Pier Paolo Pasolini, Framed and Unframed by Luca Peretti Karen T. Raizen

Author:Luca Peretti,Karen T. Raizen
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781501328879
Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
Published: 2018-10-03T16:00:00+00:00

under fascism, Italy remained intact, in its misery and its “popular” culture: Fascism had in reality involved and corrupted several hundred thousand Italians, while the other forty million or so—middle and lower bourgeois and the people [popolo]—had not been “touched” by Fascism, because fascist repression was still an archaic type of repression that imposed gestures and actions, that demanded submission, but that was not able to transform the old human models except superficially.32

That is to say, he provides an account of Italian fascism as an alien and “untimely” logic that is at once “archaic” yet future-oriented in its desire to “transform the old human models” and that ultimately cannot succeed: it descends over a people but never manages to fully corrupt them. The second major shift is the one that Pasolini uses to start this essay: the claim that fundamentally, division as such has been lost, because the mutation is so much more thorough-going, rendering moot an opposition founded on a different (and more corporally “true”) model of being human, one that he relentlessly identifies with proletarian and subproletarian populations. But as much as that hints toward an economic approach (for the basic reason that it proceeds predominantly in terms of class division), this argument doesn’t remotely move through an analysis of how the economic and the social interact, at least not on any granular level. As a result, even if referring to shifts in the organization of “neo-capitalism” (especially around consumption), those shifts come untethered from more coherent accounts about why such a shift—and the mutations it wrought—comes at the particular time it does. The signifiers become floating, in ways that often threaten to lose any analytical coherence, as evident in his compounding definition: “we must free ourselves from the idea that this sin can be identified with fascism, old or new, that is to say with the effective power of capitalism.”33

Perhaps no word in Pasolini’s work is so subject to this sort of drift as that of fascism itself. For example, he insists that, “I find myself explaining and arguing at one and the same time, that all middle-class persons are, in fact, fascist, always, everywhere and to whatever party they belong.”34 It would be unfair to take a single sentence from his voluminous output as symptomatic or proof of a general tendency, and I have little interest in splitting hairs or retroactively holding him to his words. However, it would be equally misguided to treat such statements as mere polemic or invective, because we should take seriously how this specific version of historical drift—in which everyone is becoming middle class and all middle-class persons are fascist—is enabled by a particular yet unfortunately familiar and oft-reinforced mode of analysis. This is a mode that haunts the history of socialist thought and insists on a stark class divide yet does not understand class composition as a process always in formation, generated continually and contentiously through the way that radical proletarian movements and antagonisms actively conceive of their own activities.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.