"Violence and Precision": The Manifesto as Art Form

38 Pages·2008·3.7 MB·English

"Violence and Precision": The Manifesto as Art Form
Author(s): Marjorie Perloff
Source: Chicago Review, Vol. 34, No. 2 (Spring, 1984), pp. 65-101
Published by: Chicago Review
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Marjorie Perloff
"VIOLENCE AND PRECISION":
THE MANIFESTO AS ART FORM
In the autumn of 1913, at the height of the manifesto fever that swept
across Europe in the years preceding the First World War, Gino
Severini, then living in Paris, sent the manuscript of a projected
manifesto to F. T. Marinetti in Milan.1 Here is Marinetti's reply:
I have read with great attention your manuscript, which
contains very interesting things. But Im ust tell you that it has
nothing of the manifesto in it.
First of all, the title absolutely won't do because it is too
generic, too derivative of the titles of other manifestos. In the
second place, you must take out the part in which you restate
the merde and rose of Apollinaire, this being, in absolute
contrast to our type of manifesto, a way of praising a single
artist by repeating his own eulogies and insults. Moreover
. . . you must not repeat what I have already said, in
Futurism and elsewhere, about the futurist sensibility. The
rest of the material is very good and very important, but to
publish it as is would be to publish an article that is excellent
but not yet a manifesto. I therefore advise you to take it back
and reword it, removing all that I have already mentioned,
and intensifying and tightening it, recasting the whole new
part in the form of Manifesto (informa di Manifesto) and not
in that of the review-article about futurist painting. . . .
I think I shall persuade you by all that I know about the
art of making manifestos (daW arte di far manifesti), which I
possess, and by my desire to place in full light, not in half
light, your own remarkable genius as a futurist.2
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To give one's text "the form of Manifesto"?a form Marinetti
defined in an earlier letter to the Belgian painter Henry Maassen as
requiring, above all, "de la violence et de la pr?cision"38this was to
create what was essentially a new genre, a genre that might meet the
needs of a mass audience even as, paradoxically, it insisted on the
avant-garde, the esoteric, the anti-bourgeois. The Futurist man
ifesto was a way of aestheticizing what had traditionally been a
vehicle for political statement:4 witness this definition in the OED:
MANIFESTO: (1647) A public declaration or proclamation,
usually issued with the sanction of a sovereign prince or state,
or by an individual or body of individuals whose proceedings
are of public importance, for the purpose of making known
past actions and explaining the reasons or motives for actions
as forthcoming.
Trusting neither "the sanction of a sovereign prince or state" nor
the existence of a political body "whose proceedings are of public
importance," the Futurists created an art form designed to erase the
traditional line between creation and criticism. In their curiously
mixed discourse, they anticipated many of the so-called "critical
texts" of our own time, texts that are not quite "theory" or
"poetry" but that occupy a space between the traditional modes and
genres.
The shrewd recipe that Marinetti sent to Henry Maassen?
"Maassen?"l'accusationpr?cise, l'insulte bien d?finie"?made its
first appearance in Marinetti's Fondation et Manifeste du
Futurisme, published in Paris on the front page of the Figaro on 20
February 1909. The Figaro headnote reads:
M. Marinetti, the young Italian and French poet, whose
remarkable and fiery talent has been made known throughout
the Latin countries by his notorious demonstrations and who
has a galaxy of enthusiastic disciples, has just founded the
school of "Futurism," whose theories surpass in daring all
previous and contemporary schools. The Figaro, which has
already provided a rostrum for a number of these schools,
and by no means minor ones, today offers its readers the
Manifesto of the "Futurists." Is it necessary to say that we
assign to the author himself full responsibility for his singu
larly audacious ideas and his frequently unwarranted extrav
agance in the face of things that are eminently respectable
and, happily, everywhere respected? But we thought it inter
esting to reserve for our readers the first publication of this
manifesto, whatever their judgement of it will be.5
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This bit of mythmaking sets the tone for the brilliant propaganda
machine to come. I say mythmaking because the fact is that
Marinetti became a public figure as a result of, not prior to, the
publication of the First Futurist Manifesto. Even more ironically,
the Marinetti whose "theories" were ostensibly more "daring" than
those of "all previous and contemporary schools," was writing, as
late as 1909, decadent versions of Baudelairean lyric like the fol
lowing:
Mon bel ange sensuel, br?lant et tremp?
des volupt?s du ciel et de l'enfer! . . .
Je tends les bras ?perdument vers toi
dans la profonde solitude
de cette nuit ?tincelante qui m'inonde
d'un flot d'?toiles glac?es! . . .
(My beautiful, sensual angel, burning and bathed
in the pleasures of heaven and hell!
Madly, I hold out my arms to you
in the deep solitude
of this glittering night that floods me
with a cascade of frozen stars! . . .)
This is the first stanza of "Le Dompteur" ("The Vanquisher"),
published in Akademos just a month before the publication of the
First Manifesto. It ends with the lines:
Ta chair, ta chair et sa chaleur tout entie?re,
et son ar?me qui embaume ? jamais
la terre en deuil o? je vais
creusant un sillon monotone,
Ta chair, to chair et sa chaleur tout enti?re,
je l'attends!6
(Your flesh, your flesh and all its naked warmth
and its scent that forever perfumes
with mourning the earth where I wander
cutting a monotonous path,
your flesh and all its deliverance,
I wait for it!)
Within a year, in The Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting,
Umberto Boccioni and his fellow artists were to launch their attack
on "the nude in painting, as nauseous and as tedious as adultery in
literature." "Artists," Boccioni declared, "obsessed with the desire
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to expose the bodies of their mistresses have transformed the Salons
into arrays of unwholesome flesh."7 He might have been talking
about Marinetti's "Ta chair, ta chair et sa saveur tout enti?re."
The 1909 Manifesto thus reflects Marinetti's program for the
future rather than his own poetic practice. As a lyric poet, he was a
mediocre late Symbolist; as a thinker, he was almost wholly deriva
tive, his extravagant statements being easily traceable to Nietzsche
and Bergson, Jarry and Georges Sorel.8 But as what we now call a
conceptual artist, Marinetti was incomparable, the strategy of his
manifestos, performances, recitations, and fictions being to trans
form politics into a kind of lyric theatre. We can see this transforma
tion if we compare the 1909 Manifesto to such related documents of
the decade as Saint-Georges de Bouh?lier's Manifeste Naturiste (Le
Figaro, 1897), Jules Romains' manifesto Les Sentiments unanimes
et la po?sie (Le Penseur, 1905), and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's Pro
gram f?r die Br?cke (1906), which was the first manifesto written by
a visual artist.
Each of these manifestos anticipates themes that turn up in
Marinetti's writings. Saint-Georges de Bouh?lier, for example, de
clares himself to be the enemy of Symbolisme as it was codified by
Jean Mor?as in his famous manifesto of 1886. Against such notions
as art for art's sake, elitism, transcendence ("des Id?es primor
diales"), and willed obscurity ("un style arch?type et complexe . . .
les myst?rieuses ellipses"),9 de Bouh?lier contends that "les hom
mes nouveaux" must turn to populism, nationalism, energy, and
violence:
The art of the future must be heroic. Moreover, we have
invented a new conception of the world. For that military
intoxication that not long ago so strongly moved our fathers,
has been transformed by us into a sort of cult of strength from
which no one will be able to escape. We will glorify the hero.
(Mitchell, p. 59).
For de Bouh?lier, the hero is specifically the farm laborer, the
peasant who is at one with nature. But the populist notion was soon
transferred to the urban worker: Jules Romains begins his Unanimist
manifesto as follows:
At the persent time, the life of civilized man has assumed a
new character. Essential changes have given a different
meaning to our existence. . . . The actual tendency of the
people to mass together in the cities; the uninterrupted de
velopment of social relationships; ties stronger and more
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binding established between men by their duties, their occu
pations, their common pleasures; an encroachment, even
greater, of the public on the private, the collective on the
individual: here are the facts that certain people deplore but
that no one contests. (Mitchell, p. 81)
In the modern city, the street becomes a kind of theatre?"alive,
endowed with a global existence and unanimous feelings" (p. 82).
Art is the natural expression of this unanimisme: "... I strongly
believe that the bonds of feeling between a man and his city, that the
whole ethos, the large movements of consciousness, the colossal
passions of human groups are capable of creating a profound
lyricism or a superb epic cycle" (p. 83).
A new urban mass art (Romains), an art of heroic violence and
nationalism (de Bouh?lier), an art that breaks defiantly with tradition
as Ludwig Kirchner argued in a proclamation for Die Br?cke, hand
printed on a woodcut and widely distributed:
with faith in development and in a new generation of creators
and appreciators we call together all youth. As youth, we
carry the future and want to create for ourselves freedom of
life and of movement against the long-established older
forces. Everyone who with directness and authenticity con
veys that which drives him to creation, belongs to us.10
Such calls for freedom, for the necessity of inventing a New
Art, go hand in hand with the spread of literacy and the use of print
media in the later nineteenth century. As early as 1850, the Pre
Raphaelite magazine, The Germ, bore on its back cover the follow
ing statement:
This periodical will consist of original Poems, Stories to de
velop thought and principle, Essays concerning Art and other
subjects, and analytic Reviews of current Literature?
particularly of Poetry. Each number will also contain an
Etching; the subject will be taken from the opening articles of
the month.
An attempt will be made, both intrinsically and by re
view, to claim for Poetry that place to which its present de
velopment in the literature of this country so emphatically
entitles it. The endeavor held in view throughout the writings
on art will be to encourage and enforce an entire adherence to
the simplicity of nature; and also to direct attention, as an
auxiliary medium, to the comparatively few works which Art
has yet produced in this spirit.11
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Notice The Germ's emphasis on group aesthetic, its insistence
that dramatic change must take place if the right kind of art is to
flourish. But neither in The Germ nor in its successors?The Yellow
Book and The Savoy in England; Lut?ce and La Plume in
France?do the manifestos and critical essays claim to be more than
texts of mediation, designed to lead the audience to the proper view
of a given artist or movement. The novelty of Italian Futurist man
ifestos, in this context, is their brash refusal to remain in the expos
itory or clinical order, their understanding that the group pro
nouncement, sufficiently aestheticized, can, in the eyes of the mass
audience, all but take the place of the promised art work. Indeed,
when a few months after its Figaro publication, Marinetti declaimed
the 1909 Manifesto from the stage of the Teatro Alfieri in Torino,
preceding the performance of his play Les Poup?es ?lectriques, the
audience all but disregarded the play itself (a fable of husband and
wife, plagued by the mechanical puppets made by the former?
puppets that, as allegorical embodiments of bourgeois duty, money,
and old age, turn out to be the couple's own alter egos)128and re
sponded to the drama of the manifesto.
The typical manifestos of the period open with a particular as
sertion or generalization about the arts. For example:
There are, in art, problems of circumstance and prob
lems that are essential. The former change every fifteen
years, every thirty years, and every half-century, according
to whether the issue is one of fashion, of taste, or of custom.
The more ephemeral they are, the more they absorb the at
tention.13
Or
Never has a time been more favorable to artistic dis
putes. The Athenian Republic of modern times takes a pas
sionate interest in them, and judges and condemns five or six
times a year, on the occasion of a Salon, a concert, or a
play.14
Here, by contrast, is the opening of Marinetti's 1909 Manifesto:
We had stayed up all night, my friends and I, under
hanging mosque lamps with domes of filigreed brass, domes
starred like our spirits, shining like them with the prisoned
radiance of electric hearts. For hours we had trampled our
atavistic ennui into rich oriental rugs, arguing up to the last
confines of logic and blackening many reams of paper with
our frenzied scribbling. (Flint, p. 39)15
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Not exposition?the controversial statement, the daring
generalization?but narrative: this invention was one of Marinetti's
master strokes. For when the eleven "theses" that follow in the
body of the manifesto are placed within the narrative frame, their
"validity" has already, so to speak, been established. So Marinetti
begins by telling us about a particular night inM ilan when he and his
poet-friends stayed up till dawn, planning for the glorious future that
would include "stokers feeding the hellish fires of great ships,"
"black spectres who grope in the red-hot bellies of locomotives
launched down their crazy courses," "drunkards reeling like
wounded birds along the city walls" (Flint, p. 39). As the night
comes to an end, the friends are drawn outdoors, not by bird-song
or moonlight but by the "mighty noise of the huge double-decker
trams that rumbled outside, ablaze with coloured lights, like villages
on holiday suddenly struck and uprooted by the flooding Po and
dragged over falls and through gorges to the sea."
Violence and precision?here is Marinetti's formula put into
action. The friends dash outside and take off in their three motor
cars (called fauves in the French version),16 travelling with break
neck speed so that "Here and there, sick lamplight through window
glass taught us to distrust the deceitful mathematics of our perishing
eyes." In this newly discovered fantastic landscape, everything is
transformed. The "ideal Mistress" of Romantic and Symbolist
poetry gives way to the machine, capable of "hurling watchdogs
against doorsteps, curling them under our burning tires like collars
under a flatiron" (p. 40). Marinetti himself almost meets the same
fate: just when the drive is at its most exhilarating, his car comes up
against two cyclists, swerves, and turns over in a womb-like ditch:
O maternal ditch, almost full of muddy water! Fair fac
tory drain! I gulped down your nourishing sludge; and I re
membered the blessed black breast of my Sudanese nurse.
. . W. hen I came up?torn, filthy, and stinking?from under
the capsized car, I felt the white-hot iron of joy deliciously
pass through my heart! (pp. 40-41; ellipses are Marinetti's).
Capsized, the automobile is reborn: "Up it came from the ditch,
slowly, leaving in the bottom, like scales, its heavy framework of
good sense and its soft upholstery of comfort." Accordingly, their
"faces smeared with good factory muck," with "celestial soot," the
group can put forward its program.
Marinetti's narrative contains a good deal of intentional buf
foonery and declamation: everything is presented in the most ex
treme terms possible: the automobile as a beautiful shark, "running
on its powerful fins," the steering wheel like "a guillotine blade that
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threatened my stomach," and so on. The language, as Luciano de
Maria has noted,18 is still heavily Symbolist: the maternal ditch, the
overturning of the car as rebirth metaphor, the "electric hearts" of
the hanging mosque lamps, and so on. But these images do not point
inward to the self; they reflect neither inner struggle nor the contours
of an individual consciousness. On the contrary, Marinetti's self
hood is subordinated to the communal "We" (the first word of the
manifesto), addressing the "you" of the crowd, the mass audience
whom he hopes to move as well as to delight. In its reliance on
hyperbole and parody (the reference to the "maternal ditch" im
mediately leads to the memory of "the black breast of my Sudanese
nurse"), Marinetti's symbolisme takes on a hard edge; his landscape
of capsized cars and factory drains has less in common with, say,
Mallarm?'s "transparent glacier" than with the animated surface of
the Walt Disney cartoon.
In its celebration of what D. H. Lawrence, an early admirer of
Marinetti, called "the inhuman will,"19 the 1909 manifesto strikes an
oddly impersonal note. It is lyrical (in the sense of choric), de
clamatory, and oracular without being in the least self-revelatory or
intimate. Not that Marinetti didn't possess, as did Lawrence, an
enormous ego, decry ego as he might. But in his manifestos and
other writings, questions of psychology and personal emotion are
consistently subordinated to the discourse's pathetic argument, its
appeal to the audience to join the movement. Marinetti thus uses
question, exhortation, repetition, digression, tropes, and rhetorical
figures to draw the audience into his radius of discourse. For exam
ple:
That one should make an annual pilgrimage, just as one
goes to the graveyard on All Souls' Day?that I grant. That
once a year one should leave a floral tribute beneath the
Gioconda I grant you that. . . . But I don't admit that our
sorrows, our fragile courage, our morbid restlessness should
be given a daily conducted tour through the museums. Why
poison ourselves? Why rot? (p. 42; ellipses are Marinetti's)20
A man on his feet talking, Charles Olson might have said of this.
Or again, "ONE PERCEPTION MUST IMMEDIATELY AND
DIRECTLY LEAD TO A FURTHER PERCEPTION ... get on
with it, keep moving, keep in, speed, the nerves, their speed. . . ."21
You have objections??Enough! Enough! We know
them . . . we've understood! . . . Our fine deceitful intelli
gence tells us that we are the revival and extension of our
ancestors?perhaps! . . . If only it were so!?But who cares?
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We don't want to understand! . . W. oe to anyone who says
those infamous words to us again! (p. 44; ellipses
Marinetti's)22
I shall discuss the theatricality of Marinetti's manifestos below.
But first, let us look at the theses he puts forward. Here are the first
four:
1. We intend to sing the love of danger, the habit of
energy and fearlessness.
2. Courage, audacity, and revolt will be essential ele
ments of our poetry.
3. Up to now literature has exalted a pensive immobility,
ecstasy, and sleep. We intend to exalt aggressive action, a
feverish insomnia, the racer's stride, the mortal leap, the
punch and the slap.
4. We affirm that the world's magnificence has been en
riched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car
whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of ex
plosive breath?a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot
is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace. (p. 41)
Marinetti's cult of energy, aggressiveness, violence, and heroism is
not unlike that of such manifesto-writers as de Bouh?lier and Ro
mains. But here, the theses are not ennumerated until the narrative
has already presented them in action: we have witnessed the
"feverish insomnia" of the poet and his friends, the "racer's stride"
and the worship of the "roaring car that seems to ride on
grapeshot." Accordingly, when we come to the ninth thesis, "We
will glorify war?the world's only hygiene?militarism, patriotism,
the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth
dying for, and scorn of woman" (p. 42), we don't question it as
closely as we might; indeed, war is made to look like the necessary
prelude to a new world composed of "great crowds excited by
work," of "polyphonic tides of revolution in the modern capitals,"
of the "vibrant nightly fervor of arsenals and shipyards blazing with
violent electric moons" (p. 42). Images of sound and color and kine
tic motion are foregrounded, the rhetorical strategy of the manifesto
being to minimize the possibilities for rumination on the reader's
part.
Marinetti claimed to have received more than 10,000 letters and
articles in response to the publication of his manifesto in the Figaro,
and although much of this mail was negative, even angry and jeer
ing,23 the response tells us a great deal about manifesto art. The
eleventh and final thesis, for example, is often cited as a description
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