Cultural City Bergen 2000, Bergen Public Library

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by Kjartan Fløgstad

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Dollar Road

The Ultimate Questions

Heads or Tails

Fire and Water

Cockcrow

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Of Kjartan Fløgstad

By Kjartan Fløgstad

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About Kjartan Fløgstad

Excerpt from
Dei ytterste ting IV
(The Ultimate Questions)

The growth of 19th-century industrialism in Europe and North America was accompanied by the establishment of public schools and libraries, postal services, railroads, telegraph lines and public health institutions. To regenerate the work force and enable an increasingly complex society to function, modern industrial states had to build an infrastructure of public services that could counteract and civilize the raw power of money.
In its contemporary - that is, late modern or post-modern phase, capitalism's development is characterized by the fact that information and communication, with their attendant technological attributes, are becoming the most important form of capital.
When information replaces work as the strongest force creating social structure, information becomes, so to speak, the basic form of capital. Until now, developed societies carried out the central information and communication tasks through public systems and services with innocent names such as the power supply, national broadcasting, electric plants, state railroads, telegraph and postal service, to say nothing of the public library.
To the same extent as information becomes the basic form of capital, it follows good capitalist logic to convert these state systems and services to private corporations, which by definition have no purpose but to increase their own earnings. During the last couple of decades this privatization process has been the most important hallmark of new liberalism. And it has had a powerful political breakthrough. Instead of state systems and services, today we have Telenor Conax and Telenor Mobil, Oslo Energy Holding and TV 2,3 and 4. The mathematical formula in Norway is, for example,: NRK 1 + NRK 2 = Oslo 3 + TV 3.
However, experience (in Latin America among other places) also shows that privately financed communication systems have two sides, so in principle they can work both ways. The mechanisms for ideological control are potential mechanisms for ideological opposition.
On the political plane, we see that the information revolution transforms the relationship between city center and outlying districts. Viewed from the perspective of industrial society, it's easy to mistake urbanity for modernity, and technological standards for city life. But not least in our day, the cutting edge of technology often first penetrates the geographical outskirts - something that everyone who knows a little about the oil industry has seen at close range.
Computers, fax machines and the Internet also lead to greater changes in the life of outlying districts than of the city. We who live centrally in Oslo 1,3,8 etc. can meet at the Theater Cafe, borrow a book at the University library (and pick it up after 12 noon the next day, it's true), or send the final contribution in the debate about semiology's products to the VG newspaper editors by taxi. In such situations we are, of course, far less dependent on faxes and cell phones and the Internet than if we lived in Røros or Røst. Technological development, says Hobsbawn in "Age of Extremes", has virtually done away with "the cultural advantages cities have had over rural districts." Under information's capitalism, we all live in the metropolis of language, in a Logopolis, whose center apparently can be either in Aracataca in Colombia, or in Ulvik in Hardanger.
Similarly, we see that whereas the use of automobiles tears apart and strangles the city, it binds together a rural district. In other words, there is much to suggest that classic urban customs, lifestyles and values - to put it grandly: civilization - are threatened by technological development, while rural areas and technology get along well together. The old town in Oslo is damaged more than Nesseby in Finnmark. However, outlying social and geographical districts often face the same problems and have similar interests. (One takes into account, of course, that the people of Finmark have 200 years' more experience with multi-lingual, multi-cultural and multi-ethnic life than the inhabitants of Oslo.)
Thus in the information society, cities can appear to be more endangered sociotopes than outlying districts. Apparently even the most impressive material structures in capitalistic cities can't adequately stop uninhibited razing. Meanwhile, in the social, geographic and esthetic outskirts one finds unchanged ways of life that aren't colonized by an increasingly capitalistic world.
These ways of life certainly needn't be reactionary, anti-modern or post-modern. On the contrary, they can point toward an alternative modernity founded on cultural, linguistic, urban and agricultural diversity, not on capitalism's uniform standardization.

Translated by Nadia Christensen