Page:Knight (1975) Past, Future and the Problem of Communication in the Work of V V Khlebnikov.djvu/208

200 Whereas Jakobson treated such differences as quite incidental to questions of form, in reality the reverse was the case. The “ideological” (if such a term is permissible here) contrast between Russian and Italian futurism was at root inseparable from the "formal" contrast. It was because they worshipped the machine—age and its city-civilization that the Italian futurists were willing and eager to subordinate the forms of language to what they saw as the requirements of the machine—age. It was because they were hostile to the city and its inhuman machines that the Russian futurists, on the other hand, wanted to put "form" (or “the word") first and impose it upon the external world.

The eventual political alignments of the two "futurist" movements can be seen as consistent extensions of this basic divergence. At the risk of simplifying somewhat, the "logic" of the two positions can be expressed as follows. If—~as the Italians in effect advocated——words were to serve the beauty of machines, then, correspondingly, the user of words (the poet) should naturally tend to see himself as serving the social order whose master was (or appeared to be) the machine. If this led him to glorify the first full—scale machine—age war, then that was perfectly consistent with his premises. If it led him at a later stage to place his talents at the disposal of capitalist industrialism in its most militaristic and unbridled form—the regime of Mussolini—then this, too, was not inconsistent with the “formal” premises of his art.