Forty years ago, I remember shouting, “No future! No future!” with some young British musicians. I thought it was the provocation of an unlikely avant-garde. Now, everybody thinks that the future is over; now, the sentiment aligns with a conformist position held by most of humankind. “No future” has become common sense, and this is why cynicism is expanding in contemporary culture, in contemporary political behavior. Futurism was the expression of a society that expected something from the future, and of a society that truly felt the warmth of community, whether encapsulated in the nation, the family, or social ties to working communities. All the above was the reality of lived experience a hundred years ago. No more! Today, the nation is a nonexistent thing. The dissolution of the nation is an effect of the pervasive digitalization of information and of power based on information. Do you think that Google belongs to the United States? Not at all. The United States belongs to the territory of Google. So does Italy, and France, and so on.
Desire
If desire is a two-faced machine—at once capable of producing a different world and perpetuating current forms of violence—we must aim to grasp it as clearly as possible. Indeed, the disentanglement of desire from capitalism and oppression remains the one master-key perpetually out of reach. Now, in lockdown, some desires are forced to remain unfulfilled, like consumption or contact, whilst others are amplified, like the demand for a basic income. Cognitive activity has been temporarily rid of its immediate valorization, and this gifts us that adolescent time needed to be truly honest and think collectively. In this recalibrated awareness, we should rigorously scrutinise our desires, making sure we never desire a return to normal.