THE ROVING EYE Liquid modernity, solid elites
By Pepe Escobar
FLORENCE - It all began as an extended meditation on the reach of Liquid War.
There's no place like Italy to observe the terminal decline of the West in all
its ragged, glittery splendor. Sublime art, dizzying architecture, impeccable
gastronomy and all those selected bottles of Brunello - that certainly helps.
Plus there's the tickling excitement of history repeating itself all over again
- as in a post-mod, remixed decline and fall of the Roman Empire.
I had the pleasure of being one of the guests at the Internazionale festival in
Ferrara - a sort of giant annual happening of world journalists in this Emilia
Romagna powerhouse, essentially
organized by a small group of brave and glowingly dedicated women.
Equally exciting was the pleasure of spending unrivalled quality time with
Rahimullah Yusufzai, arguably the world's top authority on Pashtun tribal areas
and all things AfPak. Rahimullah is an immensely dignified Pashtun gentleman;
it's as if he's way beyond impermanence. No wonder soon I began referring to
him as the Buddha of Peshawar.
The least I could do to partially reciprocate all the precious information
imparted by the Buddha of Peshawar - from Osama bin Laden stories to the
Russians and Chinese now actively pushing for a regional solution for the
Afghan tragedy - was to try to convey to him the true spirit of Renaissance
Europe.
You know the drill - that brief stretch of history when humankind in the West
reached for the stars (with much help from Eastern knowledge). True, you hit
certain snags like trying to explain the fanatic monk Savonarola - born in
Ferrara, burned in Florence - to a Pashtun. I settled for Savonarola as a sort
of Christian Salafi.
It also helped that the Buddha of Peshawar was delighted with the best of
culinary Italy - such as a risotto with zucca cream and funghi porcini. And
then in a dinner with a group of savvy Italian journalists we all concluded,
gloomily, that our profession - the old school foreign correspondent - was
definitely dead, just in time to order further buckets of wine to drown our
collective sorrow.
The West may be going down the drain but for the Buddha of Peshawar there is
hardly a hint of end of history in sight. After enlightening a mostly young
audience about the troubles in Pakistan, he still had to catch that long flight
back to deal, on a daily basis, with the after effects of that conceptual
cluster bomb called the ''war on terror''. If only those instant ''experts''
and think-tankers in Washington would listen to him instead of worshipping in
the bulletproof altar of the David Petraeus deity.
Pashtuns know a thing or two about fallen empires - and how to pin them down.
Before concluding his first-ever trip to Italy, the Buddha of Peshawar still
had time for a quick tour of Rome. I was frantically imagining what Sigmund
Freud would say about those Roman layers of the unconscious opening up for a
native of Peshawar, the Eastern Rome. Well, he certainly sounded excited over
the phone.
All that is solid does not melt into air
Soon I found myself in Milan having lunch with my friend Claudio Gallo, the
foreign news editor of La Stampa newspaper. Little did I know that what had
started as a running conversation about Liquid War would turn into a full
indictment of liquid modernity.
Gallo, a fine Piemontese intellect with a philosophy background, threw a
Hellfire missile into our conversation. We were talking about the current
atmosphere of impotence and angry passivity all across the Atlanticist world -
and the fact that all the great identities (political, religious, cultural)
that had shaped the glory of Europe were now smashed. All that was left was
what master sociologist Zygmunt Bauman had defined as liquid modernity.
Well, not really, said Gallo. This was a ''fable'' sold to people to convince
them that any resistance is futile; ''In reality, the centers of economic
power, the super class that represents more or less 1% of humanity, still
reasons according to the categories of the solid and structured old world,
where cause and effect alternate according to their inexorable mechanic. For
the masses liquid modernity is a reality, but its ineluctability is nothing
else than the ideology of global power''.
Thus we are in a world that "thinks" in flashes of images, not thought
processes; a world, permeated by propaganda, that may be easily bendable and
controllable. And while the elites, Gallo stressed, keep applying the same old
(solid) Machiavellian logic, this world is fast becoming the ideal landscape
for a global dictatorship; and "it's curious that, willingly or not, our
society seems to be forging the ideal slave".
I carried this striking image of immovable solid power from the elegant streets
of Milan's Brera to the Piazza della Signoria in Florence - the alma mater of
the Renaissance. The Piazza della Signoria - where our Salafi monk was burned
in the late 15th century - now also harbors a Gucci museum, a lavish ode to the
culture of conspicuous consumption that's inextricably linked to
turbocapitalism.
Nearby, at the Pallazzo Strozzi, I had booked a visit to Money and Beauty:
Bankers, Botticelli and the Bonfire of the Vanities", an outstanding exhibition
explaining how the modern banking system developed in parallel with the
Renaissance, and how high finance, economy and art interplayed (that's the
subject of a further article). After the exhibition I became even more obsessed
with the question; what if contemporary solid elites in their folly of hubris -
suddenly started to be overrun by the rejects of liquid modernity? With no
Botticelli to depict this new Bonfire of the Vanities - just uploads on
YouTube?
I got my answer from Occupy Wall Street.
It's 1968 all over again
Italy - in all its trademark aesthetically pleasant complexity is so absorbing
it's easy to make you forget about the rest of the world. Well, the New York
Times didn't have this excuse when it ignored Occupy Wall Street - happening in
its hometown for days. But now the whole world is watching, as Occupy Wall
Street is fast becoming a US-wide national movement.
And as much as those representing 99% of the American population - peaceful,
harmless rejects of liquid modernity are mad as hell and don't feel inclined to
take it anymore, predictably the solid elites still don't have a clue about
what's goin' on.
But make no mistake; fear is starting to eat their souls. It's visible in the
way politicians and their corporate media shills deride the protesters as a
"stagnant movement", a bunch of "nuts" or worse, "criminals".
In an interview with RT, world-system expert Immanuel Wallerstein stressed,
"we've been living in the wake of 1968 ever since, everywhere." (See
here). Yes, Occupy Wall Street is a grandson of May 1968, as in "be
realist, demand the impossible".
So it was no surprise that none other than the Elvis of philosophy, Slovenian
grandmaster Slavoj Zizek, an intellectual child of May 1968, stepped out in the
open at New York's Tahrir Square this past Sunday to lay down the (new) law. At
our lunch Gallo and myself also talked about Zizek; we had commented on how
he's one of the few public intellectuals who still makes us laugh - and think.
Zizek said, "We are not communists, if communism means the system which
collapsed in 1990. Remember that today communists are the most efficient,
ruthless capitalists. In China today, we have capitalism, which is even more
dynamic than your American capitalism, but doesn't need democracy, which means
when you criticize capitalism, don't allow yourself to be blackmailed that you
are against democracy. The marriage between democracy and capitalism is over."
To complement this conceptual Hellfire missile, Zizek added, "the only sense in
which we are communists is that we care for the commons. The commons of nature;
the commons of what is privatized by intellectual property; the commons of
biogenetics. For this and only for this we should fight. Communism failed
absolutely. But the problems of the commons are here.
They are telling you we are not Americans here. But the conservative
fundamentalists who claim they are really American have to be reminded of
something. What is Christianity? It's the holy spirit. What is the holy spirit?
It's an egalitarian community of believers who are linked by love for each
other, and who only have their freedom and responsibility to do it. In this
sense, the holy spirit is here now and down there on Wall Street there are
pagans worshiping blasphemous idols. So all we need is patience."
How's that for realists demanding the impossible, for rejects of liquid
modernity exposing the lies and crimes of solid elites? I could not help being
moved by this Florence-New York connection; the birth - perhaps - of a new
humanism? The seeds of our neo-Renaissance?
Against all odds, in all its gloriously decentralized way, Occupy Wall Street
at the very least seems to be offering a global road map to Fight the Power.
I'm sure the Buddha of Peshawar would approve it - because that also implies
fighting the Power's wars. As Zizek put it, "we know we will often desire
something but do not really want it. Don't really be afraid to really want what
you desire." Self-appointed Masters of the Universe, be afraid. Be very afraid.
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
