ART HISTORY ARTICLE SUMMARY

STANFORD ITALIAN REVIEW

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Louise Freeman

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Founder Alphonse J uilland

The Stanford Italian Review, published under the auspices of the Department of French and Italian of Stanford University, is devoted to critical essays in the area of Italian Studies. It will publish articles on literature (especially in the context of other in- tellectual activities, or other literary traditions), culture, and politics. In addition to monograph essays, each issue may offer interviews, original texts and documents, reviews of several works by a single author or on a specific subject.

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STANFORD ITALIAN REVIEW

VOLUME VIII, NO. 1-2

FASCISM AND CULTURE

Edited by

JEFFREY SCHNAPP AND BARBARA SPACKMAN

Contents

Jiffrey Schnapp & Barbara Spackman, Introduction

Renzo De Felice, Fascism and Culture in Italy: Outlines for Further Study

Heesok Chang, Fascism and Critical Theory

Russell A. Bennan, The Aestheticization of Politics: Walter Benjamin on Fascism and the Avant-Garde

Jiflrey Schnapp, Forwarding Address

Barbara Spackman, The Fascist Rhetoric of Virility

Paolo Valesio, Ungaretti and the Miles Patiens: Dannunzian Genealogies

Ruth Ben-Ghiat, The Politics of Realism: Corrente di Vita Giovanile and the Youth Culture of the 1930s

Diane Ghirardo, .City and Theater: The Rhetoric of Fascist Architecture

Italo Calvina, The Dictator's Hats

David Humphrey, The Dictator's Bodies

Dux Italiae

Jiffrey Schnapp & Barbara Spackman, Selections from the Great Debate on Fascism and Culture: Critica Fascista 1926-1927

1

5

13

35

53

81

103

139

165

195

211

221

235

52 Fascism and Culture

"refeudalization," i.e., the demise of a public of rational debate, re- placed by a consumerist culture of manipulation and acclamatory politics. 29 The historical episodes of fascism undoubtedly represented a major acceleration of this aestheticization of politics. Yet as little as that theoretical designation captures all the unique characteristics of the thirties, its association solely with that single historical moment underestimates its critical viability forty years after the collapse of the Central European fascist states.

29 J ii:rgen Habennas, Strukturwandel der 61fentlichkeit: Untersuchungen zu einer Kategorie der biirgerlichen Gesellschaft (Neuwied and Berlin: Luchterhand, 1974 [ 1962]) 233, 273.

Jeffrey Schnapp

FORWARDING ADDRESS

Fascist modernism. The phrase still has the power to produce_ a certain turbulence on the lips, as if the pairing were unnatural. ,

In the place of the noun staods the ism which marks the founda- tions of contemporary culture. A mostly luminous and diurnal con- cept associated with narratives of emancipation, experimentation, and scientific progress, it is still very much alive in our institutions and at their margins. Although to some modernism now seems less like an invitation to adventure than a heavily touristed ruin, its legacy stretches across the entire cultural field, from the gallery cub~ to the television tube, from the boardroom to the classroom.

In the more shifty place of the modifier stands the fascist: our culture's main depository of the demonic. His is the stain that is forever returning from history's crypt to disfigure the foremost members of an entire generation: from Martin Heidegger to Maurice Blanchet to Paul de Man. Commonly associated with narratives of reaction and regress, fascism retains its hold on the contemporary imagina- tion because it is thought to occupy a dark subcutaneous region haunted by heroism, eros, and death. Its "world" is one of myth and ritual, of broken taboos, of fantasies of dominance and submission allowed out of the closet until the inevitable apocalypse. Hence, the conviction that it has ended and, hence, its continuing power to return and shock.

Whenever one weds such apparently opposed terms, an explana- tion is calli::d for. The phrase "fascist modernism" does not describe, at least in my view, a genuine contradiction, nor is the pairing of

54 Fascism and Culture

:he word "fascist" with the word "modernism" unnatural. The phrase s not an oxymoron because, contrary to the imaginative construe- ion just evoked, fascism was, for better or for worse, one dominant Orm which modernization took in Italy and elsewhere. The evidence o this effect is incontrovertible. Beyond the vicissitudes of the historical ·egime's changing cultural policies, Italian fascism was, from its roots n the urban upheavals of 1914 and 1915 to the Republic of Salo, irmly on the side of modernity.

This suggests that the time has come to go beyond the comfortable lichotomies of modernism/fascism, progress/regress, action/reaction, 10liticized aesthetics/aestheticized politics, which still abound in con- emporary theoretical discourse. The time has come, moreover, to bandon the view of fascism as a simple and stable monolith, and J envision it instead as a mobile and contradictory formation orga- ,ized around a core of ideological/cultural leitmotifs. The task is surely delicate one, requiring both a stern refusal of the domesticating gaze

f the overzealous revisionist and a resistance to the temptation to 1ake monsters. The problem with the former is that it refuses to take n ethical stance, placing all individual and collective responsibilities nder the dangerously broad umbrella of Historical Necessity. The roblem with the latter is that its creations are extravagant: we hunt 1e monster in the remotest regions- in nesses, tundras, and limalayan snowfields- but never look for him where he is most likely ) be: knocking on our own back door. Even the most acute discussions of fascist-modernist texts and ar-

facts still tend to conceive of their task as a critical rescue mission: o effort must be spared to protect the modernist project from the LScist shadow. 1 In the case of futurism, for instance; there is the com- ton practice of placing a cordon sanitaire around the movement's first ine to ten years: the period tellingly referred to as the "first futurism" · "heroic" period. The effect is to mark off the movement's greatest movations from the inferior so-called "second" and "third" futurisms

The neo-Conservative polemics of theorists such as Daniel Bell perform the in- ·rse operation. Modernism for Bell is always already guilty by association with our ntury's two great scourges: Communism and Fascism. As such his position seems Jsely affiliated with the long predominant view of futurism as a debased form of odernism. (Widespread both in Italy and abroad, this view went mostly unchal- 1ged until the early 1970s.) Because neither offers a particularly nuanced account futurism, I omit them from present consideration.

Schnapp: Forwarding Address 55

which are stigmatized as more genuinely fascist, despite the over- whelming continuities and the instrumental role played by the "first" futurism in shaping early fascism.

Renzo De Felice's recent apologetics perform much the same move, arguing correctly against any crude equation between futurism and fascism, but in the process falling into the opposite error. 2 De Felice would have us believe that Marinetti's "genuine" political commitments do not extend beyond 1921: one year, conveniently enough, before the March on Rome. The later Marinelli thus becomes nearly unrecognizable: he is a disillusioned hero-victim withdrawn into the utopia of Art, but repeatedly forced into the Mussolinian orbit either by idealism or circumstance. 3 The futurist movement, in turn, is no longer to be considered one of a number of cultural-political "ideologies" vying for hegemony within the fascist fold. Instead, for De Felice, it becomes something at once more trivial ·and more auspicious: a buoyant "attitude towards life" founded on the values of"democracy" and "individualism"- values diametrically opposed to the "oppor- tunism," "authoritarianism," and cultural "conservatism" of fascism.+

Further examples of the attempt to limit the convergence between fascism and modernism may be found in the field of architectural history. Historians of rationalism, the Italian version of the Interna- tional style, have generally ignored the fascist resonances of Le Cor- busier's Vers une nouvelle architecture while at the same time maintain- ing that there was a clear disjunction between the so-called "pro- gressive" and "regressive" (or pro- and anti-International style) phases

2 "L'avanguardia futurista," vii-xxxv in F. T. Marinetti, Taccuini 191511921, ed. Alberto Bertoni (Bologna, 1987). De Felice's essay extends an earlier polemic with the hi$torian George Masse over the fascism/futurism connection. I share some of De F~lice's hesitations about Masse's approach, yet find his "corrective" overstated. It appears to mistake criticism" from within the fascist fold for actual opposition, distorts the historical record on a number of points, and underestimates the seriousness of futurism's longstanding effort to fUse the spheres of culture and politics. 3 Note the emphasis on external agency (italics mine): " ... l'aggravarsi della crisi politica, Ia mancanza di alternative pill consone coni suoi progetti e, probabilmente, Ia speranza che-entrati in forze nei Fasci-i futuristi potessero sia evitare che gli Arditi sfuggissero !oro di mana, sia contrastare il tatticismo e l'opportunismo di Mussolini ... lo avevano indotto ad aderire ai Fasci di combattimento e, anzi, a partecipare alia lora fondazione" (xxviii). "Negli anni successivi Marinetti si lasciO cos! andare ad una serie di concessioni e di riconoscimenti al fascismo ... " (xxx). 4 De Felice's attempt to differentiate fascism from futurism in terms of the supposed contrast between "ideologies" and "attitudes towards life" tries to take the edge off

56 Fascism and Culture

of the fascist regime's cultural politics. The archival evidence suggests mostly the contrary: both a remarkable continuity in the state's patronage of modernist architects and a strong bond between ra- tionalist planning and fascist ideology. 5

The problem is not restricted to art and architectural history alone. Frederic Jameson's fine study ofWyndam Lewis, Fables of Aggression: The Modernist as Fascist (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1979), suffers from :1 similar flaw. Adopting the categories of molecular and molar from Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-OedijJus, Jameson views Lewis's writing iS an allegory of subjugation, structured by a struggle of irreconcilable 'pposites. On the molecular level, the level of the immediate here- md-now of the microtextual surface,Jameson locates Lewis the moder- 1ist: the practitioner of a progressive, even revolutionary- almost ;ocialist, alas! -writing. On the molar level, the level of narrative, 1e locates Lewis the fasCist: the creator of a series of reactionary and mthoritarian structures of containment which reform, or better, deform he explosive surfaces of modernist experimentation into fascist 1arratives.

While such a model may have certain heuristic virtues, it leaves me wondering why it is that molar and molecular cannot intercon- lect: are they truly opposed or is there a passageway that runs be- ween them? Is the modernist as fascist always wearing a mask? 6 Is he choice really between modernism and fascism or is it between lifferent redactions of modernism? The task of a more adventurous :ultural criticism, as I see it, would be precisely to tunnel between he conventional dichotomies. The brief analysis of the futurist con- .truction of "national address" I propose here, explores only one of L number of such passageways between aesthetics and politics, the

uturism's political rhetoric. "War' becomes little more than a metaphor for moral ranscendence (xxii-xxiv), "ultrapatriotism" merely the "Italianism" shared by an entire :eneration (xix-xx) and "anti-parliamentarianism" a reformist slogan (xviii). This guralization of futurist slogans coincides with a narrowly literal view of the policies nd debates of the fasCist regime, On this subject see Diane Ghirardo's study in the present volume, as well as her

lui/ding New Communities: New Deal and Fascist Italy (Princeton, 1989). It seems that for Jameson the answer to the latter question must be affirmative

ecause of his a priori commitment to a view of history as an emancipation narrative 1 which modernist cultural production may play an inaugural role. Moreover, despite s po~.t-structuralist trappings, his dialectical reading of Lewis seems haunted by 1e classical Marxian base/superstructure dyad.

Schnapp: Forwarding Address 57

molecular and the molar. Although narrowly focused on the special case of futurism and, more precisely, on futurism's inaugural role as one of the founders of a genuinely fascist subjectivity, it is motivated by a larger concern: that of delineating a general topology of fascist modernism that might also adequately account for such varied oeuvres as those of Ezra Pound, Ernst Junger, and Gottfried Benn.

* * *

"Every writer must have an address" says Isaac Bashevis Singer, and by "address" what Singer means is not simply a place to hang one's shingle or a post office box. Rather, the term evokes a symbolic place to which the imagination can repair, whether a physical site or a theater of memories either lived or invented. There, art may work its patient alchemy on daily life without impediment: translating private events, ghosts, and tongues into the commonplace, bringing them to the collective address of humankind.

If first exile and then the Holocaust had not rendered the Warsaw ghetto an empty pharitasm, Singer's concept of the artist's "address" might seem like something of an anachronism. It longs for an act of art-making rooted in a stable sense of community and place: an art of communion with a dead and living collectivity, an art of homecom- ing in which the artist bears a privileged relation to a readily cir- cumscribable space. The notion of"address" is thus intertwined with that of Geist (or "spirit"), which with Herder came to be viewed as that indelible imprint of a collectiVe attribute, whether national, regional, or simply urban, found in every individual belonging to that collective (and most acutely so among its creative spirits).

For writers and artists the idea was productive because it placed their labor at the very heart of civilization just as a new patronage system and new technologies were relegating them to the margins. In one familiar early Romantic version, it manifested itself in the cult of the bard as the genius loci (or "genius of the place") bound by uni- que ties of mutual interdependence to the landscape in which he makes his home. All that remained was to ascribe to that particular locus- be it Wordsworth's Lake District or Millet's Barbizon-a universality which rendered it the common place of the nation as a whole.

One of the major achievements of modernism was its dismantling of this concept of "address" and of the rooted subjectivity it implied. The operation was carried out within the laboratory of the industrial

58 Fascism and Culture

metropolis which, with its pressured surfaces and shuttling carnival masks, provided the proper conditions for an explosive disjunction between public and private, past and present, collectivity and in- dividual. The redrawn cultural map that resulted was transnational and nomadic and, more importantly, was sharply polarized between extremes of privacy and publicity, hermeticism and exhibitionism.

After decades of being belittled by French-biased historiography, futurism has now come into its own. Widely acknowledged as the first full-fledged literary/artistic avant-garde movement-the ancestor of everything from 1920s Dada to 1970s Punk- it has conquered one of the most influential positions on the exhibitionist segment of the modernist map. In accordance with this position, futurism ought to prove exemplary in its dimontage of nineteenth-century notions of time and place. And at first glance, this would seem to be so.

Temporal and spatial dislocation were at the core of futurist theory and practice from the very start. The 1909 founding manifesto jumped the Italian border to appear on the front page of the Parisian daily

.Le F£garo. Addressed to a supranational class of restless youth, it adopted the lingua franca of the era- namely, French- to launch a violent assault on the principal institutional guardians of history and memory: universities, libraries, museums, and churches. Its bl£tzkrieg campaigns from 1910 through at least 1924 were unabashedly cosmopolitan, scattering in their wake a plurality of converts and philo- futurist movements everywhere from Russia to Spain to Japan and Latin America. Hence, the apposite title of the recent Venice show: Futurism and Futurisms. 7

This aggressive cultural nomadism seemingly translated into the no less aggressive construction of a rootless anticontemplative sub- jectivity in futurist works of art. In his 1914 experimental epicZang Tumb Tuuum, for instance, Marinetti attempted to stage, via an orgy of forgetting and exteriorization, the death of the "literary I" with its cult of memory, interiority, and psychological "depth." In the latter's

7 The show's catalog was published as Futun'srrw efuturismi, ed. Pontus Hulten (Milan, 1986). While its virtues were considerable, the Venice exhibition also exposed the limitations of the curatorial formalism prevalent in today's museum world. Tokens of futurism's conquests and influence were, of course, everywhere on display. The topic of its genetic relation to fascism, however, was relegated to an isolated display case. There, within an anaesthetizing glass cube, a notebook ofMarinetti's lay open (as if by chance) to a page replete with fascist clippings.

Schnapp: Forwarding Addre.-s 59

place Marinetti interpolates the futurist "multiplied man": a public being free from the fetters of history, class and analytical reason, in whom the Cartesian cogito has been dispersed into an infinitely mobile futurist ago.

The same roving athletic subject reappears in Umberto Boccioni's 1913 icon, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (fig. 1). Caught in the

1. Umberto Boccioni, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space. 1913.

Photo courtesy of Museu de Arte Contempor3nea da Universidade de Sao Paulo, Brazil.

60 Fascism and Culture

LCt of clearing an unmarked threshold, futurist man leaves the past 1ehind like a broken toy. Striding out into the streamlined machine- ike body which is now his home, he enters a realm of pure becom- ng: a realm of dynamic subjectivity beyond all socializing constraints, >eyond the ticking of external clocks.

But what if Boccioni's abstract allegory of crossing were to be in- erted into a more concrete historical landscape? What if the move- nent of"unique forms of continuity in space" were linked to a precise tinerary: say that of Italian imperialism, from Italy into Libya or lthiopia? If so, the forward stride of modernist man might find itself ,ddly in step with that of the conquering fascist warrior. In the case f Boccioni's masterpiece such a prospective reading seems patently bsurd. Yet, as I hope to suggest in this essay, the futurists' advocacy [internationalism and nomadism is, to say the least, problematical. 'ar from offering an exemplary dbnontage of nineteenth-century no- ions of place, I will suggest that futurism proposed a remontage which 1arks it as the first proponent of a distinctively fascist redaction of 1odernism.

Let me be more precise. From its foundation in 1909, I believe 1at futurism elaborated a highly specific, yet generalizable, theory f place and "race" which may be aptly described as proto-fascist. In armony with the fascist doctrine which it helped to inaugurate, it nvisaged a new agonistic and activist subjectivity-whether on the :vel of the individual or of a collective national subject- founded on 1e principle of hierarchy imposed by force. 8 Likewise, first anticipating nd later complementing fascist doctrine, it asserted the absolute claim f the "national address" over all forms of internationalism, nomadism, nd localism. Heir to nineteenth-century concepts of "address," whose ·ace it still bears, the futurist reformulation cannot be dismissed as mere repetition or regression. It thinks "address" as simultaneously Joted and nomadic: "rooted" to the extent that it is bounded by the

By invoking the principle of"hierarchy" I do not wish to underestimate futurism's 1archist components (which were sufficient to persuade Mussolini that Marinetti as a political liability). Nor do I mean to suggest a simple one-to-one correspondence ~tween the Regime's official cult of gerarchia and the futurist concept of hierarchy. limited overlap there is, but what I intend to underscore is: a) futurism's vision

·social relations and organization as properly founded on force; b) its heroic con- :ption of the subject as master over his social and natural environment; c) its laracteristically fascist blend of populism and elitism (artecrazia); and d) its bellic mception of gender relations and foreign policy.

Schnapp: Forwarding Address 61

national territory; "nomadic" to the extent that it is dispersed across this entire territory and that, in wars of imperial conquest, national boundaries will inevitably rove.

• • •

Even a superficial reading of the futurist manifestos reveals the em- phatic assertion of national boundaries precisely when one might least expect it. The founding manifesto of 1909, for instance, begins in a landscape without names. In a swift narrative parabola, it leads through a sequence of symbolically charged locales: first, the sump- tuous fin de sitcle chamber with Persian carpets and flickering mosque lamps; next, the shadowy streets of an unnamed metropolis viewed from the windows of a speeding car; and then, the maternojossato (or "maternal ditch") of an urban factory confronted face to face in the overturned car. As the sun rises and the mythical chariot emerges reborn from its womb of fertile and fortifying mud, the moment of speechmaking arrives.

A collective speaker, marked only by the pronoun "we," puts forth an eleven-point program which seems to respect no national border. Affirming the beauty of speed, the advent of the kingdom of the machine and the universality of war, this pronoun is engaged in a dran1a of the highest order: it knocks on the door of the Impossible, celebrates the Earth, proclaims the death of Space and Time. Only at the very end of the list of pronouncements is the discourse anchored in the word "Italy'': "E dall'Italia, che noi lanciamo pel mondo questa nostro manifesto di violenza travolgente e incendiaria" ("It is from Italy that we launch into the world this manifesto of ours with its over- powering violence and incendiary powers" [DM 11]). 9

With the sudden imposition of a national fran1e, enforced by the cascade of detailed references to the Italian landscape whim follow, the preceding allegory is restricted and reoriented. The "maternal ditcl1" becomes quite literally the terra madre or motherland, the reborn beast the sign of a vigorous and virile industrial order and the collective pronoun "we" the signature of Italy's new masters: they are at once giants, like Antaeus, with chthonic powers and angels ready to take flight from their earthly mother. As for the eleven-point progran1,

9 DM ~ F. T. Marinetti, Teoria e invenzionefuturista, ed. Luciano de Maria (Milan, 1968). All translations are my own.

62 Fascism and Culture

it remains addressed to an international audience, but now begins to take on the semblance of a threat. Its proclamation that the world is soon to be free from the cultural and institutional gangrene brought upon it by its museums, academies, and universities, can now be translated into an affirmation of Italy's about-to-be-restored mobility and health. Soon the diseased members will have been amputated. Then a dynamic industrial Italy will reemerge as an aggressive con- tender in the international arena.

The rhetorical shift comes to a climax in Marinetti's closing tour de force: the twice repeated cry of "ritti sulla cima del mondo, noi scagliamo ... Ia nostra sfida aile stelle ("erect on the summit of the earth, we hurl... our challenge at the stars" [DM 13]). The lowly homeland has now become the heroic launching pad for the conquest of the universe in a fantasy that seems unabashedly imperialist. Like the cosmic empire of Augustus Caesar, proclaimed by Virgil's Anchises in Aeneid 6, the futurists' empire shall extend "to a land beyond the stars ... where heaven-bearing Atlas turns on his shoulders the star- tricked cosmic sphere'' (Aen. 6. 795-97).

This alternation between a militant advocacy of internationalism and an imperial conception of culture and politics is characteristic of the manifestos as a whole. Indeed, the contradiction was openly embraced by Marinetti in a public letter addressed to the Belgian futurist Mac Delmarle in 1913. In this letter he portrays futurism as the international "of all the world's innovators and intellectual sharp- shooters'' ("la parola d'ordine di tutti gl'innovatori o franchi tiratori intelletuali del mondo"), while in the very same breath affirming that futurism is dedicated uniquely to building an ever more glorious future for the Italian race: "we profess a nationalism that is ultraviolent, an- ticlerical and antisocialist, an antitraditional nationalism founded on the inexhaustible vigor of the Italian blood."10

10 "Noi professiamo un nazionalismo ultraviolento, anticlericale e antisocialista, un 11azionalismo antitradizionale che ha per base il vigore inesauribile del sangue italiano" :nM 80). Marinetti embraces the contradiction between internationalism and na- :ionalism, because he sees futurism as the solution to every nation's problems: "II :imedio vale per gli ammalati di ogni paese" (DM 80). The same goes for imperialism. [n Democraziafuturista (1919) he declares that futurism is firmly anti-imperalist, that ~ach race will achieve glory in its own special field and that none is predestined to tchieve world hegemony (DM 322). Yet he also defines Italy's "natural" boundaries lS encompassing "il Trentino;-l~Istria, la Dalmazia, Vallona, Rodi, Smirne, Bengasi, rripoli" (DM 337) and presents the Italian populace as "una minoranza genialissima

Schnapp: .Forwarding Address 63

The tension also pervades Marinetti's orations, which preach a gospel of cultural revolution without boundaries, while all the while emphatically positioning each audience in relation to their national origin. Whether in Venice, Trieste, Barcelona, or London, Marinetti never represents or addresses his listeners as a random sampling of autonomous individuals. Rather, he invests them with all of the at- tributes of a single national body-not the stable figurative body im- agined in classical rhetorical and political theory, but a swirling material body: "in its circular expansion the heart of man ruptures the suffocating familial circle, touching the extremities of the Fatherland, where it feels the pulse of border compatriots as if they were the outer nerves of its own body. "11 For Marinetti the audience is always the dynamic point of convergence between a particular na- tional physiognomy or race, a natural and cultural landscape, and a precise historical heritage whose imprint is in the blood.

It ought to be emphasized that, as in the case of D' Annunzio, Marinetti's concept of "race" never implies an ideal of racial purity. On the contrary, the word razza indicates a dynamic fusion of body and environment, a corporeal identification of self and nation, and an incorporative principle of fertility grounded in a body which is savage, impure, and aggressively gendered. Accordingly, the homosex- ual, the Jew, and the gypsy, fascism's usual phantoms of sterility, rootlessness and genetic confusion, emerge as futurism's enemies on- ly to the extent that they undercut the dynamism and integrity of the collective national subject.

A series of ambiguities results. On the one hand, Marinetti could praise the Great War for having promoted the promiscuous "fusion of the most distant races which thus strengthened themselves physiologically" ("Ia fusione delle razze piu lontane che si rinforzavano

tutta costituita di individui superiori ... " and as "[una] massa di tipi unici ... [che] pub e deve dominare il mondo e dirigerlo con la sua maggiore potenzialita e altezza di luce" (DM 328-29). 11 "II eucre dell'uomo rompe nella sua espansione circolare il piccolo cerchio soffocatore della famiglia, per giungere fino agli orli estremi della Patria, dove sente pal pi tare i suoi connazionali di frontiera, come i nervi periferici del proprio corpo" (DM 412). Corporeal/racial metaphors recur obsessivdy in Marinetti's definitions of patriotism ("il patriotismo futurista e la passione accanita, violenta e tenace per il divenire-progresso-rivoluzione della propria razza lanciata alia conquista delle mete pill lontane" [DM 337J) and of the nation ("la democrazia italiana e per noi un corpo umano che bisogna liberare, scatenare, alleggerire, per accelerarne la velocita e cen- tuplicare il rendimento" [DM 330]).

64 Fascism and Culture

cosl fisiologicamente" [ DM 306]) and could actively oppose the racial laws of the 1930s." On the other hand, with Pino Masnata, he could cite approvingly the call of the 1933 futurist congress for "an even more fervent patriotism transformed into an authentic religion of the Fatherland warning Semites that they identify themselves with their respective homelands if they do not wish to disappear."" Or, similarly, he could extol the Sudanese wetnurse from whom he took suck and make of her a myth of his "savage" African origins, while arguing concurrently that Italy is "destined" to rule the world- but Italian Africa first and foremost-with the genius of its art and the power of its incomparable army: "l'Italia e destinata a dominare il mondo col genio creatore della sua arte e Ia potenza del suo Esercito imparagonabile" (DM 439).14

The situation is much the same in the domain of gender relations. Here Marinetti advocated legal parity and sexual freedom, while championing a revolt against the love of "woman." This virile aver- sion to the conventional feminine value-sphere, however, could not take the form of a homoerotic male Bund, because the race "requires ardent males and impregnated women" ("esige maschi accesi e donne fecondate" [DM 478]) if it is to maintain a strictly ascensional parabola. Hence, futurism affirms a paradox: "the overcoming of the love of woman via an ever intensified love of woman against the erotica- sentimental deviations of many foreign avant-gardes" ("superamento dell'amore per Ia donna con un pill intenso amore per Ia donna con- tra le deviazioni erotico-sentimentali di molte avanguardie estere ... " [DM 176]).

12 Cf. Marinetti's counterfactual claim in Al di 10. del communismo that "non esiste in ftalia antisemitismo. Non abbiamo dunque ebrei da redimere, valutare o seguiren :nM 415). 13 "Superamento del patriottismo 'con un pill fervido patriottismo trasformato cos1 in autentica religione della Patria am17Wnimento ai semiti perche si identifichino con le diverse 'Jatn.e se non vogliono sparirr (DM 176 [emphasis mine]). De Felice's attempt to dismiss :he futurist theory of race is unconvincing: "negli scritti di alcuni futuristi vi sana :tccenni che possono far pensare ad una sorta di suggestione (quanta consapevole ~ impossibile dire) di una elementare (e subito tradotta in termini estetico-vitalistici) ~eoria dell'influenza del clima sui caratteri dei popoli; certo e che il 'nazionalismo' :talianismo futurista moho risenti dell'applicazione della contrapposizione futuri~mo­ )assatismo alia definizione dell'immagine di vari popoli e delle lora 'qualita' e debolezze' ... " ( xxii). If the parenthetical insertions confess a certain nervousness :he phrase "alcuni futuristin evades the fact that race is one of Man'netti's leitmotifs: + "Cominciai in rosa e nero; pupa fiorente e sana tra le braccia e le mammelle color :arbone della mia nutrice sudanese. CiO spiega forse Ia mia concezione un po' Negra :lell'amore e Ia mia franca antipatia per le pelitiche e le diplomazie allattemielen :nM 503).

Schnapp: Forwarding Address 65

But beyond the decadent androgyne and the rootless wanderer there looms one final "racial" menace. Namely, the world of disembodied ideas: ideas which violate national borders and national physiogno- mies-what Marinetti once calledfilosofomi or "philosofumes" (DM 316). The bulk of futurism's political and cultural enemies were in fact the purveyors of such erring vapors. They were "germanophile" artists and intellectuals like Giacomo Puccini, Claudio Treves, Filip- po Turati and, first and foremost, Benedetto Croce.

• • •

With this sketch of futurist nationalism and Marinetti's dynamic concept of his audience's national address, it seems appropriate to move away from the domain ofthematics (where the fascist resonances are obvious enough) to the close analysis of visual works. Only an examination of how subject and place are constructed in the futurist artwork-or, in other words, of how the concept of national address is pictorialized- can hope to illumine the passageway that leads back and forth from molecular to molar, politicized aesthetics to aestheti- cized politics, modernist "bribe" to fascist ideology.15

I would suggest that the key doctrine in this regard is that of "in- terpenetration." First formulated in 1912 by Boccioni in the Technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture and by Marinetti in the Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature, "interpenetration" or compenetrazione defines a new relationship of mutuality between the human subject, the object world and the physical setting in which he or she appears." It also implies a vitalist theory of artistic expression in which art becomes, in Marinet- ti's own words, a "prolongation of the forest of our veins which pours itself out of the body into the infinity of space and time.""

15 The phrase "modernist bribe" is adapted from Alice Kaplan, Reproductions of Banali- ry: Fascism, Literature and French Intellectual Life (Minneapolis, 1986) 76. 16 The doctrine, which weds Nietzschean psychology to Bergsonian phenomenology, was given its definitive foimulation by the philosopher T. E. Hulme in "The Philosophy of Intensive Manifolds,n reprinted in Speculations: Essays on Humanism and the Psychology of Art, ed. Herbert Read (London, 1924) 173-214. Hulme was, of course, not only a prominent right·wing revolutionary and the English translator of Sorel's Reflections on Violence, but also a close friend of such prominent fascist moder- nists as Ezra Pound and Wyndam Lewis. 11 " ••• prolungamento della foresta delle nostre vene, che si effonde, fuori dal corpo, nell'infinito della spazio e del temper (DM 47). This vitalist formula is also na- tionalistic, the nation being "il massimo prolungamento dell'individuo o meglio: il pill

66 Fascism and Culture

The art of the future can be at once mimetic and intuitive, objec- tive and subjective, because for the futurists interpenetration is a verifiable physical phenomenon and not a mere poetic fiction. This is so because they envision our world as an infinitely agitated molecular field structured by the moving force lines emitted by permeable machine-like bodies and body-like machines. 16 Fusing elements from Cubism (and Symbolism) with metaphors from contemporary nuclear physics, this conception might seem apolitical if a relay to fascism were not provided by the Nietzschean/Bergsonian psychology which subtends it.

Described by Marinetti as the "intuitive psychology of matter," this psychology invokes a return to intuition and instinct in order to usher in a new kind of heroic civilization founded on the untrammeled ex- pansion of the Will to Power. In this futurist kingdom, the individual is by definition an artist or a soldier: a creator and destroyer who need obey no law except that which he makes his own. New technologies and machines have even freed him from having to respect the limits imposed on his body by space and time. What this means with respect to the doctrine of interpenetration is that the futurist sub- ject's corporeal immersion in the world of objects cannot lead to the sort of explosion or dissolution one might normally expect in a moder- nist context. Rather, in the futurist kingdom there is ultimately no dispersion, no tragedy or self-loss, for "a qualitative mathematics" abolishes even death ("una matematica qualitativa aboli~ce la morte che e quantitativa" [DM 198]). The taking in of matter, the penetra- tion of the body by external objects and forces, will always translate

vasto individuo vivo capace di vivere lungamente, di dirigere, dominare e difendere tutte le parti del suo corpo" (DM 337 [italics mine]). 18 Hulme offers the following psychological account: "Imagine now that you are turned into a cross section of this flowing stream [mental life], that you have no sense of sight, that in fact your only sense is a sense of pressure. Then although you will have no clear picture or representation of the stream at all, you will in spite of that have a complete knowledge of it as a complex sense of the varying directions of the forces pressing on you. If you put yourself in this position with regard to your own inner life-and this is what Bergson means by an intuition-then you will realise that it is composed not of separate things but of interpenetrating tendencies ... It is composed of a million different elements which at the same time are not elements at aU, because they melt into one another with not the least tendency to be separated one from the other. Such a state can be directly experienced, and yet is a state which is absolutely inconceivable intellectually, simply because it can't be analysed" (188).

Schnapp: Forwarding Address 67

into an ever more heroic expansion and affirmation of the subject and, especially, the national subject. 19

From this new perspective it becomes possible to understand what is at stake in the futurists' resistance to abstraction and to formalism: a politics of direct and unmediated action centered in the expanded and multiplied futurist subject. Particularly telling in this regard is the operation which futurist art performs on its borrowed Cubist form vocabulary. If one were to compare a classic analytic Cubist image such as Georges Braque's 1912 Fille a Ia guitare (fig. 2) with Umberto Boccioni's contemporaneous study for MaJeria (sometimes referred to as Costruzione orizzontale) (fig. 3), fundamental differences in attitude toward the interplay of figure and ground come into view which bear with them ideological consequences.

In the case of Braque, the girl, her instrument, the table in front of her, the bench on which she sitS, the newspaper ... all are organ- ized into a centered image which at its edges seems to dissolve. Yet the sense of dissolve is also at the center of the picture, where the forms intersect one another so elusively and allusively, that they deny each other a rigid sense of definition, movement or volume. Where, for instance, the guitar player's body threatens to acquire solidity- around the black forms on the upper right and left- a passage of at- mospheric whites and grays promptly empties them out. Likewise, in the lower center, where the edge of the girl's guitar begins to disclose its volume and depth, it is flattened out and pulled to the surface by an intruding brown overlay. The resulting feeling of the picture plane as a shallow shadowbox in which the scattered contours of humans and things partake of the same elusive materiality, leaves us with a rebus whose key is perhaps to be found in the newspaper's fractured title: Le R2ve or "the dream."

The futurist image adopts the same pictorial vocabulary to an in- verse end. Here, as in Braque, the world of objects interpenetrates

19 At its outer limit, this economy of loss as gain can conceive of the absolute disper- sal of an individual. Yet what it cannot accept is the tragic: the moment of loss is always made good via the expansion of a larger subject-the collectivity, the army, the nation. This theory of sacrifice is pervasive in futurism from the very start: Ita- ly's futurist youth are said to make a fiery holocaust of themselves on the altar of the future; their heroic flame in turn inflames those who come to bury them ... Where the principle of interpenetration spills over into a theory of sacrifice one can find links, prospectively, with the fascist ritualization of violence and, retrospectively, with the ancient cult of heros and the Christian cult of martyrs.

68 Fascism and Culture

2. Georges Braque Fille a Ia guitare. 1912.

Photo courtesy of Musee National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris

Schnapp: Forwarding Address 69

3. Umberto Boccioni, Costruzione orizzontale. 1912.

Photo courtesy of Staatsgalerie moderner Kunst, Munich.

the human figure and vice versa. Yet the female figure at the center of Boccioni's study for Materia is not refracted and dispersed; rather, she acquires an authority and monumentality which suggests that all of that which hovers around her- the wrought-iron balcony, the public square, the city's architecture- is but the immediate extension of her body. That the city should become "the prolongation," as Marinetti would have it, "of the forest of her veins," plants us firmly in that space of intersection between the instinctual world of the body and the public realm of politics which futurism so eagerly sought. Gone are Braque's guitar and the private world of dreams it had evoked. In its place is a human monolith whose outward expansion can even

70 Fascism and Culture

le rigorously quantified: the force lines from her shoulders measure ~00 and 210 meters; those from her arms, 122 meters; those from 1er base, 60 feet.

What I am suggesting is that Boccioni has reinstituted a pictorial derarchy which, contrary to Cubist practice, subordinates the ground o the central figure in order to pictorialize the new heroic subjectivi- y. So far so good. But to bridge the gap between this female monu- nent and futurist multiplied man, it will be necessary to say something 1bout her immobility. Was not the futurist hero supposed to be ac- ive and virile? The answer is that Materia is a painting not about end_s, mt about origins. In fact, its pictorial subject matter is the materiali- y of the painter's own mater or mother. Signora Boccioni appears, hus, as the literal double of the "maternal ditch" out of which, in the ounding manifesto of 1909, the new order was to be born. The nistress of her own pictorial ground, she is also the fertile terra madre md motherlode: the passive but precious foundation upon which the nobile masculine order is to be constructed (but only in order tO take light). If we turn to the depiction of masculine figures, this remotivation

1f the Cubist theme of interpenetration becomes all the more strik- ng. In Carlo Carra's Simultaneity, dated 1912, a muscular nude strides hrough a similarly fractured urban landscape. Instead of losing its ontours (as it would in a Cubist context), it gains in materiality and nonumentality. As it quite literally pierces the space of the fragments ircling about with its stride, the entire field is structured by its pass- ng. Similarly, in Boccioni's splendid figure studies of 1913, in- ~rpenetration once again translates into the dilation of the human ubject. In Muscoli in Velocita (Muscles in Motion) the body's trajectory ssumes monumental proportions; in Dinamismo. di un corpo umano '>yntheses of Human Dynamism) its stride drives a wedge right through 1e picture plane, redistributing in its wake all of the pictorial elements; 1 two Scomposizioni, instead of being decomposed by speed, the body ; dynamically expanded. In every case the figure's forward momen- llm also results in a drive toward volume. (It is as if there were an nplicit threat that it will break out into the third dimension.)

This economy of expenditure as expansion is even further literalized 1 Boccioni's sculptural experiments from the 1911-1914 period. In 1eir effort to offer a concrete rendering of the itinerary ofthe human Jrm through space, they forge an iconography of savage machine- ke warriors which will occupy a prominent place in later futurism, rhether in literary works such as Marinetti's African novel Gli in-

Schnapp: Forwarding Address 71

domabili (The Untamables) or in the whimsical mechanical savages of Fortunato Depero's Balli Plastici (Plastic Dances). Boccioni's earliest sculptural efforts, exemplified by Fusion of Head and Window (fig. 4), attempt to compress figure and landscape into a single body by adop- ting a procedure which is purely accumulative. In this case that meant the inclusion of real world objects such as the fragment of a window pane, a wig, and so/forth.

The net effect of this additive procedure is illustrated rather dramatically by th~ initial study for Unique Forms of Continuity in Space: a massive striding monster loaded down by a considerable extraneous baggage of wedges, flanges, and frames which represent the in- terpenetrating landscape (fig. 4). To arrive at his final product, Boc- cioni had to shift to a more synthetic procedure, progressively strip- ping the figure of most of these protrusions such that they remain readily visible but no longer detract from the sculpture's overall effect. Whereas initially they seemed to slow down and even bury the figure in the field it was supposed to be traversing, the final streamlining has them inte;,sifYing our sense of the strider's powerful forward drive and monumental musculatuie. The result is a reassertion of the figure's priority over its surroundings with overtones that are at once bellic and heroic.

So far I have examined: a) how, even in its earliest theoretical statements, futurism begins to elaborate a dynamic theory of place and race; b) how this theory is anchored in the futurists' heroic con- ception of multiplied man; and c) how the doctrine of interpenetra- tion allows for a pictorial transcription of the hierarchical relation be- tween multiplied man and the ground against which he is profiled. What remains to be seen is how this ground can be allegorized as the nation. Stated otherwise, the futurist subject enjoys a unique rela- tion to the place in which he appears: indeed, it can even be said to run in his blood. This is the sense in which it may be referred to as his "address." Yet in the case of the futurist work of art, both figure and ground, subject and address are, by definition, perpetually mobile. How, then, beyond the repeated affirmations of Marinetti and others, can we be sure that they are structured by the nation's borders? How can we be sure that futurist place and race are not simply no-place and no-race, that is, utopian?

A single answer is not easy to establish on the level of microanalysis being attempted. But a provisional response may be offered by chart- ing the recurrence of one of the futurists' master-symbols: the Italian flag . .T ust as in the founding manifesto the arrival of the word "Italy"

72 FasciSm and Culture

4a. Umberto Boccioni, Fusion of Head and Window. 1911~1912.

4b. Umberto Boccioni, Syniheses of Human Dynamism. 1912.

4c.

Schnapp:· Forwarding Address 73

signalled a nationalist localization and literalization of the allegory that preceded it, so the appearance of the Italian flag in futurist pic- torial space defines the drama of the expanding and multiplying sub- ject as a specifically national one. In this new context, interpenetra- tion ceases to describe the foundation of a new individual subjectivi- ty. It now comes to indicate both the foundation of a perpetually mobilized collective subject and a corresponding nationalist politics of expansionism and war.

A case in point is an interventionist fantasy, dated 1914, by Carlo Carra, whose title is lnseguimento (or Pursuit) (fig. 5). The interpenetra- tion of figure and landscape is rendered here by a horse and rider flying through a field of French, English, and Italian newspapers itself traversed by a chalky luminous median strip. In the upper right-hand corner is the Italian word AVVENIMENTO or "event," the event in ques- tion being evidently a pursuit. Whereas in the examples with which I will close, the Italian flag will be fully integrated into the pictorial field, in Carra's collage it is strictly a local motif. It is draped across the body of the forward-arching jockey and partially shared by the side of the galloping horse in what is a rather conventional allegory ofleadership. The horse's flank bears the adjective "nuova" while the flag suggests the noun that ought to follow: ltalia ... /a nuova ltalia, the new Italy.

A new Italy, with a dynamic leader at the reins, is in hot pursuit. .. but of what or of whom? Carra furnishes an answer via the scattered

5. Carlo Carra, Pursuit. 1914. r"-11--!--- ~K-u!-1! D---

7 4 Fascism and Culture

letters that at the head of the horse spell out the name JOFFRE: the nation pursues the course ofMarshallJoffre, who had just triumphed over the Germans at the battle of the Marne. Granted this level of historical specificity, it is now easy to reinterpret Carra's white road as the road to glory and the pictorial field as the international field of battle, restructured and redefined by Italy's (as yet imaginary) light- ning strike.

If in Pursuit the doctrine of interpenetration was used to dramatize and indeed provoke Italy's bellic intrusion into the international pic- ture plane, in Balla's Flags on the Altar of the Fatherland (fig. 6), Patriotic Song, and Patn'otic Demonstration it permits a dynamic remapping of the national territory itself. In varying ways, eaCh of these three works

6. Giacomo Balla, Flags on the Altar of the Fatherland. 1915.

Private collection.

Schnapp: .Porwarding Address 7 5

(all of which date from 1915-the year ofltaly's entry into the war), explore the movement from perimeter to center and center to perimeter, aggressively asserting the pictorial border and/or simultaneously breaking it. In them, the place of the horse and jockey of Pursuit is occupied by an emblem of the tricolor flag. The flag's spiral emanations-floating metaphors for carnival ribbons, the paths of bombers and flying projectiles- suggest the festive attitude of the nation at war. But, more importantly for present purposes, they also suggest how via the principle of interpenetration the pictorial ground can become quite literally identified with the national territory, its borders identified with the nation's borders.

7. Gino Severini, Armored Train in Action (Train blinde en action). 1915.

Oil on canvas, 45% x 34Ya (115.8 x 88.5 em). Collection, The Museum of Modem Art, New York. Gift of RichardS. Zeisler.

76 Fascism and Culture

One possible result of this equation may be seen in works such as Boccioni's 1915 Charge of the Lancers and Gino Severini's Armored Train :also from 1915) (fig. 7). In both the picture becomes a sort ofbattle- sround th~t must be defended against forces which lie in the empty !pace outside 1ts border. But if the surrounding void- here the gallery wall- m~y represent a potential menace, its very emptiness, like that Jf the Libyan desert, may also be read as an invitation to occupa- :ion. The theme is developed in Carlo Carra's justly famous 1914 Jn- 'eruentionist Demonstration (Manifestazione interventista) (fig. 8), whose moral ;eems to be that the best defense is an aggressive pictorial offense. Here the monumental but expanding figure usually encountered at he center of futurist images is multiplied and exploded, leaving as

8. Carlo Carra, Interventionist Demonstration. 1914.

Collezione Mattioli, Rome.

Schnapp: Forwarding Address 77

its residue the much more abstract but no less heroic commotion of a frenzied nationalist mob. Seemingly viewed from an aerial perch, we see the crowd's futurist banners, slogans, and shouts intermin- gled with the shattered fragments of an urban landscape and spun out along the spiral axis of what is, surely, an airplane's propeller. The result is a taut and dynamically expanding centrifuge which pushes hard against its borders.

Swept up in its outward momentum are two Italian flags. Represented as whole and integral forms, they seem to concretize the tricolor palette of the field as a whole. One is already edging over the border, the other has been fired like a projectile-note the zang tumb tuuum in the upper left-hand corner- and is well along its way. What I am suggesting, then, is that, once again, one of modernism's heroic themes, the pressuring and breaking of the picture frame, has been remotivated and thematically enhanced by futurism. No longer the simple allegory of art's direct intrusion into the space of daily life, it now comes to stand quite specifically for a politics of national expansion. 20

In the context of futurist painting, the theme of breaking the frame undergoes a number of further transformations, but by way of a con- clusion, I will examine only the most literal of these. It first appears as a strictly internal motif in a number of now classic early-futurist images_, such as Balla's Dynamic Depths and Luigi Russolo's Dynamism of an Automobile. Here, the passing of a speeding vehicle through a mythic industrial cityscape is rendered by a series of internal frames which are successively bent and/or ruptured. Within a few short years, the dynamism of the central figure and the violence of its force-lines become such that they can no longer be contained within the limits of the picture. Hence, in Balla's 1914 Plastic Construction, they have erupted right out of the picture plane and come to occupy the third dimension. Hence, also, in his Abstract Speed + Sound of 1913 (fig. 9), they have overflowed onto the surface of the frame and continue to press beyond.

From our distance of half a century the gesture of breaking the frame which divided art from life may seem liberatory, and indeed it was.

20 The same conflation is operative in futurist performance and poetry. Marinetti's war epic Zang Tumb Tuuum, for instance, aspires to a liminal form of mimesis that would physically polarize and mobilize its reader/audience. On paroliberismo, "ab- solute mimesis" and futurist performance theory, see my "Politics and Poetics in F. T. Marinetti's Zang Tumb Tuuum," Stanford Italian Review 5.1 (Spring 1985) 75-92.

78 Fascism and Culture Schnapp: Forwarding Address 79

10. Gino Severini, Plastic Rhythm of july 14th. 1913.

9. Collezione Franchina, Rome. Giacomo Balla, Abstract Speed + Sound. 1913-1914.

Photo courtesy of Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice.

80 Fascism and Culture

But, as we are reminded by Severini's 1913 Plastic Rhythm of july 14th :fig. 10), for the futurists it leads irreversibly into war. In this in- :tdvertently poignant image, the forward stride of a marching soldier Jushes him out beyond the edge of the picture plane toward the uncer- :ain abyss which lies beyond. He is so propelled by some momentous :osmic force that, in a hint of the tragedy to come, the extremities Jf his machine-turned body have already begun to fly off into a field iefined by the aerial meshing of the French and the Italian tricolors. fhe day being celebrated marks the seizing of the Bastille, but, in :t move emblematic of the fascist modernity which futurism in- mgurated, the festival offreedom from tyranny has also become the :'estival of militarized nations and mechanized wars.

Barbara Spackman

THE FASCIST RHETORIC OF VIRILITY

Dacche tutto ei-a, allora, maschio e Mavorte: e insino le femine e le balie: e le poppe della tu' balia, e l'ovario e le trombe di Falloppio e la vagina e la vulva. La virile vulva della donna italiana. 1

Thus Carlo Emilio Gadda, through his anagrammatic narrator All Oco de Madrigal, maliciously summarizes the fascist era in his novel Erose Priapo, by carrying the obsession with virility in fascist discourse to its limit: the virilization of woman herself. 2 His malice is double, for the novel is not only a critique of fascism through an idiosyncratic Gaddian psychoanalysis, but also through a figuration of the recep- tive masses as woman, and a subsequent. attack upon those masses through a not-so-idiosyncratic misogynist discourse. The "feminine," a term of invective in fascist discourse, is retained as a target of in- vective in Gadda's presumably antifascist parody:

KU-ce, KU-ce, KU-ce, KU-ce. La moltitudine, che al dire di messer NicolO amaro la e femmina, e femmina a certi momenti nottivaga, simulava a quegli ululati l'amore e l'amoroso deliria, siccome lo suol mentire una qualunque di quelle, ad "accelerare i tempi": e a sbrigare il cliente: torcendosi in ne' sua furori e sudori di entusiasta, mammillona

1 Carlo Emilio Gadda, Erose Priapo (Milan: Garzanti, 1967) 73. 2 Gian Paolo Biasin points out that All Oco de Madrigal is an anagram of"Carlo Emilio Gadda" in "L'eros di Gadda'e il priapo di Mussolini," Belfagor 24.4 (31 July !969) 471-78.