Passerini: Autobiography of a Generation

I have just finished Luisa Passerini‘s Autobiography of a Generation: Italy 1968, an extraordinary history of the half generation before me. Born in 59 I, like others who grew up in the late 70s, inherited, but didn’t participate in the political and cultural events of the 60s. We were the (half) generation after the movement of the counter culture. Reading Passerini has me thinking about what it was like following – how I benefited from the freedoms moved without experiencing what it was to be part of a movement. She follows those involved in 68 in Italy and the “diaspora” of directions they took from joining mainstream unions to the violence of terrorism. It seems the only real movements (as opposed to factions) to follow 68 were the feminist movement (and the US the gay/lesbian movement) – both movements that men could only support not move within.

Is it surprising that many of my generation of me would turn to computing? Computing had … still has, the transcendent rhetoric of a liberation movement along with the occaisional indulgence of drug culture. Computing offered a movement – a being part of something unique in history (or out of history). In addition it offered a certainty – things work or not, code runs or not – that the critical and ironic politics after 68 could not. Passerini comments on how many of the movers in 68 ended up in media criticism – their training in resisting traditional media and pamphleting prepared them to be critical and creative. I think a similar phenomenon happended over here – the experience of being pilloried in the press led many to become aware of mediation and to then become interested in the possibilities of computer mediation.

Some of the other themes of Autobiography of a Generation:

Passerini is interested in the subjective in history. How experience of history is different from person to person. How recounting memories is a continual negotiation with history. In particular she shows how the generation involved in the student movement of 68 dealt with the loss of such a passion afterwards. Imagine what it does to people to be involved in something so dramatic so young in life. There is no recovering the passion of that year. In this sense the book is about a generation that is continually involved in autobiography – trying to figure out how 68 continues in their often mundane lives. Most of us build up to autobiography at the end of our lives, for those involved in youth movements autobiography is their generation.

One of Passerini’s strategies is to recapture and psychoanalyze the personal tragectories, drawing common threads from them. In a reflective move, the book itself weaves her own history of those years with those of others on 68 and its aftermath. It is, for me, a very different way of writing history – to weave autobiography self-consciously into a work – and it works in this case (as it does in Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land.) It is a move of many of the popular computer histories – to talk about personal experience with computers, though it is rarely done with the self-consciousness and theoretical awareness of Passerini. Could this be a form we should explore?

A third strand to the book is a poetic recapitulation of the years of psychoanalysis while writing the book – a history of Passerini’s very personal dreams, love, and reconciliation with the past while writing this extraordinary book. Thus the book carries within it a dream of its generation in a neat hermeneutical circle.