After the Future. Franco Bifo Berardi

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СКАЧАТЬ the inability to touch and to be touched. In the film Me and You and Everyone We Know, Miranda July tells the story of a video-artist who falls in love with a young man and of the difficulty of translating emotion into words and words into touch. Language is severed from affectivity. Language and sex diverge in everyday life. Sex is talked about everywhere, but sex never speaks. Pills accelerate erections because the time for caresses is limited.

      A film by Jia Zhang-Ke, entitled Still Life and produced in Hong Kong in 2006, shows devastation unfolding. This film is extraordinarily beautiful and tells a simple story, with the background of a sad, desolate and devastated China, as both its scenery and its soul. The predominant color is a rotten, greyish, violet green. Huo Sanming returns to his place of birth in the hope of finding his wife and daughter, whom he had left years earlier to go and find work in a distant northern mine. His village, along the riverbank of the Yangtze, no longer exists. The construction of the Three Gorges Dam had erased many villages. Houses, people, and streets were covered by water. As the building of the dam proceeds, the destruction of villages continues and the water keeps rising. Huo Sanming arrives in this scenario of devastation and rising water and is unable to find his wife and daughter; so his search begins. He looks for them as groups of workers armed with their picks take walls down, as explosives demolish buildings in the urban center. After long searches, he finally finds his wife, she has aged and been sold by her brother to another man. They meet in the rooms of a building as it’s being demolished and talk about their daughter in whispers, with their heads down, against an alien architecture of bricks and iron arrayed against a shit-colored sky. In the last scene of Still Life, a tightrope walker walks on a rope from the roof of a house toward nothingness, against a background that recalls the dark surrealism of Dali’s bitter canvases. Still life is a lyrical account of Chinese capitalism, acted inside out, from the standpoint of submerged life.

      In The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen (2001) speaks of psychopharmacological adjustments as the corrections a humanity devastated by depression and anxiety uses to adjust to an existence of mandatory feigned happiness. Corrections are the adjustments to a volatile stock market to avoid losing private pension fund investments that might suddenly disappear. Franzen recounts the old age of a father and mother from the Midwest who have gone nuts as a result of decades of hyperlabor and conformism. Corrections are small and unstoppable slides toward the point of shutting down, the horror of old age in the civilization of competition; the horror of sexuality in the world of puritan efficiency.

      Franzen digs deep into the folds of the American psyche and describes in minute detail the pulpifaction of the American brain: the depression and dementia resulting from a prolonged exposure to the psychic bombardment of stress from work; apathy, paranoia, puritan hypocrisy, and the pharmaceutical industry around them; the psychic unmaking of men encapsulated in the claustrophobic shell of economic hyperprotectionism; the infantilism of people who pretend to believe, or perhaps really believe, in the fulsome Christmas fairy tale of compassionately liberal cruelty. By the end of the long awaited Christmas dinner, as the psychopathic family happily gathers together, the father tries to commit suicide by shooting himself in the mouth. He isn’t successful.

      Yakizakana no Uta, an animated film by Yusuke Sakamoto, starts with a fish in cellophane wrapping on a supermarket shelf. A boy grabs it and takes it to the till; he pays, leaves, puts it in the bicycle basket and cycles home. “Good morning Mr Student, I’m very happy to be with you. Don’t worry, I’m not a fish who complains,” the fish says while the student briskly pedals home. “It’s nice to make the acquaintance of a human being. You are extraordinary beings; you are almost the masters of the universe. Unfortunately you are not always peaceful, I would like to live in a peaceful world where everyone loves one another and even fish and humans shake hands. Oh it’s so nice to see the sunset, I like it ever so much,” the fish becomes emotional and jumps in the cellophane bag inside the basket. “I can hear the sound of a stream.… I love the sound of streams, it reminds me of something from my childhood.”

      When they get home the boy unpacks the fish and puts it on a plate, throws a little salt on it, as the fish gets excited and says “Ah! I like salt very much, it reminds me of something.” The boy puts it on the grill in the oven and turns the knob. The fish keeps chatting: “Oh Mr Student it’s nice here, I can see a light down there … I feel hot … hot …” until its voice becomes hesitant. It starts singing a song, more and more feebly and disconnectedly, like the computer Hal in 2001: A Space Odyssey as his wires are unplugged.

      Yakizakana no Uta was perhaps the most harrowing animated film I saw in June 2006 at the Caixa Forum of Barcelona, during the Historias animadas festival. Yet I perceived a common tone running through all of the works presented at the festival: one of ironic cynicism, if you’ll allow me this expression. Place in Time by Miguel Soares recounts millions of years from the standpoint of an improbable bug, an organic insect, as the world changes around it. Animales de compañia by Ruth Gomez uses ferocious images to tell the story of a generation of well dressed cannibals, young beasts in ties; they run and run to avoid being caught by fellows, colleagues, friends, and lovers who wound, kill, and eat them as soon as they fall, with terrified smiles and dilated eyes, into their grip.

      This art is no denunciation. The terms “denunciation” and “engagement” no longer have meaning when you are a fish getting ready to be cooked. The art of the twenty-first century no longer has that kind of energy, even though it keeps using expressions from the 1900s, perhaps out of modesty, perhaps because it’s scared of its own truth. Artists no longer search for a rupture, and how could they? They seek a path that leads to a state of equilibrium between irony and cynicism, that allows them to delay the execution, at least for a moment. All energy has moved to the war front. Artistic sensibility registers this shift and is incapable of opposing it. Is art simply postponement of the holocaust?

END OF THE FUTURE

      The publication of the Club of Rome’s book, The Limits to Growth, in 1972, by Donella Meadows, Dennis Meadows, Jorgen Randers, and William Behrens, marked an important step in the reversal of the progressive vision of the future. Although harshly criticized by many economists at the time, the book announced the surfacing of a consciousness of exhaustibility.

      Exhaustion plays no role in the imagination of modernity, and remains unthinkable in the first part of the century that trusted in the future. But in the 1970s, underground cultural currents started to signal the new horizon of exhaustion.

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