Introduction
I. The Modernist Mass Spectacle
II. Soviet Mass Spectacles
III. Fascist Mass Spectacle and Soviet Constructivism
Bibliography

Pictures to accompany this essay

"The form of value," Antonio Negri argues, "is the material representation of the organisation of collective labour in a determinate society" (1992, 70). By this, he means that the form of value that is dominant in a given society at a particular historical moment is a practically-determined social concept that corresponds to the "social constitution." The constitution is "the mechanism of the labour of a multitude of subjects." Thus, the form of value "constitutes the socially effective and representative mediation of the labour processes, of the norms of consumption, of the models of regulation--it resides, in short, 'above' the mode of production." In Capital (1867), Marx identifies a series of phases in the history of the labour process--from handicraft, through manufacture, to large-scale industry--that indicate a series of transformations of the mode of production. With each of these transformations, society is gradually reconstituted along the lines of the newly-dominant labour process; society has to change in order for capitalism to keep on ticking in its new form. These transformations affect the interactions between production and consumption, the forms of the State, the institutions of civil society, the forms of the political organisation of labour, and the social forms of the production, circulation and reception of culture. It is the form of value that mediates these transformations and their interaction; it is the cement that holds it all together. These processes of transformation, however, should not be conceived in a linear fashion. They follow the dynamic of the capitalist social relation and are consequently determined by the antagonism that it constitutes. Society does not automatically become "Fordist" or "post-Fordist." It does so as the result of struggles. Thus, Negri concludes:

[T]he form of value is a function of the antagonisms and a product of their solution. The form of value, as the material transcendental of the constitution of a multitude, is submitted to the alternatives which the social antagonisms determine: it can therefore alternatively tend either toward identifying itself with the "mode of production" or, on the contrary, toward being critically lived through revolutionary practice. (1992, 71)

a much greater effort is needed to see through it than to adjust to it and to obtain at least some gratification through identification with the existent--the focal point of fascist propaganda. This may explain why ultra-reactionary movements use the "psychology of the masses" to a much greater extent than do movements which show more faith in the masses. (1991, 129).

I. The Modernist Mass Spectacle

I have heard reference made to a crisis of the theater. This crisis is real, but it cannot be attributed to the cinema's success. It must be considered from a dual perspective, at once spiritual and material. The spiritual aspect concerns authors, the material aspect the number of seats. It is necessary to prepare a theater of masses, a theater able to accommodate 15,000 or 20,000 persons. . . . The scarcity of seats creates the need for high prices which keep the crowds away. But theaters, which, in my view, possess greater educational efficacy than do cinemas, must be designed for the people, just as dramatic works must have the breadth the people demand. They must stir up the great collective passions, be inspired by a sense of intense and deep humanity, and bring to the stage that which truly counts in the life of the spirit and in human affairs. Enough with this notorious romantic "triangle" that has so obsessed us to this day! The full range of triangular configurations is by now long exhausted. Find a dramatic expression for the collective's passions and you will see the theaters packed.

Mussolini. 28th April, 1933.

It is within the interrelations between the elements constituting this problematic that the Italian fascist mass spectacle 18BL (1934) attempted to install itself. Theatre--a "theatre of masses," as demanded by Mussolini almost exactly one year previously--was posited as a site for the creative mediation of social modernization, "revolutionary" political ideology, and cultural subject-formation. With the adoption of the social form of the mass spectacle for its organisational processes enabling the constitution of a mass, collective subjectivity, and the presupposition of the development of a more fully modern society--the constitution of an industrially-based "mass society"--18BL found itself, however, facing a dilemma. In contrast to, for example, the Nazi Thingspiele movement (1934-37), which harked back to the ceremonial rites of the ancient Teutons, the Italian fascist mass spectacle rushed to mark itself as a process and product of the modern. Not only did 18BL represent the fascist regime's attempt to move towards "the people," but it also had to embody its commitment to social modernization--a commitment demonstrated both through the show of the co-ordinated discipline of the hundreds upon hundreds of bodies necessary to stage the event, and through the thematic incorporation of the technological. Both these articulations--the collective constituted through the mass spectacle and the theme of technology--threatened to eliminate the specificy of its fascist political ideology by too close an association with the Bolshevik. On the one hand, the mass spectacle form, in the democratizing tendencies imparted to it ever since Wagner, threatened to eliminate the fascist sense of hierarchy: de Feo, one of 18BL's organizers, insisted:

It is absurd to consider, as I read somewhere, abolishing the distinction between different kinds of seating in these theaters-to-be; this is the usual facile rhetoric of our home-grown bolsheviks, who prepare American cocktails in rationalist salons while discussing mass psychology. (qtd. Schnapp 1996, 43-44)

II. Soviet Mass Spectacles

It is the post-revolutionary Soviet experiments that define the modern form of "mass spectacles." The Soviet mass spectacle was not haunted by questions about its specificy within the modernization thematic; it knew itself to be new, and at that time its only competitors were the elements of the "old world." Within the discursive world created by the Soviet mass spectacles, the event announces itself as new by virtue of its shift from the individual to the mass and the instigation of a collective subject as both the subject and object of the drama. In this way it distinguishes itself from the old, "pre-modern" society. More specifically, it took the pre-revolutionary Symbolist utopias of "ritual theatre" (whose formulation was largely a response to the abortive 1905 revolution), and recast their "people" as the proletariat (Kleberg 1980, 44-64). Platon Kerzhentsev's The Creative Theatre (1918) was the most influential formulation in this direction--his book was in its fourth edition by 1920. The October revolution had, he claimed, provided the social base for the realization of the ritual community valorized by the Symbolists; by the time of the fourth edition, he was able to claim that "much of what seemed a utopia two years ago now appears to be on the way to becoming a reality" (qtd. Kleberg 1980, 62). This claim was based on the explosion of mass spectacles that had occurred in the intervening years.
 
 

In Petrograd, for example, May-day 1920 saw the performance of The Mystery of Liberated Labour. Written by a collective author, it was performed by around two thousand people before the former Stock Exchange. It followed a three-act structure, depicting domination by the oppressors, their battle with the oppressed and eventual defeat at their hands, and finally the "Kingdom of Peace, Freedom, and Joyful Labour," imaged as a choral dance around a "tree of freedom," the replacement of weapons for tools of peaceful labour, and a fireworks display (von Geldern 1993, 158-9). The most striking thing about the play, in comparison with 18BL, is the means by which the collective is envisioned. Contrary to Marx's understanding of the proletarian revolution as constituted around nothing but the future, the Soviets "anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service . . . to present the new scene in world history in this time-honored disguise and this borrowed language" (Marx 1852, 595). Within Act II, the battle of slaves and oppressors is shown through a series of struggles: Roman slaves under Spartacus, peasants led by Stepan Razin, the Jacobins, and finally the Red Army. The positive figurations of the new subject of history, then, are defined through reference to older models of collectivity. What is absent from these figurations is an engagement with the effects of modern "mass society's" loss of qualitative distinction on collective subject-formation. Although the subject of the drama is a "mass" one, this mass is defined through the series of shifting--but qualitative--identities; it is thus a "pre-modern" conception of the "mass." The principle behind the series was supposed to be an increasing organisation whose highest point was the Red Army. As von Geldern indicates, however, these differences "were not visible in the performance" (162). The impression must have been more one of a series of spontaneous, leaderless revolts.
 
 

The intentions behind the development, although largely unrealized, do provide a means of locating some of the differences between the Soviet and fascist mass spectacle. This is because they point to a dynamic that was to be most fully realized in The Storming of the Winter Palace (1920): the legitimation of the Bolshevik revolution. In place of the metanymic series of uprisings in Mystery, Storming provides a very specific, localized and concrete referent: it was performed in the same location as the events it depicted from three years previous. In this, though, it does not alter the qualitative definition of its mass subject; rather, the Red Army is installed even more directly. Performed on the 7th of November before one hundred thousand spectators, the action begins with the February revolution, follows the gradual organisation of the workers (on a red stage to the left, with Kerensky and the provisional government on a white stage to the right), until they are illuminated fully by searchlights, and crying "Lenin, Lenin" charge over the arch which joins the two stages to do battle with the "Whites." Kerensky leaps to a car for an escape, and is pursued along a path between the two large groups of spectators by trucks full of the Red Guard waving bayonets, to the Palace. Silhouettes struggle in the windows of the Palace, until the Red Army is finally successful, and red lights flash out. A canon fired from the battleship Aurora and fireworks herald the victory of the October revolution. The situatedness of Storming illustrates an aspect of the Soviet mass spectacles that makes any comparison with 18BL complicated: rather than a general plan to institute a tradition of perpetual cultural revolution and to embody the ideological values yet-to-be-realized, the Soviet spectacles have a very specific task: to garner support for the Bolshevik government during the civil war. As von Geldern shows, the spectacles only appear to exist on any significant scale for three years (1917-20), and with the end of the war, and Lenin's introduction of the NEP (New Economic Policy), their significance fades.
 
 

III. Fascist Mass Spectacle and Soviet Constructivism
 
 

Modernization as such was not present as an organising principle of the Soviet mass spectacles. Although the mechanical or technological occasionally played a (usually subordinate) role in the productions--the motorcar, or the searchlights used to shift the audience's attention--they never entered as protagonist. In 18BL, however, the machinic, and the relation between the human and the machine, becomes the very site of post-bourgeois subject-formation. The association between socialism and the idea of the "modern" itself must, through the rearticulation of the relations between the modernization of industrial production and the disciplining of the human body required to adjust to that new regime, be definitively broken, if fascism is to retain its specificy. Consequently, the discursive environment that the spectacle constructs is primarily oriented towards the question of its relation to the Soviets. By virtue of the use of the rubric of "bodies and machines" as a differentiating principle of the fascist imaginary constituted by 18BL, however, the discourse of the event does not address itself to the Soviet mass spectacles. The organizers were content to allow the similarity between the two at the level of social form to go unmarked. The supercession of the bourgeois individual by the collective as both subject and object of the theatrical is common to both ideological formations. The failure to differentiate at the level of social form consequently disturbed some of 18BL's fascist critics. Since 18BL uses the "bodies/machines" rubric as the basis of differentiation, it is to those Soviet theatrical practices that are implicitly repudiated though that usage that we must address ourselves if we are to attempt to determine the specificy of its mode of articulation of the technologies of theatre. Such a shift of comparison creates a problem and a question. Firstly, the comparison will address only one pole of the stage/auditorium relation--the stage. This is because the rubric does not appear within the Soviet mass spectacles and so the latter offer no basis for comparison of the differing articulations of bodies and machines. While it does appear within Soviet avant-garde practices, they constitute the audience very differently. Secondly, a question is inevitably raised: why, within the Soviet tradition, are the themes of industrialization, modernization, and the technological not mediated through the form of mass spectacle?
 
 

18BL was named after the first truck to be mass-produced by Fiat, and presented itself as an example of the embodiment of Mussolini's call for a theatre of the masses. Like many of its Soviet predecessors, it consisted of a three-act structure: depicting the first world war, the victory of the fascist revolution, and the reconstruction of the nation that the revolution proceeded to enact. The protagonist throughout this narrative was a / the truck 18BL; strangely for a product of mass-production, however, the truck is personalized--it is gendered, and exhibits human qualities such as virtue and sudden impetuousness (for example, when she overturns the "table" of parliament). As we shall see, not only are these attributes designed to provoke the audience's identification, they are also an essential part of the fascist conception of modernity. After struggling through the war, the revolution, and reconstruction, the truck breaks down, sacrificing herself in the swamps that are being reclaimed by enabling a bridge to be built over her. Meanwhile, an equestrianly-mounted Mussolini appears on the horizon, providing a suitable site for the transference of the audience's identification. A script writing contest was announced, prior to the production, that was designed to institutionalize the production of mass spectacles for the future. 18BL was being heralded as the model that would guide the fascist cultural production of the future.
 
 

It is the organisation of the machines and bodies in 18BL that provides the key to fascism's specificy. Although moving within the same general stage space, the trucks and the human beings in the play occupy two different, and mutually exclusive, dramatic universes. The specificy of their articulation, then, lies in the constitution of each and the mode of their interrelation. In occupying a separate and parallel dramatic world, the bodies and machines "double" one another (Schnapp 1996, 89). Any interaction between the two consequently takes the form of a mimetic mirroring of entities that are fully constituted in their own world, and whose integrity is not disturbed by the interaction. Within this scheme of bifurcation, the final transference to the figure of Mussolini gains additional significance: he embodies the individual who is able to reconcile both worlds into one; a total fusion of the quantitative self-identity of mass-production and the unique qualities of personality.
 
 

As one possible example of the discursive object that constitutes the implicit point of comparison for 18BL between socialism and fascism, I have chosen Meyerhold's production of The Magnanimous Cuckold (1922). There are two technologies are at work within Meyerhold's production: the mode of performance that he refers to as "biomechanics" and the constructivist set designed by Lyubov Popova. Each of these articulated a series of relations in a particular way--a particularity that constitutes the location of socialism's specificy for the discourse of 18BL. On the one hand, then, biomechanics; Rudnitsky records the following note from the Meyerhold archive: "Biomechanics is man-movement, man-speech; man-speech-movement; man-space; man-collective (the masses)" (1988, 93). The relation I want to focus on is the last. In 18BL, as Pavolini (another of its organizers) describes it, "the idea of articulating the whole around an 18 BL truck was seized upon: a truck as protagonist; as single and collective personage" (qtd. Schnapp 1996, 51). According to this formulation, the truck does not so much supplant the bourgeois individual as supplement it by providing the model for its socialization. The truck is the vehicle for the metaphoric leap from the individual to the mass conceived as individual. When Mussolini appeals for the abolition of the triangular configurations, therefore, it is less the triangulation that is being objected to (at least, so the "argument" of 18BL would run), than its limitation to an individual level. The individual triangle of the family romance is supplemented by a collective, socialized triangle of Mussolini as the national father embodying the fusion of the maternal machine and the mass as collective subject. Within Meyerhold's biomechanics, however, the movement from the individual to the collective does not proceed via metaphoric leap; rather, it proceeds via the transmission of rhythm. This in turn consists of a deliberateness of movement, shorn of inessentials, derived from a responsive interaction with the movement of the other actors. Consequently, the biomechanical movement from individual to collective involves the mutual readjustment of its constituent elements which, as we shall see, also includes the machinic.
 
 

The constructivist set produces the second series of relations articulated by Meyerhold's production. The constructivists are associated with the idea of "production art." "It was only natural," Kleberg claims, "that the theatre, the most public art form, should have held a special attraction for the advocates of production art" (1980, 72). Although this statement correctly identifies the involvement of Tretyakov, Eisenstein, Axenov, Popova, etc. with theatrical productions, it elides what Rudnitsky identifies as "an amusing paradox" (1988, 90): the constructivists' involvement with the theatre could only be justified by an attempted destruction of its mimetic function. The stress should be laid on attempted, since a realized destruction is commensurate with the dissolution of theatre itself, which could only remain a utopian--though, for all that, a nonetheless enabling--myth of the modernist avant-garde. The tensions produced by the attempt to incorporate constructivism into a theatrical process may be gauged by the "comradely tribunal" to which Popova was summoned by her fellow constructivists, in order to defend her apparent "betrayal" of their principles in involving herself in something as illusionistic and ideological as theatre. Her defence was that the experience of the theatrical event had been "the happiest day of her life" (Rudnitsky 1988, 92).
 
 

Art should be an active, constructive force in the world, the constructivists claimed, rather than a passive reflection of reality. To this end, the skills of the actor came to be theorized as essentially inaugural: they were a demonstration of the successful merging of labour and play, achieved through "'the Taylorized gesture'" (Kerzhentsev), that would eventually be socialized throughout the working population. Arvatov suggested:

The future proletarian theatre will become a platform for the creative forms of reality; it will develop life-styles and human models; it will be transformed into a single great laboratory for the new public life, and will take for its material every manner of social function. The theatre as production, the theatre as factory for the skilled man--this is what will sooner or later be inscribed on the banner of the working class. (qtd. Kleberg 1980, 73)

This transformative function assigned to the theatrical is also the stated intention of the organizers of 18BL. The "material" of the transformative process in the Soviet model, however, is "every manner of social function." This differs from the fascist version insofar as the latter invokes the "bodies/machines" complex as a reference point. It is, in short, a productivist model. Meyerhold said in 1922: "The work of the actor in an industrial society will be regarded as a means of production vital to the proper organization of the labour of every citizen of that society" (Braun 1969, 197). Thus, while the constructivists share with the fascists an attention to the possibilities for active reconstruction of reality possessed by the aesthetic function, the former's principles of intervention into life are based on a model aimed towards reality's reconstruction according to a rationalised, functionalist principle; it should be "intelligent, rational, functionally precise and economical . . . [and] in accordance with 'clear thinking and intellect'" (Rudnitsky 1988, 89). What I will suggest is that although the fascist spectacle shares with production art the notion of a direct influence and shaping of reality--the laboratory for the new public life--it attempts to do so without discarding the mimetic function.
 
 

The schematization between the Soviet and fascist forms of theatre thus divides itself, within the attempt to make the theatrical directly organize reality, between the attempted abandonment or retention of the mimetic function. Such a schematization is only possible on the basis of ignoring the totality of technologies constituting the theatrical apparatus in each project, but it may serve as an initial alignment for mapping the interrelations between social modernization, political ideology and cultural process. The constructivists create a stage in which the articulations of its technologies constitutes a circulation of parts and functions between the bodies and machines. The fascists created a stage in which the world of bodies and that of machines could only interact indirectly, through identification, unless united in the final figure of Mussolini, which the audience is invited to incorporate. The concern with the interaction between bodies and machines is indicative of the emergence of a Fordist regime of accumulation in the social production of both countries. Although the constructivists can be criticized for their uncritical adoption of Taylorist principles as an explanatory scheme, the attempt to combine play and labour within that framework indicates, I believe, the possibility for critical intervention. In imposing the mimetic structure of identification on these interactions, however, the fascist model elides such a possibility. In this, they constitute the antagonistic poles of the embodiment of the form of value.
 

1 See Bradby and McCormick, "Radical Theatre in Weimar Germany" (1978, 60-81) and Stourac and McCreery, "Hello!--State Power! Workers' Theatre in Germany" (1986, 87-187).

2 See von Geldern's account, "Labor Transformed" (1993, 151-156).
 
 

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