RICERCA ITALIANA     

Texts of identities. Cultural migrations and public sphere: Italicity as a resource for cosmopolitism

Università degli Studi di Firenze

Abstract

Beginning with the assumption that the two starting paradigms of this research - that of the communicative view proposed by Bechelloni and that of the cosmopolitan view by Beck - are complementary, we want to make plausible the hypothesis that the original Italian hybrid identity (its lengthy history, the special character of the Italic diaspora and thus all the characteristics which contribute in identifying and defining Italicism) is today a valuable resource for human society. Using qualitative methodologies we want toprove our hypothesis by means of evidence supplied by targeted empirical social objects and processes based on the analysis of a wide but contained range of texts of Italic or Italian identity: newspaper articles and television fiction, long interviews with persons of Italian original who have settled in the Americas and in Australia, biographies and autobiographies, various scientific reports connected with the historic narratives… We will end up by giving more visibility to an existing unnoticed revolution, that of the new communication and just as much visibility to its enemies (the nihilists and the ones who over-simplify). A way in which we can build a view of our present - on the wings and the roots which characterize it - able to break away from the interpretative schools of the dominant methodological nationalis paradigm and to understand the new cosmopolitan society which is being developed. <<<

Principal Investigator

Giovanni BECHELLONI Università degli Studi di FIRENZE

Research Objectives

The aim of the research programme is on three levels: a)theoretical, b)methodological, empirical (substantial).

A. From the theoretical point of view, the scope of this programme is to render plausible and deducible the new paradigm, which has been developing for some years now, called the "communicative view". This paradigm has been included in that current of studies which the coordinator of this programme has called the "communicative turn". A merger between "linguistic turn", "ethnographic turn" and "cultural studies" converging in the renewal of the approach of "mainstream" social sciences (sociology and cultural anthropology, history and political science) towards the study of cultural and communicative processes. This convergence has permitted us to cross those borders which have long separated issues for study (as the culture of the élite from popular culture, contemporaneity from history the national and local societies from the cosmopolitanization process, the communicative processes from those social and political, simple societies from those which are complex, and so on) which must be described and interpreted from a holistic viewpoint, attentive to the interdependence, to the pluri-casualness on a long term basis. From a view which is sensitive to continuity rather than the historical caesuras and according to a comparative approach able to spread the social phenomena over a temporary length of time and in geographical space: being the "events" which can symbolize breaks and turning points, the profound "structures" can be traced in that which makes all human beings specific and unique compared to other living species in the processes which contribute to making history and human relationships a constant movement, an interminable transformation.

In the context of a unique certainty which at a certain point onwards in the hominization process, has characterized and characterizes the life of human beings: the certainty and the awareness that sooner or later we shall die.

The "communicative turn" is also the consequence of a growing awareness, resulting from the combination of the meeting between the first and undetermined appearance of nihilism in the human conscience (as a consequence of the various forms postulated by "the death of God" and the parallel triumph of science, technology and the correlated ideology of progress) and the double certainty (ensuing between the thirties and the fifties): a) that technical and scientific progress had given human beings the possibility of destroying the world and b)that the inability of human beings to build social and political institutions and forms of cooperation capable of holding back the envious and reciprocally destructive drives (the paradigm of René Girard and thoughts by Norbert Elias) could bring about, as Hegel had already foreshadowed (in the interpretation of Alexandre Kojéve, subsequently by Fukuyama by Ernst Nolte, Girard and others) the end of history and thus the end of that historical existence of the human species which is no more than 6,000 years old.
The dramatic experience of the so-called Second World War, the most dramatic of all wars preceding it (both for the destructive force of the new technologies as well as the direct involvement of such a great part of civilians, especially in Europe) was also another of those total facts that contributed to the start-up of processes which today help us to understand the scope of the existing communicative turn.
A turning point which brings us to call "new communication" (in the wake of Gregory Bateson's School in Palo Alto and other innovators) the "unnoticed revolution" which has been going on for some years now and which is similar, for its global and widespread consequences which it is provoking at all levels of life in all parts of the earth (and above all in the progressive industrial or post-industrial democracies of Northern Europe and North America) to that revolution which has spread over three centuries after the invention of movable type which hailed the inception of the revolution of the book (Elizabeth Eisenstein).

B)From a "methodological" point of view this programme allows us to utilize, within the context of a sole theoretical framework, that qualitative methodology (close reading, focus group, long interviews, secondary analysis of a great quantity of biographical and autobiographical narration and every type of research) which all the components of the research groups involved have already experimented in their previous work or are at present experimenting (doctorands and research assignees). Qualitative methodologies which will be implemented for the analysis of social objects already chosen as strategic, emblematic and significant in the previous experience of research: articles from popular newspapers, from successful television fiction programmes, stories of real life experiences as well as of work and travel experiences, cartoons narratives and traces of the individual and collective memory…

C)From the "empirical" (substantial) point of view this programme - both through the work of the research units involved as well as through the research work of the doctorands and assignees - will allow us to explore and take into account a significant amount of empirical material concerning the collective identity of the Italics and the Italians; as it is lived and told by the actors and as it is represented by the strategic media such as newspapers, television fiction and the public and political communication agencies.
The research programme's final objective is that to be able to show the coherence between the theoretical frame, the methodological procedure, empirical issues for arriving at two possibilities: 1) the transformation of communication from danger to resource; 2) the transformation of Italicism - as a summary of a hybrid identity, full of tradition but open to innovation - from assembled curiosity to a resource for a less conflicting world than that which we live in today. <<<

First Results

Partial results expected: a shared theoretical and methodological approach as well as operative procedures considered economical and relevant with respect to the aims of the research.Partial results expected: the accumulation, in the various sectors of specific relevance of the research units, of the awaited data through recordings of long interviews, summing up of focus groups, analytical records of various kinds of media narratives (newspapers and television fiction) summaries on talks, records of targeted analysis of historical-social-anthropological texts produced during recent years (some of which have been already included in the partial - for reasons of space - bibliographies attached to forms A and B of this project, summing up of talks, synthesis of thematic records taken from biographies and autobiographies and anything useful or unexpected during the course of the field work suitable for denying or confirming the reviewed hypothesis, compared to the dominant paradigms which support the theoretical and methodological apparatus of the entire project.Partial results expected: these are not only results to be published but also results able to trigger off debates among not only the experts but among the public potentially interested in the operational relapses that this project could be subjected to for the school and university educational policies, for the formation of experts in communication and more generally for public policies aimed at the formation of more competent public opinions and to political and more adequate social institutions for the challenge which the unnoticed revolution of communication is making to human society. <<<

Timescale

24 months

National and international background

1. The scientific starting point of the entire project is made up of a theoretical and methodological framework common to all the research units involved in the project; as they are composed of researchers and scholars with a sociological background, who share paradigms and have had much experience of cooperation among themselves and with the international community; even though they have been oriented towards specific areas which as a whole are joined towards the understanding of a single macro made up of processes of a complex social construction seen in modern society and in particular with regard to extreme modernity or the second modernity (Giddens, Beck). The specificity of the approach which characterizes the research units involved in the project is made up of a chosen territory which is to be explored: that of the social history of communication, starting from the history of human existence (five thousand years or more) and more specifically from the Mediterranean societies and the Hellenistic world (with its roots in the ancient civilizations of Phoenicians and Etruscans, Greeks and Romans), from the social use of the public word (Socrates and Plato) to the social use of writing. It is necessary to achieve results by going through the historical journeys of the Italians and Italy (from the eighth century B.C. to today) and to discuss further the dominant paradigms on the origin of capitalism and modernity, strongly influenced by the Protestant reformation and the birth of the national States. In this way, by means of much experience of research, a new paradigm has been obtained called "the communicative view" (Bechelloni) which has been experimented in past experience of research of each of those responsible for the research units (Bechelloni, Buonanno, Cavicchia Scalamonti, Natale, Pecchinenda, Solito) working on the Italian and European contemporaneity and on social subjects through which and with which the complex contemporary society is built glocally (the important means of communication established through journalism and television fiction, public and political communication, individual and collective memory, identities and culture, the great new migratory currents which meet and mix with the diasporas of ancient times and with those of the first modernity). And the hybridization processes of lexicons and languages, life styles and family networks, interpretative schemes which react reflectively on the great narratives of our time.
The identifiable texts are constituted of all those texts which are built up intersubjectively on the borders between identity and culture and which are prepared, more or less deliberately, in order to pass those borders thus acquiring the hybrid and contaminated characteristics which make them suitable for the double postulated hermeneutics (Giddens) and that the narrative and ethnic-anthropologic approach of close reading permits the breakdown of those traces of culture for other purposes; differently deployed in time and space: in the individual and collective memory which embraces the historical existence of the human race and "in the mixed national-cosmopolitical reality, of the global sense of place, of the "polygamy of place" and "banal cosmopolitanism" (Beck 2003, page. 30) which characterizes our contemporaneity".

2. Two short quotations which remind us of five great authors and diverse historical eras, characteristics of our humana civiltas at risk, can be used to evoke the scientific starting point of this research project. A starting point which is the fruit of an entire life devoted to study and research and the result of temporary points of arrival which have been obtained both from a constellation of authors sharing the double feature of having formed an identity as exiles (with respect to their own original culture) and of having worked sociologically to focus on the particular and distinctive traits of our contemporaneity defined as extreme or second modernity: from Elias to Bauman, from Todorov to Kundera, from Giddens to Beck.
The first quotation is that of Hannah Arendt who speaks of William Shakespeare who in "The Tempest" writes (Italian translation by Salvatore Quasimodo):"Full fathom five thy father lies. Of his bones are coral made; Those are pearls that were his eyes; Nothing of him that doth fade but doth suffer a sea-change into something rich and strange". The citation was put after the title The Pearl Fisherman in an essay in 1968 on Walter Benjamin (who committed suicide at the Spanish border on 26 September 1940); the essay begins with these words: "The past, if it is transmitted as a tradition is authoritative; authority in the way it is presented historically, becomes tradition. Walter Benjamin knew that the break in tradition and the loss of authority which occurred during his life was inevitable and he realized that he had to search for new ways of comparing with the past". (Arendt 2004, pages 62-64).
The second quotation is from Johan Huizinga. During a short interview given at the beginning of April 1942 (to a officer, an Italian writer back from the Russian Campaign and who had gone to see him in Leiden), happy that in the horrors of war an actual Italian felt the need to see him, he said: "Yes, perhaps Italy will still be able to show the way. Italy still has to devote its time on the mission given by Mazzini". Huizinga was arrested soon afterwards and over seventy years old, still imprisoned, he wrote his last masterpiece "Geschonden Wereld" before dying on 1st February 1945. In this painful, lucid and extraordinary book Huizinga often referred to Italy. Here are two comments. The first: "Italy has always had the advantage of being able to reconnect itself with its Roman or Etruscan or Greek past with its network of ancient cities which following the first conquests of Christianity were Episcopal seats and to therefore recover quickly from every perdition however serious. Notwithstanding the blows received the country was still "a breeding ground of human spirit" (page 41). The second: "The imperious past of a universal human civilization as a base a principle of the community is one of the most important sentences which flowed from the incomparable mind of Dante" (page 64).

3. Also the title of this project - as also that of the coordinator's research unit - brings the reader's attention to the scientific starting point. In particular it refers to: a) both the works of the German Sociologist Beck who in his latest book translated in Italian (The Cosmopolitan Society), takes up position against methodological nationalism, lays the foundation for a new interpretative paradigm, adjusted to the reality of the developing cosmopolitan society, which he calls the cosmopolitan view; b)as well as the work of coordinator of this research unit and the entire project which in his last five books (published in 2003 and 2004) paves the way for a new paradigm (converging and complimentary with that of Beck) which he names the communicative view referring to the works of Norbert Elias and Tzvetan Todorov, Ernst Nolte and Renée Girard. In particular the book The Silence and the Noise is referred to. The fate and fortune of the Italics in the world, which terminates a previous phase of Bechelloni's research (and which was able to count on the co-financing from Miur) and open a new one which can avail itself, by accumulating not only the empiric results of such past research but also and above all the new focussing theoretical and methodological constructs. In particular the influential text with the title Communicative turn. The project of this research will avail itself therefore of the contribution of two complimentary concepts, elaborated within two distinct traditions of research - that of the cosmopolitan view and the communicative view - which can be considered as convergent. In the sense that the communicative view elaborated by Bechelloni is also a cosmopolitan view (and perhaps we can also say viceversa; over and above the lexical differences and the different routes which have brought the two sociologists to the idea they propose; in the sense that the cosmopolitan view is also a communicative view).

4. The title of the research unit of the coordinator "The wings and the roots" - comes from Beck; who claims that the undergoing process of cosmopolitanization (radically different compared to the eighteenth century contrast between cosmopolitans and local nationals) demand and call to the reflexivity of human beings who wish to build a future and live in the present (the wings) to cultivate the individual and collective memory to reconstruct a past as an idea of tradition capable of being roots for the present and the future; rather than being obstacles to overcome and destroy as the events leading to the building of the theory of the first modernization and methodological nationalism.
5. The subtitle of the research unit's coordinator - strategies for building a communicative view on the cosmopolitan society starting from the historical experience of the Italics - is emanated by Bechelloni, who demands and claims the existence, starting from the thirties and the forties of a third unnoticed revolution; from the point of view of the social history of communication,
5.1 As we know the expression "unnoticed revolution" has been used by Elizabeth Eisenstein to define the enormous social and political consequences which have been produced since the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries by the printing press and the book.
Bechelloni suggests the same expression for defining both the transformations produced, starting from Socrates and Plato of the use of the written and spoken word after the event and the spreading of writings (and we can see in this instance both the famous definition by Huizinga - "the civilization of the pen" - as well as the more recent results of the hermeneutic research of Giovanni Reale on Plato - 2004) and also to define the transformation in communication which potentially involves all human beings; starting from the dual advent of the so-called mass communication and the "European wars" in the way they became world wars (both the First and the Second, more European than real world wars - as well as those which are ideological - the Cold War, the first real world war - either terrorist or asymmetric - the present day fully global war which began on the 11th September 2001).
The communicative view establishes itself in the wake of this third unnoticed revolution, a process which has been developed and specified over the past sixty years but which has begun to have an extraordinary visibility for the last three years coming to be generalized with the use of two key words among those more frequently used in contemporary lexicon: peace and communication. The presence of these two words signals the problem which each one of us continues to procrastinate, i.e. the dangers it hints at; respectively war and lack of communication (not communication or bad communication but better still - disturbed and disturbing communication - according to the theory of Bechelloni, in the wake of the pioneering studies of Gregory Bateson). <<<