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If all the world is a stage, then borders are its scenery, its mise en scène, its ordering of space and action, wherein actors and observers must work at making borders intelligible and manageable, and must do so in order for the drama to proceed.

T. M. Wilson & H. Donnan

Introduction

Borders are complex phenomena. Our article examines borders unicity and dividing, including and excluding, radically changing over time and space. It focuses on images of different border functions, bordering practices demonstrates the process of contradictory boundary functions clash. As wrote Wallace more than 20 years ago, only ten European states have the same borders today as they did 100 years ago1. This fact is an illustration of the changeable of borders in space and time. Nevertheless, my article is about such changeable of borders, which produce new invisible and often imaginary borders, which impossible to find on any map. However, in this case, borders are not just “invisible lines” in space; they are complex of so- cial-cultural, civilization constructions, with many different images and reasons of appearances.

Classifying borders into “thick” and “thin” borders implies looking at their formative influences and impacts on the development of the adjacent border region(s) as well as the way they continue to impede the conditions of the people living in these areas. “Thick” borders are extremely rigid.

From the view of Beatrix Haselsberger, they are characterized by disrupting relational geographies which belong together and which, as a consequence, can easily become a breeding ground for political disputes. She includes to "thick" borders "situations where there is a lack of congruence between a border and other types of boundaries, or where a border fails to coincide with the boundaries of nation, culture or ethnicity (the case Kurds in Turkey, Iraq, and Syria or the Basques and Catalans in Spain. A good example of a "thick" border is the “Iron Curtain”, which was a difficult-to-cross border, inhibiting interactions with neighboring states”2. The “Iron Curtain” is probably the most extreme example in Europe Other representative examples for our subject, where “thick” borders can be detected, are “divided cities”, such as Berlin (Germany), Nicosia (Cyprus) or Gorizia (Italy). All these cases are mostly political and geopolitical examples.

1Wallace, W. (1992). The dynamics of European integration. London: Pinter.

2Haselsberger, B. Decoding borders. Appreciating border impacts on space and people. Planning Theory & Practice. Volume 15, Issue 4, 2014. P. 505-526.

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Border and conjuncture

Etienne Balibar adds that the rearticulating border’ dictionary from national to European level close linked with the problem of conjuncture. Given the turn to the question of the constitution of political subjectivity in contemporary philosophy, Balibar suggests that political subjectivities are always constituted at the unstable point of intersection between economic conditions, ideological representations, and daily habits. For him, this intersection is nothing other than the conjuncture, which is the unstable ground of both political action and philosophy.

Balibar underlines that philosophical writing is “never independent of specific conjunctures, which is to say that all philosophy, whatever its claim to universality or consideration of eternal questions is determined in part by its political, economic, and cultural conditions, the discussion of current events is not an aside, a temporary digression from eternal questions, but essential to philosophical activity”.1

Many of Balibar’s texts are connected with the specific question of how it engages and thus defines, the existing conjuncture. Mostly it connected and addressing a specific kind of philosophical practice. He suggests a strict division of “practice” and “statement” along the lines of form and content. A conjuncture is not a spirit, dominant ideology or even episteme. It is not homogenous or self-identical but rather is riddled with contradictions and conflicts that reflect its historical tension.

Nowadays Balibar’s definition “existing conjuncture” is including European borders, mass migration, illegal emigrants and European citizenship. For him, thinking in a conjuncture is not the same as utilizing the catchphrases and buzzwords popular in a given moment. His goal is a reinvestigation of some overlooked borders concepts, looking it through ‘emancipation and transformation’, universality and ideality and their applicability to contemporary European politics. For Balibar, ‘the other scene of Politics is also the scene of the Other’.

The book “Politics and the Other Scene” (2012) is more than a mere discussion of the physical, or rather imaginary, manifestations of the borders that separate the nation states of Europe. Balibar's thinking first of all about the potentialities of trans-national or globalized citizenship. Balibar interestingly highlights the proliferation of borders in our supposedly borderless European society. No longer are borders imaginary constructs that coincide along state lines, but topographically spontaneous entities that are manifested in security all over the major social spaces of Europe.

1 Balibar É. The Infinite Contradiction. Trans. by Jean-Marc Poisson with Jacques Lezra. Yale French Studies No. 88, 1995. P. 144

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For him, the question of the border is also the question of the institution and agent, the notion of the border is tied to its historical construction.

He notes that “borders have been the anti-democratic condition for that partial, limited democracy”.1 For Balibar, the problem of mass migration crises and refugees has not any common with conjuncture and pragmatism. The contemporary meaning of European external borders covers survival, resistance, an attempt to escape from the armed conflicts, ongoing violence, persecution and instability in the origin countries, ecological disasters and economic difficulties.

Balibarian Europe as a borderland

Etienne Balibar has his own different idea about Europe’s borderlands. For him, borders denote closure and exclusion. Balibar argues that - however fixed we imagine borders to be - they, in fact, never are stable. At the same time, where there are no physical borders, it is more difficult to overcome cultural ones. He emphases that borderlands instead denote open spaces where opposites flow into one another. Borderlands do not create contradictions, but rather acknowledges that two opposites. European borderlands is a space or territory where now become impossible to ignore human migration engendered by underlying catastrophes such as terrorism, civil wars, and poverty, globalization’ negative consequences in the Mediterranean region. Balibar looks on the effect of exorbitance that helps us understand that we now entered a new era and terms such as migrations, borders or population have changed their meanings. In the new situation, the fetishes of the past sometimes cannot create possibility go ahead.

From the Balibar’s view, “Europe conceived itself as developing borders of its own, but in reality, it has no borders, rather it is itself a complex border: at once one and many, fixed and mobile, internal and external”. 2

The consequences of the new bordering process are the following:

Europe is not space where borders exist alongside one another but rather on top of one another without really being able to merge into one another

Europe forms a space within which borders multiply and move incessantly, 'chased' by an unreachable imperative of closure, which leads to its 'governance', resembling a permanent state of emergency

1Balibar É. Politics and the Other Scene, translated by Christine Jones, James Swenson, and

Chris Turner, London, New York: Verso, 2002.

2Balibar É. Borderland Europe and the challenge of migration. 2015. https://www.opendemocracy.net/can-europe-make-it/etienne-balibar/borderland-europe-and- challenge-of-migration

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even if we merely keep to current realities and decide to leave out traces of the cultural and institutional past, Europe does not have a unique identification when it comes to its territory

during the age of colonial empires, a country like France always had double borders, as it always had to define the limits of the 'French nation' on the one hand and the totality of its outremer possessions on the other hand

some European South countries are perceived by others not to be fully European, or to merely belong to buffer zones. In this situation Europe though officially belonging to the North, eventually turns into nothing more than another field to enact the division of the world into a North and a

South.

war, terror, dictatorship, fanaticism reaching our very doors do not simply follow this or that logic but their consequences do fit into a certain frame and sharpen the contradictions.

arises necessity to invert our understanding of the relation between territories, movements, and displacements as some philosophers have been suggesting now.

Balibar’s conclusion and appeal are clear: “If we want hospitality to prevail over xenophobic sentiments that they will have no other 'choice' than finding new expiatory victims such as Roma or immigrants to nourish it - the social cleft needs to be confronted at the same time as the postcolonial resentments”.1

In fact, Balibar writes and speaks in the many interviews about the theoretical deconstruction of border and policy around it. He is not along in an attempt to find a new way of thinking about Europe's borders challenged necessity of a provocative and timely reflection on the debate of border security and migration management in Europe. Nick Vaughan-Williams is an author that engages in the theoretical discussion of border reinterpretation and deconstruction in nowadays-global politics. But first of all, he "focuses upon one particular type of border: the concept of the border of the state" and these borders “are inherent to logics of inside and outside, practices of inclusion and exclusion, and questions about identity and difference”.2 He analyzes such conclusions in contemporary border studies in which is possible to radicalize the meaning of border. For him first of all, it is Étienne

Balibar radicalized ideas about borders in contemporary political life as is not necessarily, where they are supposed to be according to the modern geopolitical imaginary. Using metaphor “the vacillation of borders” Balibar added that the vacillation of borders is not conflated with their disappear-

1Balibar É. Borderland Europe and the challenge of migration.

2Vaughan-Williams, N. Border Politics. The Limits of Sovereign Power. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009, p.1

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ance. On the contrary, borders are being “multiplied and reduced in their localization, no longer the shores of politics but the space of the political itself”. As such, he implies the need to think more imaginatively, and perhaps even outside the modern geopolitical imaginary, to begin to grasp what is going on in global politics. Vaughan-Williams agrees with Balibar’s paradoxical formulation that “borders are no longer at the border”.

Crossing borders within the city

Borders are fundamental structuring elements of space and our narrow subject is about borders within a city, its structure of urban space, historical source of its creation and what they mean for people. Borders as a spatial phenomenon, become a structural element of urban space. Borders separate not only nations and territories, but they also divide local space. In our case, this local space is the city.

Divided urban space it is not only something special but always made up of various boundaries created by administrative decisions, by processes of social or cultural segregation, by urban design, or by the mental representation of space. There is now an understanding of boundaries as socially constructed and dynamic spatial features. Such authors Mark Eker, Henk Van Houtum Vladimir Kolosov, Ton Van Naerssen, David Newman, Yiannis Papadakis think that location and impact of borders must be understood as outcomes of social processes of bounding or border drawing these processes. Of course, borders do have functions but nowadays, borders carry meanings for people’s identities and daily lives. People around borderlines emotionally start related to feelings of safety and home but at the same time, they feel unwelcome sentiments to the others. The existence of borders is crucially based on their representation in people's minds, emotions, and habits.

A framework of research includes a combination of the following approaches: political, physical, functional, psychological, and socio-spatial. Last is very important in our case from the reason that it gives a wider possibility to look on the border as not only a physical but also as a social issue, both as socio-economic and socio-cultural division lines. The cultural aspect plays a crucial role in ethnic conflict enclave. The vast literature on social segregation is mostly about socio-economic and cultural or racial boundaries within the city.

The meanings “border within the city" has many senses and images:

• A border town is a city which closes to the boundary between two states (Ainaži (Latvia/Estonia), Narva, Estonia/Ivangorod/ Russia, Valga, Estonia/Valka, Latvia, Panemunė, Lithuania/Sovetsk, Russia); East Berlin/West Berlin (East Germany/West Germany, 1949-1990) and so on.

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•Cross-border town naming occurs where towns or villages with the

same or equivalent names are divided between two different countries. (Norviliskes my case study 2013-2015).1

•A divided city is one which, because of political changes or border shifts, currently constitutes (or once constituted) two separate entities or an urban area with a border running through it.

•A united city: Frankfurt (Oder), East Germany, now Germany; Jerusalem (de facto reunited in 1967)

The fate of the European city in the context of the postmodernity close linked above-mentioned situation and its contradictions. However, demarcation and city re-territorialization was started not now and not in Europe. David Carroll in the book “The Colonial City and the Question of Borders: Albert Camus's Allegory of Oran” marks that for numerous historical,

economic, and political reasons, hybridity and the modern city seem inseparable.2 It would be difficult to think of what a modem city would be like if it were not cosmopolitan, hybrid, culturally diverse. The idea of a completely homogeneous city, a city where everyone was of the same linguistic, cultural, religious, and ethnic background would have to be considered at best incredibly boring and at worst a nightmare.

During colonialism, these internal borders delineated, and in postcolonial cities today they, in fact, continue to delineate, areas where peoples from specific ethnic, economic, linguistic, religious, and cultural backgrounds, by choice or necessity, live in miniature cities within the city, both as a part of the city and apart from the city as a whole. In colonial cities, passages across the borders separating the neighborhoods of colonizer and colonized were of course severely limited and closely monitored, at least in terms of the colonized.

Nowadays same as a many years ago, the refugee or an undesirable migrant move from border to border or from camp to camp. What prospect, therefore, opens up for those who are chased by war or poverty and who risk their lives today to reach Europe? What should Europe offer them? If we don’t want to create a new underclass or a population of eternal foreigners imprisoned in interior exile over many generations (the case of the Palestinian camps in the Middle East), we should open the possibility of integration: legal work, social and cultural rights.

Many contemporary European cities have territories, area, which are

called “no-go zones”. It means that it has a reputation for violence and

1Bespamyatnykh, N., Nikiforova, B. Belarusian-Lithuanian Border. Between Fear and Hope: a View from Both Sides. Sovijus, 2015, vol. 3 · No. 2., p. 87-101. Online http://www.sovijus.lt/wordpress/?page_id=976

2Caroll D.The Colonial City and the Question of Borders: Albert Camus's Allegory of Oran. L'Esprit Créateur. 2010, Vol. 41, No. 3, Issue: Cities, Modernity, and Cultural Memory, pp. 88-104

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crime, which makes people frightened to go there. Its named "sensitive urban zones“, "veritable lawless zones“, "exposed area“, "particularly exposed area“ and other. Mostly it means that it has a reputation for violence and crime that makes people frightened to go there. The suburban world of European cities is socially diversified. Its space is segmented in various peripheral areas around the central city.

There are traditional working suburbs, often organized around large state-owned multi-family housing estates, later transferred to the ownership of private owners. There are also peripheral ghettos of older public housing estates, exemplified by the Paris La Coumeuve, where new immigrants and workers who lack "rights to the city" live. Amsterdam, for example, has not

“guilty” city opinion. It has a multicultural and tolerant reputation carefully constructed, but does this image offer concrete solutions for large flows of new migrants? In the condition of mass migration to European cities, the process of social and cultural integration has a nonlinear direction that exists in paradigmatic multi-spatial contexts.

Conclusion

The demonstrated approach offering a comprehensive understanding of intra-urban boundaries will still be valuable to the study of such places.

In every border town, abstractions always become physical. People from the border towns can look over a river, across a street, or through windows and see their foreign neighbors. It made visible that situation of people, which live across them, has completely or partly different levels of prosperity, possibility, and experience. Over the past two decades, the central part of border research belongs to multiple interpretations of visible and invisible border functions. The research of “border framing and discourse practices permit why borders are never “perfect suit” for anybody. We have no right ignore that every state aims as highlighting the benefits of sharing a national identity as creating distance from the world outside. The domination of one from these tendencies directly will depend on the strategy of managing migration crises.

References

Balibar É. The Infinite Contradiction. Trans. Jean-Marc Poisson with Jacques Lezra. Yale French Studies. No. 88, 1995. P. 142-164.

Balibar É. Politics and the Other Scene, translated by Christine Jones, James Swenson, and Chris Turner, London, New York: Verso, 2002.

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Balibar É. Borderland Europe and the challenge of migration. 2015. https://www.opendemocracy.net/can-europe-make-it/etienne- balibar/borderland-europe-and-challenge-of-migration

Bespamyatnykh N., Nikiforova, B. BelarusianLithuanian Border. Between Fear and Hope: a View from Both Sides. Sovijus, 2015, vol. 3 · No. 2., p. 87-101.

Caroll D. The Colonial City and the Question of Borders: Albert Camus's Allegory of Oran. L'Esprit Créateur, 2001, Vol. 41, No. 3, Issue: Cities, Modernity, and Cultural Memory. Pp. 88-104.

Haselsberger, B. Decoding Borders. Appreciating border impacts on space and people. Planning Theory & Practice. Volume 15, Issue 4, 2014. P. 505-526.

Vaughan-Williams, N. Border Politics. The Limits of Sovereign Power. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009.

Wallace, W. The dynamics of European integration. London: Pinter,

1992.

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УДК 821.161.1 ББК 84(2)

A.A. Sautkin

Murmansk Arctic State University Murmansk, Russia

E.V. Philippova

Murmansk Arctic State University

Murmansk, Russia

SPENGLERIAN VARIATIONS BEFORE SPENGLER:

THE MOTIF OF THE “WORLD CITY” IN ALEXANDER BLOK

Abstract. The article is devoted to the consideration of the city as a special subject of aesthetic and philosophical reflection in the works of the Russian symbolist poet Alexander Blok, who contrasts culture and civilization, city and nature, the common people and intelligentsia. Certain parallels can be drawn between Blok's thoughts and Spengler's approach to understanding the fate of each culture.

Key words: culture, civilization, world city, revolution.

А.А. Сауткин

ФГБОУ ВО «Мурманский арктический государственный университет» г. Мурманск, Россия

Е.В. Филиппова

ФГБОУ ВО «Мурманский арктический государственный университет» г. Мурманск, Россия

ШПЕНГЛЕРОВСКИЕ ВАРИАЦИИ ДО ШПЕНГЛЕРА: МОТИВ «МИРОВОГО ГОРОДА» У АЛЕКСАНДРА БЛОКА

Аннотация. Статья посвящена рассмотрению города как самостоятельного предмета эстетической и философской рефлексии в творчестве русского поэтасимволиста Александра Блока, противопоставляющего культуру и цивилизацию, город и природу, простой народ и интеллигенцию. Можно провести определенные параллели между мыслями Блока и подходом Шпенглера к пониманию судьбы каждой культуры.

Ключевые слова: культура, цивилизация, мировой город, революция.

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Walter Benjamin writes in his essay on Baudelaire that “the modern is a principal accent of his poetry,”1 and he believes that the task Baudelaire stated to himself was to give modernity a characteristic form, meanwhile, the flesh and spirit of modernity is obviously a big city.

The nineteenth century to the full discovers the city as an independent subject of aesthetic and philosophical reflection. Poe, Baudelaire, Zola, Verhaeren, Gogol and many others were involved in this. Benjamin transfers this obsession with the city into the level of the philosophy of culture.

However, a little earlier than Benjamin, another German mind, Oswald

Spengler, had postulated the city as the center of modernity: “The city is intellect. The Megalopolis is ‘free’ intellect. It is in resistance to the ‘feudal’ powers of blood and tradition that the burgherdom or bourgeoisie, the intellectual class, begins to be conscious of its own separate existence.”2

The urban spirit establishes democracy; it overturns traditional religious forms, establishing the rationality of science (as some new pseudo-religion); turns the forms of real natural exchange into a pure abstraction of monetary relations.

Spengler claims: “Finally, there arises the monstrous symbol and vessel of the completely emancipated intellect, the world-city… <…> A handful of gigantic places in each Civilization disfranchises and disvalues the entire motherland of its own Culture under the contemptuous name of ‘the provinces.’ The ‘provinces’ are now everything whatsoever – land, town, and city – except these two or three points.”3

And further: “What makes the man of the world-cities incapable of living on any but this artificial footing is that the cosmic beat in his being is ever decreasing, while the tensions of his waking-consciousness become more and more dangerous. <…> Tension without cosmic pulsation to animate it is the transition to nothingness. But Civilization is nothing but tension.”4

Spengler’s approach to understanding the fate of each culture in many respects echoes the poetic intuitions of Alexander Blok, one of the leading poets of Russian symbolism.

1Benjamin W. The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire / Ed. by Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge, Massachusetts & London, England: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006. P. 41.

2Spengler O. The Decline of the West. Vol. 2. / Authorized translation with notes by Charles Francis Atkinson. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1926. Pp. 96-97. It is notable that in the original, Spengler identifies the city with “spirit,” and not with “intellect”: “Die Stadt ist Geist. Die Großstadt ist der ‘freie Geist’.” (Spengler O. Der Untergang des Abendlandes. Bd. 2. München: C. H. Beck’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1922. S. 114.)

3Spengler O. Op. cit. P. 98-99.

4Ibid. P. 102.

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