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