Politics, Discourse, Empire: Framed Knowledge in Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities

Author(s): Robert Ryan

Source: Interdisciplinary Literary Studies , Vol. 18, No. 2 (2016), pp. 222-237
Published by: Penn State University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/intelitestud.18.2.0222

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• Politics, Discourse, Empire: Framed
Knowledge in Italo Calvino’s
Invisible Cities
robert ryan

abstract
Critical engagement with Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities (1972) is widespread.
However, much of the scholarship focuses on the text’s unstable position
between modern and postmodern forms. This article suggests that a politi-
cal reading is an equally productive—indeed, necessary—intervention in the
present scholarship. Treating the text as a schematic of empire and knowledge
production yields a deeper understanding of the specific articulations of power
constantly issued by the logic of sovereignty. By excavating the impulses of
domination implicit in empire building, this article suggests that Marco Polo’s
dialogues with the sovereign emperor Kublai Khan provide possibilities for
resistance to the structural domination that constitutes our most recent polit-
ical realities.

keywords: Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, politics, Giorgio Agamben, Michel

Foucault

If I tell you that the city toward which my journey tends is discontinu-
ous in space and time, now scattered, now more condensed, you must
not believe the search for it can stop
—italo calvino, invisible cities

interdisciplinary literary studies, Vol. 18, No. 2, 2016

Copyright © 2016 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA

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 framed knowledge in italo calvino’s invisible cities 223

With the advent of a global community increasingly dominated on the one

hand by the logic of expansion (territory, ideology, market), and on the
other by xenophobic isolationism (secure borders, exclusion of the Other,
Nationalist identitarian closure), questions of agency and identity address
every register of sociopolitical life. In turn, increasingly systematized—
though all the more reductive—negotiations of chaos and order precipitate
coercive modes of thought and articulations of power that demand crit-
ical attention. An interrogation of these new ways of thinking and being
becomes imperative when making interventions in thought—critical
thought—toward what Giorgio Agamben calls “[a] political life[:] . . . a life
directed toward the idea of happiness and cohesive with a form-of-life”
(Means Without End 7). For Agamben, form-of-life designates a life that
cannot ever be separated from its biological form (“naked life”); and naked
life constitutes a life reduced to a purely biological figure, a life that can
thus be killed with impunity. Agamben asserts that “political power as we
know it . . . always founds itself—in the last instance—on the separation of
a sphere of naked life from the context of the forms of life” (3). By formu-
lating a mode of thought that affirms form-of-life, Agamben provides an
alternative to that life always under the threat of sovereign domination. As
such, Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities serves as an occasion to think and bear
witness to the precarious logic of any system of thought and governance
founded on a sovereign authority complicit in power and domination.
Critical engagement with Invisible Cities is widespread, and often takes
the form of (at the very least acknowledging) a tendency to situate the book
in terms of either the modern, the postmodernism, or the murky inbe-
tweenness of the two. In her essay, Alessia Ricciardi undertakes a compar-
ative analysis, placing Invisible Cities in dialogue with Thomas Pynchon’s
Mason & Dixon, and in doing so, locates each novel within a larger con-
versation between Italian and American iterations of the postmodern. In a
similar vein, Carol P. James aligns the modern and the postmodern with the
two distinctive formal traits of the text: the italicized ­narrative-dialogues
between Marco Polo and Emperor Kublai Khan that “frame” the text,
and the serially numbered “invisible cities” Polo recounts. For James, the
­narrative-dialogues manifest themselves firmly in a modernist framework,
whereas the cities of Polo’s journals evade such ­structurality—­disrupting
structural modalities—and so require a postmodern interpretation.
Following James, Laurence Breiner offers a reading of the formal and
­textual methods of narrative “framing” Calvino employs, and thus iden-
tifies a perpetually precarious structure always at odds with itself. Each of

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224 robert ryan

these analyses offers productive and useful entry points for the novel, but
each underdetermines in its own way the absolute political potential of
Calvino’s work.
Ricciardi ultimately lauds Mason & Dixon as a fiercely political tract
recording the mapping of early America, while altogether dismissing
Calvino’s engagement with politics as “a literary diversion” (1066). Breiner
acknowledges politics only once in his essay, and relegates its functioning
within Invisible Cities to a footnote. While James’s analysis lends itself to
political questions, it betrays commitments to more ontological concerns.
But by ignoring, dismissing, or downplaying the political register under-
girding Invisible Cities, these critics ignore the specific and radical iterations
of resistance within the book’s pages. Indeed, the political cannot be denied
to the reader; in the various exchanges between Kahn and Polo, Calvino’s
novel imagines the disjointed and disconnected character of a supposedly
coherent and totalized political order, an order that seeks to control, and
thus render complete, a necessarily expansive and discontinuous terri-
tory. In order provoke disclosure of the devastating consequences of such
blind adherence to a closed authoritative system and its malignant deploy-
ment of power and knowledge, such a system must be rendered in its full
contingency.
The novel begins with what might be termed an “event”: an empire,
“which had seemed . . . the sum of all wonders,” reveals itself to be “an
endless, formless ruin” (Calvino, Invisible Cities 3). Emperor Kublai Khan
identifies in this event “a sense of emptiness . . . a dizziness” (12); he recog-
nizes his sovereign position as precarious, for he rules not over a cohesive
territory with clearly marked borders, but rather, an empire decentered,
“crushed by its own weight” (80). In this, the invisible cities that populate
Khan’s empire do not defer to his sovereignty. Instead, they are out-of-joint,
floating singularities in a structure that can no longer claim totality. With
his territory overextended, Khan’s sovereignty becomes, in the language of
Jacques Derrida, “not a fixed locus but a function” (353). Derrida too begins
with an “event,” where—similar to the Khan— thinking about structure and
signification in terms of balance, orientation, and order could not help but
move into the realm of contingency; where “the center is at the center of the
totality, and yet, since the center does not belong to the totality (is not part
of the totality), the totality [now] has its center elsewhere” (352). Calvino
and Derrida both engage this evental moment toward the possibilities for
thought once formerly unified systems of meaning have been rendered
inoperative.

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 framed knowledge in italo calvino’s invisible cities 225

Khan’s empire, a presumed totality, receives its orientation from a sov-

ereign power—central presence—that rules from beyond the totality itself;
Khan is external to the cities he seeks to possess. In Calvino’s language,
“the emperor . . . is a foreigner to each of his subjects, and only through
foreign eyes and ears could the empire manifest its existence to Kublai”
(21). As foreigner, Khan remains outside of his empire, and the anxious
moment when he recognizes this position utterly destabilizes his ability to
conceive of his empire as a whole. The “event” then constitutes a “desperate
moment” when, for Khan, “corruption’s gangrene has spread too far to be
healed by [his] scepter” (5). Khan’s mode of thinking about structure thus
passes from a unified totality into “an endless and formless ruin,” one that
cannot be unified by the scepter of a sovereign authority. This rethinking
demands that Khan not simply address the functioning of his kingdom—
trade routes, invasion, defense, diplomacy—but the manner of functioning
as well—the system of signification that grants him sovereignty. It is thus
fitting that Calvino describes Khan’s recognition in terms of “dizziness,” for
the emperor is in danger of falling from the vertiginous vaulted heights of
sovereignty into the fragmentary remains of a kingdom-no-more.
In his recognition of the dislocation of his privileged position, Khan
attempts to stabilize his empire by reclaiming, in radically different
terms, his position of metaphysical privilege. In the moment when the
force of his position as sovereign is decentered, Khan must recalculate
his deployment of power. We might take Derrida as defining the contours
of this scene: “This moment was that in which language invaded the uni-
versal problematic.” That in which, “in the absence of a center or origin,
everything became discourse” (353). In the event of a loss of sovereignty
as such, Khan sends Polo to collect and relay representations of life in
an empire “too large to ever be seen”—to produce a discourse of empire
and sovereignty, and so repossess his empire. Put another way, in work-
ing toward a concept of sovereignty not reliant on total geography, Khan
shifts his focus to the realm of total knowledge. Maintaining his adher-
ence to (what will be revealed as an illusory) metaphysical privilege, Khan
demands knowledge of his empire by way of a constant state of surveil-
lance, where nothing will escape his all penetrating eye. In doing so, he
enacts what Michel Foucault terms a “disciplinary gaze,” an apparatus of
power that confines and fixes a given population in closed, immutable
identities. Discipline marks the production of knowledge and the artic-
ulation of power as complicit and diffuse, and thus gathers and directs a
given population to productive, efficient, and predetermined ends. More

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226 robert ryan

importantly, discipline comprehends a population—here, a seizing or tak-

ing hold of—and thus knows them. Foucault characterizes this function of
discipline in terms of two distinct images:

At one extreme, the discipline-blockade, the enclosed institution,

established on the edges of society . . . arresting evil, breaking com-
munications, suspending time. At the other extreme, with panopti-
cism, is the discipline mechanism: a functional mechanism that must
improve the exercise of power by making it lighter, more rapid, more
effective, a design of subtle coercion for a society to come. (Discipline
and Punish 209)

Khan realizes that a rigid form of  brute force rule—the ­discipline-blockade—

will no longer consolidate his power and rearticulate his sovereignty; his
scepter will not heal the now compromised old-guard mechanisms of
power. In this, he must rearticulate his power through a disciplinary mech-
anism, not in visibly articulated physical presence, but in subtle modes of
observation—over-seeing—that prop up his sovereignty with an unyield-
ing panoptic gaze. In sending Polo to the periphery of the kingdom, Khan
attempts to gather, order, and make use of the knowledge that returns. He
constructs and asserts a new center predicated on relays of knowledge (and
their concomitant articulations of power), rather than the physical, terri-
torial unity focalized in the body of the king. This center in place, Khan
attempts an organization and consolidation of knowledge so as to confine
the potential of his empire to specific predetermined ends. This panoptic,
centered-circle distribution of knowledge helps contour the beginnings of
the discipline mechanism as:

[an] enclosed, segmented space, observed at every point, in which

the individuals are inserted in a fixed place . . . in which an uninter-
rupted work of writing links the centre and periphery, in which power
is exercised without division, according to a continuous hierarchical
figure, in which each individual is constantly located, examined and
distributed among living beings. (197)

Khan wishes, in Foucault’s language, to enclose his territory and segment it

accordingly—to locate each city and comprehend it as a part of his empire,
as having a given place within the totality. The dialogues Khan demands of
Polo might constitute such an act of location, examination, and distribution

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 framed knowledge in italo calvino’s invisible cities 227

if Polo’s voyages were ever translated into a satisfactory representation. But

Polo resists cogent and total representation, and Khan is forced to grope
at knowledge of his empire, knowledge that, in the last analysis, fails to
testify to any unified end. Thus, a sense of discursive ambiguity dominates
the dialogues. Polo refuses the condition of intelligibility in Khan’s “unin-
terrupted work of writing”; he refuses to be complicit in the sovereign’s
disciplinary scheme.
These disconnected dialogues that emerge between Khan and Polo
make clear the utter contingency of meaning—unknowability—in any
discursive or epistemological structure. In turn, their correspondence sug-
gests the failure to communicate with certainty as a productive site of dis-
course—that is, knowledge—production. First, there is utter disjuncture:
“Newly arrived and totally ignorant of the Levantine languages, Marco Polo
could express himself only with gestures, leaps, cries of wonder and of hor-
ror, animal barkings or hootings, or with objects he took from his knap-
sacks” (Cities 21). Calvino continues, and the disintegrating condition of
Khan’s power is brought thoroughly to the fore: “the Great Khan deciphered
the signs, but the connection between them and the places visited remained
uncertain” (22). Here, signs—gestures, leaps, cries, objects—appear as sta-
ble, but their function of signification is undercut by an uncertainty in
meaning. The comprehensive panoptic gaze Khan so desires is necessar-
ily disrupted by Polo’s unaccomodating narrative, which in turn provokes
oppositions and fissures between the two that force a constant reformula-
tion of systems of meaning.
This sense of disconnect comes immediately to the fore in Polo’s account
of the city of Diomera, where Polo’s description, already in utter abandon-
ment of Khan’s directive, hinges on an ambiguous referent: “Leaving there
and proceeding for three days toward the east” (7). “There,” in this case, is
left undefined. Diomira exists within the vague totality of Khan’s empire,
but cannot be fixed in place; and it is from this nonlocus of departure that
the remainder of cities take form. Like Diomira, the other cities of Khan’s
empire are found not in reference to the kingdom as a whole, nor to the
power the sovereign lords over them. Rather, they exist as singularities,
connected only the by relationships between one another. Khan’s sovereign
power is undercut by Polo’s narrative and its refusal to produce “useful”
knowledge of the empire; the cities, in the absence of the “central signified”
Khan represents, “[are] never absolutely present outside a system of differ-
ences” (Derrida 353). Polo takes these differences as an a priori condition
for any city’s identity; he renders cities not by way of distinct qualities, but

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228 robert ryan

rather by the relationships and distinctions between and within them. And
Polo’s rendering of Zaira makes this indissolubly clear:

I could tell you how many steps make up the streets rising like stair-
ways, and the degree of the arcades’ curves, and what kind of zinc
scales cover the roofs . . . but I already know this would be the same
as telling you nothing. The city does not consist of this, but of rela-
tionships between the measurements of its space and the events of its
past. (Calvino 10)

Zaira does not consist of measurable forms fixed in a structured temporality;

it consists of dynamic motion—the undefined, unquantifiable, and contin-
gent movement between that which only appears fixed in time and space.
Within this movement, even the fixed elements in the city are rendered
contingent upon the relationality between measurable forms and a nascent
becoming. In Calvino’s terms, this constitutes a relationality between

the height of a lamppost and the distance from the ground of a hanged
usurper’s swaying feet; the line strung from the lamppost to the railing
opposite and the festoons that decorate the course of the queen’s nup-
tial procession; the height of that railing and the leap of the adulterer
who climbed over it at dawn. (10; emphasis mine)

For Polo, the measurable elements of the city—the lamppost, the railing,
the festoons—only begin to take on meaning in the midst of movement—
the swaying feet of a hanged man, the queen’s nuptial procession, the leap
of the adulterer. This privilege of movement haunts the sovereign, for Khan
is attempting to possess his territories as a fixed unity, a static whole he can
comprehend.
Khan recognizes the condition of ambiguity that ceaselessly repeats—
Polo’s Bartlebian preference not to engage in the system given—and so
moves to assume a position of hierarchical privilege. In this, Khan restruc-
tures the dialogue, tethering it to a sphere of reference he can control: “‘From
now on I’ll describe the cities to you . . . in your journeys you will see if they
exist.’” Khan continues, “I have constructed in my mind a model city from
which all possible cities can be deduced . . . it contains everything accord-
ing to the norm” (69). The “norm” Khan puts forth constitutes a model
to which all possible cities will refer, a limiting and grounding function
that imposes a narcotic unity on the dynamic multiplicity of his crumbling

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 framed knowledge in italo calvino’s invisible cities 229

empire. We might here turn to Judith Butler to further make clear Khan’s
imperative. For Butler, norms are issued from within a “frame”—a delim-
iting context (a “taken-for-granted reality” [Frames of War 12]) that delin-
eates that which is recognizable as life and worthy as an object of political
thought and that which is excluded. Moreover, for frames to continually
function, and with the greatest efficiency, they must continually be brought
about and circulate throughout a population. Butler writes, “Subjects are
constituted through norms which, in their reiteration, produce and shift
the terms through which subjects are recognized” (3–4). Here, Khan’s
frame is circulated through Polo to address the entirety of the empire—a
disciplined frame circulated for “a society to come” (Foucault, Discipline
209). This disciplined frame severs Agamben’s formulation of form-of-life
from naked life, and allows for the domination and coercion of a subject’s
existential and political commitments. Iterating norms allows Khan to
repeatedly (provisionally) (re)inscribe frames through which “cities can be
deduced”—recognized—thought from within a frame of reference made
stable by a principle of normativity. Khan, then, “frames” his dialogues with
Polo in order to secure his empire as an intelligible whole. For—in Khan’s
logical schema—if Polo’s reports can allow for the sovereign to reappre-
hend and frame his empire in thought, then he can circulate that frame
throughout his empire, and thus perpetually reproduce his sovereignty. But
Polo pushes back, remains at the periphery, and through polyvalent sites of
discursive disconnectedness resists the panoptic gaze he is meant to enact.
In describing cities, Polo greets Khan’s rigid prompt with utter a-signifying
contingency: “There is little I can tell you about Aglaura beyond the things
its own inhabitants have always repeated” (67); in Baucis, “[the traveler]
cannot see the city and yet he has arrived” (77); “[the city of] Leonia refash-
ions itself everyday” (114). At every turn, communication thought explicit
is disrupted, and it is thus that the discourse between Khan and Polo itself
decenters.
The failure for Khan’s norm to recuperate Polo’s narrative causes the
emperor to again restructure—now, reframe—his dialogue in order to
better comprehend his empire. Rather than try to decipher Polo’s reports,
Khan reinitiates the dialogue with the aid of a chessboard—a constituted
structure made to guide thought along a predetermined path. Blindly reli-
ant on the structurality he has created, Khan comments, “If each city is like
a game of chess, the day when I have learned the rules, I shall finally possess
my empire” (121). This of course fails: such a confined structurality can-
not contain the entirety of knowledge regarding the empire. A chessboard

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230 robert ryan

contains an always-limited set of possibilities, it testifies to the ideal of

empire building—an ideal where each city and citizen would maintain a
prescribed function—but it fails to testify to the reality Polo ceaselessly
attempts to convey. If we take Khan’s chessboard as one of many discursive
frames, then the reiteration of these frames becomes “a constant delimita-
tion of new context, which means the ‘frame’ does not quite contain what
it conveys, but breaks apart every time it seeks to give definitive organi-
zation to its content” (Butler 10). Khan’s dialogic restructuring constitutes
this “constant delimitation of new context”: frames are constituted, break
apart, and reconstitute in the face of Polo’s ambiguous narrative. In such a
way, Polo’s evasive reportage pushes the structure to a liminal point where
it must disclose all it sought to conceal.

Knowledge of the empire was hidden in the pattern drawn by the

angular shifts of the knight, by the diagonal passages opened by the
bishop’s incursions, by the lumbering cautious tread of the king and
the humble pawn. . . . The Great Khan tried to concentrate on his
game: but now it was the game’s purpose that eluded him. . . . At
checkmate, beneath the foot of the king, knocked aside by the win-
ner’s hand, a black or a white square remains. (122–23)

The system itself falls into question, and fails to signify to Khan’s purpose.
The rigid structure of a chessboard—each piece with its designated func-
tion, each movement measured along uniform squares with a clearly
marked binary opposition of positions—fails to account for the true
form of Khan’s empire. As such, “the empire’s multiform treasures [are]
only illusory envelopes,” and the empire is “reduced to a square of planed
wood: nothingness” (123). The frame breaks; and the “taken-for-granted
reality is called into question, exposing the orchestrating designs of the
authority who sought to control the frame” (Butler 12). Polo’s account
again refuses to signify in any reliable and stable fashion. The pieces of
the game only hold meaning within the structure of the board. At the
end of the game, they are revealed as nothingness; only in relation to
one another do they gather a predicable identity. It is further impor-
tant to note, nothingness here does not constitute a nihilistic void but
rather constitutes an unconfined celebration of difference, difference that
cannot be fixed to any one stable referent, difference that exists in all
its dissonance and contradiction, unable to be apprehended, and simply
existing as such.

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 framed knowledge in italo calvino’s invisible cities 231

polo as contemporary; or, the ambiguities

The mode of thinking evinced by Marco Polo constitutes a possibility for

resistance from within structural mechanisms of domination by virtue
of its disruption of any categorical ontology or politics of identity. Polo,
in his errant travels and errant narrative, refuses the oppositional and
exclusionary character of prescriptive, framed discourse in favor of a
mode of thinking discontinuous in space and time—a critical position
denouncing the empire’s fictive boundary lines. Polo greets Khan’s ongo-
ing restructuring of dialogue by way of a mode of representation that
discloses only contingency and ambiguity—the spread of “corruption’s
gangrene” that so terrifies Khan. And when Polo discloses ambiguity
and contingency as a priori ontological conditions, the potential to think
difference positively becomes pronounced. The terms of representa-
tion thus shift from an either/or to a both/and. Rather than testify to
a complete empire as the sovereign wishes, Polo refuses the terms of
Khan’s discourse entirely—not in the form of a categorical rejection but
in the form of a critical interrogation always already questioning the
permanence of center. To identify in Khan and Polo the critical attitude
required to think the center as “center elsewhere”—to think contin-
gency with order, ambiguity with fixity— systems of order thought stable
must be called into question, and cohesive systems of meaning must be
thought at their limits.
The form of liminal thought required here finds expression in
Agamben’s concept of the “contemporary.” For Agamben, the contem-
porary is she who is able to achieve a critical distance from her “time”
or “epoch,” simultaneously embedded in and yet radically outside of the
ensemble of discourse that contours and restricts political life. In this
sense, contemporariness can be located at the limits of panopticism as that
which exposes the unstable and false metaphysical privilege of the panop-
tic eye. The contemporary, in Butler’s terms, would be that which “gnaws
at the norms of recognition,” and so calls their domination into question.
Indeed, the articulation of power brought to bear through constant surveil-
lance—a spacialized taxonomy of Being, violently cut from ambiguity and
chaos—necessarily breaks down when knowledge fails to signify within
the confines of a given structure. In Agamben’s words, “Those who are
truly contemporary, who truly belong to their time, are those who neither
perfectly coincide with it nor adjust themselves to its demands” (“What
Is the Contemporary?” 40). This figuration locates the contemporary at

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232 robert ryan

the limits of a time, on the precipice of a void, spilling partially over into
that which is yet to be. Agamben thus characterizes the contemporary in
terms of “disconnection” and “anachronism”: fully present only in utter
dys-chrony, where any central presence is relegated to the periphery. Here,
Foucault’s analysis of the legacy of the Enlightenment, as brought forth
in his formulation of a “limit-attitude,” informs and develops Agamben’s
work. Foucault asserts that “we have to move beyond the outside-inside
alternative; we have to be at the frontiers. Criticism indeed consists of
analyzing and reflecting upon limits” (“What Is Enlightenment?” 45). We
must do this, according to Foucault, “to transform the critique conducted
in the form of necessary limitation into a practical critique that takes the
form of a possible transgression” (45). Put another way, rather than think-
ing within prescribed limits of thought, we must think with and beyond
these limits—“the frontier”—and thus bear witness to that for which
structurality cannot account. This requires a mode of thought that rejects
oppositional alternatives and thinks both inside and outside as existing
together in difference.
Agamben makes clear this dislocation of binary logic in his invoca-
tion of Osip Mandelstam’s rendering of the passage from one epoch or age
to the next as the broken backbone inside a “century-beast.” For Agamben,
the contemporary must lock eyes with this century-beast and “weld with
his own blood the shattered backbone of time” (“Contemporary” 42).
Time, and the passage from one era to the next, is seen not as a linear
telos, but as a confluence of knowledge, connecting and disconnecting
at constant, allowing for a sort of discordant harmony to define (or fail
to define) any given moment. The contemporary thus constitutes a tenu-
ous bridge between an ever-growing past and a necessarily unknown and
unknowable future; the fracture of time becomes a “meeting place,” “an
encounter” (52). Put simply, what Agamben’s thematic rejects in oppo-
sition (either/or), it affirms in dialogue—both shattering and welding:
adherence through disjuncture. If the contemporary is able to be simulta-
neously embedded in and radically outside of his time—living along the
fractured spine of a given epoch—then he is able to resist—at the least,
critique—the hegemony of the frame, the all pervasive inscription of dis-
cipline upon his body.
Taking up and working through the affirmation of dialogue as an
ambiguous and obscured site of signification, Agamben and Calvino both
map a discontinuous, always experimental mode of thought able to engage
with disjoint, decentering, and dislocation in a productive way. Agamben

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 framed knowledge in italo calvino’s invisible cities 233

writes, “the contemporary is he who firmly holds his gaze on his own time
so as to perceive not its light, but rather its darkness” (“Contemporary” 55).
Here, the contemporary must not attempt to collect his age in terms of a
unified epiphanic illumination that will pervade and drive out all darkness.
Rather, he must attempt to think both the light and the dark; the contem-
porary is he “who is able to write by dipping his pen in the obscurity of
the present” (47). The contemporary makes obscurity productive, and this
obscurity grants her a freedom of thought to pursue the limits of struc-
tured accounts of Being and all that may exist beyond, not to render them
complete, but to recover, perceive, and celebrate the errancies that escape.
In this sense, the contemporary affirms Foucault’s limit-attitude. In a limi-
nal temporal space—the “frontier” of an era—the contemporary is able to
identify, analyze, and critique the limits put forth. Returning to Calvino,
this sense of liberated ambiguity—by way of a ceaseless questioning of that
which grants meaning—becomes apparent. In a meeting with the emperor,
Polo reports on his recent journey:

The empire is sick, and, what is worse, it is trying to become accus-

tomed to its sores. This is the aim of my explorations: examining the
traces of happiness still to be glimpsed, I gauge its short supply. If
you want to know how much darkness there is around you, you must
sharpen your eyes, peering at the faint lights in the distance.’ (59)

Here, Agamben’s metaphor is inverted, but the constituent meaning remains.

It is not a matter of perceiving either the light or the darkness; it is a matter
of becoming critically aware of their unceasing co-presence, a purportedly
oppositional binary that refuses resolution. As Polo peers into the darkness
and addresses himself directly to it, he “perceive[s], in the darkness of the
present, this light that strives to reach us but cannot” (“Contemporary” 57).
In Foucauldian terms, Polo enacts “a practical critique” of Khan’s suggested
discourse, and his resistance “takes the form of a possible transgression.”
For Foucault and Agamben both, resistance to mechanisms of discipline, to
frames that serve as limitations of thought, to a history of domination, lay
in a form of critical thought that refuses the dyadic structurality of inside/
outside, light/darkness, and rather persistently questions the limits of each.
The “faint lights in the distance” Polo attempts to perceive constitute that
time which cannot yet reach Khan’s empire, that darkness struggling to
become known. Instead of attempting to order the disjoint and discon-
nect into a harmonic resolution—each tone and overtone stacked neatly

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234 robert ryan

in its place—Polo celebrates and thinks with the disconnect, laying bare
the unknown and ambiguous conditions of Being. While he is always in
danger of being recuperated into Khan’s sovereign empire, he simultane-
ously tests the sovereign’s systematic discourse so as to illustrate its limits.
In this discursive mode, Polo is connected to the sovereign in dialogue,
but only by way of his radically disconnected cartography of cities never
collected in full, never charted by way of a fixed and central presence. In
this, Polo becomes a contemporary.
Polo’s contemporariness, by virtue of its radical departure from
Khan’s structural empire, disrupts Khan’s mode of thought, and exposes
that which the structure can no longer contain. Futilely, Khan enacts
yet another structural rearrangement, a reframing of dialogue. We are
told that “the Great Khan owns an atlas where all the cities of the empire
and the neighboring realms are drawn, building by building, street by
street” (Calvino 145). Khan’s atlas schematizes his empire, inscribing the
character of each city within the totality onto a page as a fixed rep-
resentation. He attempts to deploy his atlas as he did his chessboard
in order to give form to Polo’s errant narrative. Still, Khan struggles to
maintain sovereignty, pulled simultaneously by his fixed atlas and Polo’s
ambiguous narrative. In this, Polo’s stories remain; they only elucidate
and amplify the discord:

“I speak and speak,” Marco says, “but the listener retains only the
words he is expecting. The description of the world to which you lend
a benevolent ear is one thing; the description that will go the rounds
of the groups of stevedores and gondoliers on the street outside my
house the day of my return is another. . . . It is not the voice that com-
mands the story: it is the ear.” (145)

Khan’s immense structurality is met by Polo’s contemporary limit-atti-

tude. When Khan attempts to elicit a certain narrative, he does so with a
commanding ear, which calls for a limited and prescriptive interpretation
that would structure invisible cities into intelligible wholes. Polo recognizes
his words as unfixed and contingent signifiers that only hold within the
preordained structurality of Khan’s thought such that his narrative shifts
and reconstitutes meaning each time it is articulated; it is a dynamic, rather
than static, account. From within this form of dialogue, the atlas itself, as
systems of meaning before, refuses Khan’s sovereignty, and swells to impos-
sible size.

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 framed knowledge in italo calvino’s invisible cities 235

The atlas depicts cities which neither Marco nor the geographers
know exist or where they are. . . . The catalogue of forms is endless:
until every shape has found its city, new cities will continue to be
born. . . . In the last pages of the atlas there is an outpouring of net-
works without beginning or end. (137–39)

At its end, the atlas reveals its inability to contain the empire as a whole.
For everything it encloses in a fixed representation, something escapes:
an “outpouring” of networks that cannot be recuperated into any framed
identitarian logic of belonging. Thus the archive of cities remains incom-
plete, and Khan’s sovereignty is pit against a surplus of reference that never
achieves stable form.
As the atlas pours out beyond the excess of tangible knowledge regard-
ing the cities, it extends to the space of dreams, and contains “maps of the
promised lands visited in thought but not yet discovered or founded” (164).
Here, even the geographic trace of the cities is eviscerated. Khan, in his
persistent desire for static reference, becomes frustrated with the ambiguity
that has contaminated his empire—the destabilizing contingency that asks
questions of inarticulate structurality—and turns to dismissal and fear: “It
is all useless, if the last landing place can only be the infernal city” (164).
Polo’s response, taking Foucault’s limit-attitude in concert with Agamben’s
contemporary, suggests something of an ontological imperative:

The inferno of the living is not something that will be: if there is one,
it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that
we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering
it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a
part of it that you can longer see it. The second is risky and demands
constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who
and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them
endure, give them space. (165)

The “inferno” becomes an a priori ontological condition: a unified veil cast

over unresolved difference. In turn, Polo advances two pertinent orienta-
tions to the inferno reflective of the disparate modes of thought enacted
by him and Khan. The first can be thought in terms of stasis: submission
to the inferno, a becoming docile in the face of that which demands order.
The second, however, privileges motion, ambiguity, and critical contempo-
rariness: a vigilant limit-attitude that resists the subtle panoptic coercion

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236 robert ryan

of preordained structurality and activates difference: “who and what, in the

midst of the inferno, are not the inferno.” Polo is right to characterize the
latter approach as risky; it requires addressing questions at the limits of
acceptable thought, and resisting the anesthetized state of stasis so as to, in
Agamben’s language, “grasp our time in the form of a ‘too soon’ that is also
a ‘too late’; of an ‘already’ that is also a ‘not yet’” (“Contemporary” 47). Put
in Foucault’s terms, it requires “work on our limits, that is, a patient labor
giving form to our impatience for liberty” (“Enlightenment” 50).
Calvino’s text offers an image for thought all too resonant with current
political questions. With the ever-increasing concern for national secu-
rity—in terms of both territory and identity—the potential for Agamben’s
conception of political life becomes helplessly obscured. Where Khan
serves as a representative for concerns of total order, as evidenced in his
regimented and pointed dialogues, Polo offers a possibility for resistance,
unbeholden to coercive structural modes of being. In his enactment of a
contemporary limit-attitude, he is never fully recuperated into the logical
framework of sovereignty, and ceaselessly works to interrogate and critique
its hegemony over thought. Where Khan seeks the Truth—a cohesive and
fixed rendering of the empire over which he presides—Marco Polo seeks
a truth—one unbound from the transcendence of center—forever encir-
cling some form of truth that will speak to the relationality and contingency
of city and empire, subject and sovereign. Polo, in his contemporariness,
becomes the “specter that gnaws at the norms of recognition, an intensi-
fied figure vacillating as its inside and its outside” (Butler 12). As such, Polo
offers a mode of thought with the possibility of transgression at the fore.
Following Calvino’s rendering of the inferno, the success of any contempo-
rariness or limit-attitude will be bound up with the ability to activate the
obscurity, ambiguity, and contingency always-already concealed in a struc-
tured account of being. It is this ability that testifies to the nascent possibil-
ity for a political life as Agamben and, by extension, Butler, conveys it: a life
aimed toward happiness, a life recognizable as such, as inextricable from its
purely biological figure. A life that, in all its difference, has the potential to
be anything, so long as hegemonic mechanisms of discipline, framing, and
outright coercion are held at bay.

robert ryan is a PhD student in the department of English at University

of Illinois-Chicago. He holds a Master’s degree in English from Binghamton
University. He is the founding editor and editor-in-chief of Wreck Park: A
Journal of Interesting Fictions, Interested Criticism.

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 framed knowledge in italo calvino’s invisible cities 237

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