<nettime-ann> postcapital

[Geert Lovink <geert@xs4all.nl>]

.
> From: postcapital <daniel.tttp@gmail.com>
>
> 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
nettime-ann@nettime.org
http://www.nettime.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nettime-ann