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Abstract
This article, taking at its starting point the work of Pier Paolo Pasolini, tackles the aesthetic of the working class as an object d'art: how is the aesthetic sense of those who do not belong to the working class, but claim a political interest in its destiny, engaged by the outward appearance of the working class? And, more specifically, has there been a shift from a sense of aesthetic appreciation to what this author perceives as revulsion towards Western working classes? Has our aesthetic gaze wandered off, in search of more distant objects? It is not our goal to answer these questions by means of a quantitative or qualitative sociological analysis, and to this extent, the answers have to be taken as given. The article argues that there is a displacement of our gaze towards the working classes in the developing world, resulting in yet another form of consumption (the campaigns for fair trade would not be so successful without the picture-perfect – and picture-perfect because so completely desolate and objectively poor – sweatshops and small children in the fields). This displacement is not at all innocent. The article will propose that there are legal consequences – by using, and subverting, Luhmann's remark on legal taste; political consequences, where displacement means invisibility and lack of voice; and social consequences, mirroring Pasolini's horror at the cultural genocide, and now looking at the desolate spaces it has left behind.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thanks to Akbar Rasulov for his criticisms and Lilian Moncrieff for her support; both are equally necessary to any writer.
Notes
1. This is the English translation of the movie title Brutti, sporchi e cattivi, by Italian director Ettore Scola, winner of the Best Director Award at the Cannes Film Festival in 1976.
2. Furio Colombo, “Siamo tutti in pericolo,” Tuttolibri (November 8, 1975).
3. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “8 luglio 1974. Limitatezza della storia e immensità del mondo contadino,” in Scritti corsari (Milan: Garzanti, 1990), 52.
4. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction – A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (Routledge: London, 1984).
5. György Lukács, History and Class Consciousness (London: Merlin, 1967).
6. In Italy, neo-realism in cinema and literature reflected the aesthetic choice that accompanied the political engagement.
7. Pasolini himself shifted his attention and his aesthetic gaze to the Third World; Pier Paolo Pasolini, The Scent of India, trans. David Price (St Albans: Verulam, 1984). Certainly he would be horrified that also this has become a product.
8. Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Una disperata vitalità,” in Poesia in forma di rosa, in Tutte le poesie (Milan: Mondadori, 2003), 1182 (author's translation).
9. Pasolini makes an explicit reference to this in his poem ‘Dutschke’ (dedicated to the German leader of the student movement in 1968), where he writes, “In Frankfurt there's hope. In Heidelberg, people study, in the general boredom”; Pasolini, Scent of India, 32.
10. Pasolini died on the night of November 2, 1975, officially killed by a ragazzo di vita (rent boy) on the beach of Ostia, near Rome.
11. His relationship with the orthodox Left in Italy is well known, from his expulsion from the Communist Party in 1949 to the criticisms that followed the publication of his first novel, Ragazzi di vita (1956); the official literary critic of the party accused the book of “lacking an adequate ideological basis” and him of “choosing the Roman lumpenproletariat as its topic as an excuse, while the real focus is his morbid taste for everything dirty, abject, disjointed and dark”; Pasolini, “Una disperata vitalità,” XCV.
12. Pasolini, “Our Impotence in the Face of the Pedagogic Language of Things,” in Lutheran Letters, trans. Stuart Hood (New York, NY: Carcanet, 1987), 32.
13. When yesterday, at Valle Giulia, you fought/ with the police/ I was rooting for the police!/ Because they come from poor families./ They come from poor dwellings, in the country or in the city./ They are twenty years old/ your age, my dears./ And so yesterday, at Valle Giulia/ we had an episode of class struggle:/ and you, my friends (even if on the right side)/ were the rich/ and the police (who were on the wrong side)/ were the poor.
14. “What the relation to ‘mass’ (and a fortiori ‘elite’) cultural products reproduces, reactivates and reinforces is not the monotony of the production line or office but the social relation which underlies working-class experience of the world, whereby his labour and the product of his labour […] present themselves to the worker as […] ‘alienated’ labour. Dispossession is never more totally misrecognized, and therefore tacitly recognized, than when, with the progress of automation, economic dispossession is combined with the cultural dispossession which provides the best apparent justification for economic dispossession”; Bourdieu, Distinction, 386.
15. Pasolini's reflections on power are not too far from Michel Foucault's. In his Saggi sulla politica e sulla società (Milan: Mondadori, 1999), 600, Pasolini writes: “the progressive struggle for the democratisation of expression and sexual liberation has been brutally overcome and annulled by the consumerist power's decision to grant a wide (and false) tolerance. […] the ‘reality’ of innocent bodies has been equally violated, manipulated and damaged by the same power: in fact, this violence against the body is the most blatant fact of the new epoch of humanity.” For an interesting parallel, see Ward Blanton, “Reappearance of Paul, ‘Sick’: Foucault's Biopolitics and the Political Significance of Pasolini's Apostle,” Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory 11(1) (2010): 52–77. Blanton quotes Pasolini's script for his unrealized movie on St Paul, to the effect that “in a peaceful world that is ‘dominated’ by this type of ‘power,’ ‘one must protest by refusing to exist,’ a strangely creative act of abstraction from the abstractions of neo-capitalist economies of Life” (71). We do not know if Pasolini ever read Foucault, but we know that Foucault knew and read Pasolini (in 1977 he reviewed Pasolini's movie Comizi d'amore and in the review cited Pasolini's Scritti corsari; the review was reprinted on the Italian newspaper La Repubblica on April 27, 2010).
16. “I look at the crowd and ask myself: Where is this anthropological revolution I write so much about for people consumed by the art of not knowing? And I answer myself: There they are. In fact the crowd around me, instead of being the plebeian and dialect-speaking crowd of ten years ago, a wholly popular one, is a crowd of the most middle-class kind, happy to be that way. Ten years ago I loved this crowd; today it disgusts me”; Lutheran Letters, trans. Stuart Hood (New York: Carcanet Press, 1987), 63.
17. “Il pianto della scavatrice,” Pasolini, Tutte le poesie, 833.
18. And in his “unflinching declaration of love,” as he put it, for the excluded Roman underclass before its co-option and resulting cultural genocide; and yet he also had to move farther away in order to find an object for his love.
19. “My ‘Accattone’ on TV after the genocide”; Pasolini, Lutheran Letters, 104 (added emphasis). For an interesting analysis of the movie that contextualizes and stresses the intensely political approach Pasolini took towards the figure of the subaltern subject (when this position was unpopular even within the left and yet untaken by intellectuals), see Fabio Vighi, “Pasolini and Exclusion. Žižek, Agamben and the Modern Sub-proletariat,” Theory, Culture and Society 20, no. 5 (2003): 99–121. The article does not contextualize Pasolini's attitude towards the excluded “post-Accattone,” which can be summarized as a displacement towards the Third World.
20. “It is truly the experience that an intellectual can obtain of the working-class world by putting himself provisionally and deliberately into the working-class condition, and it may become less and less improbable if, as is beginning to happen, an increasing number of individuals are thrown into the working-class condition without having the habitus that is the product of the conditionings ‘normally’ imposed on those who are condemned to this condition. Populism is never anything than inverted ethnocentrism, and if descriptions of the industrial working class and the peasantry almost always vacillate between miserabilism and millenarian exaltation, this is because they leave out the relation to class condition which is part of the complete definition of that condition, and because it is less easy to state the actual relation to the condition one is describing (without necessarily being able to feel it) than to put one's own relation to it into a description – if only because this spurious identification and the indignation it inspires have all the appearances of legitimacy to support them”; Bourdieu, Distinction, 373; “Those who believe in the existence of a ‘popular culture,’ a paradoxical notion which imposes […] the dominant definition of culture, must expect to find […] only the scattered fragments of an old erudite culture (such as folk medicine), selected and reinterpreted in terms of the fundamental principles of the class habitus and integrated into the unitary world view it engenders, and not the counter-culture they call for, a culture truly raised in opposition to the dominant culture and consciously claimed as a symbol of status or a declaration of separate existence”; ibid., 395.
21. “I work all day like a monk/ and at night I wander about like an alley cat/ looking for love […] I'll propose/ to the Church that I be made a saint”; Pasolini, Roman Poems, trans. Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Francesca Valente (San Francisco, CA: City Light, 1986/2005), 87.
22. “My proposals for schools and televisions”; Pasolini, Lutheran Letters, 113.
23. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York, NY: Continuum, 1972), 130–1.
24. Pier Paolo Pasolini, Petrolio (Turin: Einaudi, 1992), 396–7 (author's translation).
25. “Competitive struggle is the form of class struggle which the dominated classes allow to be imposed on them when they accept the stakes offered by the dominant classes. It is an integrative struggle and, by virtue of the initial handicaps, a reproductive struggle, since those who enter this chase, in which they are beaten before they start, as the constancy of these gaps testifies, implicitly recognize the legitimacy of the goals pursued by those whom they pursue, by the mere fact of taking part”; Bourdieu, Distinction, 164.
26. “The ‘mode of production’ has changed – enormous quantities, superfluous goods, a hedonistic function. But it is not only goods that are produced; it makes social relationships as well – human beings. The ‘new mode of production’ has therefore produced a new kind of human being, that is to say, a ‘new culture’ which changes man anthropologically: in this case the Italian”; Pasolini, Lutheran Letters, 118.
27. Ibid., 124.
28. Ibid., 815.
29. “Bologna, a Consumerist and Communist City”; Pasolini, Lutheran Letters, 39.
30. “Pannella and dissent”; Pasolini, Lutheran Letters, 54.
31. Slavoj Žižek, “Nobody has to be Vile,” London Review of Books(April 6, 2006).
32. “Intervention at the Radical Party Congress”; Pasolini, Lutheran Letters, 124.
33. Pier Paolo Pasolini, Il pianto della scavatrice. This poem is central to Pasolini's aesthetic of the excluded, exemplified in a series of oxymoronic couplings, of which the above verse is the clearest example. The poem goes on to remark how this stupendous and miserable city [of course, Rome] taught him “that few knew the passions/ in which I've lived; that they are/ not brotherly to me, and yet they are/ my brothers because they have/ passions of men/ who joyous, unknowing, whole, live experiences/ unknown to me […]”; Pasolini, Tutte le poesie, 833.
34. Bourdieu, Distinction, 41.
35. Ibid., 4.
36. “It is no accident that […] the popular ‘aesthetic’ appears as the negative opposite of the Kantian aesthetic, and that the popular ethos implicitly answers each proposition of the ‘Analytic of the Beautiful’ with a thesis contradicting it. […]. This ‘aesthetic,’ which subordinates the form and the very existence of the image to its function, is necessarily pluralistic and conditional […]”; Bourdieu, Distinction, 41.
37. Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1990), 75.
38. Ibid., 205.
39. Vighi, “Pasolini and Exclusion,” 108. When the movie was presented at the Venice Film Festival in 1961, Pasolini was accused of being only moved by his “aesthetic passion,” as remembered by the critic Adelio Ferrero; quoted in Pasolini, Tutte le poesie, CII.
40. It has done so by returning to us a vulgarized and cheaper image of our own bourgeois selves. Bourdieu's comments on the reality of representation and the representation of reality seem apposite here: “One only has to bear in mind that goods are converted into distinctive signs, which may be signs of distinctions but also of vulgarity, as soon as they are perceived rationally, to see that the representation which individuals and groups inevitably project trough their practices and properties is an integral part of social reality. A class is defined as much by its being-perceived as by its being, by its consumption – which need not be conspicuous in order to be symbolic – as much as by its position in the relations of production (even if it is true that the latter governs the former)”; Bourdieu, Distinction, 483.
41. Little known outside of Italy, but beloved by Pasolini, who wrote to him and of him that he was “the greatest and most joyous of Italian poets”; “Letter to Sandro Penna,” in Pasolini Archive, http://www.pasolini.net/saggistica_PPP-a-SandroPenna.htm/.
42. Sandro Penna, Tutte le poesie (Milan: Garzanti, 1977), 46 (author's translation).
43. Karl Marx, “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts,” in Karl Marx: Early Writings (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), 365, as quoted in Eagleton, Ideology of the Aesthetic, 204.
44. Antonio Negri's reconsideration of the role of poverty and the poor as the immeasurable, in the sense of what is “outside measure” and therefore resistant, is put by him in the following terms: “The beautiful is lived as joy of the multitude; it is imagination and expression of all wealth in that absolutely singular moment when the poor lean over the edge of time. Aesthetic delight lies always in the perception of the immeasurable and there is no artistic creation that is not (or that could not be) delight of the poor as multitude. Consequently the monuments erected by the Powerful to the divinity of measure must be destroyed, just as the museums, veritable temples fashioned by the measure of Power, must be deserted. What is beautiful is the generation of subjectivity”; Antonio Negri, “Kairòs, Alma Venus, Multitude,” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 22, no. 1 (2000): 289–301. The original Italian was published as Kairòs, Alma Venus, Multitude. Nove lezioni impartite a me stesso (Rome: Manifesto Libri, 2000).
45. ”‘Sesso, consolazione della miseria!’ La religione del mio tempo,” in Pasolini, Tutte le poesie, 925.
46. A comprehensive attempt is given by Costas Douzinas and Lynda Nead, ed., Law and Image: The Authority of Art and the Aesthetics of Law (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999). A very critical review of this edited collection is by Ann Barron, “Spectacular Jurisprudence,” Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 20, no. 2 (2000): 301–315.
47. Including the dichotomy of “law in literature” and “law as literature.” See also Guyora Binder, “Aesthetic Judgment and Legal Justification,” Studies in Law, Politics, and Society, Special Issue: Law and Literature Reconsidered, ed. Austin Sarat 57 (2012): 79–112.
48. Codes of law such as the Hammurapi Code were inscribed on stele of monumental quality; more importantly, the codes of law constituted paradigms of justice and wisdom rather than applicable laws (as we know from contemporary documents), giving aesthetic form to the ideal of the king as dispenser of justice (keeping in mind also the traditional image of the king as protector of the weak, such as widows and orphans, and his role in relieving the poor from debt servitude); Mario Liverani, Antico Oriente. Storia, società, economia (Bari: Laterza 1988), 412–13.
49. The καλοί κ’αγαθοί of Athenian memory were indeed the upper classes, but they were to be distinguished by their beauty as well as their “goodness.”
50. Niklas Luhmann, Law as a Social System (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
51. Eagleton, Ideology of the Aesthetic, ch. 1, with additional references.
52. Even when used e contrario, aesthetic reasonings reaffirm the influence that aesthetic considerations exert over certain areas of law, in that form of non-aesthetic aesthetics referred to above. In City of Youngstown v. Kahn Bros. Bldg. Co., 112 Ohio St. 654, 148 N.E. 842 (1925), the US Supreme Court gave the classic articulation of this view (the subjectivity argument), when it stated: “It is commendable and desirable, but not essential to the public need, that our aesthetic desires be gratified. Moreover, authorities in general agree as to the essentials of a public health program, while the public view as to what is necessary for aesthetic progress greatly varies. Certain Legislatures might consider that it was more important to cultivate a taste for jazz than for Beethoven, for posters than for Rembrandt, and for limericks than for Keats. Successive city councils might never agree as to what the public needs from an aesthetic standpoint, and this fact makes the aesthetic standard impractical as a standard for use restriction upon property. The world would be at continual seesaw if aesthetic considerations were permitted to govern the use of the police power. We are therefore remitted to the proposition that the police power is based upon public necessity, and that the public health, morals, or safety, and not merely aesthetic interest, must be in danger in order to justify its use.” A different approach was taken in Berman v. Parker, 348 U.S. 26 (1954), where the Supreme Court pointed out that: “The concept of the public welfare is broad and inclusive. [citation omitted] The values it represents are spiritual as well as physical, aesthetic as well as monetary. It is within the power of the legislature to determine that the community should be beautiful as well as healthy, spacious as well as clean, well balanced as well as carefully patrolled.” See also “Beyond the Eye of the Beholder: Aesthetics and Objectivity,” Michigan Law Review 71, no. 7 (1973): 1438.
53. Eugene F. Kaelin, “The Pornographic and the Obscene in Legal and Aesthetic Contexts,” Journal of Aesthetic Education 4, no. 3 (1970): 69–84. This would be of course the terrain for the battles conducted by Pasolini against the Italian State and the Catholic Church, of which more below.
54. Luhmann, Law as a Social System, 484, n. 50.
55. Terry Eagleton, “The Ideology of the Aesthetic,” in The Rhetoric of Interpretation and the Interpretation of Rhetoric, ed. Paul Hernadi (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1989), 75–86 (added emphasis).
56. In its original sense derived from the Greek αἰσθητικός, perception, from the verb αἰσθάνομαι, to perceive through the senses.
57. Pasolini, Lutheran Letters, 124.
58. It is argued here that aesthetics is disembodied and therefore “disembodying”: the same medium that allows us to experience reality is a screen that separates us from it.
59. Pasolini himself argued that Hegelian dialectics was no longer possible, and declared: “I am against Hegel […] my dialectic is no longer ternary but binary. There are only oppositions”; Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Ancora il linguaggio della realtà,” Filmcritica 214 (1971).
60. Pier Paolo Pasolini, Empirismo eretico (Milan: Garzanti, 1995), 89–90 (the translation is given in Vighi, “Pasolini and Exclusion,” 102).
61. And its Lacanian undertones; Vighi, “Pasolini and Exclusion,” 102–3.
62. Pasolini wrote this letter, with an eye, it seems, to Wittgenstein, in apodictic mode, starting with the first postulate, that “The most lovable people are those who do not know they have rights.”
63. Pasolini, Lutheran Letters, 120.
64. As the only reality that is not in the system yet. It is crucial to stress that this is the opposite of sympathy. One could imagine Pasolini argue that it is the excluded who should have sympathy for the included. In his poem Blue-eyed Alì, Pasolini prefigures the arrival of immigrants from the African continent (“dressed in Asian rags and American shirts,” an image now so familiar to us from the news of yet another migrant boat arriving in Sicily or Southern Spain, but an image he did not live to see), and writes that they will come “to teach the workers the joy of life – to teach the bourgeois the joy of freedom […]”; Pasolini, Tutte le poesie, 1287.
65. “At a time of a justified euphoria on the Left I foresee […] the worst danger that awaits us intellectuals […] a new trahison des clercs, a new acceptance, a new adhesion, a new surrender to the fait accompli, a new régime even if it is only in the form of a new culture and a new quality of life. […] The more fanatically an intellectual is convinced of the value of his contribution to the attainment of civil rights, the more he accepts the social-democratic function which power imposes on him, thus abrogating any real alternative […]”; Pasolini, Lutheran Letters, 126.
66. “Rather than playing the game of the endless, contingent re-signification of the liberal democratic context, by then pervasively controlled by late-capitalist ideology, Pasolini assumed the impossible and yet properly political risk of forcing a radical break with that context, opening up the space for a new historical configuration”; Vighi, “Pasolini and Exclusion,” 104.
67. As he put it in his script for a movie on Paul, “one must protest by refusing to exist”; quoted in Blanton, “Reappearance of Paul, ‘Sick’,” 71.
68. From the movie La ricotta (1963); in the movie, Orson Welles reads the poem.
69. It is “the infinite nature of desire” successfully harnessed by capitalism to bring about this impossibility; Walter Siti, “Pasolini's Second Victory,” in Pier Paolo Pasolini. Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Patrick Rumble and Bart Testa (Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 58.
70. Pasolini, Tutte le poesie, 815.
71. Bourdieu, Distinction, 56.
72. The protagonist takes on different personifications in the novel, including his transformation into a woman; it is as a woman that Carlo has a sexual relationship with Carmelo.
73. Pasolini, Petrolio, 317 (author's translation).
74. The argument is here against moral sympathy and the aesthetic of suffering, in other words, the recognition of the suffering of others. Even then, there is a distancing movement, which is the disavowal of any responsibility for that suffering. Dostoevsky lets Ivan Karamazov, in the chapter aptly titled “Rebellion,” clearly articulate the impossibility of compassion; the monologue is worth quoting at length: “I never could understand how it's possible to love one's neighbours. In my opinion, it is precisely one's neighbours that one cannot possibly love. […] Let's say that I, for example, am capable of profound suffering, but another man will never be able to know the degree of my suffering, because he is another and not me, and besides, a man is rarely willing to acknowledge someone else as a sufferer (as if it were a kind of distinction). And why won't he acknowledge it, do you think? Because I, for example, have a bad smell, or a foolish face, or once stepped on his foot. Besides, there is suffering and suffering: some benefactor of mine may still allow a humiliating suffering, which humiliates me – hunger, for example; but a slightly higher suffering – for an idea, for example – no, that he will not allow, save perhaps on rare occasions, because he will look at me and suddenly see that my face is not at all the kind of face that, he fancies, a man should have who suffers, for example, for such and such an idea. […] It's still possible to love one's neighbour abstractly, and even occasionally from a distance, but hardly ever up close. If it were all as it is on stage, in a ballet, where beggars, when they appear, come in silken rags and tattered lace and ask for alms dancing gracefully, well, then it would still be possible to admire them. To admire, but still not love”; Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York, NY: Random House, 1991), 236–7.
75. Vighi, “Pasolini and Exclusion,” 102.