Dissolution 1 (The end of the societies)
© Ivan Cangelosi, 2016
190X80 cm
Ink on paper
Technique – Handwriting of the essay of Alain Touraine – Original language (pages 1-470)
Category– Society/Politics
In 2008, in Vienna, seized by a creative fury that often marks the beginning of any artist, I made a sketch depicting some flying anthropomorphic figures which, at the mercy of the flow of time and life, dispersed themselves in different directions, intersecting each other .
I was in a Café and through the large window I watched the incessant comings and goings of people along a very busy pedestrian street. That scene made me rise in the mind a thought. I wondered: where are they all going? Do they know where they’re going or not? Absurd thought, I know, but that’s what, at that time, went through my mind. Thinking about this, I started to draw. I wanted to depict that thought of mine and the result came out through quick gestures and in a few minutes. That strange question I asked myself by observing people, that “Do they know where they’re going?”, was the start of a broader reflection on human life in today’s society and on the awareness or, better said, on the ability to master his actions. The word that most of all continued to spin in my head was that of bewilderment; a concept that I tied to a feeling I had since a long time, and that concerned the progressive loss of traditional points of reference, in particular “ family” and “State”. It was all fault of the globalization and of the financial markets, I told myself. The first cancelled cultural identities; the seconds, undermined the concept of society, as we intended it up to 30 years ago, by subtracting capital for productive and social purposes. In between there was the State and its institutions, no longer able to foresee, to plan, to ensure health and safety. No longer able, in other words, to exercise its sovereignty and to make policy.
To a gradual but steady loss of states’ sovereign power, it was corresponding, in my opinion, the reverse process of dissolution of the social contract and the return to a contemporary form of anarchy characterized be the law of the jungle. And it is exactly this disintegration process, which is an indirect and unintended consequence of the globalization, which put anguish.
Not knowing any literary text, novel or essay, which could make specific reference to these speculations, I put the drawing aside and I dedicated myself to other projects. Till when, in 2015, I came across an essay entitled, needless to say, “The end of society” by French sociologist Alain Touraine (Alain Touraine – La fin des sociétés, ed. Seuil, 2013). Alain Touraine summarized the main ideas of his essay in an interview to Fabio Gambaro of the newspaper “La Repubblica” in 2013 (note 1).
To conclude: anguish, anxiety, disorientation, disintegration, despair, anarchy. These are the concepts and feelings that I have tried to express with this work (to be followed by a second entitled “Dissolution 2”) realized through the handwriting of the essay entitled “La fin des Sociétés” of the French sociologist Alain Touraine.