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The Ideologies and Semiotics of Fascism: Analyzing Pound's Cantos 12-15

Author(s): Stephen Hartnett


Source: boundary 2, Vol. 20, No. 1 (Spring, 1993), pp. 65-93
Published by: Duke University Press
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The Ideologies and Semiotics of Fascism:
Analyzing Pound's Cantos 12-15

Stephen Hartnett

Introduction

For Marxists, the rise of fascism is often directly linked to the interests
of monopoly capital; historians concerned with issues of race, particularly
"the Jewish question," have tended to emphasize fascism's anti-Semitism;
many of the culture critics loosely associated with the Frankfurt school have
seen fascism as the surfacing of certain latent authoritarian psychologies
as well as-and here Lukacs is exemplary-of an aesthetic and philosophi-
cal milieu that celebrated "irrational" and "ahistorical" tendencies. The list
of critical positions is extensive, as is the corresponding documentation,
much of which is relentless in its graphic detailing of the brutalities of the
death camps and the genuine terror of everyday life under Hitler and on
the battlefront. Whatever position one takes on this question of how and
why fascism arose, certain facts remain: 6 million Jews exterminated in the

Many thanks to Andrea Slane, Joseba Gabilondo, and Martin Padget for their helpful
criticisms; to Michael Davidson, without whose guidance and detailed commentary this
essay would have been unthinkable; and to Shawny Anderson and Meg Sachse for their
considerable editing efforts.

boundary 2 20:1, 1993. Copyright ? 1993 by Duke University Press. CCC 0190-3659/93/$1.50.

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66 boundary 2 / Spring 1993

camps; 18 million Russians dead on the Eastern front; all of Europe reduced
to rubble; over 35 million dead worldwide. Within this historical framework,
the writings of Ezra Pound are more than embarrassing and are certainly
more than the "wrongheaded" pronouncements of an artist who had lost his
bearings. There was a generation of scholars and poets who chose, out of
simple ignorance or open sympathy, to brush these matters under the rug
to make room for discussions of Pound's poetry; there is now a small, but
growing, group who provides devastating critiques of Pound's fascist and/
or anti-Semitic and/or phallocentric positions to disabuse the thinking that
we can talk about Pound's poetry without including his politics.' The most
significant breakthrough of the latter group shows that Pound's poetry and
politics are simultaneous: We can no longer pursue Benjamin's thesis con-
cerning the aestheticization of politics and the politicization of aesthetics-
the division will not hold.2
My contribution to the already overcrowded world of Pound criticism
attempts, then, to historicize what a majority of Pound criticism has either
avoided or taken for granted. Specifically, I offer an analysis of the construc-
tion of ideology as it pertains to the historical moment of the rise of fascism.
My project thus entails two sections in which I reevaluate the terms fascism
and ideology; then, in the final section, I employ these terms to address
the question of how we might analyze the semiotic strategies employed
by Pound in his production of textual "meanings." As for the "politics" of
this essay, especially as concerns my construction of a historicotheoretical
position from which to analyze both Pound and the rise of European fas-
cism, I think it is sufficient to suggest that such analyses (even those that

1. This shift in perspectives is exemplified by the differences between the literally wor-
shipful tone of Hugh Kenner's The Pound Era (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1971), and the biting political edge of Robert Casillo's The Genealogy of Demons: Anti-
Semitism, Fascism, and the Myths of Ezra Pound (Evanston: Northwestern University
Press, 1988).
2. The reference is to Benjamin's 1936 essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechani-
cal Reproduction," in his Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books,
1969), where he details (among other things) the manner in which fascism aestheticized
political activity through mass rallies and other public spectacles. The essay is particu-
larly helpful for my purposes here, for it discusses the manner in which fascism utilizes
technology to veil property relations. For example, Benjamin writes, "Mass production is
aided especially by the reproduction of the masses. In big parades and monster rallies,
in sports events, and in war" (251 n. 21). Or, "War and war only can set a goal for mass
movements on the largest scale while respecting the traditional property system" (241). I
return to these questions in detail in later sections.

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Hartnett / The Ideologies and Semiotics of Fascism 67

deconstructionists might find a bit too "totalizing" and "comprehensive")


cannot help but further our abilities to engage in critiques of the ideologies
and semiotics of contemporary political situations here in the United States.

Sources of Crisis

The rise of fascism as a viable political movement occurred within a


power vacuum created by the collapse of both liberal state parliamentarian-
ism and working-class solidarity. The simultaneous decay of both of these
power blocs followed in the wake of the massive destruction of World War i.
On the one hand, the backroom maneuverings and open power tradings
that circulated within the Balkan peninsula crisis and the resulting continent-
wide war served to reveal the naked hypocrisy of those state functionar-
ies whose nomological discourse of treaties and negotiations was finally
seen as the crude manipulation of weaker states. Indeed, the machina-
tions of colonialism, as enacted in the political power struggles over control
of the labor forces and raw materials of the Balkan peninsula, exploded
in the faces of British, French, Russian, German, Ottoman, and Austro-
Hungarian leaders, seriously compromising their ability to represent their
specific nationalist policies as the product of "enlightened" and "neutral"
political discourse.
On the other hand, the various working-class movements fared no
better. Calls for strikes and boycotts of actual participation in war met with
little response. Socialist parties throughout Europe, particularly in the Bal-
kan states of Serbia, Romania, Bosnia, Montenegro, Macedonia, and Bul-
garia, found their members consistently seduced by calls to national, rather
than class, action. Indeed, the region-wide networking of working-class
parties engaged in antiwar campaigns was quickly and efficiently destroyed
by the separatist/extremist/nationalist rhetoric of, for example, Kings Ferdi-
nand of Bulgaria and Peter of Serbia.3 In the following pages, I attempt to

3. The period preceding World War I was exemplary of this movement, particularly within
the Balkan peninsula. For example, on 13 March 1908, Socialists marching in Budapest
and demanding universal suffrage were attacked by both the official State police as well
as civilian right-wing hit squads such as the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organiza-
tion. Also active were the Bulgarian-based Cyril and Methodius Society, the Macedonian
Supreme Committee, and the Servian Society of the Sava. The paradox of the situation
is that both the Socialists and the more traditional nationalist Right were struggling for the
dissolution of the remaining bonds of foreign rule-particularly that imposed by the Turks
of the Ottoman Empire-but neither of these groups was able to impose its alternative

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68 boundary 2 / Spring 1993

show that the success of fascism was based on its abilities to manipulate
this dual crisis in representation and interpellation.

The Crisis in Representation and Interpellation


in Nicos Poulantzas's Fascism and Dictatorship (1970), the above-
mentioned crisis in representation and interpellation is described as a "gen-
eralized ideological crisis" that consisted of "a deep crisis in the dominant
bourgeois ideology and, simultaneously, a deep crisis among the masses.
This was not a crisis in the working-class ideology dominated by bour-
geois ideology" but, rather, "a crisis in Marxist-Leninist ideology itself."4
I described this dual crisis earlier in its specific manifestation in Balkan
peninsula politics, but it must be contextualized further within the mas-
sive expansion of European capital throughout the Far East, Africa, Central
and Latin America, and the Middle East. Such colonialist expansion may
have served to bolster innumerable bank accounts and the stock sheets

of Europe's largest producers and distributors, but it also served to dilute


the legitimacy of existing representational strategies. To be specific, liberal
state parliamentarianism found itself increasingly caught between the rheto-
ric of democracy/Enlightenment/"modernization" and the harsh realities of
international imperialism.
Indeed, between 1871 and 1900, Britain increased its national territo-
ries by 4.5 million square miles, with an accompanying population increase
of 66 million; France gained 3.5 million square miles and 26 million new
"subjects"; Germany appropriated 1 million square miles and 13 million new
"citizens."5 An entire world of "others" was thus conquered; within these

ideologies in the face of the region's long-standing barriers of different languages, races,
educational and religious systems, cultural traditions, and so on. Interested readers may
wish to consult Barbara and Charles Jelavich, The Establishment of the Balkan Nation
States, 1804-1920 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1977); Ivan T. Berend and
Gyorgy Ranki, The European Periphery and Industrialization, 1780-1914 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1982); Leon Trotsky, The War Correspondences of Leon
Trotsky, trans. Brian Pearce (New York: Monad Press, 1980); Jacob Gould Schurman,
The Balkan Wars, 1912-1913 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1914); Wesley Ge-
wehr, The Rise of Nationalism in the Balkans, 1800-1930 (New York: Henry Holt and Co.,
1931); George Mylonas, The Balkan States (St. Louis: Eden Publishing, 1946).
4. Nicos Poulantzas, Fascism and Dictatorship: The Third International and the Problem
of Fascism (London: New Left Books, 1974), 77; hereafter cited in my text as Fascism.
5. Figures cited in Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: World Pub-
lishing Co./Meridian Books, 1962), 124. Also of interest is Benedict Anderson, Imagined
Communities (London: Verso, 1991).

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Hartnett / The Ideologies and Semiotics of Fascism 69

new worlds, however, the imperialist governing parties were increasingly


dependent on the use of brute force to keep these others in line. The naked
barbarity of imperialism can be seen, then, as sowing the seeds of its own
internal decay. Such were the predictions of Marx and Lenin, whose think-
ing Poulantzas echoes when he states that "the bourgeois political leaders
are in a pitiable situation, well described by Marx and Lenin; they are un-
able to give political organization to, or impose hegemony on, the alliance
of classes and class factions they represent" (Fascism, 75).
The "pitiable situation" of bourgeois leaders was, however, only one
aspect of the crisis, for as I noted in reference to the Balkans, the various
Socialist parties were equally inept at imposing their political organization.
For example, the hard-line economism of the Second and Third Interna-
tionals was remarkably unresponsive to the fact that a broad-based political
movement requires a more inclusive set of criteria than dogmatic references
to the "revolutionary proletariat" and the inevitable "smashing of the bour-
geoisie.'"6 The failure of such rhetoric is particularly obvious in light of the
fact that many of the newly colonized others mentioned above had no pre-
vious experience with industrial relations. Indeed, the dogmatic concept of
a unified proletariat oppressed by an equally unified bourgeoisie generated
little enthusiasm in these newly conquered regions for the precise reason
that no such stable social groups existed.
Ernesto Laclau sees this dual inability to effect a hegemonic order
as resulting from a fundamentally misdirected process of interpellation.
Laclau's concept of interpellation-following from the Althusserian model7
-is based on the belief that "the basic function of all ideology is to inter-
pellate/constitute individuals as subjects."8 The failure of the interpellative

6. For a brilliant analysis of this inability to think beyond such static categories, see
Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe's Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radi-
cal Democratic Politics (London: Verso, 1987). Further discussion of the subject is found
in Stanley Aronowitz, The Crisis in Historical Materialism: Class, Politics, and Culture
in Marxist Theory (South Hadley, Mass.: J. F. Bergin Publishers, 1981), where he sug-
gests that "the trouble with Marxism has been to take the proletariat as a class as an
unproblematic category" (73).
7. See Louis Althusser's important 1970 essay, "Ideology and Ideological State Appara-
tuses," in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (London: New
Left Books, 1971), 123-73.
8. Ernesto Laclau, Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory: Capitalism, Fascism, Popu-
lism (London: Verso, 1987), 100. For an updated version of Laclau's analysis of inter-
pellative strategies and their relation to economic dislocations, see the stunning opening
essay of his New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time (London: Verso, 1990), 3-85.

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70 boundary 2 / Spring 1993

projects of both existing bourgeois power blocs and working-class organi-


zations is seen, then, as following from the fact that neither group was able
to articulate an ideological position that was consistent with the economic
and political needs of a majority of the population.
The logical questions, then, are: In what ways were both the bour-
geois and working-class parties unresponsive to the needs of this majority?
What distinguished this growing noninterpellated mass-in terms of both
economic and political interests-from either the bourgeoisie or the working
classes? In the following pages, I employ the writings of Laclau, Poulantzas,
and Alice Yeager Kaplan to understand these questions with specific refer-
ence to the analysis of how this crisis in representation and interpellation
led to the rise of fascism.

Petty-Bourgeois Ideology: Obscuring Class, Avoiding Politics


The largest and most aggressive of the noninterpellated masses
noted above (moving now to the Continent and away from the Balkans) was
the petty-bourgeoisie, a loosely associated "class" of small-scale producers
and small-scale property owners. Poulantzas describes the production of
the petty-bourgeoisie as entailing

those forms of artisan work or small family business in which the


same agent is both owner and possessor of the means of production,
and works directly with them. There is no economic exploitation....
[S]mall-scale production of this sort draws profit from the sale of its
goods, it does not directly extract surplus value. (Fascism, 238)

Poulantzas describes the small-scale ownership of the petty-bourgeoisie


as consisting of "small-scale commerce in the sphere of the circulation
of capital in which the owner of the business, helped by his family, pro-
vides the labor, and only very occasionally employs wage labor" (Fascism,
238). The petty-bourgeoisie are thus situated loosely between the bour-
geoisie and working classes, as they are neither aligned with the interests
of monopoly and other big capital nor oppressed by the relations of pro-
duction that constitute the working classes. This tenuous in-between-ness
perhaps explains why the petty-bourgeoisie refuses the interpellative ges-
tures of existing power blocs, for neither the liberal state power brokering
that occurs in parliament nor the radical socialist attempts to overthrow the
market system appeal directly to their needs and aspirations.
One of the results of this noninterpellated in-between-ness is the
rise of what Laclau refers to as "Jacobinism." This Jacobinism is "radi-

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Hartnett / The Ideologies and Semiotics of Fascism 71

cal, that is to say, presentable as an alternative to the system and not as


a bartering formula within the system itself," while also "preventing any
identification between radical popular objectives and socialist objectives."9
To clarify, then, the petty-bourgeoisie fears: (1) economic absorption by
monopoly capital; (2) political neutralization within the bourgeois machin-
ery of parliamentary politics; and (3) the loss of its small-scale ownership
rights and control over means of production that would occur under the
rule of socialism. Jacobinism, therefore, is an ideological alternative that
allows the petty-bourgeoisie to negotiate among these threats. It was the
National Socialist parties that were able to represent themselves as re-
sponsive to these fears and that were able, therefore, to interpellate the
petty-bourgeoisie within their political organization.
The success of this interpellative process is based on the construc-
tion of various ideologies that appear responsive to such needs. According
to Poulantzas, the three dominant ideological tropes that arise from these
concerns are status-quo anticapitalism, aspirations to social mobility, and
power fetishism, each of which is based upon, and in turn is generative of,
an obscuring of the relations of production and the scapegoating of finance
capital. Let us look more closely at these three tropes:
1. Status-quo anticapitalism. Poulantzas describes this position as
"against big money and great fortunes, but in favor of the status-quo" (Fas-
cism, 241). Specifically, the petty-bourgeoisie requires a well-oiled market
space within which to function free from both monopoly capital and radical
socialist intervention.

2. Aspirations to social mobility. Poulantzas describes this ideology


as follows: "With the fear of proletarianization below, and the attraction of
the bourgeoisie above, the petty-bourgeoisie aspires to join the bourgeoi-
sie," and "to replace a bourgeoisie not doing its job" (Fascism, 241). That
the bourgeoisie is not doing its job follows from the fact that it is unable to
represent itself as the much-needed negotiator of status-quo anticapitalism.
Thus, the success of fascism rests upon its ability to represent itself as an
alternative route to power, as an opportunity for social mobility free from the
big money entanglements of the bourgeoisie.
3. Power fetishism. Poulantzas describes power fetishism as a form
of "statolatry"; that is, the belief in the "neutral state above the classes" that
will "nurture it [the petty-bourgeoisie] and arrest its decline" (Fascism, 291).
Such statolatry is the subject of Marx's famous essay "The Eighteenth Bru-

9. Laclau, Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory, 119.

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72 boundary 2 / Spring 1993

maire of Louis Bonaparte," in which the desire for a stable marketplace and
a specifically nonrevolutionary government feeds the call for a strong leader.
The result is the December 1851 taking of power by Louis Napolean.'o
The key to each of these moments is the obscuring of relations of
production via a misrepresentation of the ties between state power and
finance capital. For example, Alice Yeager Kaplan observes that fascism is
dependent on a "separation of technology from economic production" and
that within fascism,

the autonomy of industrial production is granted as a protection


against the real-against street violence, economic depression, fal-
tering parliamentary governments, against the success of Bolshe-
vism, and therefore against an increasingly visible working class.11

The ideological aspect of this strategy lies in the fact that it is precisely a
means of not addressing the actual crises at hand. Indeed, by condens-
ing economic and political crises into an abstract question of "technology,"
fascism obscures the questions of relations of production while simulta-
neously guaranteeing the necessity of its continued (and hidden) ties to
finance capital. The ideological process, then, involves fascism represent-
ing itself as capable of engineering such an accelerated technological re-
sponse to social crises while in fact doing so only through an increased
bond to monopoly capital. Clearly, one of the major ideological cover-ups of
fascism is its ability to represent finance capital as an enemy of the petty-
bourgeoisie while simultaneously increasing its ties with the interests of
monopoly capital.
This ideological veil was achieved via the mass representation of
finance capital as the specific realm of Jews and usurers. This representa-
tional strategy of equating Jews with finance capital served a dual purpose:
It channeled animosity toward an easily marked social group while simul-

10. See Marx's "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte," in Karl Marx: Selected
Writings, ed. David McLellan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), where he writes:
"The Bonaparte dynasty represents the conservative peasant. . . . The peasant who
wants to consolidate his holding" (318). The general idea here is that a representative of
the status quo won out over the more radical claims of both the Left and the Right.
11. Alice Yeager Kaplan, Reproductions of Banality: Fascism, Literature, and French
Intellectual Life (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 26, 27. Kaplan pro-
vides a fascinating analysis of fascism's use of the radio, the loudspeaker, movies, bill-
boards-technologies of communication in which the sender is absent and communal
reception emphasized.

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Hartnett / The Ideologies and Semiotics of Fascism 73

taneously obscuring the roles of the real power brokers. In this manner,
the questions of class antagonisms and the relations of production were
condensed into the one signifier of (as Pound would call it) "Jewsry," which
functioned as a marker of otherness against which the Fascists were able to
interpellate the petty-bourgeoisie. A similar process of ideological veiling is
found in the fact that Jews were also represented as the chief actors for Bol-
shevist interests. Such ideological representations facilitated a shifting of
political discourse from questions of class relations and the relations of pro-
duction to the more vague territory of race and nationality. Thus, as material
distinctions based on one's situation within the relations of production and
governmental hierarchies become confused, so the fascist rhetoric of one
Leader, one People, one Land, Technology, and so on, increasingly acts as
a means of interpellation that seals off otherness, that locks in similarities,
and that effectively shuts down all oppositional discourse.
I am suggesting, then, that fascism arose (in part) as a specifically
ideological movement that was able to interpellate the petty-bourgeoisie
and nonaligned workers (1) through projections of national rather than class
action; (2) through representations of a neutral state policy that was anti-
capitalist as well as antisocialist; and (3) through representing a concrete
other against which a unified position could be constructed. Ideology is used
in this sense to designate a set of beliefs and policies geared toward the
obscuring of political and economic relations, with interpellation understood
as that process by which individuals are constructed or hailed as political
subjects through an acceptance/recognition/acknowledgment of their par-
ticipation within a particular set of ideologies. Fascism is used in this sense
to designate that historically specific project by which the petty-bourgeoisie
and nonaligned working classes were interpellated via the ideologies out-
lined above. When I speak of fascism, then, I mean to suggest not only
a specific set of ideological factors but also an interpellative strategy that
arose as an alternative to the post-World War I crises in both the traditional
bourgeoisie and working classes.

The Semiotics of Fascism: Binarism and Closure

In the preceding section, I analyzed three of the central ideologies


of fascism. In this section, I contend that the success of this interpellative
process lies in its ability to control representation. Specifically, the suc-
cess of fascism's interpellative process rests upon its ability to represent
the interests of the masses in all-encompassing nationalist, rather than ex-

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74 boundary 2 / Spring 1993

clusionary class, terms, and to represent otherness-in both racial and


economic terms-by condensing the image of the Jew. The success of fas-
cist interpellative strategies is seen, then, to rest upon its remarkable ability
to expand certain signifiers (the State, the People, the Nation) while con-
densing "others" (Bolshevism, the Jewsurer, finance capital). Although this
might seem like an obvious contradiction (fascism's ability to expand the
meaning of certain signifiers while condensing the meanings of other sig-
nifiers), this is exactly the function of ideology: to control representation in
such a way as to obscure contradictory political and economic conditions.
The key question, then, is: How is such a doubly contradictory system of
representation legitimized? I propose that this legitimation is based, in part,
upon the polarization of signs into crude systems of binaries and that closing
off slippage between these binaries is effected through the imposition of
state power.12

Language as a System of Differences; Fascism


as a System of Closure
My suggestion that fascism involves a closure or absolute deter-
minacy of certain representational strategies, and that this process must
involve brute force, is based upon the assumption that such fixity of mean-
ing is in complete violation of the functioning of language itself. Specifi-
cally, word and world are not one: The representation of meaning is always
partial, always slipping, always striving for fullness and yet always remain-
ing incomplete. This is the fundamental understanding of semiotics, which
seeks not to fulfill this partiality or to close off this slippage but, rather, to
examine the social construction of signs and to analyze their attempts to
represent what they cannot. Eric Gould succinctly describes this inherent
incommensurability:

The historicity of consciousness is located in the play of language


which carries in its every use the possibility of its own denial. The
incompleteness of the sign insists that no complete meaning is pos-
sible, only a system of differences: form and meaning are never

12. We could obviously look at this issue from many perspectives. For a psychological
analysis of how fascism is made to appear "legitimate," see Ernst Bloch's 1932 essay
"Nonsynchronism and the Obligation to Its Dialectic," New German Critique 11 (Spring
1977): 22-38; for a more traditional, sociological analysis, see The Nature of Fascism,
ed. S. J. Woolf (New York: Random House, 1968).

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Hartnett / The Ideologies and Semiotics of Fascism 75

present at once; the meaning of a word is a tension between its


paradigmatic and historical poles.13

Fascist interpellative strategies are specifically geared toward a can-


cellation of this tension. On the paradigmatic axis, we see this as an expan-
sion of iconic representations: the Leader, the People, and the State (i.e.,
mythical concepts that are elevated into totalizing categories represented
as transparent unto themselves). On the historical axis, we find the rewriting
of certain crucial narratives: relations of production and the flux of continen-
tal power politics (i.e., historical narratives in which class antagonisms and
contested land claims are either erased or rewritten so as to generate clear
imperatives for the masses). In both cases, the strategy is one of conflating
form and meaning, of erasing potential differences, of enacting exactly the
closure that Gould sees as impossible.
How is this project of closure successful? At the epistemological
level, this fixing of meaning is effected via what Hans Albert refers to as
"cognitive privilege."'14 This is a tautological circle in which understanding
and agreement are conflated. Thus, those who do not agree must undoubt-
edly suffer from a misunderstanding, while those who do agree are in the
realm of knowledge and immediacy of perception. The already discussed
example of the obscuring of relations of production is a case in point: In
the absence of strong opposition from either socialist or liberal democratic
parties, the Fascists were able to represent the economic crises of the state
not as manifestations of class antagonisms but as a function of the assault
of international (Jewish) finance capital. Thus, the boggling complexity of
the situation is reduced to a set of binaries: Members of society either see
the threat of such finance capital and accordingly support fascist efforts to
battle the "Jewsurers" or they do not see and are therefore complicit in the
attack upon national and racial sovereignty.

13. Eric Gould, Mythical Intentions in Modern Literature (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1987), 41.
14. Hans Albert, Treatise on Critical Reason, trans. Mary Varney Rorty (Princeton: Prince-
ton University Press, 1980), 137. Within such "cognitive privilege," the privileged viewer/
reader is represented as privy to some organic truth. This corresponds to what Albert
calls "a revelation model of knowledge," in which "truth is manifest and lies open to view
so that one need merely open one's eyes to see it" (21). For example, on 12 April 1991,
the Associated Press Wire Service quoted General Schwarzkopf as stating, "Anyone who
dares even imply that we did not achieve a great victory obviously doesn't know what the
hell he's talking about."

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76 boundary 2 / Spring 1993

Such semiotic reductionism and cognitive privilege translate on the


political level into dogma, that is, imperatives to action based upon these
epistemological maneuvers (i.e., arresting and murdering Jews, invading
neighboring lands, organizing the masses as a national and racial front,
etc.). As Alan Durant writes, "The necessary condition for mastering reality
is to have something that can be kept hold of."'15 The political problem,
however, is that such mastery relies on signs inclusive enough so that a ma-
jority of the population-even those who might otherwise be at odds-may
cling to them. Here again, we return to the People, the Land, the Nation, et
cetera.

Money as Sign
Perhaps the most obvious example of a sign system that must be
"kept hold of" is money. This follows from the fact that money is central to
the functioning of any "modern" culture and-perhaps more to the point,
since the same could be said of language, as well-that the printing and
backing of money is explicitly within the jurisdiction of the state (whereas
language generally is not). As such, the control of the meaning of money
is absolutely central to the functioning of any government, particularly to a
government that has arisen as a stopgap against the chaos of both an eco-
nomic crisis and a general crisis in political representation. Thus, whereas
socialist economics seeks a radical redistribution of wealth as well as a re-

evaluation of the meaning of money and exchange, and whereas monopoly


capital seeks the continued accumulation of wealth and a consolidation of
the meaning of money, so the legitimacy of fascism rests upon its ability
to represent itself as a party/set of policies that will legislate against these
actions. Control is necessary, therefore, both in the realm of exchange itself
and in the field of representing money and wealth. This suggests, then,
that economic control and semiotic control are simultaneous and mutually
dependent moments.
The interdependence of these moments is detailed by Peter Nicholls,
who writes, "Once the process of exchange is seen as thoroughly deter-
mined by law, the complex fabric of society is reduced to a set of sim-
plistic oppositions."16 The necessity of imposing "law" over the process

15. Alan Durant, Ezra Pound: Identity in Crisis (New Jersey: Barnes and Noble Books,
1981), 171.
16. Peter Nicholls, Ezra Pound: Politics, Economics, and Writing (London: Macmillan,
1984), 216, 217. Much of the thought in this paper was/is generated by Nicholls's study,

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Hartnett / The Ideologies and Semiotics of Fascism 77

of exchange was detailed earlier as following from the double fear of the
petty-bourgeoisie of monopoly capital accumulation "above" them and of
socialist redistribution "below." This reduction of the complex questions
of economics to "simplistic oppositions" is analogous to the condensation
of signifiers noted earlier, in which broad class issues were reduced to crude
Bolshevism (a process that was seen, paradoxically, to be furthered by
the Second and Third International's dogmatic economism) and in which
international financial crises were reduced to Jewish usury.
In each of these cases, the reduction of politicoeconomic contradic-
tions to binary opposites corresponds with the construction of normative
categories that facilitated "legislation." Finance capital is especially diffi-
cult to enmesh within this process, for it is not-as is the small cash that
exchanges hands daily between buyer and seller-directly reducible to a
this-for-that equation. Indeed, with finance capital, the distance between
sign and object is large; thus, the "meaning" of finance capital escapes
what Nicholls calls the "determination of the law." It is exactly this mobility
of meaning between money and object, between signs of value and objects
of value, that fascism must curtail.
I have so far withheld specific references to Pound, but I will here
address his economics, for they are representative of such an attempt to
close off the play of difference between sign and object. For example, Lewis
Hyde suggests that for Pound,

the arch criminal is the man who makes sure that value is detached
from its concrete embodiment and then plays the gap between sym-
bol and object, between abstract money and embodied wealth....
All the crimes that Pound warns us against come down to one: to
profit on the alienation of the symbol from the real.'7

The fascist response to this play of value, as suggested earlier, is to en-


hance certain signs so as to embody a naturalized "reality" and to effect

as well as from discussion with Nicholls upon the occasion of his lecturing on Pound at
the University of California at San Diego, 18 October 1988.
17. Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property (New York: Vin-
tage Books, 1979), 267. This "alienation of the symbol from the real" and the response
of seeking semiotic closure so as to prevent its widening are cited by Paul Smith as the
central moments in Pound's theory/practice of representation. Smith writes, "Pound at-
tempts to restore the signifier to the signified; he tries to elide the material gap in order
to restore faith and confidence in the word as an instrument in the revelation of reality"
(from Smith's Pound Revised [London: Croon Helm, 1983], 38).

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78 boundary 2 / Spring 1993

such naturalization via a reduction of meaning into crude binary equations.


This is, on my reading, the end goal of Pound's economics, as well. As
Hyde describes it,

Pound would like to reattach the symbols to their objects. ... The
poet of Imagism longs to have the symbolic value equal imaginative
value. Only then would there be no risk of crime. And how are we
to establish this equivalence? Either change the nature of money
itself (stamp scrip) or else enforce a "just" currency. Enforce it-with
state power.'18

Hyde's claim that such overdetermined equations of sign-with-object


require the backing of the state is supported by Andrew Parker, who argues
that in both linguistics and political economics, the only means of insur-
ing the immediacy of representation is through "the arbitrary power of the
state."19 Parker's claim, in turn, supports my thesis that both language itself
and economics (as the language of money) are systems of representation
that cannot attain complete unity and that attempts to seal off the play of
differences between sign and object, word and world, therefore, require the
use of arbitrary power.
I am suggesting then, that the semiotics of fascism functions-in
both a generally linguistic and/or representational sense and a specifically
economic sense-through an arbitrary closure of signifying ambiguity. In-
deed, the political needs generating a semiotics of binarism and closure
dictate that the inherent play of differences between word and world or cur-
rency and commodity cannot be tolerated, for the ideology of the State,
the Nation, the People, and so on, must be all encompassing, as breaks
or gaps in the signifying chain could potentially generate similar breaks
or gaps in the interpellative chain. Thus, the success of the interpellative
strategy of fascism rests upon the ability of its various ideological elements
to reduce the play of differences between signs and objects/interpellated

18. Hyde, The Gift, 265.


19. Andrew Parker, "Ezra Pound and the Economy of Anti-Semitism," in Postmodernism
and Politics, ed. Jonathan Arac (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 83.
William Chase sees a similar need for some form of arbitrary power to effect such closure
and "immediacy." He thus sees Pound as "an aesthetic tyrant" whose judgments, while
striving for and indeed claiming universal validity, nonetheless "rely on personal convic-
tion and almost nothing else" (from Chase's The Political Identities of Pound and Eliot
[Stanford University Press, 1973], 69).

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Hartnett / The Ideologies and Semiotics of Fascism 79

subjects, while simultaneously condensing whatever/whomever escapes


this interpellative strategy into easily targeted enemies of the social body.

Ezra Pound and the Ideologies and Semiotics of Fascism

My first references to Ezra Pound were smuggled into the closing


paragraphs of the preceding section. I now turn directly to Pound and dedi-
cate the remainder of this essay to a detailed examination of the remarkable
similarities between his ideological and semiotic practices and those that
have been discussed above as constitutive of fascism. The examination en-

tails two parts: first, a brief look at certain of Pound's prose statements con-
cerning the function of money; second, a longer look at Cantos 12 through
15. In both of these sections, my intent is not to "prove" once and for all
that Pound either was or was not a Fascist; rather, my hope is to histori-
cize more thoroughly the textual strategies he used to invest his particular
ideological moments with meaning.

Prose Statements; or, The Economics of Closure


In the previous two sections I argued that the fascist ideologies of
statolatry and status-quo anticapitalism require an obscuring of the rela-
tions of production. In the following pages, I suggest that a similar tactic
is fundamental to Pound's economics. For example, in his ABC of Eco-
nomics (1933), Pound plots the four essential elements of economics as
"1. The product. 2. The want. 3. The means of transport. 4. The certificate
of value."20 There is a peculiar ellipsis here, for notice that Pound assigns
"the product" as a given; the questions of how this product was made, by
whom, and under what conditions are thus left unasked. Such an obscuring
of the questions concerning the means and relations of production enables
Pound to avoid the issues of working-class politics and follows from an even
more basic distinction between property and capital. Pound describes the
distinction as follows: "Capital implies a sort of claim on others, a sort of
right to make others work. Property does not" (ABC, 233).21

20. Ezra Pound, ABC of Economics (1933), cited as it appears in his Selected Prose,
1909-1965, ed. T. S. Eliot (New York: New Directions Press, 1972), 260; hereafter cited
in my text as ABC.
21. This distinction transfers questions of power relations into abstract ethical questions.
Such is the reading offered by Charles Berezin in "Poetry and Politics in Ezra Pound,"
in Partisan Review 48, no. 2 (1981): 276, 277, passim. For a more apologetic analysis

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80 boundary 2 / Spring 1993

My argument is that such binaries obscure historical relations. Spe-


cifically, Pound's view of the finished "product" as a piece of "property"
that simply requires effective means of distribution ignores the issues of
by whom and how the product is produced, thus avoiding the fact that
each end product is a condensation-literally the historical embodiment-
of labor power and complex machinery. Hence, "property," for Pound, is a
given and immediate relation of subject to object, but within capitalist rela-
tions of production, every product is a condensed signifier of exploitation.
Dividing abstract capital from concrete property (and thus avoiding the com-
plexity of production itself) therefore enables Pound to validate individual
property rights, to avoid the various claims of the working classes, and
simultaneously to attack the accumulative process of the bourgeoisie. It is
clear, then, that this convenient division exemplifies the petty-bourgeois/
fascist ideology of status-quo anticapitalism. It is also important to note that
Pound's strategy for producing such ideology seems consistent with the
above-mentioned semiotics of binarism and closure.

Pound proceeds with these nondialectical divisions in mind and ac-


cordingly sees the ultimate politicoeconomic question as, "What would be
a 'just' means of distribution?" Prior to this question, however, is that of
"what and how much you produce" (ABC, 252). Answering the latter will
then allow for discussion of the former. Pound answers the latter question
of "how and what to produce" with the line: "everything useful or desir-
able" (ABC, 252). Notice, again, that the "what" is addressed, but not the
"how." Further problems arise upon asking what means of validation might
be utilized in determining exactly what is or is not "useful" or "desirable."
The working classes have already been erased from the question, so their
input is not acceptable; the bourgeoisie, as will be seen in some detail
when I turn to Cantos 14 and 15, is unable to decide due to its fundamental
moral decay. That leaves either the small-scale owners and producers of
the petty-bourgeoisie or Pound the Philosopher-King. This is where petty-
bourgeois statolatry and Pound's theories of economics intersect, for it is
clear that the right to decide what is "useful" and "desirable" resides, for
Pound, with the "neutral state."
Indeed, Pound repeatedly calls for the State to control all economic
functions. For example, he claims that "short of an absolute state ownership
of all property there will always be plenty of chance for men to make for-

of Pound's economics, see Earle Davis, Visionary Fugitive: Ezra Pound and Economics
(Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1968).

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Hartnett / The Ideologies and Semiotics of Fascism 81

tunes" (ABC, 259; my emphasis). In the 1939 essay "What Is Money for?"
Pound writes, "State authority behind the printed note is the best means
of establishing a just and honest currency. . . . Only the state can effec-
tively fix the just price."22 The connections between statolatry, status-quo
anticapitalism, and the scapegoating of finance capital-as-other are made
even more explicit when Pound states,

A nation whose measure of exchange is at the mercy of forces OUT-


SIDE the nation, is a nation in peril, it is a nation without national
sovereignty. It is a nation of incompetent idiots drifting to ruin ...
Statal money based upon national wealth must replace gold manipu-
lated by international usurers.23

It is important to note that the strategy for producing such fascist


ideologies is dependent on cognitive privilege, which provides for the polar-
ization of alternative discourses into normative binaries, such as "just and
honest currency" versus "the manipulation" of "international usurers" and
"incompetent idiots." Such is the construction of fascist ideology via the
utilization of a semiotics of binarism and closure.

Verse Statements: "Cantos" 12-15

It is currently fashionable to read Pound's Cantos as a massive


"manuscrap," as a "rhizomatic" text, or as a staging ground for rampant
heterogeneity and heteroglossia.24 Such deconstructive readings argue that
the Cantos are too massive a heap of fragments and "manuscraps" to have
any one meaning or theme: This reading privileges the complex semiotic
slippages and ambiguities cited earlier. But what of the structuring prin-
ciples that tie these "manuscraps" together? What of the textual strategies

22. Ezra Pound, "What Is Money for?" (1939), as cited in Selected Prose, 292, 293.
23. Pound, "What Is Money for?" 297.
24. Some representative examples of such readings are H. N. Schneidau, "Pound's Poet-
ics of Loss," in Ezra Pound: Tactics for Reading, ed. Ian Bell (New Jersey: Barnes and
Noble Books, 1982), 103-20; and Kathryne Lindberg, "Rhizomatic America," from her
Reading Pound Reading: Modernism after Nietzsche (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1987), 211-31. A particularly embarrassing example of such deconstructive readings is
Christine Froula's "The Pound Error: The Limits of Authority in the Modern Epic," from her
To Write Paradise: Style and Error in Pound's Cantos (New Haven: Yale, 1984), where
she claims that seeing Pound as authoritarian "only mirrors the expectations of authority,
the desire to be told what to think, feel, and value, that we as readers bring to the poem"
(165). Such thinking seems indicative of the refusal to exercise political judgment so
essential to deconstruction.

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82 boundary 2 / Spring 1993

employed not in conveying meanings but in organizing the text itself? I sug-
gest that we need to acknowledge those deconstructive readings that see
the Cantos as a masterful avoidance of the stasis of any one overriding
theme, while nonetheless believing that the Cantos (or at least Cantos 12
through 15), are, in fact, organized by certain consistent structuring prin-
ciples. My thinking here has been influenced greatly by Alan Durant, who
summarizes this movement from an analysis of meaning to an analysis of
structuring practices when he writes of the Cantos,

The poem consequently cannot be argued to contain fixed meanings


nor to enfold a coherent, monological hypothesis of its own. .... It
must rather be read as a production of relations across language ...
as a tissue of relations hinged always on the given conditions of the
text's organization.25

I have already examined this question of the "tissues of relations


across language" with reference to Pound's prose statements concerning
economics; in that discussion, I argued that his "production of relations" is
structured along poles of binary oppositions that correspond with much con-
sistency to the various ideologies of petty-bourgeois fascism. I also noted
that Pound's use of language within this ideological system is based on ex-
cluding difference and on both expanding and condensing certain signs with
the help of cognitive privilege; in other words, the "conditions of the text's
organization" were seen to be consistent with the semiotics of fascism.
The primary question of this section of my essay is whether or not
such semiotic fascism is at work in the Cantos; I will proceed, then, to ana-
lyze the production of "tissues of relations" within Cantos 12 through 15. By
limiting the field of analysis to these Cantos, and by dealing with them in
some detail, I hope to avoid the pitfall of simply stringing together random
phrases; instead, I attempt to understand more fully the textures and the
structures of relations that function within Pound's writings. I will thus gloss
the "story" of each Canto and then double back to see how their "meanings"
are the products of structuring principles.

Canto 12 provides three examples of economic behavior: Baldy


Bacon, Dos Santos, and The Honest Sailor. Bacon's crime is "usury," for
he makes his living off of charging interest for the lending of money. Pound

25. Durant, Identity in Crisis, 168; my emphasis.

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Hartnett / The Ideologies and Semiotics of Fascism 83

writes that Bacon "Bought all the little copper pennies in Cuba" and goes on
to tell us that "Baldy's interest / was in money business."26 Baldy becomes
ill, however, and returns to Manhattan, with Pound providing the specific
address of "24 E. 47th." This is a fine example of the "production of rela-
tions" between signs: Pound juxtaposes the generalized and exotic other-
ness of Cuba against the specificity and assumed familiarity of New York
represented by 24 E. 47th. The political implications of this juxtaposition
of specificity against otherness will become more important as I proceed.
Bacon is then described as working in

Commercial stationery,
and later, insurance,
Employer's liability,
odd sorts of insurance

Fire on brothels, etc. (54)

Bacon's insurance successes depend on his knowledge of

... which shipping companies were most careless;


where a man was most likely
To lose a leg in bad hoisting machinery. (54)

It seems to me that there is a curious double standard in such think-

ing. On the one hand, Bacon is represented as a usurer who pollutes the
generalized otherness of Cuba, which is portrayed as a premodern culture
in which one hoards "little copper pennies" and counts them like a child-
"un centavo, dos centavos" (53). On the other hand, Bacon is represented
as a trickster whose street-smarts enable him to exploit the misfortunes
of monopoly and other organized forms of capital; that is, he helps the
"little man" collect insurance against the dockyard disasters of modernized
shipping companies, against the organized sellers of sex whose brothels
burn down, and against the "whole'r Wall St." (54). Jean-Michel Rabate
reads the reference to Hermes ("arrived, miraculous Hermes") as Pound
suggesting that "Bacon's faculty for and speed in adapting render him the

26. Ezra Pound, The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions Press, 1986), 53.
All further references to the Cantos will be given in the text, immediately following the
quoted passage, with page numbers only. Canto 12 was written during the summer of
1923, as was Canto 13; it is possible that Cantos 14 and 15 were actually finished as
early as 1922. For more information on the dates and personal stories surrounding the
writings of these poems, see Humphrey Carpenter, A Serious Character: The Life of Ezra
Pound (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1988).

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84 boundary 2 / Spring 1993

equal of the God."27 What, then, does it "mean" for Bacon to be a god-
like trickster who exploits monopoly capital in Manhattan after having been
a centavo-hoarding usurer in Cuba? Can we not read the juxtaposition of
these situations as dependent upon the modernist myth of the unpolluted
primitivity of certain "undeveloped" regions? And doesn't such "modern"
versus "premodern" thinking serve as a justification for the ethnocentrism
that fuels colonialism? The importance of these questions will become more
clear as I proceed through the rest of Canto 12 and on into Cantos 13, 14,
and 15.

The second example of economic behavior in Canto 12 is that of


Dos Santos, a Portuguese merchant who buys a grain ship "wrecked in the
estuary of the Tagus" and presumed spoiled by the salt water. Dos Santos
buys the ship, nonetheless, by "mortgaging all his patrimony / e tot lo sieu
aver" (and all his property), and then he buys pigs to feed on the grain. The
venture is apparently a bungle-headed maneuver:

No one else bidding. "Damn fool!" "Maize


Spoiled with salt water,
No use, can't do anything with it." (54)

It turns out, however, that the water in the estuary is fresh. Dos San-
tos thus produces a "first lot" of pigs to mortgage for "the second lot," and,
before long, "Dos Santos fattened, a great landlord of Portugal." The ques-
tion appears again: Is Dos Santos a usurer or a trickster? A smart buy
sneaked out from under the noses of auctioneers and other big-money Chi-
cago bidders can only be seen by Pound as a positively creative act-Dos
Santos does, after all, literally create food. But what of Dos Santos's status
as a "great landlord"? Surely such landholdings (rented out to others no
less) are the mark of accumulating capital, which is definitely noncreative in
Pound's status-quo anticapitalist worldview. The questions, then, are, How
are these possibilities represented? and What is the "tissue of relations"
between them?
I suggest that the relation is one of aggressive ahistoricity. Specifi-
cally, we are given two historical moments, each loaded with significance,
and yet no dialectic. This might perhaps be explained by the fact that draw-
ing some sense of genesis or continuity through Dos Santos's rise would
reveal the inconsistencies in Pound's previously discussed split between

27. Jean-Michel Rabate, Language, Sexuality, and Ideology in Ezra Pound's Cantos
(London: Croon Helm, 1986), 274.

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Hartnett / The Ideologies and Semiotics of Fascism 85

property and capital. Indeed, it seems that Pound's crude economic bina-
rism forecloses the possibility of his analyzing the dialectical transformation
of property into capital, thus leaving him with two hypostatized fragments.
Pound then seals off the ambiguities of the dialectics of economic relations
by concluding the section with the line: "Go to hell Apovitch, Chicago aint
the whole punkin" (55). Apovitch is clearly intended to be Jewish, with Chi-
cago the site of the original auction. Thus, by focusing hostility on the U.S.-
based modern "Jewsry" of Apovitch, Pound directs attention away from the
complex dialectical contradictions and linkages between property and capi-
tal, trickster and usurer, and core (Chicago) and periphery (Cuba/Portugal).
My point is that Pound's story-ending imperative-"Go to hell Apovitch"-
serves to close off the ambiguous relations established between Dos San-
tos the trickster and Dos Santos the landlord and pig merchant. Indeed, it
is difficult to read such tag lines as anything less than semiotic watchdogs
intended to police our reading of the text.
The third example of economic behavior in Canto 12 is that of The
Honest Sailor. This story is told by Jim X in a "bankers' meeting" full of

... ranked presbyterians,


Directors, dealers through holding companies,
Deacons in churches, owning slum properties,
Alias usurers in excelsis,
the quintessential essence of usurers,
The purveyors of employment, whining over their 20 p.c. (55)

Notice that Jim X has for his last name a mathematical variable,
suggesting either endlessly anonymous and replaceable possibilities or
perhaps simply x, as in the sign for multiplication.28 Such anonymous mul-
tiplication is clearly evident in the bankers' "investment in new bank build-
ings / productive of bank buildings" (55). An immediate socialist response to
these lines might be one of solidarity, and yet the poem as a whole strikes
me as a clear example of Pound's signifying strategy of closure/condensa-
tion, as religious leaders, bank directors, trading company executives, and
landlords are uniformly categorized as usurers who own slum property and

28. Carrol F. Terrell et al., A Companion to The Cantos of Ezra Pound, Volume 1 (Berke-
ley, University of California Press, 1980), suggest that Jim X is based on John Quinn,
an "American lawyer; authority on modern Irish literature and drama; collector and patron
of modern art" (60). Michael Davidson has informed me that Quinn was patron not only
to Pound but to Eliot and Gaudier-Brzeska, as well.

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86 boundary 2 / Spring 1993

purvey unemployment. Indeed, the specificity of each of these occupations


and the historicity of their different forms of exploitation are condensed into
the mean-all signifier of usury. This excessive layering of pejoratives serves,
then, to condense the specificity of the object of scorn into an easily nor-
mativized other. The tissue of relations between these signs is thus one of
force,29 as Pound erases the vastly different policies and practices of his
exempla while slamming them into one seething chorus of damnation.
The story itself concerns an "honest sailor" who, after recovering
from alcoholism and returning to work,

... saved up his pay money,


and kept on savin' his pay money,
And bought a share in the ship,
and finally had half shares,
Then a ship
and in time a whole line of steamers. (56)

The sailor is even able to send his son (the child of a whore given to him
while he was in the hospital recovering from "too much booze") to college.
Upon his deathbed, the honest sailor-now a wealthy shipping magnate-
informs his son, who calls him "father," that

"I ain't your dad, no,


"I am not your fader but your moder," quod he,
"Your fader was a rich merchant in Stambouli." (57)

Notice that the son calls the sailor "father," whereas the sailor refers
to himself first as "fader" and then as "moder." I suggest that we read this
line as an example of what Russell Berman refers to as the practice of
"specious nomenclature." This is a process by which the misnaming of a
subject serves to distance it from some perceived social body. With spe-
cious nomenclature, Berman writes, "the name testifies to the enemy as

29. There is much support for this reading. For example, Michael Bernstein writes of
Pound's ideograms, "There is no voice but his own to give them authority" (from his Tale
of the Tribe: Ezra Pound and the Modern Verse Epic [Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1980], 47), while Daniel Pearleman likewise sees Pound's signifying strategy as
"evidence of an authoritarian manner" (from his "The Anti-Semitism of Ezra Pound," in
Contemporary Literature 22, no. 1 [Winter 1981]: 106, 107). Peter Brooker also supports
these charges, as he observes that Pound's signifying strategies provide evidence of "a
decidedly fascist tendency" (from his "The Lesson of Ezra Pound: An Essay on Poetry,
Literary Ideologies, and Politics," in Ezra Pound: Tactics for Reading, 28).

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Hartnett / The Ideologies and Semiotics of Fascism 87

ontological outsider, fundamentally excluded from the homogeneity of the


people."'30 On this reading, the confusion between "fader"/"moder" might
be seen as a marker of the sailor's ontological status as other. Further clues
of this sense of otherness derive from the fact that the "real" father was
not only a usurer (a "rich merchant") but he was from Stambouli, as well.31
The son is therefore the by-product of (1) economic otherness, as his "real"
father is rich; (2) geographic otherness, as his "real" father is from Stam-
bouli and his "fader" a homeless sailor; and (3) sexual otherness, as his
mother was "a whore." On each of these counts, the child is a condensed
signifier of otherness. Even the sailor's wealth is a sign of otherness, for
he saves not his "money" or his "pay" but the rhetorically redundant "pay
money." Thus, the sailor's rise to the status of usurer is seen as based
upon a fundamentally unsound economy in which one's pay (a certificate of
labor) and one's money (a certificate of value) are divided. The son is the
end result of these various forms of otherness: a true modern monster born
of foreign monopoly capital and commodified sex.
Canto 12 is, then-on my reading-a truly "modern" poem. This
conclusion follows from the poem's awareness of international markets
(Chicago, Cuba, Manhattan, Stambouli), from the poem's attention to in-
dustrialization, monopoly capital, and foreign finance, and from the spatial
form of the verse itself. I contend, however, that Pound employs each of
these "modern" elements as hypostatized fragments for the purpose of
representing usury in some transnational and cross-temporal form. Indeed,
the immense multiplication of signs and distances made possible by such
"modernization" is here seen to shrink into variations on but one theme:
usury-not specific analyses of the different forms of usury practiced by
different actors in different situations, but usury: the root of all evil. It seems
to me, then, that the three stories of Canto 12 are utilized not as sign sys-
tems for generating an outward projection of differences and specificities
but as transparencies for linking the collapse of meanings into underlying
similarity.

30. Russell Berman, "The Wandering Z," foreword to Kaplan's Reproductions of Ba-
nality, xii. "Specious Nomenclature" was one of Pound's favorite markers of otherness:
"Rosefield" instead of Roosevelt; "Jewspapers" instead of newspapers; "Jewsry" instead
of usury.
31. Terrell's Companion tells us that "Stambouli" is "the oldest part and main Turkish
residential section of Istanbul" (60).

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88 boundary 2 / Spring 1993

Canto 13 transports us from this condensation of "modern" usury


back some 2400 years to the palace where

Kung walked
by the dynastic temple
and into the cedar grove,
and then out by the lower river. (58)

From the street trading and lending of centavos in Cuba to the dockyard
accidents of Manhattan to a Chicago boardroom full of "usurers in ex-
celsis"-from all of these images of modern economic and moral decay,
Pound escapes into the paradisiacal cedar grove of a dynastic temple. In
the following pages, I argue that the nostalgic gesture of longing for a lost
era of "order" and unpolluted nature (cedars are one of Pound's most fre-
quent signs for natural beauty) functions as a bolt against the slippage of
"meaning" in Canto 12. Indeed, whatever questions might have surfaced
concerning the different levels and contexts of usury in Canto 12 are con-
densed by Canto 13 into binary opposites, with modern usury juxtaposed
against the paradisiacal premodern dynastic order of China, circa 500 B.C.
The Kung Canto proceeds with statements by various followers of
Kung, each offering a different perspective on how to govern, to which Kung
replies: "They have all answered correctly, / That is to say, each in his
nature" (58). Such forgiving pluralism might be read as little more than the
flippant answer of a ruler whose power is beyond challenge. Perhaps this
explains why Juan Jang, whom the Companion describes as "an old friend
of the philosopher, older than he himself" (62), elicits such condemnation
from Kung. Indeed, it seems that "each in his own nature" applies only to
students and not to elders, who, we may presume, have more social power
and are therefore more of a threat to Kung. For example, according to Kung,
Juan Jang is sitting by the roadside not meditating or thinking or pondering
being but "pretending to / be receiving wisdom" (59). This enrages Kung,
who shouts, "You old fool, come out of it, / Get up and do something useful."
And then: "a man of fifty who knows nothing / Is worthy of no respect" (59).
This sentiment corresponds with Pound's statement concerning eco-
nomics as the distribution of "everything useful and desirable" (ABC, 252),
for here again we find unqualified and totalizing categories begging the
question of how to distinguish something "useful" from waste. For that mat-
ter, how can anyone "know nothing"? These lines are thus further examples
of the way in which alternative forms of knowledge are normativized-
via cognitive privilege-into that which is not "useful" and not worthy of

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Hartnett / The Ideologies and Semiotics of Fascism 89

"respect." Indeed, Kung's hostility to Jang is an ominous sign, for Kung


proceeds to detail the virtues of "order." The word appears in seven con-
secutive lines and is attached to the general subject "man" three times, to
"his family" one time, to "prince" and "his dominion" one time each, and
then again to Kung himself. Thus, it would appear that such patriarchal
"order" is "useful" and "knowledgeable" precisely in its ability to "stand firm
in the middle" (59), to help rulers, like Wang, govern "with moderation" (60).
The difficult questions of what moderate government might entail, or how
it "stands firm in the middle," are not addressed. Accepting this equation
(order + moderation = well-kept state) is therefore a purely arbitrary act-
a movement of faith rather than discourse, of will rather than dialectic-
meant to legitimize the unquestioned rule of Kung.
The Canto ends with the much debated lines:

The blossoms of the apricot


blow from the east to the west

And I have tried to keep them from falling. (60)

These lines follow Kung's appeal for a leader with character. A literal reading
might see this as an authoritarian gesture; a deconstructive reading might
see this as an excessive claim that undermines its own ability to signify;
a Marxist reading might see this as further evidence of the will to control
raw materials. I acknowledge the possible validity of each of these readings
while wanting, however, to return to the question of how such text is pro-
duced in relation to Pound's other textual constructions. Therefore, I think it
helpful to recall my earlier comments concerning Pound's representation of
Cuba as a premodern/preindustrial culture, for here again, with the example
of China circa 500 B.C., we find Pound engaging in what Edward Said ex-
amines as "Orientalism."32 Specifically, Pound creates a static geographic,
cultural, and historical other against which a stable self may be authored.
This observation should bring to mind my earlier remarks on the political
function of signifying practices that condense the role of "Jewsurers" and
Bolsheviks, for in both cases the strategy is to condense a complex matrix
of economic and political relations into easily presented and clearly marked
symbols. Thus, despite the ambiguity of the conclusion to Canto 13, we can
still pursue the broader question of how the series of signs that make up
the Kung Canto relate back to Canto 12, and forward to Cantos 14 and 15.
In this sense, I read the Kung Canto as functioning as an oriental-

32. See Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1978).

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90 boundary 2 / Spring 1993

ist other that polarizes the premodern/prereified world of Kung's imperial


palace against the varying shades of modern usury detailed in Canto 12.
This reading suggests that Canto 13 is the pivotal moment within the se-
quence of Cantos 12 through 15, for as much as I discover a progression
of semiotic binarism from the condensed modernist hell of Canto 12 to the

orientalist/paradisiacal version of imperial "order" in Canto 13, so I contend


that the process is solidified in Cantos 14 and 15. That is, as Canto 13 func-
tions as a somewhat confusing and yet definitive alternative to the moral
decay of modernity presented in Canto 12, so Cantos 14 and 15 in turn
serve to condense further the opposition, thus adding weight to the critique
of modernity in Canto 12 while simultaneously reinforcing the paradisiacal
vision of Canto 13. With this progression in mind, I can now examine the
Hell Cantos, both as their own sets of ideological and semiotic acts and as
they relate to Cantos 12 and 13.

My comments on Cantos 14 and 15 will be brief, as it seems that a


few excerpts will serve to confirm my arguments. From Canto 14:

... politicians
......... e and ..... n, their wrists bound to
their ankles,
Standing bare bum,
Faces smeared on their rumps,
wide eye on flat buttock,
Bush hanging for beard,
Addressing crowds through their arse-holes,
Addressing the multitudes in the ooze,
newts, water-slugs, water-maggots. (61)

Profiteers drinking blood sweetened with sh-t,


And behind them ...... f and the financiers
lashing them with steel wires.
And the betrayers of language ...
the perverts, the perverters of language. (61)

bog of stupidities,
malevolent stupidities, and stupidities,

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Hartnett / The Ideologies and Semiotics of Fascism 91

the soil living pus, full of vermin,


dead maggots begetting live maggots,
slum owners,
usurers squeezing crab-lice. (63)

monopolists, obstructors of knowledge,


obstructors of distribution. (63)

From Canto 15:

the beast with a hundred legs, USURA


and the swill full of respecters,
bowing to the lords of the place, (64)

a green bile-sweat, the news owners, .... s


the anonymous (65)

Infinite pus flakes, scabs of a lasting pox ...


endless rain from the arse-hairs, ...
a continual bum-belch. (65)

These passages serve as a remarkably complete listing of the ide-


ologies composing fascism. These elements, in the order they appear in
the lines quoted above, are: the attack on bourgeois politicians; the use of
specious nomenclature; the condensation of political discourse into crude
binaries; the representations of the working classes as inhuman others; the
scapegoating of finance capital; the concern for "fixing" language; the in-
voking of cognitive privilege; the concern with race and reproduction; the
attacks on monopoly capital; and the desire for the policing of distribution.
In Canto 15, the list echoes with similar fascist ideological concerns: the
attack on generalized usury; representing the masses as "swill"; critiques
of the existing bourgeois power bloc; specious nomenclature (again); the
masses as "anonymous" (without Kung's "character"); the masses as dis-
eased; and then, for good measure, the whole scene as a rainstorm of liquid
shit with the thunder of a continual "bum-belch."

The sheer violence of these lines is, in itself, disturbing. What I find
perhaps more dangerous is the relation of these Cantos to those that pre-
cede them, for I suspect that much of the ferocity of Cantos 14 and 15 is a
response to the ambiguity of 12 and particularly to the potential slippages

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92 boundary 2 / Spring 1993

that occur at the end of 13. Indeed, what are the semiotic relations between
the concluding lines of Cantos 13 and the Hell of 14 and 15? And, for that
matter, how do these relations extend back to and through 12?
In discussing Canto 12, I emphasized the poem's condensation of
geographic and historical specificity into synchronous moments of some
wider "modernist" movement toward international usury. Canto 13 was then
seen to offer the 2400-year-old moral example of Kung's "order by charac-
ter," but it ends with a particularly curious and indefinite statement. I then
read Cantos 14 and 15 as providing a vulgar honor role of slanders and
scatological references, all relating to and resulting from various forms of
modern economic/moral decay. Cantos 12, 14, and 15, thus, on my reading,
construct a cycle, with 13 wedged in the middle, so that whatever ambiguity
might have remained after reading 12 or 13 is erased via the avalanche
of accusations in 14 and 15. Indeed, the Hell of financiers drinking "blood
sweetened with shit" cannot help but revalue my reading of Canto 12. Thus,
while the honest sailor and his monster son, along with Bacon and Dos
Santos, might have initially been read as somewhat ambiguous signifiers of
generalized sexual, economic, and geographic otherness, they are now-
after reading Cantos 14 and 15-nothing short of "infinite pus flakes" and
"usurers squeezing crab-lice." In short, the multiple forms of usury men-
tioned in Canto 12 are here, in 14 and 15, literally condensed into all that is
inhuman, uncivilized, full of and spouting shit, diseased. My argument, then,
is that whatever potential slippages I may have found in Cantos 12 and 13
are buried within Cantos 14 and 15 beneath a tirade of loaded signifiers
that, not surprisingly, adhere closely to the ideologies of fascism.
In my section on the semiotics of fascism, I emphasized the use of
cognitive privilege and binarism. Such strategies are employed in Cantos
12 through 15 with much vigor. The attack in Canto 13 on Jang, who "knows
nothing" and should do "something useful," serves as an example. The
lines from Canto 14, "Bog of stupidities, / malevolent stupidities," are per-
haps even more to the point, for Pound announces that the actions of both
bourgeois politicians and the "anonymous" masses result not from alterna-
tive agendas but from stupidity; and not just from simple ignorance but from
aggressively malevolent stupidity. Pound then juxtaposes against such vul-
garities and stupidities the paradisiacal order and character of Kung. The
binary pole is thus set: On the one hand, we have the condensed Hell
of modernity; on the other hand, we find the cedar groves of Kung's im-
perial dynasty. The "production of relations" between Cantos 12, 13, 14,
and 15, thus, on my reading, enacts Pound's transition from using language

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Hartnett / The Ideologies and Semiotics of Fascism 93

as a system of differences and particularities to a crude binary system of


semiotic closure saturated with petty-bourgeois fascist ideology.
I hope that the historicotheoretical analyses of the first two sections
of my essay provided a grounding from which to suggest that Pound's par-
ticular prose and verse statements were part of a widespread ideological
reaction to concrete sociopolitical relations. Indeed, I have argued through-
out this essay that his strategy for producing text clearly exemplifies the
practice of semiotic condensation/closure and that this strategy relies on
the polarization of discourse into crude binaries in which the "correct" side
is enhanced via "cognitive privilege." I have also argued that the "mean-
ings" constructed with this strategy consistently echoed the concerns of
petty-bourgeois fascism, which I outlined as: statolatry, status-quo anticapi-
talism, power fetishism, fear of both monopoly capital and socialism, and
fear of otherness in general and of Jews in particular. I think it is important to
remember that both these semiotic tactics and their corresponding ideolo-
gies were responses to the post-World War I crises in representation and
interpellation experienced simultaneously by both the bourgeoisie and the
working classes; with this reading in mind, recent events in United States
politics-both domestic and abroad-take on a more familiar and, in this
case, ominous tone.

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