The Mass Panorama 243

SCHNAPP / the mass panorama 243 The Mass Panorama Jeffrey T. Schnapp The sea has a voice, which is very changeable and almost always audible. It is a voice which sounds like a thousand voices, and much has been attributed to it: patience, MODERNISM / modernity pain, and anger. But what is most impressive about it is VOLUME NINE, NUMBER its persistence. The sea never sleeps; by day and by night TWO, PP 243–281. it makes itself heard, throughout the years and decades © 2002 THE JOHNS and centuries. In its impetus and its rage it brings to HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS mind the one entity which shares these attributes in the same degree: that is, the crowd. Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power1 The Rivista Illustrata del Popolo d’Italia was the lavish mass distribution monthly to which subscribers of Italian Fascism’s official daily could turn for commentary on current events, lit- erature, science, culture and fashion, much like Americans could turn to Life magazine, Russians could turn to Soviet Life, and the Chinese to China Reconstructs. Starting sometime in the mid-1920s, the Rivista underwent a graphic makeover. Among the innovations introduced was the regular inclusion of large scale foldouts: panoramic photographs, typically two to six times wider than the standard page size. Foldouts in and of them- Jeffrey T. Schnapp is selves were not uncommon in period magazines and, as with the director of the contemporary foldouts of Playboy bunnies or Penthouse pets, Stanford Humanities they were understood as special features, graphic highlights de- Laboratory. His current tachable for purposes of exhibition in the home and in the work- research interests include a group project place. What first drew my attention to the Rivista’s foldouts, on crowds and however, was the object of desire draped across the picture plane: modernity, and CRASH, teeming, seemingly infinite crowds rallying around a visible or a book length study on invisible leader, sometimes abstracted into an indistinct ocean the anthropology of of dots, sometimes swarming with particulars; crowds wedged speed. MODERNISM / modernity 244 into architectural settings representative of the great historical cities of the Italian peninsula, crammed together to the point of driving out all voids. The political rally as source of vicarious photo- and/or pornographic thrill. Such was the graphic principle that would inform the next fifteen years of the Rivista Illustrata’s practice; years dur- ing which wave after wave of innovative artists and graphic designers laid out its pages: Bruno Munari, Mario Sironi, Fortunato Depero, Giò Ponti, Xanti Schawinsky. The graphic environment shifted with each successive wave. But not the foldouts. Mass rally after mass rally after mass rally unfolded in every number, right up to the collapse of the Fascist regime and the review’s demise. The obvious reason for this persistence was the foldout’s propaganda value. The Rivista was much more than an Italian Life magazine. It was a semi-official party or- gan. It set out to promote the image of Fascism as a revolutionary movement and of Fascist Italy as a perpetually mobilized nation. Yet the notion of propaganda raises more questions than it answers. It tells one next to nothing about the nature and the variety of the images placed in circulation or about the contours of the socio-political imaginary which they hoped to tap into and to shape. Nor does it address the larger question of where and how these mass photographic panoramas fit into the broader stream of crowd images that arises in European culture in the wake of the French Revolution, a topic that has been addressed, though in a far from definitive manner, by culture critics such as Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin and art historians such as Wolfgang Kemp.2 Last but not least, the invocation of a propagandistic function does not help one to understand how and why mass panoramas became intertwined with the art of photomontage and, with slight though significant variations, circulated not only in inter-war Italy, Germany, the United States, Brazil, Mexico, and the Soviet Union, but also in the postwar period from the Chinese Cultural Revolution up through the North Korea of Kim il Sung II. So the topic of this essay is that literal specter of the Enlightenment known as the revolutionary crowd, hovering between reason and hallucination, between the emancipatory dreams of 1789 and the terror of 1793, and the mass public’s inscription as a graphic element within modern political art and the new print-centered public sphere. The process of inscription is not reducible to a single story line. Viewed from the standpoint of artistic technique, it is the tale of an evolving repertoire of, first, painterly and, then, photographic practices. Viewed from an art-historical standpoint, it is the story of a complex of differentiated but overlapping iconographies of the crowd, of their place within the history of panoramic modes of representation, and of their apparent ebb in the present cultural-historical moment. Viewed from an intellectual- historical standpoint, it is the story of how these practices and iconographies were influenced by millennium-long habits of metaphorizing, gendering, and abstracting human crowds, central to political philosophy at least as early as Aristotle and as late as Elias Canetti; habits decisively altered by late eighteenth century theorizations of the sublime. Viewed from a socio-political standpoint, the story is that of the rise of a politics founded upon principles of popular sovereignty and of the consequent need for new images and mythologies of the collectivity as well as models of political action SCHNAPP / the mass panorama and agency based upon the literal physical massing of bodies in public spaces or the 245 performance of symbolic marches and mobilizations in real space and time.3 A multi- layered tale, in short, as difficult to contain within the bounds of a single essay as are the oceanic masses enframed within the foldouts of the Rivista Illustrata. All this by way of an apology for the schematic character of the following narrative, a narrative that will lead the reader on a series of suggestive rather than exhaustive zigzags through the analytical strata just described. The stopping points in the narrative bear the sub- titles: “Tides,” “Types,” “Tiles” and “Spillways.” “Tides” concerns the oceanic meta- phor as applied to crowds. “Types” sketches out the history of what will be referred to as “emblematic” crowd images. “Tiles” describes the development of “oceanic” mass panoramas with respect to the prior emblematic tradition. “Spillways” deals with the transformation of “oceanic” fragments back into geometrical emblems within the con- text of modernist photomontage, while reflecting briefly on the possibility that rallying multitudes no longer serve as the pillar upon which are built contemporary models of political action. 1 Tides The phrase la folla oceanica (the oceanic mass) was the label applied both by view- ers and producers to the Rivista Illustrata foldouts. The phrase is ubiquitous in early twentieth century Italian political discourse, whether nationalist, socialist, or anarchist. But nowhere more so than in Fascist oratory where it served to enforce Fascism’s claim that it alone knew how to catalyze and to channel the mighty and mysterious forces that characterized the era of crowds. The “era of crowds” was the definition of modernity proposed in Gustave Le Bon’s 1895 classic, Psychologie des foules and in the works of crowd psychology that influenced it by authors such as Taine and Tarde, as well as by members of the Italian Positivist school (Ferri, Lombroso, Sighele, Rossi). Le Bon affirmed: “While all our ancient beliefs are tottering and disappearing, while the old pillars of society are giving way one by one, the power of the crowd is the only force that nothing menaces, and of which the prestige is continually on the increase.”4 Premodern multitudes had long been imagined as elemental hordes to be shaped and subjugated from on high; modern multitudes were the volatile protagonists of a volatile era, leaders themselves as well as breeding grounds for new forms of leadership and individualism. Nothing menaced their power because of an inherent heterogene- ity and instability: they were the result of the promiscuous intermingling and physical massing of social classes, age groups, races, nationalities, and genders along the great boulevards of the industrial metropolis. Their prestige was continually on the increase because everything modern was potentially at their beck and call: political authority, the state, commerce, communications, culture, economic production. Brought into being thanks to the loss of conscious personality that was purported to occur when human bodies agglomerate, the modern crowd is not reducible to the average of the individuals that make it up, but rather sets off a chain reaction like those that fasci- nated Le Bon in his writings on atomic particles: “just as in chemistry certain ele- MODERNISM / modernity 246 ments, when brought into contact—bases and acids, for example—combine to form a new body possessing properties quite different from those of the bodies that have served to form it,” so it is with the crowd.5 His socialist counterpart Ferri shared the same thought: Collective psychology concerns not the simple mixing of individual elements, but rather their chemical combination. This means that the resulting psychic collective is not equal to the sum of its individual psychic parts (and this is the case both on the plane of feelings and that of ideas). On the contrary, it is always different, either for the better or for the worse, in precisely the same manner as a chemical combination of two or more sub- stances confers upon the final mass a temperature that is higher or lower than that of the bodies that make it up.6 The properties in question are the result of multiple liquids combined in a single test tube always with an uncertain outcome: a new substance, an explosion, a surge of energy, accelerated decay, a fizzle, new fermentations.

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