The Anthropological Revolution

Selections from columns first published in 1974 and collected in Corsair Writings (1975)

Dear Calvino:

Maurizio Ferrara says that I am nostalgic for a “golden age”, you say I am nostalgic for “little Italy”: everyone says I am nostalgic for something, implying that my nostalgia is a bad thing and therefore an easy target.

…

“Little Italy” is petty bourgeois, fascist, Christian Democratic; it is provincial, and it is outside of history. Its culture is a formal and vulgar scholastic humanism. Do you want me to feel nostalgic for all that? As for me, personally, this “little Italy” has been the country of the police who arrested me, put me in jail, persecuted me, tormented me, and hounded me for almost two decades. A young person might be unaware of this. But not you. Maybe I have possessed that minimum of dignity that allowed me to conceal the anxiety of a man who for years and years has expected any day the arrival of a summons from the courts and had to be afraid of browsing the newsstands so that I did not read some atrocious, scandalous newspaper headline about me. But if I could forget all of this, you, however, could not have forgotten it…

…

I know full well, dear Calvino, what the life of an intellectual is like. I know, because, in part, it is also the way I live. Reading books, the solitude of the study, circles of a few friends and many acquaintances, all intellectuals and bourgeois. A life of work and essentially respectable. But I, like Doctor Jekyll, have another life. Living this other life, I must break through the natural (and innocent) barriers of class. Breaking through the walls of “little Italy”, I therefore cross over into another world: the world of the peasants, the world of the sub-proletarians and the world of the workers. The order in which I list these worlds reflects their importance in my personal experience, not their objective importance. Up until only a few years ago, my own experience was limited to the sub-bourgeois world, the world of the ruled class. It was only by virtue of mere nationality, or more accurately, reasons of state, that this world formed part of the territory of “little Italy”. Beyond that pure and simple formality, that world had nothing to do with Italy. That world (to which the urban sub-proletarian cultures belonged and, precisely, up until only a few years ago, the world of the minority of the working class—who were real, true minorities, as in Russia in 1917) is a transnational world: a world that does not recognize nations…

It is this boundless pre-national and pre-industrial peasant world that existed up until a few years ago that I am nostalgic about (that is why I spent as much time as possible in the countries of the Third World, where this world still survives, although the Third World is also entering the orbit of so-called Development).

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I have said, and I will say it once again, that the acculturation of the consumerist Center has destroyed the various cultures of the Third World (I am now speaking on a world scale, and I am therefore also referring precisely to the cultures of the Third World that are very similar to Italian peasant cultures). The cultural model offered to Italians (and furthermore to all the peoples of the world) is monolithic. Conformance to this model is obtained above all in existence, in life itself: and therefore in the body and behavior. It is here that we experience the values, not yet openly expressed, of the new culture of the civilization of consumerism, that is, of this new totalitarianism, the most repressive totalitarianism that has ever existed. From the point of view of verbal language, we are witnessing the reduction of all language to communicative language, with an enormous impoverishment of expressiveness. Dialects (mother tongues!) have receded in time and in space: children are compelled to stop speaking their native dialects because they live in Turin, Milan or Germany. Where they are still spoken, they have totally lost their creative potential. No young man from the neighborhoods of Rome would be capable, for example, of understanding the jargon of the novels I wrote fifteen years ago: and—an irony of fate!—he would have to consult the glossary in the appendix of these books just like a good bourgeois citizen from northern Italy!

Naturally, my “vision” of the new Italian cultural reality is radical: it addresses this phenomenon as a global phenomenon, rather than its exceptions, the resistance it encounters, and the survivals of older cultures.

We intellectuals always tend to identify “culture” with our culture: likewise, morality with our morality, and ideology with our ideology. This means: 

1) that we do not use the word “culture” in its scientific sense; 

2) that when we use this term we express a real, irrepressible racism towards those who live precisely in another culture. 

In fact, given my way of life and my studies, I have always been able to avoid succumbing to these errors. But when Moravia speaks to me of people (that is, practically the whole population of Italy) who live on a pre-moral and pre-ideological level, he shows me that he has completely fallen prey to these very same errors. The conditions of being pre-moral and pre-ideological exist only if one assumes the existence of a single historically correct morality and a single historically correct ideology: thus, our bourgeois morality and ideology, that of Moravia, or mine, that of Pasolini. To the contrary, however, pre-moral and pre-ideological conditions do not exist. There is just another culture (popular culture) or an older culture. It is with respect to these cultures that a moral and ideological choice is posed: for example, the decision to be a Marxist or the decision to be a fascist.

…

Millions of Italians have made choices (quite basic choices): for example, many millions of Italians have opted for Marxism, or at least in favor of more or less progressive tendencies, while millions of other Italians have opted for clerical fascism. These choices, as always happens, have become integrated into a culture. And this culture is precisely the culture of the Italian people. A culture that has in the meantime has completely changed. No, not in the ideas it expresses, not in the school, not in the values that are consciously professed. For example, a “very modern” fascist, that is, one who has gone through the mill of Italian and foreign economic expansion, still reads Evola. Italian culture has changed with respect to life, existence, and practice. This change consists in the fact that the old class culture (with its distinct divisions: the culture of the ruled, or popular class, and the culture of the ruling or bourgeois class, the culture of the elites), has been replaced by a new inter-classist culture: this culture is expressed through the very way of existence of the Italian people, by way of their new quality of life. Political choices, planted in the old cultural soil, were one thing: planting them in this new cultural soil is another thing entirely. The Marxist worker or peasant of the 1940s or 1950s, in the hypothesis of a revolutionary victory, would have changed the world in a certain way: today, according to the same hypothesis, he would change it in another way. I do not want to prophesy: but I will not conceal the fact that I am desperately pessimistic. What has manipulated and radically (anthropologically) transformed the vast masses of Italian workers and peasants is a new power that I find hard to define: but I am sure that it is the most violent and totalitarian power that has ever existed: it is changing the nature of the people, it is penetrating deep into their consciousness. Therefore, beneath the level of conscious choices, there is a forced choice, one that is “common today for all Italians”: the latter can only distort the former.

…

There is nothing less idealist and less religious than the world of television. … The ideological bombardment of television is not explicit: it is entirely otherwise, completely indirect. Yet no “model of life” has ever been publicized so effectively as by way of television. The type of man or woman that really counts for something, that is really modern, that must be imitated and realized, is not described or praised explicitly: it is represented! The language of television is by its very nature a physical-mimetic language, the language of behavior. It is a language that is therefore made from whole cloth, without mediations, in the physical-mimetic language of real behavior. The heroes of television propaganda—young men on motorcycles, girls clutching a tube of toothpaste—proliferate by the millions as heroes who are similar in reality. Precisely because it is perfectly pragmatic, televised propaganda represents the “indifferentist” moment of the new hedonist ideology of consumerism: and it is therefore enormously effective.

…

The most impressive sight that greets you while walking through a city in the Soviet Union is the uniformity of the crowd: you cannot discern any differences among the pedestrians with respect to the way they dress, the way they walk, the way they are serious, the way they laugh, their gestures, the way they behave in general. The “system of signs” of the physical-mimetic language in a Russian city has no variants. It is perfectly identical in everyone. What, therefore, is the first proposition of this physical-mimetic language? It is the following: “Here, there are no more class differences.” And this is a marvelous thing. Despite all the mistakes and backpedaling, despite Stalin’s political crimes and acts of genocide (in which the Russian peasant world as a whole was an accomplice), the fact is that the people emerged victorious from the class struggle once and for all in 1917 and have achieved the equality of the citizenry, and this is something that confers a profound, exultant feeling of cheerfulness and faith in mankind. The people effectively conquered the highest freedom: no one gave it to them. They conquered it.

Today, in the cities of the West, as well—although I am referring above all to Italy—when you walk on their streets you are struck by the uniformity of the crowd: here, too, you do not notice any noteworthy differences among the pedestrians (especially the young people), in the way they dress, in the way they walk, in the way they are serious, in the way they laugh, in their gestures, in short, in the way they behave. It can therefore be said that, here as well, just as among the Russian crowds, the system of signs of the physical-mimetic language no longer has any variants, that it is perfectly identical in everyone. But while in Russia it is a very positive, and even exhilarating, phenomenon, in the West it is instead a negative phenomenon that plunges one into a state of mind that verges on outright disgust and despair.

The first proposition of this particular physical-mimetic language is, in effect, the following: “Power has decided that we shall all be the same.”

The anxiety of consumerism is the anxious desire to obey an unspoken order. Everyone in Italy feels the degrading anxious yearning of being equal to everyone else with respect to consumption, to being happy, to being free: because this is the order that has been unconsciously received and which one “must” obey, or else feel different. Being different has never been as great a crime as in this period of tolerance. In fact, equality has not been conquered; what we have is a “false” equality that has been conferred upon us as a gift.

***

One of the main characteristics of this equality of lived expression, besides the fossilization of verbal language (students speak like printed books, street kids have lost all colloquial inventiveness), is sadness: joy is always exaggerated, ostentatious, offensive. The physical sadness of which I speak is profoundly neurotic. It is based on social frustration. Now that the social model to be attained is no longer that of one’s own class, but the one imposed by power, many people are no longer in any position to attain it. And this is horribly humiliating. Allow me to offer a very modest example. At one time the baker’s assistant, or cascherino, as he is still called in Rome, was always, constantly cheerful: it was a real joy, which sparkled in his eyes. He used to walk down the street whistling and cracking jokes. His vitality was irresistible. He was dressed much more poorly than his contemporary counterpart: his trousers were patched, and even in good times his shirt was often hardly more than a tattered rag. But all of this formed part of a model that, in his village, had a value, and a meaning, and he was proud of it. In contrast to the world of wealth, he could oppose his own, equally valid world. He came to the house of the rich man, laughing naturaliter like an anarchist, which showed that he was not impressed: even if he was rather respectful. But it was precisely the respect of a profoundly alien person. And, in short, what counts is that this person, this man, was cheerful.

Isn’t happiness what really matters? Is it not for happiness that one fights for the revolution? The peasant or sub-proletarian condition was once able to express, in those persons who lived it, a certain “real” happiness. Today, this happiness—with the coming of Development—has been lost. This means that Development is by no means revolutionary, not even when it is brings reform. It only generates anxiety. Today there are adults my age who are so aberrant as to think that the (almost tragic) seriousness with which our contemporary bakers hand us their package wrapped in plastic, with their long hair and moustaches, is better than the “silly” joy of the past. They think that to prefer seriousness to laughter is a virile way to face life. In fact, they are happy vampires, happy to see their innocent victims transformed into vampires, too. Seriousness and a dignified demeanor are horrendous duties that are imposed on the petty bourgeoisie; and the petty bourgeoisie are therefore happy to see the poor people become “serious and dignified”, too. It never even occurs to them that this is real degradation: that the poor people are sad because they have become aware of their own social inferiority, since their values and their cultural models have been destroyed.