What Is the Place and Influence of the Word, Logos, in the World Today?

BOHM DIALOGUE

Vol. 28 | October 2, 2022

Nina Murray, Peter Jukes, Julia Ovcharenko,
Chris Keulemans, Demyan Om Dyakiv-Slavitski 

Arlington—London—Vienna—Amsterdam—Kyiv

Summary

What is the place and influence of the capital-W Word, Logos in the world today? The nature of literacy in the digital era now demands meta-knowledge of the algorithms that control the platforms. While temporary, and generative of new forms of art, social media is also subject to capitalist control and prone to propaganda, or ‘post-truth’. Individual freedom implies personal accountability, being present, and bearing witness (hence, logos as the memory or the witnessing of history). Logos is also defined as a narrative that resonates with universal human values and is therefore inclusive. The role of creative and speculative writing is discussed, as well as the value and limitations of societal dialogue. 

Key words

logos, λόγος, literacy, propaganda, denialism, truth, witnessing, creative writing, speculative writing, accountability, creativity, presence

Time codes

02:20   the capital-W word is logos, not language

06:42   post-literacy literacy 

09:16   critique of social media

16:25   the informational frontline in the russian war in Ukraine 

24:26   the production of knowledge and witnessing

41:53   denialism

47:10   freedom and responsibility

50:11   repression and creativity 

53:25   the phenomenon of “Absence”

01:00:54   inclusive narratives and speculative writing 

01:15:52   fake news and the Internet

01:21:52   creative writing during the war

01:32:03   the importance and limitations of dialogue in a society 

Participants

C — Chris Keulemans
D — Demyan Om Dyakiv-Slavitski
J — Julia Ovcharenko
N — Nina Murray
P — Peter Jukes

THE DIALOGUE

D: The topic I would like to suggest for today is the Word with a capital W and its influence in the world. This does not mean only the news or social media, but beyond that. 

[02:20] the capital-W word is logos, not language

P: To me, the word, the capital-W word, is logos, is knowledge. Not language. And I think social media is a form of knowledge. And I think social media is good for poetry. 

But before we get to that, I have a friend whose son is 25. [He is] severely disabled, has no language. He’s got “u” and “e”. He certainly has a personality. He has a flow of consciousness. He has some kind of knowledge. And, I think from my structuralist training – I was brought up, went to school in the 80s, where we were told “language makes man”, you know, “I, as constituted by language” — I think that is part of the problem.

And Chris and I have spoken about this a lot, when it came to Bosnia as well as  playwrights like Peter Handke [Wiki] and the postmodern attitude that, if you like, “the language creates everything”. That there is no truth. Of course this is about truth. 

I think I’ve discovered as a journalist the importance of truth, if not absolute, then the aspiration to truth, you know. I have just put it like the lode star. We cannot get Polaris, but we can work out where north is. And truth is an aspiration, if not an achievement. And people say “There’s no truth”. Well, I can tell you having been sued for defamation, in many trials there is a law, a concept of truth.

And finally, I love to talk about language and English, and Polish, and Ukrainian. And what happens to specific languages at specific times. Why is Ukrainian so important? Why was Polish so important in the 19th century?

But I would say social media is the domination of the word. People have moved there from all other forms of language, like speaking. Everybody texts, everybody is a writer. And in a way, it’s like the next stage from Gutenberg. I think social media is the triumph of the domination of literacy. And what happened to Gutenberg? What happened with the book? Two hundred years of religious warfare.

J: For me, it’s the “why” of the questions we are discussing today. With the digital era, when everyone has the word, when everyone can write and can tell what they think, it’s often not based on knowledge. It’s not often based on truth. So it seems like the war becomes fragile—it’s as if it were threatened by too many voices. And how does one stay with the truth in this chorus of everyone saying something?

[06:42] post-literacy literacy 

N: Perhaps we could think of it as a kind of a ‘post-literacy’ literacy. I want to talk about this idea of literacy and what it used to mean for different languages, to be literate in different languages because Lesya Ukrainka is at the forefront of my mind. She wrote in russian and in Ukrainian, and was criticized for writing in Ukrainian because she was told that the same play should be written in russian. And she’d be told that her characters don’t inspire as much empathy or don’t seem as real in Ukrainian. That’s a very real choice there.

And as far as social media is concerned, it is also so visual. I understand everything is text. But I’m on Instagram as opposed to Facebook, where the visual, the picture still dominates. It’s now the era of TikTok, and the algorithms are tuned for video and the specific keywords that people tend to prefer. The reader is no longer a human reader, but the algorithm. Which is how everybody gets kittens in their feed. 

So in order to be literate in this world, you almost have to be literate not only in the language you’re writing in or the language you’re reading, but also in the meta language and the language of the algorithm. When I teach students, I aspire to teach ways to break the algorithm. And one of the skills for this is being able to curate your own news feed, to make sure you don’t end up at the mercy of the algorithm. So I would propose that there are many small-L logoses floating out there.

[09:16] critique of social media

P: There’s two sorts of obvious criticisms of social media. When I was a kid, literacy had massively increased thanks to post war education. All old people used to say, “The kids today don’t have nice handwriting and their grammar is appalling”. But they were from the time when 5% of the population went to university,  and now it’s 50% (it was 15%, when I was younger). There’s a perception that everything’s going down — but it’s just getting wider! 

And I think [when] everybody has a voice it isn’t bad in itself. I see you’ve read Walter Benjamin. He says: “All the great art forms come from these marginal forms”. Shakespeare came from the bear pits. The movies came from the peep shows. So the democratic aspect of TikTok and similar platforms and even the imagery seems to me part of the historical norm. This is emerging democracy – Eisenstein was writing a language of image against image which creates the concept. That’s his theory of montage. 

The difference here is social control, surveillance and algorithms. Obviously when a monk in the Book of Kells was writing out the Bible and drawing, it meant a lot of memes in those old Bibles that were owned by the church effectively. But it wasn’t industrialized. This is where I think English is a dead language in some ways, by the way. That’s why I think we have great lying politicians like Trump and Johnson. It’s a form of industrialization of the mind. Basically, computer industrialized countries, they’ve gone from hardware to software. The Turing machine can emulate any other machine. And I think that is the danger of monopoly surveillance capitalism.

C: There’s a lot going on. I just want to go back to the original question by Demyan. Demyan when you pose a question for us to discuss, sometimes I wonder why are you asking this question? Because you see it, it opens up all kinds of responses immediately. But I just want to be sure that we are within your motivation to ask this question. Why is it important to you? What triggers you to ask it today?

D: For me logos is a way, logos is a tower. Not just knowledge, or just the word, of course. I think social media is very temporary applied in our history in this way. I want to understand how our generation can influence and what we create right now in our lives with this Word, or with Logos. I think about generations now. I don’t know of another phenomenon except law where people can create such deep, persistent structures. It’s about the future which we create right now. 

That’s why this topic is important for me. And another one is thinking about humanity and about our common culture. What is common between different cultures, different languages, different religions and philosophical views? The word, the logos, these logos. And can we see it? Can we see one logos? Perhaps we can’t, but who can? We have many languages, but one set of values for all humanity. And these values are encapsulated in very simple words. How can we practice these values here? I think the goal for writers is to explain to other people how to practice these values. Maybe to inspire them first and then to explain. 

[16:25] the informational frontline in the russian war in Ukraine 

J: I would like to add some aspects to your “why” Chris. So, as Ukrainians in war we see that there is another frontline, the informational frontline. We see we have a responsibility to be active there. If we are not fighting as military people, we are fighting as intellectuals. We see that the word is a weapon both for defense and for counteroffensive. Also we notice some problems in defining what we are fighting, how it is going. 

Propaganda is very active in the digital world. So we ask ourselves if we want to fight this propaganda, or if we just want to strengthen the Ukrainian narratives, what do we do? What is the energy in the Word and where does this energy have to be applied? How can we be effective? Perhaps, in the era of post-truth the “word” is not as powerful as it was before. Do we believe that methods like books, traditional media, newspapers, journals are still working? Or, maybe, making movies is a better way to achieve our goals? How much time should it take? Time is really dense in a war. It flies very fast. Yet creating a discourse, a narrative, takes a long time. 

P: So from a cultural background, the last ten years I’ve been a journalist and for most of those ten years, and certainly since 2014 and the Maidan Glorious Revolution I have seen the power of lies. With Brexit, with Trump, I decided to become a journalist because this seemed to be more important than any other battle. It’s a cultural battle. I must say Ukraine and Ukrainians from that moment inspired me and have continued to inspire me; they are the reason we write a lot about hybrid warfare, disinformation, absolute lies like “the special military operation”. A horrible euphemism like “military technical solution”. I came back from Ukraine in 2014 to be told by left-wing friends that Ukraine was filled with Azov, Bandera, fascists. It was very, very effective because it was hidden. And people couldn’t see the stakes. But 15,000 Ukrainians died because of these lies. I didn’t need to tell you this. 

And so I think this is the moment of amazing clarity. Not only Ukrainians are brilliant at demonstrating not just in words, in actions, in bearing the truth — your culture is. It’s genocide in the form that targets libraries, schools, places of learning, an attempt to kill Ukrainian culture. Which is to me very similar to what happened in the 30s, particularly early, well before the 30s in Polish culture. What Ukraine has done is combined a national pride in culture and language with a sense of international values – the rule of law, membership of the EU. It’s a civic nationalism. 

And that means that a new identity comes forward, such as NATO.  This is kind of the anti-russian trolling “The Transatlantic Fellows Organization” like NATO. And there’s humor. There’s wit. There’s a difference between telling a viable truth and a falsity. But what the Ukrainians are doing is also telling a verifiable truth with confidence, with panache. And finding a language and building a new culture on top of this—this is amazing to watch. Even if sadly it’s done with blood.

C: I think Demyan and Julia are looking to revitalize logos as knowledge. When our daily life, and especially your daily life is dominated by algorithms and propaganda, what kind of language can you use to counter that? Of course, not by acting as if social media didn’t exist. 

[24:26]  the production of knowledge and witnessing

N: I wanted to go back to what Damyan said about the production of knowledge: the production of knowledge as being a universal kind of feature of Tau or Dao. As much as that is true, various spiritual traditions also have the contemplative tradition which refuses to participate in a way in the project of language, in the project of the production of, perhaps, the doctrinal logos. As a practitioner, this leads me to Julia questions of what we can do as practitioners. And it also leads me to the value of witnessing. The value of participation and practice. Language in the sense of the text that is not produced for communication, but is a narrative that is produced for the self. For the witnessing I, which we linguists play with “eye”. 

So to come back to the question of what may be effective, and how do we build our narratives. There’s a reason why the russian regime obscures the evidence. Because as Peter points out, lies hold up worse in the face of verifiable information. They do not hold up as well. And one of the subjects at my dinner table is what will it take for russians? What will it take for the people of russia to see, to understand what has happened to them? And one of the popular answers, or sort of a common answer is like their dead relatives coming home as dead relatives. From a very practical standpoint, I think witnessing is very important and if that means bringing people physically to the sites where things happen and showing them the evidence, having them witness and having them contemplate the evidence, then that is what needs to happen. 

Also to counter Demyan’s tasks to writers as a poet, I find my task is contemplation. My task is to create, and my goal is to create a fictional garden with real toads in it, as Ann Sexton put it. So that leads me on this path towards nonlinguistic production of knowledge.

J: This brings to mind so many instances when libraries were destroyed, when books were burned, to destroy the culture that someone doesn’t want to exist, and it makes me really believe the word is very powerful in keeping the knowledge. From books that survived, from old archives that were saved, we can retract Ukrainian history and we can re-find what was  happening, and what the real truth of imperial occupation was.

N: Again, when archives burn, we lose the ability to witness. We lose evidence of eyewitnesses, and in a way, we lose the ability to go back and witness and know what had happened. And this trauma of discontinuity in itself is, in my opinion, a personal trauma. It’s experienced as a personal trauma, this inability to go back and find out, to know. There’s no place for me to go to find out exactly where my great-grandfather was from and how many siblings he had because records are lost. And that’s just a very small example of a lacuna in the past due to these things. I live in England now where everything is very well recorded down to Domesday Book, which is 1086. And people can point out and say very quickly “Well, this farm has been here since 1236”. That’s fantastic! I would love to have the continuity that people are enjoying here. Going back to the practical question, that is a trauma that we need to talk about.

P: [Liubov Yakymchuk] was on Byline TV. She introduced this film [““Slova” house”] about the amazing Ukrainian surrealist modernist poets in a house in Kharkiv. And then they were all killed by the CheKa. So this was knowledge. The archives were there. This wasn’t hidden to Ukrainians, obviously, you probably knew about it. It was hidden to me, because I didn’t care. I didn’t know. And so England is full of knowledge but nobody cares. To me it’s more important that people dare face the truth. 

The poem I have pinned to my Twitter profile is Zbigniew Herbert’s Report from a Besieged City. And it ends with the lines that say, if the city is destroyed, but one man continues on the roads of exile, he will be the city. If you like, logos is the memory or the witnessing of history.

Urgently now, the problem is not just russia, putin’s armies. [The Ukrainians’ problem] is in a way what will happen to russia in the future? I mean, we think putin will lose, obviously. But not out of sympathy, but you have to think what do you do with a country which has lost, completely lost? Chris would be brilliant to talk about Bosnia now, 26 years after Srebrenica. The elections today. The old demons have not been put to bed. So my question is back to Demyan’s. The people who want to know are in dialogue with you and other people. What do you do with people who don’t want to know?

N: Whose task is it going to be? Whose job is it going to be to deal with the people who don’t want to know? In other words, who is going to deal with the russian nation, with the russian population who doesn’t want to know? 

C: In this context, is there a responsibility for writers and thinkers right there? 

P: The only analogy I can only think of is the nazis Germany, obviously, and two things happened there. There was Nuremberg. But there was also a massive reconstruction of civil society. Federalization of the Lander. There was renovation of the law, the beginnings of the EU with the Coal and Steel Federation. So there were so many things I don’t know if anybody knows this. Demyan Om Dyakiv-Slavitski, are you a fan of Alexandre Koyre? He is one of my favorite philosophers. He wrote this phenomenology of Hegel, which really influenced Camus and Sartre with all these people in the 30s. In the 50s he went on to be a founder of the EU, and laid down the philosophical basis of the European Union, which just blows my mind a little bit. So, surely we all are responsible for russia. Thinkers, writers, jurists, police officers, investigators, forensic experts. And I don’t see how we can avoid that, because we’re in a common European neighbourhood. 

N: I think that’s absolutely wonderful to hear, Peter, but I don’t know how far this sentiment goes… I’m in the public diplomacy business. I’m in the business of figuring out what the next generation is going to think. There was a question that Demyan posed about how you measure impact — this is the Holy Grail of public relations and we don’t know. But we can tell you that we can’t necessarily think ourselves into new ways of doing, but we can act into new ways of thinking. People-to-people exchanges continue to exist because they work. Because putting people on the bus and taking them to Bucha and giving them a tour will still work. I hope. I think.

J: It definitely works for those who believe and who know that it was not the Ukrainian army who had done what was done in Bucha. At the same time, a russian says, look at what the Ukrainian army does to its own Ukrainian citizens. And when these lies come to the table, it becomes difficult, and those who believe in these lies may struggle with some understanding of what actually happened. And confronting these lies seems really challenging for me. How do we convert those who believe the lies? 

P: So Chris, what happened in Srebrenica? I remember vividly the weekend in July ‘95 when it fell. But it took years and months for those graves to be found. The 8,000 men and boys. And I remember even that weeks afterwards, the Clinton government, the major government… There was denialism. But generally, worldwide it is now accepted there was a genocide in 1995. Even in russia which was Serbia’s ally. So how did that logos become accepted? What was that process?

C: By facts, by the forensic experts. Digging up remains of people in different spots. Putting them together and proving that this was one person of the 8,000 missing. But I am not optimistic about these really weird times. You can take people to Bucha and see what’s happened. As we have been taking people to Auschwitz for decades to see what happened. That has been used for a very long time by the Polish authorities as the ultimate proof that all the evil came from the nazis and that the Polish were innocent. And now among the Bosnian Serbs it goes a step further. The more hard evidence has come up about Srebrenica and about the Bosnian genocide in general, the stronger the opposition to these facts becomes. I mean the simple denial of what happened is now a common good. In the face of undeniable research and facts. That is the world we live in. And that’s why it’s so complicated to talk about this question of how to deal in the future with the people who don’t believe the truth. It’s going to be very, very complicated, because the more the truth appears, the more it encourages the deniers to deny.

[41:53] denialism

P: But there’s a reason for that, Chris. Holocaust denialism exists, but it’s not a big industry because the nazis were defeated. And you know the Bosnian Serb Republic hasn’t been defeated. They weren’t fully tried. Just as, though there was a brief moment of illumination in the 90s thanks to the collapse of Communism, it is now possible to deny Katyn. That’s what putin does. He denies what was happening at the time. Basically, the Soviets dug some of the bodies up, you know the story, and put paperwork in them, so it looked like the nazis had killed the 10,000 Polish intellectuals and troops. And that lie survives because there’s an industry and a nation backing it. I surely think this is why some lies are difficult to defeat through evidence: because there’s a vested interest, a powerful party which manufactures denials. Which is maybe what goes back to Nina’s point. The only way to get the russians to accept the truth is for the current regime to be completely defeated. The only way the truth will come out to the russian people about Ukraine is for the regime which creates the lies with its troll factories, with its russia today, Novosti to be destroyed. That regime.

N: Where I see a potential tool is in pointing out the [algorithmization] of propaganda: all propaganda narratives have commonalities, have common threads.  And to distill it completely it is the abnegation of responsibility. So anytime you have a narrative that releases you from responsibility, it is the first signal that this narrative needs to be double checked. Basically, in russia it’s the eternal “мы не виноваты” — “it’s not us”. Hashtag “we’re not there”. How often do you hear them say russia “is forced” to do something? 

To me this is a symptom of the violence with which the regime relates to the people. This is the same dynamic as in interpersonal violence where the abuser is never to blame. The regime is never to blame. “We’re always forced”. There is never responsibility. 

I don’t know the experience of the South African Reconciliation commissions. What they did, what they managed to do after apartheid is to get people to take responsibility. To stand in front of others and say “yes, I did this” or “yes, I ordered that”, “yes, I participated”. Which worked. And I think that one of the European values that we’re fighting for is the value of responsibility. “Accountability” is another word that you could use in English, but Demyan Om Dyakiv-Slavitski used “responsibility” in the production of knowledge responsibly. Perhaps if you point out that it is difficult to live in the world where nobody is responsible for anything you start at least showing the scaffolding on which the propaganda is built. You show that skeleton. And you can point to narrative after narrative, after narrative, that all have this thing in common.

[47:10] freedom and responsibility

J: It’s often said that this pair of freedom and responsibility, they always go together. And the level of freedom is also measured by the level of responsibility. The more freedom you have, the more responsible you are for your actions and vice versa. The more responsibility you take, the more freedoms you get. And it seems like in russia the more the freedoms are reduced, including the freedom of thinking, the less responsibility they also see and take. So if after the fall of the regime the people get more freedoms, we also have to remind them from outside that freedom doesn’t go without responsibilities. They are always together.

N: So my question then is this: is there anything the responsibility for which is undeniable? Is there anything the experience of which cannot be denied? My personal answer to that from my practice is the responsibility for one’s creative work. However small it is. The experience of attempting to create something and (usually) failing. That kind of failure is very difficult to deny on the personal level. And I’m looking at a very, very basic level. Where can a person who does not experience accountability or responsibility in his\her life routinely go to have this experience?

J: Yes, creativity is the first thing that goes after freedom. Being  creative is something where you feel free and this act of creation is also a sign of presence, a sign of being. So that’s the category of where we can realize where being is or where it is not.

[50:11] repression and creativity

P: And particularly repressive societies insist on education and learning by rote, as russia does. And I’m thinking of the many thousands of Ukrainian children who are now being exfiltrated and being taught russian. How do you reach those people?  Because all of us have that experience of the creativity of life expression and then being criticized, getting bad reviews, good reviews, changing what we’ve made. Not a lot of people realize that is important, but when you put it in terms of presence that really registers to me. My only encounters with what I call “evil to personality” have nearly always been about absence. This denial of responsibility. People with personality disorders. People who are very traumatized. The people who are absent. And I notice from russian media, from the conscripts being taken to Ukraine mainly drunk, vast amounts of absence. And sometimes there’s a psychological, spiritual absence. 

Also, an absence of goods. I mean why were they taking washing machines in Bucha or Irpin? They’d scrawled on the walls, you know? I mean it has historically been this way, but has also been a philosophy of absence of self-denial, of repression, of instant gratification and bourgeois capitalism. The biggest, the most absent person I’ve ever spoken to, but only on Twitter, is Rupert Murdoch. 

And I look at the Ukrainians dancing, singing; the soldiers dancing. Look at the amazing women in the army. There’s a language beyond creativity which is more cultural when you get more presence here. There’re sunflowers, beauty. This philosophy of presence obsesses me. And that’s why I can see a great morality being formed, because generous people are present people, kind people are present people. It’s very difficult to be a torturer if you’re present.

C: Explain a little bit more about “absent people”. What do you mean by “absent”? 

[53:25] the phenomenon of “Absence”

P: There’s a remoteness, a coldness, or with sociopaths it’s documented as a lack of affect. But I think I mean more historically, Chris. And philosophically. Let’s say your aim is the revolution in thirty years time. And Walter Duranty said “to make an omelet, you gotta crack some eggs”. You gotta build this amazing socialist society. So three million people died of starvation, the Holodomor. Now that’s a massive act of absence. To say it in a messianic religious way, these people suffer now for some greater good. And there’s another kind of absence, such as in England: There’s a longing for the past, for empire. When the British flag or the double headed russian Eagle was respected and great. And there’s an inferiority and there’s living in the past. 

I will just give this as an example. Those are both forms of absence. Britain still rules the waves. We’re going to do Brexit with a new empire too, with Singapore and the Caribbean. And it’s mad.

N: The new trade agreements that are not materializing.

P: Well, they are all very bad for us. Like New Zealand.

C: And this is the absence of the values that Demyan was talking about, right?

P: Of humanism. We live in the present.

N: It’s a different experience of time. It’s a refusal to be present. And therefore perhaps, a refusal to be contemplative. Refusal to be in the moment; you’re either in the future or in the past. You’re either nursing grievances constantly or you’re promising a bright future that never materializes because by the time you get there, the current generation is going to be dead anyway. And in russia it’s a past. If you ask a russian, what’s the promise of russia, what’s the vision of russia in 20 years, it’s absent. And that is also an abnegation of responsibility.

J: And that’s why it’s often called the necrocratic regime or a necrocratic policy. What do you want? What do you create? What are you trying to build? They have no answer for that. They can just say the reflection of something. Copying something, remaking something, but it’s not the initial creation from the inside. And if we say the creation is a sign of life, of presence, that’s the opposite. Nothing is the opposite. How to bring people to life who forgot what life is? 

P: And it has a story. The story of Ukraine is a great story now. We were oppressed for centuries. We tried to deal with it. Now we’ve been invaded since 2014 and we did not provoke it. We sought peace and now we have no choice. It’s a great narrative. And it’s a narrative now built around civil rights, LGBT rights. It’s a language of joining the European Union as the society of the rule of law and equality. 

But it’s very difficult to find a story these days. Chris and I used to have this great mentor Tony Judt, the historian. And he’d say, the great narratives have gone. The great narrative of liberal progress has collapsed. And I can imagine putin’s narrative is a weird synthesis. It’s now stalinism, in 1930s fascism, either Eliot and Dygin. “The West betrayed us.” “We’re the holy mother russia.” It’s trying to get a story which is cobbled together out of broken pasts. 

C: It’s super interesting to listen to this because I think, Nina, the way you formulated the absence as not being in the here and now, and living either in the past or in the future. That makes a lot of sense to me. And now Peter when you’re talking about the narrative, the story that Ukraine has at this moment and russia lacks. I think this narrative, this story is maybe what Julia and Demyan are also looking for when we talk about the logos. This might be a different way of defining logos. This narrative that is effectual for us, that invites people to join, that is inclusive and that is true across borders.

[01:00:54] inclusive narratives and speculative writing 

N: One of the keywords there is “inclusive”. One of the things that come to mind is speculative literature. Speculative writing, creating alternative futures. The russian narrative, or lack thereof, is their narrative of fear and narrative of incursion. This makes me think of the genre of horror. The horrors, the metaphorical role of horror is to rehearse that fear on the page. And therefore make it less frightening. Or perhaps more frightening. Or sort of take it out of the realm of the unknown and put it on the page and spell it out. And it might be ridiculous. For example, if you had a novel or a film in which, let’s say a radical LGBT movement stages a coup in russia and it’s a future under that kind of dictatorship. Similarly, you could write a positive future where you can create, you can present, a vision in fiction. The emotional engagement with the art, and the engagement with the narrative does put the reader into the here and now. That’s one of the powers of music, narrative and dance. The narrative pulls you in. It gives the reader that experience of what life could be like for the duration of the book. 

I have taught classes on speculative writing, on writing a better future for Ukraine, basically. And it’s a new kind of exercise. Folks are very good about thinking about dystopias. But they don’t really have experience writing just alternative positive futures, dramatizing positive futures. 

J: One of our big goals is to create a library for the future. Basically, it goes from the idea that many, many books we learn in schools and universities were written in the past. So if a book written in the 17th century is still on our shelves, maybe we can reconsider what’s written in that book and reapply it for the present moment. Or maybe new books have to be written, starting from the present, taking in all the technology that is here, and exploring from there. How could we influence the writing of new books, fiction, and nonfiction that would be read three generations ahead?

N: There is a specific practice of. There’s a workshop in Detroit that does speculative writing of a particular kind and the condition is that it plays with the power dynamics. The main character is required to be from a marginalized group, and so that unlocks alternative visions very effectively. Could it be from a group that is not being believed? Or rather a group whose knowledge is devalued or marginalized? It’s a very empowering kind of exercise. The exercise of breaking that is valuable in itself.

J: I’m so excited every time it comes to some practical tools. So totally inspiring.

D: I see many Ukrainians want to have responsibility. And not only Ukrainians. But my question is how can people retain this inspiration to responsibility? How to retain the focus on responsibility? We see our future as romantic;  I see, “neoromanticism pirates” out there. We think about humanism. We think about identity people’s values. How to inspire? How to retain this? What do you think? And how do you retain the focus of your audiences? How do you ensure your communities  daily practice responsibility? 

P: I’m always accused of being a bit of an optimist, but mind you, I did say Boris Johnson wouldn’t last very long, and that putin’s invasion wouldn’t work. So some of my optimism is well founded. Let’s go beyond the arts a bit and self-expression, truth and reciprocity work. During COVID we had all these crazy Q-Anon conspiracy deniers and all that. And suddenly a stranger who was a pop star or was an expert on epidemiology. And we can argue about facts, but the thing is the modern world is built on facts. A plane cannot fly on an opinion. And that seems like a cold thing. Science is sort of basic. 

I think it’s being proved now in the war in just the way the russians are fighting so badly. Command and control lies, top down structures don’t work as well as the Ukrainian army which is much more imaginative, decentralized, where NCO’s have power. And even in business the practices like treating your employees well, having equal rights, no discrimination, fair wages – that is more productive. 

I see my kids in their 20s. They are much more responsible. They are much more conscientious. They’re never going to have the houses we had. 

I wonder if we shouldn’t expand this sense of responsibility which is so important, to presence, and to truth and the logos if you like. To the practical, everyday things that we do. During COVID people knocked on the doors “Can we get you something?” There are millions of acts like this which do what you were talking about Damyan, which is how to retain that sense of responsibility.

N: The sense of exercising agency in one’s life is rewarding in itself. The sense of being responsive. The sense of being able to do things; the freedom to make choices. Awareness of freedom perhaps leads to desire for more freedom. But science is another sphere where you have to be in the present. And science is another one where you can’t lie so well. And we have seen russian scientific output not be competitive.

P: And a brain drain: smart russians want to work not in russia.

J: Talking about the environment: an environment with no creativity, with no science, is no fun to be in and creates no new perspectives. Take the Internet as an environment. Peter, you said your children, who were born with the Internet, who are constantly connected to the Internet, also feel more responsibility. This means the daily practice of critical thinking and searching through information and collecting, choosing the right information also brings people to more responsible acting. 

[01:15:52] fake news and the Internet

P: There was interesting work we did on Brexit, by the way, and I think it’s true also of the Trump campaign. The most bigoted, the most likely to fall for fake news with my generation. People in their 50s and 60s. They’re the ones sharing ridiculous Facebook posts. And my kids are less on the Internet than I am. They go dark, they understand it’s dangerous and they do have a voice. I think that’s the difference. When I was in 1980s punk, we had the voice, had those sort of cyclist style, scenes you could make. But you can connect across the world now. 

I think Ukraine shows the dark and good side of the Internet. We have the troll factories, all the lies pumped out there and in Syria. But then you see smart people, Ukrainians use it to tell exactly what’s going on in their towns and cities. It’s a weapon that can be used both ways. It’s like electricity.

D: Nina, I have one question for you about poetry. What is the poetry for you in the context of our dialogue? And why do you write? What is the first, author or poetry?

[01:21:52] creative writing during the war

N: It’s really hard to tell right now. And before I joined our conversation I was thinking about the fact of creative writing during the war: What is possible and what doesn’t seem possible. I’m not writing right now in a way that I used to. It comes in different ways, I’m a fairly cerebral poet and not an emotional writer. It’s about the manipulation of reality. It’s about a new angle. The reason I think I write poetry is because I’m not a very narrative thinker; either that or the narratives that I come up with are so short that they fit into metaphors. And so that’s how I write. I produce fairly dense texts. And I think the burden of witnessing is right now such that the time for reflection hasn’t come yet. Or that ability to reflect is not. It’s not there. I can’t manipulate things. I don’t know Chris, I’d love to hear about your practice and what is going on with you.

D: Thank you.

C: It seems understandable the way that you describe your moment right now. When right now it’s not your time to write poetry that you prefer writing. For me it’s a different situation, being here in Amsterdam, not being burdened personally by the tragedies of this war. It makes me feel all the more responsible to keep on writing which I do. And to keep on speaking up and to keep on stressing the fact that we need to be responsible citizens right now in whatever circles I arrive. And I enjoy my life here in Amsterdam and elsewhere partly because I move in very different circles: as a writer, but also as an organizer, as a speaker, as a teacher. I tend to stress the fact that now is a time for us people to take responsibility for the decency, the forward-looking, the inclusive mentality. That is our only way out of this. And it’s actually striking. 

Somehow a lot of people I meet seem to forget that they can take individual responsibility for improving the situation. It’s like this notion of the option of taking individual responsibilities being beaten out of people by the media atmosphere we live in, by the political atmosphere, the economical atmosphere. Over the past decade or so they seem to have become so accustomed to placing the responsibility elsewhere. With the government or with the enemy, or with the other. And this has been a very effective side effect of this whole system we live in, including social media: the whole notion of you having the agency to act in a responsible fashion and to contribute somehow to a more positive narrative — a lot of people are losing that. I lose that sometimes, but I talk to myself and I talk to the others I meet. We cannot afford to decline this responsibility. 

As a writer, your responsibility is to write but you’re never a writer 24/7. You’re also a citizen, you’re a family member. And if this is not your moment to write poetry, you will write something else.

N: Yes, I translate. This has been a very busy translation moment. I tell myself “You’ve got to do what only you can do.” And some days it helps.

C: Yeah, it’s my line as well.

N: It gives you clarity.

C: So what can I do? I can write and I can talk. That’s basically what I can do, but it’s weird talking to people in different mindsets these days. Just earlier today I was at a small demonstration. And I was there on behalf of our little citizens’ movement here, in our part of Amsterdam. And I was approached by a gentleman, very decent normal guy in his 50s. Not aggressive, not strange, not hysterical. He asked “Are you a part of this movement?” I said “Yes. I’m a part of this movement.” “So, probably it’s being subsidized by the authorities or by the municipality?” And I said “No, no, no. It’s not subsidized. We’re independent”. “Well, you probably belong to a political party”. And I said “No, no, no. We’re not a political party, we’re just our own movement”. And then he said “But you know that there’s a lot of pedophiles working in the local police station?” 

N: It’s a non sequitur.

C: Just like that. And I thought “OK.”

N: How did you respond? How did you respond to that?

C: Well, I didn’t immediately deny it. I simply listened. I said “OK, OK, I didn’t know that. How do you know? Do you work with the police?” So we’ve started discussing or I was basically listening and somehow this thing evaporated and we started talking about more serious stuff again. But I found it very confusing to meet just normal fellow citizens and get this kind of thing. Then you really feel “OK. I’m really on another planet right now.”

J: Yes, that’s exactly the feeling when you are confronted with some disturbing information: Is it right? Is it wrong? Where did it come from? I just want to say that I often feel this way dealing with things coming from russian media. 

C: Different planet.

N: And the response, “That’s patently insane” is not quite acceptable unfortunately. It’s not really useful.

[01:32:03] the importance and limitations of dialogue in a society 

C: In this society, here in this country we are approaching a moment that you in Ukraine are already familiar with…. There is a dilemma I’m dealing with right now. As long as you’re not in war it’s important to keep talking. Even with people who have different opinions. It’s important to keep talking and it’s important to keep the democratic public space open for differences of opinions. But now we’re entering a phase where some of the people who have different opinions are actually fascists. When do you decide OK, I’ll talk with you until you cross the red line? And now that you’ve crossed the red line, I will not talk with you anymore. This society is nearing that phase and Ukraine and russia obviously are beyond that phase.

J: Chris, what do you think comes next if people stop talking to each other? Keeping a dialogue is a very democratic practice, and this approach also was used by Europeans towards russia. But this “staying in dialogue” also brought us to the situation when fascism is already there and we kind of do not see it. We don’t agree with this presence. And this also caused us to make the mistake of not taking action for too long. That’s why maybe we feel a collective responsibility for dealing with russia now and after the war. So where is the moment when you realize, so let’s stop talking and act another way?

C: In the case of russia, at least our ruling class, the politicians and the business people waited too long, I agree.

J: Chris, please keep us posted. Let’s keep talking about this; it is very important to keep checking what’s going on in different societies now, especially since all of us expect this winter to be hard. 

Questions

1. Think of a time when you were able to have a productive, positive dialogue or worked together with someone who held views different from your own. What were the circumstances? Describe how you felt about this person before, during, and after the encounter. Why do you consider it positive and productive? What made it happen that way? 

2. Think of a time when you created or made something — a piece of art, a crafted object, a special meal. What made you want to do it? Did you encounter any challenges in the process? What thoughts and feelings emerged while you were creating/making it? How did you feel afterwards? Can you think of other circumstances or situations in which you thought and/or felt similarly? What were they? 

3. The dialogue discusses the notions of personal accountability and presence as related to each other. How do you feel these values relate to each other? What role do they play in the practice and individual experience of democracy?

Resources

adrienne maree brown. Author’s website. 

Herbert, Zbigniew. Report from a Besieged City. Translated by Czeslaw Milosz. The New York Review. August 18, 1983. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1983/08/18/report-from-a-besieged-city/ 

Koyre, Alexander. From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe. 1957. Available here.

Octavia’s Brood. Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements. Ed. adrienne maree brown; Walidah Imarisha. AK Press, 2015. 

“Slovo” House. Film. (2021). Written by Lyubov Yakumchuk. Trailer here.