BEFORE THE DAWN

Do you remember Peter Sellers' 1979 movie Being There? After spending his life working in a secluded villa, the elderly gardener is compelled to step out into the world - a world which is incomprehensible to him, with its inarticulate sounds and its incoherent logic, a world where he has to learn as an adult what is usually learned in the early years of one's life ; that is, how to decipher it, use it, make it intelligible to himself. Well, each one of us is a bit like the gardener who sets off into the wide world, with the fatigue of a painstaking departure.

We can speak of 'fatigue' in at least three senses. Let's take a look at them.

1. Mundus senescit

Mundus senescit, 'The world ages,' wrote Gregory of Tours in his "History of the Franks". It was 590 A.D. and everything had yet to begin, the dawn of European civilization had not broken, it was barely a faint glimmer -- and yet this sentence conveys all of the weariness of the so-called Dark Ages.

The feeling of exhaustion, therefore, is not new; in fact, it has been frequent in the few millennia of human history and does not depend on an objective situation; rather, it is a subjective state. Here is a first kind of fatigue, connected with aging; that is, with depletion, decline, the drying up of passions. It could be associated with Oswald Spengler's Untergang des Abendlandes, 'the decline of the West', or more generally with the entire artistic current of Decadence, and - skipping from one association to the next - finally, with Baudelaire's spleen. Moreover, the German word for 'West' - Abendland, the 'land of evening' - is tinged with crepuscular connotations.

In our case, in the supermarket of ideas, all of this merchandise could be found in the 'end' department. Have you noticed how many book titles of late contain the word 'end?' From the end of Communism until the end of hired labor, from the end of history to the end of the modern. This section of the supermarket contains various brands of 'dear old Europe', 'old Continent', 'new world', young nations, old peoples. But notice: the United States is on the young shelf, while Germany is on the old one; and yet Germany as a state, as a nation, is much more recent than the United States - it is younger by almost a century!

One is led to wonder whether this sense of exhaustion, this cultural hypochondria, so to speak (a civilization whose culture is aching all over), is not simply a fundamental component of the modern. It is not by coincidence that the lunar mood (and the love of ruins), so romantic in our eyes, goes hand in hand with the industrial revolution, imperialism, the frontier. Even the most dynamic promoters of the West turned melancholy as early as 1869 ; as did Logan Reavis, whom I quoted in my book about Chicago, when he wrote that 'before many cycles shall have completed their rounds, sentimental pilgrims from the humming cities of the Pacific coast will be seen where Boston, Philadelphia, and New York now stand, viewing in moonlight contemplation, with the melancholy owl, traces of the Athens, the Carthage and the Babel of the Western hemisphere.' America was still so young - I would say adolescent - it was a teenager in the registry of nations, and already it portended - it foretasted - its own aging. One cannot but compare this sense of moldering with Goethe's verses:

Amerika, du hast es besser,
Als unser Kontinent, das alte,
Hast keine verfallene Schlösser
Und Keine Basalte...1

On the other hand, The Decline of the West (1918-1922) was written when the West had not yet reached the apogee of its planetary power, which it attained after World War II ; that is, at a moment when the West was rising, not declining! Questioning oneself about one's sickly state would then be a sign of good health, as in Sten Nadolny's novel Die Entdeckung der Langsamkeit, 'The Discovery of Slowness,' 1983, when the protagonist turns into a quality what appeared to be a setback: I believe that his Langsamkeit, his slowness, partly inspired the Müdigkeit, the fatigue which is the topic of our meeting.

2. Indifference

But there is another kind of fatigue, which is what we mean when we say 'I'm tired of such and such.' It is loss of interest, indifference, boredom, the indetermination to act which Baudelaire describes when he speaks of those who 'keep a letter for fifteen days without daring to open it, or after only six months resign themselves to proceed to do something which was necessary a year earlier.' It is the fatigue of feeling useless.

This seems to be a very widespread feeling among intellectuals. Until 1989, the role of intellectuals seemed to be well defined, both in the East and the West. It was the 'engagement' of Sartre, a sense of commitment to the issues of one's society. And the brand of commitment was dissent : dissent from the predominant views of the surrounding society. In the East, this intellectual mode was embodied by dissidents. But even in the West, being an intellectual carried an obligation to think differently; that is, almost a duty to be non-conformist, to keep within the minority.

In this sense, dissent as an archetypal role disappeared with the collapse of the USSR and the Berlin Wall. Real socialism collapsed, but dissent did not win - the two sank together. It physically disappeared because no one speaks about once-famous dissidents any more (just think of East German dissidents or Russian ones, or of the Czech intellectuals of Prague's Spring). But dissent disappeared structurally as well, for its function had ceased. Not because Eastern and Western societies today are a paradise, a paradigm of social justice, but, on the contrary, because that form of dissent - the form that fought a society which gagged you, prohibited you, persecuted you, killed you - ceased to be.

When the powerful Soviet state, with its huge nuclear arsenal, prohibited photocopies and saw a free photocopier as much more lethal weapon than a Kalashnikov, it was actually giving disproportionate importance to speech, and thus to the intellectual articulating it. When Khomeini issued a death sentence against Salman Rushdie, he elevated the writer to a dizzying height, likened him to the Earth's mighty ones, compared the book to the Word, the novel to the Koran.

This is the historical modality of the relationship between power and intellectuals, a modality which presents itself in the form of censorship and repression, which characterizes the entire modern age : from Giordano Bruno burned at the stake, to Baruch Spinoza expelled by the rabbis ; to Denis Diderot incarcerated in the Bastille ; to Heinrich Heine exiled in Paris ; to Gustave Flaubert and Charles Baudelaire put on trial ; to Albert Einstein harassed and forced to flee to America ; to Osip Mandel'stam interned in a gulag.

Today, instead, the relationship between power and intellectuals no longer operates according the paradigms of physics (force and pressure) but according to those of information theory (the difference between sound and noise.) The sound emitted by intellectuals is literally muffled by too much noise. Societies continue to be silenced. But today it is the silence in which the deaf man lives, no longer the silence to which the mute is constrained. It is the consequence of too much surrounding noise. The number of noises produced by society is so high that they create only a cacophony, an inarticulate buzzing. Today, in the OECD countries, no one would ever dream of sentencing a novelist to death, but this is merely because the novel is irrelevant in the modern world. In Italy, 20,000 new books are published every year. There is no need to prohibit them -- just to bury them along with the other books. If once there existed a calling - in Max Weber's sense of the word -- to being intellectuals, today there is a widespread feeling of futility about it. In this case, the fatigue is the weariness of non-sense, of losing one's way around the map of social roles.

3. The Fatigue of the Adolescent

There is a third way of being tired. In the late 18th century, Joseph-Louis de Lagrange was probably the greatest living mathematician. Lagrange was persuaded that mathematics was depleting itself, that its apogee was past and its decline, its sunset, was beginning. And yet, the 19th century proved to be an extraordinary time for mathematics, with projective geometry, non-Euclidean geometries, the theory of sets, topology, the theory of groups. The 19th century was the golden age, an era of unequaled splendor for mathematics.

The very fact that the pessimism of Lagrange - the greatest expert, the ultimate specialist of his time - was unfounded gives us a clue to identifying yet another form of fatigue. This is the fatigue of the adolescent, who is perennially weary because he is growing up, because his energies are completely spent in the ardor of maturing. From this point of view, the fatigue of old age is turned toward, and due to, the past ; the fatigue of futility springs from the present; and the fatigue of the adolescent is turned toward the future and anchored in it.

The fact is that we usually associate revolution with the idea of war, of struggle, of bloodshed. And in the past fifty years, Europe and much of the world have lived in peace (notwithstanding a great number of bloody local conflicts). Therefore, peace has camouflaged, has disguised under a coat of routine, of business-as-usual, the incredible revolution that has overwhelmed us. Unprecedented levels were reached in particular by two processes that characterize industrial and capitalist modernity:

- the 'annihilation of space by time,' the annulment of distance, which Karl Marx saw as inherent in the mechanism of circulation of goods -- an annihilation of distance 'beyond every spatial barrier' through the communication of bodies (airplanes, in particular), of sound (radios and telephones), of images (TV) and of multimedia (Internet), changing the relationship of our bodies, of our senses, to the world around us, and of our minds to our bodies;
- the tornado of human migration, which has upset and is upsetting the human geography of the planet: Greeks and Tamils co-exist in Melbourne, Poles and Palestinians in Chicago, Croatians and Lebanese in Cleveland, Sikhs and Filipinos in Vancouver, so that one wonders about the meaning of Herder's old triad (Ein Land, ein Volk, eine Sprache: one land, one people, one language) now that one people inhabits different lands, and many languages are spoken in one land. Today, in New York alone, 143 news dailies are published in languages other than English, six of which are Bangladeshi, three Chinese and so on.

The Tornado of Migration

We live in an era of unprecedented upheaval, in a breathtaking acceleration of change. The world of just fifty years ago seems half a millennium away, and the 19th century seems to belong to a different civilization. Yet the mental structures, the categories of thought with which we judge and portray this new world are those of the old planet of yesteryear. Even the term 'democracy' has remained substantially the same as it was among the Greeks who sailed the seas aboard triremes, whereas the idea of nation was conceived with the horse-drawn coach. Suffice it to note that the very concept of identity, which today seems so essential, so indispensable, so unavoidable (how we fear the identity crisis, the loss of identity, how we aspire to find our identity, to affirm our identity), appeared only one and a half century ago, not in its logical meaning (A is A), but in its psychological and social one.

Yet just a century after its appearance, we have an Italian identity dwelling not on the Mediterranean but on the Nordsee, an Indian identity not on the Ganges but on the Michigan, a Bedouin identity without the desert but in the Midwest, a Japanese identity in Peru (President Fujimori) and a Syrian one in Argentina (President Menem.) Precisely because of all the revolutions in communications, identity today has gained its independence from its physical place. Nowadays, for the majority of peoples of the earth, identities take on a keenness because they resemble those of the nomadic peoples of the past (the Gypsies) or of the Diaspora ( the Jews.) Today, all of us are Jews or Gypsies. Today, the entire planet is made of diasporas of peoples. It is an incredibile, unprecedented, literally unthought of situation.

Our mental categories and our technological progress are two conveyor belts traveling at different speeds, and we are trying to walk with one foot on each. All of you will admit that this is an incredibly exhausting exercise for both the body and the mind. But it is the fatigue of an explosive development which is putting us face to face with the unthought of. It is therefore a fertile, creative fatigue, the healthy exhaustion caused by excitement, tension, the awareness of being alive in an extraordinary age.

SOURCES - Logan Reavis's passage is quoted in Marco d'Eramo, Das Schwein und der Wolkenktratzer. Chicago, eine Geschichte unserer Zukunft, München, Antje Kunstmann Verlag 1996, p. 154.
- The Goethe's verses are the leading ones of the poem Den Vereinigten Staaten, in Goethes Werke, Band 1,12 neubarb. Aufl. München, Verlag C.H. Beck 1981 («Hamburger Ausgabe»).
- Baudelaire's quotation comes from «IX. Le mauvais vitrier» in Petits poèmes en prose (Le spleen de Paris) (1866), Paris, Garnier-Flammarion 1967, p. 51.
- On the well known Lagrange's pessimism about fhe future of mathematics, see for instance Eric T. Bell Men of Mathematic, New York, Simon and Schuster 1937, chap. X. Trad. it. Firenze, Sansoni, 1966, p. 158.
- The Karl Marx's clauses are in the Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie (1857-1858), Berlin, Dietz Verlag 1953; engl. trad., Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, New York, Vintage Books (Random House) 1973, p. 524.
- The figure for the ethnic newspapers in New York was given by The New York Times of Sunday 19th of January 1997 (section «Metro Report»).

1« America, you have something better / than our continent, the old land / You don't have crumbling castles / and you don't have basalt. 6

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