The worker-soldier is to be subsumed into a landscape premised entirely on an economic and cultural mobilization that produces itself as its own end, rather than relying on the all too temporal flux of occasional war as a social stimulant. 23 Benjamin, in his "Theories of German Fascism" said that this "new theory of war . . . is nothing other than an uninhibited translation of the principles of l'art pour l'art to war itself." 24 The relationship of the individual body to the battlefield is all-encompassing. "In order to deploy energies of such proportion [as total mobilization requires], fitting one's sword-arm no longer suffices; for this is a mobilization [Rüstung] that requires extension to the deepest marrow, life's finest nerve." ("TM," 126) This work for its own sake, mobilisation pour la mobilisation, brings up two parallels with the case of Lewis: the odd aestheticism of a yawning baronet who works--the blend of reactionary decadence and labor--and the subsumption of individual integrity into a landscape of supplements, a prosthetic work ethic: the sword now does not extend merely from the arm, but from the deepest reaches of the self.
There's a clock ticking inside Snooty Baronet that drives this fiction to stasis--not to resolution, but to the "continuance of same." That's why the book that we read, Snooty Baronet, is the one that Snoots writes, as he tells us at the novel's close. At the end of the plot begins the writing of the totally mobilized novel, grinding out itself. Complete production, total baronet. Prosthesis can structure the individual's relationship to its context, to the point even that the seam between flesh and metal, or soldier and landscape, or plot and character is entirely reworked, or disappears entirely. The novel that begins at the amputated end of the book looks a lot like Snooty Baronet, but this is a counterfeit ending, referring us simply to its own body's beginning. The book seems amputated because its ending is false.
Two years before writing Snooty Baronet, Lewis, as I said, was in Berlin writing the journalistic pieces that would make up his Hitler; he would remain inimitable at guaranteeing unpopularity for himself. 25 It's difficult to think of anything less judicious than calling Hitler a "man of peace." (Unless, that is, you publish a recantation of your position nine years later and call it The Jews: Are They Human?) Hitler shows us snooty journalism, with Lewis wandering around Berlin looking for Nazis. Here is what he finds instead, when he wanders into a nightclub, in the first chapter of Hitler:
Elegant and eyeglassed young women will receive him . . . and he will buy one of these a drink, and thus become at home. Still, he will have to be a sightseer of some penetration not to think that his sightseeing eyes may not this time be destined to gloat, upon what he had promised them they should find there. Then these bland Junos-gone-wrong, bare-shouldered and braceleted (as statuesque as feminine show-girl guardees), after a drink or two, will whisper to the outlandish 26 sightseer that they are men.  And they will goggle at the slightly-smiling bland edwardian "tart" at their side--still disposed to regard this as a hoax after all, for it is too like, it is too true to nature by far. 27
Lewis has found transvestites. Far from being a diversion, this moment is essential to the construction of the fascist body, the fascist body both in the sense that the bodies Lewis was searching for in Germany were those of National Socialists, and that the bodies are constructed along the lines of the aesthetic we don't entirely believe in but are compelled to account for. The moment is formally essential in that the Eldorado Bar sequence--this is where Lewis strikes gold--is the first part of the book. What he and the reader find (or are forced to find--there is a grudgingly tantalized play in whether this spectacle was the intended one) are bodies that are not at all what they seem to be: they are "trompe l'oeil"; a breast is revealed to be a "wire cup, with cloth stretched over it" (H, 25). The game, though, is not terminated by a semantic distinction between metal and flesh; for Lewis, you can't go home again, because the problem exceeds its construction. "It is too true to nature by far" (H, 24); the joining of this metal with that flesh does not allow for later distinctions, for nature has now been trumped, or trompe'd, with the creation of a prosthetic sexuality that exceeds nature by becoming far too true.
J. G. Ballard says that prosthetics is "the castration complex raised to a level of the art form." 28 However compelling that idea, a genealogy of castration is itself a prematurely amputated endpoint: I am arguing for a prosthetic supplementation to the body of modernism as we now have it, for extending it to encompass a wilder body, to paraphrase Lewis. This body acts and reacts in accordance with mechanical impulses that are not regulated by desire or need. If, as Michael Levenson says, explaining the shock of a Lewis character abandoning his double, "it is difficult to imagine Marlow abandoning Kurtz to pursue business upriver" (MF, 139), how much more difficult is it to imagine Marlow suddenly growing bored by Kurtz, and shooting him--without either malice or regret?
One way of taxonomizing this cold modernism is to call it a "reactionary modernism," following Jeffrey Herf. Another way is to label it a fascist modernism, as Andrew Hewitt has. 29 But these terms do not get at the excesses of this modernism, the modernist body that is entangled with the hard metals of politics and sexualities that are mechanized by something far less familiar, far more unsettling, and something that we, at this fin de siècle, are beginning to recognize as our own, mistakenly believing that we have constructed it for the first time.
Lewis's transvestites are twins of the soldiers on Jünger's sprawling battlefield; they are workers in a landscape where beginning and end have become moot points, archaic remnants of a narrative teleology; in this case the narrative is sexuality. As Hewitt has shown, Lewis's politics are bound to an understanding of sexuality that hinges on the wavering boundary between the natural and constructed. 30 This is not simply to say that Lewis anticipates Judith Butler's pronouncements on the constructedness of gender; rather, it is to point to a historical nexus of fantasies about the corporal and the corporeal, in which labor is reworked as functionally anticlimactic, where production is so ongoing as to outweigh the object of production, and bodies are seamless elaborations of their surroundings.
If, as Walter Benn Michaels suggests, modernism is the "research-and-development division of identitarianism," Wyndham Lewis is the rat on which to test the applicability of that theorem. 31 Here's our rat: nationalism, race, and gender each are technologies that can be dismantled and reassembled at . . . not "will," because that implies a coherent agency supervising individual narratives, but in accordance with the demands of local circumstances.  In Tarr, agency is reworked as an attribute of the couple; in his Mrs. Dukes' Million, character becomes a crowd.  They are equivalent acts; both are without significance.
And what does it mean to have race, gender, or psychology equally unprivileged, each so readily adjustable? The aesthetic proposed is of total collaboration; identitarianism is simply no longer the issue. In Lewis's cold modernism, the permutations of available characteristics--race, sex, nationalism--are radically rescripted. Identity and identitarianism--being a particular citizen of a particular country--just don't work. They are both secondary concerns beside a methodology lodged between satire on the one hand and the modernist commitment to exploring the relationship between a sign and its referent, a name and its subject, on the other. According to cold modernism, you start at the outside, where resonance, be it psychological, narrative, or ideological, dissipates. To probe any deeper is to ask an automaton how it feels, "to superadd to utter ignorance desire for continuance of same" (SB, 75).
Consider Lewis's much-remarked upon concern with the world's confusing him with other Lewises, Wyndham Lewises, C. S.'s, and D. B.'s. Hugh Kenner warns his readers away from the frequent confusion of the Lewis under discussion with "another namesake, Mr. D. B. Wyndham Lewis." 32 Lewis was concerned throughout his life with the possibility of misattribution, with all those other writerly Lewises; in 1948 he said that after his death, "My books . . . would be shared out among various writers. D. B. W. L. would get two or three more, Day Lewis be given a couple probably and the screw-tape Lewis have attributed to him 'Time and Western Man.'" 33 The preoccupation with other people crowding in on the raft of a single name, the attendant anxiety of being misrecognized and forgotten, is continuous with the aesthetic that constructs agency from the outside. Lewis's 1930 diary is a compelling document in this light. Consider first that the diary is a reconstruction twice over: it is in fact a 1931 desk diary that Lewis wrote over, crossing out the days of the week to write in the corresponding ones for the previous year. In addition, the diary does not appear to have been kept at the time of the events it records, but reconstructed belatedly, at least in part, seemingly in order to assemble a narrative regarding the commission and execution of a portrait of one Lady Glenapp, when the finances turned sticky after the subject grew dissatisfied in 1931 with the results of the 1930 sitting. Other meaningful events--meaningful for our author--are recorded, among them, on 24 February, "When name was mentioned at dinner a man cried out 'Which W. Lewis.'" 34 And on 11 September, "Was it about this time that she [Lady Glenapp] started calling W. by his Christian name?" And, in a stirring moment that brings to bear the best that paranoia has to offer:
Visited 12 o'clock morning by person giving his name & address as Richards. 34 Great [Ormond?] Street. [Illegible] & occupation as solicitor working in Malay States ([illegible] at Singapore), asking if I was D. B. Wyndham Lewis. Asserted knew D. B. W. L. in Cardiff before War, where D. B. W. L. was then [known?] as BEVAN LEWIS, and worked as crime-reporter on Writers Mail. Mr. Richards (who is not Welsh, he says) worked in solicitor's office. After in army with BEVAN LEWIS. A brother of BEVAN LEWIS's goes this year to Malay States, as solicitor. Also known as [plain?] Mr. Lewis.
Mr. Richards said sure heard name WYNDHAM at all. suppose it is a christian name. [NOT?] a family name. Mr. R.'s visit suspicious. Why did he come? Said I was very like D. B. W. L. but if he knows him so well that is un[illegible] Other things fish[y]. Query [Agnes?] Mr. Richards! 35
The names here are in danger of crowding Lewis out from himself; the behaviorist's nightmare has come true. Someone else has been comporting himself as a Lewis, so successfully in fact that now Wyndham Lewis is remarked to be "very like" the impostor, the man who has been aping him. Some plot has been hatched; the pseudo-Welshman, this so-called Richards, knows more than he's saying. The plot turns on repetitions--D. B. Wyndham Lewis imitates Wyndham while also going by the name of Bevan--that is, he poses as someone else and then in turn betrays that pose, that false position, by pretending to be someone else, which in fact he is. 36 And to make matters worse, he has a brother. The world is filled with Lewises, it seems. 37 We've come to the point where identity itself is prosthetic, infinitely iterable and extensive, and thus readily available to all those people who would be us.
Prosthetics do not simply extend what is possible (a metal hand replacing a fleshly one), but articulate an altogether new set of possibilities. Susan Buck-Morss proposes that early cinema was a form of prosthetic cognition. The movie screen did not simply extend the possible; it was a "prosthetic organ," rescripting potentiality. 38 Tied historically to the development of modern warfare, cinema gave us new perspectives, literally, on "phenomena of the crowd" such as war and the street demonstration. 39 It shapes a new body with which to experience violence, positioning us, anaesthetizing us, sensitizing us. Politics is the art of the possible, as Bismarck, speaking through Jünger, has it; prosthesis is an extension of a political way of conceiving new solutions to problems and deadlocks.
The prosthetics of modernism give us a new genealogy, a line of bodies embedded in narratives that rework the possible scenarios of character--political character, ideological limits, modes and degrees of identification, and integrity--into an entirely new script. The bodies that Lewis gives us are cold, wild, and regulated by an ethos of supplementation--a prosthetic work ethic that reworks interiority into an aspect of what it means to function. Just as early cinema installed in its audience a prosthetic mode of cognition, Lewis's cold modernism contrives a new model of character in which prosthesis is the heart itself. What is at the heart of Snooty Baronet, and Lewis, is a prosthetic device that beats out laughter at regular intervals. It ticks and talks and regulates the flow of narrative, but it does not yield to more lissome, recognizable, or organic notions of empathy or identity. Identitarianism belongs in this case to an outmoded set of assumptions about stability and limits that cold modernism not so much disregards as incorporates, reworks, and renders unintelligible.
Not only have half a dozen or more beetles been named after me, but also butterflies and shell fish. My friend Théodoridès even dedicated a one-celled organism to me, Gregarina jungeri. Furthermore, there is a subspecies of tiger beetles called jungerella. It's a family of beetles that I particularly appreciate; they are animals that run along the sand. . . . I was fascinated by them even as a child; perhaps they correspond to the way I move: these animals remain motionless, then they spot a goal and they race toward it, and then they freeze back into their immobility.
--Ernst Jünger, interview 40
In the mid-1930s the young pup of the Collège de Sociologie, Roger Caillois, published "Mimétisme et psychasthénie légendaire" in the avant-garde French journal Minotaure. Caillois discusses various instances of insect mimicry--of environment (bug as leaf), of other species (bug as cat), of confederate (bug as other bug)--and the various ends to which mimicry leads--escape, surprise, fecundation. He speculates too about the roots of the phenomenon: did the insect world once contain a species especially adapted to imitation, did insects gravitate toward environments that matched their bodies, or were the matches fortuitous? He discards the notion of fortuitous "similarity" 41 on the grounds that successful mimicry involves a particular quality of relationship between the insect and its environment. We are dealing not simply with "combinations like any others," with mimicry being simply a randomly successful (in whatever terms that success is defined--fleeing, feeding, or mating) amalgamation of attributes that might well have led to death or celibacy; what we have is instead a "mutual organization," a "reciprocal topography" ("MLP," 23). Caillois says that the tendency to imitate--in this case the tendency of a butterfly, the Kallima, to resemble its environment, a kind of shrubbery--may be the behavioral vestige of "a set of cutaneous organs" that disappeared "once the resemblance was achieved" ("MLP," 23). That is, the Kallima butterfly once had a physiological system capable of molding the insect to any environment, but it froze, à la Lamarck, into a particular arrangement when the insect settled among a particular group of shrubs. "Morphological mimicry could then be . . . an actual photography, but of the form and the relief, a photography on the level of the object and not on that of the image, a reproduction in three-dimensional space with solids and voids" ("MLP," 23). The organ whose job it was to photograph the environment has evolved into something like an appendix, and this vestigial quality of insect physiology is important, because "luxury" ("MLP," 25) is the true concern of Caillois (and of the other members of his Collège). 42
The surplus of activity that mimicry involves--it is often ineffective or less effective as a survival mechanism than other behavior--leads Caillois to link it formally and thematically to magic. That mimicry can lead directly to death, that sympathy issues in cessation (an insect looking like the leaf it eats, and being pruned by a gardener or even consumed by its fellows as a result) leads Caillois to speculate on the importance of the law of contiguity:
One point . . . needs to be made, the correspondence . . . between the principles of magic and those of the association of ideas: to the law of magic--things that have once been in contact remain united--corresponds association by contiguity, just as association by resemblance corresponds quite precisely to the attractio similium of magic: like produces like. ["MLP," 25] 43
Magic derives from dangerous luxury, and contiguity is its key. Caillois's insects move in a sticky world, extricating themselves from one glutinous mass of characteristics after another. We respond to this with fascination, in the strict sense of the word; fascination is the correct response, for the result of magic is to freeze the victim, who is then sacrificed, which, in the phagocentric cafeteria of the Collège, usually means eaten.
Insectkind suffers from "a real temptation by space" ("MLP," 28) in that it offers multiple instances of the reorientation of the insect body in such strict accordance with its environment that the insect body is itself not merely drawn to that which resembles it, but finally freezes into place as a conclusion of the environment.
Here instinct completes morphology: the Kallima places itself symmetrically on a real leaf, the appendage on its hind wings in the place that a real petiole would occupy; the Oxydia alights at right angles to the end of a branch because the arrangement of the spot representing the middle veining requires it; the Clolia, Brazilian butterflies, position themselves in a row on small stalks in such a way as to represent bell flowers . . . ["MLP," 27].
It is no longer redundant or doubled; it completes. This succumbing to space is not limited to the insect world; Caillois goes on to examine the "protective coverings" ("MLP," 28) fashioned by spider crabs, who "collect on their shells the seaweed and polyps of the milieu in which they live" ("MLP," 28). He quotes Eugène Louis Bouvier, who says that for spider crabs "the disguise seems like an act of pure automatism," meaning that the process of augmentation is meaningful, and, as with insects who engage in this form of augmentation, "the nature of the bodies producing the contact is of little importance" ("MLP," 28). It doesn't matter what you put on your shell, just that your shell has things on it.
In the seemingly less leafy human world, Caillois concludes, we find individuals who suffer from "legendary psychasthenia," in which "the feeling of personality, considered as the organism's feeling of distinction from its surroundings, of the connection between consciousness and a particular point in space [is] . . . seriously undermined." ("MLP," 28)
To these dispossessed souls, space seems to be a devouring force. Space pursues them, encircles them, digests them in a gigantic phagocytosis. It ends by replacing them. Then the body separates itself from thought, the individual breaks the boundary of his skin and occupies the other side of his senses. He tries to look at himself from any point whatever in space. He feels himself becoming space. . . . He is similar, not similar to something, but just similar. And he invents spaces of which he is "the convulsive possession." ["MLP," 30] 44
The possession here is entirely different from the oceanic feeling that the Romantics described as available to those who climbed mountains in order to survey and surrender to the horizon. That was sublime; this is stasis. Caillois ends by noting that all mimicry works "in a single direction: the animal mimics the plant, leaf, flower, or thorn, and dissembles or ceases to perform its functions in relation to others. Life takes a step backwards." ("MLP," 30) This may well be Caillois playing Freud (if that's going backward); the debt to the 1920 Beyond the Pleasure Principle is clear, if not noted: "alongside the instinct of self-preservation, which in some way orients the creature toward life, there is generally speaking a sort of instinct of renunciation that orients it toward a mode of reduced existence, which in the end would no longer know either consciousness or feeling--the inertia of the élan vital, so to speak." ("MLP," 32)
The muddy puddle of attributes in which Caillois's insects and psychotics swim is homologous with what I have called cold modernism. Intellectuals too re into the nexus of the bodies that dissemble by playing dead all too effectively. He takes up the relationship between the intellectual's renunciation of self and imitating the environment later in the 1939 "Sociologie du clerc" (Sociology of the intellectual), which is a response to Julien Benda's 1927 La Trahison des clercs (The treason of the intellectuals). 45 The treason in question for Benda is the betrayal of "the purely disinterested activity of the mind" in favor of the adoption of "political passions." 46 The modern "clerk" "is determined to have the soul of a citizen" and will "descend to the market place" along with the masses. 47 For Caillois, the idea of treason is far more ambiguous. The job of the cleric is to efface himself completely; he is "not a man, but . . . an organism where his person disappears. . . . Because in eliminating himself the cleric makes room within himself for the Church." 48 As Denis Hollier points out, such self-abnegation paradoxically results in the same thing as the pursuit of pleasure: the loss of the self's boundaries; "clerical ordination does not leave the subject in possession of himself any more than did the pleasure this ordination opposes." 49 Both positions are mechanized by the loss of self, the "pleasure in playing dead." 50 These bugs and bodies are constructed to suit environmental pressures. They are extensions of locality, but their localities aren't at all specific or particularly meaningful: as in the world of the spider crab, it doesn't matter what you have on your carapace, just that your carapace mimics something local. The possibility of political and intellectual resistance from such a position is minimal. These bugs and these literary characters are not interested in explicit conflict (shooting someone in the back is aggressive, but it isn't confrontational); they are more or less artful collaborators. The prototype for these bodies is that of the insect, or more properly, the fantasy of the insect body. 51
Most of the characters in the story I've been telling were fascinated by insects. Jünger's entomological tendencies are well recorded; in the epigraph above, he comments on his fascination and identification with insects. Lewis owned and annotated a copy of John Lubbock's Ants, Bees, and Wasps: A Record of Observations on the Habits of Social Hymenoptera; he was also acquainted with the work of the entomologist Henri Fabre, referring to him at the outset of Snooty Baronet, and in two earlier pieces. 52 It's quite likely that Lewis encountered Fabre in The English Review, which gave them both early exposure to English audiences, Lewis's first published short story, "The 'Pole,'" appeared there in May 1909; beginning in November 1912, the Review published translations of extracts from Fabre's ten-volume Souveniers entomologiques (Entomological memories) that had "not yet appeared in England" alongside articles on August Strindberg and poems by F. S. Flint. 53 The first article, "The Weaving Spider: The Banded Epeira," promised "a series of six chapters from his 'epic of the insect world' . . . in the course of the next few months"; the series was apparently so successful that Fabre's articles on maggots and pond life appeared regularly for the next ten years, until 1922. 54 Bug-hungry modernists didn't languish unfed that year, however, for Boni and Liveright commissioned a "rush order" from their translator, Ezra Pound, for Remy de Gourmont's Physique de l'Amour; The Natural Philosophy of Love came out in 1922, complete with a publisher's disclaimer for the American edition. 55 Although de Gourmont's work is devoted to the entire scope of the animal kingdom--his aim is to show "that the games of love, preludes, caresses, combats are in no way peculiar to the human race"--precedence is awarded to the insect, who receives more attention than do humans. 56 While de Gourmont states that "on nearly all rungs of the animal ladder, . . . the male is the same, the female is the same" (NP, 127), the comparisons between species are often piquant because of the variations: "in the insect world the male is the frail elegant sex, gentle and sober, with no employment save to please or to love" (NP, 35). The most remarkable feature of insect society is the dominance of the female; most brutally put, "the male is an accident: the female would have sufficed" (NP, 60). 57 "[T]he social evolution of the insect has led to functional differentiations extremely complicated, and if not unknown, at least abnormal, to humanity. Bee society has the female for base, human society has the couple." (NP, 53) What these females do to these males is a subject of endless fascination for de Gourmont; The Natural Philosophy of Love provides wonderfully lurid descriptions of "headless nuptials" (NP, 126), the results of mating with "an ogress" (NP, 115): "cannibalism in sex" (NP, 120), and the economic advantages of "getting . . . both bed and board" simultaneously from your spouse (NP, 126); this latter is occasioned by observing the female mantis on her honeymoon. Devouring your partner "at both ends" (NP, 126) is simply the clarification of a slightly more woolly economy. De Gourmont was enough to sate even the most ravenous public for a while; between The Natural Philosophy of Love and The Waste Land, Boni and Liveright had the 1922 entomology/modernism market cornered.
The historical connection between modernism and the modern field of entomology is at once striking and frustratingly suggestive. The surge in the English appetite for books on bugs was concurrent with the period of literary experimentation: from 1898 to 1900, 11 books were published in England with the word "insect" or "insects" in the title; from 1901 to 1905, 8; but in the period 1906-1910, 23 books appeared; and from 1911 to 1915, 25; from 1916 to 1920, 22. The peak came in the period 1921-1925, with 29. 58 While no one force determines the contours of public imagination (happily), the turn to insects, like the turn to artistic experiment, began just before World War I and developed immediately before and after the war too, as did modernist art. The English penchant for knowing more about insects, turning as it did in the period from 1911 to 1915, is bound to the battlefield. The public taste for entomology was not born with war--historically this does not hold--but the militarization of British society was concurrent with the fascination for culture's carapaces, for things with "the works on the outside": French locomotives, insects, soldiers. 59
Modernism's orchestration of the embrace of insects and the machine was evident to Pound. While his speculation in the postscript to The Natural Philosophy of Love that the brain is a "sort of great clot of genital fluid" 60 is notorious, the more important statement there may be rather his explicit connection of the human world and that of the hymenoptera: "In his growing subservience to, and adoration of, and entanglement in machines, in utility, man rounds the circle almost into insect life." 61 Pound sees the connection between entomology and the machine age, between bugs and Vorticism. What qualifies as a machine? The biomorphic technologies of the Futurists looked to the Vorticists like objects of worship, mediterranean Romanticism recast with a tinny glaze. The notion of utility was lost beneath idolatry; Blast called this "Automobilism" and dealt with the depiction of cars in the Italians' paintings by simply noting that "Motor cars go quickly." 62 That is, the simple fact of the machine is its use value. Pound's remark is certainly ambivalent, and in this speaks directly to one aspect of what was compelling about the imagination of a homology between man and insect: the idea of absolute performance, of total utility. How attractive the insect world must be to a culture in which the bodies of its young have returned harmed, only distantly recognizable as human. That the recycling of Fabre in the pages of The English Review continued beyond its initial projection of several months is explicable in light of the war. The insect body becomes nature's attempt at prosthesis. Ants, bees, and wasps don't bruise.
Prosthesis is at the heart of cold modernism, and in mimicry we have the heart of the insect world, and its fascination for modernists. 63 Mimicry embodies the prosthetic relationship to the environment: it extends the self beyond the mere body's "nature." It is the total mobilization of the self, which becomes so thoroughly jointed into another horizon that it disappears. While the fascist body is a forgery, the insect body comports itself as counterfeit. The praying mantis, Jünger's glass bees, 64 Lewis's "demented arthropod:" 65 all emerge from a space where "there is no background, only intersecting planes where . . . the manner of intersection is violently rendered." 66 The prosthetic imagination is inherently violent, born as it was on the battlefield, and built as it is from the mere body's amputation. When the wound has cooled the machine can begin.
Jessica Burstein is a doctoral candidate in the English Department of the University of Chicago; her dissertation is on cold modernism. She is also managing editor of .
I would like to thank the members of the Workshop on European Avant-Gardes at the University of Chicago for their productive blend of ruthlessness and encouragement; thanks also to Claudine Frank-Elster, Lawrence Rothfield, Carol Macha--who informed me that the prosthetic body itches--and Benicio del Toro.
1. See Robert Casillo, The Genealogy of Demons: Anti-Semitism, Fascism, and the Myths of Ezra Pound (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1988); and idem, "Fascists of the Final Hour: Pound's Italian Cantos," in Fascism, Aesthetics, and Culture, ed. Richard J. Golsan (Hanover, N. H.: University Press of New England, 1992), 98-127.
2. See Hal Foster's "Prosthetic Gods" in this issue. In the spirit of fissure, doubling, and extension, I hope our articles supplement each other productively.
3. The quoted phrase is drawn from Michael Levenson's A Genealogy of Modernism: A Study of English Literary Doctrine, 1908-1922 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984).
4. Andreas Huyssen, for example, states that "Jünger is no modernist" ("Fortifying the Heart--Totally: Ernst Jünger's Armored Texts," New German Critique 59 [spring-summer 1993]: 5). His argument is wonderfully argued if, alas, wrong. Huyssen states,
If modernist writing is consistent experimentation in the search of a new language, the invention of new modes of narrating, the aesthetic articulation of the conditions of representation within representation itself, then Jünger with his often pretentious overwriting, murky and pompous philosophizing, and persistent lapses into the jargon of the officer's mess is a highly defective stylist, often closer to the late 19th-century B-literature than to Flaubert, Baudelaire, or Kafka. [7]
Certainly Jünger's ties to nineteenth-century literature are strong, perhaps lamentably so. But one of the things Huyssen fails to take into account (or perhaps is explicitly opposed to), is the existence of a B-class modernism. That is, just because Jünger's writing is frequently--let's not be shy here--terrible doesn't mean it isn't deeply rooted in modernist imperatives.
5. For Lewis's views on mush, see what he says about Gertrude Stein (Lewis, "The Prose-Song of Gertrude Stein," in his Time and Western Man [1927; Boston: Beacon Press, 1957], 61-65).
6. Sigmund Freud, "The 'Uncanny,'" in Collected Papers of Sigmund Freud, vol. 4 (London: Hogarth Press, 1949), 402.
7. Joanna Bourke, Dismembering the Male: Men's Bodies, Britain, and the Great War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 37; hereafter abbreviated DM.
8. Sir Anthony Bowlby, "War Diary," Contemporary Medical Archives Centre (Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine), Royal Army Medical Corps/2008/7/2; quoted in DM, 34.
9. Including the 41,000 amputee victims, the total of the returning physically wounded to Britain after the war was 462,500: 272,000 with injuries not requiring amputation to the arms and legs; 60,500 wounded in the head or eyes; and 89,000 other miscellaneous, seriously wounded (DM, 33).
10. Frederick Watson, Civilization and the Cripple (London: J. Bale and Danielson, 1930), 21; quoted in DM, 54.
11. The British government did not subsidize artificial limbs for civilians until after World War II, with the establishment of welfare (DM, 47).
12. I am grateful to Alison Landsberg and her work on the body's relationship to technologies of memory for bringing the idea of the mere body to my attention. The phrase is hers, although Henry de Montherlant used it first, in his tetralogy Les jeunes filles (The Girls), in the second volume, the 1936 Pitié pour les femmes (Pity for Women):
He was trying to differentiate her, to see in what way she was more than a mere body, more than an instrument for his caresses, more than a mirror in which to observe his own pleasure. (Henry de Montherlant, The Girls, trans. Terence Kilmartin [New York: Carroll and Graf, 1985], 256) [Il la contempla un instant, ainsi, avec attention. Il essayait de la différancier. De voir en quoi elle était autre chose qu'un corps. Autre chose qu'un moyen de son art de caresser. . . . (Montherlant, Romans et oeuvres de fictions nonthéâtrales, vol. 1 [Paris: Gallimard, 1959], 1158)]
The mere body for Montherlant is different from the mere body of Lewis or Jünger, in that it is more readily located in a sexualized, if not erotic, landscape. Montherlant's mere body is toylike, or proplike; positioned properly, it can perform more or less satisfactorily.
13. "A generation that had gone to school on a horse-drawn streetcar now stood under the open sky in a countryside in which nothing remained unchanged but the clouds, and beneath these clouds, in a field of force of destructive torrents and explosions, was the tiny, fragile human body." (Walter Benjamin, "The Storyteller," in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt [New York: Schocken, 1968], 84)
14. See the illustration in Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (New York: Anchor Books, 1989), illustration between pages 174 and 175; hereafter abbreviated RS.
15. John Masefield, letter to his wife, 21 October 1916, quoted in RS, 218.
16. T. S. Eliot, "Burnt Norton," Collected Poems: 1909-1962 (London: Faber and Faber, 1963), 194; quoted in RS, 218.
17. Snooty numbers characters too--literally in his People Behaving books, calling his specimens things like "Miss X. Three"; "my people have numbers, not names" (SB, 65).
18. "She spoke a lot of English (I can't imagine where she picked it up" (SB, 220). Language is as infectious as are names.
19. Georg Simmel, "The Metropolis and Mental Life," trans. Edward A. Shils, in On Individuality and Social Forms, ed. Donald N. Levine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1971), 326; hereafter abbreviated "ML."
20. See the character of Robert Wooton Lowndes, who has "just enough money to be a Cubist" (Wyndham Lewis, Tarr: The 1918 Version, ed. Paul O'Keefe [Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1990], 45).
21. See Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor (New York: Basic Books, 1990); and his "Neurasthenia and Modernity," in Incorporations, ed. Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter (New York: Zone Books, 1992), 178-87.
22. Ernst Jünger, "Total Mobilization," trans. Joel Golb and Richard Wolin, in The Heidegger Controversy, ed. Richard Wolin (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1993), 124; hereafter abbreviated "TM." The essay first appeared in Krieg und Krieger (War and warrior), ed. Ernst Jünger (Berlin: Junker und Dünnhaupt, 1930).
23. For an account of the relationship between National Socialism and its construction of the labor process, see Werner Hamacher, "Working Through Working," trans. Matthew T. Hartman, in 3 (January 1996): 23-55. Hamacher's account of Jünger is, if not exhaustive--the article is of course, given its subject, "to be continued" --then exemplary.
24. Walter Benjamin, "Theories of German Fascism: On the Collection of Essays War and Warrior, Edited by Ernst Jünger" , New German Critique 17 (spring 1979): 122. See also the translation by Don Reneau in The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, ed. Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 159-64.
25. Lewis's own gloss on how he came to write the book is not entirely accurate; the chronology of Hitler's emergence is examined by John Constable, "Wyndham Lewis's Hitler: Content and Public Reception," on the Wyndham Lewis INTERNET home page (http://<IP_ADDRESS>/Lewis/Lewis.html). Constable also points out that the common critical line on the book's unpopularity bears further refinement; the book was not simply ignored in the popular press. Constable counts not four reviews of the book, as Jeffrey Meyers reports in his Lewis biography, but at least forty.
26. "Outlandish" is a pun on the German word Ausländer, foreigner. Note as well the infectiousness of the object of the gaze, so that the sightseer becomes the outlandish object; the articulation of the narrative position brings up the blur between the sight and the seer, between what is being dissected and the person conducting the dissection.
27. Wyndham Lewis, Hitler (London: Chatto and Windus, 1931), 24; hereafter abbreviated H.
28. J. G. Ballard, "Project for a Glossary of the Twentieth Century," in Incorporations, ed. Crary and Kwinter, 271.
29. See Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), and Andrew Hewitt, Fascist Modernism: Aesthetics, Politics, and the Avant-Garde (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993).
30. See Andrew Hewitt, "Fables of Modernity: Wyndham Lewis and the Homosexual as Fascist," in his Political Inversions: Homosexuality, Fascism, and the Modernist Imaginary (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 171-98. Hewitt's other, as the chapter title makes clear, is Fredric Jameson, whose reading of Hitler Hewitt finds inadequate.
31. Walter Benn Michaels, "Response," 3 (September 1996): 125.
32. Hugh Kenner, Wyndham Lewis (Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1954), vii.
33. Wyndham Lewis, quoted in William H. Pritchard, Wyndham Lewis (New York: Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1968), 17. I am grateful to Timothy Materer for locating this quotation for me.
34. Wyndham Lewis, 1930-31 diary, 24 February 1931, Wyndham Lewis Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Austin; hereafter abbreviated D. Again, it merits mention that the years here recorded reflect the diary's dates. Any emendation that Lewis made to the dates--crossing them out and reworking them--is recorded individually.
35. The brackets are mine and the words inside them my guesses at Lewis's handwriting; the parentheses are Lewis's.
36. The writer D. B. Wyndham Lewis and our Wyndham Lewis at times received each other's mail; the Lewis collection at Texas contains a 1927 letter from D. B. Wyndham Lewis in response to a letter sent him by the British Sexological Society, forwarded to our Lewis; "I very much fear you are mistaking me for my namesake the artist." He adds in a note, "quite understandably, of course." (Wyndham Lewis Papers, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas, Austin)
37. Lisa Tickner points out that one of Lewis's seminal paintings, Kermesse, is now lost after its owner, one (Richard) Wyndham became so irritated that another Wyndham (Lewis) had copied him, and copied him badly--or at least satirically--into a book about the failure of mimesis, The Apes of God; the first Wyndham was so irritated at the misrecognition that he sold the painting. Fortunately, several fraternal twins of the painting survive in the forms of studies; one of them is on the cover of this issue. See Lisa Tickner, "The Popular Culture of Kermesse: Lewis, Painting, and Performance, 1912-13," in this issue.
In addition to D. B. Wyndham Lewis, C. S. Lewis, Richard Lewis, C. Day-Lewis, and Sinclair Lewis, there is entirely another Wyndham Lewis; this one widowed a woman who had to marry Benjamin Disraeli in order to recover (Meyers, The Enemy, 358 n. 37).
38. Susan Buck-Morss, "The Cinema Screen as Prosthesis of Perception: A Historical Account," in The Senses Still: Perception and Memory as Material Culture in Modernity, ed. C. Nadia Seremetakis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 48.
39. Ibid., 51.
40. Ernst Jünger to Julien Hervier, The Details of Time: Conversations with Ernst Jünger, trans. Joachim Neugroschel (New York: Marsilio Publishers, 1995), 55-56. This was originally published as Entretiens avec Ernst Jünger (Paris: Gallimard, 1986).
41. Roger Caillois, "Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia," trans. John Shepley, October 31 (winter 1984): 22; hereafter abbreviated "MLP."
42. See, for example, Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, ed. Allan Stoekl, trans. Stoekl, with Carl R. Lovitt and Donald M. Leslie, Jr. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). We have the luxury of fine scholars detailing and examining this theme; see most recently Yve-Alain Bois, "To Introduce a User's Guide" and Bois and Rosalind Krauss, "A User's Guide to Entropy," both in October 78 (fall 1996).
43. Unless otherwise indicated, emphases throughout are Caillois's. I have in some cases elided the author's emphases.
44. Given that Caillois takes a quick jab at the relationship between the field of scientific inquiry and the body of the professional as it occupies that field ("for science everything is milieu" ["MLP," 28]), it is worth noting that this description, Caillois tells us in a note, is drawn from observations he made himself during a "deliberately aggravated" attack brought on "for purposes of ascesis and interpretation" ("MLP," 30). That is, we see Caillois's own body disappearing into the verdure of the sociological field, or more properly, we see him displaying his own invisibility. Whether we choose to notice (and beyond that, whether, having noticed, we believe he is gone) depends on where we stand in regard to the Collège de Sociologie, or less locally and more interestingly, to professionalism.
45. Benda's "Clerc" means "all those who speak to the world in a transcendental manner"; Richard Aldington translates the word as "intellectual" because, as Aldington says, "I do not know the English word for 'all those who speak to the world in a transcendental manner.'" (Aldington, "Translator's Note," in Julien Benda, The Treason of the Intellectuals, trans. Aldington [1928; New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1969], ix)
46. Benda, The Treason of the Intellectuals, 44, 45.
47. Ibid., 46.
48. Roger Caillois, "Sociologie du clerc," in Approches de l'imaginaire (Paris: Gallimard, 1974), 67; the translation is William Rodarmor's, in Denis Hollier, "Mimicry and Castration 1937," trans. William Rodarmor, October 31 (winter 1984): 10.
49. Ibid.
50. Ibid. Hollier parses out the relationship between death and pleasure for Caillois, which, as Hollier puts it, is a sort of "rosy sadism" ; see Hollier, "Mimesis and Castration 1937," 6-9.
51. I say "fantasy of the insect body" because crabs aren't insects, and maggots are, but here maggots are less insectlike than crabs, in that the latter are equipped with ossature, and are more capable of performing a mimetic deadness.
52. The two pieces are "Inferior Religions" and "Bestre" . The reference to Fabre in Snooty Baronet is: "[M]y investigations into the nature of the human being have led me to employ the arts of the myth-maker, in order the better to present (for the purposes of popular study) my human specimens. Henri Fabre dramatized his insects in that way." (SB, 17)
"[T]he screw-tape Lewis," C. S. Lewis, writes in his autobiography that his childhood was close to perfect, with the sole exception of having bad dreams:
My bad dreams were of two kinds, those about specters and those about insects. The second were, beyond comparison, the worse; to this day I would rather meet a ghost than a tarantula. . . . As Owen Barfield once said to me, "The trouble about insects is that they are like French locomotives--they have all the works on the outside." The works--that is the trouble.  You may add that in the hive and the anthill we see fully realized the two things that some of us most dread for our own species--the dominance of the female and the dominance of the collective. . . . Much later, in my teens, from reading Lubbock's Ants, Bees and Wasps, I developed for a short time a genuinely scientific interest in insects. Other studies soon crowded it out; but while my entomological period lasted my fear almost vanished, and I am inclined to think a real objective curiosity will usually have this cleansing effect. [C. S. Lewis, Suprised By Joy: The Shape of My Early Life (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1955), 8-9]
Both Lewises, then, read Lubbock. If C. S. Lewis is one of Wyndham Lewis's evil twins, he is so by virtue of being the "good" Lewis, the one who was put off by insects. This might be read as their differing opinions as to the possibility for successful conversion: other hymenopterous variations in their respective oeuvres include angels; both wrote theological science-fiction trilogies (C. S.'s Perelandra; Wyndham's Human Age).
53. Two English translations of other portions of Souveniers entomologiques had appeared prior to The English Review's publishing Fabre: The Life and Love of the Insect, trans. Alexander Teixeira de Mattos (London: A and C Black, Ltd.) came out in September 1911, and Social Life of the Insect-World, trans. Bernard Miall (London: T. F. Unwin) came out in February 1912. In November 1912, the same month of Fabre's English Review debut, The Life of the Spider, Mattos's translation, appeared in America, published by Dodd, Mead, and Co., and in England, published by Hodder and Stoughton.
54. Editorial note to Henri Fabre, "The Weaving Spider: The Banded Epeira," trans. Alexander Teixeira de Mattos, The English Review 12 (November 1912): 519. Fabre appears in volumes 12-14, 17-21, 23-28, 33, and 34.
55. The disclaimer in the 1922 Boni and Liveright New York edition reads,
IMPORTANT NOTICE: This work is supplied to the Bookseller on condition that all discretion shall be used in its sale or distribution. This sale is strictly limited to recognized physicians, lawyers, sociologists or on their written order. The publishers will not be responsible for negligence on the part of any dealer who handles this book. Boni & Liveright, Inc.
The disclaimer is inserted on a quarter-slip inserted before the title page.
The translation led to a contract between Pound and the publishers, who advanced him five hundred dollars a year for his services. The books were chosen by Horace Liveright, and Pound was free to reject any book if he so chose. Under this agreement, Pound translated the de Gourmont and Édouard Estaunié's L'Appel de la route as The Call of the Road , the dust jacket of which gives the translator's name as Hiram Janus; the two-faced Janus had conflicting feelings about the commission, given that neither Pound's nor Janus's name appeared on the volume itself, presumably in accordance with the rights of the translator not to sign his name to any work he deemed (so read the contract) "a disgrace to humanity or too imbecile to be known." (See Donald Gallup, Ezra Pound: A Bibliography [Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1983], 35; and Humphrey Carpenter, A Serious Character: The Life of Ezra Pound [Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1988], 385. Carpenter however errs on two points, stating that The Natural Philosophy of Love was commissioned under this contract and that Pound "could reject anything he did not like" [385]. The contract was drawn up on 4 January 1922, following the completion of the de Gourmont translation; and there is no mention in the contract of the translator rejecting a commission, merely of his having the right to remain anonymous.) The fact that the publishers, rather than Pound, chose the de Gourmont further emphasizes the marketability--the availability--of insects to the public imagination in the early part of this century.
56. Remy de Gourmont, The Natural Philosophy of Love, trans. Ezra Pound (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1922), 127; hereafter abbreviated NP.
57. C. S. Lewis echoes this; see above.
58. "Insect" and "Insects," in The English Catalogue of Books, vols. 5-11 (London: The Publishers' Circular, Limited). The trend continued: from 1926 to 1930, 24 insect books appeared, and from 1931 to 1935, 27; see vols. 12 and 13. I have not included book titles using the word "insecticide" in my tallies, presuming (hoping?) that that topic would have been less of interest to a general reader.
59. Owen Barfield to C. S. Lewis, quoted in Lewis, Surprised by Joy, 8.
60. Ezra Pound, "Translator's Postscript," in Remy de Gourmont, The Natural Philosophy of Love, 127.
61. Ibid., 209.
62. Wyndham Lewis, "Long Live the Vortex," Blast 1 (20 June 1914; Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1981): 7.
63. It is important to note that a wide variety of modernists have been fascinated with mimicry--witness T. S. Eliot's calling his poem "He Do the Police in Different Voices" before Pound, as authorized Possum impressionist, ventriloquized a new title; and Zora Neale Hurston stating that "the art of mimicry is better developed in the Negro than in other racial groups" (Zora Neale Hurston, "Characteristics of Negro Expression," in The Sanctified Church [Berkeley: Turtle Island Foundation, 1981], 60). Thank you to Robert von Hallberg for making this point.
64. Ernst Jünger's novel Gläserne Bienen , available in English as The Glass Bees, trans. Louise Bogan and Elizabeth Mayer (New York: Noonday Press, 1991), was written too late to fall within the historical scope of this essay, but, given its author, is not surprisingly an almost made-to-order collaboration of soldierly aesthetics, entomology, mimicry, and prosthetics. The eponymous objects are transparent automata, larger than the average bee, and far more efficient, if difficult to locate; indeed, the hives themselves are transparent, and only the glitter of glass in sun gives them away. These "glass collectives" are manufactured by an "invisible master" , Giacomo Zapparoni, who also heads a movie studio. The studio specializes in manufacturing robots, rather than housing human actors; these machines include not only extraordinarily attractive simulacra of human movie stars, but also "fantastic creatures" such as "an Angel of the Annunciation through whose transparent body and wings the surrounding objects could be seen." The connection between amputation, technology, and the insect is explicit, as the narrator muses on improvements he can make to the glass bees:
Had there been at any period in the history of the world as many mutilated bodies, as many severed limbs as in ours? Mankind has waged wars since the world began, but I can't remember one single example in the entire Iliad where the loss of an arm or a leg is reported. Mythology reserved dismemberment for the subhuman, for monsters like Tantalus or Procrustes. . . .
The fear and enthusiasm we experience at the sight of perfect mechanisms are in exact contrast to the happiness we feel at the sight of a perfect work of art. We sense an attack on our integrity, on our wholeness. That arms and legs are lost or harmed is not yet the greatest danger. [112-13]
65. Lisa Tickner, "The Popular Culture of Kermesse," 4 (April 1997): 89. The phrase refers to one of Lewis's studies for his Kermesse, the Yale Kermesse; see 6 in Tickner, above.
66. Ibid., 89. This phrase refers to another of the studies for (one might well say another imitation of) Lewis's Kermesse, The Dancers; see the cover illustration of this issue.
.
Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown on to him and they still give him much trouble at times.
--Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents
In the first part of this century much modernist practice and marxist discourse still treated the body and the machine as separate entities, with the first often projected as a natural whole, the second as an autonomous agent. So opposed, the two could only conjoin, ecstatically or torturously, and technology could only be a "magnificent" extension of the body or a "troubled" constriction of it. Even with the new machines of speed and representation of the Second Industrial Revolution (e. g., automobile and airplane, radio and film), technology remained a demonic supplement, an addition to the body that threatened a subtraction from it. After Marshall McLuhan and Mark Seltzer I will call this paradox of technology as extension and/or constriction of the body the double logic of the prosthesis. 1 Here I want to consider its role in the models of art and subjectivity espoused by the most technophilic of high modernists: the Futurist F. T. Marinetti and the Vorticist Wyndham Lewis, two competitors in the wartime avant-garde, two complements in machinic fantasies and protofascist politics alike. 2
Today this double logic of technology is an historic limit that we gaze back upon: the very terms "body" and "machine" seem almost archaic, and they are no longer seen as so discrete. Yet this double logic governed the machinic imaginary of high modernism, underwrote its utopias of the body extended, even subsumed in new technologies, as well as the dystopias of the body reduced, even dismembered by them. In this way it also circumscribed the modernist politics of the machine: for the most part one could only resist technology in the name of a natural body or accelerate it in the search of a postnatural body on its other side. More complementary than opposite, this restrictive advocacy of resistance or acceleration was as pronounced in modernist practice as it was in marxist discourse of the period, and it marks a structural limitation of both formations. 3
After the military-industrial mass death of World War I, the first position, resistance in the name of a natural body, became difficult to hold. Even before the war this difficulty could be sensed in a movement like expressionism, which, even as it insisted on a natural body, also registered in its very distortions the impossibility of this ideal, of its immaculate restoration. After the war, affirmations of a natural body were mostly therapeutic or compensatory, and they did not last long (e. g., the ambition of the early Bauhaus to reintegrate body and object in a medievalist recovery of craft). The 1920s were dominated by two tendencies: on the one hand, various returns to the re, often neoclassical in nature, most of which were reaction-formations against the mutilated bodies of World War I as well as the fragmented res of high modernism; and, on the other hand, various machinic modernisms, most of which were also concerned to make over this body-ego image that had been damaged in reality and representation alike (. 1 and 2). 4 If the neoclassical reaction proffered the nostalgic balm of an imaginary body that was pellucidly intact, the machinic reaction looked to the very mechanization of the modern body for a new principle of corporal order. At base, however, the first reaction was no more "humanist" than the second: both tended to treat the body as if it were already dead, an uncanny statue in the first instance, an uncanny mechanism in the second--that is, as if the only way for the body to survive in the military-industrial epoch of capitalism was for it to be already dead, in fact deader than dead. 5
Many machinic modernisms made a fetish of technology. They treated it apart from mode of production and turned it into an object of art: it became a force in its own right and/or an emblem of "the modern spirit." This aestheticist occlusion of the socioeconomic bases of technology was not limited to the protofascist aspects of Futurism and Vorticism. It occurred wherever a machinic style was held out as the lure of a technological future to which people were asked, indeed compelled, to accede. 6 In the capitalist West the image of the machine often distracted from the reality of industrialization, while in the communist East the representation of production often compensated for a lack of productivity.
Of course there were also critiques of technology in high modernism, especially in dada and surrealism, but they tended to complement the machinic celebrations. In fact the primary modernist positions on technology pro- and con- can be schematically mapped according to the double logic of the prosthesis. Thus, for example, Russian constructivism mostly projected technology, in a communist system of relations, as an extension of the body, and this in two ways at least: as a transformation of physical sense (constructivism as a "socialism of vision") and as a transcendence of bourgeois individuality (constructivism as a collectivism of culture), all under the aegis of the engineer, the new machinic man par excellence. 7 The critical counterpart of this position was dada, especially the Cologne version of Max Ernst, which mostly mocked technology, set in a capitalist system of relations, as a constriction of the body. With the irony of a bashed ego, this dada red the new technological subject in terms of physical breakdown and psychic regression: in lieu of the paragon of the communist engineer, it offered the parody of the capitalist man-machine as infant-autist. 8
Other complements on the question of technology include the middle Bauhaus and surrealism. 9 Like Russian constructivism, the middle Bauhaus presented technology as an extension of the body, but in the context of a complicated rapprochement with capital. Thus, even as it too worked to transform physical sense and to subsume bourgeois individuality, it did so in a context that mostly abetted the capitalist rationalization of bodies and psyches. In this regard surrealism not only countered the middle Bauhaus with a presentation of technology as a constriction of the body, but also exposed this capitalist rationalization as irrational. 10 However, rather than image this irrationality as a regressive breakdown of the body à la dada, surrealism red it, with broken automatons and fragmented mannequins, in terms of a castrative dismemberment. In doing so it disclosed the psychic underpinnings of the double logic of the technological prosthesis that governed the machinic imaginary of high modernism: the machine as a castrative trauma and as a phallic shield against such trauma. It is this masculinist logic that I want to trace in its most aggressive articulations: the early polemical writings of Marinetti and Lewis.
The desire to embrace technology, to accelerate its transformation of bodies and psyches, is not bound to any one cultural politic. In different ways at different times res such as Antonio Gramsci, Siegfried Kracauer, and Walter Benjamin all advocated such an approach. Yet this Left Fordist position cannot be conflated with the aesthetic militarism of a Marinetti, a Lewis, or an Ernst Jünger. The fundamental difference is between a marxist project to overcome technological self-alienation dialectically (for all) and a protofascist desire to elevate this self-alienation into an absolute value (for a select few)--as a form of ego ecstasy (as Benjamin understood the technosublime of Marinetti: self-destruction as "an aesthetic pleasure of the first order") and/or as a form of ego armoring (as in "the new ego" proposed by Lewis before the war, or "the second consciousness . . . outside the sphere of pain" proposed by Jünger thereafter). 11
Nevertheless, both positions share one thing: they too are haunted by the specter of the damaged body of the worker-soldier. The same is true of the interwar critique of technology in the dysfunctional male res of dada and the dismembered female ones of surrealism. (The dadaist res evoke this damaged body almost directly, the surrealist res much less so--and yet might they register the displaced return of this repressed body onto the female body, with the mutilation of the former now projected as the castration of the latter?) 12 Here, I want to focus on the wartime formulations of the new technological subject in Marinetti and Lewis. These fantasies not only predate the full formation of this subject in the late 1920s and early 1930s; they prepare it in the sense that they imagine it artistically and incite it politically (in this respect both men were at war well before the war). Marinetti works on the first part of this preparation: to explode the old bourgeois idea of a nontechnological subject. 13 Lewis plies the second part: to imagine a new ego that can withstand the shocks of the military-industrial, the modern-urban, and the mass-political, indeed that can forge these stimuli into a protective shield, even convert them into a hardened subject able to thrive on such shocks. As our images as infants are said to prepare our egos to come, so the rings of body and psyche in Marinetti and Lewis might be said to prepare the technological subject of the interwar period--and to prepare it, as with the infant images, in relation to the fantasy of a body in pieces. 14
However grounded in the damaged body of the worker-soldier, this fantasy remains psychic, internal to the subject, in particular to masculine subjects prone to fascism like Marinetti and Lewis. For this subject the body in pieces represents the energies that it cannot bind, that it sees as fragmentary, fluid, feminine. 15 With Marinetti the relation to this unbound body is often ecstatic; he likes to imagine his body exploded in this way. With Lewis the relation to this unbound body is often paranoid; he works to armor his body in defense. To different degrees both men were involved in fascist activities; here, however, I stress the implications of this involvement for the models of art and subjectivity espoused by them. 16
Suggestive in this regard is the account of fascism offered by Alice Kaplan in Reproductions of Banality. Kaplan describes fascism as a "polarity machine" whose ideological power lies in its binding of such traditional opposites as Left and Right, revolutionary and conservative, populist and elitist, modern and antimodern, technological and primitive. 17 This binding is signaled in the etymology of the term: in the fasces, the rods wrapped round an ax as a symbol of power in Rome; in the fascia, the tissue that binds muscles; and in other cognates to do with a strapping of energies of all sorts. Apparent in the paranoid nature of fascist politics (especially faced with the threat of communist revolution), it is also active in the spectacular nature of fascist cultures (in its libidinal binding of masses to party and leader in the collapse of bourgeois political institutions). This binding speaks to the extreme volatility of fascism: just as binding is doubled by unbinding, so is the fascist will to absolute order countervailed by the fascist desire for sublime transgression at the level of individual body and body politic alike. Both Futurism and Vorticism exhibit this tension between binding and unbinding; at the level of the subject, the ideological function of these movements may center on the aesthetic management of this tension.
Freud uses the terms "Bindung" and "Entbindung" to describe the different states of instinctual energy in the human subject: bound, submitted to control, or unbound, open to discharge. The first object of binding is the ego, which in turn becomes the primary agent of further binding. If the ego is breached in situations of shock, the process of integration is threatened: thus the imperative to shield the ego or to shore it up after its breaching. It is in relation to such shock, real and fantasmatic, experienced and expected, that Marinetti and Lewis develop models of art and subjectivity. But binding and unbinding not only concern the ego understood as an energistic entity under pressure from within and without; they also bear on the ego understood as an image, a body image, whose inside and outside are always in doubt. For Freud the ego is "first and foremost a bodily ego . . . a projection of a surface"; it is founded in this projection, in an identification with this body image. 18 Lacan pushes this account further: as the body image is other, our identification with it is also our alienation from it, which in turn produces an aggressivity, an aggressivity that is "the correlative tendency" of the narcissistic founding of the ego. On the one hand, then, the ego is constituted in armoring (a term Lacan uses in "The Mirror Stage") and, on the other hand, it is given over to aggression. 19
Armoring and aggression are thus in tension vis-à-vis the ego, as are binding and unbinding vis-à-vis instinctual energy, and these tensions are evident in the models proposed by Marinetti and Lewis. Lewis advocates armoring: "Deadness is the first condition of art," he writes in his first novel Tarr (1916-18). "The armored hide of the hippopotamus, the shell of the tortoise, feathers and machinery. . . ." 20 Marinetti meanwhile "exalts aggressive action," most famously in "The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism" . 21 Lewis seeks to bind ego and energy: "I resist the process of melting," he writes in Blasting and Bombardiering. "It's myself I want to conserve" (BB, 15). Marinetti celebrates unbinding: "Art," he states in "Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature" , "is the need to destroy and scatter oneself" (M, 89). Two points should be noted straightaway. First, neither Lewis nor Marinetti follows the Freudian formula for the proper release of instinctual energy--i. e., that the subject bind stimuli in order to discharge them, to be safely rid of them. And second, for both men this tension is red in the machine: it attracts them not for its utilitarian and productivist possibilities but for its imagistic and energistic qualities--because it can image both the dynamism of the instincts and the armoring of the ego. 22
The place to begin this argument is obvious enough: the first manifesto of Futurism, published in Paris in 1909 by the thirty-three-year-old Marinetti. Like several origin myths in high modernism, this one is structured as a rebirth: it opens with a small group of young men in a claustrophobic interior in high-bourgeois Milan, who, once roused to the Futurist call, burst open this metaphorical womb. As a bursting, this rebirth is also a death ("I stretched out on my car," Marinetti exclaims, "like a corpse on its bier" [M, 40]). But it is a death necessary to rebirth as a technological subject, as the Futurists emerge as modern "centaurs," half men, half machines ("Look there, on the earth, the very first dawn" [M, 40]).
The blurring of birth and death in the conjoining of man and machine is typical of Marinetti. In the first manifesto it recurs in the famous baptism of the car crash:
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! [M, 40-41]
This baptism evokes the typical moment in the legend of the hero or the artist when a new identity is bestowed. 23 Here the baptism is industrial, the new identity technological, but the metaphor of rebirth remains. In a sense this is a fantasy of cloacal rebirth (maternal ditch, muddy water) in which, along the lines of the symbolic slippage that Freud locates in the anal stage, the subject is positioned at once as feces, baby, and penis. 24 This cloacal fantasy serves Marinetti in several ways. At the level of the unconscious, it allows his man-machine conjunction to appear as a regression to the pre-Oedipal--that is, as a release from sexual difference, from any division or lack, especially nestled as he is in the memory of "the blessed black breast of my Sudanese nurse." Here the machinic fantasy of origin is doubled by a primitivist one--a combination frequent in high modernism. 25 And this double release from lack permits the result of this conjunction, his new technological self, to be imagined as a phallus free of castration, a phallus, moreover, that Marinetti both creates and embodies (per the Freudian principle of cloacal birth: "if babies are born through the anus then a man can give birth just as well as a woman"). 26 Torn and filthy when plunged into the maternal ditch, he emerges whole and clean, a white-hot vulcanic body, perfectly phallic. This is the psychic reward of this technological rite of passage, and it is one he repeats in his writings. 27
Everyone knows that Futurism celebrates speed. But in Marinetti speed means more than new machines of movement, more than a new technological sensorium: it is also a psychic re, a trope of time travel, a way to beat the clock in order to recreate the self. Thus his plunge into the ditch is also a plunge into the past: in a sense the car crash is a primal scene in which Marinetti not only observes his conception but reimagines it, a family romance in which he not only chooses his parents but becomes them. This seems an incestuous move, "an attempted end-run around Oedipus": to become the father in order to displace him to be with the mother. 28 Yet the desire at work in this episode is more delirious (Marinetti is father, sacrificial son, phallic child . . . ). For a moment he arrests this mobility in the contradictory person of the Sudanese nurse, a colonialist fantasy both maternal and seductive, technological and "primitive." But she cannot deliver the goods either, for again his ultimate desire is not so much incestuous as it is phallic: to be the phallus. Only the machine can produce the phallus for him, can produce it as him, or so Marinetti imagines. And in his texts women do drop out in favor of machines: the intercourse he desires is with cars, planes, ships, trains--any machine of transport in which he can imagine his body-psyche reforged phallicly ( 3). 29
Marinetti thinks this "redoubling" in two related ways. I noted his fantasy of self-birth, of autogenesis, but he is also obsessed with the fantasy of "a mechanical son, the fruit of pure will" (M, 75). 30 This fantasy of technological procreation is active in other machinic modernisms too (Fernand Léger is especially prone to it), and it is mocked as such in the impotent "bachelor machines" of dada and surrealism (for example, Girl Born Without a Mother by Francis Picabia [1917], or Self-Constructed Small Machine by Ernst [1919]). Yet the fantasy is most extreme in movements such as Futurism, which aspire to technologize nature and to naturalize technology. 31 In this crossing, the human and the natural are far from reconciled; rather, they are forced into identity as a violent technological hybrid that is red as autonomous--autonomously creative and destructive. And often in Marinetti the issue is a landscape, at once internal and external, that cannot conceal the sadistic violence of its own imagining. Consider, for example, this Futurist scene: "Multicolored billboards on the green of the fields, iron bridges that chain the hills together, surgical trains that pierce the blue belly of the mountains, enormous turbine pipes, new muscles of the earth, may you be praised by the Futurist poets" (M, 67-68).
Marinetti does not embrace the technological in order to usurp the procreative, for, again, he desires not to be the mother but to be what she is said to desire: the phallus. This desire overdetermines not only his machinic fantasies (remember the machine is to deliver him thus) but his misogynist outbursts as well. This misogyny is more fundamental than either the absence of women in Futurism or its attack on the feminine and the feminist alike. At the psychic level, Marinetti resents women because of his desire not only to be self-born but to be so as the phallus--which is to say, in the Lacanian formulation, as The Woman. And this leads to the great irony of his work: his frenzied attempt to override sexual difference is played out, hyperbolically, according to its terms. (Lewis is even more misogynist, but in the classical way: he resents women because they threaten him with what he is not. Marinetti resents women because they re what he wants to become.) 32
I draw this Lacanian formulation from "The Meaning of the Phallus" , where sexual difference is defined in terms of "having" or "being" the phallus. But, Lacan is quick to add, no one has it as such; a signifier cannot be possessed in this way. Thus in the heterosexual "comedy" there is with the man "an 'appearing' which gets substituted for the 'having,'" and with the woman a masking of the lack. 33 In this account masculinity is no less a display than femininity is a masquerade; in fact the man is more fraudulent than the woman, for at least he is supposed to have the phallus, while she is under no such burden of pretense. 34 So it is that some men compensate for this lack of the phallus with a display of virility. And yet there is a catch here too, for according to Lacan this display is "feminine" as well, and so the very show of virility may "feminize" these men further. This conundrum is pronounced in the early polemical writings of Marinetti. First he desires to be self-born, a desire that "feminizes" him, as does his desire to become the phallus, also deemed a "feminine" position. Then his very show of virility, indeed of misogyny, may "feminize" him all the more. (Marinetti was often seen as histrionic, if not hysterical.) Might this conundrum have compounded his anxiety, heightened his desire to change his body--to shed it altogether in a machinic conjunction? In any case, male-female difference cannot be mapped directly onto human-machine difference here: a third term, "homo-technological" perhaps, overcodes these oppositions.
These two related fantasies--to be self-born and to become a machine-phallus--also govern Marinetti on art and literature, which he understands as work on signifier and subjectivity simultaneously. In order to prepare for the new ego, the old bourgeois subject must first be destroyed: thus his persistent attacks, both polemical and poetic, on subjectivity understood as interiority (this is even more pronounced in Lewis). "Destroy the I in literature," Marinetti exclaims in "Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature," "that is, all psychology" (M, 87). Again and again he calls on Futurist art and writing to make over bodies and psyches as the new technologies seem to have done. In "Technical Manifesto" Marinetti enlists the flight of an airplane to attack "the old shackles of logic" (M, 84). In "Geometric and Mechanical Splendor and the Numerical Sensibility" , the pitching of a ship bridge rebuffs traditional "human psychology" (M, 97). And in "Tactilism" an artillery battery is said to be the inspiration of his "tactile art" (M, 109). In all these ways Marinetti poses technological shock against "the old syntax" of the bourgeois subject, its culture, experience, and sense. 35
This attack is the crux of his poetic texts as well, especially the words-in-freedom. Often in these works word and image fly apart: the text is literally released into the tactility of nonsensical sounds and energistic gestures, and the syntax of the old subject is ratively scattered. But what of the syntax of the new subject to be constructed? In a text on declamation Marinetti calls on Futurists to "dehumanize" the voice and to "metallize" the face, to render the body as anonymous as "semaphores" and geometrical as "pistons" (M, 144). In "Multiplied Man and the Reign of the Machine" from War, the World's Only Hygiene, he sees this "bodily development" as a metamorphosis of an aviator into an airplane (with the breastbone extruded "in the form of a prow" and so on [M, 91]). At times Marinetti thinks this techno-transformation in terms of "pure will" (M, 75), at times in terms of the "transformational hypothesis" of Jean Lamarck (M, 91), according to which one generation inherits the physical attributes evolved by the generations before it. For Marinetti, the Futurist subject must accelerate this process, must will this evolution; only then might he "be endowed with surprising organs: organs adapted to the needs of a world of ceaseless shocks" (M, 91).
Here Marinetti almost anticipates the Freudian hypothesis, also influenced by Lamarck, according to which an organism constructs a "protective shield" (Reizschutz) out of stimuli from the world. 36 In this hypothesis, which is also suggestive in relation to Lewis, the shield develops as the surface of the organism hardens into inorganicity under the force of these stimuli--all so that the central nervous system at its core may live. "Protection against stimuli," Freud writes in a famous line from Beyond the Pleasure Principle , "is an almost more important function for the living organism than reception of stimuli" (BPP, 21). For the human organism in the military-industrial epoch of capitalism, Marinetti implies, this process has hypertrophied: the extruded shield is now a technological organ that (pace Freud) has "grown on to him," and the stimuli of the world are so many shocks pure and simple. In effect modern technology has transformed the dialectic of shield and stimulus-shock, subsumed both terms in such a way that the human organism now needs technology as both shield and stimulus-shock--and needs more of the shield because it needs more of the stimulus-shock. The effects of this technobiological addiction are clear, and Marinetti celebrates them. The Futurists "lust for danger" (M, 67).  " (M, 46). And then, almost as an afterthought regarding the re that represents the nonshielded for this subject, he adds, "Our nerves demand war and despise women." 37
In this intimation of the dialectic of shield and stimulus-shock, might Marinetti also intuit the greater hypothesis of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, that the fundamental instinct of the organism is to return to its prior state of inanimation, to the inorganicity of its death? There is no doubt that Marinetti was fascinated by the breaching of the body ego. For Freud, of course, the response to this breaching is a binding, a binding that develops through repetition. But this repetition cannot be controlled: it conduces to a becoming-inorganic not only of the protective shield but of the death drive. In his double move to reify the body and to vitalize things, "to substitute for human psychology, now exhausted, the lyric obsession with matter" (M, 87), Marinetti seems to intuit this process. More, he seems to embrace it, to transvalue the death drive as the very principle of self-preservation, indeed of self-exaltation. For Marinetti the way not only to survive but to thrive in the military-industrial epoch of capitalism is to exacerbate its fetishistic process of reification: on the one hand, in a Lamarckian evolution, to extrapolate the human toward the inorganic-technological, on the other hand to trope the inorganic-technological as the epitome of the human; on the one hand to be already dead, on the other hand to stake the future of "life" on technology. 38 Further, Marinetti suggests not only that the best protection against modern mass death is to be deader than dead, but that this reification must be turned into a libidinal process, that we must desire our ultimate self-alienation, our own destruction, as the most sublime of modern experiences. 39
I will return to this transvaluation of the death drive with Lewis; for a moment I want to remain with the Lamarckian transformation of man into machine in Marinetti. In Capital Marx argued that capitalism subjects the industrial worker to the machine: like the commodity, it comes to be seen as more vital than the worker, and the worker more automatic than it. Fifty-five years later, in History and Class Consciousness , Georg Lukács, a contemporary of Marinetti, argued that, with the advent of Taylorist-Fordist practices, capitalism now fragments this worker as well: mechanization penetrates body and psyche alike. Marinetti reverses both these marxist accounts. Rather than master the machine, he admonishes the worker to be "educated" by it (M, 92), for its mastery is the only one that now exists. And rather than resist the machine as a force of fragmentation and reification, he urges that it be embraced as the very re of totality and vitality, as the modern paragon of these states.
In this way Marinetti conceives technology not as a violation of body
and nature but as a means to reconre both as better than new, more
than whole. This is a fetishistic operation--to turn an agent of a trauma
into a shield against this same trauma. But as such it presents Marinetti
with a problem. In Freud the fetish is not only a "protection" against
castration; it is also a "memorial" to it: the fetish may
occlude recognition of castration, but it cannot erase it; sometimes
the fetish reinscribes castration in its very form.
40
The trauma is never undone, its threat never exorcized. And so it
is with the machine: it may re a new totality, a dynamic phallic
body, but it cannot rectify the old fragmentation nor make good the
originary castration of the subject. In this way the double logic of
the prosthesis may replicate that of the fetish: the prosthesis cannot
undo its reason for being; it may even underscore that the subject is
defined in lack. Marinetti is caught in this bind between recognition
of psychic castration and faith in the technological phallus, and it
pushes him toward an extreme "solution": the only way to pass beyond
this bind, he seems to sense, is to lose this lack, to castrate this
castration--in short, to get rid of the body in an ecstatic embrace
of the machine, an embrace that will either subsume the body or blow
it to smithereens. In a way this is parallel to the paradoxical logic
that, according to Catherine Millot, incites the male transsexual to
undergo actual castration: in order to become the phallus, he must lose
the penis.
41
So too, in order to become the technological phallus, Marinetti must
lose the penile body. In effect Marinetti is an imaginary transsexual,
only he seeks the phallus through the machine
--to become one with it and/or, according to the unconscious equation
of baby and phallus, to bear "a mechanical son" through it.
This imaginary self-castration is thus no ultimate sacrifice: it is a fantasmatic achievement of a phallic ego in a state of perfect narcissism. 42 Yet the rub here is that this binding does not allow for unbinding, for discharge of energy or release of aggression. Marinetti is left to seek this discharge in speed, war, and art, all of which he conceives in terms of ecstasy, ejaculation, or, more extremely, "autotomy," the term adopted by Sandor Ferenzci to describe when, in the release of sexual tension "on behalf of the entire organism," the genital organ is ejected. 43 Marinetti calls this discharge "hygiene," which he associates equally with speed, war, and art, indeed with modernity in general. Like Lewis, who substitutes for the trope of speed the re of the vortex, Marinetti looks to these three events to suspend the tensions that plague him, especially the tension between binding and unbinding, defense and discharge. Thus, in "Let's Murder the Moonshine" , Marinetti writes of war: "It's our only hope, our reason for living, our only desire!" (M, 45). And in War, the World's Only Hygiene, he turns the old condemnation of war as murderous whore into a celebration of war as furious coitus: "See the furious coitus of war, gigantic vulva stirred by the friction of courage, shapeless vulva that spreads to offer itself to the terrific spasm of final victory!" (M, 53-54). Yet what really is the object of desire here? It seems less the "shapeless vulva" than the soldier-subject as phallus--the body-psyche as narcissistic-aggressive weapon, autotomic projectile, "body in flames, like a fireship, against the enemy" (M, 46). 44 This is the primary object of investment for Marinetti: an image of the body ego at once armored and aggressive, defended and discharged, that finds its "only hope [and] only desire" in war.
Here the question of violence in Marinetti must be addressed. No less than his call for destruction, his disruption of language is performative: it prepares for actual events. Yet "preparation" must be understood in a double sense: not only an inciting of violence but a shielding from it--an inciting that is also a shielding. This process can be seen in terms of sexuality, and I doubt it is "merely" an analogy. The violence pronounced in Marinetti is sadistic, yet it is also masochistic, and primarily so: after all, who explodes in his autotomic fantasies? In several recent texts Leo Bersani has defined sexuality in terms of such a sublime self-shattering. "We desire what nearly shatters us," he writes. "The mystery of sexuality is that we seek not only to get rid of this shattering tension but also to repeat it, even to increase it." 45 This is close to the dynamic in Marinetti: he desires such shattering, desires to repeat it, but also desires to be rid of it, to discharge it or at least to "sublimate" it. (Again: "Art is the need to destroy and scatter oneself" [M, 89].) For Bersani, violence arises when this desire is arrested, when its "psychic dislocations" are denied; then there develops "a destructive fixation on anecdotal violence." 46 At some level might the rhetorical violence of Futurism, its bombastic glorification of aggressive art, speed, and war, serve to stop this stoppage of desire, to embrace the disruption created by its movement in defense against the destruction provoked by its arrest? 47
Marinetti also conceives fascism along the lines of his phallic fantasy. In "Beyond Communism" he argues that "Futurist fascism" supersedes both liberalism and bolshevism as the historical force of revolution: it purifies and protects an Italy corrupted by bourgeois parliamentarianism and threatened by communist bureaucracy. Here the Futurist discourse of "hygiene" is overtly political, but its paradoxical logic remains corporal and sexual: in order to make whole one must amputate. "We Italian Futurists have amputated all the ideologies and everywhere imposed our new conception of life, our formulas for spiritual health" (M, 148). 48 For Marinetti it is not enough to unify Italy politically; it must be totalized ideologically, all heterogeneity effaced. And this totality is red in the phallic body amputated of all degenerate, divisive, that is, penile, elements.
In this image of the body, subject and nation are made to mirror one another. With the trope of electricity as a nervous system, Marinetti imagines his fellow nationals as fellow nerves: the fatherland is not only "the greatest extension" of each but also the "single conration" that "ties [them all] together" (M, 149). Technological apparatuses that bind masses to party and leader replace political institutions that once mediated subject and nation. "All that," Marinetti writes, "in the great affectionate solidarity of our race on our peninsula within the firm circle of boundaries conquered and deserved by our great victory" (M, 153). Not only racial and ideological, this binding is libidinal and imagistic: in the fascist peninsula the subject is invited to find physical "boundaries," erotic "solidarity," phallic "victory." And this totality, Marinetti warns, is not to be had otherwise: "To deny the fatherland is the same as to isolate, castrate, shrink, denigrate, or kill yourself" (M, 149).
In this way the aesthetic of the phallus is also a politics of the fatherland in which the Italian peninsula is invoked as a libidinal image for a new collective ego. But here, too, the image may be flawed, as the etymology of the term "peninsula" suggests: paene insula, nearly an island, nearly severed. This penis(ula) dangles dangerously below the body of Europe, and Marinetti feels compelled to project it, to phallicize it, to extend Italy to its linguistic limits, to recapture its whole native body. In one words-in-freedom titled Irredentismo Marinetti shows the peninsula thrust north and east into Austria with Futurist lines, battle cries, and patron names (e. g., Mazzini): an Italy in dissemination ( 4). And yet a tension remains between the demand for "the firm circle of boundaries," individual and national, and a desire to exceed them. This tension is another instance of the double logic of order and transgression, defense and discharge, armoring and exploding, so pronounced in Marinetti, indeed in fascism. 49 Here, too, war is the primary "resolution," psychic and political, that occurs to him: "war, the world's only hygiene."
But who is to mold the "flaccid human masses" into this "higher spiritual elegance" (M, 154) of the fascist fatherland? For Marinetti the answer is obvious: "We will have a race almost entirely composed of artists" (M, 156). This race is the fatherland; "the fatherland is nothing but a vast party" (M, 149); and the party "will solve the social problem artistically" (M, 156). This crossing of aesthetics and politics, of artistic purity and social "hygiene," is ominous, especially when the language of spirituality is also crossed with the technology of spectacle. And yet the party alone is not adequate as a libidinal object to mold the flaccid masses (even fascist trappings need a body to hang on). This role must be assumed by the leader, as Marinetti implies in "Portrait of Mussolini" .
In this celebration Marinetti identifies Mussolini with Italy directly, physically, "because physically he is built all'italiana" (M, 158). "Carved out of the mighty rocks of our peninsula," his "great gesture-fist-image-conviction" embodies "the cubic will of the state" (M, 159).  And it is through this fetish of the body of the leader that the binding of individual to party and fatherland is clinched. "A marvelous Futurist temperament," Mussolini is here made a marvelous Futurist art work as well. 51
In "Some Reflections on the Ego," a short text of 1953, Lacan writes of "Homo psychologicus" as "the product of our industrial age," possessed of a strange intimacy with the machine. "It is almost as if the two were actually conjoined," Lacan remarks. "Its mechanical defects and breakdowns often parallel his neurotic symptoms.  52 In Marinetti, virility is indeed assisted by a fantasmatic prosthesis of man and machine "conjoined," and yet the charade of phallic possession is doomed to failure, to "defects and breakdowns," especially volatile ones in his case. I want to turn now to the other aspect of this fantasmatic prosthesis, its use as "the protective shell" of the ego, as manifested in the early work of Wyndham Lewis. And here one may come to wonder, as Lacan did in general, whether it is "psychologically advantageous to have a strong ego." 53
Like Marinetti, Lewis sketches the new ego in his earliest manifestos. The inaugural issue of Blast opens with a series of "blasts" and "blesses," the first of which is typical: "BLAST First (from politeness) ENGLAND / Curse its climate for its sins and infections / Dismal symbol, set round our bodies, of effeminate lout within . . ." (B, 11). Several pages later Lewis opposes to this blasted England the blessed image of an "industrial island machine, pyramidal workshop" (B, 23-24). Like the Italian penisula for Marinetti, this bounded British island, disciplined like a machine, hierarchical like a workshop, is an ideal re for Lewis of a new collective ego. As in Marinetti, nation and subject mirror one another in a body image, and Lewis demands a hardening of the "effeminate lout within" each. In the nation the lout is the masses; in the subject it is the unconscious, the drives, sexuality. Each is feared as "feminine," a force of flux, a threat to the masculinist stability of country and ego alike--a threat that stems from the commutability of the two louts, of "the outside" and "the inside." But whether the lout is the masses introjected or the unconscious projected, it must be "hardened" in nation and subject alike. 54 "Bless this hysterical wall," Lewis writes in Blast, "built round the ego" (B, 26). "Anything but yourself is dirt" (B, 70). 55
Like Marinetti, Lewis calls on artists to mold this flaccid feminine modernity into an armored masculine modernism. For these cultural "Caliphs" "a course of egotistic hardening . . . is required" (B, 134). Yet this hardening is only one part of the project; the other is the blasting that Lewis performs with satiric abandon. Aesthetic and political, these processes of discharge and defense are also psychic: if Marinetti stresses the unbinding of energy and the blasting of the subject, Lewis stresses the binding and the hardening. And this difference informs the difference between the two movements: in image and form Futurism favors the explosive, while Vorticism focuses on the fixed. Thus Futurist motifs of the burst of energy and the gesture forced free of the body, and Futurist lines as lines of force and traces of speed, are both pledged to redefine form and to interpenetrate objects temporally ( 5). The Vorticist versions tend to the opposite--to define form and to separate objects spatially ( 6). "I hate the movement that blurs lines," Lewis often remarked (once directly to Marinetti [BB, 35]).
In fact Lewis opposes all such blurrings, whether associated with crowds or women, the Freudian unconscious or the Bergsonian durée (Time and Western Man [1927] is a long diatribe against the temporal obsessions of modernist culture). This fear of interpenetration is fundamental to his aesthetics, philosophy, and politics, just as the desire for the same is basic to Marinetti. And for both men the stake of these forms and phenomena is the subject: while Marinetti strives for an ecstatic release of the body ego, Lewis struggles to keep it intact and hard.
Faced with the tension between discharge and defense, the early Marinetti seeks a momentary resolution in speed, while the early Lewis pursues it in a related ideal, the vortex. "At the heart of the whirlpool is a great silent place where all energy is concentrated," he states. "And there, at the point of concentration, is the Vorticist." 56 This vortex is more than an image; at its "maximum point of energy when stillest," it is an apparatus that elicits and channels libidinal energies (B, 148). 57 For Lewis it res not only the tension between discharge and defense, blasting and hardening, but also the binding of stimulus-shock into protective shield, the conversion of energy into ego. In a sense it is a metaphor-machine of this conversion, as Ezra Pound suggests: "The vortex is the point of maximum energy. It represents, in mechanics, the greatest efficiency" (B, 153).
Lewis invests in such res of hardening because of his great fear, before and after the war, of "nondifferentiation." This is the gist of his antihumanism: he assumes a separation not only from the divine and the natural but from the human. More, he celebrates this separation, militates for culture to reinforce it at all costs. Here again self-alienation is troped not only as the preservation of the self but also as its supreme value. In The Art of Being Ruled, Lewis attacks all forces of nondifferentiation, especially the "sex transformation" in postwar society that feminizes men and masculinizes women (the dreaded epitome of this nondifferentiation is "male inversion"). Lewis condemns modernist art too as "a thirst to sexually invade everything--to violate any intimity." 58 In Time and Western Man this attack on nondifferentiation turns philosophical. Here the great enemy of the armored ego is the Bergsonian flux, the obsession with the temporal and the psychological. For Lewis this modernist engulfment in time erodes the subject, but so does the modernist diffusion of space; the new ego and the fierce abstraction of Vorticism are arrayed against both invasions.
As Lewis rejects the flux thought by Bergson, he embraces the stasis proposed by the art historian Wilhelm Worringer in Abstraction and Empathy (Abstraktion und Einfühlung [1907]). This "psychology of style" was introduced into Vorticist circles by T. E. Hulme, but it is a primary for Lewis as well. Worringer combines two notions--empathy (Einfühlung) derived from the psychologist Theodor Lipps, and artistic volition (Kunstwollen) derived from the art historian Alois Reigl--in order to relate artistic styles to "psychic states." 59 Across history and culture, Worringer argues, there are two stylistic poles in art, naturalism and abstraction, that express two opposite relations to the world, an empathic engagement and a shocked withdrawal:
Whereas the precondition for the urge to empathy is a happy pantheistic relationship of confidence between man and the phenomena of the external world, the urge to abstraction is the outcome of a great inner unrest inspired in man by the phenomena of the outside world. . . . We might describe this state as an immense spiritual dread of space. [AE, 15] 60
"Dominated by an immense need for tranquility," the primitive turned to abstraction (AE, 16). Worringer sees a similar turn, also driven by "inner unrest" and "spatial dread," in the modern: "slipped down from the pride of knowledge, man is now just as lost and helpless" (AE, 18). As a consequence the modern artist also struggles to arrest and separate, to abstract and preserve--an account quite different from the usual celebrations of the mastery of the abstract artist, whether claimed in terms technical or formal, historical or spiritual. Worringer undercuts the proud humanism of all such readings. Like Marinetti and Lewis, he is pushed toward the paradox that the very "impulse to self-preservation" (AE, 35) has driven the modern toward the abstract and the inorganic.
Lewis came to Worringer through Hulme. In January 1914, six months before the first issue of Blast, Hulme delivered a lecture titled "Modern Art and its Philosophy" that adapts Abstraction and Empathy toward an advocacy of Vorticist art. 61 He divides modern styles into two categories, geometric and organic, which answer to opposite "necessities of the mind" and "attitudes towards the world" (S, 77-78). Organic styles, naturalist and empathic, express the humanist attitude dominant in art from the Renaissance through romanticism: a "flat and insipid optimism" (S, 80) that places man at the center of nature. Thus for Hulme the return of geometric styles in modern art signals the return of the opposite attitude: "a feeling of separation in the face of outside nature" (S, 85). Like Lewis, Hulme celebrates this "original sin"; he too embraces it as an ultimate value.
Yet a problem arises in the Vorticist adaptation of Worringer: a too-close association of the modern and "the primitive." Like Worringer and Riegl, Hulme subscribes to a cultural evolutionism that is racialist at base; here, for example, he cites Riegl: "In our scale of values, [the geometric] occupies the lowest position" (S, 17). 62 Under this bias Hulme must qualify the return of this style in modern art. First, he argues that "the necessary presupposition" of abstraction is not "a condition of fear" but of "separation between man and nature" (S, 87). Second, he insists that Vorticist abstraction is modeled not on primitive art but on machinic "organisation," which is to say machinic deorganicization, as this comment on Lewis suggests: "It is obvious that [his] only interest in the human body was in a few abstract mechanical relations perceived in it, the arm as lever and so on" (S, 106).
"What he said should be done, I did" (BB, 100), Lewis once remarked of Hulme. But, again, it is Worringer who set the aesthetic terms for both men, and both often echoed his enthusiasm for abstraction, Assyrian, Egyptian, Byzantine, and so on. Already in an early text in Blast Lewis reveals his ambition to adapt Worringer to a modern conception of art and subjectivity. Titled "The New Egos," it reads as a Worringerian parable of two complementary res, "a civilized savage" and a "modern town-dweller" (B, 141). 63 Neither is "secure": the first lives in a "vagueness of space," the second amid crowds that "overlap, intersect, and are Siamese to any extent" (B, 141). Yet the savage has developed an art to quell his insecurity, an art of the re abstracted to a "simple black human bullet," whereas the modern only senses that "the old form of egotism is no longer fit for such conditions as now prevail, [that] the isolated human re of most ancient Art is an anachronism, [that] the actual human body becomes of less importance every day" (B, 141). There follows this Worringerian credo: "All clean, clear cut emotions depend on the element of strangeness, and surprise and primitive detachment. Dehumanization is the chief diagnostic of the Modern World" (B, 141). The chief diagnostic, it is also the chief remedy for Lewis: if the modern is to survive its own dehumanization, it must dehumanize further; it must take "strangeness, surprise, and primitive detachment" to the limit.
Lewis does not forego the human re. Even in his nonobjective works he often abstracts from its gestures, as if to convert the re into its own force field. Sometimes his abstraction is this conversion of a re into a protective shield, "a simple human bullet." Yet usually he is not content to show the mere result of this armoring; rather, he evokes its struggle and its stake. Especially in the "designs" of the early 1910s a great tension exists between re and surround, as if the body ego, never secure, were caught between definition, about to break free as an autonomous subject, and dispersal, about to be invaded schizophrenically by space. 64 In a typical suite based on Timon of Athens , the Shakespearean misanthrope is suspended between definition and dispersal in this way: as he struggles toward autonomy he becomes all the more imbricated in space ( 7). 65
This tension is difficult to maintain, and especially in the early designs Lewis stresses the binding of the body image. Sometimes this hardening seems to come from without, outside in, as in The Vorticist , in which the body is abstracted as if by the stimulus-shock of the world ( 8). Sometimes this hardening seems to come from within, inside out, as in Vorticist Design (ca. 1914), in which the body is abstracted as if by its internal drives ( 9). In one concentrated re, The Enemy of the Stars , these two hardenings converge ( 10). On the one hand, with a head like a receiver, the re appears reified from without, its skin turned into a shield; on the other hand, stripped of organs and arms, it appears reified from within, its ossature turned into "a few abstract mechanical relations." (In either case it looks the part of an "enemy of the stars," resistant to all influence.) 66 After the war this hardening becomes all or nothing: in a near-literal return to the inorganic, some res of the 1920s appear petrified (this is true of many portraits as well), while others appear excoriated (in one drawing Lewis imagines the crucifixion as an excoriation, Christ flayed by space). Finally, in a few works of this period excoriation and petrification appear combined, as if the body were suddenly fossilized, then totemized. 67
In many res Lewis registers dread or shock, but only to turn dread into aggression, shock into protection--as if to convert any breaching into an armoring that both shields and aggresses. This elaboration of Worringer on abstraction toward Freud on the protective shield and the death drive seems programmatic, yet the most relevant works predate Beyond the Pleasure Principle (published in 1920, translated into English in 1922), and his remarks on Freud thereafter are scant and negative. Might Lewis have intimated this becoming-inorganic--of both the protective shield that binds the body ego against stimulus-shock and the death drive that releases the organism from all such tension--through Abstraction and Empathy? There is no explicit evidence, but Worringer does think abstraction in terms of such a drive. 68
In Beyond the Pleasure Principle Freud formulates the death drive in a famous passage: "If we are to take it as a truth that knows no exception that everything living dies for internal reasons--becomes inorganic once again--then we shall be compelled to say that 'the aim of all life is death' and, looking backwards, that 'inanimate things existed before living ones'" (BPP, 32). Thirteen years prior to this statement, Worringer referred the Kunstwollen of abstraction to a similar "morphological law" that "still echoes like a dim memory in our human organism." And here he conceives abstraction as a mimesis of this primal state of inorganicity:
A convinced evolutionist might . . . seek [geometrical form] in the ultimate affinity between the morphological laws of organic and inorganic nature. He would then erect the ideal postulate that the morphological law of inorganic nature still echoes like a dim memory in our human organism. He would then perhaps also assert further that every differentiation of organised matter, every development of its most primitive form, is accompanied by a tension, by a longing to revert to this most primitive form. . . . Thus, in the contemplation of abstract regularity man would be, as it were, delivered from this tension and at rest from his differentiation in the enjoyment of his simplest formula, of his ultimate morphological law. [AE, 35-36]
If Lewis does intimate this formulation, he does so in a paradoxical way that inverts it, for he seeks to find in this prehistory of a radical nondifferentiation a posthistory that promises an absolute differentiation. That is to say, Lewis seeks to turn this "ultimate morphological law" into a principle of transcendental self-affirmation. Along the way the (masochistic) drive to self-destruction at its core may also be turned into the (sadistic) drive to master others--a drive abundantly manifest in Lewis the artist, impresario, and man.
In his writings Lewis approaches the notions of the protective shield and the death drive in several ways. First, he espouses a "primordialism" more radical than any primitivism. "The artist goes back to the fish," he writes in The Caliph's Design, "to strike the fundamental slime of creation" (CD, 65). 69 In "The Physiognomy of Our Time," also in this first collection of art essays, Lewis describes this condition as "Futuristic," as if the primordial were not only in our deepest past but in our modernist future as well. This intuition of a death drive as a process, even a goal within modernity has two ramifications. First, for Lewis as for Marinetti the old opposition of animate and inanimate is long since undone. On the one hand, Lewis writes in "The Physiognomy of Our Time," "every living form is a miraculous mechanism"; on the other hand, in a world become "inorganic" the machine has become an "organism" of its own (CD, 77-78). Latent in the order of things ("the seagull is not far removed from the hydroplane" [CD, 73]), this mechanicity must now be articulated by the artist; in Worringerian fashion he must wrest this order out of chaos ("all our efforts indicate a desire . . . to order, regulate, disinfect and stabilise our life" [CD, 73-74]).
Second, with the organic and the inorganic thus forced into an identity that is at once primordial and Futuristic, Lewis can present his model of art in terms of a necessary evolution, even a biogenetic law: "The creation of a work of art is an act of the same description as the evolution of wings on the sides of a fish, the feathering of its fins; or the invention of a weapon within the body of a hymenopter [e. g., an ant, wasp, or bee] to enable it to meet the terrible needs of life" (CD, 65). This formulation suggests two further transvaluations. First, a troping of Worringer on abstraction in which "primitive" dread before nature becomes modern empathy with a second nature, the machinic world ("we want to enjoy our consciousness, but to enjoy it in all forms of life" [CD, 77]). Second, a troping of Freud on the protective shield, the development of which art is not only to recapitulate but, in an embrace of the machine, to accelerate--in order "to meet the terrible needs of life."
Lewis also approaches the Freud of Beyond the Pleasure Principle in his concern with ectogenesis, or the process by which an organism extrudes structures from its own surface. "The central nervous system originates from the ectoderm," Freud writes of the protective shield. "The grey matter of the cortex remains a derivative of the primitive superficial layer of the organism." Under "the ceaseless impact of external stimuli," this ectoderm is "baked" into an inorganic "crust," which screens stimuli for the layers beneath (BPP, 20-21). Compare Lewis in The Art of Being Ruled: "We are surface creatures. . . . There is no meaning except on the surface. It is physiologically the latest, the ectodermic, and the most exterior material of our body that is responsible for our intellectual life: it is on the faculty for exteriorization that our life depends." (WLA, 210) In effect Lewis adopts the Freudian metaphor of baking as a model for art and subjectivity alike, but with two revisions: he reverses the process (both must be baked inside out); and he insists that the baking be total, the crust complete. For Lewis the internal layers that Freud wants to protect are so much "jellyfish."
Even in his early writings--like the novel Tarr, the essays in The Caliph's Design, or the short stories in The Wild Body --Lewis takes this deadness as his ideal. Its most radical formulation is presented by the eponymous protagonist of Tarr:
Deadness is the first condition of art. The armoured hide of the hippopotamus, the shell of the tortoise, feathers and machinery, you may put in one camp; naked pulsing and moving of the soft inside of life--along with elasticity of movement and consciousness--that goes in the opposite camp. Deadness is the first condition of art: the second is absence of soul, in the human and sentimental sense. With the statue its lines and masses are its soul, no restless inflammable ego is imagined for its interior: it has no inside: good art must have no inside: that is capital. 70
Already in play here in 1914 are all the leitmotifs of later Lewis: the attack on psychological interiority as "naked pulsing"; the celebration of the uncanny deadness of the armored, the machinic, even the neoclassical (the statue); above all, the transformation of stimulus-shock into shield (hide, shell, feathers, machinery).
In part this celebration of deadness is cynical bravado, and it is not often borne out by the work: Lewis may detest the naked pulsing of life, but his res are not baked through. The early designs in particular capture the tense ambiguity between inside and outside, animate and inanimate, breaching and shielding that traumatic shock puts into play. Aggression also enlivens the deadness otherwise prized by Lewis. Consider his depiction of eyes: in Freud these organs are "feelers . . . left behind on the surface" (BPP, 21); in Lewis they are opaque objects, barred windows to no soul. Yet they are far from dead: like the grins of his Tyros, the "elementals" conjured up in the 1920s, the eyes for Lewis are forces of aggression. 71 Even in more realistic portraits they appear as shields-cum-weapons, the point at which the body ego is most hardened, most cruel (. 11 and 12). 72
This aggression is also apparent in his commitment to satire, which follows from his "externalist" approach. "There is a stiffening of Satire in everything good, of 'the grotesque,' which is the same thing," Lewis writes in his "Theory of the External, the Classical, Approach in Art" . "The non-human outlook must be there . . . to correct our soft conceit." 73 Here the becoming-machinic of the body is not only a model of armoring but a means to expose the inhuman within the human. Lewis uses this trope, common in satire, to reduce the human to the physical in two related ways. First as a blind mechanism: "Men are sometimes so palpably machines, their machination is so transparent, that they are comic, as we say" (MWA, 95). And then, against our soft conceit, as a mere thing: "All men are necessarily comic: for they are all things, or physical bodies, behaving as persons" (WB, 158). Despite his anti-Bergsonism, Lewis is influenced here by the Bergson of Le Rire (1900 [Laughter]), who defines the comic in terms of the sudden exposure of a person as a mere mechanism: it is this degradation that is comic.
Just as important to Lewis is the psychic economy of this comic effect, and here he approaches Freud on humor (who was also influenced by Bergson, as well as by Lipps). For Lewis the sudden exposure of the human as mere mechanism is satirical because it mocks the humanist pretense of free action: it reveals us as the "puppets" we are. But this sudden exposure is comic, at least according to Freud, because the mechanism thus revealed is the automatism of the instincts, and this revelation eases instinctual tension; the comic is this release whereby unpleasure is turned to pleasure. 74 Lewis writes of the comic object in similar terms: "We are astonished and shocked, and we bark at him--we laugh--in order to relieve our emotion" (MWA, 95). Note the atavism of this laughter: not only is the comic object instinctually automatic, but so is the comic effect. It too renders us a "wild body," that "supreme survival that is us, the stark apparatus with its set of mysterious spasms: the most profound of which is laughter" (WB, 157). 75
For Lewis, then, we are comic because we are both automatic and reified, puppets of blind instinct further reduced within modernity to the status of mechanistic things. Such is the inhuman that he bids us to see as comic. But to see it in this way is also to be screened from it: on the one hand, the comedy "relieves emotion"; on the other hand, the satire "stiffens" us. If Marinetti asks us to desire reification, Lewis invites us to laugh at it, and this comedy of reification is yet another troping of the destructive impulse in his work. Granted, this is but a turning, not a cancelling: his satire remains aggressive, his reduction of the human to the mechanistic is sadistic indeed. 76 This is true as well of his "stoical embrace" of "the brutality of mechanical life," or his sublimation of war into "romance." 77 Again and again Lewis works to turn these shocks, the "most dramatic of ailments" (BB, 115), into a new sublime, and here too he understands the transformation in terms of psychic economy: "For all life must in some way be pleasure--even . . . the horror of destruction or the 'narrow escape' from it--namely, the pleasures of the battlefield, or of any 'moving accidents'" (WLA, 212). 78 Sometimes, however, Lewis fails these transvaluations, and sometimes he does not attempt them at all--as if then the destructive impulse might be revealed as such, and he might enjoy the absolute pleasure of its complete expenditure. "Killing somebody must be the greatest pleasure in existence," he wrote as early as the first Blast. "Either like killing yourself without being interfered with by the instinct of self-preservation--or exterminating the instinct of self-preservation itself!" (B, 133).
Of course this is part swagger, but it is also part wager, and at one point, in 1922, Lewis grasps the stake: "The game consists in seeing how near you can get without the sudden extinction and neutralization that awaits you as matter, or as the machine. In our bodies we have got already so near to extinction." 79 Could it be that this game is not the grim sideshow that it seems, that the moves of a Lewis or a Marinetti are not as aberrant as they appear? Could it be that the very stake of high modernism involves wagers such as these with reification and death? I see such res of reification and death approached and/or averted everywhere in European art of this time--not only in the dysfunctional automatons of dada and the dismembered mannequins of surrealism (what Lewis called "Hoffmann puppets"), but also in the machinic men of socialist constructivisms and the scarecrow-statues of fascistic neoclassicisms (what Lewis called "robot-men" and "living statues"). 80 This is not to suggest some grand zeitgeist--that this period marches in lockstep to the death drive. But it is to hear, below the noisy appeals of the time, the various quests for the New Man as well as the various returns to the Old Humanism, the insistent call of the inhuman.
Hal Foster is Professor of Art History and Comparative Literature at Cornell University. He is an editor of October. His most recent books are The Return of The Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century and Compulsive Beauty .
1. See Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964). For a brilliant elaboration see Mark Seltzer, Bodies and Machines (New York: Routledge, 1992), especially the introduction; as well as his "Serial Killers," in differences 5 (spring 1993). Also see my "Postmodernism in Parallax," October 63 (winter 1993), where I track this logic in critical discourse on technology in the 1930s, 1960s, and 1990s. For advice on the present text I want to thank Andrew Hewitt, Jeffrey Schnapp, Geoff Waite, and especially Miriam Hansen and Mark Seltzer.
2. For both men the machine was an actual agent of bodily transformation and a fantasmatic re of the same, and this uncertain status of position and cause is part of its anxious attraction. On this uncertainty see Victor Tausk, "On the Origins of Schizophrenia in the 'Influencing Machine'" , The Psychoanalytic Quarterly 2 , essential reading for the modernist imaginary of the machine.
There is renewed interest in Marinetti and Lewis (several books on Lewis alone have appeared in the last few years), conditioned in part by two general factors: the need to complicate the antitypal opposition of modernism and fascism in visual culture, and the sense that the metropolitan West is in the midst of qualitative technological transformation.
3. This structural limitation may well be the ideological function of this (or any) double logic. I point to other modernist and marxist positions on technology below, but most remain with the double logic of a fantasy of a Frankensteinian dismemberment of the body (pronounced in Capital) versus a fantasy of its Futurist phallicization. In his account of technology as both amputation and extension McLuhan expresses this logic exactly. Not incidentally, McLuhan was inspired by Lewis: he sought Lewis out in St. Louis in the early 1940s, published an essay on his work in 1944, and founded a journal in homage to Blast called Counterblast. What continuities regarding technological shock, art, subjectivity, and politics might be found between "the new ego" proposed by Lewis in Blast 1 and "the extensions of man" traced by McLuhan in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Wyndham Lewis, Blast 1 [20 June 1914; Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1981], 141; hereafter abbreviated B)?
4. In this modernist imagery might the machinic be the fundamental re and the body the prosthetic? In his "Mirror Stage" paper (1936-49) Lacan does describe the body-ego image as "automaton" and "statue"--res uncannily similar to the machinic and neoclassical spectres of the 1920s that also ambiguate between the intact and the fragmentary (Jacques Lacan, "The Mirror Stage," in Écrits, trans. Alan Sheridan [New York: W. W. Norton, 1977], 2-3; hereafter abbreviated E). On related issues see my "Armor Fou" (October 56 [spring 1991]) and my "Postmodernism in Parallax."
5. I return to this paradox below. Neoclassicism and machinism cannot be opposed as whole to fragment in European art of the 1920s. Often machinic res are armored, made whole, while neoclassical ones are broken into bits ("scarecrow[s]," as Adorno once remarked of the neoclassicism of Igor Stravinsky, "damaged and disempowered by a patched-up arrangement of dreams" [Theodor Adorno, Musikalische Schriften vols. 1-3, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1978), 391]). And sometimes the machinic and the neoclassical are combined, and not just in fascist art (e. g., Mario Sironi); underneath the machinic veneer of a Léger or a Le Corbusier there often lies a neoclassical measure. In his caustic way Lewis captured the convergence of these uncanny tendencies as so many symptoms of reification: "That is what is afoot," he wrote in a 1934 text titled "Power-Feeling and Machine-Age Art," "the living statue--which comes upon the scene hand-in-hand with the robot-man--the herd of machine-minders mingling, without recognition of a difference, with the herd of Hoffman [sic] puppets" (Wyndham Lewis, "Power-Feeling and Machine-Age Art," Time and Tide [October 1934]; reprinted in Wyndham Lewis on Art, ed. Walter Michel and C. J. Fox [New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1969], 287). Note the ambiguity, typical of Lewis, between the individual-as-mass and the mass-as-person.
6. These futures differed from regime to regime, as did the subjects interpellated by them; and different styles were developed accordingly. In this regard, Futurist technophilia is especially overdetermined: part masculinist fantasy, part political allegory, it is also driven by technological underdevelopment. The Vorticist situation is quite different. "We've had machines here in England for a donkey's years," Lewis once told Marinetti. "They're no novelty to us" (Wyndham Lewis, Blasting and Bombardiering [1937; London: Calder and Boyars, 1967], 34; hereafter abbreviated BB). Here I focus on the machine as fantasy, which is its privileged role in modernism, even when it res "objectivity."
7. László Moholy-Nagy, Ma (May 1922), quoted in John Willett, Art and Politics in the Weimar Period (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), 76.
8. Peter Sloterdijk discusses "the irony of a bashed ego" in Critique of Cynical Reason (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1987), 441. I discuss Ernst in these terms in "Armor Fou." Again, this mapping is very schematic: the relation of dada to constructivism is more complex, especially in its Berlin version.
9. I mean the Bauhaus after 1923, that is, after the partial turn to constructivist principles following the appointment of Moholy-Nagy.
10. On this complementarity see Jean Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, trans. Charles Levin (St. Louis: Telos Press, 1981), 185-203, and my "The Future of an Illusion," in Endgame, ed. David Joselit (Boston: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1986).
11. Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 242; Ernst Jünger, "Über den Schmerz," in Blätter und Steine (Hamburg: Hanseatische Verlaganstalt, 1934), 200.
12. Of course these res also partake of the modernist attack on traditional values of sublimated beauty epitomized in the female nude.
13. This was the brief attraction of Futurism for Gramsci. In "Marinetti the Revolutionary," an unsigned article in L'Ordine Nuovo, 5 January 1921, he wrote,
What remains to be done? Nothing other than to destroy the present form of civilization. . . . The Futurists have carried out this task in the field of bourgeois culture. They have destroyed, destroyed, destroyed. . . . They have grasped sharply and clearly that our age, the age of big industry, of the large proletarian city and of intense and tumultous life, was in need of new forms of art, philosophy, behaviour and language [Gramsci's emphasis].
Just two years later, he wrote to Trotsky, "The Italian Futurist movement completely lost its character after the war. . . . The most prominent representatives of pre-war Futurism have become fascists . . ." (Selections from Cultural Writings, ed. David Forgacs and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, trans. William Boelhower [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985], 51-52).
14. I refer to the Lacanian corps morcelé that haunts the ego once it has cathected its own ral integrity--haunts it as its own projected predecessor; see Lacan, "The Mirror Stage" and "Aggressivity in Psychoanalysis" in E. The analogy is treacherous. In "Postmodernism in Parallax" I suggested that this Lacanian formulation encrypts a fascist male subject, but this may be to generalize this subject as the subject tout court. But might this be what Lacan did? And how exclusively masculine is his paranoid dynamic of the ego?
15. For the now-classic formulation see Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, 2 vols., trans. Stephen Conway, Erica Carter, and Chris Turner (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987-89). This formulation drops out fascist female subjects, as does the text in general.
16. As is well known, Marinetti was an early collaborator of Mussolini, Lewis a sometime admirer of Hitler. Like many of the wartime generation, both were influenced by Georges Sorel, particularly his Reflections on Violence , a text of enormous influence on emergent fascisms (it was first translated into English by T. E. Hulme, a Vorticist associate). In fact, Futurism and Vorticism constitute an avant-garde best described as Sorelian: both partake of the "general strike," of the imperative to mythologize events and to activate images, especially of violence. Lewis discusses Sorel in The Art of Being Ruled , and the program of his 1937 autobiography, Blasting and Bombardiering, is pure Sorel: "I have set out to show how war, art, civil war, strikes and coup d'états dovetail into each other" (BB, 4).
17. Alice Yeager Kaplan, Reproductions of Banality: Fascism, Literature, and French Intellectual Life (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 25-35.
18. Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id, trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1960), 16.