.
From: postcapital <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
POSTCAPITAL a project conceived by Carlos Garaicoa, Daniel G. Andújar
and Iván de la Nuez. The authors have replaced the usual collective
exhibition by the construction of a visual space from which to put
forward and confront their concepts, ramified into publications,
workshops, videos, scale models, a library, Internet connections and
image banks.
La Virreina Exposicions
Barcelona April 11 2006, 19.30 h
With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the communist
bloc, the countries of Eastern Europe entered a phase that was termed
"postcommunist". In barely a decade, this diverse process - sometimes
peaceful, other times violent (as happened in the countries of former
Yugoslavia) - became the focus of attention of programmes, studies,
diagnostics, theories, warnings, criticisms and applause of analysts
as different as Ralph Dahrendorf and Slavoj Zizek, Timothy Garton Ash
and Grzegorz Ekiert, Vesna Pusic and Tibor Papp, John le Carré and
Frederick Jameson, Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt...
The West, under the umbrella of a range of emergency measures - a
postmodern, and stingier, version of the former Marshall Plan for
Europe following the Second World War -, laid down a series of
economic, political and doctrinal recipes with a view to establishing
a free-market order in the former communist territories. Whether by
means of shock therapies, as in Russia, or through more moderate
programmes, their efforts were aimed at converting those countries to
capitalism and the market economy. All according to the basic rules of
liberal democracy and the reformulation of their international
relations (life under the rulings made by the IMF, entry into the
European Union, membership of NATO, etc.).
Barely two decades later (17 years to be exact), we see that, in
spite of the theories of the end of history - which presaged a boring
and relaxed eternity for capitalism -, the West is involved in a
process of changes that are only just beginning to be considered in
their full magnitude. From both the right and the left, from Robert
Kaplan to the penultimate recycling of Francis Fukuyama, as well as
Ulrich Beck and Oskar Lafontaine, the belief that the world order
stood on a sure basis started to explode in worrying fashion.
Without its dancing partner in the modern era (socialism), we have
started to find liberalism more and more orthodox and less and less
democratic. The old East-West standoff has given way to a
confrontation between the West and the Arab world, between
Christianity and Islam, between democracy and terrorism. And all this
has given rise to a new geopolitical map the beginnings of which might
be situated, chronologically, in the attacks on 11 September 2001 in
the United States.
To sum it up in a sentence: the Berlin Wall also fell in on the West.
And quasi-sacred terms that played a leading role in bringing down the
governments and the borders in those countries of the former communist
empire - "solidarity", "transparency" - were buried under the rubble
of the old walls and the foundations of the new walls that are being
put up in the new global politics. We call this situation
"postcapital".
_______________________________________________
nettime-ann mailing list
[email protected]
http://www.nettime.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nettime-ann
