Though many details remain mysterious, it is clear that the mechanomorphic structure depicted here, like the one caricaturing Stieglitz, offers a humorous commentary on its subject, in which sex, machines, and art play a role. The de Zayas portrait presents a machine that, though hardly sleek or refined, functions vigorously (at least on paper), contrasting with the malfunctioning Stieglitz portrait. Taken in conjunction with the portrait that precedes "De Zayas! De Zayas!," the drawing of the [Begin Page 78] spark-plug ( 3) entitled "Portrait d'une jeune fille américaine dans l'état de nudité" ["Portrait of an American girl in the state of nudity"], the viewer is confirmed in the overall impression that artistic creativity is a function of mechanized sexual desire, red in these works by jolting, grinding, and jerking chains of cause and effect. 22 This mechanized and sexualized creativity is not transcendent in its passion; it never attains satisfaction or release. The word "For-ever" on the spark-plug, for instance, parodies loving devotion, the source of comfort and consistency in any relationship. "For-ever" here becomes a slogan advertising the consistent efficacy of a nude American girl for firing up the strange engine of sexual desire, a constant jolt driving the artist to express himself; he does so in terms of brakes and gear-shifts which engage to produce constant erotic agitation, without guarantee of eventual release or relaxation.
The remaining drawings continue the theme: the inscription under the lamp portraying Paul Haviland ( 4), "La poésie est comme lui" ["Poetry is like him"], professes the idealist aesthete's quasi-religious conception of poetry as the secular light of the world, a sentiment parodically overshadowed by the fact that the soldier-shaped lamp in the drawing is not only unplugged but unpluggable--it is literally missing its plug. Finally, Picabia's self-portrait ( 5) employing a car horn positioned against what appears to be the cross-section of an automobile cylinder and spark plug suggests that the only efficiently working machine depicted in this series is one that calls attention to itself, "blowing its own horn," as Maria Lluïsa Borràs has remarked. 23 The inscription Picabia includes, "Le Saint des Saints/ C'est de moi qu'il s'agit dans ce portrait," suggests through its ironic conflation of the divine ("The Holy of Holies") with the artist and the machine that the traditional hierarchy of creators creating in their respective images may in modern society ultimately reduce to a schematic blueprint for a machine that operates without regard for distinctions between divine, spiritual, and industrial registers of creation.
These captioned images, then, taken as a whole, can be read as an effort to demystify Stieglitz's ideal of art as the emanation of genius complete unto itself; they replace the transcendental satisfaction of creative desire with blueprints expressing creativity as a mechanized eroticism without an off button. This contrasts with Stieglitz's photographs of nudes, as well as those he chose to print in Camera Work by other photographers, all of which are steeped in a symbolist aesthetic of the transcendance of erotic desire through artistic beauty. At another aesthetic or formal level, Picabia's drawings challenge even further the notion of the artist as creative genius because they are composed almost entirely of what we now call found objects. The camera, circuitry schematics, spark-plug, lamp, and car horn are all copied from trade catalogues or advertisements, while the captions are in many cases taken from the pink pages of the Petit Larousse, the section of that dictionary where famous phrases from other languages (primariy Latin and Greek) are translated into French. 24 Creativity has of course not been expunged from these pieces simply through the use of found objects and phrases. But the nature of this particular creativity is quite different from that held in high esteem by Stieglitz. There is a clever, parasitic quality to this aesthetic that runs against the grain of the 291 aesthetic.
To be sure, Stieglitz enjoyed poking fun at art critics, the public, and even himself, but usually in a way that made him out to be the master casting pearls before swine. Stieglitz's idea of satire was to highlight the public's overwhelming stupidity and need for guidance in matters of art: the artist or avant-garde impresario was never satirized, only the public. An example of what he felt was a satirical "experiment" involved his refusal to promote the sale of the last issue of 291, in which his famous photograph "The Steerage" was reproduced. His idea was that by not advertising, one would be able to gauge what the "American people would do when left to themselves." The "satire" came after the issue's unsurprisingly dismal sales, when he decided to have a rag picker come to take away the eight thousand unsold copies of the photograph, including the deluxe prints: he would go ironically along with the public in its stupidity, throwing away two dollar copies of a print that "an official of a Berlin museum had been willing to pay a hundred dollars for" (ASAS, 127).
Picabia's parodic creativity is different because, rather than resisting machine-age commodity culture through an exalted act of supersession, he parodically employs its very images and logic--in these drawings, man has been replaced by his own creation, the machine, which achieves and fails in precisely the same way he does, only more transparently, because stripped of any veil of idealism. In this way art functions in parallel with the industrial economy. The conjunction of image and inscription lays symbolically bare the erotic essence of machine age modernity as Picabia envisions it. Picabia says as much in an October, 1915 interview with The New York Tribune: the machine and the commodity culture it symbolizes are "more than a mere adjunct of life. [The machine] is really a part of human life--perhaps its very soul." 25 As such, machines necessarily dictate the direction of his very artistic project. He goes on to say that he "doesn't know what possibilities may be in store" for this project; this is because, as a kind of machine himself, he cannot place himself at an ideal point outside the mechanism and view his trajectory.
Picabia's embrace of the objects and commodity logic of the machine-age, as represented in his mechanomorphic aesthetic, entails an institutional corollary, one that admits the buying and selling of art objects as a legitimate enterprise. The art object that is created out of the industrial world of commodified machines, indeed as one of those commodities, renders meaningless the definition of artistic purity as the operation of the creative genius in a space untouched by considerations of popularity or financial success. Picabia views his two-dimensional machines as part and parcel of the larger universe of three-dimensional machines, a universe encompassing humans and all the objects they make. 26 I don't believe that Picabia's intention in these drawings was merely to create something saleable. My point is that the truth value of this work exists on a different plane from that sanctioned by Stieglitz. Instead of being positively articulated in the recognition of the sanctified originality of the canvas, Picabia's artistic truth reveals itself in the comic, negative recognition afforded by the mechanomorphic image. This image negates the idealistic viewer's belief in a higher realm of art with a schematic diagram of the mechanized workings of human erotic desire, including the mechanism of artistic creation itself. What de Zayas characterized in the Modern Gallery's prospectus as Stieglitz's "negative solution" to the problem of commercialism--its elimination--has been replaced with a new solution, the destruction of idealism built into the work in a way that, paradoxically, renders the issue of commercialism of secondary importance. Whether the artist is compensated or not for his effort in creating this negative recognition is beside the point, because the power of the negative recognition will not be changed by the buying or selling of the piece. The piece is thus fertile in its erotic infertility, its refusal of transcendence. 27 The negative recognition is built into the parodic logic of the representation, which itself is simply a machine among machines, rather than an "art object" per se. The effect of the negative recognition is not dependent upon an aura surrounding the work that must be protected from unworthy buyers who may not respect it. Thus, the effect on the viewer of Picabia's machine art can thrive in a different institutional framework than Stieglitz's idealistic enclave.
The de Zayas-Haviland-Meyer group heralded Picabia's machine art as the product of a new aesthetic-institutional practice that could renew the vitality of 291. It is difficult to determine the nuances of the group's understanding of this new aesthetic because it did not publish close analyses of the mechanomorphic drawings. But there is no doubt that its members understood the institutional consequences and economic ramifications of the mechanomorphic aesthetic--de Zayas' use of sexual metaphors to describe Picabia's effect on American culture attests to that.
Why was open commercialism a consequence of this aesthetic? The 291 group understood Picabia's mechanomorphic art broadly as a celebration of the machine, which they took to be an emanation of the objectively modern essence of America. Paul Haviland writes an editorial to this effect in the very next issue of 291. 28 De Zayas, in the 291 article which follows Picabia's five drawings, uses this link between the machine, objectivity, and American modernity to comment upon and, ultimately, criticize Stieglitz's work at the 291 gallery. He begins by writing that American intellectuals have prevented New York from assimilating the true spirit of modern art; that they have "covered" that spirit--the metaphor is that of contraception--with false "ideal[s]" borrowed from Europe. American culture is at its core modern ("all American activities are entirely in accord with the spirit of modern art . . . America has the same complex mentality as the true modern artist [:] the same continual need of expressing itself in the present and for the present"), but most Americans are not aware of this fact, and as a consequence little truly significant modern American art has been created. Most American intellectuals and critics, says de Zayas, are incapable of leading America to the knowledge of its essential modernity because they are non-creative popularizers who merely copy and reiterate the past theories and positions of European movements without producing anything vital. They lack a sense of, or a commitment to, contemporaneity. Their tendency to follow rather than innovate means that, in the current (post-Armory Show) commercial climate, they are really only concerned with lining their own pockets: "The critics do not work to develop their knowledge, or to spread knowledge. . . . The press has established a false notion of American life. It has succeeded in creating in the American people a fictitious need for a false art and a false literature. The press has in view but one thing:--profit." In this environment, the goal of the Modern Gallery is to appeal directly to the American public's inherent taste for contemporaneity, thus circumventing the critics' attempts to purvey stale art and ideas.
The 291 group was intensely interested in assessing the consequences, both artistic and commercial, of the new popularity of modern art in post-1913 New York. The brief article entitled "Economic Laws and Art" from the satire/notes page of the second issue of 291 (April 1915) attests to this interest and demonstrates an openness to the possibility that popularity and up-to-the-minute modernity could go hand in hand, a possibility Stieglitz would never entertain. Here they note the increasing economic success of modern art galleries in New York in 1915, and ask whether this popularity is ultimately good or bad for art. Their stance is not automatically anti-commercial; rather, they look at commercialism as a tool that is in and of itself value-neutral:
The mere fact that [the Montross show of American Moderns] can take place on Fifth Avenue where rents must be paid, is an important indication of the change of the public attitude and the added fact that the gallery was usually crowded at five cents per head, shows that the interest is not spotty but widespread. In short, it is safe to announce that cubism or futurism, or whatever else these men call their work, is not only beginning to pay its way, but is undergoing the trying ordeal of being the fashion. The obvious question is: 'Who took the lead, the artists or the public?' In other words, is American cubism, or futurism, so sincere an expression that the speedy conversion of the public to its serious consideration was inevitable, or did the public interest, aroused by 291 and the big Armory Exhibition of French moderns, create a demand which our men are trying consciously or unconsciously to supply? Judging from results in the Montross exhibition, both kinds of influence are present, thus leaving to the buying public an interesting opportunity of furthering modern thought by weeding out the true from the false . . .
The question that animated and worried Stieglitz--namely, are artists being true to their own creativity, or merely trying to fill a speculated need in a burgeoning market?--remains a question that intrigues Stieglitz's associates. Their methods for finding an answer, however, differ from his in important ways: Stieglitz saw himself as sole arbiter of the question, while the 291 writers emphasize the essential role of the public in any answer, guardedly putting faith in the public's ability, in the words of the article, to "further modern thought by weeding out the true from the false." The 291 editors found evidence in the urban life around them that the American "buying public" was animated, at least in part, by the same spirit of modernity driving modern art--with the sole caveat being that the public, not fully aware of its true modernity, may need to learn to discern between the true and the merely fashionable before it can see itself in the art it faces. 29 De Zayas makes explicit his belief that Stieglitz and his work at 291 failed to render the New York public adequately aware of its true up-to-the-minute modernist identity: "The real American life is still unexpressed," writes de Zayas.
America remains to be discovered. Stieglitz wanted to work this miracle. He wanted to discover America. Also, he wanted the Americans to discover themselves. But, in pursuing his object, he employed the shield ["capote" in the French version of the article, slang for condom] of psychology and metaphysics. He has failed.
For de Zayas, the problem with Stieglitz is that he treated the spirit of modern art (the essence of American culture) like a mystical entity removed from immediate life rather than an expression of contemporary culture. 30 Stieglitz surrounded and immobilized this spirit with what de Zayas calls "prejudices," his word for the aura which, by perpetuating a certain elitism associated with style, has prevented Americans from keeping up with their own modernity as it is reflected back to them in truly evolving modern art. Americans falsely took these static prejudices for modernity; consequently, when, thanks to the efforts of the lawyer and collector John Quinn, the tariff on art imports fell after the Armory Show and the art market expanded, a false notion of art became popularized and institutionalized by both profit-seeking critics and laggard artists (whom de Zayas labels "copyists"). This taste for false art acted as a brake on the evolution of modern art, diverting attention from objective contemporary instances of modern life into dead styles or "methods" of the recent past:
Art is a white lie that is only living when it is born of truth. And there is no other truth than objective truth. The others are but prejudices. Stieglitz tried to discover America with prejudices. He first, and he alone, has placed before New York the various foundation supports of the evolution of modern art. He wished to work through suggestion. But soon, commercialism brought an avalanche of paintings. Those lepers, those scullery maids of art, those Sudras of progress--the copyists, got busy. They even believed themselves to be part of the evolution because, instead of copying trees, they copied a method. America remains to be discovered. And to do it there is but one way:--DISCOVER IT!
De Zayas believes that the institutional framework for modern art that Stieglitz devised was weak because it relied upon subjective expression--"suggestion"--rather than a direct, objective presentation of modernity as it is, in motion. For de Zayas, photography is the art-form par excellence for the revelation of the outer world's objective nature. In de Zayas' eyes, then, Stieglitz began his work as a modernist appropriately: as a proponent of straight (or what de Zayas calls "static") photography, Stieglitz stood for modernist objectivity. In claiming artistic superiority for straight photography over photography involving the manipulation of negatives, Stieglitz demonstrated a truly modern consciousness of the machine's objectifying power over and against aestheticizing "prejudice" or nostalgia: continuing the sexual metaphor, de Zayas writes, "[Stieglitz] worked in the American spirit. He married Man to Machinery and obtained issue."
Stieglitz failed, however, when he attempted to modernize American plastic expression. His failure lay in the way he presented modern art to the public. He asked the American public to look at modern work as Art, a rarefied distillation of genius emanating from and appealing to a certain initiated segment of society, rather than the sign of the public's own unacknowledged, constantly evolving vital energy:
When he wanted to ["obtain issue"] with art, he imported works capable of serving as examples of modern thought plastically expressed. His intention was to have them used as supports for finding an expression of the conception of American life. He found against him open opposition and servile imitation. He did not succeed in bringing out the individualistic expression of the spirit of the community. He has put the American art public to the test. He has fought to change good taste into common sense. But he has not succeeded in putting in motion the enormous mass of the inertia of this public's self-sufficiency. America has not the slightest conception of the value of the work accomplished by Stieglitz.  Any effort, any tendency, which does not possess the radiation of advertising remains practically ignored. America waits, inertly, for its own potentiality to be expressed in art.
Many critics, particularly those who want to see de Zayas and 291 as proto-dada and, thus, critical of capitalism in a way that fits with Bürger's or Huyssen's characterizations of the avant-garde, take this passage as an indictment of "the radiation of advertising" and American commercialism in general. 31 Yet, when read in context, we can see that this phrase expresses de Zayas' sincere belief that commercialism has been and could continue to be an important defining trait of the essentially modernist American identity. Americans as a people of mixed origins and beliefs will never express themselves in art unconsciously, says de Zayas, because they are not a unified people with a culturally inbred second nature--a cultural "common sense" naturally imbued with "good taste"--that flows from a national tradition. The heterogeneity of American culture, says de Zayas, shows through "in politics, in industry, in science, in commerce, in finance, in the popular theatre, in architecture, in sport, in dress," realms of life in which Americans have been unafraid to "get rid of European prejudices and [create their] own laws in accordance with [their] own customs." But things have been different in the realm of art, says de Zayas. In art, Americans feel the need for an "exotic education"; in learning to copy European methods they develop "an inner censorship" which blocks a direct perception of the heterogeneous truth of the American "milieu." Result: "They do not see their surroundings at first hand." De Zayas describes those surroundings in striking terms:
One lives here [in the United States] in a continuous change which makes impossible the perpetuation and the universality of an idea. History in the United States is impossible and meaningless. One lives here in the present. In a continuous struggle to adapt oneself to the milieu. . . . In the United States there is no general sentiment in any sphere of thought.
According to de Zayas, Picabia recognizes that Americans are really modernists, that "America has the same complex mentality as the true modern artist." 32 In keeping with this realization, Picabia has created art in America that does not imitate existing false notions of artistic propriety. He has achieved this, says de Zayas, by seizing upon everyday objects (machines, schematic renderings of mechanisms, images in advertisements and catalogues) and undercutting the viewer's attempts to remove them to a higher realm separate from the milieu in which they were found--that is, he refuses them the status of "art," in de Zayas' sense of that word. Implied in the sustained use of sexual and reproductive metaphor is de Zayas's conviction that Picabia accomplishes this undercutting through the blasphemous juxtaposition of a found machine image with a found bit of relatively exalted text (for example, the sacred phrase "Le saint des saints" in the self-caricature, or the epic lyricism of "Je suis venu sur les rivages du Pont-Euxin" in the de Zayas portrait), a transgressive act which works together with the eroticizing of these objects to suggest that American modernity is grounded in a new, non-transcendable sexuality objectified by machines. De Zayas refers to this kind of eroticized, blasphemous rejection of the tradition of idealistic art at the end of his article when he holds up Picabia as the hope for a truly vital (and virile) American modern art. He writes, "Of all those who have come to conquer America, Picabia is the only one who has done as did Cortez. He has burned his ship behind him. He does not protect himself with any shield ["capote"]. He has married America like a man who is not afraid of consequences. He has obtained results."
Stieglitz's decision to reprint in Camera Work, one after the other, the withheld circular stating the goals of the Modern Gallery, this essay from 291, and an "Epitaph for Alfred Stieglitz" by Marsden Hartley attests to his understanding that the Modern Gallery and Picabia's mechanomorphic style were complementary parts in a plan to replace him with a new institution. The talk of his failure and the use of the past tense to describe his achievements must have been particularly hard to take in 1915, especially in an organ like 291, which he was supporting with his own money, space, labor, and reputation. De Zayas, despite the emasculating rhetoric in his article, sought not so much to replace Stieglitz as to bring him and his achievements at 291 (especially his pathbreaking insights into the relationship between photography and modern art) to greater effect by showing Stieglitz the ways in which modern art and everyday American culture were intimately linked in their common contemporaneity.
What ultimately became of de Zayas' project? Ironically, the Modern Gallery was a great success with the public, but a financial failure. De Zayas was not a very good salesman, and this fact, coupled with his habit of not keeping records, eventually made his European suppliers wary of lending him their works on consignment (MDZ, 50). 33 The Arensbergs bought the majority of their collection there and at the De Zayas Gallery, which succeeded The Modern Gallery from 1919-1921 and which they backed financially (AS, 196).
The tie to the Arensbergs suggests that de Zayas' interest in the mechanomorphic aesthetic continued, since the Arensbergs' apartment was the gathering place until 1920 for artists inspired by machines and found objects, including Man Ray and Duchamp, as well as Picabia. Evidence also suggests that de Zayas's view of the compatibility between commerce and the mechanomorphic aesthetic lived on in the Arensberg circle. When in 1921 Man Ray describes to Tristan Tzara the end of New York dada, he is not at all unfriendly to the commercial and promotional philosophy of the earlier Modern Gallery:
Cher Tzara, dada cannot live in New York. All New York is dada, and will not tolerate a rival,--will not notice dada. It is true that no efforts to make it public have been made, beyond the placing of your and our dadas in the bookshops, but there is no one here to work for it, and no money to be taken in for it, or donated to it. So dada in New York must remain a secret. . . . The appearance of New York dada was made possible through the generosity of a few poor friends, but it cannot go on so. Perhaps in the future we may do something again. 34
The belief that avant-garde art expresses the unconscious essence of modern New York remains ("all New York is dada"), but the energy and finances needed to make people aware of this fact are lacking.
Despite the fact that it was not as successful in practice as it promised to be, the genesis of The Modern Gallery out of 291 and the differences it brought to light between Stieglitz and the Haviland-Meyer-de Zayas-Picabia group signify a larger shift in the aesthetic as well as the institutional framework of modern art in New York in the years following the Armory Show. For instance, Robert J. Coady's gallery and his magazine The Soil (1916-1917) portrayed popular American culture, especially sports, comedy, and heavy machinery such as steam hammers and locomotive engines, as proper ground for modern art in America, while Marcel Duchamp's ready-mades challenged the aesthetic and institutional bounds of art along lines similar to those of Picabia; Duchamp in turn influenced the artists who came into contact with him at the Arensbergs' apartment. And in both cases, we find proponents of modern art positioning themselves, like de Zayas, in a guardedly optimistic manner with regard to the commodification of the art object. This tempered acceptance of commodification as a fact of modernity, which, as we have seen, grew out of a benign view of American commodity culture as the organic expression of technologized modernity, needs to be taken into account in characterizations of the historical avant-garde's engagement with society.
The desire to be contemporary held by avant-gardists such as Picabia and de Zayas has significance for our understanding of the historical avant-garde. Recognizing its importance is crucial to assessing the enthusiasm for America manifested by res such as Marcel Duchamp, Picabia, and others whom scholars such as Huyssen and Bürger include as members of the historical avant-garde. For them, America seemed to epitomize modernity: it was truly the new world. 35 Exploitation of this essential modernity, rather than opposition to high bourgeois culture and its art institutions, struck them as being of utmost importance. Artists like Picabia, Duchamp and de Zayas, or, for that matter, Man Ray, Joseph Stella, Charles Demuth, or Charles Sheeler, did not believe that American society required fundamental transformation before it could embrace modern art. Instead, art needed to evolve in the direction of contemporary consumer society if it was itself to be truly expressive of modernity. In their opinion, Americans were at worst merely unconscious of their society's inherent avant-garde tendencies and therefore in need of little more than a dose of self-consciousness. Accordingly, the post-Armory Show New York avant-garde optimistically placed the modern fact of art commodification at the center of its artistic production; it was a process that promised both European and American artists an opportunity to establish continuity between modernist art and modern life.
Because theorists have not acknowledged the importance of this notion, they tend to misread the meaning of a key theme in art of the period--machine imagery and technology. Huyssen, for instance, perceptively notes the "crucial" role of technology and the "technological imagination" in historical avant-garde art. But he interprets the importance of that role solely in terms of its oppositional value: technology was used by the historical avant-garde in a revolutionary manner to transform life through art. The opposite, however, seems true in the example at hand: the New York avant-garde's identification of technology with the essence of mainstream American society and culture resulted in the conviction that art could be transformed and rendered truly modern by life--at least here. The Anglo-Saxon world was the origin of technological innovation and the seat of a society thoroughly modernized by technology. 36 Major res of the historical avant-garde--several of whom would later be involved with continental dada--created work in New York not with the intent of abolishing the institutional category of 'art' by using avant-garde creations to transform an anti-modernist society; rather, they attempted to dissolve the barrier between art and life by creating art objects that would be the contemporary, organic expression of a pre-existing modernist society and culture.
Over-emphasis on the oppositional character of the avant-garde has created an artificial chasm separating avant-garde res from their contemporaries. Terms such as "high modernism," then, can become a dumping ground for any writer or artist who is not easily accounted for strictly in terms of opposition. Examples of avant-gardism in America in the early twentieth century, such as those of Stieglitz and the artists surrounding him, demonstrate how the idea of America as the epitome of a culture thoroughly imbued with technological modernity could lead artists to accept the fact of art's commodification and create out of that acceptance, doing so in the belief that it would allow them fuller participation in the contemporaneous whole of modernity. These avant-gardists necessarily regarded the establishment of a just commercial relationship between artist and public--what de Zayas termed "mutual service"--as social ratification of that fuller participation, because they recognized that monetary worth makes up such an important part of the way modern society expresses its values. Insofar as concerns of this sort continue to be essential in our contemporary debates about art, such clear-headedness about modern values may be worthy of admiration. It can remind us that desires other than oppositionality often motivated the activities of the historical avant-garde and testify to the ongoing importance, for art and for artists, of a sense of contemporaneity.
Stephen E. Lewis is a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Chicago. He is completing a dissertation on the corrida de toros in Anglo-American and French literature of the 1920s and 1930s.
1. Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984); Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1986); hereafter abbreviated TAG and AGD.
2. Sue Davidson Lowe, Stieglitz: A Memoir/Biography (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1983), 127; hereafter abbreviated SMB.
3. William Innes Homer, Alfred Stieglitz and the American Avant-Garde (Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1977), 172-73; hereafter abbreviated AS.
4. Dorothy Norman, Alfred Stieglitz: An American Seer (New York: Random House, 1960, 1973), 118-19; hereafter abbreviated ASAS.
5. The press often reported Stieglitz's anti-commercialism with humor. See the quotations from a 1913 article by Samuel Swift of the New York Sun and a 1911 article by Henry Tyrell in the New York World in Marius de Zayas, How, When, and Why Modern Art Came to New York, ed. Francis Naumann (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996), 81-82; hereafter abbreviated HWW.
6. This shift may sound like the one from autonomous art to non-autonomous art familiar to readers of Bürger. The difference here is that, in this example, both institutions are undeniably avant-garde, and the avant-garde institution devoted to the idea of autonomous art (bourgeois and capitalist in Bürger's reading) was anti-commercial, while the one replacing it was openly commercial.
7. In the world of literary modernism, The Sunwise Turn, a New York modernist bookstore in operation from 1916-1927, represented within one institution the tension between these two attitudes towards the fact of a consumer economy for modernist work (see Lawrence Rainey, "Consuming Investments: Joyce's Ulysses," James Joyce Quarterly 33 [Summer 1996]: 551-55). The store had two owners: Harold Loeb, like de Zayas, considered the "profit system" a fact of life and committed himself to operating without a loss, while his Stieglitz-like partner, Mary Mowbray Clarke, expressed a preference for cultural patronage from the wealthy over the "evil" of "profit." The strain ultimately proved too great: Rainey tells us Loeb sold his share of the shop in early 1921 (Rainey, 554). Significantly, Clarke and her first partner originally planned to locate their store in the 291 building.
8. Camera Work, no. 48 (Oct. 1916): 63-64
9. Stieglitz was consistent in his idealism from the very beginning, when he was concerned only with photography: see Homer, Alfred Stieglitz and the Photo-Secession (Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1983) 96, 141-42; hereafter abbreviated ASP.
10. Edward Abrahams, The Lyrical Left: Randolph Bourne, Alfred Stieglitz and the Origins of Cultural Radicalism in America (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1986), 173, 180; hereafter abbreviated LL.
11. Douglas Hyland, Marius De Zayas: Conjurer of Souls (Lawrence, Kansas: Spencer Museum of Art, The University of Kansas, 1981), 46, quoting a letter of de Zayas to Stieglitz; hereafter abbreviated MDZ. Also, see de Zayas' letter of 27 August 1915 to Stieglitz in HWW, 190-91.
12. Camera Work, no. 48 (October 1916): 63-64.
13. Stieglitz's most treasured American painters, John Marin and Arthur Dove, were in serious financial trouble at the time and consequently painting very little; also, Stieglitz's wife's stream of income from her brothers' breweries was in danger of being shut off if the U.S. entered the war and began rationing (SMB, 200).
14. Ibid.; ASAS, 129. Both (ASAS quotes Stieglitz) contradict Stieglitz's statement in Camera Work that it was de Zayas who ended the relationship.
15. In Camera Work, no. 30 (April 1910), 54, Stieglitz wrote: "The Photo-Secession stood first for a secession from the then accepted standards of photography. . . . [T]he Photo-Secession can be said now to stand for those artists who secede from the photographic attitude toward representation of form" (my ellipsis).
16. See John Russel Taylor and Brian Brooke, The Art Dealers (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1969), 31-32 on Impressionism, independent movements, and the rise of the independent dealer and art critic.
17. Collectors who bought works of 291 artists or gave them money included John Quinn, Agnes and Eugene Meyer, Walter Arensberg, Mabel Dodge, and Stieglitz himself. On John Quinn as '291' patron, see Judith K. Zilczer, "Alfred Stieglitz and John Quinn: Allies in the American Avant-Garde," The American Art Journal, 17 (Summer 1985): 20-21; on the Meyers, see AS, 57; on Arensberg, see AS, 184-185; on Mabel Dodge, see AS, 178.
18. See Dorothy Norman, "From the Writings and Conversations of Alfred Stieglitz," Twice A Year 1 (Fall-Winter 1938), 85-86, 90, 93. For Stieglitz's views on craftsmanship and artistic creation, see his article "Pictorial Photography," Scribner's Magazine 26 (November 1899): 528-37
19. Attesting to this sense of American commodity culture as modernist standard are the frequent public comments by European avant-garde artists present in New York from 1913-1923 to the effect that "America is the country of the art of the future" (Duchamp, quoted in Naumann, New York Dada 1915-1923, 19, 36; hereafter abbreviated NYD).
20. William Camfield, Francis Picabia, His Art, Life and Times (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 84; hereafter abbreviated FP. Dickran Tashjian, Skyscraper Primitives (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1975), 38; hereafter abbreviated SP. See also AS, 190-91.
21. NYD, 59-60, reports that Picabia contributed his first mechanomorphic drawing, the "Fille née sans mère" [Girl Born without a Mother], to the June 1915 issue of 291, only days after arriving in New York.
22. Hyland, MDZ, 110, considers the work a "character study" of 291's Agnes Ernst Meyer; Camfield, FP, 83, concurs. The Stieglitz-de Zayas correspondance, published as an appendix to HWW, shows the importance of her role in these affairs.
23. Maria Lluïsa Borràs, Picabia (New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 1985), 155.
24. Borràs, Picabia, 156; Camfield, FP, 83. See the illustrated plates in Camfield for the specific ads and catalogue images Picabia probably used as models.
25. Anon., "French Artists Spur on an American Art," The New York Tribune, 24 Oct. 1915, section 4, p. 2, quoted in FP, 77.
26. Naumann, NYD, 20, interprets the 1913 painting "Culture physique" ["Physical Culture"], painted after Picabia's first trip to New York, from Jan to April 1913, to show that Picabia probably thought of art in terms of commodification well before his mechanomorphic phase.
27. Many of Picabia's mechanomorphic drawings of the period 1915-1919 are inspired by this notion of technology as ring a quintessentially modern form of artistic reproduction that functions parodically in a manner contrary to the laws of human reproduction: see "La fille née sans mère" ["The Girl Born without a Mother"], "L'Enfant carburateur" ["Child Carburetor"], "Prostitution universelle" ["Universal Prostitution"] in NYD, 62-65, 69-72. Though not eroticized with the same obsessive energy, the mechanomorphic work of Duchamp and Jean Crotti, working with Picabia in New York at the same time, and of Americans such as Charles Demuth, Morton Schamberg and Man Ray, all frequenters of the Arensberg circle, exhibit similar erotic conceptions of the machine as creative in a way that parodies normal human sexuality and fertility: see Duchamp's "Fountain," cocoa grinders, and "Large Glass," Crotti's 1916 "The Mechanical Forms of Love in Movement," Man Ray's 1919 "My First Born," and Schamberg's 1916 "Machine" (FP, plates 146, 148, 149). Camfield evokes the literary erotic machines of Raymond Roussel and Alfred Jarry (particularly as represented in Impressions d'Afrique, 1912, and Le Surmâle, 1911, respectively) as likely influences on Picabia (FP, 78-79).
28. 291, nos.7-8 (Sept.-Oct. 1915).
29. A short note in the New York American, 1 November 1915, considers the significance of modern art's popularity in connection with The Modern Gallery itself, stating, "The question of how far the ideas of a comparatively small number of artists are biting into the consciousness of the community will be solved by the world's test of having arrived--the saleable value of the product. This will be something, though it will not settle the real value of the ideas" (quoted in HWW, 95).
30. Looking back on 1915, "the golden year for modern art," de Zayas says that he strived to make the Modern Gallery a place where people could "think for themselves." "I wanted to bring the artist in contact with the public, the producer with the consumer without intermediaries" (HWW, 71, 94). He contrasts this philosophy with that of Stieglitz, who "dealt with the public individually, putting the visitor to a sort of third degree to get at their [sic] mental reactions" (HWW, 126).
31. Tashjian (SP, 40) and Arturo Schwarz (New York Dada: Duchamp, Man Ray, Picabia [Munich: Prestel-Verlag and Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, 1973], 193) quote this phrase without noting that it was written within the context of de Zayas' creation of the Modern Gallery and his primary criticism of Stieglitz, namely, that Stieglitz stifled healthy commercial opportunity. Both dismiss de Zayas as "merely an art dealer" once he and Stieglitz have gone their separate ways.
32. Picabia himself says as much in his interview with the New York Tribune: he attributes his new mechanomorphic style to his realization upon coming to America and seeing New York that "the genius of the modern world is in machinery"; Picabia, like Duchamp, believed America was "destined to become the center of modern art" (FP, 76).
33. The Modern Gallery was the first uptown gallery devoted to modern art, and lasted three years. According to de Zayas, Eugene Meyer was the principal investor, with Haviland and Picabia also contributing. Meyer insisted on a no returns policy, so buyers were limited to the experienced collectors Arthur B. Davies, John Quinn, and Walter Arensberg (HWW, 94). Picabia and his wife Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia supplied much of the art, both from their own collection and from Paris contacts (FP, 76). See HWW, 134-55, for a complete list of The Modern and De Zayas Galleries' exhibits.
34. Quoted in Raimund Meyer, Judith Hossli, Guido Magnaguagno, Juri Steiner and Hans Bolliger, Dada global (Zurich: Limmat Verlag, 1994), 92.
35. This view of America was especially widespread in the period preceding surrealism (prior to 1924). Other European avant-garde res who viewed America, particularly New York, as essentially avant-garde or modernist include Blaise Cendrars (see, e.g., his 1912 poem "Pâques à New York"), Arthur Cravan, John Heartfield, and Hannah Höch.
36. Anglo-America's superior economic and technological development in comparison to that of the Continent was a point of pride among Anglo-American avant-gardists, and a rallying point around which they sometimes centered their efforts to promote their work. See Wyndham Lewis, in the opening manifesto of BLAST 1 (1914 [reprint Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1989], 39), and Ezra Pound in the essay "Patria Mia" (1913, reprinted in Ezra Pound, Selected Prose 1909-1965, ed. William Cookson [New York: New Directions, 1973], 99-141). Both argue that England and America are ideally suited to be the world leaders in modern art because everyday life in those countries is already thoroughly structured by modern realities, particularly the manufacture of machinery (for Lewis) and entrepreneurialism and the industry-driven construction of steel-beamed buildings (for Pound).
.
I feel the matter of my heart being transformed, metallized, in an optimism of steel.
F. T. Marinetti, The Steel Alcove 1
Metal is neither a thing nor an organism, but a body without organs.
G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, Nomadology 2
Transgressive representations of the body--envisaged as means of realizing corporeal fantasies, enacting empathetic identifications (or refusing them), as well as reimagining the phenomenological relation of self and world--appear with startling frequency in the works of many avant-garde artists at the turn of the last century. One thinks of the impossible profusion of res that populate Rodin's Gates of Hell, many of them multiples without predetermined meaning, Cézanne's late bathers with their occasionally indeterminate gender and unfixing of somatic boundaries, Matisse's arcadian fantasies, or Picasso's protocubist and cubist nudes, in which the signifiers of gender are at times withheld or rendered ambiguous, and in which the body's fluctuating tactile presence is linked to that of the material substratum of the canvas. While central to the prewar period, the body reconred though the lens of desire seems progressively absent or displaced in avant-garde art after war; it seems to wither in an age dominated by technological enthusiasms and dada irony, purist abstraction, and nostalgic returns of normative, classicizing archetypes. Of course there are exceptions; but the appeal to empathetic bodily sensation and gesture, which retains at least the memory of anatomical and psychic experience, when it survives, does so in greatly altered forms.
By casting a retrospective gaze onto one particular moment in the representation of the body, that of Italian Futurism, I hope to elucidate the psychic tensions and aporias that generated its appearance and eventual (willed) disappearance. For the signs of faltering confidence in the organic realization of somatic desire are already at work in Futurist images and descriptions of the body--especially the male body. The Futurist ideal of masculinity, best exemplified by the literary works and manifestos of F. T. Marinetti and the pictorial and sculptural works of Umberto Boccioni, differs, of course, from that of its historical counterparts in other countries. Yet many of the issues raised were of vital concern to artists and poets elsewhere: How best to affirm virility while becoming free of the debilitating effects of desire? How to imagine the body's boundaries--as both permeable, shifting, and open to fusion with the environment, and as rigid, closed, and resistant to penetration? How to hold in solution a narcissistic longing for expansion of the ego and fantasies of omnipotence, with their seeming negation, a longing to overcome subject/object distinctions in a corporeal fusion with matter/mother? How to respond to the body's temporality, its inevitable mortality, and reversion to (mere) matter? And finally, how to create (and believe in) an immortal man/machine hybrid, a body always already posited in the future tense?
In his literary manifestos of 1912, 1913, and 1914, Marinetti repeatedly advocated the death of the literary "I" or authorial self, that "obsessive I that up to now the poets have described, sung, analysed, and vomited up." 3 Rather than project human emotions and preoccupations onto nature, poets were to express the life of matter in its molecular composition and movement, to intuit "its different governing impulses, its forces of compression, dilation, cohesion, and disaggregation, its crowds of massed molecules and whirling electrons" ("TM," 87). 4 Marinetti's emphasis on the "life" of matter was intended to obliterate traditional distinctions between the organic and the inorganic, between sentient beings and the physical and mechanical world. He sought, in poetry but also in art and in politics, to open a new field in which a chiasmic exchange of properties and attributes might occur. The Futurist male, "multiplied" by the machine, would exemplify a new superhuman hybrid adapted to the demands of speed and violence. Sportsman, aviator, or warrior, he would be capable of astounding feats of physical prowess. His inner consciousness, modeled on the running motor, would be emptied of all that was private, sentimental, and nostalgic--of all that in 1913 Marinetti called "psychology"--which he deemed a "dirty thing and a dirty word." 5 Machines, in an inverse movement, would become the locus of all rejected human capabilities and drives, including libidinal desire and procreation. According to the poet, "motors . . . are truly mysterious. . . . They have whims, unexpected fantasies. They seem to have personalities, souls, or wills. . ." Marinetti further asserts that if treated respectfully, caressed, and never overtaxed, the machine will give back "much more and much better than the calculations of its builder--its father!--made provisions for." 6 Ultimately, then, the motor will obey its master. Once fused with the machine, with wings sprouting from his very flesh, the new Futurist male will be able to externalize his will without resistence, achieving each of his desires while reigning over space and time.
First Record (Premier Record), a free-word collage poem of 1916 dedicated to the Italian aviator Guido Guidi, exemplifies Marinetti's fantasy of "mechanical splendor" and its attendant ambiguities ( 1). Whereas Guidi had established a new world record by flying to an altitude of 7,950 meters, Marinetti's poem res forth the expansion of an heroic but impersonal self (moi + moi + moi + moi), in the process of breaking an entire series of world records. Appearing simultaneously on both sides of the Atlantic, as well as conquering the North Pole, Marinetti's multiplied hero achieves each of his victories by annexing the explosive energy of a machine or racehorse. The various selves who direct and dominate these powerful vehicles are also transformed by them. Marinetti emphasizes the fusion of man and machine, flesh and metal, by defining the self as a carburetor minus eight grains of sand--that is, without the danger of malfunctioning that sand would cause. Propelled by a mixture of gasoline and attention, and with the further addition of good luck, the hero-as-carburetor overcomes his merely human state in order to embody a Nietzschean ideal of superhuman courage and triumphant force.
In celebrating record-breaking as an end in itself, Marinetti departs from the ideology of the emerging industrial bourgeoisie in Italy. As Jeffrey Schnapp has observed, Marinetti's body/machine complex does not correspond to the ideals of efficient expenditure, predictablity, and standardization currently being devised in the domain of scientific work management (Taylorism). 7 Instead, his hybrid of man and machine is described as a "centaur"; a capricious machine capable of dazzling feats of heroism. 8 Liberated from the struggle for existence, the energy he expends is sheer surplus. What Marinetti calls the "pure idea of the ascensional record" is a manifestation of this freedom from utilitarian productivity. 9
Here comparison with Francis Picabia's The Child Carburetor of 1919 proves instructive ( 2). Picabia's carburetor is an enigmatic apparatus, a mechanical instrument that has usurped human functions while emptying them of subjectivity. The artist's earlier machine works, including Girl Born without a Mother and Young Girl in a State of Nudity (a precisely rendered image of a spark plug), both of 1915, make the erotic association of women and machines explicit. They also reveal Picabia's obsessive fantasy of autonomous reproduction, of procreation without women. Similarly born of man alone, The Child Carburetor mocks human desire by equating sexual union with the pulsing motion of the piston within a cylinder, driven by a coupling of gas and air. Yet as in Marcel Duchamp's bachelor machines, the longed-for combustion fails to occur, here thwarted by a spherical migraine. The various mechanical parts remain disjunct and curiously static against the woodgrain ground, as if laid out for inspection on a table prior to assembly.
Although not without humor, Marinetti's work exhibits none of Picabia's biting irony. Whereas The Child Carburetor displaces the human subject, First Record celebrates triumphant self-transcendence, ubiquity in time and space symbolizing invincibility and a godlike omniscience. Both works retain a reference to nature, or the organic world of materials, as the necessary counterpoint of their mechanical being. For it seems that nature, and the feminine with which it is conflated, cannot be suppressed without leaving a palpable trace. A wooden panel functions as the flat, literal ground for Picabia's painting; seemingly unformed and primal, it invites the artist's hallucinatory reveries. The mechanical forms he depicts on its surface are given a similarly literal presence and color with the addition of metallic paint. In an open letter of 1920, Picabia directs his viewers to seek the explanation of his work in the physical rather than in the psychological domain. "Magnetic ions" he remarks, perhaps not entirely seriously, have determined the "equation of the sexes," for the human brain is a powerful "magnetic field" in rapport with other naturally occuring magnetic phenomena. For this reason, Picabia asserts, his use of metallic paint should not be viewed as merely ornamental, but as having special significance. 10 Like Marinetti, he seeks to link the activity of the mind to purely physical forces while retaining a fundamentally vitalist and irrational attitude toward matter. Sexual desire, according to this antihumanist view, springs from the involuntary interactions of insentient (or para-sentient) metallic substances and the force field generated by the earth, and therefore remains utterly devoid of subjective or sentimental value.
While fantasizing a similarly nonsentimentalized eros, Marinetti never entirely rejected voluntarism, or the realization of desire as a manifestation of power over nature. In L'Alcova d'acciaio (The Steel Alcove) of 1921, a first person "romanzo vissuto" (lived novel) recounting Marinetti's experiences during the last months of the war, the poet proclaimed: "I believe that the audacious will to win is a force that projects itself out from the muscles with enormous impetus and force" (ADA, 138). 11 And in "The New Religion-Morality of Speed," published in 1916 shortly before First Record, he described the evolution of mankind's domination of nature as the acquisition of an "army of slaves": "From space man stole electricity and combustible fuels to transform motors into faithful allies. Man forced vanquished metals, rendered flexible with fire, to ally themselves with the fuels and electricity. He thus assembled an army of slaves, hostile and dangerous, but sufficiently tamed to transport him rapidly over the curves of the Earth." 12 Despite Marinetti's injunction against personifying or sentimentalizing natural phenomena, the earth assumes a distinctly "feminine" character in this and many other Marinettian texts. Comprising unequal terrains, valleys alternating with mountains, and with roads following irregular and indolent rivers, the earth offers no straight lines or level planes conducive to speed. Yet this might still be corrected. The poet declares that he hopes "to see in the near future the Danube course at 300 km. per hour in a straight line. One must persecute, lash, and torture all those who sin against speed." 13
If the literal ground of The Child Carburetor is a wooden panel, the depicted ground in First Record is the earth itself, for the work is organized as if it were a map with the North Pole at the top and the Atlantic stretched across the center. Given this structural logic, it is not coincidental that flight, a triumph of technology and a metaphor of freedom from a (feminine) earthbound condition, becomes a dominant motif. In a text titled "Electrical War," Marinetti imagines a future in which only freight trains will still creep along the earth. "Man, having become airborne, sets foot there only once in a while!" 14 In contrast, Picabia's Child envisions not a future of limitless freedom, but its destruction--at least insofar as the future is associated with the conquests of technology. The words "Detruire le future" (destroy the future), which Picabia has inscribed on the painting's surface, seem to mock Futurism and its enthusiasm for destroying the past.
Marinetti's fantasized fusion of the machine and the male body, while obviously a product of his intoxication with power and freedom from utility, also reveals a fetishistic impulse. Precisely because nature is understood as the locus of the feminine and the maternal, it must be opposed and displaced by both the machine, and its symbolic ally, matter (sheer dynamic physicality). Marinetti, I will argue, imagines matter as a vector of speed, a volatile, masculine substitute for a nature still construed as predominantly horizontal, gravity bound, and organic--inextricably linked, that is, to cycles of gestation, birth, maturation, and death. Caught in this cyclic temporality, nature can never propel Marinetti into the future, nor become the vehicle of a new, quasi-inorganic (and therefore immortal) masculine subject. Of course, this displacement proves unstable, and occasionally the feminine associations of nature (including the "lack" it embodies) return to contaminate matter, reminding us of what has been refused, or repressed. For the most part, however, the concept of matter is remarkably "productive." It allows Marinetti to confound the organic and the mechanical, the procreative, and the industrial, and thereby to seize for himself the illusory power of male autogenesis. Hence the sexual ambiguity that structures Marinetti's desire for, and identity with, the machine.
The system of oppositions and substitutions at work here can be elucidated by an examination of the narrative account of the birth of Futurism in Marinetti's "The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism" of 1909. The story opens with a description of the poet and his friends; they have stayed up all night arguing and writing frenetically within a lush, oriental interior, a space redolent of nineteenth century decadence and its obsession with enervating sensual pleasures. Having at last "trampled [their] atavistic ennui" and broken with logic, awake and standing erect, they burst forth into the street, galvanized by the "famished roar of automobiles." The text continues: "We went up to the three snorting beasts, to lay amorous hands on their torrid breasts. I stretched out on my car like a corpse on its bier, but revived at once under the steering wheel, a guillotine blade that threatened my stomach." 15 Embodying an archetypal myth of femininity, the automobiles are simultaneously associated with life and death, a compliant responsiveness, and the threat of castration. Menaced by the guillotine blade of the steering wheel, Marinetti revives, recovering his male prowess. As he puts it, "We had nothing to make us wish for death" for "we had no ideal Mistress raising her divine form to the clouds, not any cruel Queen to whom to offer our cadavers. . ." 16 The automobiles themselves redress this feminine absence and allow their masters to escape the debilitating--even life-threatening--effects of relations with idealized women.
This preliminary scene sets the stage for the core event of the story, a collision, in which Marinetti's car, confronted suddenly by two wobbling cyclists, who symbolize the impasse of the old logic, overturns into a ditch. Here is Marinetti's ironically rhapsodic prose:
Oh! Maternal ditch, almost full of muddy water! Fair factory drain!  When I came up--torn, filthy, and stinking--from under the capsized car, I felt the white-hot iron of joy deliciously pass through my heart! ["FMF," 48-49] 17
In this narrative, the collision of past and future res as a traumatic event, a symbolic death and rebirth, in which a factory drain substitutes for the mother's body, and industrial sludge nourishes the infant. This tale draws on Marinetti's memories of his childhood in Egypt, the breast providing the muddy water reminding him of his Sudanese nurse. Maternal functions are here conflated with those of the colonized other, and both are superceded by the technological. This deliberate confusion of identities serves both to feminize and to eroticize technology, so that when a crowd of bystanders fish his car out of the ditch, a caress from the poet is enough to revive it. It is Marinetti who now restores his "beautiful shark" to life, thereby becoming her father as well as her lover. Shorn of her "heavy framework of good sense" and her "soft upholstery of comfort," the automobile is reborn as a hard, dynamic form, a violent projectile into the future ("FMF," 49). 18 Thrillingly phallic in shape and power, but feminine in allure and identity, the automobile becomes a fetish, a locus of transposed desire.
Marinetti describes guns, locomotives, and even the armored tank he commanded during the first world war in similar terms.  This is the minute, knowing tenderness of a lover caressing his adored mistress" ("MM," 98). 20 Similarly, L'Alcova d'acciaio returns obsessively to descriptions of lieutenant Marinetti's amorous relation to his armored car number 74, equipped with equally feminized artillery ( 3). In a parody of literary texts that eulogize the unique, ideal woman, Marinetti asks: "Haven't you met my new mistress? I will introduce you. You understand, the one I prefer, who will exclude all others and be perhaps definitive. . . . My 74 has the health of iron, or rather steel, and a marvelous sensitivity, but armoured." The poet admits that she is much like her sisters, "But mine is the most agile of all. She has the strongest heart-motor, and the fire of her ironic artillery has neither weaknesses nor distractions" (ADA, 52). 21 Elsewhere the text compares her artillery fire to "a furious dance," whose "ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta" is "capricious, ruthless, ironic and feminine," although she always remains loyal to Marinetti (ADA, 19). 22 This eroticized relation of man to his machines, indeed to his weapons, solves a problem inadvertantly introduced by the negation of women and of their reproductive capability: How to maintain a myth of heterosexual virility in a world without women?
The topos of autogenesis through the union of man and machine, so important in "The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism," also provides the narrative impetus for Marinetti's 1909 novel, Mafarka le Futuriste (Marfarka the Futurist). This novel, like the opening scene of the founding manifesto, draws on the author's memories of North Africa, and its eponymous hero is an Arabian king with imperialist ambitions. When Mafarka's beloved brother dies, he creates a mechanical son, Gazurmah, to be his immortal substitute. Carved out of oak, Gazurmah is nonetheless modeled on an airplane; his enormous, resplendently orange cloth wings are stretched over a lattice composed of steel, bamboo and hippopotomous sinew. With his coarse skin, squared jaw, ribs of iron, and formidable metallic member, Marfarka finds his creation beautiful. He breathes life into his son with a dangerously homoerotic, lingering kiss on the lips, and is then thrown to his death by his impatient, newly born progeny--a fate he has forseen and even desired so that he might be reborn in the immortal Gazurmah. It is this early example of a cyborg, generated without the aid of what the novel calls a "vulva," who eventually fulfills his father's dreams by raping and obliterating the earth. The novel's project, as Barbara Spackman has argued, is to bypass the "vulva" and fertilize what Marinetti calls an "unused ovary" with a male spirit. 23 The fruit of his father's will, Gazurmah is "beautiful and pure of all the defects that come from the maleficent vulva and that predispose one to decrepitude and death! . . . Yes, you are immortal, my son" (MIF, 303). 24 Marfarka renders the dual aspiration for autogenesis and immortality--and the attendant demonization of woman's bodies--explicit when he triumphantly discovers that "it is possible to procreate an immortal giant from one's own flesh, without concourse and stinking complicity with woman's womb" (MIF, 237). 25 The misogyny of this text is an effect of a prior rejection of merely human, abject corporeality and hence, of mortality, which Marinetti projects onto femininity. The frantic anxiety driving this attempt at male autarchy is apparent even to Mafarka, who tells his nascent son: "I created you thus with all the force of my desperation, for the intensity of creative energy is measured by the magnitude of the desperation that generates it" (MIF, 313-14). 26
A fragment from Marinetti's diary of 31 March 1917, a time when he was still on active military duty, reveals a similar ambivalent comingling of erotic pleasure, violent fantasy, and disgust with the female body. Most significant is the way his identity as a soldier stands in opposition to, and ultimately destroys, the possibility of sexual pleasure with a woman. Here virilty is affirmed through military violence rather than through erotic or sensual activity.
Always always, in my life these two tormenting states of mind have alternated with one another. In the happiest and most voluptuous bed I have suddenly torn myself away from the arms of a seductive and delightful lover, and trembling seated at the edge of the bed I have strained my ear to catch a distant, imaginary shelling. Nostalgia, desire for heroism and violence. In the muddy broth of the trench which the shellings have made, a monstrous ivy of women's naked bodies climbing from my temples up to the moon. Torrid nostalgia of lust. Why? Why? 27
In this passage, Marinetti's desire for military heroism and violence tear him away from the arms of his lover, interrupting the flow of sexual passion and introducing a torrid nostalgia. The imagined sounds of distant shellings further transfer Marinetti from the edge of the bed to the "muddy broth" of a trench created by the shellings--a "trench" that tropes the female genitals. It is lust itself that these violent fantasies kill, through the imagined destruction of the lover's body. From this trench with its muddy broth, which recalls the factory drain and its muddy water in the collision scene of "The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism," climbs a "monstrous ivy" of naked female bodies. Assimilated to a vegetal state, these bodies ascend to the moon, the oft-rejected symbol of sentimental love in Marinetti's oeuvre. The horror of this scene exceeds the seemingly rational denial of both love and lust in many of the poet's writings. By reducing "the immense Amore of the romantics" to the simple need to conserve the species, and sexuality to a casual "friction of the epidermis," Marinetti also erects a barrier against the pleasures of the body ("MM," 100). 28
Klaus Theweleit, in his study of the psychic structure of fascist soldier males in Germany, has identified a similar impulse to negate sensual pleasure by recourse to violent acts or fantasies. 29 For these men, as for Marinetti, the war red as the ideal arena in which to experience the relation of body and world. Only in war could they be the source of, or somehow connected to, every explosion, without risking the disintegration of their fragile egos. Apart from war, the soldier males Theweleit analyzed organize their lives on the model of severe military discipline and maintain relationships primarily with other men within a strict hierarchical order. By disciplining the body, rendering it hard and nearly metallic, they create a kind of protective armor designed to shield them from their fear of dissolution. This fear emanates from the sense of an inner void, or lack of psychic coherence, which is then projected outward. Often it takes the threatening form of a miasma associated with both femininity and the unruly proletarian masses. The texts Theweleit analyzes frequently describe this miasma as bloody, oozing, a viscous liquid with the power to contaminate, overwhelm, or destroy whatever it comes into contact with. The creation of body armor is designed to render the fascist soldier male resistent to this contagion, but also, and perhaps most importantly, serves to render him impervious to sensual or erotic pleasure. For sexual communion with another implies the breaching of both psychic and corporeal boundaries.
For the Fascist soldier male, desire may be released only in the moment of destruction or annihilation of the other--the moment of firing a machine gun, throwing a grenade, or dropping a bomb. This outward eruption provides a surfeit of sensations in which the rifleman, for example, imagines himself as a bullet, hurtling through space to penetrate the enemy. He desires, not union with the enemy, but its utter obliteration. As Theweleit explains, he explodes against the enemy, in a movement that allows his body to atomize as it erupts outwards.Yet this seeming disintegration ultimately serves to strengthen his body-ego--like a gun that explodes in a powerful discharge of energy but remains whole. 30 A similar attitude drives many of Marinetti's corporeal fantasies, revealing a profound desire to experience the body as a ballistic weapon, to render it both an explosive force and impervious to attack. "Let's Murder the Moonshine" of 1909 proclaims: "It is necessary--do you understand?--necessary for the soul to launch the body in flames, like a fireship, against the enemy, the eternal enemy that we would have to invent if it didn't exist." 31 This text continues to describe the "furious" pleasure of war as a form of coitus to which even the feminized, "informe" (miasmic) enemy abandons herself: "See the furious coitus of war, gigantic vulva stirred by the friction of courage, informe vulva that rips itself open the better to offer itself to the terrifying spasm of the next victory! It's ours, the victory. . .of that I'm sure, because the madmen are already hurling their hearts toward heaven, like bombs!" 32
Indeed the ballistic metaphor pervades Marinetti's wartime writings. In L'Alcova d'acciaio Marinetti compares his body to a grenade about to be inserted into a launcher (ADA, 118), while he dedicates Come si seducono le donne (How to seduce women), written in 1916, to the Austrian grenade that wounded him, adorning his face and legs with "the only tatoos worthy of we Futurists." 33 Turning the same reifying glance on himself that he elsewhere cast upon his enemies, Marinetti regards his burnt and bleeding flesh as if it were an aesthetic phenomenon seen from a distance: "Wounded in the groin by a large piece of schrapnel, fallen under the heap of stones and sandbags of the dazzling battery, I rose up with a burnt face and taking off my blood-soaked trousers, I admired the extraordinary violet of my thighs and of my battered knee" (ADA, 118). 34 It is this ability to desensitize the body, to experience it as pure exteriority, that allows Marinetti simultaneously to treat it as a weapon and to marvel at its wounds. If there appears to be an element of masochism in this open display of battered and "tatooed" flesh, it serves only to reaffirm Marinetti's control of his own bodily sensations and his pleasure in withstanding the enemy's assault.
While arguing that Theweleit's analysis of the libidinal structure typical of the German fascist soldier serves to elucidate a similar structure in the Futurist male, I nevertheless wish to point to certain differences. Perhaps because Marinetti was above all a poet and member of an international avant-garde, and retained a certain romantic allegiance to anarchist ideals of individual liberty and spontaneity, his body armor remained provisional and fragmentary. It might be assumed, but could also be cast off--at least temporarily. The narrative of L'Alcova d'acciaio is organized around a constant oscillation between his desire for women and his desire for military heroism. Arriving in Naples for a tryst with Bianca, Marinetti observes: "a battle had broken out between my wilfull brain full of ideas of war and of the next offensive, and my trembling heart, vanquished, liquified, Neapolitan. Extremely irritated, upset, with tears in my throat, I reeled in the cab as it jolted along nocturnal alleys" (ADA, 103). 35 Surprisingly, in this case his love for Bianca triumphs and the exhausted soldier cedes his will to a woman. He experiences this reversal of ideals as a defeat and remarks ironically, "An absurd demon forces me to degrade myself, to annihilate myself. Perhaps I have suffered too much from the exuberant fullness of strength and of constricting rigidity" (ADA, 109). 36 At this point Bianca assumes Marinetti's Futurist spirit and refuses his offer of marriage, explaining that he is her second lover, and that she will marry the first. Significantly, all the women Marinetti encounters in the novel have had previous lovers and he remains singularly unconcerned about their virginity or their faithfulness. In this he diverges sharply from the attitudes of the fascist soldiers analyzed by Theweleit. Nor does Marinetti admire discipline and military hierarchy for their own sake, seeing in them a threat to the intuitive elan, elasticity, and pride of the Italian character. [Begin Page 31]
The novel closes with a speech to a captured Austrian colonel and his "niece" Rosa, in which Marinetti explains that the Italians were victorious in the war because of innate national differences. For Marinetti, German military "preparedness" and force could never triumph over Italian spiritual elasticity and improvisatory genius. (In the light of such self-proclaimed racial stereotypes, Boccioni's painting Elasticity of 1912, depicting a dynamically rendered male on horseback, might be compared with Arno Breker's 1937 bronze sculpture of a classically inspired male warrior titled Preparedness.) He further exemplifies this national, indeed racial, contrast by refusing to carry off the seductive Rosa, despite his "rights" as a conquerer, thereby demonstrating the moral superiority of Italian civilization. But by this time the war has been won, and he has already spent the previous night in the arms of a divine woman--a personified Italy who submits to his embrace in the clean, shining quarters of a steel alcove, the armored tank number 74. Whereas Mafarka and his son had represented the type of the nomadic warrior, a pure upsurge of destructive power alien to the laws and institutions of any state, in L'Alcova d'acciaio Marinetti fuses his militarism with the patriotic goals of Italy. 37 This demands a corresponding transformation of the earth itself, from an unmarked, deterritorialized feminine ground, to the delimited and embodied territory of the nation. "The elegant roseate form vibrates on the map! No longer map, she is incarnated" (ADA, 195). 38 Only in this mythic form does Marinetti penetrate her (via his armored car number 74, in whom he now sees lesbian tendencies), addressing Italy thus: "The virile impetus of this my motor which is also heart, sex, inspired genius and artistic volition, enter you, with rough pleasure for you, for me, I feel it!  Marinetti articulates the duality of his new identity at the close of the war by pointing to the coexistence of primitive and civilized qualities within himself: "Extravagant primitivism of my temperament, virgin, wild, sincere, elastic, full of cruel barbarisms and of a profound, civilized humanity. A temperament that hurls itself forward, strikes, but immediately understands and forgives all, with a lofty, indulgent and tranquil goodness" (ADA, 225). 40 This text predicts the fate of Futurism in the postwar period, which would cede its will, not so much to women or romantic desire, as to the state and its authority.
Among the Futurist artists, Umberto Boccioni was most closely associated with Marinetti during the prewar period. Like the poet, Boccioni was obsessed with the idea of expressing the "life" of matter in his art. Paintings such as the 1912 Materia (Matter--but also mother, measurable substance, and the first product of creation: chaos) posit a continuity on the level of molecular structure between the human body and the objects of the world ( 4). As a result of the inherent dynamism of matter, which Boccioni following Henri Bergson calls "absolute motion," all objects interpenetrate each other, shattering the apparently closed boundaries of individual forms as they follow the trajectories of their development in space. Only individuals endowed with superior intuitive power can detect the spontaneous forces of objects that propel them to fuse with their environments.
As we have seen, in Marinetti's texts matter functions as a kind of antinature; it both displaces and substitutes for a nature still invested with sentimental feminine attributes. The situation in Boccioni's case is more ambiguous. In Materia the monumentalized form of Boccioni's mother serves to equate primal matter with motherhood, so that matter at first seems to retain its traditional feminine associations of generative potential. Yet Boccioni's mother is invaded by the energized forces of the street, which penetrate the domestic interior she inhabits and represents. In an earlier meditation on this theme, The Street Enters the House of 1911 ( 5), Boccioni depicts his mother leaning over a balcony to observe the dynamic activity of men constructing the foundation of a modern factory. Her head and upper body plunge into the vortex of the scene before her, so that she seems to collaborate in the interpenetration of interior and exterior forces. This posture is replicated by that of several other women who also lean out from nearby balconies to observe the men at work, the masculinity of their sphere underscored by the vertical poles that provide its emblematic scaffolding. In a later version of 1912, Horizontal Construction ( 6), Boccioni again situates his mother in the liminal space of a balcony, but turns her so that she faces the interior. She no longer views or participates in the activity of urban life, but submits to its dislocations and transformations. Moreover, his mother's vision is now fractured along a central faultline, yielding a synthesis of profile and frontal aspects, one that suggests not her own multiplied visual power, but that of the artist. 41 The horizontality of this painting's title alludes to the organization of its volumes rather than to its format, which is square, and may be an attribute associated by Boccioni with his mother/matter's newly passive status. A drawing ( 7), related to both Materia and to Horizontal Construction, probably reveals a preliminary stage in Boccioni's exploration of the formal and symbolic meanings of horizontality as a property of matter. Its lateral organization ultimately proved unsatisfactory, perhaps because it reduced the view of the city beyond the balcony and confined the dynamically penetrating elements, the galloping horse and balcony railings, to a horizontal trajectory that failed to suggest virile force.
How can we explain the apparent change in the artist's depiction of his mother, in particular, his inability to equate his own act of omnipotent looking with that of his mother? I would like to suggest that it was prompted by conversations with Marinetti or a reading of his text "Multiplied Man and the Reign of the Machine," in which we find the following passage: "Thus we will see disappear, not only love for the woman-spouse and for the woman-lover, but also love for the mother, principal support of the family and as such opposed to the audacious creation of the man of the future." 42 Perhaps Marinetti's rejection of the cult of the mother reawakened Boccioni's own earlier anxieties about matter, his recurring uncertainty over the selection of an appropriate medium for a given subject, and his fear of resulting chaos. In this context, the artist had once written: "It is the terror of matter that suffocates me." 43 Whatever the reasons, during the summer of 1912, Boccioni returns temporarily to a hylomorphic model in which form and matter, spirit and substance, constitute opposing if complementary terms. Paradoxically, it was this form/matter duality that Marinetti had sought to negate by positing an energized matter with its own inherent properties of propulsion and diffusion.
Materia is closely related to Horizontal Construction, except in its format which is decidedly vertical. 44 Sitting with her overly large, coarse hands clasped before her, Boccioni's mother seems like so much raw matter waiting to be imbued with an active (male) spirit. Force lines emanating from the orthogonals of the distant buildings partially dissolve and fragment her massive form, while a nude, swift and male at right, and a lunging horse at left, traverse the scene at the level of the balcony. Horses, along with the men who ride or guide them, had already appeared as allegorical res in The City Rises of 1910, which Boccioni had titled Gli Uomini (The men) and Lavoro (Work) in preliminary studies. The studies reveal that in the course of articulating his vision of the city under construction--the scenes depict the archetypally modern erection of an electric plant--Boccioni evidently embraced Marinetti's exaltation of speed and dynamism as the free, nonutilitarian expression of the will to power. 45 Accordingly he had shorn his horses of their harnesses and replaced them with wings. If the harness returns in Materia, it is because the nature of work, of mind infusing matter with form, is once again at stake. The small scale of the horse and man is also noteworthy, implying their objective physical distance from this interior, which they have nonetheless breached. (In Horizontal Construction, which lacks these res, Boccioni experiments with simply writing distance onto the trajectory of invading force-lines: 200 meters, 122 meters, etc.) Significantly, this is one of the few examples of centripetal motion in Boccioni's work; in most cases, as in The Development of a Bottle in Space, also of 1912 ( 8), the opened core of the bottle suggests that a centrifugal force propels itself out from and around a centered, stable object to join with the environment, including a dish, table, and even a house in the distance. In the terms established by Materia, it is the vertical, masculine forces of the street, emblematic of the dynamism and modernity of city life, that penetrate a feminine personification of matter, in order to obliterate the distinction between interior and exterior, human being and urban world.
Only the hands of Boccioni's mother appear to counter this collapse of boundaries. Their uncanny proximity and gnarled forms verge on the grotesque, telling of his mother's age and years of manual labor as a seamstress. Insofar as they seem shaped by her own work, her own temporal experience, Cecilia Forlani's hands resist the disintegration visited upon the rest of her form. Still imposing, though at rest, these hands clearly captivated Boccioni, who made them the center and focal point of this and related works. Their meanings exceed the logic of the spirit/matter duality reaffirmed by Materia, in which it is now the artist who dominates and transforms matter in the creation of this very painting--and thereby implicitly engenders his own mother. [Begin Page 37]
Whereas Materia personifies matter in the form of Boccioni's mother, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space of 1913 ( 9) dramatizes the depersonalization of the human subject, in what might retrospectively be called a Futurist cyborg. This sculpture strives to represent the Nietzschean ideal of the heroic superman by representing the dreamt of fusion of human flesh and metal. Its success lies in its synthesis of a series of opposing qualities. The work evokes the heat and evanescence of flame-whipped forms, as well as the cold impenetrability of a projectile; it suggests the power of tensed human muscles without invoking any resemblance to flesh, and it retains a sense of balanced stability despite a fragmented exterior that appears to strive forward. The head bears no human features; encased in a helmet and with a cross-like projection in the place of a visage, it plies through space like Boccioni's famous fist on the power of sheer externalized will.
In creating Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, Boccioni seeks to realize Marinetti's dream of a man/machine hybrid as articulated in "Multiplied Man and the Reign of the Machine." Indeed, the sculpture res forth the terms of this 1911 text in an almost literal manner:
. . . we must prepare for the imminent, inevitable identification of man with motor, facilitating and perfecting a constant interchange of intuition, rhythm, instinct, and metallic discipline of which the majority are wholly ignorant. . . we look for the creation of a nonhuman type in whom moral suffering, goodness of heart, affection, and love, those sole corrosive poisons of inexhaustible vital energy, sole interrupters of our powerful bodily electricity, will be abolished.
We believe in the possibility of an incalculable number of human transformations, and without a smile we declare that wings are asleep in the flesh of man. . . . This nonhuman and mechanical being, constructed for an omnipresent velocity, will be naturally cruel, omniscient, and combative.
He will be endowed with surprising organs: organs adapted to the needs of a world of ceaseless shocks. From now on we can foresee a bodily development in the form of a prow from the outward swell of the breastbone, which will be the more marked the better an aviator the man of the future becomes. ["MM," 99] 46
Fulfilling the nonhuman ideal presented here, Boccioni's Unique Forms of Continuity in Space seems all armor, the "prow" formed by the breastbone circling around and sheathing an empty core. The paradox of the sculpture is that volition emanates from a mechanical being devoid of human organs and interiority; matter itself--and in particular metal--constitutes this body without organs. For if wood is the emblem of nature, metal is the archetype of matter. 47 Unique Forms of Continuity in Space renders states of being by evoking the multiple physical properties of metal, conceived as manifestations of impersonal agency. 48 The "life"of metal is thereby conceived as its content; in its molten state, metal exemplifies fluidity, expansiveness, becoming, but when cold and hard, it exemplifies the impervious rigidity of pure will.
Boccioni's Dynamism of a Man's Head of fall 1914 ( 10), returns to the theme of the Futurist superman, but this time the work addresses a specific historical moment to become a vehicle of prowar propaganda. The artist intended the diversity of materials used in this collage--which include papers of different weight and texture, as well as ink, oil and gouache--to produce a physical effect of conflict and motion and thus to convey a sense of the man's dynamic state of mind. Yet just as the emphasis on contrasting and overlapping materials suggests a synthesis of re and ground, of man and environment, the introduction of newspaper suggests the collapse of any distinction between a subjective state of mind and a public discourse. Fragments of newspaper text remain legible beneath patches of gouache and ink, and they speak of patriotic fervor, a desire for war and for acts of cruelty. From the text that lies across the man's head we read: "Serbians," "Imperial," "war," "struggle," "Hungary," and "of the Fatherland."  Belonging at once to the public domain of state propaganda and to the man's inner consciousness, the newspaper signals the extent to which the two have merged. The individual ego thus is both negated and multiplied as it expands in total identification with the fatherland and its imperialist goals. As in Materia, the boundary between the interior and the public domain is breached, so that all becomes exteriority, and consciousness is constructed from without.
With this collage we return to the leitmotif of the death of the literary I, so often invoked in Marinetti's writings. With Italy's entry into the war in 1915, this theme took on greater urgency. In a manifesto of 1916, Marinetti attunes his aesthetic ideals even more closely to military attitudes, gestures, and acts by calling for a warlike, mechanical declamation of his poetry. In order to achieve this goal, the performer is to dress anonymously, dehumanize his voice and face, metallize or electrify his voice, and in all ways imitate motors and their rhythms, until ultimately, he has "disappeared." In the new Futurist lyricism, Marinetti declares, "our literary I consumes and obliterates itself in the grand cosmic vibration." 49 Assimilated to the energized world of matter, with electrical currents coursing through his veins, his body sheathed in metal, and his actions imitating those of motors, Marinetti longs for dispersal and disintegration--even while declaiming his poetry. In the "Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature" he dreams of a vital art that would pour out from the forest of his veins, "beyond the body, into the infinity of space and time" ("TM," 97). 50 Only by imagining his own imminent death, could he fantasize this final scattering into the world of matter as an apotheosis, a triumph over his own mortality. Within the terms of this fantasy, writing poetry, and making art, become equivalent to the violent eruptions of war.
Christine Poggi is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of In Defiance of Painting: Cubism, Futurism, and the Invention of Collage.
Versions of this paper were presented at the Futurism Symposium at Yale University in November 1995 and at the University of Pennsylvania in September 1996. I am grateful to respondents who raised important questions and led me to clarify my thinking. I also thank Oliver Shell and Kristin Fedders for their assistance. All translations, unless otherwise indicated, are my own.
1. F. T. Marinetti, L'Alcova di acciaio (Milan: Serra e Riva Editori, 1985; 1st edtn. 1921), 139; hereafter abbreviated ADA. The original reads: "Sento la materia del mio cuore trasformarsi, metallizarsi, in un ottimismo d'acciaio."
2. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Nomadology: The War Machine, transl. Brian Massumi (New York: Semiotext(e), 1986), 103.
3. F. T. Marinetti, "Destruction of Syntax--Imagination without Strings--Words-in-Freedom," in Umbro Apollonio, ed., Futurist Manifestos (New York: The Viking Press, 1973), 100; hereafter abbreviated FM. The original reads: "l'ossessione dell'io che i poeti hanno descritto, cantato, analizzato e vomitato fino ad oggi" ("Distruzione della sintassi--Immaginazione senza fili--Parole in Libertà," Lacerba (15 June 1913), reprinted in F. T. Marinetti, Teoria e invenzione futurista, ed. Luciano de Maria, 2nd ed. [Milan: Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, 1990], 63; hereafter abbreviated TIF. See also F. T. Marinetti, "The Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature," Let's Murder the Moonshine: Selected Writings by F. T. Marinetti, ed. R. W. Flint (Los Angeles: Sun and Moon Press, 1991), 95; hereafter abbreviated "TM" and LMM. "Destroy the I in literature: that is, all psychology. . . . To substitute for human psychology, now exhausted, the lyric obsession with matter." The original reads: "Distruggere nella letterature l'"io": cioè tutta la psicologia. . . . Sostituire la psicologia dell'uomo, ormai esaurita, con l'ossessione lirica della materia" (TIF, 50). See also idem, "Geometric and Mechanical Splendour and the Numerical Sensibility," in LMM, 106: "We systematically destroy the literary 'I' in order to scatter it into the universal vibration and reach the point of expressing the infinitely small and the vibrations of molecules." The original reads: "Noi distruggiamo sistematicamente l'Io letterario perché si sparpagli nella vibrazione universale, e gigungiamo ad esprimere l'infinitamente piccolo e le agitazioni molecolari" (TIF, 100).
4. The original reads: "I suoi differenti impulsi direttivi, le sue forze di compressione, di dilatazione, di coesione, e di disgregazione, le sue torme di molecole in massa o i suoi turbini di elettroni" (TIF, 50).
5. "The Variety Theatre," FM, 129. The original reads: ". . . cosa e parola immonde" ("Il Teatro di varietà," TIF, 87).
6. F. T. Marinetti, "Multiplied Man and the Reign of the Machine," LMM, 99 (translation amended); hereafter abbreviated "MM." The original reads: "Les moteurs . . . sont vraiment mystérieux. . . . Ils ont des caprices . . . des fantaisies inattendues. . . . On dirait qu'ils ont une personnalité, une âme, une volonté. . . ." And: "bien plus et bien mieux que tout ce que laissaient prévoir les calculs de son constructeur: son père" ("L'Homme multiplié et le règne de la machine," in Le Futurisme, preface by Giovanni Lista [Lausanne: L'Age d'Homme, 1980], 112). This essay was first published in a French anthology of Marinetti's writings titled Le Futurisme (Paris: E. Sansot et Cie., 1911); though most of that volume, including the present essay, was republished in Italian as Guerra sole igiene del mondo (Milan: Edizioni futuriste di "Poesia," 1915), I have chosen to refer to the French version because it was the one available during the prewar period and was especially important to Boccioni, and because many passages were omitted or altered in the later version.
7. Jeffrey T. Schnapp, "Propeller Talk," 1 (September 1994): 161.
8. F. T. Marinetti, "The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism" LMM, 47; hereafter abbreviated "FMF."
9. F. T. Marinetti, "Electrical War," in LMM, 114. The original reads: "L'uomo non dovendo più lottare per conquistarsi gli alimenti, concepisce finalmente l'idea pura del record ascensionale" (TIF, 321-22).
10. Francis Picabia, "Lettre ouverte à Monsieur H. R. Lenormand" , in Francis Picabia, ex. cat. (Paris: Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais, 1976), 87-88. The full passage reads: "C'est dans les phénomènes physiques qu'il faut en trouver l'explication davantage que dans les autres: les ions magnétiques qui sont les déterminants de l'équation des sexes influent puissamment sur l'homme toute sa vie: notre cerveau est un champ magnétique d'une intensité d'un nombre de gauss considérable, et c'est ce qui explique que la production intellectuelle soit en rapport direct avec les phénomènes magnétiques naturels, notamment les taches du soleil et les aurores boréales. Et tout ceci est si manifeste que vous avez pu remarquer que j'avais incrusté de métal mes tableaux du dernier salon: ce n'était pas un vain ornement, mais bien une puissante signification." Picabia had exhibited The Child Carburetor in the Salon d'Automne of 1919.
11. The original reads: "Penso che l'audace volontà di vincere è una forza che si proietta fuori dai muscoli con slanci e potenza enormi."
12. F. T. Marinetti, "The New Religion-Morality of Speed," LMM, 102 (translation amended). The original reads: "L'uomo rubò l'elettricità dello spazio e i carburanti, per crearsi dei nuovi alleati nei motori. L'uomo costrinse i metalli vinti e resi flessibili mediante il fuoco, ad allearsi coi carburanti e l'elettricità. Formò così un esercito di schiavi, ostilli e pericolosi ma sufficientemente addomesticati, che lo trasportano velocemente sulle curve della terra." "La nuova religione-morale della velocità," originally in L'Italia Futurista 1(1 June 1916), reprinted in TIF, 130.
13. Marinetti, "The New Religion Morality," LMM, 103. The original reads: "Io spero di vedere presto il Danubio correre in linea retta a 300 km. all'ora. Bisogna perseguitare, frustare, torturare tutti coloro che peccano contro la velocità" (TIF, 131).
14. F. T. Marinetti, "Electrical War," LMM, 114. The original reads: "L'uomo, divenuto aereo, vi posa il piede solo di tanto in tanto!" (TIF, 321).
15. "The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism," LMM, 47-48, hereafter abreviated "FMF." The original reads: "Avevamo lungamento calpestata la nostra atavica accidia," "gli automobili famelici," and "Ci avvicinammo alle tre belve sbuffanti, per palparne amorsamente i torridi petti. Io mi stesi sulla macchina come un cadavere nella barra, ma subito risuscitai sotto il volante, lama di ghigliottina, che minacciava il mio stomaco" (TIF, 7-8).
16. "FMF," 48. The original reads: "Eppure non avevamo un'Amante ideale che ergesse fino alle nuvole la sua sublime ra, né una Regina crudele a cui offrire le nostre salme. . . . Nulla, per voler morire . . " (TIF, 8).
17. The original reads: "Oh! materno fossato, quasi pieno di un'acqua fangosa! Bel fossato d'officina! Io gustai avidamenta la tua melma forticante, che me ricordò la santa mamella nera della mia nutrice sudanese . . . Quando mi sollevai--cencio sozzo e puzzolente--di sotto la macchina capovolta, io mi sentii attraversare il cuore, deliziosamente, dal ferro arroventato della gioia" (TIF, 9).
18. The original reads: "il mio bel pescecane" and "la sua pesante carrozzeria di buon senso e le sue morbide imbottiture de comodità" (TIF, 9).
19. The original reads: "Eh si! voi siete, piccola mitragliatrice, una donna affascinante, e sinistra, e divina, al volante di un invisibile centocavalli, che rugge con scoppii di'impazienza" (TIF, 49).
20. The original reads: "Ne les [des mécaniciens] avez-vous jamais observés quand ils lavent amoureusement le grand corps puissant de leur locomotive? Ce sont les tendresses minutieuses et savantes d'un amant qui caresse sa maîtresse adorée" (Le Futurisme, 111-12).
21. The original reads: "Non conoscete la mia nova amante? Ve la presenterò. Intendiamoci, quella preferita, che escluderà tutte le altre e sarà forse definitiva. . . . La mia 74 ha una salute di ferro, anzi d'acciaio, una meravigliosa sensibilità, ma blindata. . . .
22. The original reads: "Poi sentiamo la danza furibonda e il ta-ta-ta-ta-tà capriccioso, spietato, ironico e femminile della mitragliatrice . . ."
23. Barbara Spackman, "Mafarka and Son: Marinetti's Homophobic Economics," 1 (September 1994), 90. Spackman cites the following text from the preface: "l'esprit de l'homme est un ovaire inexercé. . . . C'est nous qui le fecondons pour la première fois!" (ellipsis in original; Mafarka le Futuriste [Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1984], 17]). The Italian version of this novel was published as Mafarka il futurista, trans. Decio Cinti (Milan: Edizioni futuriste di "Poesia," 1910). Further references to this novel will be to the Italian version, hereafter abbreviated MIF.
24. The original reads: "bello e puro di tutti i difetti che provengono dalla vulva malefica e predispongono alla decrepitezza e alla morte! . . . Si! tu sei immortale, io mio" (ellipsis in original).
25. The original reads: "È possibile procreare dalla propria carne senza il concorso e la puzzolente complicità della matrice della donna, un gigante immortale . . ."
26. The original reads: "Ti ho creato così con tutta la forza della mia disperazione, poiché l'intensità dell'energia creatrice si misura dalla grandezza della disperazione che lo genera."
27. "Selections from the Unpublished Diaries of F.T. Marinetti," ed. Lawrence Rainey, 1 (September 1994), 4-5, diary entry for 31 March 1917. The original reads: "Sempre sempre, nella mia vita si alternarono questi due stati d'animo torturanti: Nel letto più voluttuoso e felice mi sono ad un tratto strappato alle braccia d'una amante deliziosa e buona, e seduto fremente ho teso l'orecchio ad un lontano immaginario bombardamento. Nostalgia desiderio d'eroismo e di violenza. Nella trincea fango broda delle bombarde mostruosa edera rampicante di corpi nudi di donna dalle mie tempie fino alla luna. Nostalgia torrida di lussuria. Perché? Perché?" (ibid., 25).
28. The original reads: "L'immense amour romantique est réduit ainsi à la simple copulation pour la conservation de l'espèce, et le choc des épidermes est enfin délivré de tout mystère piquant . . ." (Le Futurisme, 115).
29. Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, 2 vols., trans. Stephen Conway, Erica Carter, and Chris Turner (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987 and 1989).
30. Theweleit, Male Fantasies, vol. 2, 178-81. Theweleit, 179, cites Ernst von Salomon in Die Kadetten (The Cadets), who describes the pleasure of annihilation and its implications for the soldier's body: "It was as if I myself could feel every jolt that shook the metal parts of the gun as a bullet slicing into warm, living human bodies. A wicked pleasure; was I now perhaps one with the weapon? Was I not machine--cold metal?"
31. F. T. Marinetti, "Let's Murder the Moonshine," LMM, 54. The original reads: "Bisogna che l'anima lanci il corpo in fiamme, come un brulotto, contro il nemico, l'eterno nemico che si dovrebbe inventare se non esistesse!" (TIF, 16).
32. Ibid., 62-63 (translation amended). The original reads: "Ecco la furibonda copula della battaglia, vulva gigantesca irritata dalla foia del coraggio, vulva informe che si squarcia per offrirsi meglio al terrifico spasimo della vittoria imminente! È nostra, la vittoria. . . ne sono sicuro, poiché i pazzi lanciano già al cielo i loro cuori, come bombe!" (TIF, 26).
33. F. T. Marinetti, Come si seducono le donne (Rocca S. Casciano: Tipografico L. Cappelli, 1918), 5. The original reads: "Alla granata austriaca che, . . . mi adornò facia cosce gambe dei soli tatuaggi degni di noi futuristi, barbari civilizzatissimi."
34. The original reads: "Ferito da una grossa scheggia all'inguine, caduto sotto il pietrame e i sacchi a terra della batteria sfasciata, mi rialzai con la faccia bruciata e calandomi i calzoni inzuppati di sangue ammirai lo straordinario viola della mia coscia e del mio ginocchio pesto."
35. The original reads: "una lotta si era scatenata fra il mio cervello volitivo pieno di idee di guerra e di prossima offensiva e il mio cuore tremante, vinto, liquefatto, napoletano. Irritatissimo, sconvolto, con le lagrime in gola, traballavo nella carrozzella traballante pei vicoli notturni."
36. The original reads: "Un demonio assurdo mi costringe ad avvilirmi, annientarmi. Forse ho troppo sofferto della pienezza esuberante di forze e della rigidità costrittrice."
37. On the warrior as exterior to the state, and as inhabiting (or traversing) a "smooth" rather than striated and territorialized space, see Deleuze and Guattari, Nomadology.
38. The original reads: "Vibra l'elegante forma rosea sulla carta! Non è più carta, diventa carnosa!
39. The original reads: "L'impeto virilissimo di questo mio motore che è insieme cuore, sesso, genio ispirato e volontà artistica, entra in te, con rude delizia per te, per me, lo sento! Sono lo strapotente genio-sesso futurista della razza tua, il tuo maschio prediletto che ti ridà penetrandoti la rifecondante vibrazione!"
40. The original reads: "Primitività stramba del mio temperamento vergine, selvaggio, schietto, elastico, pieno di barbarie crudele e di profonda umanità civilizzata. Temperamento che s'avventa, colpisce ma subito comprende perdona tutto, con alta bontà indulgente e serena."
41. This interpretation takes issue with the prevalent understanding of Horizontal Construction and Materia, which sees in them the culmination of Boccioni's fascination with "circular" or total vision on the part of the depicted observer, as in The Street Enters the House and Simultaneous Visions of 1911. See, for example, Antonello Negri, "Uno sguardo circolare," in Laura Mattioli Rossi, ed., Boccioni 1912 Materia (Milan: Fondazione Antonio Mazzotta, 1995), 27-42. I believe that whereas in the earlier works, the woman at the balcony functioned as a surrogate for Boccioni, in the latter two works the artist distinguishes his own act of viewing from that of his subject.
42. The original reads: "Nous verrons disparaître ainsi non seulement l'amour pour la femme-épouse et pour la femme-amante, mais aussi l'amour pour la mère, lien principal de la famille et comme tel opposé à l'audacieuse création de l'homme future" (Le Futurisme, 115). This passage is omitted in the substantially rewritten Italian version of 1915, and hence is not reported in LMM.
43. Umberto Boccioni, Gli scritti editi e inediti, ed. Zeno Birolli (Milan: Feltrinelli Editore, 1971), 304, diary entry for 25 April 1908. The original reads: "È il terrore della materia che mi soffoca."
44. Materia was at first nearly square: 161 x 150 cm. Boccioni altered this format by adding a canvas strip of 26 cm. to the top, and two canvas strips totalling 39 cm. to the lower section of his painting. The final work then measured an imposing 226 x 150 cm. On this change and some of the stylistic and iconographic consequences, see Rossi, Boccioni 1912 Materia, 27-28, 222.
45. Ibid. 258-59, which describes the construction of the Centrale Elettrica, or main electric plant, in the Piazza Trento, just steps from Boccioni's apartment in the Via Adige in Milan; though it began service in 1905, it underwent new construction in 1910. Its smokestacks appear both in The City Rises and in the upper left of Materia.
46. The original reads: "Il faut préparer aussi la prochaine et inévitable identification de l'homme avec le moteur, facilitant et perfectionnant un échange continuel d'intuitions, de rythmes, d'instincts et de disciplines métalliques, absolument ignorées aujourd'hui par le plus grand nombre . . . nous aspirons à la création d'un type inhumain, en qui seront abolis la douleur morale, la bonté, la tendresse et l'amour, seuls poisons corrosifs de l'intarissable energie vitale, seuls interrupteurs de notre puissante électricité physiologique.
Nous croyons à la possibilité d'un nombre incalculable de transformations humaines, et nous declarons sans sourire que des ailes dorment dans la chair de l'homme. . . .
Le type inhumain et mécanique construit pour une vitesse omniprésente sera naturellement cruel, omniscient et combattif. Il sera doté d'organes inattendus: des organes adaptés aux exigences d'une ambiance faite de chocs continus. Nous pouvons prévoir dès aujourd'hui un développement du bréchet sur la face externe du sternum, qui sera d'autant plus considérable que l'homme futur sera meilleur aviateur" (Le Futurisme, 112-13).
47. See Deleuze and Guattari, Nomadology: The War Machine, 101-4, on metal as the archetypal form of matter within the ideology of the "war machine."
48. Boccioni's Unique Forms of Continuity in Space was executed in plaster and exhibited in that form in Paris in 1913. No doubt the artist was prevented from casting it in bronze by lack of expertise and funds, as well as by his denunciation of bronze as a "passéist" material in his "Technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture" dated April 11, 1912, but not published until October of that year. Guillaume Apollinaire urged Boccioni to cast his sculptures in bronze at the time of the Paris exhibition and his comment was recorded by the artist in a letter to Vico Baer of early July 1913. See Boccioni, Gli scritti editi e inediti, 369. Plaster, of course, was also a traditional material in Boccioni's eyes. I believe the plaster version was always preliminary, and that the bronze version best achieves the artist's intent. The posthumous castings in bronze were ordered by Marinetti.
49. F. T. Marinetti, "Dynamic and Synoptic Declamation," LMM, 143. The original reads: "il nostro io letterario brucia e si distrugge nella grande vibrazione cosmica . . ." (TIF, 124).
50. The original reads: "fuori dal corpo, nell'infinito dello spazio e del tempo" (TIF, 54).
.
In January 1914, an obscure London journal titled the New Freewoman changed its name to the Egoist. In recent years, the change has become a subject of intense debate among scholars of literary modernism, some of whom claim that it marks a key transformation within literary modernism itself (or at least in its Anglo-American version), a turn away from modernism's earlier affiliations with militant feminism and toward a more agonistic and decidedly male modernism. The work of Joyce, who published A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and much of Ulysses in the journal, has become a crucial site for the unfolding of this debate, in part because his affiliations with the journal were critical to his early career and left lasting traces throughout his work, and in part because of his undisputed status as the paradigmatic master of modernist prose. How were the relations between modernism and feminism played out in the change of the journal's name? What were the gender affiliations of egoism, and how did they overlap with the increasingly troubled status of the self and notions of modern heroism, and in what ways were they linked with the kind of relentless linguistic experimentalism so typically associated with Joyce? These have become pressing questions, and I propose to reconsider them by teasing out Joyce's complicated associations with egoism, viewed here as a set of philosophical commitments that intersect in complex ways with contemporary debates about gender, politics, and language.
One passage of Finnegans Wake shows that Joyce never forgot the magazine that had launched his literary career: ". . . I'm so keen on that New Free Woman with novel inside." 1 However, the full context may qualify the tone of the speaking voice:
Of I be leib in the immoralities? O, you mean the strangle for love and the sowiveall of the prettiest? Yep, we open hap coseries in the home. And once upon a week I improve on myself I'm so keen on that New Free Woman with novel inside. I'm always as tickled as can be over Man in a Surplus by the Lady who Pays the Rates. [FW, 145.25-31]
Joyce's irony is directed at the mixture of neo-Darwinism and feminism that was rampant among the magazine's editors and contributors, perhaps a reflex of his gradual move away from any form of radical politics in the 1930s. A passage from Ulysses seems to confirm the idea that Joyce identified more with the Egoist than with the New Freewoman. 2 Stephen Dedalus, locked in debate with the librarian John Eglington, thinks to himself: "I believe, O Lord, help my unbelief. That is, help me to believe or help me to unbelieve? Who helps to believe? Egomen. Who to unbelieve? Other chap" (U, 9.1078-80). Joyce plays on the Greek ego, followed by the intensive particle men ("really"), which, in a Platonic dialogue, means "yes, truly." Gifford and Seidman, among others, see this as an allusion to the Egoist, a journal that indeed helped Joyce "to believe" in his work at a time when it faced the greatest difficulties in getting published; while the "other chap," accordingly, would be George Roberts, the publisher who hesitated to issue Dubliners and finally destroyed the sheets in 1912. 3
Joyce, in fact, goes further than merely alluding to the journal; the passage directly quotes from the leading article by Dora Marsden in the Egoist of 1 August 1914, when the journal was still serializing A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Marsden, meditating on the concept of "authority," deftly links together the verb "to believe" with the notion "to leave doubt":
. . . the voices of authority echo one to another all the world round with the cry of "Believe, believe." They mean, "Leave decision, leave it, leave it to us," in effect asserting that knowledge is a spurious form, a degraded type of the ideal which is lack-of-knowledge. . . . The sacred is indeed the first weapon of defence against the prying questions of intelligence. . . . Very naturally, therefore, all that one believes is by acquiescence of belief made sacred. "My beliefs are sacred," there would be no doubt, were the decision left with the believers, but the believer, as the history of belief shows, is encompassed about with enemies: both from within and from without. . . . Spontaneously bursts from him the cry: "I believe, help thou my unbelief. I have abandoned the quest: do thou (namely, sluggishness, comfort, whatnot) smother this itch I have to return to pry and poke."
Both Joyce and Mardsen quote Mark 9:24 (Authorized Version), which tells the story of the father of a possessed child who answers Jesus's injunction: "If thou canst believe, all things are possible to him that believeth." Both insert the famous phrase in a context that stresses the value of doubt and the need to resist any authoritative injunction to believe. Marsden develops her analysis of the "word-games" by which authority imposes itself on individual consciences, presenting a genealogy of the belief in morality and sin that looks extremely modern, with echoes of Nietzsche, a bold pre-Wittgensteinian strategy, and a critical account of the "grammar of assent" that was so dear to Cardinal Newman. Marsden's deconstructive and anarchist semantics adumbrates her later development of a "science of signs." It is in this context that one may reinscribe Stephen's dialogic meditations on belief. If such an intertextual network looks promising, I shall nevertheless try to show that one cannot equate the Egoist editors with a bunch of Ego-Men and that a different gendering of Egoism is required.
While my main interrogation touches upon the definition of Joyce as an egoist--the term is a philosophical one, though inevitably it also retains some of the popular connotations of "egoism"--I wish to reopen briefly the complex issue of the journal's politics, a subject recently explored by Bruce Clarke in Dora Marsden and Early Modernism. 4 Clarke's main thesis opposes the idea that the magazine's change of name can be interpreted as the takeover of a feminist magazine by a set of aggressively phallocratic modernists. Let me first recall a few facts.
Dora Marsden had been a classmate of Christabel Pankhurst since 1900 at the Manchester Victoria University and remained associated with suffragism thereafter. She was a militant member of the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) and spoke at a huge rally that, in Manchester in June 1908, drew 150,000 persons. The same year she became a salaried organizer of the movement and captured attention with her spectacular harassment of Winston Churchill at the Southport Empire Theater in 1909, where she shouted propaganda from a skylight in the dome and almost fell to her death when the police caught her. Like many militant suffragettes, she was repeatedly jailed and force-fed through the nose. After the infamous "Black Friday" in November 1910, when two women died by police brutality, she was felt to be too radical in her positions and was condemned by the Pankhursts. In 1911 she resigned from the WSPU and founded the Freewoman: A Weekly Feminist Review. It was a unique journal, an open forum for suffragists, feminists, anarchists, socialists, Uranians (the gay liberation movement of the period), but also spiritualists, currency reformers, poets, and aesthetes. But it lasted only eleven months, collapsing in October 1912.
The journal was resuscitated under the name of the New Freewoman: An Individualist Review in June 1913, opening its columns to writers such as Rebecca West, Ezra Pound, and Richard Aldington. Six months later, in January 1914, its name was changed to the Egoist. The last issue of the New Freewoman anticipated the change with a brief note. "It is proposed that with our issue of January 1st, 1914, the title of THE NEW FREEWOMAN be changed to THE EGOIST." It also reproduced a letter signed by five men, Upward, Pound, Carter, Kauffmann, and Aldington:
We, the undersigned men of letters who are grateful to you for establishing an organ in which men and women of intelligence can express themselves without regard to the public, venture to suggest to you that the present title of the paper causes it to be confounded with organs devoted solely to the advocacy of an unimportant reform in an obsolete political institution. We therefore ask with great respect that you should consider the advisability of adopting another title which will mark the character of your paper as an organ of individualists of both sexes, and of the individualist principle in every department of life. 5
The letter has been read as the sign of a takeover by men who wish to erase all traces of feminism--a takeover prepared by the famous "Imagiste" issue of August 1913, in which Rebecca West paves the way for Pound and his friends, and by a later issue of October 1913, in which Pound published "The Serious Artist" and "Religio" amid features by Aldington, Byington, Upward, and Remy de Gourmont. A male-centered modernism has ousted and replaced an earlier and more radical feminism, according to Rachel Blau Du Plessis, who is extremely critical of Marsden's betrayal of feminism. 6 More recently, however, Bruce Clarke has shown that it was Dora Marsden herself who engineered the change of name, even soliciting the notorious letter from the reputed "men of letters."
Clarke's account is reinforced by a glance at the front page of the first issue of the New Freewoman. The influence of Max Stirner, the Young Hegelian philsopher whose work, The Ego and His Own, would furnish the title for the Egoist, is unmistakable in Marsden's first article.
This is the epoch of the gadding mind. The mind "not at home" but given to something else, occupied with alien "causes" is the normal order and as such must be held accountable for that contemning [sic] of the lonely occupant of the home--the Self--which is the characteristic of the common mind. . . . Hence the popularity of the "Cause" which provides the Idol to which the desired self-sacrifice can be offered. The greater the sacrifice the Idol can accept the greater is it as a "Cause," whether it be liberty, equality, fraternity or what not. 7
Marsden's discussion of the "Cause" is directly influenced by the opening passage of Stirner's book, which had been translated into English in 1907 by Benjamin Tucker (who was also a regular contributor to the New Freewoman). Stirner quotes the first line, "Ich hab' mein Sach' auf Nichts gestellt," of a famous drinking poem by Goethe ("Vanitas! Vanitatum Vanitas!"), a line that can be translated as "I have set my cause on nothing," then goes on to develop its chief idea:
What is not supposed to be my cause [Sache]! First and foremost, the Good Cause, then God's cause, the cause of mankind, of truth, of freedom, of humanity, of justice; further, the cause of my people, my prince, my fatherland; finally even the cause of Mind, and a thousand other causes. Only my cause is never to be my concern. "Shame on the egoist who thinks only of himself!"
Stirner describes the "egoism" of those who require us to work for them, such as the state or God, then decides to "take a lesson from them" and, instead of serving them, to serve himself first: "God and mankind have concerned themselves for nothing but themselves. Let me then likewise concern myself for myself, who am equally with God the nothing of all others, who am my all, who am the only one (der Einzige). . . . Nothing is more to me than myself!" 8
It is thanks to Stirner, as relayed via Tucker and Byington, that Dora Marsden criticizes the way the two Pankhursts have defined suffragism as a "Cause." "'The Cause to which I have given my life.' This is a message, the last but one of Mrs. Pankhurst." According to Marsden, Mrs. Pankhurst has changed; only six years earlier she would have have said simply: "I want the vote given to me." Now she has fallen into the trap of absolute dedication to a cause.
She began to "lead a cause" and imperceptibly the Cause became Leader--leading where all causes tend--"Ich hab' mein Sach' auf Nichts gestellt," to self-annihilation. Mrs. Pankhurst may die and great is the Cause. What Cause? The Cause of the empty concept--the fount of all insincerity: the Cause of the Symbol--the Nothing worked upon by the Dithyramb. ["LK," 3]
Or again:
Accurately speaking, there is no "Woman movement." . . . If primarily women are to regard themselves as Woman or as the Mother, their satisfactions as individuals would be subordinated to an external authority: the requirements of the development of Woman or Mother as such--Empty concepts again. . . . The few individual women before mentioned maintain that their only fitting description is that of Individual: Ends-in-themselves. They are Egoists. They are autocrats and government in their autocracy is vested in the Self which holds the reins in the kingdom of varying wants and desires, and which defines the resultant of these different forces as the Satisfaction of Itself. The intensive satisfaction of Self is for the individualist the one goal in life. ["LK," 5]
This flamboyant statement was published in the first issue of the New Freewoman, which suggests that anarchism, rather than feminism, was the journal's dominant inspiration. No wonder that one finds an advertisement for Stirner's book, The Ego and His Own (with the caption: "The most powerful work that has ever emerged from a single human mind") amid a list of titles that includes Anarchism by Eltzbacher and State Socialism and Anarchism by Tucker. Dora Marsden had indeed moved from postsuffragist feminism to postfeminist anarchism, and she was already sketching out her revolutionary deconstruction of political discourse and everyday language, in what she later called her "Egoist semantics." Let us thus take a closer look at her model, Max Stirner.
The American translation of Stirner's book, subtitled "The Case of the Individual Against Authority," differs somewhat in emphasis from the original version, which in German sports a title (Der Einzige und sein Eigentum) that clearly situates it among the so-called Young Hegelians and the Berlin "free spirits." Stirner radically criticizes and simplifies the system of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit by distinguishing between two great periods, that of the "Ancients," or the world of ancient wisdom, and that of the "Moderns," which he identifies with Christianity. Christian theology, because based upon a mystique of transcendent love, remains a resolute adversary of egoism, the latter being a style of thought that refuses to sacrifice personal interest to a cause, to a generous but mystifying abstract idea. Stirner dismisses theology as nothing but a systematic belief in ghosts, and he energetically mimics a contemporary rhetoric shaped by the romantic discourse of the so-called moderns:
Yes, the whole world is haunted! Only is haunted? Nay, it itself "walks," it is uncanny through and through, it is the wandering seeming-body of a spirit, it is a spook. . . . Everything that appears to you is only the phantasm of an indwelling spirit, is a ghostly "apparition" . . . to you the whole world is spiritualized, and has become an enigmatic ghost; therefore do not wonder if you likewise find in yourself nothing but a spook. 9
Everything has become spectral in a modernity that is fundamentally haunted. Stirner's response lies in a reduction of investment to the "Ego"--that is, to a transcendental egoism which will resist the constraints of abstract ideas. Unicity combats Generality somewhat like the drive struggles against the powerful fictions of the Freudian superego.  [EHO, 54]
This idea is identical to Richard Rowan's view of his love for Bertha in Joyce's play, Exiles; the refusal to defend a beloved woman as a "possession" or "in the name" of an abstract and higher principle seems to have found its way into the philosophy developed in Joyce's notes for Exiles.
Stirner would probably have been forgotten as a mere oddity, a minor left-wing Hegelian, had he not become the butt of Marx and Engels's ferocious humor in The German Ideology, a work that curiously monumentalizes him by making him the main "enemy" of Marxian dialectics. The Ego and His Own is accused of embodying ideology; the central "ego" as "unique" is reduced to the function of a ghost, thereby demonstrating the culmination of an ideology that is essentially ghostly. Stirner becomes the whipping boy and scapegoat of historical materialism, and like Finnegan in the Wake, he quickly turns into a "hegoak" (FW, 5.07). In order to debunk him, Marx and Engels feign a tactical incomprehension of the parodic tone so crucial in The Ego and his Own, deliberately deaf to the ironies that are rife in Stirner's evocation of a "phantasmagoria."
Without realizing it, Saint Max has so far done no more than give instruction in the art of spirit-seeing, by regarding the ancient and modern world as the 'pseudo-body of a spirit,' as a spectral phenomenon,and seeing in it only struggles of spirits. Now, however, he consciously and ex professo gives instruction in the art of ghost-seeing. 10
To be sure, Stirner does not explain the history of Christianity through the "empirical conditions" and "industrial relations and relations of exchange" connected to a given form of society. For Marx and Engels, Stirner remains a prisoner of the spirit that he denounces: by dint of crying "ghost," he has effectively transformed himself and his entire conceptual world into a spectral phantasmagoria.
Certainly, there is little need to reenact the Marxist trial of idealism and ideology (who would escape whipping?). Yet it is pertinent to note that the philosophical debunking performed by Marx and Engels hinges on purely literary strategies; it is as if Stirner's book was referred back to a fictional world of shadows from which it should never have detached itself. There also remains the enigma of the curious relentlessness of Marx and Engels, whose 350 pages of mocking remarks devoted to Stirner surpass by close to twenty pages the entire volume of The Ego and His Own--a rare feat of polemical overkill. Like some Bouvards or Pécuchets wishing to reach the root of philosophical "idealism," Marx and Engels manage to quote almost all of Stirner's essay! As Derrida suggests in his Specters of Marx, at times they seem miffed by the mere fact of Stirner's having spoken better and before them of ghosts and spectrality! 11 Yet there is a more serious question at stake in this struggle for the reduction of ghosts: the staunch Marxist refusal to conceive of a-relational relation, an "I" that positions itself as "Ego" or the "Unique" only in order to refute any positioning and hence disappear.
Marx and Engels reduce to a "magical incantation" the rhapsody on the term of "the Unique" which concludes Stirner's treatise. They remark on the term's unstable status, a non-conceptual concept, when they write that the "Unique" becomes a word that is "simultaneously more and less than a word," and they conclude by indicting the surreptitious return of a Christian repressed: "Sancho-Stirner has found as the object of his Quixotic quest a pure and empty word which plays the role of Christ the Redeemer--and redeems itself from any link with reality" (GI, 449-50). Yet the "anti-dialectics" of enunciation invented by Stirner may be shrewder than Marx and Engles allow: it can be seen as heralding later insights such as the main intuition of Nietzsche's critique of the self (there is at least one unmistakable allusion to Stirner's "Unique" in Thus Spake Zarathustra), Adorno's "negative dialectics," or, more relevantly perhaps, Blanchot's Neutre, a neutrality more passive than passivity. For Stirner, the "I" calls itself "Ego" only in order to transcend itself, to vanish again in its own enunciative process.
The result is a paradoxical foundation, the enunciation of an "Ego" that is alternately all and nothing, as evidenced in the famous final paragraph of The Ego and His Own:
I am owner of my might, and I am so when I know myself as unique. In the Unique one, the owner himself returns into his creative nothing, of which he is born. Every higher essence above me, be it God, be it man, weakens the feeling of my uniqueness, and pales only before the sun of this consciousness. If I found my cause on myself (Stell' Ich auf Mich meine Sache), the unique one, then my concern rests on its transitory, mortalcreator, who consumes himself, and I may say: I have founded my cause on nothing. [Ich hab' Mein' Sach' auf Nichts gestellt]. 12