In The Unmaking of Fascist Aesthetics (2001), Kriss Ravetto highlights the difficulty and danger of studying fascism, asking, “What constitutes the event of fascism? What are the criteria for representing a historical event? And how is this narrative to be plotted if narrative is indeed determinative?” This panel explores these questions through film, essay, and autobiography, considering how Benjamin’s famous dictum that “fascism is an aestheticizing of political life” might be understood as a name for a particular aesthetic of history mediated by specific forms of art. Engaging the status of different media, or genres, in the production of histories, this panel contemplates the forms of (telling) history that cultivate fascism.
To date, work on fascism’s aesthetic forms of history refuses consensus. For example, while Fredric Jameson’s classic reading of Wyndham Lewis in Fables of Aggression (1979) and Roger Griffin’s sweeping history, Modernism and Fascism (2007), both might concur with Frank Kermode’s observation about modernism and fascism’s shared millenialism, they disagree about its mediation. Where Jameson’s text, in omitting Lewis’s paintings, privileges the literary text for fascist history, Griffin argues that fascism’s ideal historical medium is “the built environment,” particularly war’s negative architecture. Rey Chow (2003), unmooring fascism from its typical political contexts, locates fascist history in the cinematic, a “technologized idealism,” that is “a glossy surface image, a crude style,” which serves to establish exclusive social groups. Meanwhile, Philip Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy’s influential “The Nazi Myth” (1990) posits that myth is the mode of nation-forming Nazi history, while Claudio Fogu in The Historic Imaginary (2003) describes Italian fascist history as defined by a visuality of immediacy, “aimed at giving presence to the past in the mind of the observer, thereby eliding the medium of narrative between historical agency and consciousness.” Though there are repeated tendencies in these conceptions of fascist history—its mythic and eschatological affect as well as its style of immediacy—the proliferating distinctions remain in tension and beg the question of whether the differences are a matter of scholarly approaches, distinct fascist histories, or distinct fascisms.
While recent MLA panels have revisited responses to fascism in the Anglo-American contexts—i.e. “Gender, Representation, and Fascism” (2018) and “Can It Happen Here?” (2018)—this panel brings together instances of fascist culture in Europe and the Americas for a more holistic engagement with what Frederico Finchelstein (2010) called a “global phenomenon.” This panel’s specific interest in holding a conversation about fascism across national boundaries distinguishes it from previous attempts to consider the aesthetic forms of fascism, which often either diffused into a “floating signifier,” as Foucault describes it, or reified in national formations. Aware that it takes place during a moment of right-wing cultural resurgence, this panel will limit each paper to a maximum of 17 minutes to allow for a robust discussion of the urgent questions about the space, time, and, ultimately, meaning of fascism that it seeks to broach.
The session’s first paper thinks through life writing as fascist history, as Sanders I. Bernstein reads Benito Mussolini’s 1928 My Autobiography, ghost-written for an American audience. The autobiography rejects the moniker of a memoir, instead insisting, despite its mediated, multiple, and essentially past-attending nature to offer direct access to the life of Mussolini. Denying its own constructed-ness and mediation, the autobiography performs the auratic illusions of fascism, making life into nothing but the raw material for the fascist-state-to-come. Examining My Autobiography’s American reception, which both confirms and contests the narrative’s mystifications, this paper will link the promises of these twinned modernist “master” forms—autobiography and fascism—with the historical promise of “America,” locating fascist desire in its ostensibly “democratic” culture.
Revisiting these transatlantic flows of fascist desire five years later, Amanda Minervini considers an unsuccessful instance of cinema’s projection of fascist history—the largely-neglected documentary, Mussolini Speaks (1933). Radio announcer Lowell Thomas and Columbia Pictures co-founder Jack Cohn conceived the film to celebrate Mussolini’s decade-long reign and allow Americans “to see for themselves” what the Italian leader had accomplished in his country. However, though the film was a box office success in the United States, Mussolini ultimately suppressed it. Closely analyzing the documentary’s narrative, footage selection, and soundtrack, Miniervini locates in the film’s form as well as its production history the source of the failed translation between Mussolini’s vision of fascist history and that of the American audience, which saw the Great Depression resolved in the film’s fascist future.
Finally, Chet Lisiecki will conclude this panel’s formal presentations by broadening these questions of fascism, form, and history through his examination of literary history and fascist futurity as worked out 1933 to 1939 by right-wing writers such as Erwin Guido Kolbenheyer and Josef Weinheber in the German literary journal Die Neue Literatur. As the journal transformed into a platform for fascist ideology, many of its contributors used the journal to theorize and imagine the artist’s unique role in fashioning the fascist state. Lisiecki argues that Weinheber’s claim in his 1939 article “On Form” that “books make history,” in playing on the double meaning of the German verb “machen” (to make and to do), articulates the fascist desire for pure presence, for History without history, for essence without difference. Fascism, in other words, demands the abjection or casting off of failure through the ever-nebulous “aestheticizing of political life.” For Weinheber and others, the fascist does history by making history. Lisiecki closes our panel, then, by suggesting that fascist historiography can be understood as the collapsing of literary history and fascist futurity through the abjection of failure, a process that negatively structures the thought of history itself.