On European Union's Transition towards Lisbon Treaty

It is difficult to miss the point that the multi-year drama over the approval of the Lisbon treaty by the member-states of the European Union was more about a collision of the badly understood institutional change of the EU and the popular perception of what this involves for each member country in terms of its positioning within the larger structure of relations. Indubitably, the EU gains it its overall influence in internal and external affairs through the very fact of becoming better governed and coordinated that the election of its president and foreign minister only weakly signifies. The effects of the change will be seen only later when the reorganized and still reforming itself EU commences on a track of transformation that has taken a coal and steel agreement as its starting point. It is clear that any offers of state-like symbols for the EU meets with stiff resistance yet. However, the Lisbon treaty by preserving the institutional moorings of the constitutional agrrement proffered earlier on for the approval by the EU's nations still ensures the forward momentum for the further institutionalization of the EU as a single actor capable of concerted course of action, be it internally or externally. Consequently, it should raise the stakes for closer cross-border cooperation within the Union, for the benefits of such coalition building would have immediate impact for accumulation of power within the from now on more effective and influential EU.

A Chatting Age Morphing into a Digital Blogosphere

It's strage that the pressure to be verbal has brought the blogosphere to maturity that challenges the assumptions of the newspaper, television and literature age with blogs, youtubes and e-books that seem to apply the same kind of pressure on the producers of content with the means of distribution and access eclipsing the original structure of relations. Its seems that another revolution is underway - that of the free content sweeping away the assumptions that the paid-for content has made possible for the last two hundred years or so. When newspapers and magazines hardly offer anything more complicated and the next blog post can aspire to be, when a wealth of special publication projects fills ever more niches, when audiences break down to the micro level of individual person, and when big corporations might in the near future offer exit strategies to individual content producers rather than companies, the playing field of the mass media as we know if may be heading for another capitalist shake-up that might leave the English-speaking public sphere at a disadvantage vis-a-vis other language and cultural environments where relative marginality, cultural traditions and institutional set-up will let a new arrangements of media providers and consumers to arise.

Sensibility, Addiction and Digitality: Perspectives on Being Post-Digital

From Negroponte's Being Digital we have moved into a whole different period of being post-digital with predictably short time span that made it possible to declare a new post-periodization to set in. Not honored with a theoretical terminology of its own, digital capitalism grows at a steep pace even in the days of one of the deepest economic crisis of last century and possibly of this, of this is only a beginning of tendencies that take shape. What in the economic world is called a new normal of economic conjuncture appears to have its pendant in the psychological new normal of addictive sensibility, addictive environments and addictive digitality that come into representative shapes in art exhibitions, computer games, amusement parks and historical districts that rest increasingly on digital media, caffeinated drinks and aesthetic sensibility to get their message across our increasingly distractive environments of instant communication, information overload, and nomadic lifestyles. These dimensions become ever more definitive as cities all over the world put ever increasing numbers of coffee shops on the maps of their flagship airports, art districts and upscale downtowns, ever thicker Wi-Fi network coverage and computer infrastructure into their daily operation, ever more money into art projects, museums and events, and ever more effort into fighting addictions to substances engendering dependencies strong and weak.

Runaway and Uncontrollable as a Defining Feature of This Century

The sad and fascinating feature of our times is that an increasing number of things that make up an inseparable part of our everyday lives is out of our control. From Google mail, internet applications, fossil energy, and risk estimations to our own selves. The irony of the situation is that both the trappings of modernity that surround us have come of age somewhere between 19th and 20th century, and therefore are not new or exciting in themselves. To this adds a seemingly subterranean shift in our self-perception, self-representation and self-development that we try but not always succeed to control. Indeed, decades if not centuries of development of social and human sciences do threated to reduce humans to nothing much than bundles of more or less idiosyncratic reactions that invariably follow same probability laws that do large collections of bees, animal herds and plain random samples. Economies of scale march forward, offer us ever cheaper and perfect material world, and put increasing premium on ephemeral and unstable factors. If to change ones sense of self is as easy as taking a medication, downloading a software and receiving a therapy session, then the core of our decision making power also shifts from within the sphere of our life-world into the non-human systems that surround us and that increasingly take lead in how we spend our time, how we perceive ourselves and how our moods are swayed. Cinema as an essentially a scientific and scholarly instrument can be a case in point.

Through the Looking Glass into the Second Life

Had Alice that got enticed to follow the white rabbit in a vest with a pocket clock into the Wonderland come of age in our epoch she not only would make a pretty wizened old lady but also be playing with the Second Life environments to get an after-taste of her long past childhood experiences of exploring a world that strangely resembled a dream. It is not just that I am trying to get at a root of what makes Second Life so attractive and engrossing, as actually any well-made game that is sold by the dozen in the shopping malls side by side with gaming consoles, but also my totally surprised realization that not only game-like environments can have a chance in the adult world but also that even a plain computing set-up can be enough to let one enjoy what the virtual reality has to offer. It gives me a pause not only about the gaming consoles that definitely come close to being micro-supercomputers for home use, since that is the capacity that the sophisticated games demand to run smoothly, but also these possibilities to become involved intensely and intimately in the hybrid environment that consists of stable hardware set-up, powerful internet infrastructure and software layers that make the whole prestidigitatorial trick possible. Daily magic of high technology.

Manhattans 2.0 on Foreign and Far Away Shores

The picture that refuses to become forgotten is an aerial shot of a business district jutting into a water expanse that goes around an island that carries, as a giant ship standing still under its crushing weight, a whole landscape of skyscrapers shooting into wuthering heights that only a bird's eye view can measure. Rather than being the southern tip of Manhattan, the small scale vertigo that the magazine illustration captures refers to is Chongqing, a city in the mainland China. Wikipedia article on it does not disappoint in terms of iconic images that this 35-millions plus megapolis routinely churns out in its daily toil of representation. A brief scroll through what amounts to an analytical precis and a newspaper overview of an encyclopedia article that it offers in English depicts soaring construction, demographic, and economic trajectories of urban growth that undeniably catapults the city and the country around it to the position that seemed only recently to be restricted to the countries that had had a place in the story of Western modernity. With the half a trillion yuan budget that the province is going to throw on the aim of moving up the value chain, Chongqing may be in a position to genetically, nanotechnologically and cyber-optically reengineer the value chain itself just as New York, and the country around it, did when it grew at comparable speed. If my impression from a European periodical does not fail me, welcome-mats for modernity 2.0 are being already rolled out around the world.

The Shifting Sense of the Present Moment

Not sure where my sense of the present and/or contemporary situation comes from in my case, I do sense a shift that the present global and local indicators register that affects how I represent to myself where the world moves and how one can map one's position on this changing geography of global flows and places. The development hitting closest to home to my sensibility is the rise and rise of netbooks as a new category of device that apparently promises to reshape the computing landscape. Strangely enough, reminiscent of the one laptop a child trend this technological development can be hoped to made biggest changes in the countries loosely named the second world, these places that are neither too affluent nor too poor to fit into a binary opposition of the opposition between the global North and the global South. Not only that but the fact that there appears to be a more unexpected than usual convergence between the two towards an average amount of insecurity of long before declared analytically insufficient classification between these two abstract groups too that makes the developing world, another term crying for a more precise definition, that sets the terms of what counts for a cool device. Taiwan and China turn out to be new and unexpected trailblazers of what is actually considered to be a new and trendy development in the everyday life of our electronic environment on a global scale, since it is difficult to believe that iPhone's portability and capabilities are going to make as much of difference for an average person regardless where she or he is, as a full-blown and truly portable set-up of netbooks would. Besides, netbooks are already a category rather than a brand-name that are fast coming to the coffee-shops near you.

From Zeitgeist to Tagesgeist

Somewhat in jest, after our belief into Zeitgeist falls into question, I wonder if one could replace it with its daily version: Tagesgeist. Spirit of time makes place for a spirit of day with all that the overcharged age of instant technology, online communication and constant obsolescence brings with it. We no longer revere and take notice of anything as classical as a Zeitgeist, as the very notion of time becomes fragmented into digital slices of temporality. We become instead surfers of what another day brings on its media wings to our attention, sensation and experience. No longer integral personalities we become instances that take it a day at a time. Long term planning is being replaced with crisis management, micro-blogging takes place of long-winded blog-posts and the technology around us gets smaller, more carriable and standardized to the point of fading into a single environment of information management. Managers of our own lives, living in times of enormous and badly understood global changes, we become overtaxed by what it means to jump from one set of certainties to another from one day to another, as if our personal and mental software has to be reloaded on a slightest notice of lifeworlds that stop being capable of an oversight. Tagesgeist opens the doors to an age of the baroque sensibility of our days.

Vielleicht die notwendigen Uebergaenge, die man machen soll

Es is eine Weile seit ich mich auch auf deutsch ausdruecken versuche. Hin und her mache ich Schritte in dieser Richtung, aber der Umschlag auf dem Ebene des Alltagsleben hat auf sich warten gelassen. Jetzt bin ich an dem Punkt angelangt, wo ich es auch wage. Es ist zum Teil mehr als ein Satz per Tag, wie es meine fruehere englische Formulierung hat, aber, wenn man es fortsetzen versucht, kann auch das herkommliche Format zum Dienst stehen. Oder? Mein letzter noch nicht klar ausgedruckter Gedankengang handelte von Fortfuehren von den sensiblen Bildern, mit denen der Tagausbruch endet. Es immer gibt diese ungenaue Teilchen von Gefuehlen, Ueberlegungen, Vorstellungen und Bildgefuegen, die man lieber beibehalten wuerde. Es kann man auch als einen Drang zum Literarischen betrachten. Doch fuehle ich, dass es sodass ist, was das Stoff von Tagebuechern ausmacht. Die innere Welt, die vielleicht nie entdeckt wird, ohne dass die jemand in Woertern zusammenfasst. Eine Sebstdokumentationpflicht, die wir uns selbst abstatten sollen, um, nicht zuletzt, zu uns selbst einen besseren Zugang zu haben. Gewisse Umwege zu Selbstbewusstsein, scheint es mir. Vielleicht kann auch nur ein einziges Bild zu fassen reichen.

Translating Difficult Days into Wordy Blog Posts

It turns out what I have to say doesn't wait for it to be brought into the virtual publicity of the blogosphere, it takes an effort to find the words and the pictures that would make it into a line of movement from one topic unto another, I need keeping doing what I promised myself doing regularly anyway, without censure, shyness or blockade. At times it seems blog-writing is like a self-delivered caring service that we so much need but are unable to take up without a nudge from an outside impulse. It is strange how sadly disfunctional can we appear to ourselves, and I am afraid, others. It is somehow a junction where habit and knowledge depend on each other but do not make mutual transition in terms of action or what people, I, do. Lots of investment just into unlocking our collective ability to exercise our imagination in a semi-public, semi-private context. It's like participating in an auto-attentive age where everyone speaks to oneself, others and into an electrified void of possible points of access to what we make available on the web. Somehow it also has to do with a sense of place and time that gets transmitted though the sentences that explore these two with one verbal probe after another. Place and time as felt sensations.

Looking Back onto Yesterday in a Rearview Mirrow of Tomorrow

Somehow it is of a surprising impact on me that a flurry of anniversary congratulations would make it into a watershed of sorts when though hard and fast ties are in an imperceptible flux even though I keep telling myself that everything is the way it was an emotional bond stays, another gets rediscovered and a smattering of other connections emerge in what is nothing else than a web 2.0 effect on outstretched social ties that spanning the globe give a totally different sense of connectedness and belonging than a face to face society of yore would, which brings me to a personal aftermath of displacement, diaspora and exile that though for me stopped being neatly contained in those terms is still of relevance to others who probably cannot as easily shake off their legacies of belonging to other places and shores in favour of a more cosmopolitan personality that I have to become in order to move on towards opportunities that I have to try myself at opening myself to, unless my actual performance, circumstances out of my control and a plain confluence of random events make me write a similar piece next year in a more somber key.

From a Narrative Arc to Philosophical Arcades

Past has somehow caught up with me with memories of people, places, and things past that though far in space and time has suddenly become present and close-by. A wave of consternation, inspiration, and wistfulness has come over, overwhelmed, and started to boil over. It is this engagement hand in hand with disengagement, working along, through, and over that both gives impulse to and takes with its waning an outburst of care, memory and reflection not all conscious, not all consequential, and not all earnest. Like shadows that get half occluded by figures of one's own speech. That's what any modernism is, was and will be about - making absent present while avoiding any simplification, formulas, and conventions. A silent cry of a long gone past echoes in the chambers of personal recollection like a distant brawl of forces beyond human control. An earthquake falling on multiple fates, a realisation of the endlessness of lines of causality, a manifold search for a relation to the heart of the matter darkened by patina of oblivion.

Anchoring Recollections

It seems to depend on a combination of the after-taste of strong coffee, the gusts of fresh wind, and the moth-overgrown concrete bank that together give a sensation of travelling in time to other moments when sitting with a book in hand in a campus-like environment was a thing to do, with a trendy city spreading wide beyond the lightly fenced grounds where name-plates grace patina-carrying brick walls, where time stands still from one page-turning to another, and where another cup of coffee is just a walk away. Less a nostalgia, it is a feeling of concert with a set of recollections, experiences and intentions that this moment anchors in its hic et nunc materiality.

In a Maze of Linguistic Mirrors Looking into Media Looking-Glass

Difficult to say what change I go through as I test linguistic territories I previously only eyed from a media distance, as I slowly become involved in the languages I read in a process similar to that that makes me ask myself if I get infected by the worry about the viral dangers of what only few years ago was a theoretical possibility that as it becomes increasingly realistic hits the media with a double force of realized fears and derealized risks as the international army of experts and executives walk a tight rope of openness and opacity as the public comes to terms with the inevitable consequences of even low intensity public health crisis that a new flu strain can lead to an outbreak that we in our everyday lives do not necesserily know how to deal with other than do the simplest of precautionary measures however insufficient they may be that I become linguisitically aware of in multiple registers of direct inner speech and its translation, seeking for passing translations, translating myself on the sidelines of my attention span, trying not to slip too frequently between direct and reported speech of my proper voice that threatens to get lost in mutliple translations from one primary language into another that vies for a comparable degree of primal connection to my imagination, sensation and expression.

A Movie Night in Jerusalem

It does make a strong impact to watch three short films in the language that you don't understand, with subtitles in English and with a partial introduction in French. The place is in an out of the way part of Eastern Jerusalem. The language of the short films is Arabic. Before the movie starts a sparse crowd starts to gather. One can hear French, Arabic, English and Hebrew spoken. We bring our dialogue in German to this linguistic melange. The movie program is in French and Arabic. What leaves its mark is not only the place - the area of Jerusalem that looks more foreign that elsewhere - but also what the three movies quietly say to us, the viewers. A film about a family tragedies and struggles, another about a love story that falls apart, and still another one about remembering past violence while riding the everyday streets of conflict. One may argue about the aesthetic merits and demerits of films, about the relations between the tradition and modernity, about the canon and its contemporary reception. But the youth of the audience, the nearness of actors after the screening, and the other, more village-like side of Jerusalem that shows through on the way back leave a strange impact. Difficult to express, necessary to explore and important to write down. It is as if I have witnessed a cultural event that takes place between linguistic borders. A culturally borderline experience. Experiences without a translation but looking for it.