Objects in Italian Life and Culture

Fiction, Migration, and Artificiality

Paolo Bartoloni

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781349948741
• eBook ISBN: 9781349948758
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Film & Video
• Index: Social Sciences

This book makes visible the hidden relations between things and individuals through a discussion of creative processes and cultural practices. Italian life and culture are filled with objects that cross, accompany, facilitate or disrupt experience, desires, and dreams. Yet in spite of their ubiquity, theoretical engagement in the Italian context is still underdeveloped. Paolo Bartoloni investigates four typologies—the fictional, migrant, multicultural/transnational, and the artificial—to hypothesize that the ability to treat things as partners of emotional and creative expression creates a sense of identity predicated on inclusivity, openness, care, and attention.

© The Author(s) 2016

Paolo BartoloniObjects in Italian Life and CultureItalian and Italian American Studies10.1057/978-1-349-94875-8_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Paolo Bartoloni¹

(1)

Italian, Arts Millennium Building, National University of Ireland, Galway, Galway, Ireland

End Abstract

Italian life and culture are filled with objects and things that cross, accompany, facilitate, or disrupt experience, desires, dreams, and the multiple needs of day-to-day life as well as those of the imagination and creativity. In spite of their ubiquity, theoretical engagement with the life of objects in the Italian context is still underdeveloped. This gap is more apparent due to the renewed interest in objects as testified to by the emergence of thing theory in the USA and Europe, which, as the following discussion will argue, has contributed to the reappraisal of the significance of objects in the context of aesthetics, ethics, and ontology. The review of humans’ dealing with objects, as well as the focus on the singularity and uniqueness of things as such, has introduced innovative perspectives not only in the area of literature, philosophy, cinema, and the visual arts but also in those of anthropology, sociology, history, and human and cultural geography. Several years ago, Francesco Orlando in Italy devoted a book, which remains seminal, to discussing objects and things in literature from a comparative and psychoanalytic angle. ¹ More recently, psychoanalyst Massimo Recalcati and critical theorist Ernesto Francalanci have rekindled the scholarly attention on objects by applying a Lacanian perspective through which the singularity of things is coupled with aesthetic endeavors in literature and paintings. ² The philosopher Remo Bodei, in his book titled La vita delle cose (The Life of Things), provides a useful overview on the ongoing relation between the world of humanity and that of things. ³ However, although Italian authors and artists are discussed and presented as part of the interrogation of thingness, none of the aforementioned studies focuses on Italy. More importantly, none of them attempts an investigation of the ways in which the materiality of things relates with everyday experiences. As a result, things and objects are treated more as symbols and vehicles of humans’ meanings than as active partners of meaningful engagements. Italian Cultural Studies, still in its infancy in Italy and, to a certain extent, in Italian departments across the USA, the UK, and Australasia, ⁴ has provided useful insights into Italian culture and life, yet often presenting things and objects as necessary appendices to the interpretation of cultural phenomena, at the center of which remains the human subject.

Instructively, David Forgacs and Robert Lumley’s seminal and still essential book on Italian Cultural Studies does not include a chapter on objects and things in Italian life and culture. ⁵ While things and objects are discussed consistently, they are still subordinate to the life stories of humans. Let us take, for instance, the first section of Forgacs’ essay on consumption in Italy. Objects are articulated as the end product of a process of appropriation, providing individuals with several and diverse supports on which to construct status, and self-fulfillment. In the course of the twentieth century, Forgacs argues that Italian consumers have gradually turned from passive recipients to active negotiators of material investments by appropriating objects, and employing their symbolic and iconic power to serve their interests. He writes: “For instance, when I buy and drink a Coca Cola I assimilate with the physical object a bit of the image or lifestyle represented in this advertising. The act of consuming this image, for myself or for display to others, may well be more important than the satisfaction of my immediate physical wants, for which many other products would do just as well.” ⁶

The image, rather than the object per se, in this case a bottle of Coca-Cola, is the significant factor behind the choice and the selection of the object. In other words, the object is not bought because of its thingness (its uniqueness and specificity), but because of what it represents in the imagination of a symbolic order established and promoted by the capitalist machine. The symbolic order is manufactured by individuals and not certainly by objects, and it is again individuals who appropriate the object to gain a certain purchase on the scale of the symbolic order to which they aspire. One can replace the bottle of Coca-Cola with a Vespa, an Alfa Romeo, a suit by Armani or a dress by Dolce & Gabbana, a bottle of Tuscan olive oil, a packet of De Cecco’s pasta, a tin of illy’s coffee, and so on, yet the result is the same. These things have acquired an excess of meaning that transcends their materiality, and that has been superimposed according to a series of prefabricated and prearranged strategies driven by desires, which, genuine or induced, end up treating things as extensions of the individual. Literature is full of such examples. In the short story “Il sorpasso” (“Overtaking”), Alberto Moravia tells the story of a young man who falls in love with his new car. ⁷ His feelings for the car are so pervasive that his love for Ines, his girlfriend, is affected. The inorganic object of “Il sorpasso” acquires the semblance, the presence, and the agency of a real person, and it gradually replaces the individual in the emotional sphere. In Carlo Emilio Gadda’s novel La cognizione del dolore (Acquainted with Grief), individuals measure their success and social position according to the cigarettes they smoke, the cufflinks they wear, and the liquor they drink. ⁸ In the poem “Il mio desiderio di ricchezza” (“My Desire for Wealth”), Pier Paolo Pasolini relates his dream of wealth to a glass balcony, soft and dark curtains, a light table with countless drawers, several armchairs and sofas, mannerist paintings with golden frames, a simple bed covered with handmade blankets woven by Calabrian or Sardinian women, and pictures by Morandi, Mafai, De Pisis, Rosai, and Guttuso. ⁹

Materiality and material culture in the Italian context came to the fore with original insights in 2010, with the inaugural issue of the journal Italian Studies devoted to Cultural Studies. Instructively, in the introduction to the volume, the Editor, Derek Duncan, wrote that, “The third element that characterizes the essays in this issue is their commitment to understanding culture in terms of its materiality, and to focusing on the conditions of its reception, or indeed consumption, as well as its production.” ¹⁰ Noticeably, one of the articles included in the volume discusses the idea as well as the physical nature of Italy as a series of “objects” to be replicated and commodified on the international scenes through simulacra and copies. “[…] These simulacra,” writes Stephanie Malia Hom, “mark the transformation of imagined community into touristic commodity, a type of Italian hyperreality, and everyday practices of power covered up by a patina of leisure.” ¹¹ This development in Italian Cultural Studies, together with the critical and theoretical implications that may emerge as a consequence, opens up possibilities of inquiry that must be developed further not only to question controversial categories such as authenticity and tradition, but also to locate Italy in the context of global aesthetic and commercial trends and developments.

The focus of this book is not so much on instrumental appropriation as on creative processes and modalities of life based on the relation between humans and things. Four typologies of relation and their relative contexts will be considered: fictional, migrant, multicultural/transnational, and artificial. The discussion will relate typologies and contexts to experiences emerging from cultural and day-to-day practices, taking place in Italy or performed by Italians abroad. The book’s principal hypothesis is that meaningful lives, and therefore meaningful personal and cultural investments, are the result of the successful implementation of processes of co-belonging. Primarily, and most importantly, this implies the ability to treat things as partners of emotional and creative expression that, by leaving sharable traces and signs, consolidate a sense of identity predicated on inclusivity, openness, care, and attention.

At the basis of this book’s methodological framework is phenomenology’s assessment of things as primarily material instances of world experience rather than as spiritual or intellectual reflections of people’s actions and agency. ¹² The discussion will reorient Kantian correlationism by framing the interface between individuals and things not only as the emblematic moment of knowledge’s emergence, but also as the point where emotional and creative bonds form. ¹³ It will be argued that connections originate in, and are shaped by, material engagement. Happiness, well-being, and recognition are only a few of the outcomes generated by a productive and fruitful coming together of things and humans. Not dissimilarly from Object-Oriented Ontology and Speculative Realism, ¹⁴ this book considers things as unique singularities independent of individuals, yet does not share the invitation to sidestep the relation between things, and humans as forms of creative representation and aesthetic expression are investigated. Forms of relation based on appropriation and possession will be challenged, and in their place modalities of co-participation in the spirit of partnership will be argued for.

Objects and things have occupied a significant space in the history, culture, and life of humanity. ¹⁵ They have structured and provided tangibility to the world of symbolic expression and spiritual introspection, and they have been indispensable as tools for the advancement of civilization, economy, consumption, and domesticity. Unlike the three spheres of biological life—the mineral, the vegetable, and the animal—objects and things have been customarily considered dependent on humans’ agency and presence. ¹⁶ The instrumentality to which things have been subjected transforms thingness into the material tangibility of objects. As objects, things come to acquire a practical function, helping individuals to achieve certain tasks and fulfill a number of needs. Gradually, the instrumental purpose of objects acquires shades of symbolic meanings, which demand an emotional and creative representation and an aesthetic response. The material and aesthetic life of objects is the result of the association with human life and humans’ practical and artistic endeavor. For instance, it is by investigating the symbolic emplacement and representation of objects that anthropologists have attempted to shed light on the cultural and religious practices of past civilizations, ¹⁷ and that significant advances have been made in the negotiation and understanding of cross-cultural encounters, and diasporic and postcolonial processes of reconciliation and migration experiences. ¹⁸

In-Between Matter and Fantasy

The material significance of objects is predicated on a conceptualization of productivity, in which content is privileged and prioritized over form. ¹⁹ However, this conceptualization has been radically challenged from the 1960s onward when technological advances, industrial production, and consumption patterns changed. Postmodernity introduced parallel spheres of spatial and temporal engagements, resulting in the increased virtualization and spectacularization of reality. With postmodernity, form replaces content on the value scale. The immediate result is the trading of material values for immaterial ones, predicated not so much on quality, durability, and employability, as on status, appearance, and look. The dematerialization of objects that has come about in postmodernity has introduced a different form of interaction between objects and humans. Things are no longer simply useful but also, if not more importantly, seductive and alluring. Today virtually everything in the world demands to be on display. ²⁰

The Italian critical theorist Ernesto Francalanci has argued that the dematerialization of the world heralded by postmodernity has introduced a further metaphysical dimension, the “virtual dimension,” which is in a constantly overlapping dynamic with the “spiritual dimension.” ²¹ The sphere of the sacred and the symbolic, which, according to Francalanci, depends on the “spiritual dimension,” is conflated and possibly confused with the sphere of immateriality, appearance, and pure form driven by the “virtual dimension.” According to Francalanci, the aura of the original and the authentic interlocks with the aura of simulation, reproduction, and replication through which symbolic order and meanings become blurred, entangled, and ultimately undecipherable. ²² Reality and fantasy, and the material and immaterial, become indistinguishable. Already in 1961, Daniel Boorstin could claim that, “The American citizen thus lives in a world where fantasy is more real than reality, where the image has more dignity than its original.” ²³

The life of objects, like the life of humans, is poised at the threshold between matter and fantasy, and between the spheres of the virtual and the real. In this space of the in-between, the organic and the inorganic are inevitably intertwined, granting objects human features, and humans inorganic and thing-like traits, as confirmed by the large literature on posthumanity, cyborgs, and various forms of technological, genetic, and prosthetic interventions. ²⁴ This process of conflation and the ensuing ethical, aesthetic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Meaningful Places
• 3. Fictional Objects
• 4. Migrant Objects
• 5. Multicultural and Transcultural Objects
• 6. Objects as Props
• 7. Conclusion
• Backmatter