Sassen & Sennet

This was an interview from Tages Speigel.  I am a fan of Sennet and Sassen and this article was a fun read.  Translated from German rather roughly via google translate and quick follow up editing on my part.  Most of the German grammar is left in place.

Saskia Sassen's site can be found here (link) and a Wikipedia page can be found here (link).  Richard Sennet's site can be found here (link) a Wikipedia Page can be found here (link)  The original article "You are an Optimist!" can be read here (link)

Richard Sennett to Saskia Sassen: "You are an optimist!"

As a couple, the sociologist Saskia Sassen and Richard Sennett, as Woody Allen you had invented. A conversation about the alarmist mother of Sennett, cooperation and capitalism.

Mrs. Sassen, Mr. Sennett, after months of waiting we had already given up hope, you can ever together to interview. Conferences all over the world, book projects, teaching: you are married - but apparently rare in the same city.

Saskia Sassen: we spend a lot of time together, but it can take weeks, in which we we don't see each other.

Richard Sennett: Is that very strange to you? I have never thought about it. However, we have just done something which, I believe, is quite reasonable: we have bought a house in the country, 45 minutes from London, near Cambridge.

On the weekends we have a common life, see friends and family. Our children live in London.

You both deal with the cities and the urban living together, many years you have spent together in New York. Why suddenly the decision for country life?

Sassen: We still have an apartment in New York. Unfortunately no longer the old, studio of the painter Edward Hopper. This was such a fantastic place, lots of glass, the light was very specifically. Unfortunately, it is almost collapsed at some point. Today is an office building for the Center for African studies.

Sennett: Now the roof is repaired, it no longer leaks. All the familiar things are gone. I connect with this House so many memories when I see it today, it overcomes me the feeling of a tragic loss.

In their works they often that people are not at the usual clips should be.

Sennett: Well, yes, you read me, you hear me! I am a man full of contradictions.

Sassen: Very different than most of us, what?

You regret that New York has become chic?

Sennett: It is now very commercial. I am at the age of 16 come into the city, which was in 1959, at that time, I was a musician. Within a day, I found a place to stay in the center, I could afford.

Sassen: today would be impossible. As an artist you must to the edge. It goes so far that the trendy places in the periphery, in Brooklyn or Queens.

Sennett: I moved to the West Village, in an area of "Dirty Dick's Fuckhole Bar".  As the Greeks returned during the day, the ships, ripping, at night it was a Transvestitenbar belonged to the Mafia. I shared the bed with another guy and a girl, one at a time we slept in shifts. That was New York. I was young, a heavenly time.

Mrs. Sassen, when you came to the city?

Sassen: Toward the end of the 70s. At that time, therefore they had just started an economic crisis soon many rooms empty, where people could make a lot of noise, as you wanted. I began to research on the subject and immigrants came in contact with the Dominican community. I grew up in Argentina, that is why I speak Spanish. And so I learned many people know about, the walkway at night the offices of Wall Street. The said to me: "Come and eat lunch with us! Lunch was where at midnight.

What did you learn in the wall street offices?

Sassen: one could read in the newspapers - now we are talking about the late 80s, that the large, established companies all from their huge buildings came forth, tens jobs were lost. I have asked the cleaning staff, for whom you are going to work then? And they said: We show! Then we are in the office, including in the of the Executive Board members. Not that we had opened the drawers! But I could see that now small Japanese and German companies were recovered, the finally should be greater. This seemingly invisible development unfolded before my eyes.

You have mentioned that poorer people in New York to the suburbs being squeezed out of the system. Similar developments can be observed in Berlin now.

Sassen: There are interesting data about how many people are thrown out of their houses and apartments, because they no longer can afford to pay for them. In a comparison with almost all EU-countries, Hungary in the first place, there is the worst, but also by Germany is part of the leading group. Each year there are 100 000 such cases.

Sennett: particularly in the United States, the social inequality. And at the lower layers are increasingly invisible.

Sassen: Cities are spaces where you can see the very good, or maybe not. New York is in the 90s has become nice and clean. The poverty has locked out. For example, not something you see at first glance: you go through a quarter of the lower middle class, and the facades are the same as 20 years ago, but it maybe several generations now living together - or owner is impoverished.

We would like to talk about you both. How did you meet?

Sennett: That was in the 80s, when I was Director of the New York Institute for the Humanities at New York University, worked on the for example Susan Sontag. We were all rather writer and poet, and so we picked up our Vorzeige-Ökonomin Saskia as .

Sassen: It was an interesting time, opened up by the economic decline at the universities freedom.

Sennett: I experience again and again that Europeans glorify the American universities. In fact, the universities in the United States at that time rigid, boring places. An example: I tried my good friend Joseph Brodsky ...

... The Russian-American writer ...

... To the NYU. He had not completed his doctorate. And he said unto me: we have the university courses on Brodsky, but unfortunately not here he must teach, and is required by the Academic Rules and so on. We gave him a job. After his Nobel Prize it could imagine the NYU even as a professor.

Mr. Sennett, they deal with issues such as separation and the value craft work, Mrs. Sassen, more of a migratory flows of capital. Discuss privately about Sociology?

Sennett: The people are putting it like this, but the truth is, we do not at all. I think, in any case, the idea that you are there with someone else an interesting dialog can lead to a topic, is incorrect. He has developed much more passionate thoughts, if you talk to people, from a completely different corner. Almost as an aside. I have learned a lot about social philosophy by conversations with a economists - a man who has never heard the name Hannah Arendt.

The historian Fritz Stern and his wife Elizabeth Sifton have recently written a book, the theologian, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and his brother-in-law Hans von Dohnanyi, resistance fighter against Hitler. According to the "time" there are no kit, "The not both agree and not as a common sounds".

Sennett: This is so awful. Gosh!

You laugh. In doing so, her latest work The title of "Cooperation".

Sennett: The idea that cooperation means that you'll be more and more on the same wavelength, it is always better to understand the is childish. I see the totally different. The whole trick social interaction is a relationship and at the same time the distance or better said to preserve its own integrity. It is essential to want to understand other means, to destroy a social connection. The Latin peoples, Italian or French, understand this much more than the protestant cultures of the north.

Sassen: As someone who grew up in Latin America is, I can confirm that. You don't need sharing everything and agree on everything.

Sennett: My ability to self-reflect there is little
you adhere to this principle also in their marriage?

Sennett: Ask me about the composer Alban Berg Cellospielen or via the which I am with you. But my ability to self-reflection is weak and Saskias even less. Saskia, there is one issue, on which I have never get a good talk with you, about music. I had absolutely no good conversation about music with Nicht-Musikern . This is a world in itself, I don't know why.

Sennett: Ask me about the composer Alban Berg Cellospielen or via the which I am with you. But my ability to self-reflection is weak and Saskias even less. Saskia, there is one issue, on which I have never get a good talk with you, about music. I had absolutely no good conversation about music with Nicht-Musikern . This is a world in itself, I don't know why.

Sassen: I am interested in avant-garde visual arts, so that Richard can get.

Sennett: But let me give you an example of what I have just said. I am in Chicago has become in Cabrini Green ...

... A poor district. Her mother, who grew up in the communist regime, was ...

Sassen: It was terrorism! An orthodox communist regime.

Sennett: Stalinist.

Sassen: and still at a time, as the none was more.

Sennett: So, in my childhood lived in Cabrini Green only black and white. Many Latinos came later. Tensions arose between them and the african-american, at the beginning of the 80s provided both groups violent street fights. It was so bad that the police did not went to the quarter and also no ambulances more lead to this. I turned back at that time, in order to convey. And the moment at which we actually made a degree of progress, was, as the black group to the Latinos said: We just don't understand you! There was suddenly a connection - they did not agree on everything. So the idea for the book on co-operation.

What is the matter?

Sennett: Unfortunately not with a happy ending. The violence went back for a while. At the end of the quarter was demolished. We were promised new houses the inhabitants. The transitional housing actually came in, and then, because the issue was solved, they forgot you. Here we are talking about 38 000 people. These people from the American middle class, the always say "we are all Americans", which came, not in a dream, to help poor black and Latino.

Sassen: And guess what has happened! On the basis of the demolished houses were built homes for the middle class and the upper middle class. Today, the area of Cabrini Green very chic. A few remaining poor people have understood: The aim was not to help us, the wanted to just get rid of them.

They have both for the Capital Critical movement occupy Wall Street is involved. The activists were at the end of 2011 from your camp in the distributed Zuccotti Park, since it is quiet around you. Are you disappointed?

Sennett: Not at all. The movement has many young people an idea that you can change something. Perhaps not immediately, but at some point. We have now launched an action in which people on the Internet to suggest places in New York, which will be held again could occupy, the page is called theatrum-mundi.org. On the first day we had 18 000 hits, which I was amazed.

Sassen: During the time of occupy Wall Street there was a survey according to which 70 percent of Americans said: Yes, there is too much inequality in us. And to speak of social inequality, it was in the States so far, as you would use a dirty word.

Mrs. Sassen ...

Sassen: ... Let me add something more. Everywhere in the world protest movements of the middle class. The middle class, like no other has benefited from the liberal state, now feels particularly hard that this state of his tasks - public schools, public transport and so on - should withdraw. SAY: The state, thou hast failed, I have done everything, have a degree, am not landed in jail - and yet I find a job and I can buy a house. The middle class, the least revolutionary group are not Rosa-Luxemburg -trailer, the storyteller is a failed social contract between the State and the citizens. I'm sorry, I blade, as I was a lecture. In any case ...

... What do you think political change?

Sassen: I am not speaking of a revolution. We must reclaim the state. Re-occupy the state. You know, people have 98 percent or so genetically with the monkeys have in common: two percent can make a huge difference, small changes the system in another direction.

Sennett: Thou art an optimist.

Sassen: I am grown up in Latin America, as we have fought a lot politically. Although, I am not really optimist.

And you, Mr. Sennett, you are a pessimist?

Sassen: Oh come on, as it always shines, it may be not a pessimist.

Sennett: We have no political Left anymore, to the still someone would believe in. Some left-hand see further in the future by selecting the change, I rather in social movements and social commitment - Connections between very different types of people. There are these former Microsoft programmer, leave the company and have come together because they want to do a better job. Something gives me hope. In France, there are 78 000 co-operatives, the no one considered as part of the polis.

For example?

Sennett: do people in small towns in Beerdigungsvereinen together. If one is not a burial can afford, look after the. The classic policy will be irrelevant to such forms of activism.

Sassen: It can be relevant.

Sennett: Not for me.