H. P. GRICE E J. L. SPERANZA: LA CONVERSAZIONE -- I VERBALI: RUSCONI

 G.: Rusconi in 1962, then. One opens the thing and immediately smells Adorno. S.: Theodor or the Sicilian? G.: Both, inconveniently. Theodor at once, because anything called critica sociologica arrives with Frankfurt in its lapel. But also the Italian Adorno, the historian of philosophy, Sicilian by birth and Ligurian by stock, which is already a small seminar in European misplacement. S.: As indeed Theodor himself, by another route. G.: Precisely. One does not get much modern thought without railway timetables and family migrations. S.: Then the title itself is enough to set you off. G.: La critica sociologica di Theodor W. Adorno. Yes. It sounds almost too proper for what it contains. S.: And what does it contain, on your first sniff? G.: A young Italian discovering that critique need not merely discuss society but may itself become a social performance. S.: Which sounds ominously close to Gellner. G.: Exactly where one ought to become cautious. Gellner made a career of turning sociological criticism into a travelling parody of philosophy. S.: A parody of what you and I are doing at Oxford? G.: A travesty, if you please. He liked to tell one that a doctrine was really the expression of a social arrangement, and then behaved as if he had thereby done the philosophy. S.: Which is rather like saying that a don wears tweed and therefore refuting him. G.: Quite. Sociology can be wonderfully enlightening until it mistakes exposure for argument. S.: Then what might critica sociologica mean in Rusconi, if not merely that? G.: At its best, something more serious. Not that philosophy dissolves into social location, but that concepts are not born in vacuum flasks. S.: So critique would ask how forms of thought live in institutions, classes, habits, publics. G.: Yes. And how they return to shape them. That, at any rate, is the respectable version. S.: While the vulgar version says only: he says that because he belongs to them. G.: Exactly. The vulgar sociologist is a gossip with footnotes. S.: Which is a type not unknown at Oxford. G.: Nor excluded by the fellowship system. S.: Then Rusconi is reading Adorno against what Italian background? G.: Against the postwar appetite for theory, against Croce’s long shadow, against Marxist seriousness, against the German temptation as imported into Italian categories. S.: And you immediately divide the Adornos in your head. G.: I do. One cannot help it. There is Theodor, the dialectician with a piano in the next room, and the Italian Adorno, the historian of philosophy, whom Oxford forgets because Oxford forgets many useful Europeans if they do not arrive as Germans. S.: And the Sicilian-Ligurian fact pleases you. G.: Immensely. It is the sort of genealogy that saves one from national neatness. S.: As though philosophy itself were always a mixed stock. G.: It generally is. Purity in philosophy is often a clerical fantasy. S.: Then tell me about critica sociologica in a way that does not become Gellnerite. G.: The difference is between saying that thought has social conditions and saying that thought is nothing but a social symptom. S.: The first is true and the second lazy. G.: Admirably compressed. S.: Thank you. G.: Do not become sociological about your own success. S.: Never knowingly. But where does classical education come in? G.: Ah, there is the old educational itch. If poverty annuls education, then the temptation is to say: give the poor classics, and they may enter the elite through the proper gate. S.: A very Clifton solution. G.: Or a very old one. Greek and Latin as passports to establishment, with a side order of moral grammar. S.: You are not wholly convinced. G.: No. Because one must ask whether classical education admits one to the establishment or merely trains one to admire its furniture. S.: That is severe. G.: Accurate enough to be worth the severity. Classics can emancipate the mind, but they can also polish deference. S.: Then why did it work for some? G.: Because any difficult discipline can become a ladder, especially when scarce and prestigious. But ladders are not the same as justice. S.: And public schools knew the difference badly. G.: Public schools often knew very well what they were doing and simply preferred not to discuss it. S.: Clifton, for instance. G.: Clifton taught one Latin and hierarchy with equal fluency. S.: And a collegio in Italy? G.: Not the same creature at all. A collegio can be residential, disciplinary, clerical, civic, or merely educational according to century and city. One must not equate it too quickly with the English public school. S.: While a liceo is still less the same. G.: Quite. A liceo is a day school with a grand etymology and no chapel tyranny in the English sense. S.: Though you like that liceo makes the schoolboy sound peripatetic. G.: The etymology flatters the reality, as it often does in education. S.: So Bologna and Oxford enter here too. G.: Naturally. Bologna represents the chair, the faculty, the syllabus, the common examination, the public academic frame. Oxford represents tutorial intimacy, private terror, and institutional understatement. S.: That is not flattering to Oxford. G.: It is accurate in the way Oxford least enjoys. S.: Then Rusconi at Bologna or Turin is formed in a world unlike your own. G.: Very unlike. More public, more civic, more syllabus-driven, less dependent on the weekly essay and the private mortification of the tutee. S.: Yet you always insist that the tutorial had advantages. G.: Immense ones, when the tutor had a mind and the pupil had courage. But it also confined thought to a narrow staircase. S.: Godot again. G.: Godot always returns when stairs are involved. S.: Then is critica sociologica more likely in Bologna than Oxford? G.: As a genre, yes. Bologna and the Italian university more easily sustain thought about institutions because they themselves present themselves institutionally. Oxford prefers to pretend that intellect occurs in persons and colleges and somehow not in structures. S.: Which is itself a structure. G.: Naturally. The most effective institutions are often those that deny being institutional. S.: You are sounding dangerously Frankfurtian. G.: Only moderately. I do not smoke enough for the full effect. S.: Then what would Adorno, Theodor, think of public schools? G.: He would probably regard them as factories of cultivated obedience with musical side-effects. S.: And you? G.: I should say they are elaborate machines for making boys feel chosen and uneasy at once. S.: That sounds about right. G.: It often was. Which is why classical education there could function as both liberation and enclosure. S.: And poverty? G.: Poverty annuls education not only by deprivation of books or time, but by making the whole educational game seem written by others. S.: So merely handing Homer to the poor is not enough. G.: Certainly not. Homer without institutions of entry is tourism. S.: And institutions of entry are exactly what sociological critique notices. G.: Yes, when it is being intelligent. It asks not just what is taught, but under what conditions teaching becomes conversion into a public. S.: Then Rusconi, reading Adorno, is asking how critique addresses a social whole rather than merely a doctrine. G.: Precisely. Critique of society, not only critique within society. S.: Which explains why “critica sociologica” is not just a label for a method but a claim about scope. G.: Very good. It says that social arrangements are not mere background but object and medium of thought. S.: And Gellner’s mistake was to make that into a sort of intellectual mugging. G.: Excellent. He often treated philosophical positions as class accents wearing abstract nouns. S.: Which is amusing once and tiresome by lunch. G.: Exactly. One wants sociology to illuminate argument, not replace it with cleverness. S.: Then would you say Rusconi escapes that? G.: In embryo, yes. There is seriousness there, a sense that theory has social traction. He has not yet become a headline machine. S.: Unlike later public intellectuals. G.: Some of whom begin as readers and end as brands. S.: You say that as if Oxford had none. G.: Oxford specialises in unbranded brands. S.: Then why does the piece remind you so strongly of the historian Adorno as well? G.: Because the phrase “critica sociologica” can sound as though one were mapping an intellectual tradition rather than merely joining a German one. It awakens the old habit of arranging doctrines historically, which the Italian Adorno did so well. S.: So there is in you a resistance to treating Theodor as simply the only Adorno worth naming. G.: Entirely. Surnames should not be monopolies. S.: Like Roman gentes. G.: Precisely. One ought not permit a single glamorous bearer to annex the whole nomen. S.: Very Speranzian. G.: Civilisation has its uses. S.: Then let us return to schools. You contrasted collegio and liceo. Where does the public school sit? G.: In the strange English place where private institutions call themselves public and proceed to shape the governing class. S.: A sociological joke that wrote itself. G.: Yes. Foreigners find it funny. Englishmen call it tradition. S.: And Clifton gave you classics as establishment grammar. G.: It gave me them as bread and butter, punishment and privilege, social code and intellectual toy. S.: That sounds almost affectionate. G.: One may be exact without being ungrateful. But gratitude is not analysis. S.: No. Analysis would ask who could afford such affection. G.: Exactly. The scholarship boy and the well-born boy do not receive the same Latin from the same lesson. S.: Even if the declension is identical. G.: Especially then. Equal grammar can mask unequal social consequence. S.: Which is again the respectable core of sociological criticism. G.: Well seen. The point is not that nouns are class-biased by nature, but that access, confidence, accent, and institutional destiny inflect their use. S.: Then “classical education as route to the elite” is only partly true. G.: Yes. It is true enough to keep reformers hopeful and false enough to keep the elite comfortable. S.: Beautifully put. G.: Keep it and improve the malice. S.: Happily. Now, Oxford versus Bologna again. Which better resists sociological criticism? G.: Oxford, because it individualises and miniaturises everything. It turns structures into persons, doctrines into conversations, and power into manners. S.: Whereas Bologna leaves the structure visible. G.: More visible, yes. Chairs, faculties, curricula, public examinations, ministerial shadows, all the apparatus. S.: Then Oxford invites philosophy and hides sociology. G.: Exactly. Bologna invites sociology and threatens philosophy with public solemnity. S.: You make both sound defective. G.: They are both educational arrangements, which is another way of saying human compromises. S.: Then if Rusconi is reading Adorno in 1962, he is also reading Italy after fascism and after resistance. G.: Of course. One does not write “critica sociologica” in 1962 from nowhere. The whole Italian postwar question of society, ideology, nation, labour, state, and culture stands behind it. S.: Which later books will make explicit. G.: Yes. But the young piece already smells of the future. One can hear the seriousness about system, crisis, social totality, and public forms. S.: You like that seriousness. G.: I do, though I do not always like its wardrobe. S.: Frankfurt tailoring? G.: Precisely. One can be right in a tie too dark for daylight. S.: Then what would you tell a student reading this piece? G.: First, do not confuse sociological criticism with sociological reduction. Second, do not assume critique is profound merely because it names society. Third, notice how the educational and institutional question hovers behind the prose. S.: And fourth? G.: Read both Adornos. Civilisation owes that much to surnames. S.: Dry as ever. G.: I am trying to remain employable. S.: That is itself a sociological motive. G.: Exactly why one ought not mention it in print. S.: Then perhaps the deepest connection between Rusconi and your own Oxford reflections is this: both ask how forms of thought become possible in institutions that pretend to be neutral. G.: Very good indeed. The liceo, the collegio, the public school, the faculty, the tutorial, the lecture hall, the journal article, the review essay, all are forms of permitted thought before they become objects of it. S.: Which means that critique begins closer to the timetable than philosophers like to admit. G.: Often. The timetable is metaphysics in administrative dress. S.: That is excellent. G.: Keep it, but do not blame me when the administrators dislike it. S.: I should never dream of depriving you of your own consequences. G.: A dangerous principle. S.: A sociological one. G.: Heaven help us. S.: Then let us close with the two Adornos once more. G.: Very well. Theodor reminds us that critique must not flatter the world it inhabits. The Italian Adorno reminds us that traditions are more crowded than our textbooks allow. S.: And Rusconi in 1962 stands between them. G.: Yes. Young enough to be discovering a vocabulary, serious enough not yet to be performing one. S.: Which is perhaps the best moment in a critic. G.: Often is. Before the method becomes a calling card and after reading has begun to hurt. S.: And the punchline? G.: If critica sociologica means only that schools produce elites, Clifton knew it already; if it means asking what kind of society has to call a private school public, then one may finally be getting somewhere.