Abstract for MLA 2006 panel on anarchism in Hispanic lit and film
Strange Destinies: Proudhonian Aesthetics in Spain, 1885-1939
Recent studies of the origins of the modernist avant-gardes trace key elements of their aesthetics – their elision of communication, their hermetic, fragmentary character – to anarchist influences. Where communism proposed rigorous representational codes (propaganda art, socialist realism), anarchist aesthetics declared war on representation. However, as critics such as Joan Ramon Resina and Lily Litvak have pointed out, this reading seems to ignore the calls of anarchists, beginning with Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, for a “social art” which would “represent labor, working life, and the proletarian struggle.”
Michael Seidman argues that this is exactly what the anarchists produced in Spain: a profusion of “productivist” images of happy, block-shouldered workers marching in unison toward a radiant future. In short, for Seidman, the aesthetics of the CNT-FAI merely mirrored those of their Stalinist rivals. Indeed, he traces this “workplace utopianism” to Proudhon’s writings.
Are these oppressive geometries really the final horizon of Spanish anarchist graphics, literature, and film? Can they really be taken as the practice of Proudhon’s theory, as enunciated in his posthumous work, El principio del arte y su destino social – a text which was indeed widely disseminated and discussed among Spanish anarchists? How might Spanish anarchist theorists and practicioners of art, from the early propagandist Teobaldo Nieva to cenetista filmmaker Mateo Santos, have modified, adapted, distorted, and/or misread Proudhon’s aesthetics? What really distinguishes Spanish anarchist aesthetics from those of avant-garde modernism, on the one hand, and socialist realism on the other? These are some of the questions this presentation will attempt to address.