“In the end physics will replace ethics just as
metaphysics displaced theology. The modern
statistical view of ethics contributes toward that.”
—Soren Kierkegaard

When the historical sequence of men, of societies, of time and thought failed Henry Adams—sequences that might have yielded him some meaning about life—he remarked in The Education that he found himself in the Paris Gallery of Machines at the Great Exposition of 1900, “his historical neck broken by the sudden irruption of forces totally new.” But despite such anxieties about the rise of machine culture, between 1850 and 1925 in nearly every area of human activity a machine was introduced, improved, or perfected. The invention of the locomotive, the automobile, the airplane, the reaper, the dynamo, the telegraph, the telephone, the radio, the typewriter, and the sewing machine—together with construction feats like the tunnel, the canal, the suspension bridge, the steel tower, and the skyscraper—all of these transformed Western culture, unarguably for the better. In A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Twain went so far as to name “the creators of this world—after God” as Gutenberg, Watt, Arkwright, Whitney, Morse, Stephenson, and Bell, the inventors, respectively, of the printing press, steam engine, cotton spinner, cotton gin, telegraph, locomotive, and telephone. The Yankee Hank Morgan, who can make anything from a sewing machine to gunpowder, is meant to be a composite of modern practical ingenuity, the Inventor-Engineer par excellence.

What was the effect on art and culture of these machines and technological developments? The simplest answer is that they provided artists with images and analogues for writing about perfectly human and natural activities. When Sherwood Anderson writes in Winesburg, Ohio that Wing Biddlebaum’s uncontrollable hands were “the piston rods of his machinery of expression,” it is clear that the organic world view of an earlier age—when Thoreau could write that a man “bears a poem . . . as naturally as the oak bears an acorn and the vine a gourd”—has given way to a wholly different matrix of machine images. But did the new technology really alter the perception of writers and painters at the turn of the century?

This question is at the heart of two new studies of technology and the modern artistic imagination—Cecelia Tichi’s Shifting Gears: Technology, Literature, Culture in Modernist America and Marjorie Perloff’s The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, avant guerre, and the Language of Rupture. Professor Tichi, who teaches English at Boston University, offers a straightforward reading of the impact on American culture of what she calls “gear and girder” technology—the visible machinery of wheels, pistons, cogs, ball bearings, springs, and the like. From the foundries and factories and their dynamic processes, she traces a new cultural emphasis on stabilizing mechanical and personnel operations, reducing inefficiency through Taylorization and time-and-motion studies, and eliminating waste in materials and methods. She finds that the marvel of machinery temporarily made the engineer one of our cultural heroes, that technological and business values began to color the thinking of Americans, and that machines and technological operations began to be thematized in literature. For some, even a new beauty had been born. As the Italian F.T. Marinetti announced in his 1909 Futurist manifesto: “A racing car whose hood is adorned by great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.” Likewise, Hart Crane hymned The Bridge.

Professor Tichi’s account of technology as subject matter—in works like Frank Norris’ The Octopus, Eugene O’Neill’s The Dynamo, Willa Gather’s Alexander’s Bridge—is well done. But I have serious reservations about her claim that the rise of machines produced the mechanization of literary form itself. It is true that William Carlos Williams once said that “A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words.” But is a poem a machine—any more than it is a gourd or fruit? Professor Tichi seems to take it on faith that the essence of literary art alters with the new metaphors used to describe it. Hence she analyzes the fiction of Dos Passos, Hemingway, and others as if they were machines constructed on the technological principles of stability, efficiency, and the avoidance of waste. Since many of her literary examples have nothing to do with machines, she recurs to the farfetched analogue herself. She knows very well that Hemingway’s stories reflect no interest in machines and that his precision and economy of style can be accounted for by the demands of journalism and the brevities of the cable dispatch, but thesis-mongering requires her to take an absence for a presence:

Hemingway shows how it is that writings on a range of subjects can embody the values of machine technology. Stories and novels about hunting or fishing, bullfighting or boxing can exhibit a machine aesthetics, even when machines or structures play no part in the fiction. The pictorial representation of a machine or structure is not necessary and may be irrelevant. The form is what counts, and formally Hemingway’s style marks the achievement of machine values in imaginative literature. He proves that the dominant technology does define or redefine the human role in relation to nature. He is full of nostalgia for a preindustrial “natural” environment, but his sentences are irrevocably of another, a gear-and-girder, world.

It would be difficult to find a more egregious non sequitur. One would think that spare, economical, effective prose was ne’er written before the industrial era. More disturbing, however, is the analysis by Marjorie Perloff of the pre-World War I Futurist movement in relation to the new industrial technology. The Futurist Moment offers a provocative reading of the manifesto as an art form, of the collage technique, and of performance art as produced by various Futurists in France, Italy, and Russia. Of course, most of what the Futurists produced was inane nonsense deliberately at war with logic, causality, temporality, grammar, syntax, and referentiality itself. But Perloff seems not to mind. The manifestos, paintings, poems, and collages of Marinetti, Blaise Cendrars, Sonia Delaunay, Kasimir Malevieh, and others (lavishly illustrated in this book) were modeled on the advertisement, the poster, the placard, ticket stub, and handbill. And they celebrated machines, technology, speed, violence, energy, revolution, propellers, airplanes, engines, steel towers, tanks—even war itself. Is it art?

Not by a distinguished standard. In fact, the Futurists set themselves against distinction of every kind and cultivated the merely outrageous. For the Futurists, the past did not exist. “The only freedom we demand,” declared Velimir Khlebnikov in 1914, “is freedom from the dead.” To secure this freedom they called for revolution and war. Against what? The “banality” of middle-class Western culture. In the ninth thesis of his manifesto, Marinetti proclaimed: “We will glorify war—the world’s only hygiene—militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn of woman.” Enchanted with machines, Marinetti proclaimed that “War is beautiful because it initiates the dreamt-of metalization of the human body,” because “it enriches a flowering meadow with the fiery orchids of machine guns,” and “it creates new architecture, like that of the big tanks, the geometrical formation flights, the smoke spirals from burning villages.” Mayakovsky, declaring war to be “magnificent,” called in Russia for the poetic muse “to ride the gun-carriage wearing a hat of fiery orange feathers.” Well, the avant guerre Futurists got the revolution and the great war they wanted; and how they suffered for it. But so did millions of others who had not asked for it and who did not romanticize its “hygienic” properties.

How are we to read the barbarous and antihuman manifestos, the placard poems, and the outrageous public performance of these avant guerre radicals who gave rise to nihilistic Dadaism and the fatuities of Surrealism? Weren’t they all proto-Fascists? Well, yes, mostly. But Perloff would like us to believe that Russian Futurism was different: “The Russian poets and artists of the prewar years expressed a faith in war as the revolution that would bring about a Brave New World, as the necessary first step in bringing down the institutions of church, monarchy, and the class system.” She means us to see a noble idealism in their brand of revolutionary warmongering. But did the Bolsheviks think them noble? Trotsky and Lenin had them pegged perfectly, better than Professor Perloff. Lenin dismissed them as a “plethora of bourgeois intellectuals” who wanted a revolution in order to play out “their individual theories in philosophy and culture.” And Trotsky in Literature and Revolution (1922) wrote them off as bourgeois Bohemians posturing within “the closed-in circle of the Intelligentsia.” The masses, the revolution, had no use for them. The Marxist Walter Benjamin was more accurate than he knew—in “The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936)—when he remarked that the Futurist glorification of war was “evidently the consummation of ‘l’art pour l’art.'”

But despite these authoritative leftist dismissals, Professor Perloff is still nostalgic about the artists of the avant guerre. For her, The Futurist Moment “has a special pathos” because it “produced a short-lived but remarkable rapprochement between avant-garde aesthetic, radical politics, and popular culture.” No matter how destructive Futurism was, it appeals to her because of what she calls “our own postmodern urge to break down the centered, hierarchical orders of the past.” What counts for her is that the Futurists foreshadowed contemporary efforts to destroy high culture, the link between the world and the text, and the connection between art and referentiality to the world itself She is in love with the notion of “rupture” and commends the Futurists for preparing the way for the abysses of Jacques Derrida’s Glas, John Cage’s Empty Words, Robert Smithson’s “Strata: A Geophotographic Fiction,” and Laurie Anderson’s United States. Perloff, an English professor at Stanford and presumably a guardian of humanistic values, thus demonstrates that she has no respect for culture itself, for the value of tradition, for the delicate ties that bind men and women together in the totality of an organic community. Duty, responsibility, prescription, obedience, authority, the past—all of these apparently mean nothing to her. What counts for her is how the Futurists were committed to the destruction of the given, to aestheticizing the radical in politics and culture. If she can see what it got the Futurists and their contemporaries, does she have the vision to see what breaking down “the centered, hierarchical orders of the past” might get us? From the evidence of this book, she hasn’t a clue.

 

[Shifting Gears: Technology, Literature, Culture in Modernist America, by Cecelia Tichi; Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press]

[The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, avant guerre, and the Language of Rupture, by Marjorie Perloff (Chicago: University of Chicago Press) $24.95]