Pierpaolo Antonello and Florian Mussgnug

Introduction

Dis-moi ce que tu exclus, je te dirai ce que tu penses. […] Celui ou ce qu’on chasse ou expulse enseigne plus de choses sur ceux qui l’excluent que tout les discours que ceux-ci tiennent sur eux-mêmes.

— Michel Serres, Atlas

Perspectivistic understanding fails as soon as political interests are at stake; but otherwise, especially in aesthetic matter, our historical capacity of adaptation to the most various forms of beauty is almost boundless.

— Erich Auerbach, ‘Vico’s Contribution to Literary Theory’

S’il est vrai que les Européens ont inventé la modernité, il est important qu’ils puissent, si j’ose dire, la désinventer, ou, plus exactement la ‘rappeler’, comme l’industrie rappelle un produit défectueux.

— Bruno Latour, ‘Le Rappel de la modernité’

‘Postmodern Impegno’: the title of this book may strike some readers as a category error, a contradiction-in-terms. Postmodernism, as Hans Bertens points out, is an ‘exasperating term’, which has been applied in an extra-ordinary number of fields and at various levels of abstraction, meaning very different things to different people.1 For nearly fifty years, it has been used to describe diametrically opposed cultural practices: in architecture, a predilection for hybridity over order and unity; in American literary criti-cism of the 1960s and 1970s, a move away from narrative and representa-tion; in music, an attention to the sounds of everyday life; in sociology, a rapid transformation of consumer culture caused by the rise of a new middle class.2 Most frequently, however, postmodernism has been described

2 Pierpaolo Antonello and Florian Mussgnug

as a triumph of eclecticism, a sceptical, but above all playful attitude towards social conventions, a loss of faith in definitive or at least comprehensive representations of the real. According to many thinkers, especially on the political left, the global proliferation of postmodernism has also been symptomatic of an underlying crisis of political values. Christopher Norris, for instance, denounces fashionable preoccupations with the ‘postmodern condition’ as a convenient excuse for political apathy, and depicts postmod-ernism as an uncritical, cynical, or nihilistic endorsement of uncontrolled capitalism.3 In Italy, opponents of postmodernism have been equally vocif-erous. For Romano Luperini postmodernism is essentially ‘una tendenza all’accettazione apologetica del presente’, which must be resisted at all costs.4 In Alfonso Berardinelli’s opinion, it is a distorted view of Western culture, closely related to New Age mysticism, which obliterates the very idea of historical truth.5 According to both critics, postmodernism sanc-tions a separation of morality, politics and art, and therefore undermines any attempt to define literature in political or ethical terms. As Berardinelli points out, postmodernism leaves no room for the previously influential category of impegno, which he defines as the belief in a single conceptual framework:

La logica dell’engagement […] parte dalla certezza che la propria coscienza politico-letteraria del presente è il principio da cui dedurre un solo modo storicamente corretto di risolvere il rapporto fra realtà sociale, imperativi politici, forme letterarie.6

Berardinelli defines impegno as a singular, historical force, which has shaped Italian culture since the immediate post-war period. But this is by no means the only way of describing the relation between literature and politics. As Jennifer Burns points out in her book Fragments of Impegno: ‘the monolithic notion of commitment to a usually communist agenda in writing began in the 1950s to reveal cracks of dissension, and the long-term effect of this is a break-up of the commitment to a single, overarching social agenda into a fragmentary attention to specific issues’.7

In their contributions to this volume, literary theorists, cultural histo-rians, and critics of literature and film, investigate the lasting significance of Burns’ metaphor of fragmentation (or rather, and more aptly, diver-sification). In section one, Remo Ceserani, Monica Jansen and Jennifer

Introduction 3

Burns reflect on the reception of postmodernism and impegno in Italy, and beyond. Section two explores different theoretical and cultural contexts – pensiero debole, feminism, life writing and sociology – which have been particularly receptive of postmodern thought. In the third section – dedi-cated to ‘genres of impegno’ – a range of case-studies illustrates the wealth and diversity of political art in contemporary Italy. While the contributors to this volume concur with Berardinelli on the historical importance of macropolitics, we do not agree that the postmodern rejection of universal-ism and metanarratives necessarily marks the end of impegno, or indeed of modern emancipatory politics. Quite the contrary: postmodernist anxie-ties about political legitimation can prompt new forms of political action and help us reformulate the goals of emancipatory struggle. There is more than one way of conceiving the relation between literature and art, just as there is more than one way of describing impegno in postmodernist terms. As Ernesto Laclau and Chantalle Mouffe point out, ‘it is precisely the ontological status of the central categories of the discourses of modernity, and not their content, that is at stake’.8 What postmodernism challenges, in other words, is not impegno as such, but its essentialist, rationalistic and humanistic underpinnings. To describe postmodernism as an expression of nihilism means to misunderstand this specific challenge to established totalities.

Drawing on a variety of cultural fields and artistic media – from cinema to the literary genres of autobiography, romance and giallo; from philosophy to investigative journalism; from theatrical performances to shared practices of cultural memory – this book wants therefore to challenge widespread – and largely negative – assumptions about Italian postmodernism and to discuss contemporary Italian culture as a particularly interesting testing-ground for the multiple, pluriform struggles which we associate here with the idea of postmodernist impegno. While we disagree on any number of points of detail, we all share the assumption that pluralism and discursive openness are not an obstacle to progressive politics, but its enabling con-dition. Postmodern impegno, as we hope to show, embraces multiplicity and the open, process-driven character of personal identity, political and

4 Pierpaolo Antonello and Florian Mussgnug

cultural discourse, and the social field at large. A more constructive and less ‘apocalyptic’ analysis of the cultural climate of the past two decades in Italy, we believe, must pay attention to disillusionment and disengage-ment – a relapse towards the private; a radical commodification of cultural values and products – but also investigate the importance of new forms of political and ethical awareness.9 The general outcry of those who maintain that Italy presently lives in a kind of cultural, intellectual and moral desert, should therefore be analyzed symptomatically rather than as a substanti-ated diagnosis of the present. Claiming that ‘il postmoderno è stato un genocidio culturale’10 seems, to say the least, a radical over-simplification of historical and cultural forces that are more complex and diversified than what appears prima facie. This does not mean, however, that simplification can always be avoided. Many of the reflections that follow are themselves provisional formulations of an experience that continues to evolve and affect us. Like any critical investigation of the present, our project involves fundamental acts of critical choosing. Let us therefore begin by stating some of the general assumptions that inform our project.

Historicizing Postmodernity

As Monica Jansen charts in her book Il dibattito sul postmoderno in Italia (2002), postmodernism and postmodernity are concepts, which had a con-troversial reception in Italy, and which often suffered from oversimplifica-tion.11 For early commentators, postmodernism (a cultural notion, defined by its inherent relationship to modernism) coincided with postmodernity (a historical period or ‘condition’), and often with autoctonous formulae such as Omar Calabrese’s ‘neo-baroque’ or Umberto Eco’s conception of postmodernism as a recurrent ‘manneristic’ phase in art and literature.12 To clear the ground from all possible misunderstandings, it is therefore worth stating that this volume treats the postmodern – following Fredric Jameson’s formulation – not so much as a ‘style’ but rather as ‘a cultural dominant: a conception which allows for the presence and coexistence of a

Introduction 5

range of very different, yet subordinate, features.’13 Postmodernity is hence seen as an epoch in which advanced societies – particularly in the West – experienced a series of profound transformations: de-industrialization and the rapid growth of service and hi-tech sectors; globalization on an economic, social, ecological, technical and communicative level; the rise of new media and communication technologies; the transformation of cognitive and pedagogical processes and aesthetic preferences; a wider circulation of works of art as commodities; a more dynamic interaction between cultural centres and peripheries; an increasing reflexivity in social strata, and a ‘horizontal’ or bottom-up construction of cultural and politi-cal dominants.14 In a Jamesonian sense, then, the aim of this volume is to analyse a range of works, discourses and cultural objects, which have been produced over the past thirty years, and therefore under the umbrella of postmodern epistemology and socio-economic structures.

From a historiographical point of view, our treatment of the postmod-ern as a cultural dominant relativizes the importance of chronological and terminological distinctions. We are aware that in current theoretical and philosophical thinking, the term ‘postmodern’ is to some extent outmoded, subject to continuous tinkering, if not to straightforward ‘rebranding’. More recent neologisms, however, do not seem to mark significant progress on a conceptual level. As Remo Ceserani points out in chapter one of this book, fashionable terms such as Zygmunt Bauman’s ‘liquid modernity’ are best understood as examples of sociological re-categorization or superficial labelling, which do not address basic conceptual assumptions, but confirm underlying categories.

On a more substantial level, it is not our concern to define postmo-dernity in terms of either continuity or a presumed radical break with modernity.15 Different frames of reference (sociological, economic or artis-tic) demand specific and diverse assessments of wider social trends. Instead of insisting on rigid historiographical boundaries, our volume therefore acknowledges the importance of ‘continual’ perspectives, which define post-modernity in terms of an accumulation and evolution of earlier social and cultural structures. On this score, we wish to draw attention to terms such as ‘hypermodernity’, ‘neomodernity’, ‘late-modernity’, or ‘reflexive moder-nity’, and to thinkers like Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens and Scott Lash,

6 Pierpaolo Antonello and Florian Mussgnug

who have suggested that ‘the transition from one social epoch to another could take place unintended and unpolitically, bypassing all the forums for political decisions, the lines of conflict and the partisan controversies’.16

From the point of view of actual periodization, it is worth noting that specific historical macro-events, which have often been singled out as radical turning points in the history of postmodernity, are not always rep-resentative of changing cultural or social attitudes. As this volume shows, new ethical and political concerns took shape in Italian literature, cinema and art during the 1980s, and, more visibly, in the early 1990s, after the fall of the Berlin wall – an event which, according to some analysts, marked the beginnings of ideological monologism at a global level. However, as Bruno Latour underscores in this regard:

the fall of the Berlin wall symbolizes the fall of socialism. ‘The triumph of liberalism, of capitalism, of the Western democracies over the vain hopes of Marxism’. […] But the triumph is short-lived. In Paris, London, and Amsterdam, this same glorious year 1989 witnesses the first conferences on the global state of the planet: for some obser-vers they symbolize the end of capitalism and its vain hopes of unlimited conquest and total domination over nature.17

Similar words of caution seem appropriate in relation to the terrorist attacks of September 2001 – an event that has been described by Carla Benedetti and Romano Luperini as a symbolic threshold, which finally dispensed with the cultural and rhetorical shallowness and political emptiness of postmodernity, bringing us back to a more ‘vibrant’ epoch of (modern) world conflicts, and inaugurating, at the cultural and literary level, a ‘return of the real’.18 While it is true that Italian writers and critics responded strongly (and promptly) to 9/11, it must also be stressed that many responses express a primarily ‘postmodern’ sensitivity: a fascination with iconic, visual and symbolic potency, rather than with political causes or consequences.19 More impor-tantly, a politics based on competing ideologies and stark dialectical con-trasts appears unlikely, at least in the near future. As both Ulrich Beck and Bruno Latour point out, in a fully globalized world it is no longer possible to externalize anything, whether from a political viewpoint, or from a dip-lomatic, economic, or ecological perspective.20 Global co-dependency and the horizontal proliferation of networks force us to think in systemic and no

Introduction 7

longer in dialectical terms. This is also evident on a military level, where war is waged by transnational agencies and interstitial actors, and where entirely new forms of conflict – what Philip Bobbitt defines as ‘market state terror-ism’ – call for an analysis in ‘postmodern’ terms.21 Even the globalization of fear in Western countries can be described, according to many commenta-tors, as a typically postmodern phenomenon.22 Moreover, as Ulrich Beck points out, the very cognitive, economic, technical and cultural structures of globalized society produce their own critique, both in terms of internal antinomic differentiation and in the amount of risk they produce:

in the risk society, the recognition of the unpredictability of threats provoked by techno-industrial development necessitates self-reflection on the foundation of social cohesion and the examination of prevailing conventions and foundations of ‘rationality’. In the self-concept of risk society, society becomes reflexive […], which is to say it becomes a theme and a problem for itself.23

For scholars like John Fiske and Fredric Jameson, a similar internal dialectic also applies to the cultural production of postmodernism.24 As Scott Lash points out, ‘the cultural logic of capitalism, though seemingly one-dimen-sional, though ostensibly identitarian, creates – in an immanent dialectical movement – its own non-identical critique. This is too aesthetic reflexivity, but at issue are not reflexive subjects but the already reflexive objects pro-duced by the cultural industries and circulating in the global information and communication structures’.25 Before we consider the reflexive objects of contemporary Italian culture, however, it will be necessary to engage with the political significance of postmodernism.

Postmodern Politics, Postmodern Ethics

The proliferation of postmodernist art and theory, as Fredric Jameson recently put it, cannot be separated from ‘a certain general agreement, a certain unspoken consensus, on those features of the modern that were no longer desirable’.26 What is most recognizable about postmodern politics,

8 Pierpaolo Antonello and Florian Mussgnug

in other words, is its pars destruens: its systematic distrust of historically grounded power, combined with a de-naturalizing critique of ideology that is common to postmodernist art and poststructuralist theory. Like earlier political protest movements, postmodernism derives much of its force from the debunking of authoritative structures: colonial imperialism, phallocentric male domination, techno-scientific control, ontologization of race, and so on. As Robert Eaglestone points out, even the Shoah has been treated by postmodern theorists as an expression of the ‘totalizing logic’ of modernity, and therefore, at least indirectly, as a foundational event of postmodernism – a view which is here discussed by Robert Gordon.27 Poststructuralist suspicion, however, is not without its internal contraddic-tions. As Linda Hutcheon points out, postmodern theory cannot escape the subversive scrutiny which directs against hegemonic power: ‘Is the theorizing of Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard, Foucault, and others not, in a very real sense, entangled its own de-doxifying logic?’28 More importantly, postmodernism has been described by many theorists as a new form of nihilism, and as a betrayal of what some have called the unfinished project of the 1960s.29 In Italy, debates about the political ambivalence of post-modernism – its alleged blindness to self-critique and its problematic attitude towards the ‘formative’ Sixties – have been complicated (but also relativized) by the fact that many influential postmodern thinkers are directly influenced by the utopian aspirations of 1968. Far from advo-cating a withdrawal from politics, philosophers such as Gianni Vattimo do in fact consider his pensiero debole a necessary step towards political emancipation. As Giuseppe Stellardi points out in his contribution to this volume, Vattimo articulates the relationship between theory and praxis at several levels, particularly by grounding his philosophical and political project on two external conditions that seem to acquire a special status: ‘freedom’, as ‘a necessary condition for the negotiation of identities, posi-tions and interests to take place’; and the ‘reduction of violence’, seen as a ‘widely shared’ external political and ethical aim. Similarly, Italian feminist thinkers such as Luisa Muraro, Adriana Cavarero and Rosi Braidotti – analyzed in chapter five by Alessia Ronchetti – have stressed the impor-tance of embodiment – ‘la contrattazione tra il linguaggio e ciò che chiede

Introduction 9

di essere riconosciuto come esistente: corpo, desiderio, vissuto, esperienza’ (104) – as a necessary precondition for ethics, thus challenging both ‘male’, post-structuralist doxa and widespread ideas about the alleged disapper-ance of the subject.30 Braidotti, Muraro and Cavarero have also played an important role in the so-called ‘turn to ethics’ – a paradigm shift, which, according to the editors of a recent anthology, has established a new focal point in the humanities and social sciences.31 As Joanna Zylinska points out, there has never been such a ‘resurgence in debates on ethics outside the strictly delineated discipline of philosophy: terms such as business ethics, professional ethics, medical ethics, or bioethics have now become part of everyday speech’.32 To speak of a shift from postmodernism to ethics, however, means to ignore the ways in which these two terms have become profoundly intertwined. Postmodernist theory, as it presents itself in 2009, is profoundly concerned with morality and political action. And ethics has a distinctly postmodern flavour.

Towards a Post-hegemonic Impegno?

If the category of the postmodern has experienced critical resistance, if not outright opposition, within the Italian intellectual field, the notion of impegno, on the contrary, has preserved an aura of strong historical and critical respectability. What is more, impegno has often been treated as a validating token that allows critics to bypass the formal, stylistic, and aes-thetic shortcomings of a given work of art.

Impegno, in the Italian context, is normally associated with a specific historical period – from the late 1940s to the 1960s – in which cultural and political actors converged on a communal project based on strict ideologi-cal premises and tied to emacipatory and potentially revolutionary action. There has been a sustained tendency – still visibile now – to associate engagement or impegno with figures such as Jean-Paul Sartre or Pier Paolo Pasolini.33 As Alan O’Leary points out in chapter ten, this ‘theoretical

10 Pierpaolo Antonello and Florian Mussgnug

narrowness’ has lead to a restrictive pigeonholing of impegno: public think-ers ‘become intellectuals to the extent that they are impegnati in the process of defining the nation and its proper direction’ (221).

For many post-war Italians, impegno was inseparable from the idea of political hegemony: as organic intellectuals in the Gramscian sense, the engagé writer or filmaker had to shape collective consciousness and co-opt individuals into a communal project for global transformation and revolutionary change. More recently, however, hegemony – one of Italy’s most significant contributions to twentieth-century Marxist thought – has entered a period of crisis. While the figure of the organic intellectual still appeals to writers, journalists and film-makers, Gramscian conceptions of a ‘collective will’ have been compromised, according to many, by the ideological and political power of Italy’s so-called ‘chiese’ – Catholic and Communist, in primis, but also Fascist in the ventennio – which envis-aged a top-down approach to cultural formation, and which cultivated a largely patronizing attitude towards the so-called ‘popolo’, very rarely seen as an autonomous interlocutor, as agent and protagonist of a well-defined ‘public sphere’, and mostly as a mass of subaltern, passive subjects, ready for political steering.34

What emerges in recent years, and what this volume aims to intercept, is an attempt to free the notion of impegno from any restrictive ideological embrace. As Jennifer Burns remarks in Fragments of Impegno, a new attitude towards political art can in fact be traced back to the 1960s, when many Italian intellectuals – including Italo Calvino and Elio Vittorini – began to see impegno as an outdated, monological illustration of ideology.35 This is evident, for example, in the following statement by Italo Calvino, which describes impegno in flexible, contingent terms:

Oggi, in genere, quando si parla di ‘letteratura impegnata’ ci se ne fa un’idea sbagliata, come d’una letteratura che serve da illustrazione a una tesi già definita a priori, indi-pendentemente dall’espressione poetica. Invece, quello che si chiamava l’‘engagement’, l’impegno, può saltar fuori a tutti i livelli; qui vuole innanzitutto essere immagini e parola, scatto, piglio, stile, sprezzatura, sfida.36

As Calvino points out, the crumbling of overarching hegemonic projects does not automatically foil the notion of impegno, preventing any further

Introduction 11

use of it; it rather ‘re-semanticizes’ it, broadening its scope and use.37 For the purposes of our book, impegno could thus be re-described, simply, as an ethical or political position chanelled through specific cultural and artistic activities, against any restrictive ideological brace. Progessive art, in this context, is not defined as a struggle for a new hegemonic affirmation – the transformation of plurality into a new habitus – but as a challenge to any form of hegemony. The alternative to rigid ideological definitions, in other words, is an ‘emancipatory’ or ‘reformistic’ impegno, a shift from macro-politics to micropolitics,38 or perhaps – in Simon Critchley’s terms – an ‘ethical anarchy’, which respects the ‘multiple singularities of the encounter with others that defines the experience of sociality’.39 In the Italian context, it can also be understood as ‘impegno civile’ or ‘laico’, positing individual responsibility and critical awareness as corner-stones of its definition and practice. Finally, its conceptual umbrella includes existential, intellectual and ethical experiences that are not the outcome of deliberate projects or interests, but the result of contingent factors and external contraints, such as Primo Levi’s intellectual and moral impegno, which derived, as he himself put it, from a biographical accident.

Thick Relationships

Unlike the Italian term impegno, English words such as ‘engagement’ and ‘commitment’ have strong relational and passional connotations and are attached more to the private than to the public sphere. In order to reflect some of the assumptions expressed by these different semantic fields, our volume conceptualizes postmodern impegno as a ‘thick relationship’, in which the individual extablishes, first of all, an engagement with the ‘other’ (lower case), meaning the ‘neighbour’, rather than the ‘collective’, or hypostasized, phantasmatic ‘Other’, in Lacanian or Levinasian terms. As Pierpaolo Antonello explains in chapter eleven – with regard to the Italian experience of ‘story-telling theatre’ – ‘thick relationships’, accord-ing to the Israeli philosopher Avishai Margalit, are based on closeness and

12 Pierpaolo Antonello and Florian Mussgnug

kinship to the ‘near and dear’, rather than simply ‘backed by the attribute of being human’.40 Thick relationships, in other words, depend on ethics and not on morality, on passional and relational exchange rather than on abstract norms (‘we need morality precisely because we do not care’, Mar-galit asserts).41 The intrinsic flaw of many political initiatives may hence be described as an inability to engage constructively and in an authetically passionate manner with ‘others’ – with ‘the near and dear’ – and there-fore as an excess of moralistic, ‘thin relationships’, which Slavoj Žižek has described as essentially narcissistic and self-compensatory:

these intellectuals are ‘multi-ethnic’ through Bosnians, break out of the Cartesian paradigm by admiring Native American wisdom, and so on, in the same way that, in past decades, they were revolutionaries by admiring Cuba, or ‘democratic socialists’ by endorsing the myth of Yugoslav ‘self-management’ […] as ‘something special’, a genuine democratic breakthrough. In all of these cases, they have continued to lead their undisturbed upper-middle-class academic existence, while doing their progres-sive duty through the Other.42

Žižek’s and Margalit’s emphasis on personal experience finds support in Beck’s and Giddens’s analysis of private life – here discussed by Orsetta Innocenti – and in their definition of our period as ‘reflexive modernity’. Beck, in particular, invites us to be more thorough in our critical assessment about any alleged withdrawal from politics and into the private sphere:

what appeared to be ‘an unpolitical retreat to private life’, ‘new inwardness’, or ‘caring for emotional wounds’ in the old understanding of politics, when seen from the other side, represents the struggle of a new dimension of the political. The still pre-vailing impression that social awareness and consensus ‘evaporates’ in the ‘heat’ of individualization processes, is not entirely false, but also not completely correct. It ignores the compulsions and possibilities of manufacturing social commitment and obligations, no matter how tentative.43

In the wake of a reflexive modernity, and in the absence of broad ideo-logical umbrellas, Beck argues, ‘people leave the “nest” of their “political home” step by step and issue by issue’.44 Before engaging with broader, col-lective issues, we feel the duty to examine and test our ethical beliefs and political convinctions. As Margherita Ganeri has recently observed, in a

Introduction 13

interesting reading of Pierre Bourdieu, ‘l’impegno comincia dall’impegno su di sé e dentro il campo delle relazioni interpersonali: private, sociali e anche accademiche. […] Bourdieu è convinto che cambiare se stessi non sia solo la premessa per cambiare il campo [intellettuale] e il mondo: pensa che significhi già cambiarli’.45

Mass Media, Intellectuals and ‘Upstream Engagement’

Moving on the other side of the political and relational spectrum, in his recent history of literature and commitment in French culture – Littéra-ture et engagement: de Pascal à Sartre – Benoit Denis underscores the link between political art and mass-society. Engagement, which Denis dates back to the Dreyfus Affair, requires a public sphere: the modern intellectual speaks essentially to a mass audience, not to any small circle of acolytes.

Pour Sartre, engager la littérature revient en fait à lancer un vaste appel au profane, en convient l’écrivain à s’adresser à cette masse de lecteurs qu’une certaine littérature élitiste exclut symboliquement de l’échange littéraire […] lancer cet appel au profane, c’est donc refuser d’écrire pour les seuls happy few.46

Unlike the French tradition analysed by Denis, Italian impegno has been characterized by an Adornian mistrust of the culture industry and by a more or less explicitly elitist stance, which expressed itself – even in leftist quarters – in an open refusal of mass culture.47 Only recently, Italy has witnessed the rise of a political and didactic art, which engages directly with mass audiences. In a society where the experience of political disap-pointment has become acutely tangible, art appears to many as the only legitimate expression of discontent. Creative invention – as Sergia Adamo shows in chapter twelve – becomes a powerful, emancipatory gesture, which reveals episodes of injustice and oppression that would otherwise appear normalized, like ordinary parts of everyday life. As a result, contemporary Italian art enjoys a mass-appeal that would have been hard to imagine fifty

14 Pierpaolo Antonello and Florian Mussgnug

years earlier – suffice to mention the books, films and performances of Marco Paolini, Nanni Moretti, Marco Tullio Giordana, Carlo Lucarelli and the giallisti, and, most recently, Roberto Saviano, all discussed in this volume. The sudden popularity of particular works – most recently, Rob-erto Saviano’s Gomorra – is not an exceptional phenomenon, a ‘caso let-terario’, but rather the expression of a wider cultural trend: a new form of engagement, which treats political art not only as instruction, but above all as a response to public demand, as well as part of a generational shift whose formation has been prepared by a historical and cultural period that is commonly defined as postmodern.

Paradoxically, the success of Italian public intellectuals has been facili-tated by the very structures which they tend to criticize: potentially eman-cipatory media which are treated by many thinkers as inadequate, corrupt, or, in the best case, neutral information carriers. As Alberto Abruzzese remarks ‘troverete pochissime volte, se non in casi eccezionali, un uomo di cultura, in Italia, che si rivolga ai media pensando che sia lui a dover ristrutturare il suo modo di lavoro rispetto al ciclo produzione-consumo dei media e non viceversa’.48

This brings to the fore another crucial feature of cultural transmission: new media technologies – in spite of Habermasian fears of a ‘re-feudali-zation’ of the public sphere49 – have always lend themselves to ‘anarchic’ or ‘counter-cultural’ strategies of communication and circulation.50 What was true for the printing press, for nineteenth-century newspapers and for independent radio stations in the 1970s, is even more evident nowadays, with the internet playing a crucial role in counter-cultural production. In full postmodernity – a condition that has been defined by its rhyzo-matic networking – new media have fostered a spontaneous catalyzation of shared knowledge around social and political concerns, while by-passing the mediation of cultual elites. If the notion of ‘hegemony’ is understood essentially as a top-down mechanism of cultural formation and domina-tion, postmodernity, on the contrary, has been characterized by so-called upstream engagement, a notion conceptualized in the field of STS (Sci-ence, Technology and Society) to define the active contribution of the public in policy making, in public associations, NGOs, and civil society in general.51