In the Words of the Avant-Garde. Caruso, Martini and the Futurist Reclaiming of Matter

Abstract

Due to its association with Fascism, Futurism experienced a significant period of academic neglect and criticism, only starting to slowly regain ground from the late 1950s. Luciano Caruso, initially supported by Stelio Maria Martini, has played a fundamental part in this revaluation through over twenty years of intense work. His determined commitment has allowed us to discover and appreciate a great number of theoretical and poetic texts from the first Italian avant-garde movement that have been overlooked for many years, and to understand or re-evaluate some of the most critical issues. As well as his efforts to reclaim Futurism from its fascist connotations, Caruso also undertook a re-evaluation of paroliberismo (“Words-in-Freedom”). This considers not only the historical and critical perspective, but also the aesthetic and philosophical aspects. Caruso specifically recognizes the merits of Futurist paroliberismo as an approach which sought to heal an excessively sharp division between "words and things" that had occurred over the centuries, and to reintroduce the expansive power of matter into the circuit of language. This article intends to retrace the principal aspects of this critical re-evaluation by considering the reflections of Caruso and Martini on the relationship between writing and matter within the aesthetic and epistemological framework set out by Jean-François Lyotard (Discourse, Figure, 1971) which championed the primacy of the visual experience over the centuries-long Western logocentric paradigm.