Why Futurism Matters Today I: As Fast As Possible, Composing, 28/07/2015

I first came up with the idea for my Utopias book from reading After the Future, a book about how the way we think of our future and human progress shapes our politics. The trippier concepts in that project will eventually revolve around these ideas of time, and how concepts of time affect what we believe about the inevitability of a better world.

Building a better world is, as far as I’m concerned, the primary goal of philosophical writing. Philosophy develops the ideas and concepts with which we can think about our potentials and ambitions for what our society, civilization, and planet can become.* This is the central mission of my upcoming book, Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity.

* I know a fair number of folks in philosophy who believe that it's about uncovering fundamental truths. Well, that may have been true when philosophy was the discipline that included all the fundamental sciences, but that's not the case anymore. If you want truth, you do some good science or good journalism. Philosophical thinking has been left to its creative possibilities, which I argue is the better for it, because it foregrounds philosophy as an engine of social and planetary progress.

The images of Fritz Lang's Metropolis articulated the desires and fears of all modernity.

Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity builds a conception of what an individual human subject is, which is better suited to living an ecologically sustainable lifestyle. When you think of yourself in the way it describes, your presumptions and instincts about how to live and what’s best will better articulate a more ecologically conscious lifestyle, and you’ll drive yourself harder to fight and change ecologically harmful systems, social & economic structures, and institutions.

Utopias will be a book that grapples with this project through a central question that’s more about method: What’s the precise power of these self-conceptions that open and close so many possibilities without our even needing to be aware of them?

Utopias will also be a very critical book about our current politics. The self-conceptions that drive contemporary Western politics are that we conceive of ourselves as technological and as free individuals in the liberal sense. 

Because it’s a philosophical book, I’m developing a peculiarly philosophical way of criticizing these aspects of current politics. I’m looking for the purest expressions of the self-conception of Technological Man and the self-conception of the Individual. I’ve found those expressions in, respectively, Italian Futurism (particularly the manifestos of Filippo Marinetti) and modern libertarianism (the trifecta of Friedrich Hayek, Robert Nozick, and Ayn Rand). 

These visions are linked in some very complex ways. Untangling them has been the task of many different writers in many different disciplines and subject areas. I’m not about to pretend that my books are the definitive word, or offer a totally comprehensive guide – only that they’re a contribution worth having, and remarkable on their individual insights and merits. 

The modern libertarian movement is based on the idea
that almost all state services, even the ones that bring
direct material benefits to people in need, are
inescapably totalitarian and must be destroyed to
protect our individual freedoms.

I think one of those insights is that my approach to criticizing destructive politics and economics targets one of the most insidious ideas of modern politics: that progressivism in all its stripes is fascist and totalitarian. 

I think it’s important that we take this seriously because millions of people actually believe that simple government-based means of trying to make society more fair – public transit, state health insurance plans, daycare subsidies, restrictions on weapon ownership and trade, regulations on investment banking, legalizing unions, even simply having a public pension fund – brings state control over the lives of free individuals, which is essentially totalitarian.

It sounds ridiculous, but these are the bedrock values of many in the American Tea Party movement, in libertarian-influenced popular thinking across the West, and the official ideology of all the think tanks that grew from the original meetings of the Mt. Pelerin Society. The freaky part is, there is a legitimate truth behind this paranoia.

Marinetti’s writing and political activism provides the clearest expression of that truth, which all progressives have to confront if we’re going to defeat new liberal conservatism for good. Marinetti was a progressive in many ways. 

His manifestos crusaded against injustices that would make him admirable to a modern progressive, and I found myself enthused and amped by his writing, even against my better judgment. 

Marinetti was against Church power and control over people’s lives, against the social infantilization and economic subjection of women, against pre-WWI Italy’s crony politics and servitude of the rich and powerful. He wanted to empower working people to control his country’s industry, largely through trade unions. He advocated for universal education, constant progress and innovation in the arts and sciences.

But Marinetti also wanted Italy to wage colonial wars to conquer huge swaths of Africa in the name of national glory. He was a deep racist who thought lesser people should be crushed under superior Italian culture. His universal education would have included regimented military training – every young boy was a stormtrooper in training. He dreamed of clearing all the forests and swamps in Europe to build superhighways, mega-cities, and factory complexes the size of Naples.

All in the name of progress. And the engine of this change would be the authoritarian hand of the state because only the state could achieve the ends of progress to a perfect society as fast as physically possible, steamrolling all resistance and even mild critics. . . . To be continued.

Know the Danger of Your Own Times, Research Time, 20/07/2015

You might wonder what exactly I find so interesting in Filippo Marinetti and the Italian Futurists, why I keep writing them, and why I decided that Marinetti’s ideas would make such an interesting focus point for my next book. There are a lot of ways I came to the decision, but here’s one aspect of that, based on what I was reading a little while ago.

Marinetti is describing the sickness of his culture, Italy in the years on either side of the First World War. The moneyed political classes spend most of their time accumulating wealth with little effort, or else arguing in parliament with an insomniac intensity about different versions of laws that all amount to the same oppressive foolishness.

I'm not the first person to say the economic pressures
working people face today are of similar calibre as
during the Great Depression. From a pro-unionization
protest among Walmart employees, December 2014.

The working classes, meanwhile, are put under deeper and heavier stress by an economy where the labour of most people is valued less and less every day. People can’t apply their intelligence to anything creative, socially valuable, or even mentally stimulating and interesting for very long. They have to spend all their energy hustling for enough income that barely covers their basic subsistence. 

His Italy’s mass cultural products are juvenile, pandering entertainment based on cheap jokes and tired stereotypes. So many people’s artistic tastes are decaying into idiocy, while it becomes increasingly difficult to produce and distribute genuinely progressive, radical art. This is despite an explosion of new forms and channels of media.

Described in these terms, the circumstances sound pretty familiar to most of us. Most of us in Western countries find an unstable work environment, where many have to hustle between internships, freelance work, and their actual jobs just to sustain enough income that we can live comfortably. It’s difficult to find the time to contribute to larger projects in society between all the work many of us have to do just to make a decent living.

Marinetti was talking about a society whose unemployment rate was skyrocketing, and where many war veterans returning from the Alpine front found themselves adrift.

Our own cultural products are increasingly fragmented, with many of the most popular things amounting to little more than humour at stereotypes, though I admit I’ve been falling behind some aspects of mainstream entertainment simply because I can’t be bothered to care. Is Duck Dynasty still on TV?

A modern Marinetti, pushing an avant-garde movement across the arts, would probably have a better shot at finding an audience, simply because of the extra reach of the internet. Where the Marinetti of the 1900s wrote plays and manifestos, a Marinetti of the 2010s could write and direct films or web series, and what else is a blog but a space for a constantly updating manifesto.

Political ideas that are not considered absolutely
horrifying were once totally mainstream, to the point
of becoming mundane, so boring that a Royal would
parrot their images.

It’s ridiculous to say that Marinetti’s world is the same as ours. Not only are the actual political systems of the world incredibly different, but even what’s politically conceivable is alien to a 2010s sensibility. I may write tomorrow about some of Marinetti’s Futurist proposals in economics that sound like walking contradictions to a modern ear. But his era and ours share a commonality in important ways.

His people and so many in the modern West face an impasse between a world of conflict, cultural fragmentation, and economic depression, and a world where we’re crawling out of these disasters. The problem is that we can’t tell which path will truly be successful, or which paths will require us to pay prices for our progress that are much too high. 

His was an era of genuine fascism and totalitarianism, after all. Those politics were so mainstream that even royals would play around with the imagery. But we have our own mainstream horrors. It could be the reach of violent religious ideologies so far that people will murder through these imageries in places as random as Chattanooga. Or it’s the sadly successful everyday racism and bigotry of Dylann Roof or the Trump campaign.

There’s a multi-front conflict the size of the First World War ongoing right now, only instead of Europe (for now), it’s across the Middle East. Instead of the French side of the Rhineland, the Italian Alps, the Russian Front, and the Bolshevik-Menshevik civil war, there’s instead the Syrian revolutionary war, the ISIS insurgency, the Houthi uprising, and the Libyan civil war. 

Marinetti is a spectre of that old era that serves as a warning to us. Reading him, you feel his punk spirit. However much he inveighs against his Europe’s radical left for their utopias of perfect equality and material abundance in communist paradise, he’s a utopian with a bizarre vision that can be eerily seductive. A society whose politics and education system are designed to build artistic geniuses who are also heroic warriors dedicated to expand their nation’s empire.

He’s the demonstration that even within the most admirable and exciting ideas, there’s a kernel of political poison that can destroy everything you loved.

Beyond Futurism to Ecological Humanity, Research Time, 22/06/2015

This weekend, I had a sudden moment where so much of what I hated in university culture became clear, an insight where I realized that I won’t really miss working there. What I loved were the good people in that system, the friendly spirit and inquisitive minds that made them good, and the thick, constant flow of new ideas. But that spirit and atmosphere can continue in my life while I walk away from the sneering classism and hypocrisy.

So I can come back to writing about my research for my next big book, and reading Filippo Marinetti. I’ve rarely read a writer so dense – there’s so much in these quick little essays. I sometimes wonder if social media are the right places to publish incendiary manifestos today, but I feel like there are already so many that they’d be lost in the din.

Giacomo Balla's 1909 depiction
of moonlight's death at human
hands.

Here’s one idea that’s meaningful in the light of this week’s official declaration that we are now living in Earth's sixth Great Extinction. Among Marinetti’s Futurist rhetoric was the phrase “Kill the moonlight!” It referred to fellow Futurist Giacomo Balla’s painting of Alessandro Volta’s first arc lamp, its flickering explosions of electricity a violent rupture in the darkness.*

* Reading Marinetti can sometimes rub off on you, and all of a sudden every sentence you write (and sometimes say) is delivered with this weird tone of apocalyptic intensity.

Every great punk movement has a decadent society to rebel against. The actual London punk scene of the late 1970s had snooty prog rock and the rise of Thatcher. The Italian Futurists had Romantic art. A huge target of their rebellion against Romanticism was the way Romantic poets wrote such rapturous poetry about nature.

Now, this nature fetish — actually, I should say Nature fetish, because their style was so reifying that it deserved a capital letter. This Nature fetish caused enough problems of its own. When I was first researching Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity at McMaster, I discovered some essays that made a solid case that the Romantic love of nature actually helped American deforestation. 

The irony is delightful, if also incredibly depressing. Romantic poetry tended to idolize Nature as a living Eden, and often treated humanity as inherently corrupt and debased. The Christian cultural legacy was all over Romanticism, as they continued to play up the hyper-separated duality of the Fallen humanity and the pure, divine Nature. 

We were so alienated from Nature, so goes the Romantic image, that we needn’t even acknowledge it as anything we owed. So a colonial settler could cut down as much forest as needed to build his new city. Nature exists so far outside our order of being that we don’t even need to acknowledge it, except to exalt it in poetry.

Marinetti and the Futurists rebelled against Romanticism, but not the alienation of humanity from nature. They wished for a world where human technology would completely annihilate nature, like the triangular blades of artificial light pushing against the borders of night-time, overpowering the soft light of the moon. Marinetti wrote the philosophy that accompanied Balla’s painting.

I imagine that if Marinetti could have read Isaac Asimov’s descriptions of Trantor, the world that was entirely encased in an enormous, planet-wide, multi-story city, he would have wept with joy at the image.

The world of nature and humanity’s cultural worship of it, says Marinetti, was growing decadent, putrefying so that it can regenerate into a fully technological world. The triumphal new epoch of Earth would be the anthropocene. Look where that got us.

Marinetti thought that being the vanguard of pushing the world to a total embrace of technological power and innovation would introduce a glorious new era. That unrestrained development seems instead to have put us solidly in a category of greatness: as the creators of a literal planetary catastrophe. 

The real challenge is to adapt our technology so that we can keep the benefits of improved health care and nutrition, scientific investigation, communication, transportation, and media (delivered in as egalitarian a mission as possible), while leaving behind the parts of our civilization that destroy the ecologies we need to survive.

We don’t need the violent, dominating technology that was Marinetti’s reified fetish. We need a technology of negotiation and compromise. If we can even manage it.

Losing Philosophy to History, Research Time, 19/06/2015

One of the pivotal figures in the Utopias project is Filippo Marinetti, an Italian artist, poet, punk provocateur, and dedicated Fascist. Well, he was more of a dedicated fascist than a dedicated Fascist, for reasons I want to talk about today. 

Mussolini's power base wasn't just in the
totalitarian vanguard like the Futurists,
but also the military elite of Italy.

I’ve come across many conflicting accounts of just how much Marinetti supported the actual Fascist party of his country, Italy, and its dictator, Benito Mussolini. Many describe Marinetti as having been a loyal member of the Fascist party until his 1944 death. There are differences between them on the level of his dedication. 

Some describe him as a longtime propagandist, others as a supporter who fell from prominence during the Second World War thanks to his failing health, the failing military campaigns of Fascist Italy, and the paranoia of an authoritarian regime under pressures it couldn’t survive.

Doug Thompson, the translator of my Critical Writings collection of Marinetti’s essays, describes a different story. It’s a more fractious, difficult, relationship of Marinetti and the Futurist art, politics, and culture movement with Mussolini and the Fascist movement. 

It comes down to a single, simple idea. A politician, even such an authoritarian as Mussolini, can only progress through compromise and building difficult alliances. A philosopher need only depend on his own skill as a writer and the power of his concepts.

After the First World War, Marinetti grew involved with Mussolini’s Fascist party as a fellow traveller in building a political culture that would put the entire population of Italy on a constant footing for war and expansion. But for Marinetti, the total mobilization of the population would have a very specific purpose in mind. 

I find it strangely perverse to see the energy for positive social revolution – a vibrant creative spirit in expression, art, and ideas, in revolt against a staid old conservatism – channelled into the totalitarian reorganization of society. The transformative industrial technology emerging at the end of the 19th century – trains, cars, highways, the first airplanes, petroleum’s entire industrial revolution – would forge humanity into its own form. The mass man, person as cog in the machine.

It’s unnerving to understand that this terrifying ideology really existed. But it’s the same revolutionary impulse powering it. It’s a vision of a new kind of society, understanding the social, political, and technological powers that new model of life improves and makes possible. It’s the faith that this vision is superior. 

And the faith is grounded in real, material developments. It isn’t the blind faith of today’s religious right, the faith of the Christian climate change denialist, an assertion of proud ignorance. Rapid transit, mass electrification, the surge in economic productivity that did, in fact, lift literally billions from poverty took place because of the social revolution in thinking that made it possible.

If you ever wondered what punk energy looked like when
it was fascist, it looked like Filippo Marinetti, who
himself looks like a Toronto hipster.

Marinetti’s vision of politics simply said, let’s do it as fast as possible, with a violent wave of conquest that will free all people by mobilizing us as war machines. 

Yet to do it, he had to make allegiances with other powers. With people like Mussolini, whose own allies were old guard nationalists and social conservatives. Even though he adopted the Fascist banner, and Italy incubated the purest ideology of global totalitarianism, Mussolini could never have fully implemented mass mobilization. 

Because Marinetti’s ideas informed the dominant political movement of the time, the new imperialist movement after the First World War was totalitarian. But in the social networks of the Italian elite, not enough people could dig out of their 19th century mind-sets. The old nobility and old bourgeois were too entrenched for Marinetti’s philosophy to uproot. No concept, no matter how terrible, can directly move people who can’t think.

Mussolini built a terrifying authoritarian dictatorship, a military state whose goal was to be the new Rome. Marinetti wanted more than that, a mass mobilization so powerful that Rome itself would have been ruins compared to his triumphant Futurist Italy.

Reading Marinetti can be like staring into an abyss.

Moral Ideology III: Philosophy Makes You a Free Machine, Research Time, 20/06/2014

Continued from previous. The typical, or at least stereotypical, reply to this looming spectre of technological processes making machines out of men is to return to nature. I encountered a lot of this notion in my research on environmental philosophy, where witlessly romanticized conceptions of the natural world were sadly commonplace. 

That sad old fox, Martin Heidegger.

The most profound offender in this regard I consider to be Martin Heidegger, though he at least promises philosophical complexity in his ontology of a pure nature and the destructive egotism of the technological drive. He came of age as a philosopher during the period of Marinetti, Gramsci, Fordism, and totalitarianism as well, so developed his thinking in the wider context of that dialogue. He has since become an inspiration to many in environmentalist philosophy, his late-period writings explicitly on the nature of technology giving them at least a starting point for a conceptual framework to oppose the current eras drives to extract from the Earth instead of live on it. 

Yet Heidegger himself was an utter fool in how he expressed his philosophical insights in action, allying with the political movement that was the most intense articulation of the drive to become machine. The reasons for this choice will probably become more clear as his Black Notebooks grow more prominent, but they will always be murky and uncertain. Reality, including human action, always underdetermines our theories of it.

The ultimate ending of the Utopias project, will be a stand against this idea of subsuming all human singularity in a mechanistic system. But it will not be a return to nature. I have learned Nietzsche’s lesson well. Once the old dogmas have been rendered obsolete, you can no longer return to them to defeat the new dogmas. The new dogmas contain the very elements that defeated the old. 

Some of Gramsci’s writings indicate part of what that stand will be. I know it will have to do with some principles of political anarchism, the impossibility of truly representing the needs and concerns of a person through any representative medium but the voice of that person herself. He presents some notes on education in which I can see seeds of that resistance. Education, he says, are about building the habits of a person who can understand himself, which is only possible not only through introspection in one’s own psychology, but through historical and cultural understanding. Not only must you know your mind, but also the history and the world that produced you.

Italian Futurist and First World War casualty Umberto Boccioni's The City
Rises, a brutally organic vision from a group who worshiped technology.

His account is still about developing habits, a mechanistic notion. In this, he has surpassed the challenge of the mechanistic vision of humanity. The brutal efficacy of the mechanistic way of life crushed the plausibility of any romantically spiritual visions of what it means to be human. It was called the First World War. And that mechanistic vision sought to create a human that was literally mindless, a collection of habitual movements, driven by the directions of the wider machine, whether it was used for war or to build cars. Gramsci instead discusses the habits of how to liberate yourself, how to make yourself into a thinking machine.

Anyone can be a philosopher, says Gramsci, a statement with which I profoundly agree. We live in a sea of concepts that we already use to make sense of the world through language and religion, and build a hodgepodge of common sense. The high-intensity professional philosophical writers like me and the others in my tradition essentially do the same thing, but with a lot more rigour than most folks muster. But our art is a popular art, the art of thought. Anyone can perfect that art in such a way that they can resist the terrifying trends of current existence, whether Gramsci’s or our own. Thought is the beginning of resistance.

Kraftwerkdenken 2: We Used to Have a Remarkable Future, Jamming, 01/04/2014

Yesterday’s post about the thoughts Kraftwerk’s 3D show inspired in me may have considered the ontological and existential question of what we would be if we conceived of ourselves as machines. A different aspect of this is inherently political. And I’m not just talking about the songs Kraftwerk writes and performs, like “Computer World” and “Radio-Activity,” that are explicitly political anthems, though I can rock to the principle of each. After all, I regularly rock out while working to Rage Against the Machine. So I’m well okay with music that incorporates blatant political sloganeering. 

Marinetti's art was a collision of energy and motion. He
painted the explosion of humanity itself.

But this post is about more profound politics, the orientation of humanity itself, how our technology and our dreams of its potential shapes our society and our yearnings. One figure who first inspired my Utopias project was Filippo Marinetti, the Italian poet, artist, and philosopher who articulated one of the earliest visions of futurity in philosophy.* It isn’t a futurity I think anyone would actually like or want to live. Intrigued by the potential of the automobile for social transformation, he saw the car as a means of emancipation from the constraints of culture or traditional morality. It was a means of total freedom.

* Literature had included plenty of visions of the future, thanks to authors like Jules Verne and H. G. Wells. But these weren’t about futurity. Essentially, they depicted and critiqued the cultures and problems of their own era, the Victorian Age of Western Europe, using imagery of advanced technology. A standard, and important, practice of science-fiction. This should be distinguished from futurity, which actually imagines wholly different cultures and ways of life, without necessarily having any relation, critical or otherwise, to the current era. The only two authors I’ve come across who have done this are Iain M. Banks and Patrick White. And White wasn’t even a sci-fi writer; I just consider the ethics of his novel Voss so utterly strange to modernity that it seems innovative in its own right.

And this total freedom was the freedom of a people without personality in the conventional sense. Marinetti was was poor students of Nietzsche believe him to be: the glorifier of speed, aggression, and war. The man of Marinetti’s Futurist vision was the embodiment of a lone car (without seatbelts, of course) flying down a highway at absurd speeds. Urban technology would not only master nature, but annihilate it under a superior order. The Futurist man would literally be a machine man. The highways of modern, urban Europe would combine with the wars of mass destruction and death to forge a superior man that would remake the Earth in his image.

But Marinetti passed in the last years of the Second World War, and his dream of a factory-made future lay fallow and disregarded for decades. And then, the industrial heartland of Europe, Germany itself, produced a group of men whose name was the literal expression of the worldly striving (Werk) for power (Kraft), making art entirely using electronic machines synthesizing sounds that heralded waveforms themselves that had never been heard on Earth, expressing images and songs of men literally becoming machines, robots, men who were no longer even human. These men sang of the highways, the concrete streets that would transform man into pure motion, the fires of destruction. They sang of the Autobahn.

That really is the narrative of the 21st century. Do you see why I’m so interested in the Italian Futurists for the Utopias project? They express the dreams of progress that drove the 19th and 20th centuries to create the absolutely mad and self-destructive worlds we live in today. They embody more purely than any other group of artists and theorists I know of the profound hubris of humanity that’s landed us in this ecological/nomic pickle.

Marinetti dreamed of a new kind of man forged by the
speed of the highway and the grind of war. He got traffic
jams and Jeremy Clarkson.

Introducing the culture of the year 2010 to the TARDIS Eruditorum, Phil Sandifer wrote about the initial dreams of the internet. He knows it from the inside, as one of the earliest editors of Wikipedia, the dream that the internet would usher in a new era of super-fast communication, a kind of universal education and enlightenment through the exchange of knowledge faster than any mere state could regulate. The internet was supposed to be the vehicle of an anarchistic utopia. Instead, we got Facebook, cat photos, and the collective ignorance of believing you could fight breast cancer by posting a selfie without your eyeshadow on. The Venture Bros. has a similar aesthetic, as the fantastic dreams of animated adventure sci-fi in the 1970s give way to the creep of bureaucracy and middling performance of a generation that has run out of steam. 

Likewise, Marinetti dreamed of a human race that would transform its very nature technologically. He romanticized the highway into the blood vessels of a mechanized continent, with cars speeding around, experiencing life at its fullest and purest as we become machines of pure motion. Today, we’re stuck in traffic jams choking on our own exhaust fumes. 

Futurism: Where Man Becomes Machine, Research Time, 02/10/2013

One of the central historical pillars for the utopias project is fascism, in particular Italian fascism. I’ve been reading a lot lately about various examples of philosophy and art being co-opted or embracing fascism, totalitarianism, anti-semitism, and other forms of political violence. Art and philosophy can express a political ideal in its most pure form, where the actual political regimes driven by this ideal may not embody it perfectly because of the compromises and pragmatism necessary for any kind of political success. 

That’s why my focus in historical research is the Italian Futurist art movement and Filippo Marinetti. Futurism was the focus of my research Tuesday evening. The utopias project will, among other things, show how Futurism set the ideal toward which fascism was supposed to strive. It did not succeed, because it was thankfully destroyed in a hideously destructive war. But it did strive toward this goal.

Thankfully, the only man-machine to emerge since the fall
of European Fascism was this underrated Kraftwerk album.

That goal was the total mechanization of humanity. This was Marinetti’s vision of a radical break from the past. Technology itself would become a new immanent religion for the West, replacing a Christianity whose transcendent focus had become literally obsolete. Futurism is best understood as a technological product, which is, after all, how they conceived of human society in the first place. Fascism, in this case, was conceived as the new religion for Western humanity, the new model of human person. Man will become Machine, industrial technology forcing man to move faster than ever thought possible, perfecting itself through the fires of violence and war. This mechanized society is the society of totalitarianism, the transformation of all individual people into elements of a massive machine whose framework is the state and whose mind is the leader. Il Duce. Futurism embodies perfectly the violence humanity does when we forget the value of the present or our history to embrace an idealized dream vision of the future.

Yet when Italian Futurism began to express its political vision through the fascist movement, Marinetti found himself and his fellows yoked as well to a vision of the past. This was Mussolini’s nostalgia for the Roman Empire, Il Duce’s movement to resurrect in his own regime the idealized glory of ancient Rome, a vision equally imaginary as Marinetti’s Futurism of the man-machine. 

Ezra Pound, the poet, was the most notable artist other than Marinetti to wholeheartedly embrace Italy’s particular vision of fascism. I’ll have more to say on Pound tomorrow, but what matters for the current analysis is that he seems to have progressed the artistic vision of fascism beyond Marinetti’s Futurism, which was sometimes hastily written off as worship of the car.* Pound’s Canto 72 and some of his letters at the time of its composition show that he understood fascism as a union of idealized past and idealized future. The past resurrected becomes reiterated in a fascist future that does not repeat its details, but instead repeats its process, the vitalization and thorough unification of a people. Every prophecy is simultaneously an elegy.

*The definition of irony: A man who imagines a machine-man of the future who purges his organic weakness by the spectacle of the speeding car does not live to see the genuine ubiquity of the automobile and its result, daily traffic jams where cars are outrun by cyclists and joggers.