How Avant-Gardes End—and Begin: Italian Futurism in Historical Perspective

The article examines the Italian futurist movement for clues about how we ought to understand “avant-gardes.” It argues that the futurists (like subsequent early twentieth-century avant-gardes) should be understood as “aesthetic ironists,” that is, as inventors of new cultural vocabularies aimed both at overcoming anxieties of influence and at bringing a desirable cultural trajectory into view. From this perspective, avant-gardes may be understood to end when their vocabularies are no longer creatively reworked but become static and fixed; or when their vocabularies are actually “betrayed” (contradicted or repudiated by their creators); or when the creators of avant-garde vocabularies cease to be self-determined. The article suggests that Italian futurism did not cease to be an avant-garde during World War I when it was transformed from a myth about regenerative violence into a utopian program for a political party, but that its avant-gardism did cease when it moved decisively into the fascist orbit in 1923. The article then seeks to understand how the futurists might have transformed themselves creatively at that point into an “immanent” rather than an “oppositional” avant-garde. In the final section of the article, this latter contrast is used as a way of exploring the possibility of avant-gardism in the contemporary world.