Pier Paolo Pasolini - Essay Example

Running Head: Pier Paolo Pasolini Pier Paolo Pasolini of the of the Pier Paolo Pasolini Pier Paolo Pasolini was an introspective and experimental artist. These two poles, f experimentation, mark out the field f his work, conditioning and delimiting the scope and focus f everything he did. Their interaction throws up a whole spectrum f positions and practices f subjectivity in language, action and form. What is more, these qualities condition a body f work that is in constant, stark confrontation with ideological, social and sexual realities, from the standpoint (at least rhetorically) f an excluded other, so that the potential for complex, surprising and at times radically eccentric incisions into those realities is remarkably rich. To understand Pasolini's significance in the panorama f post-war Italian and European culture, and indeed to understand the exploitation f his figure during his life and since, requires us to look upon and through the refracting filter f self-exploration that covers his every act, in person or in language. While discussing the Pasolini's liking for experimentation, one only has to contemplate the vertiginous formal variety f his composition: his poetry, novels, plays, screenplays, films, essays in criticism, journalism, and even songs; his work in Friulan and Roman dialects, and a number f hybrid dialects f his own creation, as well as standard Italian; his voracious, if always flawed, imbibing f philology, Marxism, theology, semiology, anthropology and psychoanalysis, among other disciplines; and his constant fascination with mixtures f all f these, perhaps epitomized in his much-used formula 'x in forma di y' (e.g. 'poesia in forma di rosa', 'romanzo in forma di sceneggiatura', etc.). To attempt to give a taste f the scale f introspection in his work, by contrast, would be otiose, since self-expression--more or less overt, strategically deployed or agonistically suffered, whether cast as pure impulse or pure rhetoric--is everywhere in his work. Were it simply a question f quantity, however, were Pasolini's art no more than the indulgence f an unrepressed narcissist, there would be scant interest in a study f this kind. Instead, his work offers an extraordinarily fertile and dense example f how subjectivities are built on something other and something far more complex than merely saying 'I'. Indeed, one might say that his work offers an illustration f the ultimate incompatibility f saying 'I' and being 'I', in any cohesive sense these phrases might have (Benveniste, 1966, 259-60). For Pasolini does indeed, as Barberi Squarotti implies, constantly offer himself up for display in his work, but to such a degree f intensity that conventional mediation 'is cast aside: he is personally, bodily present within language, as he explains in Petrolio, 'in queste pagine io mi sono rivolto al lettore direttamente [. . .] in carne e ossa'. In other words, he uses the textuality f his work or the semiosis f his multiform interventions in order to embody himself, to project himself into, rather than onto forms f expression. The project is, f course, deeply flawed and unrealizable, but also strangely utopian. It is an almost mystical aspiration to being-in-thetext, to textual transubstantiation which can be related to his homosexuality. It represents a recourse to the essential signifier f an 'authentic' body as a public locus f discourse, in response to the exclusion from discourse and from normative sexual ideologies. But the recourse is a subversive and not a naturalizing one, since the irreducible aura f presence surrounding the body disavows coded norms (Dollimore, 1991). It radicalizes the relations between selfhood, signification and the real by projecting irreducible markers f the latter into the first two. It brings selfhood and form into uneasy synthesis, in a dynamic akin to that seen by De Lauretis, 1984, in Pasolini's essays in film semiology: a deployment and experience f forms f discourse as active and subjective signifying practices, rather than as enclosed, objective systems. In other words, meaning in Pasolini is the movement of/between self and form. Signifying practices f whatever kind--and there is always a plurality f them at work in any meaningful text, act or form--are necessarily active and necessarily subjective. Since they are rooted in the contingency and determining impact f their semiotic, socio-political, and 'real' contexts, they always constitute an 'action'--what Pasolini was wont to call 'l'azione', 'il pragma' or 'il fare' (e.g. EE211; I dialoghi, 734-5)--and are steeped in both ideology and physically tangible reality. Furthermore, this notion f action carries with it an assumption f agency, even if momentary and illusory: to quote Stephen Heath, 'signifying practices always produce relations f subjectivity. [. . .] signifying practices are subject productions' (Heath, 1991, 38-9). Always in action, always interrelational, subjectivity acts or works, through any number f simultaneous signifying practices, to produce the effect f a subject f speech ('sujet de l'nonc'), which in turn is in complex, ambivalent and flawed relation with the speaking subject ('sujet de l'nonciation', Benveniste, 1966), and with the sutured 'spoken subject' at the moment f reception (Silverman, 1983, 43-53). The phrase the 'work f subjectivity' is useful and suggestive for two reasons. First, it contains echoes f Pasolini's own nostalgic, antimodernist penchant for metaphors f artisanal work to describe his intellectual and aesthetic activities, apparent, for example, in the name f his most important journal Officina (Workshop). Second and more tellingly, it is coined in analogy to Freud 'Traumarbeit' or 'dreamwork', a process whose movement between latent and manifest dream-content constitutes, for Freud, the essence f the dream's meaning (Freud, 1973, 207-18). The work f subjectivity is a process that is similarly both transformative and secondary. It too tends towards the production f a 'manifest' single entity, the subject, characterized by apparent presence, unity, and plenitude, but can only ever produce incomplete and mediated signifiers f subjecthood. Thus tokens f an acutely desired 'full' subjecthood become arbitrary and even mutually contradictory, oscillating between effects f stasis--a fixed subject is a strong subject--and mobility--a fluid subject is living and immediate, and stasis is death. Its primary manifestations are constantly and unpredictably being reinverted. Thus, the work f subjectivity is always projected towards an elusive endpoint. Its work is never done. To return to Pasolini, we find the consequences f the work f subjectivity played out at several conscious and unconscious levels. If his work is always profoundly conditioned by the fractures implicit in the nature f subjectivity, it is also frequently marked by a conscious and even strategic deployment f tokens f selfhood. The latter are absorbed and modulated from a panoply f subject positions thrown up by the work f subjectivity in its most immediate manifestations. A simple example would be Pasolini's reprojection f imagery f solitude and exclusion as a cathartic and almost redemptive burden. As he says in 'Versi dal testamento': 'bisogna essere molto forti / per amare la solitudine' (You have to be very strong / to love solitude, B1, 941). Contrary to a rather worn critical shibboleth, the author is very definitely not dead here, but nor is he quite fighting a rearguard action on behalf f the pathetic fallacy or the life-as-work-of-art, despite compelling analogies that have been drawn between Pasolini and d'Annunzio (e.g. Valesio, 1980-1). He is rather an actor, literally, in the agonistic drama f his own subjectivity, and as such, his presence is couched in a performative rhetoric whose origin can be traced at least as far back as the 1949 poem, 'La crocifissione': The matrix f imagery on show here--f display and openness, f private innocence and public guilt, f sexuality and/through suffering (passion)--inaugurates a rhetoric f authenticity and f the expressivity f the poetic which will pervade his work. In 1959, Fortini influentially labelled this feature f Pasolini's literary project as 'the proposition f an authenticity by way f the inauthentic' (translated from Fortini, 1993, 29). Dollimore, 1991, 14-17, includes 'authenticity' and 'style / artifice' in his series f binary oppositions (founded in that between culture and nature) which are subverted and inverted in different ways by what he calls 'transgressive desires'. Others include surface-depth, change-stasis, difference-essence, persona/roleessential self, maturity-narcissism, all f which are constantly renegotiated in Pasolini's work. But, as Fortini realized, Pasolini used such binarisms as oscillating models f identity and difference, deploying both sides f such oppositions and dramatizing the resultant discord as the 'noise' f subjective work. He does not quite fit either f the archetypal models f trangression offered by Dollimore, therefore: whether Oscar Wilde's anti-essentialist and performative 'Don't ever write I anymore' (quoted in Dollimore, 1991, 74), or Andr Gide's essentialist and ethical 'it is above all to oneself that it is important to remain faithful' (quoted in Dollimore, 1991, 39). Pasolini is both performative and essentialist, to the point f obsession. Even Barberi Squarotti ends his polemic with an acknowledgement f the potential complexity f the endless self-dissections he had described so witheringly, once their nature as rhetoric or 'recitation' has been acknowledged: 'the vast rhetoric Pasolini uses to declare and confess his "I" [. . .] is, nevertheless, also a sign f the difficulty, today, f reconstructing poetry as the exclusive voice f the "I"'. On closer inspection, then, that difficulty reveals itself as symptomatic f deep, ontological tensions between the individual author, the signifying practices and effects f subjecthood that surround him, his public and distorted, strategic and suffered presence as self or subject, and the elusive, floating qualities f subjectivity that subtend them all. Critical work on Pasolini already has a complex history in its own right, partly for reasons suggested in the Preface, and partly because f the well-marshalled flow f information and f unpublished or unavailable texts since 1975. 3 Perhaps the earliest milestones in the critical history were Ferretti, 1974 (first published in 1964), who posited a series f structuring pathetic dualities echoing Pasolini's own 'passione e ideologia', and Asor Rosa, 1969 (first published in 1965), who articulated a critique f Pasolini's aestheticizing (pseudo-)populist ideology. In the early 1980s, a number f rigorous studies appeared which reassessed his written uvre as a whole, displaying a particular, archaeological interest in his Friulan period. However, with the exception f Rinaldi, it could be said that they all treat Pasolini as a more or less passive and unproblematic object f analysis. By contrast, some studies f his cinema, often from outside Italy and informed by contemporary developments in film theory, and the few readings sensitive to theories f homosexuality, have tended to tread more carefully and more subtly when dealing with the complex self-constructing and self-framing dynamics that pervade his work. Even the latter, however, have tended not to follow through their occasional insights in this direction. References ASOR A. ROSA ( 1969), "'La crisi del populismo. Pasolini'", in Scrittori e popolo. Il populismo nella letteratura italiana contemporanea, 3rd edn. ( Rome: Samon e Savelli), 1st edn. 1965, 349-449. BENVENISTE E. ( 1966), Problmes de linguistique gnrale ( Paris: Gallimard). DOLLIMORE J. ( 1991), Sexual Dissidence. Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault ( Oxford: Oxford University Press). DOLLIMORE J. ( 1991), Sexual Dissidence. Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault ( Oxford: Oxford University Press) FERRETTI G. C. ( 1974), "'La contrastata rivolta di Pasolini'" in Letteratura e ideologia. Bassani, Cassola, Pasolini, 2nd edn. ( Rome: Editori Riuniti), 1st edn. 1964, 163-356. FREUD S. ( 1973), Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, translated by J. Strachey (Harmondsworth: Penguin). HEATH S. ( 1991), "'The Turn f the Subject'", in R. Burnett, ed., Explorations in Film Theory. Selected Essays from Cin-tracts ( Bloomington: Indiana University Press), 26-45. SILVERMAN K. ( 1983), The Subject f Semiotics ( Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press). Read More