[In the review below, Ulmer offers a positive critique of The Futurist Moment.]

One reason perhaps why the work of Bakhtin is popular with American critics is that it is one of the best statements of the goals of scholarship today—a synthesis of formalist close reading with a socio-historical point of view. Marjorie Perloff's study [The Futurist Moment] does not cite Bakhtin but it does display the virtues of a formalist/historical synthesis. The organizing strategy is to ground the study first in the period just preceding the First World War, the brief utopian moment of Futurism when the artists responded affirmatively to the challenges of the industrialized urban landscape. This grounding allows Perloff to state with some precision the implications for contemporary cultural studies of the revival of interest in Futurism among postmodern artists and theorists such as Laurie Anderson and Jacques Derrida. The Futurist Moment, then, is historiography at its best, focusing our attention on the earlier moment not for its own sake as information but in order to help us understand the contemporary moment as represented in such figures as Roland Barthes and Robert Smithson.

Part of the value of the study, producing an effect at once theoretical and aesthetic, has to do with its synecdochic style of thought. Indeed, the book is worth reading regardless of one's area of specialization in order to learn this organizing strategy, which is to discuss in detail a specific text, such as Blaise Cendrars' La Prose du Transsiberien, and then by a careful association of its formal features with the historical setting to derive explanatory principles extendable to the entire era. As in the case of the reading effect of allegory, in which the more the author insists on the concrete detail the more the reader experiences an appeal to an abstract dimension of meaning, Perloff's style evokes a theoretical understanding out of a series of detailed comparative discussions of just a few well-chosen examples.

Perloff's ability to evoke theoretical generalization more by means of allegory then by allegories is due in part to the aesthetic impact of her arrangement—for example the way the final chapter links up with the first in a comparison of the readings of the Eiffel Tower given by Cendrars and Roland Barthes. Such symmetries take on explanatory power by being the vehicles for a precise definition of “the language of rupture,” as manifested in three different experimental dimensions: the collage form, the genre of the manifesto, and the medium of the “artist's book.”

Part of the unity of the study, joining the present moment with the past, comes from Perloff's attention to the continuing vitality of these innovations. At the same time, the juxtaposition of close readings of representative works from different national movements—Italian, Russian, French, British—allows a full accounting of the particular differences distinguishing the varieties of Futurism that evolved relative to the specific historical circumstances in each case. This juxtaposition also provides a fresh perspective on the continuing debate concerning the relationship of aesthetics to politics. Perloff takes issue with Fredric Jameson (and through him to some extent also with Walter Benjamin) who too readily assumes that an aesthetics of politics is inherently fascist: “For while it is a truism that the Marinetti of the twenties and thirties had become a confirmed if unorthodox fascist, the Futurism of the avant guerre did not, as is often assumed, inevitably point in this direction. Here the example of Russian Futurism is especially instructive” (p. 30). The Russian artists of the “moment,” that is, used the same imagery of “battle, destruction, annihilation” found in the Italian manifestoes to express their belief that a Brave New World could be achieved by means of war. Perloff could have alluded, to further support her case, to the example of the poststructuralist cultural politics of Nomadology: The War Machine (Deleuze and Guattari) or Pure War (Virilio and Lotringer) which continue the experiment with a left political aesthetics based on the rhetoric of war.

The Futurist Moment leads us to think about several open questions—a feature of its theoretical effect—by its insistence on the relevance of its primary object for our own “moment.” The one that I find most interesting has to do with the ironic attitude toward technology that has replaced in postmodernism the initial optimism of Futurism. I am reminded of Hayden White's Metahistory with its cycle of tropes passing from metaphor to irony. White wondered if the cycle would then just repeat itself or if the circle might somehow be broken. Certainly we would not expect or desire the story of technology to be emplotted again as a Romance. Perloff shows that Futurism, in the context of modernist revolutions transforming every dimension of Western Civilisation, initiated a new attitude to the technology of writing by taking the printed page no longer as a transparent medium but as itself the object of art (viz. McLuhan's observation that the old medium becomes the content of the new one). She implies that one of the reasons for the renewed interest in Futurism is the intuition that those experiments marked a new moment in the evolution of writing beyond speech and print in response to the new technologies of communications.

The logic of this study, hinting at Perloff's next project, suggests that video may be seen as a means for the mechanical reproduction of a Futurist poetics in the collage/montage of editing. One of the effects of juxtaposition in collage/montage—its easiest and most natural device—is irony. To see this possibility in its purest state one might view a documentary such as Atomic Café, a compilation film made by editing into one text a large number of American propaganda films from the cold war period. On one hand, we might say that the ironic effects so readily producible in film/video reflect the ironic disillusionment with technology that Perloff describes as characterizing the present moment. On the other hand, there is the implied necessity to think the positive side of this new integration of art and technology.

Jacques Derrida recently has been discussing the lesson of Paul de Man's insight into the structural identity of irony and allegory. Perhaps this work might suggest a way to read the text with which Perloff concludes—Robert Smithson's “A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey.” The “monuments” consist of the bridges, car lots, sewage pipes, and smokestacks of an industrial environment, ironically presented as a contemporary version of Samuel Morse's painting. “Allegorical Landscape.” Keeping in mind that this text, consisting of photographs and commentary, first appeared in an art journal, we may read it as a work of hybrid theory, using irony as a means to achieve critical distance. It conceptualizes in these ironic monuments the end of monumentality, which is construed not as a loss, but as a celebration of the end of an ideology of mourning that created such landscapes. Smithson's essay acquires this theoretical dimension by presenting an irony that must be read as an allegory.

This is not the place to go into the details of this possibility—a monumental critique of the culture of identity. Suffice it to say that Perloff's account of the Futurist moment indicates one major resource for models teaching us how to write beyond the book, in accord with the needs of a postindustrial inventio. A more immediate lesson for language departments might be the realization that some of the boundaries we still use to select our object of study no longer fit the territory of our culture. A reading of this book, with its color prints and excellent recreations of experimental productions, raises my desire for another syllabus, for a curriculum designed by Marjorie Perloff.