we started the online edition of Crosswords one year ago, in March 2008. We have published 52 posts since then: a post a week, with articles and interviews in 15 languages, photographies, drawings and videos. Some of them, dealing with the question of “How much a community needs in common”, have been part of a print issue that was launched in September 2008 on the occasion of the 21st Meeting of Cultural Journals in Paris. Both the blog and the paper version have been a great success and we would like to thank everyone who has been involved: authors, artists, readers, partner journals and funders.

We will now interrupt this “chain of fragments” and prepare Crosswords 2.0. It will be quite different. But: the title remains the same and the publication will be as multilingual, transnational and eternally changing as it was. Il faut être absolument moderne.

A très bientôt !
R.S.

Emrah Efe Çakmak: I would like to begin with the big picture, with the question posed to all contributors to this publication: “How much in common does a community need?”

Homi Bhabha: Well, first I think the question has to be reformulated. How much in common does a community need for what? The important thing is for what. If we are talking about a very diverse community, a community with great conflict within it, but whose members have a common love for sport, then during the Olympics or during football games on particular days or particular matches its members may well appear together despite their differences and despite their difficulties being together. At the same time the community that may represent a common front or a common faith in relation to sport may split terribly in relation to the distribution of particular kinds of resources, or indeed on the question of intercommunal or interfaith marriages. There is no general question of what a community needs in common. If you pose the question just generally, then you are tempted to revert to certain conventional or naturalistic ideas. Does everyone need to have been born in the same place, for instance? Does everybody need to have at least religious belief in common? Does a community need to be a proceduralist community, where, although it may have very different values, it at least believes in certain procedures so that it can interact and negotiate peacefully on a formal basis?

On the other hand, when the purpose of the community is, say, to produce a pluralist network of journals or other communicational media across Europe in which actors can speak to each other, can negotiate with each other, can have a lively exchange and a circulation of ideas and values, this would of course be very positive. I cannot see anyone saying this would not be a very positive move. But the question as to whether this could happen and what each institutional journal would have to have in common with the other institutional journals would really depend on what the specific issue that brought them together is. Is it about race or anti-racism? Is it about political democracy? Is the question of freedom the thing that these interventionist journals want to inspect? Do they want to make a critique of certain European Union policies on culture? Do they want to talk about the impact of globalization on regional cultures? It seems to me that on each of the things I have just mentioned there is the possibility that they might or might not come together. Who knows whether interventionist journals in France, for instance, would share with interventionist journals in Turkey the same thoughts on what it means to be a member of the European Union, or what the conditions of becoming a member should be? To begin with, each question would have to be posed as a general issue and then as a very specific issue depending on regional or national communities, and their ideologies, to see what it would take to bring them together.

EEÇ: Let me then take up the question of “what for” regarding the creation of a European network of cultural journals. Such an act of networking would seek to expand the European map as far as possible both linguistically and culturally in order to encompass the current European cultural scene; in this sense its horizon would be nothing but an expanded Europe.

HB: If you are talking about creating a kind of interventionist, cultural-activist, pan-European community of journals, then obviously the question of language and translation becomes very important. And there I immediately see two issues. One, if you have an expanded Europe of that kind, with its entire linguistic multiplicity and cultural diversity, and yet you emphasize French, German, and English, then the linguistic map looks rather like a kind of colonial map, a culturally colonial map. These were always the dominant languages: French was of course the great international diplomatic language of the nineteenth century, possibly even earlier; English was the other major language of international commerce and communication; German – I am being a little general here – was the language of nineteenth century European philosophy. I would say that even amongst those languages, English would dominate the others. There is a pragmatism and a realism about what you are suggesting, but to have these languages as the major languages of communication while at the same time redrawing the map of Europe creates an internal contradiction. I don’t know whether this is something you can actually do anything about, but I think you have to observe it, number one.

Number two: Why does Europe not extend to parts of Asia, for instance? After all, many of the debates and ideas of European liberalism were formed or emerged in communication with non-European countries and cultures in the colonial and imperial stage and even before that, even in the period of mercantilism. So it seems to me that if you are talking about expanding Europe – and we should be careful about that term itself because it seems to give Europe a kind of hegemonic place – but if you are talking about such expansion, or such expandability, then I think it is difficult not to think about this on a much more global scale. It is difficult not to suggest that parts of Asia and Africa, to say nothing of the Caribbean and Latin America, have been cultural sites that have contributed profoundly to the creation of the thing that we call Europe, both politically and culturally. John Stuart Mill’s great essay “On Liberty”, which in many people’s view is a classic articulation of European values, European polity, and European public ethics, was originally written in response to the problems of Indian education after Macaulay’s proposals for the reform of Indian education. So even a text like “On Liberty”, which is often thought to be the essence of European liberal thinking, or Euro-American liberal thinking, comes out of a profound and problematic conversation with India in the colonial period. It seems to me that once you start expanding the cultural and ideological and epistemological boundaries of Europe, you reach the Ganges, you reach the Nile, you reach Latin America, the Caribbean.

EEÇ: How about Europe then?

HB: Well, if you are interested in cultural and political issues, in cultural intervention and political activism, why should you be constrained by the term “Europe”? Whether Europe is a concept, whether Europe is an idea, whether Europe is a set of values, or whether Europe is a geopolitical entity… The territory of interventionist journalism or journals should be internationalist and should be based on the affiliations between communities of intellectuals or communities of activists who see the interconnectedness of the world not as some trendy issue of globalization but as a much older story that goes back several hundreds of years. So I don’t see why you need the concept of Europe to do the kind of very worthwhile cultural work of a pioneering journal or a pioneering set of journals. In fact, I think for a long time now a lot of philosophers and writers have been seeing Europe not as a kind of containing or constraining boundary but as a threshold to cross over intellectually, ideologically, ethically; we take Europe to be a threshold, to be a liminal territory to cross over onto other territories.

EEÇ: In relation to this worldly imaginary, how can we think about the relation between territory, nation and identity in a post-national world? Or rather, how can we engage with this relationship without promoting new identitarian politics?

HB: I think this is a very important and interesting question, and I think many writers and novelists have answered it. For instance, in the 1950s, the Caribbean novel was reinvented by a group of writers – George Lamming, Wilson Harris, V.S. Naipal, Sam Salvon – who all lived and worked, roughly, in a part of London not far from where I am speaking at the moment. They came here because the institution of literary and cultural production was not appropriately supported in the Caribbean at that time for economic reasons. So they were drawn to London where they lived very much, at least some of them, as minorities, the Afro-Caribbean minority. They took the English language and they gave it an Afro-Caribbean turn, they used the dialect, the patois, and they created these great works. All of a sudden a part of London, or London itself, or England becomes the territory for the invention or creation of Caribbean literature as we have inherited it now, and the very language of English is taken and transformed and culturally translated. You again have this happening with the boom of the post-colonial Indo-Anglian novel that started with Salman Rushdie for instance: again, funnily enough, in London. But the English language is taken and it is translated culturally, and these Indian writers used the mise en scène of urban Indian cities – whether it is Ricard Brouche, or Salman Rushdie, or Arundhati Roy. And then suddenly the territory of the “English novel” or “English fiction” explores or is located imaginatively in the landscapes of post-colonial India, and yet the literary production happens in England and the publishing institutions and the intellectual milieu become international. So you begin to see the cultural transformation of language and indeed territory, and no longer do you have a kind of pure or – as you put it – identitarian English culture organically emerging out of an English social territory. The whole idea of the organic relationship between language, culture, and the intellectual is disrupted.

So I give you an example of Caribbean literature in the 1950s; I give you the example of the Indo-Anglian novel in the 1980s; and then of course we now see this happening in France, where many of the most recent prizes for fiction have been given to the North African writers. Yet it is difficult to say, “Ah, this is Maghrebian, not Parisian.” The beauty of it is that the Maghreb finds its expression in the Parisian literary context, and the Parisian literary context is actually transformed by the Maghrebian experience. And this is, I think, what Walter Benjamin meant in his great essay on translation, “The Task of the Translator”, when he quotes Rudolf Pannwitz as saying that the important thing is not to make Hindi like German but to make German like Hindi. It seems to me that the impossibility today of clinging onto some organicist or identitarian link between culture, language, and territory is being demonstrated to us by what is happening in the world of writers, contemporary writers, or contemporary writing, and also in the intellectual issues that arise through writers. I can also give you examples of many artists who are in exactly the same position. That, I think, is the most concrete and the most far-reaching response to the question about the fate of some kind of identitarian, traditionalist view of the linkages between a “pure culture” and an unsullied geopolitical territory. These developments are not part of an organicist view of culture and language. It is a different model from the organic model that many literary historians wrote with, when they always taught that the English mind would in a way reflect English realities and came out of a British background and that the English language would be best represented by those who were steeped in British culture, British politics, and British history. The fundamental notion of literature – of the nationality of literature, of literature as having a nationality – has changed.

EEÇ: Do you think that the non-organic reality of contemporary literature could be a model for a project, or for a larger community of intellectuals and writers acting together?

HB: Oh, absolutely. I have just been in Bombay, which is the city of my birth. I find now that in Bombay there are writers and journalists and art critics who are able to do the work of cultural translation between European ideas and Indian artists, between Indian political problems and international legal and political issues.

The interview was first published in the print issue of Crosswords, 9/2008.

La mémoire des aïeux est la proie des serpents.

La critique lucide et perspicace que Chebbih fait de toute forme d’instrumentalisation, et surtout de celle du sacré, de la religion et du drapeau :

Marra besm eddine, marra besm ‘lam
Une fois au nom de la religion, une fois au nom du drapeau

Elle vise certes, en premier lieu, les dirigeants et les pouvoirs, mais elle n’épargne pas non plus le peuple, la société, lorsqu’ils manquent de courage. En cela, sa poésie n’est ni démagogique ni populiste. Le pays est pour lui une sorte d’absolu.

La mythification / démystification se double, en même temps, d’une reconnaissance et d’une non reconnaissance. Reconnaissance aux ancêtres et aux lieux-symboles pour ce que nous leur devons : une histoire, un nom, une gloire. Mais aussi non reconnaissance au sens où leur legs a été déformé, leur message trahi. On ne SE reconnaît plus. Cela fait penser aux très belles paroles de Mohammed Kacimi qui comparait l’Algérie à un être cher que l’on retrouve, le visage brûlé; un visage devant lequel «on peut crier d’effroi pour dire la monstruosité de sa métamorphose, ou prendre le temps de le caresser et chercher, sous la blessure, les traits de beauté que le feu a voulu ravager». La réponse, dit Kacimi, est de «ne pas laisser le drame parler tout seul, mais de lui couper la parole pour trouver la part de vie qu’il prétend nier». C’est cette part de vie que la poésie de Chebbih tente de réveiller en essayant de ressusciter les promesses de cette aube renouvelée qu’ont été toutes les luttes pour la liberté et l’égalité. (Abdelhafid Hamdi-Chérif)

The poem by Abdelhamid Chebbih was first published in Naqd, 17/2003.

A contribution to the Crosswords print issue by Abdelhamid Chebbih and Abdelhafid Hamdi-Chérif for Naqd, Algier/Algeria

Emrah Efe Çakmak: The question being asked to all the participants of this publication is, “How much in common does a community need?” From the perspective of a difference-embracing philosophy, such a formulation could seem awkward. How do you receive this question? Is this the proper way of addressing difference and communality?

Mark C. Taylor: In the history of the West, and perhaps not only the West, there is one central preoccupation: the problem of the one and the many. This is, of course, a philosophical and theological problem; less often noted and no less important, however, is that it is also a psychological and a political problem. Surely the twentieth century testifies to the magnitude of that problem. During the latter half of the twentieth century, many philosophers and social critics became preoccupied with issues of difference and otherness. This was in large measure a response to totalitarianism on the Left and on the Right. The whole point of the analyses of thinkers like Derrida, Foucault and Lacan was to disrupt the philosophy of identity, given that it can have such devastating political consequences.

But the pendulum swung too far in the other direction and a fetishism of difference began to emerge. Ironically, the philosophy of difference led to a politics of identity. In different ways, Maurice Blanchot and Jean−Luc Nancy exposed the implications of this position when they argue that what we have in common is that we have nothing in common.

Of course, this issue is not only philosophical or even political. While these developments were unfolding, other changes were occurring that recast the question of community – the first is technological and the second is environmental. There is an interesting relationship between the emergence of post−structuralism and new information and communications technologies. While some see in networks a tendency to totalization and hegemony, other see a growth in pluralism and diversity. While there is some truth in both of these positions, it is undeniable that much of the conflict plaguing the world today is a result of the increasing interconnectedness that globalization brings. As distance vanishes, differences become more evident and conflict seemingly becomes inevitable.

The second issue that is relevant in this context is the environment and climate change. If we study physical, chemical and biological processes, it is undeniable that living as well as non−living systems are complex networks. What the philosophy of difference fails to realize is that being is relational. This is not a social construct created for political purposes; to the contrary, it is a fact that we ignore at our peril.

The question is whether community is possible any longer and if so, on what scale? It is not difficult to observe localized communities today. But it is more difficult to imagine a broader, perhaps even a global community. It is precisely the preoccupation with local interests that makes a broader community so difficult to imagine.

Protests to the contrary notwithstanding, I would insist that we are in fact a global community and all members have much in common. In part, this rests upon my understanding of technological and natural networks. As Nietzsche once said, everything is entwined, enmeshed. Ontology harbors axiology – is implies an ought. On a more specific level, what everyone has in common is the prospect of imminent climatic disaster, which will mark the end of human life on this planet. For Heidegger, being−towards−death constituted the singularity of each person; when death is universal, being−towards−death holds out the prospect of creating community.

EEÇ: How can we think about the relation between territory, language and identity in a post−national world without giving way to identitarian linguistic politics? What would be the communicative prerequisites for transnational, multilingual public spheres such as the ones we are working to establish?

MT: The language of the question is an echo of the past and reflects a political agenda that has not adapted to the present. Consider the terms: “post−national world”, “identitarian linguistic politics”, “communicative prerequisites”, “transnational spheres” and “multilingualism”. We know what these terms mean and readily understand their implications. But they shed no new light on what is occurring. If language is important, and it is, we must fashion a new language.

What I want to stress is that language in today’s world is not primarily verbal but is, more importantly, visual. The problem is that we are visually illiterate – and nowhere is this more evident than in the university. In the “real” world, image trumps word every time; in the academic world, word represses image all the time. If communication is going to become effective on a global scale, we must liberate the image from the tyranny of the word. This does not mean giving up reading and writing as they have been known in the past. But it is no longer enough. The multilingualism of young people today is multimedia. If we do not learn to communicate in this language, we will have nothing to say.

EEÇ: What could be the role of political and cultural jounals in a changing media enviroment?

MT: Books and journals as we have known them are a thing of the past. Unfortunately, the last to understand this fact are universities and academics. Having said that, the question of how to respond remains to be addressed. In the coming decades, computing will become increasingly distributed and embedded. The movement from the PC to the handheld radicalizes decentralization and changes the nature of communication. People often complain – at least, professors do – that young people do not read anymore. But that is not true. They read all the time but they do not read books or long texts. Mobile technologies scramble everything and make it necessary to recast the terms of analysis. I do not think “transnational” is a useful term here. Again, it smacks of the past and does not help us to understand the reconstitution of political space that has already occurred. Think of everything as a web with constantly shifting nodes, which might be personal, social,economic or biological. The question is where and how to plug into this network.

For the most part, presses and journals as they now exist do not serve the interests of intellectual or cultural development. To the contrary, their proliferation is symptomatic of increasing hyper−specialization in which there is more and more about less and less. This is going in the opposite direction of history, in which there is increasing interconnectedness. So my advice is to forget journals – I no longer read any academic journals and I stopped publishing in them years ago. The only function presses and journals serve is to authorize those who write for them among a dwindling group of peers. If ideas are to matter – and I believe it is crucial that they do – we must completely change the way in which they are communicated.

The interview was first published in the print issue of Crosswords, 9/2008.

Un desconocido interrumpe mi lectura de la primera entrada del blog de George Orwell («Caught a large snake in the herbaceus border beside the drive.»). Se identifica como mi vecino de abajo. Me informa que ellos (nosotros), desde su apartamento, oyen todo lo que nosotros (ustedes) hacemos en el nuestro. Que perciben cada uno de nuestros pasos. Saben a qué horas nos levantamos; cuándo abrimos un armario. Es tímido y bien educado. Nada dijo sobre voces o sonidos de otra índole. Pero hizo mucho énfasis en los pasos. C’est surtout les pas.

Las serpientes son sordas y viven a ras de suelo: imposibilidad de tramitar mi perplejidad lejos de la iconografía que me aporta lo leído; todas las imágenes de su verano inglés verde y muy caliente vivificadas por el contraste con lo que me rodea y está confinado al interior del apartamento en el que transcurre mi verano urbano. …a large snake in the herbaceus border beside the drive. Si: uno de los dos tiene que ser la serpiente. No él; no es sordo, es lo que subió a decirme. Yo, entonces – a large snake; reducida al suelo por una visita que me impone la conciencia desgraciada de mi acústica pedestre.

Automatismos así: inmediatamente después de que mi perplejidad y yo cerráramos la puerta, lo mejor que se me ocurre es abrir un blog cuya primera entrada sería el relato de la visita amablemente siniestra que me ha puesto en mood paranóico. Psicología elemental: la novedad de un diario escrito hace 60 años conjurando mis pocas ganas de asumir el llegar tarde a la actividad de blogger y el hecho de que ese diario sea el diario de Orwell, explican fácilmente mi reflejo. Pero las analogías posibles entre mi blog y el bucólico diario de Orwell se agotan rápido; son algo más consistentes las potenciales entre un blog cronista de episodios urbanos de vecindad y su ficción más conocida. Mi blog daría cuenta de las consecuencias del hacinamiento; su diario documenta una forma de estar contemplativa que se me vuelve impensable ahora que sé que tengo pies y mi vecino orejas. Mis pies en sus orejas. Obscenidad urbanística. Y esta confusión de pronombres personales… ¿De quién habla mi «su» recurrente? De todos: Orwell, mi vecino, la serpiente (desambiguar la gramática vía hipertexto: un link entre cada «su» y una foto del o de lo aludido).

Al cronista de vecindario le conviene la técnica del blog, su tecnología micelar – esa que se aprovecha de la tendencia a aglomerarse que tienen las partículas similares cuando viven demasiado cerca.

A contribution to the Crosswords print issue by Liliana Padilla.

Sie braucht also vor allem die Vorstellung, dass es da gäbe: das Gemeinsame, das sich in Geschichten über sich selbst erzählen lässt.

Das wären erinnerte oder erfundene Geschichten ebenso wie Gerüche oder Gewürze, Lieder oder Feste, die besungen und befeiert werden, Rituale und Gewohnheiten, es sind Assoziationen, die abgerufen werden durch Bilder, Töne oder Begriffe, die gekoppelt an Trauer oder Zorn, Freude oder Ekel, Schuld oder Scham, die eigene oder die von anderen, die dann erneut aufgerufen wird. Es sind Geschichten, die weitergeschrieben und verändert werden, weil die, die sie erzählen sich verändern, weil sie anders werden, weil andere hinzukommen, die anders und anderes zu erzählen wissen.

Was gemeinsam bleibt, ist der Wunsch und die Phantasie in und durch diese Erzählungen sich zu verstehen, was gemeinsam bleibt und bleiben muss ist die Anerkennung, dass jeder eine eigene Geschichte hat, die in dieser polyphonen Erzählung eine eigene Stimme hat.

A contribution to the Crosswords print issue by Carolin Emcke for Polar, Berlin/Germany

A contribution to the Crosswords print issue by Vanya Serafimova for Critique and Humanism Journal, Sofia/Bulgaria

Ora abbiamo l’Esercito a dare aiuto a Polizia e Carabinieri: 3.000 uomini destinati alle grandi città: Milano, Roma, Napoli. Il nuovo governo Berlusconi ha voluto così: per riportare «ordine e sicurezza» in Italia, dice, per ridare un po’ di fiducia alla gente che si sente minacciata dallo «straniero».

Prendere le impronte digitali dei bambini rom fa parte anche questo del «pacchetto sicurezza». La motivazione del governo è che i bambini così non potranno più essere sfruttati e abbandonati dalle loro famiglie. Sarà. Ma promuovere la «cultura della paura», seminare il sospetto, è un atto criminale e pericoloso che difficilmente si combina con le politiche sociali di integrazione che non si sa bene che fine stiano facendo. Quello che sappiamo molto bene, invece, è che la società civile, se viene educata al riconoscimento dell’«altro», può fare grandi progressi sulla strada dell’accettazione e della convivenza pacifica.

L’Italia non era un paese così chiuso e retrogrado – ci hanno fatto diventare così, a forza di promuovere la diseducazione sistematica prima dei genitori e poi dei figli, creando ideali fasulli e ottusi, azzerando il desiderio di progettare le nostre vite secondo i princìpi del rispetto e della giustizia sociale. Stiamo diventando – forse siamo già diventati – una «massa amorfa», come la chiamava Hannah Arendt. E la storia ci insegna che la «massa amorfa» ama i leader forti, quelli in cui essa si può riconoscere, i leader venuti su dal nulla, con nulla da proporre se non il loro carisma. Ma in Italia chi legge più i libri di storia ?

A contribution to the Crosswords print issue by Biancamaria Bruno for Lettera Internazionale, Rome/Italy

Parce qu’une communauté (comme dans les contrats de mariage : réduite ou non aux acquêts) se définit par la circulation (des personnes, des biens et des idées), la question centrale me semble être, dans le « devoir commun », celle des frontières, ou des limites mêmes de la « communauté ». Jusqu’où s’étend la notion même de justice ? A qui les droits fondamentaux sont-ils attribués ? Une chose est de répartir (et de partager en divisant), une autre de distribuer (avec ou sans équité). Le passé a donné de très nombreux exemples de communautés illusoires. Les départements français d’Algérie distinguaient le musulman du véritable français. Plus tôt, les colonies « d’outre mer » supportaient l’esclavage comme si les seules communautés étaient celles de l’intérêt. Le cens, l’absence de suffrage féminin ont, du commun, fait une coquille vide.

C’est pourquoi, politiquement parlant, la communauté est, relativement à la société, un devoir être, non une réalité déjà donnée. Elle est un processus indéfini d’intégration et d’individuation. Quand on dit (ici et maintenant) « les arabes » ou « les noirs », on ne désigne pas une communauté, on signifie un dehors de la communauté. Pour une communauté, pas de constat d’huissier, pas de bilan, pas d’inventaire. L’ennemi de la communauté, c’est la déliaison, c’est le secret, c’est le passé. Car ce dont nous héritons, ce sont des clivages et des divisions.

A contribution to the Crosswords print issue by Seloua Luste Boulbina for Sens public, Lyon/France