Page:Knight (1975) Past, Future and the Problem of Communication in the Work of V V Khlebnikov.djvu/106

98 POLITICALLY, the Futurists were at heart Anarchists. The "enemy" to them was not so much the rule of Capital or of the bourgeoisie as the reign of byt, which expressed itself in the greyness and grind of daily life, the routine of work, eating and sleep, the boredom of family existence—and the all-pervading fixed regulations, institutions and hierarchies of the state. Under the rule of byt, everything was fossilized, congealed, immovable. There was existence in space: everyone struggled for his own plot, his own cabbage-patch, his own position in or portion of the Terrestrial Sphere. But it was a timeless existence, or an existence subject only to the endless repetition of time, the interminable repetition of one and the same "today".

Khlebnikov's vision of the explosion of this "byt" was intimately connected with his sense of the significance of the scientific revolution which was taking place in his time. Fundamentally, he felt that radio~waves, movement at the speed of light, electronic technology and the prospect of space-travel were creating a new kind of man, for whom the struggle for fixed territory on the planet earth was becoming irrelevant.

If man could exist on all points of the globe simultaneously, how could he bother any longer about fighting for space? How could he care any longer for frontiers, for fences, for private territory or for fatherlands? And if the old immobilities were dissolving, space was disappearing and the whole earth was becoming, as it were, a "ray"—then how could the new man avoid seeing his future struggle as a struggle for change, a struggle for time?