CLIMATE. “The opportunity with the Stockholm + 50 conference is to get us back to focusing on fundamental global risks. At the same time as the ongoing war takes up a lot of attention”, writes Waldemar Ingdahl of the Global Challenges Foundation.

Sweden is hosting, together with Kenya, the UN’s climate conference Stockholm 50+. Fifty years after the UN’s first environmental and climate conference took place, the Stockholm Conference in 1972. It led to the “do no harm” principle, namely that states are obliged to prevent, reduce and control the risks of environmental damage to other states. It also led to the creation of the UN Environment Programme UNEP and the establishment of World Environment Day, held on 5 June each year.

 The ambition of Stockholm+50 is to draw attention to the 50th anniversary of the world’s first environment and climate conference and to make courageous science-based decisions to act against contemporary crises in climate and biodiversity, prosperity, and the economy.

 The intention is for multilateralism to be discussed as the basis for achieving current goals and future prosperity and well-being and to act as a springboard for reform work. Stockholm+50 is designed as a collaborative and multi-party meeting, open to various participants who are invited to share experiences and initiatives to protect the planet and contribute to sustainable and inclusive development.

 As Stockholm+50 is not part of the UN’s climate convention UNFCCC or the convention on biological diversity CBD, the meeting is outside the processes by which the world community makes decisions. Criticism has been leveled at the conference for not appearing to lead to a sharp resolution, which in turn would mean that the conference’s objectives are unclear. 

Climate change has been a hot topic and a political priority for a long time, and we are already doing much, at a significant cost. 

Greta Thunberg’s famous “blah, blah, blah” speech could perhaps be repeated this year. The situation looks depressingly familiar for an observer who participated during Stockholm + 50 this year and still has last year’s COP26 in fresh memory. Then as now, young environmental activists see the conference as a slow and insufficient way of dealing with acute problems.

 Much of the focus of the COP 26 conference ended on the global divide between north and south. The Western world’s efforts to deal with environmental degradation and overpopulation were opposed to the desire of developing countries for industrialization and prosperity. Knowledge of an ongoing environmental crisis is circulating globally, but it was perceived and handled differently by the conference’s different power blocs and countries.

Climate change has been a hot topic and a political priority for a long time, and we are already doing much, at a significant cost. 

However, the idea, expressed in Greta Thunberg’s “blah blah blah” speech, that we are not currently doing anything about the problems is unreasonable. It is difficult to think of any other issue where there is such a broad consensus despite a divided world, which includes all major political parties, trade unions, employers’ unions, the research community, and civil society. The consciousness about the issue is clearly present.

It is good to discuss and know where you are going, not least about climate change and biodiversity loss, whose conventions and meetings are so technical. They are closely related but have rarely been discussed. But it is important to see where the problems lie and how risks are affected. This is to prepare for future agreements and upcoming conferences.

There are now so many climate-related instruments that climate and development policy is often messy and inconsistent. The challenge is not to “do more”, but to sort out, rationalize, and streamline the policies to strive for environmental goals more rationally and cost-effectively. Where can the easiest efforts be made, not least in a world strained by war with nuclear threats, pandemics, and what seems to be a severe recession?

 To get a kind of overview and try to understand what needs to be done is global “tipping points”.

 A tipping point is a critical turning point, where a minor system disturbance initiates a self-reinforcing process that irrevocably drives the system further and further away from its initial state of equilibrium. Ecologists have long been aware of tipping points in local and regional ecosystems. Now they are used to explain and understand shifts in biophysical systems, while the concept was previously used in changes in markets or major crimes in societal patterns and norms.

 There are long-term costs of not making well-planned decisions and examining which reforms or new global institutions may be right. Therefore, a scientific understanding and dissemination of knowledge about global decision-making systems is good to discuss. Tipping points are also useful for understanding when the action really has an impact so that we do not stop too soon or stick to it even if its benefit is low.

The Stockholm + 50 conference opportunity is to get us back to focusing on fundamental global risks. This at the same time as the ongoing war takes up a lot of attention. Therefore, it is important to achieve peace on earth and peace with the earth.

The post New solutions for global risks? first appeared on Opulens.

FASHION. The nordic fashion that’s shown at Prince Eugene, Waldemarsudde, situated in Stockholm Royal Park, doesn’t have much resemblance to anything Nordic except for its name. 

What is Nordic anyways? After having been a rather homogeneous country, Sweden has become very cosmopolitan. This fashion exhibition mirrors this international development. Not only that, but the concept of fashion itself has developed from superficial utter garments to becoming more and more of a social manifestation. It’s asking questions about the relationship that we have between fashion, art, identity and sustainability. 

This exhibition, in the upstairs’ atelier at Waldemarsudde, points in that direction. Several designers are represented in this somewhat odd show that also encompasses films with catwalks and interviews. I will only concentrate on four main designers for the sake of this article. Hopefully, this little taste will make you curious to go and find out about all the others as well.

These young designers won a prize this year for their works: Elina Äärelä, Ines Kalliala, Idaliina Friman and Kristian David. They are exhibited on a podium in the large middle room. I was immediately intrigued by their unusual, quite extravagant and exciting designs.  

Elina Äärelä grew up with a Christian background very present, as her father was a pastor. Her design is centred around the Christian message, inspired by the Church’s liturgic clothes and Christly messages. Her collection is called Silent Voice and brings the thoughts to our inner voice, to a personal communication with God. However, she has transformed the formal religious uniforms into sporty versions of the former, with hoodies, sweatpants and gym shoes. By transforming the superficial into something spiritual, she’s not only modernising but also deepening our connection to fashion. 

Kristian David is Swedish with roots in Lebanon, Syria and Iraq. To Construct a Bridge is a fitting title for such a multicultural background. His hybrid collection shows this complexity. He’s using the Palestinian shawl, keffiyeh, the long caftan with over-emphasized shoulders to mark a power relation between men and women and between the East and the West. Via this hybrid collection, he provokes both worlds. 

Idaliina Friman uses her family’s past from Northern Finland to personalise her collection called Hetta. Unusual fabrics are used, such as pet bottles as padding for her almost out-of-space looking clothes. They cover the entire body and even most of the face. The design refers to the very harsh Finnish winters and gave me shivers just to look at the clothes!

Ines Kalliala’s collection is called Personal Uniform, and as the name refers to: it consists mostly of personified suits for women and men. She uses ready-mades and vintage materials. Her motto is: “to mend and repair my favourite clothes”. Sustainability is the red thread throughout her work. The fishing net used as a veil was certainly an unusual ingredient, I thought. 

None of the designers lacks imagination, that’s for sure. Even if the clothes aren’t easy to wear, they’re certainly fun to look at and pushes one’s fantasy to its limits. It’s refreshing to see fashion as a means for esthetic communication about how our lives are shaped by the social and cultural environments we’ve grown up in. 

Like any contemporary work of art, these designs make us reflect about our stereotypes and pre-conceived ideas. This trend seems to be here to stay. Sustainability, cultural variations, personal identities and new ways of re-using old materials and fabrics is the latest fashion, at least if we consider these young designers. 

This Nordic fashion might not be so rooted in Scandinavian traditions, but it’s undoubtedly stained by a new international trend, coupled with a sustainable vision for our future world. A world that is in dire need of repair, a return to nature and to God, as this exhibition has taught me. 

Future Nordic Fashion

Prins Eugene, Waldmarsudde, Stockholm.

April 24 – Octobre 3, 2021

The post Future Nordic Fashion first appeared on Opulens.

ART. This is a somewhat equivocal title for this spring’s exhibition of the painter Anders Zorn (1860 – 1920), showing at our National Museum in Stockholm. It’s true that he was well-known, but for some, he’s outdated. I tried to find out what such a traditional painter can offer a contemporary viewer.  

Stockholm National Museum has finally opened its doors after several months of lockdown. It wasn’t long ago that the museum closed its doors for five years of restoration. The reopening finally took place a couple of years ago, and then the museum had to close again due to the pandemic. The museum’s permanent collections are still closed, but the museum was allowed to open this exhibition under strict Corona-restrictions. 

I guess that the museum director hopes to draw many visitors to view one of Sweden’s most renowned artists. Will the public follow? Well, that remains to be seen. I was myself a bit reluctant to go and see yet another exhibition of this for a sure skilful artist but rather conservative in his way of painting.

The exhibition is huge and covers his long life exhaustively as an artist. He developed early on in his career exceptional techniques for his water-colours, oils, etchings and sculptures. Works are shown from the National museum’s own collections that I had seen before and some from the Zorn Museum in Dalecarlia. Interestingly enough, there are also paintings from private owners that have never been shown before. 

The scenery is not exceptional – rather conventional – and less interesting than the one at Petit Palais, in Paris a few years ago. However, the sober decoration at the National Museum enhances the artworks. 

The familiarity of his paintings permitted me to study his precise brush strokes; lighting inspired by Rembrandt; special body colourings and settings, as well as his exceptional rendering of water. Somebody asked me if it was photographs or paintings when I posted some exhibition pictures on the Internet. No wonder that he gained such an international renommé during his lifetime!  

The exhibition is in chronological order: starting with his watercolours. It wasn’t until 1987 that he began painting in oil as well. There are works from his many trips abroad: from Constantinople to Alhambra, St Ives, Paris, London and several portraits that he did during his no less than seven trips to the USA. 

However, it was Dalecarlia (Dalarna), his home turf, that was closest to his heart. Zorn’s paintings from everyday life there, having dressed up his muses in their traditional clothes, give us a glimpse of the lives they lived. It’s as much a delight for the eye as it gives us a very vivid historical insight into a way of living that has long passed. Hard labour, no running water, women and children washing in the lakes or basins, brewing beer or baking bread, as well as traditional dances and drunken men. I felt as if I was partaking in their daily lives. 

Stories are being told through his paintings, just as one would read in a good book. The entirety of his works makes the person behind it interesting, like a memoir in colour. The elegant portraits also tell us something about that time’s fashion, the fabrics used, the way of portraying oneself and viewing others, whether men or women.

Anders Zorn had an eye for details that indicates a man of great sensitivity. He must have been a romantic as well. His most favoured muse was his wife, Emma, that he painted in intimate and delicate scenes. They had no children, but his love for children can be sensed by his careful and tender depictions of them in several paintings – often together with their mother. The nudes are those of a sensual man’s. 

This traditional artist, who never bent for the tendencies of the moment, but continued throughout his life to paint in his own style, is still valid in our epoch. Zorn will never become boring or out-of-date, thanks to his exceptional skills and to his sensual and deep-looking eye for details. I came out of the exhibition elevated by the beauty that my eyes had been washed with during the two hours I spent with this world-renowned painter!

The post Zorn: a Swedish superstar first appeared on Opulens.

Winter Olympic games in a country with concentration camps? Are Swedish athletes expected to bobsled through a gulag?  Have their equipment carried, not by volunteers, but by forced labor with bruises on their backs? It should be completely out of the question. Sweden has no choice but to boycott the Winter Olympics in China next year. So why the silence?   

Fear is an important factor and a rational one considering how easily the Chinese regime resorts to blackmail and power politics. For each passing day, the Chinese ambassador in Sweden sounds less like a diplomat and more like Tony Soprano.

According to The Economist, around 85% of Swedes have a negative view of China, a statistic partly attributable to the ambassador’s undiplomatic behaviour. Any objection concerning Huawei, Gui Minhai, trade or Hong Kong, however minor and justified, is enough to awake his wrath and have open threats hurled against you. “Stop what you are doing or face the consequences”, he is fond of saying to Swedish journalists, businesses and the government itself.

It is a credible threat. Standing up to China is costly both in terms of commerce and security policy. On the other hand, a gulag is a gulag. This short article does not allow for a full list of torture methods to which the Uighurs are being subjected to. Among a total population of 12 million Uighurs, between one and two million people have been either brainwashed, physically abused, forcefully sterilized, raped or forced into labour. And that is not all. The whole Xinjiang province is an open-air prison where the distinction between free and unfree people is hard to make.

Even on the streets, people are being harassed, kept under surveillance and forced to spy on each other. Having a beard and taking a moment to pray can be interpreted as extremism. To receive a phone call from a Muslim majority country can be penalized, regardless of what the phone call is about. 

There is another creative evil which the Chinese regime is spreading into every household. Han Chinese (members of the majority ethnic group in China) are encouraged to move into Uighur homes, and the hosts are forced to share their beds and meals with the uninvited guests. Sometimes they stay for up to ten days, each month. This practice is called ”becoming kin”. One witness account tells us about a ten-year-old girl being paired up with a man twice her age. There they were, “the relative” and the child, sitting on a sofa in front of the mother who could do nothing but watch.

Children belonging to abducted parents are seen as a logistical problem because there are so many of them. They end up in different “educational facilities”, surrounded by high fences. Their teachers are instructed to distance children from parents, partly by prohibiting any use of the Uighur language in schools. The parents’ religion is also demonized. When pupils are asked if God exists and answer yes, they get beaten.

China’s extermination campaign aims to dilute and eliminate Uighurs’ Islamic faith, culture and language. It is an extreme example of what islamophobic assimilation policy can lead to. It is also a crime against humanity on a scale that is hard to find anywhere else in the world. A crime that the USA government has labelled as genocide, invoking satellite images, eyewitness testimonies and official documents which are in no need of hacking. Sometimes they are readily available to download from a Chinese municipality’s website.

Consumer and NGO campaigns against Western companies profiting on Uighur slave labour have recently been intensified. When H&M and other corporations voice concern about cotton harvested in Xinjiang, they are met with a fierce boycott organized by the Chinese government and nationalist Internet trolls.

The USA, EU and Canada have jointly imposed sanctions against Chinese individuals actively involved in the atrocities. More than ten Muslim-majority countries have withdrawn their official support for Xi Jinping’s treatment of Uighurs. Needless to say, these actions are far from sufficient.

Boycotting the Winter Olympic games is the least Sweden could do. This issue should not be conflated with the age-old debate about politics and sports. It should not be seen as a debate of any kind. Celebrating sports in China today is equal to dancing on someone’s grave. It simply cannot happen. So why not make Sweden’s boycott official – today?

The post No to Winter Olympics in China during an ongoing genocide! first appeared on Opulens.

Misschiefs, a feminist collective, highlights Swedish women, artists, and designers in a fun and interdisciplinary way. Unique in its form and layout. It’s opened to the public and free of charge in the centre of Stockholm.

In this former 500 square meter laundry factory, women have taken up space in different corners, creating their works during the pandemic. ”We all need each other, and this is a fabulous place for creativity, meeting and selling art” says Paola Bjäringe, who’s behind this unique project. It’s a true possibility for exchange and to show and sell now when most venues are closed.

Stockholm is one of the few capitals in the world that has kept private galleries and museums opened. Artists and cultural workers are suffering as most don’t have any cover-up or steady income. Women artists are hard hit as they usually carry the additional burden of keeping up with their family lives. 

Misschiefs is a feminist groundbreaking show of ten trailblazing Swedish contemporary artists, designers and guests. The punk nature of their work is a crossover between art, design and handicraft. These artists were chosen in order to boost the visibility of women, and part of the sales will go to an international foundation for women. All the objects exhibited have been created exclusively for Misschiefs.

You can walk home with a cool lamp, a fluorescent glass figure, a stool made from exclusive wood, an enormous painting of a pinkish woman, a handwoven carpet, a sofa, photography, the best looking ironing board I’ve ever seen, a yellow glass table, a sculpture, a broken mirror, a tapestry, a heavy and unique vase that no mischievous cat can ever spill over… Or you can just come and chat with some of the women working on their art and interact person to person.

”We started The Case for Her because we are MISSCHIEFS. We believe that women’s health is worth going all in for. We go first. We take risks. We speak the truth. We use everything we’ve got to make it count,” according to Cristina Ljungberg, who’s not afraid of provocation and stepping out of her comfort zone. 

Art shouldn’t be a luxury – culture is needed for us humans to thrive. This pandemic has at least taught us that! To live is to create, and to create is to live. Motherhood and maternity are creative but can take the form of art instead of a baby. Some of these women demand the right NOT to have children, others enhance their own mothers. Why a feminist show? What’s so different between a woman’s and a man’s creativity? Is there a difference these days when gender seems to become more and more diffuse? The only way to find out is to come and discover for yourself.     

This pop-up show is definitely worth checking out! It will lift your spirits, inspire you, and who knows, maybe you’ll come home with one of the works to decorate your home with? Punk is fun, I assure you!

The post Misschiefs Takeover first appeared on Opulens.

LITERATURE. A Swedish emigrant travels back to Sweden to work on a book and ends up writing another book – about pornography, poetry, foreignness and Lars Norén. Born in Lund, Sweden, Johannes Göransson now lives in South Bend, Indiana, where he teaches at the University of Notre Dame. He’s the author of seven books, including The Sugar Book and Transgressive Circulations: Essays on Translation, and the translator of many Swedish poets, including Aase Berg, Ann Jäderlund and Helena Boberg. POETRY AGAINST ALL is forthcoming this spring from Tarpaulin Sky Press.

from POETRY AGAINST ALL (a diary)

The photographs of Woodman and Bellmer both take place in the aftermath. In a private space, the photograph both registers the crime and somehow is the crime, the poison. It taints the space by turning it into Art, images, corpses. Art as murder mysteries that are never solved. The corpse makes the setting baroque. The atmosphere is always overwhelming.

What I love about murder mysteries are the crime scenes. All those disparate objects brought together in one scene is like a surrealist assemblage. They have a mysterious atmosphere, in which the killer lurks. To solve the crime means to create a narrative that makes sense of the assemblage, removes its mystery. The narrative clears the atmosphere, turns the killer into a person who can be prosecuted, establishes the guilt (in the interiority of the killer or in wider political conflict) through causality. I’m not interested in guilt. That’s about balancing the accounts. Balancing the account is the opposite of art. Art should be ravishing images.

Henning Mankell’s Wallander mysteries have the most evocative crime scenes: swans set on fire, a girl sets herself on fire in a rape field, a group of dead young people dressed in 17^th century garb. Wallander is capable of finding the killers because he loves opera. Because he’s an alcoholic, a diabetic, coming apart. His body is vulnerable to art and intoxication, it is breaking down.

Wallander’s father is similar to Wallander: he’s tainted by art. He’s an artist who keeps repeating the same painting – an idiot Warhol (or the idiot Warhol always liked to pretend he was) – as if he had no memory. By the end of the series the father is dead, the daughter has taken Wallander’s place as detective and Wallander has Alzheimer’s, the narrative disappearing again. The parasite of art has used up Wallander – the man and the series.

It’s like the protagonist in Stalker: art’s forbidden zone has turned his hair gray in patches and has contaminated his sperms, causing his only child to be born deformed but magical. The relationship between guide, detective and poet evokes for me someone who works with atmospheres and mysteries. It’s why the main character in The Sugar Book is all of these.

The atmosphere is the killer. That’s why the detective only catches glimpses of the killer at first. The killer is not yet a person. The detective has to use narrative make a whole person out of the glimpses, the atmosphere, so that he can turn art into a crime that can be tried in court.

Never balance the accounts.

The logic of The Sugar Book has to be contaminatory because the foreigner has no interiority and in the Los Angeles of The Sugar Book we are all foreigners. We go to the movies to find a home but it’s not there anymore. That’s what the movies tell us. They lie. It was never there. Solaris.

Foreigners make the best detectives, but they also make the best killers. They have no souls, portrayed as flat. This allows them to move in the volatility of atmosphere. This is also why the foreigner is kitsch. I take a selfie. Insects and electricity.

There is no cure for looking at images. At least that’s what they would have us believe. The degenerate porn addicts keep looking at pictures of naked bodies. An underworld of bodies and flowers: The poet must be a pornographer. No the poet must make pornography against porn.

In Distant Star by Roberto Bolano: The climax is when all the fascists go into the photography show and come out puking. But we don’t see the photographs. We just see the effect, the vomiting. The exhibit is like a black hole in the middle of the book: it both explains everything that happens and refused to actually show anything. Of course the photographer is a poet. The character is a poet-as-pornographer. But Bolano’s book – with its black room at the center of the book, a center that cannot be seen but whose effects is vomiting – is a work of parapornography: the pornography vomits itself.

The word “tusenskönor”: The correct translation is “daisies.” Daisies. Ann Jäderlund would never write a poem with “daisies” in it. Her poems are teeming with thousandbeauties.

The words “baroque” and “ruins,” which play such a central role to Friedlander’s notion of Nazi kitsch, are replayed in all the discussions in the US right now about “ruin porn.” Ravishing pictures of luxurious ruins: Is it the fact that the ruins are mostly formerly wealthy buildings that makes the ruin porn luxurious, or is it the ruination process, the debasing process that is the ultimate luxury?

These ruin-porn buildings always strike me as toxic spaces. The toxicity of art.

With a stunning frequency, ruin porn is condemned in xenophobic terms. The photographers are accused of being foreigners, or worse, foreign tourists. I’m reading a discussion right now, where one accused photographer points out that he’s actually from Detroit. A critic immediately replies: “No, if you were really from Detroit you wouldn’t aestheticize our economic collapse.”

Not only is it only foreigners who make “porn,” making porn seems to make you into a foreigner.

That time D. [an “experimental writer” from Bay Area] attacked me for turning her book into pornography by reading it retinally and failing to see it as a very ethical “critique” of pornography.

Later she forbade me from writing about her writing because I come from “some place different.” I’m not from the Bay Area. I’m from some place else. A foreigner, I made pornography out of even her moral critique. I ruined her sense of agency. I made kitsch out of her experimental art. As Haryette Mullen might have put it, I was an “unimagined reader.” I perverted her book. She had throw me out of her Republic (because I was not a member already). She wanted to denaturalize me.

Like when S. [critic and professor] said I was “tossing bombs” into US poetry. Being sensationalistic. Being a flat foreigner. Being violence.

Tarkovsky’s Stalker must be one of the origins of “ruin porn.” The images are so beautiful – so “ravishing” – they verge on kitsch. The snow falling indoors, the reliquary of discarded objects under water. The imagery is so gorgeous, iconophilic. I just want to look and look.

You can’t long for a place that still exists. The worst is to be in the place and yet to long for it. This paradox transforms me into a ghost. No, I was already a ghost. Since I was 13 years old I’ve been a ghost. And America has tried to exorcise me. But not as hard as I’ve tried. I’m trying right now. It’s finally working.

How strange it is to be home. Seeing this place where I grew up is oddly similar to the sensation of going to Korea. The feeling of returning home and the feeling of being some place utterly foreign, belonging and strangeness: How can these feelings be so similar? Something between joy and melancholia. A head-on crash with fantasies.

I want to take away all my ties to this place.

Went into town with Thomas and walked around. Had an ice cream and sat on the benches on Stortorget. Nothing has changed. It was sunny in that dusty way that smells of lilacs. To write The Sugar Book I have to become a tourist in my own home. I have to fake my own death. Disappear in order to live here again.

I have to make this book into a riddle.

I have to throw away the key.

In Paul Celan’s “Paris Memories,” the tourists can’t breathe until they die.

The Sacrifice, is a vacation movie, a tourist film. It could be read autobiographically. Tarkovsky is on vacation in Bergman’s Sweden, when the Soviet Union returns with nuclear attack – return of the repressed – to tear apart the fabric of his new life. Tarkovsky had of course abandoned his family in the Soviet Union in order to dedicate himself to his melancholic madness, his art. But Sweden is contaminated by his Russian nostalgia. It’s like his nostalgia brings about the end of the world.

The apartment I rent in Malmö has a beautiful terrace but it smells like sperm.

Everyone in Sweden is talking about Lars Norén’s diaries, the second installment of which were just published. Most reviewers are negative. In Aftonbladet, Göran Greider manages to accuse Norén of all my favorite charges: Norén is like a spectator in a “spectator democracy”; he’s like an Internet troll; if Norén was the head of a country, he’d be a merciless “despot,” annihilating cities at random; he’s like a mirror; he writes “a kind of pornography for the middle class”; he’s “like an animal waiting to be dissected”; and, of course, dead, a corpse. But on the other hands, Greider acknowledges: “when he doesn’t hate, his language is the most beautiful I know.” Somehow “the most beautiful” can so easily turn into dictatorships, bleeding corpses, animals. Kitsch and its deathy force is all over Greider’s thinking. He might as well have called Norén “debased Romanticism.”

Music about sharp objects. A cutter’s music: I’m imagining that I’m writing this in a hospital. I’m always picturing myself in hospitals when I write.

I got an email from Sara. She wanted me to meet the head of Teater Mutation. The three of us met on the square. Went to a bar. When I got back to the apartment I started to write my own captivity narrative, giving the main character a son he keeps in a separate room. I think about Herzog’s “Every Man for Himself and God Against All.” Wrote about a Kaspar Hauser situation. Everything that America touches turns into torture. I’m an American.  Later at night I met up with Sara again. Different bar. Talked until late. She lent me her copy of Norén’s diaries. A big black brick. Like a minimalist work of art and/or a gravemarker.

I think about Hawthorne’s brilliant murder story “Rappaccini’s Daughter”: Raised in the lethal garden, the daughter is exposed to so much poison that she becomes immune to the poison, but it also makes her poisonous. I think it’s an allegory about Art. I’m writing a poison book about America: Foxglove, hemlock, thousandbeauties.

The Rappaccini’s Daughter Complex: I write with poisons. I expose myself to their harm. It’s how I stay alive in here. It’s why I’ve returned to the garden.

Joyelle wrote. Majken is babbling compulsively. The compulsion must be the pleasure of language. Something akin to vandalism. Language scratched the public sphere. The origins of expression is obscenity. My daughter is obscene in her language. Children are obscene. Poetry is obscene. But there are those who want to maintain the illusion that it is good for us.

Reading Sara’s copy of Norén’s diary. I’m surprised to discover how much of it consists of shopping lists. Like a caricature of the bourgeoisie, he keeps buying fancy clothing, it seems so that he will be forced to remain incredibly productive, writing as many as three plays at the same time. It’s as if he’s using debt as a kind of currency, a kind of meaning, a reason to keep writing plays.

The sugar is leading to an all-out assault: “god against all.” The violence is like an atmospheric violence, a plague that strikes everyone: Bodies strewn everywhere.

“To cut forth the essential” (Sept 2000): From the beginning of Norén’s diary there’s an emphasis on “simplicity” and “cleanliness.” He’s constantly cleaning his apartment. And in his writing, he “skriver rent” [literally “writes clean”] his plays – as if revising was a matter of cleaning them up. It’s a rhetoric of abjection. While cleaning his apartment, he writes that he is “sorting” out the junk from the stuff he wants to save. If he’s “sorting out” his writing, what are the parts he wants to keep and what are the parts he want to get rid of? Or is the diary the ultimately “clean” text: I do this, I do that. The sentences are short, often he writes without any transitions. Diary as montage of curt sentences.  He wants to clean by writing, but writing produces art, ie filth.

The name Reagan marks my transition into adulthood. A counterfeiter determined my life. A cold war shaped my art. I write as if poetry was another name for Berlin.

Gertrude Stein supposedly said she went to France to be alone with the English language. I went back to Sweden to be contaminated by Swedish.

The post Poetry Against All (a diary) first appeared on Opulens.

POETRY. Ann Jäderlund first became famous in Sweden in the late 80s and early 90s with a pair of books that blended pastoral imagery with experimental cut-up techniques: Som en gång varit äng (Which once had been meadow) and Snart går jag i sommaren ut (Soon into the summer I walk out). The heated reception of these books placed her at the centre of the so-called “Ann Jäderlund debates,” a discussion about “incomprehensibility” in contemporary poetry. Members of the critical establishment criticized Jäderlund for being inaccessible, and as such symptomatic a new aesthetic that was gaining traction in Sweden.

Although the debate is now long over – and Jäderlund has gone on to win many awards while becoming inarguably one of the most influential poets in Sweden – the debate offers a way of thinking about Jäderlund’s latest book, Ensamtal.

Ensamtal, a writing-through of the correspondence between Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann, undoes the dominant model of communication that undergirded the original charges against her, her “inaccessibility.” Instead of offering “clear” or “accessible” poetry, or the common alternative, the embrace of “communication failure” (as in the early language poets), Jäderlund finds a beautiful, strange alternative approach. Taking a term from Ensamtal itself, I might call this approach “omklar” (around clear or about clear). These poems are indeed utterly “clear” – the language as “simple” as the poetry her original detractors advocated— but this simple language is made volatile by the small prefix “om”. Instead of imagining “clarity” as direct access, Jäderlund’s poetry creates a different model of communication, in a language of “about”-ness.

Jäderlund’s title signals the project of the book: We might read Ensamtal as the portmanteau for “ensam” (lone, lonely) and “tal” (speech); or it could be “en” (one, though to be grammatically correct, it should be “ett”) plus “samtal” (conversation). Either way, the title gives the sense of isolation, but this isolation is not so much a failure to reach a wider audience as space where language vibrates, where words are “about clear”:

If there is a theme or motif in the Bachman/Celan correspondence, it is the constant blockage of their relationship – their inability to communicate with each other or their physical inability to meet up and rekindle the original romance that sparked the correspondence. It is a book of miscommunication and communication failure. For example, this, in Wieland Hoban’s English translation, is how Bachmann wrote to Celan on December 23, 1958:

“Paul, I am thinking about your question, and this letter cannot write down everything I am thinking, only say something starting at the end. I do not think there is any answer, for you or from you, to this report; it belongs in the bin…”

Or this letter from Celan to Bachman from December 9, 1957:

“Ingeborg, my dear Ingeborg – I cast another look out the train, you had looked around too, but it was too far away. Then it came and choked me, so wildly…”

One letter has to do with the failure of “thinking” and “writ[ing] down everything,” the other about being unable to look at the other person and getting “choked” by this failure.

This “failure” is what John Durham Peters identifies as “communication failure,” the necessary result of the impossible ideal of communication as “direct contact between interiorities,” in his book Speaking into the Air. This communication ideal strangely both depends on and excludes language since we need the medium, but the moment we use the medium, we mediate the interiority that should be beyond mediation. Language both promises communication and ruins the perceived purity of our interiority. Peters suggests that this impossible ideal is a reaction to the onset of mass communication and new technologies of communication that allows us to speak or dialogue over thousands of miles in no time. He also notes that there are historical precedents for this paradigm – in, for example, St Augustine’s belief that the body pollutes the purity of the soul, or in Socrates’s anxiety about the written word.

In Ensamtal Jäderlund finds a way out of Peters’ paradox, looking to language not as direct, clear access, but as an “omklar” (about clear), poetic language, as she translates and transforms the letters between Celan and Bachman into a series of short, evocative lyrics. Rather than failures to communicate, Jäderlund finds in these correspondences a sparse, evocative and mysterious lyric that challenges the assumption of “communication” and “accessibility” by drawing its subtle energy from small twists and turns in the language.

Jäderlund’s title signals the project of the book: We might read Ensamtal as the portmanteau for “ensam” (lone, lonely) and “tal” (speech); or it could be “en” (one, though to be grammatically correct, it should be “ett”) plus “samtal” (conversation). Either way, the title gives the sense of isolation, but this isolation is not so much a failure to reach a wider audience as space where language vibrates, where words are “about clear”:

Häpnad

den är brusten

också där

rå och

omklar

omklar

den är brusten

Which I might translate as:

Amazement

it is burst

also there

raw and

about clear

about clear

it is burst

The language is simple, but its small twists and turns corrupt the idea of easy communication – it is “about clear.” It asks us to read the wrong meaning to words or to hear the echoes of some words leak into other words.

The Swedish language stutters falter, creates odd rhythms and puns. Many poems contain the word “brister” as a kind of model for how the words fail to comply with a simple semantic reading – “Lilla blomma/du brister” (“Little flower / you burst”) reads an entire poem. As if to stage this semantic non-compliance, many of the poems contain the word “ister” (lard, fat) instead:

Uppe på berget

finns träd och floder

och bakom berget

andra berg

vad floden vill

vet ingen

den rinner

och rinner

ister

[Up on the mountain

there are trees and rivers

and behind the mountain

other mountains

what the river wants

nobody knows

it runs

it runs

lards]

The breakages in language may seem like a lack, a failure – but it is exactly in those spaces that the language “lards” the poem, generating a beautiful excess in the minimalist structures.

Another poem reads:

Domna

ister

jag måste

ändra

mitt liv

[Go numb

lard

I have to

change

my life]

Here the rewriting of Rilke’s famous exhortation is re-valenced with the strangely active negativity of “go numb.” The “ister” here seems so out of place that it is almost like I want to say that the poem forces you to read it entirely as a failed “brister.” Nevertheless, the lard does bring something important to the poem – as it does every time it appears – an “about clear” quality that almost overwhelms the poem. In Jäderlund’s world, the things and stuff – the senses of the world – inevitably both trouble the idea of poetry as “communication” and creates a different kind of communication – refracted, intensive, weird.

Other times the “lard” moments almost ask the reader to misread the poems, generating poetry of the kind of lazy misreadings that often take place on line:

Ställ dig så att vinden

blåser på dig

från köket

köket är en kammare

som går på huvudet

I luften du är

gjord av luft

[Stand so that the wind

blows on you

from the kitchen

the kitchen is a chamber

that goes on the head

in the air you are

made of air]

As in other poems, there is so much movement in such few words, and the poem is vertigo-inducing. The kitchen may be “kammare” (chamber”) but it goes “on the head”, in my mind causes the “kammare” to carry an echo of “kam” – comb! Similarly, in the very airy final couplet – in the air are you are/made of air” the “gjord” (made) echoes “jord” – earth, soil. It is as if the pun pulls the body back down in the earth. The speaker keeps wanting to “fly” but the language is on the side of gravity, depression, and continually pulls them down.

Unexpectedly, to understand Ensamtal, with its translations, refractions and vibrations, it might be worth revisiting the notorious debates that surrounded her early work. In his notorious attack on Jäderlund from 1989, Tommy Olofsson wrote this curious piece of criticism:

”Dikterna betyder så litet som möjligt, bäddar tryggt in sig i sina egna motsägelser och släpper ifrån sig ett minimum av belöning åt den som vill löpa linan ut och är beredd att ta Ann Jäderlund på orden. De antyder mening, men stänger sedan om sig. De låter sig villigt möbleras med traditionella motiv och symboler, men sedan smäller de igen dörren. Genom nyckelhålet viskar poeten med flickaktig förtjusning.”[1]

“The poems mean as little as possible, bedded safely in their own contradictions and releasing a minimum of reward for the one who wants to read the whole thing and is ready to believe in Ann Jäderlund’s words. They suggest meaning but then close themselves in. They are willing to be decorated [as in furniture] with traditional motifs and symbols, but then they shut the door. Through the keyhole the poet whispers with girlish delight.”

As many critics, led by Åsa Beckman, pointed out, this conceit was misogynist: the poem that is not “accessible” is in a sense prudish; it seduces the man but closes the door on the man rather than giving him sex (her poem is a “tease”!). There are other sexist elements: Jäderlund’s poetry is “decorated” with symbols like the female domestic realms, rather than using these tropes for in-depth, profound communication.

However, is shutting the door on the critic that demands “accessibility” such a bad thing? Perhaps more importantly, why is the conceit of comparing her writing to moving furniture around such an insult? The furniture suggests the traditionally feminine domestic sphere, and the moving around of the furniture suggests a lack of meaning, a circularity; it seems to leave out the idea of interiority. Alternatively,: the interior is just a room, not a soul. So Jäderlund’s poems are the opposite of great (male) poetry of communicating interiority; they are moving stuff around.

However, if we discard these assumptions and read the quote against the grain, we might find that Olofsson very astutely identifies a poetry that problematizes the ideal of communication of interiority. Instead of the traditional idea of the poet as a great revealer of the soul, Jäderlund becomes a translator of language, a poet as “möblerare” of language. She moves the words around, and she alters them, she erases – she corrupts the great original.

Jäderlund’s poetry is mysterious. We can sense a narrative, a conflict. We may not know exactly who is doing what to whom, but the mysteriousness is what not only makes the poem interesting (even irresistible) and – indifference to what Charles Bernstein would argue around the same time in “The Artifice of Absorption” – absorbed in the way riddles are absorbing. We might say that the poems display an extreme case of what Daniel Tiffany has called “verbal obscurity”: “a resistance to understanding or communication inherent in language, a semantic condition allowing certain pragmatic effects of language to prevail in one’s experience of a text.” Furthermore, along with it, a “lyric obscurity” that is “an event, a speech act.” Nevertheless, this act is not only a negative, a failure to communicate; it contributes to the “charm of language.” I am charmed by Jäderlund. “Charm,” the Latin root of which is “carmen.” That is “song, verse, incantation.” Or, later in the middle ages, “a spell.”

[1] Originally in Svenska Dagbladet, but I found the quote on Rasmus Landström’s Blog: https://rasmuslandstrom.wordpress.com/2009/09/09/st-tommy-af-svenskan/

The post On translation and Ann Jäderlund’s latest book first appeared on Opulens.

POLITICS. They are explicitly anti-left but represent a more significant threat to freedom than the left. The right-wing collectivists obsession with nation, ethnicity and political affiliation is threatening our whole free and pluralistic society. 

This article was originally published in Swedish by Svenska Dagbladet daily paper

As a political force, the centre-right Alliance for Sweden was established around a unity of certain values: belief in the market economy and the rule of law, and a social view that the individual has rights towards the state and is responsible for one’s own life. However, such an agenda has never been a vote-winner, but in general, the common ground around the values of entrepreneurship, trade and low taxation has been the putty that united both liberals and conservatives.

For a long time, the Alliance was able to mobilise by being an alternative to socialism and social democracy. Nevertheless, since the appearance of the Sweden Democrats (nationalists) in politics and especially since the December agreement, which was disappointing for many, a new political competition has arisen. Such development has been noticed in the debate about ideas.

For the last few years, especially on the Internet, we have witnessed a rise in ideas that can almost be labelled as a collectivist right. This political tide has only gathered a few genuine and consistent representatives in the debate, but the tendencies are still evident – the insistence on duty, adaptation and serving the nation while protection of the individual, tolerance and the markets are completely ignored or rejected.

The economist Deirdre McCloskey has in three books during the 2000s (the latest one is Bourgeois Equality – How ideas, not capital or institutions, enriched the world) described the bourgeois value-shift which she claims gradually brought us into the modern world, starting in the 18^th century in the Netherlands and Great Britain, and gave us democracy, freedom and wealth.

The collectivist right-wingers have quickly positioned themselves to defend everything from comprehensive welfare to aid programmes as long as they can remain critical of immigration. Demands are also being made to revoke citizenships and impose extra-judicial border controls in order to prohibit individuals from asking for help. In the long term, such demands are eroding support for individual freedom and rights, judicial functions and the rule of law. Such ideological positions are often made by individuals who are explicitly anti-left but who in reality pose a more significant threat to the values and political programmes of the Alliance than the left itself.

The economist Deirdre McCloskey has in three books during the 2000s (the latest one is Bourgeois Equality – How ideas, not capital or institutions, enriched the world) described the bourgeois value-shift which she claims gradually brought us into the modern world, starting in the 18^th century in the Netherlands and Great Britain, and gave us democracy, freedom and wealth.

It was this freedom and respect for each other that enabled ‘ordinary people’ to innovate and conduct business. Before that, both the aristocracy and peasantry valued their existence outside work above the diligence, professionalism and education that came to be the focus with regards to personal and spiritual development. Instead of enrichment through conquest and pillaging, mutually enriching commodity exchange became the way forward.

The polarisation around identity that is dominating the public discourse today is generally seen as ultimately going against the value-shift that McCloskey describes. Ethnicity and nationality have been added to identities such as class and gender. Among the Left, but also on the Right, identity is collective, not individual. It is static, not dynamic. It is not tied to individual merits or achievements but to obedience, loyalty and a willingness to conform. Victory for the own group, rather than well-functioning institutions for co-existence in peace and freedom with others, is the goal of the collective.

The imagined world view within the collectivist right reminds us of what the American political scientist Berry R Weingast has described as the ‘violence trap’, a way of thinking from feudal times which is still widespread in developing societies. It means that different groups are creating violence capital in order to enrich themselves and protect themselves from conquest, blackmail and theft. The indications of a society where violence and violence capital have become an essential factor are not only found in the more extreme rhetoric about being subjected to invasion, war and treason that some are preoccupied with, but also found in discussions around the nation, ethnicity and political affiliation defining the individual.

In what kind of society is belonging more significant than achievement? The answer: a society where people are feeling threatened and scared. The mobilisation around identity is a warning that society has lost its fundamental safety. This is self-destructive and has to be rectified. Identity politics and its divisions are not only a danger to the bourgeois but to our whole dynamic, prosperous, pluralistic and free society.

The post The Left is not the biggest threat against bourgeois values first appeared on Opulens.

CLIMATE. According to a new UN-report, we are heading for an increase in the earth’s average temperature by 3.7 degrees. This is far from the targets set in the Paris Agreement: to keep the increase in global average temperature to well below 2 degrees Celsius and to pursue efforts to limit the increase to 1.5 degrees. According to the report, global emissions need to decline rapidly in the next decade to reach the targets.

To reach the 1.5-degree target emissions need to decrease by 7.6% annually. To reach the 2-degree target emissions need to decrease by 2.7% a year. To put these figures into perspective, global emissions have increased by an average of 1.5% per year over the past decade, according to the report. Since the beginning of the 1990s, when climate change first began to be discussed in the UN context, global emissions have increased by 70%. Given the severity of the climate crisis, now and in the future, those figures are truly terrifying.

The key takeaway from the report is that current policies are highly insufficient to reach the Paris Agreement and to halt global warming. The intended contributions by different countries towards the Paris Agreement are also insufficient. According to the report, the intended contributions need to be increased by 3 to 5 times. Countries large and small talk big about climate change but talk is cheap. Making an ambitious commitment and announcing it on the world stage is one thing, but living up to that commitment is a different thing altogether.

One example of this is Sweden. Sweden is regarded as an environmental pioneer and protecting the environment is very much in the self-image of Swedes. For some years now, there has been growing public awareness and mobilisation on climate change. The issue is visible almost everywhere in public life. Policy-wise, seven of the eight political parties in parliament support a broad framework on the long-term orientation of climate policy in Sweden.

The framework included a so-called ‘Climate Law’ and a long-term target that by the year 2045, Sweden is to become ‘net zero’ when it comes to emissions of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. In concrete terms, emissions from Sweden should be at least 85% lower in 2045 than in 1990. The Swedish government is positioning the country to become one of the world’s first fossil-free welfare societies.

Government representatives as well as representatives from other political parties, policy elites, companies and others ascribe to the notion that Sweden will be better off making a transition to a ‘net zero’ economy and that this is an opportunity for Sweden to increase its competitiveness on the world stage. This raised the question of how things are going. Is Sweden on track to reach its target of becoming ‘net zero’ by 2045?

The simple answer is: far from it. Emissions from Sweden are not decreasing at the necessary rate. Emissions appear to be increasing slightly. Nonetheless, reaching the 2045 target requires Sweden to decrease emissions by a rate of 5-8% a year and the policies to achieve that are absent, according to an independent analysis.

In Sweden, the Green Party is now part of a Social Democrat-led minority government for a second consecutive term. This term the government leans on active support from the Liberal Party and Center Party and passive support from the Left Party in order to pass its budget in parliament. In return for the active support from the Liberal Party and Center Party, the government is implementing a centre-right agenda.

When it comes to climate policy, the Greens argue that they have been an instrumental force in getting the slow-moving Social Democrats to adopt any climate policy. They also argue that they were the ones that introduced the climate issue to the other parties in parliament and that those parties have since adopted their own set of climate policies due to a gradual shift in public opinion and interest in the issue.

When the Greens presented the budget they had negotiated with the Social Democrats, Center Party and Liberal Party, they framed it as a historical moment, the largest environment and climate budget in Sweden’s history. However, the budget and the policy measures are far from sufficient to achieve the transition the Greens talk about. Of course, there is a limit to how much the Greens can be blamed for the Social Democrats and the other active support parties not living up their rhetoric on this issue, but criticism is legitimate for various reasons, not least Sweden’s posturing on climate internationally.

To mention a few deficiencies, the government is, on the one hand, preparing a tax on plastic bags but the other hand was turning a blind eye to a state authority providing insurance for export deals involving coal extraction worth 347 million SEK. Between 2014 and 2018, during the first term in government for the Greens, the same state authority provided insurance for projects linked to fossil fuels to a value of 5.8 billion SEK. Meanwhile, our state pension funds continue to invest billions in the world’s largest fossil fuel companies, despite new rules to end this practice.

Again Sweden’s green positioning does not hold up to scrutiny. To be completely clear, the political right in Sweden is no better, but the political left also has to step up its game and adopt a more coherent green agenda. Leaving Sweden aside, I find very little encouragement in the global community.

There is a tremendous amount of insight but policymakers, especially from key economies, are not motivated to make the changes necessary to address the issue substantively. There can be no other conclusion in my opinion, and social movements like the school strikers and Extinction Rebellion echo this fact. However, there is some encouragement to be found in the EU.

A week ago, partly as a signal to the current Climate Summit in Madrid, the European Parliament voted to declare a climate emergency. It remains to be seen if climate policies to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees will follow, but the newly appointed head of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen has, at least in rhetoric, put climate action at the top of her agenda. There are sceptics, but the jury is still out. Also, the long-term budget of the EU puts the Paris Agreement and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals in focus.

The commission has proposed a target of 25% of EU expenditure contributing to climate objectives. Nonetheless, what can be counted as ‘contributing to climate objectives’ is debatable. Still, there is a push from the EU for supporting emerging clean energy technologies, which is necessary. States and local governments in the US are defying the Trump administration and committing to ambitious climate targets. The state of California is fighting tooth and nail with the federal government to be able to set its own more ambitious vehicle emissions standards.

Hope can also be found in the Democratic Party presidential primaries. By now, it is essential for candidates wishing to take on Trump to have a comprehensive climate policy agenda. The Green New Deal, popularised by congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and later adopted by independent candidate Bernie Sanders, is now part of the everyday political conversation in the US.

Finally, we have the British Labour election manifesto, which is widely described as the most radical manifesto presented in a Western country in decades. The manifesto is filled with radical policy proposals to curb climate change and transform the British economy, a sort of British Green New Deal. We are at a point of no return. Due to the severity of the crisis, the days of caution are over. Radical policies are necessary. Let us move ahead. Labour can show the way.

The post The days of caution are over- the climate crisis requires radical policies first appeared on Opulens.

SATIRE. Peter Johansson, a controversial contemporary artist, together with Ewa Kumlin, the Swedish Institute’s director, presented this winter’s exhibition, called ‘National Therapy’, to an amazed French public.

The Swedish Institute (that was saved in extremis, a few years ago, from being closed down due to lack of funds) is situated in the hub of Paris’ art scene, in the Marais. It has become of the most frequented art arenas of this cultural capital. Parisians flock to the ancestral palace, with its exhibitions, café and lush garden.

The opening was held on a chilly November evening with the artist and the SI-director explaining his works in the institute’s garden. A tent had been put up serving beer and sausages. Furthermore, sausages are definitely a recurrent theme in Peter’s art, as is he himself, dressed or undressed (more often than not).

An enormous stuga (cottage on Swedish) painted in the typical red colour of most Swedish country-houses, rotated in mid-air above our heads. The sculpture, named ‘Family Therapy’, invites the audience to raise questions about what the family stands for in our contemporary world. Like the rest of Peter’s works which show no boundary when it comes to mocking and making fun of anything that has to do with nationalism, patriotism, traditions or conventional family life.

The institute’s ground floor was buzzing with fans blowing air on a sculpture with Swedish flags, next to a homemade canon piercing embroidered paintings of a house and Beatbox, a sound sculpture, shouting out the unofficial national hymn of the Swedish Nazi movement. Next to which was one of the artist’s several auto-portraits, depicting Hitler with bacon as hair and moustache.

An entire wall is dedicated to photographs of Peter naked; painted in the colours of the typical Dalacarian wooden horse; dressed up like the famous 19^th-century artist, Anders Zorn; or enveloped as a sausage. His imagination shows no limits in depicting and making fun of every typical Swedish stereotype.

On the upper floor, usually devoted to among others, Alexander Roslin, an ancient royal painter, the walls had been covered by wooden panels, pierced with holes for the audience to catch a glimpse of diverse more or less explicit and fun mockeries of the aristocracy of the time, but not without expressing some self-irony, as well as more or less explicit sexual connotations. I was wondering what he might have experienced in his life, to show such contempt for his own body and sexuality in general?

Sausages were sticking out in most of the works, making it, at least for me, impossible to go out and eat one afterwards in the kiosk that served them in the garden.  The entire exhibition might be analysed as a derision of the Swedish National Right party or SD (Sverigedemokraterna) that seems to be taking the country by storm, but equally as a surrealist sense of humour, making fun at anything conventional.

Peter’s humanity transpires by showing our vulnerability and shortcomings as mere humans thrown into the violence of the world.  He does not seem to take the discussion further, into a spiritual or godly possibility; there is no offer of redemption. That is maybe why the exhibition left me with a sense of unease and hopelessness.

Undoubtedly, the exposition will raise more questions than it will answer. The question is whether it will draw the French public to want to explore Sweden further or on the contrary, to get as far away from it as possible?

However, it is not the artist’s job to attract tourists but rather to raise uncomfortable questions. Moreover, in that respect, we must admit that Peter Johansson has succeeded over expectations!

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DEMOCRACY. During last year in Sweden, the 100th anniversary of the introduction of parliamentary democracy was publicly manifested. In principle, the introduction of democracy came to include all citizens, especially after the full voting rights were also given to women in 1921.

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At that time, it was primarily liberals and social democrats in Europe who advocated the introduction of equal democratic and proportional representation. Today, in the time of decentralisation trends as with blockchain, robotisation and virtual communities, more actors should be involved in democratising our world for a post-industrial future.

As humanity, we need to understand democracy not as representation per se but as a process of conversation that can lead to official or unofficial decisions and agreements. The strength of democracy is that human diversity regarding interests, values and opinions result in competition and conflicts which on the long-term also lead to solutions, compromises and mutual understanding. Democracy as conversation means that different ideas and proposals can be analysed and tested to be legitimised and accepted or to be disregarded and rejected.

Another strength of democracy is that democracy itself is in a constant change in pace with technological and social changes. During the latest years, there have been significant and noticeable changes in values and behaviours. In science terms such as ”post-material” and ”self-development” values are being used to describe such trends that, for example, are taking place in discussions about basic income, green taxation and humanitarian migration.

The current democratic representation, as in Europe and America, is still based on the roots of the industrial society. The late nineteenth and early twentieth century in Europe were periods of large scale changes and rapid transformation from an agricultural to an industrial society. Such development also culminated in new political conflicts and movements that came to be described as class struggle, mass movements and left vs right spectrum. Similarly, the transformation from industrial to post-industrial society also produced new political conflicts and movements.

In Sweden, this is partly reflected in the 2016 government study “Democracy inquiry” (Demokratiutredningen). The study shows that today fewer Swedes are active as members of political parties and that more voters are voting for different parties in different elections comparing to voting behaviours during 1980s and 1990s. One can also say that the time of “class voting” or “clan voting” is behind us – the time when more individuals were voting for part X because one identified with class X because of family history, social status or political ideals.

The case of Sweden is compelling since its democratic system used to be one of the world’s most one-dimensional by focusing on the left-right spectrum consisting of primarily economic discussions about labour market, welfare and taxation. The current situation is a much more multi-dimensional process where global and European dimensions of politics as well as non-economic topic as views on religion, refugees and identification are much more dominating the public discourse.

The solution for the future of democracy would be the transformation from focus on representative, or indirect democracy, to focus on liquid democracy.

There is also a general trend in Europe where fewer people are identifying themselves in primary or general terms, for example as liberals, socialists or conservatives. Instead, one can speak about the process of ”uberisation of politics” where more people are organising themselves based on topics and interests that matter to one regardless of ideology behind and without involvement in political parties.

It is also becoming more common that individuals are more liquid in their political identifications by supporting different parties and their proposals on various topics and spheres. Such development is also meaning new understandings and views, which is a minority and majority but also what does it mean to be an individual when it comes to affections, citizenship and participation.

The solution for the future of democracy would be the transformation from focus on representative, or indirect democracy, to focus on liquid democracy. As an idea, liquid democracy is based on being a mixture of direct and representative democracy.

Another vital aspect is vote delegation, meaning that an individual can delegate a vote to another individual or to an organisation that does not have to be a political party. By such methods, a 21-st century human should be able to vote every day, week or month on different topics, both locally and globally.

Last but not least, the concept of liquid democracy could mean a fairer system regarding the relations between individual freedom and mandates of public institutions. For example, through history, liberals have been sceptical that democracy will be used to reduce personal freedom by increasing the powers of public institutions. While on the other side, socialists have been suspicious that democratic constitutionalism would prevent implementation of higher taxation and redistribution. With liquid democracy, ideas as ”free citizenship” and ”non-aggression principle” could become more comfortable to implement, which means that individuals could find better compromises as in economic questions.

In combination with crowdfunding and cryptocurrency, it could become more comfortable for us to co-create and cooperate with different ideas and proposals. That would also mean that by co-creation we could privately fund those conventional institutions and programs we wish to implement after liquid democratic procedures and without using coercion against those who did not support a particular idea or proposal.

Future democracy will still demand constitutionalism based on human freedom, rights and security.  And the transformation from the current representative model to a liquid model offers new possibilities for more inclusive, co-creative and glocal democratic conversation and decision-making processes. Therefore, in pace with the current post-industrial and decentralising trends there is a necessity to renew democracy for the 2030s.

The post How can we democratise our world for a post-industrial future? first appeared on Opulens.

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PODD. Mia och Maria är tillbaka i den lilla podd-garderoben med ett nytt avsnitt, fullspäckat med både eld och glöd! Avsnitt 17 är ett riktigt reningsbad – en perfekt nystart för både ART MOSTERS-Podden och hela konströrelsen för svensk lowbrow och mörk konst. Dessutom får vi ta del av små ljudklipp som ger ART MONSTERS-Podden sin unika collage-stil.

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