https://openresearch.amsterdam/nl/page/77950/woningcrisis
As a child from the Bulgarian middleclass Joanna M. was influenced by a neoliberal mentality which one can define as “if you can’t beat them, join them,” and this way of thinking weakens the deteriorating social cohesion in the West.
When Joanna writes to me from Barcelona that “I am trying to figure out what I wanna do exactly” than this breaks my heart. I can feel enough empathy for the fact that after 28 years on our planet, she feels lost and lonely. When I once said that it surprised me that she had been receiving psychoanalytic treatment from her mother for so many years, she instantly reacted furiously out of some reflex, and began to defend both herself and her mother.
This view explains Joanna’s flight forward, into the ever-unknown and, today, dark future. Because she was pursuing a vague course of art at the University of Amsterdam, I told her what the Jewish Hungarian Kertész had written in his 2005 book "De verbannen taal." In it, he set out that “It is the task of art to set human language against ideology, to restore the imagination and to remind man of his origins, his true situation, and the human destiny. The artist’s choice can therefore be nothing other than radical.” Suddenly, she reacted sharply, saying she had had enough of my contemporaries and their hypocrisy.
You know what they want? They want obedient workers. Obedient workers, people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork. And just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shitty jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it, and now they’re coming for your Social Security Money. They want your retirement money. They want it back so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street, and you know something? They will get it. They’ll get it all from you sooner or later because they own this fucking place! It's a big club, and you ain’t in it! You, and I, are not in the big club!”
George Carlin said this after the neoliberal Western elite and the former communist elite in the Eastern Bloc were in power in the early 1990s. But the public behind the Fallen Wall had never been told that, since their own elite had no interest in it, and the Western media, in the service of a small group of “billionaires,” would not dream of seriously informing the public in the Eastern Bloc. The journalistic euphoria following the fall of the East Berlin Wall was too great to warn the -- in the meantime -- unemployed factory workers that the Western model is built on illusions. And as for the Joanna's who had not experienced real-life communism, they are now too busy looking as Western as possible, in fact becoming as invisible as possible. They didn't get the chance to develop their own individuality. This became apparent, among other things, when she suddenly appeared on a weekday in a black lace see-through blouse.
This is how Joanna M. wanted to present herself to the public. This is what the West taught her. As a disguised person, she herself became invisible. She imitates the western petty-bourgeois advertisements in the glossy magazines. This was the result of having visited universities in the U.S. and Western Europe. After casting a single glance at her, I realized why intellectuals in both West- and East-Europe will always lose.
“To be richer? Happier? No. The aggressiveness of violence is perfectly uninterested, unmotivated; it wants only its will; it is the purely irrational. Kafka and Hasek confront us... with this colossal paradox: during the era of the Modern Age, Cartesian reason destroyed one by one all values inherited from the Middle Ages. But at the moment of the total victory of reason, the purely irrational (violence that wants no more than its will) takes possession of the world stage, because there is no longer a single accepted value system that could stand in its way.”
Thanks to this insight, it becomes understandable that mainstream journalism does nothing but engage in propaganda for whatever system is prevailing. Commercial journalists generally function as priests of a so-called progressive ideology, which cannot exist without an image of an enemy. And in this regard, it is “not so important that different political interests are expressed in the various organs of the media. Behind the outward difference, one and the same spirit prevails. You only have to look through American and European opinion papers, from the right as well as the left, from Time to Der Spiegel: in all those papers you find the same view of life, reflected in the same order in which their table of contents is structured, in the same sections, the same journalistic approach, the same choice of words and style, in the same artistic preferences, and in the same hierarchy of what they consider important and insignificant. The common state of mind of the mass media, which lies hidden behind their political diversity, is the spirit of the times.”
"Some eighty years after Flaubert conceived his Emma Bovary, in the 1930s (nineteenth century. svh), another great novelist, Hermann Broch, would speak of the heroic efforts of the modern novel resisting the wave of kitsch, but ultimately being floored by it."
While reading, I was reminded of the description by the late British author John Berger that: “Consumption and communication are nowadays united in a diabolical company, and through this company exists that which we know as the media. First and foremost, the media represent an economic contract whereby everything that happens in the world is linked to the mechanism of sales.”
There are countless truths for which no direct solution exists. The word ‘solution’ does not touch upon the tragic. We must come into contact with the tragic and allow ourselves to be moved by it. We might be changed by it if we named it. Even named, the tragic remains tragic, but it would not become bad news. Only from that perspective is realistic politics possible.
And because making a profit is the holiest article of faith for neoliberalism, Berger speaks of "the dealers of the Free Market and their corollary, the Mafia,' who know that “they now have the world in their pocket. They have. But to maintain their confidence they have to change the meaning of all the words used in languages to explain or praise or give value to life: every word, according to them now, is the servant of profit. And so they have become dumb. Or, rather, they can no longer speak any truth. Their language is too withered for that. As a consequence they have also lost the faculty of memory. A loss which one day will be fatal.”
