Some Notes on Perloff’s Marinetti (Open Letter to Open Space)
Hi, Suzanne,
Truly enjoyed the Majorie Perloff lecture last night and have been thinking a lot about it. Since time ran out rather quickly on the Q&A last night, I thought to write down some of my impressions and lingering questions. Maybe they’d be appropriate for the blog? Or just for you if you prefer.

I’ve always found Perloff quite tremendous at stating (and staging) complicated ideas & histories with enough starkness to get one’s mind rolling, while still preserving the requisite level of nuance and accuracy. It’s clear that, on the rhetorical level, she has some value for both sides of that “precision and violence” formula she talked about as Marinetti’s definition of a “true” manifesto. Hence it’s maybe not surprising that I’ve mostly been thinking about some of the positions she took that I’m unsettled by. This is all very much in the overall context of being delighted by the lecture, especially the explication of what one could maybe call Marinetti’s “politics of syntax,” her stress on understanding the literal and social context of that first manifesto as it appeared in Le Figaro, the attention on that fabulous G. Stein response in her Marry Nettie poem, the great analysis & slides of the typographic experimentations, etc. & etc.

If there had been time to speak up afterwards, first I would have wanted to at least register my sense that her apology for Marinetti’s militarism was far deeper and more persuasive to me than her apology for the sexism of his “scorn for women.” Hopefully it was mostly because she was just running out of time.

I thought she made a good case, regarding the militarism, for keeping it in the context of a pre-WWI sensibility, and also for considering his sense of “war” as more akin to revolution and resistance to the middle class. And when she talked about the Russian futurists & how wonderful it was that they avoided M’s degree of militaristic rhetoric (though surely Mayakovsky is an exception?), she made it clear that she wasn’t trying to whitewash Marinetti’s disturbing aggressions, but accepted them as thorny. Yet, in the case of the misogyny, I was surprised how swiftly her lecture hurried over it, and how sure she seems that there’s simply no problem there. Her response to Roselee Goldberg on the Open Space blog on the topic goes much further into detail, thankfully. But even granting the other primary sources she brings forward, it’s quite hard for me to read M’s flat statement in the manifesto (“we want to glorify…scorn for women,” which unlike pretty much everything else in the manifesto stands there without any mitigating or modifying phrases) as something other than, at the very least, a very intense patriarchal despotism.

This is connected to the disagreement I have with one of the broadest through-lines in Perloff’s talk. I don’t disagree with her idea, which was a major thrust in the lecture, that Marinetti’s manifestos and poetic persona were “theatrical” (or, as Joanna Drucker put it, an “intervention in media”) but I have trouble understanding what that’s supposed to change or indicate in terms of these other debates. Perloff seems quite willing to be Marinetti’s apologist in a variety of ways, but this can lead to the easy assumption that she believes that Marinetti’s theatricality somehow helps clear his name. That’s not how I see theatricality: even though I think ethical questions can and do operate differently theatrical space than in non-theatrical space, that’s not the same as saying it’s a space outside ethical relevance. If you want to illustrate this hyperbolically, you could note that Hitler and Ghandi were both equally skilled at intervening in media, so it has to be a matter of the content, intent, purposes, or at least *something* specific to the given intervention. Otherwise how can you distinguish between, say, the WWF’s Wrestlemania, which has as much popularity as Marinetti in his day, uses violence and theatricality as effectively as M., and also appeals to the same socio-economic class as Marinetti’s spectacles. What makes one a theatrical intervention in media and the other a sad and complicit circus? To me, that’s an absorbing question to try to answer, and whenever Perloff looked at the works there was the shape of an answer there.

As a whole, even though it’s very stimulating and interesting to watch, I suppose I question Perloff’s strategy of trying to absolve Marinetti rather than, say, just allowing at the outset that he’s got unsalvageable views about aggression and gender. For me, those views don’t make much difference in terms of reading him, valuing large parts of him, studying him, even celebrating him. In fact I see the recognition of Marinetti’s sexism and militarism, i.e. the attempt to value his ideas and work while simultaneously admitting his regular political fatheadedness, as an essential acknowledgement of the double-edged sword of media manipulation of all sorts. Throughout the lecture and the Q&A, the fact that Marinetti’s provocations “worked,” i.e. created popular interest (especially because they reached the working class) seemed to be almost self-justifying, but I really question that assumption. If it’s just about getting the attention of working class people, lots of things work. But what is the relationship between gaining that attention and then, when and if you get that attention, turning it into some kind of increase in the awareness among the working poor of their real social position, and their possibilities for practical resistance or change. Massive & difficult question there, not at all reducible to crude or apparent answers I think, but worth asking and contrasting.