Abstract
Abstract This article describes and analyzes the Expo 2015 in Milan, building on the work of Alf Hornborg on the 'Machine' to discusses material and ideological processes of this mega-project. Hornborg calls attention to the social inequalities enabling the employment of technology in production (not only in the capitalist worldeconomy) and to its cultural underpinnings, among them money fetishism. With mega-events, the geoculture of the capitalist world-economy extols 'growth' and 'development' and celebrates the interstate system, legitimating public expenditures with a media-hyped importance of the event. The cultural force of megaevents obtains social acceptance of the unequal exchanges at their material core. Under Expo 2015's slogan "Feeding the planet, energy for life", agricultural land was destroyed to build a cement platform the size of a small city in a space of unbounded capitalism where labor laws were suspended and fiscal advantages were granted to firms. The Italian state paid for the basic infrastructure, while foreign states (and the corporations present) provided for their own pavilions. Ideologically, Expo 2015 celebrated the capacity of states and the transnational companies to 'technological advances.' Technology was presented as an autonomous force in history, propagating a vision of humanity acting on nature through a 'purified' technology independent of social relations of production. The 'Milan Charter', the Expo's cultural legacy, produced and reproduced the hegemonic geoculture which presents technology as the solution to social problems. Keywords: Expo 2015, mega-events, the Machine, human ecology, Alf Hornborg
Highlights
This article engages with Alf Hornborg's theory of the 'Machine', which highlights the unequal material exchange taking place within the monetary circuit and mystified by technology fetishism, applying it in a case study on the Milan Expo
Hornborg's latest book, Global magic (2016), reveals the function of general-purpose money in masking relationships of cultural or material power, and restates his argument that the Machine is a fetish to which we attribute independence from social relationships – whereas, a machine can only function if these relationships are unequal: The decisive question, in order for it to be rational to replace labor in one part of the world with technologies based on imports of natural resources and embodied labor from other parts of the world, is how labor and resources are priced in the different areas
Alf Hornborg underlines the importance of cultural factors in the acquiescence to, and the acceptance of, the unequal exchanges revealed by a thermodynamic analysis of the material and energy flows between core and periphery of the world-system
Summary
This article engages with Alf Hornborg's theory of the 'Machine', which highlights the unequal material exchange taking place within the monetary circuit and mystified by technology fetishism, applying it in a case study on the Milan Expo. On offer at a mega-event may be a special, or popular, activity – examples are the Olympic Games, FIFA soccer cups, important anniversary celebrations (e.g. the Colombiadi/Celebrazioni Colombiane in Genoa and Seville for the 500th anniversary of the European discovery of the Americas, and the 150th anniversary of the unification of Italy in Turin), and Universal Expositions – called Expos – organized around a particular theme. These exhibit the 'power of the machine', on display for everyone to admire. The 2015 Milan Expo had its gates open for only six months, and it is over, its cultural importance is certainly not restricted to that period, not least because of its 20 million attendees and its media presence
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