Between trauma and nostalgia: the intellectual ethos and generational dynamics of memory in postsocialist Romania

In Romania, as elsewhere in Eastern Europe, the collapse of communism triggered a testimonial drive that shifted from early concerns with victimhood, justice, and retribution to seemingly apolitical revivals of everyday life under socialism. Drawing on a range of memoirs of socialist childhood published over the last decade by an aspiring generation of Romanian writers, this article examines the role of public intellectuals in articulating hegemonic representations of the socialist past. To understand both the enduring power and limits of such representations, the author argues that published recollections should not be read only for their (competing) perspectives on the past, but also for the sociopolitical effects they have in the transitional present, where they facilitate the socialization of emerging writers into the ethos of the postsocialist intelligentsia. Exploring the tenuous relationship between dominant intellectual discourses and social memory in postsocialist Romania, this article aims to throw light on the tensions at the heart of broader processes of democratization, diversification and commodification of social memory in Eastern Europe. In Romania, as elsewhere in Eastern Europe, the collapse of communism triggered a testimonial drive that was understandably dominated by victims of communist oppression and concerned with justice and retribution. Arriving in the wake of decades of state dominated public discourse, the flood of testimonies documenting state repression aimed to counter the official ‘falsification’ of communist history, revealing the violence of the Stalinist decades. Memories of early postwar violence thus converged with fresh recollections of the economic deprivations and indignities of the 1980s to strengthen the authority of personal experience, particularly the experience of suffering and victimization, in bearing witness to the recent past. That drive to record testimony fed into an emerging public discourse which, in its most forceful articulation by intellectuals and politicians, cast the communist past as a traumatic national experience. By comparison, the past decade has witnessed a gradual shift from early concerns with political repression, justice, and retribution to revivals of the social, cultural, and everyday experiences of late socialism. If the scope of social memory has widened to include everyday life, so has the chorus of public voices, which features artists, film directors, or bloggers alongside a cohort of aspiring writers, who spent their childhood and youth in Ceaușescu’s Romania (1965–1989) and came of age after the collapse of his regime. Not unlike the public intellectuals of the 1990s, this young generation draws on the authority of personal experience to join the public debate with collectively authored memoirs of childhood, youth, and family under socialism. How has this new generation of intellectuals changed the parameters of the debate about the socialist past? Who are their readers, and what do they tell us about the impact of intellectual discourse on social memory? How can an analysis of the production, promotion, and public consumption of their memoirs illuminate the wider processes of democratization, diversification, and commodification of social memory in postsocialist Romania and Eastern Europe? In addressing those questions, this article approaches the remembrance of communism as ‘an ongoing process of understanding, negotiation, and contestation’, on which the dynamics of the ‘transitional’ present have as much of a bearing as the past, if not more so.1 I argue that, although ostensibly focused on the socialist past, memoirs of socialist childhood are distinctive products of current political and economic dynamics as well as of social aspirations. Published memoirs reflect not only their authors’ competing ideological orientations and visions of the postsocialist present, but also wider concerns about marketability. Most importantly, they have concrete effects in the present, enabling the socialization of aspiring writers into the ethos of the postsocialist intelligentsia, an ethos that ascribes to public intellectuals tremendous powers of moral leadership and civic responsibility in teaching Romanian society how ‘to master’ the communist past. Public debates around this recent autobiographical wave were framed by pervasive representations of communism as collective ‘trauma’ or fears of its retrospective idealization in popular manifestations of ‘nostalgia’. Examining the political and cultural role of these representations, I approach ‘trauma’ and ‘nostalgia’ as ‘categories of practice’, i.e. as politically charged conceptions about memory deployed by social actors, rather than as ‘categories of analysis’ that could effectively illuminate the processes of postsocialist remembrance.2 To understand how ‘trauma’ and ‘nostalgia’ emerged as the poles of a discursive field on the function of memory, I also consider the transnational dynamics—whether the transferable German model of mastering the past or the impact of regional phenomena such as Ostalgie—that enhanced their symbolic power in national debates. My analysis will begin by examining the emergence of a hegemonic framework of remembrance of the socialist past in the contentious climate of political struggles of the 1990

Lean Thinking and Transferring Lean Management - The Best Defence against an Economic Recession?

Productivity growth is a fundamental means for society to improve its living standards. Productivity growth comes from technological change (new ways of producing goods and services) and better organisation of production (better ways of using available resources given available technology). Both processes operate simultaneously and, in practice, it is difficult to distinguish between the effects of each process. The processes are dynamic and affect individual activities differently over time. These years, manufacturing functions have been transferred rapidly and globally from mature countries to emerging countries. This paper is about the lean philosophy and the critical elements for successful transfer of lean management among sites and countries

Clusters under strong VUV pulses: A quantum-classical hybrid-description incorporating plasma effects

The quantum-classical hybrid-description of rare-gas clusters interacting with intense light pulses which we have developed is described in detail. Much emphasis is put on the treatment of screening electrons in the cluster which set the time scale for the evolution of the system and form the link between electrons strongly bound to ions and quasi-free plasma electrons in the cluster. As an example we discuss the dynamics of an Ar147 cluster exposed to a short VUV laser pulse of 20eV photon energy.Comment: 8 pages, 9 figure

Suppression of ILC2 differentiation from committed T cell precursors by E protein transcription factors

Current models propose that group 2 innate lymphoid cells (ILC2s) are generated in the bone marrow. Here, we demonstrate that subsets of these cells can differentiate from multipotent progenitors and committed T cell precursors in the thymus, both in vivo and in vitro. These thymic ILC2s exit the thymus, circulate in the blood, and home to peripheral tissues. Ablation of E protein transcription factors greatly promotes the ILC fate while impairing B and T cell development. Consistently, a transcriptional network centered on the ZBTB16 transcription factor and IL-4 signaling pathway is highly up-regulated due to E protein deficiency. Our results show that ILC2 can still arise from what are normally considered to be committed T cell precursors, and that this alternative cell fate is restrained by high levels of E protein activity in these cells. Thymus-derived lung ILC2s of E protein-deficient mice show different transcriptomes, proliferative properties, and cytokine responses from wild-type counterparts, suggesting potentially distinct functions

A gene regulatory network armature for T lymphocyte specification

Choice of a T lymphoid fate by hematopoietic progenitor cells depends on sustained Notch–Delta signaling combined with tightly regulated activities of multiple transcription factors. To dissect the regulatory network connections that mediate this process, we have used high-resolution analysis of regulatory gene expression trajectories from the beginning to the end of specification, tests of the short-term Notch dependence of these gene expression changes, and analyses of the effects of overexpression of two essential transcription factors, namely PU.1 and GATA-3. Quantitative expression measurements of >50 transcription factor and marker genes have been used to derive the principal components of regulatory change through which T cell precursors progress from primitive multipotency to T lineage commitment. Our analyses reveal separate contributions of Notch signaling, GATA-3 activity, and down-regulation of PU.1. Using BioTapestry (www.BioTapestry.org), the results have been assembled into a draft gene regulatory network for the specification of T cell precursors and the choice of T as opposed to myeloid/dendritic or mast-cell fates. This network also accommodates effects of E proteins and mutual repression circuits of Gfi1 against Egr-2 and of TCF-1 against PU.1 as proposed elsewhere, but requires additional functions that remain unidentified. Distinctive features of this network structure include the intense dose dependence of GATA-3 effects, the gene-specific modulation of PU.1 activity based on Notch activity, the lack of direct opposition between PU.1 and GATA-3, and the need for a distinct, late-acting repressive function or functions to extinguish stem and progenitor-derived regulatory gene expression

Therapeutic Considerations Related to Finasteride Administration in Male Androgenic Alopecia and Benign Prostatic Hyperplasia

Finasteride has been used extensively until now as a relative efficient therapeutic option for male androgenic alopecia and benign prostatic hyperplasia. Unfortunately, over time several concerns appeared regarding the frequency and magnitude of adverse effects, which in some cases have been even irreversible. Herein we review the recent literature on this topic, trying to clarify the current safety profile of Finasteride for these two therapeutic indications. We concluded that Finasteride could be retained as a therapeutic approach for male androgenic alopecia, based on two important reasons. First, a synergistic action between a partial inhibitor of 5α-reductase (Finasteride) and another compound (like Minoxidil) are preferable to a complete suppression of 5α-reductase (see Dutasteride), in order to preserve the important physiological roles of dihydrotestosterone. Second, Finasteride side effects can currently be addressed in part prior to the onset of the therapy, by using information about the patient such as hand preference and sexual orientation to predict the risk of adverse effects

Descartes, corpuscles and reductionism : mechanism and systems in Descartes' physiology

I argue that Descartes explains physiology in terms of whole systems, and not in terms of the size, shape and motion of tiny corpuscles (corpuscular mechanics). It is a standard, entrenched view that Descartes’s proper means of explanation in the natural world is through strict reduction to corpuscular mechanics. This view is bolstered by a handful of corpuscular-mechanical explanations in Descartes’s physics, which have been taken to be representative of his treatment of all natural phenomena. However, Descartes’s explanations of the ‘principal parts’ of physiology do not follow the corpuscular–mechanical pattern. Des Chene (2001) has identified systems in Descartes’s account of physiology, but takes them ultimately to reduce down to the corpuscle level. I argue that they do not. Rather, Descartes maintains entire systems, with components selected from multiple levels of organisation, in order to construct more complete explanations than corpuscular mechanics alone would allow

Absence of Embedded Mass Shells: Cerenkov Radiation and Quantum Friction

We show that, in a model where a non-relativistic particle is coupled to a quantized relativistic scalar Bose field, the embedded mass shell of the particle dissolves in the continuum when the interaction is turned on, provided the coupling constant is sufficiently small. More precisely, under the assumption that the fiber eigenvectors corresponding to the putative mass shell are differentiable as functions of the total momentum of the system, we show that a mass shell could exist only at a strictly positive distance from the unperturbed embedded mass shell near the boundary of the energy-momentum spectrum.Comment: Revised version: a remark added at the end of Section

Regularity for eigenfunctions of Schr\"odinger operators

We prove a regularity result in weighted Sobolev spaces (or Babuska--Kondratiev spaces) for the eigenfunctions of a Schr\"odinger operator. More precisely, let K_{a}^{m}(\mathbb{R}^{3N}) be the weighted Sobolev space obtained by blowing up the set of singular points of the Coulomb type potential V(x) = \sum_{1 \le j \le N} \frac{b_j}{|x_j|} + \sum_{1 \le i < j \le N} \frac{c_{ij}}{|x_i-x_j|}, x in \mathbb{R}^{3N}, b_j, c_{ij} in \mathbb{R}. If u in L^2(\mathbb{R}^{3N}) satisfies (-\Delta + V) u = \lambda u in distribution sense, then u belongs to K_{a}^{m} for all m \in \mathbb{Z}_+ and all a \le 0. Our result extends to the case when b_j and c_{ij} are suitable bounded functions on the blown-up space. In the single-electron, multi-nuclei case, we obtain the same result for all a<3/2.Comment: to appear in Lett. Math. Phy