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This chapter demonstrates how Venice's artistic and architectonic heritage makes it extremely oppositional to Fascist urbanization, as well as to F. T. Marinetti's—founder of the Futurist movement—call for an industrial city. Without having a direct Roman heritage, Venice is devoid of any purist classicism, an aspect of the cityscape that enhanced its appeal to many artists during the nineteenth century. Venice was built almost exclusively during the so-called “centuries of decadence,” upon a collection of small islands unfitting to the modern state. Two large bridges were built across the Grand Canal to facilitate movement through the city; and canals were filled in around the city to create undisrupted stretches of pedestrian flow. But Venice's resistance to the traffic of the new century would hardly be mitigated by these; the speed and noise beloved by Futurists were held at bay by the confines of the Venetian lagoon.

This chapter reads the audio and visual innovations that stemmed from Italian Futurist poetry and late German Expressionist performance, which burst upon the first audiences at the Cabaret Voltaire (the rowdy neighbour to Lenin’s lodging room in Zurich, before he returned to Russia in early 1917) and Dada soirées, in logical continuation of currents of poetic intervention that found their apogee in Hugo Ball’s sound poetry and poems without words of 1916. The historical context of the politicised fermentation of artistic activity in Germany specifically in the years leading up to 1916, and is presented here in rigorous detail as ground for the Dada activities that are discussed in the chapters that follow.

This chapter examines how early filmmakers had to invent what motion looked like on screen, imagining it as distinct from stillness, legibility, or clarity. The images of motion in early film are blurred and impressionistic—ocean waves, clouds of dust, puffs of steam and smoke—which render motion itself a kind of obscurity and reveal how film is itself an ephemeral medium of dust and smoke. The precursor to film’s absent materiality is found in photography’s own representation of motion as blur in Etienne-Jules Marey’s strange late nineteenth-century photographs of smoke fillets and the movements of air. These images, lesser known than his other motion studies, reveal how film casts back to its still antecedent to imagine motion in blurred terms of smoke and dust, even as it resists photographic arrest.

The impact of new technologies, particularly in the fields of communication, transportation, and armaments, is evident in the work of numerous twentieth-century writers and philosophers, from the Italian Futurist F. T. Marinetti’s celebration of speed, to Walter Benjamin’s championing of mechanical reproduction, to Martin Heidegger’s reflections on the ‘question concerning technology’. Samuel Beckett’s engagement with this question is distinctive in a number of respects. In his early work, he suggests that modern technologies have a revelatory power, and he goes on to take advantage of the potentialities of various technological means in his later works, including tape-recording, radio, film, and television. However, he also insists upon a relation between technology and death, one that goes beyond the familiar idea that certain modern technologies have unprecedented destructive potential. For Beckett charts the exhaustion not only of various modern technologies, but also of technē as such. Locating Beckett’s engagement with the question of technology within its historical context, this chapter identifies the place of technology within Beckett’s negative aesthetics, before exploring some of the ways in which that aesthetics is realized, particularly in Beckett’s post-war works.

This chapter focuses on the play by Cambridge historian and Apostle Goldsworthy (Goldie) Lowes Dickinson entitled “War and Peace: A Dramatic Fantasia” (staged 1917). Serving as Goldie's riposte to war-extolling Italian Futurist and protofascist F. T. Marinetti, the play co-opts the Futurist to stage in the public art of theater the international contest between war and peace that preceded the Great War and roiled on through the interwar period to the Second World War and beyond. The play presages not only Dickinson's indefatigable labors on behalf of international peace after 1914 but a pervasive sense, in and beyond Bloomsbury, that the Great War marked less a “break” than “an intensification of many old struggles,” as Virginia Woolf later described it: interlocking conflicts at home and abroad that the Great War could not and did not resolve. Goldie's panoply of John Bull's clashes at home and abroad not only foregrounds world-shattering technologies from the aeroplane to nuclear energy and the atomic bomb but also stages intra-national, nationalist, international, and transnational rivalries for global resources and power that burst the conventional historiographic bounds both of the 1914–1918 war and, no less, of concerted work toward peace.

The chapter frames Willa Cather’s 1922 novel One of Ours within the context of the US government’s concern about wartime production’s depletion of American forests. Government rehabilitationists and foresters alike sought to place disabled soldiers in forestry-related vocations, which would provide employment and spiritual renewal in nature. These concerns mirror those of Cather’s protagonist Claude Wheeler, who suffers a spiritual amputation at age five when his father cuts down a tree with which Claude had developed an Emersonian kinship. In war he finds spiritual wholeness by offering himself as the prosthetic limbs for those intellectually and artistically superior individuals whom the war has physically and spiritually amputated. Claude’s wholeness comes, ironically, in seeing himself as the trees being cut down for the matériel needed to win the war and civilization to the western world. This self-conceptualization puts him in close company with Italian Futurism, which praises both human mechanization and violence.