An Introduction to Modernism—Fascism—Postmodernism

As the 20^th century drew to a close, the shadow of fascism nevertheless lingered on. In 2001, Silvio Berlusconi, the Prime Minister of Italy, attempted to rehabilitate the neo-fascist National Alliance (one of whose leaders is Mussolini's granddaughter) by bringing it into the government and then declaring: "fascism never killed anyone" (Stille X). Subsequently, in 2005 Duce, mio padre (My Father Il Duce), the memoir of Mussolini's son Romano became a best-selling book that allowed the author to make many favorable remarks about Il Duce on national television, most frequently on channels owned by Berlusconi himself. This alarming development, which seems to have subsided somewhat as a result of the Italian elections in 2006 that Berlusconi lost, occurred in the context of a scholarly debate that has refocused on the complex relationship of fascism to modernism, as well as to post-modernism, along with a concerted rethinking of each of these three terms.

Just as Horst Bredekamp disclosed that the modernist art critic Walter Benjamin had a rather surprising long term admiration for the political theory of Carl Schmitt, a key Nazi apologist from the 1930s onward (247), so Mark Antliff also concluded in an essay of 2002 that "The terms fascism and modern art used to seem comfortably opposed to each other, but the last two decades of scholarship in history, art history, and literature have radically revised that postwar complacency" (148). Furthermore, the conventional wisdom about the strictly antagonistic relation of modernism in the arts to fascism is as much in need of critical revision, as is the standard post-1945 assumption about the relation of fascism to an economic modernization predicated in turn on industrial capitalism. Indeed, Zygmut Bauman's insightful study on Modernity and the Holocaust (1989) has shown compellingly enough that even the irrational genocide of the Nazi holocaust was untenable without the systematic rationalization, the Taylorization as it were, of impersonal involvement by its functionaries, which alone allowed mass murder on this scale to be "humanly" possible. Along related lines, Paul Jaskot's important book, The Architecture of Oppression: The SS, Forced Labor, and the Nazi Monumental Building Economy (2000), clearly documented the extreme form to which the Nazis used the technocratic standardization of labor relations and accountancy, both of which were grounded in the instrumental division of labor known as Taylorism, a celebrated invention of capitalist modernization at its most efficient.

Moreover, major historians like Richard Evans and Thomas O. Paxton, as for example in the latter's Anatomy of Fascism (2004), have shown a related phenomenon. Despite the anti-modernization and anti-capitalist rhetoric of every fascist movement, something else obtained historically speaking, since "whenever fascist parties acquired power [ . . . ] they did nothing to carry out these anti-capitalist threats" (10). To the contrary, a decisive moment both for the German National Socialists (with its "Night of the Long Knives" in 1934) and the Italian Fascists (with its "March on Rome" in 1922) entailed the purging of precisely those radical members of their respective movements who were most implacable in their opposition to capital or to any fascist business alliances with the traditional elites (Evans, 20ff).

Given these patterns within fascist movements of embracing forms of economic modernization, along with ambivalence towards—but no mere rejection of—various modernisms in art and architecture, a key question obviously reemerged in the scholarly literature. Can we arrive at a unitary definition of fascism for all of these ultra-rightwing movements, even though they clearly diverge from each other as a consequence of their claims to regionalist particularism and national exceptionalism?

It was this set of coordinates—along with the disturbing Carl Schmitt-like recourse to "decisionism" by the current Bush Administration as it "justifies" its ultra-militarism and uncompromising nationalism—that convinced us to organize the Conference "Modernism—Fascism—Postmodernism." It was held at the University of New Mexico in September 2006, at which the following five papers were given and discussed (along with two dozen other papers). Since he had achieved international attention in the 1990s with his book entitled The Nature of...