Robert S. Dombroski

Foreword

In contrast to cultural studies as practiced in Great Britain and the United States, Italian cultural studies, it is fair to say, is still in its infancy. What progress cultural studies has made in establishing itself as a field of study in its own right has taken place largely outside of Italy: in Britain, where the term originated, and in the United States, where the niche that cultural studies has found in contemporary academic life now has expanded to include Italian culture. The anthology of Italian cultural studies recently published under the editorship of David Forgacs and Robert Lumley gives some indication of the new perspectives that have opened up on the study of modern Italy across the disciplines, while the present volume shows the influence cultural studies has had on the criticism of scholars trained mainly in the field of literature.

Many of the factors that explain why cultural studies has not staked out a domain in Italy have been covered by Forgacs and Lumley in their introduction to the collection. Surely, part of the burden of neglect must be shouldered by Italy’s humanist and philological traditions that together have worked to form an intellectualist concept of culture which has affected a whole range of contrasting ideologies; part, by the still traditional and clientalistic nature of the Italian academy, which tends to smother unsanctioned initiatives. As a result, the scholastic book industry in Italy has found little or no incentive in promoting interests devoid of institutional support. Furthermore, the Italian thinker whose work would best support a cultural studies discourse, Antonio Gramsci, has suffered — in Italy more than elsewhere — the vicissitudes of heated political conflict, whereby to involve him in the formation of a commitment to the study of cultural practices would seem, to say the least, suspect. Then, one would expect that the celebrity of Umberto Eco, who played an important role in making cultural studies into an academic discipline, would have had more of a formative influence on Italian academic life than in effect it has. But we must not forget that Eco wrote his ground breaking reflections on mass culture and the role of the intellectual in the media in the sixties, at a time when Italy had much less of a mass culture than it has today; when faculties of literature and philosophy, so steeped in tradition and reluctant to dispose of their Crocian heritage, would have found it difficult to think of culture as a communication phenomena and of semiotics as a preferred instrument of analysis. In Italy, Eco’s strong, modernizing influence has had its greatest impact on Communications departments, themselves products of comparatively recent formation. If we add these factors to the relative compactness and homogeneity of Italian society, that is to say, the lack of those circumstances which might have fostered the migration into Italy of non-Italian intellectuals and their entry into the academic disciplines and the public sphere, it is not hard to understand why the cultural studies phenomenon has been late in developing in Italy. By comparison, cultural studies in Britain and the United States, which was influenced to an important degree by the personal experiences of emigrant intellectuals from the Third World, was founded in part on the real experience of crossing cultural borders. Finally, when Italian cultural studies, and cultural studies in general, becomes mature enough to do a cultural studies analysis of itself, it will have to address the different political conditions which have affected its respective origins. By this I mean the recent histories of the left in Western Europe and, in Italy, the power base enjoyed by Marxism in the humanities and the social sciences, as well as the largely de-politicized "correctness" that seems to inspire and animate the interest in the United States for subaltern discourses and popular culture. If cultural studies is, as I believe, one of the positive effects of the current de-valuation of "great narratives," we must now assess the gains to see what this new brand of Marxism has accomplished politically, and whether its installation in the academy as a discipline among others has changed anything at all. Although it may be too early to tell, I think that cultural studies has become, or is potentially, an obstacle in the path of the right’s desire to control the curricula in the universities. The symptoms of reaction are now widespread, especially within the domain of Italian, where cultural studies, viewed as an umbrella term for a host of non-literary pursuits (some regarded as scandalous), has become a demon to exorcize in the name of traditional philological and historical scholarship. But this, as much as it may be discouraging to those hoping to embark on a career in Italian, may be a strong indication that cultural studies has now become an adversary to be reckoned with.

I think most would agree that the principal case made today for cultural studies in the United States — one that has had in some schools a positive impact on administrators looking to cut costs — is that it promotes learning that is interdisciplinary and trans-disciplinary. This is not to say that there is no intellectual justification for the move toward inter-disciplinarity and that economics is the cause of the investment, but rather that economic considerations have made the pursuit of such a goal more desirable for the American academy. In the United States, the transformation of the traditional discipline of Italian literary studies into Italian studies is an intelligent and pragmatic way of managing the losses Italian has suffered on account of the drift, especially in public universities, toward vocationism and the decrease in interest in the humanities. In other words, the ideology of inter-disciplinarity can be considered also a practical construct created by academic realities.

The Italian system of higher education, it could be argued, has always put a premium on inter-disciplinarity since it requires that students pass exams in a number of fields related to their major interest. However, the kind of inter-disciplinarity present in the Italian university curriculum is not exactly what I think cultural studies is calling for. Cultural studies is concerned much less with the quantity of than the approach to knowledge. And however important inter-disciplinarity might be to a cultural studies perspective, it is not its main ingredient. Cultural studies, in the way it has been theorized in the United States and Britain, embraces a broadly anthropological and more narrowly humanistic conception of culture, while arguing the need to study all forms of cultural production in relation to other cultural practices, as well as to society and history. In Italy, there has been no fear of moving in the direction of popular culture and film, nor of articulating the study of literature with that of art and the social sciences; feminist and gay studies have also been legitimized, and, recently, ethnic and post-colonial studies seem to have taken hold. What has been lacking is a cultural studies discourse: namely an ideology that goes beyond its material base, forcing the practitioners of criticism to theorize their relationship to culture. It is no small paradox that the intellectual left in Italy, a country in which Marxism has played a concrete role in the development of contemporary institutions, has retained throughout the century a humanist-intellectualist concept of culture and has made little effort to question the institution of culture and the class privileges of intellectual groups; while in the United States, where Marxism has been excluded from all meaningful political practice, left leaning intellectuals and academics are more sensitive to disciplinary investments and exclusions. This takes us to the heart of what cultural studies is, or, better, what it does. Tony Bennett has made a fundamental point that helps give definition to a field without specific markers to delimit its range of interest, nor without a distinct methodology. To avoid cultural studies becoming anything anyone wants, or that it be acquired merely as a fashionable commodity, some boundaries must be set, as Tony Bennett does when he states that, however different the political and theoretical positions behind cultural criticism may be, they all "share a commitment to examining cultural practices from the point of view of their intrication with, and within, relations of power" (Grossberg et al., 1992, 3). Bennett’s position, firmly rooted in Gramsci’s definition of Marxism ("la coscienza piena delle contraddizioni, in cui lo stesso filosofo . . . non solo comprende le contraddizioni ma pone se stesso come elemento della contraddizione, eleva questo elemento a principio di conoscenza e quindi di azione" [Gramsci 1975, 1487]), also requires that in analyzing the relations of power the critic consider his/her place within those relations. In so doing, an awareness is gained of the compromise embedded in every research project, while at the same time avoiding being compromised by a pluralism that is forever staking out new markets to exploit. These simple instructions, which grow out of the best tradition of Marxist hermeneutics, prepare us to approach any and all forms of cultural production in the same way, namely as culture. Admittedly, the representations, for example, of Ugolino and Lucifer in the Commedia carry infinitely more cultural weight than, say, the fantastic figures of cannibals and vampires in popular literature, but, once we abstract from their aesthetic identity, high cultural function and claims to universality, and view them as products of intellectual work in relation to other social activities, they become no more, or no less, culturally significant than other monsters who speak to our feelings and ideas. There is no need here to rehearse the meaning and complexity of the word "culture," that subtends cultural studies practices, for the question is not what culture is but rather which of its relevant definitions should be emphasized in scholarly practice.

This volume, which includes a large variety of approaches to several different objects, deals with culture both as art, belief and institution, and as intellectual and artistic activity. It is not a book of theoretical positions, nor can it be defined according to any one particular political or cultural ideology. I would rather prefer to describe it as a book of tendencies, which gives for the most part some indication of the new work being done today in Italian studies in the United States. It is a relatively large and diverse body of work reflecting different points of view on different moments of conflict and negotiation within the social relations of different societies from the Renaissance to the present. The essays chosen for this volume broach, as one would expect in cultural studies, the fantastic and sexual dimensions of culture and cultural production (Grossbeck, Nerenberg, Pinkus, Ravetto, Talvacchia), issues of marginality and power (Parati, Shemek, Zampieri, Perry), hybridity (Orton, West), gender and identity (Paulicelli, Reich, Valentini), ideology (Brose), while the studies of Barlera and Sberlati with which the volume begins and ends, center, albeit in different ways, on Gramsci’s importance for the study of cultural forms. What holds these essays together is the emphasis they place, to a greater or lesser degree, on interaction and conflict, on the sites of cultural practices and on the particular circumstances in which cultural representation takes place.

— The City University of New York

Works Consulted

Forgacs, David and Robert Lumley, eds. Italian Cultural Studies: An Introduction. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996.

Grossberg, Lawrence, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler, eds. Cultural Studies. New York: Routledge, 1992.