Creative Destruction

The other night I was walking around the intersection of Rama 9 and Ratchadaphisek. Above looms a massive façade, stretching with what looks like blocks down the busy road. It blinks with multi-colored lights, on again and off again, waving like auroras.

The same ad copy greets me every few meters as I walk down the road:

RAMA 9
NEW CBD
LOCATION IS WEALTH FOR THE NEW GENERATION

All under a photo of a handsome, pale, Pan-Asian male in a cardigan, sipping a coffee in his bamboo-floor condo, fawning over his equally handsome, pale, Pan-Asian child.

To build this new CBD, the clearances have begun. When urbanists and geographers make the claim that Bangkok mirrors Los Angeles, this is the sort of place they're thinking of-- isolated towers separated by vast parking lots, 25th story Japanese-fusion restaurants and rooftop terrace bars, palm trees silhouetted against a golden sunset.

You are recognizably in a place in transition. Entire neighborhoods seem to have been demolished wholesale, leaving vast tracts of blasted flatland, a few houses remaining here and there, lonely as prairie homesteads, separated by fields of rutted soil. The new skyline hasn't been built yet. Now there is only wasteland, and the cranes that hang overhead like the slender legs of an enormous arachnid.

I'm reminded of Baudelaire in his Paris Spleen. Mass destruction becomes the essence of modernity. During the Haussmannization of Paris, the broad, military boulevards (beautiful, yes, but could there be a more totalitarian mode of building? "Champ de Mars"-- how fascist is that?) cut across in ignorance of the old city. On the edge of the new boulevards, the rag-dressed residents of the old Medieval slums stare into new cafes.

I suppose the same sentiments were expressed by Marx when he said that "all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind."

On the right, Joseph Schumpeter famously claimed that "this process of creative destruction is the essential fact about capitalism. It is what capitalism consists in and what every capitalist concern has got to live in."

Now, a great many neoliberal economists will provide arguments about why this is a good thing, invoking the principle of lower prices thanks to greater efficiency and the axiom of economic liberalization preceding political liberalization, meanwhile invoking the twin bugbears of Mao and Stalin as the sole alternative option. But I have to conclude that these are mere bromides, poorly supported by empirical evidence and, on a more philosophical level, ultimately and deeply inhumane apologias delivered by the apparatchiks of Empire.

In the fields around Rama 9, we don't see what was destroyed-- we only see an emptiness, a cipher. Perhaps we see Baudelaire's street children begging at streetside bars in Sukhumvit 11, but this particular strip is a massive void.

And yet there is something so rapturous about it-- the flicker of distant lights, the lunar emptiness, the ice-blue glow of sodium vapor bulbs, the rush of oncoming traffic.

Because, despite all of the claims about postmodernity, we are still aching to be moderns. We don't want to give up on the thrill of the present, the near-sexual infatuation with the now.

The result is a dissonance, a raw ecstasy running headlong into rational empathy. Recognizing this dissonance, for me at least, tends to result in an especially bleak view of humanity's prospects.

The writer Marshall Berman claimed that the spirit of modernism was to embrace the uncertainty and contradiction of contemporary life, to thrive on the thrill of this modern moment, to see it for all its myriad possibilities and potentials. It's a lovely idea, and I'd like to embrace it, but I'm not so sure, and most certainly not as hopeful.

But I suppose that's my strategy at the end of the day. I continued walking down the road until I came to the bar where my friends were and ordered a vodka-tonic. And the next day I sat down at the coffee shop and started to write the above paragraphs.