Death and the Automobile
Priyasha Mukhopadhyay The driving force behind every nation’s story of progress is a motor car In his introduction to Paul Virilio’s Speed and Politics Benjamin Bratton writes of how a history of compensating for the vulnerability of the human body has led to universal prosthetisation of various kinds and to various degrees: from the military tank that in its ability to assault, destroys the concept of territorial boundaries, to the sports shoe. Transforming the possessors into “metabolic bodies,” these come together to supplement the human in the drive towards efficiency, excellence and logistical power.[i] This is a universe in which everything is a machine. The ubiquity of the mechanical in everyday life has forced us to reexamine not only the nature and extent of our reliance on such objects, but also how technological encounters shape our understanding of contemporary subjectivity. Thinking through the relation between the human and the machine is not a new gesture; widespread industrialisation in Europe ensured that the machine was a tangible presence in most nineteenth and early twentieth century documents. Critical studies however, even history indeed, mostly limit themselves to the uncovering of technophobia[ii] – horror at the debilitating effects of long hours of work in factories, the gradual isolation of the human subject from the need for human contact, the fascist undertones of the production of something as loved as Volkswagen cars in Nazi Germany.[iii] This article is an attempt, alternatively, to rethink technophilia in one of its most historically violent forms, Futurism. Taking as its focus the body of the machine, it will examine the manner in which manifestos written by its prime proponent, F.T. Marinetti, evolve an oppositional political and aesthetic mythology, one that is dependent not on the mere interactions between the human and the non-human, but on a complex set of processes by which the ideal human is, in its essence, not human at all. In writing the machine into (paradoxically) this futurist history, I am not critiquing or attempting to thwart the inevitable mechanisation of human existence, but trying to understand how such transformations and interactions can become coherent models of political and social action. I will thus make a preliminary attempt to trace how it becomes symbolic of the uncertain and scattered ways in which we “do” politics, and in turn, what politics does to us. As Fast as You Can Casually thrown before its readers is the following scene from Mario Morasso’s The New Weapon (1905): “Here is something heroic; a man seated on a rigid seat, like a barbarian king, with his face covered by a hard visor, like a warrior, with his body leaning forward almost to provoke the race and to scrutinize – not just the course, but destiny. With his hand secure on the inclined steering wheel, with all his faculties in a state of vigilance, he seems truly the lord of a whirlwind, the tamer of a monster, the calm, absolute sovereign of a new force, he who stands straight in a vortex. “(qtd. in Poggi 10 ) The focus here is the driver of the racing car, the “man seated on a rigid seat.” Rather than being a symbol of middle-class affluence, the car is instead thrown into an imaginary space of multiple contexts: there is war that the driver-warrior is prepared for; his hand is “secure,” his body leaning forward, alert and ready for combat with skill and precision that ensure that he alone is “the tamer of a monster.” Language deceives us here; on a first reading, the monster and whirlwind seem to be self-evidently the car being driven. In such a scheme of things, the man quickly becomes emblematic of humanity’s conquest over the machine, able to control it with a firm grip of the steering wheel. What makes this passage extraordinary, and anticipatory of how Futurism was to revolutionise the man-machine relation, is the manner in which the act of control transforms the man into something other than himself, superhuman. Standing in the vortex of mechanical strength, he is not merely “the sovereign of a new force,” he is that new force. Morasso’s novel was published five years before F.T. Marinetti’s “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism” appeared in Le Figaro, bringing in its wake the call for the destruction of tradition, metallisation and the pure power of speed. These are not all incidental players in the configuration of the manifesto, but rather, seem to draw from a seemingly insignificant event in Marinetti’s life: his Fiat collided with a bicycle and skidded into a ditch. He was left unscathed, but in the manifesto, this is replayed as the moment when Marinetti is “transformed” into a Futurist; nothing less than a miraculous moment of religious baptism: I gulped down your bracing slime, which reminded me of the sacred black breast of my Sudanese nurse. . . . When I climbed out, a filthy and stinking rag, from underneath the capsized car, I felt my heart—deliciously—being slashed with the red-hot iron of joy! (50) At one level, the accident reveals what Jeffrey Schnapp calls Futurism’s delight in “trauma-thrills,” modern forms of the sublime that derive from the excitement that lurching towards the limits of death and pulling back creates (4). The accident changes Marinetti; he will keep looking for opportunities to recreate this experience throughout his life and writing (a point I will return to later in this article). This transformation is undeniably psycho-somatic: the slashing of the red-hot iron through Marinetti’s heart is both literal and metaphorical, and in the process, solders the fragmented parts of his self together to make him the very object that is most likely to survive the encounter, a machine. This is addressed more clearly in a section of a later work, Le Futurism (1911), “The Multiplied Man and the Reign of the Machine”: This inhuman and mechanical type, constructed for omnipresent velocity, will be naturally cruel, omniscient, and combative. He will be endowed with unexpected organs: organs adapted to