co-authored with prof. Markus Ophälders. Translated by Caterina Diotto.
Preface to Forming to transform. On a pedagogy of Imagination (Mimesis, Milan 2022)
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2. Some proposal for this Millennium (by Caterina Diotto)
It is 1985: fifteen years barely separate us from the beginning of a new millennium. For now, I do not feel that the approach of this date awakens any particular emotion. However, I am not here to talk about futurology, but about literature […]. My confidence in the future of literature consists in knowing that there are things that only literature can give with its own specific means. I would therefore like to devote these lectures to certain values or qualities or specificities of literature that are particularly close to my heart, trying to situate them in the perspective of the new millennium.
Italo Calvino, “Norton Lectures”
With a handful of lines Calvin introduced the series of conferences, the Norton Lectures – giving the English translation to Patrick Creagh, and entitled them “Six Proposals for the New Millennium”. Visibility, Lightness, Exactness… but also Consistency, Starting and Ending, have always been aesthetic keys, critical points to which to return in order to always find new points of interpretation, not only of literature but of culture as a whole. However, many things have happened in the space and time between us and those lectures – many, as always happens, unexpected. Events and changes that have radically altered the ways of living and of making culture, as well as of reading and writing literature.
The technological revolution and globalisation have opened our horizons, connecting us with the remotest corners of the planet and pushing us all, willingly or unwillingly, to a new perception of reality – and to new kinds of alienation. Processes that have, and have had, more often than not other dynamics than the consideration of local communities, cultural multiplicities, natural environments. The movements have mainly remained imperialist ones: a western ethnocentrism aimed at bringing advantage from the “periphery” to its “centre” and disadvantage in the opposite direction, a cultural racism, a ruthless capitalism. Alongside this, however, new voices have managed to impose themselves on the stage of western attention, strenuously overcoming the barriers of self-referentiality, opening up new horizons, offering new words, and initiating new debates.
The pandemic lifted Maia’s veil over the illusion that “influences” between countries could be controlled and guided, opened and closed at will. We have discovered ourselves permeable, culturally and materially. We discover ourselves more and more mutually dependent and interwoven into the oikos we inhabit, as we witness the clash between this awareness and the desperate attempts of the restorative forces to return to an ideological “normality”. Between “Everything will be fine”1 and “Our house is on fire”2 the clash is open and alive.
So what can we say about this millennium, now that it has begun? But above all, taking up the spirit of the Norton Lectures, what proposals for the time to come?
We wanted to pose this question to scholars of culture, starting from Calvino’s reflections, yes, but also from the experience of what surrounds us, inside and outside our disciplines. We wanted to question literature, looking at its political and existential possibilities, at what it, as Calvino writes, “can give with its specific means”.
We wanted to ask ourselves what we should propose, what we should “bring” to the continuation of this millennium. Not so much in order to “have a plan” but in the conviction that the nuclei of change are to be found in the forms we give to our interpretation of reality, in the languages we use, in the voices we listen to and, perhaps above all, in the ways in which we create knowledge and the practices with which we teach it.
We wanted to do this starting with a reflection on imagination and pedagogy, and on a possible pedagogy of imagination, because it is only through this that an idea can be shaped, a vision of the future made up of sensitivity and logic together.
The path that this collection outlines can be traced to three main moments. The first is the theoretical-reflexive exploration of imagination, and its role in the constitution of the self both individually and within a collectivity. The second represents a threshold in which the fertile interweaving between pedagogy and imagination is explored, in the unexpected forms and peculiarities that this takes on when it becomes literature, writing, narration. Finally, the third moment constitutes a practical and political proposal of pedagogies that construct new ways of imagining, giving voice and body to those who have long been relegated to silence. In this sense, the last essay closes on a rethinking of the very concept of democracy to include these voices, now that it has become increasingly necessary, within our culture and our politics.
Markus Ophälders’ essay opens the series, outlining the panorama of not only ethical and political but also individual, collective and philosophical cross-references of a reflection on pedagogy and the peculiar role of imagination. Through a tight critique of the scientistic drifts of our time, as well as their authoritarian danger, and the imbalance of current pedagogical methodologies – focused on measuring numbers, skills, abilities – the author proposes a general return to the balance between sensitivity and intellect. A balance of which imagination represents the condition of possibility, the necessary element that allows those mediations and those individual, collective, philosophical and artistic-figurative syntheses through which alone it is possible to con-grow between collectivity and individual, reality and idea, experience and concept. A pedagogy of the imagination thus represents not only an educational thought but also a philosophical and political project that looks to the present and imagines the future with all the force of utopia but without losing its roots in collective experience.
Niccolò Pietro Cangini’s essay explores the concept of imagination as it has been formulated in the classical German tradition, particularly in the comparison between Kant and Hegel. It is precisely imagination that constitutes the foundation on which the later Frühromantik will build not only the critique of Kantian thought but the centre of its own reflections. It is by working on the concept of the Sublime that Cangini elaborates the possibility of balancing philosophical rigour with ‘poetic unrest’, rules with freedom, measure with dismeasure in order to think of a pedagogy of the imagination.
If the previous essay introduced that momentum, within the history of philosophy, that arose and opposed Kantian rigour in order to progressively enhance imagination, it is in Serena Gregorio’s essay that it becomes possible to touch upon some of its outcomes. Working with an unprecedented interpretation on the concept of transcendence in Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time, as well as on the reading of some Kantian concepts in the Kantbuch, the author highlights the constitutive nature of imagination with respect to human reason. Despite the fact that Heidegger himself does not complete his construction in this sense, there seems to be a basis for this position to satisfy two aspects that remain problematic in the interpretation of the Heideggerian approach: perception and the relationship between time and self. This would also make it possible to account for a particularity of the relationship between the human being and the world: the human not only has a world, with its own perception, but is at the same time a creator of worlds through imagination and affectivity.
The turning point towards the intertwining of pedagogy and literature is Caterina Diotto’s essay. Through a distinction between an education of content or of form, the author proposes a mimetic, empathic and poetic path to outline the method of a possible pedagogy of the imagination. Defining imagination through the thought of Friedrich Schiller, as a space of play necessary to maintain harmony with the becoming of reality, the author identifies in Calvino’s Lightness a possible practice to educate imagination without predetermining its contents. Interweaving the thought of Walter Benjamin and Edmund Husserl with the philosophical narrative of Michael Ende’s The Neverending Story, Diotto draws a constellation between the experiences of reading a novel, time and memory that can educate the imagination without losing the balance between freedom and responsibility.
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To conclude the presentation of this collection, we would like to return to the root of what generated this project. Beyond the questions we have asked ourselves and posed about what constitutes a pedagogy of the imagination, why and how, the feeling that moved us and moved us to this research is the feeling of those who – as an (ill) omen from China goes – we ‘live in interesting times’. Times on which history textbooks will dwell on for a long time, times of crisis. Times in which political, social and cultural scenarios, as well as natural disasters, lead to the realisation that “the idea of culture transmitted to us by our society, an idea mostly aimed at creating a conceptual divorce between humanity and nature”, but also between sensibility and intellect, reality and idea, “is inadequate to deal with the problems of the present”3. Times in which we must return to imagination. Imagine panoramas, concepts, philosophies, practices, stories, visions, music. Imagining, in the conviction that making culture is still and always a survival strategy.
- “Andrà tutto bene” in italian, was a slogan that people (and especially children were made to) wrote on sheets with rainbows and hang on terraces and balconies to be seen by the streets. An italian version of “keep calm and carry on”. ↩︎
- The title of Greta Thunberg’s biographical and political first book. ↩︎
- Serenella Iovino, Ecologia letteraria. Una strategia di sopravvivenza, Edizioni Ambiente, Milano 2006, p. 14. ↩︎
Originally published as:
C. Diotto, M. Ophälders, Stratrategie di sopravvivenza. Riflessioni su questo millennio, in C. Diotto, M. Ophälders, Formare per trasformare. Per una pedagogia dell’immaginazione, Mimesis, Milano 2022 pp. 7-19.
Caterina Diotto 