After the Future - Franco Bifo Berardi

Скачать книгу

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.

      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 of universal love and sympathy among men. After dreaming of 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.

      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

Скачать книгу