Article 2 antliff fourth dimension and futurism politicized space art bulletin, vol 82 no 4 (dec 200

The Fourth Dimension and Futurism: A Politicized Space Author(s): Mark Antliff Reviewed work(s): Source: The Art Bulletin, Vol. 82, No. 4 (Dec., 2000), pp. 720-733 Published by: College Art Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3051419 .

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The

Fourth

Dimension

and

Futurism:

A

Politicized

Space

MarkAntliff

In the opening lines to his 1914 volume Pittura scultura Futuriste:Dinamismo plastico (Plastic Dynamism), Umberto Boccioni announced his desire to transform Italy. Dedicated to "the genius and muscles of my brothers Marinetti, Carrt, Russolo," Boccioni's book proclaimed "plastic dynamism" the expression of an "antitraditional and antirational avantgarde that must rejuvenate Italy and the world by exacerbating their spiritual speed."' In his attack on tradition he condemned both the retrograde aesthetic taste of "a democratic public made up of pseudo-intellectuals, anarchists, and socialists" like Enrico Ferri, the socialist director of L'Avanti, and the aesthetic preferences of the ultranationalist Enrico Corradini, who had reportedly "dirtied his name" by defending "one of the most mediocre Sunday painters of Verona."2 As a supporter of Corradini's Italian Nationalist Association (founded in 1910), Boccioni admired Corradini "for his nationalist beliefs" but lamented his failure to appreciate the political import of Futurist aesthetics.3 In contrast to traditionalists on both the left and right, Boccioni, in Plastic Dynamism, claimed that a "renewal of plastic consciousness" among Italians required opposition to the debilitating effects of "democratic-rationalist education."4 Thus, the aesthetic of plastic dynamism propounded in Boccioni's volume was not only "antitraditional and antirational," it was also antidemocratic in its regenerative aims and nationalist in its aspirations.

Although scholars have recognized the antirationalist premises undergirding the Italian Futurists' rejection of parliamentary politics, the integral role of Futurist aesthetics in that polemical project has yet to be elucidated fully. Through an examination of Boccioni's Futurist tract, Plastic Dynamism, and works such as his UniqueFormsof Continuity in Space (1913, Fig. 1) and Carlo Carrt's Funeral of the Anarchist Galli (1911, Fig. 3), I will explore the Futurists' incorporation of aesthetic theories of time and space into a utopian campaign to transform the consciousness of the Italian citizenry and inaugurate a political revolt against Italy's democratic institutions. By analyzing the role of a theory of the fourth dimension in this highly politicized aesthetic, I will expand on Linda Henderson's important insights regarding the Futurist fusion of the spatial fourth dimension with notions of temporality and intuitive consciousness derived from the French philosopher Henri Bergson.5 As Henderson has demonstrated, theories of the fourth dimension and related concepts of non-Euclidean geometry were instrumental in overturning the assumption upheld by nineteenth-century positivists that space was limited to the three dimensions described by Euclid. The new geometries undermined positivism and inspired idealist philosophical interpretations that associated the fourth dimension with a higher, mystical reality beyond three-dimensional visual perception. Theosophist Helena P. Blavatsky announced that perception of the infinite, unbounded nature of fourth-

dimensional space opened our consciousness to unseen, spiritual realms, while the Russian mystic P. D. Ouspensky claimed that time itself constituted another, spatial dimension and that motion in time was in fact evidence of higher dimensional "virtual volumes." As Henderson noted, Boccioni's allegiance to the theory of temporality developed by Bergson meant that he was particularly interested in "dynamic" theories of the fourth dimension. Rather than generating fourth-dimensional form by the motion of a threedimensional object through space, Henderson argues, Boccioni operated in the reverse process by considering the passage of a higher dimensional form through our space.

Boccioni's claim that the spiral was an innately dynamic shape expressive of fourth-dimensional "absolute motion" is interpreted by Henderson as evidence of his awareness of the "hyperspace" philosophy of Howard Hinton, whose book The Fourth Dimension (1904) illustrated a spiral moving through a plane as one of many mental exercises designed to develop a reader's "space sense." Hinton and Ouspensky thought time and motion in three dimensions constituted an illusion to be overcome by nurturing our spatial consciousness; Boccioni, by contrast, "asserted the positive value of time and motion" following the theories of Bergson. Henderson therefore concludes that theories of the fourth dimension were less integral to Boccioni's aesthetic since Hinton's and Ouspensky's devaluation of temporality was fundamentally at odds with his Bergsonian precepts.

I will argue that Boccioni did seek to generate fourthdimensional form through the motion of a three-dimensional object through space, and that his notion of the fourth dimension owed more to his knowledge of the Bergsonian concept of "extensity" than to a reading of Hinton or other "hyperspace" philosophers. Moreover, in contrast to other proponents of the fourth dimension, Boccioni assimilated this spatial concept into the Futurists' highly politicized campaign to renew Italy. The Futurist correlation of the fourth dimension with a Bergsonian spatial-temporal flux made up of "force forms" and "force lines," unfettered by the limitations of three-dimensional space or measured "clock" time, fused with a political program premised on intuition and an antimaterialist call for national regeneration and imperialist expansion. The correlation of imperialism with national renewal was first propounded by the Bergsonian Georges Sorel and developed by his Italian followers Enrico Corradini and Mario Missiroli; the impact of Sorelian thought on the Futurists is well documented by historians such as Giinter Berghaus, Giovanni Lista, and Zeev Sternhell.6 I will argue that the fourth-dimensional force lines and force forms emanating from works like Carlo Carrt's Funeral of the Anarchist Galli (1911) or Boccioni's Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913) registered not only the artists' intuitive transformation of the self but also a desire to transform the audience

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who came to view such work and were intended to transmit the Futurist spirit of heroic violence and gendered will-topower to the Italian public.

The role of the fourth dimension in the creation of this revolutionary consciousness thus constitutes an example of how politics became aestheticized under the Futurist banner.

Such a notion of aestheticized politics thoroughly contradicts that proposed by Walter Benjamin, whose famous essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1936) related Futurist leader F. T. Marinetti's glorification of violence to a contemplative, Kantian notion of "aesthetic disinterestedness," allied to theories of aesthetic autonomy and organic closure.7 In contrast to Benjamin, I would join writers such as Andrew Hewitt and Jeffrey Schnapp in arguing that the Futurists actively repudiated any association of their aesthetic with the contemplative, and that any proper reading of their art must take into account the antimaterialist premises undergirding that disavowal, premises Zeev Sternhell and Emilio Gentile have identified as fundamental to Italian proto-Fascism.8 Whereas art historian Brian Petrie claimed that Boccioni's endorsement of Bergson's metaphysics allowed his aesthetic to "rise above [the] political metaphors (imperialist, antidemocratic) used by Boccioni to describe his art," I would argue that Boccioni's Bergsonism cannot be detached from the politicized context from which it emerged, namely, the politics of Italian nationalism.9 As an expression of those politics Boccioni's correlation of the fourth dimension with a Bergsonian rejection of rationalism in both aesthetics and politics indicates the integral relation of plastic dynamism to his political ideals. Before analyzing the ideological dimension of Boccioni's art we must begin with an overview of Boccioni's aesthetic theory, and then consider how Boccioni set about reconciling Bergsonian thought with a theory of the fourth dimension.

Vision Throughout Plastic Dynamism Boccioni employed Bergson's distinction between intellect and intuition to map out conflicting approaches to the making of art. In a critique of the art of "state academies" he claimed that such institutions promoted an "exterior and narrative" art diametrically opposed to the Futurist conception of art as "creative," "interior and interpretative." The Futurists, we are told, reject an art of "external appearances"; instead, they are "living life in its dynamic conception"; they enter an object's "interior" and experience its living dynamism through "intuition." By contrast, academic methods are declared to be "intellectual," the result of "static, nostalgic emotions"; only through intuition are the Futurists able to experience the "violent emotions of movement and speed" that "inspire new plastic ideas." The Futurists, therefore, are the "primitives" of a new sensibility attuned to the dynamism of modern life; moreover, their intuition of the "eternal renewal of life" gives them "superhuman energy."o0 Verisimilitude serves to constitute a "superficial" art of surface appearances antithetical to an intuitive art of spiritual depth. In a chapter titled "Against Artistic Cowardice" Boccioni attacks the public for having mistaken "the stupor provoked by an exterior optical illusion" for "depth" of meaning. The Futurists' "plastic intuition" alone allowed

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them to grasp "the essential element of creation" unattainable through artistic verisimilitude. Painting should not be an art of "surface execution" or emulate "mechanical processes of reproduction" such as photography. Boccioni considers such art to be "inferior" and condemns modern-day "Realists" for engaging in the "fragmentary and analytical" study of "surface appearances." Such "imitative and analytic realism" had its origins in Classical Greek sculpture and could not express "depth of interpretation." Instead of copying nature "in its exterior or transitory aspects" artists should enter into nature to "live in its forces," thereby reclaiming "the drama of forces and movement." Thus, the Futurists no longer attempted to "reproduce likenesses of objects or people" but instead entered into an object to capture "the pure sensation of plastic reality.""

To bolster his critique Boccioni outlined the analytic and intellectual premises underlying such optical illusionism. By adhering to the "static laws" of academic praxis realists subjected the world to the "scientific measure" of single vanishing point perspective. Despite the fact that there are no "perpendicular or absolutely horizontal lines" in nature, academic artists constructed pictorial space out of such lines, which converged on a vanishing point. The result was a "conception purely external and panoramic," in which a single moment in space corresponded to a single moment in time.12 In fabricating this "perspective plane" the artist destroyed the temporal continuity of dynamism by subjecting it to atomistic division; concurrently, space was subjected to quantified forms of measurement. Perspective illusionism also located the beholder in a stationary, "correct" position in front of the canvas; it did not fulfill the Futurist desire to "place the spectator in the center of the picture." The "optical illusion" fabricated through academic technique not only separated artistic "inspiration from execution," it divorced the beholder from the "sensation of plastic dynamism" that should be the subject of art.13 To reconcile technique (execution) with an artist's intuition (inspiration), the "scientific measure of appearances" had to be abandoned. "Inspiration," we are told, is "the act by which the artist enters into the object in order to live its characteristic movement." An art able to capture such "dynamism" rejects "the construction of the painting such as we have known it up until now, that is, up to cubism."14 What made Cubist and academic methods indistinguishable, Boccioni claimed, was their shared reliance on "intellectual" and "scientific" techniques that left the artist (and beholder) external to the object itself. Picasso's "study of form," wrote Boccioni, was no more than "an impassive scientific calibration," which functions by way of a rotating point of view that makes the artist an analyzer of fixity, an intellectual Impressionist of pure form. Picasso in fact copies the object in its formal complexity, taking it apart and numbering its aspects. In doing so, he creates for himself an incapacity to experience it in its action. [He] arrests the life of the object (motion), separates out the elements that constitute it....

But the analysis of the object is always made at the expense of the object: that is, by killing it.I5

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Virtually every aspect of Boccioni's critique had its roots in Bergson's metaphysics. There are "two ways of knowing a thing" Bergson wrote in the Introductionto Metaphysics(1903); "of the first kind of knowledge we shall say that it stops at the relative; of the second that, wherever possible it attains the absolute.'""16 Taking as his example the movement of an object, Bergson notes that, from a relative viewpoint, "I place myself outside the object itself," whereas to speak of absolute knowledge "means that I attribute to the mobile an inner being, and, as it were, states of soul; it also means that I am in harmony with these states and enter into them by an effort of imagination." Bergson identifies relative knowledge with all forms of "analysis" utilized in "positive science"; absolute knowledge, on the other hand, "can only be given in an intuition," for intuition is "the sympathy by which one is transported into the interior of an object in order to coincide with what there is unique" about it.17The Futurist intuition of an object's interior dynamism thus constitutes a form of "absolute" knowledge, whereas the analytic methods developed by other movements relegated them to the realm of scientific, or "relative," knowledge.

Science, like an art of "optical illusion," is condemned to study an object's external appearance rather than experience its inward mobility, the temporal development of being, known as durie or duration. "Even the most concrete of the sciences of nature, the sciences of life," wrote Bergson, "confine themselves to the visible form of living beings, their organs, their anatomical elements" and "they study life in what is, so to speak, its visual symbol."18 Analysis corresponds to "a representation taken from successive points of view," and this bias in favor of an intellectual act of viewing rather than an intuitive act of sympathy is compounded by the intellect's translation of interior duration into mathematical symbols, devoid of temporality.19 In short, Bergson singles out vision as the faculty most closely tied to our utilitarian needs and therefore a perceptual tool adapted to the "relative" knowledge discernible by our intellect.20 Bergson's ocular prejudice is most obvious in his comparison of inner duration to a melody and in his claim that our recourse to images in describing it only succeeds in dividing and "intellectualizing" duration. In CreativeEvolution Bergson claimed that if "our faculty of seeing should be made one with the act of willing," our vision would overcome its utilitarian function and, through an effort of intuition, discern the melody of inner duration.21 It is artists, states Bergson, who potentially possess such intuitive vision, for they alone are able to perceive the "original harmony," the "inner life of things" underlying appearances, and to translate this durational cadence into the harmonious combination of colors and patterns that gives aesthetic form to such phenomena.22 In developing this idea, Boccioni declared intuition to be the unique province of the Futurists and aligned the academicism pictorial praxis of other art movements-from to Cubism-to the pragmatic, intellectual, and scientific function of vision.

Intuition and the Fourth Dimension According to Boccioni, the scientific and intellectual biases governing Realism, Impressionism, and Cubism did more than simply reduce that art to the task of replicating external

appearances: these biases gave artists a false conception of both time and space. Boccioni, like Bergson before him, sought to disentangle time and space from the scientific and intellectual constructs that served to distort these phenomena, and Boccioni numbered Impressionist and Cubist treatments of time and space among those "constructs" to be avoided. According to Bergson, intellectual time-the notion of temporality championed in the natural sciences-should not be confused with the time we experience directly in our daily lives. The time of science is a mathematical conception, symbolized as a unit of measure by clocks and chronometers.

Such measuring instruments act to quantify temporal experience by resolving qualitative durie into an extended, homogeneous medium composed of normative units (days, hours, seconds). The result is an impersonal, practical conception of time, totally unlike our individual, felt experience of time as an indivisible flux.23 Boccioni claimed that the Impressionists and Neo-Impressionists did not grasp the "absolute plastic ideas" underlying perceptual experiences but instead "submitted them to the relativity of time and space." As an example of such thinking he refers us to paintings by Henri-Edmond Cross titled Second October(Wind) North-Eastand Rainbow (East) 19 October4:30.24 Clearly, Boccioni is accusing Cross of reducing duration to discrete, normative units of measure, and he extends this critique to include other sensory phenomena, most notably color. Bergson, in Time and Free Will (1889), had critiqued psychophysicists for resolving color into a series of atomistic vibrations that could be quantified, when in fact each color was a nonmeasurable, qualitative phenomenon, a symbol of pure change akin to duration itself.25 According to Boccioni, the Neo-Impressionists divided duration into normative units of measure and employed "scientific" analysis to resolve color into a "division of chromatic elements."26 As the "intellectual Impressionists of pure form," the Cubists did to form what the Neo-Impressionists did to color. Cubism reportedly subjected form to scientific analysis through a "division of formal elements," that is, Cubists divided a singular form into its component parts and juxtaposed these parts across the surface of the canvas, to reveal "the planes of the object that its accidental position prevents us from seeing." "This rational procedure," Boccioni asserted, "exists in relativity, not in an intuitive absolute," for "the integral notion of the object exists, with this procedure, in the three concepts of height, width, and depth, thus I repeat, in the relative, in the finite of measuring." Contained within the quantifiable, "measured and finite" realm of the three dimensions, Cubist technique condemned the artist to circle endlessly around an object in order to analyze its external appearances. Unable to perceive duration, the Cubist was restricted to the realm of the relative, unable to reach the "intuitive absolute."27 It is on this note that Boccioni introduces the Futurist concept of the fourth dimension, contrasting the Cubists' "false claim" to the term with his own Bergsonian conception of that idea. Boccioni asserted that the Cubists utilized a "measured and finite fourth dimension" to transcribe their "rotating point of view" around an object onto a canvas, whereas the Futurist fourth dimension was "a continuous projection of forces and forms intuited in their infinite unfolding."'"2 As we have seen, by intuition Boccioni meant an

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ability to empathize with an object and enter into its durie, but he here extends this conception to include a notion of space (the fourth dimension), identified with the "infinite unfolding" of duration in the guise of "forces and forms." Boccioni clarifies his meaning elsewhere in the text Plastic Dynamism: For every new interpretation or creation, a new effort of intuition is necessary. It forces the artist into a state of terrible tension in order to be able to remain continuously in the interior of the object, living its sensibility and recreating its unity. These forces or directions appear in the form of an infinite number of incidents, which are so many inspirations, ... the mysterious suggestions of lyrical deformation.29 As this passage implies, for Boccioni the fourth dimension constituted the unfolding of temporality into space in the guise of "forces or directions," and it is an intuition of these "force forms" that produces the "lyrical deformations" of his art. Yet this identification of fourth-dimensional space with unfolding duration at first glance appears to contradict Bergson, who is commonly held to have drawn a sharp distinction between quantitative space and qualitative time, with no acknowledgment of any intermediate conception.

Brian Petrie, in his otherwise exemplary analysis of Boccioni's Bergsonism, holds that the artist follows the philosopher in differentiating between "spatial" and "temporal knowledge," with no acknowledgment that Bergson drew a distinction between space as conceived by the intellect and an intuitive experience of space. Although Petrie finds that Boccioni's notion of "real movement" cannot be "defined in spatial terms," the fourth dimension as Boccioni understood it indicated his awareness of Bergson's definition of "extensity" as an intuitive notion of space.30 Extensity and the Rhythm of Duration Extensity represented the unfolding of duration into space in the guise of creative activity; in Boccioni's system the aesthetic analogue to such acts were those forms and forces that constituted the fourth dimension. Boccioni's infusion of durie into spatial form is clearly indebted to Bergson's own conception of how time and space coexisted: Bergson argued that the unitary image of space envisioned by Euclid differed fundamentally from the mixture of time and space found in concrete experience, which Bergson described in terms of "degrees" of "extensity."3'1 As I have discussed elsewhere, Bergson held that mind and matter formed a continuum, so that matter is simply "the lowest state of mind" and mind "the highest state of matter."32 To separate matter wholly from mind would rob duration of its extensive characteristics, for matter devoid of mind would be homogeneous and discontinuous, in short, devoid of duration. The permeability of mind and matter, duration and extension, took the form of the rhythm native to each living being, which constituted a synthesis of the temporal and spatial. Bergson saw scientific evidence for such rhythms in Hertzian waves, force lines, and the second law of thermodynamics, all of which replaced intellectual models of the universe premised on Newtonian physics with "intuitions" that resolved matter into energy fields and other dynamic processes."3 Thus, Bergson in 1911

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argued that there is an "enormous difference between the rhythm of our own duration and the rhythm of the duration of matter," while in Matter and Memory (1896) he compared our consciousness to a "melody" before speculating that "it is possible to imagine many different rhythms which, slower or faster, measure the degree of tension or relaxation of different kinds of consciousness."34 To perceive such extensive rhythms required an effort of intuition, for the intellect could not discern such inner duration, focusing instead on an object's surface appearances rather than plumbing its durational depths.35 Bergson described our states of mind in terms of varying degrees of rhythmic tension or relaxation, which in turn corresponded to varying degrees of freedom in the realm of human action. The effort of willed empathy, or "intuition," required the greatest degree of freedom; intuition took the form of the state of psychic tension experienced by artists and philosophers immersed in a creative endeavor. This "effort of intuition" did not leave us suspended in the void, "as pure analysis would do," but put the creative thinker "in contact with a whole continuity of durations which we should try to follow either downwardly or upwardly: in both cases we can dilate ourselves indefinitely by a more and more vigorous effort, in both cases we transcend ourselves."36 An effort of intuition was needed in order to reverse the mental habits imposed on us by pragmatic needs, and by countering habits we were able to discern the multiple "rhythms of durance" besides our own. In following that rhythm to its lowest degree of tension, that is, its materiality, we would have to gradually drain matter of its durational quality; we would divide it and go in the direction of simple items of experience possessing quantitative properties.37 Were we to transform our state of psychological tension into one of relaxation, intuitive consciousness would give way to the pragmatic designs of our intellect, and quantitative properties would be all that remained. Bergson affirmed this in CreativeEvolution by claiming that "the more consciousness is intellectualized, the more matter is spatialized."38 To reverse that process, to intensify an intuition, would require us to "expand our scope of attention" and "concentrate ourselves on the rhythms of durance" that transcended our own.39 It was this intensive experience of intuition that Boccioni sought in his grasp of a Futurist fourth dimension.

To capture extensity in its highest degree of tension would require the artist to intuit creative activity, that is, the potential unfolding of duration into material form. Whether in the guise of the cosmic ilan vital, or vital impulse, of energy forces animating the universe, or, on a human level, the creative activity of a body in motion, the rhythmic pulse of such acts would constitute the spatial dimension of duration, prior to its subjugation to intellectual quantification. We will see how this translates into Futurist style in a moment, but first we must consider the role of human creativity in this theoretical matrix.

Absolute + Relative Motion = Creative Evolution Study of Boccioni's comments on plastic dynamism confirm this reading. An "effort of intuition," stated Boccioni, produced a "terrible tension," a sure indication of his awareness of Bergson's theory of extensive rhythms. Boccioni described

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the "pure plastic elements" that intuition revealed in terms of "the simultaneity of forces and of states of mind."40 These forces are manifestations of an object's material substance and are compared by Boccioni to "Hertzian waves";41 thus, he follows Bergson in claiming that intuition reveals the synthesis of mind and matter on both a cosmic and a human scale. Most important, it is movement that is revealed through intuition.

"When we speak of movement," states Boccioni, "it is not a cinemagraphic concern," nor is it "the infantile curiosity to fix the trajectory of an object from point A to point B." Through studying movement the Futurists hoped "to attain pure sensation, that is, to create form in plastic intuition" and to "live the object as it manifests itself."42 Rather than retrospectively analyzing motion as a trajectory between two points, the Futurists experience motion as the mental and material unfolding of a creative act. "We want to capture the form simultaneously bursting forth from the drama of the object-milieu," for "it is only through movement that the object determines its drama and dictates the limit allowing it to create." According to Boccioni, such "plastic dynamism" takes the form of "absolute" and "relative" motion.43 As previous scholars have noted, Boccioni's dismissal of the conversion of movement into a measurable trajectory replicates Bergson's critique of relative motion in Matter and Memory. However, that has led some historians to confuse Boccioni's later references to absolute and relative motion with an endorsement of Bergson's intellectualized conception of the latter term.44 In his chapter devoted to these terms, Boccioni defines absolute motion as "a dynamic law inherent in the object" and relative motion as "a dynamic law that depends on the movement of the object," while claiming that "immobility is only an appearance or a relativity."45 This association of immobility with relativity is based on Bergson's critique of intellectualized treatments of motion and needs to be distinguished from Boccioni's notion of relative motion as a dynamic counterpart to absolute motion. As a synthesis of matter and mind, absolute and relative motion signify Boccioni's intuition of the potential for movement inherent in an object's material substance and form (absolute motion) and the degree to which an object's physical motion (relative motion) expresses this potential.

In Boccioni's words, absolute motion stands for "the plastic potential that the object carries in itself" and "is closely tied to its organic substance, according to its characteristics: porousness, impermeability, rigidity, elasticity, etc., and according to its particular characteristics: color, temperature, consistency, form (flat, concave, convex, cubic, spiral, elliptic, spheric, etc. etc.)." An intuition of these material elements reveals its "plastic potentiality" and its "force, or to put it another way, its primordial psychology."46 In Boccioni's metaphysical vision, matter, as the lowest state of mind, possesses spirit and the potential for dynamism. Rather than conceiving of motion as complete, Boccioni intuits its potential development and imagines its creative unfolding as "plastic" form.

Plastic form constitutes a "new subject" in art, for the object is now known "in its living lines that reveal the manner in which it would decompose according to the tendency of its forces."

"We thus reach a decomposition of the object, which is no longer the Cubist intellectual schema" but instead an "interpretation through a sensation infinitely refined and supe-

rior."47 Rather than divide a stationary object into its component parts, the Futurists intuit an object's living potential for expansion; Futurist decomposition captures "the respiration or palpitation of the object."48 An object's physical characteristics, its cubic or spherical shape, indicate its potential for expansion, "the different potentiality of the absolute movement," as well as its potential interreaction with other objects.

This is expressed by "currents of attraction" or repulsion between objects as well as varying degrees of dynamism; for Boccioni, a sphere has "a tendency to go," while a cone produces "a sensation of static indifference" and "a tendency to push down."49 Absolute motion registers an object's potential movement and relative motion the material actualization of motion in the here and now, rather than some future development.

Relative motion, therefore, is associated with "the object in movement," with our experience of "trains, cars, bicycles, and airplanes" as well as "a man running or a man in flight."

Regardless of the difference in speed of an automobile in comparison with a human body, "it is still a question of a simple variation of forms and of rhythm." Above all, states Boccioni, it is "a question of time."50 Through the plastic merger of relative and absolute motion, a temporal continuity composed of an ongoing present and of future potential movements is intuited by the artist. Dynamism, which is the synthesis of relative and absolute motion, is defined as a form of creative evolution: Dynamism in painting and sculpture is thus an evolutionary concept of plastic reality. It is the affirmation of a sensibility that more than ever conceives of the world as the infinite succession of a diversity in evolution. In interpreting the mobility of this evolution, which is life itself, we Futurists, we have been able to create the form-type, the form of forms, the continuity.5' This "continuity" or "succession" is realized "through the intuitive research of the unique form which gives continuity in space"; indeed, "it is this form-type that makes the object live in the universal," that is, as part of the evolutionary process.52 As "a sort of fourth dimension in painting and sculpture," works such as his Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (Fig. 1) both encompass "the three dimensions which give volume" and register the present and future development of these volumes in time. "With the unique form that gives continuity in space," argues Boccioni, "we create a form that is the sum of the potential unfolding of the three known dimensions."53 As we have seen, Boccioni associated an object's potential development with absolute motion; the fourth dimension, as the intersection of time and space, is registered as a form of rhythmic extensity. "We interpret nature by rendering these objects on the canvas as the beginnings or the prolongations of the rhythms impressed upon our sensibility by these very objects," states Boccioni, quoting from the February 1912 preface to the Futurists' first Paris exhibition.54 These rhythms are transformed into the "force lines" and "color forms" that are "the dynamic manifestation of form." Besides force lines there are also "force forms" to indicate "variation" in an object's "organic substance," its "gravity" and potential for "expansion."

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1 Umberto Boccioni, UniqueFormsof Continuityin Space,bronze, cast 1913, 43 7/8 x 34 7/8 x 15 3/4". New York, Collection, The Museum of Modern Art, Acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest

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Starting with the "centripedal construction" of an object's material substance, intuition allows Boccioni to discern "the centrifugal direction of form," for "in these centrifugal directions are inserted force lines, force forms, force colors."

Boccioni intuits such form through a "study of quantity," identified with an object's "centripetal construction," and a "study of quality," that is, "the relation of the object to its milieu" or its "centrifugal construction." The centripetal or quantitative aspect of an object is its material mass; the centrifugal or qualitative stands for its creative potential for expansion.55 Having intuited such "pure plastic rhythm" in the guise of the "spiral architecture" of his sculpture, Boccioni then calls on the beholder of his work to realize a comparable intuition.

Boccioni, in Plastic Dynamism, claims that his art galvanizes the intuitive capacities of the spectator, no longer condemned to study a sculpture's external form. In this regard, he quotes the following passage from his June 1913 preface to the First Exhibition of Futurist Sculpture,held at the Galerie La Boetie in Paris: Traditional sculptors made their statues revolve in front of the spectator, or the spectator around the statues. ... My spiral, architectural construction, on the other hand, creates before the spectator a continuity of forms which permit him to follow ideally (through the force forms sprung from the real form) a new, abstract contour which expresses the body in its material movements. By its centrifugal direction, the form-force is the potential of the living form. It is thus in a more abstract way that one perceives form in my sculpture. The spectator should construct ideally a continuity (simultaneity) which is suggested to him by the form-forces equivalent to the expansive energy of the bodies.56 In keeping with the Futurist desire to place the spectator in the center of a painting or sculpture, Boccioni calls on the beholder to revolve around a sculpture and, at the same time, to "follow ideally" the development of a unique form of continuity in space. Boccioni's preface gives us some idea of how he sought to achieve this end. When a spectator revolves around a traditional sculpture, "any visual angle thus possible is limited to one side of the sculptural group at a time," a process that augments "the immobility of the work."'57Boccioni's "sculptural ensemble" avoids such ocular limitations, for it "evolves in the space created by the depths of the volumes, while showing the thickness of each profile." Rather than consisting of "a series of rigid profiles, immobile silhouettes," in Boccioni's sculpture "each profile carries in itself a clue to other profiles, both those that precede and those that follow, forming altogether the sculptural whole.""58 To convey a sense of movement, Boccioni's sculpture takes on not a "pyramidal" form, representative of a "static state," but a "spiral" one, to suggest "dynamism." To intimate its "plastic directions (dynamism)" Boccioni recommends adding chiaroscuro in paint to the extreme edge of each sculptural contour, "in order that the outer edges of the sculptural entity die away little by little and lose themselves in space."

"One must completely forget the figure enclosed in its traditional line," asserts Boccioni, and "present it as the

center of plastic directions." It is through the combination of "real form" and "ideal form," "form in movement (relative movement) and movement in form (absolute movement)," that a sculpture is presented as "changing, evolving." For the prospective beholder it is "this double conception of form" that "can alone render in the duration of time that instant of plastic life as it was materialized.""59 In his 1913 exhibition at the Galerie La Boitie, Boccioni undertook to put theory into practice in a series of sculpted "plastic ensembles," originally modeled in plaster, of striding male nudes. In addition to his Unique Forms of Continuity in Space--also modeled in plaster and only posthumously cast in bronze-he exhibited works with titles like Muscles Moving Swiftly, Synthesis of Human Dynamism, and Spiral Expansion of Muscles in Motion. The athletic figures embody "form in movement" as well as "movement in form," for Boccioni conjoined actual physical movements in space with his intuition of the vast array of immanent and potential movements expressive of "absolute" motion. Matter and mind seem to fuse in sculptures whose primary subject is the internal expansion or contraction of muscles expressive not only of physical exertion but also of the creative will, or Rlan vital, animating these muscular bodies. In effect, Boccioni viewed the human body as an indeterminate "zone of intensity," a nexus of ongoing rhythmic activity devoid of all stasis.60 In Unique Forms of Continuity in Space the placement of the figure on cubic plinths creates a dramatic contrast between "static" and "dynamic" forms. The cubic forms represent matter in a static state, whereas the dynamic body transforms itself into an arabesque interplay of "force forms" or muscular movements. Welling up from within, the centrifugal dynamism of force forms distorts or expands the body beyond its normal contours: for instance, calf and thigh muscles bulge into fluid contours reminiscent of flames or waves. The rhythmic movements of lungs and biceps pull the rib cage apart so that a deep contour opens up at the chest. Sharpedged elements signal the interplay of flexible muscles with the relative rigidity of the skeleton; the sharp, triangular forms of the hip bones emerge from the thighs, while the brow and nose of the striding athlete are rendered in a cruciform shape, like the prow of a ship cutting the waves. As the viewer moves around the sculpture, these "lyrical deformations" transform into a new interplay of shapes, suggesting the "continuity" or evolution of bodily activity in space and time. As these images accumulate in our imagination, we are invited to "construct ideally" the expansion of the pulsing forms beyond the athlete's "relative" movement, so that we, too, might join the artist in intuiting the "expansive energy" and drama of human dynamism.

The Politics of Intuition "Plastic dynamism is the only method through which one is able to define the contemporary plastic sensibility": such was Boccioni's assertion in an article titled "Plastic Dynamism" published in Mario Missiroli's nationalist journal II Resto del CarlinoinJanuary 1914.61 In that article Boccioni claimed that this sensibility was "profoundly Italian" and that, by rejecting "external analysis," a Futurist aesthetic conveyed an object's "expansive force" and "plastic drama" to the Italian public.

Presumably Boccioni expected the readers of II Resto del

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Carlino to embrace Futurism as part of thatjournal's nationalist agenda. In the years immediately preceding the publication of the book Plastic Dynamism, Boccioni had repeatedly affirmed his own alliance with the nationalist cause. Boccioni was on hand to applaud Marinetti's synthesis of nationalism and syndicalism in the Futurist leader's July 1910 lecture "The Beauty and Necessity of Violence"; in December 1912 he joined Marinetti in attending the first congress of Enrico Corradini's Italian Nationalist Association held in Rome; and in May 1914, Boccioni reaffirmed that allegiance by attending another of Corradini's congresses.62 As Giovanni Lista notes, Boccioni and Marinetti took up a leftist position within the nationalist movement by combining patriotism with "antiAustrian irredentism, anti-monarchism, and anti-clericalism."63 This not only allied them to such publications as Paolo Orano's La Lupa and Mario Missiroli's II Resto del Carlino, it also divided them from the promonarchist position of Enrico Corradini. What they shared with Corradini, however, was a belief that nationalist fervor, and war itself, could serve to regenerate a moribund Italy crippled by democratic institutions.

Most important for this essay, Bergsonian paradigms were Boccioni's means of assimilating his theory of the fourth dimension into his political program. Boccioni couched the contrast in Plastic Dynamism between a "great, Futurist Italy" and Italy under parliamentary democracy in terms of a Bergsonian division between "intuition" and "intellect." As we have seen, his opening remarks exalted Futurism for having created "an antirationalist and dynamic avant-garde" able to "rejuvenate Italy" by increasing its "spiritual speed."64 He further claimed that Futurism could galvanize an otherwise lethargic public, tethered to a "rationalist" mentality in politics. The political corollary to rationalism was democracy in politics and academicism in art; both were undermined by the "antirationalism" of the Futurist program. Italian painting, we are told, had previously been "egoistic, antinational, antiheroic"; as the "primitives" of a new sensibility the Futurists rejected the outmoded "democratic-rationalist" precepts undergirding such art.65 In Plastic Dynamism Boccioni deployed Bergsonian intuition in his attack on rationalism in all its guises; he argued that the fourth-dimensional force forms emanating from Futurist painting and sculpture could awaken the beholder's intuitive capacities and actively transform consciousness. An intuition of the fourth dimension, in

Sorel, states historian Zeev Sternhell, "stigmatized all forms of rationalist optimism, whether Greek philosophy or the natural rights of man,"68 and identified such "rationalist" values with those of the bourgeois class of his day. In 1908 Sorel published his Reflectionson Violence,a widely influential book that proposed the myth of the mass strike as an ideological tool able to unite the proletariat by appealing to their intuitive rather than intellectual capacities. At the same time Sorel hoped proletarian agitation would awaken the bourgeois class from its rationalist stupor, so that it, too, could be invigorated through intuitive means. With both classes locked in militant conflict, the parliamentary system would presumably collapse and France's moral regeneration through violence would have its salutary effect. Proudhonian federalism would replace parliamentary democracy with a decentralized system of government.69 For Sorel, the revolution took on a decidedly psychological tone as a struggle between intuitive and intellectual forces, cast as a mythic general strike meant to incite class war between the proletariat and bourgeoisie. "Myth" to Sorel was a positive term for the creation of a revolutionary state of mind. But when Sorel's faith in the myth of syndicalist activism began to falter in 1908, he was prepared to substitute another mythic "body of images" as a means of galvanizing the proletariat's intuitive imagination. Sorel, in fact, was to supplement the myth of the general strike with that of a nation founded on the combative will power resulting from class conflict. This shift precipitated his alliance with French royalists and resulted in the founding of the journal Indipendance (1911-13), which propagated a corporatist model of national unity Sorel deemed antithetical to the rational underpinnings of republicanism. For Indipendance nationalists like Gilbert Maire, Georges Valois, and Jean Variot, the corporatism of the French royalist movement Action Fran;aise could be reconciled with Sorelian violence once royalists recognized the value of intuitive violence as an end in itself.

These Sorelians wedded Sorel's notion of a decentralized corporative society made up of contesting classes to royalism by designating the king as the neutral arbiter of this permanent class conflict.70 In the wake of failed attempts at a general strike in Italy in 1904 and 1908, Sorel's Italian interpreters, Arturo Labriola and Paolo Orano, followed his example by forging an alliance with extreme nationalists, in a united opposition against what

short, had a regenerative role to play in Boccioni's art and his politics.

To contextualize properly the Futurists' political reading of Bergsonian intuition we must consider the politics of Georges Sorel, a French theoretician who had a profound impact on the nationalism of Enrico Corradini and the Italian Futurists.66 Sorel's chief innovation was to apply the Bergsonian duality between intellect and intuition in the sphere of leftist politics. Following Bergson, Sorel identified the intellect as a faculty unable to discern durational change or human will, and like Bergson he identified intellectualism with Cartesianism, eighteenth-century rationalism, and the scientific positivism of the nineteenth century. But whereas Bergson limited his critique of intellectualism to the realm of metaphysics, Sorel claimed that intellectual modes of thought were at the root of the French Republic's parliamentary democracy.67

they saw as the parliamentary, bourgeois order underpinning the Giolitti government.71 This latter nationalism of "energy and will" was propagated by Orano and Labriola in the magazine La Lupa, founded in October 1910 after the demise of another Sorelian journal, La Demolizione. La Lupa had Georges Sorel as a contributer, and the magazine grouped Sorelian syndicalists and antiparliamentarian nationalists under the banner of the newly created myth of the proletarian nation Sorel now endorsed.72 It is for this reason that La Lupa brought the ultranationalist Enrico Corradini into its fold, as one who had used Sorelian arguments to forge a syndicalistnationalist synthesis in the journal II Tricolore.For Corradini nationalism as an idea was superior, in its mythic appeal, to the Sorelian notion of the mass strike it was modeled after.

With the failure of the myth of the mass strike as an instrument of revolution, Corradini called on political dissi-

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dents to create a myth of national and worker imperialism as a means to combat bourgeois decadence.73 In this manner the myth of class conflict could be transferred to the international plane as a battle between proletarian and bourgeois nations for global hegemony. "There are nations that are in a condition of inferiority in relation to others," stated Corradini in La Lupa, "just as there are classes which are in a condition of inferiority in relation to other classes. Italy is a proletarian nation."74 As a proletarian nation, Italy's working class could engage bourgeois nations like England and France in a battle for control over colonial territories, and this led La Lupa's staff to call for Italian intervention in Libya at a time when the vast majority of Italian socialists and syndicalists called for a national strike as a sign of their pacifist position.75 Rather than follow internationalists in declaring the solidarity of the working class superior to national solidarity, Orano and the editors of La Lupa forged a theory of heroic nationalism designed to appeal to a working class they identified as constituting the body of the nation.

Sorelian nationalism was also fostered in Mario Missiroli's I1 Resto del Carlino (founded in mid-1910), the journal that published Boccioni's defense of "plastic dynamism." From its inception, Il Resto del Carlino included articles by Sorel outlining his rapprochement with French nationalists.76 As a former contributer to Orano's La Lupa and Corradini's Il Tricolore,Missiroli was well equipped to develop Sorel's nationalist themes, and his criticism echoed the attack on the materialist and rationalist foundations of democratic ideology initiated by Sorel's Italian followers. For instance, in an article titled "Le nationalisme italien," published in the Sorelian journal Indipendance, Missiroli denounced "Jacobin democracy," the corruption of its politics, and the decadence of its institutions.77 While professing admiration for Sorelian royalism in France, Missiroli claimed that the absence of a strong monarchical tradition in Italy made that country's nationalism all the more dynamic and creative.78 Like the Italian Futurists, Missiroli did not fully endorse Corradini's program, although he applauded Italy's status as a "proletarian nation." In IJRestodel Carlino, Missiroli declared Sorel a "man of order" who advocated a "creative" rather than nihilistic theory of revolution. 79 The publication of Boccioni's "Plastic Dynamism" in the pages of II Restodel Carlinotherefore signals his awareness of the synthesis of nationalism and syndicalism developed by Sorel's Italian apologists. The Italian Sorelians

defined their nationalism in terms of the regenerative force of Bergsonian intuition and the ability of that force to overwhelm the rational order underlying democratic institutions. Il Resto del Carlino's readers were well prepared for Boccioni's own Bergsonian variation of the nationalist agenda.

Fourth-Dimensional Force Lines: Placing the Spectator at the Center of the Revolution The national syndicalist synthesis outlined above had a direct impact on the Futurism of Marinetti, who also conjoined syndicalism and nationalism. "Marinettian futurism," according to historian Giovanni Lista, "is first recognized in the anarcho-syndicalist current," where the Futurist commanderin-chief became cognizant of the Sorelian "myths of action and violence."'8 Thus, Marinetti's Founding Manifesto of Futurism (1909) was published in the March 1909 edition of

syndicalist Octavio Dinale's La Demolizione,the Sorelian journal that propagated opposition to parliamentarianism. La Demolizione'sstated aim was "to reunite the world in a single body [fasces] to oppose active energies to the inertia and indolence that threatens to suffocate all life.' 81 The fasces of La Demolizione included all those who shared revolutionary syndicalism's "combative energies" in an attempt to engage "all domains" in "the vast social battle."82 As Lista points out, Dinale's journal used the term fasces, from which the word fascism derives, to describe a political program explicitly linked to the militancy of Marinetti's Futurism. In a March 1910 edition of La Demolizione, Marinetti underscored the connection in his manifesto titled "Our Common Enemies";83 furthermore, he followed Sorel's Italian apologists in promulgating a theory of national syndicalism. Shortly before Dinale helped launch La Lupa's program of revolutionary nationalism in 1910, Marinetti had given a conference on "The Beauty and Necessity of Violence" in Milan (July 30), outlining a notion of political agitation aligned to Futurism's cultural program.84 The conference was also meant to augment his political candidacy in the district of Piedmont, where the union of nationalism and revolutionary syndicalism had recently been formulated by Corradini in the Piedmontese journal II Tricolore.85As we have seen, Corradini's synthesis, later published in La Lupa, transformed the Sorelian battle between classes into a struggle between proletarian and bourgeois nations. Corradini's program called on members of the working class to abandon their proletarian internationalism and instead identify their interests as workers with that of national regeneration. Marinetti's lecture "The Beauty and Necessity of Violence" advocated just this synthesis and met with an unruly response on the part of the Milanese proletariat.86 That "one of the most heated defenders of patriotism" who heard Marinetti's speech was "the young Futurist painter Boccioni"87 suggests that Boccioni had forged a similar rapprochement of nationalism and Sorelian violence as early as the autumn of 1910. Indeed, Boccioni is known to have read Sorel88 by that time; we also know that both Marinetti and Boccioni fully endorsed Corradini's Sorelian nationalism

by December 1912.89 In addition, early Futurist works, such as Funeral Luigi Russolo's Revolt (1911, Fig. 2) and Carlo Carrt's of the Anarchist Galli (1911, Fig. 3) bear comparison to the themes developed in the syndicalist journal La Demolizione.

The agitational import of these two works was confirmed by their inclusion in the FreeArt Exhibitionin Milan, organized by the Casa del Lav6ro (House of Labor) and the Futurists in 1911 as a charity event to aid the unemployed. In contrast to Marinetti and Boccioni, who endorsed a version of Sorelian nationalism, Russolo and the former anarchist Carrt initially favored the syndicalist half of the Sorelian equation. Russolo's 1912 characterization of The Revolt as "the collision of two forces, that of the revolutionary element made up of enthusiasm and red lyricism against the force and inertia and reactionary resistance of tradition,"'9 metaphorically echoes La Demolizione's syndicalist battle against "inertia and indolence," as well as the Sorelian myth of "heroic violence" Marinetti conjured up for Russolo and his fellow Futurists in his 1910 lecture "The Necessity and Beauty of Violence." In Russolo's painting the violent collision between the forces of

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2 Luigi Russolo, The Revolt,oil on canvas, 59 x 90 5/8", 1911.

The Hague, Gemeentemuseum

3 Carlo Carri, Funeralof the AnarchistGalli, oil on canvas, 6' 6 1/4" x 8' 6", 1911. New York, Collection, The Museum of Modern Art, Acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest

revolution and reaction is represented as an activist crowd's invasion of an urban landscape composed of apartment buildings shrouded in a nocturnal blue black. The revolutionary force of this all-male group takes the form of a "red

wedge" of chevrons, whose reverberations transverse the canvas from right to left, symbolically upending the adjacent buildings.

This correlation of Sorelian myth and Bergsonian intuition

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4 Boccioni, Riot in the Galleria,oil on canvas, 30 x 25" (76 x 64 cm), 1910. Milan, Pinacoteca di Brera, Gift of Emilio and Maria Jesi, Milan

is strongly evoked in the radiating lines of force animating Carra's Funeral of the Anarchist Galli (Fig. 3). Sorel, in his Reflectionson Violence,noted that images of strike action "have engendered in the proletariat the ... most moving sentiments that they possess," adding that "the general strike groups them all in a co-ordinated picture, and by bringing them together, gives to each one of them its maximum of intensity; appealing to their painful memories of particular conflicts, it colors with intense life all the details of the composition presented to consciousness." "We thus obtain that intuition of socialism which language cannot give us with perfect clearness," asserts Sorel, referring to Bergson." Carri gives us an image of an event following the failed general strike of 1904, when an anarchist funeral procession in Milanunder assault by police honoring a strike victim-came mounted on horseback.92 Carraiportrayed the moment when police, armed with lances, assaulted the funeral cortege: on horseback they invade the procession from both left and right, only to be confronted with fierce resistance on the part of anarchists, who use fists and canes as their means of defense. The urban setting is indicated by the inclusion of the metal grid of a tram tower and the background greenery of trees lining the street, but the battle scene itself is saturated in the black and red colors of anarcho-syndicalism. The movements of the workers form repeated arcs of radiating lines that crisscross the canvas; even the red-draped coffin of Angelo Galli is shown from multiple viewpoints, to indicate its instability in the midst of the assault. These arcs are repeated throughout the canvas; coupled with abstract sheaves of red

they convey the energy of the battle. In the February 1912 catalogue for the Futurists' first Parisian exhibition, written mostly by Boccioni, "the sheaves of lines corresponding to all the conflicting forces, following the general law of violence" in Carra's work are labeled "force lines."93 The irradiating expansion of these lines has a psychological effect on the viewer, so that he or she is "obliged to struggle himself with the personages in the picture."94 This transcription of proletarian battle into abstract pictorial form-along with its on the the subsequent impact viewing public-encapsulates Futurist idea of "physical transcendentalism," which sees force lines as "the beginnings or prolongations of the rhythms that objects imprint on our sensibility." The "continuity" of these lines, whose emotive impact "must envelop and sweep along the viewer," is "measured by our intuition."

In short, the Futurists employ intuition to capture the emotive force of political violence and then to oblige the spectator "to be at the center of the painting," to relive the intensity of the battle.95 Boccioni's own early image of street violence, titled Riot in the Galleria (Fig. 4), differed markedly from Carra's and Russolo's inasmuch as it depicted violence between women rather than men and focused on the chaos of a riot rather than the heroic violence of the politicized, all-male proletariat.96 As Christine Poggi has demonstrated, Boccioni's painting echoed the views of crowd psychologists like Scipio Sighele and Gustave Le Bon, whose infamous book The Crowd (1895) characterized crowd behavior as the product of instinctive, unconscious drives, and therefore prone to a "feminine" lack of restraint.97 Boccioni thus associated "feminine" violence with chaotic nihilism rather than with the creative violence of a disciplined, male proletariat. He likewise repeatedly made images of his mother stationed on a balcony, either perceptually overwhelmed by the dynamic sensations emanating from the laboring male workers inhabiting the street below, as in The StreetEnters the House (1911, Fig. 5), or in the guise of an iconic symbol of biological fecundity, as in Matter, or Materia (1912, Mattioli Collection, Milan).

Virginia Spate and Christine Poggi have noted that Boccioni's correlation of mother with materia in the latter work identified her with the elemental forces of creation, but that his subjection of his mother's body to interpenetrating force lines emerging from the urban environment echoed Marinetti's "rejection of the cult of mother" and the preeminence of male-gendered notions of "antimaterialist" speed and force over the generative earthbound power of female fecundity, represented in the form of an elderly mother no longer able to bear children.98 As we have seen, Bergson thought matter in a condition of stasis represented the dlan vital at its most degraded, when it came closest to a state of absolute inertia.

By contrast, the intuitive consciousness Boccioni and the Futurists associated with artistic creativity and the violence of the male revolutionary represented the elan vital as a fully operative agent of creative evolution. Boccioni's choice of the striding image of a heroic male for his Unique Forms of Continuity in Space may well reflect a gendered notion of "creative revolution," in keeping with Marinetti's Sorelian identification of the heroic male warrior as the primary force for social transformation.99 By the time Boccioni adapted his theory of force lines and

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the fourth dimension to his attempt to transform the consciousness of the spectator viewing his sculpture, the intuitive revolution envisioned was of a more reactionary sort than that conceived earlier by Carrai. Fully immersed in the nationalist discourse of Corradini, Boccioni, like Marinetti, propounded a version of Sorelian nationalism increasingly divorced from Sorel's syndicalist roots. Thus, Boccioni in Plastic Dynamism not only condemned the pacifist internationalism of Enrico Ferri's socialists, he also defended the warmongering policy of colonial conquest propagated by Francesco Crispi (18181901).100 As prime minister (1887-91 and 1893-96) Crispi had advocated war as the best means of forging an Italian national identity. As Emilio Gentile has shown, Crispi promoted patriotism as a form of "secular religion" that would overcome the divisive and demoralizing effects of a corrupt parliament and produce the spiritual unity that Italy evidently lacked.1'0 Crispi's faith in war's regenerative powers led him to increase military spending to its highest level since unification and to embark in 1896 on the disastrous military campaign to conquer Ethiopia.1o2 Boccioni considered his own call for colonial conquest in Libya and renewed heroism, as well as disdain for democratic institutions, as continuations of Crispi's program for national regeneration. A Futurist Italy, Plastic Dynamism proclaimed, would reject "the Italy that would massacre Crispi," and as a result, a "pacifist and internationalist" Italy "surrounded by nations rich and formidable" would cede to a rejuvenated Italy, ready for colonial conquest.103 In fact, Boccioni was not alone in holding this position, for Mario Missiroli-the editor of IlResto del Carlino-had launched a similar defense of Crispi in the article "Le nationalisme italien," published in the Sorelian journal Indipendance in August 1911.104 Revolutionary Time In sum, Boccioni's interpretation of the fourth dimension effectively bound that theory of space to a temporal conception of revolution. Beginning with a notion of time that was thoroughly politicized, Boccioni thought the unfolding of Bergsonian durie in its extensive form an expression of the revolutionary potential of Italian society. In breaching the limitations imposed on us by the intellect, intuition overcame the "finite" dimensions of measured time and Euclidean space and instigated a Futurist revolt against those systems of governance associated with nineteenth-century rationalism, most notably, parliamentary democracy.'05 Like the Russian mystic P. D. Ouspensky or the British social activist Edward Carpenter in their theories of the fourth dimension, Boccioni conceived of the fourth dimension as a means of transforming human consciousness; unlike Ouspensky, who tied such consciousness to a world harmony born of mystical insight, or Carpenter, who wedded this psychic transformation to a vision of homosocial fraternity based on anarcho-communist precepts, the newfound consciousness championed by Boccioni found its raison d'etrein the realm of political violence.1'06 Rather than justifying a vision of universal brotherhood, Boccioni's fourth dimension would bring about a national revolution, with a Sorelian conflict between nations as its regenerative aim. Thus, the force lines and force forms springing forth from Boccioni's Unique Forms of Continuity in Space were designed to involve the spectator in the very

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5 Boccioni, TheStreetEnterstheHouse, oil on canvas, 39 3/8 x 39 5/8" (100 x 100.6 cm), 1911. Hannover, Sprengel Museum

politics that led to Italy's intervention in World War I and, ultimately, to the rise of Fascism in Italy.107

Mark Antliff associateprofessorof art history at Duke University,is author of Inventing Bergson: Cultural Politics and the Parisian Avant-Garde (1993), coeditor with Matthew Affron of Fascist Visions: Art and Ideology in France and Italy (1997), and coauthor with Patricia Leighten of Cubism and Culture (forthcoming) [Department of Art and Art History, Duke University, Box 90764, Durham, N. C. 27708-0 764].

Frequently Cited Sources Antliff, Mark, Inventing Bergson: Cultural Politics and the Parisian Avant-Garde

(Princeton:Princeton UniversityPress, 1993).

Boccioni, Umberto, Pittura scultura Futuriste:Dinamismo plastico (1914; reprint,

Florence:Vallechi, 1977).

Lista, Giovanni, "Marinettiet les anarcho-syndicalistes,"in Prisencede Marinetti,ed.Jean-ClaudeMarcad6(Lausanne:L'Aged'Homme, 1982), 74-83.

Roth, Jack, The Cult of Violence:Sorel and the Sorelians (Berkeley: University of

CaliforniaPress, 1980).

Sternhell, Zeev, with Mario Sznajder and Maia Asheri, The Birth of Fascist Ideology:From Cultural Rebellion to Political Revolution (Princeton: Princeton

UniversityPress, 1994).

Notes My thanks to Emily Braun, Perry Chapman, and Linda Henderson for their comments on an earlier draftof this essay,which is partof a projectedstudyon the issue of aesthetic closure and modernism. Unless otherwise stated, all translationsare my own.

1. Boccioni, 1.

2. Ibid., 31; Umberto Boccioni, "Contro la vigliaccheriaartisticaitaliana," Lacerba1, no. 17 (Sept. 1, 1913): 179-81.

3. Boccioni, 1913 (as in n. 2), 179-81. For a cogent analysisof Boccioni's and F. T. Marinetti'spolitical evolution before 1914, see Lista, 74-83; idem,

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"Marinetti et le Futurisme politique," in Marinettiet Futurisme(Lausanne: L'Age d'Homme, 1977), 11-28. For an analysisof the aesthetic dimension of Boccioni's Corradiniannationalism,see Antliff, 155-66.

4. Boccioni, 30-31, 71.

5. See the section devoted to Italian Futurism in Linda Henderson's pathbreaking volume

The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in

ModernArt (Princeton: Princeton UniversityPress, 1983), 110-16; and more recently, in Henderson, "Die moderne Kunst und die Unsichtbare: Die verborgenen Wellen und Dimensionen des Okkultismus und die Wissenschaften," in Okkultismusund Avantgarde: VonMunch bis Mondrian, 1900-1915

(Frankfurt:Schirn Kunsthalle,1995), 13-31. For the most detailed analysisto date of Bergson's impact on Boccioni, see Brian Petrie, "Boccioni and Bergson," BurlingtonMagazine116 (March1974): 140-47.

6. See Gfinter Berghaus, Futurism and Politics: BetweenAnarchist Rebellion and

FascistReaction,1909-1945 (Providence:Berghahn Books, 1996); Lista; and Sternhell, 24-35, 233-39.

7. See WalterBenjamin, "Artin the Age of MechanicalReproduction," in Illuminations,trans. H. Zohn (New York:Schocken, 1969), 217-52; for an analysisof Benjamin'sapproach to aestheticization,see RussellBerman, "The Aestheticization of Politics: Walter Benjamin on Fascism and the AvantGarde," in Modern Culture and Critical Theory:Art, Politics, and the Legacy of the

FrankfurtSchool(Madison:Universityof WisconsinPress, 1989), 27-41.

8. See Sternhell;Jeffrey Schnapp, "ForwardingAddress," StanfordItalian Review 8, nos. 1-2 (1990): 53-80; Andrew Hewitt, Fascist Modernism:Aesthetics, Politics, and the Avant-Garde (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993),

134-35; and Emilio Gentile, "The Conquest of Modernity:From Modernist Nationalism to Fascism,"Modernism/Modernity 3, no. 2 (Sept. 1994): 74. As Gentile has argued in The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy (Cambridge,

Mass.:Harvard UniversityPress, 1996), Italian Fascistsidentified the myths, rites, and symbols that served to mobilize the Italian populace during World WarI with a willingnessto sacrificeone's life in the name of "secularreligious" values that were destined to transformthe nation. It was the wartimevalor of the Italiancombatantthat had produced the Fascist"new man," whose values were antitheticalto the rationalismof parliamentarydemocracy.For a recent summation of WalterBenjamin'simpact on debates over Fascism'saesthetic dimension, see MatthewAffron and MarkAntliff, "Artand FascistIdeology in France and Italy," in Fascist Visions: Art and Ideology in France and Italy, ed.

Affronand Antliff (Princeton:Princeton UniversityPress, 1997), 3-24.

9. Petrie (as in n. 5), 146-47.

10. Boccioni, 11-16.

11. Ibid., 19-25.

12. Ibid., 109-11.

13. Ibid.

14. Ibid., 109-10.

15. Ibid., 53-54.

16. Henri Bergson, Introduction to Metaphysics (1903), in The CreativeMind,

trans. Mabelle L. Andison (1946; reprint, New Jersey: Littlefield, Adams, 1975), 159.

17. Ibid., 159-62.

18. Ibid., 162.

19. Ibid.

20. For an analysis of Bergson's critique of ocularcentrism, see Antliff,

65-66; and Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-

CenturyFrench Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 186-205.

21. Henri Bergson, CreativeEvolution(1907), trans.Arthur Mitchell (1911; reprint,New York:Henry Holt, 1937), 237.

22. For a summationof Bergson'sart theory,see Antliff,58-66.

23. Henri Bergson, Timeand FreeWill (1889), trans. F. L. Pogson (1910; reprint,NewYork:Harperand Row,1960), 194-97.

24. Boccioni, 45.

25. Bergson (as in n. 23), 55-72.

26. Boccioni, 46.

27. Ibid., 85-86.

28. Ibid., 86.

29. Ibid., 96.

30. Petrie (as in n. 5), 142, 145.

31. "That which is real," he stated in Matter and Memory, "is something intermediate between divided extension [abstract Euclidean space] and pure inextension [durance]. It is what we have termed the extensive." See Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory (1896), trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1911), 92-93, 326.

32. Bergson, "L'immortaliti de l'ame" (1911), in Milanges (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1972), 956-57. See alsoJohn Mullarkey's discussion of this issue, "Bergson's Method of Multiplicity," Metaphilosophy26 (July 1995): 236-37. I have dealt with this paradigm in relation to the art of Henri Matisse; see Mark Antliff, "The Rhythms of Duration: Bergson and the Art of Matisse," in The New Bergson, ed. John Mullarkey (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998).

33. Bergson (as in n. 31), 188. Brian Petrie has noted the impact of such ideas on Boccioni. See Petrie (as in n. 5), 145.

34. Bergson (as in n. 32); and idem (as in n. 31), 275.

35. Bergson (as in n. 21), 177, 237.

36. Bergson (as in n. 16), 220-21.

37. See F.C.T.Moore's analysisof Bergson's notion of "tension" in Bergson: ThinkingBackwards (Cambridge:CambridgeUniversityPress, 1996), 91-96.

38. Bergson (as in n. 21), 189.

39. Moore (as in n. 37), 95-96.

40. Boccioni, 70.

41. Ibid., 22-23.

42. Ibid., 85-86.

43. Ibid., 78-79.

44. John Golding has claimed that Boccioni's Bergsonian references to absolute and relative motion, both in his March 1913 manifesto "Plastic Fundamentalsof FuturistPainting and Sculpture" (Lacerba,March 1913) and in Dinamismoplastico,"implicitlychallenges Bergson by suggesting that the work of art can describe an analytic depiction of the movement of a subject and can simultaneouslyintuitivelyembody 'the throbbing of its soul.' " Here he mistakenlyconflates Bergson's critique of relative motion with Boccioni's usage of the term. See Golding, Boccioni: Unique Forms of Continuity in Space

(London: Tate Gallery,1985), 10.

45. Boccioni, 80, 82.

46. Ibid., 80-81.

47. Ibid., 81.

48. Ibid.

49. Ibid., 81-82.

50. Ibid., 82-84.

51. Ibid., 91.

52. Ibid., 86.

53. Ibid., 86-87.

54. Ibid., 92; for the complete preface, see Umberto Boccioni et al., "The Exhibitors to the Public" (from the exhibition at Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, Paris, Feb. 1912), in Exhibition of Worksby the Italian Futurist Painters, exh. cat.,

SackvilleGallery,London, March 1912; reprinted in Umbro Apollonio, ed., FuturistManifestos(NewYork:Viking Press, 1973), 45-50.

55. Boccioni, 78-79.

56. Ibid., 93-94. For the complete preface, see Umberto Boccioni, "Preface, First Exhibition of Futurist Sculpture" (from the exhibition at Galerie La Boitie, Paris, June 20-July 16, 1913), in Modern Artists on Art: Ten Unabridged

Essays,ed. Robert L. Herbert (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1964), 47-50.

57. Boccioni (as in n. 56), 48.

58. Ibid.

59. Ibid., 47-49.

60. In referring to zones of intensity I am alluding to the Bergsonian aesthetics of Gilles Deleuze, who has employed Bergson's concepts of rhythm and intensity in his analysisof the art of FrancisBacon. See Deleuze, Francis Bacon: Logique de la sensation (Paris: Editions de la Diff6rance, 1981).

61. Umberto Boccioni, "Dinamismo plastico," II Restodel Carlino,Jan. 20,

1914; reprinted in Boccioni, Dynamismeplastique: Peinture et sculpturefuturistes

(1914), ed. GiovanniLista (Lausanne:L'Aged'Homme, 1975), 129.

62. Lista,1977 (as in n. 3), 19-20.

63. Ibid., 20.

64. Boccioni, 1.

65. Ibid., 71-73.

66. For studies of Sorel's impact on Italian nationalists,see Roth, 87-120; and Sternhell, 160-86. For analyses of the impact of Corradini's Sorelian ideology on the Futurists,see Lista, 1977 (as in n. 3); and Antliff, 156-66. I have recently explored the implications Sorelian nationalism had for the development of Fascist aesthetics in France. See MarkAntliff, "The Jew as Anti-Artist:GeorgesSorel,Anti-Semitism,and the Aestheticsof ClassConsciousness," OxfordArtJournal 20, no. 1 (1997): 50-67; and idem, "La citifranCaise:

Georges Valois, Le Corbusier,and FascistTheories of Urbanism," in Affron and Antliff (as in n. 8), 134-70.

67. See Zeev Sternhell, NeitherRight nor Left: Fascist Ideologyin France (1983), trans. David Maisel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 66-89, for a discussion of Sorel's antimaterialist critique of Marxism.

68. Ibid., 78.

69. See Georges Sorel, Reflexions sur la violence (1908), trans. T. E. Hulme and J. Roth (1950; reprint, New York: Collier Books, 1961), 86-92; Paul Mazgaj, The Action Franpaise and Revolutionary Syndicalism (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1979), 116-22; and Roth, 50-57.

70. For a discussion of Indpendance and its synthesis of Sorelian and royalist ideas, see Zeev Sternhell, La droite riuolutionnaire: Les origines franCaises du fascisme, 1885-1914 (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1978), 348-400; and Sternhell, 83-91. For an analysis of the aesthetic dimension of that synthesis, see Antliff, "TheJew as Anti-Artist" (as in n. 66), 50-67.

71. Sternhell, 160-63.

72. Ibid., 163. Jean Variot later recalled a Nov. 1908 conversation with Sorel in which Sorel stated that "adversity, for nations, is often a source of energy" and praised the Action FranCaise for developing an image of France as a beleaguered nation in need of moral regeneration. InJuly 1909 Sorel wrote an article for Divenire Socialein which he praised Charles Maurras's movement on similar grounds. See Jean Variot, Propos de Georges Sorel (Paris: Gallimard, 1935), 25, quoted in Mazgaj (as in n. 69), 117, 120.

73. Sternhell, 163-65.

74. E. Corradini, "Nazionalismo e sindicalismo," La Lupa, Oct. 16, 1910, 2, quoted in Sternhell, 164.

THE FOURTH

75. Ibid., 137-38.

76. For instance, see Georges Sorel's articles in Il Resto del Carlino, "La politica degli immortali," June 6, 1910; "I1 nazionalismo francese," Aug. 7, 1910; "La rivincita del patriotismo," Sept. 28, 1910; and "Barbarie o civilita?"

Dec. 27, 1910.

77. See Roth, 131-32; and Mario Missiroli, "Le nationalisme italien," Indipendance, Aug. 1, 1911, 419-35.

78. Ibid., 433-35.

79. Mario Missiroli, "Giorgio Sorel per Alfredo Oriani," II Resto del Carlino, May 12, 1912, quoted in Roth, 132.

80. Lista, 74.

81. Octavio Dinale, in La Demolizione, quoted in ibid.

82. Ibid., 75.

83. F. T. Marinetti, "Our Common Enemies," La Demolizione,Mar. 16, 1910.

84. Lista, 78.

85. Ibid.

86. Ibid., 79. Lista quotes extensively from a journalist's account of the meeting in Milan published in II Secolobut does not give a date of publication or author for the II Secoloarticle. For a fuller analysis of Marinetti's synthesis of Corradini's nationalism and Sorelian precepts, see Antliff, 159-63.

87. Quoted from Il Secolo,in Lista, 80.

88. Lista (as in n. 61), 7.

89. Ibid., 10.

90. Luigi Russolo, in Exhibition of Worksby theItalian Futurist Painters (as in n.

54), no. 12, quoted in Marianne Martin, Futurist Art and Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), 118.

91. Sorel (as in n. 69), 127-28.

92. Martin (as in n. 90), 88.

93. Boccioni et al., in Apollonio (as in n. 54), 48. Before 1913 the Futurists to convey the used pictorial elements derived from chronophotography a dynamism of movement, and the staccato lines in CarrA's painting do bear close resemblance to the chronophotography of Etienne-Jules Marey and the a "photodynamism" of his Futurist colleague Anton Guilio Bragaglia. For see comprehensive analysis of the impact of chronophotography on Futurism, Marta Braun, Picturing Time: The Work of Etienne-Jules Marey (1830-1904) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 291-311.

94. The passage that, in my opinion, alludes to CarrA's work runs as follows: "If we paint the phases of a riot, the crowd bustling with uplifted fists and the noisy onslaughts of cavalry are translated upon the canvas in sheaves of lines of corresponding with all the conflicting forces, following the general law violence of the picture"; Boccioni et al., in Apollonio (as in n. 54), 48.

95. Ibid., 48.

96. Virginia Spate, in an important study of Boccioni's gender politics, was the first to draw attention to the role of women in instigating the violence in The Riot in the Galleria. She has speculated that the women represented in Boccioni's painting were prostitutes, symbolic of the "demonic force" of women in the public sphere. See Spate, "Mother and Son: Boccioni's Painting and Sculpture 1906-1915," in In Visible Touch, ed. Terry Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 107-38.

97. Christine Poggi has explored this dimension of Futurist crowd theory in her talk "Folla/Follia: Futurism and the Crowd," given at the Princeton Art

DIMENSION

AND FUTURISM:

A POLITICIZED

SPACE

733

History Colloquium, Institute for Advanced Study, Jan. 12, 2000. For a thorough analysis of the gendered nature of fin de sircle crowd theory, and of Le Bon's theory in particular, see Susanna Barrows, Distorting Mirrors: Visions of the Crowd in Late Nineteenth-CenturyFrance (New Haven: Yale University Press,

1981).

98. Christine Poggi, "Dreams of Metallized Flesh: Futurism and the Masculine Body," Modernism/Modernity4, no. 3 (Sept. 1997): 31-35; and Spate (as in n. 96), 125-34.

99. Giovanni Lista has argued that Boccioni's politics were closely allied to those of Marinetti; more recently Poggi and Spate have drawn on analyses of Marinetti's gendered politics in an evaluation of Boccioni's politicized representations of female and male bodies, though neither author explicates the Sorelian and Bergsonian dimensions of that discourse. For evaluations of the cult of male virility that pervades Marinetti's gendered notion of Futurism, see Barbara Spackman, Fascist Virilities:Rhetoric, Ideology, and Social Fantasy in Italy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 1-33, 49-76; Cinzia Sartini Blum, The Other Modernism: F T Marinetti's Fiction of Power (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); Christine Poggi (as in n. 98), 19-43; and Spate (as in n. 96), 107-38.

100. Boccioni, 9-10, 30-31.

101. For a brilliant analysis of the function of notions of secular religion in proto-Fascist and Fascist discourse, including that of Crispi, see Gentile, 1996 (as in n. 8).

102. For an overview of Crispi's disastrous foreign policy, see Christopher Duggan, A Concise History of Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 165-70.

103. Boccioni, 10.

104. Missiroli (as in n. 77), 419-35.

105. As Linda Henderson has noted, the turn to theories of the fourth dimension and a concomitant embrace of theories of mysticism and the occult reaction against reigning positivistic were tied to a "nineteenth-century science and the status quo in politics and morality." A good example of such thinking is that of the English mystic and social theorist Edward Carpenter (1844-1929), who thought his interest in the fourth dimension a manifestation of an evolving "cosmic consciousness" that would usher in a new social order of sexual liberation and forms of communitarianism akin to anarchocommunism. See Linda Henderson, "Editor's Statement: Mysticism and Occultism in Modern Art," 5-8, and "Mysticism as the 'Tie That Binds': The Case of Edward Carpenter and Modernism," ArtJournal (Spring 1987): 29-37.

106. For a comprehensive examination of the theories of the fourth dimension developed by Ouspensky and Carpenter, see Linda Henderson, "Mysticism, Romanticism, and the Fourth Dimension," in The Spiritual in Art: AbstractPainting, 1890-1985, ed. Maurice Tuchman and Judi Freeman (New York: Abbeville, 1986) 219-37; and Linda Henderson, "Mysticism as the 'Tie That Binds' " (as in n. 105), 29-37.

107. For analyses of Sorel's impact on the development of Fascism in Italy, see Affron and Antliff (as in n. 8), 3-24; Roth, 179-211; and Sternhell, 160-232. For a definition of fascism as a generic term, see Roger Griffin, The Nature ofFascism (London: Routledge, 1993).