Tondelli and the 1980s: Four Keywords for a Reassessment

This article challenges the interpretation of the 1980s in Italy as a period in which a large section of the population and, especially, the younger generation, turned away from politics and a retreated into the private sphere after the revolutionary ebullience of the 1960s and 1970s. The discussion centres around the figure of Pier Vittorio Tondelli whose collection of short stories Altri libertini (1980) inaugurated a new understanding of the cultural role of literature, and a new relationship between authors and readers. While devoid of the ideological preoccupations that characterized the protest movement(s) of the previous decades, Tondelli’s work, it is argued, is anything but escapist and rather seeks to provide a sensitive and thoughtful account of the transformations taking place in Italian society and culture during a critical decade in which Italy, like other mature Western societies, was precipitously projected into the post-Fordist phase of contemporary capitalism. From this vantage point Tondelli’s opus demonstrate the constant and sustained engagement of its author with a disorienting new world in which the contradictions between personal and collective desires and aspirations are increasingly mobilized to fuel the “society of spectacle” Guy Debord had foreseen. It can hardly be questioned that Tondelli’s struggle raises ethical issues, but it is important to see that this ethical dimension is inherently connected with a political horizon, albeit a politics of desire that traditional Marxist approaches have some difficulty identifying as politics, let alone as revolutionary politics. In order to appreciate fully the significance of Tondelli’s cultural contribution and disentangle it from the debates that it originated, the author proposes a fresh approach. Mindful of Raymond Williams’s eminent example (Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, 1976), the analysis focuses on four keywords that can help us traverse Tondelli’s work and identify its strengths as well as some of its weaknesses. Affect, Commitment, Postmodernism, and Theory are intersecting vectors in a reassessment that through Tondelli reopens the discussion on an entire decade, and its aftermath