How the World
Swung to the Right [1]
Orlando Luis
Pardo Lazo
New
frontier,
we
must reinvent everything.
End
of discussion.
The
old elegies to rootedness
have
been brandished everywhere.
Tradition
that hesitates between irony and need,
a
multiheaded monster.
The
question is
mainly
how
to recombine the found objects
of
the vast cultural rubbish heap of modernity
in
novel ways,
writing
something other
than
what was asked of you.
In
little over forty years,
the
world has fallen under a new threefold rule:
objective
circumstances,
ideological
opportunism,
the
obsession of memory.
Recipes
for survival
inherited
after fifty years of counterrevolution.
The
sad experience of power:
counterusages
are always possible,
violence
is the only possible outlet.
Great
enemy of the people, drug scum.
A
cultural and religious backlash, son of a whore.
A
rise in nationalist nostalgias,
this
didn´t start with Donald Trump:
“You
Have the Money, but We Have the Time.”
We
have perhaps entered an era
in
which the very word “left” has become useless,
obscure,
embarrassing.
In
fact,
we
might just have to do without it.
They
make a mistake in reasoning
that
a child would not make
in
classical Marxist terms.
They
had always been elitist and moralizing
―as
well as an element of chance:
in
other words, “me, me, me.”
Situationists
(people
who are infertile, older couples, the sick…).
Only
a minority defected to the other side
in
low voices,
in
the shadows.
Who
wouldn´t benefit from changing their life,
their
city,
their
neighborhood,
their
desk?
They
have never been to these places.
People
are less revolutionary in their forties,
it
is a naturalizing and biologizing concept
which
went with a six-figure salary:
work
yourself out of poverty.
Professionals
were powerless to address it.
This
is a liberating game,
the
most thriving industry
in
the name of market emancipation.
Technology
does not exist as such.
Art
could disappear or sacrifice itself
in
light of a political revolution,
from
Lenin to Lennon
or
Stalin
to Stallone.
TV
was how all of these ideas were transmitted
from
one Third World country to another.
We
must take into account
psycho-existential
and institutional factors,
and
each country´s historical specificities.
This
whole new polychromic reality
upsets
the clear succession of the past,
the
present,
and
the future.
Societies
where people exist with the dead.
Daily
life there has become inconceivable:
“Inertia
is death.”
This
is not to say that the rot had already set in,
but
simply that we must not lose sight
of
an underground continuity.
There
is something like an invisible fringe,
an
adjoining,
nondialectical
link.
A
soft utopia,
a
more literal uprising of the same bodies.
Ghosts,
the
alpha and the omega.
Twilight
of common dreams:
our
eyes made us the overseers of one another.
In
any case
(in
the Greek sense of diabolos, to
separate),
there
is, however, no direct link.
Despite
deceptions and wrongdoings,
caught
between renunciation,
awakening,
disempowerment,
and
melancholy,
choosing
to wear the veil,
the
new generations no longer believe
in
these circular lines.
The
conclusion is logical:
that
unshakeable grieving had to be completely forgotten.
[1] Cusset, François. How the World Swung to the Right. Fifty Years of Counterrevolutions
(La Droitization du monde. Translated
by Noura Wedell.). Paris: Éditions
Textuel, 2016.
