Description:

With Karen Pinkus

Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature, Department of Romance Studies

Cornell University

HAND / MACHINE / WRITING / POLITICS IN 1960s ITALY

Italy of the 60s--can we say “the last days of analogue”?--was a fruitful laboratory for thinking (political) autonomy and (factory) automation. Italian theorists “discovered” the young Marx and worked through a relation between labor and machines while cyberart flourished and intellectuals celebrated machinic writing. The optimism of this period may seem naive today if inserted into a genealogy that moves through the digital, postfordist labor, globalization, accelerationism and so on. We might well critique the Italian situation as a kind of benevolent or soft capitalism that has now evolved into (the perhaps oxymoronic) “sustainable development”; or as “good design” that has evolved into the “design thinking” of engineers. What can we learn from 60s Italy--beyond nostalgia--that could be productive today?