SOURCE: "The Revolution of a Poetics," in Modernism: Challenges and Perspectives, Monique Chefdor, Ricardo Quinones, and Albert Wachtel, eds., University of Illinois Press, 1986, pp. 159-79.

[In the following essay, Isaak compares the Vorticist movement to Russian Futurism.]

"What strikes me as beautiful, what I should like to do," Flaubert wrote, "is a book without external attachments, which would hold itself together by itself through the internal force of its style." Flaubert's dream of an order of art independent of the referential, the representational, was actualized within certain developments of abstractionism in the early 1900s—when art took to analyzing its own ontology. The movements that follow Flaubert's imperative, creating not art contingent upon empirical experience but art as process and mode of perceptual and formal experience, have one characteristic in common—their strategies of abstraction evolved out of a complex nexus of linguistic and plastic media. It is as though what Roman Jakobson refers to as the "bared medium" could only be realized by investigating the devices of other media. In particular, strikingly similar traits can be observed among the group of English vorticists associated with Ezra Pound, Wyndham Lewis, and the manifesto Blast (1914) and the group of Russian futurists, an alliance of writers and painters who displayed a comparable urge to write manifestos which would function as "A Slap in the Face to Public Taste" (1912). In the Blast manifesto, Pound attempted to delineate what he called the "ancestry" of vorticism by quoting Pater's famous phrase on the etiology of abstraction in art: "all arts approach the condition of music." In the same chapter of The Renaissance Pater goes on to make two other much more explicit statements. The first is that "art is always striving to become a matter of pure perception, to get rid of its responsibilities to its subject." In the second, abstraction in one medium is seen to be capable of suggesting a means of aesthetic autonomy in another. Pater notes that "in its special mode of handling its given material, each art may be observed to pass into the condition of some other art, by what German critics term an Anders-streben—a partial alienation from its own limitations, through which the arts are able, not indeed to supply the place of each other, but reciprocally to lend each other new forces."

The notion of the autonomy of the artistic material was developed by the Russian futurists into a fully articulated aesthetic. Kasimir Malevich's assertion that the object of painting was the expression of its own "body as such" ("The idea is to combine the variety and multiplicity of lines, space, surface, color and texture into one body as such") had its direct linguistic counterpart in Velemir Khlebnikov's and Aleksei Kruchenykh's insistence on the idea of the "word as such," the self-sufficient word, free of its referent. Just as all the other arts consist in the shaping of self-validating material, so too does poetry: its "material" is words, and thus poetry is characterized as obeying immanent laws and its semantic function reduced to a minimum. "Before us there was no art of the word," Kruchenykh wrote in The Three, and he asserted the autonomous value of the "autotelic word." The raw material of literature was to be allowed to stand by itself, no longer chained in slavery to meaning, philosophy, psychology, or reason: "The word is broader than its meaning. Each letter, each sound has its relevance.… Why not repudiate meaning and write with word-ideas that are freely created? We do not need intermediaries—symbols, thought, we give our own new truth and we do not serve as the reflections of some sun." And Benedikt Livshits wrote that now poetry was "free from the sad necessity of expressing the logical connection of ideas." In 1911 Pound had launched a comparable attack against the burden of reference imposed upon poetry, complaining that for over two hundred years poetry in English "had been merely the vehicle … the ox-cart and post-chaise for transmitting thoughts poetic or otherwise."

The assertion of the right to an autonomous or autotelic aesthetic praxis should not be understood as synonymous with the solipsistic principle of "art for art's sake," but rather should be accompanied by the following qualification of Jakobson's:

Of late criticism thinks it fashionable to stress the uncertainty of what is called the formalist science of literature. It seems that this school does not understand the relations between art and social life, it seems that it promotes 'art pour l'art and proceeds in the wake of Kantian aesthetics. The critics who make these objections are, in their radicalism, so consistent and so precipitate that they forget the existence of the third dimension, they see everything in the same plane. Neither Tynyanov, nor Mukarovsky, nor Shklovsky, nor I have preached that art is sufficient unto itself; on the contrary, we show that art is part of the social edifice, a component correlating with the others, a variable component, since the sphere of art and its relationship with other sectors of the social structure ceaselessly changes dialectically. What we stress is not a separation of art, but the autonomy of the aesthetic function.

I have already said that the content of the notion of poetry was unstable and varied over time, but the poetic function, poeticalness, as the formalists stressed, is an element suigeneris, an element that cannot be mechanically reduced to other elements. This element must be laid bare and its independence stressed, as the technical devices of cubist paintings, for example, are laid bare and independent.…

But how is poeticalness manifested? In that the word is felt as a word and not as a mere substitute for the named object or as an explosion of emotion. In that words and their syntax, their signification, their external and internal form are not indifferent indices of reality, but have their own weight and their own value.

As the manifesto titles suggest, (Blast, A Slap in the Face to Public Taste) it is as a reaction against the pluralism of bourgeois taste that these artists posit their stylistic dissent. The enthusiasm and exaltation with which they announce this stylistic dissent indicates that the formal revolution—the redical shifts in modes of aesthetic production, theoretical positions, and treatment of perceptual and linguistic conventions—is the pretext for hurling a Promethean challenge, repudiating their determinate role in producing representations of the ideological world. According to Malraux, modern artists ventured into the field of abstractionism with the intention of escaping the hegemony and homogeneity of that "museum without walls" in which they had found themselves since photographic reproduction provided the technology of pluralism—the immediate assimilation and dissemination of the work of art. Although I do not agree with Malraux's teleology of abstract art, what is important to our discussion here is his observation of the intention of abstractionism as reaction against the dominance of now easily reproduced "high art"—traditional academic culture providing a fictitious, but authoritative, universality and continuity with the past—and against mass culture, which is wholly divorced from any culture created by the people, but which is "art" produced and packaged for the masses. Edmund Wilson has given these two types the contrasting names "classics" and "commercials."

The most famous apostle of the creed of the "classics" is T. S. Eliot, who, in appropriating mythified cultural fragments to shore against his ruin, attempted to appropriate the work of Ezra Pound and James Joyce and to marshal them under the retrospective utopian banner of new literary classicism. "It is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history," Eliot writes in "Ulysses, Order, and Myth." This is perhaps the most candid revelation of the true compensatory impulse behind the eclectic historicist's static notion of history, which enables him to create a false synthesis of cultural fragments and endow them with notions of grandeur, nobility, universality, authority—all the old verities no longer to be found in the modern world, but which, we are asked to believe, obtained in the past. The mythic method, Eliot claims, is a step toward "making the modern world possible for art." In the Slap in the Face manifesto this mode of artistic production, along with Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, et al., is the first to be thrown overboard from the "Ship of Modernity," a reaction analogous to Pound's assertion that you needn't read Shakespeare, you could find out all you needed to know about him from "boring circumjacent conversation." "Better mendacities than the classics in paraphrase."

The greatest ad-man of the "commercials" is F. T. Marinetti, who, in his zeal for "the new," heroically and hysterically attempted to acculturate the entire avant-garde to the modes of production and theoretical positions of commodity capitalism in order to develop devices that would facilitate the swift communication of propaganda for that throughly modern merry-go-round—reification. This is borne out in Marinetti's adulation of all forms of capitalist technology and in his attempts to convert the whole Italian futurist movement into propagandists for Mussolini's fascism.

The ostensibly dissimilar artistic or pseudo-artistic production practices of mass culture and high art converge on the level of the common cult of the cliche. For Pound, whose Make It New poetics is shared by the Russian futurists, who used the same slogan, Marinetti's futurism was "only an accelerated sort of impressionism," implying that it is only a new form of mimeticism. but as Jakobson maintains, "Poetry is renewed from within, by specifically linguistic means," and he treats poetic language throughout his essay on "Modern Russian Poetry" (1919) as a kind of metalanguage. Like Pound, who asserted that "a work of art has in it no idea which is separable from the form," Jakobson, too, denies the distinct existence of subject matter or "content." Analyses of innovations based upon external or social causation are therefore erroneous. Both Pound and Jakobson fault Marinetti for the way he directs poetry to the task of recording new facts in the material world: rapid transit, speeding motor cars, locomotives, airplanes, and so on. "But this is a reform in the field of reportage, not in poetic language," Jakobson observes, and contrasts Marinetti's new mimeticism with Kruchenykh's assertion that "it is not new subject matter that defines genuine innovation. Once there is new form, it follows that there is new content; form thus conditions content. Our creative shaping of speech throws everything into a new light."

Thus Marinetti's futurism and Eliot's neoclassicism—the symbolic modes of concrete anticipation and the allegorical modes of internalized cultural retrospection—are understood to be comparable devices of stultification that reinforce and reinvent the cultural power structure. They are the aesthetic manifestations of the psychic mechanisms of anticipation and melancholy. At the origin of the allegorical is an enforced and incapacitating melancholy, the result of prohibition and repression; at the origin of the valorization of reactionary power and of reification is the continual generation and denial of expectations. When Pound, in an interview in Mayakovsky's magazine, The Archer, dissociates himself from Italian futurism he does so in a way that specifically addresses these ideologically induced psychic states and the manner in which they thwart the development of any genuinely innovative artistic activity capable of critical negativity.

We are "vorticists." … Everything that has been created by nature and culture is for us a general chaos which we pierce with our vortex. We do not deny the past—we don't remember it. It is distant and thus sentimental. For the artist and the poet it is a means to divert the instinct of melancholy which hinders pure art. But the future is just as distant as the past, and thus also sentimental. It is a diversion of optimism which is just as pernicious in art as melancholy. The past and the future are two brothels created by nature. Art is periods of flight from these brothels, periods of sanctity. We are not futurists: the past and the future merge for us in their sentimental remoteness, in their projections onto an obscured and impotent perception. Art lives only by means of the present—but only that present which is not subject to nature, which does not suck up to life, limiting itself to perceptions of the existent, but rather creates from itself a new, living abstraction … our task is to "dehumanize" the contemporary world; the established forms of the human body and all that is "mere life" have now lost their former significance. One must create new abstractions, bring together new masses, bring out of oneself a new reality.

Concomitant with this insistence on the new and the present, so central to both Russian futurism and English vorticism, is their interest in primitive and folk art. Russian neoprimitivism was to have considerable influence on the inception of abstract art in England. Although ostensibly it arose in Russia out of nationalist sentiments and the need for a viable indigenous art form in opposition to the invasions of Western culture, it was precisely this aspect of Russian art that found the most favorable reception in the West—in fact, it was what the West demanded. Diaghilev's first ballet performed in the West was criticized in the French press for its lack of national atmosphere: "The French desired a folk-lore element, expected a special, almost exotic flavour in the performances. In short, they wanted what they, as Frenchmen, understood to be 'du vrai Russe.'" It was in response to this demand that Diaghilev launched L 'Oiseau de Feu (1910)—a colorful although unconvincing pastiche of various Russian fairy and folk tales. Nevertheless, it was what the West called for, and by 1911 the influence of the Ballets Russes had spread far beyond the confines of the London and Paris elite. How great this influence was may be judged by the following extract from "Painters and the Ballets-Russes" by André Varnod: "In any case, it was a perfect enthusiasm which, sweeping away the artistic, literary and social worlds, reached the man in the street, the wide public, the gown-shops and stores. The fashion in everything was Ballets-Russes. There was not a middle-class home without its green and orange cushions on a black carpet." In 1913 Diaghilev very shrewdly enlisted the talents of Goncharova, and in spite of Larionov's declaration of 1913 that "we are against the West, vulgarizing our Oriental forms and rendering everything valueless," by 1914 Goncharova had burst upon Paris and London as the creator of the decor of the Coq d'Or—and Larionov too had begun to work for Diaghilev.

The appropriation by the West of ancient Russian art cannot, of course, be attributed wholly to Diaghilev's cultural transportations. T. E. Hulme's complaint about the way in which "elements taken from the extremely intense and serious Byzantine art are used in an entirely meaningless and pointless way" was a response to the Byzantine-style screens, rugs, inlaid tables, and paintings that proliferated in the wake of the Bloomsbury group's visit to Constantinople in 1911. Fry's enthusiasm for the art he saw while on this trip may have resulted in his decision to include the work of Russian artists in his Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition (1912). Here the works of Nikolai Roerich, Mikalojus Ciurlianis, Nataliya Goncharova, Mikhail Larionov, and other Russian artists of what the catalog referred to as the "New Byzantine Group" were exhibited together with the works of Vanessa Bell, Frederick Etchells, Duncan Grant, Cuthbert Hamilton, Wyndham Lewis, and Edward Wadsworth.

In spite of Hulme's justifiable compliant, the English artists' "adaptations" of Byzantine art forms enabled them to familiarize themselves with the use of nonrepresentational design. Roger Fry spoke of the "incredible phenomenon" of Goncharova and Larionov's stage decor, pointing out that now artists could go to the theater "to see experiments in the art of visual design—still more, experiments which indicate new possibilities in the art of picture-making." The early abstract compositions of Bomberg in particular were inspired by Diaghilev's ballets. And certainly a great number of the works produced at the Omega Workshop, plans for which began immediately after the Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition, show the influence of Russian folk art and crafts. These connections explain in part the precociousness of the development of abstract art in England. For example, Wyndham Lewis's Portrait of an Englishwoman, which was reproduced in The Archer (1915), is markedly similar to Malevich's later suprematist paintings, for example Dynamischer Suprematismus; and David Bomberg's The Dancer (1914) can be compared to Rodchencko's compass drawings of 1915. Examples such as these illustrate how similar influences can lead to morphologically comparable effects.

The adaptation of Russian neoprimitivist art in England has very different ideological implications from the same activity in Russia. This phenomenon was diagnosed in the twenties by Russian productivist artist and theoretician Boris Arvatov, who writes in Art and Production:

While the total technology of capitalist society is constructed on the highest and latest achievement and represents a technique of mass production (industry, radio, transport, newspapers, scientific laboratories, etc.), bourgeois art in principle has remained on the level of crafts and therefore has been pushed out of the collective social practice of mankind into isolation, into the realm of pure aesthetics.… The individual, lonely master, that is the only type of artist in capitalist society, the type of specialist in "pure art" who works outside of the immediately utilitarian practice because this practice is based on machine technology. From here originates the illusion of art's purposelessness and autonomy, from here its whole bourgeois fetishistic nature.

Arvatov's analysis could apply to industrial England, but in post-czarist Russia the development from neoprimitivism to abstract art to constructivist and productivist practices follows a very different trajectory.

In part, this can be explained by analyzing the reasons for the Russian avant-garde's renewed interest in primitive and religious art—particularly orthodox icon painting. Malevich's enigmatic announcement that The Black Square (1914-15) was "the icon of our times" was followed by his statements in The Non-Objective World that "art no longer cares to serve the state and religion.… It wants to have nothing further to do with the object as such and believes that it can exist in and for itself." The paradox of Malevich's position is resolved through a consideration of the semiotic function of the ancient icon itself. The controversy between the iconoclasts and iconodules, of fundamental significance for Orthodox Christianity, may, to a great extent, be seen as a controversy concerning precisely the semiotic character of the icon—the central point of which was the attitude toward the sign. In spite of the icon's extremely formalized but nevertheless figurative form it was originally understood to be nonrepresentational, in that its "referent" was regarded as ineffable—the face of Christ could never be known. Malevich's Black Square lays bare the absent referent as the source of the nonreferentiality of the icon and calls into question the whole problematic of any sign's relationship to the phenomenal world. In so doing Malevich exposes the idealism of the theological debate, its assumption of what Derrida calls the "transcendental signified," "which supposedly does not in itself, in its essence, refer back to any signifier but goes beyond the chain of signs, and itself no longer functions as a signifier." Rosalind Coward and John Ellis's discussion of Derrida's critique of the sign is useful here:

In this way, the distinction or equilibrium of the notions "signified" and "signifier" in the sign allows the metaphysical belief of a reserve or an origin of meaning which will always be anterior and exterior to the continuous productivity of signification.…

[Thus Derrida asserts] that a philosophy of language based on such a notion of the sign is "profoundly theological." "Sign and deity have the same place and same time of birth." The pyramid (referent—signified—signifier) ends by resolving itself into the hypostasis of a signified which always culminates in god: "the epoch of the sign is essentially theological."

Malevich conflates the signifier and signified, not as is customarily the case to let the concept present itself in a supposedly unmediated manner, but rather to reverse the process and foreground the signifier, thereby circumventing the idealist problematic that supposes the preexistence of meaning. When Malevich speaks of the primitive tendency in modern art, he does so in terms appropriate to his own use of the icon and makes it clear that the modern adaptation of primitive art is not an atavistic activity, but rather what he calls a "decomposition": "It is the attempt to escape from the objective identity of the image to direct creation and to break away from idealism and pretense." Primitivism, as it was to be employed by the Russian avant-garde, was one of the major strategies for facilitating the creation of the autonomous, autotelic work of art, a work of art relieved of its semantic or representational function, precisely because meaning with an a priori existence had been repudiated; signification was now understood to be dependent upon the passage of signifiers themselves.

The repudiation of the transcendental signified appears as the Promethean declaration of Victory Over the Sun (1913)-—the theatrical collaboration of Kruchenykh (text), Malevich (costumes and set designs), Matyushin (music), and Khlebnikov (prologue). It is extremely significant that Malveich claimed that suprematism originated while he was working on the sets for Victory Over the Sun. It has been suggested that Malevich's sketch for the backdrop for the first act may be part of the sun against the dark universe, especially since the diagonal line is actually curved and may be the horizon line of the sun. Also, parts of the sun appear on the cover for the libretto. If this reading is valid then the Black Square may be read as the total obliteration of the sun, the climactic event of Victory Over the Sun.

Victory Over the Sun is remarkably similar in title, theme, structure, charactery, stage design, and linguistic innovation to Wyndham Lewis's play Enemy of the Stars, written less than a year after Victory Over the Sun and Mayakovsky's play Vladimir Mayakovsky, a Tragedy had caused a riot at the Luna Park Theatre in St. Petersburg. Lewis may have learned of the plays from Marinetti, who visited Russia a couple of weeks after they were performed. In his memoirs Livshits details the debate Kulbin had with Marinetti concerning the importance of zaum or trans-rational language, which Kruchenykh had just developed in Victory Over the Sun. What account Marinetti gave of all this when he returned to England a few months later, and whether he brought with him the illustrated text of Victory Over the Sun published while he was in St. Petersburg is not known. But it is clear that the innovations of the Russian futurists would be a subject of considerable interest to the English vorticists.

Lewis wrote Enemy of the Stars because, as he said, his "literary contemporaries [were] not keeping pace with the visual revolution," yet he did not adopt Marinetti's theories and practices nor his typographic experiments, but instead utilized a great many devices comparable to those employed by the Russian futurists. Mayakovsky's canvas cubes and "slightly slanted" sets may have been the inspiration for Lewis's stage arrangements, in which "overturned cases and other impediments have been covered, throughout arena, with old sail canvas." In the second scene the "audience looks down into scene, as though it were a hut rolled half on its back, door upwards, characters giddily mounting in its opening." A picture of the setting for Victory Over the Sun shows an unmatched drop and wings hung upside down; in the sixth scene there is the unusual stage direction that the fat man "peeps inside the watch: the tower the sky the street are upside down—as in a mirror." The colors of the setting in both Victory Over the Sun and Enemy of the Stars are stark, unmodulated contrasts—predominantly black and white. In the second scene of Victory Over the Sun there is the addition of "green walls and floor" for the set of scene 2, on which Malevich had written "green until the funeral"; and in Lewis's play there are "the Red Walls of the Universe… till the execution is over."

The artificial light from the spotlights used in Victory Over the Sun played an important part in creating its dramatic effects. Malevich had at his disposal a modern console-controlled lighting system that had just been installed in the Luna Park Theatre. Livshits describes how the "tentacles of the spotlights" cut up the bodies of the actors into geometric sections: the figures "broken up by the blades of light … alternately lose arms, legs, heads," presumably because the colored spotlights absorbed similar colors in the costumes. These blades of light, which light up what Livshits called "a night of creation for the world" sound remarkably close to the bizarre, tremendously forceful and threatening lighting which pierces the night in Enemy of the Stars. "A white, crude volume of brutal light blazes over" the characters, crushing them. The stars, "machines of prey," shine "madly in the archaic blank wilderness of the universe."

The characters are grotesque abstractions of people, their bodies no more resistant to the powerful restructuration than is the rest of the environment. In Mayakovsky's play there is a man without an ear and one without a head; in Victory Over the Sun the fat man complains that his head lags two steps behind his body; in Enemy of the Stars a disembodied boot appears regularly to kick the protagonist, Arghol. Characters who are not parts of people wear masks and move like animations of monumental statues or distorted half-machine, half-human figures. Arghol "walks like wary shifting of bodies in distant equipoise." In one variation he is described as a "creature of two-dimensions, clumsily cut out in cardboard by coarse scissor-work," a description appropriate to Malevich's costumes, which were made of cardboard and resembled armor. The one illustration Lewis gives of the Enemy of the Stars could be a somewhat modified side-view of Malevich's Futurecountry Strong Man. These are the protagonists of the plays.

The Futurecountry Strong Man, like Lewis's Enemy, is engaged in a Promethean struggle. Man against the sun is the paradigm of the poet's desire to overthrow the agency of meaning—the prohibitionary seat of representation, "the sun of cheap appearances" as Matyushin calls it, or an immense bleak electric advertisement of God" as Lewis calls it. "We pulled the sun out by its fresh roots / they were fatty permeated with arithmetic," the victors sign. Victory Over the Sun is a restructuration of an entire cosmology—language users, not space, time, or causality, determine the order of the universe. "Lookers painted by an artist, will create a change in the look of nature," the prologue promises. Once the victory over the sun has been accomplished the Elocutionist announces: "How extraordinary life is without a past… what a joy: liberated from the weight of the earth's gravitation we whimsically arrange our belongings as if a rich kingdom were moving."

The language and structure of both plays is closely akin to that of the carnival. As Julia Kristeva points out:

Carnivalesque structure is like the residue of a cosmogony that ignored substance, causality, or identity.… Figures germane to carnivalesque language, including repetition, "inconsequent" statements (which are nonetheless "connected" within an infinite context), and nonexclusive opposition, which function as empty sets or disjunctive additions, produce a more flagrant dialogism than any other discourse. Disputing the laws of language… the carnival challenges God, authority, and social law; insofar as it is dialogical, it is rebellious.…

The scene of the carnival… is … both stage and life, game and dream, discourse and spectacle. By the same token, it is proffered as the only space in which language escapes linearity (law) to live as drama in three dimensions. At a deeper level… drama becomes located in language. On the omnified stage of carnival, language parodies and relativizes itself, repudiating its role in representation.

It is exactly at this level—the drama located in language—that the two plays bifurcate. In Victory Over the Sun phonetic and semantic deformations and new meaning generated by them achieve what Jakobson describes as the "significant potential" of neologism, that is, its potential for abstraction. Victory Over the Sun is the creation of the non-objective world. The old order of time, space, casuality no longer obtains. Characters travel freely from the tenth to the thirty-fifth centuries of the future or "leave sideways into the 16th century in quotation marks." The final song of the play is pure transrational poetry—zaum:

luh   luh   luh
Kruuh    Kruuh
      Hee
      Hoomtuh
Krruh   duh   tuh   rruh
      Krruh         vwubra
      doo      doo
ra luh
      Kuh   buh   ee
        zhub
zeeda
        deeda

This is the complete song, as meaningless in English (or rather transliterated, as here) as in Russian.

In Lewis's play, language remains incapable of detaching itself from representation. Even though at times the materiality of language is foregrounded and we are conscious only of what Lewis was later to call "the finely sculptured surface of sheer words," these "sheer words" are not long at liberty—their referents soon overtake them. Lewis's protagonist is posited in opposition to exactly the same forces as Kruchenykh's Futurecountry Strong Man. His play can be read as an allegorical enactment of Worringer's theory of the two oppositional wills to art—abstraction (Arghol) and empathy (Hanp). Arghol is the abstract artist engaged in "the dehumanization of art," but as Lewis makes clear in the beginning he is a "foredoomed Prometheus." He is beaten regularly by the "will of the universe manifested with directness and persistence," and is beset by Hanp, to whom Arghol says, "You are the world, brother, with its family objections to me." Hanp is organic nature with its demands for empathy. In both plays "nature is not an origin, but a run-down trope." In Victory Over the Sun, "the violets groan / Under the firm heel" of the Strong Man:

The flower world doesn't exist anymore
Sky cover yourself with rot…
Every birth of autumn days
And blemished fruit of summer
Not about those, the newest bard
Will sing.

In Victory Over the Sun the victory over cosmic order and the destruction of nature is the abolition of conventions of representation. In Enemy of the Stars, however, there is no victory. Arghol is "imprisoned in a messed socket of existence," and his only mode of extricating himself is through language: "Arghol's voice had no modulations of argument. Weak now, it handled words numbly, like tired compositor. His body was quite strong again and vivacious. Words acted on it as rain on a plant. It got a stormy neat brilliance in this soft shower. One flame balanced giddily erect, while another larger one swerved and sang with speech coldly before it." Arghol's decisive struggle takes place in the dream scene. It is within the dream, whose characteristic is, as Kristeva points out, carnivalesque discourse, that language could attain its "'potential infinity' (to use David Hilbert's term), where prohibitions (representation, 'monologism') and their transgression (dream, body, 'dialogism') coexist." In the dream Arghol fails to transgress the prohibitions, to enact the revolution that would transform him and his environment. He remains Arghol (fixed identity) and others recognize him as such in spite of his attempts to "obliterate or turn into deliberate refuse, accumulations of self." "He was simply Arghol.… He repeated his name—like sinister word invented to launch a new Soap, in gigantic advertisement—toilet—necessity, he, to scrub the soul." Nor is he able to rid himself of reality for long. He wakes up to find Hanp has followed him—"Always a deux!" In the end it is Hanp (the world) who kills Arghol, to the "relief of grateful universe." "The night was suddenly absurdly peaceful." The execution is over, the universe satisfied.

Enemy of the Stars is Lewis's most daringly experimental approach to language, "a piece of writing worthy of the hand of the abstractist innovator." "If anything extended could be done with it," Hugh Kenner observed, "this early style would be one of the most impressive inventions in the history of English literature." At the same time, the dramatic action located in the language marks Lewis's retreat from the linguistic revolution. "Words and syntax," he decided, "were not susceptible of transformation into abstract terms, to which process the visual arts lent themselves quite readily." This was the first step in Lewis's withdrawal from the abstractionist experiment. His second would come when he decided that "abstract terms" no longer seemed worth exploring in the visual arts either. The war which he had first complained of as having "stopped Art dead" he later praised for having saved him from what he called the "abstractist cul-de-sac."

Many years later, when Lewis looked back on the period just after the Blast publication, he expressed a sense of missed opportunity, a recognition that there was some further potential, some next step to the aesthetic revolution which he had failed to actualize—which, in fact, he had failed to see: "I might have been at the head of a social revolution, instead of merely being the prophet of a new fashion in art. Really all this organized disturbance was Art behaving as if it were Politics. But I swear I did not know it. It may in fact have been politics. I see that now. Indeed, it must have been. But I was unaware of the fact." His fellow vorticists were even more reactionary: "The immediate need of the art of today," Christopher Nevinson announced in 1919, is for "a reactionary, to lead art back to the academic traditions of the Old Masters and save contemporary art from abstraction."

The vision of the future, so unformed in the vorticists, was extremely clear to the Russian futurists. They saw themselves as harbingers of a political revolution. The subsequent evolution from Malevich's suprematism to the constructivist practices of artists such as Rodchenko and Lissitsky, and their explicit politicization during the productivist period, confirms their vision of themselves: their work was intricately bound into and supportive of the social revolution in the Soviet Union. As Malevich asserted, the overthrow of bourgeois taste, "smashing the old tables of aesthetic values[,] was the first step in smashing the bourgeois order."