Is Futurism Fascist?

Futurism has a historical connection with fascism, no doubt, but is futurism as such inherently fascist? That will of course depend on what we mean by futurism; I’ve defined it loosely as a future oriented sentiment with an imperative to on the one hand predict the future or prophesy, and on the other hand work to bring about the future. Now the Italian futurists characterized hard, fast, violent, intense, dynamic.. was this perhaps because they sensed fascism and World War II coming? I’m inclined to respond in the positive: the artist is in large part a seismograph - but it seems we can’t discard the notion that this vision of the future to some degree helped bring about this very future, that the fascist futurism birthed the fascist future. In this we get the indication that maybe a future which is soft, joyous, and loving can be imagined?

One paradox with futurism being pinned as fascist is how fascism at the same time is regarded as a conservative movement: a reaction against modernity with an ideal constituted of a false image of the past, and through Evola and others there is a strong connection to traditionalism and perennialism. What do we make of this Janus-faced fascism? Tentatively I’d characterize it as an insectoid fortification: an exoskeleton of hard and violent accelerated modernism covers the mushy inside of national-romantic idyll - at least in vision. In practice, as Zizek develops convincingly, fascism never reaches this state but is rather in a permanent allergic reaction: there are structural problems in the inside preventing the idyll, but these are covered over by creating a universal culprit: The Jew. Thus the regressive idyll is sustained as fantasy and justifies the dry ice-cold mechanical ultra-violence.

Now, how do we, with this history, possibly justify futurism on the one hand, and traditionalism on the other? Futurism we already gave hints of the possibility to detach it from the anti-human ethics, so what about traditionalism? The key thing to note is simply how these are used: alarming futurism creating the desire for a traditionalist fantasy justifying fascist violence - this is reaction - this is a retraction into a spiky carapace of cretins cowering in the face of future vertigo. Rather, if we treat tradition as memes: pragmatic evolutionary selection indicating material useful for organizing individual and collective life. And then, indeed informed in this way by tradition, we look to the future with renunciation through faith: Humanity as we know it may very well end, but we trust in God that it will be for the better, that transcendence of some kind is at hand. This can be understood through Lacanian psychoanalysis and it’s conception of the ego: the fascist reaction is a repression, the ego’s fortification against the intruding real - it’s essentially delusional. Disolving the ego and accepting the continuous intrusion of real is the acceptance of the future, and it seems - judging from the genetic algorithmic reseach of tradition - that formulating this in terms of God and religion (but not as crystalised structure) - is the most tenable way to go about it. Renounce, be taken up by the Godwind of the Real, as it blows incessantly to a future of Lovingkindness.