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Through a chain of circumstances that I can’t quite reconstruct, I renewed my interest in Mia Fuller’s Moderns Abroad: Architecture, cities and Italian imperialism just before the outbreak of…well, since I ordered the book on January 24, 2011, I presume it was the events in Tunisia that associatively stirred my interest in the history of the horrific colonial doings next door in Libya and points further south in Africa…what the Italian architecture writers regarded in 1935 as rationalist Roman-Italian civiltà versus “primitive” Ethiopian barbari…a dialectic, and a forgotten history, that explains much about references in recent rhetoric. (We are a few months away from the centenary of the 1911 Italo-Turkish War in which Italy laid claim to Libya, which in turn led to the first bomb ever dropped from an airplane, by an Italian airman against an east Libyan tribal position.)
Fuller’s book, most of all, tries to understand the irrational career of Rationalist architecture across the Italian colonies, and its outgrowth from the irrationality of Italian colonial policy in the first place…which so goes against any standard-issue Marxist analyses that as she puts it, the only way in which to make sense of it is to examine it as a mixture of “metaphor, fantasy, and ambiguity.” There were economic hopes, nationalist dreams, and the systematic deployment of ambiguity that allowed architects, politicians and planners to ignore self-evident absurdities in favor of visions of an impossible future that became surprisingly plausible.
I am intrigued by the extent to which the recent events across north Africa, and to some extent across the whole Arab world, exemplify the points I have been trying to make for four years now about plausibility structures, the interconnection of economic, psychological, and social forces, and perhaps—perhaps!—levels of insight of those in a position to influence events. For it is certain that some of the organizers in Cairo had pondered whether it was possible to use the technology of social networking and the existing levels of disaffection in several different strata of society to bring about desired results. Elsewhere, the existence of the tipping point and the number of groups able to make productive use of the consequences comes as a complete surprise. The groups are not what anybody expected, and we know nothing of how they came together…in fact, the story thus far in eastern Libya [i.e., as of the second day of March, when I wrote this unrevised note] seems closer to theories of mutual aid than anything else. As in Rebecca Solnit’s recent study of societies confronted with sudden crisis and the breakdown of existing social structures, tonight we improvise.
I do wonder whether certain traditional models for moderating social conflict in day-to-day situations get transmuted in contemporary secular conditions, but I would be simply blathering were I to speculate on such topics.
The different outcomes thus far certainly illustrate the truths that the same forces do work out differently in differently constructed social and political situations. But the surprising thing is that in country after country, forty years of stasis in which nothing at all seemed possible suddenly crumbled, as whole masses of people decided simultaneously that something else seemed possible, and now was the time to make it happen.
I have said many times that this kind of thing isn’t rocket science, though it seems to escape the notice of most political and social theorists: it would be surprising if groups in the past had not observed the basic rules of human behavior and constructed techniques by which to accomplish desirable goals in spite of lacking the brute force with which to achieve such ends. And it would be anachronistic to suppose that they would have been proto-skeptics otherwise, so we cannot extrapolate anything from their early-adopter stance vis-à-vis social psychology. They could have been very wise in some areas and very foolish in others, but we might do well not to jump to conclusions too quickly as to how they were wise and how they were foolish based on our present circumstances….
In any case, there is no evidence that anybody on the scene today has been possessed of any remnants of such socially based knowledge. Otherwise things would be working out a lot less sloppily than they are.
But it remains as shocking today as it was in 1989 to see the chains of conditioned origination snap taut in so many places in such structurally similar fashion.
Fuller’s book, most of all, tries to understand the irrational career of Rationalist architecture across the Italian colonies, and its outgrowth from the irrationality of Italian colonial policy in the first place…which so goes against any standard-issue Marxist analyses that as she puts it, the only way in which to make sense of it is to examine it as a mixture of “metaphor, fantasy, and ambiguity.” There were economic hopes, nationalist dreams, and the systematic deployment of ambiguity that allowed architects, politicians and planners to ignore self-evident absurdities in favor of visions of an impossible future that became surprisingly plausible.
I am intrigued by the extent to which the recent events across north Africa, and to some extent across the whole Arab world, exemplify the points I have been trying to make for four years now about plausibility structures, the interconnection of economic, psychological, and social forces, and perhaps—perhaps!—levels of insight of those in a position to influence events. For it is certain that some of the organizers in Cairo had pondered whether it was possible to use the technology of social networking and the existing levels of disaffection in several different strata of society to bring about desired results. Elsewhere, the existence of the tipping point and the number of groups able to make productive use of the consequences comes as a complete surprise. The groups are not what anybody expected, and we know nothing of how they came together…in fact, the story thus far in eastern Libya [i.e., as of the second day of March, when I wrote this unrevised note] seems closer to theories of mutual aid than anything else. As in Rebecca Solnit’s recent study of societies confronted with sudden crisis and the breakdown of existing social structures, tonight we improvise.
I do wonder whether certain traditional models for moderating social conflict in day-to-day situations get transmuted in contemporary secular conditions, but I would be simply blathering were I to speculate on such topics.
The different outcomes thus far certainly illustrate the truths that the same forces do work out differently in differently constructed social and political situations. But the surprising thing is that in country after country, forty years of stasis in which nothing at all seemed possible suddenly crumbled, as whole masses of people decided simultaneously that something else seemed possible, and now was the time to make it happen.
I have said many times that this kind of thing isn’t rocket science, though it seems to escape the notice of most political and social theorists: it would be surprising if groups in the past had not observed the basic rules of human behavior and constructed techniques by which to accomplish desirable goals in spite of lacking the brute force with which to achieve such ends. And it would be anachronistic to suppose that they would have been proto-skeptics otherwise, so we cannot extrapolate anything from their early-adopter stance vis-à-vis social psychology. They could have been very wise in some areas and very foolish in others, but we might do well not to jump to conclusions too quickly as to how they were wise and how they were foolish based on our present circumstances….
In any case, there is no evidence that anybody on the scene today has been possessed of any remnants of such socially based knowledge. Otherwise things would be working out a lot less sloppily than they are.
But it remains as shocking today as it was in 1989 to see the chains of conditioned origination snap taut in so many places in such structurally similar fashion.
