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

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Rhetorical Strategies and Gender in Marinetti's Futurist Manifesto Though the importance of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti's contributions to avant-garde aesthetics has been a subject of controversy since the very beginnings of the Futurist movement, critics generally aclznowledge the innovation of what Marinetti himself called "l'arte di far manifesti." Most recently, in a remarkable study on the "language of rupture" of the avant-garde movements prior to World War I, Marjorie Perloff locates the originality of the Futurist manifesto in its hybrid, multifaceted nature. As Perloff notes, the genealogy of the Futurist manifesto can be traced back to the agonistic mode of discourse of the nineteenth-century political manifesto, and to the programmatic statements of aesthetic renovation, modernity, nationalism, and heroism articulated in the manifestos of other turn-of-thecentury movements. But the Italian Futurist manifestos differ from their precursors because of "their brash refusal to remain in the expository or critical corner, their understanding that the group pronouncement, sufficiently aestheticized, can, in the eyes of the mass audience, all but take the place of the promised art work."' Indeed, Marinetti's famous first manifesto, "Fondazione e Manifesto del Futurism~," which marks the founding of the movement in 1909, also marks the creation of a new genre straddling poetic and theoretical discourse-a collective statement directed at a mass audience, in which the articulation of an aesthetic and political program is transformed into a literary c~nstruct.~ The Futurist manifesto qualifies as a genre of rupture in two ways. As the theoretical and propagandistic arena of the Futurist "global" revolution, the manifesto is the springboard of revolutionary principles: the breakdown of barriers between the individual arts, the destruction of syntax, and the elimination of the psychologizing literary ~ubject.~ And as an art work itself, the manifesto subverts traditional codes, obliterating boundaries between different genres and expressive registers, and occasionally exemplifies the new antigrammatical and anti-syntactical model4
An aesthetic of rupture which subverts literary conventions and linguistic contraints may involve the undermining of hierarchical, centralizing ordering systems predicated upon a unitary, authorita- tive speaking and thinking subject-in other words, the mise en ques- tion of traditional assumptions about subjectivity, and about the rep- resentability of self and reality. Traditionally, the studies of Italian Futurism which emphasize the novelty and importance of its formal experimentation have tended to avoid the terrain of ideological inquiry.' Some apologetic studies touch this terrain only cursorily, to posit an unproblematic congruence between the formal and the ideological realms. That approach may lead the reader to unwarranted conclusions concerning the ideological stakes of the Futurist aesthetic revol~tion.~ It is important to recognize that anxieties about fragmentation of identity and confusion of codes lie at the psychological roots of Fu- turist experimentation. The manifesto "I1 teatro futurista sintetico" offers an example: "la realta ci vibra attorno assalendoci con raffiche di frammenti di fatti combinati tra loro, incastrati gli uni negli altri, confusi, aggrovigliati, caotizzati" (TIF, 177). The diction in this pas- sage posits a condition of threatening confusion: "assalendoci con raffiche," in particular, conjures up a hostile reality at war against a be- sieged subject. Still, it must be emphasized that the ideological underside of Futurist experimentation reverses doubts about subjectivity and representation into an acritical, boisterous affirmation of the epistemological and artistic powers of the "multiplied" Futurist man. The iconoclastic attack on linguistic conventions is governed by an effort to control the life of matter-a fantasy of omniscience and omnipotence: Oggi, pih che mai, ,Ion fa dell'arte se non chi fa della guerra. Degne di gloria non appaiono che le fronti erette a violentare il Mistero, a gettare la sfida verso le mostruosita tentatrici dell'Impossibile. (TIF, 28) Solo il poeta asintattico e dalle parole slegate potra penetrare l'essenza della materia e distruggere la sorda ostilita che la separa da noi. (TIF, 521 The object of the artist's quest is expressed in terms of negativity and impossibility ("mostruosita," "Impossibile," "sorda ostilita," "separa"). In the first pssage, the marked choice of negative periphrases to affirm the artist's power reinforces the effect of the lexical choice. But this semantics of negativity and impossibility is countered by the semantics of sexual aggression: the Futurist artist is portrayed as a warrior with his head raised to violate, or rape, the mystery of reality, and as a poet with new linguistic powers to penetrate the hostile es-
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Rhetorical Strategies and Gender in Marinetti's Futurist Manifesto ...

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