Ecologies of the Imagination: Italo Calvino’s Six ‘Memes’ for the Digital World
10.13125/2039-6597/1364
Nel 1984 Italo Calvino fu invitato dalla Harvard University a tenere le famose Charles Eliot Norton Poetry Lectures. Questo invito diede a Calvino l'ooportunità per definire sei proposte, o six memos come nel sottotitolo del manoscritto originale, esposte come sei qualità, o caratteristiche, sei valori da trasmettere al nuovo millennio in arrivo. Egli riuscì a scrivere solo cinque delle sei lezioni prima che la morte lo cogliesse prematuramente.Lo spirito delle Six Memos, il loro modo di intrecciare proficuamente riferimenti, riflessioni e citazioni, l'affascinante prospettiva retorica che offrono, non è altro che l'evocazione di personaggi e assonanze che esprimono chiaramente, con una consapevolezza lucida e matura, il senso della sfida dichiarata dal postmodernismo, che è ben riconoscibile nelle caratteristiche di quello che chiamiamo mondo digitale. Infatti, queste sei proposte e le brillanti intuizioni da loro offerte anticipano in modo sorprendente l'attuale scenario dell'ecologia dei media, definita in modo preciso da Leggerezza, Esattezza, Rapidità, Visibilità, Molteplicità e Coerenza.
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Paolo Granata
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Ecologies of the Imagination: Italo Calvino’s Six ‘Memes’ for the Digital World
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Between Literature and Digital Culture: Intersections and Contaminations
2014-12-20
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2014-11-30
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Paolo Granata
2014/12/20
10.13125/2039-6597/1364
University of Bologna
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consistency
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Ecologies of the Imagination: Italo Calvino’s Six ‘Memes’ for the Digital World
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4
           Ecologies of the Imagination:
         Italo Calvino’s six ‘memes’ for the
                   Digital World1

                              Paolo Granata


                                    The word connects the visible trace with
                                    the invisible thing, the absent thing, the
                                    thing that is desired or feared, like a frail
                                    emergency bridge flung over an abyss.
                                                   Italo Calvino, Lezioni Americane



    Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millennium
     An encyclopedic writer like Italo Calvino holds his own in the
most varied environments, literary or otherwise, including a field, the
new media, that might seem far from congenial to a man of letters.
Indeed, the new media are merely a label, almost a tautology, since the
concept of novelty is inherent in the media’s very identity. Across its
history, human beings have constantly renewed the tools with which
they engage the world, in an attempt to transform it, thus activating a
transformation in turn of themselves. Furthermore, the media, whether
old or new, are more than mere tools. They define an actual
environment, an always present and constantly changing ecosystem or
'media ecology' that we call the digital world, such an appealing a label
today.

     1
      This essay retrieves and updates some of the ideas expressed in Paolo
Granata, Arte, estetica e nuovi media, Lupetti, Milano, 2009.



Between, vol. IV, n. 8 (Novembre/ November 2014)
Paolo Granata, Ecologies of the Imagination



      In all this Calvino acts as a sort of cartographer; a skilful
cartographer of the digital world. His drafts have been under our eyes
for thirty years. Six unpublished maps of the end-of-millennium world
sketched with a fine point pencil, and an insight typical of Calvino’s
encyclopedism. Six discoveries, six insights that are still incredibly
relevant today: his Six Memos for the Next Millennium [Lezioni Americane.
Sei proposte per il prossimo millennio] (1988). Indeed, these six ‘memes’,
and the brilliant insights they offer, are surprising as they seem to
anticipate the current scene of the media ecology, precisely defined by
the characters of Lightness, Exactitude, Quickness, Visibility
Multiplicity, and Consistency.
      For a curious coincidence, just thirty years ago, in 1984, the annus
mirabilis for the propagation of mass information technology – the
same year the personal computer was featured as “man of the year” on
the cover of Time magazine – Calvino was officially invited by the
Harvard University to deliver the celebrated Charles Eliot Norton
Poetry Lectures, a series of six lectures scheduled for the following
year, and previously delivered by influential intellectuals including T.
S. Eliot, Igor Stravinsky, Erwin Panofsky, Jorge Luis Borges, Northrop
Frye, among others. That invitation gave Calvino an opportunity to
define six proposals, or six memos, as indicated in the original
manuscript’s subtitle, illustrated as six qualities, or specificities, six
values and essential, not mere literary, memos, to be passed on to the
new millennium that was about to start. As we all know, he only
managed to write five out of the six lectures – the sixth one, about
consistency, would remain unwritten – before death surprised him
prematurely. For this reason, for right or wrong, many consider the Six
Memos as a sort of intellectual testament of the famous author;
undoubtedly they represent the highest point of his meditation on
literature.
      The spirit of the Six Memos, their rich interweaving of references,
speculations and quotations, the fascinating rhetorical insights they
offer, are nothing but the evocation of characters and assonances that
clearly express, with a clear-headed and mature awareness, the sense
of the challenge declared by Postmodernism, which is clearly
recognizable in the features of the digital world. For Remo Ceserani the
Memos represent an actual “Calvino case”, «perhaps the best
descriptive map of postmodern society and culture [...]; a most refined


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conceptual diagram conceived by an observer, or a cartographer, to
penetrate the new world that surrounds us and understand its main
underlying forces» (Ceserani 1997: 173). After all, the argumentative
tension that animates Calvino’s issues also reflects the urge to reread
the past in order to find the new in the plurality, the surface, the
material and cultural connections between things. As suggested by
Mario Perniola, Calvino clearly adopts the strategy of entrism as a
device to understand the complexity of the world, the instability of its
fundamental structures, hiding «behind words appropriated by the
society of communication» (Perniola 2004: 105) in order to overturn
their meaning through the evocation of the social connection produced
by aesthetic criticism.
      Therefore, the six Memos can be viewed as conceptual couples
rather than closed and univocal propositions; dualisms that can be
interpreted as oppositional tensions between the label and its
underside, and move in a game of roles, almost like oxymorons. For
this reason, lightness results from a weightless weightiness, multiplicity
emerges from the simultaneous presence of unity, and so on. Each
couple reveals two inextricable levels that interweave and build upon
each other. The dual nature that Calvino’s critics interpreted as an
existential issue is actually a constant in his thought, where «the hero
of the story», in Marco Belpoliti’s words, «is for Calvino the one who
keeps the two opposites together and tries to reconcile them in a
difficult balance» (Belpoliti 1996: 29).
      Domenico Scarpa has described the six values proposed by the
Italian writer as «very clear abstract notions that acquire substance in
their reciprocal determination due to their style» (Scarpa 1999: 144).
Following this insight, they can be seen as six aesthetic qualities that
can be found in the experience of mediation of the world, in the
technological facts of our time, in the cultural and social sensibility
emerged from the evolution of the media system under the impulse of
Postmodernism. And thus, Calvino reveals the digital world in all its
lightness, exactitude, quickness, visibility, multiplicity and consistency.




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Paolo Granata, Ecologies of the Imagination




                                        Lightness
      Lightness is certainly the best known, and perhaps the most
appreciated meme, or quality, or specificity, among those chosen by
Calvino for his six Memos. Here it is adopted as a guide to recognize
the sensible component of the current media environment, and glimpse
the aesthetic experience in the lights and shadows of the digital world.
      Indeed, if there is a focus around which the entire first lecture
revolves, it is precisely the idea of world; its image, its knowledge, its
physical substance. Calvino’s ‘mundane’ approach is clear from the
very beginning, when lightness – as a deprivation, not a denial, of
weight – is adopted as a method, a point of view, as well as an inherent
requirement of a different «way of looking at the world» (Calvino 1988:
10). Therefore, to make the image lighter does not mean refusing its
raw reality – it rather means capturing the dusty substance it is made
of; a process that, in order to get to know the world, require the
dissolution of its compactness, to perceive «all that is infinitely minute,
light and mobile» (ibid.: 8). It is a process of deconstruction of the
strong structures of thought in favor of the weak, or light, ones,
without sacrificing the concept of materiality. It is the experience of the
weight of things that makes it possible to appreciate their lightness, just
like the metaphor of fragmentation or atomization of reality implies no
refusal of the world's physical substance, and rather expresses a new
way of interpreting lightness; and this clearly emerges further on when
Calvino openly reveals his goal and writes that «lightness for me goes
with precision and determination, not with vagueness and the
haphazard» (ibid.: 16).
      The epiphanic virtues of the Six Memos in relation with the current
media ecology are more clearly revealed when Calvino – at a time
when the personal computer has broken into mass culture – recognizes
the media world as made of the new kind of energy that can act on,
guide, animate the heaviness of machines: the software in all its
lightness. The rigidity of machines, as the symbol of modernity, is thus
countered by the fluidity of Postmodern sensibility. All in all, this is an
acknowledgement of the social climate expressed in the terms of a «so-
called post-industrial era of technology» (ibid.: 1), or what would be
later on greeted by most as a true revolution, the 'digital' revolution.



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But the interest in the flow of information that circulates as bits and
invisible electronic impulses is indeed revealed as the result of
Calvino's attempt to explore every realm of science and technology to
recognize the new possibilities, tools, and ways to mediate with the
world and build an image that reflects the new current needs, in a way
that is resonant, or similar to the procedures used in artistic and
literary fields; as a confirmation of the fact that both fields offer new
«styles and forms that can change our image of the world» (ibid.: 12). In
this sense, the myth of Perseus and the Gorgon that is evoked at the
beginning of the first Memo almost sounds like an allegory of man’s
relation with the world: the reflection on Athena’s shield is what saves
Perseus from the Medusa's petrifying look, which means looking at the
world with different eyes; achieving a visual and cognitive dissolution
of the world, acquiring new knowledge tools, new ways to mediate
with it.
      Therefore, the insights about lightness disseminated in the lecture
reveal a corollary of the idea of knowledge which «tends to dissolve
the solidity of the world» (ibid.: 8). This is a double articulation, a
double alternative that is explained through the figures of Lucretius
and Ovid. If the dissolutive lightness expressed in Lucretius’ De rerum
natura is defined by the acknowledgement of the world's atomization,
the uniqueness of all its parts, its endless breakdown in absolute and
unchangeable bodies, intangible atoms and invisible corpuscles, in
Ovid's Metamorphoses, lightness is rather the symptom of a pursuit of
new forms and relations between things in the chaotic and atomized
substance of reality, as the connective fabric of the world, the
multiplicity where anything is connected to anything else can be
recognized in them. In the author’s words: «If the world of Lucretius is
composed of immutable atoms, Ovid’s world is made up of the
qualities, attributes and forms that define the variety of things» (ibid.:
9). In both – as argued by Calvino – the idea of lightness has
philosophical and scientific roots: Pythagoras’ doctrines for Ovid,
Epicurus’ doctrines for Lucretius.
      The complementarity of these two visions projects an image of the
world as organized around a system, with no rigid hierarchy between
the hard materiality of things and the impalpable lightness of thought
that somehow animates them. Indeed, it is an approach that – like the
one represented by the hardware/software couple – embraces both in a


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Paolo Granata, Ecologies of the Imagination



constant orbital balance that gives the system a dynamic reciprocity. A
further hint of this double systemic tension can be found in two other
figures, Dante and his friend and master Cavalcanti. The former gives
substance, «solidity even to the most abstract intellectual speculation»
(ibid.: 16), while the latter, in the picturesque image evoked by
Boccaccio, can take off, from the weightiness of the world – «’sì come
colui che leggerissimo era’, a man very light in the body» (ibid.: 12) –
and capture «impalpable entities that move between soul and
intellective soul» (ibid.), by abstracting the mundane experience «as if
thought were darting out of the darkness in swift lightning flashes»
(ibid.: 16).
      Again with reference to Cavalcanti’s work – «as the poet of
lightness» (ibid.: 12) –, Calvino considers it is possible to see
«something marked by three characteristics: 1) it is to the highest
degree light; (2) it is in motion; (3) it is a vector of information» (ibid.:
13) – three aspects that outline a curious figure of message-messenger,
but even more the container that becomes contents, the message that
becomes medium. This is another facet of the atomized approach to the
substance of the world, a reflection – Perseus’ bronze shield – of the
abstractive and symbolizing logic of software, a symbol of the digital
world: breakout of things and recognition of the – old and new –
connections between them. The relevance to the world that Calvino
seems to suggest – an unusual prophecy about the symbolic impact of
the new media – goes beyond the mere mimetic relation with reality.
Reality itself needs to be unburdened, articulated in abstracting rather
than representational diagrams and processes; it is the logic of the
software thought, in the writer’s words, «the narration of a train of
thoughts or phycological process in which subtle and imperceptible
elements are at work, or any kind of description that involves a high
degree of abstraction» (ibid.: 17).
      It is more about unburdening reality, rather than getting away
from it, and finding a new point of view to get to know the world –
Marco Belpoliti has suggested that «indeed, all of Calvino's work is a
meditation on the point of view» (Belpoliti 1996: 5) – that Calvino,
following Lucretius' thought, defines in terms of an atomistic concept
of the universe, «a fine dust of atoms, like everything else that goes to
make up the ultimate substance of the multiplicity of things » (Calvino
1988: 20). If the true substance of the world lies in its elementary


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particles, in the clusters of atoms that create its fabric, then its Erlebnis –
or private experience, according to Husserl’s terminology – will be a
combination act closer to Ovid’s thought; a constant reconfiguration or
composition of its form, or even better, of its possible forms, a process
that the author recognized in Cyrano de Bergerac’s atomism.
      The relevance to the world as immersion in its atomized substance
and the one (the atomistic dimension) belonging to the multiple (the
relational forms) also suggests to downplay the hegemonic role played
by the communication processes within the digital world. According to
Calvino, that means unburdening communication, looking at it from
another point of view, from a lighter perspective, free from the heavy
and distracting procedures of the so-called media, mistakenly seen as
mere channels or pipelines that convey messages. Indeed, it has
become almost axiomatic to discuss the new media by calling them
‘communication technologies’. In fact communication is a possible but
not exclusive condition of the practices man uses to interact with the
world, or to mediate his relationship with it. The very logics of
interaction with and access to a relational system of meaning
underlying the social networks and the cognitive and connective
dimension of the new media mean that communication is an act of
immersive participation, commitment, sliding into the world’s
atomization; a being there based on a perspective of belonging, an
action, a behavior, a process, an event not necessarily limited to the
transmissive concept of communication, and rather inherent to the
place where such event took place, so that communication becomes a
world.
      Therefore, following such interpretation, we are justified to react
to the hegemonic impact of communication, brought on by the mass
media, with Calvino’s strategy of dissolution of the world's
compactness, hence considering Lucretius and Ovid as the expressions
of two different but complementary concepts of the communicational
processes made evident by today’s media ecology. Lucretius’ concept
relies on the signs, on the object part, on the atomization and breakup
of communication (the ‘weight’ of the message, or what the message
communicates), while Ovid’s concept of communication rather pursues
its relational content, forms and combinatory processes, in the endless
transmutability of the world’s connective fabric (the medium’s



                                                                                 7
Paolo Granata, Ecologies of the Imagination



‘lightness’, or how it acts on social imagination and on the aesthetic-
intellectual sphere).
      Thus, between atoms and forms, between the one and the
multiple, between transmission and interaction, or between Lucretian
and Ovidian communication according to the above mentioned terms,
we come to see the characters of that oppositional tension, the difficult
balance – almost a tautology –, «the search for lightness as a reaction to
the weight of living» (ibid.: 26) that, according to Domenico Scarpa,
represents a constant principle underlying all of Calvino’s work, «the
creative process that informs (it) more than anything else » (Scarpa
1999: 146). And so the sense of the continuing challenge to the law of
gravitation, «this drive to make the imagination exceed all bounds»
(Calvino 1988: 23), offers a powerful metaphor of knowledge, the
existential and archetypal function that guides man in transforming the
world, in renewing his material and conceptual tools to mediate with
it, thus generating in turn a transformation in himself, just like the
Baron of Münchausen, evoked at the end of the memo about Lightness,
who finally comes down from the moon on a rope that during the
descent is cut and reknotted again and again, or finds the way to pull
up himself and his horse by tugging at the pigtail of his wig.

                                       Quickness
     In developing his apology of Quickness, Calvino seems to interpret
and anticipate with conscious clarity most features of today’s media
environment, torn in the fluidity of the digital world, and captures the
characters of density and immediacy underlying the triumph of
electronic tools that would mark the turn of the millennium in the
background of the Memos in the seduction of combinatory literature,
the run for time and the game of digressions and iterations.
       Certainly, the myth of speed belongs rightfully to the machine,
one of the tenets of pre-modernist age’s imagination, rather than to the
contemporary age. For example, its glorification by Futurism is part of
the exaltation of speed as an expression of progress, as it viewed the
material culture of its time as an element of emancipation from the
social atmosphere that produced the spirit of the Manifesto. The ‘beauty
of speed’ exalted in the fourth item of the 1909 text, is therefore mostly,



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although somewhat ambiguously, focused on the technological
dimension of a mechanical nature – the analogical vocation of the mass
media, or what could be defined as hardware – where the possible
results of the soft connection with the electro-magnetic phenomena can
only be glimpsed but were already beginning to emerge.
      Why, then, is Calvino interested in the myth of speed, an element
that had been thoroughly practiced during the entire twentieth
century, and not just by the artistic avant-garde? Why does he refer to
a continuing thread with the recent past, barely behind the corner?
Why does he prefer to reiterate one the founding values of late
modernity, rather than cutting it off, when the new millennium is
about to begin? In other words, why doesn’t he devise a chronological
model that is closer to a postmodern sensibility rather than reaffirming
quickness with all its inherent anxiety?
      A closer look reveals that all of these questions are answered in
the text of the lecture, and more precisely in Calvino’s quotation from
Leopardi's notes to the Zibaldone where he declared that:

        Speed and conciseness of style please us because they present
     the mind with a rush of ideas that are simultaneous, or that follow
     each other so quickly they seem simultaneous, or set the mind
     afloat on such an abundance of thoughts or images or spiritual
     feelings that either it cannot embrace them all, each one fully, or it
     has no time to be idle and empty of feelings. (Ibid.: 42)

     That makes clarifies that Calvino’s idea of quickness does not rely
on physical elements, it does not evoke the acceleration of a moving
body or the mechanical dynamism celebrated by the Futurist
manifestoes. Indeed, he had clarified this just before, in his quotation
from a novella by Boccaccio and Thomas De Quincey’s novel The
English Mail-Coach, when he frankly stated that «the motif that interests
us here is not physical speed, but the relationship between physical
speed and speed of mind» (ibid.: 41). And so this corollary expresses
the strong element of novelty included in the Memos – and in the tool-
box to negotiate the turn of the millennium –, that can still be seen as a
continuous development, rather than an abrupt turning point, of the
experience of speed that is a cultural heritage of the modern age.



                                                                                  9
Paolo Granata, Ecologies of the Imagination



       The mail-coach, the above mentioned British mailman, represents
an interesting foreboding almost as a prophetic insight – Calvino wrote
his Memos between 1984 and 1985 – of the success that electronic mail,
a powerful and innovative, as well as very quick, form of
correspondence, would have soon after. It is the end of the age of quick
transportation, of machine-based industrialization – however quick
and efficient machines may be – and the beginning of the so-called
Information age, when quickness, acceleration, speed foster a new
perception mode, and become powerful synonyms of a new experience
of communication, that eliminates absence as it is rooted in the
simultaneity of time coordinates and in the mimetic representation of
physical proximity; in a word: the social media, today.
       The crowd of simultaneous ideas evoked by Leopardi is
therefore revealed as an all too appropriate image to describe the
complexity of the new informational space – dominated by digital
technologies – that would become a reality with the so-called network
society at the end of the twentieth century, that Calvino would not be
able to witness. And the very ‘crowding’, or layering, or simultaneity
of symbolic objects – the powerful symbolism of the magic ring that
starts the lecture (ibid.: 31) –, or of mental speeds, is the ultimate
allegory he seems to find to illustrate the mechanisms of time
continuity and discontinuity typical of narrative development (ibid.:
37).
      Besides all this, another pillar of contemporary age appears in the
pages of the Memos to break «an enchantment that acts on the passing
of time, either contracting or dilating it» (ibid.: 35). It is relativity (ibid.:
37), the symbol of twentieth century scientific breakthroughs through
which Calvino would seem to include the presence of Einstein’s
famous formula in the values – or qualities, or peculiarities – that
should be handed over to the future millennium, just like, in his
mathematical and literal symbolization, it can be found in the space
probes that travel to remote planets, looking for a connection with
intelligent forms of life in the cosmos, to communicate the level of
scientific knowledge achieved by the human community.
      The parallel with space experiments aimed at establishing a
hoped-for connection with hypothetical forms of alien intelligence is
not accidental. Indeed, in arguing the celebration of mental quickness,
Calvino relies on another tenet of the history of human thought, in this


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case found in the heart of modern science: in Dialogue Concerning the
Two Chief World Systems, between the Ptolemaic Simplicius and the
Copernican Salviati, Galileo calls for the intervention of the ‘lightning
quick’ Sagredo – a modern Theut, or Hermes, or Mercury – to achieve
«an encomium of the greatest human invention, the alphabet» (ibid.:
44). Here, Calvino gives almost all of his game away, or to use Galileo’s
words quoted in this Lecture, he plays the wild card of the ‘various
arrangements of twenty little characters on a page’:

        Communication with people distant in place and time, says
     Galileo; but we should also add the immediate connection that
     writing establishes between everything existent or possible […]. In
     an age when other fantastically speedy, widespread media are
     triumphing, and running the risk of flattening all communication
     onto a single, homogeneous surface, the function of literature is
     communication between things that are different simply because
     they are different, not blunting but even sharpening the
     differences between them, following the true bent of written
     language. (Ibid.: 45)

     The author of Cosmicomics and t zero would be far from surprised
or astonished by the current triumph of written communication
decreed by mobile devices that, all in all, have substantially dominated
the turn of the millennium prophesied by his Memos. As mentioned
before, the now widespread use of the email almost seems to be
anticipated in the late nineteenth century server of De Quincey’s mail-
coach; and the same is true for the «agility, mobility and ease, all
qualities that go with writing where it is natural to digress, to jump
from one subject to another, to loose the thread a hundred times and
find it again after a hundred more twists and turns» (ibid.: 46), that
seems precisely to describe the hyper-textual practice of online
browsing, or blog-writing and the many forms of posting on the social
media (Pilz 2005: 125). It is certainly possible to imagine that Calvino
would have been glad to find the folktale’s expressive economy, the
celebration of brevity, the impact of the epigram, of the short stories –
such as t zero and Cosmicomics – or the collections of «tales consisting of
one sentence only, or even a single line. But so far I haven’t found any



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Paolo Granata, Ecologies of the Imagination



to match the one by the Guatemalan writer Augusto Monterroso:
“Cuando despertó, el dinosaurio todavía estaba allí” (When I woke up,
the dinosaur was still there» (ibid.: 51) in the 160 characters of a text, or
the 140 characters of a tweet.
      There is one last thing to say about Calvino's far-sighted insights,
and the similar correspondences found in his second lecture about
Quickness, which certainly appears as a further connection with the
issues that will be discussed later on. In a quietly autobiographical
tone, Calvino writes: «From my youth on, my personal motto has been
the old Latin tag Festina lente, hurry slowly»; and soon afterwards he
adds: «My work as a writer has from the beginning aimed at tracing
the lightning flashes of the mental circuits that capture and link points
distant from each other in space and time» (ibid.: 48). It is impossible
not to read these last words as a perfect reflection of the world wide
web's paradigm, a crucial element of our media environment, the
expression of the material culture of our time, the symbolic
correspondences of which the six Memos seem to be focused on
revealing and anticipating. Thus, the mythology of speed offered by
Calvino in his second memo (ibid.: 51-54) reveals the opposition in the
complementarity and the seamless novelty between immediacy,
instantaneity, mobility, Hermes-Mercury's wavelike nature, and the
mediation, the temperament, the insight, Vulcan-Hefestus' nature as a
blacksmith and manufacturer; and defines this tension as an archetypal
dimension of the new media's aesthetic experience, the tension
expressed in Augustus', and then Erasmus', sublime oxymoron, Festina
lente.



                                       Exactitude
     The third Lecture elicits a general impression: Calvino seems to
intentionally avoid some inherent pragmatic and circumstantial issues
implied by the lecture's subject, to define instead an epistemological
model, a true epistemology of Exactitude, once again developed
through the strategy of bipolar couples, of the oppositional tension
between a concept and its reverse, between the part and the whole, or
rather between the particular and the multi-sided.



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      The lecture begins by evoking the idea of precision through a
reference to Maat, the Egyptian goddess of scales. Calvino takes such
information from a lecture by Giorgio de Santillana on the ancient
civilizations' precision in observing astronomical phenomena. A first
methodological hint seems to emerge: observing mainly means
measuring the phenomena; to act by following a «fidelity to the idea of
limits, of measure» (ibid.: 68), or a constant idea in Calvino's thought.
As explained by Werner Heisenberg, the tools used to observe and
measure, as well as the language used to describe such phenomena, are
what defines the image one has of a certain phenomenon. This is the
result of a logical construction developed on an instrumental and
linguistic level. Therefore, tools and language are the first two issues
we should put on the scales.
      The three short definitions Calvino proposes for exactitude
complete such concept:

       To my mind exactitude means three things above all: 1) a well-
     defined and well-calculated plan for the work in question; 2) an
     evocation of clear, incisive, memorable visual images; in Italian we
     have an adjective that doesn't exist in English, 'icastico', from the
     Greek εικαστικός; 3) a language as precise as possible both in
     choice of words and in expression of the subtleties of thought and
     imagination». (Ibid.: 55-56)

      It is quite clear that Calvino only seems to be interested in the
third item, language, and leaves aside the other two, a well-defined
and well-calculated plan, and clear, incisive visual images, the quality
of 'icastico'. However, the semantic and conceptual impact of this last
quality is precisely what underlies the entire epistemological structure
of exactitude.
      Following the spirit of the Memos, the discourse around "icasticità"
is again developed on the coexistence of seemingly opposed but also
complementary images, figures, suggestions. While opposed,
exactitude and indeterminacy also share the same double role. It is the
principle of bipolar couples, where every couple should not be
considered as the result of a univocal proposition, leaning in favor of
one or the other term, and therefore to the disadvantage of one or the



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Paolo Granata, Ecologies of the Imagination



other, but rather as a dualism that exists in a constant dialogical tension
between the label and its reverse; a developing game of roles, a
procedural contingency of belonging and not of exclusion. Across the
entire text, the space of tension of "icasticità" is defined by a series of
conceptual couples, symbols and prototypes of Calvino's idea of
exactitude, which represent the poles of the lecture's epistemological
structure. There are at least a dozen, supported by related literary
coordinates, such as: precision and vagueness, infinite and indefinite
(Leopardi), abstract and empirical notion (Kant), exactitude and lack of
definition (Robert Musil), Mathesis singularis and Mathesis universalis
(Barthes), order and disorder (Mallarmé), the crystal and the flame
(Chomsky, Piaget), rationality and sensibility (Marco Polo), surface and
depth (Hofmannsthal), visible and invisible, presence and absence
(Calvino), writing and drawing (Leonardo), which amount to a true
gnosiology of Calvino's universe. As Adriano Piacentini has written,
«A mental attitude as ancient as man flows on his checkerboards,
which is the attitude of knowing and ordering the segments of reality,
of giving them a meaning and recognizing the limit of human
possibilities» (Piacentini 2002: 207).
     Earlier we mentioned Calvino's “icasticità” as pursued in a double
way, as a double pursuit of knowledge: on one side, the reduction of
the world to abstract schemes, to geometric rules, the reliance on
logical-mathematical procedures, and on the other side the world's
inherent material dimension, the immediacy of senses, the sensible
aspect of things.
     Two divergent paths correspond to two different types of
knowledge, according to Calvino:

         «One path goes into the mental space of bodiless rationality,
      where one may trace lines that converge, projections, abstract
      forms, vectors of force. The other path goes through a space
      crammed with objects and attempts to create a verbal equivalent
      of that space by filling the page with words, involving a most
      careful, painstaking effort to adapt what is written to what is not
      written, to the sum of what is sayable and not sayable». (ibid.: 74)




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     In brief, this is the epistemology of exactitude defined by Calvino
or, as suggested by Marco Belpoliti, the guidelines to interpret reality,
as:

        The two possibilities defined by the writer relate to two
     different maps of reality, two different atlases designed by
     Calvino: a totally abstract one that only shows the trajectories, the
     routes, the lines, the vectors' directions, while the other one
     represents the world as it appears, full of forms and objects, like in
     a photograph, albeit a photograph of the mind. (Belpoliti 1996: 48)

     Once more, such projection reveals one of the Memos' epiphanic
virtues, in terms of how icasticità's double pursuit of knowledge, the
constant tension between exactitude and indeterminacy seem to
represent a precise and an incredibly fresh account of the universe of
meaning encapsulated in one of the digital world's key expressions: the
analogical/digital couple. If the insights disseminated in the first
lecture about Lightness indicated the corollary of the idea of
knowledge as «dissolution of the solidity of the world» (ibid.: 8), in the
third lecture Calvino seems to go further, and brilliantly and
insightfully anticipate one of the contemporary media environment's
defining features, and offer the best tools to negotiate the theoretical
issue of the relationship between analogical and digital, seen as two
different attitudes of inherence, or exactitude.
     The endemic need for 'icasticità' inherent in the representative
needs evoked by Calvino's bipolar couples is indeed presented as the
reflection of a double argumentative tension that enables the
coexistence of abstractive, synthetic and rational schemes, the
regulating and essential aspirations to reconstruct the world in precise
terms (the digital attitude) with the knowledge of the sensible aspect of
things, of what is expressed as density and continuity of the world (the
analogical thought). Or, according to Baumgartner's aesthetics, such
coexistence might relate to the double articulation between so-called
superior gnosiology and inferior gnosiology. According to the principle of
Calvino' epistemology of exactitude, everything is expression of a
constant logical tension, a running after each other, a double logic of
inherence to the world. Therefore, it seemed logical to place abstraction



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Paolo Granata, Ecologies of the Imagination



in the field of the digitality and tangibility in the field of the analogical.
Or in other terms, digitality would have the symbol of the flame, while
analogical would have the symbol of the crystal, or – from a typically
postmodern perspective – depth would have the characters of
analogical, and surface the characters of digitality.
       One last consideration about Leonardo, «'omo sanza lettere' (an
unlettered man)» (ibid.: 78), that Calvino refers to in the text to indicate
an exemplary case of his concept of ‘icasticità’, or the coexistence of the
double logic of inherence to the world, as a strategy for knowledge,
and the foundation of the lecture's entire epistemological structure.
Leonardo quite symbolizes two possible ways of representing and
surveying the world that coexist in a constant tension between
conception and expression – one is writing, or the symbols of abstract
schemes of logical and linguistic formalization (the digital way), the
other is drawing and painting, or the symbols of figurative traces,
signs, fully sensible shapes (the analogical way). It is for this reason
that in Leonardo's codes writing and painting, words and drawings are
both present in one discourse; almost as a prophecy of the issues raised
by the analogical/digital relationship that Calvino seems to evoke in
his referring to the Renaissance genius. Therefore, the contemporary
man should find out which linguistic and expressive tools best capture
reality in crossing that «frail emergency bridge» (ibid.: 77) that
separates him from the world.



                                        Visibility
      The lecture on Visibility is perhaps the one that best expresses
Calvino's poetics in terms of two key concepts, fantasy and
imagination, that are clearly the lecture's main subjects. The lecture
openly expresses the visualism oscillating between science and art that
Calvino's critics find so alluring and that, as suggested by Marco
Belpoliti, is what makes Calvino «one of the most 'visual' writers in our
literature» (Belpoliti 1996: XIV).
      As a self-defined son of the 'civilization of the image’ (ibid.: 91),
Calvino proposes the strategy of visualism as the preliminary key to
access the research of linguistic and literary expressive forms, among



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others. Indeed, his Memos are disseminated with visual metaphors,
symbols and images, in turn the result of a constant perceptive
research, or even better of a constant work of translation of the sphere
of imagination into the universe of sensible forms; a process that also
works the other way around (Grundtvig et al. 2007). In this sense, it is
Calvino himself who distinguishes «two types of imaginative process:
the one that starts with the word and arrives at the visual image, and
the one that starts with the visual image and arrives at its verbal
expression» (Calvino 1988: 83). It is a two-way process, the result of a
bipolar tension that embraces the entire poetics Calvino declares in the
lecture about visibility.
     There is also a double interpretation that, based on Jean
Starobinski's stance, guides Calvino's argument across the lecture: on
one side, imagination is a tool for knowledge, to imagine is a way of
knowing; on the other side, imagination is a connection with the world,
to imagine is a way of communicating, of interacting. Calvino openly
confesses he has worked in both directions, but at the same time
declares his preference for the second option – or imagination as
«identification with the world soul» (ibid.: 90). Therefore, on one side
there is the rational and analytical intention that is implicit in science
and is closer to an idea of imagination as a tool for knowledge. On the
other side, imagination becomes the expression of social memory,
closer to the sphere of art practices, where styles and traditions are
mixed and blurred in a common and shared «participation in the true
of the world» (ibid.: 88); an expression of the anthropological idea of
«imagination as social practice» (Appadurai 1997: 50). In this sense,
things get even more interesting when Calvino, who clearly wants to
overcome the initial double interpretation, indicates a further aspect of
imagination, and even describes it as a «repertory of what is potential,
what is hypothetical, of what does not exist and has never existed, and
perhaps will never exist but might have existed» (ibid.: 91). And such
definition proves how he captured, interpreted and, in some ways,
anticipated many issues that have been raised by the advent of so-
called virtual or augmented reality, the ultimate stage of imagination
achieved by technological means, that seems to have found its best
expressive forms in contemporary visual culture, under the undisputed
domination of the digital image.



                                                                              17
Paolo Granata, Ecologies of the Imagination



     Calvino clearly admits that the strategy of visibility he proposes is
the response to the bombardment of images typical of the mass society:

        What will be the future of the individual imagination in what is
      usually called the 'civilization of the image'? Will the power of
      evoking images of things that are not there continue to develop in a
      human race increasingly inundated by a flood of prefabricated
      images? (ibid.: 91)

      To keep us from drowning in such a deluge, Calvino suggests we
choose a contrary path, a return to the ground zero of imagination,
condensed in the phrase 'thinking by images', which reflects a typically
postmodern sensibility and its ability to rediscover, rehabilitate, recycle
images by constantly using and adapting them to new contexts.
Domenico Scarpa has compared the sense of such concept to Calvino's
idea of imagination, and has defined it as «the ability to translate the
stimuli the world offers us into images: so that it is mainly the look, in
particular the alienated look that makes us see the world (inside and
outside) as different from the ordinary» (Scarpa 1999: 122). Therefore, it
is the ability to draw from a range of possibilities, a «gulf of potential
multiplicity» (Calvino 1988: 91), that the digital image seems to have
for its very nature. It represents the clearest actualization of the
«mental cinema» (ibid.: 83) quoted by Calvino in the lecture, with its
blurred boundaries between imagination and visualization. And again,
when Calvino explains that imagination is «a kind of electronic
machine that takes account of all possible combinations and chooses
the ones that are appropriate to a particular purpose» (ibid.: 91), one
has the impression of reading the description of the generative
processes of digital images resulting from the most sophisticated
software.
     Calvino reveals his intention through a real apology of writing as
an expressive solution that would make fantasy and imagination
coexist and be independently experienced in the world's material
dimension. Furthermore, as suggested by Giulio Lughi, «Calvino
extends the field of literature by incorporating other ways of feeling
and knowing, based on immediacy, immersive participation, and
commitment» (Lughi 2006: 45-46). Therefore, the image changes and



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becomes more than a mere mental fact – an actual fact that undergoes a
constant and endless process of reification. The image becomes a thing
that is powered by the evocative and expressive nature of signs, of
language, of writing as it appears in the multiple practices of
multimedia production. Thus the written word becomes «a shell of
imagination» (Calvino 1988: 90), an actual feature of the undecidable
(ibid.: 97); it becomes independent, it reveals itself, it opens its own
trail, as a way to announce the triumph of the signifier over the
signified, of form over content, a key step in the extremely
contemporary meditation on the digital image. And therefore Calvino's
visualism becomes an interpretation key of the self-referentiality of
expressive forms typical of contemporary visual culture that seems to
totally permeate the digital world in all its visibility.



                            Multiplicity
     The last Memo Calvino completed is actually the result of a wider
meditation he had developed across his entire literary production that
expresses the notion of multiplicity as the discursive core of an
articulation of the very idea of literature.
     What is immediately clear is the presence – more prevalent here
than in the previous memos – of a range of writers and authors, such as
Gadda, Musil, Proust, Goethe, Flaubert, Queneau, Mann, Eliot, Joyce,
Jarry, Valéry, Borges, Perec, all more or less consciously devoted, and
in any case found to be so by Calvino himself, to multiplicity. As
Marco Belpoliti wrote, it is «a gallery of hunters of the multiple that
now Calvino feels to belong to by default» (Belpoliti 1996: 41).
Secondly, the discursive fabric developed by Calvino offers some key
concepts and notions that lead to an immediate understanding of the
lecture's subject. These are, in order of apparition: encyclopedism, as a
true process of knowledge pursued through the «network of
connections between the events, the people, and the things of the
world» (Calvino 1988: 105); systems management, or how the different
parts of a system influence each other and therefore «the simultaneous
presence of the most disparate elements that converge to determine
every event» (ibid.: 106); the web, as an endless weave of self-



                                                                              19
Paolo Granata, Ecologies of the Imagination



supporting but also interconnected elements, a «web radiating out
from every object» (ibid.: 107), the «network that links all things» (ibid.:
110); cognitive plurality, or «to be capable of weaving together the
various branches of knowledge, the various 'codes', into a manifold
and multifaceted vision of the world» (ibid.: 112); incompleteness as the
awareness of the impossibility of «exhausting knowledge of the world
by enclosing it in a circle» (ibid.: 116); timelessness, or «a growing and
bewildering network of divergent, convergent, and parallel forms of
time» (ibid.: 120); and finally, the «hyper-novel», the exploration of the
endless combinations, the support of «the network of possibilities», the
application of «the potential multiplicity of what may be narrated»
(ibid.).
      Therefore, the long sequence of authors and issues referenced in
the text implies the possibility of recognizing, as indicated by Calvino
himself, a path of continuity, an evolutionary constant, a thread that
connects and defines the boundaries of the gap between the system of
thought that can be ascribed to so-called modernism and the more
contemporary system of thought that is closer to a post-modern
sensibility. The two symbols of the labyrinth and the web offer the
interpretation guidelines for the path that leads from modernity to
post-modernity – two continuous rather than conflicting phases in
Calvino's opinion – and a connection with the contemporary age totally
projected towards the new millennium, the time horizon suggested by
the proposals included in the Memos. The passage from modernity to
postmodernity necessarily implies that the modernist concept of the
labyrinth is left behind and replaced by the concept of web, which is in
many ways the clearest sign of Calvino's contribution to the post-
modernist project. Such belief is complemented by another equally
clear, although sometimes unconscious, belief in the symbolic values of
the digital world. For this reason Calvino’s work has been defined as
the expression of a «postmodern multiplicity» (Musarra-Schrøder
1996).
      The insight that best expresses the postmodern character of
Calvino's multiplicity is entirely in his lucky formula of the 'hyper-
novel', the constitution of a sampling of what can be narrated
developed through continuous efforts of expressive research. Such
sampling represents the clearest expression of Calvino's need to invest
in a true combinatorial art, never an end in itself, as an attempt to


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adapt to the complexity of the world. And already in the second lecture
about exactitude, Calvino implies that he considers the Invisible Cities
as an action developed in concurrence with the postmodern paradigm
of complexity and, as a consequence, to the very project of cybernetic
city (Modena 2011: 143). After all, as observed by Adriano Piacentini,
the influence of cybernetics and the theory of information on Calvino
cannot be overstated (Piacentini 2002: 323).
       The vocation to combinatorial art reveals a further and explicit call
to postmodern sensibility that imbues the spirit of the Memos (Markey
1999). Indeed, Calvino's multiplicity has nothing to do with either
closed encyclopedism, that aspires to «exhaust knowledge of the world
by enclosing it in a circle» (ibid.: 116), or the expression of an archetypal
instinct of knowledge as domination of the world guided by the
strong-willed ordering power of reason and rational thought. For
Calvino it is more of a 'weak' knowledge – in Belpoliti's words, «the
boundary of the look, its true 'vanishing point'; as he seems to think
there is no analytical look or synonymic articulation that might unfold
the world, or a line and drawing that might circumscribe it» (Belpoliti
1996: 41); or, as Ulla Musarra-Schrøder has written, it is not «the
combinatorial process in itself that represents the true challenge to the
world, but the moment when the linguistic combination touches the
mysteries of what cannot be said or is unconscious» (Musarra-Schrøder
1996: 31). Therefore, the multiplicity of postmodernity appears as a
connection between forces that are in constant tension, never in
balance; a two-handed game between the «moltiplication of
possibilities» and «that unicum which is the self of the writer» (Calvino
1988: 124), that can perhaps be solved in the utopian release from the
self, or to «escape the limited perspective of the individual ego» to find
a place in a collective self that can disseminate itself «in every way
conceivable» (ibid.). Indeed, in the first lecture about lightness Calvino
already declares his fascination for the contemporary man's state of
complete immersion in the dust-like substance of the world, a dust-like
condition that is increasingly expressed today by the massive presence
of various technological devices – the multiple nodes that articulate
this web – disseminated in the daily condition. It is actually the
materialization, pursued through technology, of a condition in which
we belong to everything, are connected to everything, a pooling –
literally, a communication – of any subject of experience with the


                                                                               21
Paolo Granata, Ecologies of the Imagination



multiplicity of the world. After all, this kind of connective multiplicity
seems to totally permeate the current media experience. And such
condition is nothing but an updated form of the perceptive and
cognitive holism defined as noosphere by Vladimir Vernadsky in the
early twentieth century; a term that would be later borrowed by others
including Bergson and Le Roy, made famous by Teilhard de Chardin,
amplified as a cosmic membrane or a collective nervous system by
McLuhan, and amended by an array of similar theoretical-
interpretative proposals developed along the discursive path that was
defined by specialized literature over the last two decades of the
twentieth century.
      Summing all of this up, the «apologia for the novel as a vast net»
(ibid.) seems to reveal an original interpretation key that once again
shows Calvino's meditation as the effort of the written word to
overcome the boundaries of the territory recognized as its own, and
pursues more and more expansive expressive horizons. In this sense,
multiplicity rhymes with multimedia, a foundational label of the
digital world, just as the idea of hyper-novel seems to merge with and
share more than the prefix with another key concept – hypertext – that
inaugurates the cycle of information technology, created during the
Sixties by Theodor Nelson and described as a system of «new ways of
writing that reflect the writing of what we write about; and the readers
may choose different paths that reflect their attitudes, or the course of
their thoughts, in a way that was not possible before» (Nelson 1981: 3).
Or, between multiplicity and hyper-novel, Calvino seems to have
predicted the more widespread expression of the concept of hypertext:
the World Wide Web. Internet as an expansive contemporary novel is,
for example, what Alessandro Lucchini (2002) suggested in the
juxtaposition between the Norton Lectures and the Web.
      Therefore, the hypertext and the Web, in their symbolic and
structural implications, illustrate the triumph of the postmodern
symbol of the web, the «visual metaphor with which Calvino tries to
capture the uncatchable world that moves in front of his eyes»
(Belpoliti 1996: 16). A triumph that, as Calvino himself admitted, was
predicted in The invisible cities:




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        I built up a many-faceted structure in which each brief text is
     close to the others in a series that does not imply logical sequence
     or a hierarchy, but a network in which one can follow multiple
     routes and draw multiple, ramified conclusions. (Calvino 1988: 71)

     And so the digital world seems to adhere precisely to Calvino's
idea of invisible city: a connective structure where everything is related
to everything else, where the coordinates of space and time are found
to be traced on staggered or layered levels. All in all, it is an idea that is
similar in many ways to the kind of planetary brain, or the ultimate
network of networks, the Internet, as well as a clear expression of
cyberspace, the powerful label introduced by cyberpunk literature –
thus the “invisible city” of the digital world.



                              Consistency
     Consistency is the title of the missing lecture, what would have
been Calvino's last lecture. When he was about to leave for the United
States, he had already completed the first five lectures. He planned on
writing the sixth lecture in Harvard, had death not surprised him
before his time. In fact, consistency has not an entirely precise
translation in Italian. Coherence, constancy and – based on the term's
Latin origin – density and compactness, as well as openness are better
approximations of the title chosen by Calvino per his last Norton
Lecture. It should also be clear that, unlike the previous five lectures,
consistency, as well as coherence, constancy, density and compactness
are terms that are practically absent from the communication universe
and the semantic aura of the digital world.
     Calvino's critics have long pored about what he might have meant
by choosing consistency as one of the not only literary values, qualities
or characters that should be brought into the next millennium. Some
have also explored an even more detailed interpretation (Piacentini
2002, Barenghi 2007, Scrivano 2008).
     About the approach I adopted here, it is enough to mention, in a
preliminary way, an interesting argumentative cue from an
assumption made by Domenico Scarpa, who wrote:



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Paolo Granata, Ecologies of the Imagination



         Calvino may have borrowed the notion of consistency from
      Edgar Poe, who used it as the mainstay of his treatise or
      cosmological prose poem Eureka, 1848. For Poe, consistency is the
      insight of universe as individuality: it is the notion of the unity of
      the cosmos as a totality and at the same time as articulation and
      mutual interdependence of all of its parts. (Scarpa 1999: 93)

     Well, totality and individuality, just like singularity and
multiplicity, are closely connected to identity, which is another key
term of today's technological and cultural dimension. The digital world
incorporates this double identity implication, that on one side emerges
in the symbol of the universally known global village, conceived as
connected to a totality, to a seamless multiplicity, the connection of any
subject of experience to any other subject, a plural and all-engaging
expressive form. In this sense consistency should be viewed as part of a
logical universe of meaning, as cohesion between the parts that form a
harmonious and precisely coherent wholeness. On the other side, the
digital world emphasizes singularity and difference, specificity and
arbitrariness, as strategies of affirmation of the individual realm. This is
the real protagonist of a scene where every subject of experience,
through the digital world's endless communication forms, gets first-
hand access to a multitude of notions, relations, connections and
exchanges unheard-of until recently. In this sense consistency should
be viewed as constancy, density, compactness, singularity. In other
words, the subjects who live in the digital world have their identity
realm –and its consistency – constantly engaged and stimulated by the
increasingly widespread and pervasive social practices in the web.
     Therefore, Calvino’s interest in singularity and multiplicity across
all of his Memos implies a connection between the future notion of
consistency and the new media’s communication universe. In fact,
these are issues that emerge between the lines of the supposedly
rejected memo, Beginning and ending, the result of an extended
preparation work that led Calvino to the first five lectures’ final draft.
     In the digital world's endless relational and connection
possibilities we are constantly required to make choices: from the
general to the particular, from belonging to the wholeness to choosing
a part of it, from a cognitive plurality to a subjective specificity. The



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perceptive experience of the digital world seems to operate as a
continuous series of choices, options, narrative paths or explorations.
For Calvino it is a matter of relations between worlds, and more in
particular of multiplicity/singularity as the relation between the
experienced and the verbal world, or the need to constantly choose to
take part of the former into the latter. On second thoughts, the digital
world is indeed a verbal world, one that has certainly led to the
supremacy of the visual dimension but only after achieving a full
triumph of the textual dimension, of writing, and the verbal dimension
as the ultimate linguistic form of expression. The emergence of the so-
called virtual communities and now of the social networks, and more
in general the system of the most recent mobile devices, from the
smartphone to the tablet, has provided the ideal ground for the
flourishing of entire social colonies based on language, text and
writing. The huge proliferation of Twitter, or the success of message-
writing exemplified by the email, as well as the instant messaging
platforms are clear examples of this. It is nearly impossible to make
precise estimates but it seems that the number of messages written
since the Seventies, or since the invention of the e-mail, in particular
over the last decade, equals the entirety of messages written over the
entire history of humankind. And if one thinks about the endless
production of web pages currently on the Internet, a similar equation
may perhaps be made even in terms of the entire literary and non-
fiction production, at least since Gutenberg. Therefore, the digital
world is first and foremost a verbal world, and as such, following
Calvino's insights, a world built on constant textual acts, choices of
linguistic nature or, as suggested by Maurizio Ferraris, a world of
«idiomatic inscriptions», a system of social objects built by the most
diverse forms of recording, amazing tools for the construction of the
social reality (Ferraris 2005: 15).
      A further aspect of the consistency, or coherence, of the digital
world, based on the singularity/multiplicity connection often
illustrated by Calvino in his Memos, can be glimpsed in the process of
identity reconfiguration implied in the emergence of the most recent
forms of online communication. Indeed, the issue of the self's
uniqueness or multiplicity is an issue that occupies most meditations
and analyses focused on observing and interpreting the new social
practices occurring in that most original contemporary agora that is the


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Paolo Granata, Ecologies of the Imagination



web. The emergence of the first virtual communities and their most
recent form, the social networks, has led many observers to redefine
the coordinates of values and perceptive parameters that can be used
to interpret, and update, the very notion of experience in the light of
the new contemporary media scene. This becomes a cognitive process
that seems to blur the boundaries between singularity and multiplicity.
And therefore, if, as explained by Nathalie Roelens (1989), the issue of
superseding singularity in favor of a virtualization of experience was
already addressed by Calvino in Palomar, his perhaps bold selection of
a key value like consistency as the core of the sixth lecture shows once
more Calvino's ability in recognizing the most relevant issues and
problems of the digital world that would soon emerge in all of its
expressive forms. Subjectivity, experience and plurality thus form a
trinity of values that may be ascribed to the large and in many ways
mysterious sphere of meaning of consistency as much as to
contemporary sensibility, to the system of social, relational and
communication practices that all in all reveal the density, compactness,
coherence, constancy as well as the openness of the peculiar relation
between man and his digital world.




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Paolo Granata, Ecologies of the Imagination



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                                       The author
Paolo Granata

       Paolo Granata teaches Cultural Heritage Management, and
Media, Culture and Public Memory at the University of Bologna. His
areas of research include: Aesthetics, Media Theory, Museum
Communication, and Contemporary Arts. His main books are: Arte in
Rete (2001), Arte, estetica e nuovi media (2009), Mediabilia (2012), Ecologia
dei media (2015). In 2011 he was the recipient of the McLuhan
Centenary Award from the McLuhan Program for Culture and
Technology, iSchool, University of Toronto.

        Email: paolo.granata@unibo.it



                                       The paper
Date sent: 30/08/2014
Date accepted: 30/10/2014
Date published: 30/11/2014




28
                                Between, vol. IV, n. 8 (Novembre/November 2014)




                   How to quote this paper
Paolo Granata, “Ecologies of the Imagination: Italo Calvino's six
'memes' for the Digital World”, Tecnologia, immaginazione e forme del
narrare, Ed. L. Esposito, E. Piga, A. Ruggiero, Between, IV. 8 (2014),
www.betweenjournal.it




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