Spring 2002
Volume 28, Number 3

Excerpt from
Folla/Follia: Futurism and the Crowd
by Christine Poggi

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Crowds are somewhat like the sphinx of ancient fable: it is necessary to arrive at a solution of the problems offered by their psychology or to resign ourselves to being devoured by them. --GUSTAVE LE BON, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind16

When F. T. Marinetti founded the futurist movement in February 1909 by publishing an inflammatory manifesto on the front page of the French newspaper Le Figaro, he announced his desire to address both elite and mass audiences (fig. 1). Many of the manifesto's most extreme declarations-- the glorification of war, militarism and patriotism,

See Also Larzer Ziff: Whitman and the Crowd (Summer 1984) Jeffrey T. Schnapp: Border Crossings: Italian/ German Peregrinations of the Theater of Totality (Autumn 1994) Ruth Ben-Ghiat: Envisioning Modernity: Desire and Discipline in the Italian Fascist Film (Autumn 1996) O. K. Werckmeister: Hitler the Artist (Winter1996)

scorn for women, the call for librarires, museums, and academies of all kinds to be destroyed, the celebration of courage, audacity, and revolt, a new aesthetic of speed and struggle-- can be understood as deliberately provocative. But on a deeper level, these sometimes conflicting demands reveal that futurism did not seek merely to establish a literary or artistic school but to provoke the cultural and political regeneration of Italy. To this end it fused the destruction of tradition central to avant-garde rhetoric with calls for new forms of patriotic consciousness and action. Marinetti clearly understood the necessity of reaching beyond a small circle of elite intellectuals and bourgeois supporters if his movement were to bring about the revolution he desired. Yet his embrace of the masses was always paradoxical, mediated by a Nietzschean cult of the superman, and filtered through an ideology that both celebrated and derided the crowd as a force of the future and a regression to a primitive past. This essay explores the mutliple ways in which the futurists sought to interpellate and galvanize the masses, focusing particularly on their performative interpreation of late-nineteenth century French and Italian crowd theory. By attending to the futurists' pervasive effort both to shape and to merge with the masses, we gain a clearer understanding of the motivations that drove some of their most famous avant-garde inventions: the futurist serata(evening), parole in libertà(free-word poetry), and their pictorial synthesis of visual and verbal "images."

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According to Le Bon, once immersed in a crowd, an individual would soon find himself in a "special state, which much resembles the state of fascination in which the hypnotised individual finds himself in the hands of the hypnotiser." Similarly, Le Bon argued that "crowds exhibit a docile respect for force, and are but slightly impressed by kindness.... Their sympathies have never been bestowed on easy-going masters, but on tyrants who vigourously oppressed them" (C, pp.31, 54). Such a desire for domination, and a lack of tolerance for differing views or racial stereotypes, Le Bon repeatedly singles out Latin crowds for their extreme qualities, seeing them as the most impulsive, the most changeable, the most feminine (see C, p.39). capable of the most horrific excesses, they might also attain the loftiest destiny if properly manipulated. The crucial goal was to shape the amorphous and potentially expanding crowd, and to give it a single aim and direction. This required the leader, who like the hypnotist, would hold sway over his subjects through the persuasive use of rhetorical images.

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Although they did experiment with new subjects, techniques, and forms of distribution, most futurist visual works only gestured toward the ideal of an encounter with a mass audience. What drawing, painting, and collage could not achieve in the realm of direct, bodily confrontation and action might nonetheless occur in the register of empathic identification. Working in visual media, the artists exploited the immediacy and apparently nondiscursive logic of the image, as theorized by Le Bon and others. Their goal was to appeal to the viewer's intuition, to draw him or her, as if magnetically, into the dynamic center of the work. The boundaries of subject and object, dissolved in favor of an exhilarated expansion of the ego. But whereas Baudelaire's flaneur imagined himself taking on and discarding the identities of anonymous but discrete individuals encountered in the crowd, futurist empathy was comparatively dehumanized. In futurist painting, strident effects of contrasting color, dazzling light, distortions of perspective, and brushwork that fuses figure and ground all correspond to Marinetti's literary strategy of using analogies to cast a net over all matter. Ideally, in futurist art, the image functions as a kind of hypnotic lure, similarly casting its net over viewers, and dispersing subjectivity into the oceanic expanse of the crowd, dominated by the leader. If such an appeal frequently missed its target during the orewar periodm when the crowds at the futurist serate or theatrical events shouted back, or when the viewers of futurist art responded with satire, the fate of crowd psychology and the arts it inspired in the postwar period provide an alternate view of its potential ideological effects. Under the fascist regime, mass culture is dominated by images of crowds gathered in adulation of the Duce. The crowd finds its shape in the leader, who now exists by virtue of, and in relation to, the mythified crowd.

16. Gustave, Le Bon, La Psychologie des foules (Paris, 1895); trans pub. under the title The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (1896; London, 1952); hereafter abbreviated C.