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

 G.: Rodano has produced one of those words that sounds like a joke until one remembers that history often writes jokes in blood. S.: Catto-comunismo. G.: Yes. I should have found it merely comic when I was a scholar at Corpus, but one is no longer safely scholastic once one has a CUF lectureship and a class at Examinations Hall on Meaning to prepare. S.: A public man must choose his enigmas more carefully. G.: Precisely. Undergraduates may forgive obscurity if it arrives with Plato, but not if it comes disguised as postwar Italy. S.: Then begin with the obvious question. Why was it called catto-comunismo? G.: Because someone wanted the shock of conjunction. “Catto-” compresses cattolico into a half-prefix, and “comunismo” retains enough ideological gravity to make the collision audible. S.: So it is a word built to sound improbable. G.: Exactly. It is a label that performs the scandal it names. S.: Rather like “Anglo-Catholic” to some ears. G.: My mother would have thought that less scandalous and more merely correct. S.: But catto-comunismo does more than juxtapose two camps. G.: Much more. It says: here is a form of political self-understanding that refuses the usual administrative border between Catholic identity and communist social commitment. S.: And the abbreviation matters. G.: Yes. “Catto-” is already slightly journalistic, faintly satirical, almost streetwise. It is not the full “cattolico,” solemn and ecclesiastical. It is clipped, practical, polemical, fit for a newspaper, a pamphlet, or a police file. S.: So the very word is half nickname, half accusation. G.: Precisely. Which is why it survived. Nicknames with ideological utility are the cockroaches of public language. S.: You are in a grim mood. G.: 1947 encourages it. Europe is reclassifying its nouns and pretending it is only rebuilding its bridges. S.: Then what, philosophically, interests you in the term? G.: The way it compresses an unresolved question of universality. “Cattolico” means universal, or so it likes to remember; “comunismo” means common or communal under a very specific doctrine. Put together, they create a quarrel over what “all” and “common” are allowed to mean. S.: So the word itself stages a semantic dispute. G.: Exactly. It says: are we speaking of universality as church, or commonality as class, or some impossible mixture of the two? S.: Rodano thinks the mixture possible. G.: Or at least strategically necessary. Under fascism and after it, one does not always choose one’s political theology in a library. S.: Then catto-comunismo begins in practice before it becomes theory. G.: That is very Roman of it. In Rome the method often comes before the doctrine, because doctrine badly worded tends to end in questura. S.: Rodano would approve. G.: He would say community is not a ribbon for wrapping abstractions. It either survives clandestinity or it tears. S.: Then why not simply “Christian left”? G.: Because “Christian left” comes later and sounds cleaner. Catto-comunismo is dirtier, narrower, more tactical, more improvised, more wartime. S.: So it names a phase of conjunction before respectability. G.: Precisely. And it keeps the rough edge that later phrases smooth away. S.: You sound as if you prefer the rough edge. G.: As a philosopher, yes. Smooth labels usually conceal the best confusions. S.: Then tell me what your mother would have made of it. G.: She would have objected first to the theft of catholicity. For her, as for many High Church persons, “Catholic” was a disposition, not a postal address. S.: And certainly not a party card. G.: Exactly. When someone said “Rome,” she heard the old English complaint: you have taken an adjective of universality and put it in uniform. S.: That is very good. G.: Keep it if you like. It may yet do service in the Hall. S.: You are really thinking of the class on Meaning even now. G.: One thinks of meaning constantly once one must explain it publicly. It is like a cold; everything begins to relate to it. S.: Then catto-comunismo is a problem in meaning before it is a problem in politics. G.: In one very real sense, yes. It is a problem in what follows from attaching one loaded noun-fragment to another. What is implicated by the conjunction? What is denied? What is invited? What is shielded? S.: For example? G.: If one says “Catholic communist,” one invites the hearer to infer that Catholicism is not exhausted by ecclesiastical conservatism, and that communism is not exhausted by atheistic materialism. S.: A large inferential burden for one hyphen that is not quite there. G.: Quite. The best political labels do more by punctuation omitted than by manifest doctrine. S.: Then how does Rodano use immunity and community here? G.: Ah, that is where it becomes philosophically tolerable. Immunity is the temptation to remain safe, exempt, uncontaminated, privately intact. Community is the difficult discipline of exposure, obligation, shared risk. S.: So communism, at least in the better sense available to him, is anti-immunitary. G.: Yes. Or tries to be. The communist does not exist as a protected clubman but as one who has forfeited the luxury of exemption. S.: And Catholicism in its nobler register does something similar. G.: It can, yes, though institutions are ingenious at converting universal claims into gated enclosures. S.: Hence your mother’s irritation. G.: Exactly. She thought universal should mean universal, not “those with the right stamps.” S.: Then catto-comunismo is an attempt to rescue both words from their protected uses. G.: Very well put. It says that the universal must not become sectarian, and the common must not become merely bureaucratic. S.: And because it says this in Rome, it acquires a Roman flavour. G.: Yes. In Rome universality is never quite free of offices, and commonality is never quite free of streets. S.: So urbanity enters the term. G.: Entirely. Rodano’s language is shaped by anti-fascist clandestinity, Catholic association, communist contact, paper smuggled under the nose of police, and the habit of thinking in terms of document, movement, front, and address. S.: Which means catto-comunismo is not a lecture title but a survival term. G.: Precisely. It was minted in a pressure chamber, not in a philosophy faculty. S.: Still, you want to understand why it sounded funny at first. G.: Because to an Oxonian ear it resembles an undergraduate portmanteau, like “Aristo-Positivism” or “Neo-Teaism.” It has the same compressed absurdity. S.: Yet the absurdity is only local. G.: Exactly. Oxford hears the word and thinks paradox by laziness. Rome hears it and thinks coalition under danger. S.: Then why not use the paradox pedagogically in your class? G.: Because Examinations Hall is not the place for every private amusement. One must distinguish between donnish wit and public explanation. S.: A rare scruple. G.: A necessary one. Tutors may feed on cryptic jokes; classes require at least the appearance of daylight. S.: You are turning into a public intellectual. G.: Heaven forbid. I am only trying to survive the transition from tutorial flock to public classes without becoming my own bad anecdote. S.: Then tell me plainly: was catto-comunismo a slur, a badge, or a diagnosis? G.: All three in different mouths. That is one reason it prospered. Its ambiguity made it portable. S.: The best political terms are those whose users and enemies can both utter them. G.: Exactly. A usable slur often becomes a camp-flag by historical wear. S.: Then what would the Church hear in it? G.: A trespass. Or at least a danger that Catholic identity might be detached from anti-communist discipline. S.: And what would communists hear? G.: Depending on the communist, either an awkward but useful bridge, or a contamination, or a tactical recruit under incense. S.: You have been saving that line. G.: Only briefly. S.: Then where does meaning enter more technically? G.: In the distinction between what the term says and what its users mean by using it in a given context. The lexical content is absurdly thin. The conversational and political implicatures are enormous. S.: So catto-comunismo is a case where speaker-meaning outruns lexical meaning almost indecently. G.: Yes. One might say that the lexical vehicle exists chiefly to trigger the desired inferential work. S.: That sounds very like your own theory. G.: It would do, if one were reckless enough to bring Rome and Marxism to the Hall under the title Meaning. I may yet prefer less combustible examples. S.: Bandaged legs are safer than Christian communists. G.: Usually. Though undergraduates can do remarkable things with bandaged legs too. S.: Then why did the word persist after the immediate clandestine phase? G.: Because postwar Italy remained structurally perplexed. You still had Catholic social language, communist organisation, anti-fascist memory, democratic uncertainty, and a populace not inclined to keep its universals in tidy cabinets. S.: So the term named a real unresolved possibility. G.: Yes, or a real unresolved anxiety. Those are often the same thing politically. S.: Then your mother’s version of catholicity and Rodano’s version of community overlap oddly. G.: Quite oddly, yes. That is what amused me after speaking with Speranza. She would have hated the party form and approved the anti-immunitary moral impulse. S.: A useful family contradiction. G.: The best sort. Philosophers are often improved by mothers with bad ecclesiology and sound instincts. S.: You are being filial under cover of analysis. G.: Analysis must dine somewhere. S.: Then what of the Roman note about immunity and community? G.: It matters that in Rome one is always tempted by immunity in the bureaucratic and juridical sense—exemption, status, protection, privilege—while community remains the harder lived category. S.: So catto-comunismo opposes clerical immunity with political exposure. G.: In its better moments, yes. It says: stop trying to be saved from history by your institution; enter history with the risk of all. S.: That sounds almost Pauline. G.: Which is one reason it can be said in Rome without immediate collapse. S.: But not in Oxford. G.: In Oxford one can say almost anything provided one says it as if it belonged to logic. Theology only becomes tolerable once translated into grammar. S.: Then would you call catto-comunismo a contradiction? G.: Not formally. Socially, institutionally, rhetorically, deliciously perhaps. But not logically. A contradiction would be easier. S.: Because contradictions can be dismissed. G.: Exactly. Historical conjunctions must be interpreted. S.: Then it is more like one of your implicatures than one of Russell’s paradoxes. G.: Much more like an implicature. It depends on background assumptions, on who says it, under what pressure, to whom, and for what end. S.: So “catto-comunismo” uttered by Rodano in 1944 does not mean what “catto-comunismo” uttered by an Oxonian wag in 1947 would mean. G.: Precisely. Context is half the word. S.: That is another line for the Hall. G.: Too political perhaps. But yes, not untrue. S.: Then perhaps the reason it was called catto-comunismo is simply that no calmer phrase would have conveyed the practical scandal of the alliance. G.: Very nearly. It needed to sound like an impossible compound because the point was that the impossible was already happening. S.: Which is rather good. G.: History is sometimes a better stylist than philosophy. S.: But not usually drier. G.: Dryness remains our contribution. S.: Tell me then about the “catto-” element once more. Why not “catho-” or the full “cattolico-comunismo”? G.: Because compression breeds recognisability. “Catto-” is recognisably clipped Italian, half sardonic, half familiar. It brings the Church down from dogma into street idiom, which is already part of the move. S.: So the clipping performs de-sacralisation. G.: Very good. It makes Catholicism available as a socio-political component rather than an untouchable transcendental noun. S.: And “comunismo” is left whole because that was the more recognisable and force-bearing term. G.: Yes. One trims the universal church and leaves the doctrine of common ownership at full syllabic authority. That alone tells a story. S.: You really do think morphology reveals politics. G.: It often does, if only because political language is too busy to hide its tailoring. S.: Then is there an English analogue? G.: Not a good one. “High-Church socialism” lacks the danger. “Christian communism” sounds too literary. “Cath-comm” would be undergraduate slang and therefore perhaps not far wrong in spirit, but socially mislocated. S.: Then perhaps English has no exact equivalent because Oxford never had to hide quite so much in one clipped compound. G.: Nor had to say it under quite the same pressure. English political language prefers circumlocution when frightened. S.: Whereas Rome clipped and moved. G.: Exactly. S.: You said earlier that public classes require daylight. Could you say this in the Hall? G.: Not all of it. But one might say that certain political compounds are intelligible only as acts of speaker-meaning under historical duress, not as detachable lexical curiosities. S.: That sounds suitably academic. G.: It would do no harm to the younger minds. S.: And the older dons? G.: They would hear what they always hear: either too much politics or not enough grammar. S.: Then perhaps your true interest in catto-comunismo is methodological. G.: Yes. It is a splendid case of a term whose communicative force lies chiefly in the inferential environment it activates. The word is thin; the world around it is thick. S.: That too is good. G.: Keep that as well. S.: You are in a distributive mood. G.: That is because I am preparing for the Hall and must sound generous before the mob. S.: Hardly a mob. G.: Examinations Hall ennobles no one. S.: Then tell me one last thing. Why does the term still sound enigmatic to you now? G.: Because the conditions that made it natural in Rome are not ours. Without the anti-fascist Catholic underground, the peculiar Roman ecclesiastical atmosphere, the communist connection, and the pressure of clandestine action, the compound sounds merely puzzling. One must restore the world for the word to speak. S.: So the explanation of catto-comunismo is finally historical, not lexical. G.: Historical, pragmatic, institutional, and only lastly lexical. S.: Which is to say that meaning is where it always was: in use. G.: Under pressure, yes. S.: Dry enough? G.: Sufficiently Roman, with one eye on the Hall and the other on my mother’s prayer book.