The main task that challenged Sedlmayr and Pächt in the late 1920s to early 1930s was acknowledging the integrity of the work of art. From Gestalt theory they inherited the concern that one must first understand the basic structure and nature of a work of art before attempting to understand its history. They saw many of their contemporaries as failing in this task and therefore incapable of making meaningful progress in art history. The discipline was full of tacit assumptions about the work of art, the nature of representation and symbolisation, and historical influence that needed to be made explicit and openly theorised. The place to begin was with the single work itself.

In his 1930 book on Borromini, Sedlmayr argued that one would have to have an understanding of the basic structural principles constituting the architect’s style before understanding the Baroque. It was literally impossible, in Sedlmayr’s view, for one to understand the genealogy of Baroque architecture without first having an explicit account of Borromini. Similarly, when Pächt addressed the problem of regional styles in Netherlandish painting in his 1933 study of ‘Design Principles’, he argued that it is hopeless to argue which artists were influenced by which traditions without articulating accounts of just what those regional styles entailed, their inner form or Gestalungsprinzip.

Sedlmayr and Pächt felt that the tools to move beyond an informal formalism could be found in Gestalt psychology, which offered the means to characterise the structure of visual perception that could be applied to individual works of art and architecture. Gestalt psychology had even broached the problem of development and identity of structure in time. The theory developed by the early Sedlmayr and mature Pächt presents a compact set of commitments, stressing spatial complexes in relation to viewers, the causes of which are contiguous, immediately antecedent events. With the view that the New Vienna School is devoted to a kind of ‘structural evolutionism’, I will devote this chapter to structure and the next to evolution.

Introduction

The death of Turgut Özal brought a colourful period in Turkish political history to its end. Yet, this did not signify a change; rather, politics continued its usual pattern despite a changing landscape marked by the arrival of emerging new leaders on the political scene. The 1990s were marred by major political upheavals, economic instability, a violent conflict raging in the southeast of the country and governments collapsing as quickly as they had been established. Mirroring past behaviour patterns, political leaders were responsible for the economic, political and democratic crises that marked this decade. In the midst of these crises, the military intervened once again on 28 February 1997 to decide the fate of the sitting government.

This chapter's opening discussion focuses on the prominent politician Erdal İnönü, an anomaly within the leadership culture at this juncture. Juxtaposing experiences under İnönü exposes the level of authoritarianism of Turkish leaders and its negative impact on political outcomes. The chapter then shifts its focus to Tansu Çiller, as a central political actor throughout this era. Although Çiller symbolised a generational shift in leadership, her conduct in power resembled that of the traditional political culture and shaped antidemocratic political developments of the period. The analysis then extends its focus to the fractious coalition governments between Çiller and Mesut Yılmaz: an unstable period fuelled by the two leaders’ clamour for power, at a cost to the country's stability. Next, this chapter will survey Necmettin Erbakan's political leadership style to illustrate how his regular demonstration of Islamist values were a causal factor for the 1997 intervention. Furthermore, it will explore how Süleyman Demirel, as the President, played a critical role behind the scenes in accommodating the military intervention and subsequent breakdown of the government. The chapter ends with Bülent Ecevit, who, despite his political experience, showed that his leadership style was starkly reminiscent of the CHP in the 1970s, as manifested in similarly grave consequences for his government.

Introduction

Democracy not only promises egalitarian self-government, but also collective decisions that we are less likely to regret than those taken by non-democratic regimes. The two promises associated with the idea of democracy are intricately linked, but the means to fulfil them can be at odds. For example, political equality and self-government seem to require majoritarian procedures (Dahl 1989), while expert decision-making and technocratic forms of government seem to promise more rational decisions. In any case, however, fulfilling the egalitarian and epistemic promises of democracy requires that the interests of all affected groups are adequately considered in the decision-making-process and brought to bear on decisions (e.g., Warren, Chapter 1, this volume). The fact that some groups are notoriously easier to organise and have better access to negotiations and decision-making processes than others therefore constitutes a serious challenge to democracy's promises. In most societies, groups that lack financial resources, are internally heterogeneous and have diffuse rather than concentrated interests, are under-organised and typically under-represented in politics (Olson 1965, 1982). In addition, democratic theory and practice are confronted with intricate boundary problems: it is difficult to give everyone affected by political decisions, in particular future generations, citizen status, and it remains impossible to define the boundaries of the demos democratically (Arrhenius 2005).

This chapter discusses types of groups that systematically lack voice in political decision-making processes and that are therefore likely to become victims of public policy. They become victims either of political programmes that deprive them of opportunities and resources, or they become victims of political failures to prevent damage to their interests and eventually, their lives. While solutions to the under-representation of all these groups are sorely needed, I want to focus on only one of them that is particularly relevant in the context of this volume: statistical victims. These are policy victims that have not yet materialised and therefore have not been negatively affected yet, but will suffer damages in the near or far future due to decisions not to protect their interests. All statistical victims are thus future victims, although some of them are already born and will suffer damages in the near future, while others have not yet been born and will suffer damages only in the more distant future.

Nella Larsen's repetition quoted above aptly captures the consumerist concerns that structure many novels at the turn of the twentieth century: “Things. Things. Things.” During this era of increasingly widely available consumer goods, women's material desires forcefully drive the plots of novels by female writers. Although fantasies of consumption took root in much earlier fiction—such as Meg March's coveting of expensive violet silk in Little Women—in early twentieth- century works by Edith Wharton and Nella Larsen characters’ material ambitions are essential rather than incidental to each novel's action. And as evidenced by the vision of the “Asiatic conqueror” imagined by Wharton's character Undine Spragg in the epigraph, the discourse of consumption was often a vehicle for symbolically flaunting ownership over the riches of other regions.

Wharton and Larsen's obsession with things has not gone unnoticed; scholars have discussed their responses to shifting standards of fashion in an era of mass production, often focusing on the way in which gender inflects the issues of consumption, commodification, taste, and display tackled in their novels. Women in the early twentieth century were active consumers of goods that in turn amplified their own commodification, like clothes and jewelry, contributing to what Lori Merish describes as women's “unstable construction as both subjects and objects of exchange.” She elaborates that “this instability is especially apparent in the fashion system, a symbolic structure that historically has entangled signs of liberation and oppression—of feminine pleasure and autonomy, and masculine power and domination—within the image of the fashionable female body” (“Engendering Naturalism” 322).

Tracing the material history of the fashion system that Merish describes can lend further complexity to early twentieth-century American women's efforts toward economic liberation and self-actualization.

One of the challenges facing the attempts at establishing public higher education in Islamic theology in Europe has been the forging of Islamic religious authority. Creating viable cooperation between universities and Muslim stakeholders (including potential students as well as subsequent employers for graduates) and finding the right teachers who can meet the requirements for academic positions at a European public university as well as present a convincing religious habitus, have not always been easy. One of the available frameworks for understanding and debating these challenges has been the insider–outsider distinction. In the context of Islamic theology this distinction seems to indicate both a distinction between confessional and non-confessional teaching, between Islamic and non-Islamic, and between inside and outside the epistemic domain of the public university. Across the board, insider–outsider discussions here largely draw upon what we could call a secular discursive repertoire, for example, assumptions about the category religion and its position vis-à-vis domains of publicly sanctioned knowledge. In neighbouring areas of European academia, a different conversation has intensified during the last decade, legitimising certain forms of insider positionality as more insightful, knowing and authentic. This conversation has been launched mainly by students in the humanities and the social sciences, it focuses on the role of power in knowledge production, and it is driven by a critique of claims to universality and the exclusion of non-Western knowledge traditions from university curricula. In many respects, this mobilisation continues debates from the 1970–90s about black history, feminist epistemology, post-colonialism and Eurocentrism, and it is articulated not through a distinction between confessional and non-confessional, but rather through the binary of oppressor– oppressed, lodging the discussion within a struggle for justice and equality.

Both Islamic theology and what I in the remainder of this chapter will call newer social justice mobilisation in the academy represent attempts to open up the public European universities to new and potentially challenging forms of knowledge. As such, they elicit various forms of boundary work (Gieryn 1983; McCutcheon 2003; Johansen 2006; also Dreier, Chapter 6, this volume) that in different ways contribute to the conflictual reproduction of a European academic field. My aim in this chapter is to unpack and compare these two forms of boundary work in order to discuss their different ramifications and consider what they tell us about the epistemic underpinnings of European (secular) universities.

When attention began to turn towards the second or New Vienna School, scholars grouped researchers together in an inclusive approach. Thus, Fritz Novotny’s work on Cezanne was included in Christopher Wood’s Vienna School Reader, even though Novotny had been a product of Strzygowski’s Institute and not (the descendent of) Riegl’s. Subsequently, his membership in the second Vienna School has been questioned. The same issue faces another student of Stzrygowsky: Otto Demus. Nevertheless, in the following I will emphasise Demus’s academic socialisation after completing his university training, whereupon he actually did teach at the University of Vienna with Pächt. By the 1960s, the ‘two Ottos’ of course would become famous for having offered one of the most formidable medieval art programmes in the world.

As I will argue, Demus’s work fits quite well with the second Viennese school to the degree that his work is focused on an understanding of the work of art or monument as a functional whole. Parts and their relationship are understood, or in the case of a lost work, intuited by way of reconstruction. In addition, technical knowledge is used in order to judge initial states of objects so that the universal working of perception will be accurate based on these same givens.

I propose to explain Demus’s methodology through his most famous contribution: an exegesis of the structure and function of Byzantine mosaics. I will show that his approach, which has been linked to Riegl in a casual way, can be aligned in a more rigorous way. After reviewing Demus’s career, I will pass on to his important interpretation of Byzantine mosaic decoration in terms of negative perspective and the icon in space. These considerations challenge traditional notions of the self-sufficient image and mark the passage of the image as space. If Wilde had placed the image into its relational context, Demus instead marked the movement of figure and ground into new spatial configurations.

Charlie Chaplin's 1936 film Modern Times presents a provocative image of its tramping hero in a moment of extreme duress. The film follows Chaplin's Little Tramp – whose vagabond garb, consisting of baggy pants, bowler hat and toothbrush moustache, remains iconic to this day – as he works a variety of jobs against the backdrop of the Great Depression. One of the most memorable scenes occurs on the factory floor, where the Little Tramp struggles to keep pace with the frenetic activity of the assembly line. After throwing himself on the conveyer belt, he is quickly swallowed by the gargantuan machine and finds himself trapped among its cogs. As this brief description already implies, the scene is heavy with symbolism in a film that, alongside its slapstick comedy, casts into relief the hardships faced by a significant portion of the population around the world during the interwar period. The social context of the factory scene becomes especially clear in the moments immediately following the Little Tramp's journey into the machine. Sent into a work-induced frenzy, the Little Tramp continually turns knobs, pulls levers and wrenches bolts until he is whisked away from the factory first by a policeman and then by a medical doctor who believes he has suffered a nervous breakdown. Soon after, he runs afoul of the law again and, this time, is thrown into jail. Chaplin's tramp character traverses the factory floor and the jailhouse; he is treated medically so that he can continue working and then arrested when he proves he cannot. In short, Modern Times locates its famous tramp character in a setting where police power and medical oversight combine to regulate public health – and rid society of harmful influences. If the archetypal tramp figure once connoted exceptionally mobile characters, as the previous chapters have attested, then Chaplin asks audiences to reckon with a profound transformation in the tramp's relationship to the state. Rather than being on the outside looking in, the Little Tramp is – quite literally – at the centre of this industrialised society.

The transformed conditions attending vagrancy both in popular culture (as in Chaplin's case) and in law are at the forefront of this chapter. Modern Times is a transitional film in a number of ways. Much of the commentary surrounding it has to do with the film industry itself and Chaplin's role in it.

In the opening of his history of John Jacob Astor's fur company titled Astoria; Or, Anecdotes of an Enterprise Beyond the Rocky Mountains (1836), Washington Irving declares the centrality of two commodities to American economic success: fur and gold. He writes:

Irving's florid language here wildly stereotypes the national characteristics of the various imperial invaders who were motivated by the New World's lucre, including the Spanish, the French, and the British. Irving also equates the “wide and daring enterprise” of America with the spread of “civilization,” anticipating the Manifest Destiny ethos that would drive American western expansion during much of the nineteenth century, and connecting that expansionism to economic advancement. Pinpointing the apparent permeability of national borders when commodities like fur and gold are at stake, Irving celebrates in sexually suggestive terms the way these “pioneers and precursors of civilization” have “penetrated” these territories to lay “open the hidden secrets of the wilderness” that is lush with “beauty and fertility.”

Decades after Irving's account of the fur trade was published, two fictional treatments of the commodities he lauds present a more cautious perspective on the impact of imperial economic conquest.

Introduction

After Demirel was forced to resign in 1971, the military restructured the political arena in order to prevent a recurrence of the political and societal dysfunction of the late 1960s. The junta-backed ‘above-party’ government made wide-ranging changes to the constitution, which repealed much of its liberal character. It was hoped that the amendments would foster political stability by providing greater powers to the executive, as a safeguard against a repeat of the previous period.

During these years Demirel maintained his role as the head of the AP while, on the other side of the political divide, changes were taking place inside the CHP. A young social democrat, Bülent Ecevit, replaced the ageing İsmet İnönü and brought with him hope that there could be a liberalisation within the party. As the leaders of the two most dominant parties of the era, Demirel and Ecevit alternated six times as Prime Minister between 1974 and 1980. This was a significant indicator of the electoral popularity of both men and the competitiveness of the party system. In this sense, it was a break from the single-party governments that Turkey had largely experienced up to this point. Nonetheless, constitutional restructuring and changes in the political landscape did not resolve government paralysis and political violence, which accelerated between 1976 and 1980 and saw more than 5,000 people lose their lives. The generals determined that the situation had totally escaped the control of the leaders and undertook another military intervention on 12 September 1980.

This chapter will demonstrate that the political developments of the period were largely in response to both Ecevit and Demirel's leadership and a critical reason for understanding the democratic failure of this period. Although the military maintained its tutelary position, it could not exert substantive influence over civilian politics and determine political outcomes: if it had, civilian rule might not have slowly resulted in the ‘complete erosion of governmental authority’ between 1973 and 1980 (Tachua and Heper 1983, 25).

As the preceding chapters have shown, the way in which North Africa is addressing major global challenges such as economic stagnation, the decline of rentierism, climate change and socio-economic inequality has direct implications for North African citizens as well as those in surrounding states and regions. This chapter will examine the opposing directional effects – how external actors engage with North African states. It will look at five major actors – that is, the West (United States and Europe), the Gulf States, Sub-Saharan Africa, China and Russia – to understand both their interests in North Africa as well as the challenges and opportunities that those interests offer.

The West

The international community (in particular the United States, the European Union and the EU member states) have deep and important diplomatic and economic relationships with North Africa. Europe is inextricably tied to North Africa through geography as well as history. While the US has placed less emphasis on North Africa than on other parts of the MENA region (apart from Egypt), the country also maintains important security and economic ties with most North African states. As Richard Youngs notes, ‘the EU's main focus has been on one part of the MENA region: the Mediterranean’. Europe's contemporary approach towards North Africa began with the 1995 Barcelona Process (or the Euro Mediterranean Partnership Initiative), which developed a multi-lateral framework on security, political, social, cultural and economic relations between Europe and the countries of the southern Mediterranean. Through this process, North African states signed association agreements that opened the door to free trade agreements and allowed them access to aid from Europe; however, as Adel Abdel Ghafar and Anna Jacobs argue, ‘[t]hese free trade agreements suffered from blatant imbalances, and countries such as Algeria remained hesitant for several years to sign them because of the privileging of European industry over North African agriculture and the political conditions attached to the agreements’. The Barcelona process evolved into the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) in 2004. The ENP was set up to ‘create a ring of friendly, stable and prosperous countries around the European Union in order to guarantee stability along the outer borders of the EU’.

This series of monographs on selected topics in modernism is designed to reflect and extend the range of new work in modernist studies. The studies in the series aim for a breadth of scope and for an expanded sense of the canon of modernism, rather than focusing on individual authors. Literary texts will be considered in terms of contexts including recent cultural histories (modernism and magic; sonic modernity; media studies) and topics of theoretical interest (the everyday; postmodernism; the Frankfurt School); but the series will also re-consider more familiar routes into modernism (modernism and gender; sexuality; politics). The works published will be attentive to the various cultural, intellectual and historical contexts of British, American and European modernisms, and to inter-disciplinary possibilities within modernism, including performance and the visual and plastic arts.

Tim Armstrong and Rebecca Beasley

The notes that follow are based for the most part on Gianni Vattimo’s own autobiography, Not Being God, written with Piergiorgio Paterlini (2016 [2006]); on Santiago Zabala’s comprehensive introduction to Weakening Philosophy: Essays in Honour of Gianni Vattimo (2007); on the long interview Vattimo conducted with Luca Savarino and Federico Vercellone, ‘Gianni Vattimo: Philosophy as Ontology of Actuality’ (2009d); and on various other sources from the Vattimo Archive (Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona) and as specified in the text.

A BIOGRAPHICAL-INTELLECTUAL PROFILE

Gianteresio (Gianni) Vattimo (b. Turin, 1936) is one of those rare philosophers who can claim the mantle of public intellectual, the engagé thinker called to comment on the political and social issues of his time while simultaneously developing an extremely sophisticated, complex and specialised branch of philosophical thought. He is a philosopher in the classic sense of the term: a well-rounded, inclusive figure who has embraced, in his mature years especially, the idea that philosophy is praxis – in the political sense as much as in any other – an approach we find in the origins of Western philosophy.

As Antonio Gnoli writes in his introduction to the ‘Opera Omnia’, Scritti filosofici e politici, ‘[Vattimo’s] writings go beyond the theories that he professes and enter into the existence of a man who, after all, thought the way he lived. It is no small thing. And even though some may think it is, I would like his versatility and his contradictions to be seen as a singular form of coherence’ (2021: 12, my translation). This ‘singular coherence’ may in part derive from Vattimo’s status as a ‘literate proletarian’, as he loves to define himself (Gnoli 2021: 15), which is in marked distinction to most of his fellow schoolmates, and later, colleagues. Vattimo is the son of a Calabrese policeman who died of pneumonia when he was a year old, and of a Turinese tailor who worked from home. A precocious learner, he was always considered by his mother and his sister to be the ‘educated’ member of the family.

Writing in October 2011, economist James K. Galbraith depicts a nation trapped in a debt prison, serving a sentence of indeterminate length (Galbraith 2018: 31). The road map to economic recovery that was drawn up by the European Union foreshadowed at least a generation of hardship. The austerity measures international lenders forced Greece to implement in return for the record-sized loans were meant to service its record-sized debt, but were also meant to instil economic discipline and responsibility on a society widely castigated for being lazy, profligate and unwilling to pay its fair share of taxes. Yet four years after Galbraith made his sombre observations, conditions had worsened. A BBC report entitled ‘How Bad Are Things for the Greek People?’ described a country in ‘an economic crisis on the scale of the US Great Depression of the 1930s’.

Much of the Greek population was reluctant to accept its fate, as seemingly incessant protests and the occasional riot made international headlines. Most protesters simply wanted manageable loan arrangements, but some were also calling for the overthrow of the political order. For its part, the EU’s greatest concern was that Greece might default. It had done so several times in its history, but this time such a move might jeopardise the EU project and especially the euro. Hence Greece was also regarded as a potential vandal. Headlined ‘The End of the Euro’, the 17 May cover of Newsweek showed a protester with a gas mask throwing stones with one hand, while holding a red flag with the other (Figure 11.1).

East–West diplomatic relations: Louis XIV and the Kingdom of Siam, 1660–88

The relations between the Kingdoms of Siam and France during the reign of Louis XIV were both singular and revealing with regard to the possibilities and limitations of diplomatic and intercultural relations between independent powers in the age of European expansion and colonialism. The Kingdom of Siam, the future Kingdom of Thailand, represents, in fact, one of the rare countries in the non-European world which resisted successfully the ambitions of the European colonial powers, and it may seem paradoxical that it had been in very close and intense contact, since the seventeenth century, with European powers, and especially with the Kingdom of France. Besides its contacts with Siam, the Kingdom of France in this period had also established relations with a number of other non-European powers: Persia, the Ottoman Empire, the Bey of Tunis, China and Russia, with relations with the latter being intensified after the visit of the Russian Tsar Peter the Great to Versailles in 1717. For the Historical Dictionary of Thailand published in 2005, these relations were characterised as both intense and short, with consideration limited to the 1680s:

The authors of the dictionary point out that after 1688 the relations between France and Siam were interrupted for two hundred years before being resumed again at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, when Siam ‘experienced extremely difficult relations with France’ during the period of French colonisation in South East Asia and the conquest of Indochina.