"Chaos Invading Concept": Blast as a Native Theory of Promotional Culture

It is Chaos invading Concept and bursting it like nitrogen.

Wyndham Lewis, Blast 38

The advertisements in the final pages of the modernist journal The Egoist were usually modest affairs, small boxes of print that announced the availability of publications such as Max Stirner's The Ego and His Own or Benjamin R. Tucker's State Socialism and Anarchism. But on 1 April 1914 a peculiar full-page ad appeared in these pages, an ad that loudly proclaimed the imminent arrival of a periodical to be edited by Wyndham Lewis. The ad promised that this new journal, brazenly christened Blast, would provide its readers with a "Discussion of Cubism, Futurism, Imagisme and all Vital Forms of Modern Art." From this "Discussion" would emerge the English avant-garde movement vorticism. Lewis, Pound, and the other artists and writers affiliated with this new journal had yet to ascribe a moniker to their movement, but in form and content this ad for Blast adumbrated the vorticist cultural agenda, which belligerently demanded that the art public reject anachronistic sentimental culture in favor of a radically new a nd distinctly English visual and literary aesthetic. [1] The aggression that would characterize vorticism was evident in this first ad, for it pushed the other ads in The Egoist--conservative notices for books and journals featuring traditional typography, complete sentences, and abstemious claims--to the margins. At center stage was the ad for Blast, which used the visually striking typography of mainstream commercial advertising: oversize, boldface type, capital letters placed only for emphasis, and unlineated text with large white spaces.

It also invoked the sensational language, the telegraphic messages, and the outlandish promises of commercial advertising when it offered Blast's potential readership "NO Pornography. NO Old Pulp," and the "END OF THE CHRISTIAN ERA." [2] This ad, composed by Ezra Pound well before the actual birth of the vorticist movement, serves as a trenchant example of how modernist intellectuals deployed the tropes of commercial print advertising to publicize a nascent avant-garde movement and its organ of cultural and political expression.

The broad claim that modernists employed the practices of commercial advertising in their aesthetic production or that they aggressively marketed their wares is not particularly electrifying in a field enamored of studying the interplay between mass culture and modernism. While the first half of the twentieth century was rich with academics from the Leavisites to the New Critics eager to assert that modernism was either indifferent or hostile to mass culture, around the time of Andreas Huyssen's now-famous contention that "Mass culture has always been the hidden subtext of the modernist project" (47), many critical studies began to clarify how mass culture offered modernist authors a rich source of inspiration both for stylistic innovation and for subject matter that reflected contemporary life practices. [3] In particular, recent critics have explored the modernists' relationship to promotional culture, a term the sociologist Andrew Wernick uses to describe our culture as one in which advertising is a "rhet orical form" that has "come to shape not only that culture's symbolic and ideological contents, but also its ethos, texture, and constitution as a whole" (vii). [4] A number of works have explored the relationship between promotional culture and modernist art, but perhaps the most salient sign that the academy has come to recognize the important interplay between promotional culture and modernism is the publication of Marketing Modernisms: Self-Promotion, Canonization, Rereading, edited by Dettmar and Watt. In this anthology, a variety of well-established literary and cultural critics provide readings of modernist texts and practices, all supporting the editors' assertion that "Advertising is arguably the modern(ist) art form par excellence" (5) [5]--a claim with which fictional modernist admen such as Joyce's Leopold Bloom or Dos Passos's J. Ward Moorehouse would no doubt agree.

This essay will join in the conversation about "marketing modernisms" by arguing that the vorticists reconfigured the relationship between high art and advertising in order to create a chaotic aesthetic form that would shock, polarize, and eventually educate the limited public to which they addressed Blast. Most studies of the vorticists and their promotional tactics tend to see the vorticists' engagement with promotional culture as a tactic derived from their association with (and subsequent dissociation from) Italian futurism. [6] But this position is a limiting one. Given that vorticism was so aggressively nationalistic, it seems imperative that we explore the native inspirations for the vorticists' promotional tactics. First, we must acknowledge that Blast was created as a response not only to the Italian futurists but also to the other intellectual, artistic, and political groups that vied for the spotlight in prewar London. Then we can begin to look to the way in which native sources helped determine h ow the vorticists would merge British advertising practices and London art politics. Two obvious native sources of inspiration for Blast were the commercial advertising practices developed in England during the nineteenth century and the promotional tactics that the suffragettes deployed