How to change the world

The title of Slavoj Žižek's latest book is The Year of Dreaming Dangerously, and rightly so. It focuses on 2011, a year that was characterized by a media roller-coaster, with the Arab Spring and the Occupy movement shaking things up pretty much all over the world, from city squares to Twitter. The Slovenian philosopher puts these recent developments in perspective, highlighting their revolutionary potential for a utopian future. Similarly, for what concerns the raging Euro-crisis, Žižek stresses the need for Europe to restore its emancipatory value as a universal idea, instead of indulging in the technocratic violence that is currently destabilizing the whole region.

Such thought-provoking ideas were followed by an invitation to Amsterdam to be the keynote speaker in the yearly Nexus Institute conference, this year ambitiously titled How to Change the World. Unfortunately, Ljubliana's most famous intellectual couldn't make it to the event for health reasons, but a valuable replacement was found in no less than Alain Badiou, another renowned Hegelian materialist whose theory of the Event has much to do with change.

The French philosopher spoke to a dressed-up crowd of more than a thousand people in the historical Stadsschouwburg theatre in Leidseplein. After scaling down both the concepts of "world" and "change", Badiou described the Event as a local interruption in the repetition of the world (e.g. the cycles of capitalism), a rupture through which the Real breaks through, creating a space for possibility and a new world. As quoted in Žižek's book, the French philosopher sees the 2011 protests as flashes of a possible future where new subjects emerge, reaching beyond their previously closed identity (the Occupy Wall Street movement, for example, was able to envision a subject uniting both students and workers). By showing us a sample of such positive Real, the consequences of these events are realizations of the impossible.

From these examples Badiou proceeded to elaborate on other concepts like freedom, satisfaction, and happiness. The former lies in creation, while the second means to be content with the repetition that the Event is aimed at disrupting, and is therefore subjective death. Happiness, instead, comes from being unsatisfied, by becoming a subjective part of the consequences of the local event. Creation doesn't come easy, though, and here the French philosopher calls in the artist as a paradigmatic example of someone that brings something new to the world, paying the price daily through his or her artistic discipline.

Badiou's mention of art as a world-changer is not unexpected, as political imagination has been the object of much debate around the art world as well in the last couple of years. I could make many examples, from the latest Berlin Biennale to projects like SCEPSI, the European School for Social Imagination, and publications like The Populist Imagination, but the list would be endless. However, art is not the only revolutionary act we can accomplish: according to Badiou, falling in love can also change the world.

The keynote speech was followed by two debate sessions, one centred on the crisis of modernity, and another on technology and public engagement, with speakers ranging from political philosophers to best-selling fiction authors and conservative politicians. Unsurprisingly, one of the most crucial knots of the first panel was the failure of the Communist ideal as well as the impasse of modern democracy, which according to Badiou is an illusion and an instrument of power that keeps radical change from happening — namely, the change of capitalist relations.

If the gap between the human kind and its true potential is the scandal for the author of L'Être et l'événément, conservative thinker Roger Scruton blamed atheism for today's fear of judgement and the refusal of the sacred and mortality. Despite not believing in progress, political philosopher Agnes Heller, on the other hand, insisted that some things are right and others are wrong, which makes it impossible to accept the mortality of entire parts of society. In terms of societal change, ad-man Rory Sutherland pointed out that urbanization is a definite threat to the closed identity of rural communities, but also, and quite controversially, that governments — if they want to reach their cities bustling with unsatisfied people — could learn something about communicating social norms from past totalitarian regimes, whose branding was excellent, and spend more on advertising.

Things got more interesting in the second panel. While novelist Margaret Atwood insisted that the environment is the most important thing to safeguard and political philosopher John Gray warned that change is reversible — asking whether women or gay people in liberated Iraq are more or less free than they were under Saddam Hussein — the politics of technology otherwise ruled the stage. Most spectacularly, Internet-sceptic Evgeny Morozov and tech-enthusiast Parag Khanna discussed the latter's concept of "pax technologica" — the notion that, in the future, a multi-polar, global modernization via technology will empower individuals at all latitudes, locally and horizontally. Morozov, as a self-admitted "cynical Eastern European" and author of the best-selling The Net Delusion, argued that the problem of a world where everything works (a satisfied world, if we want to use Badiou's terms) is it doesn't allow imperfection and reality. Later in the conversation, his most effective example was that of Rosa Parks' history-making refusal to move to the back of the bus in segregated America, which would have been neutralized in a dystopian world where buses are able to adjust to people's skin colour (the example is quite extreme, but was brought up in connection to government's tendency to make crime impossible). Morozov's point opened the way to a discussion on the necessity of illegal actions as a test for society's boundaries. Such actions allow society to understand its limits, adjusting them and arguably improving itself.

Not unlike Žižek in his book, the Belarus-born theorist also mentioned the Internet-fueled Occupy movement's wariness of becoming a political party and commit to the type of campaigning that organizations and politicians need to do in order to get their points across to the public. On the other hand, conservative politician and author Rory Stewart expressed frustration with the current distrust in politics and politicians: for him, political engagement is the only compromise that could empower citizens to see some real local change. If people become more involved in local issues and become a better, more informed and demanding public, as a consequence they'll also have better politicians.

This ambitious, sold-out event allowed for a day of intense, stimulating discussion, offering diverse lens with which to interpret the complexity of our present moment, but offered few conclusions. If philosophers, however, tell you that the best you can do is believe in visions from the future, actively participating in public life is all we can do. Nicola Bozzi (@schizocities)