Italian Futurism is, by and large, a product of unique historical and
social circumstances. For centuries, Italy lagged behind the rest of Western
Europe, both economically and politically. It was still, largely, a collection
of city-states, with only the barest hints of a national identity; trains,
automobiles, and electricity were still novelties; and the country, in the
view of many, "had degenerated into a tourist mogul celebrating its
glorious past for the sake of the German antiquarians who emigrated by the
thousands each year."3 Although Futurism's
impact was felt throughout Europe and in the United States, their primary
objective was national -- they wanted to destroy Italian culture's fascination
with its own past. Such an emphasis, Marinetti and others argued, kept Italy
locked in its own memories, unable to break free and move forward. In their
attempt to destroy Italy's paralysis, Futurism offered a two-fold strategy:
Firstly it was to introduce a new aesthetic which would express the
mental and physical sensations of life in the Machine Age. ... Secondly,
it was to shock, ridicule and provoke the Italian public and the custodians
of Italian culture out of their complacent lethargy and to inspire them
to create an up-to-date Italy which would be as great as the Italy of classical
antiquity and of the Renaissance and yet in no way dependent on them.4
Essentially, Futurists set out to reclaim the past by defining the present
and the future. In so doing, they attempted to destroy the attitudes and
mores that he associated with a pre-"Machine Age" world. Consequently,
Futurism's attacks centered upon political, ideological, and aesthetic institutions,
from "museums, libraries, academies of every kind" to "moralism,
feminism, every opportunistic or utilitarian cowardice" (M 50).
These "old world" devices were out of touch with a modernity that
had redefined and reimagined not only the physical world but also the social
body, language, human physiology, and perception. In particular, Futurist
arguments centered around a rejection of a particular notion of language,
which (according to Fredrich Kittler) emerged in the nineteenth century
through a series of sweeping changes in the fields of education, grammar,
and spelling and effectively standardized how words were written, how they
were spoken, and what values they were ascribed. These changes effectively
controlled the process of writing so that a hierarchy was established, whereby
language (either verbal or written) was accorded a power that exceeded its
materiality. As a result, any sounds or marks that did not conform to the
uniform rules -- including spelling errors, accents, animal sounds, or gesticulations
-- were reduced to the level of non-sense.
In order for such a network to successfully regulate channels of discourse,
however, it was necessary to align the idea of language with a particular
origin, or point of reference that would "naturalize" this system,
thereby linking it a transcendental "Truth" that extends and defines
all knowledge. Because it was the mother's job to teach her children to
read, the origin of language in the "discourse network of 1800"
became the mother's voice. She would enunciate letters until her child could
both comprehend the sounds and equate that sound with the written letter
found in their primer. In this position, mothers embodied the "spirit"
of the letters -- which, in themselves, "have no meaning" but
are "related by the voice to the body and to Nature."5
As school minister Heinrich Stephani notes, the mother's mouth must become
"an instrument upon which we are able to play certain meaningful tones
that together we call language."6 Women,
in this "network," came to embody the Origin of language; however,
as a consequence, women's own voices were subsumed within their child's.
As Kittler notes, "Mother ... separated the child from everything animal
because she did not speak or did not speak to anyone at all; rather, she
praticed vowels and consonants."7 A
woman could create language, but she could not speak and she could not write.
Kittler adds that these developments in phonetics and education "culminated
in the description or prescription of a new body. This body has eyes and
ears only in order to be a large mouth. The mouth transforms all the letters
that assault the eyes and ears into ringing sounds."8
As in 1800, the cultural and scientific developments of 1900 would alter
the human body's perception of reality, space, and above all time. As Stephen
Kern notes, "the impact of the automobile and of all the accelerating
technology was at least twofold -- it speeded up the tempo of current existence
and transformed the memory of years past, the stuff of everybody's identity,
into something slow."9 In other words,
the early twentieth century witnessed a transformation of the concept of
time from the fixed and permanent object of Kittler's 1800 analysis to a
fluctuating and expanding force that altered shape according to each situation.
This dynamic reading of time was based, in large part, upon the epistemological
shift which, as Derrida notes, was centered around a revision of Plato's
separation of mental and physical activities.10
As psychologists like Freud, William James, and Henri Bergson assert, both
mental and physical functions are products of the brain's neurological matrix.
"Brain" and "mind" are interchangeable terms, and the
human body's functions (both lower and higher) are attributed not to a "spirit"
or "voice" but to a physical network that, in many ways, resembles
the inner workings of machines. In fact, as Bergson points out, the brain
is no more than a kind of central telephonic exchange: its office
is to allow communication or to delay it. It adds nothing to what it receives;
but, as all the organs of perception send it to their ultimate prolongations,
and, as all the motor mechanisms of the spinal cord and of the medulla oblongata
have in it their accredited representatives, it really constitutes a center,
where the peripheral excitation gets into relation with this or that motor
mechanism, chosen and no longer prescribed.11
Bergson's metaphoric alignment of brain and telephone exchange reduces thought
process to the level of a complex machine, compiling and transmitting rather
than creating information. While it functions as the "center"
of neural-processing, it cannot add to what the body's nerves and sensory
organs give it. The effect of this rethinking of mental processes led to
a certain anxiety, particularly because machines like the telephone and
the radio processed information so much faster and more efficiently than
the human brain. As Kern notes, "There is abundant evidence that one
cause of World War I was a failure of diplomacy, and one of the causes of
that failure was that diplomats could not cope with the volume and speed
of electronic communication."12 Because
information was processed and transmitted so quickly through wires and radio
waves, the human beings who controlled this flow of data (that is, who operated
the social brain) could not keep up with technology's demands; consequently,
they panicked and started a war that, in itself, came to define the 20th
century's ambivalence over its own technologies.
Whereas many read the advances of science as dangerous or troublesome --
preferring to look "back fondly on the good old days of 'inefficient'
production"13 -- Marinetti and his
fellow Futurists relished every new technology and every moment of humanity's
transformation: "We must prepare for the imminent, inevitable identification
of man with motor, facilitating and perfecting a constant interchange of
intuition, rhythm, instinct, and metallic discipline of which the majority
are wholly ignorant" (M 99). There is no question in the Futurist
mind that the human body had changed. However, it was clearly evident that
the language and logic of Italian and European cultures in 1911 had yet
to catch up with this change, and begin the process of rethinking humanity
as a machine. As Bruno Carradini and Emilio Settimelli remark, "a human
brain is a much more complicated machine. The logical relationships which
govern it are numerous. They are imposed on it by the environment in which
it is formed."14 The "environment"
in question is the social codes, mores, and beliefs at work in a given culture
at a given time. In the Futurist moment, circa 1910, that network had yet
to catch up with the rapid perceptual, physiological, and intellectual changes
undergone by the human brain in the machine age. Futurism's project, therefore,
was to transform the environment of 20th century Italy into a network both
familiar with technological models of intelligence and capable of controlling
and dominating such systems.
In light of Kittler's analysis of women's voices and their epistemological
importance in the nineteenth century, it is not surprising that one of the
overriding issues in Futurist manifestoes is the elimination of a "feminized
language," which Marinetti refers to as Amore, or the cult of
"Beauty" that had been at the center of Italian culture at least
since Petrarch, and which positioned female bodies and voices as ideal objects,
without fault and without question. In "Against Amore and Parliamentarianism,"
Marinetti writes, "We scorn woman conceived as the sole ideal, the
divine reservoir of Amore, the woman-poison, woman the tragic trinket,
the fragile woman, obsessing and fatal, whose voice, heavy with destiny,
and whose dreaming tresses reach out and mingle with the foliage of forests
drenched in moonshine" (M 80). Futurism's target, here, is at
once women's bodies and the image of women as defined by men; it is, consequently,
a decidedly schizophrenic attitude that couples misogyny with feminism but
is fundamentally in support of nothing other than Futurism itself. On the
one hand, the criminal at work in the poetic charade is defined as the "horrible,
dragging Amore that hinders the march of man, preventing him from
transcending his own humanity, from redoubling himself, from going beyond
himself and becoming what we call the multiplied man" (M
80). Woman as image, woman as spectacle, woman as ideal -- these are the
enemies. Women themselves (specifically suffragettes), on the other hand,
are "our best allies ... because the more rights and powers they win
for women, the more will she be deprived of Amore, and by so much
will she cease to be a magnet for sentimental passion or lust" (M
81).
Marinetti's ambiguous support for women's rights in this passage suggests
that the Futurists were optimistic that technological advancement will result
in a more harmonious, egalitarian society bereft of discrimination and prejudice.
However, such an idealized view can only extend so far. In fact, Marinetti's
writings are replete not only with derogatory comments about women's bodies
and women's abilities, but he also uses female bodies to metaphorically
map Futurism's inherent desire for transcendence through the violence of
machines and war. As he declares in "Let's Murder the Moonshine":
"See the furious coitus of war, gigantic vulva stirred by the friction
of courage, shapeless vulva that spreads to offer itself to the terrific
spasm of final victory! It's ours, the victory..." (M 61-2).
The sexualization of war in this passage is certainly not uncommon; in fact,
according to Klaus Theweleit, it is prevalent in German proto-fascist literature
and propaganda, where the battlefield itself becomes a sexual terrain far
more familiar and desirable than a woman's body. As he notes, "These
men look for ecstasy not in embraces, but in explosions, in the rumbling
of bomber squadrons or in brains being shot to flames."15
In the case of Marinetti and his brand of proto-fascism, however, the
terrain of the battlefield, although sexualized, is nevertheless centered
upon a recreation of creation: a realization (echoing Nietzsche's Zarathustra)
that "Man is something that shall be overcome."16
To the Futurists, this can only be accomplished through a union of human
desire and machinic power which redefines the act of creation not as a biological
reproduction of life but a mechanical assemblage wherein the parts themselves
configure a body but not a "self."
In Thus Spake Zarathustra, Nietzsche remarks, "body am I entirely,
and nothing else; and soul is only a word for something about the body."17
The configuration of the "self," as an imagined construction
of the very discourse network that produced and expressed Amore,
runs contrary to the Futurist's future of precision, technology, and force.
In Marinetti's view, women's bodies and their link to reproduction are diseased
specifically because they are an aspect of the past that must be destroyed
if humanity is to adapt and evolve in an ever-mechanizing future. In response
to witnessing an airplane taking off into the sky, Marinetti comments, "I
confess that before so intoxicating a spectacle we strong Futurists have
felt ourselves suddenly detached from women, who have suddenly become too
earthly, or, to express it better, have become a symbol of the earth that
we ought to abandon" (M 83). As a symbolic link to "earth"
that is quickly being replaced by metal, women represent a past which Futurism
is attempting to destroy: "We have even dreamed of one day being able
to create a mechanical son, the fruit of pure will, a synthesis of all the
laws that science is on the brink of discovering" (M 83).
Marinetti's writings resound with images of new bodies, fusions of the biological
and the mechanical, projected images of life without "humanity,"
all attempting to comprehend and capitalize upon the rapid changes brought
about by modern industrial life. As Stephen Kern notes, "The new technology
provided a source of power over the environment and suggested ways to control
the future. The Futurists identified their movement with the promise of
that technology and the new world that it offered."18
Technology, as Marinetti understood it, would remake the human body as it
remakes the Earth. "The energy of distant winds," he writes, "the
rebellion of the sea, transformed by man's genius into many millions of
Kilowatts, will penetrate every muscle, artery, and nerve of the peninsula,
needing no wires, controlled from keyboards with a fertilizing abundance
that throbs beneath the fingers of the engineers" (M 112). The
power and mastery promised by science and technology necessitates a transformation
of human physiology and perception. As John Hanson remarks, "The Futurist
... dreamed of reaching that absolute point of alchemetical intensity where
motion and space would become one, the man merging with the tram, the onlooker
with the city."19 Futurism's identification
with noise and speed, by replacing female love and beauty as the central
determiners of meaning and truth, did not so much challenge the existing
social order as it recognized its irrelavence in a machinic world.
In fact, as Kittler notes, the disillusion of "humanity" was already
evident in the early part of the 20th century. Along with advancements in
high-speed transportation and communication, psychophysics and psychoanalysis
broke language and perception "into individual elements: into optical,
acoustical, sensory, and motoric nervous impulses and only then into signifier/signified/referent."20
As a result, "children circa 1900 learned to read without understanding
and to write without thinking."21 Kittler
sees Dr. jur. Daniel Paul Schreber22 of
Dresden as the principle model of literary production in this period, for
his account of schizophrenia perfectly exemplifies the effect of a mechanical
society upon the psychic processes. Freud's case study of Schreber details
his transformation from "a man of superior mental gifts and endowed
with an unusual keenness alike of intellect and of observation,"23
to a patient in a mental hospital suffering from acute paranoia, where "he
believed that he had a mission to redeem the world and to restore it to
its lost state of bliss. This, however, he could only bring about if he
were first transformed from a man into a woman."24
Freud's analysis asserts that the connection between Schreber's desire to
communicate with God and his desire to become a woman constitutes "a
feminine (that is, a passive homosexual) wish-phantasy, which took as its
object the figure of the physician."25
Freud's reading, here, is consistent with his overall paternal and authorial
narratives; what is missing, however, is the very text of this analysis
-- namely, the body itself. As Kittler argues, "Freud was much too
concerned with the testimonial value of the received messages to investigate
the logic of the channels. What Schreber writes, what writers write -- everything
became for Freud an anticipation of psychoanalysis."26
The "logic of the channels" is precisely the matrix of desires
and fears played out upon Schreber's body. According to Dr. Weber, the director
of the sanitorium where Schreber spent several years,
It is not to be supposed that he wishes to be transformed into
a woman; it is rather a question of a "must" based upon the order
of things, which there is no possibility of his evading, much as he would
personally prefer to remain in his own honourable and masculine station
in life. But neither he nor the rest of mankind can win back their immortality
except by his being transformed into a woman (a process which may occupy
many years or even decades) by means of divine miracles.27
Schreber's logic is based not upon the phantasy of Oedipal desire but the
reality of his mission: that he alone must become a woman if humanity is
to survive. Weber goes on to note that the process of "becoming woman"
would "probably require decades, if not centuries, for its completion,
and it is unlikely that any one now living will survive to see the end of
it."28 This transformation seems to
exceed the boundaries of Schreber's own phantasy; there is, in other words,
more to it than simply replacing a penis with a vagina; that, in fact, what
he is referring to is a movement from one conception of humanity to another,
incorporating human, machine, and ethereal or divine elements. To a degree,
Schreber's "metamorphosis" is similar to Marinetti's belief that,
in the future, the differences between machines and humans will grow progressively
less certain. As he notes, "We believe in the possibility of an incalculable
number of human transformations, and without a smile we declare that wings
are asleep in the flesh of man" (M 99). To grow wings, to become
woman: each metaphor forecasts a vision of the future that cannot be explained
within the linguistic boundaries of the time. Futurism's project attempts
to give shape to these transformations; in part, this involves the creation
of a new language system that would be better suited to a technologically-powered
world.
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