I imagine myself standing on the Karl Theodar-Brucke Bridge on the River Neckar that passes through the Rurecht Karl University of Heidelberg. On one side, I see the overwhelming impact of the baroque and renaissance facades of the old university campus established long ago in the Holy Roman Empire and, on the other, I see the portrait of the baroque baron surrounded by the river gods of the Rhine. I see here the confidence and the courage of a race, its piety, justice, agriculture and trade personified by three female figures at the foot of the bridge. As I look beyond the university buildings towards the mountains, the ruins of the Heidelberger Palace standing majestically on the hilltop remind me of the Romantic era that embodied a state of civilisation reflecting a world of light and confidence.
The extraordinary creations of history only convince me to wonder what went wrong in the aesthetics of a civilisation like ours that can fashion the monstrous and brutal Shopping Mall that controls and dominates modern society, or the non-descript architecture of Corbusier that swept the western world in the last century, and more so, our ‘City Beautiful' where you see very little human encounter or the sense of wonder that you experience in ancient cities. The politics of aesthetics is underpinned by the hegemony of consumerism and the overwhelming nature of a Trade Centre or a Burj Khalifa ‘super-scraper', where the super-affluent live, shop and vacation. Needless to say the recently unveiled Dubai monstrosity was built during the global depression when cheap immigrant labour was available at $ 5 a day and in a state whose future depends on the millions of tonnes of ice that is daily melted for air-conditioning resulting in vast emission of carbon.
Let us, for a moment, juxtapose the contemporary shopping mall with a quaint bazaar in a small village called Cheog in Himachal located a few kilometres from where I live. I remember one cold sunny morning in November when we walked down the bazaar that consists of only eight shops. The shopkeepers sat in the sun chatting while we sauntered down the bazaar. A very warm feeling swept over us as we bought some knick-knacks in one shop, some vegetables in another while all the time engaged in a warm tête-à-tête. Opposed to this is the synthetic monoculture of a shopping mall where the artificial becomes ‘more real than the real' where needs are produced and desires managed. Here there are no traditional values of truth or reality, only the play of the outward show.
The current condition of global capitalism brings up the polemics between the apologists of a free market economy and the passionate defence of a more natural living where human values are still respected and appreciated. Undeniably, a village bazaar is more aesthetic than the shopping mall symbolic of the scourge of neo-liberalism combined with an alienating architecture.
Dismantling of public welfare in the name of private enterprise and the brutalisation of the inner city space only provokes a language of resistance — of land, poetry, art, ecology and dignity underpinned by the question: Do we let ourselves be claimed by this affliction or should we consider our existence, in the words of philosopher critic Giorgio Agamben, ‘a possibility or a potentiality' where the act of resistance remains the only human force to counter the decadence of an ugly world proliferating with objects which confer social prestige on consumers? This calamity of unbridled economics can be countered through a celebration of creativity by an act of imagination and a transgression of modern day production that caters to unquenchable consumer fantasy with equal extravagance.
