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

knowledge (or science) as masculine and of nature as feminine is a
historically pervasive figure in Western She has focused
in particular on Bacon's metaphor of knowledge as "chaste and lawful
marriage" (36)between mind and nature, which she sees as a prescient
vision of rational, "objective" thought in modern science ("a metaphor
for power and domination, designed to safeguard the integrity
of the knower," 95). This vision of "a conjunction that remains forever
disjunctive" [95), Keller argues, exposes the dual constitutive
motives underwriting the ambition to "objectivity": power and integrity
of the subject. Pursuing the question of the emotional substructure
from which the claim to objectivity grows, Keller explores the
linkage among the conceptions of autonomy, masculinity, objectivity,
and power which emerge from the child's developing sense of self,
gender, and reality. She thus identifies "patterns of male and female
socialization that reproduce a sexualization of aggression, power, and
domination," lending force to the association of love with female
"impotence1' and of autonomy with male "power," aggression and
separation from the "otheru-maternal love first, then human others
and nature (1 14). In a footnote, the connection between these psychosocial
premises and sexual violence is spelled out:
There is little question that the denial of interconnectedness between
subject and object serves to nullify certain kinds of moral constraint;
it allows for kinds of violation (even rape) of the other that would be
precluded by a respect for the relation between subject and object. At
the same time, however, it ought logically also serve as a protection
against forms of violence provoked by a relation between subject and
object that is experienced as threatening to the subject. (96; author's
emphasis)
This sociological explanation indirectly squares with Kristeva's psy-
choanalytical perspective. When promiscuity (chaos) explodes, de-
stroying or threatening the "chaste and lawful marriage" between
subject and object, i.e., the subject's integrity and control, violence
also explodes-that very violence which marks the distance between
the Baconian metaphor and Marinetti's metaphor of violation and
rape. The latter entails, in fact, a display of power which hides a prob-
lematic relationship with the other, a sense of crisis that exacerbates
the need for control and the desire for domination.
Along this line of analysis we can pursue further the question of
the ideological underpinnings of the manifesto's aesthetic and epis-
temological model. The Futurist revolution is predicated upon the de-
struction of the old symbolic order by an explosion of rejuvenating
irrational forces. But the irrational is perceived as hiding feminine-
connoted threats to identity, which the Futurist fiction of power tries
to ward off.