#historical evolution

In 1921, Marinetti metaphorizes about the armored car: the overman is over-grafted, an inhuman type reduced to a driving--and thus deciding--principle, an animal body that disappears in the superpower of a metallic body able to annihilate time and space through its dynamic performances. Vain attempts have been made to fit Marinetti's works into various artistic and political categories; but Futurism in fact comes from a single art--that of war and its essence--speed. Futurism provides the most accomplished vision of the dromological evolutionism of the 1920's, the measure of super-speed!

Like all varieties of cultural change, technological development was supposed to proceed step after step and one at a time. It was only logical, after all. But cyberspace changed all this. It suddenly seemed as if all the components and tendencies which were now feeding into this virtual zone had been made for it before it had even been named; as though all the ostensible reasons and motivations underlying their development had merely provided occasions for the emergence of a matrix which (William) Gibson's novel was nudging into place; as though the present was being reeled into a future which had always been guiding the past, washing back over precedents completely unaware of its influence.

'There is in my nervous system,' wrote Ada (Lovelace), 'such utter want of all ballast and steadiness, that I cannot regard my life or powers as other than precarious.' They said she was nervous system apparently unable to settle down. She had what was described as a 'vast mass of useless and irritating POWER OF EXPRESSION which longs to have full scope in active manifestation such as neither the ordinary active pursuits or duties of life, nor the literary line of expression, can give vent to' She couldn't concentrate, flitting between obsessions, restless, searching.

The open borders position of today's Left stands in glaring contract to what were once traditional leftist views. Members of the Left through most of the twentieth century would have denounced the move towards open borders as a 'neoliberal' trick intended to increase capitalist fortunes at the expense of low-paid workers. They would have also been disconcerted by the antifascist Left's unwillingness to allow Western peoples to preserve their national identities: the antifascist assault on Western identities would have reduced the Old Guard to utter bemusement.

In a rightly famous book, Karl Polanyi demonstrated that, already during the first Industrial Revolution, market ideology, while seemingly contraposed to state power, was in reality working in conjunction with it: only through this secret collaboration could market ideology bring about the great transformation of Western society. State power has always, in every era, coexisted with new forces, inside or outside of it: this is true for both the duality between temporal and spiritual power in the Middle Ages, and the antagonism between workers' movements and state organization in the twentieth century. When we talk today about globalization, big spaces and the resulting eclipse of the nation state, it should not be forgotten that this apparent antithesis will result not in the abolition of state powers, but in their transformation. The bipolar system that defines Western politics will keep working in new forms.

But the Future separated from the Present is a pure abstraction deprived of any metaphysical 'substance.' And this translated, on the level of human and political existence, as the fact that the Authority of the Leader, isolated from that of the Master, takes a 'utopian' character: the legislation that is separated from its execution constructs a 'Utopia' with no ties with the Present (that is to say, reality), which subsequently fails to come true (that is to say, it fails to remain in force in the Present), and it drags along with it in its downfall the Authority that has produced it, and with it, the State itself in its 'separated' form.

Prometheus redefines the preconceived limits of the possible, making the putatively impossible possible by means of technological science. The Prometheist has the strength to grasp the burdensome fact that the truth is what works. Knowledge is not the mirroring of an objective 'Reality' by a subjective cognition that only needs to be rendered more perceptive and precise, like a mirror that requires polishing. Knowledge is radically pragmatic, because technology is ontologically prior to science --- which is inseparable from the technology that makes theoretical research possible and renders knowledge discoverable. Rather than distinguishing Science from Technology, and misconstruing technology as applied science, we should always conceive of them as the unified phenomenon of Technoscience, wherein theoria is inconceivable apart from praxis,

The time has come, it seems, to face the facts: revolution is movement, but movement is not a revolution. Politics is only a gear shift, and revolution only its overdrive: war as "continuation of politics by other means" would be instead a police pursuit at greater speed, with other vehicles.