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Undecidability
Silvia Bottiroli
Multiplying the Visible
The word [i]undecidable[i] appears in [i]Six Memos for the Next Millennium[i] written by Italo Calvino in 1985 for his Charles Eliot Norton poetry lectures at Harvard University. In the last months of his life Calvino worked feverishly on these lectures, but died in the process. In the five memos he left behind, he did not only open up on values for a future millennium to come but also seemed to envision future as a darkness that withholds many forms of visibility within.
Calvino’s fourth memo,[1][i]Visibility[i], revolves around the capacity of literature to generate images and to create a kind of “mental cinema” where fantasies can flow continuously. Calvino focuses on the imagination as “the repertory of what is potential; what is hypothetical; what does not exist and has never existed; and perhaps will never exist but might have existed.”[2] The main concern that he brings forth lies within the relation between contemporary culture and imagination: the risk to definitely lose, in the overproduction of images, the power of bringing visions into focus with our eyes shut and in fact of “[i]thinking[i] in terms of images.”[3]
In the last pages of the lecture, he proposes a shift from understanding the fantastic world of the artist, not as indefinable, but as [i]undecidable[i]. With this word, Calvino means to define the coexistence and the relation, within any literary work, between three different dimensions. The first dimension is the artist’s imagination – a world of potentialities that no work will succeed in realizing. The second is the reality as we experience it by living. Finally, the third is the world of the actual work, made by the layers of signs that accumulate in it; compared to the first two worlds, it is “also infinite, but more easily controlled, less refractory to formulation.”[4]He calls the link between these three worlds “the undecidable, the paradox of an infinite whole that contains other infinite wholes.”[5]
For Calvino, artistic operations involve, by the means of the infinity of linguistic possibilities, the infinity of the artist’s imagination, and the infinity of contingencies. Therefore, “[the] attempts to escape the vortex of multiplicity are useless.”[6] In his fifth memo, he subsequently focuses on [i]multiplicity[i] as a way for literature to comprehend the complex nature of the world that for the author is a whole of wholes, where the acts of watching and knowing also intervene in the observed reality and alter it. Calvino is particularly fascinated by literary works that are built upon a combinatory logic or that are readable as different narratives. The lecture revolves around some novels that contain multiple worlds and make space for the readers’ imaginations. The common source to all these experiments seems to rely in the understanding of the contemporary novel “as an encyclopedia, as a method of knowledge, and, above all, as a network of connections between the events, the people, and the things of the world.”[7]
Therefore, let’s think visibility and multiplicity together, as: a multiplication of visibilities. They are traits specific to artistic production and define a context for the undecidable, or rather for undecidability, as the quality of being undecidable. Calvino seems to suggest that literature[8] can be particularly productive of futures, if it makes itself visible and multiple. Which is to say, if it doesn’t give up on involving radically different realities into its operation modes and doesn’t fade out from the scene of the ‘real’ world. We might stretch this line of thought a bit further and propose that art’s potentiality is that of multiplying the visible as an actual counterstrategy to the proliferation of images that surrounds us. A strategy that is capable of producing different conditions of visibility. Embracing what we are capable to see but also think and imagine, to fantasise and conceptualise; and bringing into existence different configurat
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1. Out of five, the sixth lecture was never written, as the author died suddenly and the series remained unfinished, and yet published with its original, and now misleading, title.
2. Italo Calvino, [i]Visibility, in Six Memos for the Next Millennium[i], Harvard University Press, Cambridge 1988, p. 91.
3. ibid, p. 92.
4. ibid, p. 97.
5. ibid.
6. ibid, p. 98.
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7. Italo Calvino, Multiplicity, [i]Six Memos for the Next Millennium[i], cit., p. 105.
8. Or ‘art’ which is the term I will use below for the rest of this essay.
9. Claire Bishop, [i]Artificial Hells. Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship[i], Verso, London-New York 2012, p. 33.
10. Respectively by the independent filmmaker Sarah Barberis and by the researcher Laura Gemini at the Urbino University.
11. An active group of spectators invited to exercise their agency over the artwork
12. See Valeria Graziano, [i]Prefigurative Practices: Raw Materials for a Political Positioning of Art, Leaving the Avant-garde[i], in Elke van Campenhout and Lilia Mestre (ed.), Turn, Turtle! Reenacting the Institute, Alexander Verlag, Berlin 2016, pp. 158-172.
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