Hated and Proud- Ultras Contra Modernity Read online

  Figure 2. AS Roma Ultras graffiti: ‘Enough immigrants, homes and work for Italians.’ Vicolo del Lupo, Rome, 2007.

  Taking up Giulianotti’s challenge to study soccer in host communities and in the subjective terms through which it is locally known, during fifteen months of anthropological fieldwork I came to understand the Ultras who support AS Roma not as impassioned fans who occasionally take part in the political process as members of a politically liberal society, but rather as an extremely political counter-modern cultural movement which aims to restore communal, spiritual, and ritual dimensions to modern life. They seek to do so by challenging the political, ideological, and aesthetic processes of global-market capitalism, which — through global consumerism, cultural and political pluralism, and individualism — threatens to destroy the particularity of Roman cultural forms.

  After the death of Raciti in February 2007, many commentators were quick to label the perpetrators of violence as delinquents out only to cause trouble and commit anti-social behavior. Even those who tried to defend the Ultras were unwilling or unable to see what happened as part of a larger project, or as part of a counter-modern conceptual system. Professor Vincenzo Abbantanuono likened the Ultras to the ‘disaffected’ French youth who burned the Parisian suburbs in the autumn of 2005. These were people, he said, who acted without a ‘political conscience.’4

  We are left to wonder at his reaction to the news that the young man accused of killing Officer Raciti was a middle-class member of the Fascist party Forza Nuova, who had worked hard the previous summer to have a Gay Pride parade cancelled in Catania. Elsewhere, in Civitavecchia, an interesting piece of Ultra graffiti relating to the Catania violence was found. ‘2–2–2007 Vendetta for Carlo Giuliani,’ it read, referring to the protestor killed at the 27th G8 Summit in Genova in 2001.5

  The details of the Raciti killing reveal that the Ultras’ violence, in this case against the State, is not perpetrated without a political conscience. Roversi and Balestri (2002) have shown that the Ultras were politicized in the 1990s, even beyond their original class-based political forms. Actual mob-and-political violence aside, what this book seeks to understand is how these politicized Ultras use their respective ideologies to create, maintain, and elevate their rivalries, understandings of Italian soccer and social life. In other words, my work understands, like Antonio Gramsci, that all aspects of human experience are political and involve the creation of knowledges (narratives) and counter-knowledges.

  The political concerns of AS Roma’s Ultras as Ultras are ambivalently related to contemporary Fascism’s most popular parties, CasaPound Italia, Fiamma Tricolore and Forza Nuova. While the issues that concern these Ultras are certainly important to these parties, my research demonstrates that the large majority of Ultras have become devoted to these concerns without the intervention of organized Fascism. The issues I have in mind range from the political (such as immigration and international trade) to the metapolitical (such as rights-based movements, cultural protection, and sovereignty). The link to Fascism is clouded further by the highly philosophical nature of their own political agenda against the business of soccer and its links to the neoliberal State. Thus, the ambivalence of the relationship between organized party-based Fascism and the Ultras is such that the latter can be considered more of a cultural than a political movement. As such, it has more in common with New Right political philosophy than with political Fascism.6 In other words, the politics of the Ultras is ultimately less concerned with the political qua politics than with how fascist-inspired political ideas shape their vision of Rome, the AS Roma soccer team, and themselves.

  Because of this, in no way can the influence of the Right on AS Roma’s Ultras be seen as deriving from an invasion by the Far Right parties, as others have argued.7 Instead, fieldwork demonstrated that the Ultras harbor and utilize a moral and ethical system that generates its own political orientation. If some are Fascists it is because of the common elements that exist between the Ultras and Fascism — most notably squadrismo (organization and activities in the form of paramilitary groups): an ethic of violence that celebrates engagement and aggression, pageantry as a form of political action, and a harsh critique of modernity.8

  Griffin’s Modernism and Fascism continues the earlier analysis of Emilio Gentile that showed that, while Fascism was a Modernist force due to its modernizing, it was informed by an attack on modernity itself. The question for Fascism was, then, what form of modernity was it to create? While modernizing and attaching itself to Futurism and its vision of speed, industry, efficiency, and power, Fascism also promoted agrarianism, autarchy, and the celebration of Italian folkways. It was devoted on the one hand to increasing industrial output, and to using international warfare as a means of masculinizing populations, but on the other hand to a philosophical anti-materialism and hostility to political liberalism. Furthermore, Sternhell argues that while Fascism maintained capitalism as an economic model it was horrified, via Nietzsche, of modern bourgeois values such as universalism, individualism, progress, natural rights, and equality.9

  According to Griffin, Gentile, and Sternhell, this contradiction was born not only from the material limitations of early-20th century Italy but also from the ideological and philosophical influences of Fascism. These influences, in the persons of Nietzsche, Ernst Junger, Ezra Pound, Gabriele d’Annunzio (and, for Hitler, Benito Mussolini), are now termed as part of the Counter-Enlightenment tradition.10 These thinkers, amongst others, similarly influence today’s Ultras of AS Roma, who are themselves committed to challenging the hegemony of the current state of modernity — be it understood as post-modernity, hyper-modernity, or globalized-market capitalism. Thus, I argue that they, like Fascism itself, are counter-to-modern, even if neither is pastoral in outlook.

  Franco Ferraresi has studied the post-war Right in Italy and concluded that, although the Far Right is often in organizational disarray, Counter-Enlightenment thought is still popular there, as are the Counter-Enlightenment philosophical traditions of Friedrich Nietzsche and Julius Evola. This thought carries with it, in his words, ‘nationalism, chauvinism, ethnocentrism, and xenophobia … frequently couched in the terms of rescuing original identities [that are] threatened by the encroachment of … globalization [and] the Americanization of culture.’11

  Within the political activities and ideas of the Ultras we find precisely these elements of Counter-Enlightenment thought. It was Ferraresi’s work that prompted me to focus on the ideological elements of Ultra behavior. Knowing from scholarship on the Ultras that the political Right became popular amongst them during the same late-1990s period in which Ferraresi was studying the Italian Far Right, I immediately began searching for intersections between the ideology of the one within the other. The most obvious common links between the Ultras and the Far Right, as well as between Ferraresi’s and my analysis, are Nietzsche and Evola, both of which feature prominently in this book. However, where Ferraresi and I diverge is in his assumption that the only youth manifestation of Rightist ideology is the skinheads, of which Italy is largely bereft.12

  Ultras Defined, Including Key Concepts

  As I have already demonstrated, the Ultras are misunderstood if seen as merely impassioned fans that occasionally, as members of a politically liberal society, take part in the political process. When defining the phenomenon, then, one cannot overlook the political nature of how they conceive and perceive themselves, nor the pageantry and beauty of their public displays in and around Italian (and European) stadiums. The problems others encounter when attempting to understand the Ultras occur largely because they tend to separate the aesthetic from the political. When one combines them, however, and refuses to see them as distinct parts of the Ultras’ conception and behavior, who they are and why they do what they do becomes clearer.

  In realigning aesthetics and the political, this book seeks to understand the relations among mental images, philosophical/historical ideas, and aesthetic principles t
hat express themselves in public rituals and representations.13 Thus it will at once collapse the division between spiritual and material, being inclined to search for the micro-historical and micro-political relations between thought and language. The relations between class, status, and political participation — while also relevant to the material consequences of the spiritual thrust of the Ultra ‘form of life,’ — will be a secondary focus.

  Although I am very comfortable with this kind of approach, I feel that the Ultras themselves prompted the methodology I used. The Ultras live as what Victor Turner called ‘social anti-structures’, because they have withdrawn symbolically and actually from the larger community in order to fully embrace their ‘signal mark of identity.’14 While they are aware of who they are and what is their historical and cultural mission — the terms of which, as will be explained, come largely from Fascism, Futurism, and political philosophers like Nietzsche, Sorel, and Le Bon, who were all highly critical of modernity — their political focus is largely ‘ritual and cultish.’ Politics of this kind are not only interested in transforming society, but in doing so strictly within the terms of the cosmological myths that buttress the phenomenon in question. This focus on the political from the perspective of the symbolic challenges the division between real (material, power-oriented) elements and symbolic (a sign-driven ‘language’ constructive of identities) elements, seeing instead a continuum of change and action that simultaneously engages our emotional and instinctual centers.15

  Therefore the focus of inquiry duly shifts, from the actual workings of liberal politics, per se, to an understanding of the intellectual and ideational background of a system of politics and its ‘reality making’ function, not in a neo-Marxist way to connote a mode of deception whereby the ruling class stays in power, but as a system of knowledge (or controlling concepts and theories) that does not merely describe but creates reality.16 The distinction between politics and political ideology, then, is rendered artificial. The categories ‘overlap, interpenetrate, and feed from each other, exchange, transform into one another.’17 This is especially important in Italy, where politics becomes a marker of identity in highly personal ways, bleeding into other areas of life seemingly unrelated to the political system.18

  Having provided the reader with explanation of the methodological assumptions I hold about politics, narrative, and human behavior, I will now turn to defining four of the major concepts of this project: Calcio Moderno; mentalità; Ultras; and agonistic, or oppositional form of life.

  Calcio Moderno, A Brief Overview

  Calcio Moderno (Modern Soccer) is perhaps the most important concept used by the Ultras at this particular time — not only because it ties their self-interests to international manifestations of resistance to globalization, but because it incorporates the other important concepts identified above. It is used throughout the book to denote the postmodernization of fandom and the sports experience, the focus of which has shifted toward the cultivation of global markets at the expense of local communities. It also refers to the business of soccer, including the clubs, international federations (such as FIFA and UEFA), the media, and the system of club owners and player transfers (trades). Thus, Calcio Moderno provides the view of globalization held by the Ultras, through which they come to equate anything harmful to themselves, the Ultras phenomenon, or AS Roma, as being equally harmful to Rome and its local culture and traditions.

  Mentalità: A Poetic Ideology

  I will use a particular (maybe peculiar) vocabulary to discuss the ways in which the Ultras understand, and interact with, their environment. Anthropology has developed a number of strategies for explaining this problem. The term ‘ideology’ is still the most popular way of denoting a system of logic that impacts in some way upon reality. Already, in 1973, Clifford Geertz saw fit to perform a genealogy of ideology; such was the term’s overuse. Marx popularized the concept in negative terms, as a bourgeois ‘discursive sheet’ laid atop the reality of proletarian suffering and need for unity.19 Biologist James Danielli uses ‘ideology’ but to denote ‘the discursive practices which institute each human society’s field of consciousness.’20 The idea of an order of consciousness as part of a cultural system is perhaps still best explained by Evans-Pritchard, for he shows that the Azande21 exist within a symbolically coded system of representation by which consciousness is inscribed. This system, as he says, is ‘the very texture of ... thought.’22 The idea of ‘texture of thought’ moves us closer to how ‘ideology’ will be used in this study. Geertz correctly critiqued the term as inexact and suffering from a lack of value. However, his idea of a cultural system as a ‘web of meaning’ seems closer to how recent scholarship uses ‘ideology.’23

  A critical thinker in 2016 experiences ‘ideology’ differently than did previous generations. Verily, we do so not even as ‘ideology.’ This is because of the success and popularity of Bourdieu’s ‘habitus’ and Foucault’s ‘episteme’ as variations on ‘ideology.’ Habitus names the categories through which we interact with the world. It is ‘a system of acquired dispositions functioning ... as categories of perception and assessment.’24 Foucault’s ‘episteme,’ in contrast to ‘habitus,’ is less focused on the body and the material conditions of existence. Instead, it is explained succinctly as an ‘order of knowledge’ and a ‘general grammar’, consisting of language and structures of power (both political and discursive) that create the very ‘conditions of possibility of existence.’25

  Even where ideology is used, it is understood as a system through which power and ideas collide. Eric Wolf offers a rich critique of our ‘metaphysical’ tendency to, on the one hand, acknowledge the cultural nature of conception, without, on the other hand, seeking to understand the consequences of conception upon culture.26 Culture-specific ideologies, he explains, may share a function — to ‘orient society to act within the field of its [society’s] operations,’ but they are unique in form, logic, rationale, and effect. Thus, we must seek to pull back our gaze and incorporate into ideology’s purposes the ‘material resources and organizational arrangements’ of the world being affected.27

  Similarly, Antonio Gramsci accentuated the active nature of thought in his understanding of ideology. He understood ideas to be the moving force of culture, but not at the expense of the material or oppositional forces also at play within a society. The class impact on ideas and ideology, he explains, is so pervasive that the lower, or ‘subaltern’ classes, only come to self-consciousness by way of a series of negations of the class power and identity of their ruling class enemies.28 In this way, Gramsci left no distance between the availability of self-consciousness and the possibility of class warfare, as well as theorizing the power central to all workings of culture.

  Later scholars also sought a liberatory model of idea formation. Sylvia Wynter uses ‘episteme’ as an alternative to ‘ideology’ because it lends itself to an understanding of each culture’s specific ‘system of symbolic representation,’ or ‘mode of subjective understanding.’ However, even as she searches for clarity and power from concepts, she also uses Fanon’s ‘sociogeny’ or ‘sociogenic principle’ to explain culture-specific behavior-orienting criteria.29 Both Wynter and Fanon stress the creation of knowledge inherent in ideology and central to all cultures. They do so not to understand this process on its terms but to connect it with the failings of modernity to provide an ecumenical basis of knowing the human species. As such, they point to a deeper understanding of the role of concepts and ethics in cultural processes.

  Similarly, Allan Young maintains the discursive theme in describing the ‘practices, technologies, and narratives ... of various interests, institutions, and moral arguments’ constitutive of reality.30 Paul Kroskrity goes further, but also resorts to using ‘ideology’ in explaining the ‘language ideologies’ that ‘represent the perception of language and discourse that is constructed in the interest of a specific social or cultural group.’ This includes ‘notions of
what is ‘true,’ ‘morally good,’ or ‘aesthetically pleasing’.’31 What these scholars point to is a methodology that accounts for the reality-producing power of knowledge. But, as I hope to make clear, so do the subjects of this study.

  Fascism and the Problem of Morality in Social Science

  The Ultras of AS Roma not only speak about a mentalità and a form of life disconnected from, and at odds with, the modernity of the liberal global-market, but they act upon this disconnection. In acting, they express a deep and conscious commitment to the ideas and ideals around which they cohere.

  For instance, I passed an evening with a small group of Ultras discussing the arditi and their relation to the Brigate Nere (Black Brigades — Special Forces of the Italian Social Republic [RSI] at the end of WWII). Aside from the oddity (from the perspective of an American) of a group of young men (each younger than thirty) casually discussing an obscure history, the scene was valuable because they spoke both with reverence and an understanding that in these soldiers there was a model of proper contemporary behavior.

  This was furthered by their attempts to equate themselves with the arditi and Brigate Nere. ‘The Ultras,’ said Massimiliano, ‘are today scorned like the arditi after the First World War — and demonized like the fighters of Salò [alternate name for the RSI]. It is only right, though, because we all wanted the same things.’ Among the romantic list of common desires was ‘to live according to values — bravery, strength in the face of any opposition, and brotherhood.’ Eventually, the conversation became less solemn and concluded with the participants celebrating their identity as ‘bastardi neri’ (black bastards, or hard men).