Sunday 28 June 2020

International e-conference on Solidarity in a post-Covid world

The Solidarity e-Conference organised by Professor Mirna Džamonja from the 22nd to the 26th June 2020 was a platform where 'engaged intellectuals and cultural workers could give their personal vision of the world after Covid-19'. It was possibly the first such conference of its kind and was successful in bringing together more than forty experts from many different disciplines, many countries and many ideological inclinations to the same platform. The aim of the conference was There were musicians, artists, writers, lawyers, journalists, theatre directors and philosophers besides mathematicians and scientists, all of whom tried to grapple with the idea of the post-Covid world in their own ways. The central theme was global solidarity, which the conference assumed to be the only way forward in order to survive this crisis, and the conference was described as ‘an international video conference where selected leaders from the world of science, culture and civil society would meet and offer their vision of the world after the crisis’.

Given the geographical spread of the presenters across the globe it was a challenge to find a time that would work for those in Bogota as well as for me in Guwahati, but it worked. There were as many as 8 presentations every day, arranged in 45 minute slots, with roughly half the time dedicated to discussion. The presentations were made in many languages; many of the presenters had multiple nationalities (Mirna has three including English and Belgian), and Ema Bregović (more about her later) at least 8! Hence this conference was international in a very real sense. And of course everyone stayed at home while participating in the conference and spoke from out of their living rooms or work spaces, adding to the novelty of the whole effort.

Since it was Mirna’s conference and she is a reputed academic and logician hailing from the erstwhile Yugoslavia, there was understandably an over-representation of university academics, especially logicians and mathematicians, and also of speakers from the Western Balkans. But getting speakers from those countries to come together to interact on a common platform was a feat in itself and that only added to the uniqueness and extraordinariness of the whole exercise, and the audience got to hear voices from places that are not often in the news. The proceedings began with a very interesting conversation between two experts of the Western Balkans, politician and historian Florian Bieber from Graz and philosopher and socialist Igor Štiks in Belgrade.

One of the highlights of the conference was the presentation by our very own Gandhian- philosopher-academic-turned-politician Yogendra Yadav, who tried to present a manifesto for a post-Covid world. Starting with a brief description of the disastrous management of the Covid-crisis in India and using Gandhian ideas of Swaraj [which he defined not just as rule by ‘self’ but also the rule over ‘self’], of truth, of (un)freedom and of justice, Yadav encouraged the audience to clear oneself of all preconceived notions before trying to come up with answers to what should be important and what should be given up in the world to come. Along the way he came up with some very interesting ideas: that politics need not necessarily always be combined with power, politics could also have to do with struggle, with constructive work, as well as with knowledge and the inner self.

The compellingly powerful presentation by the French philosopher, musician and mathematician François Nicolas, a close friend of the well-known French philosopher Alain Badiou, set out to tackle the question "what is happening to us this year?", to us disoriented humanity, subjected by governments to the jerky alternation confinement/deconfinement. He set out to approach it from the following ideological angle: how what happens to us affects the confidence that each of us can have in it humanity as such, in its capacities to orient its destiny towards some collective emancipation rather than towards nihilistic self-destruction? He was very impressive and his ideas resonated very closely to some of my own [for example, he spoke of the close to 2 billion people which the capitalist world considered as pure and simple waste since they could not be exploited any further -- this can explain very powerfully why all those lakhs of migrant workers were completely ignored and left to die on the Indian highways during the lockdown].  

Another highlight was a fascinating interview with the distinguished 90 year old Jewish Mexican writer Margo Glantz of Ukarianian origin. She said many important things – that the new ‘normality’ is a new ‘mortality’ and that a pandemic causes a breakdown of traditional structures and produces shortages of many important things. Speaking of literature, she said that new metaphors of reality were needed as the old ones were no longer applicable. In response to my question of whether some literature produced in the pre-Covid world might become irrelevant, she responded that 'many very successful books will be forgotten soon'. She was also incredibly up-to-date with technology, uses twitter etc. and said that she now tries to write in the language of fragmentation that the new generation uses and understands.

Staying with literature, Canadian Philosopher and poet Jan Zwicky recited some very powerful poems in her own inimitable manner. Referring to the impending ecological cataclysm (which she believes is a far greater threat to the planet than the Covid crisis) she writes: ‘we are in the situation of a body undergoing extreme centripetal acceleration in which we might fly out into space, we might crash and burn, or we might, just might, withstand the extreme forces acting on us and complete the turn’.

Of the many presentations made by distinguished mathematicians and logicians, while Menachem Magidor of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem spoke of the prospects of higher education in the post Covid world, Demetrios Papageorgiou from Imperial College London spoke of the technological hubris whereby overconfidence in what technology can do leads to a loss of faith in it. Conference host and logician Mirna Džamonja  used  simple deductive logic to show that global truth does not exist, and hence the pluralist model is the only reasonable model in mathematics as well as in life. Painting a rather pessimistic picture philosopher nad historian of mathematics Fernando Zalamea from Bogota spoke of the solidarity crisis caused by exacerbated individualism, industrialization and doctrinalisation. He maintained that resistance cannot be global, it is always local; but that solidarity might completely disappear if people stop believing in the existing systems.

Mathematician Rehana Patel from India (working in Senegal) spoke about decentering the University and  Joseph Fishkin’s theory of bottlenecks that students have to negotiate in trying to access higher education. With the industrialization of academia she believed that Fishkin’s concept of Opportunity pluralism would help potential students find new ways to travel through and around bottlenecks.  The other speaker from Africa was Gisèle Bedan, a former Minister of the Central African Republic. She spoke very powerfully of how the pandemic had proved to be a great equalizer as everyone was equal in their fear for the disease. She hoped that this pandemic would teach humankind the lessons of coexistence and co-operation.

Artist and architecture historian Azra Akšamija presented a very powerful video of the ‘culture shutdown’ movement that she had led in museums in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 2013. Another mathematician turned museum specialist Alejandro Martin Maldonaldo from Columbia spoke in beautiful fragmented verse about the sensation of ‘living in time – not here or there, but in time’.  In his words, ‘these last months, time has been lived in a very singular way. Sequences, arbitrary, disconnected, and at the same time, deeply related, forming some kind of chain or tree, suggesting that this “other” time could be like a dream or a nightmare, and also a window or a threshold to…’.  Mathematician and philosopher Andrés Villaveces, who is also the co-host of this conference, also spoke about the changed perception of temporality by using Cortazar’s powerful metaphor ‘fighting emptiness’ for resistance in the face of the void; he also asks whether we have the language to capture the present while admitting that the future will not be harmonious.

Journalist Esma Kučukalić’s very interesting presentation spoke about how any discussion of the Covid crisis in interspersed with war terminology such as Covid warriors, enemy, war against the pandemic etc; talking of the ‘new normal’ she questioned how something that is normal can be new? She also described a kind of activist journalism  ‘solution journalism’ where issues are considered from the perspective of the solutions to a given problem, and one tries to understand not just what  solutions might work but also why they could work. Another journalist and writer Vedrana Rudan read out a no holds barred essay titled ‘Who the fuck is WHO?’ where she asks many uncomfortable questions without mincing words, for example: ‘In Sweden many people of colour died with the virus. I ask was this Sweden’s way of cleaning up the Ghettos!’

Artist Ema Bregović  in her presentation asks whether art forms can make us rethink the concept of transgression and whether art can contribute to the creation of a society based on the collective, in a world where solidarity is constantly losing ground. Artist Miri Segal presented some of her very unusual lockdown creations. Serbian pianist Vladica Mikicević and composer came together with singer Balša Stevanović to use the language of music to explore the old and the new in our changing world. Theatre Director Marie-José Malis  spoke about her vision of a fair world and how she had been penalized and persecuted for taking the side of the victim.

The conference ended with a reading of a story written by Mirna’s brother, writer and journalist Dario Džamonja, whose stories bring forth the unbearable difficulty of being but also carry the hope that human beings are capable of changing. In the end, I suppose the conference and its success made clear that solidarity was not only something simply desirable but also something crucially necessary if we wanted to survive this ongoing health, economic as well as humanitarian crisis and wanted to create a better future world. The sheer fact that this conference happened and evoked such tremendous response is in itself a demonstration of immense global solidarity. But all of us who participated spoke from a position of privilege; most of us were connected with universities, we had the advantage, one could even say, luxury, of sitting at home and debating abstract ideas…

But for true solidarity we must be able to include many other voices in this discussion. In this spirit I would like to end with the words of François Nicolas and his take on that point as well as his response to the central question of his vision of the world after the Covid-19 crisis.  In his own words (in translation), ‘It is up to us to rebuild a confidence of humanity in its own collective capacities by transmitting the modern assets of the XX° century to the young generations and by practicing, here and now, with enthusiasm, new modalities of meetings between intellectuals, workers and women of the people of the contemporary world. In other words, a proposal, perhaps, for a next session of this Solidarity Conference.’

For more about the actual conference here is the link to the conference website.
Soon most of the lectures presented at the conference will be available for viewing in the dedicated Youtube channel of the conference as below:



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