Salaried Intellectuals: Fortini, Giudici, Ottieri, Volponi, and Buzzi at the Olivetti Company

Abstract

With the category of the “salaried intellectual,” this article intends to explore what it meant for twentieth-century Italian poets, novelists, and other artists to take up employment at the Olivetti company’s modern industrial factories. On the one hand, the economic and political resources of a successful capitalist enterprise seemed to offer the intellectual untold creative possibilities. But on the other hand, these resources seemed to place new limits on the exercise of critical thought, particularly for those intellectuals who aimed to challenge the rule of profit. The article theorizes the paradoxical figure of the salaried intellectual in European society, including their relation to previous analyses by Antonio Gramsci and Michel Foucault. It then offers a close reading of the critical theory and literature of five Olivetti employees: Franco Fortini, Giovanni Giudici, Ottiero Ottieri, Paolo Volponi and Giancarlo Buzzi.

Keywords:

• intellectuals
• industrial culture
• Olivetti
• Franco Fortini
• Giovanni Giudici
• Ottiero Ottieri
• Paolo Volponi
• Giancarlo Buzzi

Notes

Notes

1 Intellectuals at Pirelli included the poet Leonardo Sinisgalli, the industrial designer Bob Noorda and the graphic artist Albe Steiner. At ENI there were the poet Attilio Bertolucci and the architect Marcello Nizzoli. But Olivetti took the cake, filling whole departments with intellectuals like the literary critic Geno Pampaloni, the painter Giovanni Pintori and the industrial designer Xanti Schawinsky, among many others.

2 See, for example, the accounts in Berta 1980 (49-59) and Saibene 2017 (65–82).

3 The practice of using corporate profits to promote the arts was very uncommon in Italy. It was somewhat more common in the United States, where the main example was the Rockefeller Foundation, founded in 1913 by Standard Oil owner John D. Rockefeller.

4 Already in 1930, Siegfried Kracauer had used the language of salaries to explore the social role of white-collar masses in Weimar Germany. The salaried intellectual is a cultural counterpart to Kracauer’s (1998) “salaried masses,” appearing some decades later and relating to the German sociologist’s subjects in ways that will become clear in the writings of the Olivetti intellectuals.

5 For a more comprehensive treatment of Giudici’s work, including his poetry, see Simone Giorgino’s article “Un colletto bianco all’‘Inferno’: La poesia di Giudici e le utopie dell’‘Ingegner Adriano’” (2014).

6 One important but very brief overview is provided in Caesar 1997 (568–569).

7 Adriano Olivetti died of a brain hemorrhage on 27 February, 1960. By this date, Volponi had already been Director of Olivetti Social Services for four years. Memoriale was published two years later, in 1962.

8 That psychoanalysis failed to grasp collective problems was a common bias of Marxist intellectuals in postwar Italy. However, it should be pointed out that Freud explicitly recognized the importance of social relations in the constitution and development of the individual psyche, including pointed discussion of “caste” relations in his 1921 study Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (Freud 1955, 70). I am grateful to Alessandra Diazzi for help with these insights.

9 In 1955 Adriano Olivetti introduced Comunità di Fabbrica-Autonomia Aziendale, a labor union wing of his political organization, the Movimento Comunità. The union advocated collaboration between capital and labor and was constantly mocked by the CGIL as the ‘sindacato dei padroni.’

10 After Adriano Olivetti’s death in 1960, the company quickly ran into financial trouble. In 1964, it was taken over by a holding group made up of Roberto Olivetti, FIAT, Pirelli, Mediobanca and other Italian conglomerates, and the most promising part, the electronics division, was sold to General Electric. Carlo De Benedetti assumed the presidency in 1978 and expanded into the market for personal computers. But De Benedetti did little to return the fruits of production to the community in Ivrea, and his presidency ended in 1996, amid another financial crisis.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jim Carter

Jim Carter is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Romance Languages & Literatures at the University of Michigan and the 2018–2019 Marian and Andrew Heiskell Pre-Doctoral Rome Prize Fellow in Modern Italian Studies at the American Academy in Rome. Jim was trained in modern Italian cultural history at Hofstra University, New York University, and the University of Florence, and he is currently completing dissertation research on the philosophy of Adriano Olivetti. He has published an article about the transnational history of Italian design in Modern Italy (February 2018), and developed a course on “Made in Italy,” which he teaches at the University of Michigan. He is also preparing a co-edited volume on Italian industrial literature and film.