In its celebration of chaos and dynamism, Italian Futurism provided a definitive answer to the age-old question of mind versus body. In their performance, their rhetoric, and even their cooking and fashion, the Futurists resolutely declared that mind and matter were inextricably linked. The Futurists believed that only through assaulting the senses could the mind truly be awakened – battered by chaos and confusion, the mind and body would be forced to take action. They also announced a ban on pasta in Italian cooking, on the grounds that it made the body sluggish and thus dragged down the mind. Constant disorder and movement were the basis of elasticity, one of their most prized virtues – through movement they believed they could transcend static conceptions of time. They also supported the intuitive rather than the intellectual, and constructed the self as the communal “we”, rather than the individual “I”. Finally, consciousness was born out of movement – a concept heavily entwined with ideas of the soul, and the nature of the machine.

Chaos and dynamism is the core of the Futurist movement; in the revolutionary Founding and Manifesto of Futurism, Marinetti proclaims, “We intend to exalt aggressive action, a feverish insomnia, the racer’s stride, the mortal leap, the punch and the slap… Poetry must be conceived as a violent attack on unknown forces, to reduce and prostrate them before man.¹” In the Manifesto he ridicules the endless, ancient mass of “passéists”, the academics and antiquarians who are tied down by the weight of history and classical tradition. The Futurist movement was born as a backlash against tradition – it represented energetic youth and the violent urge to destroy, to bring about chaos. “Reality vibrates around us, hitting us with burst of fragments with events amongst them, embedded one within the other, confused, entangled, chaotic,²” the Futurists wrote. Their vision of the world was not one locked into a static, logical development from past to present, but a constantly shifting, simultaneous existence. Accordingly, a simultaneous existence meant being absolutely present in the body – thus their assertion that the workings of the mind are tied directly to the senses.

Futurist performance provides a direct example of this concept – in the Synthetic Futurist Manifesto, the Futurists announce that: “The Futurist theatre will be able to excite its audience, that is make it forget the monotony of daily life, by sweeping it through a labyrinth of sensations imprinted on the most exacerbated originality and combined in unpredictable ways.³” They wanted to create a reality that attacked the audience and forced them to action, and the idea was not just rhetoric – it took concrete form in many of their plays and performances. There were a series of evening presentations in which Futurists read their manifestos that quickly disintegrated into outright brawls; as Canguilla recounts of one winter evening in Florence: “The showers of potatoes, oranges, and bunches of fennel became infernal… I see Russolo again with saliva running from his mouth; I hear Carrà roaring, ‘Throw an idea instead of potatoes, idiots!’⁴” He describes Marinetti spotted with tomato juice and the artists using their paintings as shields, “and the performance came to a premature end when the actors themselves began to hurl vegetables and fruit back at the audience.⁵”  Such a noisy, violent event was the essence of what the Futurists were striving for – a way to spur the people to action.

Another thing the Futurists believed to be dragging the spirit of the Italian people down was pasta. Marinetti launched a incendiary campaign against pasta, on the grounds that its thickness and starchy consistency turned its consumers into useless, lethargic pigs. “Swallowed down the way it is, spaghetti poisons us and weighs us down… We have no more easy syllables or ready images. Our thoughts wind around each other, get mixed up and tangled like the vermicelli we’ve taken in…Rhymes are fatuous, witticisms cretinous, reasoning impossible, when tremors of the bowels disturb them.⁶” The physical organs are directly linked to the mind and the thoughts within. Sluggishness of the stomach means sluggishness of the brain; bodily senses are linked to the strength of the mind. As a columnist for Gazzetta del Popolo wrote, “It’s certainly true we think dream and act according to what we eat and drink… It seems the preoccupation of those who cook is to stuff… while it ought to be to prepare… food which awakens the imagination with rural panoramas, scents of tropical gardens and which induces dreams without resort to alcoholic beverages.⁷” Food even extends to the mysterious power of dreams, affecting the subconscious as well as the conscious mind.

Marinetti agreed with the columnist that a new order of food was called for, and set about creating a Futurist form of cooking. The banquets thus created were a multisensory experience involving scents, music, and other sounds, as well as the food – for one dish, the right hand was given a strip of sandpaper, velvet, and silk to finger, while eating with the left. During the dish, waiters went around and sprayed cold scented water on the diners’ heads. The Futurist banquets also continued the idea of assaulting the senses. To jolt the diner, the dishes often were strange combinations such as beef and cherry liqueur soup, or grapes and figs stuffed with anchovies. In Intuitive Antipasto, the first dish of one Futurist banquet, there were little papers with Futurist messages hidden inside stuffed olives. Dining was by no means a safe or pleasant experience – one attendee reports that, “By this time many of the diners had already put their digestive systems into a not quite normal condition, so they could not really be blamed for being unable to repress an instinctive gesture of terror when the tray carrying the ‘conclusive foods’ appeared.⁸” The nature of the food made one dish which consisted mostly of bread aeroplanes seem heavenly: “this dish was among the most appreciated, being one which offered many of the guests the chance to still their hunger with bread which had never before appeared to be such a divine and precious food.⁹” Normally bread is no extraordinary food, but in the context of a Futurist banquet, it was an amazing delight – through agitation, the diners had been forced to realize the value of something they usually took for granted.

Marinetti’s novel The Steel Alcove discusses the reaction of certain opponents to his radical new style of cooking. One guest at his fictional banquet, a doctor, has marked unenthusiasm for the new types of courses, and Marinetti’s character pursues him relentlessly. “And you, dear doctor, don’t forget that the highest and most precious virtue is elasticity,” he chides him. “How could you cure, without elasticity, swollen glands, corns, syphilis, ear infections or stop some of our superiors going soft?” The chaotic approach of futuristic cooking thus had a positive medical effect, in developing physiological flexibility.  The idea actually has solid scientific roots – a 1989 study on the patterns of the heart reveals that, “Chaos provides the body with the flexibility to respond to various stimuli.¹⁰” It continues: “A healthy physiological system has a certain amount of innate variability, and a loss of this variability – a transition to a less complicated, more ordered state – signals an impaired system.¹¹” A certain amount of chaos is healthy – if the rhythms of the heart become too orderly, it is a sign of sickness. Even the structure of the heart, with its branching nerve system, is essentially chaotic. “Configurations like this are called fractal structures, and the entire heart (as well as other parts of the body, such as the lungs and circulatory system) seems to be fractal in design.¹²” Fractals are an integral part of chaos theory; they are repeating patterns that seem to construct random sequences. Marinetti’s elasticity is medically valid for the body, which adds credibility to his idea of the elastic mind.

Futurist fashion also put forth a brief note on the subject of mind versus matter – although typically the Futurists dressed in sober black suits, they did invent the anti-neutralist suit. “The colorful, asymmetrical, comfortable suit was intended to transform men’s apparel into a performative, proselytistic stimulant, producing an activistic, agonistic, nationalistic ‘mood’ and behavior.¹³” Through a mode of clothing, the Futurists hoped to effect change in attitude and lifestyle. “The ‘antineutral suit’ is not merely an artistic creation… rather, it is a means for fashioning a new self and world.¹⁴” Something as simple and external as clothing could make an impression on a fundamental identity.

Fundamental identity for the Futurists was also intimately involved with the concepts of speed and time. Einstein had discovered special relativity only a few years before the Futurists launched their movement, and the influence of his theories is evident in the Futurist Manifesto. “Time and Space died yesterday,” that document proclaims. “We already live in the absolute, because we have created eternal, omnipresent speed.¹⁵” Special relativity states that all objects perpetually move at the speed of light, the sum of their movement through all four dimensions – three space, one time. Usually all of the movement goes into time; however, once an object starts moving, it takes up speed in the three spatial dimensions, and goes slower in time – if it reached the speed of light in the spatial dimensions, it would stand still in the temporal dimension. The more speed something attains, the closer one would be to an absolute state frozen within time, as the Futurists suggest.

Futurist cooking reflects the concept that less weight equals more speed. “Since everything in modern civilization tends toward elimination of weight, and increased speed, the cooking of the future must conform to the ends of evolution,¹⁶” Marinetti states. He also refers to minimal meals as helping to achieve a ‘state of grace’, as if transcending static boundaries is almost a religious experience. Futurist performance addresses more directly the continuity of time itself. In Sempronio’s Lunch, a Futurist play, the title character goes from infant to old man over five scenes, compressing decades each time, yet continues to eat the same meal throughout, representing a sort of simultaneity of time. It seems illogical according to the careful parameters of measured time, but “the time of science is a mathematical conception, symbolized as a unit of measure by clocks and chronometers… The result is an impersonal, practical conception of time, totally unlike our individual, felt experience of time as an indivisible flux.¹⁷” The seeming paradox of events happening at once or close on each other’s heels is a better representative of intuitive time. In addition, with dynamism of movement, everything has a duration through time, a duration observed and recorded by some sort of mind. Thus matter cannot exist in its full four dimensions without the presence of a mind; “matter devoid of mind would be homogenous and discontinuous.¹⁸” By Futurist ideals mind is dependent on matter; now we see also that matter is dependent on mind. Without a point of perception, movement is only expressed through probability waves – only when observed do particles choose their path of motion. Matter requires a consciousness to realize it.

In the concrete connection between matter and mind, Futurism was a strong proponent of intuition as opposed to intellect. Intellect and rationality, the realm of Descartes with his mind-body duality, were scoffed at by Futurists. “One of the main things that attracted Marinetti to the variety theater was its basically alogical nature…It does not tell a story or represent anything. It tends to be rather than to refer…¹⁹” Occasionally Futurist plays would contain representations, such as Lady Death in Parallelepiped, but they offered no intellectual explanation or deep underlying allegory. The Futurists preferred to live in the sensory experience rather than detach themselves to pick at something analytically. “The Futurists “are ‘living life in its dynamic conception’; they enter an object’s ‘interior’ and experience its living dynamism through ‘intuition.’ By contrast, academic methods are declared to be ‘intellectual’, the result of ‘static, nostalgic emotions’.²⁰” Intellect attempts to remain exclusively in the realm of logic, but intuition is an inclusive experience which encompasses mind and matter. “Instead of copying nature ‘in its exterior or transitory aspects’ artists should enter into nature to ‘live in its forces’, thereby reclaiming ‘the drama of forces and movement’.²¹” Becoming nature is the only way to understand its dynamism and its forces of compulsion.

In becoming part of nature, Futurists gave up the idea of a conscious “I” in favor of the communal “we”. The Manifesto itself begins with the “we”, forfeiting an individual self for the self of the whole. “These images do not point toward the self; they reflect neither inner struggle nor the contours of an individual consciousness.²²” The Futurist movement at first glance seems to be centered around the ego, both in terms of arrogance and the psychological term denoting the self. However, upon examination, a sense of the power of the community emerges. One of Futurism’s main ideals was to raise up Italy, and its goal was to achieve this through the people. In Futurist performance in particular, the lines between audience and actors were often blurred. In his writings in praise of variety theater, Marinetti applauded the way “its spectators actively responded during the performance with indications of approval or disdain… They yelled comments and sang along with the music. There was an energetic exchange between performers and spectators.²³” Theater in this sense was a living art, an active exchange of energies. Futurist plays took this same impetus and created plays such as Lights, where the actors run through the audience screaming, “Lights! Lights!” until the audience is yelling for lights as well. “The obsession for light must be provoked – so that it becomes wild, crazy – by various actors scattered in the auditorium, who excite the spectators and encourage their shouting.²⁴” Another form of blurring the actor-audience boundary was conceived in the Futurist play From the Window, in which the audience member is supposed to enter a form of self-hypnotism. “To understand the drama, all the spectators, the protagonist characters, who are here must place themselves, by self-hypnotism, in the place of a paralyzed person who is unable to move or speak.” They then hypnotized themselves to believe the male actor was their father and the female their sister, and were forced to watch as the two collided and fell off a wall to their death. The spectator becomes not only physically but emotionally involved in the performance, binding the “we” together into one specific experience. When the whole community believes that the man is their father and the woman their sister, the “we” becomes a solid, definite identity, instead of a mingling of many different “I”s.

The intuitive process of giving up the “I” to become nature has roots in the writings of the French philosopher Henri Bergson. Bergson referred to an ‘absolute knowledge’ of an object, which could be obtained only by entering the object and living through it. “To speak of absolute knowledge ‘means that I attribute to the mobile an inner being, and, as it were, states of soul; it also means that I am in harmony with those states and enter into them by an effort of imagination.’²⁵” Bergson equates the inner states of an object to its soul; since inner states are based on shifts in dynamism, in a way he is suggesting that dynamics creates soul. He also declared that mind and matter were a continuum – mind the highest state of matter, matter the lowest state of mind. Boccioni links this more concretely; “in Boccioni’s words, absolute motion stands for ‘the plastic potential that the object carries in itself’… In Boccioni’s metaphysical vision, matter, as the lowest state of mind, possesses spirit and the potential for dynamism.²⁶” Absolute knowledge of an object, Boccioni is saying, is about potential energy, the potential for movement. Through movement, an object becomes a being. An example would be Marinetti’s play They Are Coming, where the climax is the chairs exiting the room. The inanimate becomes animate; objects become characters through movement.

This transformation of objects into beings has clear echoes in the Futurists’ love of the machine. Machines are, essentially, objects that move, and the Futurists equate their movement with life. Marinetti refers to his automobile in the Manifesto as “my beautiful shark”, and speaks of it reviving, springing again to life. The Futurists sought to become the machine, to become quick, electric, and efficient. For instance, in the Futurist cookbook the recipe for Chickenfiat instructs that ballbearings of mild steel be placed in a cavity, cooked, and when the flesh has absorbed the flavor of steel, to serve²⁷. In eating steel, the Futurists are eating machine, and with the absorption into their digestive system, they become part machine. In Futurist performance there are also examples of man becoming machine; “each of the twelve performers in Printing Press became part of a machine, moving rhythmically and repeating a particular sound: ‘lalalala’, ‘ftftftft,’ ‘riorioriorio’ and so forth.²⁸” The rhythms of the machine are what make it life. In dynamism, they become beings, not just static objects. In dynamism, they have souls.

The film interpretation of Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot presents a fascinating version of the theory of the ghost in the machine. Instead of the philosophical implications of a mind-body duality, the character of the scientist addresses the idea of chaotic behavior in machines. “There have always been ghosts in the machine,” he says. “Random segments of code that have grouped together to form unexpected protocols. Unanticipated, these free radicals engender questions of free will, creativity, and even the nature of what we call the soul.” Machines are often considered orderly structures, but they are quite the opposite because of their dynamism and speed. Speed is the result of energy, energy is heat, and heat is chaos – the jittering fury of particles against each other, just like the quantum jittering of energy levels. The hotter and faster a system is, the more disordered it is – thus the chaos that can result from machine. In that chaos, the scientist in I, Robot is saying, unexpected patterns emerge. Some would say that they are the evidence of a soul – or perhaps the soul is the result of these unexpected patterns. Either way, the soul exists in chaos and dynamism.

Soul, mind, and body – all three are linked in the Futurist conception of the world. The thoughts are directly influenced by input from the senses, whether it be the strange taste of anchovies and figs or the loud clanging of Futurist noise; mind shifts itself in response to sensations from matter. To match that, dynamics do not exist without a point of perception, or a mind, and since the only real matter is that which exists dynamically in all four dimensions, mind is required for matter to exist. The Futurists aimed for the absolute and eternal through speed and through the attainment of a sense of self as the communal “we”, rather than the individual “I”. Intuition, rather than intellect, was required to truly experience the dynamism of the “we”. In fact, all self was defined through dynamism – through motion life came into being, thus machines were also forms of being. The Futurists created a sweeping world of machine, chaos, violent sensation, and dynamism: an art movement unified and inspired by science.

² Kirby, Michael. Futurist Performance. p. 43.

³ Kirby. p. 201.

⁴ Kirby, 14.

⁵ Kirby, 16.

⁶ Marinetti, F. T. Futurist Cookbook. 46.

⁷ Marinetti, 46.

⁸ Marinetti. Cookbook. p. 92.

⁹ Marinetti. Cookbook. p. 92.

¹⁰ Pool, Robert. “Is it Healthy to be Chaotic?” p. 604.

¹¹ Pool. p. 604.

¹² Pool. p. 605.

¹³ Blum, Cinzia Sartini. “The Futurist Refashioning of the Universe.” p. 89.

¹⁴ Blum. p. 97.

¹⁵ Marinetti. Founding and Manifesto.

¹⁶ Marinetti. Cookbook.

¹⁷ Antliff, Mark. The Fourth Dimension: A Politicized Space. p. 722.

¹⁸ Antliff. p. 723.

¹⁹ Kirby. p. 22.

²⁰ Antliff. p. 721.

²¹ Antliff. p. 721.

²² Blum. p. 87.

²³ Kirby. p. 23.

²⁴ Kirby, 254.

²⁵ Antliff, 722.

²⁶ Antliff, 724.

²⁷ Marinetti, Cookbook. 78.

²⁸ Kirby, 62.

Sources

Antliff, Mark. “The Fourth Dimension and Futurism: A Politicized Space.” The Art Bulletin, Vol. 82, No. 4. (Dec, 2000), pp. 720-733. <www.jstor.org>

Blum, Cinzia Sartini. “The Futurist Refashioning of the Universe.” South Central Review, Vol. 13, No. 2/3, Futurism and the Avant-Garde. (Summer – Autumn, 1996), pp. 82-104. <www.jstor.org>

Kirby, Michael. Futurist Performance. PAJ Publications. (New York, 1986)

Marinetti, F. T. “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism.” Futurism. <www.unknown.nu/futurism/manifesto.html> (Accessed Apr. 23, 2007.)

Marinetti, F.T. Suzanne Brill, trans. The Futurist Cookbook. Bedford Arts. (San Francisco, 1989.)

Perloff, Marjorie. The Futurist Moment. The University of Chicago Press. (Chicago, 1986)

Pool, Robert. “Is It Healthy to Be Chaotic?” Science, New Series, Vol. 243, No. 4891. (Feb. 3, 1989), pp. 604-607. <www.jstor.org>