Dilema veche 264, 6 March

Andrei Plesu
The meaning of life, preparing a shortlist
Andrei Plesu offers a 7-point shortlist that defines the contours of a life preoccupied with its own meaning. The first step to a meaningful life is to pose the very question about it having a meaning. Posing this question, however, should not suspend life itself but become its positive shadow. If somebody else (be it an angel, a master or a simple fellow) offers the answer to, then searching for a meaning will become a recipe, not an existential endeavor. There is no collective meaning to life, thus each and everyone has to follow their own path in finding it. Furthermore, Plesu argues, we should not overlap and confuse the social expectations with fulfilling our quest: doing one's duty is far from finding a meaning. Finally, prolonging the search for an answer to this question is in itself part of the answer.

Mircea Vasilescu
The old iron curtain
Mircea Vasilescu observes that the current financial crisis made apparent that the old Cold War European divides are still looming large in the background. While Europe was prosperous, the old gaps were easier to handle. But the current crisis has led to new divides: the western, more prosperous countries of the union seek to fence off the effects of the crisis. Meanwhile, the eastern countries call for shared shouldering of the burden. Now, whether good or bad times, the East Europeans feel that they remain second-class citizens of Europe.

Stela Giurgeanu
Books, a piece of home – on the Jerusalem International Book Fair
Amid security fears, Jerusalem International Book Fair proceeded with its twenty fourth event. Stela Giurgeanu chronicles the Romanian stand and the book launchings of the fare. The variety of authors, mixing well-known ones with those from the younger generation, attracted a vibrant public whose aim was to recover a piece of their old home – Romania.

Adina Popescu
The readers are both 1 and 0 – interview with Manuela Preoteasa
Manuela Preoteasa has had a long career in journalism. She started at Radio Romania and continued reporting for television and writing about economic issues. She was one of the founders of an exclusively on-line news portal during a time when access to the Internet was a privilege. Recently, she co-founded Euractiv, a news portal covering European information. In the interview, she decries the lack of serious coverage by mainstream media of really ticklish issues. The current financial crisis provides the best example: while everybody is scared, few details and analyses can be found in newspapers or on TV. One of the more general reasons for this current state of affairs is the on-going tabloid media culture that prioritizes easy-going topics. Thus, the quality of people's response cannot be significantly different. But it's not all bad news. Her experience as a professor of journalism gives cause for hope. Students seem to approach journalism in a more pragmatic manner and with a view to tackle serious issues such as the economy. Some of them also seek to incorporate the communication possibilities enabled by the Internet to by-pass the monopoly of mainstream media.

Alex Leo Serban
Another letter from abroad – on the Clermont-Ferrand Film Festival
Attending the Festival for the twelfth time, Alex Leo Serban notes, in a letter to a friend, the similarities of the place with Brasov, a Romanian city. This year's edition seems to have been marked by an array of good movies. From social issues to necrophilia and paedophilia, from the Israeli-Arab conflict to a horror view of the pension system, a variety of worlds, actors and perspectives offered the contours of this year's festival.

Weekly dossier: TV guide for smart people

Iulian Comanescu
Minimax, the tycoons' terror
The author documents an interesting trend. More and more TV viewers seem to prefer niche channels (like Discovery and Minimax) and shows over local productions. The explanation is two-fold. Firstly, the financial crisis diminished the local advertising funds. These funds feed most of the local TV productions. The problem with the local productions (such as talk-shows and soap-operas) is that they are expensive and can only be broadcast... locally. Thus, their turnover has to be covered by the local advertising industry. While a Discovery documentary costs a lot, it can easily be sold on many markets around Europe. The profit is cashed in more rapidly with a higher turnover. Basically, in terms production costs, a local show stands no chance when faced with international competition. With the disappearance of advertising funds it is expected that the gap between the two will grow, which will further diminish the number of viewers of local productions.

Ana-Maria Caia
Surprise, surprise! The audience is not what it seems to be
Based on recent rating and audience statistics, Ana-Maria Caia recommends caution in determining the socio-demographic structure of TV viewers. Surprises do occur. For example, close to 40 per cent of the viewers of a sports channel are women. Reversely, almost 40 per cent of the audience of a women's show are men. Furthermore, TV shows that seem specifically targeted to lower classes are viewed by surprisingly high numbers of intellectuals. Thus, the audience is far from what meets the eye.

Dilema veche 265, 12 March

Andrei Plesu
Politics and puberty
Plesu, after reading an encomiastic article for Obama published by Jean Daniel in the Nouvel Observateur, concludes that even the most talented and experienced journalists might, at times, fall into juvenile love. Just like any juvenile love, the political passion for certain leaders (and complete dislike for others) manages to blur reality. Total political enthusiasm, especially in the East, brings back fatal memories, the author concludes.

Mircea Vasilescu
The deliverers of high education
Mircea Vasilescu ponders the effects of the Bologna process on the Romanian academic system. While Vasilescu acknowledges that the EU education system is still highly competitive, it also comes at the high price of a huge academic bureaucracy. In the case of Romania, this is even worse since the European bureaucracy meets an already established, vast and ossified counterpart. The effects are, like most other things, comical. Apart from the inadequacy of a forester professor evaluating an MA programme in art history, the rules and number of papers a university has to submit for accreditation makes the situation untenable. The most descriptive example comes from the faculties of the University of Bucharest. Every time they put together a file for accreditation, they have to include the copy of the founding act of the University, the second oldest in the country.

Cristian Ghinea
The bridge of 1200 doers – interview with Roxana Florescu
Roxana Florescu is leading PACT, an NGO aiming to foster community action in rural regions and to empower and encourage people to get involved voluntarily in solving their communities' problems. However, a few weeks ago they faced an unprecedented and uncanny situation. A group of peasants from a village affected by last year's flooding decided to take matters into their own hands and rebuild a bridge that was destroyed during the floods. Their action, pursued entirely with voluntary means, followed after months of petitions to and empty promises from the state. Paradoxically, the peasants now face prosecution for building without the state's authorization. To add insult to injury, reporters discovered that these villagers are not the first to come under legal scrutiny for doing what the state was supposed to do. PACT faces the uneasy situation of continuing to encourage people to develop their communities, even though at times this may mean breaking the law. A catch-22 situation if there ever was one.

Weekly dossier: Dinner with Darwin

Mihail Neamtu
Progress and evolution: to what?
Without denying the complexities of Darwin's theory, Mihail Neamtu argues that it cannot account for evolution in moral and socio-historical terms. The tragic experiences of the twentieth century have left to be optimistic about. Neamtu concludes that we need different criteria than Darwinist evolutionary theories in order to account for these spiritual flaws.

Alexandru Al. Ecovoiu
Neodarwinism – the paradigm of modern biology
Biology, together with informatics and astro-physics, represents today's hopes for the scientific transformation of society. But biology, without its Darwinian legacy, would be an empty and incoherent undertaking. His theory of evolution based on the individual's adaptation to environment via their biological characteristics (the phenotypes) paved the way for further crucial discoveries like the genes and the chromosomes, which offer, beyond any doubt, the outline of the evolution of life and biological transmission within and across the species. Thus, recent discoveries in molecular biology, far from invalidating Darwin's theory, prove that his discoveries remain the cornerstone for biological science.

Mircea Cartarescu
Diary with Darwin
The much-acclaimed Romanian writer imagines three personal diary entries following a press conference organized by Darwin in a contemporary Romanian coffee house. The absurdity and humour of Darwin, depicted as a pop-star academic, talking in public and flirting with the journalists, is only rivalled by the moment we realize that the world itself is reversed: saints killed for their religious beliefs, in a totally dominant rational paradigm. A marvellous piece, with Darwin alive and kicking.

Dilema veche 266, 19 March

Madalina Schiopu
Reading online and on paper – interview with Calin Fusu
Calin Fusu is a successful manager of an online business dealing with social networks and job portals. His courage in investing in Internet potential when only a few had Internet access hasa been rewarded by a high profit enabling further expansion into the neighbouring Balkan countries. From this position, his analysis of the two media – paper and electronic – in light of the contemporary financial crisis speaks volumes. As a constant and enthusiastic reader of Dilema veche, Fusu remains highly optimistic regarding the future for both types of publications. The current conditions and financial strains will inevitably push quotidian newspapers more towards online versions, while papers dealing with analysis and opinions will maintain a stronghold in printed format. If raw information is now easily available on internet, people will still prefer printed materials for longer, in-depth approaches.

Ionut Iamandi
We like the crisis
The author notes a paradox surrounding the current financial crisis: it determines a sort of fascination for the disaster. The media uses it as a news enhancer, politicians refer to it in search for justifications, and business people set up a new department to deal with it. Moreover, popular perceptions are reshaped under its spell. China, up until recently blamed for its poor human rights' record, is now seen as the miraculous saviour of the financial system. In Europe, the Eastern countries seek each other out in solidarity and dissociate themselves from Western European policies – something bordering on the absurd a few years ago. To top it all, the two famous auction houses, Christie's and Sotheby's, reported record profits following recent auctions. The crisis, the author concludes, seems to produce two kinds of surplus: a surplus of job seekers and a demand for expensive art.

Daria Ghiu
The artist is a dizzident researcher – interview with Lia Perjovschi
The opening of the first private gallery in Bucharest – Pavilion Unicredit – offered the space for a retrospective of Lia Perjovschi's entire work, suggestively entitled "Statement". Perjovschi, one of the most creative and renown contemporary Romanian artists who is also the researcher-curator for the Pavilion, imagined her "Statement" at the intersection of her formative and creative routes. The archive, as an overarching investigative theme, is rendered artistic by its possibilities of creatively engaging and producing history. The researcher-artist is a dizzy inventor, but this does not preclude her capacities to critically question reality and offer solutions.

Weekly dossier: Having fun during communism

Mircea Kivu
Mating rituals
The article recollects a widely popular fun activity during socialism, the so-called "tea parties". The name bears little, if any, similarity to the British habit, mainly because strong alcohol was the inevitable choice of beverage. Under this banner, youths from Socialist Romania occasionally met to dance and listen to music in one of their friends' houses, while their parents were away. These occasions enabled creative flirting and mating rituals which shaped bonds that lasted for years. While Kivu refrains from labelling them as anti-totalitarian pockets of fun, these tea parties nonetheless made life bearable and articulated a youth culture similar to the car and cinema culture of the 1960s in the West.

Bogdan Iancu
Improvisations
The author, an anthropologist studying popular memory of socialism, acknowledges that literature on socialism has been dominated by powerful anti-totalitarian stances. Everyday life of is subsumed into this framework by an overemphasis on the hardships faced back then. However, following fieldwork in a formerly industrial town, the author notes that apart from the predictable state-organized leisure time activities, a vast array of fun practices came out of people's creativity. Various resources were employed in order to improvise fun activities and find places where people could enjoy themselves: football and volley pitches, chess tables and cradles being just the most common sites of entertainment.

Marius Chivu
I dubbed thousands of movies – interview with Irina Margareta Nistor
Irina Margareta Nistor is best known for her voice. During socialism, she dubbed the vast majority of foreign movies that circulated clandestinely on video-cassettes. In the interview she points out that the entire industry of smuggling, dubbing and distributing foreign movies was tolerated by the authorities who had their share in this. This practice was widespread in the entire socialist bloc, a vast array of trans-national networks traversing the space. Nistor confesses that making the life of Romanians bearable during the grim times of socialism remains, for now, her greatest achievement.

Florin Dumitrescu
The guilty innocents
Florin Dumitrescu recollects his time as a rock aficionado on behalf of the security forces during socialism. Popular depictions portray the "moles" as bleak epitomes of the repressive regime. However, in this case, we learn about the security agents infiltrated among rock bands and networks. The hippie look, the devotion to western music and overt western sympathies prove to be mere provocations and cover-ups aimed at generating information for the security forces. However, the author notes, these people, by providing and fostering free access to western rock music, also enlarged the circle of rock fans in socialist Romania.

Dilema veche 267, 1 April

Mircea Vasilescu
Discursive ballet around the crisis
The recent governmental decision to apply for an IMF loan has resuscitated a particular kind of political discourse present in Romania during the early 1990s. At the time, the draconic economical reforms imposed by the IMF as a guarantee for such loans, generated discontent in the political sphere. The discussions and consultations with regards to IMF had been monopolized by nationalists and nostalgic communists who debated the issue along an imagined divisionary line between "us" and "them". At the beginning of the 1990s, Romania was not only far from being an EU or NATO member state, but more importantly, its economy was dramatically suffering from a rapid process of deindustrialization. The anxieties associated with such profound social transformations were discursively built around an "us" – victim of a socialist regime yet proud of its industrial legacy – and a "them" – the rich West which stubbornly would not invest its money here. Ten years later, Romania has reached its goals: it is a full EU member and a strategic site for foreign investments. Yet the prevailing logic is still unchanged, with recent political debates framed around the same "us"/"them" line. The politicians' strategy of response to the world economic crisis is to keep "us" – the ordinary citizen – in the dark through false promises and unrealistic approaches, while looking at the EU as a foreign organization, one of "theirs" from which "we" expect only support and benefits.

Alice Georgescu
A parable
Alice Georgescu reports on the last of the International Deszka theatre festivals. Held in Debrecen and organized by the Csokonai theatre, the Deszeka festival focuses on contemporary Hungarian drama. The selection of this year's performances included theatre groups from Romania, Serbia and Hungary with shows in all three languages. Georgescu considers that the most outstanding performance of the entire programme was East Station performed by the New Theatre from Budapest.

Vintila Mihailescu
A lesson on globalization at the Peasant Fair
Peasants selling home made produce are confronted with the distrust of urban buyers. The cure is cheap and effective – photos of the actual manufacturing of diverse foodstuffs convince reluctant buyers. This is the starting point for Mihailescu's explorations over the reasons for the exponential increase in the demand for locally/home-made "traditional" products. Yet traditions are never messages from the past but speak of present day queries. Mihailescu explores the roots of post-modern angst which manifests itself though the search for traditional and local goods. He suggests that the fluidity of space/time dimension of post-industrial society suppresses any possibility for sedentary life and rooting. In the given context, it is highly plausible that consumption of "traditional" products as a compensatory strategy will re-anchor the modern subject into a stable time/space frame. The patrimony of "tradition" gets its attraction from the fact that it fuels all our nostalgias for a world slowly disappearing. The market of local/traditional products is an alternative market. It responds to present day awareness of ecological risks and local and community development, yet it is also a market that responds to certain needs of the subject to re-establish itself in clear time/space dimensions which the market itself undermined.

Stela Giurgeanu
Odd how books circulate – interview with Dan Lungu
The novelist and sociologist Dan Lungu has written a new novel titled How to Forget a Woman. Leaving his usual themes behind – communism, identity and memory, this new book focuses on love and forgetting. Like a Moebius strip, throughout the book, the characters unveil their interior landscapes while new situations continually restructure their everyday personae. Dan Lungu suggests that his new novel is not solely about a woman who leaves a man, but a story about the unpredictable, about chance and irrationality. Lungu considers that his experience as a sociologist plays out wonderfully part of his personality in the creative writer. Discussing the role of the audience, of the direct contact between the writer and his public, Lungu appreciates the experience of public readings. He considers such events as democratic practices where the cultural producer and his potential consumers have a chance to meet on equal terms.

Ciprian Valcan and Alin Tat
Christianity is not a religion cut out for modernity – interview with Jean-Yves Lacoste
Lacoste considers post-modernity a mere rush escape from real problems articulated by modernity. In relation to religion, belief and theology, Jean Yves Lacoste contends that Christianity was not initially a religion palatable to modernity, but which nonetheless underwent processes of adaptation and attempts of rationalization. Christianity's greatest tragedy in modern times has been the split between spirituality and theology. As for the relationship between philosophy and theology, Lacoste contends that the best way to conjoin them is to understand that the common denominator of both paradigms consists of a sustained effort to think of our surrounding world. The phenomenological tradition, argues Lacoste, is very present in cotemporary philosophy and French has had a special role in this endeavour. It has been remarked that French philosophers have functioned as symbolic (and real) translators of German philosophy towards the Anglo-American cultural space. Moreover, Lacoste recognizes that sometimes phenomenology attracts and fascinates theologists while contemporary philosophers interested in Heidegger can not escape theology in analyzing the relationship between Heidegger's concept of "unveiling" and the Christian concept of revelation. In his own philosophy, Lacoste talks about the liturgical dimension of human existence rather than the more unrefined concept of religious experience which does not capture the originality of the human encounter with God.

Weekly dossier: Do you still read? It's a crisis!

Simona Sora
Books on the table – interview with Mihai Penescu, President of the Romanian Editor's Union Mihai Penescu discusses the latest statistics on book sales through the perspective of the
world financial crisis. He contends that in Romania the book market is so fragile and volatile because of the small number of readers. On average, the statistics show, a Romanian buys one book per year, while for example in the Netherlands, the number is eight books. Moreover, out of potentially twenty two million readers, seventy per cent do not read, not even one book per year. Penescu believes that the recent economic recession is only partially affecting the book market. He argues that buying books does not destabilize family incomes inasmuch as the book consumption per family is small or insignificant. However, as a side-effect of the crisis, potential readers stop buying books because of their reticent attitude towards spending cash. Penescu identifies as an anti-crisis strategy the recent policy of the printed press to offer translations of classical books along with their editions (instead of CDs or DVD or other prizes). With regards to a national campaign promoting reading, he believes that one of the biggest difficulties is to coordinate efforts between different stakeholders (school and Ministry of Education with editors, librarians or Writer's Union). An efficient campaign for the promotion of reading has to prove the usefulness of the act of reading while at the same time build necessary networks to access books.

Published 2009-05-01

Original in Romanian
Contributed by Dilema veche
© Dilema veche
© Eurozine