Abstract
This chapter describes F. T. Marinetti’s glorification of early twentieth-century technologies such as the wireless. Marinetti wanted his audiences to embrace the values of progress as represented through speed, efficiency, evolution, and ahistoricity. Marinetti’s art makes use of parole in libertà—words in freedom—to accentuate the aesthetic goals of minimalism and telegraphic prose. He advocates an aesthetic based on reducing expressions to the fewest number of words. Marinetti’s art reconstructs the cultural values of industrialization by promoting textual efficiency. Even in Marinetti’s art there is something technical about his desire for words to capture efficiently the essence of the technology, idea, or, most importantly, action. Also, Marinetti glorifies technologies for their speed and war potential. Unlike other high modernist authors, Marinetti values the destructive nature of new modern technologies. His manifestos exaggerate tropes of progress, advocating a love of mechanization.
History is more or less bunk. It’s tradition. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker’s dam is the history we make today.
(Ford 1916/1999, p. 61)
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Toscano, A.A. (2012). Tropes of Progress in F. T. Marinetti’s Early Futurist Texts. In: Marconi's Wireless and the Rhetoric of a New Technology. SpringerBriefs in Sociology. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-3977-2_5
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