“Time and Space died yesterday.” Marinetti’s eighth postulate in his Manifesto. Not exactly true, or if it was true at the time, it is no longer true. For futurists, Time is dead because “We already live in the absolute, because we have created eternal, omnipresent speed.” And that was written in a time when mail was a letter, not a binary coding. The speed we have witnessed and experienced since Marinetti wrote this manifesto is exponentially more than what they had experienced. However, our great speed, and the conquering of outer space (kinda), has revealed that the speed of our “life” is far from “absolute.” The material limits we have discovered have reigned in the infinity perspective that the futurists seem to revel in. Even while digital poetics has opened up new experiences of immediate time and space (works can be viewed simultaneously from anywhere at anytime), the field has become very aware of its own limitations. A new quantum technology is being put into iPods because there just isn’t the space to add anymore parts that aren’t on the atomic scale. Digital artists know operate in the limits of what a program can do, even if they don’t know all it can do. Alan Sondheim’s programming poetry is taking programs and pushing them to their limits to see what happens. But he always finds a limit.
It is interesting that the futurists were invested in such boldly material typography but still thought the “absolute” was essential. Apollinaire, I gathered from the reading, thought the same thing. There seemed to be a real cognitive dissonance with the futurists, where they tried to force a perception of the world without fully investing themselves in the consequences. Their wanting to “destroy…feminism” is their retaliation against being “human”, a title that men claimed in the previous centuries. Essentially, they are saying men are now machines, and women are now human. Our proof is that we say so. Shucking the material of the person, they turn to the material of the letter and got nuts with it. Maybe in this sense, women are the writings of men, a proposition with which I just bet Kelly will have a problem.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just bet.
ReplyDeleteBut it's a proposition that is historically true, given the limited role women have played as creators of literature--rather*, they're it's fractured objects, reduced to lips, cheeks and whatever other pretty part the poet in question felt like fetishizing at the time. The way Marinetti puts it, women are denied a full part of humanity until humanity is no longer the goal. Then women can have the leavings, but not a part of the good stuff. I guess that my problem with the futurists is that they're still writing women and while there is small mention of women's presence in the text, it's not explored. If the focus is on clean, hygenic self-birth, I want to know how women achieve that as well and this is something that's just not addressed.
*I accidentally typed "father" there my first time around, which perhaps betrays just how flustered I'm feeling with this. Also, it probably betrays the fact that I have issues. Oh! Oh.
This is obvious I think but how can humanity not be the goal?! Marinetti was a nutcase. When you've always had your 'humanity' (men), then obviously moving on to the next goal makes sense. I see humanity as still being a goal for women at least and we therefore are unable to dispose of it to become more human-we had nothing to dispose of to begin with.
ReplyDeleteBirth is wet, bloody, painful and messy like war.
The ipod trivia is fascinating. The future is awesome, futurism is not so awesome(land).