne weiteres anzunehmen, daß der Sevillaner auf das Leben eines Engländers der City verzichtet, weil er unfähig ist, so viel zu arbeiten wie dieser. Er würde eine solche Lebensweise, selbst wenn sie ihm ohne Arbeit als das Geschenk einer Fee in den Schoß fiele, mit Entsetzen zurückweisen. … Dem Andalusier erscheint an dem Engländer oder Deutschen die Art der Arbeit ebenso hirnverbrannt wie die der Zerstreuung, beides ohne Maß und eines vom anderen losgerissen. Er für sein Teil zieht es vor, wenig zu arbeiten und sich mäßig zu vergnügen, aber beides zugleich …”

aus: José Ortega Y Gasset: Theorie Andalusiens. In: ders.: Stern und Unstern. Stuttgart: DVA 1952, S.47-52. Span. Originalausgabe des Aufsatzes 1932.

Abb.: eigenes Foto, frz. Ardennen, 03/25.

07/14

“To bring in only urban, university-educated elites … is a waste both of human potential and of foreign policy, since the immigrants often get their degrees at universities in their own countries that have been funded by foreign governments to help create medical, legal and technical knowledge in the developing world. If the products of these programs all become hotel desk clerks and roofers in Western cities the entire aid agenda is wasted. … Of ‘chronically poor‘ immigrants in Canada, 41 per cent have university diploma’s. … The Canadian government was surprised to discover that the uneducated relatives of points migrants are faring better economically that the original migrants themselves … [and] when immigrants are brought over without their networks of relatives and village neighbours, they are more likely to become isolated and unsocialized, to fall into criminality or social conservativism.”

aus: Doug Saunders: Arrival City. How the largest migration in history is reshaping our world. London: Windmill Books 2011 (Originalausgabe 2010), S. 91-93.

Abb.: Bathélémy Toguo: The world’s new climax, 2000, Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf.

06/14

“Because arrival cities are so widely misunderstood and distrusted – dismissed as static ‘slums’ rather than places of dynamic change – governments have devoted much of the past 60 years to attempting to prevent their formation. …

[But] people move through its neighbourhoods. … they arrive very poor, … but … [poverty] rates fall sharply, especially during the first decade of residence … Nevertheless, the neighbourhoods themselves often stay poor or even get poorer, … sending its educated second generation into more prosperous neighbourhoods and taking in waves of new villagers. … The downward trend for the place is the opposite indicator of the upward trend enjoyed by the residents themselves. This paradox has created a sense among outsiders that the city‘s immigrant districts are poorer or more desperate than they really are, which leads to a misunderstanding of the forms of government investment they really need – a serious policy problem in many migrant-based cities around the world. rather than getting the tools of ownership, education, security, business creation and connection to the wider economy, they are too often treated as destitute places that need non-solutions such as social workers, public-housing blocks and urban-planned redevelopments …”

aus: Doug Saunders: Arrival City. How the largest migration in history is reshaping our world. London: Windmill Books 2011 (Originalausgabe 2010), S. 55, 81/82.

Abb.: Tom Frantzen: Brutopia, Mensen op zoek naar het geluk in Brussel, Migratiemuseum, Foto: brusselblogt

06/14

“People had been moving from the country to the city since about 3000 B.C., when the first urban formations took shape around the Persian Gulf and soon spread across Asia and Europe. For the next 5.000 years, countless millions of peasants, and hundreds of thousands of regional elites, made the move to the city …

For most of those 5.000 years, big cities functioned as ‘population sumps … they soaked up large numbers of rural people, held them for a few years and promptly killed them, usually before they could reproduce or settle in any meaningful way … In every major city, deaths outnumbered births, and childhood mortality was especially high … London in the eighteenth century was so lethal that it required an average of 6.000 rural migrants a year just to maintain its population of 600.000. Cities, like armies, destroyed people almost as fast as they could take them in.

In the last half of the eighteenth century, and especially after 1780 or so, the dynamics began to change. … The tightening web of global commerce and communication had created a homogenous human pool of immunity across Europe and much of Asia, rendering formerly lethal epidemic diseases endemic (that is, turning them into mere childhood diseases). The new immunity unleashed an unprecedented population boom. …”

aus: Doug Saunders: Arrival City. How the largest migration in history is reshaping our world. London: Windmill Books 2011 (Originalausgabe 2010), S. 135/136.

Abb.: Olalekan Jeyifous: Shanty Mega Structures of Lagos Nigeria, 2021, Detail, Moma, im Internet.

06/14

“To an outsider, the village seems fixed, timeless, devoid of motion or change, isolated from the larger world. We consign it to nature. To those who might glance at its jumble of low buildings from a passing vehicle, the village seems a tranquil place of ordered, subtle beauty. We imagine a pleasant rhythm of life, free from the strains of modernity. Its small cluster of weathered shacks is nestled into the crest of a modest valley. …

in peasant villages around the world, nobody sees rural life as tranquil, or natural, or as anything but a monotonous, frightening gamble. …

At the moment, only 41 per cent of Asians and 38 per cent of Africans live in cities – leaving a population of villagers that is unproductive and unsustainable. They are on the land not because it is a better life, but because they are trapped.”

aus: Doug Saunders: Arrival City. How the largest migration in history is reshaping our world. London: Windmill Books 2011 (Originalausgabe 2010), S. 5,6 und 22

06/14

“Im übrigen, was ich Ihnen gestern über die sogenannte Sturmsonate gesagt habe, ist sicher interessant und ich bin auch sicher, daß, was ich Ihnen über diese sogenannte Sturmsonate gesagt habe, stimmt, aber ist doch wahrscheinlich für mich selbst interessanter, als für Sie. So ergeht es einem ja immer, daß man über ein Thema spricht, weil einen dieses Thema fasziniert, aber es fasziniert einen selber mehr als den, dem wir es letzten Endes doch mit aller krampfhaften Rücksichtslosigkeit, zu der wir fähig sind, aufzwingen. … Jeder hat seinen eigenen, seinen ureigenen Redezwang, und ich habe den musikwissenschaftlichen Redezwang schon mein ganzes musikwissenschaftliches Leben … Natürlich kann ich heute auch sagen, daß alles heute Unsinn ist, was ich gestern über die Sturmsonate gesagt habe, so wie ja alles Unsinn ist, was gesagt wird, aber wir sagen diesen Unsinn doch überzeugend, sagte Reger. Alles Gesagte stellt sich über kurz oder lang als Unsinn heraus, aber wenn wir es überzeugend sagen, mit der unglaublichsten Vehemenz, die uns möglich ist, ist es ja kein Verbrechen, sagte er. Was wir denken, sollten wir auch sagen, sagte Reger, und wir geben im Grunde so lange keine Ruhe, bis wir es gesagt haben, wenn wir es verschweigen, ersticken wir daran. Die Menschheit wäre längst erstickt, wenn sie ihren im Verlauf ihrer Geschichte gedachten Unsinn verschwiegen hätte, jeder einzelne, der zu lange schweigt, erstickt, auch die Menschheit kann nicht zu lange schweigen, denn dann erstickt sie, auch wenn es doch nur immer Unsinn ist, das der einzelne denkt, das die Menschheit denkt und das der einzelne jemals gedacht hat und das die Menschheit jemals gedacht hat. Einmal sind wir Redekünstler, einmal Schweigekünstler und wir perfektionieren diese Kunst bis zum Äußersten, sagte er, unser Leben ist genau in dem Grade interessant, in dem wir unsere Redekunst wie unsere Schweigekunst haben entwickeln können. … Gerade weil sie theoretisch an Musik tatsächlich gar nicht interessiert sind, sind Sie das ideale Opfer meiner Auseinandersetzungen mit der Musik, sagte Reger. Sie hören aufmerksam zu und widersprechen nicht, sagte er, Sie lassen meine Reden in Ruhe, das brauche ich, gleich was es wert ist, was ich sage, es ebnet mir nur den Weg durch diese fürchterliche, glauben Sie mir, doch tatsächlich sehr selten glücklich machende musikalische Existenz …”

aus: Thomas Bernhard: Alte Meister, Frankfurt (Main): Suhrkamp 1985, S. 185-189.

04/14

“Despite having sympathy for recent forms of protest like the indignados in Spain or the various forms of ‘Occupy’, there is a reason to be concerned about the type of anti-institutional strategy that they have adopted and that is inspired by the exodus model. … They … believe in the possibility for social movements, on their own, to bring about a new type of society where a ‘real’ democracy could exist without the need for the state or other forms of political institutions. Without any institutional relays, they will not be able to bring about any significant changes in the structures of power. Their protests against the neo-liberal order risk being soon forgotten. …

I find their slogan ‘We are the 99%’ rather unsatisfactory. It might be rousing, but it reveals a lack of awareness about the wide range of antagonisms existing in society and a rather naïve belief in the possibility of installing a consensual society, once the ‘bad’ 1% have been eliminated. …

Jason Hickel … says that Occupy’s structure of non-hierarchical, consensus-based participatory democracy takes the liberal ethic of celebrating diversity and tolerance to its extreme, and that this prevents them from apprehending the nature of power in capitalist societies and the fact of hegemony. Moreover, he sees an anti-political attitude and ‘the liberal ethic in full force’ in their refusal to organise around specific demands, so as not to alienate those who might disagree and discourage diversity. …

By mobilizing a binary rhetoric celebrating the virtues of the free market against the oppressive state, they [neo-liberal advocates] have been able to justify the primacy of the market and the commodification of all social realms, thereby establishing the bases of neo-liberal hegemony. …

Such a negative attitude with respect to the state is also found in some left radical sectors. This convergence can be explained by a shared belief in the availability of a self-regulating society beyond division and beyond hegemony. …

The “horizontalist’ protest movements … celebrate the ‘common’ over the market, but their rejection of the ‘public‘ and all the institutions linked to the state displays uncanny similarities with the neo-liberal attitude. …

The Occupy movement was almost non-existent in France .. In France … the belief in the power of politics to change things has not waned like in other European countries. …

it is high time to stop romanticizing spontaneism and horizontalism.”

aus: Chantal Mouffe: Agonistics. thinking the world politically. London/New York: Verso, 2013, S.77-127.

03/14

“Coming now to your question about the moralization of politics. … The distinction between left and right has been replaced by the one between right and wrong. This indicates that the adversarial model of politics is still with us, but the main difference is that now politics is played out in the moral register. … When the opponents are not defined in a political but in a moral way, they cannot be seen as adversaries, but only as enemies.”

aus: Chantal Mouffe: Agonistics. thinking the world politically. London/New York: Verso, 2013, S.142/143.

Abb.: Eko Nugroho: Ride Your Moral, 2014, im Internet.

03/14

“… Now, if Britain was a typical country, you might expect it to have a second city of about five million, which is twice the size of Greater Manchester or the area around Birmingham.

I say this because it has been observed – very loosely it should be said – that the size distribution of cities within countries tends to follow a pattern in which the biggest city is about twice the size of the second city, three times the size of the third city, four times the size of the fourth and so on.

It is named Zipf’s Law after the American linguist George Zipf, who noticed that the frequency distribution of words in many languages followed that pattern.

For the UK, the implication is stark. As the eminent economic geographer from the London School of Economics, Henry Overman, puts it: ‘These kind of arguments imply that the problem with Britain’s urban system is not that London is too big. Instead, if anything, it’s that our cities are too small.’

Our second tier cities in particular. Having cities that are too small is potentially an economic problem because we know that big cities act as hubs which boost whole regions.

We know that cities are where a disproportionate amount of business gets done. And we know that, typically, bigger cities are more productive than smaller ones. …

Hitherto, one might say that the lack of a proper second city has allowed London to divide and rule the rest of the nation. And the argument is even more powerful now that London has become such an obvious global centre.

It is as though Britain has a great world city but lacks a great national one.
So, if you believe this analysis, which second city offers the most hope for taking on the might of London?

Manchester or Birmingham are usually put forward, and the data suggests there is a logic to those two being on the shortlist. …

However, there is an interesting alternative suggestion – Hebden Bridge. It is not a suggestion to take literally, but it does make an important point.

Hebden Bridge, nestling in the Pennines between Manchester and Leeds, is certainly one of the most interesting and flourishing towns in the UK. It was once declared the “fourth funkiest town in the world” (whatever that means) and is often said to be the lesbian capital of the UK. The suggestion that it is Britain’s second city came from resident David Fletcher, who was active in the 80s saving the town’s old mills and converting them to modern use.

His point is that Hebden Bridge is an inverted city with a greenbelt centre and suburbs called Manchester, Leeds and Liverpool.

His point was that the real second city of the UK is a northern, trans-Pennine strip that extends the relatively short distance across northern England, joining the built-up areas that lie second, fourth and sixth in the UK ranking.

Certainly, Hebden Bridge has attracted a lot of professional couples who are split commuters, one heading towards Manchester and one towards Leeds each morning. It is a place that allows both those cities to be treated as next door.

And maybe therein lies some kind of answer to the critical mass of London. It’s not a second city called Hebden Bridge, but a super-city that tries to turn the great cities of the north into one large travel-to-work area.

It would require a lot of physical infrastructure to improve links between the different centres. …”

aus: Evan Davis : The case for making Hebden Bridge the UK’s second city, Mind the Gap: London vs. The RestBBC Two at 21:00 on Monday, 10 March 2014. (siehe ganzen Text auf BBC-Website)

03/14