The absence of movement is visible today, at the end of the zero zero decade: the absence of an active culture, the lack of a public sphere, the void of collective imagination, palsy of the process of subjectivation. The path to a conscious collective subject seems obstructed.
What now? A conscious collective change seems impossible at the level of daily life. Yes, I know, change is happening everyday, at a pace that we have never experienced before. What is the election of a black President in the United States if not change? But change is not happening in the sphere of social consciousness. Change happens in the spectacular sphere of politics, not in daily life—and the relationship between politics and daily life has become so tenuous, so weak, that sometimes I think that, whatever happens in politics, life will not change.
The fantastic collapse of the economy is certainly going to change things in daily life: you can bet on it. But is this change consciously elaborated? Is this connected with some conscious collective action? It isn’t. This is why neoliberal fanaticism, notwithstanding its failure, is surviving and driving the agenda of the powers of the world.
The so-called counterglobalization movement, born in Seattle at the close of the century, has been a collective conscious actor, a movement of unprecedented strength and breadth. But, I repeat, it has changed nothing in the daily life of the masses; it hasn’t changed the relationship between wage labor and capitalist enterprise; it hasn’t changed daily relationships among precarious workers; it hasn’t changed the lived conditions of migrants. It hasn’t created solidarity between people in the factories, in the schools, in the cities. Neoliberal politics have failed, but social autonomy hasn’t emerged.
The ethical consciousness of the insanity of neoliberal politics spread everywhere, but it did not shape affective and social relations between people. The movement remains an expression of ethical protest. It has, nonetheless, produced effects. The neoliberal ideology that was once accepted as the word of God, as a natural and indisputable truth, started to be questioned and widely denounced in the days following the Seattle riots. But the ethical demonstrations did not change the reality of social domination. Global corporations did not slow the exploitation of labor or the massive destruction of the planet’s environment. Warmongers did not stop organizing and launching deadly attacks against civilian populations in Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine, and many other parts of the world.
Why? Why did the largest demonstration in human history, the antiwar Global Action that the movement launched on February 15, 2003, fail to stop the bombing of Baghdad?
Why was conscious collective action, although massive and global, unable to change things? This is the question I’ve been trying to answer for the last ten years. This is the question that I am trying to answer in this book.
I’ll say here, in short, that the answer is not to be found in the political strategy of the struggle, but in the structural weakness of the social fabric.
During the twentieth century, social struggle could change things in a collective and conscious way because industrial workers could maintain solidarity and unity in daily life, and so could fight and win. Autonomy was the condition of victory, because autonomy means the ability to create social solidarity in daily life, and the ability to self-organize outside the rules of labor and exploitation. Autonomous community was the condition of political strength. When social recomposition is possible, so is collective conscious change.
In social history we can speak of recomposition when the forces of labor create common cultural flows and a common ground of sensibility, so that they become a collective actor, sharing the same questions and sometimes the same answers.
In conditions of social recomposition, social autonomy from capital becomes possible. Autonomy is the possibility of meeting the power of capital, with counterpower in daily life, in factories, neighborhoods, homes, in the affective relationships between people.
That seems to be over. The organization of labor has been fragmented by the new technology, and workers’ solidarity has been broken at its roots. The labor market has been globalized, but the political organization of the workers has not. The infosphere has dramatically changed and accelerated, and this is jeopardizing the very possibility of communication, empathy, and solidarity.
In the new conditions of labor and communication lies our present inability to create a common ground of understanding and a common action. The movement that spread in the first years of the decade has been able to denounce the effects of capitalist globalization, but it hasn’t been able to find the new path of social organization, of autonomy from capitalist exploitation.
This book is not linear in its composition. It is an expression of the complex constellations that comprise our present. The reader may find that the development is not always perfectly consistent. Actually it is not, because I don’t know where we are heading at the moment, and I don’t pretend to have a solution for the current problems of social autonomy. What I can do is sketch the map of our wanderings. And search for a way out.
IF 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