Between Fascism and Democracy: Gaetano Ciocca -- Builder, Inventor, Farmer, Engineer

1. Soul building

Few figures loom larger in the modern imagination than the engineer. Invoked as the emblem of a dreamed-of immediate linkage between art and life, as embodying the new norm to be followed by less technically grounded practitioners of thought or art, and as an idealized agent of orderly democratization, the engineer hovers at the center of the revolutionary fantasies of the avant-garde. In the famous 1923 pamphlet in which he identified the Bauhaus with the will to erect the “cathedral of socialism,” Oskar Schlemmer called reason and science the “regents” of the present era and the engineer “the sedate executor of [their] unlimited possibilities.” ¹ His was that “idealism of activity that embraces, penetrates, and unites art, science, and technology, and that influences research, study, and work [so as to] construct the ‘art-edifice’ of Man, which is but an allegory of the cosmic system.” ² Likewise in Le Corbusier’s 1920 program for a new architecture, engineering leads and architecture follows: “The engineer’s Aesthetic and Architecture are two things that march together and follow one from the other: the one being now at its full height, the other in an unhappy state.” ³ He continues: “Working by calculation, engineers employ geometrical forms, satisfying our eyes by their geometry and our understanding by their mathematics; their work is on the direct line of good art” (PMA, 59). Off the direct line of good art, architects have instead mired themselves in ornamentation, the false beauty of secondary forms. Their present task is thus to return to practical geometries: to “arrive at the ‘House-Machine,’ the mass-production house, healthy (and morally so too) and beautiful in the same way that the working tools and instruments which accompany our existence are beautiful” (PMA, 62)—to become, in short, the executors of the unlimited possibilities opened up by modern technology. As already indicated, the modernist concept of engineering bears within it figurative extensions into the domains of individual and collective subject formation, morality, spirituality, and even a utopic, human-centered cosmology. Hence for the Left Front of the Arts (LEF), led by Osip Brik and Vladimir Mayakovsky, “constructivism must become the highest formalistic engineering of all life.” ⁴ Hence also for the self-designated man of steel, Joseph Stalin, the once “useless” writer was to become an (at least figurative) engineer working in the service of the supreme engineer, the builder of the State: “We need engineers who build living quarters. We need engineers who build automobiles and tractors. But we need engineers just as much who build men’s souls.” ⁵

Many other instances could be cited, but the point would remain much the same. The modern movement consecrated the engineer’s passage—carried out during the second half of the nineteenth century—from the periphery to the center of the industrial world, from the status of a mere technician, the passive implementer of visions of others (poets, politicians, generals, social reformers) to that of socio-political visionary, at once creator and protagonist of modern times. This event’s impact has been well studied in the American, German, French, and Soviet contexts, but less so in that of Italy, where even so vigorous a proponent of industrial civilization as the Futurist movement clung to what remains, at base, an individualized model of production resistant to routinization and rationalization. For all its celebration of modern machinery and mechanized humankind, Futurism rejects analytical reason and tends to imagine all manufacturing as artistic creation, the latter usually understood as a solitary act carried out by the titanic individual of late romanticism. It thus thinks mass production in terms not of the proletariat’s genius as marshaled by and embodied in the engineer, but instead in terms of a “proletariat of geniuses”: a proletariat of Prometheus-like heroes of the everyday life world, each endowed with full autonomy. Cast in a similar mold, Italy’s Fascist decades have often been found wanting in the scientific-technical domain. “Fascism,” wrote the great physicist Emilio Segrè, “was substantially indifferent to science, which it did not...