Radboud Philosophical Facutly Journal

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  • The Privatization of the Future and Human Essence

    Introduction

    In his work Neuromancer (1984, 17), William Gibson explains that the economy of the future is experienced as “a constant subliminal hum, and death the accepted punishment for laziness, carelessness, lack of grace, the failure to heed the demands of an intricate protocol.” This approach to capitalism seems to be a staple when it comes to the Cyberpunk genre, a sub-genre of science fiction that explores the integration of technology into different aspects of life in an urban, dystopian setting, often elucidated through the motto “High tech, low life.” (Abreu 2022). The incorporation of technology can be observed through characters often sporting technologically advanced prosthetic limbs, eyes and even organs. While physical alterations in merely, say, phalanges may seem a big step, Cyberpunk also introduces hypothetical technology with the ability to plunge us straight into a realm known as Cyberspace. Cyberspace or The Net is “a vast telecommunications network that joins all of the computers and telephones on earth. It is formed by radio, telephone, and cellular phone links, with microwave transmitters beaming information into orbit and beyond” (Pondsmith 1990, 127). The Cyberpunk 2020 manual goes on to state that in the early 20th century, Cyberspace was only accessible through a specific device, but in 2020, it could be entered through merely the brain (ibid.). Clearly, a contemporary phenomenon pointing toward the manifestation of a Cyberpunk-esque future is exemplified through the development of virtual reality and the Metaverse.

    While the most famous breakthrough of the genre stems from Ridley Scott’s 1982 film Blade Runner, Cyberpunk has delivered eerily accurate prophecies concerning the current state of the world since the New Wave science fiction movement of the 1960s and 70s (Duran 2020).

    This shift from using technology as a tool to the complete integration of it in both society and the body itself will be explored through a case study of the dystopian sci-fi work of Mike Pondsmith. The works analyzed are Pondsmith’s Cyberpunk 2020, and the work it was based on, Neuromancer, by William Gibson. These works, along with works such as Blade Runner (1982) and Ghost in the Shell (1995), show us the possibility of our projected future. Through an exploration of postmodernity through Mark Fisher’s work, Capitalist Realism (2009), a modification on Hannah Arendt’s conceptualization of the human condition, and various science fiction authors, this case study will analyze how the Cyberpunk genre succeeded in projecting our future. Through further exploration of how the neoliberal revolution has affected our use and dependence on technology, this essay will, finally, aim to answer the question: is capitalism becoming part of the human essence?

    Part 0.5: Welcome to Night City

    An important aspect to roughly grasp the feel of the genre is the commonly used setting. Both Pondsmith’s Cyberpunk 2020 and Neuromancer are set in Night City, also referred to as “the Ninsei,” specifically in Neuromancer. Night City, in Pondsmith’s work, was founded in 1994 by a land developer called Richard Night. Initially the city was a mere clustered section of suburbia on the American west coast, so a harbor city, which later encompassed San Francisco and Los Angeles. Night City was planned as a clean city, free of crime, and “by offering lucrative tax packages to several major corporations, he was able to establish a strong economic base as well as an instant population of corporate employees.” (Pondsmith 1990, 216). This plan was interrupted, however, as Night used his own resources, thereby excluding major unions and construction firms all controlled by organized crime syndicates, which, in turn, assassinated Night and took over. In the period that followed, the city turned into a sprawling war zone, run rampant with drugs, prostitution, and crime. In 2009, the corporations on which backs’ the city was built decided they had had enough of this; they “eliminated most of the gang leaders and established a corporation-controlled City Council.” (Ibid.). This city council secured its status as an autonomous Free State; while considered part of the United States, it had the option to declare its own federal laws (Ibid.). In the ‘present’, Night City is a rapidly growing metropolis teeming with both crime and economic growth, which is almost impossible to leave: “Nobody ever leaves Night City. Except in a body bag.” (Ibid., 217). While this fantastical city is rich with lore, the most crucial aspect is that it was originally meant as a so-called “everycity,” or a city that could be found anywhere in projected futuristic America, exemplifying the neoliberal revolution the genre expected.

    Part 1: Capitalist Futures and Hyper Commodification

    Such “everycities” are merely a projection of how the genre recognizes late-stage capitalism to be changing the current state of society. In the Cyberpunk genre, this state of being is magnified to the point of societal integrity, including ‘non-partisan actors’, and even governments are privatized, formulating a hyperbolic neoliberal framework. Philosophers Fredric Jameson and Mark Fisher explore the, albeit, less dramatic, realistic conception of this societal stage.  

    Fisher draws heavily on American literary critic and fellow philosopher Jameson, who speaks on the conception of the postmodernist movement in his 1991 work Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. The beginning of this movement finds its roots in globalization, and the commodification capitalism spurs on in international finance, mass communication and multinational corporations (Jameson 1991). Nevertheless, postmodernism remains a contested phenomenon in terms of definition, and the term in of itself implies that modernism “possessed revolutionary potentials by virtue of its formal innovations alone”. What Jameson saw happening instead was the incorporation of modernist motifs into popular culture (suddenly, for example, Surrealist techniques would appear in advertising)” (Fisher 2009, 8).

    While Fisher prefers, for these reasons, the term capitalist realism, he also states that “what we are dealing with now, however, is a deeper, far more pervasive, sense of exhaustion, of cultural and political sterility” (Ibid, 7). Fisher’s interpretation of the term capitalist realism is defined as capitalism being so ingrained that we can see no economic or political alternative, referring to Margaret Thatcher’s infamously pro-market slogan “There is no alternative” (Krämer 2013). Our current stage of being is seen by Fisher, as an ontology rooted in business. In this ontology, we cannot exist in separation from capital, including mental states such as the feeling of nostalgia and depression, which is why the Cyberpunk genre may prove yet again to be a realistic and inevitable scenario.

    The capitalization of nostalgia and culture is a theme found throughout Fisher’s later work Ghosts of my life, in the form of the Derridean concept of ‘hauntology’. In Fisher’s work, this term refers to a “melancholic refusal to give up on the days of popular modernism where everything seemed possible, and a refusal to yield to capitalist realism and postmodern finitude” (Diaz 2021). In layman’s terms, Fisher’s definition of hauntology can be explained as the gripping-onto of past cultural phenomenon and reproducing them to monetize nostalgia, leading to a complete Avant-guardian halt. Through hauntology, what Fisher calls ‘the slow cancellation of the future’ is introduced. He notes that this phenomenon is best observed through the transformation of musical trends throughout the last century:

    Rather than the old recoiling from the ‘new’ in fear and incomprehension, those whose expectations were formed in an earlier era are more likely to be startled by the sheer persistence of recognisable forms. Nowhere is this clearer than in popular music culture. It was through the mutations of popular music that many of those of us who grew up in the 1960s, 70s and 80s learned to measure the passage of cultural time. But faced with 21st-century music, it is the very sense of future shock which has disappeared. (Fisher 2014, 7)

    Fisher argues that at the point where everything becomes retro, “we lose our grasp on history – and, without a sense of why the past happened the way it did, our anything.” (Hsu 2018). Capitalism keeps us in constant cultural stagnation as the feverish hunt for nostalgia is turned to a motive for profit. This hunt forces humanity to turn art, music, and anything we produce as an expression of ourselves into a hypercommodified sphere; keeping in mind that the price paid for sentimentalism is exuberant.

    Aside from this analysis of the relation between consciousness and capitalism, cyberpunk, also lays huge emphasis on how capitalism physically affects humanity. A pillar of Cyberpunk as a genre, alongside the nearing rabid thirst for profit, is cybernetic augmentation and the theme of the body invaded by technology. Such bodily ‘invasions’ as prosthetic limbs, cosmetic surgery, and ways to ‘jack in’ to cyberspace are most common. Not only does technology become an extension of the body, but also of the mind, through said cyberspace. Through the gradual bodily takeover by such innovations, it becomes less and less a vessel for experiences such as sensations and thoughts, considering this is now no longer human. As such, the parts of the body that have died off in favor of using technology are now revived, resulting in “futureshocked zombies.” For science-fiction author Bruce Sterling, this branch of Cyberpunk is post-humanist, spurring on “technological destruction of the human condition [that] leads not to future-shocked zombies but to hopeful monsters.” (Sterling 1987, 4-5). This quote, as used by post-humanists, refers to the type of change technology brings to human nature.

    In both Sterling and Gibson’s works, characters are regularly subjected to a scenario likened to a futuristic ship of Theseus. The thought experiment centers around a ship of which every plank is slowly being replaced one-by-one. The question resulting from this is: once every component of the ship is replaced, can it still be considered the same ship it started out as? In this soon to be contemporary version of the well-known thought experiment the subjects are continually reshaping their bodies. Thus, notions of human nature through a purely physical essence lose credibility, and a redefinition of what it means to be human becomes necessary (Hollinger 1990, 8).

    Such a discussion of the ship of Theseus is, however, incomplete. As the classic experiment goes, it merely involves the vessel it discusses, and not the ship’s characteristics and purpose. Considering the application of this investigation on humans, another layer must be added through Hannah Arendt’s work on the human condition.

    In exploring this added layer of how the human condition affects our behavior, the resulting feeling of alienation in the context of the Cyberpunk genre will be further discussed.

    Part 2: The Human Condition and Its Dichotomies

    Hannah Arendt introduces us in her work The Human Condition, first and foremost, to the term vita activa, and distinguishes between three forms of activities: labor, work, and action. Each form “corresponds to one of the basic conditions under which life on earth has been given to man.” (Arendt 1958, 7). ‘Labor’ refers to biological processes concerning the human body; its human condition is life itself. ‘Work’ is the opposite of labor, with a definite beginning and end, representing the creation of a product, such as a work of art. Yet, what makes work different from labor is the desire to create, and not the need for survival as observed in labor. The human condition for work, according to Arendt, is worldliness: the possession of tangible references in the world and the partaking in a political world. What sets both labor and work apart from ‘action’, is that for Arendt it specifically takes place in the web of human relations through both speech and action, and it is what we both use to set ourselves apart from others and to build relationships. Arendt describes this to be the ultimate expression of freedom one can partake in. Action adheres to the human condition of plurality: we are shaped by those around us and our environments, which we shape in turn (ibid., 7-8). To define plurality, in this sense, distinction is a necessity as “if people are not distinct, then a person would only be like everyone else, there will be no need for neither speech nor action to manifest him/herself.” (Bas 2013, 13). Along with distinction, another characteristic of plurality is equality. This condition of equality is not inherited through birth but through speech and action. Employing these methods, humans can create the polis, a public sphere through which distinction and equality can be enabled (ibid.).

    A central thesis in her work is that, opposite to earlier epochs, labor has been glorified, contrasting with its earlier and significantly lower status (Beiner 1990, 360). This glorification is the consequence of John Locke discovering labor to be the source of all property. This claim, followed by Adam Smith’s assertion of labor leading to wealth, found its zenith through Karl Marx’s “system of labor” (Arendt 1958, 101). In said system, labor became the ultimate method of wealth accumulation and expression of humanity (Ibid.). These three thinkers,

    Though Marx with greatest force and consistency, held that labor was considered to be the supreme world-building capacity of man, and since labor actually is the most natural and least worldly of man’s activities, each of them, and again none more than Marx, found himself in the grip of certain genuine contradictions. (Ibid., 101)

    Arendt notes that such contradictions arise from the fact that these authors equated work with labor, bestowing labor with attributes only found in her definition of work. Marx claims labor to be the measure of all human productivity, whereas Arendt finds distinction within labor being unable to produce anything eternal, only able to maintain perishable human life. However, while definitions differ, both philosophers seem to agree on Locke’s dichotomy of “the labor of his body, and the work of his hands,” referring to the body constantly laboring to keep itself alive, and the hands working to create a durable result (Locke 1980).

    Part 3: Alienation and Reconciliation

    While Arendt and Marx consider different definitions of work and labor to be correct, they find agreeance in the concept of alienation resulting from glorifying the accumulation of an end product and wealth. Arendt opens the Human Condition by discussing the launch of Sputnik in 1957, which was met with an immediate reaction of joy that “expressed on the spur of the moment, was relief about the first “step toward escape from men’s imprisonment to the earth.”” (Arendt 1958, 1). This reaction troubles Arendt, forcing her to pose the question as to why humankind has such a strong desire to ‘escape’ its home, in exchange for an unexplored, largely empty, void. She believes that we have made our planet inhospitable, causing an alienation from it. Arendt believes that our world has been lost to modernity, which is emphasized by Arendtian theorist Ring:

    It [the world] contained needs that Arendt believes are universal: the need for permanence and structure that survives beyond the lifetime of a single generation. The creation of permanence, which she refers to as the creation of objectivity, constructs an essentially human activity. (Ring 1989, 433).

    I propose that Arendt’s conceptualization of the human condition can be used as a model to show how technoscientific and economic developments of capitalism have alienated us from both the world and from ourselves. This is achieved through the literal invasion of the human body and mind, as observed in the Cyberpunk genre. In an attempt to cling to the conditions listed and to reconcile ourselves with our home, we try to adapt through the concept of the world. Arendt’s concept of the world is meant not as a reinterpretation of nature but as a product of human work, the products produced are the realization of models or hypothetical blueprints (Arendt 1958, 139-144), “they include institutions as well as material things such as buildings, tables and computers.” (Chapman 2007, 435). While humans inhabit the world, Arendt also argues that the world is lived on, creating a human “artefact”, and created from what we are given by nature (ibid.). The world is meant as a place that humans inhabit, seeking to understand each other. For this, Arendt introduces the metaphor of the table; the table acts as an analogy for worldliness, perpetuating a hypothetical space over which people can relate to one another and a shared cause while remaining individually in their own chairs (Bas 2013, 2). As Arendt writes:

    In acting and speaking, men show who they are, reveal actively their unique personal identities and thus make their appearance in the human world, while their physical identities appear without any activity of their own in the unique shape of the body and sound of the voice. This disclosure of “who” in contradiction to “what” somebody is – his qualities, gifts, talents, and shortcomings, which he may display or hide – is implicit in everything somebody says and does. (Arendt 1958, 179)

    If this table, and so the world, are abstractions for a common political sphere in which humans form each other, it is only natural that current political, and thus economic, ideas become embodiments of their abstractions. In the current iteration of the world, in which everything must be efficient and function as a well-oiled capitalistic machine, the body can no longer compute. This could be interpreted, as for Arendt’s version of alienation, that the overwhelming joy felt once interplanetary escape became an option stems from an extreme technological advancement housed only in the world while the body lags further and further behind. Yet, in an Arendtian framework, the conclusion of technology breeding reconciliation could never be accepted. This is, of course, unless the only option is to remain stagnant in an ever-changing world, where to reconnect, humans must also become more technologically advanced. This rise of technology promises to free humanity of any limitations as upheld by the human condition, and so the Cyberpunk genre would, through cybernetic prosthetics and augmentation of the body, provide both further alienation from our bodies, but an option for reconciliation with a more and more technologically advanced planet as well.

    However, it can be noted that if, for humanity to be reconciled with its home, both the planet and humanity must keep developing technologically, capitalism will forever remain unable to escape. The environment keeps changing, forcing its inhabitants to do so as well, spurring the idea of the human body not being utopian but dystopian. We want to free ourselves from the human condition through progress. Still, we lose everything in doing so: belonging in the world and the ability to fantasize about a reality where we are indeed free from the whims of merely an economic system.

    Conclusion

    While in Cyberpunk, late-stage capitalism and all its consequences are vastly magnified, the works of Mark Fisher and Hannah Arendt allow an interpretation that provides a scope of the future that  runs rampant with everything the science fiction genre has to offer. This specific branch of sci-fi is often elucidated through the motto of “high tech, low life,” exemplified predominantly through its extreme focus on highly advanced technology and the accumulation of wealth. A pillar of the focus on technology lies within the exceedingly easy, even encouraged, installation of cybernetic augmentation and prosthetics. Through this invasion of capitalistic ideals, such as efficiency through the human body, and a study of Arendt’s conceptualization of the human condition, this essay aimed to answer the question: “Is capitalism becoming part of the human essence?”

    From Fisher’s works, Capitalist Realism and Ghosts of My Life could be gathered that we presently find ourselves under ingrained and inescapable conditions induced by capitalism, for which humanity is unable to even ponder an alternative. Even abstract concepts such as nostalgia and depression are wrung out for profit through the regurgitation and remaking of art and culture, obstructing the creation of anything new. As humans apparently yearn for the feeling of a simpler time, the production of avant-garde expressions is just not profitable enough. Human existence has become ensnared deep within the maul of capitalism, forcing humans to abide by an ontology rooted in business. Living by this ontology forces society to turn anything that results from Arendt’s interpretation of action into a monetizable commodity or service.

    Along with Arendt’s conceptualization of the conditions for being human, work, labor, and action, a compelling aspect considering humanity’s future is her iteration of alienation. This is first mentioned in her work, when discussing the launch of Sputnik: “In 1957, an earth-born object made by man was launched into the universe, where for some weeks it circled the earth according to the same laws of gravitation that swing and keep in motion the celestial bodies” (Arendt 1958, 1). For Arendt, alienation is the estrangement of humans as fundamentally “earth-bound creatures” from a world we have made inhospitable. Through her metaphor of the table, a common sphere where humans seek to understand each other through a common cause, it becomes a necessity for abstractions to become part of our lived-upon “human artefact”. As our “artefact” has technologically hyper-progressed, humans have realized that this will soon become a hostile environment for the human body, alienating us from our home. This essay argues that the Cyberpunk genre has seemingly provided humans with a hypothetical opportunity for reconciliation with the world through means of the adaptation found within the abstract bounds of cybernetic augmentation, but in reality has done quite the opposite. In our frivolous  search for adaptation, humanity has entered an unescapable cycle of “progress”, leading to the further breeding of alienation.

    In a state of Fisher’s capitalist realism and through a reinterpretation of Arendt’s human condition, it has, unfortunately, become a realistic possibility that capitalism has become an overwhelmingly prominent aspect of what it means to be human.

    Bibliography

    Abreu, Rafael. 2022. “What is Cyberpunk – Genre Definition, Origins & Examples.” Studiobinder, June 12, 2022. https://www.studiobinder.com/blog/what-is-cyberpunk-definition/.

    Arendt, Hannah. 1958. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

    Bas, Melis. 2013. “A reinterpretation of Hannah Arendt as a philosopher of technology.” Master thesis., University of Twente.

    Beiner, Ronald S. 1990. “Hannah Arendt on Capitalism and Socialism.” Government and Opposition 25, no. 3 (Summer): 359-370. https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/44482522.pdf.

    Chapman, Anne. 2007. “The Ways That Nature Matters: The World and the Earth in the Thought of Hannah Arendt.” Environmental Values 16, no. 4 (November): 433-445. https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/30302380.pdf.

    Diaz, Nicholas. 2021. “Introducing Mark Fisher: Part 3 – Hauntology, Lost Futures, and Politicized Melancholia.” Medium, September 25, 2021. https://medium.com/@nicholasadiaz7/introducing-mark-fisher-part-3-hauntology-lost-futures-and-politicized-melancholia-820e7a207e1e.

    Duran, H.B.. 2020. “Who Created the Cyberpunk Genre?” Steelseries, April 10, 2020. https://steelseries.com/blog/who-created-cyberpunk-sci-fi-224.

    Fisher, Mark. 2009. Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Hampshire: Zer0 Books.

    Fisher, Mark. 2014. Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures. Hampshire: Zer0 Books.

    Gibson, William. 1984. Neuromancer. New York: Ace.

    Hollinger, Veronica. 1990. “Cybernetic Deconstructions: Cyberpunk and Postmodernism.” Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal 23, no. 2 (Spring): 29-44. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24780626.

    Hsu, Hua. 2018. “Mark Fisher’s “K-Punk” and the futures that have never arrived.” New Yorker, December 11, 2018. https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/mark-fishers-k-punk-and-the-futures-that-have-never-arrived.

    Jameson, Fredric. 1991. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press.

    Krämer, Michael. 2013. “There is no alternative!” The Guardian, May 4, 2013. https://www.theguardian.com/science/life-and-physics/2013/may/04/no-alternative-bayes-penalties-philosophy-thatcher-merkel.

    Locke, John. 1980. Second Treatise of Government. Edited by C. B. Macpherson. Cambridge: Hackett Publishing.

    Pondsmith, Mike. 1990. Cyberpunk 2020. Berkely: R. Talsorian Games.

    Ring, Jennifer. 1989. “On Needing Both Marx and Arendt: Alienation and the Flight from Inwardness.” Political Theory 17, no. 3 (Summer): 432-448. https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/191225.pdf.

    Sterling, Bruce. 1987. “Letter (Ansible, #50).” N.p.: Ansible Editions.

  • Off the Record: FTR Coffee Corner’s Bert

    From the moment I enter the 15th floor’s coffee corner, I am welcomed by the ever-warm and comforting smell of coffee. On the table lies a crossword puzzle, glasses and an empty cup. “Can I get you something?” Bert asks, holding a small stick of liquorice in the left corner of his mouth. “Coffee, please,” I answer. He pours us both a fresh cup of hot black coffee and while we settle down at the table next to the bar, the great view of Nijmegen accompanies us. 

    Bert works on Mondays and Thursdays at the coffee corner on the 15th floor of Radboud University’s Erasmus building, which houses the spirit of Philosophy, Theology and Religious studies. Since the thinking mind needs a lot of coffee to process all that has been read and written, it seemed like a good idea to interview Bert who, together with Yolande, takes care of this precious place we all need in our daily lives.

    “So, Bert, can you tell me something about yourself?”

    “Well, I am Bert, originally a carpenter. Previously, I did maintenance for student housing. And my hobbies are birds and working with wood to make things.”

    When I ask Bert what he likes to make, a whole story unfolds in the morning of a regular but quiet day. He has just created a couple of parrot-trees from wood for his volunteering job at an elderly home where he is creating a birdhouse. Apart from doing all kinds of activities with the elderly, he also likes to cook. Right now, he is experimenting with spices from Greek cuisine, a very relevant region to the 15th floor. He is also very interested in antiquities. He tells me he owns a few massive books containing catholic illustrations which he absolutely loves. And that is not all. In his earlier days, he worked at what is now called Orientalis, the former biblical open-air museum, where he created museum pieces based on Roman archaeological excavations. Moreover, he is very skilled in renovating pieces of furniture, and in the past, he restored playgrounds to construct any furniture that his family had ever dreamed of.

    “Need to check if there is still enough coffee.”

    While greeting the incoming personnel, Bert heads off to the bar. When he returns, I ask him how many cups of coffee he drinks during the day, and what his favorite coffee is. He answers: “I think, well, it is a little bit less right now, but on average, 12-14 cups. I used to drink fresh filter coffee, but now we have Senseo at home, the dark Senseo. Nice, with a layer of foam on top.” And when I continue to ask for his favorite pastries on the side, he adds: “Just cookies. Regular plain waffle cookies. The only pastry I really like is schuimgebak.”Freely translated, it is a foam-pastry (again, the foam!). 

    We talk about all sorts of subjects, but a very important part of Bert’s life has not yet been addressed, so I return to the subject of birds. His eyes begin to sparkle when I ask him about his favorite birds.  “Colored canaries. And a putter. Well, actually, it is a goldfinch, but here, we call it a putter[1]. Beautiful bird to look at.” He shows me some pictures and videos of these beautiful, tiny creatures. His favorites are the red colored ones, mosaic-like, and we both listen to the charming, bright whistles of these birds. An amusing fact: because of his elaborated whistle-hearing abilities, Bert discovered that he was a little hard of hearing. “At one time, I entered the shed and I wondered, why don’t I hear the birds? Those sharp tones were just gone.” We both laugh. “Let’s see if there is enough tea left.” Whistling to himself now, he makes sure that everything is always in place and taken care of. 

    Next year, Bert will retire, and because he doesn’t have a yacht to run off to Dubai with, I ask him what he plans to do. He wants to continue his work as a volunteer at the elderly home, touring around on his moped, and specifically, he would like to spend his days fishing. He adds: “Then… I completely relax (…) I personally prefer the ‘old-school’ solid stick, which is far more beautiful to use, because then you have a sort of feeling with it (…) and when I am tired, I will buy some coffee and a meatball for my friend and I, and all of it is just very relaxing.”

    Bert is a morning person, a listening ear, a calm and friendly man. He has found his way at the 15th floor and he stresses the feeling of involvement he experiences during his working days which is created by the people at the coffee corner. When I stop my recording at approximately fifty-five minutes, we continue chattering for another forty-five minutes about movies, his family, and all sorts of things. Serving ourselves a final round of hot coffee, we discuss the missing cups problem while the sun breaks through the clouded, rainy morning. Just another day at the coffee-corner…

    [1] ‘Het puttertje’ is famously known as a painting by Carel Fabritius and the book cover of Donna Tartt’s ‘The Goldfinch’.

  • Philosopher Abroad: Culturicide in the Shadows of the USSR

    Please be aware of a trigger warning for cultural genocide and war.

    The war in Ukraine is entering its 16th month, and the terrifyingly destructive battles show no sign of relenting. With the Russian army launching a slaughter in their ‘fraternal’ nation, other peoples of the former Soviet Union find themselves at odds with each other. I want to describe the differences in how the general public is reacting to the war.

    In order to illustrate my argument, I will draw from my experiences travelling across the former Soviet Union.[1] By giving you an illustration of the contrast between Kazakhstan and Lithuania, I hope to convince you that culture can be turned into a weapon of resistance, and that we must use culture as a weapon of resistance to support Ukraine. My three principal reasons are that it brings hope, it brings truth, and it embodies Ukrainian defiance itself.

    I am going to do this in two steps. Firstly, I will analyse how art and symbolism is valuable in times of war. Secondly, I am going to describe the contrast in art and symbolism in Kazakhstan and Lithuania to illustrate the merits and needs for the weaponisation of art and culture. I will focus on public, grass-roots artistic and cultural activism, as a way to engage in the war. I am talking about individuals and groups making public phenomena in solidarity with Ukraine.

    Throughout this paper, I refer to Russian fascism, or Ruscism. The use of the term fascism is not done lightly, and I justify this having studied Putin’s ideology and the ideology of the invasion. This includes, among other things: irredentism and a cult of violence, hyper-masculinity and authoritarianism, the denial of Ukraine as a national identity and the justification of ethnic cleansing. For Putin, this fascism ultimately justifies war because “we are one people” (Putin 2022).

    Culturicide, or cultural genocide, can be defined as a systematic destruction of a culture. It can take many forms but aims to undermine and root out national and cultural identities and specificities. It is widely seen as a war crime and a crime against humanity. My experiences have found that the way that some groups take a silent position in the face of culturicide is a dangerous precedent. To stay silent in the face of any form of culturicide or oppression is tantamount to complicity. I hope to convince you not be silent in the face of fascism of any form.

    Culture and Symbolism as Resistance

    In order to back up my argument that ordinary people should be showing signs of support for Ukraine, I will first discuss the value of art and culture in times of war. I maintain that art can be weaponised in three ways: it is a form of documentation, it can be weaponised in this war as a form of defiance itself, and because art and culture can bring solidarity and unity.

    Firstly, art and symbolism for Ukraine demonstrates solidarity. It is a binding agent that can unify peoples. Ukrainian art and culture are not only important motivators for the defence of the nation, but as a unifying factor it is also politically valuable. Like many national anthems, “Ukraine has not yet perished” has a role in binding peoples. This happened at Nijmegen4Ukraine demonstrations in March 2022, as an international crowd began to sing in Ukrainian, highlighting this power to bind people behind a common cause. But the ultimate power of cultural works like this is the use of a simple symbol to designate solidarity with a plight. For Ukrainians home and abroad, this is a powerful and hopeful message, albeit sad for the same reasons. As one Ukrainian told me: “[the symbols] make me smile. Because I know we’re not alone [which is important because] wars aren’t won alone anymore.”

    During a war of information, reality is distorted. Putin’s post-modern truth is a dangerous political technique to rewrite the histories of Ukraine, Russia and the war. Art and culture can depict history and events from either side and do a lot of work to spread the truth. This is the second way that art can serve in war: as an account of history. For this reason, Putin tries to destroy museums and cultural institutions, in order to re-write history, according to the Ruscist vision and the Russian World ideology. But art and culture can undo this disinformation, as it is the “material evidence of the existence of a culture” (The Canvas 2022, 4:34).

    One such attack on Ukrainian cultural institutions came in February 2022, when Russian bombing targeted a museum near Kyiv that housed the works of a celebrated Ukrainian folk artist, Mariia Prymachenko. As the building was engulfed in flames, a local man ran inside to save some of the art and managed to save 10 pieces (The Canvas 2022). Putin and Ruscists tried to destroy Prymachenko’s art because art has the power to embody a culture.

    The ideology behind the war is the denial of Ukrainian national identity. Subsequently through violent methods “all symbols of Ukrainian statehood have been methodically removed [in occupied territories] and a new Russian imperial identity imposed on the civilian population” (Dickinson 2022). Any manifestation of Ukrainian cultural identity is thus a rejection of the Ruscist ideology. Ukrainian art and culture are embodiments of resistance, in that their very existence represents a denial of Putin’s claim that Ukraine as a nation does not exist. This is why that man ran into the museum to save the art. Because the very existence of this artwork is an embodiment of defiance of Ruscist ideology. Mariia Prymachenko’s uniquely Ukrainian art is a testament to the very existence of Ukraine.

    The man who was willing to risk his life to save the art of Mariia Prymachenko did so for the resistance of Ukraine. Because art is more than just oil on canvas; it is culture. And in this fight against cultural cleansing, the disposition of art is itself an act of defiance.

    Lithuania

    The skyline in Lithuania has been transformed since the war; you cannot escape its impact. Lithuanians take the symbolic fight to Putin, and the messages of solidarity make me feel inspired. But I strongly feel Lithuanian artistic activism is something we should emulate.

    Lithuania’s public activism has become a weapon of information, trying to directly combat the narrative pushed by Moscow. Vilnius tries to dispel the falsified Russian propaganda. One striking example of this is the huge billboard on a skyscraper testifying ‘Putin, the Hague is waiting for you.’ Long before any international court sentenced Putin, Lithuanians were making their feelings known about the culturicide in Ukraine.

    Or another example is 1K fund, a private, 100% volunteer-driven activist group. Their mission statement says:

    “Our third field of interest is information warfare. We conduct public relations campaigns that combat Russian misinformation and help us gather donations for the fund.” (1Kfund.org)

    Lithuanians are directly contradicting the disinformation disseminated in Russia. They are providing as much sport as possible for the defence of Ukraine in the name of the defence against fascism. Through cultural and artistic activities in public spaces, Lithuanians are taking the fight on information to the Russians. They do not sit idly by but take a firm anti-fascist narrative.

    A second key feature of Lithuanian pro-Ukraine activism is unwavering solidarity. With the constant presence of activism, Lithuanian public society clearly signals its support and determination to help. This has many positive impacts. For example, it provides space for public grieving and trauma recognition. It increases awareness and boosts dialogue. It can even begin to humanise the conflict. But most of all, it provides hope through solidarity.

    Furthermore, I believe that this solidarity has a positive impact on donation for support through grass-roots fundraisers and public events. Lithuania has one of the highest ratios of GDP to donation to Ukraine ratio in the world (Statista Research Department 2023) and is often linked to cultural and artistic movements like Radarom that provide Ukraine with vital equipment. I have found that the omnipresence of Ukrainian symbolism boosts a sentiment of solidarity, but also seems to be helping with vital contributions.

    A final valuable part of Lithuanian artistic activism is how it is producing Ukrainian culture and expression. Since the war, many Ukrainians have fled to Lithuania, and this is producing a vibrant diaspora. By providing a space for this cultural expression, Lithuania helps Ukrainians abroad live their nationhood, and in a sense, embody resistance against Ruscism.

    These intercultural projects among Ukrainians in Lithuania represent the embodiment of the resistance to the Ruscist ideology. By producing Ukrainian culture, you defy the claim that Ukrainian culture does not exist. It is through the display and the creation of new and old symbols of Ukrainian culture and resistance that art becomes a weapon in this war.

    Kazakhstan and Ukraine

    By contrast, public spaces in Kazakhstan almost never exhibit public symbols of solidarity. During my four months in the cultural capital, I saw one Ukrainian flag. There is an atmosphere of wilful blindness, of solicited ignorance. While there are some interactions with Ukraine on a state level, there is almost a complete lack of ostensive pro-Ukraine artistic culture. This section focuses on this neutrality in the face of culturicide in Ukraine.

    My first point about art in war, concerns documentation. In Kazakhstan, the absence of interaction with the war in Ukraine means that Russian media has increased power among the populace in Kazakhstan. Consequently, the Ruscist narrative on the war has a greater impact on society.

    During my conversations and interactions, I have noticed a disturbing reluctance to even mention the war. When I have mentioned it, I feel like I tripped a mine. Fear of upsetting others, a perception of being unable to understand complex political issues and feeling too uneducated are recurring excuses that seem to stifle public debate surrounding the war and Ukraine. This pervasive tradition of silence, perhaps in part due to the generations of Soviet oppression and the subsequent suppressive effect on political engagement (Zhukov 2018), means that politics seems to occur around people. Kazakh society seems to allow Moscow to control the political narratives.

    Indicatively, people tend to use delicate language to describe the war, such as “circumstances” or “situation.” Even my university professors called it a “military operation.” This kind of delicate language, stemming from a neutral position, tends to avoid explicit claims about the war, because it is essentially silence. But that silence plays into the hands of Russia, because not only does it fail to recognise the culturicide occurring, but because of the continued influence of Russian media in Kazakhstan today. Moscow’s pro-war narrative has a pervasive effect on public opinion, especially among Russian speakers (Kumenov 2022), who constitute around 95% of the population. This evidence suggests that by staying neutral, Kazakhstan is vulnerable to the fascist ideology pushed by Russia. Thus, we can see how the official line of neutrality has dangerous consequences in Kazakhstan. Through this passivity, Astana allows Moscow to put their lens on current affairs, and the silence of their neutrality creates an eerie indifference towards the war crimes in Ukraine.

    Secondly, the general reluctance to anger Russia means that Kazakhstan’s neutrality allows for the Russian war economy to continue to fire, which could endanger Western support. And this has a damaging effect on hope. Kazakh society has an understandable fear of Russian aggression. The relationship between Astana and Moscow is deep and complicated, and the centuries of history mean their peoples are close, with Astana very much at the whim of Putin. This I have found evidence of during my interviews and discussions with Kazakh people here in Almaty. There is an understandable motivation behind this since Kazakhstan is economically dependent on Russia, does not benefit from the security of NATO, and has received threats from their former colonial overlord. This fear promotes a policy of placating their northern neighbour.

    The policy of placating by staying neutral benefits Russia because it allows for the continued mechanisation of the post-soviet integrated economy. This could endanger long-term Western support for Ukraine because the economic cost of such support is growing in the face of an ever-operative Russian war machine. Operative in part thanks to ‘neutral’ states enabling the evasion of sanctions (Burna-Asefi 2022). What this means, then, is that the war will draw on. Ukraine will liberate all of its territories, but the question is when, and at what cost. As long as Kazakhstan and other nations stay silent, they prolong the bloodshed.

    Finally, by ignoring culturicide, Kazakh society has a tendency to legitimise the destruction of national identity in Ukraine. I say this because the indifference towards the destruction of another, while deeply treasuring one’s own culture, implicitly makes a value judgement on these two different cultures. I think Kazakhstan can be described as a fairly nationalistic and patriotic country. There is no shortage of flags here, and people are rightfully proud of their identity. But for Ukraine, there are no flags, no symbols of solidarity, despite the fact that the evidence of the destruction of Ukrainian culture and nationhood is widespread (Dickinson 2022). Yet, many in Kazakhstan refuse to publicly criticise this; according to a poll in November 2022, 95% of respondents claims to be neutral to the war (Dumoulin 2023). This is seen in the lack of symbolism of solidarity for Ukraine through artistic expression in public spaces.

    Kazakhstan’s passionate nationalism and pride of its own culture, while silently witnessing the destruction of another, implies a lack of egality between these cultures. This norm of favouring one culture while ignoring the extermination of another culture creates a dangerous precedent of value judgement toward the ‘cultural other.’ It is by ignoring the culturicide, while propagating your own nationalism, that you normalise the destruction of what could only be, according to this logic, a lesser culture.

    To conclude my findings on Kazakhstan, I have identified that on the superficial level, the society generally forms a neutral perception. I had an interesting conversation with a taxi driver, and in response to my asking why there are no flags of Ukraine here, he stated that the Kazakh people are vehemently against the war. And I believe him. But my point is that the surface paints a different picture. The streets seem silent in the face of culturicide in Ukraine.

    Conclusion

    It is easy during a violent conflict to ignore the value of non-violent resistance, especially when what Ukraine needs most is military and material equipment. But the importance of solidarity should not be forgotten.

    I have tried to illustrate one difference that I have found during my year abroad, and the disturbing effects of the war in Ukraine. Kazakhstan and Lithuania are, of course, wildly different societies, and I would not suggest that Lithuanians are in any way inherently better than Kazakh people. And as I have stated, I am aware that Kazakh people support Ukraine in the conflict. It is true that neutrality and solidarity towards culturicide are not opposites. Meanwhile, the difference between neutrality and solidarity should not be understated. One of the problems of this neutrality is that it enables the continuation of Russian fascism.

    Aimé Césaire, writing about Imperialism and Colonialism in the 20th century, argued that those who passively allow for the bureaucratic machine to continue, are responsible in part for the violence done (Césaire 1972, 54). This is because this system of exploitation and fascism required a hoard of unquestioning and obedient civil servants to keep the wheels turning. While Ruscism and European Colonialism are a far cry from one another, it is through this same mechanism of the obedient or ‘neutral’ performance of functions that the violence continues. As one Ukrainian respondent wrote, there is no such thing as neutrality; you cannot hide in the shadows. And this is necessary for any of the intersections of fascism. Silence is violence.

    If you want to donate, use the following link: https://stipruskartu.lt/.

    Слава Україні!

    Bibliography

    Burna-Asefi, Sophia Nina. 2023. “Just Passing Through: Kazakhstan’s Parallel Trade Predicament.” The Diplomat. 27th February 2023. https://thediplomat.com/2023/02/just-passing-through-kazakhstans-parallel-trade-predicament/

    Césaire, Aimé. [1950] 1972. Discourse on Colonialism. Joan Pinkham (trans.). New York: Monthly Review Press.

    Dickinson, Peter. 2022. “Vladimir Putin’s Ukrainian Genocide: Nobody can claim they did not know”. 1st December 2022. Washington, US: Atlantic Council. https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/vladimir-putins-ukrainian-genocide-nobody-can-claim-they-did-not-know/.

    Dumoulin, Marie. 2023. “Steppe Change: How Russia’s War on Ukraine is Reshaping Kazakhstan.” European Council on Foreign Relations. https://ecfr.eu/publication/steppe-change-how-russias-war-on-ukraine-is-reshaping-kazakhstan/.

    Kumenov, Almaz. 2022. “Kazakhstan: Survey finds solid support for Russia, but mostly among Russian speakers.” Eurasianet. New York: Harriman Institute. https://eurasianet.org/kazakhstan-survey-finds-solid-support-for-russia-but-mostly-among-russian-speakers.

    Putin, Vladimir. 2022. “Here’s the Full Translation of Vladimir Putin’s Victory Day Speech.” Bloomberg News. 9th May 2022. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-05-09/full-transcript-here-s-russian-president-vladimir-putin-s-victory-day-speech.

    Statista Research Department. 2023. “Total bilateral aid commitments to Ukraine as a percentage of donor gross domestic product (GDP) between January 24, 2022 and January 15, 2023, by country.” 23rd February 2023. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1303450/bilateral-aid-to-ukraine-in-a-percent-of-donor-gdp/.

    The Canvas. 2022. “Maria Prymachenko, Ukraine & Art as a Factor in War.” YouTube Video. Uploaded 18th March 2022. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1unsnhztCW8&ab_channel=TheCanvas.

    Zhukov, Yuri M. and Roya Talibova. 2018. “Stalins Terror and the Long-Term Effects of Mass Repression.” In Journal of Peace Research: 55, 2: 267-283. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, Ltd.

    1Kfund.org. 2023. “About 1K Fund.” Accessed 21st May 2023. https://1kfund.org/.

    [1] This article has been written with the assistance of students and experts in Lithuania, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Russia. Most of them wish to remain anonymous. I am grateful to all of them.

  • Reviewing Owen Jones’ Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class

    While discussing unfortunate misrepresentations within British society, Owen Jones’ Chavs: Dehumanization of the Working Class (2011) is highly applicable to the media coverage of working-class people in many Western societies. Jones uses the term “chav” (2011) as symbolic of the most common portrayal of the working class – comparable to the derogatory Dutch epithet, “tokkie”. These distasteful terms can be understood as relating to anti-social behaviour and raise negative connotations of less affluent members of society as lazy, criminal and rude, among other depictions. The terms ultimately result in the harmful stereotyping of the working class and – as Jones puts it – their “demonization” (Jones 2011).

    As he writes on a subject rarely tackled in mainstream media, Jones provides an effective entry-level analysis of the representations and realities of the British working class over the span of the last thirty years. It is important to consider that his argument does not concern the act of labelling the working class as “chavs”, but instead targets the underlying mechanisms that created such class contempt. Using a range of examples, including interviews and case studies, he demonstrates that working-class organisations and communities have eroded.

    One of many striking cases seen within the titular Chavs concerns the broadcasting of the BBC televised programme The Future of the Welfare State, presented by well-known interviewer John Humphrys. The show claimed that “Britain was living in an ‘age of “entitlement’” (Jones 2011, 24), alongside other controversial claims. This statement in question reinforces the connotations surrounding the working class as greedy and reliant upon the welfare state to avoid employment. As the programme was later found to have violated the BBC Trust’s regulations of impartiality and accuracy, Jones illustrates the media’s indulgence of biased sources. This indulgence includes the broadcasting of overemphasised cases of working-class individuals faking health conditions to claim welfare benefits. The sad truth is that these cases are far more uncommon than the media portrays. From decreases in payments given to the unemployed and sick to the reduction of industrial and mining sectors, Chavs sheds light on the ever-growing narrative of the “lazy” chav that “lacked aspiration” (Jones 2011, 28), despite the reality of incomes falling behind in an ever-growing social housing crisis.

    In addressing the complexity of the working-class struggle, Jones places significant emphasis on Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government of the 1980s. As Jones puts it, “Thatcher’s assumption of power in 1979 marked the beginning of an all-out assault on the pillars of working-class Britain” (2011, 10). Hence, his analysis illustrates the deindustrialisation of Britain under Thatcher’s government, marking the dissipation of the traditional working-class community. While she worked toward an ideological campaign for a consumer-based, individualistic population, as seen in the initiation of marketised education, Jones’ analysis allows readers of all backgrounds to understand the impacts these ideals had and continue to have on industrial and welfare policies today.

    Despite Jones’ approach lacking an academic nature, the text opens the arena of discussion to the general reader while employing statistical evidence in explaining his main arguments. Illustrating the reality that lies behind the data on wealth disparity and the relations between immigration and wages (to name a few), Jones tackles the ineffectiveness of both Conservative and New Labour governments that have maintained and created a commonplace for the narrative of the lazy unemployed. A similar notion is seen within Katz’s Undeserving Poor, where the American titular portrays the view of poverty as personal failure (Katz 1989). However, unlike Katz, Jones pays particular attention to the media’s representation of outrageous events – from child disappearances to the collapse of trade unions – and the role it played in the fragmentation of communities. While both critically acclaimed works approach issues of blame-the-poor politics, cases such as the aforementioned BBC violation of accuracy allow Chavs to draw an unforgettable image of elitist media representation, thus bringing the issues closer to home than Katz’s analysis from 33 years ago.

    Overall, Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class is persuasive and passionate, alongside being accessible to a wide range of viewers within and outside of the political and academic arenas. This insightful work, although focused on the realm of British government, is applicable to societies beyond the UK. By bringing the prominence of middle-class-centred policies and media coverage to light, Jones tackles processes that maintain misrepresentations of the working class while illustrating the reality of struggle hidden behind the curtain.

    References

    Jones, Owen. 2011. Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class. London: Verso.

    Katz, Michael B. 1989. The Undeserving Poor. New York: Oxford University Press.

  • Dying for God?

    On how Dutch media influences the imagery of ‘IS women.’

    ‘We have an insatiable desire for classification, for through it we create the world. Power, true power, is held not by those with the largest bank accounts or the strongest military, but by those who give us the words with which to view the world.’ (Whitley 2016)

    With this statement scholar Thomas J. Whitley aims to highlight the importance of narrative around terrorist acts, claiming that leading narratives have a strong influence on how we perceive the events these narratives are about. In the West, it is especially the narrative of the media by which we attain ‘knowledge’ about certain terrorist events. In line with Whitley, it would hence mean that the media has a strong influence on how we perceive these events (Whitley 2016).

    Thus, it is important to at least research this possible influence of the media. This is especially relevant when considering cases like that of the Dutch women who have joined ISIS and are now trying to return to their homeland. Within the Netherlands, the question of whether the Dutch government should allow these women back has indeed become a topic of popular debate. These women were part of an organization that is categorized by the Netherlands as terrorists, but does this make these women terrorists or a danger to Dutch society? As stated above, the media could have a big influence on how we think about this dilemma and therefore also have a big influence on both the lives of these women and their kids, whose faith is usually bound with that of their mothers.

    Therefore, my aim for this paper is to answer the following research question: How does Dutch media influence the public image of Dutch women who are or were part of IS? I answer this question by using the first section to give an outline of the situation of the so-called ‘IS-women’ and the response of the Dutch government to the IS-women who want to return to the Netherlands. This section takes a sociological perspective and aims to give background information that is relevant to the remainder of my paper. However, academic research lacks a specific discussion on how media influences the imagery of women who are part of ISIS. Therefore, I use the second section of this paper to analyze existing research about the broader relationship between ISIS and the media in general. This section is mostly from the perspective of the communication sciences. Lastly, I use the third section to analyze Dutch media which have written about ‘IS-women’ and apply the background information of the first section and the broader research of the second section to this analysis. By doing this I conclusively give an answer to the question of how Dutch media influences the imagery of women who are part of the IS movement.

    Ultimately, I argue that the narrative of the media creates a notion that many people take to correspond to reality. What I mean by this is that we all have a certain image of what it means to be a woman who is part of ISIS and tend to believe that this general image corresponds with all the women who are, or were, part of ISIS. As the quote with which I opened states, our words determine how we perceive reality. This general image, and the fact that we think this image corresponds to reality, is in a big way influenced by the way the media writes about these women.

    1. ‘The Dutch dilemma’

    Who are the Dutch IS-women?

    In June 2014 the ISIS caliphate was proclaimed. In response, a small group of individuals residing in the West chose to migrate to this new caliphate due to their alignment with the interpretation of Islamic teachings by members of the Islamic state. Mostly, this interpretation refers to a version of Jihadism, which can be defined as a particular version of Islam which argues that violence has to be used to spread the teachings of the Islam.[1] Among them there were also women who can be defined as follows:

    A female jihadist is considered a girl or woman who has either considered (and is registered as such by the police) or attempted to travel to ISIS territory; who facilitates or recruits others for travel or marriage to jihadists; has returned from ISIS territory; or has committed acts of violent extremism. (Gielen 2018, 456)

    These women can also be ascribed a certain agency because they knowingly and willingly traveled or considered traveling to ISIS territory. This is also shown by the fact that they actively contributed to the recruitment of others. A rapport of the AIVD[2] shows that most of these women are between 15 and 30 years old and are known to be converts with various ethnic backgrounds. However, minors who were taken by their parents are not covered by this definition because of their lack of agency (Gielen 2018, 456-458).

    Subsequently, to understand these women it is relevant to understand the process by which they are recruited. This process can be proactive, which means that (vulnerable) women are actively manipulated to join ISIS, and reactive, which means that recruiters wait until the women show interest. One must also consider other influences outside this recruitment process, like love, online group chats, and peer pressure within social media. It is also common that these women already had peers involved within the jihadist network. These relationships were further enhanced by social media whereby recruiters anticipated certain push and pull factors (Gielen 2018, 459). An important pull factor is that one can be motivated because of personal or idealistic reasons (Jacques and Taylor 2009, 506-507). Also, it is important to acknowledge the feeling of sisterhood and romanticized narratives as important pull factors (Saltman and Smith 2015, 13-17). Romanticized, in the sense that these narratives are often constructed to paint a perfect picture to overshadow the more negative aspects of joining the Islamic state. As will become clear, this disillusionment regarding the romanticized narrative becomes an important factor in why people want to leave.

    Push factors would be revenge or certain key events that motivate these women to join ISIS (Jacques and Taylor 2009, 507). Examples of this are: isolation, the search for identity, having a sense of belonging, a feeling that the Muslim community is being oppressed and persecuted, and aggrievement at the (perceived) lack of international action (Gielen 2018, 458). However, one of the most apparent push factors is the troubled life histories of these women. Studies have shown that 60% of the foreign fighters within ISIS have had psycho-sociological problems and 20% had psychiatric problems (Gielen 2018, 458).

    Additionally, research exists about the push and pull factors for women leaving ISIS. Pull factors are often positive alternatives such as the desire for a normal life or having family obligations. One of the most important push factors is dissatisfaction with other group members, leaders, or the ideology of IS. These push factors can be further divided into three categories. First, there is the ideological category that concerns disillusionment with the ideology. Second, there are the social factors to be understood as dissatisfaction with extremist peers. Third, you have practical factors that ‘revolve around the personal life situation, such as feeling isolated, stigmatized or externally pressured to participate in extremist groups’ (Gielen 2018, 459). 

    The Dutch reaction

    What these women also have in common is that authorities know about their affiliation with ISIS and therefore certain measurements are undertaken. These women were first portrayed as victims and this resulted in the fact that many European countries did not prosecute them nor offer ‘exit programs’. These exit programs normally aim at deradicalization and reintegration, but due to the assumption that women were the victims this program was not deemed necessary for their situation (Gielen 2018 454-456).

    However, according to Gielen, recent studies have shown different imagery of these IS-women. Research of the AIVD[3] stated that IS-women often are heavily armed and are trained to use these weapons. Next to that, IS-women seem to have an active role in recruiting other girls and women online. IS-women thus seem to have a much more active role within ISIS than previously thought. It follows that it is critical to have an effective policy to deal with these IS-women. This is especially critical because a growing number of IS-women are aiming to return to their home country due to the decline of the IS-caliphate. The need of such an effective policy is especially important for the Netherlands because they have relatively many women who migrated to the Middle East to join ISIS. 100 Dutch women have migrated to this area and at least 80 of these 100 women have actually joined ISIS (Gielen 2018, 455).

    II. Media and ISIS

    Now that there is an outline to work with, we are one step further in analyzing the influence of Dutch media on Dutch women who have joined ISIS. However, as remarked in the introduction, it is relevant to first analyze the broader relationship with ISIS and the media in general. This is important as there exists no scholarly literature that specifically focuses on Dutch media. Accordingly, this lack of a theoretical framework needs to be complemented by first giving a more general overview in order to apply this theory to the case of Dutch media. I shall give this overview by firstly analyzing two relevant publications, the first being from Moran Yarchi and the second from Archi Mehdi Semati and Piotr M. Szpunar. Secondly, I shall formulate my own reaction to the insights given by these publications.

    Using media as a weapon

    According to Moran Yarchi the media plays an important role in the war against ISIS. She states that, alongside the actual military confrontation, an ‘image war’ exists to support one of the main goals of terrorists: to attract attention and to spread fear. Publicity in the media is one of the key ways to achieve these goals. Therefore, many terrorist organizations actually make use of this by considering how the media would portray their actions. Based on this, Yarchi supports the claim of B.M. Jenkins[4] who stated that terrorism is a theatre: the people watching are far more important in a terrorist attack compared to the actual victims (Yarchi 2019, 53-54).

    Additionally, Yarchi claims that this ‘image war’ within the media has its roots in the fact that, in general, conflicts have changed recently since the War on Terror. This is because the rise of this conflict is connected to a couple of major changes. The first major change is that contemporary conflicts are mostly fought between state and non-state actors. The second change is that conflicts gain much more attention through media compared to other means. The media coverage has come to play an important role in conflicts because media influences political actors and these in turn influence other fronts, like public opinion. Hence, the media becomes the weapon of modern warfare because terrorists can influence public opinion (Yarchi 2019, 53-54).

    Next, Yarchi states that terrorist organizations and especially ISIS have numerous methods of how they aim to influence the public. To understand their methods, we have to keep in mind that these organizations are usually less powerful compared to the states they wage war against. Consequently, by ‘promoting’ their violent acts and spreading fear within the media these terrorist organizations aim to reverse this public image of an asymmetric power relation. In other words, they aim to appear as evenly powerful as their enemy (Yarchi 2019, 55). Next to that, organizations like ISIS try to gain more support from other Muslims by glorifying the war. Both aspects are especially relevant now that ISIS is losing power; they still want to come across as a powerful foe and at the same time hope to make up for their loss by trying to influence Muslims to joining them (Yarchi 2019, 63-65).

    Beyond the spectacle

    Likewise, Mehdi Semati and Piotr M. Szpunar agree with the importance of media within the conflict between ISIS and ‘the West’. They, however, disagree with the statement that it is purely ISIS that tries to weaponize the media. For this, they refer to an earlier publication by Barbie Zelizer who states that the U.S. media and ISIS propaganda share a journalistic style: both frame ‘the conflict in a simplistic us/other binary’ (Semati and Szpunar 2018, 3). Thus, despite being very different, both try to construct an insurmountable divide between the U.S. and ISIS (Semati and Szpunar 2018, 3).

    Zelizer also states that some aspects of ISIS are ‘hyper-visible’. According to Semati and Szpunar she argues that: ‘much of the conflict remains unseen, with any information gaps filled in through phantasmagorical, speculative and imaginative registers’(Semati and Szpunar 2018, 3). In other words, only a part of the conflict is shown in the media, but it is portrayed as the main part of the conflict and thus given more visibility compared to other aspects. Due to this, many people come to understand these aspects as being the whole conflict, with the aid of their ‘speculative imagination.’ She claims that both sides are using this tactic so that they can portray the conflict as they see fit (Semati and Szpunar 2018, 3).

    Semati and Szpunar illustrate this point by referring to the work of Rebecca Adelamn who states that Western media uses the weapon of imagery to ‘locate and contain the phantom enemy of the war of terror’ (Semati and Szpunar 2018, 3). What she means by this is that the media is being used to construct the idea of ‘the other’ as the enemy. The reason for the U.S. to do this is that by framing an image of the enemy they hope to control how we perceive these terrorists. However, ISIS uses this technique against them by aiming to portray the West as evil in (local) media. Thus, while both try to create a distinct ‘other,’ they do so by applying the same tactic and thus being more alike than they make it seem (Semati and Szpunar 2018, 3).

    However, according to Semati and Szpunar, ISIS does not create a ‘spectacle’ by only reinforcing its violent image. Here they draw on the arguments of Maran Kraidy, who claims that ISIS also tries to promote the ‘good life’ within the caliphate. Semati and Szpunar contrast this with the radical position of Francois Debrix and Ryan Atrip who make a distinction between reality and non-reality. According to them both ISIS and the U.S. use media not to present truths, but rather a simulation, a non-truth (Semati and Szpunar 2018, 4). This is in line with the research of Friedrich Kittler, who states that ‘states create their own terrorists.’ (Semati and Szpunar 2018, 5). What is meant by this is that people from ISIS paint a more positive picture on what we would call terrorism, instead claiming that these actions make you a pious Muslim. As such, this non-truth is also used to create a romanticized narrative in order to gain more followers.

    Nonetheless, Western media focuses much on the violent aspects of the IS-caliphate and therefore much of the public attention goes to this aspect of ISIS. This shows that how we perceive ISIS is very much influenced by how they appear within the media. Such appearances can however be nuanced according to Semati and Szpunar. Some claim, for instance, that ISIS is ‘a ‘transnational multiethnic state’ that moves beyond racism in a way that America never could (Semati and Szpunar 2018, 7). This shows the ambiguity surrounding narratives around ISIS and therefore Semati and Szpunar invite readers to keep problematizing Western narratives by keeping into account different narratives concerning these conflicts (Semati and Szpunar 2018, 6-7).

    Discussion

    To conclude this section, both articles have important insights that I will use for the next section and ultimately answer my research question. Yarchi argues that the aim of terrorist organizations like ISIS is to spread fear through the media because they aim to influence the public image into thinking they are as powerful as their enemies. Semati and Szpunar add that the West also uses a similar tactic because they aim to control the perception of the conflict and to create a further divide between ISIS and the West. The media does this by focusing on one part of the conflict and ignoring other parts. Hence, they create hyper-visibility, which is thickened by the speculative imagination of the public.

    However, I do want to criticize these articles by claiming that it is unjust to the situation to only focus on the responsibility of ISIS and the U.S. What this overshadows is that the media is its own entity. Of course, the media is influenced by the courses that ISIS and the U.S. take. Despite this intertwinement, we should not underestimate the individuality of the media. Hence, we should not only look at how the West and ISIS influence the media but also the other way around.  Therefore, I am now to approach the relationship between Dutch media and IS-women by considering this individuality and how the media influences the West and ISIS.

    III. Dutch Media and the women of ISIS

    The perspective of the Dutch media

    After having undertaken this more general analysis concerning the relationship between ISIS and the media, it is now time to apply these theories to the way ‘IS-women´ are being portrayed in Dutch media. As a start I want to give an enumeration of headlines:[5]

    • To get IS-children (and their mothers) back or not?[6]
    • ‘IS women are very happy.’[7]
    • Yezidi community afraid of the return of IS-women.[8]
    • IS-women from Syria want to return to the Netherlands.[9]
    • These are the two IS-women who have returned: ‘Prove atrocities are hard to find.’[10]
    • They want to return to the Netherlands, but how dangerous are the women of IS?[11]
    • IS-women helped fighters rape our women.[12]
    • Two returned IS-women in the Netherlands: May be difficult to prosecute them[13]
    • How dangerous are the Dutch IS-women?[14]
    • Should we pick up ISIS women and children or not?[15]

    This selection is made by simply googling ‘Nederlandse IS-vrouwen’ (‘Dutch IS-women’). What this selection makes clear is that almost every headline seems to imply that they do not write or talk about specific cases but about ‘IS-women’ in general, with the exception of a WNL video (WNL 2019) and an RTL article (De Goede 2019),

    This also seems to be the case when taking a closer look at these articles. Let’s take, for instance, the 2019 video of Nu.nl. Within this video, people talk about the dilemma surrounding IS-women and how some people in the parliament think it’s too dangerous to let these women return. Others in the video think it is safer for these women to be judged in the Netherlands. Within the rest of this video, two activists, who both claim to have talked to IS-women, make their say. These activists claim that ‘they’ (the ´IS-women´) have chosen to be a part of the dangerous IS-organization. Hence, these women should not be allowed to return (Nu.nl 2019).

    The most prominent argument for this statement concerns the crimes that IS-women committed against the Yezidi women, whose homes were conquered by ISIS (Nu.nl 2019). These crimes especially became apparent during an NOS interview with a Yezidi woman and her family. This woman claims that she has a hard time seeing ‘them’ (women who joined ISIS) because they reminded her of the gruesome things these women have done to her and her people. Hence, she and her family claim that these women should not be allowed back in the Netherlands under any circumstances. According to this Yezidi family, the women were worse than the IS-men (NOS 2019a). This is also claimed by another 2019 NOS articleand by some people within the 2019 Dutch EO-documentary translated as:  Should we pick up ISIS women and children or not? According to both, ‘IS-women’ helped the ‘IS-men’ in beating and raping Yezidi women.

    Some of the media articles and videos do however conduct interviews with individual Dutch women who were part of ISIS. Despite this, general claims are still being made. For instance, in a 2016 interview by the Telegraaf,an ‘IS-woman’ claims that all ‘IS-women’ are still happy within the caliphate. In the previously mentioned EO documentary, a mother states that she cannot accept that her daughter might be allowed to return. According to her, all ‘IS-women’ are terrorists. In the same documentary, a journalist states that all women from ISIS are innocent and that their only task was cooking. A Dutch CDA[16] politician reacts to this, claiming that it does not matter and that ‘they’ (IS-woman) all tell lies. According to him, all IS-women are guilty of collaborating with ISIS (EO 2019). According to a 2019 article in Het Parool, the Dutch state indeed claims that they do not intend to bring back women from ISIS. These women have chosen their own fates and the state does not see them as any less dangerous than their husbands.       

    Some media articles and videos do, however, try to take a more positive stance against this dilemma. A 2019 article by RTL Nieuws claims that the migration of IS-women can perhaps be explained due to a bad childhood and as an attempt to give new meaning to their lives (RTL 2019). A NOS article of the same year claims one can make a divide between women who had active and passive roles within ISIS (NOS 2019a). However, the first article ultimately claims that women did know what they got themselves into. According to this article, these women must have known beforehand about the beheadings and other crimes committed by ISIS. They chose to maintain this system (De Goede 2019). The second article also warned that we should not underestimate these women (RTL 2019).

    Thus, what all these media articles and videos have in common is that all of these make general claims about ‘IS-women,’ regardless of which normative stance they take. They constantly refer to ‘them’ and make statements such as ‘they are all dangerous´ and ‘they should not be allowed to come back to the Netherlands.´

    The simulation of the Dutch spectacle

    In line with the article of Semati and Szpunar, I claim that this trend is problematic from an epistemological point of view. What I mean by this is that all these articles make claims based on induction. Based on an enumeration of singular events, they make general claims by stating that all women of ISIS are applicable to these events. Even when articles claim that not all of these women are the same, they all still make general claims in the end. In other words, conflicts are made up of singular events and certain actors who acted in these events. It is therefore problematic from an epistemological point of view to claim that all of these women were active in the conflict, that all of them are terrorists and, therefore, ought not to be allowed to return to the Netherlands. By doing this, the abstract notion of ‘the IS-women’ that is being fed by the media becomes the leading influence in how people think about IS-women in general. Instead of considering each case individually, the media let many of us think that all the women of ISIS have the properties that are written or talked about in the media.[17] 

    Moreover, in line with Semati and Szpunar I claim that this kind of journalism causes a ‘simulation’ which is made up by the generalization of the media and the reactive speculative imagination of the Dutch people. What I mean by this is that the media lays a big focus on certain aspects or properties surrounding the situation of IS-women and makes it seem as if these are all applicable to every woman of ISIS. For instance, however horrible the crimes committed against Yezidi women are, the claim that all ISIS women are guilty of this cannot be known. Due to this statement, it is, however, very easy for the speculative imagination of the reader to create a false narrative that indeed all of the women are guilty. This is also strengthened by the fact that these news items use the general label of ‘IS-women’ instead of talking about (particular) Dutch women who joined ISIS.

    However, one can argue that the women who did not have an active role in these crimes, have still had an indirect role in them by maintaining the caliphate and, therefore, making these crimes possible. But when we analyzed the media, we have seen that some of these articles or videos claim that ‘IS-women were worse than the men’ and ‘IS-women’ helped rape the Yezidi women.’ This makes it at least seem as if all of these women had an active part in these crimes. And despite that, the first and second sections of this paper both showed that assuming these women had full agency is problematic.[18]

    As a final remark I want to highlight that this paper is not a critique of the policy of the Dutch government. By no means am I trying to argue here that we should or should not allow  Dutch citizens who joined ISIS to return to the Netherlands. Instead, the point of my paper is that the general statements by the media can very easily influence people into agreeing with this generalization and, therefore, ignore much of the reality of the conflict. As Semati and Szpunar have shown us, the conflict has much more ‘reality’ than what the media portrays. Next to that, the first section has shown that not all Dutch women who joined ISIS are doing so because they want to be terrorists. Instead, research by the AVID has shown that numerous complex sociological (push and pull) factors exist and thus the motivation for Dutch women to join ISIS can vary per person.

    However, the media is the main way by which we gain ‘knowledge’[19] of these events, as stated in the introduction of this paper. This could prove to be problematic because we live in a democracy and people can choose our government and the government decides how to deal with the women who joined ISIS. It is very likely that these votes are being influenced by fallacies fed by the media. Hence, like Semati and Szpunar claim, we should keep problematizing this narrative. This is because not only the lives of these women depend on it, but also the lives of their children whose current faith is intertwined with that of their mothers.

    Of course, one can aim to counter this generalizing narrative by looking at more in-depth media coverage concerning IS-women. However, I argue that this would miss the more important insight that language itself has a generalizing tendency. In the 20th century, philosophers like Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida already argued that our discourse about the world has certain epistemological limitations that cannot be overcome by language itself.[20] Consequently, they argued that we should acknowledge that there is a part of existence that transcends our understanding of the word. Put differently, existence is too complex to fully be encompassed by our linguistic framing of the world: there will always be something that escapes our words. What their point makes clear is that it is perhaps a better solution to acknowledge that we can never fully understand the situation of IS women, instead of reproducing our generalizing understanding at a more in-depth level.

    Some might think that this kind of ‘thinking’ would amount to a standstill, which in philosophy, we would call an aporia. However, as early as Plato, such a standstill is not seen as wholly unproductive. In Meno, this take on the aporia becomes clear when Plato writes about a discussion between Socrates and Meno concerning the idea of knowledge. At a certain point, Socrates argues for the benefits of an aporia:

    ‘Socrates: So he is now in a better position with regard to the matter he does not know?

    Meno: I agree with that too.

    Socrates: Have we done him any harm by making him perplexed and numb as the torpedo fish does?

    Meno: I do not think so.

    Socrates: Indeed, we have probably achieved something relevant to find out how matters stand, for now, as he does not know, he would be glad to find out, whereas before the thought he could easily make many fine speeches to large audiences about the square of double size and said it must have a base twice as long.

    Meno: so it seems.

    Socrates: Do you think that before he would have tried to find out that which he thought he know though he did not before he fell into perplexity and realized he did now know and longed to know?

    Meno: I do not think so, Socrates.

    Socrates: Has he ten benefited from being numbed?

    Meno: I think so.’ (84 b-c)

    Here, of course, being numbed referred to how Socrates’ questioning caused someone to arrive at a state of not-knowing [aporia]. What this dialogue tries to teach is that it is sometimes better to question everything one thinks to ‘know’ in order to arrive at truth as separated from knowledge. As such, the unknowable transcendence within our world can be seen as an aporetic truth that cannot be aligned with our knowledge of the world. Perhaps further research could instead indicate that it is precisely by not speaking that we can have a more open stance toward the transcendent existence of IS-women. As Levinas and Derrida would claim, it is only then that ethics could begin.[21]

    Conclusion

    Summarizing, in the first section I have given background information surrounding Dutch women who joined ISIS. Here we saw that a complexity of push and pull factors exist that explain the motivation of these women. In the third section, the article of Yarchi showed that ISIS in general uses the media to spread fear and to reverse public opinion around the asymmetric power-relations between ISIS and its enemies. The article of Semati and Szpunar has shown that both ISIS and the West use media to control the public image of their conflict. They do this by letting the media focus on certain aspects of the conflicts and making these hyper-visible. However, I argued that we also should account for the individuality of the media and thus should not only look at how the West and ISIS influence the media, but also the other way around.

    That is what I analyzed in the third section. I started my section by analyzing some media videos and articles which took IS-women as their topic. Based on this analysis I argued that all of these articles made general statements about these women and thus did not consider their singularity. I argued that this is problematic from an epistemological point of view because you cannot make general claims without considering the singularity of each event and the person who participated in these events. I closed this section by stating that this paper does not function as a critique of the policy of the Dutch government, but simply is a critique of how the media uses false statements to influence public opinion on Dutch women who joined ISIS. Therefore, we should always keep problematizing these statements. Thus, let me respectively restate and answer my research question: How does Dutch media influence the (Dutch) public image of Dutch women who are or were part of ISIS? My answer is that the media uses general statements about ISIS women and therefore influences us into thinking that every Dutch woman who has joined ISIS is the same, while in reality, ‘they’ are not.

    Bibliography

    AIVD (2016) Life with ISIS: the Myth Unravelled. The Hague: AIVD.

    AIVD (2016): Annual Report 2015: A Range of Threats to the Netherlands. The Hague: AIVD.

    AIVD (2017): Jihadistische vrouwen, een niet te onderschatten dreiging. 17 November. The Hague: AIVD.

    De Telegraaf. 2016. “’IS-vrouwn zijn heel gelukkig.’” Youtube video, 1:03. July 5, 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXTBnvh1b1Y.

    Gielen, Amy-Jane. 2018. “Exit programmes for female jihadists: A proposal for conducting realistic evaluation of the Dutch approach.” International Sociology 33, no. 4: 454-472.

    De Goede, Agnes. 2019. “Dit zijn de twee teruggekeerde IS-vrouwen: ‘Bewijs gruwelijkheden lastig te vinden.’” RTL Nieuws, November, 21, 2019. Dit zijn de twee teruggekeerde IS-vrouwen: ‘Bewijs gruwelijkheden lastig te vinden’ | RTL Nieuws

    Jacques, Karen and Paul J. Taylor. 2009 “Female terrorism: A review. Terrorism and Political Violence.” Terrorism and Political Violence 21, no. 3: 499–515.

    NOS. 2019. “Jezidi-gemeenschap bang terugkeer IS-vrouwen.” Facebook video, 3:02. “NOS.” November 1, 2019. https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=573379010138198.

    Nu.nl. “IS-kinderen (en hun moeders) terughalen of niet?” Youtube video, 9:19. November 16, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x0bFpqdG65w.

    Plato. ‘Meno.’ 1997. In Plato: complete works, edited by John M. Cooper, and translation by G.M.A. Grube, 870-897. Indiana: Hackett Publishing Company.

    Rosman, Cyril. 2019. “IS-Vrouwen uit Syrië willen terug naar Nederland.” Het Parool, November 1, 2019. https://www.parool.nl/nieuws/is-vrouwen-uit-syrie-willen-terug-naar-nederland~bbb57801/

    RTL Nieuws. 2019“Ze willen terug naar Nederland, maar hoe gevaarlijk zijn de vrouwen van IS?” March 1, 2019. https://www.rtlnieuws.nl/nieuws/buitenland/artikel/4906066/vrouwen-kalifaat-syrie-terugkeren.

    Saltman, Erin Marie and Melanie Smith. “Till Martyrdom Do Us Part: Gender and the ISIS Phenomenon.” London: Institute for Strategic Dialogue.

    Semati, Mehdi. 2018. “ISIS beyond the spectacle: communication media, networked publics, terrorism.” Critical studies in Media Communication 35, no. 1 (January): 1-7. 

    Swolfs, Lennard. 2019. “‘IS-vrouwen hielpen strijders bij het verkrachten van onze vrouwen.’” NOS Nieuws, January 11, 2019. https://nos.nl/artikel/2308525-is-vrouwen-hielpen-strijders-bij-het-verkrachten-van-onze-vrouwen.html.

    Van den Berg, Ellen en Hanne Küpers, “Hoe gevaarlijk zijn de Nederlandse IS-vrouwen?” Argos. Vrijzinnige Protestantse Radio Omroep. Hilversum: VRPO, October 26, 2019. https://www.vpro.nl/argos/media/afleveringen/2019/Hoe-gevaarlijk-zijn-de-Nederlandse-IS-vrouwen-.html.

    Van den Brink, Thijs. 2019. “Moeten we IS-vrouwen en kinderen ophalen of niet?” Nieuwlicht. Evangelische omroep. Hilversum: EO, June 3, 2019.

    Whitley, Thomas J.. 2016. “An act of terror and an act of hate.” MRBLOG. Accessed on 25 June. 2021. https://marginalia.lareviewofbooks.org/mrblog-act-terror-act-hate/.

    WNL “Twee teruggestuurde IS-vrouwen in Nederland: ‘Mogelijk lastig om ze te vervolgen.’” Youtube video, 2:20. November 20, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4838oUUAUM.

    Yarchi, Moran. 2019. “ISIS’s media strategy as image warfare: Strategic messaging over time and across platforms.” Communication and the public 4, no. 1: 53-67.

    [1] Jihadism refers here to the Islamic term of Jihad which bears the meaning of ‘making an effort’ to achieve a goal. Accordingly, the Jihad is split into two versions: the inner Jihad, mostly referring to the personal struggle to keep up the teachings of the Islam and the greater Jihad, referring to the goal to convert people to the Islam. When people talk about Jihadists, one often refers to this greater Jihad. However, the connection to violence is not a necessary definitional aspect of this term.

    [2] The ‘Algemene Inlichtingen- en Veiligheidsdienst’ (AIVD) translates as ‘General intelligence and security service’ and is a secret organization that aims to protect national security.

    [3] For the research see: 1. AIVD (2016) Life with ISIS: the Myth Unravelled. The Hague: AIVD. 2. AIVD (2016): Annual Report 2015: A Range of Threats to the Netherlands. The Hague: AIVD. 3. AIVD (2017): Jihadistische vrouwen, een niet te onderschatten dreiging. 17 November. The Hague: AIVD.

    [4] Jenkins, B. M. (2006). The new age of terrorism. In Kamien, D. G. (Eds.), The Mcgraw hill homeland security handbook (pp. 119). New York: McGraw Hill Professional.

    [5] I will immediately give the English translation. However, for each translation I will give the original Dutch in the corresponding footnote.

    [6]  IS-kinderen (en hun moeders) terughalen of niet? See: (Nu.nl 2019).

    [7]  ’IS-vrouwn zijn heel gelukkig.’ See: (Telegraaf 2016).

    [8] Jezidi-gemeenschap bang terugkeer IS-vrouwen. See: (NOS 2019a).

    [9] Rosman, Cyril. “IS-Vrouwen uit Syrië willen terug naar Nederland. See: (Het Parool 2019).

    [10] Dit zijn de twee teruggekeerde IS-vrouwen: ‘Bewijs gruwelijkheden lastig te vinden.’ See: (De Goede 2019).

    [11] Ze willen terug naar Nederland, maar hoe gevaarlijk zijn de vrouwen van IS? See: (RTL Nieuws 2019).

    [12] ‘IS-vrouwen hielpen strijders bij het verkrachten van onze vrouwen.’ See: (NOS  2019b).

    [13] Twee teruggestuurde IS-vrouwen in Nederland: ‘Mogelijk lastig om ze te vervolgen.’ See: (WNL 2019).

    [14] Hoe gevaarlijk zijn de Nederlandse IS-vrouwen? See: (Argos 2019).

    [15] Moeten we IS-vrouwen en kinderen ophalen of niet? See: (EO 2019).

    [16] Christian Democrats.

    [17] Next to that, this generalization is problematic from a juristic perspective. Legally, we cannot judge them all in the same manner. Instead, the judge has to consider the complexity of each individual case. Thus, it is too easy to just say that none of these women should be allowed to return.

    [18] In line with this, we can also ask ourselves to what extent citizens, in general, are responsible for the crimes of their government. Should the person who voted for Bush, Obama, or Trump be held accountable for the war crimes committed by presidents? But more importantly, do we think differently about these questions if they question the crimes committed by our own government?

    [19] As I have argued, no real knowledge but rather a simulation.

    [20] See, for instance, Derrida’s Violence and Metaphysics and Levinas’s Totality and Infinity.

    [21] Further elaboration on this alternative is beyond the scope of this paper as this paper mainly concerns itself with the problem of media.

  • What Gary Lachman Taught Me About Surrendering To Myself

    Gary Lachman, Rejected Knowledge: A Look At Our Other Ways of Knowing, 2015

    A few weeks ago, I had the great pleasure to attend a reading group in Arnhem with a dear friend, hosted by the interdisciplinary philosophy platform “future based”. The evening was filled with the laughter of strangers, sitting muddled up on the floor of an industrial looking alleyway house, swirling their minds around modernity and the (apparent) separation between mind and body. The event was centred around medieval witch hunts and the knowledge that was denounced and lost, which inspired many discussions about the underlying assumptions and motives that led to the killing of wise (mostly) women, and the idea that the only valid way to scientific discovery passes through the calculating, rational mind of a Western man.

    Descartes´ separation between mind and body, so we quickly agreed, finds its most dominant expression in the way emotions are seen as separate from and subjected to the control of the mind. This theme is present from Aristotle to modern day self-proclaimed alpha males who stress that true power lies in conquering your own emotions, their synonym for weakness.

    As the group consisted of mostly women, the gendered dimension of this separation was discussed with great passion and intimacy, moving from a “speaking about” to a “speaking from within”. In Western modern knowledge production and modes of thinking, but also in many spiritualities or religions such as Hinduism, women, emotions, and nature are muddled up into one entity that encompasses wilderness, impulsiveness, untamedness, and must be risen above in order to reach true enlightenment. Nature and humans are thus gendered into opposites, and organized along the lines of a control-obsessed rejection of emotions as valid knowledge.

    I was lucky enough to read and discuss texts by various incredible authors that night, but there was one that stood out especially and stuck with me for many days after. Our conversation became deeply personal to me when we discussed an excerpt of the book “…” by Gary Lachman, bass-guitarist of the band Blondie. Lachman writes in such a poetic way that his mere composition of words is already beautiful to me.

    Lachman argues that we have entered a new mode of relating to the world, which is defined by us placing ourselves outside of it. Rather than recognizing our interconnectedness to the world we exist in, we have created a distance that places us into a position of observation and separateness. The world, in this case, is everything natural around us, that we dissect, observe, explain, disconnect, and hide away from through what Lachman calls “the scientific mode” or “the new tradition”.

    This objectification of nature treats it as a soulless machine, it reduces it to mechanical processes.

    Probably the most fundamental way in which these two kinds of knowing (“know how” and “know why”) differ is that in the new scientific mode, we stand apart from the world. We keep it at a distance, at arm´s length. It becomes an object of observation; we become spectators separated from what we are observing. With this separation the world is objectified, made into an object. What this means is that it loses, or is seen as not to have, an inside. It is a machine, soulless, inanimate, dead. We object to this when it happens to us, when we feel that someone is not taking into account our inner world, our self, and is seeing us as an object, as something without freedom, will, completely determined. But it is through this mode that we can get to grips with the world and arrange it according to our needs. Whether we are scientists or not, this is the way in which we experience the world now, at least most of the time. There is the world: solid, mute, oblivious, and firmly “out there”. And “inside here” is a mind, a puddle of consciousness in an otherwise unconscious universe.

    Lachman argues here that we treat nature in such a way that would feel deeply wrong and hurtful if directed towards ourselves in the same cold, objectifying manner. As already mentioned, nature and emotions, our very own nature inside, have historically been and still are equated with one another.

    What Lachman misses here is that this objectification of nature does not only stem from the need to justify our domination over it, but also comes from a place of fear. We dissect nature into its parts and atoms and mechanisms and chemical compounds and whatnot, we understand every tiny process behind majestic phenomena that could only be grasped through myths back in the day. Dissecting nature allows us to subject it to a conception of primitiveness. That which we understand becomes less threatening, less unpredictable, less wild. It makes nature nothing but a web of calculated mechanical gears and us less small against its forcefulness.

    The flipside of this is that we rob ourselves of a sense of awe and the chance to surrender to being but a fraction in an infinite mosaic beyond comprehension. Wonderment and giving up control share a deeply intimate relationship, something that is not compatible with a mode of being that requires constant control and alertness.

    The new scientific mode of standing outside is an incomplete comprehension of the world, it is fundamentally lacking something, and I believe that people feel this. Currently I am partaking in a project at Valkhof museum, where I am helping to conceptualize and curate an exhibition about black holes. This has given me the chance to speak to various astrophysicists and astronomers. The surprising number of these scientists having turned to art confirmed my thought that this purely scientific, cold mode of observing the world is fundamentally lacking something. Engaging with space in this way allows for a sense of wonder to return that cannot be expressed by numbers, statistics, and scientific reports, and it places the human back into a relation with their surroundings.

    Lachman claims that we would fiercely reject such a denial of our inner world. I have experienced this differently, in fact, I see the need to control and tame nature even more prominently in the way we engage with (or shy away from) its expression within us.

    Throughout the last year I have greatly dealt with this myself, and Lachman´s text made me wonder how the intellectualization of emotions as an escape from their forcefulness is in any way different than hiding from the same force of our surroundings through Lachman´s new scientific mode.

    If we cannot separate ourselves from nature, it also means that we cannot separate the way we engage with ourselves inside from the way we engage with the outside. Even upholding such categories becomes obsolete. Surely, I can explain why I have difficult feelings in a rationally appealing manner, I can choose from an endless number of names to describe them, read self-help books and relate every negative pattern back to some childhood event, but where in all of this do I just feel? Where exactly do we hold still and experience in our new scientific mode?

    Human beings are a kind of microcosm, a little universe, and we contain within ourselves vast inner spaces, that mirror the vast outer spaces in which our physical world exists. In the rejected tradition, the whole universe exists within each one of us, and it is our task to bring these dormant cosmic forces and realities to life. If in the new scientific tradition we have begun to explore outer space, in the rejected tradition we turn our attention inward and explore inner space.

    Exploring inner space in this rejected tradition cannot be successful if done in the same manner that lies at the basis of its initial rejection. Instead of exploring to understand with our mind, we must be willing to give up the false sense of control this rational modus operandi grants us and surrender to the nature within ourselves, even if that means to just sit down and cry. You will be surprised at how many might come to sit next to you.

  • Racial Segregation in Brazil

    Content Warning: This paper refers to sexual violence as a result of racism

    “To be an oppressor is dehumanizing and anti-human in nature, as it is to be a victim” (hooks, 2015). In this quote, the author bell hooks shows how the subjugation of an individual or a group is a way of excluding them from the condition of being human. The very definition of “the human” has changed throughout history, often being used as a mechanism of maintenance of the status quo, which goes to show that there is no neutral point of view when it comes to the conceptualization of human nature. Taking that into account, this paper will argue that human nature is a social construct often used to support certain political views and forms of domination of one group over another. Racism will be the focus of my analysis as it is one of the possible misconceptions about human nature that can be used by articulations of hegemonic power.

    (meer…)

  • Friedrich Nietzsche en de luxe van Epicurus

    Inleiding

    Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) was naast filosoof ook getalenteerd filoloog. [1. Een taalkundige die zich specialiseert in oude en dode talen.] In 1869 werd hij als 24-jarige benoemd tot hoogleraar klassieke filologie aan de universiteit van Bazel. Antieke denkers hebben dan ook een grote invloed gehad op het denken van Nietzsche. Er is in de literatuur veel geschreven over de invloed van Heraclitus, Plato en de stoïcijnen op Nietzsche. Er is echter weinig geschreven over de invloed van de Griekse filosoof Epicurus (341-270 v.Chr.) en zijn Romeinse volgeling Lucretius (94-55 v.Chr.) op het denken van Nietzsche [2. Nietzsche lijkt het denken van Epicurus en de epicuristische interpreet Lucretius met elkaar te identificeren. In dit stuk wordt Lucretius dan ook niet zozeer als individuele denker behandelt, maar voornamelijk als interpreet van Epicurus.]. De invloed van Epicurus op het denken van Nietzsche wordt naar mijn opvatting onderschat. Nietzsche heeft vele aforismen over Epicurus geschreven en in een aforisme uit het werk Der Wanderer und sein Schatten (1880) noemt Nietzsche Epicurus zelfs een van de grootste mensen ooit (Nietzsche 2008a, 534; WS295). Dat zullen velen opvallend vinden; veel van Epicurus’ gedachten zouden we immers niet meteen met Nietzsche associëren. Zo hebben beide denkers een hele andere visie op het lijden. Toch is Nietzsche bijzonder positief over Epicurus. Nietzsche – ook wel de ‘filosoof met de hamer’ genoemd – staat erom bekend grote kritiek te hebben op vrijwel iedere denker en discipline. Er zijn slechts enkele figuren waar Nietzsche achting voor uit, waaronder Epicurus (Nietzsche 2008a, 415; VM408).

    Lees meer

  • The Metaphysics of Techno

    Imagine you are standing in a dark night club, surrounded by hundreds of people dancing ferociously to an amalgamation of synthesizers and drum machines beating together in rhythmic unity. The atmosphere is ecstatic and vibrant in the sort of way that makes you temporarily forget about your life outside the walls of the club. You are not just enjoying the music, you embody the music. You are here. You are entranced. You are alive.

    (meer…)

  • Editorial

    This edition is, I think, the most special edition I have worked on in my time as editor-in-chief, as it is both our annual theme edition as well as the issue that completes our 50th anniversary. On the 15th of September 2022, Splijtstof turned 50 years old. To celebrate this monumental achievement, the editorial team decided to focus on the theme of “metamorphosis”: has Splijtstof changed, or have we, in some ways, stayed – perhaps alarmingly – the same? Luckily for us, one of my predecessors, Bas Leijssenaar, wrote an excellent overview of Splijtstof’s history for our 40th anniversary.[1. Bas Leijssenaar, “Splijtstof sprak,” Splijtstof 40, no. 3 (2012): 53-67.] He traced many important events of the first 40 years of our existence, and I will partly rely on his insights. Almost everyone, not only Leijssenaar, emphasises Splijtstof’s activist aspirations:

    In the early years, Splijtstof functioned as a platform for students, teachers and staff members who did not hide their involvement in the content of the curriculum, the organisation of the study programme, the role of philosophy in society and social developments in general.[2. My translation. Leijssenaar, “Splijtstof sprak,” 55.]

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