Fascist Spectacle.pdf

Fascist Spectacle http://content.cdlib.org/xtf/view?docId=ft18700444&chunk.id=0&doc.v...
myths it created. In the process of making "new men" and a beautiful Italy, Mussolini's regime refined
its political orientations and prioritized its ends. Symbols and myths became fascism's means of
self-definition, its main forms of representation, and in this fashion they helped to shape fascism's
identity.
4
Bodily Economy
Corporativism and Consumption
― 119 ―
The regime's antibourgeois rhetoric of the 1930s exploited themes and myths that had been circulating
during the immediate postwar period in many of the countries involved in World War I. War veterans
adjusted uneasily to the regular rhythms of daily civilian existence; the banality of normalized behavior
was anathema to many of them. Returning soldiers, with their heroicized vision of social relations,
denounced the baseness of petty aspirations and utilitarian worldviews. Comfort, egoism, and the
pursuit of gain were indicted in the critical representations of the bourgeoisie constructed by the
demilitarized youth. An internal enemy, one who failed to be transformed by the sacrifice of the
millions dead, substituted for the ones in the muddy battle zones.
As the self-proclaimed voice of the values of combattentismo , the early fascist movement glorified
the masculine experience of the trenches and exalted struggle as a source of life. History could not
unfold without contrasts and conflicts: a social war was now necessary to refurbish spiritual and moral
values in Italy and to ensure the country's renewal. Within this vision, the bourgeoisie assumed the
role of culprit. "Fascism, interpreter of the healthy majority of the people of the trenches, of sacrifice,
and of work cannot tolerate the predominance of conservative bourgeoisie any longer," wrote Piero
Gorgolini in 1922, in a book Mussolini praised as "the best publication on fascism" to date. [1] Sacrifice
and war did not seem to rhyme with "bourgeois," regardless of the specific semantic approach the
fascists applied to the term. [2] Hence, the newly formed Fasci Italiani di Combattimento politically
expressed the same contempt for the stillness and conservatism of bourgeois existence that the
futurists had displayed artistically beginning on February 20, 1909, when their first manifesto
appeared in the Parisian newspaper Le Figaro . But whereas the futurists and other modernist
movements challenged the pragmatism of the bourgeois world and proposed the domination of fantasy
over reality, heroism over habit, difference over "equaling quotidianism," [3] the fascists concentrated
their attack on the bourgeois roots of individualistic stances. The futurist leader Filippo Tommaso
Marinetti
― 120 ―
encouraged the emancipation of all individuals from the tyranny of homogeneous life; Mussolini
denigrated the bourgeoisie as the historical formation from which the modern concept of the individual
was born.
The combination of individualistic tendencies with peace-loving attitudes and comfort-oriented
lifestyles made the bourgeois the natural enemy of fascism, a political system that pursued heroic
deeds in the name of the nation and that consigned to a handful—or better, one superior and
privileged man—the responsibility of leading. Spiritually, bourgeois conservatism offended fascism's
myth of action and its vitalistic conception of life. Politically, fascism reserved the status of individual
for the few. With its semantic confusions and overloaded meanings, "bourgeoisie," in effect,
constituted a recurrent trope in the fascist movement's attempts to define its own political stance and
worldview, its critique of democracy and liberalism. The antibourgeois rhetoric became the discursive
context in which to represent an ideal sociopolitical model, an embodied expression of fascism's
identity. Thus, when it denied "bourgeois" citizens an active role as individual subjects, fascism
declared the obsolescence of democracy. When it assaulted bourgeois egoism, fascism asserted the
principles of discipline and obedience. And when it castigated bourgeois spirit and attacked bourgeois
style, fascism warned against the evil of a consumption-oriented polity in which hedonism and material
pleasure prevailed. The allure of happiness and the economy of desire, typical of an emerging
consumer culture, particularly clashed with fascism's effort to combat individualism and homogenize
the Italians. Hence, in one of its multiple significations, "bourgeois" came to symbolize in fascist
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