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ОглавлениеIF WE THINK OF the avant-garde as a conscious movement devoted to revolution in society, in communication, and in the relationship between society and communication, Futurism—namely Italian Futurism—can be considered the avant-garde’s first conscious declaration. The Futurist Manifesto of 1909 is an act of faith in the future. I would argue that it is also the cultural and ideological inauguration of the twentieth century, the century that trusted in the future.
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In the last three decades of the century, the utopian imagination was slowly overturned, and has been replaced by the dystopian imagination.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, to force them to bow before man.
8. We are on the extreme promontory of the centuries! What is the use of looking behind at the moment when we must open the mysterious shutters of the impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. We are already living in the absolute, since we have already created eternal, omnipresent speed.
9. We want to glorify war—the only cure for the world—militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas which kill, and contempt for woman.
10. We want to demolish museums and libraries, fight morality, feminism and all opportunist and utilitarian cowardice.
11. We will sing of the great crowds agitated by work, pleasure and revolt; the multi-colored and polyphonic surf of revolutions in modern capitals: the nocturnal vibration of the arsenals and the workshops beneath their violent electric moons: the gluttonous railway stations devouring smoking serpents; factories suspended from the clouds by the thread of their smoke; bridges with the leap of gymnasts flung across the diabolic cutlery of sunny rivers: adventurous steamers sniffing the horizon; great-breasted locomotives, puffing on the rails like enormous steel horses with long tubes for bridle, and the gliding flight of aeroplanes whose propeller sounds like the flapping of a flag and the applause of enthusiastic crowds.
Acceleration, speed, the cult of the machine—these are the values emphasized by the Futurist Manifesto. Marinetti’s text is a hymn to the disrupting modernity that in those decades was changing the face of the world, especially in the industrialized countries. Italy was not one of them: having only recently achieved national unification, its economy was based on agriculture, and the Italian style of life and consumption was traditional and backward. It wasn’t by chance that the Futurist movement surfaced in Italy—and in Russia. These two countries shared a common social situation: scant development of industrial production, the marginality of the bourgeois class, a reliance on cultural and religious models of the past, the allure of foreign culture (especially French) for urban intellectuals. This is the background of the Futurist explosion, both in Italy and in Russia, but we should not only see this movement as a reaction against national backwardness. On the contrary, it activated an aesthetic energy that spread all over Europe during the following decades; it was the artistic core of the enthusiastic belief that the future would fulfil great expectations in the fields of politics, science, technology, and new styles of life.
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. (ibid.)
The Futurist Manifesto declared the aesthetic value of speed. The myth of speed sustained the whole edifice of modernity’s imaginary, and the reality of speed played a crucial role in the history of capital, whose development is based on the acceleration of labor time. Productivity in fact is the growth rate of accumulated relative surplus value, determined by the speed of the productive gesture and the intensification of its rhythm.
We will sing of the great crowds agitated by work, pleasure and revolt; the multicolored and polyphonic surf of revolutions in modern capitals: the nocturnal vibration of the arsenals and the workshops beneath their violent electric moons: the gluttonous railway stations devouring smoking serpents; factories suspended from the clouds by the thread of their smoke; bridges with the leap of gymnasts flung across the diabolic cutlery of sunny rivers: adventurous steamers sniffing the horizon; great-breasted locomotives, puffing on the rails like enormous steel horses with long tubes for bridle, and the gliding flight of aeroplanes whose propeller sounds like the flapping of a flag and the applause of enthusiastic crowds. (ibid.)
The Manifesto asserted the aesthetic value of the machine. The machine par excellence is the speed machine, the car, the airplane, tools making possible the mobilization of the social body. Marinetti dedicated a poem to the racing car:
To The Racing Car
Veeeeehemently god of a race of steel
Car drrrunken on space,
that paws the ground and trembles with anguish
seizing the bit with shrill teeth …
Formidable Japanese monster,
with the eyes of a forge,
nourished on flame
and mineral oils,
eager for horizons and sidereal prey …
I unchain your heart that pulsates diabolically,
I unchain your gigantic tires,
for the dance that you know how to dance
away through the white sheets of the whole world!
(Marinetti 2004, 47)
For us, dwellers in the postmodern conurbation, driving back home from the office, stuck and immovable in the traffic jam of rush hour, Marinetti’s adoration of the car seems a little bit ludicrous. But the reality and concept of the machine have changed, a hundred years after the Futurist Manifesto. Futurism exalted the machine as an external object, visible in the city landscape, but now the machine is inside us: we are no longer obsessed with the external machine; instead, the “infomachine” now intersects with the social nervous system, the “biomachine” interacts with the genetic becoming of the human organism. Digital and biotechnologies have turned the external machine of iron and steel into the internalized and recombining machine of the bio-info era. The bio-info machine is no longer separable from body or mind, because it’s no longer an external tool, but an internal transformer of body and mind, a linguistic and cognitive enhancer. Now the nanomachine is mutating the human brain and the linguistic ability to produce and communicate. The machine is us.
In the mechanical era, the machine stood before the body, and changed human behavior, enhancing our potency without changing our physical structure. The assembly line, for instance, although improving and increasing the productive power of laborers did not modify their physical organism nor introduce mutations inside their cognitive ability. The machine is no longer in front of the body but inside it. Bodies and minds therefore cannot express and relate anymore without the technical support of the biomachine.
Because of this, political power has changed its nature. When the machine was external, the State had to regulate the body and for this it used the law. Agencies of repression were used to force the conscious organisms to submit to the State’s rhythm without rebellion. Now political domination is internalized and indistinguishable from the machine itself. Both the machine and the machinic imagination undergo a mutation. Marinetti thought of the machine in modern terms, as an external enhancer. In the biosocial age, the machine is informational: an internalized process of linguistic modeling, logic, and cognitive automatisms.
A hundred years after the publication of the Futurist Manifesto, speed also has been transferred from the realm of external machines to the information domain. Speed itself has been internalized. During the twentieth century, the machine of speed accomplished the colonization of global space; this was followed by the colonization of the domain of time, of the mind and perception, so that the future collapsed. The collapse of the future is rooted in the acceleration of psychic and cognitive rhythm.
Thanks to the external machine the spatial colonization of our planet has been accomplished: transportation tools allow us to reach every inch of the Earth, and give us the possibility of knowing, marking, controlling, and exploiting every single place. The machines have made it possible to excavate at a tremendous rate, to penetrate the bowels of the Earth, to exploit 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 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 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 calls it, or translinguistic symbolization, opens an issue of great importance today, in the age of intercultural planetary communication. Poetical and magical symbolism are both involved in the process of evocation that the word and the sign can produce. But we must reconsider the problem starting from a new datum, coming from electronic technology: the virtual reality machine, which involves the same problem posed by poetical and magical symbolism, that is, the problem of telepathic communication.
Linguistic communication is made possible by signs conventionally and arbitrarily connected with meanings; here we speak of communication stimulating mental states corresponding to the image, to the emotion, to the concept that the sender wants to transmit. The production of technical tools for simulation, and especially of machines for virtual reality, puts the problem in a new light. We may label virtual reality any technology capable of directly transmitting impulses from one brain to another, in order to stimulate in the receiver brain a synaptic connection corresponding to a certain representation, to a certain configuration, image, concept, emotion. In a purely abstract way, we may say that virtual reality is the stimulation of a neuronic wave, structured following models that are intentional and isomorphic to the mental states corresponding to a certain experience. We can say that this technology is the most apt for a telepathic sort of communication. Jaron Lanier, who in the 1980s was the first creator of virtual reality machines, spoke in those years of postsymbolic communication. If you can provide a reality with virtual reality tools, and if you can share this reality with other persons, you no longer need to describe the world, because you can simply create this contingence, this coincidence; you don’t need to describe an action, you can create it.
Starting from this premise, we can go back to the problem posed by Leibniz, the problem of characteristica universalis, i.e., in contemporary terms, the problem of a planetary language, of a language that should be able to connect people belonging to different cultural and linguistic traditions. Pierre Lévy (1991) has proposed in L’idéographie dynamique the idea of a communication technology he calls “dynamic ideography.” What does it mean, synthetically? Dynamic ideography is a communication technology that enables people to transmit mental states, images, emotions, concepts, sense configurations, without any conventional means. The transmission is made possible by a direct stimulation of the neurophysical connections corresponding to sense configurations. Dynamic ideography is a communication technology that can transfer, from one communicating person to another, the mental models involved in seeing a certain image, in experiencing a certain situation, in thinking a certain concept. It’s easy to see the relationship between virtual reality and dynamic ideography. Dynamic ideography is a technique that activates a sequence of virtual realities, corresponding to the contents that I want to send and communicate, an analogical tool of a global and synesthetic kind, directly acting on imagination.
Imagination is an infinite variety of analogical combinatory items, an infinite variety of possibilities that the mind processes, starting from disposable engrams. Memory storage is limited, but the possibilities of rearranging the items stored in memory are not. The process of combining these analogical plastic items is called imagination. The theoretical and practical study of the Becoming of Imagination can be called psychedelics.
“Psychedelics” is the possibility of manipulating and transforming mental activity through chemical, electrical, or other stimulation. Starting from the possibility of transmitting mental models, to stimulate synaptic waves corresponding to the mental states that we want to communicate, it is possible to share imaginary words, in mental co-evolution. On this basis, we can say that language itself is the transmission of signs intended to trigger in the mind of the receiver the building of mental models that correspond to the intentions of the sender.
In the pages of Neuromancer, William Gibson (1984, 81) sees the world as “cyberspace”: “A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts.… A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system.”
Cyberspace is a hypothesis of the world: Ontology and Gnoseology are on the same level of consistency, since Being is essentially a projection. “We are in a sort of cave, like Plato said, and they’re showing us endless funky films,” says Philip K. Dick (in Williams 1986, 72). We can think that reality is the infinite projection of endless movies on the screen of our brain. But, if we want to move from the hallucinatory to the real-world dimension, we simply must introduce the notion of communication, i.e. sharing the hallucination. Dick continues:
If two people dream the same dream it ceases to be an illusion; the basic test that distinguishes reality from hallucination is the consensus gentium, that one other or several others see it too. This is idios kosmos, the private dream, opposed to the shared dream of us all, the koinos kosmos. What is new in our time is that we are beginning to see the plastic, trembling quality of the koinos kosmos—which scares us, its insubstantiality—and the more-than-mere-vapor quality of the hallucination. Like SF, a third reality is formed halfway between. (in Williams 1986, 170)
The Hindus call it “Maya.” But the concept isn’t easy to understand in its deepest meaning. Maya is illusion because it has been torn from its living connections and is limited in time and space. The individuality and corporality of the unenlightened human being, trying to maintain and preserve its illusory selfhood, is Maya in this negative sense.
The body of the Enlightened One is also Maya, but not in the negative sense, because it is the conscious creation of a mind that is free from illusion. Maya does not mean illusion, but something more: I would say that it means the projection of the world. The projection of the world can be frozen and become mere illusion, self-deception, if we think that the imagined world is independent from imagination, and if we think that the imaging self is independent from communication and from the becoming of the world. But Maya in itself means projecting action, the creation of the world. Thus Maya becomes the cause of illusion, but it is not illusion itself.
We are witnessing a proliferation of technological tools for simulation. The social technology of communication is aimed at connecting the imaginations and projections of individuals and groups. This projection-web could be called Technomaya, neurotelematic network endlessly projecting a movie shared by all the conscious organisms who are connected. This techno-imagination, this mutual implication in the koinos kosmos, is socialization itself. Through the proliferation of machines for electronic, holographic, and programmed neurostimulation, we can enter the domain of Technomaya, because we can produce worlds of meaning, and we can transmit these worlds, triggering the imaginations of other people.
Futurism and the avant-garde set themselves the task of violating rules. Deregulation was the legacy left by Rimbaud to the experimentation of the 1900s. Deregulation was also the rallying cry of the hypercapitalism of late modernity, paving the way for the development of semiocapital. In the totalitarian period of the external machine and mechanical speed, having previously used the state form to impose its rule on society, capitalism decided to do without state mediation as the techniques of recombination and the absolute speed of electronics made it possible for control to be interiorized. In the classical form of manufacturing capitalism, price, wages, and profit fluctuations were based on the relationship between necessary labor time and the determination of value. Following the introduction of microelectronic technologies and the resulting intellectualization of productive labor, the relationship between different magnitudes of value and different productive forces entered a period of indeterminacy. Deregulation, as launched by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, marked the end of the law of value and turned its demise into a political economy. In his major work, Symbolic Exchange and Death, Jean Baudrillard (1993a: 2) intuitively infers the overall direction of the development of the end of the millennium: “The reality principle corresponded to a certain stage of the law of value. Today, the whole system is swamped by indeterminacy, and every reality is absorbed by the hyperreality of the code and simulation.”
The whole system precipitates into indeterminacy as all correspondences between symbol and referent, simulation and event, value and labor time no longer hold. But isn’t this also what the avant-garde aspired to? Doesn’t experimental art wish to sever the link between symbol and referent? In saying this, I’m not accusing the avant-garde of being the cause of neoliberal economic deregulation. Rather, I’m suggesting that the anarchic utopia of the avant-garde was actualized and turned into its opposite the moment society internalized rules and capital was able to abdicate both juridical law and political rationality to abandon itself to the seeming anarchy of internalized automatisms, which is actually the most rigid form of totalitarianism.
As industrial discipline dwindled, individuals found themselves in a state of ostensible freedom. No law forced them to put up with duties and dependence. Obligations became internalized and social control was exercised through a voluntary, albeit inevitable, subjugation to chains of automatisms.
In a regime of aleatory and fluctuating values, precariousness became the generalized form of social relations, which deeply affected social composition and the psychic, relational and linguistic characters of a new generation as it entered the labor market. Rather than a particular form of productive relations, precariousness is the dark soul of the productive process. An uninterrupted flow of fractal and recombining infolabor circulates in the global web as the agent of universal valorization, yet its value is indeterminable. Connectivity and precariousness are two sides of the same coin: the flow of semiocapitalist production captures and connects cellularized fragments of depersonalized time; capital purchases fractals of human time and recombines them in the web. From the standpoint of capitalist valorization, this flow is uninterrupted and finds its unity in the object produced; however, from the standpoint of cognitive workers the supply of labor is fragmented: fractals of time and pulsating cells of labor are switched on and off in the large control room of global production. Therefore the supply of labor time can be disconnected from the physical and juridical person of the worker. Social labor time becomes an ocean of valorizing cells that can be summoned and recombined in accordance with the needs of capital.
Let us return to the Futurist Manifesto. War and the contempt for women are the essential features of mobilization, which traverses the whole parable of historical vanguards. The Futurist ambition really consisted in mobilizing social energies toward the acceleration of the social machine’s productivity. Art aided the discourse of advertising as the latter fed into mobilization. When industrial capitalism transposed into the new form of semiocapitalism, it first and foremost mobilized the psychic energy of society, bending it to the drive of competition and cognitive productivity. The new economy of the 1990s was essentially a prozac economy, both neuromobilization and compulsory creativity.
Paul Virilio has shown the connection between war and speed: in the modern forms of domination, the imposition of war onto the whole of social life is an implicit one precisely because economic competitiveness is war, and war and the economy share the common denominator of speed. As Walter Benjamin (1992, 234) writes: “all efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war.” The aestheticization of life is one aspect of this mobilization of social energies. The aestheticization of war is functional to the subjugation of everyday life to the rule of history. War forces the global masses to partake in the process of self-realization of the Hegelian Spirit, or, perhaps more realistically, to become part of capitalist global accumulation. Captured in the dynamics of war, everyday life is ready to be subjected to the unlimited rule of the commodity.
From this standpoint, there is no difference between fascism, communism, and democracy: art functions as the element of aestheticization and mobilization of everyday life. Total mobilization is terror, and terror is the ideal condition for a full realization of the capitalist plan to mobilise psychic energy. The close relation between Futurism and advertising is an integral part of this process.
In Art and Revolution: Transversal Activism in the Long Twentieth Century, Gerald Raunig (2007) writes on the relationship between the artistic avant-garde and activism. His work provides a useful phenomenological account of the relation between art and political mobilization in the twentieth century, but it fails to grasp the absolute specificity of the current situation, that is, the crisis and exhaustion of all activism.
The term “activism” became largely influential as a result of the antiglobalization movement, which used it to describe its political communication and the connection between art and communicative action. However, this definition is a mark of its attachment to the past and its inability to free itself from the conceptual frame of reference it inherited from the twentieth century. Should we not free ourselves from the thirst for activism that led the twentieth century to the point of catastrophe and war? Shouldn’t we set ourselves free from the repeated and failed attempt to act for the liberation of human energies from the rule of capital? Isn’t the path toward the autonomy of the social from economic and military mobilization only possible through a withdrawal into inactivity, silence, and passive sabotage?
I believe that there is a profound relationship between the drive to activism and male depression in late modernity, which is most evident in the voluntarist and subjectivist organization of Leninism. Both from the standpoint of the history of the workers’ movement in the 1900s and from that of the strategic autonomy of society from capital, I’m convinced that the twentieth century would have been a better century had Lenin not existed. Lenin’s vision interprets a deep trend in the configuration of the psyche of modern masculinity. Male narcissism was confronted with the infinite power of capital and emerged from it frustrated, humiliated, and depressed. It seems to me that Lenin’s depression is a crucial element for understanding the role his thought played in the development of the politics of late modernity.
I have read Hélène Carrère D’Encausse’s biography of Lenin. The author is a researcher of Georgian descent, who also published L’Empire éclaté, where she foresaw the collapse of the Soviet empire as an effect of the insurgence of Islamic fundamentalism. What interested me in Carrère D’Encausse’s biography of Lenin, more than the history of Lenin’s political activity, was his personal life, his fragile psyche, and his affectionate and intellectual relationships with the women close to him: his mother, his sister, Krupskaia, comrade and wife, who looked after him at times of acute psychological crises, and, finally, Inessa Armand, the perturbing, the unheimlich, the lover whom Lenin cut out, along with symphonic music, for softening his character.
The psyche described in this biography is framed by depression, and Lenin’s most acute crises coincided with important political shifts in the revolutionary movement. As Carrère D’Encausse writes:
Lenin used to invest everything he did with perseverance, tenaciousness and an exceptional concentration: such consistency, which he thought necessary in each of his efforts, put him in a position of great superiority over the people around him […]. This feature of his character often had negative effects. Exceedingly intensive efforts would tire him and wear down his already fragile nervous system. The first crisis dates back to 1902. (Carrère D’Encausse 1998, 78)
These were the years of the Bolshevik turn, of What Is to Be Done? Krupskaia played a fundamental role in her comrade’s crisis: she intervened to filter his relations with the outside world, paid for his therapy and isolation in clinics in Switzerland and Finland. Lenin emerged from the 1902 crisis by writing What Is to Be Done? and engaging in the construction of a “nucleus of steel,” a block of will capable of breaking the weakest link in the (imperialist) chain. The second crisis came in 1914 at the height of the break up of the Second International and the split of the Communists. The third crisis, as you might guess, occurred in the spring of 1917. Krupskaia found a safe resort in Finland, where Lenin conceived The April Theses and decided to impose will on intelligence: a rupture that disregarded the deep dynamics of class struggle and forced onto them an external design. Intelligence is depressive, therefore, will is the only cure for the abyss: ignore but do not remove it. The abyss remained and subsequent years did not simply uncover it: the century slipped into it.
I don’t intend to discuss the politics of Lenin’s fundamental choices. I’m interested in pointing out a relationship between Bolshevik voluntarism and the male inability to accept depression and transform it from within. Here lies the root of the subjectivist voluntarism that crippled social autonomy in the 1900s. Leninism’s intellectual decisions were so powerful because they papered over depression with an obsessive male voluntarism.
By the beginning of the twenty-first century, the long history of the artistic avant-garde was over. Beginning with Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk and resulting in the Dadaist cry to “Abolish art, abolish everyday life, abolish the separation between art and everyday life,” the history of the avant-garde culminates in the gesture of 9/11. Stockhausen had the courage to say this, although many of us were thinking the same: it was the consumate work of art of the century with no future. The fusion of art and life (or death, what difference does it make?) is clearly visible in a form of action we might call “terrorizing suicide.” Let us take Pekka-Eric Auvinen as an example. The Finnish youngster turned up at his school with a machine gun, killing eight people, himself included. Printed on his T-shirt was the sentence: “Humanity is overrated.” Wasn’t his gesture pregnant with signs typical of the communicative action of the arts?
Let me explain: I’m not inviting the young readers of this book to go to a crowded place with an explosive belt. I’m trying to say, pay attention: a gigantic wave of desperation could soon turn into a suicidal epidemic that will turn the first connective generation into a devastating psychic bomb.
I don’t think this wave of suicides can be explained in terms of morality, family values, and the weak discourse conservative thought uses to account for the ethical drift produced by capitalism. To understand our contemporary form of ethical shipwreck, we need to reflect on the transformations of activity and labor, the subsumption of mental time under the competitive realm of productivity; we have to understand the mutation of the cognitive and psychosocial system.
The context of my understanding of present historical and cultural dynamics is the transition from a realm of conjunction to one of connection, with a special focus on the emergence of the first connective generation, those who learn more words from a machine than a mother. In this transition, a mutation of the conscious organism is taking place: to render this organism compatible with a connective environment, our cognitive system needs to be reformatted. This appears to generate a dulling of the faculties of conjunction that had hitherto characterized the human condition.
The realm of sensibility is involved in this ongoing process of cognitive reformatting. Aesthetic, ethical, and political thought is reshaping its observational standpoint and framework around the passage from a conjunctive to a connective form of human concatenation.
Conjunction is becoming-other. In contrast, in connection each element remains distinct and interacts only functionally. Singularities change when they conjoin; they become something other than they were before their conjunction. Love changes the lover and a combination of a-signifying signs gives rise to the emergence of a meaning that hadn’t existed prior to it. Rather than a fusion of segments, connection entails a simple effect of machinic functionality. In order to connect, segments must be compatible and open to interfacing and interoperability. Connection requires these segments to be linguistically compatible. In fact the digital web spreads and expands by progressively reducing more and more elements to a format, a standard and a code that make different segments compatible.
The segments that enter this rhizome belong to different realms of nature: they are electronic, semiotic, machinic, biological, and psychic; fibre optic circuits, mathematical abstractions, electromagnetic waves, human eyes, neurons, and synapses. The process whereby they become compatible traverses heterogeneous fields of being and folds them onto a principle of connectivity. The present mutation occurs in this transition from conjunction to connection, a paradigm of exchange between conscious organisms.
Central to this mutation is the insertion of the electronic into the organic, the proliferation of artificial devices in the organic universe, in the body, in communication, and in society. Therefore, the relationship between consciousness and sensibility is transformed and the exchange of signs undergoes a process of increasing desensitization.
Conjunction is the meeting and fusion of rounded and irregular forms that infuse in a manner that is imprecise, unrepeatable, imperfect, and continuous. Connection is the punctual and repeatable interaction of algorithmic functions, straight lines and points that juxtapose perfectly and are inserted and removed in discrete modes of interaction. These discrete modes make different parts compatible to predetermined standards. The digitalization of communication processes leads, on one hand, to a sort of desensitization to the sinuous, to the continuous flows of slow becoming, and on the other hand, to becoming sensitive to the code, to sudden changes of states, and to the sequence of discrete signs.
Interpretation follows semantic criteria in the realm of conjunction: the meaning of the signs sent by the other as she enters into conjunction with you needs to be understood by tracing the intention, the context, the nuances, and the unsaid, if necessary. The interpretative criteria of the realm of connection on the other hand are purely syntactic. In connection, the interpreter must recognise a sequence and be able to perform the operation required by general syntax or the operating system; there is no room for margins of ambiguity in the exchange of messages, nor can the intention be shown by means of nuances.
This mutation produces painful effects in the conscious organism and we read them through the categories of psychopathology: dyslexia, anxiety and apathy, panic, depression, and a sort of suicidal epidemic are spreading. However, a purely psychopathological account fails to capture the question in its depth, because we are in fact confronted with the effort of the conscious organism to adapt to a changed environment, with a readjustment of the cognitive system to the technocommunicative environment. This generates pathologies of the psychic sphere and in social relations.
Aesthetic perception—here properly conceived of as the realm of sensibility and aesthesia—is directly involved in this transformation: in its attempt to efficiently interface with the connective environment, the conscious organism appears to increasingly inhibit what we call sensibility. By sensibility, I mean the faculty that enables human beings to interpret signs that are not verbal nor can be made so, the ability to understand what cannot be expressed in forms that have a finite syntax. This faculty reveals itself to be useless and even damaging in an integrated connective system. Sensibility slows down processes of interpretation and renders them aleatory and ambiguous, thus reducing the competitive efficiency of the semiotic agent.
The ethical realm where voluntary action is possible also plays an essential role in the reformatting of the cognitive system. Religious sociologists and journalists lament a sort of ethical lack of sensitivity and a general indifference in the behavior of the new generation. In many cases, they lament the decline of ideological values or community links. However, in order to understand the discomfort that invests the ethical and political realms, the emphasis needs to be placed on aesthetics. Ethical paralysis and the inability to ethically govern individual and collective life seem to stem from a discomfort in aesthesia—the perception of the other and the self.
The arts of the 1900s favored two utopic registers: the radical utopia of Mayakovsky and the functional utopia of the Bauhaus. The dystopian thread remained hidden in the folds of the artistic and literary imagination, in Fritz Lang, expressionism, and a kind of bitter paranoid surrealism from Salvador Dali to Philip K. Dick. In the second half of the twentieth century, the literary dystopias of Orwell, Burroughs and DeLillo flourished. Only today, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, does dystopia take center stage and conquer the whole field of artistic imagination, thus drawing the narrative horizon of the century with no future. In the expression of contemporary poetry, in cinema, video-art, and novels, the marks of an epidemic of psychopathology proliferate.
In her videos, Eija-Liisa Ahtila—Wind, If 6 was 9, Anne, Aki and God—narrates the psychopathology of relations, 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?
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.
