from the el-blog:

this text is meant as an experiment in opening up a concept. we take a term with all its history, put it in the context of todays global society, find it’s ideological meaning and through that it’s limitations in comparison to freedom. 

a text about feeling comfortable in small circles, and what this means for todays status of the world…

some quotes:

it’s not only feeling comfortable, but feeling comfortable in conditions. in that sense it’s less than feeling comfortable as such, it’s having a concrete postive feeling of the surroundings, the feeling that the surroundings are, almost actively, comfortable towards one.

these conditions being “social comfort”:

the competition of isolated individuals means some feel free in their identity and others get lost in the process. to dissolve the identities into post-individual collectivity is not the only negation of these competitive processes. there also remains a space between, not collaborating and not competing, to denounce the idea of productivity and to claim an agile association with itself as the only aim. to have a collaborative existence not for having a profit, but for having existences and collaborations outside the idea of profit. also this image brings up the idea of deviance, to act outside the norm can claim comfort, even if the act itself seemed to aim at finding adventure. people who are bored seek entertainment, and will find lots of it without deviant behavior in mass culture. but people who feel uncomfortable with this mass culture will find their comfort in deviant communities, something that seems adventurous. so the initial decision was not so much to seek adventure, but more one of seeking social comfort.

it’s a trap:

a politics which defends something just because it feels good is itself guilty of not speaking of the surroundings of the comfortable community. the process that was mentioned before, that individuals succeed in competition and liberate themselves on the costs of others, can be transported also to the actions of collectives. the degree of them feeling good marks in the same time how much they won in the competition. it’s a luxury to feel good in a competitive society, and it feels even better in companionship. and since it is not possible under present social conditions to feel good with the global human society, we found a limit of the concept.
while one part of humanity gets presented with a competitive concept of individuality and cooperation, the others are denied even these (e.g. workers still under slave-like conditions without workers rights). this injustice of course has to be dissolved in one direction: claim the luxury of comfortable togetherness for all. this legitimates working with these concepts, it makes the most sense to talk about freedom when it is denied.

while there are positive connotations:

sharing a space and feeling a status between alone and together, to help each other without aiming at reward or even any action in trade, to feel close without having the feeling to loose oneself (in the sense of opening up completely) or without asking for others to open up completely (which is in any ways a strange and illusionist idea), to deny the idea of absolute understanding, and to reclaim the idea of communication from those that think that free communication is possible under the doctrine of market competition.

don’t get fooled into idealization:

the feeling is linked to the presence of one, two or more others, but not to an immediacy with each other human, with whole humanity. this limitation can be transformed into an ambivalence: feeling together, but not unified. to feel the concrete connection with the abstraction as something comfortable is what shall be grasped with this text. these precarious moments of feeling alone in presence, or connected in moving ambivalence, free association instead of collectivizing unification. [...] presence of something diffuse, that becomes concrete in the liberation of identity. not to see oneself as strictly bordered from others anymore, but also not loosing oneself into the abstraction. it’s not yet the conciliation of these two poles, but a metaphor for it. in finding a poetic metaphor, we also accredit the limitations of this mode of freedom. and through that we make the deficit of any positive reference to the idea of freedom tangible. [...] in doing this we also get to grasp the hope for other conditions, that would allow other more far-reaching conciliations of the whole and the particular. what we found now is not a norm to judge the quality of social events, but to find the limits of one image of sociality. what constitutes these limits?

because of the critique of ideology:

the ratio of social experiences is marked by the rationality by which the members of society cooperate and cultivate, how they communicate its culture. which means under present conditions of the primacy of profit that society organizes itself in markets. other doctrines were mentioned in this text before (like the one of reproduction, sexuality), we want to sum them up as ideologies and identities all leading astray of the primacy of humanity. ideologies like productivity or industrial progress, or more specific ideas like the invisible hand of the market. they replace and overlay the primacy of the well-being of all humans, the test which all these ideologies and identities have to pass. [...] this is presented to give momentum to this way of thinking, and not to present a normative description of potential retreats of freedom.

the way this is done in the text is by reflecting on one specific word and some images:

the conditions of the whole don‘t disappear when focusing on a partiality. this also means that we cannot envision a concept of freedom that is not touched by the totality of society and its rationalities. by focusing a word that is an image, a concept, we do so to show what the limitations of that concept are. when we search for the limitations of a concept, we recall the history of the concept and find the boundary of history itself, which means finding history. or in other words: when we find the limitation of freedom, we find the historical development of freedom.

now go and read it: Gemütlichkeit – el.blogsport.de (an english text about a german word)