After the Future. Franco Bifo Berardi

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      During the twentieth century Futurism, in both its Italian and Russian forms, became the leading force of imagination and project, giving birth to the language of commercial advertising (especially the Italian variation) and to the language of political agit-propaganda (the Russian variation). The idea of the future is central in the ideology and energy of the twentieth century, and in many ways it is mixed with the idea of utopia. Notwithstanding the horrors of the century, the utopian imagination never stopped giving new breath to the hope of a progressive future, until the high point of ’68, when the modern promise was supposedly on the brink of fulfilment.

      In the last three decades of the century, the utopian imagination was slowly overturned, and has been replaced by the dystopian imagination. For many reasons, the year 1977 can be seen as a turning point: this was the year when the punk movement exploded, whose cry—“No Future”—was a self-fulfilling prophecy that slowly enveloped the world.

      A new utopia appeared during the last decade of the century that trusted in the future: cyberculture, which has given way to the imagination of a global mind, hyperconnected and infinitely powerful. This last utopia ended in depression, after the sudden shift in perspective that followed the 9/11 event, and it has finally produced a growing system of virtual life and actual death, of virtual knowledge and actual war. The artistic imagination, since that day, seems unable to escape the territory of fear and despair. Will we ever find a path beyond the limits of the Dystopian Kingdom?

      In this book, I want to reconsider the cultural history of the century from this point of view: the mythology of the future. The future is not an obvious concept, but a cultural construction and projection. For the people of the Middle Ages, living in the sphere of a theological culture, perfection was placed in the past, in the time when God created the universe and humankind. Therefore, historical existence takes the shape of the Fall, the abandonment and forgetting of original perfection and unity.

      The rise of the myth of the future is rooted in modern capitalism, in the experience of expansion of the economy and knowledge. The idea that the future will be better than the present is not a natural idea, but the imaginary effect of the peculiarity of the bourgeois production model. Since its beginning, since the discovery of the new continent and the rewriting of the maps of the world, modernity has been defined by an amplification of the very limits of the world, and the peculiarity of capitalist economy resides exactly in the accumulation of the surplus value that results in the constant enhancement of the spheres of material goods and knowledge.

      In the second part of the nineteenth century, and in the first part of the twentieth, the myth of the future reached its peak, becoming something more than an implicit belief: it was a true faith, based on the concept of “progress,” the ideological translation of the reality of economic growth. Political action was reframed in the light of this faith in a progressive future. Liberalism and social democracy, nationalism and communism, and anarchism itself, all the different families of modern political theory share a common certainty: notwithstanding the darkness of the present, the future will be bright.

      In this book I will try to develop the idea that the future is over. As you know, this isn’t a new idea. Born with punk, the slow cancellation of the future got underway in the 1970s and 1980s. Now those bizarre predictions have become true. The idea that the future has disappeared is, of course, rather whimsical—since, as I write these lines, the future hasn’t stopped unfolding.

      But when I say “future,” I am not referring to the direction of time. I am thinking, rather, of the psychological perception, which emerged in the cultural situation of progressive modernity, the cultural expectations that were fabricated during the long period of modern civilization, reaching a peak in the years after the Second World War. Those expectations were shaped in the conceptual frameworks of an ever progressing development, albeit through different methodologies: the Hegelo-Marxist mythology of Aufhebung and founding of the new totality of Communism; the bourgeois mythology of a linear development of welfare and democracy; the technocratic mythology of the all-encompassing power of scientific knowledge; and so on.

      My generation grew up at the peak of this mythological temporalization, and it is very difficult, maybe impossible, to get rid of it, and look at reality without this kind of cultural lens. I’ll never be able to live in accordance with the new reality, no matter how evident, unmistakable, or even dazzling its social planetary trends. These trends seem to be pointing toward the dissipation of the legacy of civilization, based on the philosophy of universal rights.

      The right to life, to equal opportunities for all human beings, is daily denied and trampled on in the global landscape, and Europe is no exception. The first decade of the new century has marked the obliteration of the right to life for a growing number of people, even though economic growth has enhanced the amount of available wealth and widened the consumption of goods. A growing number of people are forced to leave their villages and towns because of war, environmental waste, and famine. They are rejected, marginalized, and simultaneously subjected to a new form of slave exploitation. The massive internment of migrant workers in detention centers disseminated all over the European territory dispels the illusion that the “camp” has been wiped out from the world. Authoritarian racism is everywhere, in the security laws passed by European parliaments, in the aggressiveness of the European white majority, but also in the ethnicization of social conflicts and in Islamist fundamentalism.

      The future that my generation was expecting was based on the unspoken confidence that human beings will never again be treated as Jews were treated during their German nightmare. This assumption is proving to be misleading.

      I want to rewind the past evolution of the future in order to understand when and why it was trampled and drowned.

FUTURISM AND THE REVERSAL OF THE FUTURE

      On Feb 20, 1909 Filippo Tommaso Marinetti published the first Futurist Manifesto, the same year that Henry Ford launched the first assembly line in his automobile factory in Detroit. Both events inaugurated the century that trusted in the future. The assembly line is the technological system that best defines the age of industrial massification. Thanks to it, the mass production of the automobile became possible and the mobilization of social energies was submitted to the goal of the acceleration of labor’s productivity.

      MANIFESTO OF FUTURISM

      Filippo Tommaso Marinetti

      1. We want to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and rashness.

      2. The essential elements of our poetry will be courage, audacity and revolt.

      3. Literature has up to now magnified pensive immobility, ecstasy and slumber. We want to exalt movements of aggression, feverish sleeplessness, the double march, the perilous leap, the slap and the blow with the fist.

      4. We declare that the splendor of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing automobile with its bonnet adorned with great tubes like serpents with explosive breath … a roaring motor car which seems to run on machine-gun fire, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.

      5. We want to sing the man at the wheel, the ideal axis of which crosses the earth, itself hurled along its orbit.

      6. The poet must spend himself with warmth, glamour and prodigality to increase the enthusiastic fervor of the primordial elements.

      7. Beauty exists only in struggle. There is no masterpiece that has not an aggressive character. Poetry must be a violent assault on the forces of the unknown, СКАЧАТЬ