Autumn 1997
Volume 24, Number 1

This essay is concerned with how certain materials--associated not with the decadent materiality of ruins, languorous bodies, and exotic landscapes but instead with the clean, agitated, intensified materiality befitting a new age of electricity and steel--became identified with modern forms of embodiment. It approaches this global tale from the standpoint of a local, differentiated story: that of the symbolic investments made by a generation of Italian designers, architects, artists, writers, industrialists, and engineers in artificial textiles. Like tempered glass, reinforced concrete, aluminum, stainless steel, and plastics, artificial textiles belong to a privileged family of modern materials. "Privileged" because theirs is a happy, often utopistic, even miraculous materiality, not unlike a secularized version of the Christian theology of glorified bodies according to which the chains that bind matter and human bodies to the corrosive effects of time are shed through the activation of a higher potentiality that was thought to lie dormant within the material world (but was nonetheless imagined as an integral component of it): that inner agitation and drive towards "greater ardor, greater movement, a greater subdivision of itself" sung in Filippo Tommasso Marinetti's "Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature" [1912].1 My essay's aim is to apply some pressure to the timeworn formulas that identify modernity with secularization and modern architectures and design practices with a functionalism or rationalism stripped of myth or metaphysical aspirations. In probing these mythologies and aspirations, I set out to track the traffic between technical and nontechnical discourses contemporary to futurism: in the present case study, between a technicist poetics with hypermimetic ambitions and a set of industrial practices saturated with and motivated by symbolic and social meanings. The spirit, I try to suggest, could not easily be buried in an era of diminished or absent belief in the supernatural. Rather, poets, designers, architects, industrialists, and engineers regularly collaborated to relocate the spiritual within new technologies and the materials with which they were affiliated, all of which were felt to offer artificial paradises constructed from the very building blocks of nature, man-made forms of levity and levitation that compensated for deeper losses: of community, tradition, and a stable sense of social identity and place.

1. The full passage reads: "Man tends to soil matter with his youthful joy or old pain, matter which possesses an admirably sustained drive towards greater ardor, greater movement, a greater subdivision of itself. Matter is neither sad nor happy. Its essence is courage, willpower, absolute force" (F.T. Marinetti, "Manifesto tecnico della letteratura futurista," Teoria e invenzione futurista, ed. Luciano De Maria [Milan, 1983], pp. 51-52).

Jeffrey T. Schnapp is professor of Italian and comparative literature at Stanford University. The author of The Transfiguration of History at the Center of Dante's Paradise and Staging Fascism: 18 BL and the Theater of Masses for Masses, he is currently working on a study of the anthropology of speed from eighteenth-century coaching to 1960's pop art, entitled Crash.