Broadcasting Modernism

3. Marinetti, Marconista: The Futurist Manifestos and the Emergence of Wireless Writing

c h a p t e r 3 Marinetti, Marconista The Futurist Manifestos and the Emergence of Wireless Writing Timothy C. Campbell In a history of twentieth-century encounters between literary Modernism and turn-of-the century communication technologies, Marinetti’s Futurist manifestosoccupyasingularrole.ForDouglasKahnandGregoryWhitehead, much of the manifestos’ significance resides in Marinetti’s conception of a wireless imagination (immaginazione senza fili) and the term’s capacity to chart “sonographic resonances” among voice migrations, phonography, and noise in a modern media ecology (x).1 For Jeffrey Schnapp, Marinetti’s wireless imagination, when seen in conjunction with other technologies developed during the second industrial revolution, opens up cognitive possibilities ,making“thinkable”newformsofliteraryexpression(154).Thetermdoes double duty, capturing locally the possibilities one communication technology , wireless telegraphy, offers Modernism while embodying more generally the features of early twentieth-century encounters with technology. Given the privileged position of the manifestos and the wireless imagination for many writings on sound technologies and literary production, it is surprising therefore that the details of Marinetti’s interaction with wireless technology remain unscrutinized. The reasons, having much to do with the conflation of the machine with communication technologies, I have discussed elsewhere.2 Consequently, for all the emphasis on Marinetti and his wireless imagination, the actual parameters of his interaction with wireless telegraphy and later radio remain largely unknown.3 It is precisely to these encounters that I turn in the following pages. 51 51 To situate Marinetti in a larger context of wireless listening and writing, my itinerary opens with an examination of the principal details of wireless telegraphy circa 1912 (a date that marks the publication of Marinetti’s most important statement on the wireless and aesthetics in the “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature”). Recuperating the details of wireless invention in the figure of Guglielmo Marconi, I begin by focusing on the wireless medium itself as well as the principal features of the wireless operator, or marconista, as he was known in Italy. The wireless listener not only demonstrates a remarkable virtuosity in hearing the dots and dashes of Morse Code out of the static but also in writing down these messages. The coupling of writing to an acute sense of hearing underscores the differences with his predecessor, the telegraph operator, and later the radio engineer. This crucial point—that the marconista symbolically captures the dots and dashes moving across the ether—will mark the contours of Marinetti’s engagement with the wireless in the Futurist manifestos. After outlining the technical characteristics of the wireless operator and the nature of the wireless transmission, I turn to the “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature” and its enmeshment in wireless listening and writing. I argue that Marinetti’s literary appropriation of wireless’s practices in words in freedom (parole in libertà) and wireless imagination (immaginazione senza fili) is sparked by his prior transformation into a marconista. Where before Marinetti depends upon an outdated lyrical I (io lirico) for poetry, he now simulates a wireless receiver that converts the sights and sounds of modern life into writing. Turning next to his “Answer to Objections,” his rejoinder to criticism that greeted the publication of the “Technical Manifesto,” I show how Marinetti’s wireless imagination denies its Romantic lineage, becoming instead a dictating machine whose transmissions to the medium Marinetti have little to do with sense. Following this line of inquiry leads me to argue for a rubric of wireless writing in which a number of modern writers work. Wireless Writing: Instructions for Use The details of the invention of wireless telegraphy are well known. Although many contributed to the emergence of wireless telegraphy (Maxwell, Hertz, and Tesla, to name the most decisive), the name of Guglielmo Marconi is most often associated, rightly or wrongly, with its invention.4 Beginning with a series of experiments in 1895, Marconi essentially produced a variation 52 Timothy C. Campbell of the telegraph without the wires (captured in the Italian telegrafia senza fili and the German die drahtlose Telegraphie), which relayed signals tapped at a transmitter to a receiver using Morse code. Aided crucially by James Clerk Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetic radiation published in 1865 and by Heinrich Hertz’s experimental proof of the existence of radio waves in 1888, better known as Hertzian waves, Marconi recognized in these early sound waves the possibility for sending messages (marconigrams, as they were known in the United Kingdom) using Morse code. He did so by utilizing...