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,
