Jonathan Nossiter - Cultural Insurrection: A Manifesto for Arts, Agriculture, and Natural Wine

I N 1974, a year before he was murdered, Pier Paolo Pasolini, taboo-busting filmmaker, poet, novelist, journalist, relentless antifascist, and one of the last genuinely public intellectuals anywhere in the worldwas invited by RAI, the Italian public broadcasting company, to narrate a visit to the model fascist town of Sabaudia.

Though the producers were expecting a violent denunciation of fascist-era city planning, they shouldve known that Pasolini was above all a free man, free even from his own biases: the clearest sign of intellectual courage. In the televised report, we follow him through the streets of this coastal town, sixty miles south of Rome, and we hear him explain: In fact, there isnt anything fascist about this model city. The buildings here are all built on a human scale. You feel in harmony wherever you go.

The TV film crew, surprisingly attentive to his subtlest gesture, follows him onto the sand dunes. As the February wind rakes his hair dramatically, Pasolini turns to the camera and addresses the viewer. But he also speaks to the television crew, whom he clearly considered his colleagues. This is not a famous intellectual condescending to technicians and the public. This is a profoundly compassionate poet terrified by the world, urging every sentient being around him to rethink what they see. His intensity and instinctive egalitarianism produce an intimacy between viewer and onscreen actor unlike anything were accustomed to from the sterilizing lens of a TV camera.

The fact is, the fascists even screwed this up. At the end of the day, they were just a bunch of criminals who came to power. They failed to leave a lasting stamp on any aspect of Italian life. His gaze then seems to bore into each one of us.

Today, in 1974, its the opposite. Our government is democratic. But this consumer society has managed to homogenize culture in a way the fascist government was never able to.

W HAT WOULD HE SAY TODAY , over forty years after his death, about the state of culture? Is there any national network anywhere that would put a renegade poet in front of a prime-time audience? And are there still artists and intellectuals who can raise their voice in a forum that commands an audience as complete as television did in 1974? Or as the agorathe marketplace of ideas and commerce in Athens at the inception of a democracydid 2,500 years ago?

What has happened to the status of public intellectuals? How can they address the general public today? How can they bring culture to life as an affirmation of subjective freedom? What popular venue is left for them to express culture as a joyous invention of aesthetic forms, as a way to question the mechanisms of power, as a guarantee of our collective freedoms? The infinite compartmentalization of the Internet is one of many guarantees that this has become virtually impossible.

The dream of every totalitarian state has been to silence artists and make them invisible. By the nature of their activity, artists are uncontrollable. This makes them the truest counterweight to any exercise of power. Pasolini was prophetic in his understanding of how an omnivorous consumer society has managed surreptitiously, even unintentionally, to accomplish what the fascists only dreamed of.