Siniscalco

INTRODUCTION

I do not attempt to offer a definition of Cultural Studies in my presentation, nor enter into the debate regarding its merits, or faults. Nor have I undertaken a reconnaissance of critical works produced in Italy which may be classified under the label of Cultural Studies. Rather I will start with the assumption, based on my own observations and experience as a teacher and researcher within the Italian university system, that Cultural Studies are absent within Italian academia. What I mean to say is that the presence of Cultural Studies as a teaching and research practice, as may be witnessed in the U.K. or the US, is not visible in Italy. In attempting to explain why this is so, I will also try to show why a greater presence of Cultural Studies within Italian universities would be beneficial. In the concluding section of this paper I also maintain that the present reform of the Italian university system may make the development of Cultural Studies in Italy possible in the near future.

WHY CULTURAL STUDIES IS NOT PRESENT IN ITALY

ITALIAN CONCEPT OF CULTURE NON CONDUCIVE TO DEVELOPMENT OF CULTURAL STUDIES AS A TEACHING AND RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

One general consideration regarding the diffusion of Cultural Studies in Italy concerns the very term "culture" in the Italian language. "Cultura" generally connotes high culture, or "big C" culture in Italy. This is especially so in or around an institutional setting, such as a school, a university, a museum, a library, a playhouse, etc. The anthropological or ethnographical concept of culture is not foreign to Italy, but it is most generally used by those people who work in such areas. Among a general public, and even among school and university students, the idea which prevails is that of culture as something connected to education, higher learning, the classics, masterpieces of the arts and letters. To be cultured, "essere colto" means to have studied, to possess a school, or university degree, or in any case to have read the classics of Italian literature, or at least to be familiar with the major authors, and with representative periods of our national history. It also means to possess a good knowledge of the standard Italian language. A non-cultured person in Italy is someone who does not have a good written or spoken command of the language, who communicates in one of the numerous Italian dialects, and who did not study the "classics" of the national culture.

There are many reasons for this particular connotation of the term culture in Italy. One explanation may be traced to the "Risorgimento", when the intellectual middle class attempted to establish a national, united culture. This attempt, as is well known, becomes even more explicit after unification, when the newborn Italian state and its hegemonic classes will forcefully impose a national culture and language through, among other things, a centralized school system. National culture in this period was identified with traditional, classical, and universal; in other words to what today we would refer to as high culture, as opposed to a local, contemporary, transitional, and utilitarian culture.

The presence of the Roman Catholic Church in Italy contributed further to this process. Notwithstanding its initial attempts to resist unification, and with it the establishment of a national lay culture, the Church promoted its own concept of high culture: religious culture came to be identified with Latin, the scriptures, the classics of religious thought. The priest would act as mediator between this high culture and the people, thus further stressing the idea of culture as something above the plain, ordinary aspects of daily life. Something that could not easily be obtained, but which could be identified by anyone, albeit far above the reach of ordinary mortals.

Fascism, as may be imagined, did not change this state of affairs, rather it added to it its own idiosyncrasies. Through its propagandistic efforts, a set of national cultural icons were to be deeply rooted in the Italian popular imagination, so that once again the term "culture" came to be removed from daily occurrences, and identified with a pompous national popular tradition: poets such as Dante and Petrarch, for example, loomed well above the ordinary citizens in their innumerable sculptural or pictorial representations.

Furthermore, through the reform of the educational system, headed by the Italian philosopher and secretary of education under the fascist government, Giovanni Gentile, a deep fracture came to be formalized between the lyceums, where classical or scientific learning would be imparted to the children of the professional middle and upper classes, and the technical and vocational schools, where the less fortunate would learn a specific trade. The subject matter of the lyceums would be identified with high culture–be it humanistic (classical) or scientific–and would prepare the way for university. The subject matter of the technical and vocational schools, as their names implied, would be identified with an inferior type of learning, practical and utilitarian, but not really identifiable with a higher culture, and not suitable as a preparation for a university education. Hence the development of the dualism, which we still find today in Italy, between high culture, equated to intellectual activity, study and research, and an inferior type of culture, equated to practical activities, disconnected from the higher realms of critical thinking. Unsurprisingly the Italian left will resent this class distinction between types of learning, and will strive for a more democratic diffusion of the "higher" type culture, thus implicitly buying into, and ratifying, the dualistic conception of culture.

PHILOSOPHY AND STRUCTURE OF ITALIAN EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM HAS HINDERED DEVELOPMENT OF CULTURAL STUDIES

The structural organization of the Italian educational system implemented by the Fascist regime and the philosophy that lay behind it have had consequences which are still present today, and which have strongly hindered the development in Italy of anything resembling a Cultural Studies approach to teaching and research.

ELEMENTARY AND SECONDARY SCHOOLS

From elementary through secondary schools the view of culture as pertaining to something high above daily occurrences and removed from practical issues and concerns is still prevalent. The dualism between theoretical subject matters connected to speculative thinking, and practical subject matters, tied to the acquisition of professions and trades, still remains. The differentiation between lyceums and professional and vocational high schools is still valid today, though since 1969 access to university has been open to anyone with at least 5 years of secondary school. The lyceums, though attended by just 25% of the student population, still set the tone to higher learning. Their outlook on education values the theoretical over the practical, thinking over doing. There are clear class issues at play here. Children of higher social strata enroll in the lyceums, and are happily complying with an idea of education which shelters them from the obligations of a practical know-how. The offspring of lower social classes who manage to enroll in the lyceums (through the sacrifice of their parents, who will have to financially support them for several more years of study) enjoy the hard-won privilege of being able to learn theoretical issues rather than trades or vocations. Thus none seem to mind the prevalent theoretical nature of teaching within this type of school. Nor does anyone resent the fact that culture is presented to them from above, so to say, as something to be studied, learned, memorized, rather than confronted on an even level, without certainties and ready-made answers. The learning process is one-directional, from top to bottom: from the teacher to the student. Instruction is essentially based on lectures, coupled by exams-interrogations designed to ascertain that the students have correctly mastered the information imparted. I should add that the relative absence in Italy of extracurricular activities (due to the insufficient facilities of the schools, especially in the poorer areas of the country) contributes to the lack of hands-on experience for the students. It is not easy for an Italian student to experience, for example, the creation of a school newspaper or journal, or to contribute to the production of a musical or of an art-exhibit, as it is for some of the other European or North American students.

HIGHER EDUCATION

The educational philosophy which permeates the elementary and secondary school system also characterizes higher education. In this case, however, a major change takes place. The mechanism described earlier, by which theory has a predominance over praxis, will remain active only among humanistic courses of study. Otherwise, at the university level, scientific and technical areas will recognize the importance of a practical training (though, because of a lack of facilities and funds its availability is still insufficient). Among the humanities the situation does not appear that different than from the lyceums, except for the fact that a much greater level of specialization is reached. Yet the subject of study remains predominantly higher, canonized culture, and the approach almost exclusively theoretical. A closer look at a school such as "Lettere e Filosofia", where degrees in philosophy, literatures, languages, history are offered will exemplify some of the reasons why the development of Cultural Studies practices have thus far been close to zero in Italy.

The type of instruction in the "Facoltà di Lettere e Filosofia" is predominantly theoretical. In order to obtain their "Laurea" degree, the only one available so far, which corresponds to a level between a Master and a Ph.D., students have to follow a set number of courses, usually around twenty, and sustain oral examinations. The courses are most often lectures on monographic topics (usually connected to the professor’s own line of research). Attendance is not compulsory, and frequently students will exchange each other the favor of taking notes, or recording the lecture with a tape recorder. Student participation is limited, and often non-existent. A whole course may be structured as a series of lectures on a monographic topic, with an attached bibliography to read on ones own. The length of the course is regulated by a central authority, the Ministry of Education, and more recently the Ministry of University and of Scientific and Technological Research (MURST). At the end of a course, but not necessarily immediately after its conclusion, the students will submit themselves to oral examinations by an examining committee, usually made up of the professor who has taught the course and one or two other professors of a similar discipline. There are usually no examinations or evaluations of the students during the course, and the students may wait as long as they like to take the final oral examination. This procedure determines the development in the Italian university of an impressive number of "out of time" students (studenti fuori corso), that is of students who do not complete the degree course in the specified required time (usually four years in this type of school; often the students will take as many as ten years). This is turn leads to a drop-out rate of over 70%.

These however, are structural problems which would take us too far from our topic of discussion. My concern here is to underline that even at this level of study, the attitude of the students (and of the professors) towards learning is one directional, from the top down. Literature, as a specific example, is usually presented as an organic whole of which one may study the historical developments over several centuries. Though a certain number of representative texts are read by the students, and the professor may offer detailed textual analysis of these, there will be very little, if any, student participation. Students are not invited to express their own point of view, nor does the teacher ask them for a direct criticism of the texts. This certainly reinforces the view of culture as a canonized body of works and in the worst case it instills in the students a sort of fear towards the cultural tradition: something that may not be challenged, but that must be accepted uncritically. A different approach would not easily be accepted, and would most probably succumb to the authority of tradition.

There are also other characteristics of the Italian university system which concur to the difficulty of establishing a Cultural Studies approach to teaching and research in Italy. Among the most significant is the resistance to change which characterizes Italian academia. Another is the until now total government centralization of any decision having to do with issues concerning higher education. Another yet is the privileged status of the professorial cast, which represents one of the strongest lobbies in Italy (it is well know how Italian governments are usually a list of universities professor who temporarily give up teaching for politics). Until today the major concern among university professors has been to maintain a status quo, so that Italy has become one of the few economically advanced countries where the shifting role of the humanities within society has had little if no effects on university life. Disciplines in most areas have remained unaltered for decades, regardless of their relevance within the outside world, or of student enrollment. Most often what determines the number of students following a given course is the inclusion or exclusion of such a course from a list generated by the department of education which specifies all the courses necessary to be able to teach different subject areas at the school level. Disciplines (and the respective chairs, occupied by full, or associate professors) are untouchable. This means that regardless of student enrollment, or pertinence with a given program of study, no one would ever be able to suggest that a given discipline be changed, or that the professor teach something else. It is obvious that in this kind of situation new, innovative disciplines have a remote possibility of becoming established. This is the case for Cultural Studies, or, for that matter, for any of the new disciplinary areas that have developed in other countries, such as Women Studies, Colonial and Post-colonial Studies, and so on.

POSSIBLE BENEFITS OF A CULTURAL STUDIES DIFFUSION IN ITALY

Given this situation, it is not surprising, I think, that Cultural Studies as a teaching and research practice has had such a limited outgrowth in Italian academia. Yet, their diffusion could be extremely beneficial, as it would facilitate the development in Italy of a different type of education, and a different conception of culture. For example, an initial benefit would be the possibility of having regional and local dialects and cultural traditions coexist as a subject deemed suitable of academic study next to the larger national tradition. Another, possibly more far reaching benefit, would be a gradual shift of attention from a canonized past to more contemporary issues. Courses dealing with the media, pop music, and other contemporary cultural practices, may be found even today within the Italian university, but most always at an advanced level. Rarely are such courses taught with the aim of presenting these topics at a larger, unspecialized student audience. Many students, the more unimaginative ones, those who do not venture to look for the less obvious courses, will never be exposed to alternative and less main-stream areas of study. A greater visibility of Cultural Studies type courses would enable a larger number of students to become familiar with an alternative approach to learning. Ultimately a greater number of students, I think, would become more critically aware of their surroundings.

I would like to underline this last point further, as I think it is of utmost importance, and possibly represents one of the most significant contributions of Cultural Studies. I am referring to the critical perception of the contemporary post-industrial reality surrounding European and North-American students. Cultural Studies offer these students the possibility to study aspects of contemporary popular and mass culture, so that they may learn to unveil otherwise hidden discursive practices and hegemonic strategies. Through this type of study these students become better equipped to confront issues pertaining to their everyday life and experience. What is unique to the Italian situation, and what Cultural Studies may put an end to, is the fact that most high school and university students are not given any instruments with which to confront daily realities. Through a greater presence of Cultural Studies in Italy, for example, the grand narrative of a united national culture which makes its way, almost painlessly, from the early middle ages to our present day would come to an end. Students in Calabria, or Puglia would finally be given the opportunity to stop thinking that Dante and Petrarch are "their" most important poets.

CONCLUSION: FUTURE POSSIBILITIES FOR THE DIFFUSION OF A CULTURAL STUDIES APPROACH OF EDUCATION IN ITALY

There are moments in a given culture when it is possible to introduce through the back door certain changes which are destined to have radical and long-lasting consequences. I believe that in Italy we are now experiencing such a moment thanks to the imminent university reform. I don’t think I am exaggerating when I say that the Italian university is on the verge of undergoing revolutionary changes, which will effect even elementary and secondary education, and more extensively the very conception of "culture" in Italy. The reform, ironically, is not the result of some grass roots movement from below (this was attempted in the Sixties and Seventies, but with no substantial results, at least of a lasting nature), rather it is result of an attempt from above to conform to European standards and levels. (It would be interesting here to understand how and why Italy has remained the last stronghold in Europe where an old, almost pre-modern type of university exists, but this would require much more time than what is available to us at this moment). Certainly there may be attempts to halt this process of reform, to go back to a previous system, but the ball, so to say, has already started to roll, and it will not be easily stopped.

The Italian university now must comply to a system of three level of degrees. The first level, known as the "laurea europea" (the equivalent of a BA) will have to be issued through a three year period of study (it will no longer be possible for the students to become "out of time") The second level corresponds to a Master (no appropriate Italian name has been found yet!) and will require two more years of study. The third level, called the "Dottorato di Ricerca", is equivalent to a Ph.D. and will require another two years. For a series of reasons which would be too lengthy to explain here, this will mean the redrawing of academic disciplines, or more specifically, the creation of freely designed courses which will be given a set number of credits (a concept up to now foreign to the Italian university). The rigid governmental centralization which until now regulated the creation of new courses is about to be stopped. Single universities will be able to invent their own courses based on their own local necessities. Thanks to the credits system students will finally be able to move among different institutions, following courses that may not be yet taught at his or her own home university. This will, in turn, create more mobility among the students, who will be able to choose among different universities to find exactly what they are looking for. As a consequence there will be the development of "residential" universities, which up to now have been almost totally foreign to the Italian academic tradition. Residential universities will enable the development of more extensive facilities, where the students may connect theoretical instruction to more practical applications (I should say here that in Italy up to now we had a system of radical separation between the theoretical study of the arts, and their practical application; thus one would study the history of the theater and never have anything to do with producing a play; or study the history of music without any connection to its performance).

It is easy to see how in the midst of these radical changes there is a great opportunity for the diffusion of a Cultural Studies approach to teaching and research. As a closing remark I would like to suggest that this may be the moment for Italian scholars and intellectuals to go back to Gramsci’s writings, and take new inspiration from his conceptions of culture, hegemony, and the role of the intellectuals. Perhaps his Notebooks, so instrumental for the development of Cultural Studies in other parts of the world, will acquire new significance even for the Italians.