Pier Paolo Pasolini

In Living Memory

Ben Lawton, Maura Bergonzori, Ben Lawton, Maura Bergonzori

• Publisher: New Academia
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780981865416
• eBook ISBN: 9780983245186
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Literary Essays

A collection of essays discussing the famed Italian film director, writer, and intellectual. More than thirty years after the tragic death of Pier Paolo Pasolini, this volume is intended to acknowledge the significance of his living memory. His artistic and cultural production continues to be a fundamental reference point in any discourse on the state of the arts, and on contemporary political events, in Italy and abroad. This collection of essays intends to continue the recognition of Pasolini's teachings and of his role as engaged intellectual, not only as acute observer of the society in which he lived, but also as semiologist, writer, and filmmaker, always heretical in all his endeavors. Many directors, reporters, and contemporary writers see in the "inconvenient intellectual" personified by Pasolini in his writings, in his films, and in his interviews, an emblematic figure with whom to institute and maintain a constant dialog, both because of the controversial topics he addressed, which are still relevant today, and because of the ways in which he confronted the power structures. His analytical ability made it impossible for him to believe in the myth of progress; instead, he embraced an ideal that pushed him always to struggle on the firing line of controversy.

Part I

Political Engagement

1

Pasolini: Between Passion and ‘Ideology’

Joseph Francese

Pier Paolo Pasolini was a critical observer of Italian society. He participated in many of the topical debates of his time, casting himself as ceaseless antithesis or negation of the status quo. If we are to cull lessons from Pasolini that are relevant today, we must take care to not fossilize his memory with a-critical readings of an author who in many instances predicted what Italy and Italians would become over the last twenty-five years of the twentieth century. Rather than elevate Pasolini to the status of cultural icon, and thus deprive his life and work of real meaning, we must continue to ask which aspects of Pasolini’s opus are still relevant and useful to us today, and separate them from those that are not. In other words, we must view Pasolini critically if we are to be true to his cultural legacy.

Pasolini is often called a “poeta civile.” His engagement runs throughout his work, and is perhaps most clearly evident in his penchant to sincerely and openly discuss his belief that his government had offended and violated him, as citizen. If we use his work as point of departure for pursuing the meaning and role of the committed, public intellectual, Pasolini may be a model for those intellectuals who believe it incumbent on them to serve as catalysts for progress by animating an ongoing ‘cultural revolution.’

Pasolini believed that the intellectual must “trasumanar,” a term he took from the story of Glauco in Paradiso I to signify a desire to transcend the human.1 To do so, it was imperative to remain faithful to one’s youthful “passions” or ideals and work for a just future while avoiding what Pasolini euphemistically called “organizzar,” a tendency toward bureaucratization and loss of initial fervor that was shared by all revolutionary movements as they approached and assumed political power. In fact, demonstrating a certain political naiveté, Pasolini contended that he never wanted to be part of a majority, because, to him, majorities by definition repressively impose their views onto minorities. He preferred to inhabit a position “beneath the underdog,” to borrow Charles Mingus’s phrase,2 so that he could give public voice to the voiceless and political standing to the marginalized.

At the same time, Pasolini hoped that his “passion” could be overcome and develop into “ideology.” He told his readers that, in speaking of “[p]assione e ideologia,” the conjunction “e” is neither a copulative nor a concomitance, but a disjunctive, “nel senso che pone una graduazione cronologica: ‘Prima passione e poi ideologia’” (Pasolini, Passione e ideologia 488). In other words, the term “passion” was Pasolini’s own verbal shorthand for the ideals that had grown out of his youthful “sogno di una cosa,” his irrational emotions and self-love. Thus, he struggled to give his “passion” a civil dimension, which he equated with “agape,” love for all humanity. “Ideology,” as he defined it, denotes a rational, intellectual commitment to social progress and to the moral and ethical ideals of justice and equality.

Such a process is reminiscent of what Gramsci calls “catharsis,” the process by which an individual moves beyond emotional, egotistic, economic interests to attain a universal-moral, or ethical-political awareness and identify with the working and subaltern classes (Gramsci 1244). Yet Pasolini falls short: “agape” is merely a form of empathy-based altruism. Pasolini, as we shall see more clearly further on, believed it possible, and necessary, to operate independently of Gramsci’s “moderno principe,” what Togliatti later called the “collective intellectual” (207), the only locus where an effective counter-hegemonic cultural politics could be elaborated, lest the intellectual remain nothing more than an isolated ‘voice in the desert.’

While the image of ‘unarmed prophet’ does seem to describe Pasolini, and while his efforts to attain “ideology” were not successful—at the conclusion of Passione e ideologia he admits as much—the constant tension in his work to transform his “passions” into “ideology” cannot be discounted. Because Pasolini never reached his goal, we may say that the premise for his politics were moral, empathetic-altruistic, and cultural exigencies that became manifest through his “amateurish” interventions into areas outside his area of expertise. In this regard his Scritti corsari—especially “Il romanzo delle stragi” and “L’articolo delle lucciole” (Scritti corsari 107–13; 156–64) — and the Lettere luterane in which he put “on trial” Italy’s governing Christian Democrat party (Saggi sulla politica e sulla società 632–38) come quickly to mind.

Like Pasolini, Edward Said claims that the intellectual is called on to be an independent ‘speaker of truth,’ or, in his phrasing, a “disturber of the status quo” (x), an obstructer of the “passive acceptance of unexamined ideas and sentiments” (27). Said argues that the intellectual’s principal duty is “the search for relative independence” from the pressures of co-optation into power structures (xvi). The question, for Said then, is that of how the intellectual addresses authority: “as a professional supplicant, or as its unrewarded, amateurish conscience” (83).

In assigning a positive value to amateurism—which he defines as “an activity […] fueled by care and affection rather than by profit and selfish, narrow specialization” (82)—Said claims that amateurs are “able to speak the truth to power” because they are “crusty, eloquent, fantastically courageous and angry individual[s] from whom no worldly power is too big and imposing to be criticized and pointedly taken to task” (8). They can do so because they resist the pressures of professional specialization and expertise, and the drift toward power and authority (76 and ff.) that challenge the intellectual’s enthusiasm and will while finding strength in their “desire to be moved not by profit or reward but by love for and unquenchable interest in the larger picture, in making connections across lines and barriers, in refusing to be tied down to a specialty, in caring for ideas and values despite the restrictions of a profession” (76). According to Said, the intellectual should be

someone who considers that to be a thinking and concerned member of a society one is entitled to raise moral issues at the heart of even the most technical and professionalized activity as it involves one’s country, its power, its mode of interacting with its citizens as well as with other societies. In addition, the intellectual’s spirit as an amateur can enter and transform the merely professional routine most of us go through into something much more lively and radical; instead of doing what one is supposed to do one can ask why one does it, who benefits from it, how can it reconnect with a personal project and original thoughts. (82–83)

While “the professional claims detachment on the basis of a profession and pretends to objectivity, […] the amateur is moved neither by rewards nor by the fulfillment of an immediate career plan but by a committed engagement with ideas and values in the public sphere” (109). Indeed, Pasolini succeeded in what Said considers the “hardest aspect of being an intellectual,” that of “represent[ing] what you profess through your work and interventions, without hardening into an institution or a kind of automaton acting at the behest of a system or method” (121).

Therefore—since, as Said maintains, “all intellectuals represent something to their audiences, and in so doing represent themselves to themselves” […] you do what you do according to an idea or representation you have of yourself as doing that thing” (xv) — the question we must answer is what does Pasolini represent for us, especially in an age defined by the unabashedly grand récit that is globalized capitalism. As Dombroski has written

oggi l’interesse per questioni che riguardano lo stato, i media, il razzismo, il patriarcato e il neo-colonialismo sembrano partire dalla premessa che il capitalismo sia una cosa naturale e inamovibile, che costituisca una struttura (materiale ed epistemologica) così forte che non è possible uscire dai suoi confini al punto che è meglio non parlarne neppure. (Dombroski 41)

Indeed, we tend to repress awareness of the extent to which national legislatures and governments are overshadowed and circumvented in a new world system dominated by international corporations, and lending institutions, and of the pressures exerted by globalized market economies on fragmented work forces. We live in a period in which the real living conditions of workers (not only those employed in farming and industry, of course, but those in the tertiary and in research) have been subjected to rapid change by advances in information technology and in which the disappearance of an alternate economic model, the Soviet Union, has rendered ‘unnecessary’ all sorts of social welfare programs and safety nets.

Against such a backdrop, Pasolini represents, for me, the strength that can be garnered from doubt, or better uncertainty, and the will to contemplate alternate possibilities; the courage to assert that things need not be as they are. Pasolini tirelessly—indeed, with “impegno totale” (Saggi sulla politica e sulla società 296)—interrogated and protested his present, while attempting to transform his “passions” into “ideology.” This is why his example of “amateurism” challenges both the institution of literature and men and women of letters to see what is not yet visible, and to open up for themselves and for others heretofore uncharted vistas.

For Pasolini literature is action in the world, not a description of it. In other words, literature is not a passive observer/recorder of events, but a protagonist, the incarnation of dialogic exchange and interaction between ‘laborers of the mind’—writers and readers— that unavoidably affects and transforms all those who surround us. And since literature is by definition socially incisive and transformative communication, its content cannot feign exemption from ethical and political critique.

Such engagement may seem—to some, at least—anachronistic. Yet, as Bodei, following Hegel, reminds us, passion—or to phrase it a bit differently, human desire—is the motor force of history. Indeed, the protagonists of both history and literature give expression to collective forces because they give voice to that which many—consciously or unconsciously—feel (50, 51).

So, I would propose, in representing his doubts, Pasolini represents our own passions, our need to interrogate our present, which for many has been characterized by the disorientation associated with the collapse of ideologies and utopian visions following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the installation of a planetwide Pax Americana (even though it would seem that there has been relatively little “pax,” and a lot of “americana”).

Indeed, Bodei maintains, we have entered into “un’epoca del tutto disideologizzata” (73) characterized by a ‘common sense’ faith in a globalized laissez-faire market economy and the belief in the absolute contingency of the future, now seen as a place of explication of forces that escape human control (42). It would almost seem, Bodei notes with irony, “che soltanto oggi, dopo secoli e millenni, ci fosse caduta la benda dagli occhi e potessimo finalmente vedere la realtà così com’è, con sguardo snebbiato” (73). And that reality is of a piece with “[l]’attuale crisi del telos della storia,” the “conclamata perdita di visibilità di qualsiasi meta” (55). Despite this state of affairs, Bodei claims it is possible to retrieve a sense of history and to find global and coherent explanations of the world in which we live (19).

This “sense of history,” of course, is not History writ large, a meta-narration of events, another grand récit, but it is, nonetheless, “sufficiente a definire la storia” because it re-proposes “il problema della ‘verità’” (67): the act of judging an un-modifiable past in order to correct future behavior (an attribute of historiography that is mirrored in literature’s transformative power). Consequently, Bodei proposes a “costruttivismo storico” whose point of departure is a “noi strutturato”—his euphemism for the institutions of civil society—that would enable groups to reconnect with the subjective dimension of individuals. Those institutions would be considered forms of organization of both sense and of associated life (67–69). In Bodei’s opinion our struggle to comprehend those vaguely perceived, subjective exigencies, or the contradictory drives that Pasolini calls “passions,” enables us to “partire da esigenze sentite per comprenderle, allargando gradualmente il compasso del nostro orizzonte, così da imparare a orientarci meglio nella ‘selva’ degli eventi.” Ultimately, we aspire to understand the interaction between “eventi privati o di minore incidenza [ed] eventi pubblici o di più ampio respiro” in a way that allows for “una migliore comprensione reciproca dei vari fattori e al potenziamento degli aspetti significativi della nostra vita” (68–69).

The question, of course, is in the absence of ideologies and utopian visions, how do we guide Bodei’s “noi strutturato” in a progressive direction, rather than let it be carried forth by the flow of events?

If we keep in mind Pasolini’s limits, we remember that although he approached “agape,” he never achieved “ideology,” a coherent view of the world and his place in it, or better, a non-egocentric, abstract sense of justice. The reason this is so may well be that he did not believe that he, an intellectual, could become organic, in the Gramscian sense, to the working classes, an attitude ascribable to the fact that Pasolini attributed an absolute value to the term “organic,” not a heuristic one. In any case, Pasolini’s irrepressible individualism — which is perhaps most easily seen against the background of his difficult relationship with mass society — caused him to insist on the didactic mission—or to use his term, the “funzione sacerdotale”—of the intellectual, and, consequently, the place he assigned the intellectual: as a ‘speaker of truth’ outside an organized workers’ movement. He believed that it was sufficient to talk of himself: because our macrocosm was reflected in his microcosm, he spoke for the rest of us. And this prevented Pasolini from believing possible the full integration of the i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I Political Engagement
• Part II Reflections on Language and on the Means of Representation
• Part III The Body, the Word, and the Other: Towards a Definition of the Anti-Bourgeois Author
• Part IV History and Society as Seen by Pasolini
• Part V Works in Progress
• Part VI The Pasolini Myth
• Part VII Pasolini’s Impact on Contemporary Artistic Production
• Works Consulted
• About the Authors