CRITICAL AND

CULTURAL STUDIES

ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY

LETÍCIA ZANFOLIM
 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.
(Berardi, 2011).

Differently from the meaning of the word, the psychological perception of the future is subject to change. It
emerged during the long period of modern civilisation, and, until today, it remains widely discussed. Even
though the progress depends on a variety of factors, it can be broadly defined as the relationship between the
advancement of technology and the political state of society.

THE PROMISE
From the first Industrial Revolution (1760) to Marinetti’s Manifesto of Futurism (1909), the future appeared
as a conscious action that was taken collectively—even though, by collective, it meant by the hands of the
bourgeoisie. During the supremacy of the Italian futurism, the love for the machine was stridently sung:

1. We intend to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and 1909 fearlessness. […]

4. We say that the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed.
[…]

5. We want to hymn the man at the wheel, who hurls the lance of his spirit across the Earth, along
the circle of its orbit. […]

7. Except in struggle, there is no more beauty. No work without an aggressive character can be a
masterpiece. […]

8. We stand on the last promontory of the centuries!... Why should we look back, when what we
want is to break down the mysterious doors of the Impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. We
already live in the absolute, because we have created eternal, omnipresent speed.

9. We will glorify war—the world’s only hygiene—militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of
freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for woman.

10. We will destroy the museums, libraries, academies of every kind, will fight moralism, feminism,
every opportunistic or utilitarian cowardice.
(Marinetti, 1909).

The preferment of the machinery happened rapidly. At that time, it was still an external one, visible in the
city landscape. Soon it acquired new features, and, in contrast, its size was extraordinarily reduced. It left the
industrial ambient to appear inside the residencies; closer and closer to the human body. The rest of the story
can be inferred by the frequent use of a small device that, today, is owned by more than half of the world
population (Valente, 2019), the smartphones.

Absolute speed means the ubiquity of mind; not of the body, not of sensibility. Absolute speed is
made possible by the network of signs. An all-pervading semiosis is secreted by innumerable
 interconnected brains. What are the effects on the social psychosphere? What is the acceleration
going to produce in the field of erotic sensitivity, and in the very perception of others as embodied,
as living organisms? […]

Nowadays, the effects of that acceleration and deterritorialisation are evident in the waves of fear,
insecurity, and panic traversing the globalised social sphere.
(Berardi, 2011).

In order to understand the future, the political construction of society should be taken into consideration.

The 1960s are regarded as one of the most turbulent and divisive decades in world history. On one side, there
was a burst of civil rights and counterculture movements, on the other, a strong investment by major world
powers in the war market, like the Cold War, the Vietnam War, and the Cultural Revolution in China. The
overall tone was that the government possessed big answers to big problems—but the golden age was never
materialised. By the end of the decade, it seemed that great nations were falling apart. (Onion, Sullivan and
Mullen, 2010).

Confronted with the truth, the 1970s’ declarations were of repudiation of the previous events. In a way, the
fight for equality was still ongoing, but the mindset has changed.

The year 1977 is generally recorded as a year of violence. [...] There was a kind of existential rage, a
wave of insubordination, because the baby boomers all over the world were hit by the premonition
that the welfare state was going to be dismantled, and that the modern horizon was starting to
dissolve.
(Berardi, 2011).

The violence wasn’t exclusive of the Americas:

[In Tokyo,] a young girl killed herself by leaping from the roof of a 13-floor apartment building.
Later, two other girls flung themselves from the same roof.

These and similar youthful tragedies in recent months have sent 1977 a shock wave through
Japanese society, alarming parents, police

and school officials. In one period of 10 days, 11 children committed

suicide, provoking a painful national introspection about the pressures facing Japanese youths. [...]

Most alarming, the rate has risen swiftly among Japan's younger children. By June of this year, 46
suicides had been counted among youths 10 to 14—a number equal to the total for that age group in
all of 1965. “We face the danger that this is going to increase even more,” said a specialist with
Japan's national police agency.
(Chapman, 1977).

The psychological perception of the future was shaken. Compared to Marinetti’s promise of magnificence,
the expectations towards the future hit a new zenith—of despair.
NO FUTURE
Now that every inch of the planet has been colonised, the colonisation of the temporal dimension has
began, i.e., the colonisation of mind, of perception, of life. Thus begins the century with no future.
(Berardi, 2011).

The abyss of desensitisation, fused by the virtual utopia, was deeper than expected. The prolonged exposure
to the psychic bombardment of stress from work; to apathy, paranoia, and other systematised illnesses; to
economic hyper-protectionism; and to an hysterical pharmaceutical industry has reshaped the mind of
mankind. It resulted in an epidemic of anxiety, depression and dementia; in exhausted, prostrated
individuals. A genuine state of collapse.

Human beings perform productive actions, but they are not conscious actors of what they are doing,
and seem unable to unite feeling and thought in a common space of consciousness. Capitalism has
destroyed the conditions of recomposition, and society has become unrecomposable. The
noncomposability of society means that the process of subjectivation cannot take place. This is why
the future has lost its zest and people have lost all trust in it: the future no longer appears as a choice
or a collective conscious action, but is a kind of unavoidable catastrophe that we cannot oppose in
any way.
(Berardi, 2011).

One of the project prompts, written by Jack Self, defended the ideia that “by analysing the material evidence
of the past, and understanding the systems, objects and spaces it has produced in the present, we can use it to
imagine new futures.” Unfortunately, that cannot be affirmed anymore. “The fragmentation of the present is
reversed in the implosion of the future.” (Berardi, 2011). There is no imaginable way.

VISUAL TRANSLATION
In order to illustrate the perception of the future, it is important to visually imagine the face of technology
advancement and the political state of society.

Industrialisation played an important role in the process of urbanisation. By conceiving more job
opportunities in the factories, the population was drawn to these specific regions. In the modern era,
manufacturing facilities were often replaced by technology-industry hubs, which preserved the workers’
flow. Therefore, a translation of the system could be made from a macro scale, from the paths that so
invariably conducted the people. The same paths that, in modern times, were the womb of important
movements. Paths that figuratively led to evolution.

In the beginning, technology could be found in the heart of the hubs. Today, it is everywhere.

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
nano-machine is mutating the human brain and the linguistic ability to produce and communicate.
The machine is us.
(Berardi, 2011).
A machine is associated with an electronic system, which is composed by a group of circuits. When these
circuits are compared to the paths that make technology-industry hubs, from above, they do lookalike. Due to
the broad use of smartphones today, the most used unity may be the pixel, basic building blocks of a digital
image or display. By combining these three aspects—hub, circuit, and pixel—, an image could be generated.
Finally, a visual representation of an extensive and complex definition of the future.

In the end, the micro domain is nothing but a miniature of the complex relations that make the macro world.
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