BACK
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MODERNITY
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STEFANO SALIS IN CONVERSATION WITH GIUSEPPE LUPO.
IN PURSUIT OF A NEW LIFESTYLE.
Born in 1970 in Sant’Antioco in Sardinia, Stefano Salis is a journalist for Il Sole 24 Ore where he edits Commenti, the
opinion and editorial page. In the newspaper’s Sunday culture insert, he writes frequently on bibliophilia, publishing,
art, design, and literature. He has led conferences on these topics around the world and taught university courses
on journalism at the Università di Milano and the Università Cattolica.
Stefano’s contributions in book form include curating (with Barnaba Fornasetti) Piero Fornasetti: Certi paraventi
sono stati disegnati due volte (pub. Henry Beyle). His latest book is Sulla Scacchiera (pub. Franco Maria Ricci).
Pending publication is a book on Roger Caillois’ stones (Franco Maria Ricci). He is on the advisory committee of
FMR magazine.
Born in Lucania, Giuseppe Lupo lives in Lombardy, where he teaches Theory and History of Modernity in Literature
at the Università Cattolica in Milan. In 2018, he won the Premio Viareggio with Gli Anni del Nostro Incanto and, in 2011,
the Selezione Campiello prize with L’Ultima Sposa di Palmira. Giuseppe is the author of numerous other novels,
including L’Americano di Celenne, La Carovana Zanardelli, Viaggiatori di Nuvole, L’Albero di Stanze, Breve Storia del
Mio Silenzio, and Tabacco Clan (2022).
His most recent book is La Modernità Malintesa (2023). He has published many essays on the culture of the 20th
century and industrial modernism, and he collaborates with the cultural sections of Il Sole 24 Ore.
TalkingAbout 2023
MILANO, 23.11.2023
STEFANO SALIS: This evening, on my way here for our conversa-
tion launching this series on Modernity — a keyword of the 20th century — I ran
into an interesting book in the second-hand bookstore next to my house.
By Roberto Vacca, one of Italy’s most eminent futurologists, it is a book I
read when it first came out. In the 1970s and 80s, Vacca authored several
books that convincingly described possible futures.
Il Medio Evo prossimo venturo (published in 1974 as The Coming Dark Age)
attracted a following with its speculation on dystopian post-technology
scenarios and foreshadowed environmental and social issues that, at the
time, were not exactly “front and center”. I mention it not because this
book predicted the future, which has brought surprises no one could have
foreseen, but because it traced several distinguishing aspects of moder-
nity, at least as they have been perceived in Italy. For our conversation, I
have brought a series of images, but even without seeing them a simple
description is enough to convey the heart of the matter.
Let me give you an example with two objects that are precisely the
same age: Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and a 1907 Ford. Whoever
sees them cannot help but notice something. The car appears hopelessly
antiquated: a technology that was groundbreaking at the time but today
seems ridiculous and inadequate. In contrast, Picasso’s painting still strikes
many of us as not merely contemporary, but futuristic. We are not accus-
tomed to seeing faces and bodies fragmented in this manner, and art has
certainly preceded its times, achieving a dynamism that even today seems
projected toward what is to come.
My point is that when speaking of modernity, we must carefully con-
sider the limitations, accepted meanings, anachronisms, and objective dys-
functions that we encounter. This theoretical knot is what makes the concept
of modernity something we have not already surpassed (it is no coincidence
we say we live in a post-modern, or even a post-post-modern world). Indeed,
it urges us to continue reflecting on the topic. Establishing what “modernity”
was, what it is, and what it will become enables us to orient ourselves in a
dialogue that unfolds over time without losing its future prospects.
In your new book, La modernità malintesa [Misunderstood Modernity],
you cite a quote by Fernand Léger that I know you hold dear. It appears in a
chapter called “A matter of trains and hats”, in which you discuss how, in the
early 20th century, the train was a disruptive symbol of progress and modernity.
Was it the direct result of a process of industrialization that emancipated indi-
viduals who possessed only the strength of their arms, their labor? Or might
the train instead have marked the beginning of a slow retreat from an Arcadian
civilization based on agriculture and craftsmanship?
GIUSEPPE LUPO: Léger’s expression should be rewritten as a ques-
tion: is it the train’s fault if a hat blows away? Do we need to rein it in as it speeds
across the plain? In my opinion, no. I believe the problem is another, yet in the
majority of instances over the past century and in the new millennium as well,
the train has been scapegoated. It is the train’s fault, say the authors of stories
set in factories. This is the train’s symbolic function, if it is true that progress
and technology (or shall we say more precisely, modernity) have ruined the
landscape, destroyed the environment, and made humankind a miserable
inhabitant of what T.S. Eliot called the waste land, a place of desolation.
But this does not mean that when a hat blows away as a train
passes that our reaction should be: stop the train! The train can keep going.
What we need to do is modify the hats. However, to get to this point, to
defend modernity’s primacy over all that preceded it, we must set aside
the misconceptions that surrounded it in the 20th century. We must declare
its inalienable existence. We must overcome the temptation to feel nostalgia
for a past that appears perfect only in hindsight. And, at the same time, we
must envision a compromise between the need to build, improve, and pro-
duce and the respect that our planet asks of us. A human-centered approach
to technology, without shadows and without prejudice.
Exhaustively defining modernity and postmodernity is a singular
challenge. Modernity is as much the invention of the wheel as the discovery
of America, shifts that took place in different historical periods. However,
there is a widely acknowledged fact: at the close of the 20th century, the
concept of the factory changed and, together with divestment and globali-
zation, a new era began, the era “after” modernity. The reaction from
modernity’s narrators — the intellectuals, writers, and philosophers who
have described its phenomena — did not always depict its complexity.
Often, it was colored by ideological bias, leading to confusion.
My impression as I read the books published in the last two decades
is of their fundamental continuity. A corrosive attitude toward workplaces
remains, as if the 20th century were still ongoing and its mechanisms
continuing to operate. Unfortunately, only a few writers avoided this view
— Leonardo Sinisgalli, Primo Levi, Italo Calvino, Elio Vittorini — as most
intellectuals have taken an anti-modern stance.
SS: This problem with our perception of modernity’s processes,
costs, and the benefits we have reaped (the latter routinely omitted) not
only risks undermining the debate, but almost always severs it from its
historical context. Not only that: it seems to me that in Italy, alongside the
enthusiasm that coincided with its post-war economic miracle — a few
years in which the country progressively regained its youth and, with
speed and agility, seized the moment — many intellectuals delayed
mourning for the passing era or for production systems that could no
longer keep pace with the times.
What is so striking is that nearly all the writers, thinkers, and also
many artists, publicly declared their skepticism, and even outright opposition,
to the new modes of production and social life. Little did they realize that,
speaking of trains, as a nation and society it was imperative that we not miss
the arriving train, which would continue forward whether or not we were on it.
This shortsighted attitude, if not utter misunderstanding, is absent in the
point of view of the general public, with its basic common sense.
Today, for example, it is fashionable to condemn the use of toxic
and indestructible plastic that pollutes the environment. However, we forget
that plastic was the 20th century material that, democratically and economi-
cally, enabled the public to enter the age of modernity. Of course we cannot
flip the argument on its head: at the time, we could not have foreseen
needing to keep the potential harm in mind. And without plastic, the factory,
and technology, we would not have achieved the ease of our current era.
GL: Undoubtedly, circumstances continue to change very rapidly, which leads
to tools, methods, and systems becoming prematurely obsolete, despite having been
cutting edge not long before. Yet this is the price we pay on the altar of technology, which
has the power to both aid and damn humanity. It depends on how we use technology and
how we approach it.
Shifting focus to a topic directly affecting us today, this argument is also valid
or artificial intelligence. In theory, the dialogue between productivity and cultural
evolution is still a path we can follow. Here as well, it depends on our approach.
A company that seeks to align itself with its current context cannot base its strategy on
traditional methods.
If ever there was a time for culture and humanism, it is now. Entrepreneurs have
grasped this: it is not enough to produce and make profits. They need to engage in a
dialogue with the realm of ideas, with the language of art, and even with proposals from
visionaries. Put simply, I believe that apparently unrelated worlds must collaborate, provided
they respect and cooperate with each other.
However, the books I read these days give me the impression that today’s intellectual
efforts are leading to outdated points of view. Even the narratives about our present times
retain many elements of anti-modernity. Factories continue to be characterized as
de-humanizing places that promote drudgery, exploitation, and suffering. A factory worker
is either fired or felled. This does not necessarily mean it is true, except in rare cases.
The real problem is that many of today’s authors who write about industrial labor have never
set foot in a factory. Consequently, they write according to old 20th century coordinates,
adhering to stereotypes that the publishing industry encourages (because readers can
easily grasp them) but that do not correspond to reality.
How this anomaly came to be is destined to make us ponder. However, one
thing is certain: not only has there been, and continues to be, an intellectual culture inca-
pable of recognizing the potential generated by the proliferation of industrial systems, but the
suspicion remains that this attitude originated in some kind of misconception — a misunder-
standing generated by prejudices descending from an ideological humus, a political culture
that sees the factory as capitalism’s most inhuman icon, the heart of the conflict between
social classes and exploitation, the battlefield of a cynical and unscrupulous middle class.
This is not to say that all this has not happened before, nor that it should not con-
tinue. However, this 20th century way of thinking, speaking, and acting cannot be our only guide
for understanding the workplace in an era that has long superseded the 20th century. It may
seem paradoxical, but this is what we read in the writings of Ritanna Armeni, Simona Baldanzi,
Gianfranco Bettin, Angelo Ferracuti, Alberto Prunetti, Stefano Valenti, and Massimiliano
Terrarossa. We are and remain an anti-modern country, most likely influenced by Benedetto
Croce’s philosophy that encouraged avoiding technology, rather than embracing it.
We are anti-modern because the temptation to return to a pastoral Arcadia persists
in the dreams of far too many writers dissatisfied with our current reality and alarmed by
the advance of progress. Unfortunately, this point of view risks poisoning the wells:
it confuses reason with the sophisms of an abstract and unrealistic rhetoric, and it derails
attempts to mitigate negative outcomes, thereby causing worse consequences.
Faced with modernity’s perils, we have two alternatives: negate modernity (but can we
truly renounce the benefits it offers us?) or seek to redeem its errors and imperfections.
This is the true challenge on which our future depends.
SS: Another dimension comes into play here that I want to reiterate. We are
looking at Uliano Lucas’ famous photograph of a laborer, a migrant from Southern Italy
holding a cardboard suitcase, with the stunning Pirelli Tower, the utmost in innovation at
the time, rising starkly behind him. Therefore: the Italian South versus Milan, the labor of
the soil versus that of the city, the land versus tram tracks, an anthropological mutation
underway before our very eyes. Yet I ask myself and you: what is the modern element in
this image? Undoubtedly, it is Gio Ponti’s glass and cement “Pirellone”, a slender cuttlebone
towering over Italy’s most industrialized city. But I assert that it is the person standing in
the foreground who truly embodies modernity. Even if constrained by circumstances,
this individual chose to begin a new life under an unknown sky — impelled by necessity,
but also attracted by a better future.
Post-war Italy launched itself thanks to these individuals, who hailed from a
Dark Age that was not coming, as Vacca would have said, but already present. In exchange
for the disruption of traditional, at times millennial, paradigms, they leapt headfirst into the
future: a future not only filled with electrical appliances — washing machines and electric
ovens, stoves and telephones, later the television — but one that gave their children access
to education, liberating them from a societal condition that had become far too obsolete.
GL: The conversation around what “modern” means can occur at two levels: on
one hand, ordinary people, living each day in a technological euphoria; on the other, a
dialogue between intellectuals that implies a judgment on technology and on our country’s
altered anthropology. Observing the panorama of literature, film, and art, it is easy to think
that this attitude originates in a distant ideological prejudice that distinguishes a priori
between “poetry and not-poetry”, as Benedetto Croce posited in his Estetica (1902) [pub-
lished in English in 1909 as Aesthetic: As science of expression and general linguistic].
Croce’s philosophy made this sharp distinction based on a principal of exclusivity, con-
forming to a tendency to segregate, creating hierarchies that would inevitably lead to a
society stratified from highest to lowest.
The entire 20th century can and must be understood as an extended struggle
between contamination and purity, between destructive impulses and the restoration of
order. On this watershed, the intellectuals could have played their hand. Choosing which
side to take would have had ethical and political value, giving meaning to their individual
efforts, as well as to the country’s prospects. Yet, despite being aware of its significance,
in response to modernity’s revelations that converge around manufacturing, the most
widespread attitude among intellectuals has been that of denial and outrage, as if
modernity were a fault to avoid, a structural error that only returning to an uncontaminated
natural state can erase completely.
They deemed it better to reject the unknown rather than to accompany its trajec-
tory toward a hyper-technological dimension that would have implicated coming to
terms with machines, debasing themselves to the same level of objects enslaved to
utilitarian logic. Little mattered that, already, these tools had indelibly modified our percep-
tion of time and our relationship to reality. The machines’ fault was being the ma-
nifestation of a capitalism to be opposed on ideological grounds.
They have even become the principal cause of human suffering, the suffering of the century,
as portrayed by Simone Weil in La condition ouvrière (1951, translated in Italy by Fortini in 1952)
[transl. The Worker’s Condition].
That the 20th century was a century running away from itself — to the extent that
it seems difficult to characterize, if not undefinable — underscores the challenges of dis-
cussing a chaotic, pluralistic era, the majority of whose voices are dissonant. The fact that
we mistrust any attempt to neatly describe the 20th century is a symptom of its complexity.
Walter Benjamin understood this mid-century, identifying its key in Paul Klee’s Angelus
Novus [New Angel]. This “Angel of History” is a creature without mythology (or with a
mythology falsified by horror), a cross-eyed monster that is both witness of calamity and
harbinger of death.
If indeed the 20th century bears the stigmata of its conflict with tradition — as the
avant-garde movements have pictured it — its rebel nature and its revolutionary furies
cannot help but instigate an irreparable process of rupture. The more all trace of the
human is abolished, the more the sacred dimension is lost. Then literature’s only task
becomes the illusion of keeping alive a relic of the past, taking refuge in that veneer of
eternal secularism that is the realm of memory.
SS: The dimension of memory, to conclude, is sacrosanct, provided it is not
all-absorbing. Constantly asking the question — what is modernity and what is it becoming —
is a cultural endeavor that requires great self-awareness. Particularly when it is undertaken by
companies that must continually make sense of this paradigm shift through innovation, exper-
imentation, design, and production. Without disregarding the past, they must create
new ways of life that help us adapt to our era, while accompanying us toward the future.
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