Decodificare il presente, raccontare il futuro
TREDICESIMO-PIANO
dom 10 aprile 2016
UNDER THE SNOW
«The snow does not settle everywhere.»
The snow does not settle everywhere.
Two geometric figures, two rhomboids. A woman and a boy smiling, in an interior. A fireman extinguishes a fire without fear. Everything else is snow. A uniform blanket, lying on the surface. But the two figures, diamond-shaped, resisting its grasp.
Those two colour images, are watercolours. The faces of the woman and the boy, the wooden staircase behind their shoulders. And the suit of the fireman, and the fire. And even the snow, even the white is made of pigments diluted in water.
I pass my finger over it, delicately. I can do it. The watercolour is mine. One of the series “Under the Snow” by Illja Josypovyč Kabakov. I bought it. If I lend it to a museum, the label would say “Private collection”. There would not be written my name, Derek Morgan.
I am not an expert on conceptual art, not a contemplative.
Always in the shadows and without frenzy, but I am always a man of action. I’m a man who pulls the strings, a manipulator, the general of an invisible line-up. Action. Yet the way the snow lays, this extraordinary effect, I wanted it to belong to me.
I wanted to pass my finger over it, like this. On this leather armchair, with sleeves rolled up and tie loosened. To reflect, to pursue thoughts, and pass my finger over it.
Kabakov’s work gives a sense of absolute stillness. Everything is crystallized. As if the properties of the snow had prevailed on the technique of watercolour. The uniformity of the snow, the uniformity of the world. This is also why I like that it is mine.
The optical illusion of time stood still. An ice age fixing the present state of things, the frozen instant. That’s what makes the Devils. Immobility can determine the future. Erase any anomalies and ensure the summit owner of a social pyramid by ice walls, unscalable. That’s what we do.
On my right, the white stretches over everything possible. To travel the sky by aeroplane reminds me that even the clouds, even they are gathering everywhere uniformly.
A white hug that seems to stop space, time: like the watercolour under my finger, like beyond the glass on my right. But pieces of land emerge, like the face of the woman and the boy, like the confident expression of the fireman. The mass accumulates in some places, for the most part, but there are always other parts where the white gloves can’t reach. No snowfall can really erase the profile of the landscape. It’s like in this tangle of clouds, that part to take something from the earth. A few holes that are enough to glimpse the view. And these holes are the effects of Quantitative easing on the real economy.
The smile of the woman and the boy, in the watercolour.
The European consumer inflation still in negative territory. That’s what we can see, under the white of the snow. A plot of bare land.
And in the United States jump ancient laws of economics: unemployment falls but wages remain compressed. And it is as if I see this, under the white of the clouds.
The uniform of the fireman. Japan on the brink of recession: the Country that has printed more than all others ends up with the GDP of less than 1,2 in the second quarter and an obligation for the Bank of Japan to do another round. Still stimulated, new tricks, endless deceit. When I think about the scenes of some films on finance, when I see extremely ambitious traders give in to snorting cocaine, it makes me laugh. The drug isn’t the white powder. The real drug is the rolled up note.
Here, the snow all around cannot prevent this recognition. The spine of a mountain range, a vertical rift on the ground. The social turmoil in Europe: executives who run half-naked to avoid being lynched, in the Country where the workers occupied factories, once, and in a Capital of revolutions where the sky was assaulted and the students raised barricades. Here it is, a snippet between these accumulations of vapours.
The image of that executive on the run from being lynched, someone wrote that has the power to express the anger of men and women who risk their jobs. But no, there is no power in such images. Quite the opposite. It is easy to confuse anger with despair, violence and the political use of force. I know it well.
The plane travels through space and time. I leave kilometres and hours behind me, I consign to the past the meeting to ratify the TTIP. Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. The biggest ever trade agreement. Not just that. One of the standards of the new global governance.
“New World Order” we said at the beginning of the nineties. To ensure that order we used armies and fighter-bombers. This time it is different.
This time the wars guarantee the superiority of the West and we, to advance, use other tools. Control is the key. Total control, coming down to cover the world like the snow of this watercolour.
Yet no monetary policy can really wrap around everything, in the coils of its control.
QE is a device: it stabilises the political financial system, defending annuities. The governance of the system is subject to this device. When austerity destroys local economic autonomy, QE intervenes to inject liquidity to ensure the survival of the system. I rhythmically caress Kabakov’s painting. QE reorganises the governance of the countries that benefit from it, establishing a relationship of absolute dependence. It has a constituent power, where it requires the executive to legislate to respect the decrees. It has a power of destitution, where by it can cancel any local law that will impede implementation.
QE is a kind of global financial constitution, which every country must follow. However, no one has voted. And a few of us wrote it, marking the invisible balance of power in the West. Like any establishment, it has its articles: reduction of labour to the dependent variable, reduction of salary, destruction of welfare, deflation and stagnation. It cuts the cost of state debt, eliminating the yields on government bonds, and thus evens out the debt of the beneficiary countries.
QE is an instrument of control, and must remain in our hands.
Those economists who speak of QE for the multitudes are fantasising, they hope to eliminate banking intermediation. Fantasies. They would jeopardise the safety of the device. The roll of the aeroplane responds to slight turbulence.
The liquidity must be checked at every movement, and must be used where it is needed. The global pension system needs the support of annuities, such as the elderly need the walking stick. The ageing population and the increasing scarcity of wage labour lead, inevitably, to the bankruptcy of all the social security systems. Only manipulating the revenues and the growth in stock prices, only this can guarantee its survival.
That is the basis of QE: the welfare of the Fordist era is dead, there is the need to inject liquidity to define a new system. A transition. And if money is a language, then the QE is our message of peace. A message that says: if the governance is unstable open contradictions. We need to insert ourselves to recompose it, before the wedge of conflict and social forces that preach the change plant themselves.
The snow does not settle everywhere, unfortunately. We must move from revolutionary, unfortunately, to be the first to arrive on the fault that is opening. You have to sterilise the possibility of transformation.
The future must not exist. Beyond the glass, through a hole in compact white, you see that we are flying over the snowy peaks of a mountain. Someone said that in the future we’re all high and happy, and that is precisely why the future always fails. Precisely for this reason it can not be the happy place which they try to transform. And there can be no assault on the sky, when the sky is of the Devils.
Above the snow, above the clouds, the aircraft makes a turn. The watercolour tilts in my hands. Through time and space, in the highest.
Amen.
«The snow does not settle everywhere.»
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