Futurism’s outsized ambition responded to the limited and limiting conditions of Italian modernity.  It was a still chiefly agrarian country, unified for less than half a century.  Its identity remained wedded to a (lost) exalted past and a still largely provincial present.  Marinetti aptly based his efforts in Milan – the only nation’s only real industrial powerhouse – recruiting in short order a roster of young visual artists to the Futurist cause.  The movement quickly expanded well beyond the domains of painting and sculpture.  Within just a few years, it issued manifestos on everything from music and architecture to dance and photography, matching theoretical propositions to actual practitioners.  By 1918 there even existed a Futurist party.  Much of my interest in Futurism stems from the fact that its efforts began in the literary and aesthetic realms, but ended up shaping modern politics.  In its most basic impetus, Futurism assailed the boundaries between art and life.

Futurism’s early political platform decidedly influenced the nascent Fascist movement founded by Benito Mussolini in 1919.  Their affinities – anti-bourgeois aggression, a cult of violence and virility, and fervid anti-parliamentarian nationalism – persisted long after the consolidation of the Fascist regime in 1922, and even as the government sidelined the more progressive elements of Futurist ethos.  And so, the book attempts to understand how and why the movement’s importance has transcended its specific geographic and historical contingencies.  Futurism served in many ways as the spark for and the “unconscious” of various twentieth-century avant-gardes.  In addition to bridging registers high and low, and conflating various formats and media, it also anticipated the aggressive mix of politics and performativity, of ideology and aesthetic gesture, with which we have long become familiar in politics.  The volume seeks to understand the lingering effects of that anticipation.