Back to the Futurists
By Daniel Miller · 29 August 2024
Note from the Editors: This essay is contained in our fifth print edition, Futurism Reloaded.
Futurism Reloaded: An Introduction
Futurism rocketed into international consciousness on February 20, 1909, with the publication of the Futurist Manifesto on the front page of Le Figaro. “M. Marinetti,” the editors declared, “the young Italian and French poet, whose remarkable and fiery talent has been made known throughout the Latin countries by his notorious demonstrations and who has a galaxy of enthusiastic disciples, has just founded the school of ‘Futurism,’ whose theories surpass in daring all previous and contemporary schools.”
“We believe that this wonderful world has been further enriched by a new beauty, the beauty of speed,” wrote Marinetti. The message instantly traversed the globe. A week after the Le Figaro front page, articles about Futurism had appeared in The Daily Telegraph, The New York Sun, the Kölnische Zeitung, the Athenai, El Liberal and La Nación. On March 8, an unsigned article in the St. Petersburg journal Vecher praised the Futurist poetic vision of celebrating “machines, factories, modern urban dwellings, electricity, locomotives, steamships, and airplanes.” Marinetti’s splendid apartment in recently industrialized Milan, ornately furnished with filigreed brass lamps and oriental carpets from his childhood in Alexandria became the headquarters of the new movement, as Marinetti himself assumed the newly invented role of the avant-garde impresario with aplomb.
Domineering, spritely, inventive, and clever, with a bachelor’s degree from the Sorbonne, and a Doctor of Laws from Genoa, the early death of his brother, mother, and father had left him the heir of a huge estate which made it possible to employ a secretary and two clerks to dispatch his publications to the farthest corners of the globe. “We wish to spur young people toward the most impertinent of intellectual vandalisms, so that they live with a taste for madness, a craving for danger, and a hatred for all those who counsel caution,” he told a journalist for French theater magazine Comœdia on March 26. “We wish to prepare the way for a generation of strong, muscular poets who know how to develop their courageous bodies, every bit as much as their vibrant spirits.”
By the end of 1909, Futurism incorporated a fine arts division, a music section, and a section for “women’s activities,” and large swathes of European society were aware of it. And the Futurists were just warming up. At the beginning of 1910, Marinetti organized the first “serata” at the Politeama Rossetti in Trieste, an Italian city under Austro-Hungarian sovereignty. Featuring political speeches, a picture show, the performance of music, and a fist-shaking reading by the burly athlete poet Armando Mazza, the evening established the formula of theatre-as-combat that the Futurists would repeat across Europe.
“We wish to glorify war—the sole cleanser of the world—militarism, patriotism, the destructive act of the libertarian, beautiful ideas worth dying for,” Marinetti had written. War would not just be an ideal that Futurism proclaimed, but also the logic it adopted to spread. After Trieste, the next stop was Milan, where the Futurists recited an ode to an irredentist Italian general and the police stormed the stage and arrested Marinetti, Mazza, and the poet Michelangelo Zimolo on charges of disrupting public order.
Over the next five years, similar spectacles played out across nearly forty Italian and twenty international cities. After wild sprees through the city streets during which the Futurists hurled flyers from their cars, the events took place in crowded rented theatres. Marinetti emceed, adopting the strident posture familiar from his manifestos: “I’ve had enough of the femininity of the crowd and the weakness of their collective virginity,” he told one audience. A revolving cast of Futurists declaimed poems and manifestos, displayed art, and played music. Finally, the evening concluded with triumphant parades and brawls in the piazza. “Everywhere,” Marinetti wrote, “we saw growing in a few hours the courage and the number of men who are truly young, and [we saw] the galvanized mummies that our gesture had extracted from the ancient sarcophagi, becoming bizarrely agitated.”
At the end of April 1910 Marinetti’s pamphlet “Futurist Manifesto to the Venetians” saw the Futurists begin to target cities. Denouncing Venice as “a market for counterfeiting antiquarians, a magnet of snobbery and universal imbecility, a bed whose bottom has been staved in by caravans of lovers, the bejeweled hip-bath of cosmopolitan courtesans, the cloaca maxima of passéism” the pamphlet concluded by calling for Venice’s “little reeking canals” to filled with “the ruins from its leprous and crumbling palaces” and its gondolas (“rocking chairs for cretins”) to be burned in order to give birth to an “industrial and military Venice which can dominate the Adriatic, this great Italian lake.”
On July 10, the Futurists printed 200,000 copies of the text and threw them from the clock tower in Piazza San Marco partly to publicize a painting exhibition at the Ca’ Pesaro and a serata at the Fenice Theater taking place that same evening. From the stage, Marinetti’s speech attacking the Venetians as “seedy custodians of the greatest brothel in history” and “nurses in the saddest hospital in the world” once again provoked a brawl. Enthused, Marinetti repeated the same move against Rome, which he claimed “lay rotting in the leprosy of its ruins” along with Spain (“bent low beneath the infectious stench of incense and rotting flowers”) and England (“oh when, will you rid yourselves of the sluggish ideology of that deplorable man, Ruskin.”)
Futurism was fundamentally anti-conservative and pro-dynamism rather than Leftist or Rightist. The point was to attack mediocrity and intensify dynamism by any means necessary. Marinetti’s militant nationalism slotted into this paradigm through the conjecture that the nation presented the supreme political structure for maximizing and channeling energy. The critical point was the tension between freedom and order. “Individual freedoms,” he argued, “which proliferate as they develop toward a possible and desirable anarchy, must coexist with the principle of authority.” The highest form of this tension was a project of national greatness because it was in the form of the nation, and especially the nation at war, that the tension between desire and discipline achieved maximum beauty.
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (date & location unknown)
In October 1911, Marinetti experienced his first personal taste of war when he traveled to Tripoli to report on the Libyan war for the French journal Intransigeant. Italy had invaded Ottoman Libya in September, and Marinetti had immediately affirmed the Futurist’s support for the endeavor, publishing the second Futurist political manifesto shortly before his departure. “We Futurists… are happy to be experiencing, at last, Italy’s great Futurist hour,” he wrote. His text stipulated that: “Every individual and our entire people must be given total freedom, other than the freedom to be cowards. Let it be declared that the word ITALY must take absolute precedence over the word LIBERTY. The tiresome memory of the greatness of Ancient Rome must be eradicated by an Italian greatness that is a hundred times more impressive.”
Meanwhile, Futurism was expanding beyond Italy. In 1912 a slim pamphlet with the title ‘A Slap in the Face of Public Taste’ appeared in Moscow, signed by David Burliuk, Alexander Kruchenykh, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Velimir Khlebnikov. Alongside poems and drawings, the pamphlet contained a manifesto that repeated the bombast of Marinetti’s attacks on museums (“Throw Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, etc., etc. overboard from the Ship of Modernity”) while placing more focus on literature: a year later this focus would crystallize with Kruchenykh’s invention of the “transrational” language of zaum and the production of the Futurist opera Victory over the Sun.
The Russian Futurists were younger, poorer, and rougher than their Italian counterparts, but their situations were comparable. Pre-war Russia, like Italy, was a second-rank power playing catch-up with modernity: provincial, under-capitalized and still dominated by a disintegrating feudal system, the country was a perfect hotbed for cultural radicalism. Anticipating later youth movements like punk, the Russian Futurists wore face-paint and bizarre clothing in public, performed other antics on stage, and were regarded as an alarming manifestation of insanity and hooliganism.
Futurism was also exerting influence in London. Marinetti had launched Futurism at the Lyceum Club in April 1910, where he had castigated the British for their treatment of Oscar Wilde. Half-inspired and half-repulsed, in June 1914 Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound established Vorticism in the first issue of their new periodical BLAST. “The vortex is the point of maximum energy,” Pound wrote. “It represents, in mechanics, the greatest efficiency…It is the picture that means a hundred poems, the music that means a hundred pictures, the most highly energized statement, the statement that has not yet SPENT itself in expression, but which is the most capable of expressing the TURBINE.”
Vorticism for Lewis was a purified Futurism: “ESSENTIAL MOVEMENT AND ACTIVITY… as opposed to the imitative cinematography, the fuss and the hysterics of the Futurists.” Futurism, he argued, was too concerned with self-promotion, and was degenerating into sterile agitation.
Marinetti was beginning to form the same conclusion. In February 1912 the Futurist painters opened a major exhibition in Paris which traveled to London, Berlin, Amsterdam, Zürich, Vienna, and Budapest. At the beginning of 1913, they returned to Italy with force, staging serate across nineteen cities from Catania to Turin. But with audiences grown accustomed to the shape of the evening now arriving ready for combat, the events were becoming increasingly dull and predictable, as well as increasingly violent. After the so-called “Battle of Florence” at the Teatro Verdi on December 12, where the Futurists were unable to make themselves heard from the stage, Marinetti changed strategy to a more guarded approach. “Futurism doesn’t need a lot of fuss right now, but rather direct communication with the few truly futurist spirits a city has,” he wrote. The new plan would see the establishment of three permanent galleries run by art collector Giuseppe Sprovieri in Rome, Naples and Palermo. The Roman branch opened in December 1913 and the Naples branch in May 1914, but the Palermo branch never opened due to the war.
***
World War One began in August 1914 with Austria-Hungary’s declaration of war against Serbia; Italy entered nine months later after ceaseless pro-interventionist agitation by Marinetti and others. The conflict today is remembered as perhaps the most pointlessly destructive in history, but at the time it was acclaimed by the European avant-gardes as a thrilling new adventure that would create a new man, and a new culture.
“The war is not meaningless murder but a poem about a liberated and uplifted soul,” wrote Mayakovsky in Moscow. “Russia’s human foundation has changed. The strong men of the future have been born.” Marinetti, who had immediately signed up to fight, at the age of 39, advanced the same perspective. “The 30 million men that fight in the mud,” Marinetti wrote in March 1917, “will bring with them after the war into the cities a new sensibility.” The prototype was the Ardito, or the Italian shock trooper: “audacious, reckless, fiercely patriotic, and, importantly, resistant to any authority that hampered their liberty.” The “flower of elite troops” according to their battle hymn and the “company of death” according to the rest of the army, for Marinetti the Arditi were the “avant-garde of the nation” and the template for a new kind of man, who reconciled freedom and order through “an elastic, effective, just, and intelligent discipline” and a fighting style that was “violent, a little libertarian, and a little mafioso… They are the new Italy, young, impetuous, revolutionary, Futurist.” Two years later, Arditi would compose three-quarters of the soldiers used by Gabriele D’Annunzio to occupy Fiume for fifteen months.
By that point, Russian Futurism had already transformed into something else. The “0.10” or “The Last Futurist” exhibition, featuring Kazimir Malevich’s famous Black Square along with thirty-nine other Suprematist works had taken place in in December 1915 in Saint Petersburg, which had been renamed Petrograd following the beginning of the war. Developed from the set designs produced by Malevich for the 1913 Futurist Zaum opera Victory over the Sun, the work itself was suspended high in a corner of the atrium, tilted downwards, in the position of an icon.
“The new art of Suprematism,” Malevich declared, “which has produced new forms and form relationships by giving external expression to pictorial feeling, will become a new architecture: it will transfer these forms from the surface of canvas to space.” By destroying obsolete artistic conventions Futurism had freed art to face the real conditions of its epoch. But because it remained tied to realism, it was doomed to remain in a subordinate position. “In following the form of airplanes or motorcars, we shall always be anticipating the new cast-off forms of technological life.” With Suprematism art finally became truly autonomous beyond the artificial reality of “naive distortions and copies of nature.” The technological emblem of flight which had defined Futurism became a mystical ascent into the zaum realm beyond space, time, and gravity.
Suprematism didn’t invert Futurism, only rendered explicit an element tacitly encoded within it: Futurism was never a purely materialist project, but rather an attempt to enchant materialism by investing it with a new mythopoetic and spiritual basis. Magical symbols recur throughout Futurist texts from the Ouroborosesque tailspin (“I spun my car around as frantically as a dog trying to bite its own tail”) in the First Manifesto to the revitalizing alchemical mud which Marinetti slurped in the drain following his car crash (“I gulped down your bracing slime”) and re-encountered in the trenches. Suprematism shifted this symbolism from the magical to the mystical at the moment that a sense of the dark side of the new political aesthetic theology was beginning to register. Two years after the birth of the Black Square, Lenin and the Bolsheviks were in the Kremlin thanks to the Futurist means of a sealed train and the wireless. “The Russian revolution owes its success to Marconi,” Ezra Pound observed. “You may verify this by reference to John Reed’s 10 Days that Shook the World. The Bolshevik coup d’état could not have been effected without wireless; the other means of communication were sabotaged.”
Russia would quickly degenerate into a Communist terror state that would silence and murder its avant-garde artists in the name of a proletarian future. A year after Red October, the Bolshevik Council of People’s Commissars launched the Red Terror: a policy of systematic murder of “counterrevolutionaries” across the country designed to liquidate the elites of pre-revolutionary society. The decree ordered “the isolation of the Soviet Republic’s class enemies in concentration camps and summary executions of any individual involved in White Guard organizations, insurrections or riots.” A frenzied article in Pravda outlined the logic: “The anthem of the working class will be a song of hatred and revenge!” Within three days, five hundred “hostages” had been executed in Petrograd and another seven hundred had been killed in Moscow. By the end of the week, more people had been summarily executed than during the entire previous century, after due process, under the Czar. Over the next two months at least 10,000 people, including Tsarist military officers, entrepreneurs, priests, members of the intelligentsia, Socialist Revolutionaries, and dissident peasants were killed. By the end of 1919, the death toll stood at around 100,000, while the legions of the Cheka had expanded from two hundred to two hundred thousand.
Already by that point, two of the finest Italian Futurist artists, the painter Boccioni, and the architect Sant’elia, were dead in the trenches, along with tens of millions of others, for nothing, in a war in which officers died at twice the rate of enlisted men. Instead of the world’s only hygiene, the war was a dysgenic and political disaster. But in another respect, Marinetti and the avant-garde had been right. The link with the past had been decisively severed and Europe now was unmistakably on a revolutionary path.
***
Already in February 1918, with the end of the war coming into sight, Marinetti had announced the creation of the Futurist Political Party (FPP) with the release of a political program that called for a “strong Italy, that is no longer under the burden of its great Past… an Italy that is no one’s ward, the absolute master of all its energies” Proposing a “revolutionary nationalism for the liberty, health, physical and intellectual improvement, strength, progress, greatness, and pride of the Italian people” the program offered an implausible synthesis of anarchism and technocracy. Alongside now familiar Futurist demands for modernizing and industrializing Italian cities, dismembering Austria-Hungary, and destroying the power of the Catholic “medieval theocracy,” Marinetti advocated “[o]bligatory and legally enforced gymnastics, sport, and military education in the open air”, a progressive taxation system, a minimum wage, cost-free recourse to the law, and easy divorce, leading ultimately to a “devaluation of marriage… to be replaced by free love and children reared in State institutions.” At the same time, the bureaucracy was to be purged and devolved, and parliament reformed into a bicameral legislature combining an “excitatory” composed of members under thirty who would pass demands to an administration of technocrats who would implement them.
When Mussolini’s Fasci di Combattimento formed in Milan a year later the Futurist influence over the new alliance was initially profound. In an afternoon speech, Mussolini made clear that the new organization would “declare war on Socialism, not because it is Socialist, but because… the Socialist Party has been reactionary, absolutely conservative.” Mussolini went on to affirm significant sections of the FPP manifesto including the eight-hour workday, the demand to abolish the Senate, universal suffrage, proportional representation, and republicanism. But it would be the point of maximum influence. By the summer, with the climate of political violence intensifying, Marinetti was having increasing misgivings about Mussolini’s more opportunistic and conservative instincts while Mussolini was labeling Marinetti an “extravagant buffoon that wants to be in politics and that no one, not even I, takes seriously in Italy.”
In September 1920 Marinetti would declare he was abandoning Fascism over its increasingly reactionary nature. Two years later, on September 25, 1922, a month before the March on Rome, he announced he was abandoning politics for good, but would also be re-entering fascism and continue to advocate for Futurist goals as an “ultra-Fascist”; six months after that on March 11, 1923, he stated that Futurism was a purely artistic movement “that would only intervene in politics in moments of national crisis.” For the next twenty years, until his death in 1944, after marriage and children, cultural diplomacy in South America, and the publication of a Futurist cookbook including a memorable attack on pasta and the recipe for Giordano Bruno Granzarolo’s Ardito Negroni, Marinetti would continue to occupy an ambiguous place in Mussolini’s regime not unlike the role played by “super-fascist” Julius Evola: as one intellectual among many trying to impress his vision on the perpetually oscillating Mussolini.
The Futurist moment had passed. But Marinetti’s irrepressible radicalism remained undiminished. In January 1934, at the same moment that Evola was touring Germany lecturing in German on Revolt Against the Modern World, Marinetti and his cohort were dispatched to Berlin.
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (date & location unknown)
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All this is today in our past, and haunts our present. On the one hand, the concepts and tactics that Futurism invented have been decisively encoded into modern culture. Art today moves entirely in the orbit of art-azione: traditional disciplinary standards have vanished, and originally Futurist art forms like the collage are now standardized across multiple mediums. The Futurist sound poem and Russian Futurist zaum, emphasizing the phonetic dimension of language, became the basis for popular music and the serata became the model for performances.
Yet in other respects, contemporary culture has never been less Futurist. Marinetti’s energy and imagination have disappeared, his nationalist and militaristic positions are today almost illegal, and the boldness of Futurist projects is unthinkable. In the hands of the Futurists rhetoric against the reactionary signified everything anti-dynamic; today it is deployed by a necrotic bureaucracy against anything demonstrating vitality, and especially anything resembling Futurism. The case could be made that the most authentically Futurist cultural phenomenon in recent years was Generation Identity, whose daring Defend Europe military maneuver-style spectacles were immediately suppressed by hysterical European security services and whose leadership remains under police surveillance.
Contemporary culture, because it owes so much to it, lacks the strength to reject Futurism directly. Instead, it suppresses and misrepresents it. On the centenary exhibition of Futurism at London’s Tate Modern in 2009, only paintings from the years 1909-1915 were shown, in order to avoid having to face the Futurist connection to Fascism but also to downplay its dangerously radical implications more generally. Eight years later the same city saw the suppression of the radical internet art gallery LD50 by half-literate Antifa grad students.
Like Surrealism, Futurism, which once called for the destruction of museums, is today a museum piece, and art itself is an ideological anti-culture designed to suppress inspiration as opposed to incite it. Instead of electric fantasias, we live in a boring dystopia punctuated by random irruptions of violence, smothered by saccharine sentiments. Machines have never been so ubiquitous but technology has lost the Faustian spirit which enthralled the Futurists and instead is regarded with a mixture of irritation and fear. The myth of the future, which in the early twentieth century was a lodestar of visionary energy, today is imposed as a doctrine by a failing police state dedicated to decadence and managed decline.
For all of its rhetoric of diversity, contemporary global society is a society of hatred of difference and listless conformity to the disgusting and trivial. For all its insistence on freedom and progress, contemporary culture is slavish and stagnant, cannibalizing reheated dreams. Meanwhile, critical opposition to the current conjuncture is animated more by a sense of rebellion than a sense of direction. What is sometimes understood as a counterculture, sometimes as a movement, and sometimes as a freak show, lacks a unified syntax and grammar for understanding itself. What it possesses are only fragments of concepts and vague intuitions. What it requires are models of action enabling more precise, more elastic, and more dynamic maneuvers.
For all these reasons, the moment for reactivating Futurism is now. Because what now exists as Futurism is the death mask of its intentions and because a death mask is the emblem of our culture as a whole, Futurism occupies a critically transformative position. Like sleeping beauty sleeping through a boring movie, the challenge is to reactivate the energies that remain latent in contemporary aesthetic forms by grasping how and why they were originally deployed. Futurism reloaded doesn’t mean repeating everything that Marinetti said or did or endorsing all his positions or his judgments, but grasping the logic of his choices in the context of the forces of his time, and the logic of their equivalents today.
We now are operating in a different world than Marinetti was, but Futurism 2024 is the same project in spirit as Futurism 1909—a sigil and herald, a traveling circus, and a war band. And the enemies of Futurism are the same as well: enervation, mediocrity, cowardice, pettiness, and the apocalyptic inertia of the eternal current year.
What Marinetti identified with medieval theocracy today takes the form of a bureaucratic and “crapitalist” consumer progressivism which promotes the reduction of man to the most pitiable condition imaginable. When Marinetti proclaimed “contempt for women” what he had in mind was the soap opera of e-girls and delusional anon narcissists and clout theatre now syndicated daily in the theatre of the captive globe. What, in the end, is social media except a global Venice—a masked ball, a brothel, a sewer, a cemetery? Thanks to digital communications, the voyeuristic museum-like qualities that Marinetti hated in Italy have now extended throughout Europe and the rest of the world. We have all become tourists—tourists of our own lives and the lives of others, scrolling sexlessly through mirrored screens.
We should be traveling differently, like astronauts or conquistadors, in the cause of a more vital and radical engagement with life; this also means understanding how the historical Futurist trinity of nationalism, war, and machines has transformed between the avant-guerre world in which Futurism was launched, and the post-war context we inhabit today.
Futurist nationalism emerged in an era of newspapers, telegrams, and industrial masses when the nation was still the avant-garde political form. Today, in the age of computers, nationalism is designated reactionary in the eyes of a new global order which views it as an obstacle and threat. Everywhere national power structures have been cannibalized by transnational networks. Accelerating demographic change through mass migration is the most visible expression of this phenomenon, but is not unique. The same formula recurs everywhere, from the so-called pandemic to climate change: predatory enterprises combining criminal elements, activist organizations, institutional capture, and advanced propaganda spontaneously coordinate exploits in the fissures of pulverized national cultures and sovereignties. Even the new nationalisms today crystallizing in response to the new global power politics have to operate on the new global terrain.
One can already recognize the tacit connection between the archeo-atavisms now proliferating across the political spectrum, and the abstract “hyperracist” model of the network state: what they share is an awareness of the accelerating disarticulation of nineteenth-century national space and its replacement by subnational models. Nationalism is today identitarian because national political space has effectively ceased to exist. It is no longer a question of an elite and the masses, but networks of specialists controlling a patchwork of territories capable of the projection of power through a multidimensional battle space.
One can no longer assume loyalty from legacy national institutions, whether the National Health Service in the UK, the US Department of Defence, or Western political parties, universities, and judiciaries. These institutions today are appendages of transnational networks whose interests they serve as a function of their own corporate interests while protecting themselves in their national territories through political, legal, and media corruption and capture.
With rare and embattled exceptions, national power and sovereignty are no longer an extant reality. Nations now are shell corporations controlling global economic zones run by regional managers beneath the black rainbow flag. Any Futurist politics that still wishes to orient itself towards the nation needs to recognize that today we are closer to the Carbonari than Marinetti. But the nineteenth-century model is inadequate too.
The Futurist question comes down to identifying the political structure with the greatest potential for dynamism. The nation was a European invention that reached its zenith in the liberal nineteenth century and was superseded in the twentieth century by the superpowers who fought the Cold War. As Friedrich A. Kittler points out, the First World War marked the moment that “[w]ar that relied on personnel gave way to war based on materiel.” The Second World War further depersonalized and technologized war and the Cold War intensified and extended it into social and psychological space.
Today we inhabit an era of absolute war: cyberwar, culture war, information war and drug war, gender wars, the war on terror and the war on truth, and wars sold as exercises in “peace-keeping” or “nation building” launched “to wash money out of the tax bases of the US and Europe… and back into the hands of a transnational security elite.” If twentieth-century total war marked the moment that war ceased to serve as “the world’s only hygiene” twenty-first-century warfare has marked its simultaneous disappearance, normalization, and apotheosis as immersive entertainment spectacle and psycho-social logic: contemporary war is a desert war, in and for the desert of the real. It is not only impossible to adopt the straightforwardly bellicose position that the Futurists struck, but difficult to even understand what they meant: not just a political, but an aesthetic and metaphysical position.
Here, as elsewhere, we are behind the Futurists rather than the reverse: we have forgotten what they knew: that war is not simply a crime or a “genocide” but a fundamental reality, if not the deepest form of reality. What counts, then and now, is nothing to do with morality or “human rights” or “international law” but the “death athleticism” of a cause for which one would be prepared to dedicate one’s life, and the truth of what this cause reveals. At the same time, to the extent that this attitude, once ubiquitous, is now mysterious, it is possible to note a blind spot in the Futurist program regarding the social and political consequences of technological progress. Political forms are invented by war and technology, above all communication technology, which determines the logistical limits of chains of command, and the psychological structures of socialized individuals. Underpinning Marinetti’s full-throated celebration of modernity was a classical ethos of courage and daring. But with the advance of technology, it was precisely this ethos that was comprehensively undermined. With its destruction, the thought of the future as a project has vanished, and regressed into something resembling an intimation of fate.
Man no longer believes that he controls his own destiny or is capable of recognizing himself as a subject; today he is merely an object of history, even for those who at first glance seem closest to the Futurist spirit. Marinetti is canonized as a saint alongside the accelerationist philosopher Nick Land in Marc Andreesen’s widely circulated Technofuturist Manifesto, but the distance that separates Marinetti from these men is profound. Andreesen writes at one point: “To paraphrase a manifesto of a different time and place: Beauty exists only in struggle. There is no masterpiece that doesn’t have an aggressive character. Technology must be a violent assault on the forces of the unknown, to force them to bow before man.” The passage, of course, is a rewrite of the Futurist Manifesto. But Marinetti’s original emphasized artistic ambition: “Poetry must be thought of as a violent assault upon the forces of the unknown.” Andreesen has substituted poetry with technology—art has literally dropped off the radar.
This same straitened ambition animates the non-Western CGI futurisms that have proliferated in recent years. Neither so-called Sinofuturism nor Gulf Futurism proposes a vision beyond skyscrapers and shopping malls. With one clear exception—Elon Musk—contemporary techno-futurism shows no sign of Promethean glory, and only the ghost of a stunted, programmatic adolescence: no wonder that the cultural impact of the trillions in excess capital that Silicon Valley has generated has been so pitiful.
For a new Futurism to mean more than an appeal to nostalgia or nothing it needs to combine a pragmatic relationship to technological forces with an ethos that recognizes the purpose of harnessing them. Undoubtedly, the key contribution made towards this effort so far has been French Nouvelle Droit writer Guillaume Faye’s concept of Archeofuturism, or what he defines as “the harmonious union of the most ancient memory with the Faustian soul.”
“It is necessary to reconcile Evola and Marinetti,” Faye writes, “and do away with the notion of ‘modernity’ produced by Enlightenment ideology.” According to Faye, this ideology will soon disappear anyway through a “convergence of catastrophes” combining to destroy global liberalism within one generation. Primitive values will return with a vengeance. In Archaeofuturism 2.0, published in 2012, Faye plots the reassertion of a tripartite social order divided between workers, priests, and a ruling military aristocracy.
The only hope of forestalling or at least mitigating this eventuality depends on the reassertion of more basic values now in order to establish a more anti-fragile political and social structure. What this requires involves a ruthlessly clear-eyed appraisal of the real strengths and weaknesses in contemporary global society leading to a triage of what is likely to survive.
Whereas Marinetti was able to take the future for granted, we are no longer so fortunate. Whether a collapse is imminent or not, what’s certain is that the tensions of the present will continue to intensify. The next twenty years will see terrorist violence, anarcho-tyrannical government, high-technology, and transnational crime syndicates hybridizing to create an increasingly dangerous and unstable world. To be a Futurist today means to face this reality without blinking in order to recognize within it the first signs of rebirth.
