TOWARDS TECHNO-POETICS AND BEYOND The emergence of modernist/avant-garde poetics out of science and media-technology (1) What do modern literature, science and media-technology have in common? They all share in different respects the dynamics of a modern, industrial mass-society. Scientific research and the technological implementation of this research in a variety of media are of course the key factors in the development of the modern, industrialized society as it evolved since the last quarter of the eighteenth century. But modern literature as a whole and the poetics of modernism and avant-garde more specifically also express with their literary means the evergrowing dynamics of modernization. German Early Romanticism was perhaps the first genuine avant-garde movement that tried to elaborate a new style of poetics with a highly modernistic flavour. Its concept of irony came indeed very close to the logic of surrealist montage. Ludwig Tieck in his Shakespeares Behandlung des Wunderbaren of 1793 formulated the basic dynamics of this new kind of poetics as follows: "Es gehört dies zur unbegreiflich schnellen Beweglichkeit der Imagination, die in zwei aufeinander folgenden Momenten ganz verschiedene Ideen an einen und denselben Gegenstand knüpfen, und jetzt Lachen, und gleich darauf Entsetzen erregen kann."(2) This "incomprehensibly quick mobility" of the literary imagination with its preference for ever bolder analogies is indeed the literary paradigm that would haunt the imagination of literary innovators from Tieck onwards. So, as early as the last decade of the nineties in the eighteenth century, this kind of mobility or dynamism that is so typical of the industrial mass-society of today reflected itself in this new brand of modern, "dynamic" poetics. However, it would take more than a century before literary innovators fully realised that the form of the literary text could be modernized by consciously borrowing from the methods of science and media-technology. Italian Futurism - the first exponent of the historical avant-garde - will try to set the marks for a new kind of autentically modern literature by precisely doing so. Marinetti's concept of "wireless imagination" (immaginazione senza fili) deliberately copied Marconi's invention of the wireless telegraph. In that sense, Marinetti was the first artist to create a sort of techno-poetics and as such the historical avant-garde emerged indeed out of science and especially out of media-technology. 1. From Marconi's wireless telegraphy to Marinetti's "wireless imagination" Until his "Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature" (Manifesto tecnico della letteratura futurista) from May 1912, Marinetti only proclaimed a radical version of French symbolist vers libre that dealt with technological subjects. In this first stage of futurism (1909-1912) technology was used as a favourite icon to demonstrate vigourous vitalism, just as Verhaeren and Whitman did in their poetry. Technology, in other words, was only another theme in an otherwise pretty traditional literary form. So far, nothing new - and certainly nothing futuristic - since Maxime Du Camp in 1855 already used technology as a lyrical subject with outspoken positive connotations. It is hard to tell what exactly caused Marinetti to hit upon the idea of his techno-poetics as this is outlined for the first time in his "Technical Manifesto". Both Marconi's widespread popularity and Marinetti's contacts with futurist painters and sculptors who were much more aware of the "technical" side of art production may have inspired Marinetti. Marconi's wireless telegraphy dates from the end of the nineteenth century and was an offspring of the socalled second industrial revolution of around 1880-1890 that witnessed the rise of the first audiovisual media like phonography, telephony and cinematography. Marconi managed to establish a wireless service between England and France in 1899 and by 1901 H.G.Wells already brooded on the impact of Marconi's revolutionary medium on the imagination: "The world grows smaller and smaller, the telegraph and telephone go everywhere, wireless telegraphy opens wider and wider possibilities to the imagination."(3) By 1909 - the year in which Marinetti published his famous futurist manifesto - Marconi's fame was such that he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics. The disaster with the Titanic in April 1912 became one of the first real media-events thanks to the wireless telegraphy. Everybody could virtually witness how the ship was about to sink while telegraphic messages reached the shores of Europe and America. Was it then that Marinetti grasped the significance of a medium that without wires and within seconds could virtually reach everybody all over the world? Which writer indeed wouldn't be envious of a medium like the wireless that could "write" (graphein) on the spur of the moment - from within the heart of reality itself - and in a minimalist textual form that was very easily understandable? The years of Marconi's popular success - between 1909 and 1912 - coincide with Marinetti's futurist founding period. It was after a futurist soirée (serata futurista) in 1910 that Marinetti came in touch with painters and sculptors that shared his enthusiasm to create a antitraditionalist art in terms of the modern age and its techno-industrial dynamism. These painters and especially Umberto Boccioni were much more concerned with the technical or formal side of art making. They probably made Marinetti aware of his own lack of "technical" experience in the literary field. It was only till after Boccioni's technical manifestoes of futurist painting and futurist sculpture that Marinetti wrote his own technical program for a futurist literature. After three years of iconoclastic, passéist (passatismo) art-bashing in which Marinetti proclaimed what futurism certainly did not want, he finally came to a positive and esthetically elaborated account of what futurism actually stood for. 2. The techno-poetics of "wireless imagination" In the "Technical Manifesto" of 1912, the "wireless imagination" already fulfils a major part in the outline for a still very negatively formulated futurist literary form. The manifesto from 1913 "Destruction of Syntax, Wireless Imagination and Words-in-Freedom" (Distruzione della sintassi - Immaginazione senza fili - Parole in libertà) is the real blueprint of Marinetti's techno-poetics in that it positively summarizes the poetics and the literary practice of futurism. The start of this manifesto is pretty impressive by boldly stressing the link between modern times and modern, futurist art. Whereas these modern times owe their modernity to a great extent to science and media-technology, it is only natural for a truly modern art to look for new impulses in the scientific and media-technological field. Marinetti: "Le Futurisme a pour principe le complet renouvellement de la sensibilité humaine sous l'action des grandes découvertes scientifiques.Presque tous ceux qui se servent aujourd'hui du télégraphe, du téléphone, du gramophone, (...) du cinématographe et du grand quotidien (...) ne songent pas que tout cela exerce sur notre esprit une influence décisive." (4) In what way did the media - "these great scientific discoveries" - affect the human mind in general and what is the message of these media for a new, futurist poetics and literature? A short paragraph in Marinetti's "Technical Manifesto" coined the answer to this crucial question while at the same time interlocking the media to the altered state of modern mind and to a new futurist sort of poetics: "La vitesse aérienne ayant multiplié notre connaissance du monde, la perception par analogie devient de plus en plus naturelle à l'homme. Il faut donc supprimer les comme, tel que, ainsi que, semblable à, etc. Mieux encore, il faut fondre directement l'object avec l'image qu'il évoque en donnant l'image en raccourci par un seul mot essentiel." (5) The technological media - be it an airplane or the wireless telegraphy - impose a new way of experiencing reality, another kind of looking at things. On its turn, this mediatic "perception by way of analogy" - as Marinetti puts it - asks for a new form of poetics that operates in the same analogical mood and thus connects the tenor ("the object") and the vehicle ("the image") of the analogy or metaphor with no connection at all, as all the traditional connecting words like "as" are simply dismissed. Marinetti, even stronger, not only pleads to do away with the connecting words of the analogy or metaphor but with the tenor as well, so that in the end only a poststructuralist-like "dance of the signifiers" ("l'image en raccourci") is left or - according to Tieck - an "incomprehensibly quick mobility" of the imagination. (6) It took till 1916 to find a clear, unambiguous assessment by Marinetti about the poetical nature of this kind of perception by analogy. In a manifesto entitled "The new religion - Morals of speed" (La nuova religione - morale delle velocità) Marinetti finally puts the pieces together. The analogical perception as imposed by the media could be characterised as "wireless imagination" as far as poetics is concerned because media and futurist poetics alike compare or bring together the different aspects of reality in a sudden and mysterious, quickly performed synthesis: "Une grande vitesse d'auto ou d'aéroplane permet d'embrasser et de comparer rapidement différents points de la terre, en faisant ainsi mécaniquement le travail de l'analogie poétique. Qui voyage acquiert mécaniquement du talent, rapproche les choses distantes vues synthétiquement et en les comparant l'une à l'autre découvre leurs mystérieuses sympathies. Une grande vitesse réalise l'intuition analogique de l'artiste. Omniprésence de l'imagination sans fils = vitesse." (7) So finally, it is the speed with which things are perceived that constitutes the link between an outrightly mediatic perception like that of a pilot or cardriver and the analogical perception of the writer or poet. In both cases different objects or views of reality are brought together with no effort at all to link them together because there is simply no time for close scrutiny. Another example in Marinetti's manifesto of 1913 very clearly underlines once more the structural unity between telegraphic or mediatic perception and the literary imagination in that both aim at the same analogical synthesis of things instantly perceived. Marinetti talks about the futurist poet as follows: "Il lancera d'immense filets d'analogies sur le monde, donnant ainsi le fond analogique et essentiel de la vie télégraphiquement, c'est-à-dire avec la rapidité économique que le télégraphe impose."(8) Marinetti's statement about the "immense nets of analogies" that are spun both by telegraphy and the poetic imagination may be somewhat misleading. Didn't Marinetti claim that "the wireless imagination" operates without any nets at all, but just juxtaposes things as they are perceived? Indeed, Marinetti who uses in this example the obsolete image of the Morse-telegraph, which still worked with wires, corrects himself a few sentences later by insisting on the essentially "wireless" nature of modern telegraphic radiocommunication and futurist literature: "(...) L'imagination du poète doit lier les choses lointaines sans fils conducteurs, moyennant des mots essentiels et absolument en liberté" And he concludes unequivocally this time: "Par imagination sans fils j'entends la liberté absolue des images ou analogies exprimées par des mots déliés, sans les fils conducteurs de la syntaxe et sans aucune ponctuation."(9) The reference to Marconi's wireless telegraphy as tenor for the vehicle of the futurist "wireless imagination" with all its implications for the literary style - destruction of the syntax, words-in-freedom - couldn't be more outspoken, although Marinetti never mentions the name of Marconi but only speaks in a single instant of the TSF or "télégraphie sans fil" (telegraphia senza fili). By using the term "wireless imagination" Marinetti more or less conforms to his own poetics that says to eliminate the tenor or object of the analogy and only to mention the vehicle or image as such. What Marinetti didn't realize, however, was the excruciating dilemma in which he maneuvered modern literature by adapting her traditonally "textile" body to a media-technological machine. Can the fabric of the text accomodate itself to a technological kind of "texture" with a totally different fabric? In other words: how do the fragile threads of the pre-industrially modelled or interwoven text respond to the telegraphic wires that Marinetti wants to have installed in their place? Or even more so: how can you replace a traditional medium like literature with something that has no fabric at all and operates wirelessly ("sans fils conducteurs", senza fili)? 3. From analogical to digital literature? It seems, indeed, that Marinetti's techno-poetics stumbled upon the boundaries of the literary system. The liberated syntax with its liberated words that had to articulate the constant flow of images was unable to capture this "wireless" flow of second-term analogies by literary means. The fabric of the literary text couldn't compete with the transparant medium of electromagnetic radiowaves as they were first used by Marconi to transmit instantaneous, "wireless" messages and as they served later on to broadcast radio and television. What Marinetti intended to do with his wireless imagination bore fruit so to speak in the audiovisual media in general and in the videoclip style of today's most advanced television more specifically. However, the sort of literary logic that Marinetti was aiming at with his techno-poetics still remains highly relevant. In a way Marinetti anticipated the digital logic of the present computer and the computer-controlled virtual reality or cyber-space, the digital dreams of which fulfil Marinetti's wildest wireless fantasies! It is certainly no coincidence that this digital logic was also the result of experiments with telegraphic and telephonic communication-media, just as Marinetti's "wireless imagination" emerged out of the wireless telegraphy. The telegraphic code that Morse developed for his electric telegraph with wires consisted of four basic signs: dots, dashes, long and short pauzes. It was this code that probably inspired Marinetti to specify in his "Words-in-Freedom" that the futurist flow of images was only to be connected by means of Morse-like or mathematical symbols to indicate the rhythm of the continuous surge of images. Anyway, Morse's code soon became redundant when Bell's telephone and the radioexperiments based on Marconi's wireless transmitted the human voice as it was. The problem still remained how to transmit this human voice as quickly as possible. The electric pulse that activated or disconnected the electromagnetic medium or the moment between connecting and receiving of the message still had to be shortened in order to speak of really flashlike, momentary communication. The code that ensured such an instantaneous connection was developed by an engineer in the Bell Laboratories. In 1937 George Stibitz devised the socalled binary code that was made up of two figures or digits: one positive bit for opening the circuit and another negative bit for closing the gate. Stibitz' addition machine based on this binary digital system became the computer of today. The ceaseless flow of information is controlled by the binary digits that tell the computer how to proceed through the different gates of his curriculum. Right now, computer-controlled machines allow its user to project visual fantasies on to a screen. All he has to do is put on a socalled magic glove that connects him with the computer and provide himself with stereo-glasses that show him a three-dimensional picture of the things he likes to imagine. This socalled virtual reality or cyber-space more or less realises what Marinetti had in mind with his "wireless imagination". There is of course one great difference in that the user is wired to the computer and consequently doesn't enjoy of a totally freed imagination. But the digital logic that Marinetti unknowingly fringed, encompasses more than its most recent achievements in a computer-induced virtual reality or computer-steered interactive media. Digital logic in its most common meaning refers to the very sudden, impulse-like shifting of information. The speed with which the binary or digitally operated gates in the computercircuits open and close becomes every year more and more mind-boggling. In the same way, modern literature as soon as German Early Romanticism looked for an analogical form of poetics that could capture with an adequate stilistic speed the swiftly shifting perceptions of modern life. The reality of modern life became more and more dynamic and disintegrating as the Modern Age proceeded. Tieck already envisioned an "incomprehensibly quick mobility of the imagination" that would be able to connect ,so to speak, in the same moment two conflicting sensations. This meant - technically speaking - that the tertium comparationis of the analogy was to be reduced to the minimum. The common ground between tenor and vehicle of the analogy or metaphor expired or evaporated as the autonomy of modern literature estabished itself in the nineteenth century. As soon as 1869, Lautréamont forged his remarkable analogy that young Mervyn was as beautiful "comme la rencontre fortuite sur une table de dissection d'une machine à coudre et d'un parapluie". Indeed, one can ask oneself what a sewing-machine and an umbrella have semantically in common except for their fortuitous bringing together on an operation table. However, this perception by analogy without an obvious tertium comparationis was not fortuitous at all since it was to become the new paradigm of looking at things in a fragmented way in the age of media. This mediatic age started ,as already mentioned, around the turn of this century. And Marinetti, like no one before him, must have been pretty highly aware of this mediatic perception with its craze for connecting things that at first sight don't belong together. Moreover, this piecemeal or at random combination of different sensations or objects happened at a pace that mimicks the ever growing dynamics of modern reality. In the end, the speed of this "wireless" imagination is such that even the signifiers, freed from the load of the signified, threaten to disappear in a diabolic, syncopated rhythm. 4. Lacan on the digital nature of language Lacan called this free-floating or wireless concatenation of signifiers - signifying nothing except their own movement - "the dance of the signifiers". He spoke about the "chaîne du signifiant" as a digital series of "points de capiton": points of meaning in which the paradigmatic, metaforical thread of the texture pops up in the syntagmatic, metonymical thread. This momentary visibility of the textual woof crossing the warp constitutes the meaning of the text. These "points de capiton" occur "digitally", meaning that they happen suddenly, unexpectedly. Lacan, like Marinetti, never used the word "digital" as such to characterize the sudden moment of metaphorical realisation. However, the terms he coined to speak about that moment like "implantation", "ponctuation", "scansion", "coup" all suggest the very quick, instant-like nature of this metaphorical or analogical operation. Moreover, there are explicit references in Lacans texts of the fifties to that new kind of digital or cybernetic language and Lacan interestingly enough sometimes talks in these texts about cybernetics or digital operations in the computer as if he were speaking about natural language. He even uses similar words or concepts of his linguistic theory to describe the digital modus operandi in computers. Speaking about the digital code of a computer, he uses the word "composition signifiante" as if he were speaking about the "chaîne signifiante" in natural language(10). And in a seminar of 1955 - two years before he gave his lecture on "L'instance de la lettre" from which the above mentioned quotation was taken - he speaks in full about the relationship between psychoanalysis, cybernetics and language. Psychoanalyse et cybernétique, ou de la nature du langage tries to formulate a kind of semiotics of cybernetics. Talking about the digital or binary code, Lacan strikingly enough uses the term "scansion" - a word previously used to indicate the sudden appearance of the metaphorical component in the text - to characterize the quintessential unit or digital bit of that code(11). While telling how mathematics changed from a static, geometrically organised science into the dynamic ars combinatoria of a cybernetics-like science in the seventeenth century, Lacan once more stresses the suddenness of this cybernetic code by implicitly referring to the metaphorical process of Verdichtung in his use of the word "coup" (12). So in the end, Lacan himself suggests a parallellism between the digital nature of computerlanguage or cybernetics and the metaphorical emergence of sudden "nods of significance" or "points de capiton" in a text. Marinetti's "wireless" "filets d'analogies" or "chaîne des analogies" - as he puts it elsewhere(13) - find their theoretical self-defense in Lacans theory where he speaks about the implicit digital nature of the "chaîne du signifiant" as a series of digitally installed analogies without a first term. Lacan never referred to Marinetti's techno-poetics but very clearly proposed his theory of the metaphor or analogy while speaking about the surrealist "écriture automatique", which comes pretty close to Marinetti's "écriture télégraphique", so to speak. It is then that Lacan within the framework of his own theory explains the elimination of the first term in the analogy. The solution to this operation, which was never solved in Marinetti's poetics, sounds as follows in Lacans ingenious theory: "L'étincelle créatrice de la métaphore ne jaillit pas de la mise en présence de deux images, c'est-à-dire de deux signifiants égalements actualisés. Elle jaillit entre deux signifiants dont l'un s'est substitué à l'autre en prenant sa place dans la chaîne signifiante, le signifiant occulté restant présent de sa connexion (métonymique) au reste de la chaîne."(14) The first term of the analogy, though eliminated in the actual process of the text where only the second term survives, is virtually still there on the contextual or metonymical level. 5. Beyond techno-poetics Long before Lacans theorizing in the fifties about the digital process of meaning in a text, Marinetti tried to make Lacans insights work in the context of his techno-poetics. His vision of a "wireless imagination" certainly was too ambitious but for all its practical flaws suggested where literature could come to an end. The dissocation of the analogical or metaphorical logic that started in the eighteenth century was brought to an ominous conclusion in Marinetti's techno-poetics. The kind of digital literature that Marinetti had in mind balanced on the verge of its own literary impossibility. The crypto-digital logic that manifests itself throughout Marinetti's poetics of dismembered analogies in which only the second terms of the comparison survive, finds it ultimate fulfilment in the realm of the imagination from which Marinetti borrowed his poetics. It seems indeed that the media - especially the videoclip style-media on TV and in publicity ads - honour Marinetti's wireless imagination as no futurist literature could ever have done before. Meanwhile, experiments with computers suggest a virtual reality in which Marinetti's boldest wireless fantasies could come through. Did these media for that reason become more literary than modern literature itself and is the digital fabric of some of these media therefore the ultimate perfection of the analogical substance of avant-garde poetics? 1. This paper with its focus on Marinetti's futurist concept of a 'wireless imagination' is part of a bigger project that concerns itself with a meadia-comparative history of modern literature. This history tries to reconstruct the influence of modern media-technology on the literary form and imagination, in contrast to the current comparative study of literature that usually restricts itself to the description of interferences between traditional, non-technological media - like painting or music - and literature. 2. Tieck:Kritische Schriften vol. 1, p. 56: "It is typical of the incomprehensibly quick mobility of the imagination to associate totally different ideas at two subsequent moments with the same object, thus arousing laughter yet almost simultaneously also horror." 3. Kern:The Culture of Time and Space: 1880-1918, p. 229. 4. Cited in Lista: Futurisme: Manifestes, documents, proclamations, p. 142. 5. Marinetti, cited ibid., p. 134. 6. Marinetti: Supplement to the Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature of August 1912 (Supplemento al Manifesto tecnico della letteratura futurista): "La poésie idéale que je rêve [... ] ne serait que la suite ininterrompue des seconds termes des analogies [... ] Je me propose de donner la suite illogique, non explicative mais intuitive, des seconds termes de nombreuses analogies, toutes déliées et opposées l'une à l'autre." 7. Marinetti, cited ibid. p. 368. 8. Marinetti, cited ibid. p. 144. 9. Marinetti, cited ibid. p. 144. 10. Lacan: "L'instance de la lettre dans l'inconscient,", p. 518: "C'est dans une mémoire, comparable à ce qu'on dénomme de ce nom dans nos modernes machines-à-penser (fondées sur une réalisation électronique de la composition signifiante), que gît cette chaîne qui insiste à se reproduire dans ke transfert, et qui est celle d'un désir mort." 11. Lacan: "Psychanalyse et cybernétique," p. 347. 12. Lacan: Ibid., p. 345: "A la science de ce qui ce retrouve à la même place, se substitue ainsi la science de la combinaison des places en tant que telles. Cela, dans un registre ordonné qui suppose assurément la notion de coup, c'est-à-dire celle de scansion." 13. Marinetti: Manifeste technique de la littérature futuriste: "Pour donner les mouvements succesifs d'un objet il faut donner la chaîne des analogies qu'il évoque, chacune condensée, ramassée en un mot essentiel." Cited in Lista: Futurisme - Manifestes, documents, proclamations, p. 134; italics used by Marinetti himself! 14. Lacan: "L'instance de la lettre de l'inconscient," p. 507.