- # 1
Paradoxes in the quest of an origin
Well, where does the Danube has its origin? It seems that, against the age-old controversies between specialists, it stems from the source of the river Breg, but the water that irrigates the meadow from which the Breg rises comes from a pipe, planted straight into the ground. An old woman who lives in a house on top of the meadow has attached a hollow trunk to the pipe, which forms a kind of gutter. Is it therefore necessary to conclude that the Danube originates from a gutter? In this matter the first foundation is missing, the base that holds everything together; even the gutter that feeds the spring is fed by the spring] Anonymous The Danube that both is and is not, that is born in several places of several parents, reminds us that, thanks to the complex, hidden fabric to which we owe our existence, each of us is a Noteentiendo [a form of not understanding you], as are the people from Prague with German names or the Viennese with Czech ones. But on this evening, along the river which they tell us sometimes disappears in summer, the step which treads with mine is as unmistakable as that watercourse, and in the flow of it, as I follow the curve of the banks, perhaps I know who I am. Claudio Magris, Danube, 1986 What if we are looking for the source of a river and we find out that it is a gutter, collecting rainwater?
- # 2
In the beginning was the name of a woman
According to myths, Europa was named after an Asian princess. Europa was abducted by Zeus, who had transformed himself into a bull, while she was picking flowers with her friends on the beaches of Tyre, a city in modern-day Lebanon. The animal carried her from Asia across the sea to Crete, where it married her. Her brother Cadmus came to Greece to look for her. He did not find her, but founded the city of Thebes instead. In the beginning [Europe] was the name of a woman. The narrative of people, of things and ideas is always marked by the names given to them. So also the tale of Zeus´ love-stories with deceived, abducted, seduced princesses reveals in their names a remote key to understanding the present. The abduction of the Phoenician princess by the God, turned into a bull, is just a short episode in the tormented relationships of the civilizations born on the coasts of the Mediterranean. Myth illuminates history. The myth calls them Io, Telefassa, Europa, Arianna, Fedra, Elena, kidnapped women, sometimes fugitives or looking for their beloved ones. All these women triggered the oscillations between Asia and Europe: at each oscillation a woman, and with her a crowd of predators, passed from one coast to the other; this is the story. At an unspecified point in this age of oscillations, Europa — the daughter of the King of Tyre — begins a journey on the back of her kidnapper. Riding on a god in the form of a bull, she travels towards a wild and unnamed land on the other side. The name of a woman. A tale made of names; of men overpowering women, overpowering other men. And also a tale of journeys across this sea surrounded by lands, exchanging goods and abductions, plundering and culture, something not yet resolved today.
- # 3
Constructing cities of refuge
We would ask to transform and reform the modalities of membership by which the city (cité) belongs to the state, as in a developing Europe or in international juridical structures still dominated by the inviolable rule of state sovereignty […] This should no longer be the ultimate horizon for cities of refuge. Is this possible? […] How can the right to asylum be redefined and developed without repatriation and without naturalisation? Could the City, equipped with new rights and greater sovereignty, open up new horizons of possibility previously undreamt of by international state law? […] If the name and the identity of something like the city still has a meaning, could it, when dealing with the related questions of hospitality and refuge, elevate itself above nation-states or at least free itself from them (s’affranchir), in order to become, to coin a phrase in anew and novel way, a free city (une ville franche)? Under the exemption itself (en général), the statutes of immunity or exemption occasionally had attached to them, as in the case of the right to asylum, certain places (diplomatic or religious) to which one could retreat in order to escape from the threat of injustice.
- # 4
Crooked city planning
A city is crooked because it is diverse, full of migrants speaking dozens of languages; because its inequalities are so glaring, svelte ladies lunching a few blocks away from exhausted transport cleaners; because of its stresses, as in concentrating too many young graduates chasing too few jobs … Can the physical ville [city] straighten out such difficulties? Will plans to pedestrianize a street do anything about the housing crisis? Will the use of sodium borosilicate glass in buildings make people more tolerant of immigrants?
- # 5
Birdlike voices of women
Moreover, I think that the women were called doves by the people of Dodona for the reason that they were Barbarians and because it seemed to them that they uttered voice like birds; but after a time (they say) the dove spoke with human voice, that is when the woman began to speak so that they could understand; but so long as she spoke a Barbarian tongue she seemed to them to be uttering voice like a bird: for had it been really a dove, how could it speak with human voice?
- # 6
Why do you fear the forest?
The fear is related to the forest, not the plants. This feeling is very old, it goes back to Roman civilization. For the Romans, the forest was the place of the “stranger”: It was in the forest that the barbarians hid. Moreover, the French word “forêt” [forest] comes from the Latin foris, which means “outside”. In English, the word “foreign” refers to what you don’t know, that which is far away. It may be due to the ecological legacy of antiquity that the tree continues to be considered a material for trade, which is not very commendable. We have remained within this fear of the forest and the desire to sell wood.
- # 7
Made of mud… how compost builds the world
My partner Rusten Hogness suggested compost instead of posthuman(ism) (a thought tradition that criticises the role of the human at the center), as well as humusities instead of humanities, and I jumped into that wormy pile. Human as humus has potential, if we could chop and shred human as Homo, the detumescing project of a self-making and planet-destroying CEO. Imagine a conference not on the Future of the Humanities in the Capitalist Restructuring University, but instead on the Power of the Humusities for a Habitable Multispecies Muddle!
- # 8
Making histories speak to each other
Beyond a pacific and sterile coexistence of reified cultures (multiculturalism), we must move towards cooperation among cultures equally critical of their identity - that is, to access the stage of translation. The stakes are colossal: it involves allowing the rewriting of "official" History in favor of plural narratives, while facilitating a possible dialogue among these different versions of History.
- # 9
Monstrous algae meets gentrification: a Tale of Invasion
More than ever today, nature has become inseparable from culture; and if we are to understand the interactions between ecosystems, the mechanosphere, and the social and individual universes of reference, we have to learn to think ‘transversaly’. As the waters of Venice are invaded by monstrous, mutant algae, so our television screens are peopled and saturated by ‘degenerate’ images and utterances. In the realm of social ecology. Donald Trump and his ilk -another form of algae - are permitted to proliferate unchecked. In the name of renovation, Trump takes over whole districts of New York or Atlantic City, raises rents, and squeezes out tens of thousands of poor families. Those who Trump condemns to homelessness are the social equivalent of the dead fish of environmental ecology.
- # 10
Rocks, cities and mushrooms - Information flows
Bacteria, fungus, whale, sequoia - we do not know any life of which we cannot say that it emits information, receives it, stores it and processes it. For universal rules so incontrovertible that, by them, we are tempted to define life but we are unable to do so, because of the following countexamples. Crystal and indeed rock, sea, planet, star, galaxy–we know no inert thing of which we cannot say that it emits, receives, stores and processes information. Four universal rules, so uniform that we are tempted to define anything in the world by them but are unable to do so because of the following counterexamples. Individuals but also families, farms, villages, cities and nations–we do not know any human, alone or in groups, of whom we cannot say that they emit, receive, store and process information.
- # 11
Who can own nature? And other questions of belonging...
But who really owns land and nature? Humans have no more self-evident rights than grass, trees, and squirrels, not to speak of fungi and bacteria. Property, the conceit that state-backed human social relations give us absolute rights over things, does not go far in the realms of land and nature, where people can never fully be in charge. What people can share is not absolute rights over land and nature but the knowledge, affect, and social relations involved in living with them.
- # 12
Do we live in an economy of theft?
Extractivism identifies a political economy premised on the withdrawal of value without corresponding deposit: resources are removed from the Earth, profits from labor, and commodifiable data from plants, bodies, and information systems. Returned to their place is waste, toxicity, disease, exhaustion, and death. Comprising a fundamental logic of advanced global capitalism that is now evident worldwide, extractivism has long been recognized as a fundamental form of colonialism as well: “[E]xtracting is stealing—it is taking without consent, without thought, care or even knowledge of the impacts that extraction has on the other living things in that environment,” notes Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. “That’s always been a part of colonialism and conquest. Colonialism has always extracted the indigenous.” […] Extraction increasingly includes digital appropriation, relating to social media and surveillance-based data mining, IT processing, and algorithmic capture, expanding the extractive zone to the techno- and info-spheres.
- # 13
Undo the goal of economic growth
When governments pursue growth as a goal in itself, they undertake desperate and damaging measures to make it happen. They chase cheap energy and keep issuing licences for fossil fuels and opening coal mines. They say they're cutting red tape in the name of business innovation, but they end up undermining legislation that protects the rights of workers, protects communities and the health of a living world. They deregulate finance and unleash speculative bubbles. And they privatise public services and turn public wealth into private profit. That's why it is so important to ask what are we for? Doughnut economics is a positive propositional frame: meet the needs of all people and do so within the means of the living planet. It is an overriding vision to move from a degenerative economy that runs down the living world to a regenerative one. To move from divisive economies that capture value in the hands of a few to having distributive ones that share that value and opportunity far more equitably with everybody who co-creates it, and that turns out to be the whole of society. Europe has the opportunity to show the leadership of what this looks like.
