{"id":1085,"date":"2020-05-20T21:16:55","date_gmt":"2020-05-21T02:16:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/betweentwokingdoms\/?p=1085"},"modified":"2020-05-20T21:16:55","modified_gmt":"2020-05-21T02:16:55","slug":"umberto-boccioni-and-the-joyful-future","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/betweentwokingdoms\/2020\/05\/umberto-boccioni-and-the-joyful-future\/","title":{"rendered":"Umberto Boccioni and the Joyful Future"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\"\"Among proponents of an emerging \u201cChristian postliberal\u201d vision of life, one of the most common themes is the need to reclaim a sacramental understanding of reality\u2014an understanding of the cosmos as more than simply a reserve of natural resources given for technological exploitation and domination, as itself a theophanic manifestation of God\u2019s beauty. I certainly share that commitment. But I can\u2019t help noticing that, all too often, Christian postliberals struggle to articulate a compelling philosophy of technology.<\/p>\n

Specifically, high-profile proponents of postliberalism\u2014whether one turns to Eugene McCarraher\u2019s The Enchantments of Mammon<\/a><\/em>, John Milbank and Adrian Pabst\u2019s The Politics of Virtue<\/a><\/em>, or Thomas Crean and Alan Fimister\u2019s Integralism<\/a><\/em>\u2014tend to endorse the gauzy ideals of preindustrial Christian socialism, or some form of distributism. But as Texas A&M professor James Rogers has pointed out<\/a>, these alternatives to contemporary \u201cneoliberalism\u201d come with plenty of baggage. The world is certainly capable of providing the necessary resources for human subsistence\u2014but absent modern technology, the scale of that production would be enormously reduced. A return to premodern economics would likely lead to massive impoverishment, not to mention the return of famines and droughts as apocalyptic scourges.<\/p>\n

Accordingly, it seems to me that a cohesive, modern-day understanding of human flourishing\u2014and the common good more broadly\u2014requires serious theological engagement with the process of industrialization and the digital revolution. Any transformed Christian social order of the future cannot turn back the clock further than that.<\/p>\n

Fortunately, the starting place for such reflection need not be the realm of abstract theory, but rather the work of an Italian futurist painter of the early 1900s named Umberto Boccioni.<\/p>\n

Boccioni\u2019s futurist paintings\u2014featuring vivid and contrasting colors and sharp, jagged angles, with a suggestion of the fractal beneath the surface\u2014immediately seize the viewer\u2019s attention. They are simultaneously abstract and representational, depictions of dynamism and energy loosely bundled into contiguous forms. The Boccioni painting that first caught my eye\u2014Dynamism of a Soccer Player<\/a><\/em>\u2014is suffused with a driving forward momentum that sweeps the viewer into the canvas, quickening the pulse in an explosion of real exuberance.<\/p>\n

Crucially, in these paintings, the cosmos of our experience is glimpsed from a perspective that is simultaneously intelligent and yet wholly other<\/em>, nonhuman. Immanuel Kant famously argued that our thoughts are unavoidably shaped by the categories our mind superimposes on the raw stuff of experience; in Boccioni\u2019s work, it is as if those Kantian scales fall from our eyes and we can at last behold the seething, yet ordered, currents of life\u00a0<\/em>beneath the world\u2019s skin. Boccioni\u2019s works are not realist paintings, and they certainly do not evoke the iconography of the pre-Renaissance period\u2014but neither do they reject representationalism entirely. There is still an essential unity between the thing described in the placard and the image on the canvas.<\/p>\n

Interestingly, during their heyday, Boccioni and the other futurists understood themselves as engaged in a rejection of artistic tradition\u2014at least to a point. In their 1910 Manifesto of Futurist Painters<\/a><\/em>, the young futurists denounced the snares of \u201ctradition, academicism and, above all, a nauseating cerebral laziness\u201d and called for \u201cdestroy[ing] the cult of the past, the obsession with the ancients, pedantry and academic formalism.\u201d Taken at face value, this is an attitude that someone like me\u2014especially after having repeatedly<\/a>\u00a0defended<\/a> the merits of classicism in the architectural context\u2014should reject.<\/p>\n

But a more careful reading of the Manifesto\u00a0<\/em>makes clear that tradition as such\u00a0<\/em>isn\u2019t rejected. While the Manifesto <\/em>encourages listeners to \u201crebel against the tyranny of words: \u2018Harmony\u2019 and \u2018good taste\u2019 and other loose expressions,\u201d it justifies this claim by pointing out that such words \u201ccan be used to destroy the works of Rembrandt, Goya, Rodin\u2026\u201d What is defended here is decidedly not\u00a0<\/em>an approach to art that revels in chaos and disharmony: rather, the Manifesto\u00a0<\/em>rejects the tendency in certain patterns of classical thought to deny that good art may truly startle\u00a0<\/em>us. For instance, the Thomistic tradition has, somewhat reductively, defined<\/a> the beautiful as that which possesses wholeness<\/em>,\u00a0proportionality<\/em>, and radiance<\/em>\u2014but as David Bentley Hart points out, we \u201cfrequently find ourselves stirred and moved and delighted by objects whose visible appearances or tones or other qualities violate all of these canons of aesthetic value . . . At times, the obscure enchants us and the lucid leaves us untouched.\u201d<\/p>\n

What the futurists understood was that the modern artistic imaginary demanded some way of giving voice to \u201cthe tangible miracles of contemporary life\u2014the iron network of speedy communications which envelops the earth, the transatlantic liners, the dreadnoughts, those marvelous flights which furrow our skies, the profound courage of our submarine navigators and the spasmodic struggle to conquer the unknown.\u201d A total refusal to engage the now\u00a0<\/em>in favor of a pure flight to the past\u2014or, one might say, an attempted premodernism in the guise of \u201cpostliberalism\u201d\u2014would always be experienced as fundamentally inauthentic. Real joy in the oncoming future is indeed possible. (Anna Frey Taylor has also argued<\/a>, along lines similar to these, for \u201cthe crit\u00adical role that religion played in the development of the early Futurist move\u00adment\u201d).<\/p>\n

Boccioni\u2019s nontraditional representationalism offered an important alternative to hidebound tradition and Dadaesque nihilism alike. Indeed, it captured the truly beautiful\u00a0<\/em>insight of modern science and technology: that a given object of our experience may be understood in ways that go beyond merely its phenomenological appearance, that there is always a kind of unfolding depth of intelligibility\u00a0<\/em>that invites the scientist further into the truth. One can take a photograph of a soccer player in the moment of her triumph\u2014or one can, as Boccioni did, depict the surging currents of bio-energy inherent in that event. Both are glimpses of the truth, and both are beautiful.<\/p>\n

Today\u2019s postliberals, it seems to me, could learn a thing or two from Boccioni in thinking theologically about the modern process of industrialization and technological development. Boccioni\u2019s work is not flamboyant, but rather revelatory: that is, his paintings depict a kind of order inherent in the objects depicted<\/em>, rather than an ordering superimposed by the artist as an act of will. This, in turn, cannot help but decenter that human will: just like the artist Boccioni, the modern scientist or engineer is unavoidably accountable to an order always already given\u00a0<\/em>in the world. And so technological progress, in short, can be conceived as a participation in the disclosure of a transcendent rational principle<\/em>\u2014what we might call the\u00a0Logos<\/em>. (It was not for nothing, after all, that the ancient Pythagoreans posited a correlation between mathematical harmony and the divine!) This process need not involve a rejection of the good things of the past\u2014after all, Italian futurism was influential in the development of the later Art Deco movement, which drew heavily<\/a> on classical themes while simultaneously building on them\u2014but rather a development of them for a new era.<\/p>\n

From this perspective, it is proper to understand the products of human cultivation and extraction not as objects wrested from nature in an act of alienation, but as gifts of nature\u2019s Creator\u2014never to be wasted, but instead to be stewarded. This understanding need not exclude modern technological developments tout court<\/em>: what is necessary is that any scientific project\u2014and any technological or industrial development\u2014be undertaken in a spirit of gratitude and wonder, an attitude of appreciation of the uniformly rational Logos\u00a0<\/em>disclosed beneath and beyond all immediate phenomena. That, it seems to me, must be the heartbeat of a genuinely healthy postliberal economic order.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Among proponents of an emerging \u201cChristian postliberal\u201d vision of life, one of the most common themes is the need to reclaim a sacramental understanding of reality\u2014an understanding of the cosmos as more than simply a reserve of natural resources given for technological exploitation and domination, as itself a theophanic manifestation of God\u2019s beauty. I certainly […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3470,"featured_media":1091,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1085","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-culture"],"yoast_head":"\nUmberto Boccioni and the Joyful Future<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Among proponents of an emerging \u201cChristian postliberal\u201d vision of life, one of the most common themes is the need to reclaim a sacramental understanding\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/betweentwokingdoms\/2020\/05\/umberto-boccioni-and-the-joyful-future\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta 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