Abstract
This article highlights the progress that has been made within fascist studies from seeing ‘fascist culture’ as an oxymoron, and assuming that it was driven by a profound animus against modernity and aesthetic modernism, to wide acceptance that it had its own revolutionary dynamic as a search for a Third Way between liberalism and communism, and bid to establish an alternative, rooted modern culture. Building logically on this growing consensus, the next stage is to a) accept that modernism is legitimately extended to apply to radical experimentation in society, economics, politics, and material culture; b) realize that seen from this perspective each fascism was proposing its own variant of modernism in both a socio-political and aesthetic sense, and that c) right-wing regimes influenced by fascism produced their own experiments in developing both a modern political regime and cultural modernism grounded in a unique national history.
Highlights
Griffin problems, nor is it likely to be as well developed as the paradigm it promises to displace
This article highlights the progress that has been made within fascist studies from seeing ‘fascist culture’ as an oxymoron, and assuming that it was driven by a profound animus against modernity and aesthetic modernism, to wide acceptance that it had its own revolutionary dynamic as a search for a Third Way between liberalism and communism, and bid to establish an alternative, rooted modern culture
Building logically on this growing consensus, the stage is to a) accept that modernism is legitimately extended to apply to radical experimentation in society, economics, politics, and material culture; b) realize that seen from this perspective each fascism was proposing its own variant of modernism in both a socio-political and aesthetic sense, and that c) right-wing regimes influenced by fascism produced their own experiments in developing both a modern political regime and cultural modernism grounded in a unique national history
Summary
There has been a gradual shift in the understanding of ‘modernism’ as a term that should be extended to embrace not just aesthetic, and socio-political and ideological phenomena. Just how absurd it is to impose a strictly patrolled demarcation between modernist aesthetics and socio-political utopianism left or right in the first part of the twentieth century is clear when the art-historical lens is widened to take in the visionary hopes that lay behind many avant-garde movements Several of their most important manifestos offered wholesale rejections of the aestheticist ideal of art as a spiritual refuge from a decadent material world. Expressionists, Dadaists, Sorelians, and radical aesthetes from Van Gogh, Rilke, Stravinsky, D’Annunzio to Virginia Woolf, Bernard Shaw, Wyndham Lewis, and Ernst Jünger believed in the spiritual bankruptcy or insubstantiality of the modern world in its present form Many such socially minded modernists struggled to bring about a new age of heroic vitalism based on the power of myth in a spirit informed by the influence of Nietzsche. Nor does it focus on the paradox that modernism can express itself both as an agent of societal change, but well without the goal of transforming the world beyond the artist’s or intellectual’s private experiential horizon
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