ACCELERATION, MONTAGE, INTERMEDIALITY, AND THE SUBJECT: FUTURISM AND ITS LEGACY

Abstract

Futurism adopts new technologies of early twentieth century as central tenets of its aesthetics and worldview. Its technomorphism prefigures cultural theory’s views on the end of the humanist subject and the posthuman. The eternity of the technological flesh is the most far-reaching expression of the Futurist utopia centred on the machine. The Futurists’ objective is to dislodge conventional forms of representation as a way to displace conceptual, cognitive, and behavioural models. Their aim is to revolutionize human identity and subjectivity. They foreshadow Virilio’s concepts of instantaneity and ubiquity in our electronic culture, as well as Bauman’s notion of liquidity as a sign of an ever-changing sense of selfhood. The intensification of sensorial elements and the colonization of the body by the machine recall McLuhan’s theories. Futurism creates fusions and fluid exchanges of the arts and opens them to intermediality, abstraction, performance, and conceptualism. It opens many doors that lead to contemporaneity.