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FT Marinetti's "Mechanical Son" and Manifesto of Tactilism (1921)

Likewise, works written at this time - most notably, Mafarka Le Futuriste - abound with images and nonsexual procreation, consistently eliminating the figure of the effeminizing mother. This tendency is expressed programmatically in Marinetti's railings "Against Amore and Parliamentarism" in "War, the World's Only Hygiene": Well then: I confess that before so intoxicating a spectacle we strong Futurists have suddenly felt ourselves suddenly detached from women, who have suddenly become too earthly, or to express it better, have become a symbol of the earth that we ought to abandon. We have even dreamed of one day being able to create a mechanical son, the fruit of pure will, a synthesis of all the laws that science is on the brink of discovering." (Marinetti SW, p75)   

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The regulation  of sexuality envisaged in this early work, written in the heyday of the productive model of the machine metaphor, is extremely strict: sex serves the function of procreation. Desire is machinic insofar as it motivates (re-)production. 

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Again, it is with a reference to the organizing metaphor of the machine that one can begin to understand the shift to a degenitalized sensuality. If the early machine concentrates sexual energies on the act of procreation, then the dissociation of the machine from the act of production - its utilization as a model of order rather than as a principle of proliferation - results in a celebration of the technology of creation and necessarily dissociates sexuality from the act of procreation. Sexuality itself becomes the exercising of a power rather than the creation or regeneration of a power in the act of procreation. Thus the "dispersed" sexuality of the Tactilism Manifesto [1921] - though subversive or progressive when viewed purely in terms of discursive divisions that take no account of the subjugation of ideology to the machine metaphor - corresponds to a shift in Marinetti's understanding of the function of the machine and gives expression not to liberational impulses but to an ideology of control at the level of the body. The "efficiency" of the body as machine does not consist, here, in its productivity, but in its full utilization, its functioning at full capacity, every orifice plugged and every inch of epidermis aroused.

Fascist Modernism: Aesthetics, Politics and the Avant-Garde by Andrew Hewitt. Pg 150 - 51. ISBN#

"The Displacement of the Ethical by the Aesthetic"

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti

It would now be timely to move away from the figure of Man toward that more central figure in Marinetti's work, the machine. I wish to examine here the functioning of the Futurist machine in its specifically political implications, in order to understand whether, and how,  a metaphysics of presence asserts itself in Marinetti's work at the political level

Of course, given the model of aestheticization of political life framing the work so far, it is impossible to isolate the political as a realm somehow sealed off from the aesthetic. However, before limiting our examinations to the perspectives opened up in Benjamin's analysis, it is important that we situate aestheticization as a socially and culturally potent ideology. At face value, aestheticization might be taken to mean a displacement of social, political and ethical concerns as the guidelines for political action and a replacement of these values by aesthetic criteria: for example, a political action is judged in terms of its beauty rather than its goodness or even efficacy. This displacement of the ethical by the aesthetic - if that is all that aestheticization might be taken to mean - begs the question of the constitution of  'the beautiful' itself, as a category replacing 'the good.' If aestheticization is to be understood on a purely semantic level - that is, as a replacement of one set of values by another - then it is incumbent upon theorists of aestheticization  to provide some content to the notion of the aesthetic itself.

Influenced, perhaps, by the fascist predilection for spectacle and its tendency toward cultural philistinism, those who work with this model - including Benjamin, as previously I argued - generally assume that 'the beautiful' means what it had always meant in the nineteenth century; that it dictated a reliance upon falsified principles of harmony, organic totality, and unity. On the one hand there would be decadence - the dark side of progress, as it were - and on the other simple philistinism. The fascist predilection for regimented spectacle, the adherence to nineteenth century aesthetic standards that, in light of the avant-garde, can surface only as kitch - all of these things tend to confirm the critical desire to equate fascism (as aestheticization) with cultural philistinism. This conflation of  political and aesthetic tendencies might stress the importance of outmoded notions of aesthetic harmony and balance to fascist notions of the organicist State. Aesthetic resolutions would serve to paper over cracks and fissures of an increasingly fragmented and noncohesive social totality. Thus, from  a broadly leftist perspective 'the aestheticization of political life' comes to mean the masking of class struggle under a facade of aestheticized social unity.

Fascist Modernism: Aesthetics, Politics and the Avant-Garde
by Andrew Hewitt.
Pgs. 134-135
ISBN# 0-8047-2117-3

Futurism: Manifestos and other Resources