Walter Benjamin once observed that “a man … who died at the age of thirty-five appears to

recollection, at every point in his life, as a man who is going to die at the age of thirty-five”1. A

similar observation might be made regarding people or movements who became supporters of

Fascism: Italian Futurism2 is treated by later theorists of Modernism as a scarcely mentionable

embarrassment until the 1970's3. These late coming critical appreciations have tended to bend the

stick the other way, either emphasising Futurism's 'radical' content against Mussolini's

'conservatism'4 or (implicitly or explicitly) divorcing Futurism's formal achievements from its

adherents' subsequent political development.

From the perspective of art history, such re-examinations can usefully trace many of

Modernism's formal techniques (especially those of Dada and Surrealism) to their roots in the

movement founded in 1909 by Filippo Marinetti. It remains true, however, that adherence to

fascism is not some bus that one is accidentally struck by while crossing the street. In order to fully

appreciate Futurism's artistic achievements, it is necessary to understand their social and political

content.

As has often been noted, Futurism valorised the new experiences of modernity:

we must breathe in the tangible miracles of contemporary life – the iron network of speedy communication which envelops the earth, the transatlantic liners, the dreadnoughts, those marvellous flights which furrow our skies … How can we remain insensible to the frenetic life of our great cities and to the excitement of night-life …?5

And again:

Futurism is grounded in the complete renewal of human sensibility brought about by the great discoveries of science.6

1 Walter Benjamin, “Der Erzahler” Qouted in Esther Leslie Walter Benjamin: Overpowering conformism, Pluto Press, London, 2000, p. 216.

2 “The principal exponents of futurism were among the founding fathers of fascist movement” Emilio Gentile The Struggle for Modernity: Nationalism, Futurism, and Fascism, Praeger, London, 2003, p. 41. Moreover, Marinetti –the movement's founder – was a member of the Central Committee of the Fasci di Combattimento.

3 “Introduction” in Marianne W. Martin Futurist art and theory: 1909-1915, Hacker Art Books, New York, 2nd edition, 1978.

4 See esp “Chapter Eleven: Futurism and Fascism” in Caroline Tisdall and Angelo Bozzolla Futurism, Thames and Hudson, 1977, p. 200 -209

5 Umberto Boccioni et al. “Manifesto of the Futurist Painters 1910” in Futurist Manifestos ed. Umbro Apollonio, Thames and Hudson, 1973, p. 25

6 F.T. Marinetti “Destruction of Syntax – Imagination without Strings – Words-in-Freedom 1913” in Futurist Manifestos p. 96

This ideology was linked to new and innovative ways of seeing: poetry whose form resembles the

telescoped syntax of telegrams, abstractions of speed in painting and sculpture, images of horses

with their legs multiplied by their gallop, the views from speeding locomotives. Art historians have

tended to treat this as the core and motive force behind the movement.

But the Futurists' excitement over technology is inseparable from their acute sense that Italy

risks missing out on precisely these developments because of its 'passéism':

we establish Futurism, because we want to free this land from its smelly gangrene of professors, archaeologists, ciceroni and antiquarians. Fort too long has Italy been a dealer in second-hand clothes.7

The Futurists therefore set themselves the task of making a new Italian spirit, one which was

imagined as a radical break from its (now anachronistic) heritage.

Futurism develops in reaction to Italy's late entry into industrial capitalism and European

imperialism. Although it is true that it found an audience among some organised workers8,

Futurism had from its inception a particularly poisonous nationalism and anti-humanism that

distinguishes it from subsequent Modernist art movements and determined the meaning of their

infatuation with the experience of technology.

Thus, while a still socialist Mussolini was arguing for Italy's neutrality, the Futurists were

claiming that “We will glorify war – the world's only hygiene – militarism, patriotism, the

destructive gesture of freedom-bringers ...”9 and in the years directly preceding Italy's entry into the

first World War, Lacerba, the key Futurist paper was so full of 'interventionist' propaganda that the

censors often left more blacked out than readable text.

Transparently, Italy's involvement in the war could serve Marinetti's goal extraordinarily

well: it could help to forge a sense of nationhood, it could act as a further spur to industrialisation,

and it was the sole means by which Italy could stake its place among the great powers. Equally

transparently, the Futurists, and Marinetti in particular, infatuated as they were the immense forces

7 F.T. Marinetti “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism 1909” in Futurist Manifestos p. 228 Tisdall and Bozzolla Futurism p. 9. For anecdotes of Marinetti's meetings with revolutionary anarchists see

Berghaus, Gunter. "Violence, war, revolution: Marinetti's concept of a futurist cleanser for the world" The Free Library01 January 2009. 19 March 2012 <http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Violence, war, revolution: Marinetti's concept of a futurist cleanser...-a0257129031>. (Originally in Annali d'Italianistica)

9 F.T. Marinetti “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism 1909” in Futurist Manifestos p. 22

of modernity, were enamoured of the violent Technik of modern warfare for its own sake.

Marinetti's considerable literary achievements are often directly rooted in his anti-human

ideology. His chosen exemplar text, Battle of Tripoli, contains the strikingly original image of time

as “the sunset-conductor” ordering the actions, motions and sounds of the birds, insects, kettle-

drums, and rifles underneath the “footlights of the sky”; the innovation stems from the sustained

manner in which he has written the acting subject out of the narrative, to be replaced, he smugly

informs us, by “matter”. (A similar, if weaker tendency can be found among the futurist painters

who, when painting portraits sought virtually to efface the sitter by having “the whole of the

surrounding atmosphere” inter-penetrate them and who could write, “the suffering of a man is of the

same interest to us as the suffering of an electric lamp...”10) Marinetti, who has just driven humanity

from literature, goes on:

The solidity of a strip of steel interests us for itself; that is, the incomprehensible and non-human alliance of its molecules or its electrons that oppose, for instance, the penetration of the howitzer. The warmth of a piece of iron or wood is in our opinion more impassioned than the smile or tears of a woman.

This quasi-scientific language, however, is a façade. What we find in Marinetti is an ecstatic

relationship to matter and especially machinery – a sympathy to be expressed in “strokes of

intuition”11 and a cultic declaration that “we must prepare for the imminent, inevitable identification

of man with motor”12. The love for 'matter' tended to dissolve the human, both in terms of the

individual and the species as a whole, into her own creations.

Because this sort of violent, nationalistic, irrationalism bears obvious similarities with

fascism, it is easy to think of Futurism as having converged with fascism at a particular moment in

their development, only to fall away from each other again.

This is not quite good enough.

It is not simply that they converged, rather, Futurism, with its vision of an Italian rebirth,

10 Umberto Boccioni et al, “Futurist Painting: Technical Manifesto 1910” in Futurist Manifestos p. 28 and 29.11 F.T. Marinetti “The Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature” (1912) in Marinetti: Selected Writings ed. R.W.

Flint, Trans. R.W. Flint and Andrew A. Coppotelli, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1972, p. 8712 F.T. Marinetti “Multiplied Man and the Reign of the Machine” in Selected Writings p. 91

with its love for energy, riot and combat provided Italian fascism with the enabling myths that it

required to cohere a mass movement that would eventually become strong enough to drag the

monarchy and the Church into deals with it. When fascism no longer needs these particular

enabling myths (by around 1920), when the Fascists needed to shift their tactics and their power

base, Mussolini and Marinetti had their – rather mild – falling out.

Mussolini spoke clearly (and probably correctly) of his debts to Futurism: “I formally

declare that without Futurism, there would never have been a fascist revolution.”13 But fascism, as a

particular manner in which capitalism secures itself in the face of a deep political crisis, is not

intrinsically modernist or irrationalist any more than it is intrinsically Futurist. What it is is eclectic

and opportunistic14. It raided Futurism's ideology to give itself coherence, thereby stamping its

early stages with Marinetti's unmistakable mark, although in the process it selected particular

aspects of Marinetti's cultural work for greater or lesser emphasis.

But if fascism was not necessarily Futurist, Italian Futurism was necessarily fascist. The

Futurists were keenly aware that none of their aspirations for Italy could be realised without

breaking the workers' movement. Marinetti's response to the Biennio Rosso was to write a polemic

entitled “Beyond Communism.” For all their bombast, and in spite of the revolution in art that they

more than anyone else helped to begin, their subordination to Mussolini's image of Italy was

determined by their own immanent laws of development.

13 Emilio Gentile, The Struggle for Modernity: Nationalism, Futurism, and Fascism, Praeger, London, 2003, p. 4114 Marinetti's artistic and ideological opponent, Gabriel d'Annunzio, was also a hero of fascism.

Bibliography:

Benjamin, Walter “Der Erzahler” Qouted in Esther Leslie Walter Benjamin: Overpowering conformism, Pluto Press, London, 2000.

Berghaus, Gunter. "Violence, war, revolution: Marinetti's concept of a futurist cleanser for the world" The Free Library01 January 2009. 19 March 2012 <http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Violence, war, revolution: Marinetti's concept of a futurist cleanser...-a0257129031>. (Originally in Annali d'Italianistica)

–, Futurist Manifestos ed. Umbro Apollonio, Thames and Hudson, 1973

Gentile, Emilio The Struggle for Modernity: Nationalism, Futurism, and Fascism, Praeger, London, 2003.

Marinetti, Filippo Tomaso Marinetti: Selected Writings ed. R.W. Flint, Trans. R.W. Flint and Andrew A. Coppotelli, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 1972.

Martin, Marianne W. Futurist art and theory: 1909-1915, Hacker Art Books, New York, 2nd edition, 1978.

Tisdall, Caroline and Angelo Bozzolla Futurism, Thames and Hudson, 1977.