ESSAY CEMETERY

"To see traces of the Utopian everywhere… is to naturalize it and imply that it is somehow rooted in human nature". Biologists in general and evolutionary scientists, in particular, would not hesitate to concede to this somewhat Freudian suggestion, posited by Jameson in his 2005 book Archaeologies of the future: the desire called Utopia and other science fictions . A frequently recited maxim in academic biological circles is that life is an extremely unfavorable energetic and dynamic state, as contrasted with death which is a state of easily self-perpetuating equilibrium. Similarly, the very rhetoric of Darwinian evolution implies that life inherently seeks better circumstances, with phrases such as "survival of the fittest" and "natural selection", in which the most enviable position belongs implicitly to the organism best suited to his or her or its surroundings. While Utopianism does seem to be a natural individual quality, idealism has not always been...

Written in 1909 in Italian. Marinetti and his friends are having a fruitful discussion, writing, and feeling proud of being unique in their endeavors. They are distracted by the noises of vehicles going through the street. They rejoice in technology. They are filled with a sense of power and recklessness. They go in the car and shout stuff, and two cyclists disapprove. This prompts the writer to throw the car into a ditch. As fishermen and naturalists fish the car out of the muck, they "dictate our first will and testament to all the living men on earth". Their manifesto promotes: taking risks and being rash rebellion glorifying technology meshing nature with technology technology that brings speed as the end of all things- the future is here war and violence anti-feminism, moralism, museums, and libraries (?) They want to reform Italy so that nothing remains of the past: professors, archeologists, museums, and libraries will be gone. They want daily visits to museums done aw...