Gintautas Mažeikis (Vytautas Magnus University)
The report discusses the conditions for the existence and transformation of new full-fledged lifestyles, worldviews and meaning organisations, the struggle for recognition (A. Honneth, J. Buttler) and the possibilities for political expression. The report takes a critical look at models of prosperity, sustainability and resilience that undermine the significance of cultural diversity and its intersection. Resilience can pander to grand narratives (J.-F. Lyotard) and ensure the dominance of grand discourses, and the hegemonic narrative is often the narrative of the welfare state as the new ideal of the middle-consumerist class. The report speaks of the conditions of active alteration and conscious settlement and the links with unconscious forms of cultural and biological existence. Recognition of the transformations of diversity does not imply a renunciation of resistance or citizenship, but on the contrary a defence of the right to diversity. The autonomy of speaking and hearing also implies a revision of the public (Habermas), with an emphasis on its qualitative differences, fissures, heterogeneity and problematic nature. Only total propaganda and censorship make the public one-dimensional and instrumentally definable. Otherwise, the public is characterised by qualitative diversity, where the right to misunderstand, to not be understood and therefore to be different exists alongside the right to perceive each other. This implies the end of the classical Enlightenment, but by no means a return to the New Middle Ages, nor to the Dark or Neoreactionary Enlightenment. Of course, each of the little lives and symbolic worlds can pursue its own populist politics, create missions and visions, and try to influence the lives of its neighbours, to change their world-views, and thus to bring about alterventions. In the same way, the world of diversity is characterised by individual toxic fragments, instances that deserve criticism or resistance.