34:2 Spring 1984

MARJORIE PERLOFF

"Violence and Precision": The Manifesto as Art Form

Marjorie Perloff’s essay, “‘Violence and Precision’: The Manifesto as Art Form,” was printed in the Spring 1984 special issue titled, “Some Things Worth Considering Before Beginning To Think About Poetry and Politics,” which also included essays by Hugh Kenner, Gerald L. Bruns, and Hugh Kenner.

The issue appeared at a moment in Chicago Review’s evolution when, as editor Keith Tuma disclosed in his introduction, CR was drawing criticism from “ideological watchdogs,” most of whom were “ignorant of the complicity their acts of criticism reveal but nonetheless eager to dismiss postmodernism on ‘ideological’ grounds.” Perloff, whose essay evokes the capricious influence of the Futurist manifestoes aside from any consideration of their relation to Italian Fascism, recently provided the following commentary:

At this writing (September 2006), the J. Paul Getty Research Center has a beautiful exhibition on Italian Futurist artworks—particularly manifestos and parole in liberta—on view, and I was asked to give one of the lectures for the exhibition on “the manifesto” on Oct. 19!  So the essay “Violence and Precision,” reprinted in my The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant-Guerre, and the Language of Rupture (University of Chicago Press, 1986) has been very much on my mind. Not only because of the Getty exhibition: it is also the case that the Norwegian journal Rett Kopi is doing a special issue on avant-garde manifestos and I wrote a new piece, on F. T. Marinetti’s First Manifesto (1909) for that journal just this summer. In 1984, it seems, my piece was ahead of its time; no one then was thinking much about manifestos, and Italian Futurism was, in any case, considered taboo because of the purported Fascist connection some of the artists and poets displayed. Now, more than twenty years later, we are, I think, more tolerant of “unacceptable” politics or perhaps just more aware of the fact that art and politics are not always in sync, that one can be a fine artist and hold unpleasant political views and vice-versa. The Futurist manifesto, in any case, has had an enormous influence: without it there would be no Dada manifesto, no BLAST!, edited by Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound, no Situationist manifesti. So I am delighted to gain a wider audience for the invention, on Marinetti’s part, of manifesto form.

Perloff is professor emerita of English literature at Stanford University as well as the 2006 President of the Modern Language Association. 

[KM, 2006]

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