Metallized Flesh: Futurism and the Masculine Body

I feel the matter of my heart being transformed, metallized, in an optimism of steel.

F. T. Marinetti, The Steel Alcove ¹

Metal is neither a thing nor an organism, but a body without organs.

G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, Nomadology ²

Transgressive representations of the body—envisaged as means of realizing corporeal fantasies, enacting empathetic identifications (or refusing them), as well as reimagining the phenomenological relation of self and world—appear with startling frequency in the works of many avant-garde artists at the turn of the last century. One thinks of the impossible profusion of figures that populate Rodin’s Gates of Hell, many of them multiples without predetermined meaning, Cézanne’s late bathers with their occasionally indeterminate gender and unfixing of somatic boundaries, Matisse’s arcadian fantasies, or Picasso’s protocubist and cubist nudes, in which the signifiers of gender are at times withheld or rendered ambiguous, and in which the body’s fluctuating tactile presence is linked to that of the material substratum of the canvas. While central to the prewar period, the body reconfigured though the lens of desire seems progressively absent or displaced in avant-garde art after war; it seems to wither in an age dominated by technological enthusiasms and dada irony, purist abstraction, and nostalgic returns of normative, classicizing archetypes. Of course there are exceptions; but the appeal to empathetic bodily sensation and gesture, which retains at least the memory of anatomical and psychic experience, when it survives, does so in greatly altered forms.

By casting a retrospective gaze onto one particular moment in the representation of the body, that of Italian Futurism, I hope to elucidate the psychic tensions and aporias that generated its appearance and eventual (willed) disappearance. For the signs of faltering confidence in the organic realization of somatic desire are already at work in Futurist images and descriptions of the body—especially the male body. The Futurist ideal of masculinity, best exemplified by the literary works and manifestos of F. T. Marinetti and the pictorial and sculptural works of Umberto Boccioni, differs, of course, from that of its historical counterparts in other countries. Yet many of the issues raised were of vital concern to artists and poets elsewhere: How best to affirm virility while becoming free of the debilitating effects of desire? How to imagine the body’s boundaries—as both permeable, shifting, and open to fusion with the environment, and as rigid, closed, and resistant to penetration? How to hold in solution a narcissistic longing for expansion of the ego and fantasies of omnipotence, with their seeming negation, a longing to overcome subject/object distinctions in a corporeal fusion with matter/mother? How to respond to the body’s temporality, its inevitable mortality, and reversion to (mere) matter? And finally, how to create (and believe in) an immortal man/machine hybrid, a body always already posited in the future tense?

In his literary manifestos of 1912, 1913, and 1914, Marinetti repeatedly advocated the death of the literary “I” or authorial self, that “obsessive I that up to now the poets have described, sung, analysed, and vomited up.” ³ Rather than project human emotions and preoccupations onto nature, poets were to express the life of matter in its molecular composition and movement, to intuit “its different governing impulses, its forces of compression, dilation, cohesion, and disaggregation, its crowds of massed molecules and whirling electrons” (“TM,” 87). ⁴ Marinetti’s emphasis on the “life” of matter was intended to obliterate traditional distinctions between the organic and the inorganic, between sentient beings and the physical and mechanical world. He sought, in poetry but also in art and in politics, to open a new field in which a chiasmic exchange of properties and attributes might occur. The Futurist male, “multiplied” by the machine, would exemplify a new superhuman hybrid adapted to the demands of speed and violence. Sportsman, aviator, or warrior, he would be capable of astounding feats of physical prowess. His inner consciousness, modeled on the running motor, would be emptied of all that was private, sentimental, and nostalgic—of all that in 1913...