The essay begins in a Prague hotel, with a hairstyle that Pasolini believed had once spoken the language of dissent. From that small, unstable sign it follows his account of Italy’s transformation: the divorce referendum, the fate of dialect, the education supplied by objects, television’s authority, the fireflies, and the resistance of film images to political simplification. His dispute with Italo Calvino interrupts the temptation to mourn an older world without considering those who wanted to leave it. The final chapter turns to contemporary recommendation systems, with their quite different forms of visibility and selection.
The Atlas desk offers a second route: works, chronology, disciplinary connections, key ideas and concepts, a working instrument, questions and sources. The distinction is useful. The essay develops a reading; the desk allows the reader to test it and find a way into the primary works.
The main essay
1. The hair that ceased to dissent
In the lobby of a hotel in Prague, two young men crossed the room and sat down without saying a word. Their hair fell to their shoulders. Pier Paolo Pasolini, watching them, thought that their silence was anything but empty: the hair was already speaking. It announced a new allegiance, a refusal to resemble the adults who stared at them. Years later, in a newspaper article published on 7 January 1973, he returned to the encounter. By then he had changed his mind about what the hair was saying.
The sign had travelled. What had once distinguished dissenters was now familiar in advertising and fashionable dress. During a visit to Isfahan in 1972, Pasolini had seen another version of the transformation: a European-looking hairstyle could mark privilege and distance its wearer from poorer young men nearby. In his account, the sign of rebellion had become a sign of belonging to a new international consumer class. The judgment was harsh; so, at times, was the gaze that produced it. But the question behind the article has lost none of its difficulty. How does a way of appearing in the world acquire meaning, and who can change that meaning without our consent?
Pasolini followed such questions through dialects, streets, films, clothes, television and the things a child learns to handle. He came to believe that Italy was undergoing what he called an anthropological mutation: a change in the habits and expectations through which people recognised themselves and one another. His claim asks more of a reader than agreement or indignation. It asks us to look at the evidence he chose, the worlds he feared were disappearing, and the freedoms he sometimes overlooked as he mourned their disappearance.
Contro i capelli lunghi (“Against Long Hair”) appeared in the Corriere della Sera on 7 January 1973. Its scene in Prague is a small work of semiotics. Pasolini treats a hairstyle as a public utterance whose meaning depends on where it appears and who adopts it. Nothing in the hair itself guarantees rebellion. A sign can be repeated until it loses the edge that first made it visible.
The later scene in Isfahan tightens the argument and exposes its weakness. Pasolini notices two young men whose appearance separates them, in his reading, from the modest local dress around them. He interprets the style as the claim of a privileged class to modernity. Such signs certainly can function as badges of distinction; they can also be ambiguous. Pasolini's description tells us much about what he believed he saw, less about the private intentions of the men he watched. He sometimes crosses the gap between a perceptive reading of an appearance and a judgment on the entire person wearing it.
That gap matters. A social language is spoken by people who may misunderstand, resist or repurpose it. Pasolini's lasting question is how quickly a market can absorb a form of opposition and sell back its outward signs. His most precarious move is to assume that adopting the sign means surrendering the person.
2. The referendum and the country it revealed
On 12 May 1974 Italian voters rejected a proposal to repeal the law permitting divorce. The result was widely understood as evidence of changing attitudes towards family and religious authority. Pasolini welcomed the victory yet read the electorate's transformation with unease. Writing in the Corriere della Sera on 10 June, in an article titled Gli italiani non sono più quelli, subsequently collected as Studio sulla rivoluzione antropologica in Italia, he argued that political parties had failed to understand the scale of social change.
The point deserves to be held in its difficulty. A vote could record a genuine advance in civil freedom while also revealing, for Pasolini, that the cultural world of traditional Catholic Italy had been altered by forces no party controlled. Industrial growth, migration, advertising, television and the spread of consumer goods had not merely introduced new choices. They were helping to establish new standards of what a person should want and how a modern life should look. The institutions that claimed to speak for Italians were discovering that the people they represented had already changed.
He named this an anthropological mutation, deliberately borrowing the gravity of a term that suggests a change in human form. It is one of his most provocative formulations, and among the least susceptible to simple verification. A national society cannot be diagnosed by a handful of faces or a single referendum. Yet his attention moves towards a genuine historical problem: the distance between a political system's account of its citizens and the identities formed in everyday life, in the home, at work, before a television set, along a city street.
The distinction between development and progress becomes essential here. Economic expansion may produce opportunities while also destroying certain ways of living together. Pasolini insisted that those consequences had to be judged separately. His readers need to do the same with his own account: some changes expanded freedom, including freedom from inherited authority, and some forms of loss cannot be made visible by measuring prosperity alone.
3. Whose language survives?
For Pasolini, omologazione named a pressure towards likeness exerted by a national consumer culture. “Cultural homogenization” conveys much of its force in English, provided it is understood as a tendency rather than a completed fact. Regional differences did not simply vanish; they came under new conditions of prestige. Speech that had lived within a locality could be made to sound provincial beside the accent of television, the language of advertising, or the promise of work elsewhere.
Pasolini's concern for dialect was not an antiquarian attachment to picturesque words. He had written poetry in Friulian and made Roman slang central to novels and films. Different languages gave form to different worlds of intimacy, humour, insult, memory and social position. When a dialect declines, a literary archive may preserve its vocabulary while the daily situations in which its words were needed become harder to recover. Loss here involves relations, as well as sounds.
This concern complicates the eighth triad. Manzoni had laboured over the making of an intelligible common literary language; Collodi dramatized the encounters through which a child learns to live among others. Pasolini turns to the price that an increasingly common language and culture may extract from local difference. The three projects belong to different centuries and answer to different historical problems. Their tension is worth keeping: a shared world can enlarge participation and still impoverish the forms of expression by which people once recognised their neighbours.
4. What Gennariello learns from things
In 1975 Pasolini addressed a boy he called Gennariello. The boy is a literary addressee, not a documented pupil whose responses we can inspect. Pasolini imagined a lesson and then encountered a difficulty within it. He could challenge what parents, teachers or public figures said. He felt far less able to challenge what a young person had already learned from the material circumstances of growing up.
One passage of Gennariello moves through a journey to Yemen. Pasolini distinguishes what a writer might select in a landscape from what a film-maker must admit into the frame: old buildings alongside new concrete, electricity poles, plastic objects, imported goods. The scene refuses to remain a simple postcard of an untouched culture. Different historical worlds coexist in the same street, uneasily, in the form of things. He calls this the linguaggio pedagogico delle cose, the pedagogical language of things. At one point he insists that, in cinema, le cose restano cose — things remain things. Their material presence itself enters the lesson.
A thing does not lecture. Its position in ordinary life nevertheless makes some acts easy, others awkward, some aspirations plausible, others scarcely imaginable. A shop window teaches distinctions of taste and status. A school building arranges movement and obedience before a teacher speaks. Clothing signals whether a body belongs. Pasolini's claim derives its force from the fact that these lessons come with a powerful appearance of naturalness: the world seems simply to be as it is.
His account is also too absolute. People do reinterpret material signs and redesign the environments they inherit. Things are used differently across households and generations; objects can be shared, repaired, rejected, repurposed. The important difficulty is that such resistance begins within a world already equipped with meanings. Education reaches the body before the lesson can be named.
5. The television set in the room
Television was the most conspicuous transmitter of the new culture Pasolini distrusted. In Italy during the 1960s and early 1970s, national broadcasting carried recurring examples of speech, family life and social success into homes divided by class and region. It could teach a shared vocabulary and extend access to information. It could also elevate certain voices, bodies and aspirations above others, making their repetition feel like a standard of normal life.
Pasolini's attack on television was connected to his criticism of consumer power. A commercial offers an object, but it also stages a relationship between possession and happiness. The image of a desirable life can precede any explicit wish to buy the thing that supposedly completes it. In this sense, the broadcast participates in education, even when no one has described it as educational.
The case is historically particular. The concentrated national television system he knew cannot simply be mapped onto the diversified and personalised media environments that came later. Nor can the existence of a repeated image prove that viewers receive it uniformly. Pasolini was describing a powerful tendency through his experience as an artist and critic; he was not measuring audience behaviour in a representative study. His insight survives most clearly when it is joined to an examination of how a specific medium selects, repeats and rewards its models.
6. The fireflies and the continuity of power
On 1 February 1975 the Corriere della Sera published Il vuoto del potere in Italia, later known as the article of the fireflies. Pasolini recalled the disappearance of fireflies from countryside nights he remembered, associated it with pollution, and made the loss an emblem of Italy's transformation. The image performs several kinds of work. There is a remembered landscape, a claim about environmental damage, and a political argument about the gulf between the continuity of governing institutions and a radical change in the society they governed.
The political argument is sometimes lost when the article becomes a wistful meditation on vanished insects. Pasolini used the image to divide the history of Christian Democratic power into two phases and to claim that consumer modernity had broken older arrangements more thoroughly than the public language of politics could acknowledge. The fireflies were his way of naming an event that official chronology had failed to date.
The beauty of the image gives it unusual authority, and also creates a danger. A remembered darkness full of lights does not establish the full history of a country. Environmental change and a transformation of political culture need separate kinds of evidence. The essay remains compelling because it holds an observed loss close enough to the reader to make the historical claim disturbing. The claim must still be argued. This is the point at which the poet's power and the historian's obligation meet without cancelling one another.
7. The body that resists a diagnosis
The late journalism belongs beside the films. In Accattone (1961) the gestures and faces of Rome's outskirts enter the cinema with music and compositions borrowed from high art. In The Gospel According to St Matthew (1964) the sacred is encountered through actual landscapes and human faces rather than through an abstract religious illustration. Pasolini's cinema brings languages and registers into deliberate collision. His attachment to cultural difference was also a method of making images.
His final film, Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975), provides a terrible counterimage to that practice. Adapted from Sade and relocated to the Fascist republic of 1944–45, it shows bodies subjected to the arbitrary will of those who hold them captive. The extreme violence is inseparable from the film's staging of power, degradation and enforced sameness. Interpretations of its relation to consumerism vary, but the film's connection with Pasolini's late disillusionment is difficult to miss. His argument about bodies trained by authority has become a work in which the body is ruthlessly deprived of agency.
Here a division between art and public thought would be especially misleading. In the newspaper Pasolini risks reducing strangers to signs of historical transformation. In the cinema he confronts viewers with bodies that cannot be exhausted by the language of a political diagnosis. His work is strongest when the image remains troubling after the claim has been heard.
8. Calvino and the cost of nostalgia
Pasolini's defence of threatened popular cultures has an uncomfortable relationship with the lives he described. He knew poverty and social exclusion could be brutal, yet sometimes wrote as though older forms of deprivation preserved a human wholeness that prosperity destroyed. In July 1974 Italo Calvino challenged the nostalgia he perceived in this account. Pasolini replied by distinguishing the vanished peasant world he mourned from the provincial, authoritarian Italy that had governed it. It was a serious answer, but it could not settle whether his preferred image of the peasant world gave sufficient weight to its internal inequalities.
The dispute protects a necessary distinction. Cultural plurality is valuable; so are schooling, public health, mobility, legal rights and release from inherited domination. Modernisation can be criticised without treating hardship as virtue. A judgement about the decline of dialect or communal memory does not in itself decide whether the people who lived within those worlds would have chosen to stay there.
His rhetoric also pushed comparisons to their limit. The claim that consumer conformity exercised a power surpassing older authoritarian forms was a deliberately shocking political diagnosis, not an equivalence that historical analysis can simply accept. State violence, legal coercion, market incentives and cultural prestige act through different mechanisms. Pasolini often saw something real before he had described it proportionately. Readers have to preserve both the discovery and the disproportion.
There is, finally, a difficulty in his position as observer. The writer who mistrusts the signs of modern youth can still become too certain about what those signs mean. The ability of a young person to fashion a life out of borrowed models, to use media against their intended purpose or to invent a new language within an old device should not be dismissed because it spoils the image of cultural catastrophe. Pasolini's vigilance is most valuable when directed towards structures of power rather than towards the supposed moral deficiency of an entire generation.
9. The next image arrives unseen
In February 2024 the European Commission opened proceedings under the Digital Services Act to examine, among other issues, risks associated with TikTok's design and protection of minors. On 6 February 2026 it announced preliminary findings concerning addictive design, including infinite scrolling and personalised recommendations. On 6 November 2026, in a further preliminary assessment, the Commission addressed the “rabbit hole” effect of TikTok's “For You” feed: repeated recommendations of similar material, including potentially harmful content concerning mental health or body image. These are regulatory assessments at particular stages of a procedure, with rights of defence and further decisions to follow; they are not final judicial findings about the effects of a platform upon every user.
The design question is specific enough to be inspected. A recommendation system selects what appears next, and an interface can make continuing easier than stopping. Repeated exposure offers models of beauty, belonging, wealth, conflict and success; the sequence of those models is itself a form of arrangement. It can broaden access to unfamiliar voices as well as concentrate attention around content already rewarded by the system. Unlike the national television environment Pasolini knew, the stream is partly adapted to each user. Precisely because it feels personal, its selection can be less visible as a selection.
Pasolini would have recognised the importance of the objects and images through which a way of life is learned. His essays do not supply a theory of algorithmic recommendation, and the Commission's findings do not prove his account of Italian culture. They meet at a narrower difficulty: the environment through which we learn what is desirable can acquire influence before anyone has recognised it as an educator. The practical question is how a person might gain access to other models, discover why these were selected and change the conditions of attention rather than merely choose from the next things offered.
The Atlas desk
Pasolini at a glance
Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922–1975) was a poet, novelist, film-maker, critic and newspaper polemicist. His early writing in Friulian, the language of his mother's region, already challenged the assumption that literary life had to speak in the idiom of the cultural centre. After moving to Rome in 1950 he wrote about the lives and speech of people on the city's margins, notably in Ragazzi di vita (1955), before directing Accattone (1961) and Mamma Roma (1962). His cinema would move from Roman streets to religious narrative, myth and fierce political allegory.
Pasolini's late essays belong to this longer search. Scritti corsari (1975) gathers interventions on consumer society, cultural authority and political power. Lettere luterane (1976), assembled and published after his death, includes Gennariello, an unfinished series in which an imagined Neapolitan boy becomes the listener to a disquieting lesson about education. The newspaper polemicist and the poet worked on the same material: the gestures, bodies and languages of people living through historical change.
He distrusted the new Italy's confident vocabulary of development. He was also an uncompromising participant in modern cultural life, writing for a major newspaper and using cinema to dismantle familiar ways of seeing. The contradiction is productive. The pages of his newspaper polemics can seem almost claustrophobic; his films answer them with dialects, paintings, music and bodies that refuse to settle into one register.
A short orientation
Period: 1922–1975; an Italian writer and film-maker whose work spans the years of postwar reconstruction and mass consumption.
Literary beginnings: Friulian poetry, then novels that gave Roman street speech an extraordinary formal presence.
Artistic forms: poetry, fiction, cinema, essays and newspaper polemic, each making different demands on the evidence.
Central late question: how does a society change the gestures, desires and languages through which people understand their lives?
A necessary caution: his account is an artist’s and polemicist’s historical interpretation, sometimes lucid and sometimes disproportionate, rather than a sociological survey.
Why Pasolini matters
A change can take place in a country before its institutions discover how to describe it. Pasolini watched a new language of aspiration enter ordinary life through things easily mistaken for mere accessories: a hairstyle, an appliance, a broadcast, a way of speaking to a stranger. Those details were the material of his political thought.
His importance lies partly in the breadth of the evidence he was willing to consider. Fictional speech, bodily gesture, cinematic composition and the rhetoric of a newspaper article all bear on the question of who is permitted to appear modern. He also teaches suspicion of his own certainty. The most revealing passages often contain both a brilliant recognition of a social sign and an excessive confidence about the human being who carries it.
The human and political problem
A person begins to recognise what is desirable long before anyone asks for a conscious declaration of values. Children encounter objects arranged by adults; households receive repeated images of success; local speech acquires or loses prestige. Such encounters belong to ordinary life, although their cumulative force may be political.
The problem is what happens to freedom when the available forms of life have already been ranked. Pasolini saw the new consumer order as a source of uniformity, but a reader must also ask whether changes he lamented released people from coercive traditions. His work keeps both questions alive: who shapes the environment in which we learn to want, and who gets to judge the forms of life that environment displaces?
Life, work and the turning points of the inquiry
The first decisive turn is linguistic. In Poesie a Casarsa (1942), Friulian enters a literary project in which the supposedly peripheral language can carry emotional and formal complexity. Pasolini’s later defence of dialect therefore has a history in his own practice.
After moving to Rome in 1950 he encountered social worlds whose speech and movement he brought into Ragazzi di vita (1955). He later found in film a medium capable of setting real bodies, landscape, music and sacred or historical images beside one another. Accattone and Mamma Roma opened that trajectory; The Gospel According to St Matthew extended it into religious narrative without giving up concrete human faces.
The newspaper essays of the 1970s emerge from this artistic life, not from a late abandonment of it. In 1973 a hairstyle becomes a changing sign; in 1974 an electoral result prompts the diagnosis of anthropological mutation; in 1975 the fireflies and Gennariello become two very different ways of asking how material surroundings teach. The unfinished pedagogical project and the posthumous publication of Lettere luterane require care when reconstructing his final intellectual intentions.
Historical setting: the Italy that had already changed
The Italy of Pasolini’s later writing had been transformed by economic expansion, migration, new opportunities, national broadcasting and the circulation of consumer goods. The gains were substantial, but they were uneven, and a national image of progress could hide the differing social prices paid for it. Pasolini’s complaint was directed at the failure of inherited political languages to register these transformations.
The divorce referendum of 12 May 1974 exposes the dilemma. A vote could enlarge individual liberty; it could also disclose a distance between a society’s lived values and the categories used by its parties and cultural authorities. His June article treats this disjunction as a historical event whose force has not been recognised by those claiming to represent the country. The argument should be read within this moment, rather than retrofitted to every later account of media influence.
The disciplinary circles
Literature and the politics of language. Friulian verse and Roman slang make linguistic difference part of artistic form. Language carries social relations, not merely information.
Cinema and visual thought. The material presence of places and faces can complicate the sweeping claims of polemical prose. Pasolini’s films work through images as well as arguments.
Semiotics and everyday life. Hair, dress and consumer objects acquire meanings in use; the same sign can move from dissent to privilege or fashion.
Political history. The referendum and the fireflies articles read the persistence of institutions against a society whose practices have changed.
Education and material culture.Gennariello asks what the world teaches without the explicit authority of a teacher.
Media and cultural authority. National television provides the historically specific setting for Pasolini’s diagnosis of standardisation. The comparison with personal feeds belongs to this guide’s contemporary interpretation, with the media systems kept distinct.
The works: a map for reading
Begin with the signs.Contro i capelli lunghi (1973) is short, vivid and methodologically unstable in instructive ways. Read the Prague and Isfahan scenes together; ask when observation becomes a verdict.
Move to the national diagnosis.Gli italiani non sono più quelli (10 June 1974), collected under the heading Studio sulla rivoluzione antropologica in Italia, follows the divorce referendum and gives the idea of anthropological mutation a political occasion.
Read the image as history.Il vuoto del potere in Italia (1 February 1975) gives the fireflies their political meaning. The claim about governing power must not be dissolved into landscape nostalgia.
Ask what teaches.Gennariello, the unfinished series of 1975, places education amid the things and environments of ordinary life. It later appeared in Lettere luterane (1976), a posthumously assembled volume.
Keep the films beside the essays.Accattone (1961) and Mamma Roma (1962) put bodies and language into visual form; The Gospel According to St Matthew (1964) tests the meeting of the sacred and the concrete; Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975) confronts domination at its most violent.
Scritti corsari (1975) gathers late interventions, but collected titles and newspaper headlines do not always match. Poesie a Casarsa (1942) and Ragazzi di vita (1955) help explain where Pasolini’s later concern for endangered languages and ways of life began.
An original Cerchi instrument: the environment test
An environment can be read for the lessons it makes available before words are spoken. The question is practical: what is placed before someone repeatedly, what receives status, and how easily can an alternative be encountered? Pasolini’s own examples invite such an inquiry, though they cannot dictate its result for contemporary audiences.
A closer look · The pedagogy of things
An environment that teaches.
Two contexts, held apart: Pasolini’s historical diagnosis and this guide’s reading of the present. Follow a label to return to the full argument.
How to use this instrument. In the television state, identify the common national models and the households receiving them. In the platform state, ask who selects and repeats images, what evidence of that selection is visible, and where a reader could find materially different models. The comparison is an interpretive exercise by Cerchi; it does not establish that the two systems produce identical effects.
Key ideas
A sign has a history. A hairstyle can carry dissent in one setting and class distinction in another. Neither meaning belongs to the hair by nature.
A society can change before its official language does. The 1974 referendum is an occasion on which Pasolini sees political categories lagging behind lived transformation.
Economic development and human progress require separate judgments. New material opportunities may expand freedom while affecting local relations, languages and forms of life.
Language holds a social world. Dialect belongs to situations of address and recognition; preserving words does not automatically preserve those situations.
Things have a pedagogical presence. Objects and built spaces make some actions and expectations ordinary before a teacher intervenes.
A medium distributes models of normal life. Television’s recurring representations did more than convey information, though their effects cannot be inferred as uniform.
Images can open a claim without proving it. The fireflies make historical loss palpable; the account of political change still needs argument.
The observer is implicated. Pasolini’s defense of difference risks deciding too quickly what freedom should mean for other people.
Key concepts: distinctions that carry the argument
Anthropological mutation (mutazione antropologica): Pasolini’s strong name for changes in habits, speech and desire that he believed altered the lived form of Italian society. It is a polemical historical diagnosis, not a biological theory.
Cultural homogenization (omologazione): pressure towards shared models of aspiration and expression; not a claim that all differences literally disappear.
Pedagogical language of things (linguaggio pedagogico delle cose): the formative influence of material environments, explored in Gennariello.
Development and progress: a distinction between economic expansion and its wider human or cultural value.
Dialect: a living practice of speech bound to place and relation, rather than simply an inventory of nonstandard words.
Sign and interpretation: a social gesture or appearance may carry publicly recognised meanings without revealing the whole person who uses it.
Television’s centralisation: a feature of the Italian broadcasting conditions Pasolini knew, not a universal account of all media.
The fireflies: an image of remembered ecological change used to advance a separate political argument about historical rupture.
Cultural formation: this guide’s broader name for the processes through which norms, aspirations and identities become familiar, including processes that are not officially educational.
The constellation
What prepares this author. Pasolini’s own early literary experiments in Friulian and his later attention to Roman marginal life prepare the newspaper critic’s sensitivity to speech, gesture and place. The languages and bodies of his artistic work form the immediate prehistory of his late concepts.
Interlocutors and objections. Italo Calvino’s 1974 challenge is essential: how much of Pasolini’s defense of a lost peasant world depends on a privileged image of life that others experienced as deprivation? The dispute concerns both the legitimacy of remembering and the rights of those who lived inside what is remembered. Italian political institutions and the vocabulary of modernisation form another, less personal adversary in the late essays.
Later readers and inheritances. Film critics, scholars of literary language and historians of cultural change have different reasons to return to this work. The contradictory relation between visual art and political diagnosis gives the corpus a life beyond an agreed doctrine. A later thinker’s resemblance to Pasolini is not, on its own, evidence of influence.
Relations within Cerchi. The Manzoni–Collodi–Pasolini triad is an editorial comparison across different centuries, not a claim of direct conversation. Manzoni asks what permits common language and judgment; Collodi follows formation through lived consequence; Pasolini questions the environments that prepare desire before an explicit lesson. Their arguments create a tension between a shared world and the danger of enforced likeness.
The present. Algorithmic recommendations make the problem of selection newly concrete. The analogy is useful only when the centralised television system and a personalised digital stream remain historically distinguishable.
Legacy: an unsettled inheritance
Pasolini left no single theory capable of containing his poetry, cinema, fiction and journalism. Readers who inherit only the denunciation of consumer society lose the artist who made heterogeneous forms of life visible; those who inherit only the artist may evade the violence and overreach of his public claims.
His work continues to matter wherever language, bodies and material surroundings are treated as politically consequential. Its most exacting inheritance is a discipline of attention: to notice the forms in which historical change becomes ordinary, and to remain answerable for what the observer’s own desires make visible or invisible.
The contemporary wound: the conditions of attention
A young person opening a personalised feed encounters a succession of images already ordered by design choices and previous activity. That order is not entirely visible. The European Commission’s 2026 preliminary assessments of TikTok concern specific design and recommendation risks; the proceedings do not make every use of the service harmful or settle the question of causation for every viewer.
The problem worthy of inquiry is how much choice remains perceptible when the sequence of available alternatives has been arranged in advance. The question cannot be answered by importing Pasolini’s television diagnosis unchanged. It requires examining a particular platform, the kinds of content rewarded, how recommendations can be altered and whether users can reach other worlds of expression. This is the guide’s contemporary argument, not a forecast found in Pasolini’s essays.
Limits and contradictions
Pasolini can recognise cultural impoverishment and exaggerate the innocence of what is disappearing. His defence of popular worlds must be held beside poverty, patriarchal authority and the possibility that individuals themselves desired a different life. The dispute with Calvino makes that conflict visible without settling it by a simple verdict.
There is a second danger in treating people as fully legible signs of a historical process. The young men at Isfahan may have meanings inaccessible to the observer. The claim that consumer conformity surpassed older authoritarianism also risks flattening distinct modes of coercion. The force of his perception becomes more useful when joined to proportion, historical evidence and the freedom of those he describes.
Curiosities worth following
The Prague scene in Contro i capelli lunghi is dated by the 1973 article’s publication, but the opening episode itself is not securely dated in the article. Giving it a precise year would falsely sharpen the evidence.
The Isfahan episode is explicitly connected to a 1972 journey and concerns a style read as a sign of class privilege. The men’s private motives remain unknowable from the encounter.
The title Gli italiani non sono più quelli belongs to the newspaper publication; Studio sulla rivoluzione antropologica in Italia is the collected title. Both are needed for precise citation.
Gennariello is a literary listener. The pedagogical exchange is not the transcript of a real boy’s education.
A description of Yemen enters a discussion of film and material objects. Pasolini notices how a camera must register incompatible elements within the same frame.
The famous fireflies passage is part of an argument about the political history of Christian Democratic rule, not an environmental essay detached from institutions.
Lettere luterane appeared in 1976, after Pasolini’s death. Its date should not be used to suggest that he completed and published the volume in that form.
Common misreadings to avoid
“Pasolini predicted social media.” His historical subject was different. The present comparison belongs to readers who must verify its limits.
“Anthropological mutation” means a measurable transformation of every Italian. It is his historical and polemical formulation, not a population study.
“Cultural homogenization” means dialects or differences literally disappeared. It names a pressure under changing conditions of prestige.
“Long hair ceased to be rebellious for everyone.” Pasolini interpreted specific scenes; a sign’s meanings can remain plural.
“The fireflies prove his entire account of Italian politics.” A striking image can begin an argument without supplying all the evidence it needs.
“He wanted poverty to continue.” That reduces a serious, controversial defence of threatened cultures to a crude position. It is still necessary to examine how his nostalgia could neglect material freedoms.
“The films merely illustrate the essays.” They can complicate the conclusions of the prose through the bodies and images they place before us.
“A preliminary regulatory finding proves the platform harms every user.” It does not; the status and scope of each institutional assessment matter.
Working glossary
Term
Working meaning in this guide
Omologazione
Pressure towards cultural likeness through widely rewarded social models.
Mutazione antropologica
Pasolini’s name for a perceived alteration in forms of living, wanting and speaking.
Linguaggio pedagogico delle cose
The instruction carried by the material environment before formal explanation.
Consumer culture
Patterns of desire, prestige and belonging organised around goods and their social meanings.
Dissenting sign
A visible practice that can signify opposition, but whose meaning can change through circulation.
Dialect
Socially situated language whose value depends on the life around its speakers.
Cultural centralisation
Concentration of models of speech or success in widely shared media channels.
Political continuity
Persistence of parties or institutions despite changes in the society they claim to represent.
Fireflies
A literary and political image whose ecological and historical claims require different evidence.
Recommendation system
A technical process for selecting and ordering content; part of this guide’s contemporary application, not Pasolini’s own terminology.
“Rabbit hole” effect
The Commission’s 2026 description of risks from repetitive personalised recommendations; a procedural assessment at a preliminary stage.
Editorial triad
A deliberately constructed tension among separate authors, without implying a historical genealogy.
Reading paths
1 · From a hairstyle to a diagnosis. Begin with Contro i capelli lunghi, then read the essay on anthropological mutation. Track the movement from one observed sign to a claim about an entire society. Where does the evidence carry the argument, and where does Pasolini ask more of it?
2 · What a thing teaches. Read the passages from Gennariello concerning material environments and film. Return to the television section and the environment test. The object and the medium are not equivalent, but both make the arrangements of everyday life visible.
3 · A landscape and a political break. Read Il vuoto del potere in Italia, then the account of the divorce referendum. Ask what would count as historical proof of a rupture whose signs appear before its causes have been agreed.
4 · Poetry against the certainty of polemic. Move from Ragazzi di vita or Accattone to the newspaper essays, then to Salò. Consider what the films allow a viewer to encounter that a general political category might suppress.
5 · The quarrel over a lost world. Read the July 1974 exchange with Calvino. Hold the worth of cultural plurality beside the lives of those seeking rights, mobility and release from deprivation.
6 · Follow the triad. Read Manzoni and Collodi as separate guides before returning to Pasolini. The shared subject is formation; each author’s historical and literary conditions remain distinct.
Questions to orient a reading
What does Pasolini actually observe in the Prague and Isfahan scenes, and what does he infer?
Why could the 1974 referendum appear simultaneously as a civil gain and evidence of a broader social mutation?
What is lost when a dialect becomes less necessary in ordinary relationships?
Which material details in Gennariello carry the strongest account of informal education?
How does the fireflies image connect to an argument about political institutions?
Where does a Pasolini film resist the totalising language of his late journalism?
Which part of Calvino’s challenge remains unanswered?
What evidence would allow a defensible comparison between a common broadcast and a personalised stream?
Does a model of desire become less powerful when its selection is made visible?
Nodes to remember
A visible sign changes its meaning as it travels through social settings.
The 1974 referendum is a political event that Pasolini reads as evidence of a deeper transformation.
Omologazione concerns the pressure of shared prestige, not the complete extinction of differences.
The pedagogy of things begins in the lived arrangement of the material world.
Television is historically specific in Pasolini’s diagnosis; contemporary recommendation systems require separate examination.
The fireflies are a powerful image and a historically contestable argument.
His cinema cannot be reduced to the journalism: its formal arrangements complicate political claims.
Calvino’s objection protects the autonomy of people who may reject an older world that the observer wishes to preserve.
Cerchi’s present-day application asks who arranges the next possible object of attention.
Frequently asked questions
Who was Pier Paolo Pasolini?
Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922–1975) was an Italian poet, novelist, film-maker and critic. His work ranges from Friulian poetry and Roman marginal life to cinema and the newspaper interventions of the 1970s.
What does “anthropological mutation” mean in Pasolini?
It is his deliberately forceful name for the changes he believed consumer modernity brought to Italians’ speech, habits, bodies and aspirations. It should be read as a historical diagnosis, not as a biological or statistically demonstrated transformation.
What does omologazione mean?
Usually rendered here as “cultural homogenization”, it describes a tendency towards common models of lifestyle and value. It does not establish that all regional differences vanished.
What is the relationship between development and progress?
Pasolini wanted economic expansion to be judged separately from improvements in human life. Material gains may widen freedom while also altering languages, relationships and inherited ways of belonging.
Why did Pasolini write about long hair?
In a 7 January 1973 article, he used changing hairstyles to examine how a visible sign of dissent could acquire different social meanings. His reading is acute, but it cannot disclose every wearer’s motives.
Did the Prague encounter happen in 1973?
The article recounting it appeared in 1973. The opening recollection does not securely establish the precise date of the earlier encounter; the Isfahan episode is associated with 1972.
Why is the 1974 divorce referendum important in his thought?
The rejection of the attempt to repeal divorce legislation was an advance in civil freedom. Pasolini also regarded it as evidence that Italian social attitudes had changed more profoundly than established political languages acknowledged.
What does Pasolini mean by the “pedagogy of things”?
In Gennariello, he asks how objects, buildings, goods and everyday surroundings educate without delivering explicit instruction. Their habitual presence makes some expectations seem natural.
Who is Gennariello?
Gennariello is an imagined young addressee in Pasolini’s unfinished pedagogical writing of 1975. He is not a documented pupil whose answers can be treated as historical testimony.
Why did Pasolini care about dialects?
His work in Friulian and his rendering of Roman speech made him attentive to the relations sustained by local language. The loss at issue is social as well as lexical: the situations in which speakers use and recognise one another may change.
Did Pasolini think television educated people?
Yes, in a broad cultural sense. He argued that national broadcasting repeatedly presented standard models of speech, success and desire, though his polemical diagnosis was not a representative measurement of audience responses.
What is the “article of the fireflies”?
It is Il vuoto del potere in Italia, published on 1 February 1975. A remembered loss of fireflies becomes the image through which Pasolini argues for a rupture in Italian social and political history.
Were the fireflies literally all gone?
The essay is not sufficient ecological evidence for a complete disappearance. Its power comes from a remembered landscape used to frame a separate political argument.
How does Pasolini’s cinema relate to his political essays?
The films place bodily gesture, speech, music and visual form into combinations that can complicate the late polemics. Accattone, The Gospel According to St Matthew and Salò offer different forms of that encounter.
What is Salò about in this guide?
The guide considers its staging of domination and enforced degradation in the Fascist republic of 1944–45. Interpretations of the film’s relation to consumer society vary; it cannot be treated as a simple illustration of one thesis.
What did Italo Calvino object to?
In 1974 Calvino challenged the nostalgia he perceived in Pasolini’s image of the vanished peasant world. The dispute raises the question of whose view of an older life is being preserved and whose hardship it may conceal.
Was Pasolini opposed to all modernisation?
His rhetoric was often severe, but that summary is too coarse. His own work belonged to modern media and artistic experimentation; criticism of cultural loss must also be held beside gains in education, rights and material wellbeing.
Did Pasolini predict algorithms or TikTok?
No. He analysed the specific institutions and media of his own time. The comparison with modern recommendation systems is a contemporary interpretation made by this guide.
What did the European Commission report about TikTok in 2026?
On 6 February it announced preliminary findings concerning addictive design; on 6 November it issued further preliminary findings on the “rabbit hole” effect of the personalised “For You” feed. These procedural assessments do not prejudge a final outcome.
Why read Pasolini with Manzoni and Collodi?
In Cerchi’s eighth editorial triad, Manzoni examines the conditions of common judgment, Collodi education through experience, and Pasolini formation through the surrounding cultural environment. The relationship is interpretative, not a claim of direct historical influence.
Sources and editorial orientation
Primary works, with original publication context:
Poesie a Casarsa (1942); Ragazzi di vita (1955); Accattone (film, 1961); The Gospel According to St Matthew (film, 1964); Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (film, 1975).
“Contro i capelli lunghi”, Corriere della Sera, 7 January 1973, subsequently collected in Scritti corsari under a date-based heading concerning the speech of hair.
“Gli italiani non sono più quelli”, Corriere della Sera, 10 June 1974, subsequently collected as “Studio sulla rivoluzione antropologica in Italia”.
Open letter to Italo Calvino, Paese Sera, 8 July 1974, subsequently collected in Scritti corsari.
“Il vuoto del potere in Italia”, Corriere della Sera, 1 February 1975, subsequently collected as the article of the fireflies.
Scritti corsari (1975). Gennariello, newspaper pieces of 1975 included in the posthumously published Lettere luterane (1976); the intended pedagogical work remained unfinished.
Scholarship and further orientation: Walter Siti and Silvia De Laude (eds.), Saggi sulla politica e sulla società (Meridiani Mondadori, 1999); the Centro Studi Pier Paolo Pasolini of Casarsa; essays by Sam Rohdie and other film scholars on Pasolini's cinematic language; and contemporary scholarship on literary language, cultural homogenization and social change. Consult dated newspaper texts when interpreting the later collections: newspaper headlines and collected headings are not always identical.
Contemporary institutional points of reference: European Commission, opening of TikTok DSA proceedings (19 February 2024); preliminary findings on addictive design (6 February 2026); further preliminary findings concerning the “rabbit hole” effect of the “For You” feed (6 November 2026). These events are an application developed in the present and have no status as evidence of Pasolini's foresight. None is presented as a final judgment.
The distinction between dated newspaper pieces, collected versions and critical editions matters here: titles and order do not always coincide. The institutional sources cited for the contemporary case describe proceedings in the present and cannot serve as evidence for the interpretation of texts written fifty years earlier.
Who teaches a people — and which environments make certain forms of judgment, desire and belonging possible?
22 · Alessandro Manzoni — Conditions of judgment. Manzoni shows how fear and institutional weakness expose the fragility of collective judgment. English guide.
23 · Carlo Collodi — Formation through experience. Collodi shows that a person is trained by incentives, temptations, work, care, deception and repeated encounters with reality. English guide.
24 · Pier Paolo Pasolini — Formation through environment. Pasolini shows how economic and media environments can reshape norms and desires without presenting themselves as education. English guide.
An editorial comparison of distinct arguments, not a historical genealogy.
Citation: Alessandro Gentili, “Pier Paolo Pasolini: anthropological mutation and consumer culture”, Cerchi d’inchiostro / Circles of Ink, International guide 24, English edition. Canonical URL: https://alessandro-gentili.it/en/cerchi/guides/pier-paolo-pasolini-anthropological-mutation-consumer-culture/.
An editorial closing
The two young men in the Prague hotel could be watched by everyone in the room. The forces arranging the next image on a personal screen are harder to see. That difference belongs to our time, and it changes where the inquiry must begin.
