In 1964 Lacan (1998, p. 210) famously exclaimed: “One has to admit that there is a lot of this alienation about nowadays.” Although not always explicitly in the spotlight of political and cultural discourses, alienation seems to have been a ubiquitous presence that haunted Western society in the 1960s and 1970s. The purpose of this book is to explore, from an interdisciplinary perspective, this notion’s political meaning and cultural representation in Italy during two fundamental decades, which we reassess here as the country’s “age of alienation” (Murchland 1971) par excellence. Although this is a time in which alienation seemed to be the malady that, broadly speaking, affected capitalist countries, Italy is a particularly significant case study for cultural, political, and social reasons that we will clarify here.
Alienation is a term of ambiguous vagueness, an “atrocious word” that perfectly fits the definition of “panchreston” (Hardins 1956), meaning everything and nothing (Johnson 1973). One of the most extensive studies on the slippery concept of alienation, Johnson’s Alienation: Concept, Term, and Meanings (1973), begins by highlighting the difficulties inherent in theoretically pigeonholing the concept.
Though exploring a more limited field of inquiry, both geographically and chronologically, this volume is grounded in the same awareness of dealing with an all-encompassing word, an umbrella term that has multifarious meanings. At the same time, we aim to challenge the view of alienation as an undefinable and loose concept, contributing to the definition of the notion, its uses, and its representation in literature and the arts. This volume thus reappraises, from an Italian perspective, the different meanings that the notion of alienation took on: a social condition of estrangement and discomfort caused by the capitalist system, a pathological state of mind, and an ontological condition of subjectivity.
Traditionally stemming from Marxism, the concept of alienation in its sociopolitical sense had to be radically revised according to the transformations brought about by the rise of the post-Fordist, post-industrialized, and consumerist society over the two decades in question. At the same time, alienation understood as a synonym of mental disorder came under critical focus. On the one hand, movements critical of psychiatry questioned its medical nature and accused it of being a cause of social and mental alienation rather than the solution that it claimed to be. On the other hand, psychoanalysis started to investigate alienation as a constitutive characteristic of subjectivity rather than as an ailment to be cured. In the two decades under scrutiny, these two notions of alienation, arguably at the apex of two independent histories, began to overlap and cross-contaminations were explored: social alienation as a cause of mental disorders, and the continuity between the ontological alienation of the subject and the social alienation caused by the capitalist order, to name but two. The Italian context stands out as the most receptive soil for a variegated debate on alienation, and this has contributed to elucidating the several shades of meaning that the notion encompasses, and has even revolutionized the understanding of such an ideologically bound term. This book focuses on two physical and metaphorical spaces that we believe embody in the most telling way these takes on the notion of alienation: the factory and the asylum. They enable us to reveal the movements of “dis-alienation,” for want of a better term, that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s in these spaces. Although in the factory social alienation came to the fore as much as mental alienation emerged more clearly in the asylum, this book explores potential overlaps, such as the factory as a cause of mental alienation and the asylum as an instrument of capitalist social control. Certainly, there are many more institutional contexts of alienation that could be explored, starting with schools, universities, and prisons. As we will show in this introduction, however, asylums and factories are at the center of the social upheavals and struggles of the two decades that are analyzed in this book, and as much as they are the physical spaces where the battles were waged, they were also elevated so that they became metaphorical spaces embodying all forms of institutional power and class struggle.
1.1 Social Alienation
Although the concept of alienation has a variety of meanings and uses in different disciplines, within the social sciences the Marxist definition is certainly the most popular.
According to Marx, the condition of alienation corresponds with a feeling of estrangement ( Entfremdung ) from one’s humanity as a result of stratification into social classes. Belonging to a social class as a passive and mechanistic part of the system means that the individual is deprived of self-determination and free will. This is a consequence of the capitalist mode of production, which transforms the worker into an economic entity whose activity is fully controlled by the bourgeoisie, who own the means of production. As a result, although workers are self-realized subjects, within the logic of production they are tools from which owners aim to extract the maximum surplus value. At the same time, the working class is alienated from the product of their labor, which is taken from the control of workers and buyers, being determined by the capitalist class. In sum, in Marxian terms alienation is a “state produced by the ravages of a particular economic system – viz, capitalism – which separated the individual from the products of his labour, from the process of work, from the fellowship of his mankind, and, ultimately, from himself ” (Johnson 1973, p. 15).
According to Eco, in 1962, such a state of alienation “costituisce per l’uomo moderno una condizione come la mancanza di gravità per il pilota spaziale” (Eco 1997, p. 256), a condition of abnormality that is, however, inescapable within a certain—transformed—environment: the neo-capitalist and newly industrialized Italy of the economic boom .
When Eco wrote these words, Italy was enjoying the miracolo economico (economic miracle), a time of sudden and unexpected growth that transformed the country from a backward and mostly rural nation to one of the strongest economic powers in Europe.1 This time of euphoria created by the rapid economic development coincided, however, with an increased feeling of discomfort and estrangement. This was provoked by a set of concurrent factors: the gradual disappearance of the countryside and the homogenization of the Italian landscape, which led to the loss of Italy’s local diversity; the uncontrolled expansion of urban centers and the new life in chaotic metropoles and their peripheries, which meant that people lost the reassuring sense of community (Ginsborg 1990, p. 296); and exhausting work shifts in factories and a change in collective habits, which moved towards a gradual privatization of life.
Although “the state had played an important role in stimulating rapid economic development, […] it then defaulted on governing the social consequences” (Ginsborg 1990, p. 240). As a result, the economic boom was not adequately followed by social reforms or by the long overdue renovation of public services. After the initial excitement about the new and unexpected opportunities, Italian people discovered the dark side of the miracle. “Fordism (the automated mass production of consumer goods) and consumerism,” from being “the twin gods of the age” (Ginsborg 1990, p. 213), turned into alienating forces that were felt to be gradually dehumanizing public and private life.
Resistance to modernization and industrialization, which were seen as oppressive—rather than liberating—forces, emerged as soon as Italy began to develop. One of the most paradigmatic examples of this tendency is Pierpaolo Pasolini, who, looking retrospectively at the great changes that Italy underwent in the 1960s, saw in this transformation the main reason for the widespread diffusion of forms of social and cultural alienation. Whereas social alienation was due to the gradual disappearance of rural Italy, to be replaced by major urban centers, cultural alienation should be seen, according to Pasolini, as the gradual loss of the preconsumerist model of culture, not yet contaminated by popular products belonging to so-called low-brow culture. Although, in sum, Pasolini did not provide a systematic theory of alienation, the collective trauma to which he refers, a world from which fireflies gradually disappear (Pasolini 1975), certainly entails a view of the economic boom as an alienating process, which takes people away from their most authentic self and from the nation’s shared past. Likewise, the concept of mutazione antropologica (1974) implies an idea of collective—and unredeemable—alienation, in that “come polli d’allevamento, gli italiani hanno indi accettato la nuova sacralità, non nominata, della merce e del suo consumo” (Pasolini 1999, p. 402).
Clearly, the resistance to modernity—conceived as an alienating condition—that can be found in the literature has political and ideological roots. From the early postwar years onward, Italian politics was undeniably affected by the Cold War. Although it was part of the Western bloc, and in spite of the influence the USA had on national economics, the Italian Communist Party (Partito Comunista Italiano, PCI) maintained primacy in several regional governments and local communities. As Stephen Gundle observes, “whereas most communist parties in Western Europe declined dramatically in the late 1940s and social democratic parties lost support in the 1950s, the PCI not only conserved a substantial membership but actually saw its electoral standing rise slowly yet continuously up until 1977” (Gundle 2000, p. 4). The PCI played the role of a sheer “cultural force” (Gundle 2000, p. 9), and it managed to impose its hegemony, disseminating throughout the country “the last great left-wing subculture in Western Europe” (Gundle 2000, p. 7).
Arguably, the PCI’s cultural strength was a result of the long-term reaction to the 1956 crisis that, following Khrushchev’s revelations and the repression of the Hungarian uprising, hit all European communist parties. In Italy the crisis served as an opportunity to promote Togliatti’s “policentrism,” the notion that every country should find its own way to socialism. The Italian way was to transform the PCI from a revolutionary to a mass party: a national-popular, Gramscian force, characterized by a leaning toward both intellectuals and social movements and investment in cultural policies, the intellettuale collettivo. This leaning, however, was felt to betray the original purpose of communism: to be a revolutionary doctrine of the working class. It attracted the dissent of, among others, Panzieri and Tronti, who founded the journal Quaderni Rossi, the cradle of operaismo , an autonomist Marxist theory focused on returning the working class to center stage, both from a practical and a theoretical standpoint. Operaismo and discontent about the PCI led to the creation of a strong, extrapolitical, and extraparliamentary left.
Consequently, Italian culture was split: on the one hand, it was in the mainstream largely affected by Americanization, and, on the other, it was s...