Futurism, Mass Culture, and Women: The Reshaping of the Artistic Vocation, 1909- 1920

Mass culture as an interlocking complex of technologically sophisticated and increasingly international media and entertainment industries (among others, newspapers, popular magazines, bestsellers, professional sports, film, fashion, advertising, and the like) emerged in Europe and America during the two decades prior to the First World War. ¹ Highly responsive to this development, Futurism played a significant, creative role within mass culture not only in Italy but across Europe, a role that was noted by astute contemporaries and has more recently been explored by scholars such as Claudia Salaris. ² In general, however, Futurism’s interaction with the new mass-culture industries has been slighted in favor of concentration on Futurism’s relations with Fascism (Futurism as proto-Fascism, as a movement within early Fascism, as the shaper of Fascist ideals of war, virility, and misogyny). While no one would dispute Futurism’s importance for the understanding of Fascism, such concentration has relegated Futurism to the status of an independent variable and led to serious distortions. Few would deny, for example, that Futurism strongly apppealed to masculinist ideals and frequently asserted a misogynism later appropriated by Fascism. Yet from its beginning Futurism also held a strong attraction for women anxious to escape the confines of traditional roles, an interest that further increased during World War I as the rapid social changes it imposed created new opportunities and expectations for women. That attraction, I shall argue, may have much to do with Futurism’s involvement with mass culture, a conjunction that (despite increasing recognition that mass culture was gendered as feminine from its inception) has been little explored and that seriously complicates our current understanding of Futurism’s gender politics. ³ Similarly, stress on Futurism’s relations with Fascism has led to emphasis on their common rhetoric, an idiom characterized by its affiliations with a new, non-static, non-traditional, “modernist” type of nationalism. ⁴ Yet such rhetoric was peripheral to Futurism’s main thrust, except during the nine months prior to Italy’s entry into the war in May 1915.

More fundamental to its prewar history were its erotic and mass-entertainment dimensions. Despite its nationalist rhetoric, Futurism was internationalist in practice, since it understood itself as part of an emerging global culture. ⁵ To claim that Futurism was enmeshed in the emergence of mass culture and yet also modernist may seem contradictory. But, as scholarship has increasingly called attention to the divergences among European modernisms and as their connections with capitalism and consumerism have been more fully appreciated, it has become apparent that the old paradigm of “modernism vs. the culture industry” will no longer do. ⁶ My primary aims in this paper are to clarify the nature of Futurism’s relations with both modernism and mass culture, to consider some of the implications this has for our understanding of Futurism and gender, and to show how F. T. Marinetti and other Futurists understood the reshaping of the artistic vocation in the face of a mass society of consumerism.

1. Modernism, Mass Culture, and Futurism

As Andreas Huyssen argued in his pathbreaking work of the 1980s, the notion that modernism and mass culture arose in hostile opposition to one another has proven “amazingly resilient,” in part owing to its close association with two canonical theories of modernism, those of Theodor Adorno and Clement Greenberg. ⁷ In this context, modernism refers to intellectual efforts to secure the work of art as an autonomous realm in the Kantian sense by stressing self-referential, ironic, and experimental means and by eschewing not only a moral role for art but even a mimetic or representational one. While such an art becomes possible historically only with the separation of art from its traditional moorings in religion and the patronage system, and their replacement by a secularized art market, its practitioners resolutely resist any “contamination” by mass culture and entertainment.

Although Huyssen offered some qualification to the Adorno-Greenberg model, he accepted the “great divide” between “high” modernism and “low” mass culture as an accurate historical description of the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century world. Where...