Note on Pasolini and politics

I know Pasolini's films though not his poetry, and I am reminded that I must read his writings on film in Heretical Empiricism. This essay clearly aims not to promote any new interpretation of Pasolini's films or writings so much as to provide a kind of introductory overview. What I find most interesting is his identification of "the cinema of poetry" with a bourgeois sensibility, largely on account of its neuroticism. It seems to me that this represents an impasse. I think the answer lies partly in being resolutely Marxist in analyzing the society but without placing too much hope and faith in the subjectivity of social subjects like classes. Capitalism largely destroyed the peasantry, in a spectacular way in Italy after the war but also across Europe and continuing today in much of the world. The industrial proletariat that the peasantry became is now disappearing in its turn, and the ex-proletarians least of all will mourn this. And if a consumer society of plentiful goods and entertainments is neo-bourgeois, we should be Hegelians enough to recognize that in itself this is a good thing even if it at present it is manipulated and in its form largely unthinking, the shiny yet dull alternative to the boredom that in fact it only crowns.

Pasolini's first 3 films (Acattone, Mamma Roma, The Gospel according to St. Matthew) express a neorealist hope identified with the poor, and also with a classicizing style of great visual beauty. Mamma Roma has made the same journey from village to city that the characters in Visconti's Rocco and His Brothers made. The later films Teorema, Pigsty, and Salo are less hopeful, more critical, even despairing (Teorema, or "Theorem," shows us what is left of Christian salvation, and how the various members of an haute bourgeois family try and fail to deal with the life-transforming event of an experience of love with a mysteriously silent stranger who makes himself available to all).

When Pasolini died, the left internationally had begun to fall into an impasse that, in theoretical terms, it is now still trying to climb out of. I am cautiously hopeful, but the triumph of consumerism and of the artificial over the natural is not itself something I would protest, undo, or mourn. (And I grew up with it and have known little else, though I know my father and grandparents who grew up on family farms left as soon as they could and never thought of going back, unlike what Ciro suggests to the youngest brother at the ambiguous conclusion of Visconti's Rocco and His Brothers). We need a working sense of the imminent critique of consumer capitalism; the future will either be a society where people are satisfied with commodity opiates or are given therapeutic treatments for their disaffection, or one in which the communicative functions of language operate in an egalitarian, fraternal, and democratic context that makes use of the reason in everyday common practical sense, and the expressive uses of language and sensible forms will be so predominant that the old bugbears of the 19th and 20th century social critics of bourgeois society, alienation and ennui, will have ceased to haunt us the way they once did. Malaise is one but is expressed in many ways, and as long as things stay as they are today, most people will either live lives of quiet desperation or be forced to submit to "treatments" for their desperation in such a way that threatens to make our societies only less extreme versions of Nazifascisms with their cult of health, normality, and community, or racial nativism and ideas of nation.

I think we need Marx more than ever, but we can refuse the simplistic formulas that make a particular social class the chosen people of the God of history. European culture has been essentially bourgeois for 1000 years; Italian neorealism did create something of a proletarian culture, but I do not feel comfortable dividing the history of culture, even recently and even in Italy after the war, that most politicized of countries, into an art of the proletariat as universal class and an art of the bourgeoisie.  And of course culture today is not really national either; in the art world, as for the bourgeoisie, territorial identities such as nationality are at best informative and weak determinants of meaning.

Though the early postwar films of de Sica in particular a sympathy for, and identification with, the failures of the poor (that constitute their social class position) that does not moralize them in the way that is routine in a bourgeois society, and perhaps nowhere more taken for granted than in that most thoroughly bourgeois of all societies, the United States. If I had to chose one film that demonstrates how political judgments are distinct from, and not a form of, moral ones, it would be de Sica's Bicycle Thieves.

I agree with Pasolini that Antonioni is the greatest postwar Italian filmmaker, and he was a Communist but made films almost exclusively about bourgeois and upper class characters. The most you could say in criticizing him for this is that the rich are people whose problems are mostly personal. But in criticizing artists of the time for portraying bourgeois life as neurotic, there is an implication that the proletariat is somehow pure, at least psychically. Such notions do indeed lead only to Stalinist totalitarianism, and I think one of its causes is precisely the link between totalization and a notion of nothingness or void: for a certain kind of Marxism, the class that is the bearer of good or value must be empty, a blank slate, and the Party will then write its story on you. And if we instead tell stories of workers and poor people only, that is fine except for the "only."

Capitalism and things related to it have deformed social and personal life, ethically and affectively, for many of us, maybe all of us, and it remains for the artist who is not only critical but visionary, as Antonioni was, to try to find fragments that can serve somehow, in some view of them, as images of some less alienated future. It is an irony perhaps that in the field of political philosophy and philosophical social theory, it was in Italy after Pasolini's death in 1975, perhaps more than anywhere, that lines of thinking developed that may be of much help in this regard. That in many ways Heidegger is the more important precursor than Marx, for this project and for understanding Antonioni, Godard, and others, in no way negates the impression of continuity with neorealism, and with Italian Marxism from Gramsci to Negri. It is also worth remembering that "bourgeois culture," to whatever extend it did and does have a class basis, is not the product of factory owners and financiers any more than of military heroes, but of artists, scientists, and thinkers.