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Authors: George Prochnik
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joyfully boasted.
Plenty of people before the futurists made noise on purpose, but no one had ever constructed such elaborate and provocative philosophical arguments on its behalf. The futurists proclaimednoise to be the soundtrack of liberation. We’ve been dubbing that soundtrack over our lives with revolutionary impunity ever since.
The flip side of the futurists’ lust for noise was their loathing of silence. Ancient life was nothing
but
silence, Russolo complained. And the whole of nature was no better. He bemoaned the fact that apart from “exceptional movements across the earth’s surface, such as hurricanes, storms, avalanches, and waterfalls, nature is silent.” Marinetti lumped silence in with what he called the moribund “idealization of exhaustion and rest”—the “rancid romanticism”—that provoked his movement’s first public action on a serene Sunday afternoon in July 1910.
Marinetti and a contingent of his
rat-tat-tat
pack climbed to the top of the clock tower in Venice’s Piazza San Marco. It was no accident that they’d chosen to launch their movement in one of the world’s most famously quiet cities. Leaning over the tower’s balcony, Marinetti’s disciples proceeded to dump 800,000 pamphlets titled “Against Past-loving Venice” down onto the heads of the bewildered public below, while he howled through a megaphone: “Enough! Stop whispering obscene invitations to every mortal passerby, O Venice, old procuress!” The content of the leaflets went further, calling upon Venetians to transform their city into a commercial and military metropolis: “Burn the gondolas , those swings for fools, and erect up to the sky the rigid geometry of the large metallic bridges and manufactories with waving hairs of smoke.” One has to admit, it’s got panache.
Of course the futurists didn’t appear out of nowhere. Voices celebrating the noise that man makes in the act of “denaturing” the Earth have existed since the beginning of civilization. The words of William Faux, an English farmer who traveled throughthe American west in 1819 to weigh the advantages of resettling there, are typical. Referring to the effect of forest fires lit by the “White Hunters” to help them shoot animals, Faux wrote, “The everlasting sound of falling trees … night and day, produces a sound loud and jarring as the discharge of ordnance, and is a relief to the dreary silence of these wilds, only broken by the axe, the gun, or the howlings of wild beasts.” Manmade noise often signals the defeat of nature. What the futurists did was to link this idea with a deeper philosophical mistrust of silence.
Twenty years before the first futurist manifesto, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote in
Twilight of the Idols
that he meant to “
sound out idols
” with the “hammer” of his philosophical interrogation. Nietzsche’s idols consisted of all those comforting, hypocritical fantasies by which we delude ourselves about the character of the world and mute the healthy energies of the human spirit. Nietzsche expected to be answered by “that famous hollow sound which speaks of inflated bowels—what a delight for one who has ears behind his ears … in presence of whom precisely that which would like to stay silent
has to become audible
.”
Nietzsche’s commitment to broadcasting “that which would like to stay silent” echoes in all those latter-day liberation movements dedicated to “making a noise” about unjust power relationships and giving voice to those who’ve been gagged. Part of why we fell in love with being loud is because quiet is associated with “being silenced” and with being given “the silent treatment.”
This is, of course, a formula for explosion. At the start of the First World War, the futurists were on the vanguard agitating for Italian intervention. In his most regrettable formulation, Marinetti declared war to be the “world’s only hygiene” and wrote a letterdescribing his own
Plenty of people before the futurists made noise on purpose, but no one had ever constructed such elaborate and provocative philosophical arguments on its behalf. The futurists proclaimednoise to be the soundtrack of liberation. We’ve been dubbing that soundtrack over our lives with revolutionary impunity ever since.
The flip side of the futurists’ lust for noise was their loathing of silence. Ancient life was nothing
but
silence, Russolo complained. And the whole of nature was no better. He bemoaned the fact that apart from “exceptional movements across the earth’s surface, such as hurricanes, storms, avalanches, and waterfalls, nature is silent.” Marinetti lumped silence in with what he called the moribund “idealization of exhaustion and rest”—the “rancid romanticism”—that provoked his movement’s first public action on a serene Sunday afternoon in July 1910.
Marinetti and a contingent of his
rat-tat-tat
pack climbed to the top of the clock tower in Venice’s Piazza San Marco. It was no accident that they’d chosen to launch their movement in one of the world’s most famously quiet cities. Leaning over the tower’s balcony, Marinetti’s disciples proceeded to dump 800,000 pamphlets titled “Against Past-loving Venice” down onto the heads of the bewildered public below, while he howled through a megaphone: “Enough! Stop whispering obscene invitations to every mortal passerby, O Venice, old procuress!” The content of the leaflets went further, calling upon Venetians to transform their city into a commercial and military metropolis: “Burn the gondolas , those swings for fools, and erect up to the sky the rigid geometry of the large metallic bridges and manufactories with waving hairs of smoke.” One has to admit, it’s got panache.
Of course the futurists didn’t appear out of nowhere. Voices celebrating the noise that man makes in the act of “denaturing” the Earth have existed since the beginning of civilization. The words of William Faux, an English farmer who traveled throughthe American west in 1819 to weigh the advantages of resettling there, are typical. Referring to the effect of forest fires lit by the “White Hunters” to help them shoot animals, Faux wrote, “The everlasting sound of falling trees … night and day, produces a sound loud and jarring as the discharge of ordnance, and is a relief to the dreary silence of these wilds, only broken by the axe, the gun, or the howlings of wild beasts.” Manmade noise often signals the defeat of nature. What the futurists did was to link this idea with a deeper philosophical mistrust of silence.
Twenty years before the first futurist manifesto, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote in
Twilight of the Idols
that he meant to “
sound out idols
” with the “hammer” of his philosophical interrogation. Nietzsche’s idols consisted of all those comforting, hypocritical fantasies by which we delude ourselves about the character of the world and mute the healthy energies of the human spirit. Nietzsche expected to be answered by “that famous hollow sound which speaks of inflated bowels—what a delight for one who has ears behind his ears … in presence of whom precisely that which would like to stay silent
has to become audible
.”
Nietzsche’s commitment to broadcasting “that which would like to stay silent” echoes in all those latter-day liberation movements dedicated to “making a noise” about unjust power relationships and giving voice to those who’ve been gagged. Part of why we fell in love with being loud is because quiet is associated with “being silenced” and with being given “the silent treatment.”
This is, of course, a formula for explosion. At the start of the First World War, the futurists were on the vanguard agitating for Italian intervention. In his most regrettable formulation, Marinetti declared war to be the “world’s only hygiene” and wrote a letterdescribing his own
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