HISTORICAL CONSCIOUSNESS / HISTORIC IMAGINARY
INTRODUCTION
Seen from a genealogical perspective the current cacophony of 'European identity-discourse'
[Niethammer: 1999] reveals a discernible base-tune: a conceptualization of 'identity,' which, however
defined, is firmly anchored to a 'spatial' process of othering [Strath: 1999] in apparent contrast to the
'historical' discourse on European heritage prevailing in the 1920s and '30s [Passerini, Orluc: 1999].
Has 'historical consciousness' relinquished its traditional connection to notions of collective identityformation?
What connection, if any, can we establish between the rise of 'European identity-
discourse' and postmodern historical culture?
In my talk I will seek to pursue these questions at a historical-theoretical level focusing on:
1) The relationship between the prolonged crisis of 'historical semantics' [Koselleck: 1986] at the level
of the immaginario (imaginary) [Passerini: 1991] and the rise of Europe pensée in the 1920s and '30s.
2) The connection between fascist 'historic semantics' and post-WW2 'End of History' imaginary.
3) The relationship between the formation of a postmodern 'historic culture' and the rise of European
identity politics / discourse.
THE CRISIS OF HISTORICAL SEMANTICS
a) The post-W.W. I discourse on European 'heritage, consciousness, tradition' was not 'historical' in
the traditional sense attributed to this term in the 19th century. It participated in that modernist crisis
of the notion of 'historical consciousness' that Hayden White has rightly connected to the 'experience'
of the Great War as a 'modernist event' [White: 1996], and the concurrent challenge that Freudian
psychoanalysis posed to all realist notions of consciousness-formation [White: 1991]. The appeal to
history characteristic of 1920s-30s Europe pensée may be better seen as projecting a European
'historical unconscious' against the Spenglerian inversion of progress into decline. In this sense,
Europe pensée participated in that affirmation of a definitive rupture in the realist fabric the 19thcentury historical imagination [White: 1989], and that longing for the 'presence of the past' [T. S Eliot:
1919] which characterized the formation of modernist imaginary after the Great War (far beyond
avant-garde or literary-philosophical circles). Europe pansée was intertextually connected to the
widespread recording of the war-trauma as 'Lost Generation' and the European-wide diffusion of
'generational consciousness-discourse' [Wohl: 1979].
b) The modernist sensibility towards the discontinuity between historical experience (lost generation)
and modern 'historical semantics' (singularization, temporization, trascendentalization of History)
[Koselleck: 1986] received its most theoretically consistent, politically influential, and mass-diffused
codification in Actualist-Fascist historical culture.
Giovanni Gentile's 'thought' (Actualism) and
Mussolini's 'intuitions' did not amount to a reformulation of the 'Romantic sublime' [White: 1989], but
to a properly modernist de-transcendentalization of History, deeply resonant with the longevity of premodern rhetorical codes in Latin-Catholic popular culture. The Mussolinian dichotomy between
fascist 'history-making' and liberal 'history-writing', just as much as Gentile's immanent conception of
'history belonging to the present' (1918), referred to a paradigm of 'historic semantics' codified in the
discoursive compounds 'historic speech, site, event,' and genealogically connected to the signification
of 'presence' in Latin-Catholic visual culture [to be expanded upon in the talk]. Positing the Great
War as 'Historic Event' leading to the emergence of a 'historic agent' (fascism), Actualism-Fascism
acknowledged / empowered an immanent notion of historic agency and representation which affirmed
the permanence of Latin-Catholic rhetorical codes in structuring an immanent notion of the 'epochal'
against thetranscendental paradigm of modern historical semantics.
c) Operating at all levels of image-politics, Actualist-Fascist historic imaginary projected a modernist
notion of collective identity-formation rooted in a 'normative' rather than descriptive conception of
style [Gombrich: 1982]. Fascism meant to give style to the times. Conversely, Fascist identity was
conceived as an injunction to 'distinction' in the eyes of the Other, rather than mere identification with
the leader.
Below the surface of fascist 'rhetorics of virility' [Spackman: 1993], and autotelic
'aesthetic politics' [Benjamin: 1936; Falasca-Zamponi: 1998], operated the perennial masculine fear of
non-recognition (in the flesh of the feminine Other) [to be expanded upon in the talk]. To highlight
the 'stylistic utopia' of Fascism against the background of the 'racial' and 'social' utopias projected by
Nazism and Soviet Communism, may be absolutely necessary to understand not only the 'fascination'
that fascism has continued to exercise on the Western mind after W.W.II [Sontag: 1975], or the
construction of 'Italy-Style' in the age of Corporate Capitalism, but also the modernist unconscious of
current Eurocentrism.
THE END OF HISTORY AND FASCIST HISTORIC IMAGINARY
a) In 1932 Fascism celebrated the 10th anniversary of its 'revolution' with an exhibition that not only
gave visual form to historic semantics but celebrated itself, that is, the decade as fascist unit of historic
time. Fascist historic agency would henceforth express itself in historic decades. Historically, the
'fascist decade' functioned in fascist discourse as counter-altar to both Nazi and Soviet units of utopian
time (the 1000-years Reich; the five-years plans), and its utopian overcharge may be best appreciated
in the obstinate effort that, during the war, the Mussolinian regime continued to put in the
construction of the first 'permanent' Universal Exhibition (EUR 42) that was to celebrate the second
decade of fascist power in 1942. Fascism, of course, was defeated, and the EUR 42 monumental
structure has merged in the urban landscape of modern Rome, but what about the decade itself? Hasn't
the decade become the principal unit of our postmodern stylization of time, the cipher of the
normalization of fascist imaginary into fashion?
b) My principal proposition is that in the post-fascist imaginary the Fascist combination of historic
agency and decade has been disjoint giving birth to that widespread feeling of post-ism that Francis
Fukujiama has termed the 'End of History'. I borrow Fukujiama's concept for its cultural resonance
with a much more complex phenomenon than the one referred to by its author. I conceive of a
postmodern sense of time as structured along the divided lines of a 'historical' imaginary stylized by
the time of fashion (the decade) and a 'historic' one anchored to the perception of epoch-making
events.
Rather than translating into a fascistic-modernist experience of historic immanence,
postmodern
temporality
had
deconstructed
(de-singularized,
de-temporized,
and
de-
transcendentalized) our 'historical senses' [Nietzsche: 1873]. We live, as it were, in the rarefied
atmosphere of the 'unhistorical' and 'suprahistorical', but there is no historical culture against which to
use these antidotes. We are fully immersed in a 'historic culture' whose phenomenological offspring
is a historic sense of simultaneously living after the 'End of History', and of living 'the historical', as
Paolo Virno has recently argued, in a Bergsonian state of 'déjà vu' [Virno: 1999; Bergson: 1908] [to
be expanded upon in the talk]
3) HISTORIC CULTURE / EUROPEAN IDENTITY
a) In this last part of my talk I intend to explore the connection between the spatialization of European
identity-constructs and the historic event that marks the rise of such discourse: 'The Fall of the Berlin
Wall'. The composite imago of this Event has not merely displaced that of the Holocaust in the
construction of German historic imaginary: it has more generally and effectively re-coded it as the
European Other. The specter of Hitlerism can be now agitated before the extra-European demarcating
a space of identity that Bergson defined as the essence of the 'déjà vu': fausse reconnaissance (false
recognition) [to be expanded upon in the talk]. The current 'territorialization' [Deleuze-Guattari:
1972] of European identity is therefore not simply 'spatial' as opposed to 'historical', but eminently
historic, and, as such, dangerously resonant with fascist politics of distinction and rhetorics of virility.
b) The task at hand, I want to conclude, is not to lament the phantasmal loss of 'historical
consciousness', nor, that of (re-)connecting European identity to the process of 'coming to terms' with
the Nazi-fascist past [Ginzburg: 1999], but that of re-orientation our existential sense of déjà vu
towards the souvenir du present [Virno: 1999]. [to be expanded upon in the talk].