a new cultural emphasis on stabilizingnmechanical and personnel operations,nreducing inefhciency through Taylorizationnand time-and-motion studies,nand eliminating waste in materials andnmethods. She finds that the marvel ofnmachinery temporarily made the engineernone of our cultural heroes, thatntechnological and business valuesnbegan to color the thinking of Americans,nand that machines and technologicalnoperations began to be thematizednin literature. For some, even annew beauty had been born. As thenItalian F.T. Marinetti announced innhis 1909 Futurist manifesto: “A racingncar whose hood is adorned by greatnpipes, like serpents of explosive breath,nis more beautiful than the Victory ofnSamothrace.” Likewise, Hart Cranenhymned The Bridge.nProfessor Tichi’s account of technologynas subject matter — in worksnlike Frank Norris’ The Octopus, EugenenO’Neill’s The Dynamo, WillanGather’s Alexander’s Bridge — is wellndone. But I have serious reservationsnabout her claim that the rise of machinesnproduced the mechanization ofnliterary form itself. It is true that WilliamnCarlos Williams once said that “Anpoem is a small (or large) machinenmade of words.” But is a poem anmachine — any more than it is a gourdnor fruit? Professor Tichi seems to takenit on faith that the essence of literarynart alters with the new metaphors usednto describe it. Hence she analyzes thenfiction of Dos Passos, Hemingway, andnothers as if they were machines constructednon the technological principlesnof stability, efficiency, and thenavoidance of waste. Since many of hernliterary examples have nothing to donwith machines, she recurs to the farfetchednanalogue herself. She knowsnvery well that Hemingway’s storiesnreflect no interest in machines and thatnhis precision and economy of style cannbe accounted for by the demands ofnjournalism and the brevities of thencable dispatch, but thesismongering requiresnher to take an absence for anpresence:nHemingway shows how it is thatnwritings on a range of subjectsncan embody the values ofnmachine technology. Stories andnnovels about hunting or fishing,nbullfighting or boxing cannexhibit a machine aesthetics,neven when machines ornstructures play no part in thenfiction. The pictorialnrepresentation of a machine ornstructure is not necessary andnmay be irrelevant. The form isnwhat counts, and formallynHemingway’s style marks thenachievement of machine valuesnin imaginative literature. Henproves that the dominantntechnology does define ornredefine the human role innrelation to nature. He is full ofnnostalgia for a preindustrialn”natural” environment, but hisnsentences are irrevocably ofnanother, a gear-and-girder,nworid.nIt would be difficult to find a morenegregious non sequitur. One wouldnthink that spare, economical, effectivenprose was ne’er written before the industrialnera.nMore disturbing, however, is thenanalysis by Marjorie Perloff of the pre-nWorld War I Futurist movement innrelation to the new industrial technology.nThe Futurist Moment offers a provocativenreading of the manifesto as annart form, of the collage technique, andnof performance art as produced bynvarious Futurists in France, Italy, andnRussia. Of course, most of what thenFuturists produced was inane nonsensendeliberately at war with logic, causality,ntemporality, grammar, syntax, and referentialitynitself. But Perloff seems notnto mind. The manifestos, paintings,npoems, and collages of Marinetti, BlaisenCendrars, Sonia Delaunay, KasimirnMalevieh, and others (lavishly illustratednin this book) were modeled on thenadvertisement, the poster, the placard,nticket stub, and handbill. And theyncelebrated machines, technology,nspeed, violence, energy, revolution,npropellers, airplanes, engines, steelntowers, tanks — even war itself. Is itnart?nNot by a distinguished standard. Innfact, the Futurists set themselvesnagainst distinction of every kind andncultivated the merely outrageous. Fornthe Futurists, the past did not exist.n”The only freedom we demand,” declarednVelimir Khlebnikov in 1914, “isnfreedom from the dead.” To securenthis freedom they called for revolutionnnnand war. Against what? The “banality”nof middle-class Western culture. In thenninth thesis of his manifesto, Marinettinproclaimed: “We will glorify war — thenworld’s only hygiene — militarism, patriotism,nthe destructive gesture ofnfreedom-bringers, beautiful ideasnworth dying for, and scorn of woman.”nEnchanted with machines, Marinettinproclaimed that “War is beautiful becausenit initiates the dreamt-of metalizationnof the human body,” becausen”it enriches a flowering meadow withnthe fiery orchids of machine guns,”nand “it creates new architecture, likenthat of the big tanks, the geometricalnformation flights, the smoke spiralsnfrom burning villages.” Mayakovsky,ndeclaring war to be “magnificent,”ncalled in Russia for the poetic muse “tonride the gun-carriage wearing a hat ofnfiery orange feathers.” Well, the avantnguerre Futurists got the revolution andnthe great war they wanted; and hownthey suffered for it. But so did millionsnof others who had not asked for it andnwho did not romanticize its “hygienic”nproperties.nHow are we to read the barbarousnand antihuman manifestos, the placardnpoems, and the outrageous public performancenof these avant guerre radicalsnwho gave rise to nihilistic Dadaism andnthe fatuities of Surrealism? Weren’tnthey all proto-Fascists? Well, yes, mostly.nBut Perloff would like us to believenthat Russian Futurism was different:n”The Russian poets and artists of thenprewar years expressed a faith in war asnthe revolution that would bring about anBrave New World, as the necessarynfirst step in bringing down the institutionsnof church, monarchy, and thenclass system.” She means us to see annoble idealism in their brand of revolutionarynwarmongering. But did thenBolsheviks think them noble? Trotskynand Lenin had them pegged perfectly,nbetter than Professor Perloff. Leninndismissed them as a “plethora of bourgeoisnintellectuals” who wanted a revolutionnin order to play out “their individualntheories in philosophy andnculture.” And Trotsky in Literaturenand Revolution (1922) wrote them offnas bourgeois Bohemians posturingnwithin “the closed-in circle of thenIntelligentsia.” The masses, the revolution,nhad no use for them. ThenMarxist Walter Benjamin was morenaccurate than he knew — in “ThenMAY 1988/ 3Sn