futURIsm SEEds!! FutuRism sEEds!!

For today's blog, I want to focus on how I see futurism as an influence to the emergence and current shape of digital poetry. While reading Nicholls, the Manifestos and the prologues to Futurisms in Poems for the Millennium, the parallels are pretty blatant really. In fact, I have collected so many quotes from these readings that speak to digital poetry that I am having a difficult time choosing which to talk about. As difficult as it may be, I am going to try not to focus too much on the obvious and malignant problems with futurism such as its violent anti-feminism and pro-fascist agendas because they are obvious and discussed in depth by Nicholls.

As the Italian and Russian futurists faced a changing world in the midst of the Industrial Revolution, we in the 20th/21st century are faced with a Digital Revolution. I almost had a meltdown last night because my internet connection was down, and it seems that the South Park Episode in which the whole world turns to chaos after the internet inexplicably disappears, is not as absurd as we think. Our world is the internet, is the computer-the distinction between our online lives and our corporeal ones becomes further blurred every day. The futurists like us, saw their world changing into one that cannot function without collaboration with machines and they, like me, wanted to celebrate that. Nicholls says, "Futurism was the progeny of those northern Italian cities like Genoa, Milan and Turin where modernity was powerfully experienced as the everyday clash of cultural tradition with the forces of industrial innovation", and they "celebrate the very humanity of the new machine age"(Nicholls 85). Nicholls later disusses how the triumph of the mechanical over the natural allows the modern subject to be uncontaminated by tradition. This last point, as we have discovered in our discussions is proving to be all but impossible in regards to digital poetry. We have time and again pointed out that part if not most of the problem is the undefinable and deep traditions carried by the word "poetry" itself, but it seems that digital poetry is not in fact uncontaminated by tradition. It is as we have seen, influenced by futurism, language poetry, cubism etc. Digital poetry does have a tendency to want to separate itself from tradition however, especially in form and concept. "Tradition" has never seen computers, flash, java, googlewave, html, actionscript etc. in poetry before and therefore there seems to be a sense in certain works that what is being done has never been done before, and often, that itself is the piece. The "sound" poems of Jim Andrews for example (it's fresh in my mind), are like Futurist writing,"poems" that question what poetry is, can be and has been traditionally. I "read" Andrews's work and am convinced based on my traditional knowledge of poetry, that it is not in fact poetry but is conceptual digital art. Here I am back again to where I was trying not to go this week. The point is, Futurism was a cleaner categorization than "Digital Poetry" to begin with and therefore had more room to play with the impossible task of ignoring history. The" transformation of language to sound-a new transrational language that undermines or ignores the conventional meanings of a given word, thus allowing its sounds to generate its own range of significations or the invention of a new word based in sound" is a more true step in the direction of making language new. As we all know, language is inherited, is social, and when used can inherently never completely escape history. Honestly, the idea is nifty but I find both print and digital poetry that is only worried about escaping history and doing what has never been done before rather dull. Marinetti's manifesto calls for a "dread of the old and the known. Love of the new, the unexpected." Digital poetry does reject this idea in a sense because code is shared, work is remixed, Adobe programs are used etc.

I disagree as I said with most of Futurism's polarizing claims but I do appreciate its influential importance in the poetry to follow. I think where Futurism and some digital poetry both fail is in their beliefs that an artist can work outside of an uncontaminated tradition. Not to say this is the only way in which they fail but I think that the possibilities of human/machine interaction that do include human (both male and female!) traditions of art and culture (which include) machines hold more possibilities than machine art that enacts identity erasure in what is really thinly veiled self interest. The dehumanizing elements of Futurism and Digital Poetry are obviously problematic unless you are a human to begin with. J. Michael touched on this in his first blog entry and it remains relevant. Women, the poor, minorities, the oppressed are already dehumanized and have no "human" to begin with to lose, and therefore only a machine to gain. I am all for the "renewal of human sensibility brought about by the great discoveries of science", but need human to mean all humans. The possibility of using machines to renew our sensibilities is a Futurist idea that can be applied to and attracts me to digital poetry; but I am interested in how human/machines can, through art, actually give us more humanity, more voice, more culture and not less of it.

More quotes related to DigPo (working list):

"The futurists created a radical form of poesis, the poem as the act of making, in which theory and practice are inextricably tied together. Marinetti's call for the total destruction of syntax."

"Except in struggle there is no more beauty...Poetry must be conceived as a violent attack on unknown forces, to reduce and prostrate them before man." (like the mystery of womanhood?)

"Want to break down the mysterious doors of the impossible, why look back?"

"The book, static companion of the sedentary, the nostalgic, the neutralist, cannot entertain or exalt the new Futurist generations intoxicated with revolutionary and bellicose dynamism."

"One must free the cinema as an expressive medium" (sounds familiar)

"We shall project two or three different visual episodes at the same time, one next to the other."

"Cinematic musical researches (dissonances, harmonies, symphonies of gestures, events, colors, lines, etc."

"A lyricism that seems antipoetic to all our predecessors"

"Futurist destruction of syntax"

"Art is a need to destroy and scatter oneself"

"Completely dehumanize his voice, systematically doing away with every modulation or nuance. Completely dehumanize his face...Metallize, liquefy, vegetalize, petrify, and electrify his voice."

"Futurism limited itself simply to imitating machines, and this capitulation to immedacy was reflected in its practice of words-in-freedom, which exhibited a 'blind faith in raw material, in sensation, in chaotic impressions'" (sounds very familiar)

"The subject no longer counts, or if it counts, it counts for very little." (Cubism)

"It's all roundness, sun, earth, horizons, fullness of intense life, of poetry which can't be put into words" (Cubism)

"The machine provides a model, an 'approximation', and the Russians have no desire to follow the Italian habit of making imitation art'" (Russian Futurism)