After the Future. Franco Bifo Berardi

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СКАЧАТЬ the evolution of the media, after proclaiming the advent of universal communication and wireless imagination, in the second half of the century the avant-garde will witness the conversion of the media into tools of domination over the collective mind. But the ambiguity is there from the beginning.

      In 1921, Khlebnikov (1987, 392–96) wrote an amazing paper entitled “The Radio of the Future.” In it you’ll find everything and its contrary. It evokes the exhilarating adventure of communication that spreads all over the planet, joining and connecting distant villages and communities, bringing words and images, and enlightening every corner of the world. But in the same words and in the same tones you can feel the prophecy of totalitarian control, of centralized state domination which annihilates freedom. Utopia and dystopia come out from Khlebnikov’s imagination of the radio, which is simultaneously the irradiating light of love and knowledge, and the voice of almighty power.

      In the country of Guglielmo Marconi, Futurism translates the spirit of the new medium through the idea of wireless imagination, and Khlebnikov, in the newborn Soviet Republic, sings the praises of the irradiating medium. In Russia, these are the years of civil war and massive scarcity and starvation, but the enlightened and naive spirit of the Futurist poet wandered beyond the fog and the clouds and saw the bright future of the media. The radio becomes, in Khlebnikov’s words, a gigantic screen in the central plaza of every city and village, where the people can receive news and suggestions and lessons and medical instructions. In this visionary text, Khlebnikov is clearly foreseeing what we today call the Internet, the infinite connection of places without a place. And his imagination is simultaneously wildly libertarian and despondently totalitarian. His radio broadcasts colors and images thanks to a system of mirrors reflecting what is happening in a distant place. But the flow of images and words, disseminated everywhere in the country and received by the web of radio-screens, comes from a central source: the Supreme Soviet of Sciences, broadcasting every day to all the schools and villages. Khlebnikov foretells a medium that we today call television. The history of the twentieth century may be described as the struggle between the broadcast and the web, between the centralized medium of television and the proliferating medium of the Internet. The two models obviously intermingle and interact, though their philosophies are clearly distinguishable as the utopia and dystopia of the mediascape. But in the imagination of the Futurist King of the Universe (as Khlebnikov named himself) the two are united in the same nightmare-dream.

ZAUM AND TECHNOMAYA

      Khlebnikov’s poetics can be viewed as a utopian and anticipatory appreciation of the new reality of language in the age of media tech. He was the prophet of late-century cyberculture, and the utopian thinker of the mix of technology, transmentality, and psychedelics. He created the language of “Zaum,” transmental emotional language, referring to the ability to transfer meanings without the need for any conventional linguistic symbols.

      This issue was seen clearly by the Symbolist poets. Since the end of the nineteenth century, Symbolist poetics tried to overcome linguistic limits to interpersonal comprehension and looked for a form of communication freed from semantic convention. The Symbolist poetical school started from the notion of transmental language. Mallarmé sought a poetics that could transmit emotion rather than meaning. His concept of emotion should not be understood in any romantic or decadent sense. As he wrote in a letter to Cazalis in 1864, Symbolism is “une poétique trés nouvelle, qui peut peindre non la chose mais l’effet qu’elle produit.” To paint, he says, not the thing, but the effect produced in the mind of the person receiving the message. His intention has little to do with any (late) romantic aura: the emotional effect Mallarmé is talking about is the transmission of mental states. Color, phoneme, image, and word are intended to act as mental change, as neurological emotion, as synesthetic telepathy.

      Khlebnikov had been influenced by Symbolist poetics before joining the Futurist movement in the roaring years of the Revolution. The affinities between Symbolism and Futurism are much more interesting than their differences. Khlebnikov, who loved to travel all around Russia by train, and who loved the archaic ways of life and magical-shamanistic practices of deep, traditional Russia, wanted to create a virtually planetary language, able to be understood beyond linguistic boundaries. He called this language Zaum. Angelo Maria Ripellino (1978, 93) points out that “Futurism has two faces. On one side, it emphasizes technology, skyscrapers, machines; on the other side, it’s moved by the troglodytes, the wild, caves, and the Stone Age; and so it opposes the sleep of a prelogic Asia to the modern European metropolitan frenzy.” Here we are on ambivalent ground, open on two different sides: Zaum is seduced by pre-symbolic forms of communication, the original protolinguistic vocality, the language of original emotions. But at the same time, it is predisposed to imagine the possibility of a postsymbolic communication, i.e., a telepathic technology; in that sense we see Symbolism and Futurism converging toward the imagined linguistic utopias, merging archaism and Futurism.

      Khlebnikov is charmed by the enchanting virtues of sounds, by phonetic sorcellerie [witchcraft]:

      Faith in witchery of phonemes, interest in the shamanic culture, research of a ritual language, this is the Symbolist influence: poetry is a magical action, and an oracular message. Many poems by Bal’mont, Bel’ij, Blok are conceived as means of magical action, similar to witches’ balms, animal brains, snake skin, Savina leaves and belladonna or datura and so on. (Ripellino 1978, 93)

      Khlebnikov turns his back on the modern European world, notwithstanding his Futuristic flirtations, preferring eternal Asia, and he dives into the “etymological night,” into the deepness of a past that reaches toward imaginary origins. In this magical background he sees the possibility of a telepathic effect of transmitting meaning without the mediation of a conventional signifier, through the direct stimulation of neurological emotions corresponding to meaning.

      Khlebnikov’s approach leads to presymbolic communication, but this must converge with postsymbolic research, which is our task today. Khlebnikov seems to be the point of connection between the two directions. The aim of his transmental language is to find a nonconventional dimension of communication through travel against the grain in the nocturnal territory of etymologies and origins; but now we progress toward the same end through the dangerous experimentation of telepathic techniques.

      Symbolist research is explicitly tied to timeless mystical quests, because mysticism knows the way to nonconventional dimensions of communication. In Foundations of Tibetan Mysticism, Lama Anagarika Govinda (1960, 17) says: “The essential nature of words is therefore neither exhausted by their present meaning, nor is their importance confined to their usefulness as transmitters of thoughts and ideas.” Anagarika Govinda is perfectly conscious of the fact that, in this regard, Buddhist symbolism has a deep similarity with poetical symbolism, and notes: “The magic which poetry exerts upon us, is due to this quality and the rhythm combined therewith … The birth of language was the birth of humanity. Each word was the sound-equivalent of an experience, connected with an internal or external stimulus” (1960, 17–18). The material consistency of the poetic sign (i.e. sound, rhythm, vibration) produces its efficiency and capability to create mental effects. Referring to the Tibetan tradition, Anagarika Govinda distinguishes between the word as shabda and the word as mantra. Shabda is the ordinary word composing common speech, the word that is able to carry signification through conventional understanding. Mantra, on the other hand, is the impulse that creates a mental image, the power to change mental states. “Mantra is a tool for thinking, a thing which creates a mental picture” (1960, 19). With sound, it calls forth its content into a state of immediate reality. Mantra is power, not merely speech, which the mind can contradict or evade. What mantra expresses by its sound exists, comes to pass. It is the peculiarity of the true poet that his word creates actuality, calls forth and unveils something real. Mantra is a force able to evoke images, to create and transmit mental states.

      The characteristica universalis, as Leibniz СКАЧАТЬ