Manifesto Destiny

Writing that demands change now 

 

 

Zoe Leonard, I want a president, 1992, wheat-pasted paper. Installation view, High Line, New York, 2016. Timothy Schenck; Courtesy the High Line

 

MANIFESTO IS THE FORM THAT EATS AND REPEATS ITSELF. Always layered and paradoxical, it comes disguised as nakedness, directness, aggression. An artwork aspiring to be a speech act—like a threat, a promise, a joke, a spell, a dare. You can’t help but thrill to language that imagines it can get something done. You also can’t help noticing the similar demands and condemnations that ring out across the decades and the centuries—something will be swept away or conjured into being, and it must happen right this moment. While appearing to invent itself ex nihilo, the manifesto grabs whatever magpie trinkets it can find, including those that drew the eye in earlier manifestos. This is a form that asks readers to suspend their disbelief, and so like any piece of theater, it trades on its own vulnerability, invites our complicity, as if only the quality of our attention protects it from reality’s brutal puncture. A manifesto is a public declaration of intent, a laying out of the writer’s views (shared, it’s implied, by at least some vanguard “we”) on how things are and how they should be altered. Once the province of institutional authority, decrees from church or state, the manifesto later flowered as a mode of presumption and dissent. You assume the writer stands outside the halls of power (or else, occasionally, chooses to pose and speak from there). Today the US government, for example, does not issue manifestos, lest it sound both hectoring and weak. The manifesto is inherently quixotic—spoiling for a fight it’s unlikely to win, insisting on an outcome it lacks the authority to ensure.

Somewhere a manifesto is always being scrawled, but the ones that survive have usually proliferated at times of ferment and rebellion, like the pamphlets of the Diggers in seventeenth-century England, or the burst of exhortations that surrounded the French Revolution, including, most memorably, Mary Wollstonecraft’s 1792 A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. The manifesto is a creature of the Enlightenment: its logic depends on ideals of sovereign reason, social progress, a universal subject on whom equal rights should (must) be bestowed. Still unsurpassed as a model (for style, force, economy, ambition) is Marx and Engels’s 1848 Communist Manifesto, crammed with killer lines, which Marshall Berman called “the first great modernist work of art.” In its wake came the Futurists—“We wish to destroy museums, libraries, academies of any sort, and fight against moralism, feminism, and every kind of materialistic, self-serving cowardice”—and the great flood of manifestos by artists, activists, and other renegades in the decades after 1910, followed by another peak in the 1960s and ’70s.

After that point, fewer broke through the general noise, though those that have lasted cast a weird light back on what came before: Donna J. Haraway’s postmodern 1985 “A Cyborg Manifesto,” for instance, in refusing fantasies of wholeness, purity, full communication—“The feminist dream of a common language, like all dreams . . . of perfectly faithful naming of experience, is a totalizing and imperialist one”—presents the manifesto as a form that can speak from the corner of its mouth, that always says more and less than it appears to say, that teases and exaggerates, that usefully undermines itself. Haraway makes an explicit case for “serious play” and for irreconcilable contradictions, introducing her “effort to build an ironic political myth faithful to feminism, socialism, and materialism. . . . More faithful as blasphemy is faithful, than as reverent worship and identification.” By directly announcing its own tricksiness (an extra contradiction in itself), “A Cyborg Manifesto” seems both to critique its predecessors and to hint that even the most overweening of them were never quite designed to be read straight.

And it’s true that a manifesto’s swagger, its impression of speed and fury, might lead its readers astray, allowing them to imagine a far simpler communication than is offered. Often the most basic premises of the text remain murky. There is a tension, in Marx and many of those who followed, between change that must be willed or seized, and that which is already in process and historically inevitable. Then there is the question of who is being addressed—an enemy establishment, an untapped army of comrades? And whose views or intentions are actually being represented? In his notes to my undergrad Penguin Classics edition of TheCommunist Manifesto, the British historian A. J. P. Taylor tactfully notes that “the Communist League was itself the creation, more or less imaginary, of Marx and Engels” (the specter, in other words, had in fact not gotten round to haunting much just yet). Likewise, Valerie Solanas’s rollicking Swiftian SCUM Manifesto (1967) invents a lethal cadre of “secure, freewheeling, independent, groovy female females” in her own image. Though sometimes accused of gender essentialism (“the male is an incomplete female,” Solanas writes, “a walking abortion, aborted at the gene stage”), SCUM Manifesto envisions a world beyond binaries, in which boring, passive panderers of whatever sex are gone—and with them their pesky distractions, such as war, disease, marriage, religion, government, bullshit jobs, the money system, “Great Art,” politeness, etc.—leaving only “kookie, funky” revelers, which might be to say, only an array of mutually admiring Solanases. Biological femaleness explicitly doesn’t guarantee you membership in this groovier set, and so the reader feels encouraged to self-identify. If Solanas didn’t commit so seriously to what she’s saying, and deliver it with such palpable relish, SCUM Manifesto wouldn’t be as funny as it is. The destabilizing tone feels like a test of textual orientation: anyone willing to enjoy the joke is in; a reader who’s offended, confused, or scared might have good reason to be. (Or, if you look around and can’t tell who the sucker is, it’s you.)

Manifestos, explicitly or otherwise, always attempt to teach you how to read them. Virginia Woolf’s 1938 Three Guineas was an urgent feminist pacifist manifesto that in its circuitous imagery and form—its profusion of footnotes to sources then considered too frivolous or unauthorized for history, its delicate linguistic connections and repetitions—upset the expected boundaries of private and public life, traced the relationships between patriarchy, capital, colonialism, and war, and dragged the reader along, half-tricked into absorbing arguments and picking sides. Manifestos espouse violent metaphors and large abstractions that dare you not to take them literally: “All that is solid melts into air”; “A lesbian is the rage of all women condensed to the point of explosion,” The Woman Identified Woman (1970); “We’re not waiting for the rapture we are the apocalypse” Dyke Manifesto (1992); “If SCUM ever strikes, it will be in the dark with a six-inch blade.” Many contain an apt slippage between art and politics. June Jordan, in a 1973 essay called “Young People: Victims of Realism in Books and in Life,” links limitations of genre to the standard politician’s cop-out that transformative policy is “not realistic”: in a section titled “My Manifesto,” she pledges to “attempt, in all of my written work, to devise reasonable alternatives to this reality. . . . We are the ones who owe our children something else, right now.” If a manifesto has one job, it is, perhaps, to expand what may be imagined.

For obvious reasons, many manifestos have been more vivid and specific in condemning what is than in detailing the future they intend. As Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor puts it: “We have no idea what it would be like to live in a society free of exploitation and how that would change people.” In recent years, though, post-social-media, when the fantasy of a coherent public sphere to speak into has weakened and fragmented, there’s also been a renewed obligation to make clear precisely what isn’t being said. You may fear languishing unread but you are nonetheless always at risk of being overheard. Laboria Cuboniks’s “Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation” (2015) proactively defends itself against so many pitfalls and misreadings (“This non-absolute, generic universality must guard against the facile tendency of conflation with bloated, unmarked particulars”; “Open, however, does not mean undirected”) that it risks losing some of the carefree brazenness of predecessors who invited attack or misinterpretation left and right. In other cases, writers take advantage of the palimpsest of possible readings that await them. The “Letter on Justice and Open Debate” published in Harper’s Magazine in 2020, which argued against a climate of “ideological conformity,” was pitched to be either over- or under-read. To some readers it was a straightforward, even anodyne reassertion of the importance of free speech. To others, it was a strike back against those who’d expressed alarm at the reactionary ideas espoused by some of its signatories (who were accustomed to publishing their views without facing such loud, vehement public disagreement). In an intriguing reversal of the manifesto’s foundational irony, rather than outsiders usurping the tone of authority, many of those signatories were establishment figures sounding the plea of a persecuted minority.

More : https://www.bookforum.com/print/2802/writing-that-demands-change-now-24497

 Text by Lidija Haas 

 

ARE WE HUMAN? THE DESIGN OF THE SPECIES 2 seconds, 2 days, 2 years, 200 years, 200,000 years

ARE WE HUMAN?
THE DESIGN OF THE SPECIES
2 seconds, 2 days, 2 years, 200 years, 200,000 years

The 3rd Istanbul Design Biennial explores the intimate relationship between the concepts of “design” and “human.” Design always presents itself as serving the human but its real ambition is to redesign the human. The history of design is therefore a history of evolving conceptions of the human. To talk about design is to talk about the state of our species. Humans have always been radically reshaped by the designs they produce and the world of design keeps expanding. We live in a time when everything is designed, from our carefully crafted individual looks and online identities, to the surrounding galaxies of personal devices, new materials, interfaces, networks, systems, infrastructures, data, chemicals, organisms, and genetic codes. The average day involves the experience of thousands of layers of design that reach to outer space but also reach deep into our bodies and brains. We literally live inside design, like the spider lives inside the web constructed from inside its own body. But unlike the spider, we have spawned countless overlapping and interacting webs. Even the planet itself has been completely encrusted by design as a geological layer. There is no longer an outside to the world of design. Design has become the world.

Design is the most human thing about us. Design is what makes the human. It is the basis of social life, from the very first artefacts to the exponential expansion of human capability. But design also engineers inequalities and new forms of neglect. More people than ever in history are forcibly displaced by war, lawlessness, poverty, and climate at the same time that the human genome and the weather are being actively redesigned. We can no longer reassure ourselves with the idea of “good design.” Design needs to be redesigned.

ARE WE HUMAN? : The Design of the Species : 2 seconds, 2 years, 200 years, 200,000 years invites a wide arrange of designers and thinkers from around the world to respond to a compact set of eight interlinked propositions:

DESIGN IS ALWAYS DESIGN OF THE HUMAN
THE HUMAN IS THE DESIGNING ANIMAL
OUR SPECIES IS COMPLETELY SUSPENDED IN ENDLESS LAYERS OF DESIGN
DESIGN RADICALLY EXPANDS HUMAN CAPABILITY
DESIGN ROUTINELY CONSTRUCTS RADICAL INEQUALITIES
DESIGN IS EVEN THE DESIGN OF NEGLECT
“GOOD DESIGN” IS AN ANESTHETIC
DESIGN WITHOUT ANESTHETIC ASKS URGENT QUESTIONS ABOUT OUR HUMANITY

These propositions will be explored over the coming year in events, classes, workshops, and online discussions – including open calls for responses to the propositions by short videos. This year of exploration around the world will culminate in a dense program of exhibitions, debates, broadcasts and publications during the six weeks of the Biennial in Istanbul that opens in October 2016.

This Biennial is an archaeological project. It is not about celebrating particular designers or about visualizing remarkable futures. It will be a multi-media documentary about the state of design today, when everyday reality has outpaced science fiction. It will place the extreme condition of contemporary design into the context of the extended 200,000 year history of our species – from the first standardized ornaments and the footprints of the first shoes to the latest digital and carbon footprints. A Biennial normally focuses on the last 2 years. The time frame for this exhibition will span from the last 2 seconds to the last 200,000 years. Ancient archaeological artefacts from Turkey and the region will be presented at the heart of the Biennial to reframe the latest real-time thinking about design.

Text by the curators Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley for the 3rd Istanbul Design Biennial  

http://tasarimbienali.iksv.org/en/theme 

Elogio della fragilità

In tempi come quelli attuali, fatti di pragmatismo che sfiora il cinismo anche nel mondo dell’arte, fa specie che si pubblichi un Manifesto che ruota intorno al tema della fragilità. È ciò che propone Roberto Gramiccia, già autore di un fortunato libro intitolato proprio “Elogio della fragilità”. Lo pubblichiamo integralmente e vi invitiamo a discuterne qui sotto.

http://www.artribune.com/arti-visive/arte-contemporanea/2017/07/manifesto-fragilita-roberto-gramiccia/

For a New Liberty

Murray N. Rothbard proposes a once-and-for-all escape from the two major political parties, the ideologies they embrace, and their central plans for using state power against people. Libertarianism is Rothbard's radical alternative that says state power is unworkable and immoral and ought to be curbed and finally abolished

https://mises.org/sites/default/files/For%20a%20New%20Liberty%20The%20Libertarian%20Manifesto_3.pdf

Goeritz entre dos obras idénticas

¿Qué tienen en común Brecht, Duchamp,  Alban Berg, Gropius, Klee, Moholy, Grosz, Kandinsky, Picasso, Kafka, Mann, Wiene, Chagall? ¿Y arquitectos y artistas mexicanos como O’Gorman, Barragán, Reyes, Friedeberg, Cuevas, Escobedo o Legorreta? Pocos artistas son justificados con tanta vehemencia a partir de las referencias de las que partió y también de aquellas que desató como Mathias Goeritz (Danzig, Prusia 4 de abril 1915 – ciudad de México 4 de agosto 1990). Explicamos El Eco con El Gabinete del Doctor Caligari o con las ruinas de Mitla, y las Torres de Ciudad Satélite con las de Gimignano o con la monumentalidad de Teotihuacán.

La figura del polifacético artista parece encadenada entre los que estuvieron antes y los que llegaron después, encerrado cronológicamente como un eslabón coherente y necesario en la Historia del Arte en México. Pero la historia es enemiga del artista. En la maleta con la que llegó a México, por septiembre de 1949, cabían indistintamente el Dadá, el Expresionismo o  la Bauhaus, todas las referencias servían, pero no todo valía. Como una antología andante (antes de ejercer de artista estudió Historia del Arte) utilizó las herramientas a su alcance para responder a un único objetivo: “Mi obra (…) es fundamentalmente de preocupación ética” (1). Interés común con el resto de las vanguardias y que será radicalmente opuesto a lo que estará por llegar. Para Goeritz, y para las vanguardias, la renovación del arte es una obligación ética antes que estética, pertenecían a ese mundo que por encima de cualquier resultado formal debía aspirar a una exigencia mayor y cuyo fin último era transformar la sociedad. Objetivo que compartía en México con sus rivales artísticos de la Escuela Mexicana, el arte oficial que representaban los muralistas; de ahí que podamos intuir que las polémicas con este grupo espoleaban al alemán en sus ideas y que de esta primera confrontación surgiera alguna de sus mejores obras.

por Alberto Oderiz

http://www.arquine.com/goeritz-entre-dos-obras-identicas/

The Designer's Dilemma

Elisha Otis did not invent the elevator.

Elisha Otis did create the safety catch that would prevent a vertically mobile enclosure from plummeting from great heights to great depths at very high speeds, injuring its passengers. This invention was demonstrated at the 1853 World’s Fair in New York, almost five thousand years after the elevator first came into usage.

Technically, Otis did not invent the elevator, although he is regularly credited with it. But it was his incremental improvement to an existing technology that launched what we now know as the elevator industry, the great facilitator of skyscraping cities, of vertical living, working, and buying.

Otis exemplifies what I call the designer’s dilemma – the tension that exists in the space between inventing and improving. If the designer’s role is to drive innovation on a large scale, how can we resolve ourselves to the incremental improvements that are necessitated by today's increasingly complex culture?

Now, this question is more relevant than ever: there is no single innovation that can counteract the innumerable injuries we have done to the global ecosystem. But if the key to tackling our environmental challenges lies within this world of iterative change and cumulative improvement – and I believe that it does – then what does this mean for design as a whole?

Cultural Pressures for Radical Change

An oversaturated consumer market and increasingly sophisticated end-user have made it difficult to differentiate products and services in today’s economy. Design has become the de facto solution for pursuing, and owning, the habits and routines of consumers. So strident is the competition for shelf-space and mindshare that incremental improvement is often thought akin to colossal failure. While designers excel at making the small changes that shape everyday experiences, in this competitive climate we are compelled to pursue the next big thing with great ferocity. We seek change in the Orwellian sense – paradigm-shifts, phoenix products, dot-something web landmarks. And success has a short memory; we are measured only by our most recent achievement: the last to-market, the newest award-winner, the latest recognition by the digerati.

It is a challenge, then, that in this time of fierce competition and creative pressure, we are pummeled by the tsunami of the green movement. It is virtually impossible to avoid the daily discussions of climate change, G8 debates, and company manifestos. This is the single most significant movement of our generation – a veritable perfect storm of social awareness, corporate interest, and technological advancement. All things “green” have entered the cultural vernacular, and our contemporary currency is a fluency with these issues. Just as the market pressures us to create more individual design contributions, it has become obvious that the key to meaningfully addressing environmental issues is through additive change – continual improvement, rather than discrete invention. There is no magic bullet, no single a-ha moment, no “iPod” of the green movement.

So in this time of transformation, when new thinking is so critical, why are designers at a standstill? Why has design not been at the forefront of this movement with new solutions and roadmaps for change? In many ways, the green movement is threatened by the prevailing mentality in design today – one that equates sustainability with stasis, and collaboration with mimicry.

Of course, there are the requisite resin-seeped art pieces, recycled coated paper packaging explorations, and sunflower-seed kitchen cabinets. But at this cultural inflection point, we need to do more than create niche products and art pieces. We need to do more than play corporate catch-up or throw our hats into the ever-enlarged PR ring of greenery. We need to stimulate mass change.

In the same way that we approach design challenges – not by purporting to have all of the answers, but instead by assuredly asking the right questions – we must recognize that we don’t have the solution yet because our formula has been wrong. Our addiction to sweeping change has hobbled us from seeing the most obvious opportunities for improvement. In order to create a radical position around sustainability, we need to change our concept of design. Our first green products must be ourselves.

Perhaps the most revolutionary characteristic of the environmental movement is its sheer scope. Activist Paul Hawken describes it as the largest and fastest growing movement in the world, comprising more than 2 million organizations worldwide. This vast reach provides a great opportunity for facilitating change - but it also poses a unique set of challenges regarding the management and self-identity of such a broad, loosely connected network.

Designers are just one of many groups clamoring to contribute within this space. NGOs, commercial businesses, technologists, academics, and governments are all forging ahead with their individual visions, sharing the public's attention. Together, the many voices of this movement form a harmony, deeper and more complex than any solo the designer alone can offer.

Yet this is a new and uncomfortable space for many designers to occupy, indoctrinated as we are with the importance of differentiation and exclusivity. To date, we have succeeded in our difference, not our similarities. We are accustomed, in many ways, to known boundaries. This is not to say that designers are not continuously pushing those boundaries and rewriting our own histories and futures, but rather that our design thinking tools and methods (narrative, motion, form, virtuality) have remained relatively constant. Even as our industry has evolved to integrate robust strategic and analytical perspectives, our jurisdiction has remained clear. Even as we engage in transformational thinking, build new business and brand models, and tackle human-interaction challenges in emerging economies, we are still designers. The horizon line moves with us.

Our clients expect our ability to translate research and ideation into concrete products and services. And they know we'll be able to differentiate them - at least for a while - from their competitors. But now we are not dealing with competitors, we are elbow-to-elbow with people who share our ethic, and to engage in the traditional competitive stance would be counterproductive. In a world where everything is connected and we all share common goals, how do we satisfy our deep instinct to create a unique position for ourselves?

We need a new strategy.

When in deep waters, become a diver

As we redefine the role of design in this new world order, we must look to each other for ideas and inspiration. Individually greening our companies is not sufficient. By pooling our knowledge, we can create a network in which every client is compelled to engage in a discussion of sustainability - no matter which firm it selects as a design partner. Together, we can advocate for the improvements - large and small - that will produce lasting change.

By creating independent "green design" practices that exist adjacent to traditional industrial design, engineering, and digital media design offerings, we only marginalize the issue. To effect real change, we need to apply a green lens to all of our activities, not just some of them. Environmental intelligence needs to be fully assimilated within the entire design process, across the entire field.

Of course, in order to engage in an informed conversation with our clients, we also need to commit to educating ourselves and our teams about eco-friendly behaviors and environmental strategies. This undertaking is significant, for as we ask more in-depth questions, the answers become more difficult to locate.

frog* has initiated a Kyoto Treaty of design - a call to arms for the creative community around environmental stewardship. Our initial thoughts and conversations have led to these basic tenets, but these are just a start. We ask each member of the the design community to commit to these principles and join with us in building upon them:

Collectively:

- Helping craft a larger social equity protocol for the design community

- Publicly ratifying that agreement, and committing to its compliance

- Contributing to the communal knowledge base for sustainable design

- Advancing the intellectual understanding of environmental issues from a design perspective

Individually:

- Offering green analysis to clients, or partnering with others to conduct this analysis

- Providing material alternatives for sustainable product development

- Investigating manufacturing processes and rewarding green innovation

- Minimizing environmental impact from prototyping or model-making activity

- Publicly reporting the carbon footprint of our firms

- Becoming educated about the environmental impact of our work

Everything we know is inverted. Everything we rested our beliefs on is cast in a new light. Change happens fast, and we need to act quickly. We are revisiting our practices, our methods, and our philosophies. We are talking to each other. We are leaving our egos behind.

If you are ready for change, join us.

Text by Valerie Casey

*frog is a global design and strategy firm; the author was creative director of design research and design strategy at frog.

This article was the first written piece about The Designers Accord (which at the time was named the "Kyoto Treaty" of Design). It was featured in the frog Design Mind newsletter, summer 2007.

designersaccord.org

valcasey.com

What Foundations Have Been Laid for Them: The Building and Burning of Knowledge

We are accustomed to equating literature and architecture—a stanza, the basic unit of poetry, is, after all, a “room” in Italian. But in the case of the edifices built to hold books, this relationship is more intimate, not just linguistic or metaphoric but concrete (often marble). If a stanza is a room for words on the page, a library is a series of rooms for words—and the books that hold them—on the ground. And ground is often disputed, desecrated, possessed and dispossessed. It is always political: just as it is the site for the building and projecting of knowledge, it is often the site of its destruction as well. Consider three examples:

The Fridericianum in Kassel, Germany, opened in 1779 as a library and public museum, one of Europe’s earliest. Along with the art collections of the Hessian landgraves, it held more than 100,000 books. The Fridericianum’s construction was funded by Friedrich II, Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel, who made his fortune by selling local mercenaries to Great Britain to fight in the American Revolution. After briefly becoming a parliamentary building under Napoléon’s brother Jérôme, then King of Westphalia and Kassel, the Fridericianum was returned to its original function; Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm would work at the library there. The museum’s collections were relocated to Berlin under Prussian rule, and by the early twentieth century the building became a state library only. Thus marks some of the nascent stages of Fridericianum’s building of knowledge, but burning would come.

On May 19, 1933, approximately 2,000 books were burned on Friedrichsplatz, reportedly attended to by enormous crowds. The bonfire was held in conjunction with book burnings in university towns across the country, a nation-wide “Action Against the Un-German Spirit,” as it was termed, that aimed to rid Germany of “Jewish intellectualism.” Nearly a decade later, in 1941, the Fridericianum—still a library at the time—caught fire during the Allied bombing raids that flattened Kassel. In images taken after the bombing, we notice not just the thousands of burned volumes leafing out palely from the dark rubble, but the now naked Neoclassical armature of the building’s columns; indeed, the eighteenth-century structure was designed in the “spirit of the Enlightenment” by Huguenot architect Simon Louis du Ry.

The main architectural embodiment of that spirit, and of the classical ideal more generally, was, of course, the Parthenon in Greece. Built during the rule of Pericles in Athens between 447 and 432 BC, the temple was dedicated to Athena, the goddess of wisdom, civilization, justice, and war, among other attributes. And the Parthenon would become the architectural model that has most often inspired the shape of Western public institutions’ edifices of knowledge, among them libraries, museums, universities, government buildings, courts, and banks. Though built to shelter a monumental gold-and-ivory statue of Athena, the Parthenon would also house the city’s treasury. Indeed, the temple was funded by taxes derived from both the Athens treasury and tribute from cities across the Aegean after the Athenian victories in the Persian Wars (Plutarch famously offers a story about Pericles wasting allies’ money on “sacred buildings”). Transformed into a mosque during the Ottoman Empire, and partially destroyed and rebuilt many times in the interim, the deconsecrated Parthenon of the modern period became an emblem of Western cultural hegemony, not exclusively democratic.

Text by Pierre Bal-Blanc, Marina Fokidis, Quinn Latimer, Yorgos Makris, Marta Minujín

Read more : http://www.documenta14.de/en/south/29_what_foundations_have_been_laid_for_them_the_building_and_burning_of_knowledge

Ordinaryism: An Alternative to Accelerationism. Part 1 - Thanks for Nothing

http://www.furtherfield.org/features/articles/ordinaryism-alternative-accelerationism-part-1-thanks-nothingBy Robert Jackson - 24/03/2014

American Progress

John Gast, "American Progress," 1872.

This painting shows "Manifest Destiny" (the religious belief that the United States should expand from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean in the name of God). In 1872 artist John Gast painted a popular scene of people moving west that captured the view of Americans at the time. Called "Spirit of the Frontier" and widely distributed as an engraving portrayed settlers moving west, guided and protected by a goddess-like figure of Columbia and aided by technology (railways, telegraphs), driving Native Americans and bison into obscurity. It is also important to note that angel is bringing the "light" as witnessed on the eastern side of the painting as she travels towards the "darkened" west.
Source:wikipedia

Introducing Objectivism by Ayn Rand

The following is a short description of Objectivism given by Ayn Rand in 1962:

At a sales conference at Random House, preceding the publication of Atlas Shrugged, one of the book salesmen asked me whether I could present the essence of my philosophy while standing on one foot. I did as follows:

Metaphysics: Objective Reality
Epistemology: Reason
Ethics: Self-interest
Politics: Capitalism

If you want this translated into simple language, it would read: 1. “Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed” or “Wishing won’t make it so.” 2. “You can’t eat your cake and have it, too.” 3. “Man is an end in himself.” 4. “Give me liberty or give me death.”

If you held these concepts with total consistency, as the base of your convictions, you would have a full philosophical system to guide the course of your life. But to hold them with total consistency—to understand, to define, to prove and to apply them—requires volumes of thought. Which is why philosophy cannot be discussed while standing on one foot—nor while standing on two feet on both sides of every fence. This last is the predominant philosophical position today, particularly in the field of politics.

My philosophy, Objectivism, holds that:

Reality exists as an objective absolute—facts are facts, independent of man’s feelings, wishes, hopes or fears.

Reason (the faculty which identifies and integrates the material provided by man’s senses) is man’s only means of perceiving reality, his only source of knowledge, his only guide to action, and his basic means of survival.

Man—every man—is an end in himself, not the means to the ends of others. He must exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself. The pursuit of his own rational self-interest and of his own happiness is the highest moral purpose of his life.

The ideal political-economic system is laissez-faire capitalism. It is a system where men deal with one another, not as victims and executioners, nor as masters and slaves, but as traders, by free, voluntary exchange to mutual benefit. It is a system where no man may obtain any values from others by resorting to physical force, and no man may initiate the use of physical force against others. The government acts only as a policeman that protects man’s rights; it uses physical force only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use, such as criminals or foreign invaders. In a system of full capitalism, there should be (but, historically, has not yet been) a complete separation of state and economics, in the same way and for the same reasons as the separation of state and church.

Copyright © 1962 by Times-Mirror Co.



Ayn Rand and Thunderbird, 1964

Anarchist Morality

Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin, Anarchist Morality.
The Czech cover is designed by Josef Capek and published in 1919.

Le Nouvelliste et la defense religieuse

Le Nouvelliste,19 decembre 1898

Journal religieux, 1879-1889, Lyon.

All Power to the Free Universities of the Future

Copenhagen Free University
ALL POWER TO THE FREE UNIVERSITIES OF THE FUTURE

The Copenhagen Free University was an attempt to reinvigorate the emancipatory aspect of research and learning, in the midst of an ongoing economization of all knowledge production in society. Seeing how education and research were being subsumed into an industry structured by a corporate way of thinking, we intended to bring the idea of the university back to life. By life, we mean the messy life people live within the contradictions of capitalism. We wanted to reconnect knowledge production, learning and skill sharing to the everyday within a self-organized institutional framework of a free university. Our intention was multi-layered and was of course partly utopian, but also practical and experimental. We turned our flat in Copenhagen into a university by the very simple act of declaring 'this is a university.' By this transformative speech act the domestic setting of our flat became a university. It didn't take any alterations to the architecture other than the small things needed in terms of having people in your home staying over, presenting thoughts, researching archival material, screening films, presenting documents and works of art. Our home became a public institution dedicated to the production process of communal knowledge and fluctuating desires.

The ethos of the CFU was critical and opinionated about the ideological nature of knowledge, which meant that we did not try to cover the institution in a cloud of dispassionate neutrality and transcendence as universities traditionally do. The Copenhagen Free University became a site of socialized and politicized research, developing knowledge and debate around certain fields of social practice. During its six years of existence, the CFU entered into five fields of research: feminist organization, art and economy, escape subjectivity, television/media activism and art history. The projects were initiated with the experience of the normative nature of mainstream knowledge production and research, allowing us to see how certain areas of critical practice were being excluded. Since we didn't wanted to replicate the structure of the formal universities, the way we developed the research was based on open calls to people who found interest in our fields or interest in our perspective on knowledge production. Slowly the research projects were collectively constructed through the display of material, presentations, meetings, and spending time together. The nature of the process was sharing and mutual empowerment, not focusing on a final product or paper, but rather on the process of communization and redistribution of facts and feelings. Parallel to the development of the CFU, we started to see self-organized universities sprouting up everywhere. Over this time, the basic question we were constantly asking ourselves was, what kind of university do we need in relation to our everyday? This question could only be answered in the concrete material conditions of our lives. The multiplicity of self-organized universities that were starting in various places, and which took all kinds of structures and directions, reflected the diversity of these material conditions. This showed that the neoliberal university model was only one model among many models; the only one given as a model to the students of capital.

As the strategy of self-institution focused on taking power and not accepting the dualism between the mainstream and the alternative, this in itself carried some contradictions. The CFU had for us become a too fixed identifier of a certain discourse relating to emancipatory education within academia and the art scene. Thus we decided to shut down the CFU in the winter of 2007 as a way of withdrawing the CFU from the landscape. We did this with the statement 'We Have Won' and shut the door of the CFU just before the New Year. During the six years of the CFU's existence, the knowledge economy had rapidly, and aggressively, become the norm around us in Copenhagen and in northern Europe. The rise of social networking, lifestyle and intellectual property as engines of valorization meant that the knowledge economy was expanding into the tiniest pores of our lives and social relations. The state had turned to a wholesale privatization of former public educational institutions, converting them into mines of raw material for industry in the shape of ideas, desires and human beings. But this normalizing process was somehow not powerful enough to silence all forms of critique and dissent; other measures were required.

In December 2010 we received a formal letter from the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation telling us that a new law had passed in the parliament that outlawed the existence of the Copenhagen Free University together with all other self-organized and free universities. The letter stated that they were fully aware of the fact that we do not exist any more, but just to make sure they wished to notify us that "In case the Copenhagen Free University should resume its educational activities it would be included under the prohibition in the university law §33″. In 2010 the university law in Denmark was changed, and the term 'university' could only be used by institutions authorized by the state. We were told that this was to protect 'the students from being disappointed.' As we know numerous people who are disappointed by the structural changes to the educational sector in recent years, we have decided to contest this new clampdown by opening a new free university in Copenhagen. This forms part of our insistence that the emancipatory perspective of education should still be on the map. We demand the law be scrapped or altered, allowing self-organized and free universities to be a part of a critical debate around the production of knowledge now and in the society of the future.

We call for everybody to establish their own free universities in their homes or in the workplace, in the square or in the wilderness. All power to the free universities of the future.

—The Free U Resistance Committee of June 18, 2011.

Source: www.edu-factory.org

L’Echo de la Fabrique

Echo de la fabrique, n°1, 30 octobre 1831

Journal industriel de Lyon et du département du Rhône. Hebdomadaire publié du 30 octobre 1831 au 4 mai 1834, au moment des deux insurrections lyonnaises de 1831 et 1834, L’Echo de la Fabrique constitue l’organe de défense des canuts lyonnais. Il est considéré comme le tout premier journal ouvrier.
La Bibliothèque de Lyon possède l’une des très rare collection de ce journal. Une collaboration avec l’ENS (Ecole normale supérieure de Lyon) donne lieu, depuis 2004, à la publication en ligne de ce journal et des quelques feuilles qui lui ont succédées : L’Echo des Travailleurs (1833-1834), la Tribune Prolétaire (1834-1835 ; BML, 5714), l’Union des Travailleurs (1835 ; BM Lyon, 5714), le Nouvel Echo de la Fabrique (1835 ; BM Lyon, 5714) et l’Indicateur (1834-1835)

"Ce journal [...] comprendra dans chaque numéro un article d’historique de la fabrication de la soierie, toutes les découvertes utiles qui y ont trait, tous les griefs imputés aux divers chefs de commerce et appuyés de preuves authentiques, les débats détaillés de tous ce que les séances des prud’hommes offrirons de plus piquant, quelques articles de localité, et enfin une colonne d’annonces pour les insertions de tous ce qui peut intéresser la fabrique des étoffes de soie, au prix de 10 c. la ligne."

"Prospectus", L’Echo de la Fabrique, s.d. (ca. octobre 1831).

Source: www.pointsdactu.org

Revolution by Design

It’s a funny place, Cuba. It’s very, very Soviet. You can’t ask the wrong questions, you can’t talk to people about politics. That’s a big faux pas in Cuba. If you say to anyone, “What do you think of the revolution,” they’ll all say, “Oh, it’s great, it’s been fantastic, it’s been really interesting, who wouldn’t want a revolution,” that sort of thing. And then you hear from other people there’s this thing called the CDR, the Committee for the Defense of the Revolution. It’s basically a spy on every block, a woman or a man who lives in a small apartment who has been awarded the title of CDR representative for that block. And it’s his or her job to snitch if you’re up to no good. So I was at Alfredo Rostgaard’s house and I said, “Are you a supporter of the revolution?” and he smiled and said, “Yeah, I love the revolution,” and that was that.



I met him a few years before he died, and I have to say he was a bit of a crazy old man. I’d asked the taxi driver — I had a taxi driver who seemed to know things, he was like my fixer — “Can you take me somewhere where I can buy Cuban posters?” Because there are no shops in Cuba; you just have to ask around. “Yeah, yeah,” he said, “I can take you somewhere.” So we bang on this door and it opens and there’s Alfredo Rostgaard. I was like, “Oh my God, I recognize this guy from photos, it’s Alfredo Rostgaard.” And he’s one of these sort of smiley, mischievous, cheeky old men who you just knew had been a bit of trouble in the past, good-looking, sort of a bit of a flirt. He told me a joke. He said in Spanish, “You know, I don’t speak English. But I do know a joke in English.” And he told me a joke — I don’t remember it, unfortunately, something about a small boy at school asking his teacher something about sex. He was a very amusing old geezer.



After I bought some posters and we chatted for a while in our broken Spanish and English, I said, “Shall we go for a drink?” So we went to the local bar and got really drunk. And the next day the guy who had taken me over there phoned me and said, “You didn’t take Alfredo out for a drink, did you? Oh God, he’s not supposed to be drinking.” So he was someone who I would describe as antiestablishment. Very antiestablishment. And antiestablishment in a funny way. I would say that if he was the art director of Tricontinental for all those years, he would be constantly trying to get away with stuff that he thought was a little bit wacky and slightly not quite what his bosses wanted from him. You know what I mean?

— Charles Moseley, proprietor,

cubanposterart.blogspot.com

One of the oddest chapters in the annals of the Cold War was its proxy war by magazine, and the oddest Cold War magazine was undoubtedly Tricontinental. Based in Havana and art-directed by legendary poster designer Alfredo Rostgaard, Tricontinental was the official publication of OSPAAAL, one of the many revolutionary acronyms liberated by Fidel’s triumph in 1959. OSPAAAL stood for Organization in Solidarity with the Peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and its magazine was available in each of the New World’s great colonial languages: English, French, and Spanish. Some issues were even available in Arabic and Italian.



The magazine did its share of party-line thumping: inspiring tales of 100 percent literacy rates and vaulting social and technological progress, with occasional missives from communist luminaries like North Korea’s Kim Il-sung. But the bulk of Tricontinental’s editorial content was aimed at Third World militants, practicing or potential, for whom it served as bulletin board, guidebook, and lifestyle magazine.

self-criticisms of counterrevolutionary coup plotters in Guinea, describing the exact make and model of the Mercedes they accepted from the imperialists in exchange for betraying the intractable destiny of the people. There were unreadably long lists of tiny victories by innumerable guerrilla organizations: trucks full of ammunition or wheat or concentrated fruit juice liberated from the imperialists; city squares and government buildings gloriously defaced by revolutionary slogans; hopelessly obscure silos, checkpoints, bridges, pipelines, roads, radio towers, and police stations, exploding forgettably in the subtropical night. There were first-person accounts of police corruption and genuinely tender evocations of fallen comrades. In March 1970, a special issue presented the full text of Brazilian Marxist Carlos Marighella’s Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla, a pragmatic and hair-raisingly detailed program for revolution in the cities of the industrialized world. (The chapter on “The Bank Assault as Popular Mission” detailed “important innovations in the tactics of assaulting banks,” including “the shooting of tires of cars to prevent pursuit, locking people in the bank bathroom, forcing someone to open the safe or the strong box, and using disguises.”)



What made all of this truly strange, however, was Tricontinental’s design. Compared to dismally drab Soviet attempts at cultural propaganda — or the comically guileless efforts of the Chinese — the Cubans had something uncontrivable going for them: it looked like they were having fun. Tricontinental resembled an underground zine from San Francisco more than an information vehicle for Third World liberation, and that juxtaposition had an effect comparable to that moment in Godard’s Sympathy for the Devil when a gang of black nationalists in a municipal junkyard read from a stilted manifesto while necking with white women in abandoned cars. Tricontinental’s covers were deliriously poppy, with bright, eyecatching graphics, making it just the sort of thing Marighella’s urban guerrillas should never be seen carrying in public.

At the height of its fame, the magazine boasted more than 30,000 subscribers in some eighty-seven countries. Most issues featured a poster insert demonstrating Cuban solidarity with one or another righteous global political struggle. Those posters found their way to college dorm rooms and kiosks across the globe, with young people from Berkeley to Beirut lining up to join OSPAAAL’s solidarity-of-themonth club.



The spare, colorful style of the OSPAAAL poster — like those of the ICAIC (Cuban Film Institute) and a number of other revolutionary cultural ministries — became the unofficial design language of graphic agitation the world over. That language was largely dictated by necessity; the posters, like the earliest covers of the magazine, were printed by hand on a silkscreen press. The inside of the magazine displayed a similar economy. In a technique Rostgaard called “Origami,” a single photo could be used to accompany any number of pages of text. Over the course of a six-page article, an image of Haitian dictator Papa Doc Duvalier appeared, only to be torn into four neat pieces and tossed into a garbage can.

But it was the introduction of four-color printing for the front and inside covers that occasioned Tricontinental’s signature graphic development, the “Cartel Maqueta,” or model poster. Cartel Maqueta is an allegorical and highly composed style of photography in which objects and people are graphically arranged to tell a story or illustrate an idea. (A similar style was popular in record album art of the late 1960s and is currently enjoying something of a revival.) What made Tricontinental’s photography unique was that it operated under the same constraints that had led to Origami. The third dimension was attacked with characteristic gusto, using an idiom Rostgaard called “the anti-ad” — similar to the Situationist strategy of détournement, in which the modes and methods of the spectacle are used against it. In Tricontinental’s case, this meant ironically adopting the language of capitalist publicity to further revolutionary ideals. But photography carried its own problems, particularly in regard to costs.

The solution developed by the Cubans that proved so elusive to the propagandists of the rest of the Red world was a sense of humor. The photographic medium occasioned a sort of self-conscious humor to lighten the hand of ideological imperative and steer the ridiculous toward the satirical. Hence an image meant to evoke solidarity with Palestine features a Palestinian youth (an unshaved and fatigued Cuban with a sheet wrapped around his head) with his foot planted on the head of an Israeli soldier (a mannequin head wearing an army helmet bearing a freshly painted Star of David), buried up to his neck in the sand of the desert he had stolen (a white sand beach — the whole scene was shot from a ladder to keep the sparkling blue Caribbean out of the frame).



In another singularly hilarious image, this one meant to expose the contradictions of American domestic priorities, an astronaut (a man in a white cotton one-piece, with a futuristic-looking pilot’s helmet) reaches for the moon (a cardboard crescent wrapped in tinfoil) while standing on the backs of three rather confused-looking black children (three confused-looking black children).

Although their quality varies considerably, all the images in Tricontinental succeed in giving concrete expression to a means of production that was itself political, analogous to guerrilla warfare — making the most of limited technology and/or arms by dint of manpower, charisma, and ingenuity. This ethos of finding opportunity in necessity also defined the American counterculture and the peace movement, which also shared the Cuban affection for the silkscreen, and for radical politics (up to a point).



While the young Cuban artists at OSPAAAL were ambivalent about the aesthetic influence of their enormous neighbor to the north — Rostgaard was purportedly bemused to learn from an American magazine that he was practicing “pop art.” But the remarkable thing is that their publication never looked as if it were co-opting trippy Yanqui graphics and far-out motifs to repurpose them for the party line. On the contrary, in the pages of Tricontinental, communist revolution through armed struggle emerged as the farthest-out trip of all.

It’s worth remembering that the magazine took its name from the Tricontinental Congress of January 1966, a convocation of revolutionary states and organizations at the Chaplin Theatre in Havana, chaired by Castro. If you spend enough time reading neoconservative Web sites, you will eventually find the contention that the congress was the primal scene of late-twentieth-century terrorism, as Soviet agents and their Cuban henchlings began cultivating a network of operatives who would go on to sow decades of terror across the globe, culminating in 9/11. That’s quite a stretch, even if the attendees at the conference did, in fact, include a seventeen-year-old named Illich Ramirez Sanchez, later known for his “work” with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine as Carlos the Jackal.



In 1975 Alfredo Rostgaard left the magazine to work for UNIAC, the Union of Cuban Artists. But the magazine continued to be published, even as the prospects for the inevitable triumph of the revolution came to seem more and more remote. Tricontinental only stopped printing around the turn of the 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when Cuba literally ran out of ink. Whatever one thinks of the Cuban revolution and its contradictions and failures, Tricontinental’s demise seems like the noblest conclusion that any magazine could aspire to. This one included.

Text by Babak Radboy
Source:Bidoun Magazine 22, 2010

iMarx Manifesto

The factory workers of Foxconn in China being forced to the edge of suicide will take little comfort from this, and it's certainly not what Karl Marx had in mind when he said the bourgeoisie creates its own gravediggers.



However, Apple's decision to free distribute free copies of The Communist Manifesto to millions of iPhone owners seems a curious twist as the firm now makes $5.7 billion in profits on annual turnover of $36.5 billion by exploiting cheap, ununionised workers in China.


Owners of the iPhone with the latest iOS4 can download iBooks without charge - allowing them to download the Communist Manifesto for free. The world's best selling political publication can be copied, pasted, highlighted and annotated.

The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 by Friedrich Engels, Marx's sponsor, editor and closest associate - is also available for free. Marx's The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte and Selected Essays are also free, along with selected extracts of Das Capital.

Lenin's State and Revolution has also gone on sale at £9.49 while the only Trotsky publication is An Appeal to the Toiling, Oppressed and Exhausted People's of Europe - a timely launch of the ebook - at £4.49. It would be interesting to know if this edition is available in China

Source: http://atthesauce.blogspot.com

Toward an Incomplete Manifesto of Decade

The Return of the Politics in Art and Architecture
Yorgos Tzirtzilakis

1.
No Absolute Individualism, no Supremacy of Mobility, no Sprawl, no Metapolis, no Junkspace, no Figurative Architecture, no Dematerialization, no Cyberspace, no Cyberplatonism, no Neoliberal Urbanisation, no Corporate City, no Spectacular City, no Hidden City, no at Hysteria of Continuous Joyful Life, no Overexcited Situationist City, no Boring Green Cities, no Sentimental Common Planting of Trees the Sundays, no Technocratic Sustainability Consensus, no Political Cities -but only making Cities Politically, no Political Art -but only making Art Politically.

2.
We prefer abstract and underdesigned architecture, incomplete and infrarealistic installations, empty and void spaces where only life itself is allowed to be fuckin' special, dramatic and “jouissance” –in the lacanian sense.

3.
No Tourist and Idyllic Pictures of the Sea –only Coastal and AgroMegastructuralism

2010


Yorgos Tzirtzilakis, Dimitris Tsakalakis, East urban Center of Heraklion, Crete, 1993

Ingestion / Anti-pasta

Here is a photo of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti eating a plate of spaghetti in 1930. What looks like an anodyne photograph was in fact a highly loaded image, for this was the man who, together with his younger colleague Fillia (the pseudonym of Luiggi Colombo), had just published the "Manifesto of Futurist Cookery" (1930), which dared declare anathema Italy's sacrosanct pasta. Marinetti saw the Italian table as weighted down by heavy traditional food. The English might be content with their dried cod, roast beef, and pudding, the Germans with their sauerkraut, smoked bacon, and sausages, but for the Italians pasta would no longer do. Marinetti wanted to reverse the best-known chapter of the history of Italian cuisine. In the 17th century, the city of Naples had initiated a gastronomic revolution whereby its inhabitants, until then known as mangiabroccoli and mangiafoglie, now became mangiamaccheroni. The pasta eater, holding the spaghetti in his hands above his mouth, became a stock figure, like the characters of Commedia dell'Arte, disseminated in prints all over Europe. Now the Futurists were calling for the abolition of what they deemed an absurd Italian gastronomic religion. Marshalling the opinions of doctors, professors, hygienists, and impostors, Marinetti claimed that pasta induced lethargy, pessimism, nostalgia, and neutralism. In short, pasta stood behind everything the Futurists had been battling ever since the appearance of their initial manifesto in 1909.

They lamented that pastasciutta—dried pasta of the sort we all eat—was 40 percent less nutritious than meat, fish, and vegetables. Mixing scientific data with poetic flights of eloquence, Marinetti held that pasta ensnared Italians within the slow looms of Penelope and bound them to the sailing ships somnolently awaiting a gust of wind on a sleepy Mediterranean. Being anti-pasta meant being antipassatista, i.e., against the past.

Predictably, upon its publication in the Turin daily Gazetta del Popolo on 28 December 1930, and its translation in the Parisian daily Comoedia a few months later, the manifesto provoked an uproar. Delighted to have finally managed to write a manifesto that, in line with Futurism's intent to transform every aspect of life, had finally hit on the one realm of the quotidian that affected every single Italian, Marinetti and Fillia gleefully devoted a whole section of their 1932 Futurist Cookbook to recording the blistering effects of the initial cooking manifesto. In typical Futurist fashion, the section containing the polemic preceded the section with the actual recipes. Marinetti and Fillia claimed, in equally characteristic Futurist inflationary style, that the pros and cons of pasta were endlessly debated in the Italian press in hundreds of articles by writers, politicians, chemists, and famous cooks, not to mention innumerable cartoons. Meanwhile, foreign publications from London to Budapest, from Tunis to Tokyo, and all the way to Sydney had announced somewhat incredulously that Italy was about to abandon spaghetti. In the city of l'Aquila (a few hours from the Italian capital) women had taken the situation into their own hands by signing a collective letter of indignation, addressed to Marinetti, in favor of pasta. In Genoa, an association called P.I.P.A., an acronym for International Association Against Pasta, was formed. Thousands of miles away in San Francisco, a fight had erupted between two Italian restaurants situated on different floors of the same building. While the head cook of the Savoia, Italy's royal family, actually came out against pasta, the mayor of Naples professed that vermicelli with tomato sauce was the food of the angels. To which Marinetti responded that if that were the case, it simply served to confirm the boredom of life in paradise.

Ultimately, Marinetti believed, modern science would allow us to replace food with free, state-sponsored pills composed of albumins, synthetic fats, and vitamins that would lower prices for the consumer and lessen the toll of labor on the worker. Ultraviolet lamps could be used to electrify and thus dynamize food staples. Eventually, a totally mechanized production would relieve humankind of labor altogether, allowing man to be at leisure to pursue nobler activities. Dining could thus become a purely aesthetic enterprise. On this premise, Marinetti and Fillia's proposals for the new Italian cuisine constitute one of the most inspired chapters in the annals of Futurism. The cookbook gave a new infusion of giovinezza—a favorite Fascist word, meaning "youth"—to the slightly tired antics of a movement now known as Secondo Futurismo. While the spectator could already expect, by the 1930s, to be abused by the Futurist text, the Futurist painting, the Futurist polimaterico (multimedia sculpture), and the Futurist performance, here the abuse went not to the head, but straight to the stomach.

The polemics in The Futurist Cookbook were followed by an elaborate account of some Futurist banquets. One of the more memorable of these Aeropranzi futuristi was a banquet for 300 people held on 18 December 1931 at the Hotel Negrino in Chiavari. Guests were delighted and terrified as they braced themselves to ingest dishes prepared by the famous cook Bulgheroni, who had come especially from Milan to this small Ligurian town to preside in the kitchen over the burial of pastasciutta. Although the Futurists had advocated the abolition of eloquence and politics around the table, the guests nevertheless first had to sit through a lecture by Marinetti on the state of world Futurism. Afterward, the meal began with a flan of calf's head seated on a bed of pineapple, nuts, and dates, stuffed—oh, surprise!—with anchovies. Then, to cleanse the palate, Bulgheroni served a decollapalato (a pun on decollare, meaning "to get off the ground"), a lyrical concoction of meat broth sprinkled with champagne and liquor and decorated with rose petals. The main dish was beef in carlinga (another aeronautic term, probably referring to a kind of Dutch oven), meatballs—whose composition was best left uninvestigated—placed over airplanes made out of bread crumbs. After a few more dishes the dessert, named eletricita atmosferische candite, arrived, consisting of colorful little cubes made of fake marble crowned with cotton candy that enclosed a sweetish paste containing ingredients only a long chemical analysis could disclose. Not everybody made it to the end of the dinner.

Most memorable among other Futurist recipes was the carneplastico: a synthetic sculptural interpretation of Futurist aeropittura referring to the much-beloved Italian landscape. In honor of the beacon of Italian industry, one could taste the pollo Fiat, a stuffed chicken placed on puffy pillows of whipped cream. On a more pornographic note, one could also have a porco eccittato, a cooked salami placed vertically on the plate with coffee sauce mixed with eau de cologne.

Whatever Marinetti might have thought about his capacities for perennial transgression, such conceits of dishes as "divine surprises" had a long historical lineage. They went back to the most extraordinary passages in Petronius Arbitrius's Satiricon, thus reviving an aspect of Romanita that the Fascists, in their eagerness to revive Roman glories, would have been all too happy to endorse. Indeed, many of the ingredients were coded so that the exotic fruits that appear in so many Futurist dishes were meant to evoke Italy's hope for a firmer grip on North Africa in fulfillment of its imperial ambitions as master of the Mediterranean. There was, it turns out, some disagreement during the Fascist ventennio as to the uer-history of pasta. According to the story presently told in Rome's Museo Nazionale della Pasta Alimentare (the only such museum in the world, founded in the 1990s), traces of early pasta implements were found in the archeological remains of the Etruscan town of Cerveteri, near Rome, dating to the 4th century BC. Pasta was also identified in low reliefs of the 12th century. And yet the writer Paolo Buzzi, in an article printed in 1930 in the much-venerated journal La Cucina Italiana, pointed to the fact that no mention of pasta by the ancient Romans could be found in the history of Italian cooking by d'Apico, the Homer of cooking. This might sound strange, he added, if one thinks of the thousand stories one was told as a child about the catastrophic volcanic eruption of Pompeii, one of which told of plates, still filled with maccheroni, thrown into the lava.

As always with Futurism, Marinetti's ottimismo della tavola had its darker side in the realm of realpolitik. Not by chance, as he himself acknowledged in the manifesto, Marinetti launched his attack against pasta just when Italy, hit hard by the Depression, was struggling to achieve one of Mussolini's great dreams: autarchy, or the elimination of Italy's economic dependence on foreign markets. Pasta, quintessentially Italian as it was, depended on expensive imports of wheat. The regime thus launched a campaign in favor of home-grown rice as a better substitute. Rice, we are told, was more virile, more patriotic, and more suitable for fighters and heroes. Rice also had its part in the history of Italian cooking as the great rival of pasta; it came from the Po valley in the industrial North, while pasta, with its hypothetical birthplace in Etruria and its triumph in Naples, was identified with the center, and even more with the agrarian and backward South. This was a battle that could thus be waged on familiar Futurist geopolitical territory.

And so the Futurists offered tuttoriso: new dishes to replace the traditional Northern risotto. More sinister is the fact that among the doctors summoned by Marinetti was the eugenicist Nicola Pende, the man behind the new Instituto di Biotipologia in Rome. Marinetti's attacks against pasta coincided, significantly I think, with the first wave of Taylorization of pasta production. On display in the Museo della Pasta in Rome are vintage photographs of women (almost never men) at work in front of vertical hydraulic presses, grinders, cutters, and blenders that look no less impressive, no less daunting, and no less alienating, than the assembly line at Fiat's famous Turin factory known as the Lingotto, a Futurist favorite back in the teens. By the 1930s, the institution of biotypes as substitutes for Taylorism to attain maximal efficiency in the working place and the provision of a master race had taken hold of the Fascist imagination. Thus the New Futurist Man, the man without pasta, the homo ludens who might eventually replace homo edens, the man whom one may be tempted to theorize as the postmodern "desiring machine" of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in Anti-Oedipus, was, then, first and foremost, the New Fascist Man.

Fine. But what is one to make of our Marinetti snapshot? The staple photograph we see reproduced shows Marinetti instructing a female cook on how to concoct one of his recipes, both of them standing in front of a 1913 Muscular Dynamism painted by Umberto Boccioni. So is our photograph here of Marinetti caught red-handed in the act of eating the infamous dish? A good Italian who just couldn't resist? And this taking place at Biffi, if one is to believe the caption, one of the best-known Milanese establishments (still in existence) and a favorite haunt of the Futurists? Or is it a clever maneuver by Marinetti intended to bamboozle the viewer, leave him or her guessing, spinning yet still more controversy? About to send off my text and still wavering between these two interpretations of this piece of photographic evidence, I stumbled on one little paragraph of The Futurist Cookbook. There, entry number 7 in a short section on apocryphal anecdotes provided a possible answer: "Photographs of Marinetti in the act of eating pasta appeared in a few mass-circulation magazines: they were photographic montages carried out by experts hostile to Futurist cuisine, who were trying to discredit the campaign for a new way of eating."1 There could, however, be another reading: the photo is real and Marinetti, whatever he might have claimed in his cookbook, was simply lying about the montage. There must have been moments when, even for Marinetti, the desires of the everyman vanquished those of the Futurist and the Fascist in him.


1 — Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, The Futurist Cookbook, trans. Suzanne Brill (San Francisco: Bedford Arts, 1989), p. 99.

Text by Romy Golan

Source: Cabinet magazine, Issue 10, Spring 2003