Rhetorical Strategies and Gender in Marinetti's Futurist Manifesto ...

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The epistemological implications of this revolutionary stance are less iconoclastic than it might at first appear. In fact, the scattering ("sparpagliamento") of the self in the universe (brought about by the fast pace of modern life) is presented as a means to a more powerful unity freed from the limits of human nature: "Vittoria del nostro io sui perfidi complotti del nostro Peso, che vuole assassinare a tradimento la nostra velocita trascinandola in un buco d'immobilita. Velocita = sparpagliamento + condensazione delllIo. Tutto lo spazio percorso da un corpo si condensa in questo stesso corpo" (TIF, 136- 137; author's emphases). Destroying the "I" of passeist literature, the Futurist subject disperses himself to penetrate the molecular life of matter, and, with aeropoesia, rises as a super "I" propelled by mechanical wings to control immense spaces in the totalizing, both detached and dominating perspective allowed by the airplane.18 Just as the self is not actually dispersed in the Futurist imaginary universe, the subject is not lostlfragmented in the chain and texture of Marinetti's signifiers. Even at its most experimental, Marinetti's writing displays some mechanisms of ~uture,'~ which beget the subject's unity and ability to produce meaning: glosses that explicate the meaning of obscure aspects of the text; mathematical signs that arrange the elements of discourse according to a precise logical systemj20 and parentheticindications of tempo that direct the reading pace. Like the subject of idealist cognition theory, the Futurist subject is hypostatized as a self-assured center of perception and representation. This self-present, "condensed" subject regards poetic language as an instrument of intuition (in Marinetti's words, "il prolungamento lirico e trasfigurato del nostro magnetism0 animale" [TIF, 104]), which must be freed from the hindrance of syntax as an instrument of logic and used to conquer reality: "Metteremo in mot0 le parole in liberta che rompono i limiti della letteratura marciando verso la pittura, la musica, l'arte dei rumori e gettando un meraviglioso ponte tra la parola e l'oggetto reale" (TIF, 141). As this passage clearly indicates, the Futurist attack on linguistic conventions, its destruction of the symbolic, is actually governed by a mimetic desire to master the life of matter, "to penetrate it and know its vibrations" (TIF, 1051. Even the typographic revolution is fundamentally a mimetic device and a means to gain absolute control over the interpretation of the text.21 While the rapidly changing reality of the modern industrialized world subverts the traditional way of life and the old parameters of interpretation, the Futurist project is to destroy in order to resymbolize, to re-affirm mastery over that which threatens to move beyond the control of language. Ultimately, no true ideological conflict exists between the misogynist rhetoric of gender and the gestures of formal disruption: in both
cases, the fundamental ideological drive is not to subvert the phall- ogocentrism of the old symbolic order, but to produce a reassuring representation of self, founded on exclusive opposition and on the de- valuation of otherness. The declared destruction of the literary "I" does not involve the deconstruction of the unitary subject, but its "multiplication," its transformation into a new all-powerful one. Ac- cordingly, modern reality in the Futurist manifesto is not, as in other texts, a problematic world of contradictions to explore; it is, instead, a source of new myths to celebrate-a world to colonize and subjugate in a self-assertive, self-aggrandizing enterprise. Just as Marinetti's syntactic destruction is coextensive with a re- constructive effort, so the theme of destructive violence is inextrica- bly bound up with the construction of new myths predicated on the terrain of modernity-the third step of the Futurist project: the utopia of the multiplied, metallicized man, who will be immunized against the disease of love; the celebration of technological progress-life in the industrial city, the "electric" war; and the exaltation of the all- powerful, but controllable machine, which replaces woman as the ideal of beauty and as the object of man's narcissistic love. By focusing on the rhetorical function of gender and on the recur- rent use of erotic imagery, it is possible to investigate the complicity between the apparently contradictory themes of warldestruction and progresslcreation. Marinetti's most paradigmatic and illuminating articulation of the idea of (male) creativity was not given in a manifesto, but in the "explosive novel" 8 Anime in una bomba (1919), where the central idea of phallic power is expressed in a series of for- mulas or multiplied analogies: Formule MEMBRO VIRILE = sverginare - vulva - fecondazione - baci sangue, ecc. STANTUFFO = andare venire - caldaia - industria - vapore, ecc. PRUA = navigare - mare vento - commercio - schiuma, ecc. ARATRO = aprire - terra - agricoltura - linfa, ecc. SHRAPNEL = spaccare - corpo nemico - guerra - lagrime sangue, ecc. VOCE PENNA SCALPELLO = creare spirito - arte - he, ecc. BISTURI = anatomizzare - corpo amico - chirurgia - pus - salute o morte, ecc. ITIF, 8381 The first analogical chain refers to the action of fecundating deflora- tion. The phallic power thus evoked is then both projected on and multiplied by the subsequent chains (in themselves marked by patent sexual connotations), so that it is set up as the paradigm or the origin of all the other manifestations of power: industrial production, eco-
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Page 3 and 4: An aesthetic of rupture which subve
Page 5 and 6: contemptuously attacked as a form o
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Page 9: e read as a gloss to the accumulati
Page 13 and 14: knowledge (or science) as masculine
Page 15 and 16: tive and empowering structures-Rail
Page 17: 'Noi futuristi, barbari raffinatiss

Rhetorical Strategies and Gender in Marinetti's Futurist Manifesto ...

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