"We are not out of breath. Our hearts are not in the least tired. For they are nourished by fire, hatred, and speed."

I. A Celebration of Youth Culture

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers; For he today who sheds his blood with me shall be my brother, be he ne'er so vile, This day shall gentle his condition.... Shakespeare, Henry V

FOUR YEARS AGO, as a freshman, I went to MIT with some friends to see the Living Theater perform Paradise Now. It was a big event; the Living Theater was on a triumphal return from European exile: leading audiences naked through the streets in New Haven; roughing up big name critics in New York. They were the heart of the heart of avant-garde rebellion.

I remember the performance well enough. The company stripped down to Join cloths and circulated through the Theater pleading that the audience do the same. I remember Julian Beck, the impressario of the show, snarling insults at a terrified bald-headed man in my row. And Beck's wife, Judith Malina, sitting on my friend's lap in the seat next to mine, caressing him. I recall very vividly being attacked for ten minutes by a black member of the cast, who stopped shouting only when I began to tremble and then put his arm around me and told me that everything was going to be all right.

But, peculiarly, I remember getting tickets for the performance better than the performance itself. The Living Theater being absolutely the chicest thing going and the need to be out front lock-step with the latest negation of establishmentarian culture being what it was in those days...you can imagine that everybody was there in line waiting for the few remaining tickets for that night's show. It took a long time for the box-office to open up, and rather than submit to the banal civility of the queue, many people--mostly those in back--left the line for the floor nearby, and began talking hip talk and passing joints.

I recall my joy as the line dissolved into these garrulous circles. I was so happy to be in that room with that group of people; we were so far out! We had made a revolution in the lobby, dispensing with laws against drug use and stupid procedures of order and patience. A narcissistic pride seemed to envelop us--this instantaneous collectivity, of those few with their ears to the cultural ground, hearing the same dinning forecast of the new world, the new freedom.

Yet as the waiting progressed, I noticed that despite myself I was beginning to get a little edgy. More and more people were arriving in the lobby and it was obvious that there were not going to be enough tickets to go around: the few were not few enough.

There was a hush: the ticket seller had arrived. All of a sudden the lobby exploded; joints and cigarettes were tossed aside as people from all sides of the room began pushing and shoving their way toward the ticket window. It was a free-for all. The strongest were literally stepping over the weak to get their tickets. Imagine what a bread riot must be like: men and women, divested of any human grace, maiming each other in a primitive battle for survival.

That was what it had come to in the well-fed world of the counter-culture: that awful crush at the ticket window to feed upon the hoary zeitgeist. I battled my way to a ticket. I had the privilege of living in the heart of the heart of the avant garde for an evening.

IRRATIONALISM was a principle of conduct in the counter culture of those days. At least it was for me. And because it was so irrational--so precisely antithetical to rational American capitalism that it encompassed the most hapless millenarians: waiting for the lost continent Atlantic to rise; waiting for the polar ice caps to melt; waiting for John F. Kennedy to be wheeled out of the hospital, with his head glued back together and his arm held in a wave by John John and Caroline, to proclaim the salvation of all the shell shocked vegetables--this counter culture was so doped up and crazy that it could never explain itself with any coherence. For me, it is as if all those days of getting stoned had no content whatsoever, so little do I remember anything specific about them. There was a Zen ethic about: those who know don't say; those who say they know don't know.

Just the same, there were plenty of people who said they knew, and they found their way to the advertising agencies and the national media with no trouble. What a godsend this new counter culture was to the hungry market forces of the economy. The market penetrated to new sectors: the crotch, the rough palate, the mind. New industries were developed for the production and servicing of eccentric implements of consciousness, which had an ontological obsolescence built into them to insure a steady level of demand.

And the popularizers wrote an instant history for this instant culture, creating a monolithic false collectivity to sell the new consciousness: "We" marched in Selma; "we" went to Washington to protest the war; "we" joined Weathermen. And then when it all became a little stale, no longer selling the goods, "we" were junked in favor of a new product line. And then, suddenly neglected, "we" shuddered as the sense of apocalypse fell like a gangrenous drapery across our vision. "We" retired to the libraries, where "we" sit in the total silence of post-apocalypse.

This instant history which has been spun around us is no history at all, for it is the negation of real personality, meaningful tradition, and organic development. It is a neat, didactic, easily digestible abstraction of the experiences of thousands of diverse individuals over ten years, lumping their yearnings, experiments, successes and failures together and calling the result a "movement," which can be discarded by the ad-men and the editors as easily as it was created.

And what is more, ersatz theorists have set down an instant history of the Twentieth Century and derived programs for the future from it. For those theorists--Buckminster Fuller, Paolo Soleri, Charles Reich, Alvin Toffler, and many others--contemporary events are classified with such certainty that their solid proximity to us makes them loom quite as unique cataclysms. And whether these theorists of unique apocalyptic crisis posit as a solution the incorporation of man into mile-high monster cities that will last a thousand years, that have static patterns of social relations drawn into the architectural blueprints so that the idiot masses may not mar the technocrats' as does Soleri; or the rule of the computer, as does Fuller; or neo-primitive hipism, as does Reich, they all serve to further dissociate the individual from those bonds and understandings that have been developed in the past. These theorists can be lumped together under the term "futurist." Their future is one that comes due in 1984; a silent Fascism which will seem like peace after we have been softened and disoriented by successive waves of cultural nausea.

II. Futurism and Fascism

We are not the first to see ourselves in an age of unique crisis. More than 50 years ago--as automobiles began to replace horses in the streets, as aeroplanes began to rise off the ground, as Darwinism ground to pieces the Old World cosmology that it had shattered--there was a feeling that recognizable human history had ended and something new had begun. Europe seemed to have lost its center, even as the scientists and engineers and money men of bourgeois capitalism busied about with their work.

European culture's solitary validation of classical wisdom had dissolved in cacophony. What good was tradition? It could no longer contain and embody the contradictions of a society which was being so drastically refigured. Out of this depression and disarray came a movement of rebellious poets and painters, the Italian Futurists, standing "upon the extreme promontory of the centuries," proclaiming the modern age and its marvels.

Their sensibility was a patchwork of ideas that are familiar to us. They professed a love of technology that is much like Fuller's; they carried themselves in the defiant aesthetic posture of some of our rock musicians; they awaited the violent transformation of the world with a longing that is a little like that of Weatherman.

In her researches on the Futurists Marianne Martin, an art historian, uncovered an unpublished autobiographical statement by Giacomo Balla describing his conversion to the movement:

Friends took him aside, imploring him to return to the right course, predicting a disastrous end. Little by little, acquaintances vanished, the same happened to his income, and the public labelled him MAD, BUFFOON. At home his mother begged the Madonna for help, his wife was in despair, his children perplexed!...(But) he regarded these obstacles as mere jests and...without further ado put all his passeiste pictures up for auction, writing a sign between two crosses: 'For sale--the works of the late Balla.'

Two years later, the reborn Balla would submit, as part of his movement's agitation for Italian participation in the First World War, a manifesto advocating the wearing of "antineutral" clothing, "that should include no neutral colors and possess the Futurist characteristics of flexibility and lack of symmetry, as well as being phosphorescent and not durable."

In Balla, whose representation of the Futurist scriptures for a new art that conveyed the dynamism and simultaneity of the machine age culminated in his painting of a dachsund on a leash in motion, Futurism shows an eccentric but relatively harmless face. It is this face which art historians have located along a continuum of European aesthetic development as a cantankerous sect of modern abstractionism and a precursor of Dadaism.

Yet the obscurity of Italian Futurism stems more from its political badness than anything else. F.T. Marinetti, its founder, led most of the movement into an alliance with his friend Benito Mussolini and sponsorship of the Italian Fascist Party. And it is precisely because futurism gave itself over to Fascism that the temper of its revolt against modern society should be understood. For it is not as if their Fascism was a mistake, or a moment of bad judgment, or an afterthought. In the movement's First Manifesto, Marinetti wrote:

We want to glorify war--the only hygiene for the world--militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchists, the beautiful ideals that kill, and contempt for women.

Because Marinetti acted upon this bone-rattling avant-garde rhetoric--agitating with Mussolini for Italian intervention in the War, joining him as a cohort in the founding of the 'Fasci di Combattimento, and leading the first rampage of Fascist anti-Socialist violence, the sacking of the Avanti! offices in April 1919--his movement in the arts has been buried or sterilized by criticism, with judicious hind-sight.

Thus James Joll may say that Marinetti's entry into politics "made nonsense" of his life. This post-facto definition of "sense" reintroduces the dichotomy between political and aesthetic selves that the Futurists sought to transcend. For the most central element of their sensibility was the convergence of art and politics in a total movement. Their politics were meta-political; their aesthetics meta-aesthetic: the two converged on a terrain that I wish to describe.

***

Marinetti was called "the caffcine of Europe" by a Parisian journalist. He was a wealthy, supremely self-confident man, who chose early in his life to seek recognition as a benefactor and overlord of the arts. His strategy was that of a flamboyant aristocrat: to attack the small mediocre bourgeois democrats who seemed to be taking control of the world. Marinetti's was a call to the heroic: "we stand upon the summit of the world and once more we cast our challenge to the stars." He would later descend upon Italian nationalism, and appropriate it in the service of his aesthetic designs. Indeed, early in his career, this Italian nationalist wrote exclusively in French.

In 1902 he published a 4000-verse allegorical epic, La Conquete des Etoiles. Martin says of it: "At times one is overwhelmed by his volubility, and the rhetorical tone of certain passages detracts from the poem's effectiveness." His second work was a book of poems titled Destruction. One of the poems, "Le Demon de la Vitesse," was described by a near-contemporary critic as "a kind of railway journey of the modern soul." A play published in 1905, Le Roi Bombace, attacked socialist utopianism in the style of Alfred Jarry. Already his writing spoke of "the beauty of machines which could replace the more traditional objects of aesthetic satisfaction, and a realisation of the heightening of experience which the sensations of speed and mechanical power could give."

Marinetti came into contact with the most advanced avant-gardists while living in Paris. He found them, for the most part, too precious and introspective. He committed himself to completing the demolition of classicist values, a task that seemed too great for his contemporaries.

And thus he chose to leave Paris and its shilly-shallying for Milan, where he began publishing in 1905 Poesia; a compact and sophisticated revue, so solid and self-sure that we might call it an avant-garde steam-roller. Milan was the industrial and commercial center of Italy, with few treasures of the Rennaissance to keep polished. It was a city of the 20th Century, crackling with the sound of the new instruments of instantaneous destruction and creation. It was an ideal city from which to launch attacks on the iconologies of Florentine art and Vatican religion, for the very life of the city embodied a new aesthetic. Giovanni Paini recalled one of Marinetti's early stories: "His arrival in the peaceful Florence of those days was like a meteorite landing in an old Palace garden."

From Milan, he sent his Futurist Manifesto of 1909 to Le Figaro in Paris. The Manifesto began by recounting an evening Marinetti had spent with Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carra, and Luigi Russolo, later lions among the Futurist painters: "As we listened to the last fervent prayer of the old canal and the crumbling of the bones of moribund palaces with their green growth of beard, suddenly the hungry automobiles roared beneath our windows," wrote Marinetti.

...Come my friends!' I said. Let us go.... We must break down the gates of life to test the bolts and padlocks. We went running to the three snorting machines to caress their breasts... No reason to die unless it is to be rid of the too great weight of our own courage...

Let us leave good sense behind like a hideous mask and let us hurl ourselves, like fruit spiced with pride, into the immense mouth and heart of the wind.

Suddenly Marinetti, the driver--"the man whose ideal stem pierces the earth"--is distracted by "disapproving cyclists." The cyclists tottering back and forth are so boring that Marinetti throws the automobile into a ditch, to be revived by a band of "fishermen and gouty naturalists." The four retire lustily to proclaim their response to cultural malaise: the destruction of all in the modern world that is incommensurate with the heroic proportions of the automobile:

We want to sing the love of danger, the habit of danger, and of temerity.

We declare that the world's wonder has been enriched by a fresh beauty: the beauty of speed.... There is no more beauty except in struggle... No more masterpiece without an aggressive character. Poetry must be a violent attack against the unknown forces, summoning them to lie down before man...

Time and space died yesterday. We live already in the absolute, since we have created the eternal omnipresent absolute, since we have created the eternal omnipresent speed. We shall sing... the gluttonous railway stations swallowing smoking serpents; the factories hung from the clouds by the ribbons of their smoke...the broad-chested locomotives, prancing on the rails like great steel horses curbed by long pipes, and the gliding flight of aeroplanes whose propellers snap like flags in the wind, like the applause of an enthusiastic crowd.

The program specifically called for the demolition of museums, libraries, backward-looking cities, and useless national monuments. The new aesthetics shattered the very notions of form, harmony, and beauty: "A roaring automobile... is more beautiful than The Victory of Samothrace."

Futurism set out to lance the boil of traditional Italian society with the collision of thousands of motorcars; skyscrapers, with men riding on their backs, would emerge through the puss. Memory itself was to be abolished. And the Futurist Manifesto granted Marinetti and his gang only ten years to accomplish their works of destruction. When they reached 40 they would collapse in chagrin and burn their books, giving way to rapacious successors. Later, Mussolini, "whose dearest wish was the uprooting of three centuries of the Italian tradition of servitude," would say that he wanted to make Italy unrecognizable in ten years.

In delivering Italy from "the gangrene of professors, of archeologists, of tourist guides, and of antiquarians," Marinetti hoped for a release of national vitality and a transformation of the homilied Italian national character: joviality, ingenuousness, and incompetent bungling of wars and foreign relations. Later, in 1930, he would even issue a Manifesto of Futurist Cooking, pleading the liberation of Italy from its national dish of pasta, "because it develops that typical ironical and sentimental scepticism which too often dampens (our) enthusiasm." This disdain for the quality of Italian life and the manners of its people, even if it was spoken in the rhetoric of radical nationalism, reflects Marinetti's position as an outsider--attempting to manipulate objects for whose cares and attachments he had little sympathy.

***

Futurism was not the only voice of cultural radicalism in Italy. The Florentine Papini had written in 1904:

When lives have to be sacrificed, we are not saddened, if before our minds shines the magnificent harvest of a superior life that will arise from their deaths. And while lowly democrats cry out against war as a barbaric residue of ferocious ages, we believe that it is the greatest awakener of the weak, a quick and heroic instrument of power and wealth.

D'Annunzio had espoused a similar glorification of violent and courageous genius. And Corradini had published in his Il Regno as virulently and anti-semitic a nationalism as anything that had emerged in Europe.

Yet despite its theoretical currency, the creation of an heroic new nation through the destruction of traditional forms had as yet few practical partisans. The unified Italy already was a new nation, born with the Risorgimento. Frustration with its slow development took varied forms: monarchist restoration, bemoaning the loss of tradition and respect, looked to the past; those who sought the expansion of bourgeois institutions hovered over the present with their bureaucratic flow charts and financial ledgers; those who disliked both conservative traditionalism and bourgeois materialism yearned for the future. It is in their clamorous externalization of this last tendency of the universal frustration--the lust for the speed and vitality of a new age--that the Futurists made a place for themselves.

They issued manifesto upon manifesto. They propagandized their movement at Futurist soirees where their baiting of stuffed-shirt critics often ended in fistfights and brawls. They organized the Futurist Variety Theater, with such pre-Dada techniques of shocking the stuffed-shirts as placing glue on the audience's seats, or selling one seat to two people. They issued leaflets attacking whole cities for their sloth and sentimentality. An early drawing shows some Futurists emerging from an evening of vitriol under huge banners and flanked by clowns and jugglers, punching out shocked onlookers. In 1909, Marinetti covered his manifesto with his first novel, Mafarka le Futuriste, an ode to the new man of unchained brute aesthetics. He was charged with obscenity, and sentenced to two months. For the Futurists it was a glorious moment.

Roger Shattuck describes the paralytic theorizing of some of the French avant-gardes which Marinetti had determined to explode with his wild-in-the-streets agitation:

Why are these authors so concerned with metaphysical preliminaries to the artistic process? The answer reaches far beyond the question. When literature and painting cease to be representations or imitations of external reality in order to become self-sufficient creations rivaling reality, then the artistic function itself demands scrutiny.

The Marinettist ethic of direct action can be seen as the first attempt by an avant garde movement to transcend the self-conscious pre-occupation with its own existence. The Futurists left such introspective questioning behind when they hopped in their automobile. And liberated from the world of passeiste moral ethics, they were able to externalize the frustration and loneliness of an advanced cultural group in physical violence. Rather than add to the mounting pile of speculation about the vitality of the arts in an age of giants, they attempted to live in that age; to make available its primeval forests in the modern cities and its fire-breathing dragons in the automobile. And the optimism of their vision is that in the wondrous new age of the present, men can ride dragons to the office every morning. For man has mastered the dynamism of the natural world by reproducing it.

Quite quickly the Futurists made their movement a total one; announcing their radicalism not simply as a transcendent response to the sense of impasse in the world of aesthetic creation, but that of the society as a whole. In 1909, Marinetti baptized with water only, but his words were an ominous prescience of Mussolini's later deeds:

In politics we are as far removed from international and antipatriotic socialism--that ignoble exaltation of the rights of the belly--as we are from timid clerical conservatism symbolized by the bedroom slippers and the hot water bottle... We sing of war, the only cure for the world, a superb blaze of enthusiasm and generosity, a noble bath of heroism without which races fall asleep in slothful egoism, in economic opportunism, in a miserly hoarding of the mind and will.

Fascism would learn much from Futurism about the style of a total movement. In 1920, Mussolini, renouncing the ethical dicta of "both vaticans, in Moscow and Rome" would say that he looked "with extraordinary sympathy on (the) 'new impetus' to modern life, in the pagan forms of the cult of strength and daring."

For the Futurists were among the first to comprehend what new possibilities the age of machines opened to men not cowed by their metallic presence. One manifesto called for a youth technocracy:

Instead of a lower house composed of incompetent talkers and feeble-minded scholars held in check by a senate of octogenerians, Italy shall be governed by a government of twenty experts (all under thirty years of age).

***

BEYOND the continual haranguing of its public, the Futurist movement, particularly its painters, began to embody the new aesthetics of speed, simultaneity, and dynamic motion in works of art. The painters saw themselves extending the abstraction of the Cubists, advancing from the representation of diverse planes and dimensions of subjects frozen in time to the incorporation of continuous and extended movement. It was a daring experiment: taking their inspiration from the moving picture camera, the Futurists attempted to rival the igenuity of science by dissolving the last formal limitation of the artist's brush on flat canvas. The painters issued a Technical Manifesto in 1909 specifying how the new synthesis was to be achieved.

Space no longer exists: the street pavement, soaked by the rain beneath the glare of electric lamps, becomes immensely deep and gapes to the very center of the earth. Thousands of miles separate us from the sun; yet the house in front of us fits' into the solar disk.

Who can still believe in the opacity of bodies, since our sharpened and multiplied sensitiveness has already penetrated the obscure manifestations of the medium? Why should we forget in our creations the doubled power of our sight., capable of giving results analogous to those of the X-Rays?...

Our renovated consciousness does not permit us to look upon man as the center of universal life. The suffering of a man is of the same interest to us as the suffering of an electric lamp.... The harmony of the lines and folds of modern dress works upon our sensitiveness with the same emotional and symbolic power as did the nude upon the sensitiveness of the old masters.

As was the rule with Futurist art, the painters' theory preceded their practice. It was not, despite the claims of Ms. Martin an organic art, evolving out of post-Renaissance experimentation. First came the intellectual appreciation of what might be possible; then came the paintings, almost as illustrations for the Manifestos. Luigi Russolo portrayed the prescribed visions of the Technical Manifesto. He even painted an homage to Nietzsche, with the great man staring defiantly into space, enfolded in the sweeps of his own tumbling hair and that of a dark-eyed woman behind, gazing lovingly at him.

Yet some of the painters, particularly Boccioni in "The City Rises" and "The Laugh," made new and expressive art out of the programmatic concepts. "The City Rises" shows huge rock-solid buildings rising out of the swirling motion of a construction gang struggling with its horses. It is a sensuous ode to the violence and power of modern civilization, painted with a precise pointillist brush, yet lacking in definition of the forms in its tumultous foreground of sharp reds, blues and yellows. "The Laugh" attempts simultaneity rather than dynamism, locating the image of a fat happy woman in what seems a night club against the myriad consonant objects which surround her--all seemingly lit by the broad rays of spotlights at the top of the canvas.

Some of Boccioni's other works, notably his "States of Mind" series, succumb to over-intellectualization of the craft. Appolinaire recounted a conversation with Boccioni in his column in Mercure de France. He recalls that Boccioni proudly told him that in the "States of Mind" not a single line of "Those who Stay" was repeated in "Those who Go." Appolinaire found the claim amusing.

Despite its self-importance, the movement grew more popular, and seemed one of the most vital currents in the European arts. But acceptance of the movement created new problems, for unlike machines, the new aesthetics could not simply chug on and on through the fixed pattern of wheels and cogs in the same perpetual motion. The Futurists had achieved their notoriety by creating a public which awaited each new perversity, each new defiant experiment. Carlo Carra, in the onward march of the avant-garde sensibility, would declare The Painting of Sounds, Noises and Odours which:

DENIES... greys, browns,... the pure horizontal, the pure vertical... the right angle... the cube... (and) WANTS ... Reds, Reeeds that screeeeeeam... greeeeens that shrieeeeek...

And Rusollo would be conducting a concert orchestra of "Gurglers, cracklers, rubbers, crackers, screamers, roarers, exploders, whistles, and buzzers." Applause for the barely comprehensible pushed the Futurists on toward in-comprehensibility.

The most important of the converts to the movement were Papini and Ardengo Soffici, who seceded from the Florentine revue La Voce in protest of its idealism and, in 1913, founded a new revue, Lacerba, as a joint venture with the Futurists. Milan had captured Florence. "I am a Futurist," wrote Papini, "because Futurism means Italy, an Italy greater than the Italy of the past, more modern, more courageous, more advanced than other nations. The most lively flame of this Italy burns brightest among the Futurists, and I am proud of being one of them."

Yet after several months of careening around corners with tires squeeling and shouts of "hurrah!", Papini alighted from Marinetti's automobile to publish a lead article in Lacerba entitled "The Circle Closes." In it he criticized Russolo's absured orchestration in such pieces as Concourse for Airplanes and Automobiles; Marinetti's latest concept of literary formlessness, "free words;" and some of Boccioni's sculpture in quite passeiste terms: he feared that for the Milanists "thought abandons itself to action... art... turns into raw nature."

As Marinetti was away in Russia propagandizing, Boccioni replied to the criticism in the name of the movement in the following issue of Lacerba. He wrote bitterly, demanding repentence: "Confess that you have made a blunder, or at least that you have shouted just like any senator: 'Liberty is fine... but where will liberty lead to?'" Following this row, jealousy began to further erode the movement's aggressive collectivity. Boccioni published a book on Futurist painting, Pittura Scultura Futuriste. Carra was angry that he was not given adequate credit for his Painting of Sounds, Noises, and Odours. Soffici, who had only recently before published Cubismo e Futurismo, a book similar but inferior to Boccioni's felt usurped.

Carra broke from the Futurists and joined a revitalized Florentine alliance with Papini and Soffici. The three tried to mau-mau the Milanese in their own idiom, and accused Boccioni of being a "potential moralist" and a "professor of history and aesthetics." Boccioni grew defensive under the criticism, and began to withdraw from the increasingly claustrophobic comradeship of the Milanese rump. Ms. Martin notes: "After three years of exhausting activity, all the artists were fretting under the demands of collective enterprise and longing for peace, with time for reflection on their own." Marinetti's automobile was beginning to rattle apart.

As Papini and Soffici grew more distant, they took an increasingly anarchistic line, accusing Marinetti of "trying to establish an immobile church with an infallible creed." The Futurist rhetoric was common property, and each side claimed to be the truly radical representative of the germinal ideas of the movement. The debate was joined in a style reminiscent of the Trotsky-Stalin harrangues of the late 20s and 30s as to who was the real Leninist. This line of argument culminated in an article in early 1915 by Papini and Soffici entitled Futurism and Marinettism, in which the Florentines claimed to be the only true Futurists, and dismissed Marinetti's Futurism as authoritarian automobilism.

Indeed, the analogy to the Trotsky-Stalin split is quite precise, even on the level of physical resemblance. Papini plays the Trotsky part: slight, curly-haired, highly literate, and nearly effete in his manner. He was a latecomer to the movement but rose immediately to the top because of his brilliance; yet he was a man who could not submit to the discipline and hard-knocks of a vanguard group, and in his flight claimed the libertarian high ground. Marinetti of course plays Stalin: a mustachioed Machiavellian man, with an affable bearish personality. He was a fierce partisan of the movement from the moment of its inception, doing the dirty leg and fist work; a man more given to street brawling than to intellectual debate. The struggle raged, and artistic production nearly vanished.

***

Even as Futurism was losing its center as an aesthetic movement it began to realize its fondest meta-aesthetic dreams. "The only hygiene for the world," intervened on the sloppy playground skirmishing of the sects. The Great War had come at last! Lacerba immediately declared itself a political journal. With Russolo, Marinetti joined a volunteer cyclist brigade. There was only one problem: Italy, trapped in an unwanted formal alliance with Austria, had chosen neutrality.

The aesthetics of Marinetti's nationalism demanded an alliance with France and England. He transformed the Futurist Soirees into violent anti-neutral demonstrations. On September 15, 1914, in a Milan theater, Boccioni high in the balcony ripped apart an Austrian flag and threw it to the audience, while Marinetti waved an Italian flag. The next day Marinetti and Russolo staged a similar demonstration in a piazza in the center of town. They were arrested and spent five days in jail.

Marinetti had said in 1909 that "patriotism and love of war have nothing to do with ideology" As the war broke out, Mussolini, still nominally a Marxist revolutionary, proved Marinetti's point. In protest of The faithful Second International and anti-interventionism of the Italian Socialist Party, Mussolini had resigned the editorship of Avanti! His last Avanti! editorial closed:

We have the unique privilege of living in the most tragic hour of the world's history. Do we wish to be--as men and socialists--passive spectators of this grandiose drama, or do we wish to be its protagonists?

Mussolini, backed by substantial capital, began a new newspaper, II Popolo d'Italia and a militant interventionist group motivated by "the spirit rather than the letter" of international socialism. Despite his disdain for socialists, Marinetti was drawn to the group. The cult of violence was a thing beyond whatever mealy-mouthed ideology happened to be convenient. After being arrested together in an interventionist demonstration, Mussolini and Marinetti became fast friends. James Joll cites this description of Mussolini penned by Marinetti as the embodiment of Mafarka the Futurist:

Square, champing jaws; prominent, scornful lips, which spit arrogantly and aggressively on everything that is slow pedantic, analytical, whimpering.... His eyes move ultradynamically, race as fast as an automobile on the plain of Lombardy or Italian seaplanes in the skies over the ocean; their whites flash from right to left like those of a wolf.... His right hand, in his pocket, grasps a stick, like a saber straight along the line of the muscles of his arm.

THE AGITATION of the nationalists was successful. The Treaty of London, signed in April 1915, transferred Italy's alliance to France, England, and Russia. On May 24, war was declared. Marinetti, Boccioni, Russolo and others departed from the Austrian front with their cyclist brigade. They served bravely; their boasts had not been idle. Marinetti was wounded and decorated for heroism. Russollo was also wounded. Boccioni died, as did the Futurist architect Sant' Elia.

Yet even the bloody consecration of warfare could not cure the lust for absolute transfiguration of these men. It was not yet a sufficiently large drama to locate them in time and space. "Look at us!" Marinetti had written in the first Manifesto. "We are not out of breath, our hearts are not in the least tired. For they are nourished by fire, hatred and speed."

Marinetti returned from the war agitating all the louder, now against the "traitors of Caporetto," the pusillanimous parliamentarians who had sold out the otherwise heroic troops. The war had not been hygiene enough. Perhaps another.... Marinetti joined Mussolini in organizing the Fascist Party in 1919, and was one of its first candidates for election.

That same year, D'Annunzio, home restless from the war, marched with a pick-up army on Fiume, a city on the Adriatic, to claim it as a fruit of Italy's up-from-the-bottom nationalism. He wrote a description of the "newness of life" in Fiume, which he ruled as a fief for a year despite the protests of the Italian government:

Versailles means decrepitude, infirmity, obtuseness, betrayal, and cruelty, which look out on the world from eyes dilated with fear. Ronchi (the town from which D'Annunzio had marched) means youth, beauty, daring, cheerful sacrifice, broad arms, profound newness.

And a man less given to political forms for spiritual renovation--a more truly Nietzschean man, the artist Boccioni--would write before his death of his impatience with the insufficient and clumsy brutality of war:

I shall leave this existence with a contempt for all that is not art. There is nothing more terrible than Art. All that I see at present is play compared to a well-drawn brushstroke, a harmonic verse, a well-placed musical chord. Everything compared to that is a matter of mechanics, of habit, of patience, of memory. There exists only art.

III. The Aesthetics of Fascism

IN DESCRIBING one of Boccioni's best-known pieces of sculpture, the bronze figure Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, Joshua Taylor wrote:

The figure... strides forth, a symbol of vitality and strength, yet its impetuous step rests lightly on the ground as if the opposing air gave the figure wings. It is muscular without muscles, and massive without weight. The rhythm of its forms triumph over the limitations of the human stride to suggest unending movement into infinite space.

The sculpture is indeed a masterpiece. It refines and recombines the immediately apparent image of a man walking; enhancing rather than reducing the complexity and grace of that image. The piece is a validation of the new freedom of the avant-garde artist, unbound from the traditional task of copying precisely that which his gifted eye perceives. The mental image and its ground of associative thought mingles with the elements of the material image in the finished work.

Without demeaning the transcendence of the finished object, we may ask what the new art says about the particular moment in history in which it was created. For such works as Boccioni's are unimaginable in other moments. Although the sources of his inspiration cannot be precisely located in the historical events contemporary to him--any more than they can be located in the nature and quantity of the food he ate, or the configuration of the stars--his mode of representing that inspiration was, by his own admission, heavily influenced by the world of material creation, out the door.

Boccioni's technical experimentation suggests the inadequacy of traditional forms to portray the images, gestures and subtle moments of a world whose very logic has been exploded by the emergence of technology, "Who," as Boccioni and the others admonished, "can still believe in the opacity of bodies." We know better. Thus Futurist art, insofar as it was an attempt to explore new techniques of representing our augmented perception: simultaneity, dynamism, motion--tried to narrow the gap between the infinitely complex world which the artist perceives and his aesthetic embodiment of it.

Yet the Futurists did not rest at embodying the world that technology produced. to have limited their role to purveyors of a sensibility informed by technology would have made them too much the machine's creatures. Instead they were a movement, seeking to reintegrate the exploded world in the name of human heroism and power. They embraced technology, but opportunistically, seeking to capture it as a prize, a new demonstration of man's creative primacy in his world. Theirs was a subtle cunning: they championed technology as a means to the end of the exaltation of those human qualities most removed from the mediocre and mechanized efficiency that the machines had brought with them.

The artist meditated upon the technological forms. And insofar as he did this, he brought them within his sphere of control. For the artist must dominate the subject of his art: that is what art is; a wrestling with those elements of a changeable reality which are deemed suitable; taming them, making them lie still on the artist's easel or plinth.

Yet the Futurists' assertion of a triumph for the human will through the extension of its realm of manipulable objects led inescapably to metaesthetic demonstrations of will; to displays of courage and primacy over the conditions and fixtures of modern life--like civility--to which more cautious men submit. And this was the hubris of the Futurists. For the violent assault on tradition became an assault on the frustrating ambiguities of the human condition. Violence became diffuse and its own end. From the first night, described in Marinetti's Manifesto of 1909, the machine aesthetic broke out of the studio and the library and into the street.

More important, the artist's dilemma, of creating new and vigorous life within the limited dimensions of canvas or stone, was preached as society's dilemma. Men must transcend their own inadequacies; they must set to work on their society as if it were so much clay to be molded, stone to be chiscled. Art and life were merged, and the direct techniques of the artist--familiar to a realm where morality or ethical behavior have no meaning--were applied in political agitation, and finally in acts of violence. The commingling of aesthetic and political sensibilities is shown in criticism of Lenin for creative incompetence:

Lenin's attempt is a vast terrible experiment in vile bodies. Lenin is an artist who has worked with human beings as other artists work with marble or metals.... There has been no masterpiece: the artist has failed. The task was beyond his powers.

Mussolini, seeking the task of political leadership in such terms, would execute a remorseless terror, a terror which would not recognize itself by that name. His "squadrists"--brigades of street thugs and ex-soldiers in black shirts--would obliterate Italy's painfully assembled Socialist movement and its institutions of people's culture and decision-making shouting their motto: "I don't give a damn!"

Mussolini proclaimed a revolution, and armed the middle classes with the aristocratic contempt for common decency and respect that he found in his friend Marinetti. He gave his private army the license of artists to manipulate reality, and they created for him his masterpiece. In Three Faces of Fascism, Ernst Nolte recounts one of the thousands of aesthetic moments in the creation of Fascism:

One of Italy's most famous squadrists, Sandro Carosi, entered a workingman's cafe with some companions, draw his pistal and with a broad smile forced one of the men present to stand against the wall with a cup on his head: he was going to prove his marksmanship. But the bullet entered the man's head and killed him--in mock despair the marksman bewailed his unsteady hand.

Fascism was a desperate regress to feudal social relations in an attempt to re-assert man's control over a technological world that had grown too diverse. Since the Fascist spirit always overwhelmed its patchwork ideology, competence and the bravuro gesture were the only remaining standards by which value might be measured. This mirrors the earlier predicament of the Futurists, who, in transcending the ethical canons of tradition, embraced technological forms while using barbaric violence to assert their autonomy of technology. "War is beautiful," said Marinetti, "because it establishes man's domain over the subjugated machinery by means of gas masks, terrifying megaphones, flame throwers, and small tanks." The two poles of the Futurist sensibility--technology and militance--were incorporated in the very structure of the local fasci units of Mussolini's party: each local chapter included a squadro di combattimento (the black-shirted squadrists) and a gruppo di competenza (the local technical elite).

***

WE PLAY the lyre on all its strings," said Mussolini. "From violence to religion, from art to politics." The enemy became parliamentary democracy, because "Democracy has deprived the people of 'Style': that is, a line of conduct, the color, the strength, the picturesque, the unexpected, the mystical: in sum, all that counts in the soul of the masses." Fascism was able to make allies of the middle classes--first enfranchised by parliamentary democracy and theoretically its most militant supporters--by appealing to their fear of a growing socialist movement. In the 1920 elections, the Socialists had won control of one-third of Italian communal and provincial administrations, and they were pressing on toward what seemed to be the frightened middle classes an inevitable triumph for Italian Bolshevism.

Against the Marxist ideology of the masses, the theorists of the middle and upper classes placed a nationalism which trapped the deepest longings for dignity of the Italian people and offered a simpler solution to the nation's problems than socialist reconstitution. D'Annuzio had given nationalism a radical cross-class rallying cry, describing the struggle as:

the crusade of all the poor and impoverished nations, the new crusade of all poor and free men, against the nations which usurp and amass all wealth, against the predatory races.

For all Mussolini's skill in uniting the Italian people, it is not unfair to say that he was a dupe of the pre-existing Italian ruling elite. He had surrendered his pre-war Marxism only as he had come to feel that the beast of bourgeois society was nowhere near expiration. Just as the Futurists before him had realized that the technological age was no hallucination and had attempted to dominate the machines by making them servants to art and man, Mussolini attempted to dominate the bourgeois society whose reality and permanence he had accepted. This was a significant departure, for there was a large wing of Italian Socialism which believed that bourgeois society was little more than an impermanent hallucination: the "Maximalists" awaited the imminent collapse of a capitalism whose structural contradictions seemed irremedial and malignant.

In reacting against this view, Mussolini had decided to throw in his lot with the still-growing capitalist state and consolidate it by a surgical streamlining of useless and decadent trappings like elections and labor unions. Mussolini was a man for whom irrelevance to any dynamism, be it war or an economic system, was intolerable. Once in power, Mussolini declared the corporatist state, one big union of everybody working together for the common good of the fatherland. Mussolini was an honorable man, of sorts; he believed his utilitarian rhetoric. Yet in the same way that he would later become Hitler's fool, Mussolini became an ideal caretaker for the interests of the richest of the Italian industrialists. For, as Nolte says:

Practically speaking, Fascist corporatism meant forcing the employees to accept Fascist functionaries as their representatives and welding their representation with the virtually unaltered representation of the industrialists by means of government intervention.

Mussolini's revolution created a massive defense committee to insure the interests and stability of the Italian ruling class.

Nolte characterizes Fascism as "resistance to transcendence." By this he means that the Marxist legacy of 19th Century romanticism, which implied that one sector of society as it existed had within itself the seed of a glorious new society and the negation of all that had come before, was seen as wishful and insipid thinking. Resistance to romantic transcendence also characterizes the Futurists, whose theory and practice added up to a statement that the material effects of rational technology--of the material world--could not be transcended, and that man had best set out to transform himself so as to be able to live with them.

Marinetti loved to malign the traditionalists and their devotional objects as so much useless baggage. They were to be jettisoned from the ship of modernity to make for a speedier passage to a new order in which men were men, women were irrelevant, and art was life. Marinetti took in hand the implements of technology; and he used them as well. But by 1920, he, like Boccioni before him, grew weary of the incomplete realization of his dreams through the immediate world of guns and blood spilled and political exigencies. He returned to art, proclaiming the rule of genius and the possibility of transcendence of the material world through art. He ended his days as a member of the Italian Academy.

What is the consonance between the collapse of Mussolini's half-program of utilitarian social change and the collapse of Marinetti's image of the violent restoration of primal vision and lucidity? Both men saw their work as the augmentation of the artifacts of the present to enormous proportions. A key element in the Futurist-Fascist sensibility was the irrelevance of analytical and ideological thinking. "Our program is simple," said Mussolini just before the March on Rome. "We want to govern Italy." They chose to bypass any of the subtler interpretations of social dynamics as more of the useless baggage obscuring heroic vision. And they became instrumentalities of the hidden forces of bourgeois society which the useless theoretical baggage had described. The two movements, Futurism and Fascism, could only create vacuums for themselves when they stepped outside all established political and aesthetic logics.

If, as I have tried to show, both Mussolini and Marinetti made agitation an end in itself, and in so doing deferred the material ends of their agitation to other institutions or social forces, we may say of them that they were oblivious to the realm of values that an historical awareness imparts. Or, as Nolte says, that they were, "hostile to history." This is the contour of their shared irrationalism.

Nolte quotes a letter from Hitler to Mussolini written in 1941 in which Hitler places himself outside any logic of an evolutionary or dialectic history and instead at the van of a retrograde restoration.

It often seems to me that in these 1500 years the evolution of mankind has only suffered an interruption and now once again is about to return to former paths.

Hitler's play on Mussolini's fantasies of the new Roman Empire with himself as the new Caesar characterizes the Fascist longing for the pure unproblematic social relations of an imagined past. This longing has often been described as Nietzschean.

Without rehashing the arguments of Walter Kauffman and others that the "Nazified Nietzsche" of The Will to Power misrepresents the humanitarian conviction of his thought, let me summarize their conclusions. Nietzsche sought to make men more aware of the supremely subtle test of living honestly with the spiritual dilemmas of the modern world. In a passage in The Gay Science, Nietzsche asked men to take full cognizance of their responsibility in a world from which the personification of ethical authority and moral order in the figure of the Christian God had disappeared. The Superman would not be more violent and Dionysian than those who came before: he would rather be courageous enough to remake ideas of authority, order, beauty, trust in man's image, without the epistomological props that Christian political and aesthetic man had so neatly available. "Where has God gone?" asks the Madman. "We have killed him--you and I." The Madman then describes modernity's predicament of simultaneous power and disorientation:

How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What did we do when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? A way from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, foreward, in all directions? Is there any up or down left? Are we not straying through an infinite nothing?

The first Futurist Manifesto proclaimed this very dissociation--"Time and Space no longer exist!" Yet they allowed themselves to meditate upon the critical dilemma of creation in a solitary universe for only an instant. And then they were off in their automobiles.

The Futurists attempted to exalt the artist's power of manipulation over life by ignoring his paralyzing disorientation. They embraced the very elements of modernism to which Nietzsche traced man's amoral nihilism: machines; sterile progress; vulgar scientifism. And thus, in a sense, the Futurists were Nietzscheans in reverse. Their superhumanity was in their embrace of the deadly technocratic anti-aesthetics.

Neitzsche's writing, according to Kauffman, began as a reaction against Darwinian positivism. And it just such a positivism that characterizes the Futurist temper. Darwinian and Futurist thought share an assertion of the inherent "rightness" of progress: with a corresponding ethic of amoral struggle and an uncritical acceptance of newly emergent forms as ipso facto good, certified by their mere existence.

That Nietzsche's thought could be so transfigured by his devotees attests to the peculiar power of ideas: that they motivate actions before they yield comprehension. The Futurists attempted to create in their art a progressive image of man triumphing over his world. Yet they failed to understand that man's triumph would lie precisely in his ability to forestall the violence of men upon each other without appealing to any force or power ordained above man himself.

The Futurist avant garde did some heavy body work on Italian society. They nearly accomplished the task they had set for themselves: the undermining of the sentimental idealist view of man in history, and the substitution of more primal modes of social relation than the hesitancy of old fashioned moral ethics permitted. Then they gave way to Fascism, in a sense the only possible heir to their sense of the world. And Fascism welded the irrational ahistoricism of the Futurists into an all-conquering political weapon.

Where Marxian socialists proclaimed the logic of history, and derived their political impreatives from it, the Fascists saw in history neighter logic nor legitimacy. And thus, seeing itself as a separate and unique phenomenon in a ime isolated from any past, Fascism made no peace with partial or delayed satisfaction of its political will.

Where the Socialists saw violence as an unfortunate means to humanitarian ends, the Fascists loved violence for itself-for its delicious enhancement of boring everyday reality. Evil people exist in the world---people who delight in human suffering-and the Fascists were evil people. And they won.

If history is simply a series of bloodly transcripts, will evil people-those most naturally given to violence and most adept in its use-always triumph? Marxism is an intricate, and sometimes dubious, statement that political alternatives are not so bleak; that there is such a thing as "progressive violence"-the violence of the masses against the jealous hoarders of power on top. Are you against the violence on principle? Tell it to the Carthaginians. Or the Italian Socialists.

Lenin's attempt is a vast terrible experiment in vile bodies. Lenin is an artist who has worked with human beings as other artists work with marble or metals.... There has been no masterpiece: the artist has failed. The task was beyond his powers.

Mussolini, seeking the task of political leadership in such terms, would execute a remorseless terror, a terror which would not recognize itself by that name. His "squadrists"--brigades of street thugs and ex-soldiers in black shirts--would obliterate Italy's painfully assembled Socialist movement and its institutions of people's culture and decision-making shouting their motto: "I don't give a damn!"

Mussolini proclaimed a revolution, and armed the middle classes with the aristocratic contempt for common decency and respect that he found in his friend Marinetti. He gave his private army the license of artists to manipulate reality, and they created for him his masterpiece. In Three Faces of Fascism, Ernst Nolte recounts one of the thousands of aesthetic moments in the creation of Fascism:

One of Italy's most famous squadrists, Sandro Carosi, entered a workingman's cafe with some companions, draw his pistal and with a broad smile forced one of the men present to stand against the wall with a cup on his head: he was going to prove his marksmanship. But the bullet entered the man's head and killed him--in mock despair the marksman bewailed his unsteady hand.

Fascism was a desperate regress to feudal social relations in an attempt to re-assert man's control over a technological world that had grown too diverse. Since the Fascist spirit always overwhelmed its patchwork ideology, competence and the bravuro gesture were the only remaining standards by which value might be measured. This mirrors the earlier predicament of the Futurists, who, in transcending the ethical canons of tradition, embraced technological forms while using barbaric violence to assert their autonomy of technology. "War is beautiful," said Marinetti, "because it establishes man's domain over the subjugated machinery by means of gas masks, terrifying megaphones, flame throwers, and small tanks." The two poles of the Futurist sensibility--technology and militance--were incorporated in the very structure of the local fasci units of Mussolini's party: each local chapter included a squadro di combattimento (the black-shirted squadrists) and a gruppo di competenza (the local technical elite).

***

WE PLAY the lyre on all its strings," said Mussolini. "From violence to religion, from art to politics." The enemy became parliamentary democracy, because "Democracy has deprived the people of 'Style': that is, a line of conduct, the color, the strength, the picturesque, the unexpected, the mystical: in sum, all that counts in the soul of the masses." Fascism was able to make allies of the middle classes--first enfranchised by parliamentary democracy and theoretically its most militant supporters--by appealing to their fear of a growing socialist movement. In the 1920 elections, the Socialists had won control of one-third of Italian communal and provincial administrations, and they were pressing on toward what seemed to be the frightened middle classes an inevitable triumph for Italian Bolshevism.

Against the Marxist ideology of the masses, the theorists of the middle and upper classes placed a nationalism which trapped the deepest longings for dignity of the Italian people and offered a simpler solution to the nation's problems than socialist reconstitution. D'Annuzio had given nationalism a radical cross-class rallying cry, describing the struggle as:

the crusade of all the poor and impoverished nations, the new crusade of all poor and free men, against the nations which usurp and amass all wealth, against the predatory races.

For all Mussolini's skill in uniting the Italian people, it is not unfair to say that he was a dupe of the pre-existing Italian ruling elite. He had surrendered his pre-war Marxism only as he had come to feel that the beast of bourgeois society was nowhere near expiration. Just as the Futurists before him had realized that the technological age was no hallucination and had attempted to dominate the machines by making them servants to art and man, Mussolini attempted to dominate the bourgeois society whose reality and permanence he had accepted. This was a significant departure, for there was a large wing of Italian Socialism which believed that bourgeois society was little more than an impermanent hallucination: the "Maximalists" awaited the imminent collapse of a capitalism whose structural contradictions seemed irremedial and malignant.

In reacting against this view, Mussolini had decided to throw in his lot with the still-growing capitalist state and consolidate it by a surgical streamlining of useless and decadent trappings like elections and labor unions. Mussolini was a man for whom irrelevance to any dynamism, be it war or an economic system, was intolerable. Once in power, Mussolini declared the corporatist state, one big union of everybody working together for the common good of the fatherland. Mussolini was an honorable man, of sorts; he believed his utilitarian rhetoric. Yet in the same way that he would later become Hitler's fool, Mussolini became an ideal caretaker for the interests of the richest of the Italian industrialists. For, as Nolte says:

Practically speaking, Fascist corporatism meant forcing the employees to accept Fascist functionaries as their representatives and welding their representation with the virtually unaltered representation of the industrialists by means of government intervention.

Mussolini's revolution created a massive defense committee to insure the interests and stability of the Italian ruling class.

Nolte characterizes Fascism as "resistance to transcendence." By this he means that the Marxist legacy of 19th Century romanticism, which implied that one sector of society as it existed had within itself the seed of a glorious new society and the negation of all that had come before, was seen as wishful and insipid thinking. Resistance to romantic transcendence also characterizes the Futurists, whose theory and practice added up to a statement that the material effects of rational technology--of the material world--could not be transcended, and that man had best set out to transform himself so as to be able to live with them.

Marinetti loved to malign the traditionalists and their devotional objects as so much useless baggage. They were to be jettisoned from the ship of modernity to make for a speedier passage to a new order in which men were men, women were irrelevant, and art was life. Marinetti took in hand the implements of technology; and he used them as well. But by 1920, he, like Boccioni before him, grew weary of the incomplete realization of his dreams through the immediate world of guns and blood spilled and political exigencies. He returned to art, proclaiming the rule of genius and the possibility of transcendence of the material world through art. He ended his days as a member of the Italian Academy.

What is the consonance between the collapse of Mussolini's half-program of utilitarian social change and the collapse of Marinetti's image of the violent restoration of primal vision and lucidity? Both men saw their work as the augmentation of the artifacts of the present to enormous proportions. A key element in the Futurist-Fascist sensibility was the irrelevance of analytical and ideological thinking. "Our program is simple," said Mussolini just before the March on Rome. "We want to govern Italy." They chose to bypass any of the subtler interpretations of social dynamics as more of the useless baggage obscuring heroic vision. And they became instrumentalities of the hidden forces of bourgeois society which the useless theoretical baggage had described. The two movements, Futurism and Fascism, could only create vacuums for themselves when they stepped outside all established political and aesthetic logics.

If, as I have tried to show, both Mussolini and Marinetti made agitation an end in itself, and in so doing deferred the material ends of their agitation to other institutions or social forces, we may say of them that they were oblivious to the realm of values that an historical awareness imparts. Or, as Nolte says, that they were, "hostile to history." This is the contour of their shared irrationalism.

Nolte quotes a letter from Hitler to Mussolini written in 1941 in which Hitler places himself outside any logic of an evolutionary or dialectic history and instead at the van of a retrograde restoration.

It often seems to me that in these 1500 years the evolution of mankind has only suffered an interruption and now once again is about to return to former paths.

Hitler's play on Mussolini's fantasies of the new Roman Empire with himself as the new Caesar characterizes the Fascist longing for the pure unproblematic social relations of an imagined past. This longing has often been described as Nietzschean.

Without rehashing the arguments of Walter Kauffman and others that the "Nazified Nietzsche" of The Will to Power misrepresents the humanitarian conviction of his thought, let me summarize their conclusions. Nietzsche sought to make men more aware of the supremely subtle test of living honestly with the spiritual dilemmas of the modern world. In a passage in The Gay Science, Nietzsche asked men to take full cognizance of their responsibility in a world from which the personification of ethical authority and moral order in the figure of the Christian God had disappeared. The Superman would not be more violent and Dionysian than those who came before: he would rather be courageous enough to remake ideas of authority, order, beauty, trust in man's image, without the epistomological props that Christian political and aesthetic man had so neatly available. "Where has God gone?" asks the Madman. "We have killed him--you and I." The Madman then describes modernity's predicament of simultaneous power and disorientation:

How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What did we do when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? A way from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, foreward, in all directions? Is there any up or down left? Are we not straying through an infinite nothing?

The first Futurist Manifesto proclaimed this very dissociation--"Time and Space no longer exist!" Yet they allowed themselves to meditate upon the critical dilemma of creation in a solitary universe for only an instant. And then they were off in their automobiles.

The Futurists attempted to exalt the artist's power of manipulation over life by ignoring his paralyzing disorientation. They embraced the very elements of modernism to which Nietzsche traced man's amoral nihilism: machines; sterile progress; vulgar scientifism. And thus, in a sense, the Futurists were Nietzscheans in reverse. Their superhumanity was in their embrace of the deadly technocratic anti-aesthetics.

Neitzsche's writing, according to Kauffman, began as a reaction against Darwinian positivism. And it just such a positivism that characterizes the Futurist temper. Darwinian and Futurist thought share an assertion of the inherent "rightness" of progress: with a corresponding ethic of amoral struggle and an uncritical acceptance of newly emergent forms as ipso facto good, certified by their mere existence.

That Nietzsche's thought could be so transfigured by his devotees attests to the peculiar power of ideas: that they motivate actions before they yield comprehension. The Futurists attempted to create in their art a progressive image of man triumphing over his world. Yet they failed to understand that man's triumph would lie precisely in his ability to forestall the violence of men upon each other without appealing to any force or power ordained above man himself.

The Futurist avant garde did some heavy body work on Italian society. They nearly accomplished the task they had set for themselves: the undermining of the sentimental idealist view of man in history, and the substitution of more primal modes of social relation than the hesitancy of old fashioned moral ethics permitted. Then they gave way to Fascism, in a sense the only possible heir to their sense of the world. And Fascism welded the irrational ahistoricism of the Futurists into an all-conquering political weapon.

Where Marxian socialists proclaimed the logic of history, and derived their political impreatives from it, the Fascists saw in history neighter logic nor legitimacy. And thus, seeing itself as a separate and unique phenomenon in a ime isolated from any past, Fascism made no peace with partial or delayed satisfaction of its political will.

Where the Socialists saw violence as an unfortunate means to humanitarian ends, the Fascists loved violence for itself-for its delicious enhancement of boring everyday reality. Evil people exist in the world---people who delight in human suffering-and the Fascists were evil people. And they won.

If history is simply a series of bloodly transcripts, will evil people-those most naturally given to violence and most adept in its use-always triumph? Marxism is an intricate, and sometimes dubious, statement that political alternatives are not so bleak; that there is such a thing as "progressive violence"-the violence of the masses against the jealous hoarders of power on top. Are you against the violence on principle? Tell it to the Carthaginians. Or the Italian Socialists.