CRITICALAND

CULTURAL
STUDIES
ANNOTATED
BIBLIOGRAPHY

LETICIA ZANFOLIM
 Since the beginning, the book cover was meant to be developed when-
ever the research reached its peak. The objective was to one text lead to
another so the path would be traced naturally. In the end, the cover was
only a fraction of the project.
2
 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. 1

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, 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.

THEPROMISE
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 with-
out 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. 2

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 pro-
duce 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 deterritorial-
isation are evident in the waves of fear, insecurity, and panic
traversing the globalised social sphere. 1
3
 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 insubor-
dination, 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. 1

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. 3

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.

NOFUTURE
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. 1

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.
4
 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 unrecompos-
able. 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. 1

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.” 1 There is no imaginable way.

VISUALTRANSLATION
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 move-
ments. 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. 1

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, ba-
sic 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.
5
 1 2 3
Berardi, F., 2011. After Marinetti, F., 1909. Chapman, W., 1977. Japan Seeks Cause Of
the Future. AK Press. Manifeste Du Futur- Upsurge In Children's Suicides. [online] The
Kindle Edition. isme. Paris: Le Figaro. Washington Post. [Accessed 17 June 2020].
6
BOOKCOVER
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