Roman holiday

Great cities of Europe are marked by characteristics. Some of them — like London — bear a colonial imprint, and sport a no-nonsense attitude. Some — like Paris — still dream on in imperial reverie. While others — like Rome —  manifest nostalgia for a majestic past. Rome can only live and die in preserving its ruins. Yet, fate spares none of the cities. If Athens evinces signs of struggle due to severe indebtedness, Rome refuses to accept its indebtedness, and that the city has nothing to offer the world except its beautifully preserved ruins reminiscent of melancholia of — not the past — but the present. The dilapidated rich luxurious villas and fountains, the fine shoes, gowns, hats, and beards — and the rich aroma of food served with exquisite Italian wine in restaurants till the dead hours of night, cannot conceal the bankruptcy of Rome. It cannot hide its vacant treasury battered from massive loans, resource deficit, and the stagnant economy. The Italian people are demoralised today.

Here’s the question usually asked: Where is the Left? Well, the Left is dead. Antonio Gramsci lives on only among scholars. The autonomista movement of the workers is fragmented into factional quarrels. Palmiro Togliatti — a myth — is revisited over and over again. Groups of professional agitators are moving from one site of demonstration to another. Meanwhile deserters from the old Left —  Giorgio Napolitano for instance — the longest serving President in the history of the Italian Republic — now occupies an important position in the government. He cosies up to the mandarins of Brussels and the European banks for more money and more money, so that Italy can live in the fading charm of melancholia. It is then hardly a wonder that President Napolitano has decided to appoint former EU commissioner, Mario Monti, as a senator for life. Citing age, Napolitano resigned on January 14, 2015. However, while bureaucrats run the government, palace intrigues continue, 
Rome can thus spend its days and nights in this painful and perhaps pleasurable experience of sinking. Each tranche of loan handed over to Rome is matched by the drowning of migrants desperately trying to reach Italy, from across the Mediterranean. The European border security system, Frontex, never had it so good. The migrants either drown or are intercepted by authorities. Rome’s protracted end is marked by indifference, melancholia, indebtedness, empty treasury while it battles the arrival of outsiders as an invasion of barbarians. 

While Italy’s famous universities in Bologna, Padua, Florence, Venice, Bari, Siena, and Naples — uncared for — wear a decrepit look, her famous ecclesiastical scholars, theologians, grammarians, and philosophers, working with ancient and medieval texts, surely must wonder: what is happening to time? In this case the time of decline and misery that does not seem to end.  How is one to understand the caprice and the vagaries of time that presents to the world a confident China and a melancholic self- defeated Rome? 

Time is one of the mysterious properties of history, more so of contemporary history. The West has known the time of crisis only in the form of war and violence within. Otherwise even if there is crisis, time does not appear as one of crisis, which is why Romans could think of perpetual pleasure, and an ever-lasting epicurean mode of life. In contrast, our post-colonial life is spent moving from one crisis to another. Crisis and crisis management seem to be the principal mode of colonial governance and political life in general. Possibly, this remains true also of the post-colonial life. Compare India with Italy — and you find people in India are aware that the country is passing through a crisis; that the contemporary time is crisis-ridden and only the future can ensure a life free of crisis. 

Therefore, only in dreams do Indians imagine a future of pleasure and peace. One may argue that the post-colonial sensitivity about time is different from the modern capitalist ideas of time, which knows how to commercialise the long gone past, in a way where the present, past, and future — are collapsed in an ethos of hedonistic contemporaneity.

Yet, this collapsing of time in the framework of a hedonistic contemporaneity may not be the only feature of the consumerist West. There may be something in the framework of crisis that enforces a revolution in our sense of the time. The Italian crisis, like the Greek and the Spanish crisis, may be a framework of multiple temporalities. As Greece shows, crisis may be speeding up time, events, confrontations, and collisions. The time of crisis in Italy may also be a crisis of her own notion of time. 

According to the Italian National Institute of Statistics, the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in Italy stagnated in the fourth quarter of 2014 over the previous quarter. The GDP growth rate averaged 0.61 per cent from 1960 until 2014, reaching an all time high of 6 per cent in the first quarter of 1970 and a record low of -3.50 percent in the first quarter of 2009. Given therefore this stagnation and indebtedness, Rome should have felt the tremors of crisis. But no, the Roman holiday continues. The last tango in Rome will perhaps never end. 

What is this feature of a neo-liberal capitalism that can supply the entire population the opium of consumerism, where the entire intellectual class is bought over to the pleasures of dream, reverie, and the carnal sensations of existence? What is this system that, drawing on the surplus of social labour of the huge migrant population — Bangladeshi, Pakistani, and Indian labourers from the Meghreb land — builds this world of pleasure? What is this aesthetic that allows the seamless incorporation of the ruined past of ancient Rome and medieval Papacy into the modern entertainment industry of our time? Whatever may be the answer of political economy, it is clear that the time in which the migrant labour lives in Rome and the time in which the Roman aristocrats and the political class live, are two different times. 

Even within Rome there are different time zones. Besides the one alluded to here, the occupy movement continues sporadically in this city, spawning the anxious question — how long should the occupy movement continue? In Spain they ask, how many more cantons and towns must be occupied before being able to throw out these entertaining buffoons and members of the leisure class.

The author is Director, Calcutta Research Group