This Crisis Is The Spectacle: Where Is The Real

This crisis is the spectacle: where is the real? – Alain Badiou

This makes a very interesting and enlightening read for me. I can relate some of the issues it addresses to some of my own indulgencies and what the impact of such indulgencies might mean on a global scale. I do not have a mortgage as I am currently in the cadre of people Badiou describes as ‘on such low incomes – or – non incomes.’

But the indulgencies I mean are things I would not have considered having when I still lived in Nigeria. I have lived here for nine years and it is difficult to even point them out. The boundaries between ‘need’ and ‘want’ have been voraciously eroded in that time and in some way or another, I know I now I feed the system.

It is not my intension to set Nigeria (or any other African country, hell any country in the world in the same league!) on a higher platform for getting priorities right (she cannot get it more wrong!), or blame developed countries for making better provisions for their populace. Most of her population’s ability to make do with the least of resources and infrastructure stem out of the governments’ years of shocking indifference to its subjects’ plight. Nonetheless in juxtaposition to the standard of life here in the UK, it is easy to see how those boundaries between what is really important and what is ‘luxury’ become eroded, blurring peoples prudency and consequently leaving them exposed to the predatory exploits of the capitalist.

However in our current predicament, where we have all been so anesthetized by the ‘system’, I welcome Badiou’s crucial wake up call. He very cleverly packed in a relatively short article a bit of background information to educate the less conversant, makes a pertinent comparison of the dire situation we find ourselves to something everyone can identify with – the cinema, offers recommendations as to how we may start to address the afflictions of this financial crisis in the short term and the deal with the greater brutality of capitalism and its devices in the long term.

The same force (capitalism) may be at work in Nigeria or other third world countries of the same genre where the most basic amenities are so few and far between which is aimed at creating a mad frenzy when they are briefly made available at much higher prices. This undoubtedly generates huge profits for the perpetrators. I think either way, Badiou’s recommendations for both political and ideological rethinking caters strongly for both sides of the coin and remains pertinent.