After the Future. Franco Bifo Berardi

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СКАЧАТЬ underground resources, to occupy every visible spot with the products of technical reproduction. As long as spatial colonization was underway, as long as the external machine headed toward new territories, a future was conceivable, because the future is not only a dimension of time, but also of space. The future is the space we do not yet know; we have yet to discover and exploit it. Now that every inch of the planet has been colonized, the colonization of the temporal dimension has began, i.e., the colonization of mind, of perception, of life. Thus begins the century with no future.

      The question of the relationship between an unlimited expansion of cyberspace and the limits of cybertime opens up here. Being the virtual intersection of the projections generated by countless users, cyberspace is unlimited and in a process of continuous expansion. Cybertime, the ability of social attention to process information in time, is organic, cultural, and emotional, therefore anything but unlimited. Subjected to the infinite acceleration of infostimuli, the mind reacts with either panic or desensitization. The concept of sensibility, and the different but related concept of sensitivity, are crucial here. Sensitivity is the ability of the human senses to process information; sensibility is the faculty that makes empathic understanding possible, the ability to comprehend what words cannot say, the power to interpret a continuum of non-discrete elements, nonverbal signs, and the flows of empathy. This faculty, which enables humans to understand ambiguous messages in the context of relationships, might now be disappearing. We are currently witnessing the development of a generation of human beings lacking competence in sensibility, the ability to empathically understand the other and decode signs that are not codified in a binary system.

      When the punks cried “No Future,” at the turning point of 1977, it seemed like a paradox that couldn’t be taken too seriously. Actually, it was the announcement of something quite important: the perception of the future was changing. The future is not a natural dimension of the mind. It is a modality of projection and imagination, a feature of expectation and attention, and its modalities and features change with the changing of cultures. Futurism is the artistic movement that embodies and asserts the accomplished modernity of the future. The movement called Futurism announces what is most essential in the twentieth century because this century is pervaded by a religious belief in the future. We don’t believe in the future in the same way. Of course, we know that a time after the present is going to come, but we don’t expect that it will fulfill the promises of the present.

      The Futurists—and the moderns in general—thought that the future is reliable and trustworthy. In the first part of the century, fascists and communists and the supporters of democracy held very different ideas, and followed divergent methods, but all of them shared the belief that the future will be bright, no matter how hard the present. Our postfuturist mood is based on the consciousness that the future is not going to be bright, or at least we doubt that the future means progress.

      Modernity started with the reversal of the theocratic vision of time as a Fall and a distancing from the City of God. Moderns are those who live time as the sphere of a progress toward perfection, or at least toward improvement, enrichment, and rightness. Since the turning point of the century that trusted in the future—which I like to place in 1977—humankind has abandoned this illusion. The insurgents of ’68 believed that they were fulfilling the modern Hegelian utopia of the becoming-true of thought, the Marcusean fusion of reason and reality. But the integration of reality and reason (embedded in social knowledge, information, and technology) turned history into a code-generated world. Terror and Code took over the social relationship and utopia went dystopic. The century that trusted in the future could be described as the systematic reversal of utopia into dystopia. Futurism chanted the utopia of technique, speed, and energy, but the result was Fascism in Italy and totalitarian Communism in Russia.

THE MEDIA UTOPIA OF THE AVANT-GARDE

      Avant-garde is a word that comes from a military lexicon. Both Russian and Italian Futurisms have a military character and military conceptions of cultural action. But the word avant-garde is also linked to the concept of utopia, as it implies the opening and prefiguration of a possible historical future.

      Neruda speaks of utopia in terms of an horizon. We walk and see the horizon, and in that direction we head. Although the horizon is shifting further and further and we can never reach it, looking at it gives sense to our walking. Utopia is like the horizon. The etymology of the word implies that utopia can never be brought into existence, but the history of the twentieth century avant-garde tells a different story. Generally, utopia has been realized, although in an inverted sense: the libertarian utopias of the century have generally given birth to totalitarian regimes. The utopia of the machine, nurtured by Italian Futurism, gave birth to the overproduction of cars and to the alienated production form of the assembly line. The communitarian utopia gave birth to the reality of nationalism and fascism. The utopia of Russian Futurism met the totalitarian violence of Stalinism.

      Then, at the end of the century that trusted in the future, utopia gives birth to the kingdom of dystopia. In the first decades of the century, machines for the amplification and diffusion of the voice were an indispensable tool for the creation of authoritarian power. Both democratic and totalitarian regimes based the creation of consensus on the new electric technologies of communication (loudspeaker, radio, and cinema), giving leaders the possibility to fill huge urban places with crowds of followers, and to bring together wide territories and distant populations. Futurism experimented with and anticipated this utilization of the media. The biographies of artists like Marinetti, Russolo, Cangiullo, Depero and many other Italian Futurists attest to this anticipation. Emphasizing electricity as the universal medium, Futurism can be viewed as the premonition of the ultimate utopia, cyberculture, emerging in the last two decades of the century.

      Paul Valéry writes somewhere that, in the future, the citizens of the world will be able to receive information directly in their houses, like water that comes out of the tap. The universal flow of communication was seen as the actualization of the ideal human universality. The “wireless imagination” that Marinetti speaks of is the origin of the network of technique, knowledge and sensibility that, over the course of the century, has joined the planet, turning it into an all-pervading “Global Mind,” as Kevin Kelly (1994) calls it in the book Out of Control.

      Futurism’s contribution to the development of media sensibility is significant. The visual experiments of French pointillism and divisionism at the end of the nineteenth century had opened the way to cinematic technique and perception. In those years, when cinema was beginning its development, Balla’s and Boccioni’s works tried to experiment with visual techniques that would create a sense of movement in the motionless framework of the painting.

      Henri Bergson says that cinema demonstrates a close relationship between consciousness and the technical extroversion of movement in time. For the first time in human history, cinema makes possible the re-actualization of an action that happened in the past, and gives us the possibility of coming back to the future when future has become past. In 1912, Delaunay, a pupil of Bergson, wrote in a letter to the Italian Futurists: “Your art has velocity as expression and the cinema as a tool.” The Manifesto tecnico della pittura futurista [Futurist Painting: Technical Manifesto], written in 1910 and signed by Boccioni, Balla, Carrà, Severini, and Russolo (1970, 27), proclaims the idea of dynamism: “The gesture which we would reproduce on canvas shall no longer be a fixed moment in universal dynamism. It shall simply be the dynamic sensation itself.”

      Futurist dynamism wants to infuse painting with the perception of temporal progression, as we can see in Balla’s painting Signorina con cagnolino, and in Boccioni’s Stati d’animo. Futurist innovation exploits the rhythm of technomedia innovation: photography, cinema, radio. Cubo-Futurist painters try to capture the dynamic of movement by simultaneously presenting different sides of the object, anticipating the sensibility of cinema and television. Velimir Khlebnikov and Aleksei Kruchenykh sing the praises of radio as the medium СКАЧАТЬ