Morbid Symptoms Gramsci and the Political Rhetoric of Futurism

Sascha Bru

Shortly after a rumour began circulating in the fall of 1920 that Filippo Tommaso Marinetti had converted to communism, , the intellectual leader of the Italian Communist Party (PCI), issued an essay entitled “Marinetti Rivoluzionario?” in the communist daily L’ordine nuovo.1 The essay claimed that Marinetti and his Futurist comrades could count on considerable support from the working class,2 and it depicted the Futurists as true Marxists in the bourgeois aesthetic sphere. On 6 January 1921, L’ordine nuovo published the programme of Gramsci’s newly launched Istituto di Cultura Proletario in Turin, which announced educational and artistic projects for the working class. Throughout the same year, critical but constructive assessments of Futurism continued to appear in the communist daily, as if Gramsci were looking to win the Futurists over to join his Institute. And sure enough, a number of Futurist ‘officials’ (Carlo Frasinelli, Franco Rampa Rossi and Fillia) went on to co-operate with the Turin communists. In less than two years, jointly they organised various Futurist exhibitions (the first one opened by Marinetti giving a speech3), published a number of poetry collections and manifestoes, produced Fillia’s first play Sensualità, and eventually established a Futurist artistic syndicate. The latter managed to attract more than a thousand members in less than a year, which

1 The essay is reproduced in an English translation in Antonio GRAMSCI, Selections from Cultural Writings, ed. David Forgacs, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985, 49–52. Hereafter referred to parenthetically as SCW. 2 On the popularity of Futurism among working class Italians, see: Claudia SALARIS, Marinetti Editore, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1990, passim; and Claudia SALARIS, “Marketing Modernism: Marinetti as Publisher”, Modernism/Modernity, 1/3 (1994), 109–127. 3 The speech, “L’inaugurazione della mostra d’arte futurista”, was partly published in L’ordine nuovo on 28 March 1922. Variations 13 (2005) 120 Sascha Bru gave way to plans to erect branches in Bologna and Genova as well.4 These plans were never executed, however. After a year or two, the flourishing Turin section of Futurism began to whither, in part because the PCI’s predominantly conservative aesthetics led to a heated debate on the distinct roles of the artistic and the political avant-gardes, Left-wing newspapers as Il rinnovamento, Gioventù socialista and Avanguardia being just some sites of the altercation.5 Meanwhile, Marinetti witnessed how Mussolini started to erect the Fascist regime. Accepting to continue Futurism under constricting conditions in order to avoid its total demise, he took refuge to Mussolini’s Fascism. Despite discussions among Futurists on Marinetti’s politics, most Futurists remained loyal to his aesthetic movement thereafter. As a result, the brief dialogue between Gramsci and Marinetti’s movement ended. Gramsci reiterated, albeit ambivalently, his admiration for Futurism in his famous letter to Leon Trotsky (reproduced in the latter’s Literatur und Revolution of 1923) just before this dialogue came to a close. Later, when incarcerated by Mussolini from 1926 until his death, he voiced his disappointment in Futurism in his famous Quaderni del carcere or Prison Notebooks (in particular in notes 1670 and 2110). In a note from 1930 entitled “The Futurists”, his depiction of Marinetti and his followers has a bitter ring to it: “A group of schoolboys who escaped from a Jesuit boarding school, whooped up in a nearby wood, and […] led back under the policeman’s stick” (SCW, 19). Research on Gramsci and Futurism most often contents itself with pointing at the short-lived ideological congeniality between both to explain Gramsci’s disappointment in the movement in later years.6 Yet, already in his letter to Trotsky did Gramsci refer to

4 For a more detailed discussion of the Futurist exploits in Turin, see: Günter BERGHAUS, Futurism and Politics. Between Anarchist Rebellion and Fascist Reaction, 1909–1944, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 180–197. 5 Umberto CARPI, L’estrema avanguardia del novecento, : Editori Riuniti, 1985, chapters 3 and 4. 6 See, among others: Sabine KEBIR, Die Kulturkonzeption Antonio Gramscis. Auf dem Wege zur antifaschistischen Volksfront, Berlin: Akademie, 1980, 94–97. Renate Holub, who has it that “until recently, the Gramsci critical community has showed little interest in his literary Morbid Symptoms 121

Marinetti’s Al di là del communismo (1920), accentuating that a straightforward political doctrine was lacking in the movement from the start. Somewhat surprisingly, then, scholars far less frequently pay attention to the way Gramsci’s assessment of Futurism may have figured in his more general approach to language and politics.7 Why, for instance, did Gramsci deem Futurism worth critical attention even after it had become clear to him that bourgeois society had been able to foster and tolerate the Futurist aesthetic opposition? In this essay, I should like to take up this question, because a reading of Futurism through the lens of Gramsci’s language politics allows us to view Futurist poetics from a perspective beyond the narrow confines of party-ideology. Evidently, for this perspective to take shape, a few words on Gramsci’s critical practice must forego our discussion of Futurism.

The Language Lacking in Gramsci It has become a commonplace in Gramsci studies to state that his “philosophy of practice” (as his version of Western Marxism is most often called) does not amount to a clear-cut methodology.8 Always embedding his object of enquiry in concrete contexts, Gramsci’s work proves too pragmatic to derive simple theoretical formulae from. Yet as Franco Lo Piparo and others have illustrated, there are a number of obvious continuities inscribed in his work that come to the fore when we link his early work in linguistics to critiques”, refers only once to the fact that “Gramsci knew [Futurism] very well”. Renate HOLUB, Antonio Gramsci. Beyond Marxism and Postmodernism, : Routlegde, 1992, 17. 7 A recent exception is found in Peter Ives’ Gramsci’s Politics of Language (2004), which asserts that Gramsci saw the Futurists “as a starting point” for a critical approach to language, since they represented “the most creative and progressive response to […] bourgeois culture”. However, whereas Ives successfully shows how Futurism provided Gramsci with insights to counter neo-grammarian and Crocean approaches to language and literature, he fails to take into account the close inter-connection between Futurism and Gramsci in the early 1920s and as such also refrains from a reading of Futurism that points at the broader cultural stakes Gramsci invested in Marinetti’s movement. Moreover, little attention is paid in Ives to elucidate Gramsci’s later disappointment in the movement. See: Peter IVES, Gramsci’s Politics of Language. Engaging the Bakhtin Circle & The Frankfurt School, Toronto: University Press, 2004, 61. 8 See the insightful Pasquale VERDICCHIO, “Reclaiming Gramsci: A brief survey of current and potential uses of the work of Antonio Gramsci”, Symposium, 49/2 (1995), 169–177. 122 Sascha Bru his later elaboration of the concept of hegemony.9 In his final Prison Notebook Nr. 29, entitled “Notes for an Introduction to the Study of Grammar”, Gramsci observed that “[e]very time that the question of language surfaces, in one way or another, it means that a series of other problems are coming to the fore” (SCW, 183). One of the central problems addressed in Notebook Nr. 29 is how a collective popular will is formed through language, that is, “how hetero- geneity and multiplicity [are] transformed into a collective unity”.10 By addressing this issue, the Notebook harks back to a problem Gramsci already came across in his years as a student of linguistics with professor Matteo Bartoli in Turin. A topic Bartoli dealt with in his courses was how and why one people could conquer another through language. Bartoli’s interest appears to have cast a long shadow over Gramsci’s work. His journalistic writings, as is well known, often critically reflected on attempts to unify linguisti- cally, and as the aforementioned Notebook illustrates, the question of language would continue to attract his attention until his death. Such reflections gradually led Gramsci to approach language as the vehicle of an ever-changing culture and multilinear history fuelled by hegemonic constellations. Significantly, the concept of hegemony, too, can be traced back to Gramsci’s years as a student. Terms Bartoli frequently used, for instance, were fascino (binding) and prestigio (prestige). Lo Piparo argues convincingly that these terms were often employed synonymously with egemonia (hegemony) in linguistic writings of the latter half of the nineteenth century which Gramsci must have been acquainted with.11 Hegemony, in brief, can therefore not be separated from language. Lo Piparo’s account falls somewhat short, however, when it discusses Gramsci’s political-theoretical insights. Reproducing the

9 Franco Lo PIPARO, Lingua intellettuali egemonia in Gramsci, Bari: Laterza, 1979; Niels HELSLOOT, “Linguists of All Countries …! On Gramsci’s Premise of Coherence”, Journal of Pragmatics, 13 (1989), 547–566; Leonardo SALAMINI, The Sociology of Political Praxis: An Introduction to Gramsci’s Theory, London: Routledge, 1981, 181–196; Luigi ROSSIELLO, “Linguistica e marxismo nel pensiero di Antonio Gramsci”, The History of Linguistics in Italian, ed. Paolo Ramat et al., Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1986, 237–258. 10 Peter Ives, Gramsci’s Politics, 36. 11 Franco Lo Piparo, Lingua intellettuali egemonia, 106. Morbid Symptoms 123 formula “State = Civil Society + Political Society”, he summarises Gramsci’s theory of hegemony in a manner all too familiar in the cluttered field of cultural studies today. According to this view – which is, to be sure, encountered in Gramsci’s writings, yet, as will become apparent, only as part of a larger design – civil society comprises all institutions mediating between the individual and the coercive state apparatus or political society. The latter is then seen as coterminous with government (bureaucracy, parliament, etc.). From political society, a ruling group can exert power and exercise hegemony as long as it can rely on the voluntary co- operation of its citizens. Now, it is not hard to see why Lo Piparo should stop at this depiction of hegemony, since the frontiers of the “State” evoked here clearly coincide with the boundaries of a linguistically united Italy. However, if hegemony – coinciding with a national language – can be defined as the means employed by the modern state to generate consent, then two questions arise that have to do with counter-hegemonic opposition. Primo, what would a state look like wherein (external) coercion is minimal (or even non-existent)? Secundo, what kind of language is required to move away from the modern state, that is, what kind of language would people have to internalise or use for them to view society differently? Lo Piparo pays little attention to these queries, despite the fact that they, too, clearly form concerns throughout Gramsci’s work.12 I should briefly like to address these questions, because they point at a conundrum in Gramsci’s thought that may explain his early sympathy for Futurism (for other than party-ideological reasons) as well as his bitter stabs at it in prison. For it appears that Gramsci had a clear idea of what an ideal state should look like. What he lacked, though, was a language to convince others of his being in the right. And Futurist poetics and literary experi- mentation, we will see, may have provided just the tools required. When we turn to how Gramsci envisioned an alternative to the modern state, his metaphor of the “regulated society” plays a pivotal role:

12 For a critique of Lo Piparo in this sense, see: Dante GERMINO, “Antonio Gramsci: From the Margins to the Centre, the Journey of a Hunchback”, Boundary 2, 14/3 (1986), 19–30, 25–26. 124 Sascha Bru

It is possible to imagine the coercive element of the State withering away by degrees, as ever-more conspicuous elements of regulated society (or ethical state or civil society) make their appearance. The expressions “ethical state” or “civil society” would thus [signal …] a pure utopia, insofar as it was based on the presupposition that all men are really equal and therefore equally reasonable and moral, agreeing to accept the laws spontaneously, freely and not through coercion as imposed by another class, as something external to one’s conscience.13

Overtly labelling this self-regulated society (or civil society without political society) a utopian metaphor, Gramsci nonetheless went as far as to devise a number of strategies that must be developed for a transition to the regulated society. Such a transition, Gramsci argued, requires “a coercive [state] organization which will safeguard the development of […] regulated society, and which will therefore progressively reduce its own authoritarian and forcible interventions” (SPN, 263). From this remark, it appears that Gramsci could only conceive gradual progress, and this under constrictive terms. Political society, he asserted, would have to become a “nightwatchman”, until civil society could organise itself. Importantly, he thereby also located a rupture at one point in the future after which society would no longer be directed by coercion, but only governed by “spontaneous” consent. In devising a strategy for gradual progress to be followed by the state, Gramsci ascertained that change could only come about through language. “For a mass of people to be led to think coherently […], the question of language in general [linguaggio] and languages in the technical sense [lingua] must be put in the forefront of our enquiry” (SPN, 325, 348). Leaving the lingua (“la langue”, in French, as opposed to “le langage”) aside here – for then we would again be dealing with national, Italian tongue – Gramsci noted that language in general or linguaggio is essentially a “collective term”, binding various common senses living among people on different social strata in civil society. These common senses – in part comparable to what Raymond Williams later called

13 Antonio GRAMSCI, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. Quintin Hoare, London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1971, 263. Hereafter referred to parenthetically as SPN. Morbid Symptoms 125

“structures of feeling” in Marxism and Literature (1977) – are characterised by fragmentation, incoherence and a dogmatic as well as conservative outlook. Subject to coercion in the modern state, they are nevertheless also subject to continuous changes and cross-fertilisations, which illustrate that a more fundamental shift, such as the coming about of a regulated society, could be envisioned as well. A philosophy of practice, according to Gramsci, should open with a critique of “popular” common senses, since only then can a philosopher get into touch with the people and devise a somewhat different language which collectively attains “a single cultural ‘climate’” (SPN, 349) that could lead to a self- regulated civil society. Getting in touch with what people think and feel through language is one thing. Devising a different language that could represent a coherent counter-hegemonic ideology foregrounding the necessity of regulated society is another. Throughout Gramsci’s writings, reference is made to how to construe an alternative, counter-hegemonic language with which various common senses could identify. For example, his frequent use of inverted commas (especially in the Prison Notebooks) warns readers that the words highlighted should not be taken for granted, but that they are meant as new terminologies corresponding only in part to old meanings. “Hegemony”, obviously, would be a case in point. Whereas the term traditionally indicated dominance or power over,14 Gramsci pushed the concept’s boundaries to make them appropriate to changed circumstances. Anne Showstack Sassoon:

What is at stake here is his own continuing struggle with language […], in terms of the significations carried by individual words, as he attempts to find a way to depict not just old but new phenomena. […] Above all, he cannot see, or comprehend, these phenomena if they are reduced to one aspect, for example, if the state is only portrayed as having a monopoly of force without reference to its dependence on consent”.15

14 See the entry on “hegemony” in The Blackwell Dictionary of Twentieth Century Social Thought, ed. William OUTHWAITE and Tom BOTTOMORE, Oxford: Blackwell, 1993. 15 Anne SHOWSTACK SASSOON, Gramsci and Contemporary Politics. Beyond Pessimism of the Intellect, London: Routledge, 2000, 43–44. 126 Sascha Bru

This observation correctly stresses the inherent ambivalence and opaqueness of many concepts in Gramsci, resulting from the continued interference of dominant meanings and connotations. However, as will be clear by now, a number of passages in Gramsci’s writings suggest that, next to seeking a middle ground in language, one of his goals was a total redefinition of language’s components. Hegemony, again, is a case in point, for ideally it would come to stand for consent only and no longer for coercion. Gramsci’s thinking suggests that what his project lacked was a language that could somehow still be familiar and at the same time convey a spontaneity unheard of before, a language that could somehow generate a radically new outlook on the social. Throughout his work, we encounter his attempt to redefine indivi- dual words and push their semantic limits and thus to establish a new way of viewing society. Yet as prospects grew dim in prison, he noted that “[t]he crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear” (SPN, 276). Marcia Landis observes that “it is characteristic that Gramsci should frequently identify social problems in terms of language symptoms”.16 Indeed, he regularly alluded to neolalismo, for instance, as a symptom of the separation of artists from the people: “What are all the artistic and literary schools and groups if not a manifestation of cultural neolalism?”17 Still, at least one offspring of neolalism, that is, Futurism, provided Gramsci with a possible way out of his conundrum. That Gramsci paid a lot of attention to serialized fiction, theatre, and other modes of aesthetic production as means to gradually move towards a regulated society is well known. His attention for these phenomena can be explained mainly by the fact that they formed part of a wider popular culture crisscrossing various common senses. Gramsci’s attraction to Futurism as well cannot be

16 Marcia LANDIS, “Culture and Politics in the Work of Antonio Gramsci”, Boundary 2, 14/3 (1986), 49–70, 65. 17 Antonio GRAMSCI, Quaderni del carcere, ed. Valentino Gerratana, Turin: Einaudi, 2193, my translation. Morbid Symptoms 127 separated from his acute awareness of its popularity among the working class. On 8 September 1922, he reported to Trotsky on a Futurist exhibition organised by the Turin communists and Futu- rists, which Marinetti opened with a speech. The often cited letter reads:

Marinetti went round the exhibition with the workers and expressed his satisfaction at seeing that the workers were a great deal more responsive to Futurist art than the bourgeoisie. Before the war, the Futurist movement had been very popular with the workers. The review Lacerba, with a circulation of 20.000 thousand copies, sold over 80 per cent of them to the workers. During numerous Futurist events in the theatres of major Italian cities, the workers defended the Futurists against the blows dealt out to them by upper-class and bourgeois youths. (SCW, 52–54)

In Turin, Gramsci thus clearly saw Futurism as an important counter-hegemonic voice, emanating spontaneously from civil society. His acquaintance with the movement before the war further suggests that he may have been familiar with the poetics and literary experimentalism of Futurism. Indeed, already in 1913, thus long before the instauration of the Turin Instituto in 1921, Gramsci expressed his sympathy for Futurism in the Turin Corriere Universitario. Interestingly, he noted in the university periodical that “so far, the Futurists have had no intelligent critic: that is why no one has paid attention to them. If a few Grocean journalists had written a couple of articles on the subject, who knows how many discoverers of America there would now be!” (SCW, 49). He then went on to describe Marinetti’s writings as transgressing traditio- nal literary techniques by characterising his work as a language untying itself in a successive series of words, “as a successive or parallel or intersecting series of noun-planes […] Pity, though, that these poor people [the Futurists] are not really able to use their shotguns and daggers!” (SCW, 48). Welcoming first and foremost the Futurist stir in the “Italian intellectual hen-house,” Gramsci’s brief article in the Corriere Universitario also displays his aesthetic sensibility and linguistic sympathy for Marinetti’s poetics. Could it be that this poetics, the Futurist dealing with language, somehow 128 Sascha Bru attracted his attention as much as (or even more so than) the political and institutional role of the movement?

Futurist Freedom in Words / Fascist Words in Freedom Gramsci was very much aware of the fact that Futurist language emanated from the aesthetic sphere, and hence that the techniques of representation developed in Futurism would have to be re- appropriated for a more pragmatic political use. At the same time, we must remind ourselves of the downright ambitious aesthetic endeavour of Marinetti’s movement, for as he made clear in Democrazia futurista (1919), Futurism aspired to become no less than the new political elite.18 The poetics Marinetti conjured up in order to attain this goal, his poetics of parole in libertà or words in freedom, hardly require an introduction. Although Marjorie Perloff and others have pointed out that Marinetti seldom succeeded in living up to his attempt to de-individualise writing,19 and even though Cinzia Sartini Blum and many others have highlighted that his authorial personae most often tend to domesticate his alleged words in freedom,20 I believe we can benefit from a speculative assessment of just some issues in his poetics that may have prompted Gramsci’s early interest in Futurism as a possible form of political representation, as well as his later disappointment in the movement. In Marinetti’s “Manifesto tecnico della letteratura futurista” (1912) and “Distruzione della sintasi – Immaginazione senza fili – Parole in libertà” (1913), Gramsci may in particular have found the poetics of substantivisation appealing, because, at least in theory, it allowed for language to re-generate itself. In line with his 1913 essay on Futurism, of specific interest to Gramsci may have been

18 F.T. MARINETTI, Teoria e invenzione futurista, ed. Luciano De Maria, Milano: Mondadori, 1983, 345ff. 19 Marjorie PERLOFF, The Futurist Moment. Avant-Garde, Avant Guerre, and the Language of Rupture, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1986, passim. 20 Cinzia SARTINI BLUM, The Other Modernism. F.T. Marinetti’s Futurist Fiction of Power. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Morbid Symptoms 129

Marinetti’s promotion of sostantivi doppii or double nouns and “semaphoric” adjectives. Pushing the paratactic use of language in favour of traditional syntax, Marinetti envisaged a literature that could ideally generate its own meaning. Paratactic series of substantives and substantivised adjectives had to work through analogies unleashed in reading. (Additive) pairs of nouns as “woman-wave” and “mantorpedo-boat”, to Marinetti, could give rise to a dynamic linguistic object that represented its own production of meaning through what may be called resemanti- cisation. Instead of only highlighting conventionalised signifieds of individual words, double nouns engage a reader in a play between several words’ signifieds, making words and concepts flow into each other. For the same reason, adjectives were elevated to become pendants of nouns, no longer “decorating” substantives, but leading to seemingly oxymoronic word pairs that pushed readers into semantic aporia and offered various interpretations at the same time. By stressing Gramsci’s potential interest in such paratactic poetics in light of political representation, it could appear I am somewhat overstating the relevance of Futurist experimentalism. Yet it will be clear that, again at least in theory, Marinetti’s poetics provided a strategy with which traditional meanings and connotations of words in political representation could both be eased off from the materiality of language and replaced by novel meanings and connotations. In other words, Futurist poetics provided Gramsci with a means of representation that could attract the readers’ or citizens’ attention to conventionalised as well as new concepts. Of course, word pairs as “woman-gulf” make poor forms of address in the political sphere. When we relate Futurist poetics to Mussolini’s language, however, it becomes rather apparent just how effective Futurist parataxis was to become. As I already noted above, Gramsci observed in prison that the chances of a fundamental cultural and linguistic change grew slimmer under Mussolini, referring to a series of “morbid symptoms” that arose in a period where the old was dying and nothing new could emerge. Nowadays often jokingly, scholars 130 Sascha Bru refer to a private conversation of Mussolini in which the Duce signalled that without Futurism there would have been no fascist “revolution”. From the immensely vast amount of research on Mussolini’s discourse, it would appear that Mussolini’s remark has to be taken seriously, however. For one thing, many linguists and scholars, including Erasmo Leso and others, who have turned to Mussolini’s speeches and language highlight his use of parataxis21 and, secondly, it is no secret that Mussolini’s audience interpreted his syntactical constructions both as clear language use and as a sign of a masculine and monumental style. As I noted above, it is difficult to circumscribe distinct meanings in texts composed with Marinetti’s paratactic words in freedom, because they generate and thematise their own meaning relationally. It is thus highly remarkable that Mussolini’s contemporaries viewed his speeches, with their often endless sentences comprising numerous “che’s” (that … that … that …) as lucid. At the same time, we are to avoid mandarin depictions of the Italian people which take the working class and bourgeoisie of this period for an “irrational” or “barbaric” group of listeners. (Even Adorno, in his essay on Hölderlin, characterised parataxis as rational.) Further excluded is that the popularity of Futurism, by the time of Mussolini’s seizure of power, had led to such a wide spread of Futurist language that its novelty had somehow toppled into normality. The only thing we can assert with some certainty is that Mussolini somehow lay under tribute to parole in libertà. Indeed, one pair of words in freedom encountered in Mussolini’s speeches is Italia proletaria!, a slogan which, as Ernesto Laclau makes clear, was also frequently used in fascist propa- ganda.22 In political discourse the individual terms of this pair had a distinct meaning. For communists as Gramsci, however, the state of Italy obviously did not coincide with the working class. At first sight, the pair suggests an oxymoron, but in light of Marinetti’s

21 Erasmo LESO, “Osservazioni sulla lingua di Mussolini”, La lingua italiano e il fascismo, Bologna: Consorzione Provinciale Pubblica Lettura, 1977, 33f. 22 Ernesto LACLAU, “Fascism and Ideology”, Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory, New York: Verso, 1977, 120. Morbid Symptoms 131 parole in libertà we could characterise the pair as consisting of a noun and a “semaphoric” adjective. Read in this way, Mussolini offered his listeners a choice between Italia or proletaria(to), leaving his audience in aporia, inviting them to let either one of the words’ meaning dominate the other, or letting the words’ conventional meaning go in favour of a chiasmic game of analogies that managed to convey both unity and heterogeneity, difference as well as identity. Other such pairs encountered in Mussolini’s speeches are rivoluzione conservatrice (conservative revolution) and democrazia autoritaria (authoritarian democracy).23 The latter in particular warrants attention, since it highlighted just how close Gramsci’s regulated society came to Mussolini’s regime. Not unlike Gramsci, Mussolini envisioned a redefinition of hegemony, and in his Dottrina del fascismo (1932), he, too, referred to the Fascist state as an “ethical state”. Yet whereas Gramsci had in mind a civil society without a political society, Mussolini installed a political society claiming to fully coincide with civil society. Mussolini: “Let no one kid themselves in believing that I do not know what is going on even in the smallest village of Italy. I may perhaps learn about it untimely, but I will know eventually”.24 He could have added: “Mussolini Italy”. In this morbid constellation, Futurism may have been but a bunch of “schoolboys who escaped from a Jesuit boarding school”, as Gramsci observed. However, to the incarcerated author of the Prison Notebooks, Futurism may also have made clear that language in general is always both collective (that is, belonging to civil society) and political (belonging to the state). Language alone can give the impression of social coherence, and for this representation to gain shape, civil society cannot undo itself of political society or vice versa. This internal split or gap in both language (linguaggio) and society must never be denied or filled. Politics, in this sense, is a necessary evil. “This is also the case with Futurism,” Gramsci observed around the same time, “and is part of the people’s cult of

23 See Benito MUSSOLINI, “Dottrina del fascismo,” Opera Omnia, ed. Eduardo and Duilo Susmel, Florence: La Fenice, 1956, vol. 34, 127. 24 Benito MUSSOLINI, “Il discorso dell’ascensione,” Opera Omnia, vol. 22, 382. 132 Sascha Bru the intellectuals (who are in fact admired and despised at the same time)” (SCW, 273). Or how a group of schoolboys meant serious politics, without being taken seriously.

Sascha Bru is a research fellow in the Department of Dutch Literature and Literary Theory at Ghent University (Belgium).

Abstract Throughout his life, Antonio Gramsci paid critical attention to F.T. Marinetti’s aesthetic movement of Futurism. A shift in Gramsci's attitude toward Futurism can be noticed. Whereas he initially sympathises with the movement, his Prison Notebooks give evidence of a deeply felt disappointment in it. Relating Gramsci’s political theory and his writings on linguistics to Futurist poetics and rhetoric, the essay ascertains that Marinetti’s "parole in libertà" as a system of resemanticisation wherein conventionalised meanings are redefined relationally, may have also interested Gramsci as a form of political representation. By staging how this very same system is taken over in Mussolini’s discourse, this essay gives Gramsci’s bitter disappointment in Futurism another dimension.