Documediality 2

Prof. Dr. Maurizio Ferraris (University of Turin), Dr. Alberto Romele (University of Porto)

Thirty years – a generation – have passed since Calvino’s death and his unfinished American Lectures. His keywords (Lightness, Quickness, Exactitude, Visibility, Multiplicity and "Consistency", the evocative but enigmatic word, as not accompanied by a text) speak of a world in which reality is constructed by thought and dissolves in virtuality. Calvino wrote at the dawn of postmodernism, while now its sun has set: construction has revealed its limits, and lightness, or liquidity, has turned out to be rather heavy indeed. What happened? Asking this question, and proposing six new keywords for our millennium (or, more likely, for the next thirty years), I believe is in line Calvino’s intention. Giving the posterity the possibility to re-read and integrate his work, indeed, he wrote: “none of the values I choose as a topic for my conferences claim to exclude the opposite value.”