Everything that is New

"Everything that is new is good, beyond the new there is no health. Humanity endures only by renewing itself constantly, by killing with years its old age."

Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, Interrogations, 1917
quoted by Robert Wohl

Louis Lozowick - New York - 1925

Anton Stankowski - Geometrical Mural - 1928

Giacomo Balla - Compenetrazione Iridescente 13 - 1912-13

Giovanni Papini - The Failure - 1912

"But I will here quote this one sentence of Novalis: 'The world shall be as I wish it!' There you already have in a nutshell the whole problem of Hitler, the central problem of the dedivinizing and dehumanizing."

Eric Voegelin, Hitler and the Germans, 1964

Papini, Giovanni. 2009. Un Homme Fini. 

trans. Y. Pelloso, Lausanne: L'Age d'Homme

In the words of Boris Groys, traditional mimetic art “was based on an adulation of Nature as the whole and consummate creation of the one and only God that the artist must imitate if his or her own artistic gift were to approximate the divine” (GROYS 2011, 14). In contrast avant-gardism wished no longer to imitate God, but rather to replace him, “by subjugating it [the world] to the single organizing and harmonizing will of the artist” (GROYS 2011, 16) ;
Hubris had long been central to the scathing diagnosis leveled against modernity, but it is not until the rise of modernism proper that culture embraced it as the legitimate ideology behind progress. Groys’ work, alongside that of James C. Scott (SCOTT 1998), is one of the few to have focused on this power-hungry dynamic of the movement, that runs a parallel and no less controversial path to the secularization of culture.
Papini’s book, “The Failure” (Un Uomo Finito in his 1912 original, and “Un Homme Fini” in the French I have been reading) is perhaps one of the most outspoken and unashamed exploration of what Groys has called the avant-garde’s “demiurgic” drive, as well a valuable (if biased!) document in early “Recall to Order”(POGGIOLI 1968, 93).
Giovanni Papini (1881-1956) entered the limelight with his publishing of the journal Leonardo (1903-1907) in Florence along with his close friend Giuseppe Prezzolini, introducing Italy to the thought of Bergson and William James, and setting the scene for the further development of avant-garde culture. Unlike those two fervent democrats, he would involve himself early on with Italian nationalism, promoting, with varying degrees of conviction, the end of Giolittian democracy (as editor of Il Regno), Italy’s involvement in WW1 on the side of the allies (as editor and futurist in Lacerba) and much later, from 1933 onward, half-hearted obedience to Mussolini. 

Un Uomo Finito intends to mark a turning point in his life, the end of his old ways and a turn from ruthless monadic individualism to rootedness and a cult of the Toscanità (ADAMSON 1993, 9) which will come crowning and terminate his futurist celebration of nationalism as a mean to cultural renovation. This new concern for “La Terre et les Morts” probably plays a large part in leading Papini to embrace the catholicism he had sometimes victimized to popular acclaim, writing in 1921 what remains his most famous work Storia di Cristo ; Somehow silenced by many of his sympathetic biographers, or wrongly reduced to “christian” anti-judaism, Papini was also a longstanding and vocal anti-semite, long before he was allegedly coerced into joining the Fascist Party in 1933¹. 

Albert Weisgerber - Pfauentanz - in Jugend magazine - 1902

But at the time of writing Un Uomo Finito, in 1911, we have no reasons to believe he held antisemitic views: he had indeed penned the nationalist program for Corradini and voiced his hostility to socialism, but neither Corradini nor his Nationalist Association seem to have supported this ideology (TALMON 1991, 484). In fact, much more than nationalism, the ideology that permeates Papini’s writing up to and including this book, is that of a radical individualism of Stirnerian inspiration: Close to anarchism as a youth, he quickly shed those political commitments in favour of the de facto anarchy of a monadic celebration of the self, in the spirit of Stirner’s “I do not demand any right, therefore I need not recognize any either” (STIRNER 1995): such “might is right” attitude will remain largely theory as he was deemed too myopic and ill-built for serving in WW1 (despite his best efforts) but following the Great War he will have mustered enough clairvoyance to realize it was nothing to be celebrated.
Since it was not with deeds he was to prove his strength, he went early for sarcasm and solitude: at first because his ugly face and thankless character but soon after as an intransigeant discipline and defense against a hostile and mediocre world. For long the young Papini has no friends, and even when he has some, he seems to find it difficult to reconcile this commitment with his egotic worldviews.
With age, those will become somewhat muted, but to the end he remains fond, despite his pestering of all déracinés, of his self-image as an intellectial vagrant, a discreet recalling of his self-education: “Me, I always remained a bit of that  drifting and fanciful nomad from this distant era: (…) I don’t have a fraction of the world I could demarcate with a wall and claim: this is mine!” (PAPINI 2009, 74)

Papini will even eventually find his own “union of egoists” (STIRNER 1995, 161) who share his passion and some of his outlooks, and who will soon get to work and produce first Leonardo, followed by an unsteady stream of other publications some of which will gain national and international recognition: “It was for us, as divine youth, intoxication without wine, orgy without women, a party without women nor dances. It was, everyday, the exultant exhumation of our self, of our deepest and truest self; the discovery, the perpetual reconstruction of our intelligence of poets of the concepts and probers of the abyss.” (PAPINI 2009, 78). At first Papini seems as close as it gets to a leader, but neither does he seem to exhibit an authoritarian personality, nor does his circle really try to wrestle his authority from him. When clashes do happen those seem to be largely motivated by diverging ideals:
His best friend Prezzolini, once a “sworn enemy of all discipline” will eventiually follow Benedetto Croce’s idealism, rooted less in the soil than in reason. While they had run Leonardo together, they depart in the age of La Voce, Papini then founding the incendiary and war-mongering paper “Lacerba,” that will for a time represent in Florence the interest of the Marinetti’s futurists (ADAMSON 1993).
Ardengo Soffici on the other hand, maybe more involved in painting than in philosophy, will remain closer to the vehemence of his early days:
Others yet, like Giovanni Amendola (few in fact…) who partook in both Leonardo and La Voce, would turn to defending democracy against the rise of Fascism and eventually loose his life to the cause.

Hugh Ferris - Lure of the City - 1925

Among this blossoming avant-garde, all opposed to the decadent sensuality of the previous generation (most of all embodied in the Florentine D’Annunzio) we find the foundations of Papini’s poetics, which unlike off his ideas will remain somewhat consistent throughout his life: corollary to their activism is rejection of the unnecessary, of the refined, of all aristocracy but that of action. Aside from emerging populism this expresses itself in a rich, often visual imaginary of earthy metaphors rooted in the quotidian, generally celebrating firmness, simplicity and authenticity.
In Papini this take the form of a fascination for inhospitable nature, for the “the nakedness of the earth and the purity of altitude” (PAPINI 2009, 76) no doubt rousing his “passion for naked thought” (PAPINI 2009, 72) ;
It is hard not to think of a Mediterranean Adolf Loos² when we hear Papini condemning effete prose and demand “return to the nakedness of our souls, innocent as Adam was naked of body” but right away he adds “Reason must be our reason, and history starts today. Year one of our era. Incipit vita nova.” (PAPINI 2009, 94)

This new era shall not be one of positivism nor rationalism: his monadic individualism happily sidestep into solipsism and Papini’s pursuit of emancipation through the negation of determinism rapidly turn to a kind of gnostic liberation atheology: alienating conditioning, pathological self-deprecation, short-sighted materialism all conspire to rob man from “the divine liberty of the self” (PAPINI 2009, 74) and the awareness of his divine omnipotence.
What is proposed instead is the recognition that “I am the world” (PAPINI 2009, 83) and the negation of “the pretentious puppets of my inner theatre” (PAPINI 2009, 85).

Papini claims that following his encounter with Max Stirner’s idiosyncratic philosophy, he moved from “cognitive solipsism” to “moral solipsism” (PAPINI 2009, 89) : as if from his early suspicion the world at large may only exist in his mind, he came to merely doubt the actual individuality of those around him. This seems rather dubious given that down to the writing of Un Uomo Finito, Papini will retain the certainty that sheer will should suffice to bend the laws of the real. It could be argued that Papini takes up Stirner’s diagnosis that “we are the mere servants of our thoughts” (STIRNER 1995, 11) but can only allow the self, transcendent but in his case unconstructed (save by himself) to be so worshiped

What does seem to constitute a genuine transformation, though, is his shift from personal to messianic and collective liberation: His erstwhile rejection, negation even, of all men took his decadent elitism to its paroxysm, the one-man elite relentlessly attacking the rest of the world as unworthy of his attention. This phase came to an end when Papini discovered or acknowledged the significance of mass movements in his metaphysics, gaining maybe enough confidence and recognition to venture proposals not only for himself but for those willing to hear: “No longer a victim: I found myself dominant and superior – the only quick in a world filled with shades.” (PAPINI 2009, 86)
The impact of anarcho-individualism on the development of fascist ideologies has not been, to our knowledge, adequately studied, but this “populist turn” in Papini’s voluntarist political religion suggests a possible articulation: if we are, as Deleuze (DELEUZE & GUATTARI 1980, 281) or Leo Strauss (STRAUSS 1999) do, to speak of fascism as rooted in nihilism, there comes a point when the incipient negation of the world makes room for a conception of the real as popular consensus. 

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy - Wie bleibe ich jung und schön - 1925

The life of Papini is littered with what we could call “performative terminations”: spectacular declarations that mark the end of a period, and sometimes the birth of another, or that of an angsty interregnum. His early life is recounted through his successive abandoning of all sorts of megalomaniac scholarly projects, and in his Il Crepuscolo dei Filosofi (1906) he proclaims the end of that “anguished cabal of signs around oblivion” (PAPINI 2009, 164), philosophy itself, which he sees as masturbatory contemplation removed from all utility and praxis. The last issue of Leonardo is trumpeting Papini’s editorial infanticide and some five years later in Un Uomo Finito, his acerbic autobiography constitutes a lengthy drumroll for his announcing a new turn in his intellectual life, abandoning nihilistic individualism in favor of rootedness and a more vital austerity. This new Papini will shed once and for all his old self  in 1919.

Where does this need to demarcate distinct phases, as if beating the rhythm in his life, arises from? Purely in terms of style, there is no doubting that Papini enjoyed playing the apocalyptic prophet, with a keen ear for the grand poetics of ill omen. But beyond style there is of course more than one answer:
One of those could be his consistent pursuit of radical extremity, notably difficult to conjugate with the shifts and changes a real life brings about. He feels the need to dramatize his own changes of opinion (no doubt felt as lacking virility), to turn them from failure into changes of heart of metaphysical significance (cf. the first of the “five unpublished chapters” in addendum to the French editions of L’Age d’Homme - see PAPINI 2009, 263) ; 

A large amount of Papini’s self-flagellation and relentless criticism seems to result from this strategy of his, consisting in first pointing out, and eventually embracing his own shortcomings, turning them from weaknesses into badges of “badness” (MAO & WALKOWITZ 2010)

Yet all this was a mere gesture towards real badness – in fact, towards the absolute badness – which Papini openly aspired to: in 1903, the Austrian Otto Weininger, and in 1910, the Italian Carlo Michelstaedter, had each killed themselves aged 23, right after finishing their respective philosophical testaments. We know Papini had been influenced by Weininger’s extolling  virile asceticism (ADAMSON 1993, 91) and that Papini brought public attention to Michelstaedter’s death in an article titled “Un suicida metafisico³“

That peculiar form of nihilism, which demands the author’s death as a correlative and confirmation of their philosophical indictement of the world, had a profound resonance with Papini’s own pessimism: he longed for “sacrifice, great and dignified because absurd, and sacrifice because absurd” (PAPINI 1912, 254) but, for reasons we can only speculate about, he choose to live.

Instead of an actual suicide, which might, at times, have seemed the appropriate full stop to his life conceived as a coherent work of art (WILSON SMITH 2007, 134) Papini concludes Un Uomo Finito with a rebirth: “The best is yet to come: I was only born today” (PAPINI 2009, 253) and “The child is born nine months old, but the man only starts at thirty” (PAPINI 2009, 255). 

It is fairly clear the possibility of his suicide did cross his mind, and he is aware that it probably crossed that of his readers too. “under the guise of trying to do more than others, one does less than all and prepare oneself a glorious defeat: he had proposed things so great his forces were not enough” (PAPINI 2011, 185) – yet the emptiness of life, the lack of a legacy maybe, and no doubt a part of fear too, lead him to live. He dedicate a certain amount of energy to justify this survival: “With this nobility, this grandeur, this ultimate and desperate heroism, I escape both death and mediocrity at the same time” (PAPINI 2009, 238) – But beyond those sorry claims to doing one better than Mishima, the death and rebirth his autobiography heralds displaces the author’s death from the realm of the factual to that of the performative: In the crucial, conclusive chapter XLVII, “Who I am”, Papini paints his portrait as the unlikely cohabitation of two conflictual drives, a destructive one, bent on annihilating all illusions, extinguishing all pretense of hope and celebrating oblivion, and one playful, illusory, creative:

“But after this devouring fury, comes back the dreamer who imagines Impossible stories, distorts reality, projects in the convenient mirror of his imagination his baddest instincts, his most frenzied desires, which makes larger than nature the men he hates and those he loves, drawing from life itself the real point of departure from which to prolongate and widen the dream.
Then I am assaulted by all absurd stories, bizarre projects, incredible adventures, the mad men and the criminals who have never lived and want to live in me, the loves factitious and unreasoned, the singular deaths, incredible.” (PAPINI 2009, 247)

And indeed after this death and rebirth, and his “admitting crudely to the feebleness and of fiction of life” (PAPINI 2009, 186) Papini will embrace more and more his creative side: he will take up poetry, the tales that had sprung up after his “philosophical death” of 1906 will grow into fully fledged novels, and most importantly he will “leap over” his scepticism to embrace catholic faith in 1919. 

Boris Ignatovich - Hermitage - 1931

The papinesque automyth⁴ depicts him setting to work on his magnum opus, the “Storia de Cristo” as an atheist, and warming up to the faith as his close reading of the gospels ignited the embers of his idealism. A recurrent concern in Papini’s work, as with many of his time and milieu, is with the potency, the impact, of art on life: here writing itself operate the conversion, granting it the thaumaturgic qualities Papini had long demanded.

It would be wrong to depicts Papini’s conversion as one more publicity stunt, or just another contrived provocation, as some of his contemporaries have done (LOVREGLIO 1975, 227) – it is in fact precisely in the most inflexible nihilism of his youth we should look for that mystical disposition that has led him from early on to gravitate around religion (PAPINI 2011, 37). He himself writes in the foreword to his Storia de Cristo, “The author of this book once wrote another one, many years ago, to tell the sad life of a man who wanted, at one point, to become God. Now, in the maturity of age and consciousness, he attempts to write the life of a God that made itself man.” (PAPINI 2010, 51);

But more than a contortion to find some continuity in his variegated existence, there is no doubt some some truth in this parallel. The failure to reach godhood must have played its part in his later choosing the more humble and gemütlich path of merely partaking in the divine. This said, to my knowledge, his future writing as a catholic superstar do not engage with origenian or other “authorized” discussions of deification.

His need to act on the world, to make a durable mark on his age, lure him out of his ivory tower: he comes to admit that acting upon men demand “sympathy and love,” demands “a direct and quotidian contact with all, with men of the city and men of the country, with school children and factory workers, with the women who hope and those who suffer”  (PAPINI 2009, 204) – already by then, the program of his strapaesian populism contains the words and seeds of his future Catholicism.

And to justify his old habit of boisterous indictments, he gives it an unexpected twist: 
“Men, I love you, as few loved you. All my inner life is filled with the profound love.” Never mind the fact that a few pages earlier he had claimed his writing was the honest portraiture of that inner life. He goes on: “I would like to see you greater, happier, purer, nobler and more powerful. And my greatest dream would be to be your true and greatest redeemer.” (PAPINI 2009, 206). Hence his blasphemous project to dethrone God is reconstructed into a messiah complex somewhat more sympathetic to the christian values.

In fact shortly after, Papini reveals (maybe unwittingly) a paradox of his metaphysics – or lack of thereof: from his earliest writings but increasingly after Il Crepusculo (1906) he articulates his own creativity in terms of inspiration: nothing very original there, Papini had read Carlyle and there is little doubts he sees himself on the side of Great Men. Describing the ecstatic fervor of such inspirations he write: “And what have I not done, and what would I not do to be shaken and woken up for one instant, to receive suddenly the mysterious dictation of a revelation!
Be it God that inspires me or the Demon, I do not care: but mat someone greater than me, saner than me, more clairvoyant than me, madder than me, speak through my mouth, write through my hand, think through my thoughts.” (PAPINI 2009, 209)
Indeed the reader does wonder, when the early Papini spoke of inspiration à la Boccacio, where did he imagine those sacred thoughts came from? Not from the empty sky, surely, and not from the demon either, in whom, for all his talk, Papini believe no more than he did in God? His artistic activity, and subsequently his quriks, were justified from his status as a chosen among men, his belonging to an elite – who watches the watchers and chose the chosen? Here we might well have the roots of Papini’s faith stretching back into his old life of unbelief… 

Ivan Kliun - Unknown title - Omsk - 1910'

via Avant-Garde Foundation

Altogether we have a book of great significance which does not seem to have received in the English language (or French, for that matter) the attention that it is due: an increasing number of books explore the connection between the avant-gardes and the radical right, and Papini provides us with a crucial testimony of how to pass from the one to the other. It is both exceptionally biased and clear-headed, in that it was written precisely at the time of the transition, and does not yet attempt to re-write history as to ease the fit between the pieces of the puzzle.
For all his flaws and eccentricities it is easy to relate to, if not to like, Giovanni Papini: the existential questions he is asking, in his exotic dialect, were becoming all pervasive at his time, and haunt most of us to this day. His answers, though, are significantly less satisfying.

1 - On Papini being forced into joining the Party, see LOVREGLIO 1973, 141. Despite the sheepish sympathy of the biographer, this account is not to be dismissed as many a catholic writer found actually existing fascism not conservative enough to support it officially. Concerning Papini’s anti-semite activities long before Fascism turned officially to this ideology in 1938, see GUNZBERG 1992, 254. On the same subject, in Italian, see this article.

2 - See Adolf Loos' 1908 "Ornament is Crime". 
3 - in "Il Resto del Carlino", 5th of November 1910.
4 - François Livi , in the French preface, calls the book an "autobiographical myth" - the concept is developed by Westerhoff (in French). 

Adamson, Walter L. 1993. Avant-Garde Florence. From Modernism to Fascism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Deleuzes, Gilles & Guattari, Félix. 1980. Mille Plateaux. Capitalisme et Schizophrénie. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit.

Gunzberg, Lynn M. 1992. Strangers at Home : The Jews in the Italian Literary Imagination. Berkeley : University of California Press.

Groys, Boris. 2011. The Total Art of Stalinism. Avant-Garde, Aesthetic, Dictatorship and Beyond. London: Verso Books.

Lovreglio, Janvier. 1973. Giovanni Papini. Un odyssée Intellectuelle entre Dieu et Satan. 4 volumes. Paris : Editions P. Lethielleux.

Mao, Douglas, and Walkowitz, Rebecca L. 2010. Bad Modernisms. Durham: Duke University Press. 

Papini, Giovanni. 2009. Un Homme Fini, trans. Yseult Pelloso. Lausanne : L’Age d’Homme. 

Papini, Giovanni. 2010. Histoire du Christ. Trad. Gerard Genot. Lausanne : L’Age d’Homme. 

Scott, James C. 1998. Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. London: Yale University Press.

Stirner, Max. 1995. The Ego and its Own. London : Cambridge University Press.  

Strauss, Leo. “German Nhilism”. Ed. Janssens D. & Tanquay D. in Interpretation 26, 3 (1999) 353-78.

Talmon, Jacob L. 1991. Myth of the Nation and Vision of Revolution: Ideological Polarization in the Twentieth Century. New Brunswick: Transaction publisher

Wilson Smith, Matthew. 2007. The Total Work of Art. From Bayreuth to Cyberspace. New York: Routledge. 

Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a New Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler

" 'O man-projected Figure, of late 

Imaged as we, thy knell who shall survive? 

Whence came it we were tempted to create 

One whom we can no longer keep alive? "

Thomas Hardy, God's Funeral, 1908, in A. N. Wilson's God's Funeral

If you wonder whether or not you should buy this book, I will try to save you time: go and buy it now, read it first and maybe later come and read this post. In the following paragraphs I might appear more critical of the work than I actually mean to be, and that is only for a couple of reasons: first, reading -and writing- a review that has only praises to share is fairly boring, and second, criticism of such a dense and structured theory prompts, as it should, the groping development of my own ideas, and provide me with a platform to put them in form. 

When Stanley G. Payne writes this book is 'the most important to appear in the history of fascism in a decade or more' I think it is not only to keep his seat in the canonical assembly of the New Consensus, but because this is truly a step forward for his field both in terms of method and of content, a big step on the slippery slope of fascism studies that could have proven fatal to anyone less rigorous, well read and well established than Roger Griffin.

Roger Griffin has published four books, a collection of essays, edited a number of key sources in the area and, Iordachi tells us, written more than a hundred articles. In the process he largely engineered the emergence of a "new consensus" in the field of comparative fascism studies, essentially a definition and interpretation of fascism as an international phenomenon, including both Nazism and Italian Fascism, as well as number of other more or less embryonic related movements throughout the world, stretching from the early XXth century to contemporary examples. 

If you would like a better grasp of the notion, and how he differentiates it from previous accounts of the fascist phenomenon, you will find him unpacking his concept time and again, and summing up the state of scholarly research in the field (here for example) both online and offline - but for the time being, let us focus on the more condensed definition he provides, in its more concise incarnation: 

"Palingenetic Ultranationalism" he finds to capture the essence of the phenomenon, iin somewhat sibylline terms. But Griffin leaves nothing to chance and repeatedly proceeds to explore the meanings of both terms with great skills and minute precision; To keep it short one could define ultranationalism as a form of authoritarian and often violent concern with homogeneity - both ideological and biological - "palingenetic," on the other hand, present a bigger challenge, but also the true specificity of Griffin's interpretation, for it refers to fascism's alleged irrational, mythic and 'political religious' content, an area difficult enough to grapple with for historians already treading a narrow path, to the point it had often before been belittled or completely ignored. 

Palingenesis, more specifically, refers to the quest of (national) rebirth, that New Beginning the subtitle of the book refer to; And indeed, Modernism and Fascism, more than any of his previous books is partly abstracted in order to focus on concepts, and on palingenesis in particular, an elusive notion which Griffin confronts with an extended arsenal of concepts often lifted from studies of modernity and modernism, ranging from Zygmunt Bauman to Modris Eckstein, but also Frank Kernode or, as we will see, Victor Turner. This makes for a rather different book from what his readers might have been used to, stretching defiantly his field of expertise. Save the two central examinations of modernism in Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, do not expect the dense, focused, surgical prose one finds elsewhere in his work: this is an ambitious work of theory, of 'reflexive narrative' as the author calls - and as ambitious his endeavour, it worked for me on at least two levels: both in providing a compelling and original analysis, and on introducing me to a entire range of sources and concepts carefully handpicked across many unfamiliar disciplines.  

I suspect an emerging trend of historians calling onto anthropological concepts to untangle difficult notions the 'post-modern' approach did not provide for (just yesterday I heard UCL David D'avray make a similar case.) Here and there they might be found raving defiantly against the Cultural Turn lobby, but it's armed with a precise conceptual apparatus (his signature Weberian 'ideal type' or the 'reflexive narrative') borrowed from very respectable authorities that Griffin sets out on the Grand Projet to provide his readership with an autobahn stretching from generic fascism to the roots of modernism, and even way beyond this into the age old 'psychodynamics' of mankind as a whole:

Umberto Boccionio - Fusion Of A Head And A Window - 1912 - 

via Futurism and the Past

"Destruam et Aedificabo"
Joseph Proudhon's motto, of contentious signification, 

quoted in James H. Billington's Fire in the Minds of Men

The book first attempt to produce a working definition of modernity, in anthropological terms, as a gaping hole left in the ideological fabric of the West, a 'black hole' absorbing mankind's virtus and high-minded ideals. This rotting corpse left over from God's aborted funerals exhale an angsty stench that has fueled many artistic and ideological movements since the Enlightenment. Escaping this dire metaphysical condition, Griffin's modernists experience sparse but intense epiphanic moments, timeless and overwhelming mystical experiences flowing often from Modernity's very heart, and, on the late, set out to construct a world that could render this extra-temporality permanent. 

The construction of atemporality is found to justifies the dual fascist (and modernist) imaginary, often perceived as paradoxical: futural and modernist on the one hand, arcadian, pastoral and sometimes primitive on the other.

Throughout the book he presents his reader with several compelling examples of the oft occulted relationship between modernism and fascism in art and design, from which, for example, I borrowed here. As confirmed by the rich bibliography he provides, the association of fascism with modernism is not as rare he sometimes make it out to be: the real and riskier thesis of his book lies elsewhere, namely in the atavistic interpretation of modernism itself, as the cultural dynamic that spawned and sustained fascism.

Modernism is a movement, loosely defined and certainly blurry on the edges, but none the less recognizable - where it becomes problematic is in identifying it's source and it's logic, since it is undeniably bound up to modernity, not unlike fascism itself: either through conscious identification, or as hostile reaction. Griffin attempts to outline an image of programmatic modernism that transcends the modernist/reactionary duality, but it sometimes feels like somewhat of a pragmatic reaction, attempting by the means of modernity to reconstruct a pre-modern ideal. In order to encompass the cultural pessimism admittedly axial to any interpretation of the development of fascism, Griffin I believe favours the second interpretation, that of modernism being a reaction, to modernity, and to that pervasive 'low-brow' form of secularization Weber coined the 'disenchantment of the world'. 

If modernism was often elusive a concept, modernity is one broad behemoth of a notion, that feels sometimes like it has been misplaced, like belonging to the 'theology shelf' rather than the 'sociology' or 'history' one: to put it differently, modernity might well have drained the world from much magic, but this only made modernity all the more numinous; 

For Griffin's fascists, modernity has robbed the West of it's certainties, of it's meaning and of it's purpose: deprived from an integrated, coherent and self-contained representation of the world, man cannot ward off any longer the ever-present existential terror inherent to his condition as a sentient being. Modernism, the author finds to be a nebula of attempted solutions to this spiritual crisis, particularly acute under the raging capitalism of XIXth century Europe. It manifests itself either in epiphanic form (essentially the contemplation of this numinous modernity I referred to earlier), or, more importantly for the subject of the book, in programmatic fashion, that is as an organized attempt at constructing wholly a re-enchanted world, to forge anew the 'Great Chain of Being' with which to fetter anew the world as it stands.

This is what Griffin calls political modernism, a concept that we could to define away from the ageing tropes of totalitarianism so as to integrate Zionism for example, or democratic nationalism in the colonies. In my eyes this notion, if indirectly treated, appear to be one of the cores of the book's many headed hydra, and it is easy to picture how comparative analysis of political modernism might bring crucial new concepts to the table. 

The other core concept I think is the characterization of fascism as essentially modernist - but a modernism that is not merely an isolated, self-conscious and indulgent aesthetic aping, but a 'primordial', universal and heartfelt reaction to an existential condition. This approach the author wants to be a solution to the perceived "aporias" of fascism, as resolving the paradoxes that have now for decades eluded or polarized scholarship.

This is a courageous stand point, the polar opposite of the still often encountered pathologisation of fascism, and if it by no means justifies or sympathizes with fascist ideology, it also ensures to keep at bay any assertions of fascism's "exceptionalism", in it's psychological or sociological forms. 
As to the resolution of fascism's paradoxes, I am maybe less convinced, as I have come to think of at least some fascist thinkers  as self-consciously, -perversely, even- paradoxical (NR in particular, but also cultural pessimists/traditionalists, and some of the artistic 'fellow travelers', all of which hold a preponderent position in Griffin's narrative). In his interpretation, the modernist, utopian drive, essentially pictures a sort of palingenetic Progress as transcending time to bring about a world where physical and cultural technology has largely been abstracted. This, to me, fails to address to it's full extent fascism's refusal of progress, and their embrace of paradox as transcendence  This would take into account the instrumentalisation of anti-enlightenment thinkers (Joseph de Maistre etc.) of many fascist or proto-fascist movements (for example Action Française) and the theological elements sometimes construed as rhetorical. 

The modernist and fascist peculiar fusion of utopian and arcadian imaginaries is not fully explained by their alleged striving for an extra-temporal, permanent civilization: anarcho-primitivists (by no means fascists!) for example offer an often immanent understanding of the future as a new past. In their case, as, I believe, in some manifestations of fascist (often volkish) thought, it is not progress that is understood to abstract from contemporary existence an idyllic pastoral, but it's very refusal, an epoch-making process not of innovation but of brutal regression. 

Caspar David Friedrich, Zwei Männer am Meer, 1817

"Wie scheint doch alles Werdende so krank"

Georg Trakl, quoted by Theodor Adorno in
Spengler nach dem Untergang, 1950

Anthropology sometimes reminds me of political theology: in Carl Schmitt's often quoted "All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical development - in which they were transferred from theology to the theory of the state, whereby, for example, the omnipotent god became the omnipotent lawgiver," one can discern the same concern with distinguishing (or establishing) a permanent order of social relations, and an integrated model of both inner and social life.
Anthropology, though, for all it's concern with tribal societies, wrestle heroically a model of change, of transformation, whereas Schmitt, Evola or even at some extent Eliades, are in search of permanence to legitimize their own modern existences, or that of particular regimes.
What Griffin's interpretation, to my surprise, does not take into account, something central to my intuition as to fascist reflexivity, is the understanding of modernity as being essentially irremediable, permanent - In the fascist spectacle, the predominance of style, as is sometimes argued, evidence acute awareness of the sheer infeasability of its project, and fully embrace the subsequent tragedy. It does not so much attempt at re-enchanting the world, as it pretends it does: the true blackness and nihilism of the fascist movement is to be found in this half-acknowledged awareness of the futility, and hence ultimately of it's mere aesthetic character, of attempting any resistance in the face of modernity, 

Griffin here and there throughout the book shows he is quite aware of the uncannily parallel trajectory an historian is bound to follow when attempting to evidence (or to conjecture) the peculiar mindset that would have presided to the development of fascism: his own narrative of this emergence, in all it’s sweeping ‘trandisciplinarity’ and reflexive essentialism, is not without analogy with the very ludic recombination, he elsewhere found to characterize the autodidact intellectuals of the New Right. Sternhell, I hear, was often to be found on the shelves of NR and radical right, but I would not be surprised would his historical work soon come to be dwarfed by Griffin's volume.

This in and of itself does not strike me as problematic in the least, but if the outcome of an informed research work by the leading scholar in the field produce an ideological map so similar to that followed by the alleged fascists themselves, we might need to add on that map some sort of indication as to this peculiar fascist self-consciousness:

Victor Turner, whom I have before mentioned in the context of the ludic metaphore, provides Griffin with the master-key to his 'primordial' interpretation of fascism and modernism interrelations: Turner, an anthropologist (famed for his advocacy of performance studies, and a close collaborator of Richard Schechner) is often remembered for his compelling interpretation of ritual and performance interrelations. 

But what Griffin lifts from Turner's vast analytical framework is a less popular assemblage, a universal typology of crisis. Turner's theory advances that every institutional response to transgressions or conflict, be it in modern or pre-modern societies, takes place in  a peculiar isolated space and time, a land of symbols and rituals both escaping the routine and crucial in maintaining it. Crucially, this enclave Turner finds to act as the 'reservoir' of social and cultural change, providing both a framework and a justification for innovation and adaptation. 
In Turner's model, when a society experience a crisis that requires change, it is often unable to effect those changes itself in it's day to day process - it needs to call for the delimitation of a special time and place, somehow situated outside of the normative boundaries of tradition, a spatio-temporal state of exception if you will, where structural changes and innovation that would elsewhere be perceived as hostile, are allowed to take place. This space and time, that of rituals but also of organized justice, is what Griffin and Turner refer to as the liminal (when it aims at perpetuating the existing order) or liminoid (when it attempts at creating a new one.)

Unknown - Yesterday and Today - 1925

“Theatre is, indeed, a hypertrophy, an exageration, of jural and ritual processes; 

it is not a simple replication of the “natural” total processual pattern of social drama. 

There is, therefore, in theatre something of the investigative, judgemental, 

and even punitive character of law in action, and something of the sacred, mythic, numinous, 

even “supernatural” character of religion action – sometimes to the point of sacrifice.” 

Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play, 1982

Griffin sizes the well formed anthropological model as the core of his reflexive narrative of modernity - modernity becomes an extended, permanent sense of crisis, and modernism's ritual and symbolic agitation an attempt at harnessing the power of the liminoid to put an end to the modern condition.
One is bound to agree that all consideration of such titanic concepts as modernity could hardly be pursued without a narrative of sort - yet as Griffin selected, from the gigantic interconnected body of work proposed by Victor Turner (stretching from such universal conceptions as Social Drama, all the way to performative praxis of rituals in school - which in Griffin case's would admittedly be taking "methodological empathy" a step too far!) one is surprised to find he leaves out Turner's emphasis on the relation between reflexivity and performance: in ‘From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play”, he for example advances the existence of a continuum stretching between ritual, a true ‘ideal type’ lost in the midst of conjectural history, and theatre or performance, reflexive and modern. 

Griffin is well aware of the collusion between modernist theatre and political praxis (see his ‘Staging the Nation’s Rebirth' or his quoting from Falasca-Zamponi) - but to my surprise, the model through which the author analyses and deconstruct both fascism and modernism gives surprisingly little credence to the development of this reflexivity: whereas he is at pains to insist on the legitimizing presence of the said reflexivity in his own narrative interpretation of modernity, in modernism and fascism, it seems that for all his methodological empathy, he did not find in the fascist train of thought, nor, more surprisingly, in the the modernist one either, enough self-awareness to address nor question the ritual pattern, the ‘eternal return’ of an atavistic concern allegedly transcending time. Reasons and excuses abound when looking at the existing scope (and size!) of the book as it is written – but I cannot help but think that, for example, the Benjaminian debate over fascism manifesting the aesthetization / sacralisation of politics would be seen under a different light if modernism, political or otherwise, came to be interpreted as a spectacular and performative (if not downright parodic) re-enactment of a fabled, yet total and coherent golden-age.

But let's be honest: I am pretty glad he left that much out, because as those who will or have read the book might notice, there is little on this blog that could pass as anything else than a paraphrase of Pr. Griffin in general, and of this one book in particular! 

Unspeakable Space

“When a work is at its peak in intensity, proportions, quality of execution, in perfection, 

there occurs a phenomenon of unspeakable space. 

The areas start shining, radiating, physically they radiate.”

Le Corbusier, quoted by Gavin McKeeney

Giovanni Guerrini, Ernesto Bruno La Padula, Mario Romano - Palazzo Della Civiltà - 1938/1943 - by Agugiaro

Aldo Rossi - San Cataldo Cemetary - 1978/? - Picture by Gabriele Basilico 2007

Yi Architects - Stuttgart Municipal Library

"architecture is not simply construction, or even the satisfaction of material needs; it must be something more [...]. Only when a harmony of proportions is reached, inducing the observer to pause in contemplation or emotion--only then will the constructive scheme have become a work of architecture."
Giuseppe Terragni, Caro Guardiano, 23 March 1931
quoted in David Rifkind, The Battle for Modernism, 2013

To control and shape the entire social arena - Constant Nieuwenhuys

“Architecture exists only to control and shape the entire social arena. 

It is constituted by this impulse propelling it to erect itself as the center 

and to organize all activities around itself.”

Denis Hollier, Against Architecture: The Writings of George Bataille, 1974

Guy Debord and the Situationist International shared, with others of the sixties characteristic attempts at realizing a Utopian praxis, an interest in reforming the human experience in it's totality. The sheer ambition of the project endowed their sometimes vague ideology with a visionary and sometimes nearly mystique quality, where the re-constructed, post-revolutionary world they prophesied had become so foreign to our contemporary alienated consciousness, that only abstract and poetic descriptions could be achieved.

Žižek famously claims in the 2005 eponymous documentary that is is more difficult to imagine the end of all life, than it is to picture the end of capitalism. This no doubt never stopped several generations of thinkers on the left, before and after Debord, to attempt at picturing what the reformed reality would be like: Adorno and Horkheimer, in The Dialectic of Enlightenment, find the re-enchantment of the world to be a process overlapping with the Marxist struggle but also, historically, straying from the stalwart historical materialist and the dominant modernist narratives that often presided to the leftist politics.

And indeed the sixties would-be revolutionaries learned the Frankfurt School's lesson well: all power was now to be given to the imagination rather than the soviet, a slogan, like many in those days, that made use of concepts and terminology vague enough to accommodate the increasing diversity of an atomized and bourgeois radical milieu. Yet, if preference was given to an inclusive praxis over a perceived dogmatic theory, the alleged leaders of the movement, and among them the situationists, did not loose the opportunity to perpetuate the speculative tradition, albeit with a timely twist.

Guy Debord - The Naked City - 1958

"When man plays he must intermingle with things and people in a similarly uninvolved and light fashion. He must do something which he has chosen to do without being compelled by urgent interests or impelled by strong passion; he must feel entertained and free of any fear or hope of serious consequences. He is on vacation from social and economic reality – or, as is most commonly emphasized: he does not work."

Erik Erikson, Childhood and Society, 1950

Psychogeography and other elements of their philosophy mark a clear rejection of the productivist, disciplined and intrinsically teleological spirit of orthodox Marxist thought, leaving only untouched (alongside with the authority of Debord...) the revolution itself, as an eerie absolute, largely bared from it's economic and class-based mechanics.

One of the models inspiring the situationists for this reconstruction of social relationships was to be found in the work of Johann Huizinga, a cultural historian who penned a landmark work in the field of game studies entitled Homo Ludens (1938) - Huizinga, like other radicals of his generation, attached himself to producing a discreet critique of the rational and mechanized way of life promoted by modernity, but the alternative, the model of social interaction against which he contrasted the alienated condition of the XXth century man was the model of the game.

Much could be said - and has been said - of the mindset fueling this pervasive and virtually indefinable activity that is play: Wittgenstein famously asserted that games, much like words, cannot be defined as such and only hold a "family resemblance" between themselves. An interesting attempt at separating the ludic activity from the quotidian, more recently, is to be found in Michael J. Apter's psychological reversal theory and it's opposition between telic (purpose oriented) and paratelic (process oriented) activities.
From this, inferring how a society based on those principles would function might prove more difficult.

Constant Nieuwenhuys - New Babylon - 1963

"Play is free movement within a more rigid structure."

Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman, 

Rules of Play : Game Design Fundamentals, 2003

Debord himself, acknowledging the importance of Huizinga and of games in general, will develop in 1977 a game of his own, "The Game of War", a lucky mixture of the long tradition of wargames and simulations, and of the more accessible variations on chess. The tokens could easily accommodate the archetypes of strategy and military theory he had been reading eagerly. And maybe the checkerboard proved a more welcoming support for the war he had been waging not unsuccessfully in the compromised realm of artist, student and worker politics some ten years earlier.

One of Debord's early collaborators, Constant Nieuwenhuys, who was to leave their increasingly politicized situationist milieu in the early sixties, embarked on an ambitious project of creating an alternative reality - a gigantic, all-encompassing project of semi-abstract urbanism, somewhat akin to other sixties, unapologetically utopian, "paper" architecture as presented by Archizoom, Haus-Rucker-Co, or recent Turner Prize nominee Paul Noble.

The New Babylon, as he titled it, he envisioned for all of the fifteen years he spent working on the project as a world-spanning city designed for the new modes of living that were to arise after the downfall of capitalism in the world, and more importantly, in the minds. The city as metaphor for political organization has of course a long ancestry, from Thomas More to St Augustine, but the peculiar approach artists have taken on those questions differentiate it radically from the mere ideological illustration: in the space of fifteen years of work, someone like Nieuwenhuys (or Noble) has not only time to develop individual, self-standing artworks, but also to extend, and enmesh or coordinate their respective mythologies to create a total framework. The choice of the urbanistic model for the construction of a grand-narrative likely reflect a will to evidence, in the inevitable variety of the artist production, a structure and a meaning, that could transcend the limited scope of the particular artwork to reflect the author's life-as-art.

Black Dog Publishing has an excellent book A User's Guide: The Situationist International by Simon Ford if you would like to read more on the situationist ideology

Constant Nieuwenhuys - New Babylon - 1963

"If he had been a great and wise philosopher, like the writer of this book, he would now have comprehended that Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and that Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do. And this would help him to understand why constructing artificial flowers or performing on a tread-mill is work, while rolling ten-pins or climbing Mont Blanc is only amusement."

Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Swayer, 1876

The principles governing to the organization of New Babylon's modular megastructures and of it's imagined inhabitants reflect the peculiar world-view that was arising from the creative milieu of both Debords and Nieuwhenhuys:
The ludic model they read in Huizinga offered powerful alternative to the mythic one for the blue-print of their utopia. Whereas myths pointed towards a monolithic and ossified future, the game provided the same self-contained narrative, but focused on the individual and affording him the meaningful choices a mythical framework denied. The game, in a way, was the myth for the liquid modernity.

In an interview given to BLDBLOG, architecture theorist Mark Wigley agree with the interviewer that the New Babylon "actually seems to be an example of architectural Stalinism – a world of total control." - agreeably a step or two from what is usually projected on the deconstructed and surreal architecture.
Surely games are not the most current metaphor for totalitarian societies: play, with it's associations of insouciant spontaneity, of creative individualism seems hardly to fit in as the typical activity in a regime where the individual initiative is sacrificed on the altar of the static and monolithic state.
Yet Boris Groys has written at length of the "The total art of Stalinism", as did Ulrich Schmid for fascism, on totalitarism as aesthetic pursuit, and Mussolini wrote in his Popolo d’Italia on the 14 July 1920 that “Lenin is an artist who has worked men, as other artists have worked marble or metals. But men are harder than stone and less malleable than iron. There is no masterpiece. The artist has failed. The task was superior to his capacities.”

Huizinga sees poetry and in particular the Vate, like Wittgenstein, as engaging in a form of play -of play with words- that creates myths by accumulating layers of discordant meanings. What Claudia Salaris calls the "lyrical order" (A la fete de la révolution, 2002, p.137) of modernist politics attempt at merging those contradictory meanings, and in the process at anchoring the concrete into the mythical.
Whether art was used as a metaphor for the construction of a coherent political community, or whether it was the political community that was metaphor of a creative endeavor, the relationship between art as a practice and that of politics seems in the case of totalitarian regimes to be more complex than purely instrumental - the sole constraint, for meta-political readings of the totalitarian discourse, be them artistic, literary or tragic, is to keep in mind the compulsory obsession with purity. Purity expresses the homogeneity of the organic whole and justify the movement/regime as Gestalt.

Constant Nieuwenhuys - New Babylon - 1963

"Play is the purest, the most spiritual, product of man at this stage, and it is at once the prefiguration and imitation of the total human life,--of the inner, secret, natural life in man and in all things. It produces, therefore, joy, freedom, satisfaction, repose within and without, peace with the world. The springs of all good rest within it and go out from it."

Freidrich Froebel, The Education of Man, 1888

The game seem a paradoxical activity: although it is intrinsically defined by it's rules, and often only by its rules, it is also a fundamentally free activity, in that it is, in it's purest forms, not compulsory. Beyond the obvious advantages, in terms of ideological construction, to build on a model that accommodate both rules and yet presupposes absolute freedom, it is worth calling on a concept of Huizinga to understand better this duality: what the Dutch writer refer to as the "magic circle" is the conceptual or imaginary frontier that separate world of the game from the real world. Just as the rules of the game do not need applying in the the players lives when they quit playing, the norms and hierarchies of the quotidian are in many ways suspended in the time and space of the game.
Although the "magic circle" is obviously porous (money stakes, relationships building between players, or celebrity for a few examples) it is easy to imagine that the stretching of this circle to englobe the entirety of human life, as Constant Nieuwenhuys was fantasizing, would be a lot less idyllic than might at first appear.
As Wigley inform us, Constant himself acknowledged rapidly that life in his city would probably, if safeguard a sense of individuality, crush any sense of privacy, but, and this is probably the most amazing thing in the New Babylon project, that did not stop him from developing his project further and further for many years, willingly sliding into dystopia, mirroring history.

Was there an acknowledged connection between modernist politics and games, before the Situationists? It is hard to say: Many modernist artists, like Duchamp who apparently gave up on Art for the sake of chess, readily acknowledged their fondness of games - but if dictators were fond of comparing their work with art, I have not yet come across any references to games; The analogy between politics and theatre, where one certainly "plays", has been widely discussed concerning both modernity and modernism, but this is still remote from games as we understand it here.
Roger Griffin defines in his foreword 'Another Face, Another Mazeway' a process of 'Mazeway Resynthesis', where "old and new ideological and ritual elements - some of which would previously have been incongruous or incompatible - are forged through 'ludic recombination' into a totalizing worldview." This, he considers to be the key process that allow the surprising medley of sometimes contradictory elements that characterize fascism.

He borrows the notion from anthropologist Victor Turner, for whom play and ritual are intrinsically related - the notion of liminality with which he refers to the idea of a world separated from the quotidian, is bound to remind us of the kingdom locked inside the magic circle: rituals, to Turner, just like games, have for primary purpose to construct and delimit this liminal space, escaping norms and traditions, yet fundamentally regimented. This, to me, sounds a lot like Carl Schmidt defense of the State of Exception and the marxist Permanent Revolution.