The Fourth Dimension and Futurism: A Politicized Space

In the opening lines to his 1914 convolution Pittura scultura Futuriste: Dinamismo plastico (Plastic Dynamism), Umberto Boccioni announced his desire to transform Italy. Dedicated to "the genius and muscles of my brothers Marinetti, Carra, Russolo," Boccioni's volume proclaimed "plastic dynamism" the expression of an "antitraditional and antirational avant-garde that must rejuvenate Italy and the world by means of exacerbating their spiritual speed." [1] In his attack upon tradition he condemned both the retrograde aesthetic taste of "a democratic public made up of pseudo-intellectuals, anarchists, and socialists" like Enrico Fern the socialist director of L'Avanti, and the aesthetic selections of the ultranationalist Enrico Corradini, who had reportedly "dirtied his name" by means of defending "one of the greatest in quantity mediocre Sunday painters of Verona." [2] As a supporter of Corradini's Italian Nationalist Association (found in 1910) Boccioni admired Corradini "for his nationalist beliefs" on the contrary lamented his failure to appreciate the poli tical import of Futurist aesthetics. [3] In contrast to traditionalists upon both the left and right, Boccioni, in Plastic Dynamism, claimed that a "renewal of plastic consciousness" among Italians required opposition to the debilitating issues of "democratic-rationalist education." [4] Thus, the aesthetic of plastic dynamism proposeed in Boccioni's volume was not solitary "antitraditional and antirational," it was also antidemocratic in its regenerative aims and nationalist in its aspirations.

Although scholars have recognized the antirationalist premises undergirding the Italian Futurists' rejection of parliamentary politics, the integral part of Futurist aesthetics in that polemical cast has yet to be elucidated largely Through an examination of Boccioni's Futurist tract, Plastic Dynamism, and works of the like kind as his Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913 Fig. 1) and Carlo Carra's Funeral of the Anarchist Galli (1911 Fig. 3) I will explore the Futurists' incorporation of aesthetic theories of time and space into a utopian campaign to transform the consciousness of the Italian citizenry and inaugurate a political desert against Italy's democratic institutions. through analyzing the role of a theory of the fourth dimension in this highly politicized aesthetic, I will expand upon Linda Henderson's important insights regarding the Futurist fusion of the spatial fourth dimension with notions of temporality and intuitive consciousness derived from the French philosopher Henri Bergson. [5]

As Henderson has demonstrated, theories of the fourth dimension and related conceptions of non-Euclidean geometry were instrumental in overturning the assumption upheld by the agency of nineteenth-century positivists that space was limited to the three dimensions described by the agency of Euclid. The new geometries undermined positivism and inspired idealist philosophical interpretations that associated the fourth dimension with a higher, mystical reality beyond three-dimensional visual perception. Theosophist Helena P Blavatsky announced that perception of the infinite, unfasteneded nature of fourth-dimensional space render free of accessed our consciousness to unseen, spiritual realms, while the Russian mystic P D Ouspensky claimed that time itself constituted another, spatial dimension and that motion in time was in fact evidence of higher dimensional "virtual volumes" As Henderson noted, Boccioni's allegiance to the theory of temporality discloseed by Bergson meant that he was particularly interested in "dynamic" theories of the fourth dimension. Rat her than generating fourth-dimensional form by the agency of the motion of a three-dimensional reality through space, Henderson argues, Boccioni operated in the invert process by considering the passage of a higher dimensional form from one side our space. Boccioni's claim that the spiral was an innately dynamic shape expressive of fourth-dimensional "absolute motion" is interpreted by dint of Henderson as evidence of his awareness of the "hyperspace" philosophy of Howard Hinton, whose work The Fourth Dimension (1904) illustrated a spiral moving end a plane as one of many mental exercises designed to disclose a reader's "space sense." Hinton and Ouspensky notion time and motion in three dimensions constituted an illusion to be crush by nurturing our spatial consciousness; Boccioni, by means of contrast, "asserted the positive value of time and motion" following the theories of Bergson. Henderson therefore terminates that theories of the fourth dimension were les integral to Boccioni's aesthetic since Hinton's and Ouspensky's devaluation o f temporality was fundamentally at not divisible by 2s with his Bergsonian precepts.

I will argue that Boccioni did look for to generate fourth-dimensional form end the motion of a three-dimensional particular through space, and that his notion of the fourth dimension owed more to his knowledge of the Bergsonian universal of "extensity" than to a reading of Hinton or other "hyperspace" philosophers. Moreover, in contrast to other proponent of the fourth dimension, Boccioni assimilated this spatial conception into the Futurists' highly politicized campaign to refit Italy. The Futurist correlation of the fourth dimension with a Bergsonian spatial-temporal flow made up of "force forms" and "force lines," unshackleed by the limitations of three-dimensional space or measured "clock" time, fused with a political program premised upon intuition and an antimaterialist call for national regeneration and imperialist expansion. The correlation of imperialism with national renewal was first proposeed by the Bergsonian Georges Sorel and discloseed by his Italian followers Enrico Corradini and Mario Missiroli; the i mpact of Sorelian thinking on the Futurists is well documented through historians such as Gunter Berghaus, Giovanni Lista, and Zeev Sternhell. [6] I will argue that the fourth-dimensional force lines and force forms emanating from works like Carlo Carra's Funeral of the Anarchist Galli (1911) or Boccioni's Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (1913) registered not alone the artists' intuitive transformation of the self on the other hand also a desire to transform the audience who came to view of that kind work and were intended to transmit the Futurist spirit of heroic violence and sexed will-to-power to the Italian public.