“Every human action is anthropophagic”

The Freudian theory and the era of acceleration announced by the Futurist Manifesto arrived in Brazil in 1899 and 1909, respectively. Afterwards the concrete reception of these two significant events became more than the symptomatic revelation of the shocks provoked by industrial modernity and its powerful undercurrent of anxieties. The poet, „clown“, writer and major figure of the Brazilian modernist avant-garde, Oswald de Andrade (1890-1954) absorbed Freud and the Futurist Manifesto at once, re-pragmatized and re-semantized them. Oswald's concept of Cultural Anthropophagy (1928) as a central interpretative strategy, to be exact, an hermeneutic approach is defined by Haroldo de Campos aptly: “Oswald's ‘Anthropophagy’ [...] is the thought of critical devoration of the universal cultural heritage” (Campos,1986). The introduction of the anthropophagic trope inspired by Native Americans’ metaphysics leads the poet to a subversion of the Gestalt/Behavior psychological theories: “The anthropophagic function of the psychological behavior is reduced to two parts: 1) totemiser the external taboos; 2) create a new taboo in exogamic function” (Andrade,1929). From 1928 to 1950 the Anthropophagy approach on the interaction between the individual and the environment gained philosophical consistency. Oswald's thesis is a conceptual alternative that attempted to bring answers through the amplification of our ethical becoming. As an epistemological perspective attentive to the different modes of existence, the proposition of Oswald is a field of transformative practices having the power to overcome the techno-industrial paradigms. I will examine the contribution of Oswald de Andrade to theoretical psychology and to the issues that arise in an “Era of Acceleration” where the symbolic field is replaced by a cybernetic field.

Sustainable construction for affordable housing program in Kabul

Afghanistan suffers from four decades of war, caused a massive migration of the rural population to the cities. Kabul was originally designed for 1,5 million people, where now 5 million people live. The importation of modern western styles housing for rapid reconstruction reveals apparent cultural conflict and significant environmental footprint. The new constructive cultures for sustainable reconstruction should necessary consider the use of local materials combined with modern technologies. Earthen architecture underlies the embodiment of Afghanistan architecture. The aim of this research is to revisit traditional afghan earthen construction with the tools of industrial modernity. Three soils of the Kabul region were first characterized. Then, sun-dried mud brick and compressive earth block, with and without stabilization have been prepared and tested in the laboratory to develop the most suitable earth construction element which is cost effective and easily available compared to the imported modern products.

Digital Ruins

Geography has seen a rebirth of interest and appreciation of the ruined and abandoned spaces of industrial modernity. This work has often considered such ruins largely in terms of the phenomenological or affectual experiences of material decay, disorder, and blight. This chapter is an investigation into ruined spaces that do not have materiality or temporality: digital ruins. Existing in a kind of eternal present, such spaces do not decay, yet still demonstrate many affective and phenomenological experiences of what we understand to be ruin. Using ethnographic research of three abandoned and nearly abandoned virtual worlds, these landscapes provide a unique opportunity for a critical analysis of digital ruins as spaces of disconnection: particularly in their relationship with time, their algorithmic disconnection from the social imaginary of the Internet, the phenomenological disconnection one experiences in these places, and their founding premise as spaces of utopian disconnection from the limitations of materiality.

Introduction: Special Effects and the Techno-Romantic Paradigm

German silent cinema is famous for its unconventional aesthetics and film-technological innovations. These characteristics were the result of efforts to reconcile the new medium’s automatic reproductions of physical reality with idealist conceptions of art. Special effects played a crucial role in this endeavour. They afforded creative experiments with the cinematic apparatus and inspired filmmakers to convey ideas and emotions. Special effects embodied the “techno-romantic” project of construing technology as a means for transcending material reality. This common response to industrial modernity profoundly shaped German silent film culture. The techno-romantic paradigm formed the basis of one of the most creative periods in film history and proved instrumental in the evolution of cinematic expressivity and film art.

The Technological Sublime: Metropolis (1927)

Metropolis displays a deeply conflicting attitude toward industrial modernity. Conceived and marketed as a marvel of film technology, the film pursued the techno-romantic project of transcending material reality through technological means. What is more, the goal was to capture the unfathomability of technology itself. Metropolis simultaneously portrays technology as an agent of tyranny and dehumanization and flaunts it as spectacle. Special effects facilitate encounters with overpowering technological environments and omnipotent machines, which give rise to sentiments that are best described in terms of a “technological sublime.” The sublime characterizes experiences that go beyond the earthly and finite, to attain a spiritual dimension. In attributing transcendent qualities to mechanical objects, the technological sublime embodies the technoromantic paradigm.

Underground and Over the Sea: More Community Prophylactics in Europe, 1100-1600

Public health historians have repeatedly shown that the theory, policy, and practice of group prophylactics far predate their alleged birth in industrial modernity, and regularly draw on Galenic principles. While the revision overall has been successful, its main focus on European cities entails a major risk, since city dwellers were a minority even in Europe’s most urbanised regions. At the same time, cities continue to be perceived and presented as typically European, which stymies transregional and comparative studies based at least in part on non- or extra-urban groups. Thus, any plan to both offer an accurate picture of public health’s deeper past and fundamentally challenge a narrative of civilizational progress wedded to Euro-American modernity (“stagism”) would benefit from looking beyond cities and their unique health challenges. The present article begins to do so by focusing on two ubiquitous groups, often operating outside cities and facing specific risks: miners and shipmates. Evidence for these communities’ preventative interventions and the extent to which they drew on humoral theory is rich yet uneven for Europe between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries. Methodological questions raised by this unevenness can be addressed by connecting different scales of evidence, as this article demonstrates. Furthermore, neither mining nor maritime trade was typically European, thus building a broader base for transregional studies and comparisons.

Environmental Crisis, Cli-fi, and the Fate of Humankind in Richard Jefferies’ After London and Robert Harris’ The Second Sleep

This article discusses two instances of ‘Anthropocene fiction’ (Trexler, 2015: 4) that engage with the environmental crisis that industrial modernity has generated: Richard Jefferies’ After London (1885), and Robert Harris’ The Second Sleep (2019), which both depict a future in which technological civilisation has collapsed, and the non-human world is resurgent. Like climate change fiction, or cli-fi, these novels are concerned with the elusive and unpredictable environmental risks that modern societies inadvertently create, and with finding ways to negotiate the representational challenge of those risks; unlike many instances of climate change fiction, however, these novels do not set out to warn their readers of what is to come, or lament the disaster they depict. They are instead concerned with the legacy of technological civilisation – a legacy of risk and uncertainty – and the question of whether that legacy can ever be escaped. Neither novel offers an answer; but nor do they foreclose its possibility.

From Queen Anne to Queen Victoria. Readings in 18th and 19th century British literature and culture. Volume 7

The present, seventh, volume of the series "From Queen Anne to Queen Victoria" offers profitable re-visitations of old themes, as well as explorations of new themes and problems. The volume focuses on the literature, culture, and political and social history of Britain in a period when the structures of industrial modernity were being created, and examines Britain’s imprint on the global cultural heritage, including class, gender and race-based hierarchies that persist in varying degrees into the present.