What if Coffee is Responsible for Fascism? Lol Jk …Unless? Part I

Any old hipster will tell you that the best coffee—as per the directions of the barista at their favorite third wave coffee shop—is made with a Chemex Pour Over. You could, however, opt for the French press, (the modern design actually comes from Italy, an important note), if you prefer the thicker, oily consistency that comes from a longer steeping process. But if you really want to be an aficionado—and by aficionado, I mean, pretend that you are sipping homemade espresso in some romantic Italian countryside, as if plucked from a scene in Call Me by Your Name—you will use a Bialetti Moka Pot.

The Moka Pot, designed and introduced to the market in 1933, offered consumers an inexpensive way to make espresso-like coffee in their own home, right on their stove top or even over a fire. It works like this: water in the bottom chamber begins to boil and create steam pressure, which, pushing up through a filter of coffee, brews a dense, espresso-like coffee that slowly drips out of spigot into the upper chamber. Because of the pressure generated in the bottom chamber, the coffee is forcibly extracted from the coffee grounds, using less liquid than a pour-over or immersion brewing technique. This violence—that is, the violence of pressurized bean extraction—is what makes espresso espresso. The Italians knew that steeping wasn’t enough—there was more caffeine left, more to be taken—and thus, the espresso machine was made. But the Moka pot brought that machine into the home, in a small aluminum casing. It was espresso for all, the democratization of strong coffee, an idea we will come back to. Just bear with me please.

In 1922, Italian born artist and advertiser Leonetto Cappiello made a now famous poster for the espresso machine company Victoria Arduino, that featured a man in a trench coat leaning out of a moving train grabbing a cup of coffee. It was a brilliant idea: I mean, what better way to show the speed of it all? The brewing process, the consumption of the drink, the jolt of energy, the on-the-run ceremony, the productivity it brings, and the pace of modernity—all on display in one succinct image. Espresso became fundamental to the Italian image, and that image sought to represent one important value: speed.

Well, at least that’s the image some Italians wanted to show the world, and it actually predates the Moka Pot (a period referred to by absolutely no one as, B.M.P.). In 1909, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti wrote and published “The Futurist Manifesto,” in which he declared the start of a new national art movement, “Futurism.” In it he writes, “We declare that the splendor of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed.”[i] For Marinetti and the futurists, art is and must be the expression of violent, explosive creation, and glorification of the values of war, militarism, patriotism, a contempt for the past, and a contempt for women. It’s origins in Italy are especially significant, since the futurist, tired of the past ruling over Italy’s image, sought to, “deliver Italy from its gangrene of professors, archaeologists, tourist guides and antiquaries.”[ii] For them, Italy could represent the future—the powerful, fast, and violent future—and thus, they sought to present these values in their art.

Marinetti’s literary works never received much in the way of critical praise, but his political writing, as well as several important speeches he gave, became incredibly influential to other artists. Futurism took off in the visual arts, with sculptors and painters who were intrigued by the challenge of representing speed and “dynamism” in the still image. Trains, planes, automobiles, crowds, proto-robots, and dogs—surprisingly—became favorite subjects of the futurists, and their paintings oftentimes featured a mix of harsh-edged shapes and blurred figures so as to represent movement and industry. Take “The Train Arriving at the Station of Lugo” (1916) by Roberto M Baldessari, for instance, which portrays the fast pace of modern mass transportation, through jagged confusing lines and blurred faces, like apparitions.

[i] http://bactra.org/T4PM/futurist-manifesto.html

[ii] Marinetti

The Futurists were hugely important to the arts during the 20^th century, and their influence stems far beyond those who identified directly as “Futurists.” The “Vorticists,” for example, who’s manifesto was published in Ezra Pound’s magazine BLAST! in 1914, took the geometrical abstraction of futurism even further, rejection representational art completely, and was founded directly after Marinetti gave a speech in London to a group of major poets and artists.[i] Vorticism, as a response to Marinetti’s insistence that they reject the past, was also influenced other contemporary Avant Garde movements, such as Imagism and Cubism, which were both invested in abstraction and concision. So, while Marinetti’s actual writings were not critically successful, his influence can nevertheless be found among even the most critically acclaimed of modernist artists and poets, which suggests that his violent yearnings and revolutionary thoughts were not just some benign fringe, but rather, commonly shared among many of the so-called “high modernists.” Many of these writers and artists would go on to support, or at the very least “sympathize” with the fascists. After founding the Futurist political party, Marinetti wrote Italy’s first Fascist manifesto—pre-dating Mussolini’s—which eventually was subsumed by the official Fascist party. Wyndham Lewis, co-editor and founder of BLAST! was a supporter of Hitler. And Pound’s support of the fascist cause has been discussed widely.

But are there earlier hints towards this political leaning in modernist works? Or, better yet, how does modernist poetry confront the confluence of Futurism, the Avant Garde, and the impending wave of fascism?

In 1913 Ezra Pound wrote a poem named, “In the Station of the Metro.” It reads: “The apparition of these faces in the crowd: / Petals on a wet, black bough.” Is this not the very scene from Baldessari’s painting, painted just three years later? Pound is finding beauty not just in the faces, but in the movement of the faces—the speed at which they come and go, as apparitions—in the train station, arriving and departing. Not only is Pound quick in his writing—the poem is only two lines—but the scene suggests the movement of a crowd, faces been seen then lost, absorbed into the pace of the train station. And so quick is he to make an equation: that these faces are “Petals on a wet, black bough,” individual units tied together, connected to the main branch. What does it mean for Pound to turn these faces into flowers, and to hamper them to a branch? His seemingly pretty image here, can instead be seen as restrictive, in that the figures he finds in the station are tied to movement, forcibly progressing, petals waving in place, yet held together by some larger structure, the bough. It is representative, then, of the condition of modernity, the necessity for movement and productivity, and the constraints that this places on the human. And concerning Baldessari’s visual representation of this scene, the figures become one large mass, in which the individual faces blur into one shape-less-shape, relinquishing each of their individuality. Pound’s image here is not too far from the main concept of Mussolini’s fasces—the symbol of fascism—which represents societal unity visually the tying of individual sticks to a central post. In Mussolini’s fasces, however, the bough becomes an axe, suggesting a violent strength in this unity.

[i] “Futurist Speech to the English” from Marinetti: Selected Writings (1972).

I’m not proposing that there is something inherently fascist to modernism, or that trains and the concept of speed is either. Instead, what is interesting is the ways in which modernist poems either knowingly or unknowingly played into an emerging imagery which would go on to influence, inform, and ultimately, create what we now recognize as fascism. This aesthetics of materiality and particular representations of modernity (i.e. representations of the train, the crowd, etc.) is embedded in an ongoing and intricately connected conversation. Pound’s contribution is obvious—he was literally a fascist and anti-Semite—but where else might we find the fascist influence in modernism, especially where it may not be at all intended? And what other artifacts and cultural symbols (i.e. coffee) might be embedded in this conversation?

For instance, let’s reconsider Cappiello’s poster, which contains, after all, it has a train and coffee. We have already noted the way in which the poster visually represents the central tenet of futurism, that of speed, and how it does this through the use of the train as a way of highlighting the pace at which one consumes espresso, but also, the pace at which one operates after consuming the espresso. In many ways, espresso and the espresso machine are the ultimate futurist symbols. Espresso machines, for example, make use of steam and pistons just like a train, have a shiny metallic exterior, and produce a drink which makes the consumer faster and more productive. It is a machine-extension of the human, optimizing human performance through the sheer power of pressurized bean extraction. Cappiello, whether he knew it not, marketed not only an espresso machine here, but also the core values of futurism.

But, to experience the espresso machine, you had to go to a café, and probably live in the city. What makes fascism just slightly different from futurism, is that it is much better at encompassing and including the rural. This is where the Moka Pot comes in (A.M.P).

Tune in next week for part two, where we’ll take a closer look at the role of coffee in the creation of fascism, as well as coffee’s unique role in the Avant Garde poetry of American writer T.S. Eliot and the 2017 film Call Me by Your Name.

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