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.
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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