The Cellophane State: From Density to Abstraction

The Cellophane State: From Density to Abstraction develops a cultural and anthropological genealogy of Western modernity from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, tracing a progressive thinning of social life from embodied consequence toward abstraction, procedure, and surface legibility.

Drawing on European literature and art history across Italy, France, Russia, and Eastern Europe, the paper analyses how moral weight, lived time, and personal presence are gradually displaced by representation, administration, and evaluative systems. Figures including Manzoni, Pirandello, Svevo, Baudelaire, Flaubert, Dostoevsky, Kafka, and Malevich are treated as parallel diagnostic archives of this transformation.

The paper advances a central claim that neurodivergent experience, characterised by hyperfocus, moral intensity, and non linear temporality, registers the costs of abstraction earlier and more acutely than the neurotypical norm. What contemporary discourse frames as individual burnout is reinterpreted here as a collective settlement effect, the anthropological cost of sustaining intensity within systems optimised for compliance, masking, and procedural time.

Artificial intelligence is situated not as the origin of this condition, but as a potential accelerant that renders abstraction more explicit and more brittle. The paper argues that neurodivergent collapse functions as an early warning signal of civilisational limits, rather than a private pathology.

This preprint is released to establish authorship, conceptual priority, and archival permanence for the theoretical framework and visual model presented, including the Roadrunner Loop, prior to further editorial circulation.