Techno-Prosthetic Romantic FuturismNecromanticismLet's say for the sake of argument that Romantic Futurism once constituted an emergent cultural possibility. [1] It was the rambunctious teen of the bourgeois public sphere, resisting its rationality and imagining alternatives. [2] It seemed for awhile in the early 1790s that the adolescent might make off with the coach and drive straight to Paris. But it crashed. Romantic Futurism died an untimely death. Memories linger in surrealist painting, green politics, sado-masochistic sex. But radical culture was put to rest when the bourgeoisie showed up (at Waterloo) with the shovels. Notes1. This is the language of Raymond Williams, of course. See Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977). 2. See Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Bourgeois Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger (Boston: MIT, 1991). Navigation |