Crash (Speed as Engine of Individuation)

Abstract

Crash (Speed as Engine of Individuation) Jeffrey T. Schnapp (bio) Today we live affirmatively in our automotive moments, moments in which the driver looms as king, as sovereign, as tyrant. João do Rio, “A era do auotmovel,” Vida vertiginosa (Paris, Rio de Janeiro: H. Garnier, 1911), 4. At the wheel, many an American tends to transform himself into a god. William Phelps Eno,, The Motor-Vehicle Driver: His Nature and Improvement (Saugatuck, CT: The Eno Foundation for Highway Trafic Patrol, 1949), 4. 1 Every culture has its founding myths, and a culture like our own, built upon the worship of technics and science, is no exception to the rule. 1 If many of its inaugural texts and artifacts proudly proclaim their resistance to the blandishments of mythology in the name of a brave new post-mythological world, others (perhaps with greater honesty and lucidity) identify this very stance as modernity’s founding myth. For them, the dream of overcoming all prior mythologies constitutes a revolutionary myth. It promises access to a technicist Olympus through not only an overcoming of history, but also the advent of a heroic new humankind emancipated from the shackles of temporality. Such a text is the 1909 “Foundation and Manifesto of [End Page 1] Futurism”: a document which, for all its bombast and bathos, rightly deserves the key place that it was long ago assigned in accounts of the birth of cultural modernism. The manifesto opens with a clash between objects that is also an intergenerational clash. It pits copper mosque lamps perforated with stars against their own “electric hearts”: light bulbs whose brilliance they constrain; light bulbs fighting to break out. The copper mosque lamps stand in for a larger inventory of objects—plates, cabinets, oriental carpets—inherited by the manifesto’s author, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, from his father. Objects that bear witness to the poet’s upbringing in Alexandria, Egypt, but that, in so doing, crystallize everything that the manifesto subsequently identifies with the term passéism: ancestral indolence; the celebration of dead or moribund things; world-weariness; a taste for the precious, the arcane, and the exotic; repugnance for the present. This past-centered, contemplative paternal world, responsible for the decor of the poet’s apartment on Milan’s Via Senato, is about to be left behind by the manifesto’s second paragraph. The catalyst for its abandonment is the flow of traffic. A passing trolley and a roaring automobile drive Marinetti and his young friends out into the streets, where, bathing in the stark, artificial glare of the new public sphere, they can proclaim the overcoming of “mythology” thanks to the appearance of two new modes of transportation: automobiles (“we are on the verge of experiencing the birth of the Centaur”) and airplanes (“soon we will see the first Angels fly!”). 2 Mythology is overcome inasmuch as, in Marinetti’s view and in that of his era, technology actualizes what was once only a poetic dream or a theological fiction. It gives rise to “living” machines that are also machines for living: machines that, because endowed with powers of agency, intuition, and moral autonomy, are capable of serving as prosthetic enhancements of human bodies and psyches. Two body/ machine complexes are mentioned in the passages just cited: the driver/automobile complex figured by the Centaur and the pilot/airplane complex figured by the Angel. The first structures the central episode of the 1909 manifesto: the automotive flight into the outskirts of the city culminating with a crash cast as the actual scene of Futurism’s birth. 3 It is this drive and accident, and the transformative impact ascribed to it that constitute my springboard for the following reflections. Before the accident, Marinetti appears bound to a shadowy fin-de-siècle world of mosque lamps and oriental carpets; after his rebirth in the “good factory muck [with its] impasto of metallic shavings, useless sweats, and celestial shards,” he emerges as the new metallic man with a pulsing light-bulb heart: the prophet of a gospel addressed to all the living men on the earth whose points include “singing the love of danger,” “exalting aggressive movement, feverish insomnia, the sprint, the mortal...