Aesthetic Modernism and Masculinity in Fascist Italy

John Champagne

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9780415528627
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136237799
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Aesthetic Modernism and Masculinity in Fascist Italy is an interdisciplinary historical re-reading of a series of representative texts that complicate our current understanding of the portrayal of masculinity in the Italian fascist era. Examining paintings, films, music and literature in light of some of the ideological and material contradictions that animated the regime, it argues that fascist masculinity was itself highly contradictory. It brings to the fore works that have tended to be under-studied, and argues that, while fascist inclusive strategies of patronage worked to bind artists to the regime, an official policy of non-interference may inadvertently have opened up a space whereby the arts expressed a more complicated and contestatory view of masculinity than the one proffered by kitsch photos of a bare-chested Mussolini skiing.

Champagne seeks to evaluate how the aesthetic analysis of the artefacts explored offer a more sophisticated and nuanced understanding of what world politics is, what is at stake when something – like masculinity – is rendered as being an element of world politics, and how such an understanding differs from more orthodox 'cultural' analyses common to international relations.

Providing a significant contribution to understandings of representations of masculinities in modernist art, this work will be of great interest to students and scholars of gender studies, queer studies, political science, Italian studies and art history.

1

Fascism, modernism, and the contradictions of capitalism

What fascism revealed was that international monopoly capitalism, far from leaving such national lineages behind it, was able to exploit them at a point of extreme political crisis for its own ends, once again drawing the old and the new into unexpected constellation. It is precisely such correspondences between the archaic and the avant-garde which characterize Nazi ideology, as the sensuous specificity of blood and soil is coupled to technological fetishism and global imperialist expansion.

(Eagleton 1990: 333)

Eagleton’s words hold equally true for Italian fascism, despite the ways in which its particular combining of “the archaic and the avant-garde” were in some cases unique to Italy.¹ In terms of a fascist fascination with the archaic, three welldocumented examples immediately come to mind:

• • The fascist fetishisation of the “sensuous specificity” of the Roman Empire.Propped up by the concepts of romanità (Whittam 1995: 85–88) and italianità, this fetishization took numerous forms, including the adoption of the fasces, the Roman salute, and the passo romano (Roman march step), the destruction of medieval ruins to make way for fascist building projects such as the present day Via dei Fori Imperiali and Via della Conciliazione,² and the excavation of sites like the Largo di Torre Argentina.
• • Fascist agrarian schemes and their attendant ideologies. Made possible by Italy’s status as what Victoria de Grazia (1981: 14) has termed a “half industrial/half agricultural country,” these included fascist “rural demagogy” (Zamagni 1993: 261–2), as well as legal measures designed to prevent “landflight” from the country to the city (de Grazia 1981: 99).
• • Fascist nurturing of Italian folk culture and crafts.³

As for the fascist preoccupation with modernization, modernity, and modernism, we might mention Italian aesthetic modernism in general and Futurist aeropittura in particular, Dottori’s and Alessandro Bruschetti’s portraits of Mussolini offering perhaps the most flagrant example of modernist painting in the service of fascist propaganda;⁴ the gradual if uneven adoption in Italy of Taylorism and Fordism—evidenced by Antonio Gramsci’s “Americanism and Fordism” (1985), written from within the walls of a fascist prison—and their attendant deskilling of labor and expansion of the “new” lower middle class of functionary intelligentsia, many of whom staffed the fascist bureaucracy;⁵ fascist land reclamation projects such as the draining of the Pontine marshes; and the Ethiopian war. Hybrid forms combining the archaic and the modern in a single instance would include the “classical modernism” of the Novecento painters (Cannistraro and Sullivan 1993; Bossaglia 1991), the architecture of Esposizione Universale Roma (EUR) and the Foro Italico, including the latter’s statues and mosaics.

A number of writers have sought to capture this “eclecticism and inconsistency” (Mras 1961: 7) of fascism by inventing particularly evocative phrases. Roger Griffin (1993: 33), for example, speaks of fascism as a “palingenetic ultranationalism” that poses “a radically new beginning which follows a period of destruction or perceived dissolution.”⁶ Alice Kaplan (1986: 24–5) describes fascism as a “polarity-machine” that works by “binding doubles” and “splitting.” Barbara Spackman (1996: 88–90) combines Marxist and psychoanalytic accounts of fetishism to explain the incoherence of fascist ideology. In their attempts to analyze fascism as a form of cultural production, critics sometimes risk being bedazzled by fascism’s semiotic feats, leaving Robert Paxton (2004: 236) to conclude that “sometimes works in this genre seem to take the decoding of fascist ritual and art as ends in themselves.”

An exploration of the representation of masculinity in Italian fascist-era art and literature, this study risks replicating a critical fascination with fascism. To address the concerns of a reader like Paxton, then: I see, as Eagleton does, the fascist constellation of the old and the new, and the contradictory representations of masculinity this constellation made possible in the Italian context, as a response to the structural contradictions of international capitalism as it transitioned “from laissez-faire to monopolistic forms” (de Grazia 1981: 23).⁷ Provided we adopt a framework from historical materialism, we do not need potentially mystifying terminology to account for Italian fascism’s combining of the old and the new. This framework recognizes fascism as a moment in the history of capitalism as a world system, a moment whereby an attempt was made to accelerate, through state intervention, an “underdeveloped” Italy’s entry into that system. Given the contradictory role the state plays in capitalism, attempting to mediate the interests of all parties within its borders while also making possible the flow of capital, labor, and goods across state boundaries, this strategy could not be maintained permanently—thus the failure of fascist autarchy.

As a modern myth, Italian fascism was an imaginary resolution to the real contradictions of twentieth-century capitalism, contradictions exacerbated by Italy’s unique history and position in the international division of labor. We might initially term that highly contradictory position a “peripheral region of the core,” or the “least” of Europe’s great powers. With a knowledge of Italian history, we can enumerate specifically the reasons why Italian fascism required a collapsing in the same time and space of the ancient and modern—a collapsing that in some way parallels certain “underdeveloped” nations today as they attempt to cope with the contradictory demands of international monopoly capitalism (for a detailed account of the “structural and ideological links” between fascism and capitalism, see Woodley 2010: 132–61).

In her study of the economic history of Italy, Vera Zamagni (1993: 8) explains, “Contradictions and complications constitute the price that Italy has had to pay for the centuries of history that have been acted out on Italian soil.” To Zamagni’s claims we might add that capitalism often directly benefits from earlier modes of production (Hennessy 2000: 91). For example, while capitalism did not invent a gendered division of labor, it hierarchized and codified it by designating female subsistence labor as unworthy of remuneration—thus insuring that the male wage worker could return every day to work, he and his children clothed, fed, and healthy, at no extra cost to the owner (Wallerstein 1989; Evans 1993). While, in many regions of the globe today, women also work for wages, there is a continuing expectation that they be responsible for the bulk of the housework (and that they be willing to accept lower wages than their male counterparts). Thus the historically prior definition of women’s labor as unworthy of remuneration survives, and to the benefit of the owners of the means of production. As long as we are sufficiently attentive to the fact that capitalism is a system of structural contradictions whereby, for example, some owners somewhere need women to enter the pool of wage laborers while some owners elsewhere need to block or at least defer that entry, we can recognize that capitalism continues to overdetermine the meaning of gender difference.

In terms of the fascist period in particular, Pierluigi Ciocca reminds us that the Italian economy during fascism

on the whole was part of the structural changes and developments that characterized world capitalism, to which it was tied in such a way that the policy of autarky could only slightly modify this relationship; furthermore, it was driven by an internal capitalistic logic which fascism, with its particular brand of economic policies, did not in fact alter.

(cited in Zamagni 1993: 234)

To return to the example of gender, it is thus no surprise that the status of women under Italian fascism was complex and contradictory. Fascist policies of encouraging women to stay in the home, for example, were perfectly consistent with Italy’s need to curb or limit consumption, given its limited industrialization and the realities of the Depression. By the same token, a world economy whose core was shifting away from production and toward consumption required the targeting of women as consumers—something Italy could not ignore (de Grazia 1992: 1–17 in particular).

In the following section, I discuss fascism’s ultra-nationalism and contradictory economic policies as examples of an amalgam of the archaic and the modern that might be explained with reference to both the Italian economy and the world economy as a whole. My argument is that these two representative cases remind us that the fascist linking of the old and the new was a “rational” response to developments in transnational capitalism, given its contradictory logics.⁸ I then explore how these specific developments overdetermined representations of masculinity in particular.

Written in the heyday of what is sometimes called the “linguistic turn” and informed by a number of post-structuralist themes (the critique of master narratives, the acknowledgement that historiography must struggle with the tropic qualities of language, the understanding of history itself as “textual”), accounts such as Kaplan’s are read by some of their champions as an antidote to that old hobby horse of liberal critics, economic determinism (Affron and Antliff 1997:9). Any serious reader of the history of Marxist thought, however, knows that the problem of the inter-animating relationship of the base to the superstructure is one that Marxists themselves have always taken up.

Additionally: in a brilliant essay on historical method, Carlo Ginzburg argues, in Foucauldian fashion, that “the same conjectural paradigm employed to develop ever more subtle and capillary forms of control”—what Foucault famously called discipline—“can become a device to dissolve the ideological clouds which increasingly obscure such a complex social structure as fully developed capitalism.” According to Ginzburg,

The idea of totality does not necessarily need to be abandoned. On the contrary, the existence of a deeply rooted relationship that explains superficial phenomena is confirmed the very moment it is stated that direct knowledge of a connection is not possible. Though reality may seem to be opaque, there are privileged zones—signs, clues—which allow us to penetrate it.

(Ginzburg 1989: 123)

Ginzburg’s argument is a rejoinder to all those who would assert, for example, that one must choose between post-structuralism and historical materialism, as his essay teases out the methodological similarities between these various approaches. He also reminds us that all work in what he calls the humane sciences is of necessity speculative and conjectural. More recently, queer theorists like Rosemary Hennessy (2000) and Kevin Floyd (2009) have reanimated debates on the necessity of imagining how capitalism structures social relations in a totalizing manner.

Nationalism, capitalism, fascism

Drawing on the work of Marx and Weber, David Forgacs and Stephen Gundle offer the following definition of modernization:

In the economy, it means the transition from feudalism to capitalism, the rise of the wage contract, industrialization, and the growth of market economies. In politics, it means the transition from absolutist states to nation states, accompanied by national armies and police forces that acquire a monopoly on the legitimate use of force … in their own territories and normally, though not necessarily, by liberal-parliamentary forms of democracy. In administration it means the growth of modern centralized bureaucracies and the managerial rationalization of private firms.

(Forgacs and Gundle 2007: 19)

Based on this definition, we can conclude that, prior to fascism, Italy had not undergone a significant degree of modernization. As of 1922, the country was not yet fully industrialized; the liberal nation state had not only tolerated but at times encouraged and even depended upon paramilitary forces in the form of the fascist squads to control worker unrest; private firms had only minimally adopted Taylorism and Fordism.

Forgacs and Gundle call the three tendencies they identify as “interrelated,” but in fact the first development—the transition to capitalism—overdetermines the others. Fascism thus intervenes in Italian history not to delay modernization but rather to speed the process along. It is not hostile or even extrinsic to capitalism but part of its history. However, during this same time period, capitalism is itself undergoing changes, and these changes threaten to overtake the changes initiated by the fascists. Finally, because capitalism pits owner against owner, it is at times in the interests of some owners to delay modernization. The costs of technological innovations, for example, outweigh the benefits, at least in the short run. The fascist “binding” of the old and the new is thus not a resistance to capitalism but rather an attempt to try and keep pace with a capitalism that never ceases to develop new forms of exploitation even while maintaining the old.

Take, for example, the problem of the Italian nation state. The modern world consists of a series of nation states organized hierarchically in an interstate system. Assigning to itself the right to control the relations of production within its borders, the nation state thus holds the potential to assist some capitalists in their pursuit of the accumulation of surplus against others, while also exerting some influence over the international system as a whole. However, the sovereignty of the nation state always exists in tension with the necessity of developing economic and political relationships with other states, as capitalism has always been to some extent “transnational” in its scope. In an effort to extract greater and greater surplus, commodity chains of any significance have crossed state frontiers, capitalism’s hierarchical division of labor has been internationalized, spatial differences between producers and consumers make possible the masking of conditions of exploitation and the manipulation of price, and so forth. As long as the means of production are privately owned, capitalists feel no necessary allegiance to their states and must always retain relationships with “foreign” states so as to exert some leverage over the states in which they are located, should, for reasons of maintaining internal equilibrium, the state be required to act against the interests of the owning class.

These nation states were born through a series of “bourgeois” revolutions beginning in the late eighteenth century, whereby an emerging, titleless owning class demanded from the remnants of a pre-modern aristocracy political power to match this owning class’s growing economic clout (called a “middle” class because it was located “between” the aristocracy and a feudal peasant class, it is more accurately described as either the bourgeois or owning class). If the Enlightenment was the theory, bourgeois revolution was the practice. As Graziano (2010: 35–6) argues, “This coincidence between the birth of the ‘nation’ and the bourgeoisie’s assumption of political power is hardly a matter of chance. [Emmanuel-Joseph] Sieyès himself explained that the nation and the bourgeoisie are but one.” And as Benedict Anderson (2006) suggests, once a British (or Spanish) “creole” class, shut out of the upper echelons of power simply by virtue of having been born in the New World, managed to seize political control of the colony and set up its own “representative” government overseas, the model of the nation state could be exported back to the metropolitan center.

Oftentimes, during the course of the long transition from feudalism to capitalism, certain aristocrats reinvented themselves as members of this new owning class.⁹ In the Italian context, we might mention Count Camillo di Cavour, who “transformed” himself from a member of the aristocracy to a land owner, increasing his wealth by applying modern farming methods to his family’s agricultural estates. Significant given the diplomatic role he played in securing Italian unification is this description of Cavour: “convinced that property was the foundation of a modern economy, he rejected radical democracy, socialism, and communism” (Di Scala 2004: 104).

Alongside this owning class emerges a cadre of functionary intelligentsia whose role is to mediate between workers and owners. This class fraction, sometimes called the petty bourgeoisie or lower middle class, includes doctors, lawyers, journalists, and artists, but also shop keepers, salespeople, clerks, bureaucrats (including government employees), and other white-collar workers. In bourgeois democracies, the establishing of what Gramsci has termed the hegemony of the ruling owner class involves the attempt to convince this cadre class fraction, which shares objective interests with both owners and workers, to misrecognize themselves as the former and thus to assist the owning class in its accumulation of capital.

Once the owning class has achieved power, it must nationalize the masses so as to further legitimate its hold on power. We tend to think of a bourgeois revolution as “successful” when the owning class is sufficiently large to be able to retain and consolidate its power and, in the process, make convincing claims to be representative of the interests of the population as a whole. As Eagleton suggests,

once the bourgeoisie has dismantled the centralizing political apparatus of absolutism … it finds itself bereft of some of the institutions which had previously organized social life as a whole. The question therefore arises as to where it is to loca...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Aesthetic Modernism and Masculinity in Fascist Italy
• Popular Culture and World Politics
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: beyond virility
• 1 Fascism, modernism, and the contradictions of capitalism
• 2 Pirandello fascista?: modernism and the theater of masculinity
• 3 The dandy, the mystic, and the Tonalists: Italian modernist painting and the male body
• 4 “A glimpse through an interstice caught”: fascism and Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s “Calamus” songs
• 5 Giorgio Bassani and “Italian ‘queers’ of the 1930s”
• Conclusion: “beyond” fascism?
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index