Morbid Symptoms: Gramsci and the Political Rhetoric of Futurism

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, Antonio Gramsci, 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, Rome: 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, London: 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 Italy 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.

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