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On Recognition and Memory, Demos and Candlelight Vigils, Brecht and Berghain Berlin
Back in Berlin, it feels like home, fall colors, döner kebabs, bike rides, klezmer music, funky bars where they serve white Ukrainians, not Russians. On we chat for hours and make our way back home to sleep, dream, run into David Crooks and Colin having a party for the rest of the class of 1987, remembering Trey ,on his own journey, dreams, friends, on the road, sometimes separate, sometimes apart. Back home to Faust in the Witches kitchen.
"If you really want to get to know someone, ask about their dead mother," notes Caroline during post art show drinks with Federico, the next night. Scott joined us at Walterhaus. Monica showed us her work and the work of her whole collective, collective, 9 colors, photographers, years.
I find out Monday that I had to present on Tuesday at our Multiculturalism Seminar.
It would be another full day of adventures in sociology.
Arrived for the lecture and a seminar, full of butterflies, after staying up half the night, thinking about the presentation, as I had a Chicago all those years ago. Walked into our multiculturalism seminar to review a paper by Nancy Fraser. And then answer questions. Froze a little during the discussion. And went out to lunch at the mensa to vent. What a roller coaster. I think I am learning more in the Mensa than in class. It feels like all my life is pouring through me right now, Berlin, questions about multiculturalism, conflicts and clashes, US elections, discos, art, struggles against reactions and counter reactions, stories everywhere.
On the tram ride home, I’m thinking about the USA and the midterm elections, hoping we will be ok. I'm a bit worried. I guess we all have been for a while.
Wednesday we unpack the news all day long.
Mom got stuck in passport control in the US and had to turn around.
So I wrote and read all day,
Wednesday is Kystalnacht, said the musicians at Lyric Cafe Saturday.
I’d spend the day, Nov 9th, reading of the names of the 55,696 murdered Berlin Jews from the Memorial Book of the State of Berlin...Kristallnacht (Novemberpogrome 1938), Nov 9, 1938 – Nov 10, 1938, Night of Broken Glass, as well as 1989 Fall of the Wall, rode around Berlin, from memorials to the East Side Gallery, where there was a demo. And then fascist and anti fascist demos in the streets. Everything connected, history alive.
The day seemed to go on forever, biking all afternoon, all night, off to a punk club, the Schokoladen, in Mitte. Police lights blared, the acute sounds of chants in German, protests and counterprotests in the streets, police congesting traffic. It was my second night in a row of these marches.
Every Monday, a group of anti maskers and Alternative for Deutschlander types march by our apartment. Berlin gegen Nazis notes, “There are still small "Monday demonstrations" weekly from the conspiracy ideological spectrum….” The actions in our neighborhood are organized under the call for an "Immediate end to all sanctions against Russia and immediate end to all corona measures."
I guess everyone is searching for recognition.
They were out on Wednesday, my second night with them this week, marching, chanting. A small crew of somber anti-fascists were out offering a counter protest. They had that scary Adolph like cadence in their chants. Police were out, giving them all cover, creating a scary clusterfuck after my day reading names of those who 55,000 jews who perished in Berlin. My head was spinning with all the old Housing Works AIDS names readings from two decades ago on World AIDS Day. I was tempted to throw eggs. I am pretty committed to nonviolence. Just don't see the use in adding more violence, more fire. But last night was jarring. Make no drought, West Germany rolled over the east in 1989. And people from the East are resentful. Obviously, the answer is not to get rid of refugees or masks, which Germany has done a great job embracing in recent years. And many Germans were busy lighting candles for those who perished. Which way forward? Do I carry counter signs and heckle as many are doing? Is an egg crossing the line?
More adventures in sociology on Friday. The librarians brought out the hard copies of the journals I was looking for. I couldn't make the VPN connection work with the library. We talked about relative deprivation, what criteria makes a social movements and differences between sports riots and movements, collective action and the Iran protests. Students from Afghanistan, Ukraine, Shanghai, Spain, N.Y.C. Belarus, and maybe even Germany. I am probably talking too much..but we're having fun..I am not a fan of neutrality. You can't be neutral on a moving train. Howard Zinn rip.
All weekend, we go to housing demos, calling for Socialism in a place that used to be socialist, and Beethoven's Ninth in Berlin. I watch the glorious cello and double bass players, tearing at their instruments, their notes singing.
“Drop acid not bombs,” say the paintings on the street in Berlin, from Beethoven to smokey jazz to techno at Klunkerkranich:
“After the short November shock, the sun dares to come out of the clouds again and we are already looking forward to Saturday night on the roof! Living room:
The Jazzy Berlin Saturday Night Live @ *living room
w/ Jazzy Berlin Jam Session *live / Ilo Pan & Elmo Lewis (DJ) / Emorine (DJ) | Saturday November 12, 2022 | starting 18 O 'clock The Jazzy Berlin Bandstand is back and doing "Saturday Night Live" with a proper Live Jazz Jam Session in the middle of the *living room! Our unbeatable duo for handmade music provides the right records: Ilo Pan & Elmo Lewis from Dusty Ballroom! Afterwards, Emorine takes care of the perfect translation of jazzy vibes into electronic sounds and turns the stage into a dance floor! *Club "Behind the Alps":
JANNA N x KLUNKERKRANICH @ *Club “Behind the Alps”
w/ DJ Goodboy / Janna N | Saturday November 12, 2022
from 8 p.m During the year of her Kranich residency, Janna N invited many guests, transformed her sound and rocked the dancefloor until no leg could stand still! Rafush & DJ Goodboy are guests today in the "Club Hinter den Alpen" - the two bring the bounce to the dance floor - a good load of Afro-Futurism, a fine pinch of trap and leftfield dance that it just cracks! Not to be missed!”
Dancing for hours, Federico joins us and we wander deeper into the city, to a late night gay bar, with a back room, people meeting, connecting, hookups, straight people, queer, public sex alive and well in Berlin.
Sunday, we ride out for snacks, Weißwurst and glühwein with Caroline before a trip to the alte-nationalgalerie. And then to Berghain Panorama Bar, techno and German romanticism...lights and colors. The line winds down the street, when I arrive, people nervous to get in, no phones allowed, only black.
My mind wanders as I stand in line.
I’m thinking about the teenager writing poetry, submitting to contests.
Much better than my writing, reading like crazy, two of my favorite novels,
Unbearable Lightness of Being and Hundred Years of Solitude.
Now Anna Karenina, wow.
What a history of the world to explore.
I also applied the Literature program at the Freie Universitat.
But they didn't have me.
So I’m left to read Dad’s old copy of Faust and to review everything I've learned about sociology from this lens, biking around Berlin on my days, reading and writing as much as I can, going out as often as possible.
Such are my thoughts in line.
And finally, it's my turn.
The door guy waves me inside the secretive club.
I can’t believe I got in.
Stay quiet in line.
No selfies.
No colors.
Don’t stand out.
Just do your thing.
And have a blast once inside the most famous techno club in the world.
I have been to the Stark Club in Dallas. I’ve seen Cafe de Paris in London, House of Yes in Brooklyn.
I’ve seen raves in crumbling warehouses, tripping on spiked punch in Hollywood.
I’ve danced all night on MDMA.
But I’ve never seen anything like this.
Inside, people are sitting around half dressed chilling in the warehouse like space; techno music fills the second floor, laser lights and darkness, point the semi clad dancers toward a the dance floor, where people gyrate in a disco that is more like Dante. I can't tell if it's paradise or the lower levels. But it is pointing me toward something, quite captivating, a lot of fun. Bacchanalian fun, trippy side rooms, strange, light, fun, dark, chilling bodies, shaking bodies, moving bodies, halting bodies, women and men with no shirts, people making out, boys, huggling, couples kissing… inviting others to join them on the stage, chill out spaces, dancing spaces, pulsing techno, funny bartenders, secret places, pass out spaces. Most everyone is high.
But there’s still a politics to it all.
And of course, this is the point, conflict is everywhere, but so is connection among friends.
We spend all day unpacking the mysteries of the Hegel and Marx, the dialectical method during Social Theory class.
Back home, Caroline has theater tickets for us.
A quiet evening of anti war theater with Mutter Courage und Ihre Kinder at the Gorki:
I think of all our work through the years, our absurd responses to absurd wars. “An examination of the interconnections between war, fascism and capitalism."
"Wherever life has not died out / it staggers to its feet again..." wrote Brecht.
“I don’t trust him, you see we’re friends,” says one of the wandering soldiers.
“Sometimes I see myself driving through hell with this wagon and selling brimstone. And sometimes I’m driving through heaven handing our provisions to wandering souls! If only we could find a place where there’s no shooting, me and my children—what’s left of ‘em—we might rest a while.”
Yet, war is everywhere, endless permawar, thirty years of it, eternal war, through time, World War I to World War II, Korea to Vietnam, Central America to Iraq.
“All I get from your victory is losses.”
“The noblest plans are brought down through the low-mindedness of those who are supposed to carry them out.”
I am still thinking about the yins and yangs, the ways the world looks at difference. I guess that's what war is about, that's what the clash is all about.
That was what my presentation, on Fraser’s paper, “rethinking-recognition,” was about. I’ve long loved Fraser’s thoughts on public space and the public sphere. For Fraser (1989) differing outsider groups have limited access to public opinion, debate, and democratic participation. Her concept of subaltern-counterpublics works as a corrective to this.
At a conference after the fall of the Wall, Fraser famously asked Jurgen Habermas: “If, as you have argued, ‘markets and state bureaucracies are a necessary feature of life in complex societies’ must we not ask whether capitalism is compatible with a ‘non-exclusionary and genuinely democratic public sphere?“
Habermas stammered an answer.
The article I was presenting was from June 2000, presumably before the US crisis of democracy, with two out of the next four presidents, elected without winning the popular vote. Our first Black president, Barack Obama, followed by Trump backlash – white lives and resentment as politics.
Identity is not destiny Mimi Abramowitz used to say in grad school.
Yet how do we support democratic living? How do we live in a truly demotic way, Angela Davis wondered in Oranienplatz this fall. How do we treat our neighbors as ourselves instead of putting them in cages, as Trump did, or burning down their houses of worship as the Nazis did that night here 84 years earlier. The protesters in Black Lives Matters and those working with refugees wonder the same thing.
We live in a diverse, multicultural world, or at least that's what it feels like in New York or Berlin, on the subway and in my classrooms where my students come from the Caribbean, Russia, Latin American, Eastern Euripe and deep in Brooklyn. I wonder why the authors continue to ask the question why multiculturalism? Multiculturalism is our reality. It's like waves on the beach, New York’s former Mayor once said. People are going to migrate here. They bring their lives and stories. And we learn from each other.
Fraser helps us to consider this simple plea for recognition, “the recourse to a common grammar is worth considering. Why today, after the demise of Soviet-style communism and the acceleration of globalization, do so many conflicts take this form? Why do so many movements couch their claims in the idiom of recognition?“
Some context by the author, “For many years, calls for recognition took place among leftist movements, under the banners of sexuality, gender, ethnicity and ‘race’ aspired not only to assert hitherto denied identities but to bring a richer, lateral dimension to battles over the redistribution of wealth and power as well.“ Yet, by the end of the century, issues of recognition and identity have become even more central, yet many now bear a different charge: from Rwanda to the Balkans, questions of ‘identity’ have fuelled campaigns for ethnic cleansing and even genocide—as well as movements that have mobilized to resist them….We are facing, then, a new constellation in the grammar of political claims-making—and one that is disturbing on two counts,” says Fraser. “First, this move from redistribution to recognition is occurring despite—or because of—an acceleration of economic globalization, at a time when an aggressively expanding capitalism is radically exacerbating economic inequality. In this context, questions of recognition are serving less to supplement, complicate and enrich redistributive struggles than to marginalize, eclipse and displace them.”
She calls this “the problem of displacement. Second, today’s recognition struggles are occurring at a moment of hugely increasing transcultural interaction and communication, when accelerated migration and global media flows are hybridizing and pluralizing cultural forms. Yet the routes such struggles take often serve not to promote respectful interaction within increasingly multicultural contexts, but to drastically simplify and reify group identities. They tend, rather, to encourage separatism, intolerance and chauvinism, patriarchalism and authoritarianism.” Fraser calls this “the problem of reification.”
By reification, I assume Fraser is referring to the Marxist concept of rich ideas becoming concrete, material things, one dimensional as Marcuse warned; Lukacs worried Lukács suggested the process involved “taking social relations for things.” Fraser, suggests it, “reifies group identities, it risks sanctioning violations of human rights and freezing the very antagonisms it purports to mediate.” Thus, turning claims about groups into simplified categories.
As result, she explains, many have turned away from “‘identity politics’—or proposed jettisoning cultural struggles altogether.” Others “reprioritizing class over gender, sexuality, ‘race’ and ethnicity” therebye “rejecting all ‘minoritarian’ claims … and insisting upon assimilation to majority norms—in the name of secularism, universalism or republicanism.” Moving back to the old left claim that class trumps race, that economics determines all. Is this useful?
The trend is understandable, but Fraser feels it is misguided, that it obscures old grievances. “Culture, moreover, is a legitimate, even necessary, terrain of struggle,” says Fraser, “a site of injustice in its own right and deeply imbricated with economic inequality. Properly conceived, struggles for recognition can aid the redistribution of power and wealth and can promote interaction and cooperation across gulfs of difference.”
“Everything depends on how recognition is approached,” says Fraser.
She goes on to argue for a new “ way of rethinking the politics of recognition in a way that can help to solve, or at least mitigate, the problems of displacement and reification.”
For Fraser, “This means conceptualizing struggles for recognition so that they can be integrated with struggles for redistribution, rather than displacing and undermining them. It also means developing an account of recognition that can accommodate the full complexity of social identities, instead of one that promotes reification and separatism.” Fraser goes on to “propose such a rethinking of recognition.”
Like Taylor, Fraser uses a Hegelian framing to make her case.
“According to Hegel, recognition designates an ideal reciprocal relation between subjects, in which each sees the other both as its equal and also as separate from it.”
Her aim is to revitalize claims for redistribution through reciprocity, embracing the complexity of our experiences, not the one dimensional thinking as Herbert Marcuse lamented.
Identity can be constructed dialogically, argues Fraser, with mutual recognition of our reciprocal relations.
We are shaped in relation to others, notes George Herbert Mead. She doesn’t quote him. But his thinking seems to run through her work.
Yet all too often, we witness a distorted claim of recognition. Think Trump. Yet the problem feels larger that than.
This may have been what I saw at the demos on Prenzlauer Allee. A drunk guy yelling at a dozen people surrounded by cops were screaming, down with NATO, no more masks, no more fake energy crisis.
The drunk man screaming Nazis fuck off.
I imagine if Fraser was there she would suggest, this is a frame that rejects dialogical interaction in favor of monologue, turning complexity into a hegemonic narrative.
Yet, is this a problem with recognition or good old fashioned no nothingism, another version of the paranoid style of politics that American historian Richard J. Hofstadter, first described in November 1964?
Yet, how do you have dialogue with some people?
This leads to questions of status, argues Fraser.
Who is valuable and who is not?
In many ways, this is the root of grievances around multiculturalism, with poor white people feeling like without white supremacy, what do they have? Very little. My mom saw this after desegregation in the South in the US. Without hierarchies, poor whites felt lost. And they turned away ever rightward.
Misrecognition leads to institutional subordination.
Jim Crow laws fell only to be replaced by a New Jim Crow in the US, with a school to prison pipeline.
Fraser explains: “Without doubt, this identity model contains some genuine insights into the psychological effects of racism, sexism, colonization and cultural imperialism. Yet it is theoretically and politically problematic. By equating the politics of recognition with identity politics, it encourages both the reification of group identities and the displacement of redistribution.”
We can respond by fostering participation, built around recognition of difference, says Fraser.
Address maldistribution of resources and inequality.
What is needed is an alternative politics of recognition, seeing ourselves in others, seeing our interconnections, creating a city of friends, rather than identity based framing.
Is this possible? Or will the clash become a chasm?
Martin Luther King called for such a framing, and he was killed.
Martin Buber called for an I thou kind of framing, the kind of mutuality Hegel and Fraser imagined.
Yet, all too often debates about Multiculturalism become heated or one sided. History is contested space, so is culture.
Kymlicka. (1995) argues: “cultures do not need state assistance to survive. If a societal culture is worth saving, one could argue, the members of the culture will sustain it through their own choices. If the culture is decaying, it must be because some people no longer.”
Kymlicka. (1995) concludes, “all political theories must accord recognition to certain forms of group differences.”
Of course, they must.
We all want to be accorded some recognition. How do we do so in a fair and equitable, mutually interactive fashion, where we learn and share with each other?
In “Liberal Culturalism: An Emerging Consensus?” Kymlicka (2001) argues: “While most authors in the literature are working within the broad camp of liberal culturalism, this doesn't mean that they are satisfied with the existing theories... On the contrary, many questions have been raised about these theories.”
Why do questions continue to come up about the very nature and existence of multiculturalism? It feels like a fact of life. How do we deal with differences? This is a complicated question. But it's a fact of life, from immigration to refugees, school curriculum to history, it's a reality of our worlds.
As are the conflicts related to them.
Inclusion vs exclusion, tension and contestation, claims and counterclaims, yet isn’t mutual interaction and dialogue more interesting?
We all have a vague sense of identity. We hope we can let it fly. I thought that, wearing all pink the first time I tried to get into Berghain. That didn’t work out. I was bounced fast, denied entry. All black next time like everyone else and I was in.
We differentiate, good and bad, learning about the world from our significant others, from experiences, from living.
Still, minority rights a majority society can be complicated, says our Prof. Dr. Christian von Scheve, in our seminar. Germany prides itself on being a liberal democracy, he continues. Looking at religion, it prides itself on being liberal. Yet, Christianity is the de facto religion. It gets all the holidays. That puts other religions in an unfair position. He refers to a Buddhist Temple that is getting evicted now. It is not a recognized religion here. If it was an obscure Christian sect, they would not have a problem. But now they must leave, as Buddhism is not recognized. It creates a conflict. We say we are liberal, but we don’t act that way. Tensions over justice and fairness, related to liberalism create conflicts. These tensions create still more clashes over race and ethnicity. You can look at them in multiple ways. Justice and fairness concerns become still more conflict points.
Recognition is never simple. Several of the Turkish students I eat lunch with were rattled about the terrorist bombing in Istanbol.
“Deadly-istanbul-bombing-sparks-fear-and-defiance-in-Turkey,” reports aljazeera.
No professors even mentioned it, one student laments.
Others worry about the crackdown on protest in Iran.
I am listening and trying to understand.
There is a lot to learn.
I’m on the last day of my 52nd year, almost four months away from the US. My record was seven months away in 1991. Next year we’ll break this record.
Back to the NY Times.Our elections remind us that voters need to be recognized. We all do.
And Ukranians were celebrating pushing back at Russia.
There is a lot to learn, the clash, ever reverberating within new connections.
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