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Part One
Confronting Disaster
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One
Cassandra’s Details
Coronavirus and the Course of Globalization
Luisa Bonesio
Faced with the unexpected coronavirus pandemic, which has spread very rapidly and has affected the world on a planetary scale, the predominant trends of thought have instantly imploded while the mantras of world unification in the name of capital have turned to defensive positions or have been repeated in an increasingly unconvincing way. Within this context, a hermeneutics of some turning-point events of the twentieth century may be illuminating in order to understand the necessary thread that connects such occurrences in a catastrophic crescendo as well as offer an almost didactic explication of the unsustainability of the model of mundialization (mondializzazione) that has unfolded ever since the beginning of the twentieth century.
The symbolic events (eventi-simbolo) at the core of the hermeneutic reflection I propose here are the sinking of the Titanic (1912), the collapse of the Twin Towers (2001), and the coronavirus pandemic (2020). Like the details of a prediction by Cassandra—the Trojan priestess of Apollo cursed to utter accurate prophecies yet not to be believed—these three events appear as true cornerstones in an unconsciously self-destructive course pursued by the dominating cultural—but, truly, economic—model; that is, the model of Western globalism and its compensatory ideologies.
The intention of the considerations that follow is neither to advance nor to hope for future scenarios, but rather simply to take note of a movement in crescendo toward a point of no return. This course of development, whose point of no return might have already been crossed, is marked not by mere events but by a specific symbolism that recapitulates the details of all possible individual analyses and liquidates, at least for now, most of the political and social imaginaries (immaginari) advanced in the last decades.
The Power of the Elementary: Technology and the Titans
Ernst Jünger is perhaps the most visionary twentieth-century interpreter of modernity. In his 1951 The Forest Passage (Der Waldgang), he sketches an unsurpassed analysis of technological automatism understood as primer for the inevitability (fatalità) of disasters.1 In automation, the liberation of human beings from fatigue and repetitiveness turns into cession of autonomy and freedom. The impersonal dangerousness of this abdication is displayed in the case of accidents, where the space for human autonomy and initiative is almost always drastically reduced. When it takes up the aspect of inevitability, as it happens in technological modernity, fear becomes terrifying, Jünger remarks. The well-known example that is analyzed in his text is the sinking of the Titanic, caused by collision with an iceberg. The Titanic was a luxurious transatlantic liner, an emblem of modern power; it carried, up to the ineludible catastrophe, a cosmopolitan, wealthy, and elegant society in a cruise around the world—sort of an anticipatory icon of other condominium ships, accurate and fatal reproductions of mass society, big numbers, and the desire to escape by finding always and again the same things. At the time of its happening, the sinking of the Titanic caused much emotional stirring. Yet, it neither marked the end of these kinds of activities, nor did it call into doubt the model of the world that had created it and for which it stood as symbol. The sinking was simply read as a mere accident of technology.
Those who had sufficient interpretative ability could have nevertheless fathomed the quite evident, ominous portent of that catastrophe, starting with the name that had been proudly and superstitiously given to a ship that was the supreme creation of technology. Many years later, with respect to the modern faith in the demiurgic power of technology—which is an exemplary expression of the nihilistic will to power initially underscored by Nietzsche—Jünger remarks that “in the end, the Titans are not sufficient as was demonstrated in augural form by the sinking against the iceberg of the ship that had been named after them. Very rarely does Cassandra deal with details in the same way as she did then.”2
Technological human beings are idolatrous, though, and have de-divinized the world, turning it into a globe that can be dominated in all its corners; they do not raise questions from a point of view that remains external to their own ideologies. An instructive revelation of modernity’s unlimited will to power within a world that has lost or, even better, has destroyed its religious and metaphysical points of reference was the ship’s name, Titanic. Ever since its outset, the twentieth century, which is the century of iron and fire, of enormous destructions, of the rush to overcome all limits and level all forms of thought that do not adapt to the politically correct and to conforming globalization, had received a clear symbolic warning that nevertheless remained unheeded.
There is no reason to recall what the 1900s have brought, including global wars, genocides of populations, massacres of nature, consumerism, poverty, policies of global power and annihilation of cultures and civilizations, and homogenizations that have been imposed via bombs as well as glamour. Yet, the sinking of the Titanic already contained all elements of criticism and potential dissolution of that which would then unfold, escalate in power, and detail itself with related, increasing blindness concerning the catastrophic course imposed on the Earth and its inhabitants (including those living beings that have no active say in any of this).
This is not all that happened, though. The Titanic prolonged and reproduced itself, with abundance of details, in all big contemporary cruise ships. These democratic and cosmopolitan quarters currently have more reassuring and Disney-inspired names than their progenitor (Celebrity Reflection, Carnival, Fantasia, Oasis of the Seas, Concordia, Royal Princess, etc.); they navigate the seas and oceans of the world carrying multitudes of people from all parts and origins; they loyally (yet paradoxically, given that it should be leisure time) duplicate modalities, proximities, and alienations of the mass situations from which their guests would like to escape; and, in addition, they replicate lifestyles, views, and pictures of the world whose ability to match those repeatedly seen before departure is tested and verified during the cruises. It is a paradoxical and yet revelatory logic, in which the image of something functions as the standard to which the world has to conform. It is the world reduced to an image, as analyzed by a fundamental thinker of the twentieth century such as Martin Heidegger.
Now, with the coronavirus pandemic, these big cruise ships and, what is more, even airplanes have come to a halt. What, together with them, has come to a stop is the very ideology of traveling, of being continuously on the move, of never being anywhere. This ideology finds in the virtuality of “surfing” the internet its quintessential and deepest truth, namely, the vaporization (vanificazione) of the world, the annihilation of the Earth, of nature, and of cultures through their digital replacement, the portability of devices, hyper-reality, the instantaneousness in which everything has already been seen, everything is replaceable, ephemeral, interchangeable. Cruise ships too have suddenly become (or have revealed themselves to be) claustrophobic spaces of unwanted cohabitation, or they have become floating lazarettos rejected from all harbors. They have disclosed the profound truth of our time, that is, the impossibility of escaping the truth unless one recognizes it, fake sociality, and a superficial statelessness very similar to a generalized Truman Show.
In the abovementioned essay, Jünger also dwells on another aspect that fear can assume and then spread around in a world that is hyperconnected, dominated by techno-science, and feels self-deceptively safe. This other aspect is the contagion and the train of related manifestations and figures. Jünger writes:
A man may join the realms of rigorous knowledge and ridicule earlier spirits who were so terrified by Gothic schemas and infernal imagery. Yet he will hardly suspect that he is caught in the same chains. The phantoms that test him will naturally conform to the style of knowledge, will appear as scientific facts. The old forest may have become a managed woodland, an economic factor; yet a lost child still strays in it. Now the world is a battlefield for armies of microbes; the apocalypse threatens as it always did, only now as the doing of physics. The old delusions continue to flourish in psychoses and neuroses. Even the man-eating ogre can be recognized again through his transparent cloak—and not only as exploiter and taskmaster in the bone mills of our times. More likely he will appear as a serologist, sitting among his instruments and retorts and pondering how to use human spleen or breastbone to produce marvelous new medicines.3
This is not all, though. Jünger prophetically notices how, in a Europe that is divided, humiliated by the catastrophe of World War II, where the American colonization of the collective imaginary and of the economy begins to appear, the very ideas of freedom, human dignity, and spirituality will undergo transformations, ideologizations, instrumentalizations, and persecutions such as those that find a disquieting and precise fictional anticipation in George Orwell’s dystopian yet incredibly clairvoyant narrative. In a world that is dominated by the ideology of political correctness and humanitarianism, by an idea (of an abstractly Enlightenment nature) of humanity, of the emancipation of habits and customs—an ideology that is nevertheless fundamentally and necessarily uninterested with respect to the conditions of survival that are about to be set in place for oneself and the planet—Jünger foresees how, within such a world, besides the weapons of planetary destruction and the “accidents of technology,” microbes (and thus the contagion), which are unperceived due to their infinitely small dimension, and medicalization will play an increasingly larger and more capillary role in our societies and their collective imaginary. A few years later, Ivan Illich too will argue in similar terms in his fundamental Medical Nemesis: The Expropriation of Health.4 The reasons for such an increased role of microbes and medicalization have to do with the fact that morbidity (or the fear of it) will grow, thereby creating increasingly greater and more capillarily diffused dependencies and weaknesses. This constitutes a form of power that may terrorize or heal, make one live or let one die—the case is that of an all-pervasive biopolitics, in which anyone is an object and a dependent, an experimental ground void of transcendence. In some phases, biopolitics will be able to explicate its power openly—a power that only a minority will have the intellectual and spiritual instruments to understand in its deeper meaning.
What remains to be dealt with is the supporting background of all the considerations above. From a philosophical point of view, it is the materialistic immanentization through functional economic regimes that enables the sanitary short circuit of the unified world. From an environmental perspective, it is the Titanic blindness that subverts, perhaps irreversibly, the possibility of further human dwelling on the Earth. Appealing to the numerous works in this area, starting with the scientific predictions on the limits of growth and development by the Club of Rome (1972), has been useless. The fundamental studies by Serge Latouche have been marginalized and ignored.5 The late pleas by Greta Thunberg have been unsuccessful, even when she symbolically puts on stage the very powerful (yet, perhaps, as matter of fact, naïve and ephemeral) image of the young girl who unarmed fights in the crusade for the awakening of the superpowers. Useless have been the religious appeals for a battle which, next to the establishment of good mass practices, would require a total change of paradigms. But the techno-economic powers have no intention of implementing such a change, in what Vandana Shiva has qualified as an age of violence and shallowness, which is the emanation of an abstract and uprooted mind.6
The coronavirus pandemic has displayed aspects, though, that might be capable of undermining the representation of the ineluctability of globalization as it is currently carried out, on the one hand, in economic ultraliberalism and the financialization of the world and, on the other, through the construction of narratives based on the extraordinary possibilities of global tourism, (chosen or imposed) emigration, the joyful homogenization of glamour, fashion, the ephemeral, consumerism, unawareness, and deresponsibilization. This is a concrete horizon in which the globalist model displays its falsity and unsustainability insofar as it does not take into account the main subject of this possible evolution, that is, the Earth (the topic at the core of the reflections by Jünger, Shiva, Panikkar, Latouche and many others) and the crucially constitutive role played by cultural differences, which are swept away with elementary violence by the economic and cultural globalist model.
The Collapsed Towers of Mundialization
Evidently keeping in mind the stultification in which the majority of globalized huma...
