Futurist Spectrum: Infrared to Ultraviolet
Futurist Spectrum
Alisdair_Clarke@hotmail.com
New Right and Traditionalist speculations on futurism can be imagined as a spectrum, with the realists at the infra-red end and romantics and poets verging toward ultra-violet. A few, most notably the Italian Futurist Filippo Marinetti, fought not to be restricted to a certain point on that continuum; the man who could anticipate and wax lyrical about Twenty-First Century alternative technology, “the energy of distant winds and rebellious seas, transformed into millions of kilowatts by the genius of man, would be distributed everywhere…regulated by the the keyboards vibrating under the fingers of technicians” practising “the religion of extrinsic will and daily heroism” was the same man to head a campaign against Italians eating spaghetti in the early 1930s.
Germans took note of that initial bright blue burst of Futurism from Italy, but their futurism was to be of a more serious and sombre variety. Oswald Spengler stressed the inevitability of technology for Western civilization as a part of our Faustian spirit and destiny. Junger and Niekisch were more celebratory of the efficiency, dynamism and productive power of modern technology, and the possibilities it could open up for the individual and society. Meanwhile in practical, pragmatic England, at the red, realist end of the spectrum, Alexander Raven Thomson of the British Union of Fascists proposed a model for an automated civilization in part inspired by insect-hives.
After the War, while consumer capitalism was refining cybernetics, Traditionalists and Conservative Revolutionaries unsurprisingly stuck to the Romantic and metaphysical, ultra-violet side of the spectrum. James Madole was sufficiently distanced, geographically at least, from the catastrophe in Europe to influence the National Renaissance Party in the United States. Madole and his futurist ideas were themselves influenced by Theosophy and other occult sources. Later, in Europe and America, again in the ultra-violet, metaphysical realms, science-fiction writers like Michael X. Barton, Wilhelm Landig, Jean Parvulesco, Ernst Zundel and W.A. Harbinson developed a Nazi/ UFO/ Survival mythology, which extended to the Aryan Aldebaran thesis of Austrian science fiction in the 1990s. For a book at the outer limits of ultra-violet, try “The Black Sun: Montauk’s Nazi-Tibetan Connection” by Peter Noon. Philip K. Dick’s “The Man in the High Castle” is a (slightly) more mainstream science fiction novel about an Axis victory in World War Two, which contains some interesting ideas. Reflections of this UFO/ survival mythology can be caught in mainstream popular culture, such as in “The X-Files Movie” which depicts the aesthetic perfection of silver spacecraft gliding over the glittering purity of Antarctic glaciers and ice-mountains.
Just as Marinetti’s Futurism marked the start of the Twentieth Century, so the brilliant, emerald-green flash of Guillaume Faye’s Archeo-Futurism marked its end. Faye emerged from GRECE, which had always been pro-technology. “In the 20th century appeared the possibility for men to transform and dominate themselves, and to go much farther than simply adapting to their surroundings in forging their own environment; the prospect of biology, electronics, genetic engineering, telematics, astrophysics and space research announce the coming of the ‘third man’.”- GRECE statement.
Guillaume Faye and GRECE were of revolutionary significance because they were the first to systematically merge George Dumezil’s recent discoveries of Aryan tri-partite structuralism with contemporary politics and technology, to be made manifest in the pagan Imperium.
My own belief is that the idea of synthesis/ the Hegelian dialectic/ resolution of opposites into a singularity is at the heart of Aryan mythology and cosmogenesis. It is represented most often as the (North) Pole; Hlidskalf – Odin’s throne – above Asgard in the Eddas. I contend that Asgard/ Olympus/ Caer Arianrhod is a blueprint for the future.
Recent Futurisms, apart from Archeo-Futurism, include Constantin von Hoffmeister’s National Futurism www.newnation.com/Hoffmeister/index, the Surreal Futurism of Ars Vindex www.rosenoir.org/articles/surreal.php, and my own Aryan Futurism. As an Anglo, I’m typically at the redder end of the spectrum, concerned with nuts & bolts and organizing practicalities like the environment and economy. Just as Le Corbusier imagined homes as “machines for living” in an ideal (fascist) civilization, so I can imagine Paolo Soleri’s Arcologies (massive hermetically-sealed self-sufficient cities) as “machines for conquest”. Not for mundane territorial expansion, but for the ultimate conquest of Space and Time.
Futurism and Progress
In his “Age of Ideologies” (1982) Karl Dietrich Bracher argues that since the Enlightenment, two opposing ideas of progress have fought it out in Europe: progress as freedom versus progress as power. Generally, liberals and leftists supported the idea of progress as freedom, while Hegel and thinkers on the right took the opposite view.
Freedom is a tricky, ambiguous word. A man can be free “from” the material world, i.e. live as an ascetic hermit, or a Buddhist who has renounced desire. Alternatively, a man can be free “to” the material world, meaning he has access to everything material, but everything material has access – purchase – to the man. The man becomes a free offerer, and a free offer, in the supermarket of life.
Power has no such ambiguity; a man can only have power “over” the material world. One aspect of power is the ability to manipulate matter in accordance with will, which is one of the essential components of the Faustian spirit and the basis of Futurism.
Finally, some of the liberal and universalist futurists still occasionally have some useful ideas, despite their mistaking our particular European industrial civilization for a universal civilization. H.G. Wells (especially in “Shape of Things to Come”), Arthur C. Clarke and the Catholic theologian Teilhard de Chardin all have interesting ideas concerning evolution, amongst other things, which can be adapted to New Right metapolitics.
Alisdair_Clarke@hotmail.com
New Right and Traditionalist speculations on futurism can be imagined as a spectrum, with the realists at the infra-red end and romantics and poets verging toward ultra-violet. A few, most notably the Italian Futurist Filippo Marinetti, fought not to be restricted to a certain point on that continuum; the man who could anticipate and wax lyrical about Twenty-First Century alternative technology, “the energy of distant winds and rebellious seas, transformed into millions of kilowatts by the genius of man, would be distributed everywhere…regulated by the the keyboards vibrating under the fingers of technicians” practising “the religion of extrinsic will and daily heroism” was the same man to head a campaign against Italians eating spaghetti in the early 1930s.
Germans took note of that initial bright blue burst of Futurism from Italy, but their futurism was to be of a more serious and sombre variety. Oswald Spengler stressed the inevitability of technology for Western civilization as a part of our Faustian spirit and destiny. Junger and Niekisch were more celebratory of the efficiency, dynamism and productive power of modern technology, and the possibilities it could open up for the individual and society. Meanwhile in practical, pragmatic England, at the red, realist end of the spectrum, Alexander Raven Thomson of the British Union of Fascists proposed a model for an automated civilization in part inspired by insect-hives.
After the War, while consumer capitalism was refining cybernetics, Traditionalists and Conservative Revolutionaries unsurprisingly stuck to the Romantic and metaphysical, ultra-violet side of the spectrum. James Madole was sufficiently distanced, geographically at least, from the catastrophe in Europe to influence the National Renaissance Party in the United States. Madole and his futurist ideas were themselves influenced by Theosophy and other occult sources. Later, in Europe and America, again in the ultra-violet, metaphysical realms, science-fiction writers like Michael X. Barton, Wilhelm Landig, Jean Parvulesco, Ernst Zundel and W.A. Harbinson developed a Nazi/ UFO/ Survival mythology, which extended to the Aryan Aldebaran thesis of Austrian science fiction in the 1990s. For a book at the outer limits of ultra-violet, try “The Black Sun: Montauk’s Nazi-Tibetan Connection” by Peter Noon. Philip K. Dick’s “The Man in the High Castle” is a (slightly) more mainstream science fiction novel about an Axis victory in World War Two, which contains some interesting ideas. Reflections of this UFO/ survival mythology can be caught in mainstream popular culture, such as in “The X-Files Movie” which depicts the aesthetic perfection of silver spacecraft gliding over the glittering purity of Antarctic glaciers and ice-mountains.
Just as Marinetti’s Futurism marked the start of the Twentieth Century, so the brilliant, emerald-green flash of Guillaume Faye’s Archeo-Futurism marked its end. Faye emerged from GRECE, which had always been pro-technology. “In the 20th century appeared the possibility for men to transform and dominate themselves, and to go much farther than simply adapting to their surroundings in forging their own environment; the prospect of biology, electronics, genetic engineering, telematics, astrophysics and space research announce the coming of the ‘third man’.”- GRECE statement.
Guillaume Faye and GRECE were of revolutionary significance because they were the first to systematically merge George Dumezil’s recent discoveries of Aryan tri-partite structuralism with contemporary politics and technology, to be made manifest in the pagan Imperium.
My own belief is that the idea of synthesis/ the Hegelian dialectic/ resolution of opposites into a singularity is at the heart of Aryan mythology and cosmogenesis. It is represented most often as the (North) Pole; Hlidskalf – Odin’s throne – above Asgard in the Eddas. I contend that Asgard/ Olympus/ Caer Arianrhod is a blueprint for the future.
Recent Futurisms, apart from Archeo-Futurism, include Constantin von Hoffmeister’s National Futurism www.newnation.com/Hoffmeister/index, the Surreal Futurism of Ars Vindex www.rosenoir.org/articles/surreal.php, and my own Aryan Futurism. As an Anglo, I’m typically at the redder end of the spectrum, concerned with nuts & bolts and organizing practicalities like the environment and economy. Just as Le Corbusier imagined homes as “machines for living” in an ideal (fascist) civilization, so I can imagine Paolo Soleri’s Arcologies (massive hermetically-sealed self-sufficient cities) as “machines for conquest”. Not for mundane territorial expansion, but for the ultimate conquest of Space and Time.
Futurism and Progress
In his “Age of Ideologies” (1982) Karl Dietrich Bracher argues that since the Enlightenment, two opposing ideas of progress have fought it out in Europe: progress as freedom versus progress as power. Generally, liberals and leftists supported the idea of progress as freedom, while Hegel and thinkers on the right took the opposite view.
Freedom is a tricky, ambiguous word. A man can be free “from” the material world, i.e. live as an ascetic hermit, or a Buddhist who has renounced desire. Alternatively, a man can be free “to” the material world, meaning he has access to everything material, but everything material has access – purchase – to the man. The man becomes a free offerer, and a free offer, in the supermarket of life.
Power has no such ambiguity; a man can only have power “over” the material world. One aspect of power is the ability to manipulate matter in accordance with will, which is one of the essential components of the Faustian spirit and the basis of Futurism.
Finally, some of the liberal and universalist futurists still occasionally have some useful ideas, despite their mistaking our particular European industrial civilization for a universal civilization. H.G. Wells (especially in “Shape of Things to Come”), Arthur C. Clarke and the Catholic theologian Teilhard de Chardin all have interesting ideas concerning evolution, amongst other things, which can be adapted to New Right metapolitics.
Labels: Futurism
posted by Alisdair Clarke at 4:36 AM
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