Modus of Nostalgia of Modern English-Speaking Culture as a Phenomenon of Weird-Liminal Aesthetics: Literature, Cinematography and Music

This essay attempts to demonstrate the mechanism of the process called by Franco Berardi the slow cancellation of the future. The relevance of the research stems from the need to face the crisis situation in which contemporary English-speaking culture has lost the ability to create artistic works that present a clear image of the future. The crisis can be dealt with if understood as the cancellation of the future. This study aims to reveal the aesthetics of anachronisms, viewed narrowly and understood in a specific sense as means of dealing with the projects of a cancelled future which renders any transgression impossible. To demonstrate the results and theorize the essence of this cultural trend, the authors turn to different ways of presenting and examining heterogeneous cultural material. Proposing to apply the unconventional new research optics of weird-liminal aesthetics, which combines nostalgia for times that never really existed, the liminal nature of aesthetics, which contains a dysfunctional component of a teleological crisis and weird-imagology, which combines incompatible epochs, objects, ideas and motives. The paper applies meta-analysis of research in different cultural fields, hermeneutic research, and comparative analysis. The main trends of contemporary American and British literature are analyzed, as well as genres in which their poetics works with images of the future. Within the framework of the cinematic analysis, the figurative features of the representation of time, being-to-time, and the imagery of progress are studied using the example of the films It Follows (2014), directed by David Mitchell, Melancholia (2011), directed by Lars von Trier, and Barbie (2023), directed by Greta Gerwig. The final examination offers an overview and substantive analysis of the unveiled set of anachronisms in contemporary music and lyrics written in English. In conclusion, from the perspective of cultural philosophy we demonstrate and theorize a diverse and multifaceted crisis of visions of the future as exemplified in the sources studied. If modernity was characterized by a strong sense of the future, the current culture is gradually erasing the distinction between artistic concepts and visions of yesterday and tomorrow in a blurred reference to our days.

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