Invited by Harvard University to hold the Charles Eliot Norton Poetry Lectures of 1985, the Italian novelist Italo Calvino performed a remarkable gesture: instead of confining himself to addressing either specific aspects of his own literary work or established categories and concepts of literary theory, he chose to identify and discuss six (seemingly idiosyncratic) “literary qualities or values.” To the extent moreover that Calvino elaborated these as truly literary qualities, the lectures’ Wirkungsgeschichte has also shown that their significance may extend far beyond the literary realm and be deployed in completely different discourses (cf. Lolli [2011] for the case of mathematics).

The wide-ranging scope of the six qualities (lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, multiplicity, consistency) comes as no surprise, if we take into account, on the one hand, Calvino’s understanding of literature as a cognitive (and not ‘simply’ aesthetic) adventure and, on the other, his characteristic ambition (and ability) to bridge the gap between literature and science, and to interweave the ideas of these “two cultures”. Indeed, in his view, “[s]cientific and poetic attitudes coincide: both are attitudes at the same time of inquiry and planning, of discovery and invention” (Calvino, 1995, 108). In their own way, the lectures thus also try to articulate a constructive answer to what more recently some have termed the “bifurcation of nature”—the problematic modern divide between social and natural sciences, culture and nature, human and non-human agency (Latour, 2008). 

This research workshop aims at resuming and continuing the Calvino gesture in a philosophical-educational key. The purpose is not merely to ‘apply’ Calvino’s tenets and intuitions to the educational field, or to comment on them through a pedagogical lens, but rather to develop an autonomous philosophical-educational reflection pivoting on the qualities/values identified by the Italian writer. In what sense, if any, could lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, multiplicity, and consistency (also) be considered educational qualities and values? Might they represent a useful compass to navigate certain contemporary educational scenarios? Can they help us to hone new conceptual vocabularies to resist the raging instrumentalization of education (and educational theory) and to find different—possibly more interesting and fruitful—ways of speaking about it (cf. Wortmann 2019)? In fact, Calvino may have partially invited such questions himself, when in 1985 he introduced the selected qualities/values as “six memos for the next millennium”: are they still “memoranda” (= something to be remembered and taken care of) now that education has already entered the third decade of the third millennium?

The proposed workshop is not understood as a way to make a case for the significance of literature for educational theory, even though Calvino’s lectures might certainly prove inspiring for such purposes, given both his superb mastery of world literature and the exquisite interpretive skills displayed in his analyses (see in this regard: Lezione invibili: Italo Calvino e l’educazione, a 2010 special issue of the Italian journal École). However, his lectures are more than pieces of literature or literary criticism; they are also—if not first and foremost—‘essays’ in the etymological, Montaignian sense of the word, experiments with and probes into our historical and existential situation (Halpin, 2015). Hence, our intention is to join Calvino in his experimental endeavour to (re)invent “concepts” which cross the boundaries of different epistemic domains and disciplines, and which, ultimately, may allow us to make sense anew of our present educational conditions, in view of its various pressing and emergent challenges. 

Against the backdrop outlined thus far, the proposed engagement with Calvino’s lectures can perhaps best be viewed as an exercise of/in thought. This phrase, originally introduced by Hannah Arendt, has been reinterpreted by Jan Masschelein (2011) to indicate a particular way of doing philosophy of education, reviving some of its ‘ascetic’ inspirations: “[in exercises of/in thought] we put ourselves to the test of our educational present. These exercises illuminate, try to see, try to attend our present, try the words and the verbs once more” (p. 361). Moreover, just as Masschelein emphasizes “the actuality of incidents” as the point of the departure for these exercises—“[t]o try the words and verbs again, we need to expose ourselves to concrete issues” (Ibid.)—we want to confront the aforementioned ‘abstract’ qualities from within the concrete actuality of contemporary education. At the same time, while Arendt is shown to perform her exercises as a non-debunking critique of more traditional concepts, our aim (in the vein of Hodgson, Vlieghe & Zamojski [2017]) is to operate a post-critical affirmation of the qualities ‘invented’ by Calvino, by recontextualizing them into our educational present. To do so, methodologically, the session’s exercises will be developed as a community of inquiry (Oliverio, 2017), c.q. a practice of collective study (Schildermans, 2021, 125sq.). After summarily presenting the premises and results of our own study of Calvino (on the basis of online reading groups currently taking place), the idea is to deploy these as starting-points for an actual workshop, that implicates the audience as ‘co-workers’ in a common exercise, whose results cannot be pre-determined. After all, if the new concepts and vocabularies we search for are to be more than passing fancy, the thought they reflect must also determine some kind of public ethos, a shared and ‘response-able’ practice in which thought puts itself to the test, engaging with an ever wider scope of experiences (Ibid., 85sq.). Practically, apart from re-reading parts of Calvino’s lectures, this will mean that we invite the audience to studious encounters with a wider array of (textual and other) materials related to Calvino’s qualities, in order to exercise with these in a philosophical-educational key. Classical group discussion will inevitably be part of this, yet will not necessarily be the privileged mode of exercise: in the experimental spirit of Calvino, other modalities of collective practice (e.g., involving writing, art, digital media) might be called for to guide our study-work.

What in our opinion recommends Calvino’s qualities/values as such an outstanding stimulus for the proposed kind of exercise in/of educational thought, is the fact that they cannot be pigeon-holed into any given or recognizable theoretical framework. Exercising oneself with them may thus offer the opportunity to explore what finding/inventing/elaborating new vocabularies (in educational theory) may be all about, and what specific “requirements and obligations” these practices may entail (Ibid., 52-55). Moreover, the conceptual precision which Calvino pursues—one that is arguably rigorous, but not in any strictly analytical style—can encourage an inquiry into what forms ‘rigour’ and ‘consistency’ can still have in (post-modern?) educational thought, both on a strictly speculative-conceptual and on a more methodological level. What might render educational theories and concepts both creative and precise? and what kind of ‘research rigour’ does this pre-suppose? It is perhaps the very fact that the style of thought in Calvino’s Memos is itself both so consistent and so difficult to categorize, which also leaves us to deal with them, not as a given framework that immediately strait-jackets our thought exercise, nor as a merely convenient pre-text, but as a genuine ‘colleague’ or co-reader of the educational pluriverse. The challenge of the workshop will hence be that of operating qua philosophers of education with his texts, in analogy with what Calvino himself tried to accomplish with an amazingly broad repertoire of literature, mythology and scientific learning.

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