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Sin Espíritu, Corazón y Mente Invertida (ce399 artwork)

Sin Espíritu, Corazón y Mente Inversa_ce399. 2009

No offense to horned creatures.

Mecánico Hijo de Marinetti (traducción de texto en el progreso)

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (Alejandría, Egipto, 22 de diciembre de 1876 – Bellagio, Como, 2 de diciembre de 1944)

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Las obras escritas en este momento - en particular, Mafarka Le Futuriste [1910]- abundan con de las imágenes a la procreación non sexual, de manera coherente en la eliminación de la figura de la madre feminiza. Esta tendencia se expresa mediante programación en duras críticas de Marinetti "Contra Amore y el Parlamentarismo", en "La Guerra - única Higiene del Mundo" Bueno, entonces: Confieso que antes de un espectáculo tan embriagador de que pronto nos fuertes Futuristas, de repente nos encontramos separados de las mujeres, que de repente a ser demasiado terrenal, o por mejor decir, se han convertido en un símbolo de la tierra, que debemos abandonar. Incluso hemos soñado una día ser capaces de crear un hijo mecánico, fruto de la pura voluntad, una síntesis de todas las leyes que la ciencia está al borde de descubrir. "(Marinetti SW, p75)

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#

J.K. Huysmans: Up the Anti-Naturalist's Arsehole

Huysmans 1896

A tree is a tree. How many more do you have to look at? - Ronald Reagan (1966)

...Nature has had her day; she has definitely and finally tired out by the sickening monotony of her landscapes and skyscapes the patience of refined temperaments. When all is said and done, what a narrow, vulgar affair it all is, like a petty shopkeeper selling one article of goods to the exclusion of all others; what a tiresome store of green fields and leafy trees, what a wearisome commonplace collection of mountains and seas!

In fact, not one of her inventions, deemed so subtle and so wonderful, which the ingenuity of mankind cannot create; no Forest of Fontainebleau, no fairest moonlight landscape but can be reproduced by stage scenery illuminated by the electric light; no waterfall but can be imitated by the proper application of hydraulics, till there is no distinguishing the copy from the original; no mountain crag but painted pasteboard can adequately represent; no flower but well chosen silks and dainty shreds of paper can manufacture the like of!

Yes, there is no denying it, she is in her dotage and has long ago exhausted the simple-minded admiration of the true artist; the time is undoubtedly come when her productions must be superseded by art.

Why, to take the one of all her works which is held to be the most exquisite, the one of all her creations whose beauty is by general consent deemed the most original and most perfect,--woman to wit, have not men, by their own unaided effort, manufactured a living, yet artificial organism that is every whit her match from the point of view of plastic beauty? Does there exist in this world of ours a being, conceived in the joys of fornication and brought to birth amid the pangs of motherhood, the model, the type of which is more dazzlingly, more superbly beautiful than that of the two locomotives lately adopted for service on the Northern Railroad of France?

One, the Crampton, an adorable blonde, shrill-voiced, slender-waisted, with her glittering corset of polished brass, her supple, catlike grace, a fair and fascinating blonde, the perfection of whose charms is almost terrifying when, stiffening her muscles of steel, pouring the sweat of steam down her hot flanks, she sets revolving the puissant circle of her elegant wheels and darts forth a living thing at the head of the fast express or racing seaside special!

The other, the Engerth, a massively built, dark-browed brunette, of harsh, hoarse-toned utterance, with thick-set loins, panoplied in armour-plating of sheet iron, a giantess with dishevelled mane of black eddying smoke, with her six pairs of low, coupled wheels, what overwhelming power when, shaking the very earth, she takes in tow, slowly, deliberately, the ponderous train of goods waggons.

Of a certainty, among women, frail, fair-skinned beauties or majestic, brown-locked charmers, no such consummate types of dainty slimness and of terrifying force are to be found. Without fear of contradiction may we say: man has done, in his province, as well as the God in whom he believes.

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He possessed in accordance with this taste a marvellous collection of tropical plants, produced by the cunning fingers of supreme masters of the craft, following Nature step by step, recreating her, taking the flower from its birth, carrying it to maturity, imitating it to its final decease, observing every shade of its infinite variety, the most fleeting changes of its awakening and its sleep, noting the pose of its petals blown back by the wind or beaten down by the rain, sprinkling on its morning leaves little drops of gum to represent dew, fashioning it according to every season,--in full bloom, when the twigs bend under the weight of sap; or when it lifts its parched stem and ragged corolla as the petals drop away and the leaves fall.

This admirable art had long fascinated him; but now he was dreaming of the construction of another sort of flora.

He had done with artificial flowers aping the true; he wanted natural flowers imitating the false.

Against Nature (A Rebours), by J.-K. Huysmans, 1884

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The title is almost untranslatable. Against the Grain sounds oddly anonymous [also Wrong Way]; Against Nature is closer to the spirit of the book. But since Huysmans explains that his hero, Des Esseintes, occasionally takes his nourishment ‘a rebours’ - through the rear end - when eating bores him, it could equally be translated as Up the Arsehole - a version that would have undoubtedly pleased the author.

The Word Painter of Paris: Joris-Karl Huysmans by Colin Wilson

Related Article:

A Rebours (Against Nature) - Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848 – 1907)

"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