Fascism, Gender, and Culture

FASCISM, GENDER, AND CULTURE Author(s): Ara H. Merjian Source: Qui Parle, Vol. 13, No. 1, Fascism, Gender, and Culture (Fall/Winter 2001), pp. 1-12 Published by: Duke University Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20686134 Accessed: 09-05-2019 17:43 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms Duke University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Qui Parle This content downloaded from 128.122.134.253 on Thu, 09 May 2019 17:43:42 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms FASCISM, GENDER, AND CULTURE Ara H. Merjian In the wake of a post-World War II, leftist intellectual reckoning which needed to distance its politically suspect forebears, the no tion that fascist ideologues permitted - indeed encouraged - di verse, often revolutionary aesthetic projects seemed an outrageous, even perverse proposition. Renato Poggioli's The Theory of the Avant Garde (1962), for example, which undertook to define traditional culture vis-a-vis its radical (and righteous) ideological counterpart, contended that A totalitarian order opposes avant-garde art not only by official and concrete acts, for example preventing the import of foreign products of that art or the exhibition of a rare and accidental indigenous product, but also by, first of all, creating, almost unwillingly, a cultural and spiritual atmosphere which makes the flowering of that art, even when restricted to marginal and private forms, unthinkable even more than materially impossible.' Along the same lines, the influential postwar critic Clement Greenberg asserted that "the main trouble with avant-garde art and literature, from the main point of view of Fascists and Stalinists, is not that they are too critical, but that they are too 'innocent,' that it is too difficult to inject effective propaganda into them," while another well-known QuiPaerle vol. 13, No. 1 Fall/Winter 2001 This content downloaded from 128.122.134.253 on Thu, 09 May 2019 17:43:42 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 2 ARA H. MERJIAN cultural critic similarly posited that "the dictatorships of right and left have [only] generated the anemic products of enforced enlightenment."2 Lurking within these arguments, of course, is a casuistry that seeks to cleave - and thus rescue - "culture" from fascism tout court if revolutionary art could not have been made under fascism, then fascism cannot have infected the legacy of modernist aesthet ics. Totalitarianism's opposition to avant-garde culture is so intrin sic, according to such reasoning, that its subjects spurn progressive culture spontaneously, "almost unwillingly." And when totalitarian regimes did apply their cultural "will" (the "enforced enlightenment" assumed endemic to fascism), fascist governments, it is widely ar gued, anathematized any texts, objects, or elocutions opposed to reactionary and racist sentiment. Joseph Goebbel's terrorization of "Degenerate Artists" has provided leftist intellectuals convenient evidence for such a verdict since the 1930s: all culture that was novel and radical, they argued, the fascists had execrated. But starting in the 1980s and 90s, a number of critical studies began revealing avant-garde cultural practices under different even some non-fascist - states to be integral to the development of fascist and proto-fascist ideologies between the world wars. The kinds of cultural representations that counted as "fascist" could no longer be dismissed as ideologically uniform, nor aesthetically retrograde. In numerous cases, from Ezra Pound to Paul De Man, F. T. Marinetti to Martin Heidegger, the epithet "fascist culture" now transcended bombastic neoclassicism, antiseptic academicism, or fatuous kitsch.3 Indeed, if any notion of "fascist art" percolates in the popular imagi nary, it is that of official Nazi aesthetics, which permitted strictly 'Aryan', neoclassical, and lowbrow organicist forms. Italy's contri butions to aesthetic modernism, for example, have since emerged not as simply pro- or anti-totalitarian, but rather as part of an institu tionalized, ideological dialectic that encouraged heterogeneous cultural productions. Though Poggioli alleged that "[w] hat charac terizes a totalitarian state is, in fact, an almost natural incapacity to permit evasions, or to admit exceptions,"4 it became clear that Mussolini had established precisely a policy of "exceptions" as the lightening-rod of fascist culture - an ingenious (if insidious) strat egy which diverse scholars of Italian Fascism have respectively This content downloaded from 128.122.134.253 on Thu, 09 May 2019 17:43:42 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms FASCISM, GENDER, AND CULTURE 3 deemed a "polarity machine," a "dynamic multiplicity," and a "pro ductive paradox."5 The very name of Mussolini's "Avanguardisti" points to the complex relationship of fascist politics to cultural pro duction - a relationship that in other countries and cases, as well, was characterized by idiosyncrasies, variations, and ambivalences. Yet while the coupling of "fascist culture" has finally, if belat edly, entered academic discourse as a complex signifier, the notion of fascist sexuality still lingers in the shadow of both doctrinal pos tulations and popular misconceptions. "Fascist" sexual politics are imagined to be as rigid and predictable as nationalist and racist absolutes, ascribable to a schema of facile psychoanalytic analo gies in which the prevailing motif is unequivocally that of sadomas ochism.6 And the idea of fascism as an institutionalized sexual perversion does not cease to "fascinate";7 it has even turned into a lucrative cultural cachet. "Fascism . .. I hate to say it, but it's sexy," recently remarked a style editor in a New York Times article on the fashion world's penchant for "fascist chic."8 A New York fashion designer similarly noted that Italian Fascist architecture is "all about power, and power is the greatest turn-on."9 Perhaps it is the phallic thrust of the bound lictors' axes - the fasces, the symbol of Italian Fascism - or the neatly pressed uniforms of the SS phalanx which have sealed their reputations as dressed-up repression. For, as Bar bara Ehrenreich notes, the fascist affinity for imagery and iconogra phy leads to interpretations of its ideological structures as merely "representational, symbolic"; its power dynamics become easily dismissed as "'really' about something else - for example, repressed homosexuality."10 Whether for Frankfurt School intellectuals, French existentialists, or Prada pundits, fascists come to signify repressed homosexuals or sex-obsessed maniacs. In brief, the relationship of fascist aesthetics and culture to questions of gender and sexuality still largely appears as a foregone conclusion, reducible to an in flexible yet sweeping phenomenon "all about power." Despite these seemingly inveterate preconceptions, some schol ars have paid increasing attention to how gender inflects different forms of fascist culture, and conversely, how cultural representations limned the dimensions of gender and sexuality in fascist society. Following George Mosse's pathbreaking study of European nationalisms and their This content downloaded from 128.122.134.253 on Thu, 09 May 2019 17:43:42 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 4 ARA H. MERJIAN relationship to sexuality, Alice Kaplan's Reproductions of Banality: Fascism, Literature and French Intellectual Life was one of the first studies to take seriously the role of desire in fascism - not simply the maniacal pathologies (real or imagined) of its authorities, but rather of its subjects and supporters." Inspired in part by the works of Wilhelm Reich and Louis Althusser, Kaplan's text considers not only how cul ture helped to elaborate fascist ideology in France, but how sexuality drove and informed those cultural practices. As a sociopolitical ex treme, the hyperbole of fascist image-politics puts into relief the cen trality of desire to all forms of political life: "What ideology," writes Kaplan, "could make it clearer than fascism does that people have a sexual, as well as material, interest in their political life?"'2 As Kaplan's work makes clear, it is the artifacts of fascist cul ture, its visual and verbal textures and materials, to which we must turn in order to comprehend the interests of everyday individuals, the sexual politics that sustained and subtended fascist social life. In this same vein, it is the records of gender relations - articulated in films, paintings, novels, newspapers, etc.- that most pointedly re veal the sociological underpinnings of fascist discourse. The essays collected here consider the ebb and flow between fascist ideologies and their cultural and sexual representations, using these categories both to illuminate each other and to shed light upon the obscured dimensions of fascist discourse. Just as all forms of fascism were not identical, so too did diverse forms of fascism shape - and find voice through - different kinds of culture, different models of gender and sexuality. Focusing on the period between the wars in Europe, these essays scrutinize the ways in which various cultural forms in a range of countries served as the nexus between the public realm of fas cism and the private worlds of sexuality, gender, and individual imagi nation. As these writings make clear, it is through the refractive lens of aesthetics - whether visual or verbal, high or low - that the public and the private spheres of fascist life became inexorably in tertwined, and where the lines between individual sexuality and collective politics became indistinguishable. Historiography of the inter-war period in Europe has stressed the penchant for a severe but halcyon realism in the visual arts, on the one hand, and for traditional family and gender structures in so This content downloaded from 128.122.134.253 on Thu, 09 May 2019 17:43:42 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms FASCISM, GENDER, AND CULTURE 5 cial life, on the other. The alleged apostasy of avant-garde radicalism in the arts after World War I is thought to have both mirrored and influenced increasingly nationalistic, reactionary, and hieratic politi cal configurations. Yet European cultural life between the wars did not, in fact, witness an instant polarization between right and left. The Spanish Civil War, which augured and crystallized this ultimately categorical opposition, did not begin until 1936. From the late teens until well into the 1930s, aesthetes and ideologues in different coun tries produced texts, objects, and images which often blurred the lines between revolution and reaction, progressive aesthetics and repres sive politics. So too, it may be argued, did fascist notions and modes of sexuality vacillate between the traditional and the radical, and fascist leaders frequently embraced different modes of gender - at least in theory - to suit new political subjectivities.13 As the essays here make plain, the circumscription of fascist sexuality or fascist gender roles from their putatively "non-fascist" counterparts proves as unrealistic as the attempted severance of fascism from culture. We cannot consider fascism as an exclusively bureaucratic phe nomenon - imposed from above, occupied only with economic and nationalist restructuring - but rather as a kind of modernism itself, in that it produced aesthetic and cultural objects in dialogue with, as a negotiation of, and as a response to, modernity.'4 In fact, fascism in various incarnations and national contexts often embraced many of the tenets we imagine to be synonymous with artistic modernism: cul tural renewal, primitivism and palingenesis, the utopia of technology, the merging of art and life. Though one prominent historian has ar gued for a "collapse of modernist idiom"" in the art of the 1920s, this is predicated on the belief that fascism existed outside of modernism's paradigm. (Good) modernism can thus be seen to have wilted in the wake of (bad) fascism. But instead of insisting that the modernist idiom died with the rise of fascism, these essays force us to consider how this idiom continued to inform various aspects of fascist cultural life. In their essays on Ernst Jiinger and Philippe Lamour, Todd Presner and Mark Antliff not only probe the nuanced relationships of German proto-fascism and French fascism to technology, but also challenge the neat teleology of an organ icist, post-World War I "re turn to order" - a term that emerged out of aesthetic discourse, but This content downloaded from 128.122.134.253 on Thu, 09 May 2019 17:43:42 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 6 ARA H. MERJIAN which has come to serve as the historiographic shibboleth of Euro pean cultural and political life between the wars.16 In his study of Ernst Junger's Worker (1932), Presner reveals the human body as the obsessive site of Junger's literary fantasy - the site where tech nology and political ideals were believed to forge a new, Promethean political subject. Hardly an anticipation of the Nazi youth ideal, Junger's "last men" evince not simply the plasticity of their author's political and aesthetic imagination, but also a notably flexible con ception of gender during the Weimar period. For Junger, technology could elide (or collapse) gender differences and produce individu als beyond the pale of limiting sexual characteristics. Examining the aesthetic ideologies of the French cultural fig ure Philippe Lamour, Mark Antliff illuminates a fascist ethos at once atavistic and novel. A devotee of Georges Sorel's mythopoetics of violence, Lamour believed that a revolutionary, fascist spirit could be evoked in objects and images, in architecture and photographic montages alike. Instead of championing conservative art, Lamour sought to gather the most revolutionary media under the collectivist aegis of French fascism.17 The dynamism of modern machinery and mechanical art, whether embodied in the automobile or the film, captured the rhythms of a new ideological order and encouraged communal participation in fascist cultural life. Thus, even a woman photographer such as Germaine Krull could carry out Lamour's project to "virilise" French culture since both her medium (photog raphy) and her subject (the city) furthered his technological demiurge. Junger's and Lamour's respective projects reconciled temporal rejuvenation - sparked by war and its technologies of death - with a palingenetic myth of origins in "primitive" sensibilities. They defined themselves not as the arbiters of a return to the soil, but as revolu tionaries, mapping out a dynamic matrix of expansive productivist technologies and rigidly nationalist boundaries. For Junger and [amour, as for the Italian Futurists before them, war and its technolo gies signified not so much the casket as the chrysalis of a new set of aesthetic and social relationships - a necessary fissure between an outmoded cultural patriarchy and a radical cultural revision. This valorization of technology did not wither, however, as the revolutionary, "historical" avant-garde gradually ossified after World This content downloaded from 128.122.134.253 on Thu, 09 May 2019 17:43:42 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms FASCISM, GENDER, AND CULTURE 7 War I. Rather, very different political regimes sought to adapt tech nology to the often protean parameters of totalitarian order. The stakes of personal and public participation in modern machinery thus pre occupied not simply eccentric fascist intellectuals, but also the cul tural agendas of established regimes. Jeffrey Schnapp's scrutiny of I lya Ehrenburg's Desiat'loshandinkh sil (The Life of the Automobile) and Pietro Maria Bardi's novel La strada e ii volante (The Roadway and the Steering Wheel) makes it clear that Fascist and Soviet mod ernisms shared not a little faith in the transcendental potential of technology. For both authors, the automobile simultaneously crys tallizes the driver's individuality and links him with a larger collec tive. At once a hypostatization of technological innovation and a shedding of base materialism, the car could serve the political imagi nations of both the Soviet "revolution of matter" and the Fascist "revo lution of the spirit." The erotics of these two "industrial novels" springs not from the sedate purity of the countryside, but from the velocity of wheels, and in both cases the car extends and amplifies the male body and the male ego. As Schnapp notes, this elision of political and cultural elements (summed up most aggressively in Bardi's de scriptions of Mussolini on the road) took different forms, but their common grounding in the trope of driving speaks much about the revolutionary investment in the myth of machines. As Barbara Spackman points out in her essay "Fascist Puerility," Italian artists set out to affirm the regime's revolutionary origins not only in literature, but in the visual arts as well. In a close reading of Alessandro Blasetti's Vecchia Guardia (1935) Spackman teases out the "disavowal" that haunts the film's attempt at a mythicized geneaology. Like Mussolini's subsequent references to his fictional "March on Rome," Blasetti's narrative self-consciously foregrounds its own spe cious revisionism. Yet the founding origins at the heart of Blasetti's and fascism's - mythical narrative, Spackman suggests, are as spec tral and transparent as the film's revenant protagonist, a martyred boy hero. The film embeds this child's life within a fascist temporality that will have occurred and yet never does: the "future perfect" of fascism's intended permanent revolution. Rather than the likely figure of the paterfamilias, the film deploys the youth as a fresher and more endur ing symbol of fascism's vigor. The capacious logic of "virility" that This content downloaded from 128.122.134.253 on Thu, 09 May 2019 17:43:42 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 8 ARA H. MERJIAN came to reconcile Italian Fascism's many contradictory principles could thus replenish itself eternally through the deferred temporality of the boy's life. The traditional Italian family, then, becomes the plastic ve hicle for reimagining both genealogical origins and political legacy. In his essay "A Fascist Feminine," Andrew Hewitt also examines the relationship between family structure and the development of fascist ideology. Considering the role of matriarchy in the theories of nineteenth-century philosopher Jakob Bachofen, Hewitt reveals how German proto-fascist thinkers viewed Bachofen's celebration of ma triarchy as a more cogent unifier of Volk and state than conventional patriarchy. As an idealized link between nature and culture, between familial and political law, the mother at once legitimates and sub tends an ostensibly masculine form of dominance. What appears outwardly to be a wholly phallic order -the fascist body politic - is in fact founded upon a mythical and elusive maternal core. Hewitt writes, "As a symbol of the pre-symbolic, the figure of the mother filled for the right the need to reconcile idealism and anti-intellectu alism, groundedness and anti-materialism." German proto-fascism thus sketched a kind of "polarity machine" or "productive paradox" of its own.18 For fascist officials such as Alfred Baeumler, Bachofen's "Mother right" forged the true, originary connection of self to state, yet hov ered unseen beneath the carapace of patriarchal politics. It is, ulti mately, the invisibility of the matriarch that proves and drives her mythical status as the origin of the (fascist) state. With regards to Mussolini's varied iconography, historian Luisa Passerini discusses a similar appropriation of feminine and matriar chal qualities by male authoritarian rule. The constant visual asso ciations of Mussolini with his mother, Passerini suggests, performed a maneuver in which gender categories were temporarily suspended - a symbolic maneuver permitted only to II Duce. He could ap pear at once tyrannical and maternal, aggressive and nurturing. Again, what appeared as a potentially liberating inclusion of the feminine in political leadership revealed itself to be a merely ges tural, and ultimately repressive, co-optation. Passerini further argues that questions of race and "stock" (stirpe), long ignored in the histo riography of Italian fascism, were central to the regime's construc tions of gender and must therefore be addressed in historiography. This content downloaded from 128.122.134.253 on Thu, 09 May 2019 17:43:42 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms FASCISM, GENDER, AND CULTURE 9 Particularly in the case of Mussolini, the dictator's changing repre sentations as a "southerner" or "northerner" alternatively height ened or downplayed his image as a virile, potent figure. What stands out in Passerini's remarks is, once again, an acknowledgement of fascism's accommodations in the realm of culture and ideology. If these essays evince any common theme, it is that different fascist movements and regimes used both cultural representations and gender relations as means to an end - that is, as ways of ar ticulating and shaping new political identities, as ways of interpel lating the subjects of those identities. As such, sexual roles - like artistic media and styles - were often labile. To be sure, as some of the authors here reveal, the revolutionary promise of such represen tations ultimately proved to be repressive in most cases. Both Todd Presner and Mark Antliff, for example, demonstrate the specious ness of what was potentially redemptive about these proto-fascist and fascist projects' treatments of gender. For Lamour, as for Jnger, a destabilizing of rigid gender roles - woman as cultural producer, or woman as worker - eventually became reinscribed as part of a utopic virility. And the celebration of matriarchy in Bachofen's po litical model, or its symbolic use in Mussolini's propaganda ma chine, were not, as Andrew Hewitt and Luisa Passerini emphasize, liberating for German or Italian women. These different cases make clear, however, that fascist cultures and discourses often used avant-garde aesthetics and alternative sexual models as the vehicles of their ideology, even if they ulti mately rejected the more progressive social consequences of such models. This recognition does not translate into a de facto apology for fascism. Nor does it disavow the brutalization of women and men that fascist culture (like Stalinist, or Maoist, or even capitalist culture) ignored, sanctioned, or abetted. Rather, it forces us to con sider protofascism and fascism's fraught relationship with, and am bivalent contributions to, the modernist project in various nations. For, if the term "fascist modernism" still, in the words of Jeffrey Schnapp, "produces a certain turbulence on the lips,"19 the turbu lence results as much from contemplating what is modern about fascism as from the painful recognition of what is fascist about mod ernism and modernity themselves. This content downloaded from 128.122.134.253 on Thu, 09 May 2019 17:43:42 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 10 ARA H. MERJIAN The theme of this issue takes its inspiration in part from a graduate seminar that Professor Barbara Spackman taught at the University of California at Berkeley, in the spring of 2000, entitled "Gender, Sexuality, and Fascist Discourse/'Thanks go to Professor Spackman and to the editors of qui parle for their comments on and criticisms of this introduction. 1 Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Gerald Fitzgerald (Cam bridge: Belknap Press, 1968), 100. 2 Clement Greenberg, "Avant-Garde and Kitsch/' reprinted in Francis Frascina, ed., Pollock and After: The Critical Debate (New York: Harper and Row, 1985), 30; Rudolf Arnheim, "Picasso at Guernica," reprinted in To the Rescue of Art: Twenty Six Essays (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 76. 3 It was, after all, only a decade or so ago that fascism even came to be discussed in (English) scholarship with regards to diverse cultural production. "What is the relation between the terms 'fascism' and 'culture'?," asked Jeffrey! Schnapp and Barbara Spackman in their important collection, Stanford Italian Review 8, no. 1 2, Special Issue on Fascism and Culture (1990); Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modern ism: Technology Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984); Alice Kaplan, Reproductions of Banality: Fas cism, Literature, and French Intellectual Life (Minneapolis: University of Minne sota Press, 1986); Richard Golsan, ed. Fascism, Aesthetics, and Culture (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1992); Mark Antliff, Inventing Bergson: Cultural Politics and the Parisian Avant-Garde (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993); Matthew Affron and Mark Antliff, eds., FascistVisions: Art and Ideol ogy in France and Italy, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). The orthography of the words "fascism" and "fascist" is a vexed and not altogether straightforward problem. We have therefore decided to leave the capi talization of this word up to the discretion of individual contributors to the present issue. 4 Poggioli, 101. 5 Kaplan, Reproductions of Banality, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities: Italy, 1922 1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 102-107; Jeffrey! Schnapp, "Epic Demonstrations: Fascist Modernity and the 1932 Exhibition of the Fascist Revolution," in Golsan, ed., 3. 6 For an eminent example of this association in cultural criticism, see Susan Sontag, "Fascinating Fascism," reprinted in Brandon Taylor and Wilfried van der Will, eds., The Nazification of Art: Art, Design, Music, Architecture and Film in the Third Reich (Hampshire, UK: Winchester Press, 1990). For a riposte to Sontag's thesis, see Barbara Spackman, Fascist Virilities: Rhetoric, Ideology, and Social Fantasy in Italy (Minneapolis: University of MinnesotaPress, 1996), 34-35. Perhaps the most hyperbolic representation of fascism as the political incarnation of (numerous) sexual perversions is Rasolini's film, Sal?. 7 As Kaplan discusses, the seductive but misleading alliteration "Fascinating Fas cism" (notably iterated by Sontag), implies that there is something inherently sexy about fascism (For a brief discussion of the etymology of the word Fascism, see Kaplan, xxvii). 8 New York Times, "The Latest Look: Unforgiving," Monday Nov. 13,2000, section B9. This content downloaded from 128.122.134.253 on Thu, 09 May 2019 17:43:42 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms FASCISM, GENDER, AND CULTURE 11 9 Ibid. 10 See Barbara Ehrenreich, foreword, Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, vol 1: Women, Floods, Bodies, History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), xi. On the notion of homosexuality as allegory of fascism, see Andrew Hewitt, Pblitical Inver sions: Homosexuality, Fascism, and the Modernist Imaginary(Stanford: Stanford Uni versity Press, 1996). 11 See George Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Middle-Class Morality and Sexual Norms in Modern Europe (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985); and Kaplan, Reproductions of Banality. 12 Kaplan, 23. 13 Particularly in sexual life, fascist states did not reject new social technologies, but in fact adopted them as means to regulate fertility, natalism, and eugenics. See Herf, Reactionary Modernism, and David G. Horn, Social Bodies: Science, Re production, and Italian Modernity(Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994). 14 On this concept, see Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, pages 303-311. Thanks to Barbara Spackman for this connection to Jameson's text. 15 Buchloh, "Figures of Authority, Ciphers of Aggression," reprinted in Brian Wallis, ed., Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation (New York: The New Mu seum, 1984), 108. 16 The term "rape/ ? l'ordre" was originally coined by Jean Cocteau to describe the more classical and conservative bent of art after World War I. See Kenneth Silver, Esprit de Corps: The Art of the Parisian Avant-Garde and the First World War, 1914 1925 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989); and Romy Golan, Moder nity and Nostalgia: Art and Politics in France Between the Wars (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995); Buchloh, "Figures of Authority, Ciphers of Regression." Whereas Silver maps the discourse of conservative French nationalism onto the trajectory of Parisian modernism, Buchloh attempts to trace the demise of an art practice gradually reified and emptied of its own self-critique. 17 In this same manner, we might consider Lamour and Sorel's visions of technology - technology as a spiritual, revolutionary catalyst for everyday life and political subjectivity - alongside other early twentieth-century politico-aesthetic movements such as Futurism and Constructivism. Indeed, in his idealistic celebrations of tech nology as the basis for collective ideology, Lamour follows the thread of these foregoing movements and their (very different) conceptions of revolutionary objecthood. As Antliff writes, Lamour clamored for a "dynamic" and "collective" art - an art "not made by an individual but by the collaboration of individual constructors and of individual utilisers." Indeed, this appropriation of Futurist and Constructivist "dynamism" and "collectivity" points to the ways in which different proto-fascist and fascist movements embraced technology and radical aesthetics as the vehicles of revolutionary ideology (and challenges, furthermore, Walter Benjamin's claim for the dialectics of montage as a singularly communist-revolu tionary mode of representation). It comes therefore as no surprise that Lamour's - and Italian Fascism's - modernist mythopoetics share a common philosophical geneaology in Henri Bergson (On this issue, see Mark Antliff, Inventing Bergson). For J?nger, Lamour, or Marinetti, the modernist art object could serve as the em bodiment, the sharpener, and the inspiration for a radical ideological subjectivity. 18 And here, I think, Hewitt's point resonates most strikingly with Alice Kaplan's This content downloaded from 128.122.134.253 on Thu, 09 May 2019 17:43:42 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 12 ARA H. MERJIAN assertion that "[w]e need to realize how dependent the phallic fascist is on mother nation, mother-machine, mother-war" (Kaplan, Reproductions of Banality, 11). 19 Jeffrey T. Schnapp, "Forwarding Address/' in Jeffrey T. Schnapp and Barbara Spackman, eds. Stanford Italian Reviews, no. 1-2. This content downloaded from 128.122.134.253 on Thu, 09 May 2019 17:43:42 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms