Train after train, across the city, stories on the walls, on the buildings, in the distance, neighborhood after neighborhood. Beautiful spring days, looking out the window, thinking about populism and migration, streams and counter streams, debates about modernity, dialectics of freedom and control, cleavages and regressions. Some of the material is clearer than others. Still, we meet and discuss it, outside after class, over coffee. Each place has its own cleavages and inequalities. Is there one story we should we paying attention to or are there many?
I was in Berlin, Caroline in Weimar, on the train to Buchenwald, with Germans trying to contemplate what happened. The teenager was painting and I was reading.
In “Multiple Modernities,” S. N. Eisenstadt writes:
“The idea of multiple modernities presumes that the best way
to understand the contemporary world, indeed to explain the
history of modernity, is to see it as a story of continual constitution and reconstitution of a multiplicity of cultural programs.These ongoing reconstructions of multiple institutional and ideological patterns are carried forward by specific social actors in
close connection with social, political, and intellectual activists,
and also by social movements pursuing different programs of
modernity, holding very different views on what makes societies modern. Through the engagement of these actors with broader sectors of their respective societies, unique expressions of modernity are realized. These activities have not been confined to
any single society or state, though certain societies and states
proved to be the major arenas where social activists were able
to implement their programs and pursue their goals..”
Each city, each periphery has its own center.
Each center has its own periphery, struggles for equality, amid inequalties, flows of people and stories, immigrants and refugees, always arriving.
In “A Theory of Migration,” by Everett S. Lee writes:
“Stream and counterstream.-"Each main
current of migration produces a compensating
counter-current" (I, p. 199).”
Today, we see those streams and counterstreams everywhere, on the US border with Mexico, in Istanbul, in Germany, with its refugees from Ukraine.
Like waves on the beach, they come, one after after, steam and counterstream, reactions and counter reactions. Alternative for Deutschland is at the center of the German political system now. Berlin voters just voted for more cars and less green spaces... the problem is not isolated.
Past is prologue, what happens with New York's neighborhoods, high rents and patterns of displacement, that we know there, seem to be what will be in Berlin. Save the Garden, Save the City, say Garden activists. Order is coming to Berlin, some worry. The same thing happened to New York three decades ago. And the city lost its soul in the cleanup. Keep New York Sexxxy, activists chanted. In Berlin, we are poor but we are sexy, said an old mayor. Keep Berlin Sexxy!
I see you, dancing in the clubs, working it in yoga, outside in the parks on a gorgeous spring day, yoga, strolling through town...planning my evenings, looking at the dance parties, posted on the walls...taking the tram back home. Long discussions of measurement of income inequality, the conflict in Ukraine, the ongoing struggle for autonomy in Georgia, revolutionary feminism, and a perfect day for banana fish by jd salinger. My friends from Georgia like to Faulkner and Salinger. I like to Marquez, who read about Faulkner and Kafka, growing up in Cartagena, Columbia. We all read the sociologists from Germany, France, and the UA. Novelists from Peru. Multiple stories, steam and counter stream, city after city.
Don't measure us by the yardstick of your modernity, said Garcia Marquez in his nobel acceptance speech in 1982. Countless stories, some of invasions, some of families or our imaginations, war and desolation, surrealist narratives which compel us, stories of violence, and movements, powers to create and destroy, recall and forget, dream and wonder.
And so, I sit on the train, looking foward, thinking of what is now, what happened before.
“We have all, even the least of us known the turmoil of almost constant volcanic shocks suffered by our native continent of Europe,” writes Stephan Zweig in The World of Yesterday….” a countless multitude.. an Austrian, a Jew, a writer, a humanist and a pacifist, I have always stood where those volcanic eruptions were at their most violent.”
The stories are many here and there.
The “constitution and reconstitution” is constant.
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