A more dynamic conception of experimental science led various intellectuals of the time to consider occult manifestations as phenomena not yet known because of imperfect human senses and the limitations of human research tools; sooner or later, however, the scientific community was expected to be in a position to measure, understand, and explain. Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle would eventually limit, if not altogether undermine, this hope for accurate measurements.
Exhortations to avoid reducing existence (and so the world) exclusively to what human senses can perceive came from all sides, as exemplified by the famous astronomer Camille Flammarion’s comment that X-rays were a further proof that “sensation and reality are two very different things.”11
Among the many attempts to systematize ways of understanding, ranging from alchemy to metapsychics to spiritualism, and drawn from sources as diverse as the Corpus Hermeticum, medieval mysticism, the neoplatonism of the Renaissance, freemasonry, and Eastern philosophies, was the philosophy of the Rose+Croix, which is worth citing for its direct influence on artistic disciplines.12 But even more relevant was the influence of theosophy.
Blavatsky’s theosophy, with its comparativist and encyclopedic popularizing approach, which embraced Eastern philosophical thought as well as having numerous points of contact with scientific research, found fertile ground in the cultural context of the epoch. In fact, it became fashionable in those end-of-the-century artistic circles that still believed in romantic philosophical ideas or had aligned with the new symbolist trend. Theosophy famously called for systematic research of parascientific phenomena that would apply the same criteria used by scientific method to investigate other natural phenomena. Such spiritual research was never intended for utilitarian purposes but only for the spiritual advancement of humanity.
In Italy theosophy paid particular attention to the study of the human psyche. In fact, perhaps because of the charismatic presence of the celebrated Turinese psychiatrist and anthropologist Cesare Lombroso, psychiatry and neurology were in Italy the first disciplines to take an interest in various forms of the occult. Among these forms were parapsychology and parascience (telepathy, clairvoyance, possession, psychokinesis, ideoplastic), as well as correlated mediumistic phenomena.13 The need to push beyond the appearance of things to understand the world and the belief that mediums and artists were gifted with more highly developed spiritual faculties—both principles that betrayed connections with romantic aesthetics—were propositions that futurists maintained on several occasions.
In this “sounding out” of reality the new frontiers of science were certainly helpful. Among the scientific discoveries of the age, that of Röntgen’s X-rays in 1895 was one of the most suggestive, because its application implied a complete revolution of the perceptive act itself. Unlike the theories on the fourth dimension or the study of non-Euclidean geometries that affected the representation of the perceptive act, X-rays revolutionized the very act of seeing. This discovery was fundamentally important in the development of theories of the pictorial avant-garde in the first years of the century—and not only for the futurists.14
X-rays bore a metaphoric weight: they encouraged one to view things profoundly rather than occupy oneself with the surface perceptible via the five senses. And an even closer relationship with mediumistic phenomena circulates in the scientific literature of the time: Lombroso, Flammarion, Ochorowicz, and Zoellner all drew a direct connection between Röntgen’s research on the vibration of ether waves and the phenomena of ectoplastic condensation.15 It is not surprising, then, to learn that X-rays thoroughly fascinated Boccioni, Balla, and Russolo, and that they offered a concrete way of achieving (through the extension of human senses of perception) the futurist interpenetration of planes they promoted in the manifestos of futurist painting.
The futurists’ fascination with this new technology is first documented in a passage in the technical manifesto of futurist painting of April 11, 1910: “Who can still believe in the opacity of bodies, while our acuity and multiplied sensitivity makes us intuit the obscure manifestations of mediumistic phenomena? Why must one continue to create without taking account of our visual power that can give results analogous to those of X-rays?”16
The futurists were convinced that X-rays and X-ray-like clairvoyance could help to register otherwise invisible aspects of reality, such as the residual traces of the movement of bodies or the luminous emanations produced by the brain and projected in the surrounding aura—emanations that theosophists called “thought-forms.” This protocol of perception based on light and movement permitted one to grasp the spiritual level of reality. The technical manifesto claimed that “by the persistence of the image in the retina, objects in motion multiply, deform, following one another, as vibrations, in the space that they pass through [i.e., of their trajectory] [. . .]. To paint a figure one does not need to make the figure: one needs to render its atmosphere. [. . .] Motion and light destroy the materiality of bodies.”17
These convictions would be summarized at the end of the manifesto in the concept of complementarismo congenito (congenital complementarism), a notion that the art historian Marianne Martin, in her Futurist Art and Theory, considered “an occult spiritual experience bringing the artist in closer touch with the universal forces.”18 The term complementarismo congenito readily promotes a union of opposites that rings distinctively alchemical, and thus occult.
SPACE AND TIME TAMED: MARINETTI’S ECTOPLASM
An examination of the critical texts of Calvesi, Fagiolo dell’Arco, and Celant reveals that all of the most representative futurist artists were to varying degrees concerned with the occult.19 This is certainly true of Marinetti. By celebrating action and movement—a celebration clearly intoxicated with Nietzscheanism—his aesthetics celebrated the energy manifested in every vibration of the cosmos, that is, energy itself.
Far from being a proposition of materialistic thrust, Marinetti’s obsessive celebration of movement and vibration reflects an occult, symbolist-derived substratum.20 Central to this view is the idea that matter is constituted by condensation of waves vibrating at different intensities; as such, through movement, matter either vanishes or better reveals its implicit spirituality. Basing his ideas on Nietzsche’s theory of action, his personal reading of Bergson’s vitalism, and Einstein’s theory of relativity (which Marinetti probably encountered by way of the popularizing work of Minkowsky), the founder of futurism derived a conception of the world in which, if only because we lack absolute parameters to show stasis, all is perpetual movement.21
According to Marinetti, “absolute space and time do not preexist, nor do any absolutely immovable points nor any objects in absolute movement, because there is no absolute term of reference: object and subject are, always, correlatively but discontinuously mobile.”22 According to Calvesi, futurists did not regard “spirit and matter (and therefore [. . .] intuition and intellect)” as separate; they saw them as a unity, under the “same principle of energy.”23 As is also true of Boccioni, Marinetti overcame Bergson’s dualism of matter versus movement. Matter never exists as absolute inertia: “Matter and movement, rather than contradictory ends, became ends that could be brought back to one single principle.”24
Behind this theory of energy we find not only the influence of Nietzsche’s interpretations and Einstein’s suggestions but also one of the core propositions of alchemy that futurists may have derived from pre-Socratic philosophies: the belief in a universe that may be synthesizable into a single generating principle, a primal matter, existing in various levels of density and from which all things derive.25 This primal matter, a wave vibrating at different frequency, was often referred to as the ether.
The interest in waves and vibrations, and in their relationship to occult themes, is a constant in Marinetti’s prose. In his Manifesto della declamazione dinamica e sinottica he writes that the futurist poet/performer will have the task of “metallizing, liquefying, vegetalizing, petrifying, and electrifying the
voice, fusing it with the vibrations of matter, themselves expressed by Words-in-Freedom,”26 whereas in La grande Milano tradizionale e futurista Marinetti recognized in Russolo’s enterprise the capacity to “organize spiritually and fantastically our acoustic vibrations.”27
A similar transformative approach is found in the manifesto La radia, published with Pino Masnata in 1933. Among other things, the radio set (Marinetti and Masnata have recourse to the feminine gender for the word, radia) is here considered to be:
4. Reception amplification and transformation of vibrations emitted by living beings by living or dead spirits noisy dramas of states of mind without words.
5. Reception amplification and transformation of vibrations emitted by matter Just as today we listen to the song of the woods and of the sea tomorrow we will be seduced by the vibrations of a diamond or of a flower.28
It is, furthermore:
6. Pure organism of radiophonic sensations
7. An art without time or space without yesterday or tomorrow [. . .] The reception and amplification, through thermionic valves, of light and of the voices of the past will destroy time [. . .]
9. Human art, universal and cosmic, that is like a voice with a true psychology—spirituality of the noises, of the voices and of the silence.29
In these passages points of contact with panpsychism are evident. The idea that everything is vibration is an eminently occultist one, as it implies that all phenomena occurring in the world are in some way secretly linked. Once the corpuscular theory of light, inspired by Democritus and upheld by Newton, was put aside in favor of the theory of waves traveling through ether, which lasted until Einstein, it was as if the scientific community implicitly validated the long esoteric tradition that had always included a belief in the correlation between light and sound. The discovery of electromagnetic waves, X-rays, and, shortly after, radioactivity, confirmed this occultist proposition.30 In fact, the theory of waves propagating themselves in the ether reinforced and essentially confirmed an alchemical/synesthetic conception of art, because both sound and light are, according to this vision of physics, waves that only differ in frequency or wavelength—a difference of degree, not of kind.
Futurism was always characterized by a strong synesthetic component, and synesthesia has traditionally been an indicator of the occult (by way of the vibrational tradition).31 This connection was a remnant of the connection between futurism and French symbolism in the latter’s most occultist (and psychedelic) moments—one may think of the Baudelaire of Correspondances or the Rimbaud of Voyelles—but also of the Italian version of that same symbolism, alcoholic and brilliant, which we call Milanese scapigliatura, an anti-bourgeois art movement surely characterized, just as futurism is, by an overlap of scientific and occult interests.32
The debate about synesthesia was widespread at the opening of the twentieth century.33 Marinetti’s interest in the relationship between the arti sorelle (sister arts) and the different senses was ever present, even when not taking center stage as it does in his manifesto “Tactilism” (1921, revised in 1924).
Tactilism, Marinetti claimed, could be considered the result of the mortification of the other four senses, producing an empowered sense of touch; this would occur following a deviation of the sun from its proper orbit that would cause its unusual distancing from the earth.34 But, Marinetti maintained, the phenomenon was instead created by “an act of futurist caprice/faith/will.” In fact, in an extreme situation such as a planetary catastrophe, the five senses would be reduced to only one. Marinetti wrote, “Everybody can feel that sight, smell, hearing, touch and taste are modifications of a single, highly perceptive sense: the sense of touch, which splits into different ways and organizes into different points.”35
In this manifesto, tactilism is a provisional term for a new art form that merges all of the five traditional senses as well as a series of new senses that Marinetti lists. He chooses to give “the name of Tactilism to all the senses that are not specified,” since he believes that the perceptive senses are in fact “more or less arbitrary localizations of that confused total of intertwined senses that constitute the typical forces of the human machine”; these forces could in his opinion “be better observed on the epidermal frontiers of our body.” Notwithstanding this, the attention here is obviously on the sense of touch; as Marinetti describes it, to arrive at a tactile art, other stimuli (including the visual) must be sacrificed or neutralized.36
Marinetti therefore contemplates a synesthetic emotion—which by definition links different senses by means of association—that is evoked and activated by use of specially made implements that he calls tactile tables (tavole tattili). In tactile art it is exclusively through touch that the perceiver reconstructs, by association, stimuli that, while similar, belong to other expressive fields such as music or painting; this kind of reconstruction is encouraged in the tactile tables. Marinetti chose not to integrate the expressive protocol of the tactile tables with expressive modalities derived from other art forms (like painting or sculpture)—a choice made not to prevent a dialogue between the arts but to protect the newborn art form tactilism and permit it, at least in the beginnings of its journey, to develop autonomously.
Marinetti believed that the sense of touch, when empowered, permits seeing beyond the physical—permits seeing even inside objects, as if by a sort of tactile X-ray vision: “A visual sense is born, at the fingertips. Interscopia is developed, and some individuals are able to see inside their own bodies. Others can dimly discern the insides of nearby bodies.” The connection with Boccioni’s interpenetration of planes, and of its occult and scientific matrices (or implications), could not be clearer.
At its core, Marinetti’s tactilism aimed at the perfecting of “spiritual communications between human beings, through the epidermis.” Often read as merely an erotic proclamation, this statement was, rather, the testimony of Marinetti’s spiritual and occult attitude, perhaps even traceable to the conversations with his father, who was an enthusiastic reader of Eastern philosophy.37 With Tactilism, Marinetti proposed to “penetrate better and outside of scientific methods the true essence of matter” and to promote the type of spiritual experience that could reach the point of “negating the distinction between spirit and matter,” an affirmation that in substance overcomes, as stated above, Bergson’s dualism of movement versus matter. Marinetti believed that comprehension of the essence of matter could be obtained by eliminating the mediation of the brain (i.e., of human reason), which is guilty of polluting the virgin, immediate perfection of the tactile experience. As he wrote: “Perhaps there is more thought in the fingertips than in the brain that has the pride of observing the phenomenon [the act of touching].”
According to Marinetti, the new art had more relations with spiritualism and could better demonstrate the validity of theories of reincarnation than other arts: “The futurist Balla declares that by means of Tactilism everyone can enjoy again with freshness and absolute surprise the sensations of his past life, that he could not enjoy again with equal surprise by means of music nor by means of painting.”38
Only a few years after this manifesto, the Manifesto della fotografia futurista, a collaboration between Marinetti and Tato published on April 11, 1930, proposed updating Anton Giulio Bragaglia’s fotodinamica (photodynamics) by taking advantage of the new technological possibilities. The aesthetic coordinates of this book however are not that distant from Bragaglia’s, who was from the beginning of his career interested in phenomena of mediumistic materialization.
The goals of futurist photography in 1930 included, among other things:
4. The spectralizing of some parts of the human or animal body isolated or joined nonlogically; [. . .]
11. The transparent and semitransparent superimposition of concrete persons and objects and of their semiabstract phantasms with simultaneity of memory/dream; [. . .]
14. The composition of absolutely extraterrestrial landscapes, astral or mediumistic by means
of thicknesses, elasticity, turbid depths, clear transparencies, algebraic or geometric values, and with nothing human, vegetable, or geologic;39
But in L’uomo moltiplicato e il regno della macchina, part of Guerra sola igiene del mondo of 1915 (and originally in Le futurisme of 1911, perhaps even drafted as early as 1910), Marinetti aspired to a structural modification of man that in future would, thanks to the materialization of wings produced with the force of thought, allow man to fly.40
In L’uomo moltiplicato, Marinetti wrote: “The day it is possible for man to exteriorize his will such that it extends outside of him like an immense invisible arm—on that day Dream and Desire, which today are vain words, will rule sovereign over tamed Space and Time.”41 Having lost the reader in this forest of his postsymbolist prose, Marinetti then showed us the way. He believed that this prophecy, which he himself recognized as paradoxical, could be more easily understood by “studying the phenomena of exteriorized will that constantly manifest themselves in séances.”
This uomo moltiplicato, a metallic alter ego that would duplicate man without duplicating his defects, would even have the gift of clairvoyance and, in addition to being a “non-human and mechanical type, constructed for an omnipresent velocity, it will be naturally cruel, omniscient and combative.” The figure of the multiplied man shows interesting similarities with the metallic animal of the subsequent manifesto, “Ricostruzione futurista dell’universo” by Balla and Depero, the aggressiveness of which would unquestionably have been inebriated with the spirit of World War I interventionism.
For Marinetti, the man of the future was not so much the product of Darwinian evolution as, rather, the transformist hypothesis of Lamarck (whom, indeed he cited in his essay): not an evolution of man but his alchemical transformation into a more perfect being created by the futurists, a “non-human type in whom moral pain, kindness, affection and love, i.e., the only corrosive poisons of inexhaustible vital energy, will be abolished”—in short, a man aiming for a suspended, ataractic, beyond-good-and-evil spiritual state.
Luigi Russolo, Futurist Page 3