Demanding the Impossible (4 page)

It might have disappointed readers who wished to find an answer from your notion of communism. I also believe that the obligation of the secular left is not just to struggle for ideology but also to begin from the beginning, as you quoted Lenin at his Beckettian best, which brings about the big question. You once mentioned that the difficulty of today’s capitalism is, in effect, that we cannot even imagine a viable alternative to global capitalism. Are we really not able to envision a possible alternative? What will be our only possible option? How do you picture the new model of a good society? What is your idea of the future? What sort of society do you want?

SŽ:
If you ask me what will be our future, my model is this: did you see that wonderful film
Brazil
by Terry Gilliam? It came out almost 30 years ago, but it’s a beautiful film, a totally crazy comedy, and it shows the future England under a totalitarian regime, but also with private hedonistic pleasure. It is not the dignified authoritarian way, but a kind of Groucho Marx in power. Isn’t the first step of Berlusconi, a former prime minister of Italy, close to this? Also, in China, at the level of private life, no one cares about your private perversions, but just don’t mess with politics. It is no longer the typical fascist mobilization. Liberal democratic capitalism is approaching its limit, and we need large, coordinated social actions. Otherwise the future will resemble the film
Brazil
.

I think that the new authoritarianism will not be like the old one within the discipline order, but it will result in a strange society where, at the consumerist and private level, you will have all your sexual freedom or whatever you want and, at the same time, you will have a kind of
depoliticized
order. It’s a horrible thought. So how should we measure this?

Another meaning of common is very important in the context of common sense, common manners. This is why I like to shock people, telling them that I am in favor of authoritarian values. What do I mean by this? Let me give you an example. I wouldn’t like to live in a state where you have to argue that it is not right to rape women. It’s obscene. What kind of society is this where these values need to be debated? I would like to live in the society where there is no question that the very idea of rape is considered absolutely disgusting and crazy. And the same goes for racism, fascism, and so on.

The measure of ethical status in society depends not on certain things that are debated, but on certain things that are simply accepted as unwritten rules. For example, in Europe you don’t get to see signs telling you, “Don’t spit on the floor. Don’t throw food around.” I’m not being disparaging, but I was told that they have such signs in China. But in Europe it’s automatically understood. You don’t even have to write it on the wall. This is, I think, the
ethical standard
of society. Not what is explicitly prohibited or allowed, but what is to such an extent accepted that you don’t even have to refer to it.

And if you look at Europe, standards are falling terribly. In this sense, things that were considered impossible 20 or 30 years ago are today becoming more and more acceptable. For example, 20 or 30 years ago, the very idea of having the extreme right in power was unacceptable. They were considered anathema: all the small neo-fascist parties, like Jörg Haider in Austria, Jean-Marie Le Pen in France. We didn’t talk with them. We are in a democratic society, so we tolerate them. But it was absolutely out of the question to have them in power. But then this fell down. You now have them in Austria and elsewhere. They all of a sudden become respectable. The way we think of fascism: until now, it was a consensus in Europe that fascism is bad. But now you have debates about it. And, as I claimed, the same will happen more and more with racism.

The same thing happens even now apropos Egypt. I think that the West will increasingly have to abandon democracy – even if we hold on to some form of it. It will become more and more fashionable to say “Yeah, democracy. But you cannot apply it directly, some people are not mature enough.” Israel already said this openly: “We support Mubarak because Egyptians are not yet mature people for democracy.” But isn’t it ironic? Because this revolution in itself proved that they wanted democracy.

I really think we are approaching potentially dangerously chaotic times. What I seriously see is a kind of
new authoritarian society
different from fascism. I don’t like what many people claim, “Oh! It’s a new fascism.” I don’t like this term, because what I claim is something new and I don’t even like their use of the term in this metaphoric way where they appear to say something precise, but all they do is betray their lack of analysis. When people describe what’s happening now in Hungary as fascism, basically they are saying: “I don’t know what is happening, it just reminds me of what was happening 60–70 years ago.” That’s not good.

I think today the world is asking for a real alternative. Would you like to live in a world where the only alternative is either Anglo-Saxon neoliberalism or Chinese-Singaporean capitalism with Asian values? What I’m afraid of is that with this capitalism with Asian values, we get a capitalism that is much more efficient and dynamic than our Western capitalism. But I don’t share the hope of my liberal friends. The marriage between capitalism and democracy is over.

The lesson of Wall Street for me is that the true utopia does not mean we can have a different society. The true utopia is the way things are, that they can go on indefinitely just like that. I claim that we are approaching some tough decisions. If we do nothing, then we are clearly approaching a new
authoritarian
order.

Even though we are approaching potentially dangerous times of chaos and confronting tough decisions, we do not know what is really going to happen. How shall we deal with this time of uncertainty, of “the unknowns”?

SŽ:
I really think we are living in very dangerous, interesting times. Everything is changing, including human nature itself, along with the prospect of biogenetics, etc. I was always absolutely fascinated by this phenomenon of directly connecting our brain and physical activity without the use of apparatus. For example, when I was in New York, I saw on TV that crippled people in wheelchairs can control the movement just by their mind. You don’t even need Stephen Hawking’s proverbial little finger: with my mind, I can directly cause objects to move; that is to say, it is the brain itself that will serve as the remote-control machine. It is literally a realization of the Orwellian notion of “thought control.” If you just
think
strongly about moving forward, the wheelchair moves forward.

Now this sounds very nice. We feel like we are God. We can move objects with our thoughts. But the problem here is that, first, if this can go on outside, it could also go on inside. This is to say, maybe someone could also control your thoughts from the outside. I mean what is clear is that our very sense of identity – “what are we?” – is based on this gap. This very gap between my thought and the world out there is the basic foundation of our senses of personal identity, where freedom is being undermined. We don’t know what this means, what really is happening. We are entering such a new world. We don’t know.

Some leftists like to say: “We know what is happening. But we just don’t know how to mobilize people.” No! For example, what is happening today in China? Is it simply an authoritarian form of capitalism? Is it a new form of communism? Is it something totally new? We have old Marxists and old liberals who agree about one thing, simply that the old form of communism is even more triumphant. But they don’t have a good theory. We have many of these new slogans – postindustrial society, reflective society, postmodern society, information society – but I think these are just journalistic names. We don’t yet know what is happening. So we need
theory
and
philosophy
more than ever.

Today is the
time for theory
. Why? Look at the debates about abortion and so on. You cannot simply apply old religious wisdom, because it is a totally new situation. Should we or should we not allow genetic research? Do you notice how confused the debates are? It totally shocked me how in Europe Catholics and Christians oppose biogenetic interventions, claiming that humans have an immortal soul, and they are not just machines, so we shouldn’t mess with them. But I ask them a very naive question: If you believe that humans have an immortal soul, which is independent of matter, why then are you afraid of biogenetic interventions? They just take place in the brain; they cannot attack the immortal soul. We are all aware that we are touching on something that is very dangerous.

I don’t think either of the standard solutions works. On the one hand, there is a conservative solution (Jürgen Habermas / the Catholic Church), which simply urges that this should be stopped, that it should be prohibited. It’s dangerous to mess with it, so let’s set up a limit. On the other hand, you have this man Ray Kurzweil, a main representative of techno-digital apocalypticism, an ultra-optimist, who says that we are moving to a stage of technological singularity, human species and its transmutation into the “post-human.” Both are obviously wrong. There is hard work to be done. It is a unique task.

Can postmodernism tell us something about today?

SŽ:
The good thing is – I may sound like a Eurocentric – that the Western world is losing its privilege. It’s open to everyone. One thing I like about what we fashionably called postmodern society is that it no longer works with this sense of old status. Look at Singapore. About 60 or 70 years ago it was a backward village state. Now it’s a state with maybe the highest income per capita. Generally, we think of Lichtenstein, with its banking system, as being one of the richest, but I think it lost its reputation during the financial crisis, while Singapore did very well. Even in the crisis of 2009, it grew by 15 percent. These are, and not just in a cynical way, the proofs of our interesting times. And it is a very good effect of postmodern capitalism that everyone is given a chance.

I don’t even agree with those who claim that postmodernism means Americanization. No, postmodernism means that even in a small nation everyone gets a chance. This is why in Europe some people are against globalization. I think that the big victims of globalization are not the United States or China, but second-level traditional powers like France or Germany. Nobody even speaks their languages today. All my French friends are furious because 40 years ago English was considered vulgar and the true international language was French. Now nobody speaks it. Even English is a loser. I read a wonderful text claiming that what we are talking now, this English, which is emerging as the world language, is some sort of strange language that is actually very different from what is spoken in traditional English-speaking countries. The English language itself will, as a result of its global dominance, become lost. Some of the English that is being spoken somewhere in a Chinese market may well be more real than what English farmers are talking.

Do you know where I see good points here? Globalization is so amazing that I myself also even know about your Korean films. I even know that Taiwan films are now fashionable. Isn’t this wonderful? The domain that I like very much is the detective novel. My god, now you have them everywhere! Today, there are detective series taking place in Native American reservations in the US, in the industrial Ruhr area of Germany, in Venice and Florence, in Iceland, in Brezhnev’s or Yeltsin’s Russia, even in today’s Tibet (James Pattison’s series with the Chinese police inspector exiled there for political reasons as a hero).

In Sweden, of course: they are the kings of the detective novel there. Stieg Larsson is a special case; he’s not properly a detective novelist, but Henning Mankell definitely is. Mankell’s true achievement is that, among today’s writers, he is a unique artist of the
parallax view
. That is to say, the two perspectives – that of the affluent Ystad and that of Maputo (the capital of Mozambique) – are irretrievably “out of sync,” so that there is no neutral language enabling us to translate one into the other, even less to posit one as the “truth” of the other. All we can ultimately do in today’s conditions is to remain faithful to this split as it stands and, in the absence of any common denominator, to record it.

Let’s take an absurd case: Arnaldur Indriðason in Iceland. The whole country of Iceland has fewer than 300,000 inhabitants. Do you know how many copies of his latest detective novel sold in Iceland? 50,000 copies. It’s like the Bible – every family has one. And he’s selling hundreds of thousands in France, Germany, now also in English. Reykjavík City even offers a literary bus tour that focuses on the crime novels of Indriðason. Just like the Mankell tour in Ystad. This is the good side of postmodernism, for me. You couldn’t even imagine all this 40 years ago. We live in such interesting times, with great dangers, but also with hopes.

And the rules are changing. It’s quite incredible to see the structure of Hollywood. Many foreign actors, directors, and cameramen are able to work there. For example, there, in Hollywood, are Miroslav Ondříček, a Czech cinematographer, and Vilmos Zsigmond, who is one of the most influential Hungarian-born cinematographers in history. The good thing about Hollywood is that, in contrast to what others think, it is much more open to the world. I also like Chinese mega spectacle films like
Hero
,
House of the Flying Daggers
,
The Curse of the Golden Flower
, and so on. The Chinese are now making better historical spectacle movies than the Americans. They are making the best.

In a way, I like to see how things are really changing. I think, in the long term, globalization does not mean we will all eat hamburgers; globalization means that a true
global field
will emerge. I think that the United States will slowly lose their priority. They make few big hits, but even Russia is emerging with interesting major historical spectacles. And Korea and even Romania too. You see, this is what I like to emphasize about the postmodern era.