Thinking in Babel

Auretta, Christopher Damien

Álvaro de Campos, in his Ultimatum, published in the first and only issue of Portugal Futurista (1917), proclaims the revolution to come, not one of a strictly material kind but rather one fleshed out by the speculative imagination, conceived philosophically by way of a complex meditation on the historical expression of material habits and spiritual values while manifested poetically by way of a deeply ironic mediation of the now positivistic, now symbolic sources of human consciousness. The revolution to come will be a material and dematerialized (or “immaterial”) one, since it will be nourished by the complex noetic territory open to the increasingly self-reflective human community presaged by modernity.