Welcome back, everyone. Is this now me or it's not OK, but that's up here.
You know, we're just we're in this very advanced, technologically advanced material, which is great, but it confuses me occasionally.
So bear with me. So hello again from from Riga, from Riga, Latvia.
I'm really, really very happy to to to welcome all the panel, the roundtable participants to this to this event.
This roundtable is entitled Emptiness Space Capital in the State,
and I will begin by introducing the speakers after which I will just say a few introductory words,
and so will Volodya to kind of begin the discussion and something that then the roundtable participants will use to refer to or respond to.
So we will. We are joined today by Saskia Sesan, who is Robert Blinged,
professor of sociology at Columbia University and an exceptionally inspiring speaker or think and
thinker rather than speaker as well about the city migration and global spatial reconfigurations.
Her work on the global city and on expulsions has been one of the inspirations for this project, and we're very happy to help her think with us today.
I think she's joining us from New York. Johanna Berkman joins us from Washington, D.C. or somewhere nearby.
I'm not entirely sure. You'll have to correct me. She's associate professor of sociology and global affairs at George Mason University.
Some 10 years ago, Johanna blew our minds,
if I may say so with her book on the left wing origins of Neo Liberalism, in which she carried out a truly trans,
local and relational analysis of the practises and arguments that led to the rise of neo liberalism in the 1980s and 90s.
Even though she has moved on to analysis of gentrification in Washington, DC, we hope that she will.
Due to emptiness today what she did to neo liberalism neo liberalism in her book.
Don Kolbe is a professor of anthropology at the University of Bergen, where he moved after a long career at the Central European University.
He's a fellow traveller for some of us in terms of Marxist inspired analysis of global processes.
He has written extensively on globalisation, class labour and neo nationalism in Central and Eastern Europe and in Europe more broadly.
Don is also the founding editor of the journal Focal Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology,
and we very much look forward to hearing his thoughts today.
Last but not least, Martin Demand Fredrickson is a social anthropologist at our university doing research in Georgia,
Croatia, but now also in Denmark. Martin writes about resonant things, about nothingness, the materiality of decay on things, the periphery, and more.
He sometimes joins us for inspiring and generative conversations.
Last year, we collaborated on a special forum for Cultural Anthropology, where Martin contributed an essay on emptiness and surfaces.
We also share an interest in tourism as the last utopia in some of the empty places,
so we're hoping that Martin can ground us today if we start to kind of travel globally too much.
OK, so let me then begin with a few words that I kind of just said to the conversation going.
And I already spoke during the introduction to the conference a bit about how
I encountered emptiness and how I understood it demographically in Latvia.
And you read it in the material that I sent you earlier in this roundtable.
We want to focus on the spatial dimensions of emptiness and on emptiness as an emerging
spatial coordinates in the contemporary landscape of capital and political power.
As I began to outline in the introduction to this conference,
one way to see emptiness is as a particular reordering of relations between people place the state capital and
the future that opens up to analysis of configurations of power that exceed specific articulation of emptiness.
Now we'd like to zoom in, so to speak, on some of this reordering and perhaps even put the term emptiness aside for a moment.
As part of the spatial reordering that constitutes emptiness in eastern Latvia,
living spaces are turning into overgrown fields or spaces of agricultural production or forestry.
Spaces of industrial production, in turn, are becoming zones of abandoned people plan.
Their days around mobile and increasingly distant services is instead of receiving them nearby churches, the symbol of a particular ideological order,
have been returned to their functioning after serving as warehouses or sports halls during Soviet industrialisation,
but are empty because people are gone and local government officials talk about growth even as they cannot plan for it.
Such a spatial reordering is the result of translatable processes.
It invites analysis of emptiness not only as a particular condition of life, but also as a spatial coordinates alongside global cities in the space,
in the changing spatial configurations of capital and political power that extend beyond specific localities.
Understanding the spatial order of which emptiness is part, in turn, requires a rethinking the analytical terms.
Analytical terms of the past, there have been noteworthy analytical moves in this direction,
for example, such as dozens analysis of global cities in her work and explosion,
as well as Neil Brenner's and Nicole Catechist spatial scheme that consists of global urban agglomerations and hinterlands.
The latter demarcated, as I quote as a variety of nano cities, faces,
whether as supply zones, impact zones, sacrifice zones, logistics corridors or otherwise,
which could include diverse types of settlements, towns, villages, hamlets,
land use configurations, industrial, agricultural, extractive and ecologies.
Terrestrial oceanic subterranean atmospheric end quote.
This doesn't mean that emptiness is rural for non city.
Spaces include towns as well, but it is arguably losing its urbanity, while at the same time being part of planetary urbanisation.
Empty spaces could fall broadly within Brenner and could seek its hinterland category, but this is only the beginning of enquiry rather than the end.
Emptying spaces remain black boxes in this model. For little is known about capitalist's relations that may be operable operational
there or about the forms of life that emerge in response or through them.
It may be the case that the empty spaces are altogether expelled from capitalist relations, providing no resources for capital accumulation.
And perhaps it is in these cases that emptiness seems truly empty, as when, for example,
abandoned and decaying houses in the countryside resist marketisation due to unclear property relations.
At the same time, these places can be sources of labour for other hinterland,
such as these rural villages becoming sources of labour for the British agricultural sector.
Our approach, then, is one of looking into the black box of expelled places or hinterlands,
which is likely to generate insights about different forms of life while not losing sight of the place of emptiness in the global order of things.
And now I'll hand it over to Volodya, a duke who is my co-host or co co-chair of this roundtable hour before the microphone.
I thank you both. So can you hear him? Yes.
OK, so we've been in search of a common theoretical language to talk about emptiness across fields side sounds, except for a lot VR.
We can read about the vacant housing in Budapest and London in the context of financialization.
We can read about vanishing model towns in Georgia and Russia as consequences of the industrialisation destroyed
and disrupted livelihoods in Ukraine has done bust or in Bosnia and Herzegovina brought by civil war.
I lost. A.K.A. We've lost the microphone.
It's my village's microphone is not working. Is that right?
OK. Do then come here, OK?
No, not if they can. Mm-Hmm. Yeah. Sorry, I just thought.
But you want to be seen on this? So just put your computer there and just go for it.
Yeah, yeah. Is it good now? Yes.
Yes. Okay. Thanks. Yes. Before I started with our theoretical journey and looking for critical concepts to grasp antennas and where we start.
I yeah, no. That's fine.
No. Yeah, that's right. Yeah.
So the question that that I was posing was where to look for a theory of post-Soviet emptiness.
And we started with the start with the point that was obvious to us,
and it was the early Marxist authorisation of space as integral to social production of life.
However, the classical facts on the production of space emerged on the state supported monopoly capitalism,
where spaces of emptiness were regarded as either disappearing or utopian in the moments of transition or crisis there.
The older representations of space were supposed to be so suppressed by the new ones,
partially incorporated into the dominant space and partially appropriated by this subaltern representational spaces.
But what they encountered. In my fieldwork in Ukraine several years ago.
Would only partially be only partially with this scheme.
There was a field working in a giant soviet-era tire factory that structure the livelihoods of
two thousand eight hundred strong city was fractured into many large and small private firms,
surrounded by limited traffic and autonomous forms of informality.
This, however, look far removed from a forward march of a new mode of production of space.
So Walton's coping practises look even less like active appropriation.
Does the post-Soviet emptiness poses a challenge for terrorising production of space?
It is problematic to find a clear-cut change in the mode of production it raises.
The crisis seems never ending and always shifting. The class struggle is surreptitious and to.
It is true that the new developments in March, theorising of space mentioned by dots already open some perspectives.
For example, Brammer schools rely on the older man for the distinction between building
infrastructural clustering and building the degradation of very urban spaces.
Well, this is still a result of situated capital accumulation,
which demands resources and intensifies extraction and such on building indeed can be found in
half abandoned villages around quickly developing industrial centres exhausted agricultural zones.
However, what we empirically encounter in post-Soviet space space is nearly abandoned by both
Typekit on this day and the spaces of dense de-industrialisation of migration,
disinvestment and war. Thus, creative destruction does not exhaust all the absurd forms of post-Soviet emptiness.
We could take a cue from Mark's discussion of surplus population and his distinction
between the relative surplus and absolute surplus population and endeavour to cool.
Some state of affairs on the ground, absolute emptiness, which doesn't mean it's absolute.
There is nothing. There is absolute in relation to capital and the state, which is paradoxically full of formerly productive remnants,
would fall outside of the foremost of some would not be restricted to hinterlands or operational spaces.
This is where I see this is how I conceptually see the division of my future fieldwork.
This absolute emptiness would be centre in Donbas.
The rest of Ukraine would be more relevant to relative to those deindustrialisation and deserted villages.
Meanwhile, Belarus would probably represent something like a forum formerly subsumed antennas.
And these are the provisional scheme which which I will try to develop further with the help of our collaborative efforts,
and I hope that I invite all participants today to think through and help us with the impulses that we faced in our theoretical journey and.
Offer us the opportunities to develop conceptualisation of our team further.
And until. It it does it tends to be when when you really need it, the most, certainly something starts going wrong, but that's part of the challenge.
Thank you all. So hopefully you can hear and see if you can just let us know in some way.
So I will then handed it over now to Saskia, please.
We're really happy to have you and the floor is yours, OK?
And I'm delighted to be here, and I'm hoping you can hear me well.
Yes. OK, very good. So I find this a fascinating concept that you have sort of produced.
I don't know your your, your area, your land, et cetera.
I don't have that knowledge, but I'm very intrigued by the concept.
And so a first little question I have before I proceed is whether emptiness destroyed land, poisoned water bodies.
Do you have that in your because we have that in the Americas, the Americas, whether the North or the south are amongst the most brutal,
the most brutal kinds of ways in which we have produced and used people destroyed water bodies.
So I'm sort of curious, and maybe you can give me just a very quick answer, whether in your land destructions have happened,
you know, the poisoning of water is via chemicals in all of that because we have we in the West have done a lot of that.
We have destroyed so many bodies of water just to mention one that there are it's not only water and.
And the question is, how can we humans be so stupid, so brutal that we destroy what is actually one of the most important?
And that's water and water in its many manifestations, elements that allow us to survive.
Now I grew up in Latin America. Latin America is a vast continent that is mostly empty.
There are particular areas you know that that have very intense crowds.
Sao Paolo, et cetera. But really, so much of the America is empty now.
A lot of empty is destroyed. It's destroyed land.
It's because the expanse of land is such that it was easy, unlike, say, in Europe to abuse it and to destroy it.
And so it's lying there, dead poisonous sleep debt very often, in other words, something that is really not good.
Now, at the same time, again, back to my story.
Growing up in Argentina, Argentina is a very big country, but very empty, you know, and then when you come to Europe.
SpaceX is one of the most precious things to have.
So I'm just always amazed at how we humans manage to be sufficiently sedentary, in other words,
we don't want to move too much that we would rather be in an enormous city for,
say, Sao Paolo, full of really bad air quality than, say, going to a small town where you might have very clear.
What so what is it about our modernity that has, and I think we're beginning to see a change here.
But up until now, our modernity has been marked by us accepting all kinds of very destructive models.
So we have destroyed a lot of water bodies.
We have destroyed small towns, you know, a lot of destruction, not the destructions of war and the destruction of the quotidian everyday life.
And to me, I really like the way you described your your project to me.
There is something very interesting in trying to extract if you want.
What is it that we are going to war because we have in the West?
Certainly, I repeat, destroy a lot and we have done it in a sense of order is so much space.
There is so much of this, there is so much of that that we think of it as an invisible little negative, you know,
all the little destructions and a few big destruction, but a kind of sense of we can handle it, it will survive it.
And there is hope in that an arrogance that is really stunning that we think that, oh, everything will be OK.
No, it won't. We have already destroyed half of certain types of forms of life plants, trees, etc. Just destroyed.
And has the moment arrived because now I have been at several conferences that deal with this subject.
How has the moment arrived that we are becoming very,
very aware of the losses that we have experienced because of how we have treated plants, water bodies, sand?
You mention it. And so so the question is, are there also in play?
In other words, emergent modes of thinking of analysing, of building off,
of producing housing, of enabling what we need to enable we humans in order to survive.
Now my sense is that in certain parts of the world, and I think this part where you are is one of those,
this is beginning to be recognised in the Americas.
It is not now. Partly, as I mentioned, the Americas are so big and so relatively speaking empty that there is a sense of, Oh my god, you know this.
This can go on for a very long time. We can destroy here and there, and we'll still be fine.
Whereas in Europe, it's a bit tighter.
And I think that we should at some point really have a good analysis of the difference between how the Americas with the vastness of empty land,
so to speak, versus Europe and versus other parts of the world.
I think that that that there is something in play nowadays, something that we absolutely must address,
but in a way are not addressing, which is how we build, how we travel, you know, all kinds of things like that.
Now, I think, as I said, the younger generations are moving in that direction.
Not everybody clearly. But so it is an interesting moment.
And so sort of to conclude, have we entered my question, have we entered a new epoch?
And I tend to say, yes, we have entered a new epoch and partly we don't notice that or we cannot necessarily know that that has happened
in many ways that no epoch has happened because we are caught up in a multiplicity of modes of survival,
of building, of making, of how we travel, etc., etc.
That have been with us for quite a long time, so we tend to assume, OK, this is not new.
We have been doing this for 30 years. You know, this is this way of travelling, this way of building this way of cetera,
et cetera, with acceptance of certain countries have been very, very good.
The fact the Netherlands, I would say, kind of because they had to, since half of the country is below sea level.
But most countries are not that way. And so most countries have been able to to sort of abuse it all of it.
And and and then the question emerges for me.
Have we again, have we entered a new epic?
And are we not quite able to detect the difference now?
This notion of having entered a new epoch has two phases.
I would say two extremes two extremes, and I exaggerate a bit here just for simplicity sake.
One is a profoundly negative one. I see that in the Americas.
They are so big, so much empty space that they just abuse it.
So you you start a mining operation and you don't. Even when you're done, they don't even bother.
Unlike, say, in Europe, they don't bother to clean up, you know, all the poisonous elements that are used when you have one of those operations.
At least, I would say in Europe, there is there is just far more population,
far more need for land, far more need to protect land or we're out of business.
And that has turned out to be a positive.
The negative happens in the vastness of the emptiness of the Americas, especially the America, so other parts of the world.
But let's just focus on that. So there is an irony in that because we have so much empty space in the Americas.
And I repeat in a few other parts of the world, we don't have a sense of urgency and urgency is really what is called for.
I think we have entered a new epoch and that new epoch is marked by some very dangerous
capabilities that can really destroy far more than we can afford to have destroyed.
We have left, especially in the Americas, with the notion that, my God, you know, we can live through this.
We, you know, there's so much empty land, et cetera, the whole notion of empty land as a corruption of what is actually happening.
We shouldn't think of it as an empty land with we should.
In other words, empty land where you can build anything.
We should think of it as the last remaining operational, healthy with with plenty of of sun, plenty of water, plenty of good quality air, etc.
It's the rareness of it that we should be protecting rather than saying, OK, everything is fine here.
No, it is not. We need to protect a battle lies ahead of us.
Thank you very much for your attention. Here.
Thank you very much. Saskia, I it's really quite quite a call for us to think about to kind of urgently think about
the land empty in the positive or negative ways in what I hear you to be saying,
sort of from a position of a kind of a universal subject and the questions you posed about whether there is destruction,
I suppose in whatever each of us would understand with our land probably will emerge as as as the speakers go on.
And everyone would have some some other question or rather response to that.
So I'll maybe move on to Johanna and then we can kind of return to this question when we start this discussion.
Thank you very much, Johanna. Yes, thank you so much.
This is great. I have. I find this also to be a very fascinating topic.
I I myself don't. I am merely an observer of these trends.
And so I find this really interesting to use this term as an analytical term and to think about a common theoretical language to talk across this,
as Lydia said about talking across these various field sites.
And so and specifically talking about a post-Soviet theory, a theory of a post-Soviet space and in its place.
So I and and I think that it's important that you, of course, are highlighting the key element as abandonment by the state and capital.
So I want to talk a little bit about the idea of comparison for a minute because you're comparing across many different cases,
and this may lead to certain categorisations of different types and things like that.
You're looking for maybe possibly an underlying structure or underlying reality that these that are affecting these many different cases.
But I think that there are some other ways to think about comparison that might also be additionally
helpful when we think about comparison in order to understand what makes emptying happen.
We also should compare the emptying villages with our towns with those that are not emptying right.
And we could we could sort of assume that this non emptying areas are due or because they have tourism or whatever.
But I mean, it requires the thought that you're doing that. You're doing so well in this.
Emptying villages and towns also compare with the actual non end to be emptying.
And of course, we could. We could do not empty. We could do global cities.
But I think actually it would be more important to compare with villages and towns as a comparison case.
But also and I think that some of you are also working on this is that certain parts of towns,
like certain parts of towns or villages are emptying and other parts are not.
That's as scarce often as made. This very important about how to think about parts of cities as having different dynamics going on.
But also, we should also think about the possibility that these towns and villages actually are not independent cases and can actually be compared.
There are, in fact, possibilities that these are in fact cases that are causing other cases.
I mean, I'm going to give one example based on I you know, I heard about in the past about the socialist government in Romania that,
you know, attempted to do a mass destruction of villages as a form of creating efficiencies in the rural areas.
I only heard about that. But we can see possibly that elites are looking at these cases that were provoked a
huge outcry and are learning from previous cases not only in the socialist period,
but in the whole socialist period. They may be looking around and seeing that really over there, that town over there did this.
We can do that too. Right. So there that causal aspect is very important.
But also we can see that the residents are also learning from other places.
They can look at a town nearby or a town in another place and they can go, Oh my God, that place had this happen.
I'm going to get that get out of town as soon as possible because I don't want to be part of that.
Right. So this is this is also a problem. This is not these are not independent cases.
There are in fact causing each other to happen, right? So I think that's an important thing.
So we can see this instead of a comparative.
There's an aspect that when I talk about is that is the transnational trend that is created by this causal effect,
also whatever kind of comparison that we do.
We can we need to ask why some spaces are empty and other are not are tending towards emptiness.
And we, as you guys are you been look at capital city. Also, Empire is very important to the ending of empires.
But in the beginning of new empires. But but also we can think about look at why certain spaces do not empty because of their social dynamics.
If they are spaces that are that are spaces of social solidarity that have special solidarity that make them less likely to empty.
We also might see certain spaces of spaces of horrible trauma that people might want to leave as soon as possible.
So, I mean, that's just an example of I've been looking at this place in Maryland called Port Tobacco was
a vibrant community and a horrifying community based on a deep slavery and tobacco trade.
And it is in the late 19th century, everyone leaves.
There's like 12 people left. So like, it's like, you know,
this is a species of deep social trauma where you could also think of in the kind of margins distant or sort of far reaches of Russia.
We could think of gulag towns as places of trauma, but we could also see them as places of refuge and that people,
you know, found found solidarity there possibly and decided to remain in and to keep that solidarity, it's possible.
I don't really know. We can also see that in Ivan or Reykjavik is talk.
He's going to talk about the environmental protests leading to the revival of the city.
And some of these places me then have a layering of social solidarity too, so we can think of a city, these towns,
as having a palimpsest of layering of social trauma or social solidarity that might make some spaces these these spaces,
you know, not want to embody in other places, too.
But we'd have to also talk with the people who leave and never come back to, which isn't the difficulty of this kind of question.
But I'm also thinking about this, too. I think of Julia Gillard's work on waste in Hungary.
And she talks about the hegemonic view that socialism was always ruined.
It was always grey. It was always the socialist legacy was a vast wasteland or a wasteland just about to happen.
And she talks about how these this vision of the wasteland doesn't.
It actually obscures the reality,
which is this that there were many environmental practises under socialism and that there was immense wastefulness on the part of capitalism.
And so this and that capitalism, in fact, in the post socialist period destroys the environmental practises that were done.
And we see this many times the destruction of many things.
Juja delay as her colleagues have also explored these other things that have been destroyed.
So this it would make sense then, that people would take on this category of emptiness because it is a hegemonic view of the terrain from,
you know, about hegemonic, about socialism.
And this view of really ruins a kind of wasteland legitimates the destruction of the landscape and then the legitimates the attempt, which is will.
It always doesn't really happen, of course.
But it is a fantasy of the tabula rasa in this tabula rasa that will allow for the flourishing of capitalism.
But it also is a legitimation this is Galileo's work. That is, it sets in motion a call for purification also and the moral call for purification.
But for other people and many people with the idea that the idea that there
were ruins was like that was the basis on which you could create a new world.
These ruins were not to be destroyed, but in fact used for the future.
So and then when I just end with this guest, I said, I don't know if that's giving you.
I don't know if you you would agree with this,
but I was just we were using your book in my class and and you could if you step forward the idea that globalisation is a foreign implantation,
it's like this war like Bambi that gets put into a city.
And there's global cities have these and then there's like export processing zones and I'm sure banking sites and all these different
groups of these foreign bodies implanted that are connected with each other and they suck out the capital and move it around.
And so so we can tell she's just like things about globalisation as a foreign implantation.
But we can also think of possibly then emptiness as a foreign implantation and it.
Might come with its own social relations, it comes with its own not only the social relations that come from it, so it's actually not just a negative,
but you know, and I think you guys are suggesting it's also has this not positive good but positive actual content.
But it comes also and I think Martin was also talking about this and in his it's one of the blog posts I saw about also that brings its own ghosts,
right? And so we could have the ghosts that come that are there in the locality and the ghosts that come with the emptiness.
So I'm just suggesting that it's a possibility. Thank you. Yeah.
Great. Great. Thank you so much. By way of sort of moving forward, maybe I'll just point out that actually,
Johanna started answering the question that Saskia posed by by actually pointing out that what seemed to be the
environmental destruction of the sort of Soviet modernity turned out to be not so bad was the capitalist one stepped in.
And so interestingly, in some of my field sites, actually people think of Soviet Soviet modernity as secondary,
both in terms of its sort of civilizational value, but also in terms of the force of its construction.
So, for example, when Danish farmers moved into the rural Latvia and started establishing hog farms,
the locals were complaining that they're incredibly environmentally destructive.
And I said, Well, what about the Soviet farms? I mean, independence movements were built on environmental concerns, and they said, Oh no,
the Soviets couldn't possibly do anything as bad as the new Danish, just as an anecdote.
But thank you very much, Johanna.
And indeed, I think that you're right that every place emptying or not has a certain configuration of emptying anonymity that we're looking at.
So it's also comparatively within the actual locations themselves and that perhaps empty nest, even though there are, you know,
this is a kind of a even a figure or coordinate in relation to which lives are crafted and unfolds,
such as progress perhaps was, you know, in the midst of 20th century.
So even if you're,
let's say place is not emptying that prospect or that sort of is out there in relation to which you might have to think about your own life,
but so much to discuss. And I will then ask Don to come in with his contribution.
Thank you very much. So. Yeah, this is a fantastic topic, emptiness.
I'm very happy you pick it up. I'm very happy you pick it up in a comparative way.
I've walked through villages in eastern Estonia and exactly that feeling terrible emptiness, talking to people, people talking about emptiness.
Everybody gone. Everything devalued. Only old people left.
It is great that you do the comparative way by bringing in a conversation very explicitly with the Mediterranean in any case.
I feel. Well, let me leave that aside.
In fact, I think Mateusz Feldman's at the LHC was the first to use the concept of emptiness in two articles that he did for Fogle in 2002 and 2005.
And this in the context of Georgian buildings and later in the context of the Kirklees revolution of 2005 two, I think.
Later, he began to work on religious conversion, so that has also led to,
say one potential theoretical empirical follow up after emptiness that is the sort of
ideological or religious or mythological categories that emerge within that emptiness.
I don't hear you talk enough about it, perhaps. And just perhaps also because you emphasise that the emptiness is so defined by its liminal adi is,
of course, the conversion to a new type of religion or the shared emergence of new nationalism,
which was very much the sort of way that I began dealing with it in an earlier stage is the end of the analogy.
But nevertheless, I think it's important for you to show to be open for the potential politics that emerges within and against it now.
So my own work, I don't think I ever use the term sheer here, my analytic concepts in explaining the rise of new nationalism in Eastern Europe.
So let's say the authoritarian, illiberal right where dispossession and disenfranchisement.
Increasingly, I have started to think about those processes and perhaps even more structurally,
but also more culturally, in fact, dispossession and disenfranchisement of very short of dispossession.
File Hafiz very clear political economic connotation, disenfranchisement if a political connotation.
I thought about that more in terms of Tili,
where increasingly large segments of electorates don't matter anymore and of course, don't vote anymore over time,
because the notion of the public and the notion of public politics was increasingly neoliberal,
liberalised and increasingly narrow and focussed on on monetary and economic orthodoxies, etc. the concept of devaluation.
Links up well, there's perhaps a little bit more in terms of the way these processes are placed within value chains.
We didn't tell you regimes in a rich anthropological sense of the term and the politics within and against that.
Devaluation of increasingly.
Talked about double devaluation, because devaluation again, might seem like a purely economic process that is, of course not the case.
It's always a political economic process and it's a double devaluation because there's a discursive devaluation going on too,
as we know everywhere in Eastern Europe.
And perhaps in fact, in the in the in the Baltic states, this was always already more fiercely the case than everywhere else.
Bolivia's new political elites were very, very.
Bent on devaluing the past, but also devaluing the people who were mentioned to keep living in the past and showed a particular ideological set up
and shelter in Eastern Europe that basically says down with all of us who are not ready to be winners of the transition.
Now that sort of a politics, I call also a double devaluation in the sense that it is a continuous discursive attack on the common people,
so to speak, and in particular, of course, on earlier generations who are not as well placed as as young,
better educated people to respond to and to the devaluations that are going on.
So double devaluation as a sort of concept, but I think can do a lot of both analytical as well as ethnographic and imaginary work.
Now you're asking us about the limits of contemporary theories.
Well, I don't think that we are so limited.
I think we know a lot. The last 30 years has seen a fantastic global urban sociology social worker is, of course, the prime example of that.
We've also seen a very intelligent, specialised Marxism.
I don't want to name David Harvey here, but because it's much wider than him.
But of course, he is the sort of icon for that. So specialised Marxism is a great critical geography.
There's a political ecology that you can work with and that I would very much recommend working with because you are working to some extent,
an allocation in a rural context with a lot of, you know, environment and nature and so on.
And then there is the anthropological political economy which has worked with
all the notion derive from that in a more ethnographic historical global way.
Now, I think with all these. Two bodies of theoretical literature do.
Is telling us that what we are seeing in your particular place is that experience themselves are becoming emptied out.
Emptiness is that this is not an issue of disconnection.
I think this is a very important theoretical point and a methodological point.
So these are not disconnected places.
These may be places where capitalism doesn't work for them and in the sense that revalued their productivity or devalues
place territory of people and a particular version of social reproduction that are being that people are engaged in,
it doesn't revalue them. But that, of course, is not a question of disconnection is precisely caused by its precise connexions,
with kept its precise integrations within capitalism.
So it's the massive devaluation that capital accumulation imposes on both socialist and post-Soviet places,
perhaps more than anywhere else that produces this emptiness that might perhaps be more than anywhere else.
Now, abandonment is a concept of another order.
And I think Cisco will agree with me about that. Abandonment this is really about is about politics.
It's about the potentialities of the state, the form of the state. So is there a capacity in place?
Is there a mobilisation order alliances? Are there Connexions popular Connexions imaginary connexions being made between past
presence and futures that allow a re-evaluation of people and places to go on?
That is what abandonment is about neoliberalism or financial.
Largely neoliberal, whatever you want to call it was always about yelling states and state elites, you know, abandon all those guys.
And so the fight is really not about reconnecting with capitalism and capitalism, that you are perfectly connected.
So it is really about creating forms of the state and those forms of the state's state are local, national, global and in the EU.
Of course, this is a this is very multitude,
the multi-stakeholder sort of process forms of the state that you can feed back into local form to social reproduction.
How many minutes far left? I'm sorry, I was so drawn into what you were saying, I forgot to monitor.
And you can just get a minute or so to that was also a drone in what I was saying.
Mm hmm. Yeah. You know.
I think. Yeah, OK, I want to say a couple of things about.
Emptiness. And the politics within and against emptiness, uh, that can allow the re valuation and the Rockefeller recession of place and people.
Now these are these are. Terribly integrated type of politics, right?
And. It is not just a local politics that can do that, as you very well know,
because all your local communities that you're working with in Latvia or in Ukraine or in the in post-war Bosnia Herzegovina.
Are have have very little resources at all.
So so this is something that is happening or must be happening or almost assured of multi scalar field of politics.
And it is about monetary and it is about fiscal reform. It is about the state form.
It is about creating new historical blocks that allow to to to short and vision a productive connexion between past, present and future.
And it's about popular politics now is always about popular politics, that reverberation and devalues territories,
spaces and people that have been abandoned by states and devalued by capital.
There will always be. I am afraid, a sort of new nationalist possibility in there.
And that is exactly, I think, what has happened in Central and Eastern Europe.
So when I read your things? I think back of how I was travelling through many spaces in east east central Europe around, let's say,
2000 2002 that were exactly being abandoned in with the speed and the drama and collapsing in the same way that you are now finding,
let's say, a next point in the process. The rise of neo nationalists, author and populist.
Politics,
was there particular response at that moment in time and in led to from the mid 2000 onwards that was the case in Poland was the case in Hungary,
a similar processes were happening, of course, in Bulgaria and Romania.
I'm afraid that you need to bring in that central East European experience a
little bit stronger because that might still be on the horizon for you too.
And it's very different from the one that's happening in the Mediterranean. Last word on that.
The biggest drama of your emptiness of is, of course, outmigration.
And it's outmigration of the young, and they're the leaving behind of all the people.
Now I am not so certain whether in this particular respect, you know, this is the son.
The pensioners and the tourists in the south are really good comparison point for you in Latvia or in Ukraine, right?
And so bringing back Central and Eastern Europe and its particularly historic experience over the last twenty five years is,
I think, very important for us east of Poland, eastern Hungary, eastern Romania.
Stop. Thank you very much. Very good.
Yeah. Thank you very much indeed. I mean, thanks for bringing politics.
What's interesting here and just just really one thing before we move on to Martin is that, of course, and for example,
unlikely of what you would call neo nationalism or the right has been part of the government kind of already for a long time.
So you don't have that sort of the populist frontier falls elsewhere.
And in a way, you could sort of say there's a kind of empty politics of geopolitics happening in perhaps and luckily for sure,
and nobody would be able to speak.
So there's that aspect as well that I think we need to bring in and thinking about what are the political responses of the liberal there,
perhaps in the lack of two to this sort of devaluation by capital and abandonment by the state, but incredibly rich insights?
Thank you very much. And I'll move on to Martin now for his contribution.
OK, thank you. Thank you. Can you all hear me? Yes. Perfect.
So first of all, thank you for inviting me to this.
I'm sorry that I wasn't able to hear the sessions earlier today, but it because it is a topic that I am really interested in.
Unsurprisingly, I'm going to take my point of departure in talking about Georgia and something perhaps a little more empirical than the rest of you.
But I will try to kind of end on some questions that can potentially be posed across sites in within this region and elsewhere.
And I kind of took my cue from from from the title of the conference in terms of of ways of seeing oil and try to
phrase it differently in terms of asking who's actually looking at these places and what are they looking at aside,
of course, from from the local population? So who's who's looking in?
And you could say, first of all, that there's always an anthropologist,
no matter where you go, there's always an anthropologist looking at some things.
So we can we can take that as that's the first one, but I'm not going to talk about that.
Secondly, there are also always, in my experience, conceptual artists looking at these specific.
So they're usually the first people you meet when you enter an abandoned building.
But more importantly, and what I'll be leaning towards here is also the theme of this roundtable.
So the question of the way the states and also private companies, for instance,
look at places of abandonment or places that are kind of marked by emptiness.
Mm-Hmm. And when when looking at certain areas and I think particularly in urban areas that have been marked by
an emptiness or coastal areas marked by emotion is the gaze from the state or from investors is always,
in a sense, aimed at another gaze.
So it's aimed at creating a gaze at the place in in terms of tourism, which has certainly been the case brought in in Croatia and in in Georgia,
where kind of visions of the future or the potential of tourism is kind of a layer upon particular sites that people
or state or private sponsored investors kind of look at these potential layers of what tourism might be able to do,
which I mean in in the case of Georgia, at least if we look at coastal regions has a certain logic to it because it has been in the Soviet area.
So when Soviet era a place of tourism which went into decline in the 1990s and ended
up in in the empty building buildings that Matisse felt once wrote about that.
John also mentioned and the particular social lives that emerged in the late 90s around emptiness.
But the gaze kind of came back after that, and particularly after the rose revolution,
when when tourism and rebuilding became quite a massive political project in Georgia.
And in many ways, they actually got rid of the empty buildings that Matisse was was writing about.
They were reconstructed and rebuilt in different ways.
So this kind of state gaze, at least a certain part of Georgia,
has has often been a gaze that had included ideas about tourism as as kind of the mode of the way in which to counter a counter emptiness.
Now, in more rural areas of Georgia and in the hinterlands, if we want to use those concepts,
the situation has been very different and very similar at the same time.
It's been very different in the sense that the state has not really had any interest in looking at certain places of Georgia.
So the state gaze in a way has been very selective in terms of where it has seen any kind of potential, particularly when it comes to tourism.
So what the state after the revolution, in a sense tried to reconstruct were the places that have already been tourist sites beforehand,
whereas places that didn't really have any prior history of tourism were often
overlooked and particularly places where you could say kind of material.
Soviet legacies have been abundant.
So plain places of deindustrialisation, for instance, or empty factories and villages related to them have not really come into focus.
And I would say in relation to what Saskia was mentioning, I mean places that are basically also slightly toxic landscapes now,
which the state has not really paid attention to, essentially because it costs a lot of money.
If you want to turn a toxic landscape into a site for tourism.
So there are places that are really overlooked, both by private investors and the state,
which makes it very different from these coastal regions or regions that have or places in Georgia that.
I have had a prior history with tourism.
But at the same time, there is a very clear similarity, at least when you start talking to the local population.
In my experience, at least in the villages of lupins anarchy in western Georgia,
where the idea of tourism continues to be strong, even though tourism has never really been there.
So whenever a conversation has started about what could be done to counter emptiness,
what could be done to counter the population, youth migration, deindustrialisation and decline in agriculture?
The conversation rarely comes to the question of whether we could try to bring back industry or we could try to have more agriculture.
We could try to keep the youth somehow in the city or in the village.
It always goes into a conversation about what about tourism?
What could we do to attract tourism to this particular village?
And it also often leads to a discussion about uncertainty in terms of what people can actually see,
because often there is actually very little to see there, aside from a relatively pristine landscape.
But we would say Georgia is blessed with quite wonderful landscapes, so it takes some effort from the landscape to to attract tourists.
So there is this strange duality where, on the one hand,
the state and these kind of historical aspects of of tourism are not really present in these sites.
And at the same time, it is actually what people are often wanting or what they are yearning for,
or what they to borrow a phrase from Vladimir Tasmanian to see as a fantasy of salvation.
And it was interesting, Don, that you mentioned that this question of nationalism in Central Europe,
because that was what Tasmania was originally writing about that after the nineties,
nationalism kind of became a fantasy of salvation in this particular this particular region, which is why a lot of people turned roots.
So I think there is something interesting in also looking at that political aspect in in in Eastern Europe or in different sites,
but also in looking at what other fantasies actually emerge along with its abandonment and emptiness,
where in Georgia, at least tourism increasingly kind of becomes the default fantasy.
So whenever something has to be solved, tourism comes up as a potential answer,
even though it hasn't really materialised or it isn't materialised yet.
So. In terms of kind of posing broader questions, because a lot of this, of course,
is bound to go to the context of George and the particular history of tourism in Georgia and the history of the state in Georgia.
But I think returning to what Thatcher talked about in the beginning about these relational aspects,
I think there is something interesting in terms of looking at how local populations also think relationally across scales.
So the ways in which local villages, villages in Georgia look at other places in Georgia as kind of sites for inspiration,
or they look to the coast because things were working there in terms of saying, how can we actually work with emptiness in the place that we in?
And that kind of returns also you and that's what you were talking about comparison in general.
And I'm not seeing it, just I think as a theoretical question,
but also a methodological question in asking what do people actually compare themselves or their place with in a context of emptiness?
And related to that which spatial fantasies emerge across sites in these different places?
Yes, I think that was it. Very good.
Thank you very much indeed.
You've sort of ended you add that to who else is looking in in the empty buildings are empty places after the conceptual artist it is.
It is also actually dark tourist or or sort of people who seek out these places specifically for tourism.
And it's an interesting actually thing when sort of places and people devalued by capital,
abandoned by the state themselves become a kind of a commodity to be consumed in that sense.
So that, I think are extremely interesting note to to end on.
I will ask you now who will tell you what will follow.
We'll ask whether he wants to see kind of a few observations of following your your contributions.
And then I will ask you perhaps each to speak to you, each other's contributions and what you heard and then and then open up to questions.
I can try to turn on your microphone there. Let me just try and then quickly say something.
It's on and see you. Do you hear me? Can you hear him?
Yeah, thing. Right? Well, thank you very much.
It's exactly. This is exactly what we wanted with this roundtable, a really rich and insightful flow of reactions to our.
Initial. Initial concerns that we that you faced, and I would say that we will have a lot to think about and answering,
probably I'll briefly answer the questions that were both from you to ask for.
First of all, from Saskia, whether we encounter spaces that are that are just destroyed or depleted.
This is definitely the case and this is something that I somehow missed my in designing my fieldwork.
And this this is the spaces that that are now undergoing desertification in the in the south, in the in the northern.
And the laws of Black Sea and in the area that stretches from Caspian to the Black Sea.
And this is really something to be taken into account and it's it's been a result of a kind of.
US mismanaged investment projects into reviving agriculture.
Four, four, four gone. You are completely right that that I probably overemphasised detachment and absolute mess of
some types of abandonment and looking at the double devaluation would bring more dynamic,
more dynamism in in our comparative design, which.
Which brings me to Joanna's remark about.
That we need we need to exert a bit mechanical or counter control position of cases and take into consideration the.
There are calls our relations and the probably the movement of mythologies and.
And the processes of. Sociality amongst amongst our cases in general.
Did this this contributes to talk to a potential reworking of some of our hypotheses,
and now I think we should move to and we should encourage you to.
We will we will. I just want to add to that that in a way that's with how we think about comparison is also something that we're actually
working on and what actually a collaborative comparison means so that we often don't think of these different fields,
such as cases, but we move laterally from one to the other in the process of which actually the the object of analysis itself may change.
So we're really sort of allowing for, on the one hand, thinking about what you might be saying,
what you sort of said, underlying structures or reality,
but also, on the other hand, allowing the kind of transformation of the object that we're looking at as we move from one field site to the other.
And yes, so actually,
I think this is this is a good moment to to ask you to sort of see who wants to perhaps be the first to to reflect on on on what we've heard.
I thought this was absolutely fascinating stuff that you have developed and I'm not very familiar with your area.
I have been there several times, but still so.
So what I'm interested in understanding is whether on the growth question, you know, growth, which can be both positive and negative.
But the area that you are describing is that a flourishing area?
Is that an area where a lot of the water bodies have been poisoned?
You know, what are the specifics? Because when you look, for instance, in the Americas, the Americas, as I said,
one of the most brutal zones when it comes to how we protect environments in the Americas,
we have destroyed an enormous amount of trees of water bodies, you name it.
I'm just curious. And the Americas, of course, is huge, vast and quite empty.
And so I'm curious to understand your area because your area is not so big.
You have quite a quite a population there, too. You also had some abandoned or semi abandoned cities.
What what is what is emerging as something that is different from your past?
Is there something like that? I mean, I thought I heard a few elements there that signal that I don't know if I'm clear in what.
Yeah. Anybody.
So just to help them, but please join people, we're all, I suppose, in some way connected to our area.
But in the sense you're talking about the land, you really talking about sort of floods, about environmental issues as well.
And so I mean, of course, you know, there are there the species variegated in a sense,
there's Chernobyl, of course, but you know that that you've heard of.
But but what is there? Yeah, the the new things, you know that we could sort of say what's new that's emerging is that, you know,
one is that what used to be an intensively industrialised country site is being industrialised.
And again, this is contested. It's is it. Is it the good?
Is it bad if you're looking from the perspective of of people who kind of lived Soviet modernity, not just as industrialisation,
but also as a bundle of services of social relations, of accessibility,
mobility, all kinds of things and are now living a deindustrialisation for them.
This is a really radical change for them. In particular, they are.
They basically in one location where I work, people describe it to similar to to World War, to the undoing of things that they are experiencing now.
Of course, if you look from kind of a more birdseye psychological perspective,
perhaps from the perspective of the universal subject that in a way you invoke, we can sort of think, OK, so let's industrialisation.
There's perhaps reforestation or there is, which is not necessarily purposeful.
It just kind of can be nature reclaiming as it were the spaces or some of some of the former residential spaces turned into agricultural lands.
And then of course, also, of course, that Don mentioned emigration where basically,
for example, Latvia has lost twenty seven percent of its population in the last 30 years.
Various various forms of migration. So again, it really depends.
And it's not all relative, you know, something you know, depends on which perspective we look at,
but it is kind of one where much has to ask who who is experiencing this, this kind of what counts as destruction and for whom.
But I'll perhaps allow the other panellists to comment on this.
Well, I asked some questions, and so I heard some thoughts. And Saskia,
I was wondering about whether you would see your theories of expulsion as working well
with this idea of emptiness or do you think there's something missing in that way?
I just have just one of the two other questions for Don.
I just wondering about this.
I totally agree about this is not a disconnection, and I like that idea and I was wondering if, but there is some kind of.
Disconnecting and reconnecting, going on into a new place in the world system or something, I would might say,
so I'm wondering what you think about that there is some disconnecting or reconnecting, but it's still connected.
So I just wanted to share their thoughts on that. And Martin, you have great your questions that you brought up in your presentation are fabulous.
And I really how do we relate the idea that how people compare with they compare themselves to and our comparisons as as scholars?
How do those relate in some way is interesting to me. So thanks.
Just start. Dan, go ahead. I talking to me.
I was looking at who will raise their hand, so who's ready to go? I thought Don Hand, but yeah.
And then in whichever order? Yeah, yeah. I could go ahead.
Yeah. OK, talk a little bit more about about the actual integrated ness of any place in Central and Eastern Europe,
but also any place in that space in the global economy.
I mean, if you if you integrate into the global value regime.
Meaning that you can migrate. And that your labour has a particular value within that.
Track migration that you're wrong. And that the costs of living,
the costs of your food and the cost of your social reproduction is not determined by any local
production primarily but primarily by the global value regime and its regional instantiation,
so to speak. You are perfectly integrated, you are perfectly integrated when your state is indebted and has an account
with the IMF and they tell you to cut down on this and this and this and that,
and then you become abandoned. Right. That's perfect. Integration social is really very important to think about capitalism, not as a national thing.
That will always work for you, because as as regional researchers on socialism,
we know that the new nationalist analysis of capitalism has always been that we want real capitalism.
We we haven't gotten it yet because it's run by the by the Communists, by the Communists.
And so it's corrupt. And now we finally want a transparent, liberal, real capitalism.
But the point is, it's always been a real capitalism and nobody was ideologically prepared to see it.
And that is true for the elites, political elites, as well as the wider population,
so that this is the drama of Central and Eastern Europe that they have been
told between 1945 or earlier in 1989 that something like capitalism existed,
which can be bad. Nobody believed it at the end. And then it came and nobody could see it.
In this particular regional instantiation, which meant drastic devaluation of any infrastructure, build up skills,
build up people build up right and show that has been going on so that on a very
general level about about integration into capitalism and this other regime,
I've had all discussion, I think with Greece, the Harper in Bolaji,
who I think builds on on on James Ferguson, that all of this was about disconnection.
If capitalism doesn't work for you because it doesn't value you and it doesn't become productive in your social reproduction,
it doesn't mean that you are not in capitalism. It means that you are being devalued fruitlessly by capital.
Right? And so, so that's been going on. Yes.
Yeah. Look, I think and this will show, I think it's an answer or perhaps a bit of an answer to Solskjaer's point.
I actually think that there are there are enormous potential resources in central eastern Europe and in the post-Soviet space, and they are natural.
They are about forests. They are about all sorts of commons that are, of course, always being quasi or fully privatised or in the process of but.
But it isn't very often it doesn't really happen because it doesn't get commercialised,
even though it is commodified entirely, but nobody buying it up.
A very simple example on this, and this is about good advice.
So I was living for it for 15 years and a neighbourhood in Budapest.
Well, like everywhere else and goodbye, but this was a relative, this was not a district, especially in a way, a flourishing district within Budapest.
The 30s. And but there were so many empty first floor.
So in 2008 or something when you were walking through the streets, every fourth or fifth potential shop,
restaurant or living space was just empty and had been empty for years.
And now, at some point, the new mayor decides that we're going to make a list of all these places.
We're going to claim them and we're going to give them to people who do something with them as simple as that.
And it was an enormous change in the neighbourhood.
And, you know, the kindergartens, all sorts of social spaces emerged, the artists, etc., etc. So.
So yeah, and this is an urban example.
And of course, it is more difficult to envision examples like that in spaces where people have left on a massive scale,
which was, of course not the case of Budapest. So. So the spaces in in eastern Latvia are, of course, much more difficult to envision.
And then, yeah. And as Martin says, immediately, the phantasmagoria tourist emerges.
Right. Because the tourist is the placeholder for somebody who actually brings not real capital,
but a bit of money in it and can actually buy things and sort of support social reproduction of places and people in a broader sense.
So that is a mythic solution, which works in some cases. And of course, you can make politics work in that direction, too.
And the EU is not so bad that it actually making a little bit of politics possible, enabling it, giving a little bit of money, et cetera, et cetera.
So, you know, these are my my quick thoughts about connexion capitalism devaluation, a revaluation.
I think Eastern Europe has a lot of potential. And I am afraid that for a little while, it was the new nationalists.
It was the Orban in which it was Jobbik and used in Hungary who saw the chances of actually doing that.
Social Democrats were totally out of it. Totally new liberalised when we need communism.
South. Maybe you want to come in on that one?
Well, I mean, but one question that I have and there is no easy or at least self-evident answer is have we entered a new level?
And given all the buildings we have, et cetera, et cetera, entering a new epoch may well not be a visual event in terms of,
you know, changes in the architecture in who lives where, etc.
And so the question then is what are the instruments that we actually need to develop in order to
capture certain types of transformations where the visual order everything looks more or less the same,
some might be emptier than others, et cetera.
But still, there it is, the housing and the, you know, the the what, the economic centres and all of that.
And so and of course, thinking also from the perspective of the Americas, which the Americas have vast empty nurses, there's a lot of empty.
I don't mean I mean empty land. I don't mean empty buildings. I mean empty land.
And so then you you you sort of begin to think about the concentration of people takes has taken, historically speaking, place in very specific areas.
And and in many ways, we have not studied many of those areas sufficiently.
And I think the area that we're discussing here is also part of that.
There is a long history there, a long history, not a little history, a long history.
And and still, we in the West, for instance, don't totally understand how that has evolved.
And so I'm sort of interested in a little question, really, which is the differences, you know, so we have certain instruments for building, you know,
they may be rather generic nowadays, we all more or less know what needs to be done, etc., etc. The where is the depth of depth of the difference?
Because I think that your region is really a very particular kind of region.
It's different from where I grew up in Argentina, where there was so much empty left, you know that it was like, unbelievable.
That's where my parents went. Also there, because all that empty land, you know, a huge continent,
really huge area and and so I've just I just it is something that I still want to hear more about, about your region and and what is it, you know?
Or is it full of people and we just can't see it?
You know, I think that's why that's actually, I mean, this is exactly what we also sort of trying to to to work towards.
And I think that's why they gave me money to try to answer your question and we're just at the beginning of this.
But I agree that and this is kind of what we're trying to do is develop this methodology.
We think as you do that there's actually something a difference that we're trying to to to capture.
But this is this is going to going to have to happen in the next few years and will definitely get back to you on that one.
But Martin, we have I'm told that we have about five minutes left.
I'm sorry to all the people out there who wanted to ask questions.
Maybe you can put them in the chat and we'll see them because this link remains live throughout the conference so they can actually,
the questions will be visible and we will try to perhaps engage them as we move on.
So I'll give Martin. The next floor to Martin, yet just to come and pick up on some of it is like, I agree with you says that there is a new epoch.
I mean, it is kind of the Anthropocene era that we're living in, which does have consequences.
And I think it's also interesting to to examine in relation to, uh, to emptiness.
And also, I mean, for us, a project to really see, I mean,
which which comparative axes can you actually find both within the region but also with other places?
Because I think when I compare my own material, I mean, I've only just begun conducting fieldwork in Denmark for four COVID related reasons.
But but in communities in Denmark, people are horrified by the idea of tourists, of more tourists coming.
So emptiness is cherished in the completely different way.
But the main reason for that is, I think, because the local population can afford to be horrified by that idea.
So I mean, they don't need the tourists, and that is a very, very big difference from these local communities in in Georgia or in Croatia.
But I do think it would be interesting to also ask, I mean, who in the regions that we're studying in Eastern Europe, actually then I mean,
who see emptiness as a positive trait because there are also some who actually like the emptiness that surround them.
And I think particularly in Croatia, I know that a lot of people have been really happy that tourists haven't been
coming because they can suddenly see their place in a completely different way.
So I mean, there is a tendency to see emptiness as kind of an inherent negative aspect of a place.
But I think that something fruitful and also asking what are the positive traits of emptiness in a given site?
Exactly, yes. Right? That final point? Yes. Yeah.
Yes. I mean, indeed. And that's that's I think that one way we were thought of is that we also saw kind of a
almost an instant as soon as someone started perceiving emptiness as something negative,
there was the instant kind of reaction to it is let's or it is also possible to see it as a positive.
So it's an interesting kind of dynamic that emerges in relation to observations or discourses of emptiness.
And the one one thing we wanted to do is to actually pause and think,
OK before we assign value to what we're seeing, trying to understand it in a kind of a more in-depth way.
But that in itself is interesting.
Maybe there is no neutral space sort of from which to see it, of course, was sort of a pause or a kind of a liminal space,
but rather that these valuations are competing with each other as a sort of in a certain politics of emptiness.
I have to thank you all so very much. I really feel like I should.
We should have planned this to be twice as long than than it was.
I hope that you will be able to stay on and listen to some of the sessions as well.
And this this roundtable was recorded and will be also then available for viewing to conference participants at a later time,
but also possibly elsewhere. So thank you very much and please keep entering your questions.
I see that they're there,
and the roundtable participants can actually read the questions and perhaps answer them if they feel inclined in brief responses.
And I'm sorry, we didn't get to actually asking the questions. Am I correct, Michel, that we're out of time?
I'm afraid we are 15 minutes, including the caption.
OK. OK. Trying to keep up with everyone. Sounds good.
Well, thank you very much. And please. I think it's a 15 minute screen break and and but please stay on and and join us for the next panel around.
OK, thank you. Thank you.