La nascita del modernismo italiano. Filosofie della crisi, storia e letteratura. 1903–1922

“Signori non preoccupatevi, la borghesia è immortale.” So reads the epigraph of Luigi Malerba's final, postmodern novel, Fantasmi romani (Milano: Mondadori, 2006; p. 5). The same quote from Joseph Roth could serve equally well to preface the monumental exposition of Italian modernism recently published by Mimmo Cangiano. Both see in the logic of modern cultural production an ingrained effort to sustain and reproduce a social order and system of values that corresponds to the exigencies of bourgeois power. Both offer trenchant critiques of the logics and forms of life that align themselves with that effort. But where Malerba's fiction diagnoses an ongoing cultural malaise that reaches into the twenty-first century, Cangiano reveals how we can reconceive Italian modernism along the lines of a Marxian political critique that aims to establish a new understanding of modern Italy's cultural politics in the first two decades of the twentieth century.Cangiano's La nascita del modernismo italiano has moved the debate about Italian modernism into a new phase. His intervention is both capacious and important, particularly insofar as he sheds light on a broad intellectual tapestry of overlapping figures, institutions, and schools of thought that help account for how modernist ideas not only developed and circulated but also gained a potentially surprising form of cultural ascendency in the first decades of the twentieth century in Italy. He thus pushes beyond the debates of the previous decade to widen scholarship beyond the paradigmatic figures studied by many earlier interventions, outlining what he terms a “dominant cultural logic” that emerges in these years (29).Cangiano characterizes modernism not just as a set of formal techniques or practices but as a philosophical outlook. His articulation of that outlook is rooted in the long tradition of critical theory that takes the modernist moment as a key locus of investigation. This approach allows for a valuable level of philosophical depth in the study of Italian modernism. It also requires the approach of an intellectual historian who is attuned to the complexities of the many currents of thought active in the period. Cangiano proves himself most able in this regard, and his hefty volume attests to a tremendous amount of archival and scholarly digging to excavate and articulate a panoramic picture of the intellectual terrain at hand.Cangiano's study thus combines a deep dive into the intellectual history of the period with a theoretical elaboration of the Marxian critique of bourgeois cultural structures and ideas. Focusing on a lesser-studied set of intellectuals who responded to the changed conditions of Italian modernity, he contends that modernist thought entails a rejection of “history,” by which he means material history in a Marxian sense. Contending that modernist thought is defined by a sense of crisis that is primarily epistemological in nature, Cangiano argues that what might appear to be a rejection of the cultural, social, and historical forces giving rise to that crisis actually works in an unexpected way to maintain and reproduce those very conditions. The culprit in this surprising confluence of modernist skepticism and bourgeois hegemony is a philosophy rooted in contingency: the modernist thinker sees all things as accidental, contingent, constructed—as “forms,” using the language of writers like Pirandello and Simmel, who are both recurring names in Cangiano's account; in response, it would be possible for the modernist thinker to make an active intervention into the material conditions that give rise to these constraining forms. Instead, Cangiano suggests, the modernists respond by going down one of two divergent paths that nevertheless end up at the same destination. Some, like Pirandello, Papini, Prezzolini, Soffici, and Palazzeschi, hypostatize their skeptical “nihilism” (Cangiano's term for the negative pole in modernist thought). They respond to the doubt cast on old forms of essentialism (religious faith in God, political faith in a monarchic feudal order, etc.) by converting the very skepticism questioning those forms into a new type of essentialism: the world is in essence unknowable, all beliefs are particular and individual, life is a constantly changing flux that belies any attempt to solidify set forms to contain it. By turning these principles of uncertainty into an essential truth, modernist thinkers create a kind of new metaphysics, one rooted in negation (hence nihilist) that also, necessarily, denies the reality or possibility of meaningful historical change (through organized labor).On the other side, Cangiano depicts a different version of the modernist response to skeptical uncertainty, one that pushes for a new form of systematic stability. One version of this push is visible in Catholic modernism, which Cangiano argues is actually aligned with literary and philosophical modernism. Another version can be seen in neo-Kantianism, where philosophers work to reestablish an absolute moral law that can ground a system of values in response to the nihilistic contingency of the modern outlook. Giovanni Boine and Piero Jahier both receive extensive treatment as figures who represent this effort to restore an essentialist framework through moral or religious means. But the key point, for Cangiano, is that despite their seeming difference, both the nihilistic strand of modernist thought and the push toward reestablishing truth end up creating a new, static absolute. The modernist critique of fixed form ironically creates a new form of fixity, which ultimately sustains the hegemonic power of capitalism. It is in this sense, then, that both sides of the modernist project lead to affirming precisely the “immortality” of the bourgeoisie.Against this view, Cangiano offers what I would term a hopeful alternative, another path that arises from within the modernist mindset. The hero of his story is Carlo Michelstaedter, the increasingly studied eccentric thinker and artist whose brief but productive life and dramatic suicide in 1910 turned him into a figure of interest for generations of intellectuals. For Cangiano, “Michelstaedter è . . . fra i primi a capire come, tanto la crisi valoriale descritta dalla prospettiva nichilista, quanto le risposte a questa, siano in realtà i risvolti culturali di una crisi sociale, e siano entrambe finalizzate a proteggere lo status quo” (506). Michelstaedter's critique of rhetoric recognizes the fundamental lack at the core of modernist visions of truth/knowledge, and so it operates a move that places modernist thought back into a dialectic (582). The details of this claim are too complex to elaborate here, and they are themselves echoed and expanded in Cangiano's second monograph, The Wreckage of Philosophy: Carlo Michelstaedter and the Limits of Bourgeois Thought (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019). The key point is that, following in Adorno's footsteps, Cangiano's study not only excavates the negative side of its object but also finds within it the seeds of critical progress.Cangiano's methodology relies on a series of case studies, each of which is structured as a fairly comprehensive intellectual biography of a figure who serves as a key node in his analysis of the intellectual networks constituting the modernist “hegemony” he describes. This explains why the argument becomes so long: on the one hand, the book is focused on articulating a narrative to show how modernism develops its dual trajectories and how Michelstaedter responds to them; at the same time, though, it is also interested in detailing the complex, sometimes overwhelming particularities of each of its key figures, many of whom are clustered around shared institutions, like the important cultural journal La Voce. While the sheer volume of details can be intimidating, likely making the book better suited to an expert audience than students, Cangiano does important work by engaging with a series of scholarly debates over each figure of focus (Papini, Prezzolini, Soffici, Palazzeschi, Boine, Jahier, Slataper, Michelstaedter). While a reader who does not share his Marxian assumptions about the nature and meaning of historical development may find reason to disagree with the overarching narrative of his argument, Cangiano's study participates in a long tradition of critical theory rooted in and focused on the moment of modernist production, making it part of a vibrant discourse in this regard.While Cangiano's treatment of his principal protagonists is in general extremely detailed, to this reader's mind the treatment of the case study in chapter one, Pirandello, is somewhat rushed. Analyzing Pirandello's lesser-studied historical novel I vecchi e i giovani, together with his famous essay on L'umorismo, Cangiano falls into a series of commonplace assumptions about the “nihilistic” skepticism of Pirandello's “relativism” that a more nuanced reading might reveal to be only partial. That Pirandello receives such fleeting consideration where other figures are explored in biographical completeness suggests that his function is more to link Cangiano's study to the previous discourse on Italian modernism, which has focused overwhelmingly on literary and artistic figures like Pirandello with much less consideration of the intellectual figures that are the real heart of Cangiano's account. Pirandello, and the “standard” view of modernism he represents, thus becomes a kind of foil for the eventual alternative suggested by Cangiano's reading of Michelstaedter. It seems plausible, though, that a more nuanced account of Pirandello would actually show that he aligns much more with Cangiano's dialectical reading of Michelstaedter than the book suggests.These interpretative disagreements aside, what is clear is that Cangiano's La nascita del modernismo italiano makes a hefty intervention into the growing discussion about Italian modernism. It is likewise important for those interested in the development of a critical theoretical framework for rethinking modernity. It will prove a necessary point of reference for scholars interested in Italian modernism in particular and the development of Italian “thought” (or philosophy) more generally. Cangiano sheds valuable new light on one of the most fascinatingly complicated moments in Italian culture—not to mention the alleged immortality of the bourgeoisie.

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