Culture isn't enough

At twenty I used to read the opinion pieces published in Internazionale and fantasise that one day I too might translate and narrate the complexity of the world, give an Italian shape to things thought elsewhere, inhabit by trade that realm in which reading, writing and curiosity seem to transform themselves into a form of authority. No one in my family would ever have thought that desire could become a job. Not out of hostility toward books, nor out of any caricatured popular suspicion of culture, but for a much simpler reason: no one from my social background had ever made a living that way. Which is why, when cultural work still promised to be a social elevator, I believed in it.

At the moment when it seemed most credible — at least in retrospect, roughly between 1968 and the early nineties — cultural work carried with it a promise: the word, if used with skill, could redeem a life.

Not in the naïve sense that a novel, an article or a review would make everyone rich and happy, but because those who had no inherited wealth, no resounding surnames, no apartments handed down, no investment income, no family networks, could still imagine carving out a place in the world by learning to think, write, interpret and take a stand. Culture as a second baptism, in short; or, to put it less sacrilegiously, as a social elevator.

Many of us believed in that illusion. The children of working-class or lower-middle-class families believed in it — and some still do — seeing in universities, newspapers, publishing, criticism and literary festivals not merely a career path but a passport to social legitimacy. The children of the enlightened bourgeoisie believed in it too, naturally, but from a far more comfortable position: for them culture was often the natural extension of an environment already primed to receive them; for everyone else it looked more like a residence permit in a foreign country. You just had to learn the language, it seemed. You just had to read the right books, stop laughing at the wrong jokes, work out which names to drop and which to leave unspoken, which enthusiasms to suppress, which family tastes to bury beneath the carpet of primary socialisation. But in practice, it was never enough.

The hallucinatory part of that promise lay not in outright falsehood, but in its having worked just enough to make itself credible. Some people — myself included — did walk through the Stargate: studying, publishing, teaching, signing bylines, working in newsrooms, attending book launches, accumulating symbolic capital.

We were able to say "we" when speaking of a world that, without that brief historical window of openness, would probably have left us out in the cold. But that very passage made visible the repressed part of the story: culture did not abolish class — if anything, it reformulated it in a subtler grammar. That world no longer said "you're not one of us", or at least not directly: it communicated it through clothes, consumption, the relationship with money, ease in social settings, the naturalness with which some people occupy spaces while others ask permission even when no one asked it of them.

My latest ebook, La cultura che non posso permettermi (Einaudi I Quanti, 2025), grows directly out of the firsthand experience of that friction point between the promise of culture as emancipation and culture as an environment of social selection.

I had no interest in writing a screed against the rich reading the cool novel of the moment, nor a tearjerker autobiography of the poor kid shut out from the cocktail parties of Milan's publishing world; what I cared about was highlighting a fact that Italian public discourse still treats as an uncomfortable detail to be handled with care: the progressive cultural world — the very one that has built much of its identity on inclusion, sensitivity to minorities, and the critique of power — remains, in large part, a classist world.

Only its classism bears no resemblance to that of the old reactionary establishment: it has learned to speak a better language, to perform a more studied kindness, to recognise many forms of discrimination promptly — provided they don't require too long a discussion of how material resources are distributed. The blind spot, when all is said and done, is this: a sector that pays little, late, and poorly keeps describing itself as a space of freedom; a world accessible primarily to those who can afford years of precarity presents itself as open and meritocratic; a professional field built on reputation and personal connections imagines itself as the territory of pure talent. Those who have a family home to fall back on, parents who can cover the gaps, a name that already opens doors — or even just the financial security needed to avoid looking desperate — can afford to call vocation what for others is a daily risk.

Whoever needs an invoice paid — and paid within a reasonable timeframe — introduces into the drawing room a noise that makes one clutch the pearl necklace in dismay: need. For years, in my own incarnation of cultural work, need was the thing you didn't name. You could talk about desire, the imaginary, identity, language, conflict, deconstruction, marginality, care; but rent, contributions, salaries, and family resources — no, except in the fascinated tone of those who were better off than you. Money became vulgar — the dung of a demon who never read Carrère — precisely in the place where its presence decided who could pass the selection to join the club. Those who didn't have to think about it seemed freer, and therefore more interesting; those who had to think about it every day seemed weighed down, less elegant, less suited to the bohemian lightness of cultural conversation.

I was reminded of this on the occasions when, in my newsroom, we talked about Milan evenings costing «at least 80–90 euros» a head as if that were an almost physiological expense of social life, while I was doing the mental conversion into days of groceries, utility bills, train tickets, late payments. Or when the distinction ran through apparently incidental aspirational symbols — a pair of sneakers, a designer piece, a restaurant, even a particular food — that nonetheless composed a kind of map of belonging. My dream was far simpler: to be paid to understand things.

To have a desk, or even just a byline, from which I could give a piece of the world back to people who didn't know me; to translate an American longform, write a profile, feel legitimised to take part in a public conversation without having to pretend I'd been born into it. I didn't want to get rich through culture, and that alone says a great deal about the power of the hallucination: at bottom, I wanted culture to authorise me not to feel out of place.

Cultural precarity, of course, bears no resemblance to low-wage work. It would be false, and insufferable, to conflate the person waiting ninety days for a paid invoice with the delivery rider bringing food in the rain, the shop assistant standing for eight hours, the cleaning staff at the progressive university, or the underpaid cashier at the arthouse cinema. The point is precisely its specific ambiguity: cultural work can be badly paid and socially aspirational at the same time; it can exploit you precisely because you want to be admitted to the very place that excludes you. It is aspirational precarity, and for that reason harder to politicise.

It doesn't simply present you with economic coercion; it offers you a form of recognition, a small measure of prestige, the feeling of finally being «in the room». And so you end up accepting conditions that in any other sector would strike you as unacceptable, because the material harm is temporarily anaesthetised by the symbolic promise.

Today the cultural hallucination has cracked, because material reality has stopped serving as backdrop. Rents, the cost of living, the crisis in publishing, the transformation of journalism into a supply chain of underpaid content and of culture into a set of positional dynamics detached from reality — all of this has made the old Faustian bargain steadily less credible: suffer now, accumulate prestige, and sooner or later the industry will recognise you. In most cases it recognised very little, and paid even less. The result is that cultural work tends, with growing visibility, to reproduce the class it comes from: those who can stay, stay; those who cannot are expelled in silence, often convincing themselves they simply weren't good enough. Perhaps the most painful point is that this illusion was not merely professional — it took on the shape of a political defeat.

If for decades we thought of culture as the place where society comes to know itself, we ought to ask what kind of self-knowledge can be produced by an environment made up disproportionately of people who are economically protected, or of defectors forced to disown their origins in order to be admitted at all.

Over time, I came to realise that even my own gaze on contemporary culture wars — the specialisation that occupied the last few years of my editorial work — was shaped by these class short-circuits: the culture wars rapidly became conflicts between different factions of the educated middle class, fought out through vocabulary, posture, and symbolic allegiance, while the material dimensions, at least in mainstream media, remain in the background like an embarrassing presence. The working poor, the low-level clerk, the delivery rider, the shop assistant, the cleaner at the progressive university, the cashier at the arthouse cinema: all these figures enter the discourse almost always as objects of representation, and far more rarely as subjects authorised to represent themselves.

The distorted perception of cultural work, then, has nothing to do with having believed too much in books, in ideas, or in the possibility of changing the world through language. If anything, it has to do with having believed that access to language was enough to shift the existing balance of power, and that learning to speak like those who hold power meant drawing closer to power. And yet being invited to a book launch, publishing in a magazine, teaching on a course, or appearing at a festival were always processes complementary to — but distinct from — actually owning a substantial slice of the pie. In many cases they were temporary concessions, revocable, and above all conditional on not disturbing the order of the room too much.

Culture can still be a vehicle for emancipation, of course. But only when it stops behaving like the private property of the class that inherited it, and agrees to discuss its own material conditions of production. Otherwise it remains an exclusive club with a gentler vocabulary; a drawing room that has replaced the closed-off character of the learned aristocracy with more presentable formulas, but no less elitist ones. It's hard not to think that the point isn't whether cultural work has taken on the guise of a con: the question is how many of us, having understood as much, still go on wanting to be admitted to places that teach us to feel out of place.