Oct 23, 2026 · 16 min · 10 segments
A preview wherein I try to sort out how Italo Calvino would feel about literature-machines based on his amazing 1967 lecture “Cybernetics and Ghosts”…
In November of 1967, Italo Calvino delivered a lecture entitled Cybernetics and Ghosts.
Calvino starts his lecture all the way back at the dawn of what we might recognize as human language.
He imagines a band of people with a very limited vocabulary to describe the things in their immediate experience, the names for animals and wild roots and simple techniques, basic rules of survival and conduct.
In this context, he poses the storyteller as a kind of researcher, a pioneer, a surveyor of the outer bounds of reality that could be communicated.
The storyteller began to put forth words, not because he thought others might reply with other predictable words, but to test the extent to which words could fit with one another, could give birth to one another, in order to extract an explanation of the world from the thread of every possible spoken narrative, and from the arabesque that nouns and verbs, subjects and predicates performed as they unfolded from one another." And what these storytellers found was a pattern, deep and complicated and endlessly permutative, but a pattern nonetheless that could hardly vary from culture to culture any more than mathematics could.
This oral tradition of a narrative evolved into the written tradition, the literary tradition, and Calvino credits groups like the French structuralists and their writings in places like the avant-garde French magazine Telle Quelle, with kind of carrying on the project of those shamanic storytellers of old.
One of the things that was being discovered in the second half of the 20th century, according to Calvino, is that the world can be seen as discrete rather than continuous.
Reality, in the modernizing view, is more and more seen as objects and phenomena made up of smaller and smaller measurable parts.
Even a thought, once considered, quote, something fluid evoking linear images such as a flowing river or an unwinding thread, or else gaseous images such as a kind of vaporous cloud, we now tend to think of as a series of discontinued states, of combinations of impulses acting on a finite, though enormous, number of sensory and motor organs, end quote.
Calvino sees this perspectival trend in history, biology, everything, information theory writ large.
Calvino, in this lecture, thinks of it as a short hop from there to considering a sufficiently complex electronic brain to be capable of perhaps perfectly mimicking human mental processes.
The world, per Calvino, may very well best be understood mathematically, and mathematical complexity is best understood by electronic brains.
Language, per Calvino, is a system like any other, perhaps in the final analysis unintelligible or at least not fully excavatable by an individual human mind, but ultimately knowable with enough data and computing power.
He points to the work of people like Chomsky, who in Calvino's day was perhaps best known for charting out what he claimed to be a universal human grammar.
In November of 1967, Italo Calvino delivered a lecture entitled Cybernetics and Ghosts.
Calvino starts his lecture all the way back at the dawn of what we might recognize as human language.
He imagines a band of people with a very limited vocabulary to describe the things in their immediate experience, the names for animals and wild roots and simple techniques, basic rules of survival and conduct.
In this context, he poses the storyteller as a kind of researcher, a pioneer, a surveyor of the outer bounds of reality that could be communicated.
The storyteller began to put forth words, not because he thought others might reply with other predictable words, but to test the extent to which words could fit with one another, could give birth to one another, in order to extract an explanation of the world from the thread of every possible spoken narrative, and from the arabesque that nouns and verbs, subjects and predicates performed as they unfolded from one another." And what these storytellers found was a pattern, deep and complicated and endlessly permutative, but a pattern nonetheless that could hardly vary from culture to culture any more than mathematics could.
This oral tradition of a narrative evolved into the written tradition, the literary tradition, and Calvino credits groups like the French structuralists and their writings in places like the avant-garde French magazine Telle Quelle, with kind of carrying on the project of those shamanic storytellers of old.
One of the things that was being discovered in the second half of the 20th century, according to Calvino, is that the world can be seen as discrete rather than continuous.
Reality, in the modernizing view, is more and more seen as objects and phenomena made up of smaller and smaller measurable parts.
Even a thought, once considered, quote, something fluid evoking linear images such as a flowing river or an unwinding thread, or else gaseous images such as a kind of vaporous cloud, we now tend to think of as a series of discontinued states, of combinations of impulses acting on a finite, though enormous, number of sensory and motor organs, end quote.
Calvino sees this perspectival trend in history, biology, everything, information theory writ large.
Calvino, in this lecture, thinks of it as a short hop from there to considering a sufficiently complex electronic brain to be capable of perhaps perfectly mimicking human mental processes.
The world, per Calvino, may very well best be understood mathematically, and mathematical complexity is best understood by electronic brains.
Language, per Calvino, is a system like any other, perhaps in the final analysis unintelligible or at least not fully excavatable by an individual human mind, but ultimately knowable with enough data and computing power.
He points to the work of people like Chomsky, who in Calvino's day was perhaps best known for charting out what he claimed to be a universal human grammar.
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