Here is Veronesi on fighting back:

To amuse ourselves, Claudia and I played ‘What a pity!’ with the GPS. We had put in the school address as the destination then we’d systematically disobeyed the orders given by the female voice (cold, peremptory and pretty unsympathetic) that told us the shortest route. ‘Turn to the right NOW!’ said the voice. But I replied, ‘What a pity! That doesn’t suit,’ and I kept straight on. The GPS got confused. It started recalculating the route and Claudia laughed. Then once it had got things sorted out the female voice began again: ‘After 100 yards turn left.’ And I replied, ‘What a pity! That could be tricky.’ The voice was insistent: ‘Turn left NOW!’ And it was Claudia, whilst I turned instead to the right, who told the GPS, ‘What a pity! We’ve gone right.’
(Sandro Veronesi: Caos calmo)

‘So what’s happened to people? I would say that their sense of themselves as moral entities has fallen asleep and that television bears a great responsibility. [It’s] a Nirvana: the more Life disappoints it becomes like those prize competitions where if it goes well for you you don’t need effort or intelligence, just some stroke of luck, and off you go with a nice big pot of money.’
(Dario Fo: 85 anni, compleanno orribile)

‘… it’s a prison. But to get out of it you first have to find yourself in prison. It’s necessary that prison should contain and incarcerate virtual beings, since only because that’s what they are can they really find the capacity and really decide to escape.’
(Giorgio Cesarano: Manuale di sopravvivenza)

‘He indicated a little television on a shelf. He said, “I just need 30 seconds of advertising (any kind will do) to make me lose the will to write. The cynical and cowardly game that’s played upon the instincts of anyone who’s watching, the false and studied sentiments coming from murderers sitting at their agency drawing boards. The little smiling families out in their gardens used to peddle detergents to those who are prisoners of cities poisoned by the detergent industries. And they go to Ireland or into the Sahara to film cars, after cars have destroyed this country to the point where there isn’t even a corner where you can find a car that can drive along unimpeded.”’

‘Even I had to make an effort to keep on track. I tried to go very slowly. I checked up on him using the rear view mirror: he wasn’t sleeping. At one point he said to me, “One needn’t ever imagine anything in much detail, because the imagination ends up gobbling up the entire terrain upon which something might yet happen.”’

(Andrea De Carlo: Due di due)

‘The people have spoken and we don’t quite know what they’ve said.’
(The Guardian: ‘From Hung Parliament to Age of Uncertainty’)

And here is Romano Alquati (who died a bare few weeks ago) on the FIAT workers’ revolt of Piazza Statuta in Turin in 1962, looking at things from below:

‘Even though we had organized it we didn’t expect it.’
(Franco Berardi: ‘Romano Alquati è morto’)

The difference between these two quotations is important. Alquati’s irony is about the excess of achievement over anticipation and, indirectly, about openness: we advance into unanticipated, uncontrolled possibility. Milliband’s ruefulness is about insufficiency and about keeping control: I can’t quite hear what you’re saying is what he probably means; if we knew what you wanted we would do it, but as things stand we can’t.

‘I mean perhaps in the end you do manage to forget about the past; but then it’s the past that remembers you.’
(Francesca Marciano: Casa  rossa)

II

‘And meanwhile you were the only one condemned to know that in reality the facts of themselves do not explain a thing, that under their shiny membrane everything remains perpetually in need of being discovered, given a justification, connected…
[…]
‘…the history of As If … our life passes, in carrying on As If…’
(Carlo Fruttero & Franco Lucentini: La donna della domenica)

III

‘I remember days and gestures that go like the tracing out of a crack, they launch out randomly to work out a way of lasting…
[...]
‘We are fish upon the surface of the water.’
(Erri de Luca: Tre cavalli)

‘One doesn’t rage against the darkness but within it. The struggle is obscure and the person struggling lacks self knowledge and knowledge, above all, of the enemy… In the moment in which he fights man is sleeping. He actually lives the whole of his waking existence apparently at peace whilst in the heavy sleep that roots itself in him there continues always, echoing in the distance, the roar of battle.’
(Antonio Scurati: Il rumore sordo della battaglia) 

Here is Veronesi on much the same sort of thing:

‘Huge things happen in the world, terrible things, marvellous things, so close at hand that they mark our lives for ever. And yet, once they have passed, we become aware that they have merely brushed against us and we have to content ourselves with imagining them, as though, in fact, they hadn’t happened.’
(Sandro Veronesi: Gli sfiorati, my italics)

Now here is Scurati again, this time showing how technology intervenes between the past, the present and the future:

‘There remains the glimmer of an intelligence, ie mine, which isn’t entirely spent. An ironic intelligence which undergoes the fascination of reality only once this is frozen in some photographic image. A melancholy intelligence that’s seduced by the fascination of the present only once it appears in the form of a life anterior to this one. But in life as photographed this intelligence, having set off in search of the agony that only an unknown and unlived past can provide, ends up by flushing out the detail which renders vain any hope for a life to come and renders pointless any search.’
(Antonio Scurati: Il rumore sordo della battaglia) 

As in this description of a photograph of an anti Czarist demonstration:

‘The photo shows a dense crowd all packed together. Clearly it’s been taken from a position that’s deliberately higher up but not too distant from its subject. Probably the camera had been positioned on the balcony from which those demonstrating were expecting to hear at any moment what Lenin had to say. The particularly flattened perspective means that what’s shown is almost just the faces, whilst the foreshortening of the distance means that these faces, conscious of being portrayed, are looking fixedly at the lens. A multitude of turn of the century faces striking a pose. Faces that place their trust in the immortality conferred by the photographic image, in its prophetic capacity to hypothecate the future [...] Countenances and ways of looking that are the opposite of our fin-de-siècle ways of looking.’
(Antonio Scurati: Il rumore sordo della battaglia) 

And here finally is Antonelli Venditti on the ‘children of tomorrow’:

Don’t ask me too many questions
I wouldn’t know how to answer you
The veins run dry, and the memory’s stopped transmitting (x 6)

Father, what was this planet?
This was Earth
An open planet, always smiling (x 6)

This animal, Father, what is it?
This was a dog
And this, Father, what strange machine is this?
This was a man, a very strange machine, it never smiled  (x 3)

And us, where are we going?
Towards the Universe
And the images they’ve sent me, tell me: are they dead now?
Yes, dead, a million years ago
And this is only a shadow
Man has gone, he’s given up making errors
He’s gone away, there’s only us (x 7)

We’re perfect, we’re perfect human beings
We never play with the sun, and never weep, we never weep. (x 2)

(Antonello Venditti: Figli del domani)

‘When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said, “Let us pray.” We closed our eyes. When we opened them, we had the Bible and they had the land.’
(Steven Gish: Desmond Tutu: A Biography)

This sort of joke makes several thing explicit in a useful way. It’s clear, for example, that colonialism was really a form of theft, with the Church being fully complicit. And that the colonised for their part were naïve in allowing the swindle to happen. So there’s a critique here, arising out of indignation, that’s overt.

On the other hand, it’s equally clear that as an Anglican archbishop Tutu is part of the Church and its success is therefore his. So is he part of the problem? Although as an African he is a victim, what’s also strongly implied is that by stealing the land the colonising North may in fact have lost its soul whereas he and his compatriots are having their revenge: they have ‘colonised’ the Church. By wittily nesting the positive within the context of the negative Dr Tutu’s emotionally complex strategy allows the oppressed to become subjects again and thus (morally at least) to gain the upper hand.

*

And now here by contrast is Archbishop Rowan Williams making various interview points about the state of Britain’s finances. There has, apparently, been a bit of financial trouble up at St Chav’s. Several of the younger boys have lost their iPhones. The school tuck-shop, after a run in with what the school caretaker likes to call the school’s Collateralised Doughnut Obligations, has needed a sub from parents. In the meantime a number of pupils have made complaints that the Economics teacher keeps talking over their heads. They can’t understand a word of what he says. An air of unreality is hanging over St Chav’s…

Dr Williams dislikes unreality. What he wants is repentance good and strong:

‘There hasn’t been what I as a Christian would call repentance. We haven’t heard people say, “Well actually, you know, we got it wrong and the fundamental principle on which we worked was unreal, was empty. […] I’m talking about bankers but also about all of us. We should all, I think, look back and say, “Well we were hypnotised into that sense of unreality.”’
(Rowan Williams: Newsnight interview with Jeremy Paxman 15 September 2009))

Which is why there are now lines to be written. Why boys who lost their iPhones are writing, ‘I must look after my iPhone.’ Why boys who have taken iPhones are writing, ‘I must not steal people’s iPhones.’ Why Dr Williams himself is earnestly scribbling on the blackboard, ‘I must take playground duty much more seriously and look out for stolen iPhones.’ The school tuck-shop has given up CDOs. It now sells proper doughnuts filled with jam…

But alas the Economics master still seems to be in post. A horrid example of boffinry. An indefatigable presenter of unintelligible graphs who makes up strange equations and uses the school computer. In short, a nasty chap. This puts a damper on things. In the corridors boys keep finding their pockets empty and administering Chinese burns. Dr Williams has been getting quite upset. ‘There hasn’t been a feeling of closure about what happened last year,’ he declares at one point during Assembly. He detects ‘a quite strong sense of diffused resentment’  in and around the school. But fortunately he has a solution for this as well. We should all ignore the Economics master, who is nothing but a bully and a windbag, and start reading Keynes instead:

‘We felt intimidated by expertise [… Experts] convinced the rest of us because I think we’ve most of us grown up with the idea that economics is an exact science and that suggests that we haven’t actually read Keynes in the first place because Keynes’s stress on uncertainty as something utterly unavoidable in economic activity beyond a certain level, that again seems to have vanished.’
(Rowan Williams: Newsnight interview with Jeremy Paxman 15 September 2009))

*

The differences here are striking.

Firstly what Dr Williams appears to want is actually to shut down in the name of ‘closure’ the very sort of opposition (‘they’ versus ‘we’) which Dr Tutu seeks to redeem and then keep open. The key is positionality. Thus Dr Tutu’s joke is radically ambivalent. As the individual he is he straddles the division between two personal pronouns, between two separate actors. Each of the elements associating him with either ‘they’ or ‘we’ prompts an interpretation which disturbs interpretation of the other. But when, by contrast, Dr Williams refers to what ‘a Christian would call repentance’ he conflates four different things which differ morally as they do in terms of deixis: regret (‘What a pity about those crooked deals he made us enter into’), blame (‘What about those crooked deals you made us enter into’), contrition (‘I’m sorry about those crooked deals I made you enter into’) and forgiveness leading to closure (‘That’s OK’). He seems to find no moral inequivalence between, say, Bernard Madoff and one of Madoff’s clients. And, though he would hardly have meant it as such, by saying, in effect, ‘We’re all to blame and now I want the whole class to stay behind after school,’ he merely varies the thesis used by prejudiced judges down the ages that rapists’ victims were asking for it: ‘We girls should try to dress more discreetly.’

Secondly, whereas Dr Tutu’s ‘we’ is a pronoun which owns up (‘I am a member too’) what Dr Williams does is to manipulate to his own advantage the difference between the ‘we’ of individuation and the ‘we’ of collective belonging. Again positionality is the key. Whilst, for example, Dr Williams emphasises that ‘we’ are all collectively to blame, he nonetheless permits himself an individuating ‘we’ whenever it really matters. Thus when he declares that treating economics as science suggests that ‘we’ haven’t read Keynes (And where exactly is our essay on J M Keynes, Master Romer?’) he applies a stricture to others that he seems not to apply to himself. That’s dishonest.

Whereas Dr Tutu simplifies a complex history to bring out certain essentials, Dr Williams merely fudges. Thus he claims to want a closer relationship between financial products and the creation of socially desirable goods and services, which he terms ‘wealth as wellbeing’. But instead of addressing those who created dodgy products in the first place he blames economists, who are already one step removed.

*

There was, of course, an opportunity (ducked by Dr Williams) to consider things rather more fully. For a start, it simply isn’t the case that everyone in Britain had somehow been ‘hypnotised’ by the unrealities of an economics modelled on the sciences any more than Dr Tutu was literally present at the snatching away of land and handing out of bibles. Neither was a bargain freely entered into. Both were about fraud, and powerlessness, and loss. That would be one possible point of entry. But instead Dr Williams merely paraphrases Thatcher’s reference to people who:

‘live by illusions, the illusion that you can spend money you haven’t earned without eventually going bankrupt or falling into the hands of your creditors.’
(Margaret Thatcher: Speech to Conservative Party Conference, October 1978)

Whereas modernising capitalism captured past experience (the skills of the artisan) and absorbed them into mechanised production, postfordist capitalism seems to be capturing future experience (how the world may be interpreted and re-formed) partly through the mediations of ICT; partly through the substitution of personal knowledge by various kinds of expert system; partly through the privatisation of an intellectual commons as new sorts of property; partly through the privileging of rule based behaviours over individual good sense, and partly through the institution of immaterial labour, of an often precarious workforce of information providers and creators whose links with one another are increasingly virtual and transindividual and thus lack the intersubjectivity of communities, workplaces, what used to be called solidarity. This is the wider context in which the financial crisis appears to have begun. It’s one in which what Marx called general intellect, within which Virno includes ‘formal and informal knowledge, imagination, ethical tendencies, mentalities and language games’ is being steadily substituted by a technology which now (in)forms and creates us more and more rather than vice versa. And since ‘solidarity’ is now in pawn to multinationals, political elites, to the enactors of globalization, ‘we’ need to redeem it through a new sort of subjectivity; through constituting in ‘our’ behaviours a new social subject; through our anger, directed and direct.

So that would be another point of entry. To view the credit crunch not simplistically, as a single issue, but as a symptom of something wider, of which the crisis in Britain’s parliamentary system (MPs’ expense, distaste for the major parties) is another. To look towards the context and the cause. And with a different aim. Not to stop being ‘hypnotised’, supposedly, by money and/or clever economics but to attempt to recover ourselves: ‘Sikhalela izwe lethu (We cry for our land) / Elathathwa ngabamhlophe (That was taken by the white people’); we cry for that latest part of our humanity, of our subjectivity, that is being taken from us by another colonising process.

Thoreau’s view is of a truth that is covered over, masked with falsehood, and which (as with Frisch’s technology) we exploit without engaging with. He views it from above:

‘The very simplicity and nakedness of man’s life in the primitive ages imply this advantage, at least, that they left him still but a sojourner in nature. When he was refreshed with food and sleep, he contemplated his journey again. He dwelt, as it were, in a tent in this world, and was either threading the valleys, or crossing the plains, or climbing the mountain-tops. But lo! men have become the tools of their tools. The man who independently plucked the fruits when he was hungry is become a farmer; and he who stood under a tree for shelter, a housekeeper. We now no longer camp as for a night, but have settled down on earth and forgotten heaven. We have adopted Christianity merely as an improved method of agriculture. We have built for this world a family mansion, and for the next a family tomb. The best works of art are the expression of man’s struggle to free himself from this condition, but the effect of our art is merely to make this low state comfortable and that higher state to be forgotten. There is actually no place in this village for a work of fine art, if any had come down to us, to stand, for our lives, our houses and streets, furnish no proper pedestal for it. There is not a nail to hang a picture on, nor a shelf to receive the bust of a hero or a saint. When I consider how our houses are built and paid for, or not paid for, and their internal economy managed and sustained, I wonder that the floor does not give way under the visitor while he is admiring the gewgaws upon the mantelpiece, and let him through into the cellar, to some solid and honest though earthy foundation.’
(Thoreau: Walden)

*

‘Why do you live if you’re not happy?’
[…]
‘Everyone is constrained to create a fiction for themselves in order to carry on living. There are those who think about their families, those who think about work, or about money, or about sex. But they’re all illusions.’
(P V Tondelli: Rimini)

The important thing here is that Rimini is actually radically false, whether viewed by Bauer, the young journalist stationed there from outside, or from within, and even though the ‘real’ is thoroughly complicit with the false. Hence this about a homosexual relationship that is likewise radically subaltern in how it is expressed:

‘Leo felt then the entirety of his own life separated by an abyss from the great events of living and of dying. As if he had always lived in a zone that was separate from society. As if his doing badly in the world, or being happy, his wandering, all this had taken place on some stage. Now the portrayal was ending. Fathers and mothers, the Church, the State, the officials in charge of personal data were re-establishing their grip, consigning everything to the nullifying dust of the archives. Everything except the insignificant pain of some extraneous young man.
[...]
‘But Thomas was dying. At twenty five years. And he, Leo, who was only four years older, found himself the widower of a companion so that it was as though he had never had one and about him there existed not even a word in any human lexicon that could define the one who had been for him not a husband, not a wife, not a lover, not only a companion but the essential part of a new and mutual fate.’
(P V Tondelli: Camere separate)

UNOs appear in Wu Ming I’s identification of the New Italian Epic. A UNO is part of the ‘aberrant development’ of the latter, which:

‘…at times abandons the orbit of the novel and enters the atmosphere from unpredictable directions. ‘What’s that? Is it a bird? No, it’s a plane. No, wait a moment. It’s Superman!’ Absolutely not. It’s an Unidentified Narrative Object.

‘Fiction and non fiction, prose and poetry, diary and investigation, literature and science, mythology and comedy. In the last 15 years many Italian authors have written books which cannot be labelled or pigeon holed in any way because they contain almost everything […] It’s not just a matter of ‘intra-literary’ hybridisation, within the genres of which literature is made up but rather the utilization of whatever will serve its purpose.’
(Wu Ming I: New Italian Epic 2.0, 2008)

The inside flap of the 1965 edition of Calvino’s Racconti: hints at something similar. On the one hand, La nuvola di smog is ‘a short story tempted continually to turn into something different: either a sociological essay or else a private diary’. On the other, these temptations are regularly subverted by Calvino; this allows the text ‘to remain suspended within the environment that suits him best, between symbolic transfiguration, topicality drawn from what is true, bursts of humour and prose poetry.’

So this then is a precursor.

*

Another way to look not only at La nuvola but also at La formica argentina (its predecessor and not quite identical twin) is through the lens of anthropocentrism and at what the alternative to that might be.

‘Our society lives after the end of nature,’ according to Anthony Giddens. Along with Fukuyama he seems excited by the ending of some war. Between Man and Nature in this case. Apparently Man has won.

The ending of Kaputt involves a struggle against flies:

‘Oh here in Naples too we’ve struggled against the flies. Actually we’ve conducted an absolute war against the flies. For three years we have had a war against the flies.

‘In which case how come there are quite so many flies here in Naples?

‘Well that’s the thing. The flies won.’

(Curzio Malaparte: Kaputt)

Like Malaparte’s flies, Calvino’s ants and his smog ought to be in the background, mere phenomena, offering a quasi natural setting of some kind. But their activities, albeit compromised or potentiated by man, are what motivates the texts.

Wu Ming I comments as follows:

‘[A]nthropocentrism is alive and well, and it fights against us. Scientific discoveries, objective proofs, the crisis of the subject, the collapse of old ideologies… Nothing seems to have removed from humankind the absurd idea that we are at the centre of the universe.

[…]

‘Which is why the issue of looking at things obliquely is so vital and why (as Calvino had sensed) the literary ‘surrendering’ of viewpoints that are exterior to the human, that are non human, which can’t be identified with, will become even more so.’
(Wu Ming I: New Italian Epic 2.0, 2008)

*

Of course it’s true that Calvino’s protagonists are by no means always human. In, for example, Marcovaldo (II giardino dei gatti ostinati) or Cosmicomiche (notably Qfwfq). But this isn’t really the point. More relevant is his obliqueness. Hence this observation on the voice of the narrator in II visconte dimezzato:

‘[It’s] not the voice of a protagonist per se but rather that of a lateral or secondary character who has the role of narrator.’
(Gregory L. Lucente: An Interview with Italo Calvino; his translation, my italics)

Rather than a battle, some elemental struggle for supremacy or in the service of one viewpoint that’s supposedly more powerful than the others, there’s a rendering up to openness, a ‘surrender’.

And if that ‘surrender’ is important, which I think it is, then one clear example of it (albeit not from Calvino) would be the beginning of Genna’s Grande madre rossa, where the viewpoint (or perhaps the ‘gaze’) has become detached from whoever (or whatever) does the viewing.

*

One might, for example, creatively (mis)interpret the following:

‘Point of view and movement exclude one another.’
(Giuseppe Genna: Grande madre rossa, 2004)

The totalising stasis of historical achievement, of ‘truth’, of ideological hegemony (which all points of view have in common, even if only in embryo), of ending, is here set at odds with the endless dialectical process of which history is made up, as in Agamben’s view of time. (Benjamin hints at something similar in The Arcades Project when he draws an analogy between allegorical procedures and the relationship between commodity and price: ‘The allegorist rummages here and there for a particular piece, holds it next to some other piece and tests if they fit together … The result can never be known beforehand, for there is no natural mediation between the two. This is just how matters stand with commodity and price. How the price of goods in each case is arrived at can never quite be foreseen.’)

In fact, this is the second of two quotations which preface Genna’s book, from Ulrike Meinhof’s final letter to her Hamburg comrades dated 13 April 1976. The German uses ‘Standpunkt’, ‘point of view’. However, up until this moment Meinhof had actually been using the more explicitly political compound, ‘Klassenstandpunkt’, ‘class position’.

Meinhof insists that ‘this class position, with which you puff yourselves up [is] unbearable.’ (By 9 May she was dead.) The ‘class situation’ she perceives is within the ‘imperialist system, with its invasion of all relationships by the market and, as a given, the process of State control of society by the ideological and repressive State,’ outside of which ‘there is only illegality and liberated territory.’ (my italics)

The novel itself starts as follows:

‘The gaze is from 10,200 metres over Milan, inside the sky. It’s freezing blue and rarefied up here.

‘The gaze is towards on high, it sees the hemisphere of ozone and cobalt, going outwards from the planet. The luminous barrier of the atmosphere prevents the stars from passing through. The heavenly body absolute, ie the sun, is on the right, extremely white. The gaze swings free and circular in the pure blue void.’
(Giuseppe Genna: Grande madre rossa, 2004)

And one could go a lot further back. To this arresting paragraph from Deledda, for example:

‘A nightingale sang on the solitary tree, which was still suffused with mist. All the coolness of the evening, all the harmony of far away serenities, and the smile of the stars towards the flowers and of the flowers towards the stars, and the proud joy of the fine young shepherds and the closed in passion of the women with their red bodices, and all the melancholy of the poor who live waiting for what’s left over from the tables of the rich, and the sorrows far away and the hopes that are there, and the past, the lost fatherland, the love, the crime, the remorse, the prayer, the canticle of the pilgrim who goes further and still further and doesn’t know where he’ll spend the night but feels himself guided by God, and the green solitude of the smallholding down below, the voice of the river and of the alders down there, the smell of the euphorbias, the laughter and the weeping of Grixenda, the laughter and the weeping of Noemi, the laughter and the weeping of Efix, the laughter and the weeping of the entire world, trembled and vibrated in the notes of the nightingale above the solitary tree that seemed higher than the mountains, with its top scraping the heavens and the tip of its topmost leaf thrust inside a star.’
(Grazia Deledda: Canne al vento, 1913)

What happens here, albeit fleetingly, is exactly that sort of transfer of utterance to some ‘secondary’ voice to which Calvino later referred. The nightingale’s ‘sang’ is a sort of aorist. Not the imperfect of background information (‘cantava’) but the passato remoto (‘cantò’) of a discrete, protagonistic act. The nightingale isn’t subalternised into a soundscape for individualised human behaviours. Nor yet is she an echo. This isn’t pathetic fallacy. Rather the fact of her nightingalehood is extended and exceeded into something else. She becomes the owner of a positive act of her own, which (even though it has no purpose beyond itself) subsumes all human activity, present, past and future; all three are represented. And yet she too is exceeded. Whereas she sits on top of the tree (‘sull’albero’) her song rises above it (‘sopra l’albero’) like the tip of the topmost leaf as it pierces the heart of some star: her viewpoint has been surrendered to something-not-of-this-world.

So clearly there are precursors and successors.

*

Of course, the smog of Calvino’s La nuvola di smog (1958) is also a physical smog, a matter of grey particulates. The Argentine ants of La formica argentina (Linepithema Humile) do exist, and in Ligurian gardens. However, Calvino employs what he elsewhere called ‘the essayistic dimension’ to address irrationality with rationalistic precision. And it is this UNO disjuncture, this anomalousness, which enables Ovid and Lucretius (or maybe Cerveteri and Bensi, respectively the ‘poet’ and the ‘philosopher’ of La speculazione edilizia) to join together in his work.

Here, for example, is Gore Vidal on La formica:

‘[It is] as minatory and strange as anything by Kafka. It is also hideously funny. In some forty pages Calvino gives us […] the human condition today. Or the dilemma of modern man. Or the disrupted environment. Or nature’s revenge. Or allegory of grace. Whatever…’
(Gore Vidal: Calvino’s Novels, NYRB 1974)

Now clearly there’s a link between, on the one hand, what Vidal calls ‘nature’s revenge’ and, on the other, what Wu Ming I says about displacing anthropocentrism. Yet equally clearly something else is going on: the anomalousness that Vidal conjures up with ‘whatever’ emerges from two directions. On the one hand the ants provide an unexpected challenge to the psyche from outside: perhaps they are going to win. On the other they are an extrusion of the psyche (some sort of over-reaction coming from within; some interior disposition) into that outer world:

‘We didn’t know then about the ants when we came to settle here. […] Thinking it over, perhaps Uncle Augusto had mentioned them once – You should see the ants down there, not like the ants we have here – but it was a sidetrack from talking about something else…’
(Calvino: La formica argentina)

*

Calvino’s ants are hardly Deledda’s nightingale and cannot be read as such. But they are perhaps the McGuffin. They allow him to ‘surrender’ control over the narrative just as the narrator in turn ‘surrenders’ to their effects. As a result the text becomes an early ‘game of combinations, following through the possibilities implicit in the material from which it has been made.’ (Una pietra sopra) Which means in turn that whether or not these ants are (for example) either the anxiety from which one hoped to get away or the challenge which one really hoped one didn’t have to face in the first place it scarcely matters any more. They could have been avoided, excluded or suppressed either way. Were it not for the exterminator, Signor Baudino (who has come to resemble an ant, and who acts a sort of untore, the paranoid interpretation, spreading the pestilence in order to benefit from it, or maybe as a sort of stand-in for Calvino, the postmodernist interpretation) it is possible that there might not even have been such a problem in the first place.

But the ants are there nonetheless. Not quite foregrounded but endlessly, self-replicatingly there: an existential emblem of subversion:

The great oak, the emperor’s pride and joy
is collapsing!
Who’d have thought it!
It wasn’t the river, nor yet did some hurricane rip
that magnificent trunk from its roots,
rather it was the ants, thousands of ants
organized, working together day by day
year after year!
(Dario Fo: La grande quercia)

Except that Calvino rejects all such programmatic engagement of that sort.

*

‘The artist manages to communicate only through the sort of isolation which a political or propagandistic type of engagement cannot affect.’
(This is Montale countering Gramsci in La solitudine dell’artista)

In his 1964 preface to Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno, though clearly speaking with hindsight Calvino writes as follows. His point is a little different:

‘Today when one speaks of the ‘literature of commitment’ one generally gets it wrong, as though speaking of a literature that serves to illustrate a theme that’s already been defined, that’s independent of poetical expression. On the contrary, that which one called ‘engagement’, commitment, can be found at every level…’ (my italics)

There’s an example of one sort of level in La speculazione edilizia. The protagonist sits listening to a dispute between his two friends, Bensi and Cerveteri. He ‘really doesn’t know which side he ought to take’:

‘Bensi was seized by one of his nervous laughs … as though to express his own pained amusement at witnessing his interlocutor getting lost in a labyrinth from which he alone knew the way out.

‘We have to proceed from the ideology to the dream, not from the dream to the ideology …  Ideology runs through all your dreams rather as butterflies are pierced through by pins.

‘Cerveteri looked at him, dumbfounded.

‘Butterflies? Why did you say butterflies?’

(Calvino: La speculazione edilizia, 1957)

Finally here is Calvino, this time in propria persona, speaking about a moment in Palomar:

‘In that brief story of mine I don’t take sides but instead I limit myself to representing both positions.’
(Gregory L. Lucente: An Interview with Italo Calvino)

II

La formica and La nuvola instantiate ways of speaking. They turn on the sort of social constructivism in which meaning lies (in both senses) in the telling rather than in what the telling is about. The differences, though, are profound.

The narrator of La formica, has moved out from the town into the country. The narrator of La nuvola has travelled the other way. He arrives in the town (‘for someone who has just got off the train, the city is one big station’) as though entering into a holding formation. He takes ‘some sort of a room’:

‘I took my overcoat, my scarf and my great illusion
I left home
to go to where to where to where to where to where…
the cold ends,
to the start of another ghetto.’
(Antonello Venditti: Dove)

Here’s how the piece begins:

‘It was a time when nothing much mattered to me, when I came to settle in this town. Settle’s not quite the right word. I didn’t have any desire to settle down, what I wanted was that everything should stay fluid and provisional around me and only in that way did it seem I’d be settled inside, even though I wouldn’t have been able to explain what that meant.’
(Calvino: La nuvola di smog)

*

The narrative of La formica tells of a broken idyll: the idealised state is not to suffer from ants. The world was clean to begin with but is now revealed as infested, so the watchword must be ‘response’. Only one question remains: How should one react? With ill suppressed hysteria, like the wife of the narrator? By soldiering on, like Mr and Mrs Reginaudo, keeping cheerful along the lines of the peasant in Ho visto un re? With endless, ineffectual ingenuity, like Captain Brauni, a sort of Italian Heath Robinson? By grandly ignoring the problem, as does Madam Mauro (just as the Pintor sisters ignore their own decline in Canne al vento)? And so on.

This is, of course, the ‘allegory’, to pick up a term from Vidal: how to make a moral choice? Responses vary. Attitudes may be brought in a priori or may arise through experience. Whether the ants are something natural or have been humanly induced remains uncertain. However, the principle of ‘commitment’ to one’s own reactions or to some chosen point of view is never in any doubt.

Until, that is, the narrative of La nuvola turns all this around. The pivot is political. Calvino had published La formica back in 1952. La nuvola was written in the summer of ’58. In July ’57 Calvino had published La gran bonaccia delle antille, satirising the Stalinist stagnation of the Italian Communist Party under Togliatti and provoking a response (Stalin as Captain Ahab and so forth) from Maurizio Ferrara, Giuliano Ferrara’s father. He had resigned from the Party one month later.

*

A figurative smog is what its narrator wants, at least at first. It’s something not quite settled:

‘…it had to be entirely provisional and I wanted this to be clear to myself as well.’

The ants embody a constant, undefeatable energy, the restlessness of invasion. The smog is undefined. It’s a depression, lethargy. It subsists as a transience which perpetuates itself through always leaving traces, an elective but threatened pessimism to be set against both the failing optimism of La formica and, for example, the energetic intrusions of the narrator’s girlfriend, Claudia:

‘How could she ever have understood this unhappiness of mine? There are those who condemn themselves to the greyness of a life of increased mediocrity because they have had a grief, a misfortune; but there are also those who do it because they’ve experienced more good fortune than what they felt they could cope with.’

Unlike the world of La formica, whose supposedly ‘natural’ state is shown to have been corrupt through the original sin of having ants, La nuvola’s world is an already dirty, human infested place, one where ‘commitment’ (as it turns out) is also under threat, the commitment of performing a narrative that’s expected, which in this case is a narrative against pollution for a journal called Purification that’s owned by the same person (Cordà the engineer) who produces the pollution in the first place:

‘…it was he who wafted it without cessation over the town and APAUIC, the Agency for the Purification of the Atmosphere in Urban Industrial Centres, was a creation of the smog, born from a need to give to those who worked for the smog the hope of a life that would not be wholly smog but at the same time to celebrate its power.’

So obviously one could normalise this as an ‘allegory’ about following party lines, or indeed about the imprisonment of any ideology or orthodoxy whatsoever, about anything in which experience is greyed and reduced by being included in some sort of formulation.

But isn’t it in the nature of allegory that it resists such consistent readings?

Here is Benjamin, making precisely this point:

‘Where man is drawn towards the symbol, allegory emerges from the depths of being to intercept the intention, and to triumph over it […] If it is to hold its own against the tendency to absorption, the allegorical must constantly unfold in new and surprising ways. The symbol, on the other hand, … remains persistently the same’
(Walter Benjamin: The Origin of German Tragic Drama)

*

In the symbolism of one-to-one correspondence, according to De Michele in Carmilla, ‘the symbol is already inscribed in an interpretative dimension made rigid through the pretence of objectivity.’ (my italics) Likewise metaphor ‘risks operating as a translation of sense within some pre-determined cognitive environment.’ (again the italics are mine, as is the touch of Sperber.) Whereas ‘the allegorical is autonomous with respect to the overall context of antinomy, an autonomy which the symbolic is denied.’

And since de Michele pillages Benjamin who in turn pillages Creuzer, here is Creuzer himself, explaining what he calls the ‘difference between symbolic and allegorical representation’:

‘The latter signifies merely a general concept, or an idea which differs from itself, whereas the former is the very incarnation and embodiment of the idea. In the former a process of substitution happens … In the latter the concept itself has descended into our physical world and we see it directly in the image.’
(G F Creuzer: Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Völker, besonders der Griechen)

Which accounts for, say, allegorical objects such as the ice which tinkles in the glasses of the first class passengers travelling on de Gregori’s Titanic. Or for the complex relationship either between de Gregori’s mythical Titanic both with the (earlier) wreck of the Sirio and the fate of postwar Italy. Or the similarly complex relationship between the ‘wounded steinbock’, the historical Milanese fraudster Felice Riva and the issue of (failed) political violence in early ’70s Italy which Antonello Venditti explores in Lo stambecco ferito.

*

Allegory, ideology and memory are aspects of one another. Ideology is a sort of allegory reconfigured as memory. Thus the UK’s New Labour, freed from ideology, lost both its memory and its ability to envisage the future in the course of its coming to power: not just Agamben’s ‘means without ends’ but government by Alzheimer’s, reaching for absurd metaphorical fragments from elsewhere (Big Tent, New Deal etc) with which to remedy the lack.

For Calvino ideology presents a different problem. Here’s how he introduces it in La speculazione edilizia. First he describes the gloriously heterogeneous anomaly of a section of land owned by the protagonist’s mother. On it there’s a former chicken coop now doing service as a potting shed. It is said to have (Calvino’s parents were botanists and Calvino himself studied agriculture, albeit briefly) ‘a disharmonious aspect, between the agricultural, the scientific and the highly valued.’ It is, in short, a heterocosm. Some pages further on the protagonist’s two friends, Bensi and Cerveteri, decide to start a journal, although its title is still in doubt. According to Bensi:

‘…we have to let it be understood right from the very title that what we’re aiming for is a generalised phenomenology that brings back each separate form of knowledge into a single discourse.

‘It was on this point that the argument between Bensi and Cervetero started up … Since everything was to become part of a single discourse was the journal to bring in only what had already been incorporated into that general discourse or rather that which still lay outside?’

*

The key to La formica is the discovery of Inside. What happens when you find yourself on the inside of something else (or within an ideology) is that you lose a degree of autonomy: you live within a situation that persists beyond your control. The narrator visits the noble Madam Mauro in her house on the upper slopes. Is she troubled by ants? Is she external or internal to the situation, in other words? ‘We chase them away with a broom,’ is her response. But unfortunately:

‘at that very moment her expression of studied impassivity was traversed by something like a physical distress, and we saw that whilst remaining seated she shifted her weight quite firmly to one side, bending herself at the waist. If it hadn’t been inconsistent with the assurances that were issuing from her mouth I would have sworn that an Argentine ant, having got under her clothes, had nipped at her…’

The narrator and his wife go to the sea, which ought to be a figure of Outside, but find instead a sort of reprise of the ants. Whilst it appears as another idyll beneath the idyllic ‘calm’ of the surface there is an endless, minute activity:

‘The waters were calm, with just a continuous swapping about of colours, blue and black, getting denser as they got further away. I thought of the water stretching out in the distance like that, of the infinite, tiny grains of sand down at the bottom, where the current deposits the white husks of shells that have been polished by the waves.’

*

The key to La nuvola is the converse: the discovery of Outside. The narrator’s view of his landlady is a negative one. But though her kitchen is in chaos she maintains her public rooms like a ‘private work of art’, created through, as it were, subtraction or withdrawal of some ‘liberated territory’, producing an outside within. The cheery decisiveness of the narrator’s girlfriend, Claudia, is an intrusion into melancholia from outside. And so on.

The narrator brings Claudia to a lookout point in order to show her the view. But his own viewpoint is broken and ‘surrendered’ through what happens then. He shows her the whitish peaks of the Alps which emerge ‘from the sky’ but loses control of the narrative in a sort of Calvino sublime. He has the names but cannot name them because he doesn’t know which is which. ‘A sense of vastness had seized me. I don’t know if it was Claudia’s hat and her dress that did this or whether it was the view’:

‘We were there, looking out over the low wall. I was squeezing her waist. I was looking at countryside in all its multiple aspects, struck immediately by a need for analysis, already dissatisfied with myself because I didn’t have at my disposal an adequate nomenclature for places and for natural phenomena. She, on the other hand, was ready to transform these sensations into unexpected humorous impulses, effusions, into things she said that had nothing to do with it. And it was then that I saw that thing.’

*

‘That thing’ is actually the smog, at least as seen from outside. Whereas the ants’ greatest reality comes with the discomfort, actual or imagined, of Madam Mauro (La formica bids for totality, either the totality of solution or the unstoppable taking over of the ants) La nuvola works by limitation. Such as, in this instance, through conceiving the smog as a cloud. The narrator describes it as such, and this is the point of its greatest un-reality. But what Claudia either sees or chooses to see instead is a flock of birds.

‘And I remained there, looking out and watching for the first time from the outside the cloud that surrounded me all the time, that cloud I lived in, that lived in me and I knew that of all the variousness of the world with which I was surrounded this was the only thing that mattered to me.’

In the restaurant just below where he lives the narrator shares a table with a worker. They read separate papers. The narrator, in David Riesman’s terms, is other directed: ‘mine was the one that everybody read, the most important paper in town; I certainly had no reason to get myself noticed as someone set apart from other people by reading a different paper.’ Whereas his paper is stylish but conformist, the worker’s paper is ‘grey, incredibly dense, monotonous’ but at the same time also critical:

‘[His] was so to speak the converse of mine, not just because the ideas it put forward were the opposite but because it concerned itself with things that for my one didn’t even exist: employees given the sack, machine workers who ended up with a hand trapped in the gears…’
(my italics; Dolce’s Inchiesta a Palermo was published in 1956)

The narrator’s conception of the worker is a negative one. He projects his own lack of openness onto his interlocutor:

‘I tried to give [my impression of his paper] to my tablemate … endeavouring at the same time (since he seemed to me to be the sort who didn’t care for criticism …) to play down my judgement’s more negative aspects.’

However, he is wrong in his assessment of the other’s supposed loyalty. Indeed he perceives his being wrong as the other’s resistance to his own judgemental hegemony, whereas:

‘[i]nstead [the worker] seemed to follow his own train of thought, in which my appraisal of his paper must have seemed superfluous, out of place.

‘You know, he said, there hasn’t yet been a paper that’s been put together as it should have been put together. Not as I would like to see it done.’

The worker has formed a study group ‘amongst the young people in our business’. (Montaldi founded the Gruppo di Unità Proletaria in 1957):

‘I didn’t follow what he was saying any more. I thought that someone like [him] wasn’t at all trying to escape from the smoky greyness around us but to transform it into a moral value, into an internal norm.

‘The smog, I said.

‘The smog? Yes, I know that Cordà wants to play the modern industrialist … To purify the atmosphere … Let him go and tell his workers that. Certainly it won’t be him that does the purifying. It’s a matter of social structure … If we do manage to change it, we’ll also solve the smog problem. Us, that is. Not them.

*

The sea at the end of La formica is another attempt at the natural, freed of pollution or entailments.

Towards the end La nuvola the narrator spots a side road. There’s a mule loaded up with laundry. He comes to see the process of laundry exchange (soiled for clean) as something festive, as a different and restorative human event:

‘Between the meadows, the hedges and the poplars my gaze continued to trace the water troughs, the words Steam Laundry written on certain low buildings … the fields where the women passed by with baskets as though they were harvesting grapes to take down the dry clothes from the line … It wasn’t much. But for me, who sought no more than images to keep in view, perhaps it was enough.’

Which is how the story ends.

So I decided to go up. Up there I found Roberto Leydi, Gianni Bosio and Umberto Eco. I was a bit embarrassed about my songs. I didn’t want to sing them. ‘My stuff’s a bit peculiar.’ Then I secreted myself round a corner, where there was a piano, and I sang (doing so was a liberation) these Ballads about Violence Great and Small, autobiographical material drawn in part from my brother’s experience and in part from my own. Even though I’d never thought of using them to present a representative sample of the great violence of fascism through the smaller violence of my father. It came to me more as an urgent need to liberate myself from my family by way of warding off misfortune and to shout out my availability to a thousand and more other families to seek out and to find.

Then I emerged from my corner with the air of a cat that’s wondering, ‘What the hell will happen to me now?’ and they began to argue. I remember only the initial verdicts of Roberto Leydi on the general import of my pieces: ‘This is a typically anarchico-syndacalist approach.’  And that of Umberto Eco: ‘Here we are faced with an archetype.’ Gianni Bosio, on the other hand, stayed silent.

They discussed all this for ages and I went to sleep on the couch. When I woke at 4.00 they were still discussing it. So then I went home.

(Ivan Della Mea, taken from Cesare Bermani: Una storia cantata)

I know that one day
he’ll come to me
a white man
dressed in white
and he’ll say to me:
‘My dear chap, you’re exhausted’
and with a smile
he will offer me his hand.

He will lead me
amongst white houses
the walls will be white
the heavens will be white
he will dress me
in coarse material, harsh and white
and I will  have a room
a white bed for me as well.

Come that day
and all those people
including youths
dressed in white
will speak to me
about their dreams
as if this were
reality.

I will look at them
unblinkingly
and I will tell them
about freedom;
that same man will come
with all those others strong and white
and to my bed
they’ll tie me fast with straps.

‘Freedom,’
I will say, ‘is a fact,
though you may tie me
still it resists.’
And they will smile:
‘My dear chap, you are bonkers,
freedom
does not exist, not any more.’

And then I’ll laugh:
this world is great
here everything has got its price
even the brain.
‘Sell it, my friend
sell it with your freedom
and you can have a place
in this society.’

Three cheers for life
bought on the never never
along with the Fiat 600
the washing machine
three cheers for the system
which renders equal and makes happy
those who do have power
and those who on the contrary don’t have any.

(It’s probably worth mentioning, as a sort of footnote, that his brother Luciano, 16 years his senior, was interned in a German concentration camp in 1940 and in the ’70s worked with Franco Basaglia’s colleague Agostino Pirella in assisting those deprived of their freedom under Italy’s former mental health legislation.)

‘Never mistake the pattern of the nails for the structure of the house,’ was one of Faulkner’s apothegms. According to Illuminati you should likewise never see the ruins of some former politics as ‘a prequel of the rebuilding’. Destruction, opposition and/or defeat, on the one hand, and creation, re-creation and/or success, on the other, are orthogonally positioned. History is written by its victors, according to the phrase sometimes ascribed to Churchill. Or in the version which Clinton ascribed to Plato:

‘Plato said thousands of years ago: Those who tell the story rule society.’

(Bill Clinton: Remarks at a Jewish community centre in Scarsdale, NY, 2000)

And so on and so forth. The point is clear enough. The other side of history is what Wu Ming call its ‘mistaken side’ in the blurb to Manituana.

*

‘The form in which language is expressed itself defines subjectivity,’ according to Lacan. And this is another aspect. Lacan also (famously) has much to say on the future perfect, the ‘historical’ subject in all its completedness:

‘I identify myself in language, but only by losing myself in it like an object. What is realised in my history is not the past definite of that which was, since it is no more, nor yet the present perfect of that which has been in what I am, but the future perfect of that which I shall have been for what I’m in the process of becoming.’

(Jacques Lacan: from Part III of Fonction et champ de la parole et du langage en psychoanalyse, Rapport du Congrès de Rome.,1953)

Which is to say that rather than inflecting causally the historical sequence First A then B then C… as A was the cause of B…, we might complain instead that our present state of A is explicable by our becoming B. Change what we would become, in other words, and we can change our present state:

The revolution …
isn’t some simple event.
The revolution …
is a daily conquest.

(Enzo del Re: La Rivoluzione)

*

And finally here is Benni on how restraints can be put in place through the use of nostalgic language:

‘Our dreams were better than theirs.’
‘Maybe … Or maybe we just dreamed that our dreams were better.’

(Stefano Benni: La compagnia dei celestini)

In fact Lucarelli was at the University of Bologna at this time, still researching a thesis (subsequently abandoned) on the police under Fascism pre ’43. But he had wandered somewhat off piste. A question came to mind: for whom did this chap vote?

‘I wanted to know if at least at some point he had been bothered about putting the handcuffs on someone, and instead he looked at me, slightly offended, and said, What’s that got to do with it? I’m a policeman.’

(Lucarelli: Nota di Carlo Lucarelli in Il commissario De Luca, 1990-1996)

That sense of a centre of gravity reappears during the second of the trilogy:

‘Look, I like my work. I’ve got it all in here. He tapped his head with the tip of one finger. And I think I’m good at it. But I lack experience. I took the police officer course when the armistice happened and I went immediately into the mountains with the partisans… The practical stuff I did alone. But it’s not enough. It won’t be enough very shortly because, yes, everything’s going to change. Perhaps there’ll be a revolution but the police, this much I know, will always be the same.’

(Lucarelli: L’estate torbida, 1991)

*

It might of course seem like trimming. It might be exactly that. But not always. Sometimes, ideally, there might be a loyalty to something higher which can unite the private person, his constancy, her self respect, with a social identity which perdures through all its changes.

What’s significant about Britain’s current parliamentary crisis is not that a significant number of MPs can now be seen to have been corrupt (that much isn’t surprising) but that the Fees Office had been drawn into that corruption, just as the intelligence services had been drawn into a different sort of corruption during the preparations for the invasion of Iraq under Cardinal Blair.

Indeed it has been the marvellous achievement of New Labour, heading towards a British version of Italy circa 1992, continuing the damage wrought by Thatcherism, to have destroyed much of the independence of the Civil Service, to have damaged gravely, unacceptably, the freedom of action of the Judiciary, and to have expunged almost completely any notion of politics as a set of actors, actions and beliefs that together constitute what we used to call a vocation and not something comparable to, say, the activities of some of the more questionable figures in the business community with whose salaries politicians’ incomes are now, apparently, meant to be in competition.

To have destroyed, in short, not only independence and self respect at a personal level (and thus in the case of individual MPs) but also constancy and integrity at a social level, which is the level at which institutions and those who make up those institutions have to function.

I saw a king
a king who wept, still seated in the saddle.
He wept so many tears, so many tears that
even the horse got wet. Poor king
and poor old horse as well.
The emperor had taken from him one fine castle
the crafty sod
out of thirty two of them he’d owned. Poor king
and poor old horse as well.

The song, of course, goes on. A king, a bishop, a rich man, an emperor and a cardinal have all of them been ‘half ruined’. (The bishop indeed is so upset that he bites the hand of his sacristan.) Fo then mentions the peasant. He’s been cheated out of his chicken, his turkey, his wife, his farmstead, his son who’s gone for military service, even his pig. So he’s been completely ruined.

But does the peasant weep? Not a bit of it. He laughs. Because it’s the duty of the poor to keep cheerful, to avoid upsetting wealthy folk.

*

Rowan Williams appeared to take a similar line in yesterday’s Times. Britain’s MPs have suffered enough. They’ve even sacked the Speaker, rather in the manner of the bishop biting the hand of his unfortunate sacristan. Enough humiliation. We must move on.

‘We must move on’ is painfully New Labour. Indeed there’s a thesis to be written (using Talmy’s Force Dynamics) on how New Labour likes to use ‘speed’ whenever it lacks direction, which is often. Here, though, it belies something else. Whilst Dr Williams purports to solicit restraint when attacking dodgy MPs, he actually seems more confident in making the perfectly valid point that public service is (or ought to be) about something more than rule based behaviour and that the something he has in mind includes (or ought to include) the institution of a higher morality of some sort.

And yet he misses the vital point, which is that the Great Expenses Fiasco with all its absurdities, its lying and its cheating is but a symptom of a very much greater corruption, that of representative democracy itself. So his thesis becomes a purely local one about cleaning up peculation, about how a regular audit by nanny (‘Turn out your pockets this minute, Master McNulty!’) won’t solve everything and not about more explicitly political issues, such as:

• how Parliament itself now fails miserably to represent the electoral will of this country. In 2005, for example, 22% of those eligible to vote supported the present government, despite its large majority. This was the worst result for any single party government since at least World War I
• how the Executive now retains almost total power within the parliamentary process, so that the views of the opposition can generally be ignored
• how the Whip systems, the Committee system and the craven acceptance of both of these by backbench MPs (who now function either as lobby fodder or as deracinated local ombudsmen or as both; hence the two homes) means that reams of fatuous and ill considered legislation are passed without scrutiny and, frequently, without comment
• how, in more general terms, principle has now become mere policy, consumables to be sold to a supposedly gullible public for whom New Labour has contempt; means have been severed from ends; political labels have become brands, power has been exiled into bureaucracy, and so on.

*

But if representative democracy is to mean anything, then it must be about something very like a sort of mutual inspiration: of the leaders by the people and of the people by their leaders. Whereas what we have is mutual contempt. We may or may not want to solve this. And if we do, it can’t be by keeping cheerful lest MPs should get upset.

Anger may embarrass many people, but it is the surest sign that our democracy isn’t yet dead.

We need to become angrier still. And angrier, of course, about still more. Not just about bent cabinet ministers, duck islands and moats.

(E Nesbit: The Magic City)

‘What was the use of my having come from Oakland it was not natural to have come from there yes write about if I like or anything if I like but not there, there is no there there.’
(Gertrude Stein: Everybody’s Autobiography)

When Augé (in Un ethnologue dans le metro) describes the non-space of the Metro as ‘the collective without the celebration, and the solitude without the isolation’, he too is reflecting how it feels to have a form without substance, to find a label attached to some sort of empty cabinet, to be in a situation where there is no experience (or no ‘there’) there, where the extensional, the denotative, seems to be the only option because the connotative, the intensional, is either denied or is suppressed or has gone missing.

If modernism proceeds, typically, by finding ways to ‘make it new’, as a revolt against or overturning of tradition, whatever ‘tradition’ means, then one question raised by these comments is whether this particular fish is rotting from the head inwards and downwards or outwards from within. Whether, in terms of one of the false dilemmas posed by modernism, form takes precedence over content, an endless sequence of new moulds into which something is poured and thus reshaped, or whether content pushes form. (It scarcely matters here that form and content are actually indivisible; it’s how we think of them that counts. And, of course, there are parallels between ‘content’ and movement, or grass roots politics, on the one hand and between ‘form’ and the avant garde, or party structure, on the other.)

Varèse seems clear enough, at least at first, that content pushes form:

‘Form is a result – the result of a process. Each of my works discovers its own form. I have never tried to fit any of my compositions into any known container.’
(Edgard Varèse: Rhythm, Form and Content)

So too is Creeley. ‘Form is never more than an extension of content’; this in a letter to Olson. Olson quoted it in Projective Verse. Creeley later expanded on it as follows to make poetry analogous to something naturally occurring:

‘Form is what happens. It’s the fact of things in the world, however they are. So that form in that way is simply the presence of any thing.

[...]

‘The what of what was being said gained the how of what was being said, and the how (the mode) then became what I called form.’
(In Martin Lammon: From an interview with Linda Wagner, in Written in Water, Written in Stone)

In fact, both the proposed relationship between form and content and their perceived relationship with the natural are ambivalent.

For Zukofsky, for example, ‘Poetry convinces not by argument but by the form it creates to carry its content.’ (Zukofsky: Test 52, from A Test of Poetry, 1948). However, that’s because he conceives of poetry as a sort of totalising procedure in which ‘content’ changes its meaning to become poetry’s organising forms  just as the ‘content’ of science is a formalisation of the world with which it engages, which is somehow formless without it:

‘[I]t appears that the scientific definition of poetry can be based on nothing less than the world, the entire humanly known world.

‘Like the theories of science which are valid because they explain most, this definition will be valid inasmuch as it will be comprehensive.’
(Zukofsky: Poetry / for my son when he can read, 1946)

Which is why, in the spirit of Zukofsky, Ron Silliman can say in a curious formulation, about the work of Alan Davies, that ‘the content of form is anger’ and of Zukofsky himself that there are two alternative readings: ‘Zukofsky as suggestion of possibility’ on the one hand and ‘Zukofsky as horizon or limit’ on the other. Whilst for his own part Silliman himself claims to use form (‘The purpose of the poem, like that of any act, is to change the world’) as a technique to break down, a sort of exemplary act, his own cognitive limits:

‘When I wrote the first volume of Ketjak in 1974, I used a systematic methodology to break down certain habits of mind that prevented me from focusing on the sentence as the point of perception.’
(Ron Silliman: Wild Form)

*

‘A book is a machine to think with,’ according to I A Richards. (Richards: Principles of Literary Criticism, 1926) Williams too, conceives of poetry in these industrial terms rather than those of Nature:

‘To make two bold statements: There’s nothing sentimental about a machine, and: A poem is a small (or large) machine made out of words. When I say there’s nothing sentimental about a poem, I mean that there can be no part that is redundant.

‘Prose may carry a load of ill-defined matter like a ship. But poetry is a machine which drives it, pruned to a perfect economy. As in all machines, its movement is intrinsic, undulant, a physical more than a literary character.’
(William Carlos Williams: Introduction to The Wedge)

But in fact what Zukofsky and Williams both represent is actually quite a ‘tame’ view of form, in which the world is codified but somehow not engaged with except with rubber gloves. (An earlier post on technology may give a flavour of what I mean.) For Zukofsky ‘form’ implies a sort of conceptual syntax, permitting no unorganised conception and no excess of the natural over conception. For Williams it’s more explicit: nothing is ‘sentimental’, ‘ill defined’ or ‘redundant’; everything becomes part of an idealised mechanics, just as the ideal of ‘science’ hovers over Zukofsky.

Of course it’s Kerouac (hence the title of Silliman’s piece) who represents (quite self consciously) what ‘wild’ means in this context. But Kerouac’s rhetoric is solipsistic, even bombastic. Indeed there’s a self contradiction. What ought to come from the future or from outside or from the natural (‘discovery’) actually comes from the past and from within, from the confected: ‘every image and every memory’. So that the encounter isn’t, in the end, with the alterity of, say, an undiscovered wilderness but with his own ‘exploding’ mind. As with a tantrum in a playpen there’s a reaching out towards totality, for a freedom of speech that denies others’ freedom not to listen, but at the same time an awareness of limitation which functions for Kerouac rather as shame does for Levinas:

‘What I’m beginning to discover now is something beyond the novel and beyond the arbitrary confines of the story… into realms of revealed Picture… wild form, man, wild form. Wild form’s the only form holds what I have to say – my mind is exploding to say something about every image and every memory…. I have an irrational lust to set down everything I know.’
(Jack Kerouac: letter reproduced in J C Holmes: Nothing More to Declare)

*

Of course the dilemma I posed at the start (which comes first, form or content?) and its essential absurdity may still seem somewhat abstract. And yet if one thinks about composers things get a good deal clearer. Consider, for example, the apparent opposition between Milton Babbitt’s total serialism, theoretically total control, and Cage’s indeterminacy. Whereas for Babbitt form arises out of the rigorous construction of content, for Cage the content (which is often something quite unknown) is invited to participate, a revelation of Sound corresponding to Kerouac’s Picture, through the rigorous prior construction of ‘arbitrary’ formal constraints.

*

And so to Ayckbourn, which might well seem at first a very odd leap to have made.

But Ayckbourn’s conceptual approach resembles that of Cage at least in this respect, that he uses form, a priori, rather as Cage does, to compel the arrival of results for which the corresponding causes don’t exist and thus to break the discursive, organising syntax of what we think of as reality.

And yet this resemblance masks a sharp distinction.

Augé describes what interests him about the Metro as ‘the play between the subway map – which is there, and is imposed on us – and the various ways we find to move through it’. Ayckbourn’s characters are likewise at odds with his plots. They live with what Gloria Anzaldúa calls the ‘emotional residue’ of unnatural boundaries. They struggle to get free of them and, in the end, remain imprisoned together by what is randomly positioned, orthogonal or parallel relative to them but which is emphatically not them at all. When, for example, Tom punches Norman in Table Manners (one of The Norman Conquests) it’s by way of protecting Annie; however Tom has misunderstood. When Doug knocks Vic into the swimming pool in Man of the Moment, indirectly causing his death, he ought to be taking revenge. In fact, it’s out of a sort of knee-jerk chivalry, like an emotional Groundhog Day. And so on.

*

Whereas, and this is a major distinction, the thrust of Zukofsky, Williams, Cage et al is to open up new frontiers (progress: the impulse to colonise and coerce, to ‘civilise’ through the operation of boundaries or of science, to deny the idea of the ruin) Ayckbourn deals with what Benjamin calls the ‘refuse of history’ and what Freud called the ‘refuse of the phenomenological world’, that which is left behind by such constructed objects as rugs, board games and swimming pools:

‘Borders are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them. A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition.’
(Gloria Anzaldúa: Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza)

‘… to demonstrate a historical materialism which has annihilated within itself the idea of progress [...] Its founding concept is not progress but actualisation.’
(Walter Benjamin: The Arcades Project, N2,2)

‘Where the categorical network is so closely woven that much of that which lies beneath is concealed by conventions of opinion, including scientific opinion, then eccentric phenomena which have not yet been incorporated by this network at times, take on an unexpected gravity.’
(T W Adorno: On the Logic of the Social Sciences)

Whereas Cage’s approach is inclusive, bringing into account what the attention would have overlooked simply by widening the scope, even though in practice someone of a later generation like Silliman behaves as a sort of gatekeeper, drawing a Manichean distinction between the ridiculously named ‘post avant’ and those he dismisses grandly as the ‘School of Quietiude’, the effect of Ayckbourn’s stagecraft is quite otherwise and exclusive: aspects of experience and motivation are cut off arbitrarily rather as Peter Pan’s shadow is cut off by the closing window.

Thus Jack’s morality in A Small Family Business has a purely denotative quality, it acts as an empty label since he crumbles like the rest. So too the play’s attempt to reconcile the Thatcherite principles of individual greed and family solidarity, which excludes Jack’s daughter, Samantha. Likewise Vic in Man of the Moment, whose self reinvention has been only of his image in the media. And Nerys, Vic’s original victim and now Doug’s wife through the exigencies of the plot, who has been excluded from the play altogether.

*

In bringing exclusion into the mechanics of the plays, in other words, Ayckbourn writes not as the victor or about the loser but rather out of the state of defeat, out of abjection, out of the dream and reality of Oakland, or rather of East Grinstead, less heroic even than Hastings, not as one of the tramplers but out of what has been divided, broken, trampled and left behind as progress goes on progressing.

So maybe what Benjamin said of Baudelaire could find some relevance here:

‘That which the allegorical intention has fixed upon is sundered from the customary contexts of life: it is at once shattered and preserved. Allegory holds fast to those ruins…

‘Baroque allegory sees the corpse only from the outside; Baudelaire evokes it from within.’
(Benjamin: The Arcades Project, J56,1 and J56,2)

‘The human mind, left to its own devices, can usually justify any code of behaviour it chooses to suit circumstances. Beware!’
(Ayckbourn: programme note to A Small Family Business)

Gordon Brown on the behaviour of Damian McBride, a man he personally employed, whilst Chancellor and as Prime Minister, for more than ten years:

‘I have said all along that when I saw this first I was very angry indeed. I think the most important thing we do is reassure people everything is being done to clean up politics in our country.’
(Gordon Brown: statement in Glasgow 16 April 2009)

Barack Obama’s Nuremberg defence of those who carried out torture in Guantánamo:

‘This administration has made it clear from day one that it will not condone torture … those who carried out their duties … in good faith … will not be subject to prosecution.’
(Barack Obama: statement accompanying release of CIA memos 16 April 2009)

But what about the hurt that stubbing causes? Why do toddlers complain (about, say, a bump on the knee) when the hurt itself has faded? Perhaps they’re inventing memory, developing a sense of time in all its passing and perdurance: the hurt received back then versus the remedy just now delivered; what you thought was there versus what actually is there, and so on.

I quoted this from Scurati once before:

‘Here in the zone of contact, the cause does not precede the effect. Here the chronological order doesn’t matter. Here the cause of what has been done not only still has to be discovered but actually does not yet exist.’
(Antonio Scurati: Il sopravissuto)

This variant comes from Wu Ming:

‘We are on the summit of time, where the answer precedes the question, the effect precedes the cause, death precedes birth.

‘You had to climb this hill to understand the journey you had taken.’
(Wu Ming: Manituana)

But time is also rhythm.

Lazzarato describes (in Videofilosofia) how Bergson distinguishes between, on the one hand, time as perceived by the senses and, on the other, time as conceived by the intellect. There is more ‘reality’ in sensation, according to Bergson, and that ‘surplus’ of reality in perception is to be sought, according to Nietzsche, within the body. He then traces the whole thing back to an Aristotelian sense of time extensively measuring the movement that is in Nature (in other words a cosmology) versus a neo-Platonic view of time as intension, as measuring out the movement of the soul.

In Svevo’s La coscienza di Zeno the breathing of Zeno’s dying father has a fretful quality which Zeno imitates ‘almost unconsciously’, before affording himself pauses which he hopes to pass on to his patient. The rhythm of the father’s dying breaths seems to become part of the room ‘from that point and for a long, long time after that.’ In fact what Svevo seems to be describing here is the sort of entrainment whereby memory develops as a sort of felt persistence.

In a related passage Zeno plays the violin:

‘Even the lowest sort of being, once he knows what three, four and six note figures are, knows how to pass between them with the same rhythmical exactness as his eye knows how to pass from one set of notes to the next. With me, though, once I’ve played one of these figures, it sticks to me and will not let me go again, so that it gets mixed up with the figure following and deforms it. In order to put the notes in the right place I have to mark time both with my feet and with my head, and so much for nonchalance, for serenity, so much for music. Music that comes from an organism that’s in balance both is itself the time that it both creates and exhausts.’
(Svevo: La coscienza di Zeno)

And here, finally, for good measure, are some quotations from Sapienza in Onda, the Rome  section of the Anomalous Wave, 18 March 2009:

‘We have entered a new era. Today we can say this unambiguously, without prevarication. The recession is concrete reality: the government doesn’t doubt it: police against the students, police against dissenters, police and baton charges against those who won’t pay for this crisis!

‘The Wave isn’t dead. The Wave isn’t some memory of youth. The Wave is alive and it doesn’t intend to stop. The Wave causes fear.’

‘Well I believe that now might be the time to go back and place more weight upon the story of the Fall.’

(Antonio Scurati: Il sopravissuto)

‘They never tell you why they are doing anything. That way they don’t find out that they don’t know themselves.’
(Chandler: The Long Goodbye)

Or perhaps you should ‘murder your darlings’. This was Q’s advice (Arthur Quiller Couch: On the Art of Writing, 1914) though it’s been claimed on behalf of others. The context is what Q calls ‘purchased ornamentation’. The ones you fall in love with are the worst. The artist must be rigorously unsentimental about such things and always chuck out what is dross.

Then there’s Beckett’s onwards and upwards version, likewise fairly terse: ‘Try again. Fail again. Fail better,’ which comes from Worstward Ho. Do it better next time, if you can: a story of making progress.

So ‘fail better’ towards some end? Which is where progress always leads us. Not necessarily. The same phrase was recently used, unacknowledged, as the title for a piece by Zadie Smith on writers and readers in The Guardian. Though she does quote Adam Zagajewski: a story of Hunt the self. But what exactly is the self? ‘It likes to dress up, to masquerade’:

‘Neither custom officers
nor their beautiful dogs will find it. Between
hymns, between alliances, it hides itself.’
(Adam Zagajewski, from The Self)

‘To me,’ Smith comments:

‘writing is always the attempted revelation of this elusive, multifaceted self, and yet its total revelation – as Zagajewski suggests – is a chimerical impossibility. It is impossible to convey all of the truth of all our experience.’
(Writing as Self Betrayal, from Fail Better)

But unfortunately there’s a kind of prurient chastity about this sort of thing. The self plays Peekaboo. At the point of total disclosure time would stop. Whereupon the self would presumably stand there motionless and naked like the girls at the Windmill Theatre. Yet time doesn’t stop like that. Rather it avoids such indecent truth because if time really were to seize up there would be no more artistic production, no more ‘analysis’ in Lacan’s terms. Instead time just carries on regardless like the Ford or Fiat production lines in 60s capitalism. And in that case doesn’t writing (don’t all the arts indeed) become a sort of all encompassing narcissism (a kind of personal subsumption by each artist) for ever holding the floor and yet never quite reaching the end? I’d tell you everything about myself, is what’s implied by this conception, except that isn’t possible. Which also leaves the arts without any social dimensions. Or, like Mobius the Stripper in Josipovici’s titular apothegm, a surface with only one side. (In Josipovici’s split screen story Mobius reveals himself psychologically across the top half of each page. Eventually he kills himself, leaving the final top half blank. Conversely it is only during the remainder of that page that a writer who has been struggling to engage with what he’s doing across each lower half can now begin writing fluently.)

Obviously there’s a connection here with Ovid. Like Zagajewski’s quoted poem, Ovid’s telling of the Narcissus myth is a sort of parable of nominalism (how the word for the thing and the thing itself become detached from one another) and maybe too of phenomenalism: how the things of the world become bundles of sensory inputs. Echo loves Narcissus but she can only echo him, and so she pines away; she leaves behind only her voice. Narcissus loves the image of himself, and ends up suicidal.

But with this difference, that implicate in this version is the social dimension. Without a sense of herself, in other words, Echo is nothing; but without a sense of other people, Narcissus is also doomed.

*

And yet ‘each man kills the thing he loves,’ according to Oscar Wilde. So the impulse towards murder isn’t just about moving on or about failing better despite what’s been said above. Nor yet is it about something that’s postponed through endless self revelation or about bringing all that to an end.

It’s implicit in Catullus, for example:

Odi et amo, quare id faciam fortasse requiris.
Nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.

I hate and love. Perhaps you ask how I can do this.
I don’t know, but I feel it happen and I’m crucified.
(Carmen 85)

Here a chiasmus structure binds together exteriority and interiority, positive and negative, empathy and exclusion (‘hate and love’ versus ‘feel it [...] and am crucified’) into a single unit, a completed conceptual object full of potential for action but without the action itself.

But whereas Catullus creates an object kept suspended in the present, Rodchenko describes an inflection of this, an object which is receding into the past or from which he himself is moving forward into the future: The lingering last hopes of love are destroyed, and I leave the house of dead truth’. This is history conceived of as a sort of numinous object: ‘The crushing of all -isms in painting was for me the beginning of my resurrection,’ was how he had also put it. It’s something that results from some sort of course of action, that’s equipped with both an outside and an inside (like the inclusion and exclusion in Catullus) even though it’s since been emptied of its potential and is thus described as ‘useless’, and with a structure that had been sketched out through time rather as a building is stretched out in space but which now obtrudes, albeit briefly, into the present:

‘When I look at the number of paintings I have painted I sometimes wonder what I shall do with them. It would be a shame to burn them. There are over 10 years of work in them. But they are as useless as a church. They serve no purpose.’
(Alexandr Rodchenko, in Novyi Lef, no 6, 1927)

The filaments of Kafka’s Odradek, another inflection, in Die Sorge des Hausvaters: The Cares of a Family Man, stretch out not only through time but also in space. For Kafka, though, it’s the narrator who is history, exceeded by his conception, some ‘useless’ thing or creature, some ‘strange bobbin whose true form we will never know, still less the purpose of its existence’ but which moves nonetheless in a contrary direction to that of Rodchenko’s church, out of the past, through the present and so on into the future, like the progress of DNA, as Kafka contemplates his own extinction with disquiet.

Girolamo De Michele writes of it thus:

‘It exists but it doesn’t have any function; it has a form, and yet it is formless. It is suspended in an intermediate dimension, as though halfway between some useless object that has lost all function and an object that’s going to be reused for purposes that are both new and unexpected.’
(Girolamo De Michele: New Italian Epic e allegoria, in Carmilla)

And Kafka himself writes as follows:

‘I ask myself, to no purpose, what is likely to happen to him? Can he possibly die? Anything that dies has had some kind of aim in life, some kind of activity, which has worn out; but that does not apply to Odradek. Am I to suppose, then, that he will always be rolling down the stairs, with ends of thread trailing after him, right before the feet of my children, and my children’s children? He does no harm to anyone that I can see; but the idea that he is likely to survive me I do find almost painful.’
(Kafka: Die Sorge des Hausvaters, The Cares of a Family Man)

Of course, an object that’s ‘lost all function’ has become entirely external in how it is perceived. Its pointlessness excludes us or we have turned away from what’s within. However, it is still an object, something that’s been created, retaining full interiority nonetheless. Conversely the object ‘that’s going to be used for purposes that are both new and unexpected’ (the example De Michele himself comes up with is the McGuffin, the television protagonist of Wu Ming’s 54) may have no content as such (the McGuffin lost its innards). However, it can still offer possibility, the possibility of approach and entering into, of filling with new content, thereby remaining an object. Even the surprise of disappointment is on offer:

‘When I came home I expected a surprise and there was no surprise for me, so of course I was surprised.’
(Wittgenstein: Culture and Value)

Or that which Duchamp offers in what Lazzarato calls the ‘null set’ of the readymade, which also remains an object, to which there’s nothing added except the artist’s choice.

*

In Hi/story, I wrote of time as extension (the winding road, the hands of the clock, how many hours have gone by) against time as intension: of how it feels to be here now, to be doing these things and to have these affiliations. The mechanisation of time is, in many ways, the beginning of its failure as a whole. Indeed the Taylorised factory may have begun along with the clock, whose hands complete and re-complete their frictionless journeys endlessly, over and over, without accumulation or result.

When Q advises murder it’s in the service of one’s craft, in the pursuit of some single and excellent object: excellence as a remainder. For Beckett that pursuit is in the plural, of better and better objects: steady progress up a hill. But for Zadie Smith it’s the production line itself that really counts: an endless succession of essentially fungible manufactures, where time is never switched off.

In Carmen 85 the ‘object’ Catullus creates is fully formed, but all movement is in potential. That is, it has no extension, being virtually pure intension, pure affiliation. Rodchenko’s 10 years’ production, on the other hand, is his own artistic practice perceived as a sort of perdurance: thingness dividing itself into its various temporal parts as the world gets divided even as we travel along the road, through different towns and villages, watchful of the scenery. Whilst his ‘useless … church’ is a sort of endurance: a sense of the temporal wholeness of the world as it continues, along with us. So that any decisive movement there is, whatever distance he sets, is not of time but of the attention and of purpose: he moves forwards, leaving his ‘church’ behind as a sort of detritus. Whereas Kafka privileges the object over the human, endurance over perdurance. So that whilst Humanity is maintained through successive generations the continuance of Odradek, by contrast, is as an entity that is permanently single, undivided.

In other words time, as a concept at least, persists.

*

And yet sometimes something happens that’s quite different, that finally cuts through time. In Antonio Scurati’s Il sopravissuto, a boy walks into the gymnasium of his school. He’s meant to be taking his viva. Instead, in a destructively creative act (Scurati is explicit about ‘the basis of its analogy with the work of art’) he shoots dead seven teachers. Only one is left behind: the ‘survivor’ of the title.

So why exactly does he do it?

One theory (that of the criminologist, Dr Salini) is that the ‘serial killer’ works in a circle, that he selects ‘trophies’ (aspects of the loved one reflected in the victim), constantly narrowing in a deferred or indirect way the gap between ‘the original’ (the one that’s loved and hated) and ‘its similar’, who’s the victim, until Browne’s ‘mortal right lined circle must conclude and shut up all.’ Until, that is, the circle reaches its end (or its beginning) ‘either with the capture of the murderer or with the death of the loved one’.

Significantly, Salini delivers this explanation within the gym itself, where it’s framed by an obscurity, by a lack of differentiation that’s on the one hand both external and geographical (‘[O]utside the gym … in whatever direction one turned, North, South, East or West, one saw only accumulations of water vapour in suspension’) and on the other both internal and temporal: ‘Everything in the gym, the walls, the furnishings, the men, was pasted together out of blind materiality. One was in the instant prior to the creation of a universe that was endlessly deferred.’

So time has stopped. At least for now.

‘We are living,’ as the text announces later, ‘through a back-to-front creation.’ A more social situation than had been described within the gym, and one in which, as the survivor puts it, the killer (or the artist):

‘wants it to be us that finds the reason for what he did, the reason not even he can understand. We and he are complementary moves within the same debate. In killing he has put the question. In living we have been asked to come up with the response. We have been called upon to complete that which he has begun [...] This is what he wants from you: he wants you to be the one that closes up the circle [...]

‘Don’t pay any attention to common sense. Here in the zone of contact, the cause does not precede the effect. Here the chronological order doesn’t matter. Here the cause of what has been done not only still has to be discovered but actually does not yet exist.’
(Antonio Scurati: Il sopravissuto)

Almost as though reprising Michaelangelo’s painting of the Creation of Adam from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, the killer had even pointed his finger out towards the survivor (‘It wasn’t an act of aggression, rather it was an election’) during the very moment of the killings. But with this difference, that in Scurati’s version of what happens Andrea Marescalchi has to step forward from the crowd through the fact of his survival, through his (negative) selection by the killer, whereas the killer himself, Vitaliano Caccia, seems to recede from view altogether, just one amongst a crowd of disaffected youths, ‘the pointed end of the arrow’. Indeed he has acted, according to the Public Prosecutor, having been ‘chosen from within by a group of his own age to complete a death mission’, ‘a kind of collective mandate set by a group of his peers.’

 
‘Trained by millions of hours passed in front of the television these people reacted to each event in human existence, even one of tragedy and mourning, with the only behaviour necessary from the television watching public, with applause.

‘But real life, that which like a death squad knocks on your door when you least expect it, grabs you from the comfort of the sofa in the living room, drags you out by your hair and then shoots you, by the side of the road, immediately claimed the rematch.’
(Antonio Scurati: Il sopravissuto)

It’s not just a matter of watching the past play out behind one like so much length of road or even of using that past experience, rightly or wrongly, in dealing with the present and the future. In a car one lives time linearly, privately. One excerpts oneself from the flux and multifocality of what goes on, locking the door on community and all that lies outside one’s chosen focus.

In Travesty, for example, John Hawkes catches a car and its occupants in the act of moving towards catastrophe and death, which lie beyond the novel’s ending. The experience of the present is all inside their metal box. Joni Mitchell’s Big Yellow Taxi starts and ends with ‘a parking lot’ as the paving over of ‘paradise’. Its emotional centre speaks of being excluded from a within:

Late last night
I heard the screen door slam
And a big yellow taxi
Took away my old man
Don’t it always seem to go
That you don’t know what you’ve got
Till it’s gone
They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot.

But could one not perhaps live history in a more open way through being part of the molar and molecular arrangement, that flux, by which communities are made up?

When Dante meets up with Virgil, for instance, it’s after the famously ‘dark wood’ and during a sleep akin to death. Virgil is part of the past: ‘I’m not a man. I was a man before’. He leads Dante into a series of possible futures which are the present for those who find themselves there: a more social and more dimensioned sense of time. However, when Dante enters Purgatory he is warned against looking back, a reversal of the Eurydice principle, because ‘anyone who does look back returns outside’.

And now here is Enrico Palandri in a 2006 conference paper, delivered in English, exploring Time & Literature. First he asks whether time appears in ‘our culture’ along with the written word:

‘[W]e distinguish History from Pre-historic time precisely along the border marked by the invention of the written word. From that moment onwards we will have things and their linguistic and symbolic representation. I shall give a simple example of this separation: God will appear in the Bible as Ya-ve-he, I am what is, but the word which indicates what is cannot be written as it makes it past.’

So writing is looking back. And the US Constitution is a written one, a closing out of the past.

*

Palandri develops his thesis in a very particular way. He asserts, for example, that nowadays we orient ourselves in ‘our time’ by reference to its precedents. We use the rearview mirror, keeping that metaphor, through psychological relativism expressing itself chronologically. An objectifying process. Its effect on usefulness and presence isn’t a good one:

‘When Romanticism begins to describe the individual reading as ‘subjective’ interpretation, History begins to separate us from the past. We look at these books today and ask ourselves what did they mean for them, rather than what do they mean for us.

[...]

‘Our time separates generation from generation through a severe objectivity, a material grasp of the meaning of words which dissipates any ambiguity, but possibly also any real proximity.’

His own take on Dante is as follows:

The development of this historical view of the past, mainly through philology, has given us reliable texts and a scientific attitude towards the study of our tradition [...] but it is worth stopping a moment and wondering whether it is not because of this further historicization of time that we cannot really imagine, like Dante, to have as a guide to the other world a poet born 1300 years before, and to meet all those poets and philosophers we would like to confer with in Limbo.’

Another Palandri text feels like background for this. His 2003 novel, L’altra sera sets the personal experience of a broken family attempting (or not) to meet up within the public experience of a rioting, multicultural Paris during the 1998 World Cup. It’s a short but complex book which can also be read as a dialectic between two competing times: the time of the job and the car, and the time of affiliation. (Close to the end of the novel there’s a scene which embodies this dialectic quite precisely: Gilles, whose impatience is quotidian, attempts to chivvy Francesca, his wistful, delaying wife. And it’s through her interruption of quotidian time that some kind of real reunion comes about.)

The emotional substance of the novel arises out of words but it forms a sort of surplus which words alone cannot capture. (A young victim of a knife attack is not the father’s unknown son. So things don’t ever quite come into balance.) Blanchot called death ‘merely the side of life which isn’t turned towards us.’ Here it’s night which provides the frame, at either end of the book. This is the side of death which remains as possibility, of construction as well as destruction: ‘Night will come. Black night. Bare night. My night,’ the repository of fear. Either the sky has been stripped of its constellations or else it’s waiting to be (re)populated with new stars: a prelude to conversation. Later on these possibilities are reconstructed, through memory:

‘In the evening the peasants called the animals into their quarters and the countryside was filled with cries that lasted for ages, cadenced and repetitive like songs [...] that seemed the calling of the stars, one by one, until night was made complete. In the perfect darkness, after supper, they turned off the lights in the kitchen to look at the constellations and to chatter a bit in the cool air.’

And within the body of the novel, there is indeed (ostensibly) precisely that bringing in, or bringing out. The procedures of desire (positive and negative; its indefinableness is often evoked by smells) as they are articulated in all their different tenses and their moods. The communitas (in Turner’s sense) of the football, which is also the communitas of the rioters. The proposed family meeting disrupted by the riots. Affinities both real (a grandfather, an unborn child, furtive sex between cultures) and implied (a potential lover, a potential child and so forth). How Gianni, the student son, is subject to ‘the irresponsibility of desire’, as he attempts to construct a new present out of the theorised future, as he joins up with a group of Kurds and they attempt to destroy a car; though not Gilles’ car, which gets through it all unscathed. How Giacomo, the father, seeks the (re)construction of a new present out of the legally separated past, whose own desire is more cautious:

‘Superstition has taken up space again within me, that marvellous caution that accompanies us when a desire is so intense that it seems to produce reality directly out of hope, and then we endeavour not to break the spell, not to disturb the surfaces of things

‘In order to be present,’ as Simondon puts it using soul and body as an analogy (L’individuation psychique et collective à la lumiere des notions de Forme, Information, Potentiel et Métastabilité), ‘the present needs the future and the past; through these two [...] the soul reaches the body. The body is what-isn’t-present; it’s not the material of some animating form. The present rises up from the body and returns to it; the ‘anima’ crystallises the body. The present is a work of individuation. The present isn’t a permanent form; it’s a form in operation. It finds its form in individuation.’

The novel ends as follows, more or less:

‘Here it is. Night. Bare night. My night. [...] One shouts in its face, Don’t scare me, Night. But actually you please me with the infinitude of your time which isn’t beaten out by commerce and by the ordered living of families, of schools, of traffic. Your time is totally free, open to irregularities, to the tentative search for someone with whom to cross the darkness and come out on the other side.

‘[...]

‘I still wait for the night like a child, like a boy, like a man, and like someone who’s grown old. That the day might come to an end…’

In Il fattore A (from Gli autonomi vol I) in which he discusses why Italy was so uniquely and profoundly affected by ’68 – ’77 Lanfranco Caminiti sketches this distinction.

On the one hand there is the US model, a sort of ‘wild capitalism, of primitive accumulation, of the frontier, of mercenaries, where the turbines sweep everything away without regard, and where one can only resist by reforming a little here, a little there, and that at a very high price.’

And on the other there is the ‘Soviet’ version, in which inherent contradictions are gathered together at the highest level of generalisation, as ‘the plan’, thus completing ‘an insurrectional leap without actually creating any insurrection, rather making itself the engine of development: worker democracy produces electrification.’

What Gordon Brown, who likes to save the bathwater from discarded babies, retains (at least rhetorically) is some notion of the State Capitalism of the former Soviet Union.

Anyway here is Badiou at the recent Birkbeck conference reasserting how refusal, which is against the State and its ‘progress’ also comes from within:

‘We must create a political framework, something which is disassociated from the State, which is not ruling by the State itself’ [...] we cannot live today outside capitalism. It’s a nonsense, There is no place outside capitalism. So is it possible to create something like a political space by [...] an analysis of contemporary capitalism? I think this [...] is a necessity, but we cannot [...] create political places outside or at a distance from the State.’

(from L’esercito del Surf, the Army of the Surf, written by members of The Anomalous Wave)

(Maurizio Lazzarato: Lavoro immateriale, 1997)

Prescott, for the record, is a sort of English Berlusconi; similarly amoral. Where the latter (was it Rosanna Rosanda who actually made this observation?) embodies a certain male Italian self perception as gaffe prone and inept (see the considerable Italian literature on ineptitude) but also oddly successful, so Prescott for New Labour has been its inarticulate, supposedly ‘working class’ soul: a buffoon who is also wheedling, stupid and aggressive, insufficiently despised. And successful.

Now Prescott has started a blog. A 15 March entry refers to an interview with the BBC:

‘They called because they read this blog. It’s remarkable how by being your own publisher you can get your thoughts out there unedited and have the mainstream media follow you.’

They called, of course, because Prescott has some status and because of his tireless self promotion. And his blog is a form of viral marketing designed to sell New Labour as a product, a label, as he knows but does not say.

Part of that viral marketing has been to give Ms Harman’s Court of Public Opinion some small semblance of flesh. Hence Mr Prescott’s bogus ’petition’ against poor Fred Goodwin’s pension, which a vast army of 3,710 New Labour sympathisers have been induced to sign in the run up to red rose day:  Multitude 2.0, as it were.

In Ms Harman’s Tame Kangaroo I tried to highlight a closely related trick, to show how Ms Harman pointedly conflated the coercive violence of the lynch mob with conventional models of legality to produce what she called ‘the Court of Public Opinion’ in a piece of rhetoric which showed up disturbingly (as the assault on Civil Liberties also does) New Labour’s quasi fascist inclinations.

Not that there is anything very new in this technique: New Labour has employed it from the beginning. Before his translation to Cardinal Blair of Baghdad, for example, Bishop Tony used quite regularly to jump the barrier between, say, the providers of a central service (for which he was broadly responsible) and those who found themselves victims of its delivery, co-opting their complaints.

And now, in New Labour’s plans, announced by Alan Johnson and James Purnell, that the unemployed should all be offered counselling, preferably CBT, the managerial version of the ‘talking cures’, we have the latest policy counterpart of that same principle.

In 1936, 200 people marched from Jarrow to Westminster to protest against unemployment; not an insurrection, to be sure, though it was something.

In 1981 Norman Tebbit mischievously rewrote that episode to attack the riots then taking place in Handsworth and in Brixton.  A good example of the jam tomorrow version of reality upon which capitalism relies:

‘I grew up in the ’30s with an unemployed father. He didn’t riot. He got on his bike and looked for work, and he kept looking until he found it.’

Unsurprisingly, what New Labour now propose, at a cost of £13m in freshly invented money, is no more helpful than Mr Tebbit’s plucky memorial and very much more despairing even as rhetoric: not merely the diversion of political anger into sturdiness and self help along the lines of Samuel Smiles but actually the full privatisation of social discontent through its elimination from the social and collective (ie political) sphere and its extrusion into the private, the personal and the ‘mental’.

Should there be mass unemployment and consequential anger and despair, in other words, and this seems by no means unlikely, then the fault will lie not with the depredations wrought by neoliberalism, of which New Labour is a part. Rather it will have come about through individual failures to perceive exactly how half full the glass is. And should there be a solution in New Labour’s terms then this will come about not through the emergence of some new social subject already present in potential, through the ballot box or across the barricades, but simply through getting used to how things are.

Which is a gloss on political impotence, of course: the dissipation of political energy and  endeavour and how they come about through Bourdieu’s social suffering into the ’symptoms’ of ‘disturbed’ individuals.

‘[T]he more man’s nature runs to [revenge], the more ought law to weed it out: for as for the first wrong, it doth but offend the law, but the revenge of that wrong putteth the law out of office.’

Towards the end of the essay he draws a further distinction:

‘Public revenges are for the most part fortunate [...] But in private revenges it is not so…’

Because ‘justice’ in its untamed state is private, plural, interpersonal and damaging to the Law as an institution, private revenge is inimical to the latter in a more systemic way than, say, the breaking of some individual prohibition. So revenge is like dry rot, ground elder or a virus. As part of any civilising project it needs to be done away with or, at the very least, controlled even as the tarmac is being laid down over the chaos.

Hobbes similarly insists on keeping separate the plurality of the multitude in its natural state, on the one hand, and, on the other, the unity of the people civilly instantiated in (not just represented by) whatever ‘public’ institutions are in place:

‘[M]en distinguish not enough between a People and a Multitude. The People is somewhat that is one, having one will, and to whom one action may be attributed; none of these can properly be said of a Multitude. [...] In a Democracy, and Aristocracy, the Citizens are the Multitude, but the Court is the People. And in a Monarchy, the Subjects are the Multitude, and (however it seem a Paradox) the King is the People.’

(De Cive, XII 8)

And here by contrast is the ‘little and narrow mind’ of the ineffably stupid Ms Harman, New Labour’s deputy leader, as revealed to Andrew Marr, acceding to the exceedingly ‘weak pleasure’ of threatening poor Mr Goodwin’s pension with a lynch mob:

‘The Prime Minister has said [Mr Goodwin's pension] is not acceptable and therefore it will not be accepted. It might be enforceable in a Court of Law but it is not enforceable in the Court of Public Opinion and that’s where the Government steps in.’

What’s underway here, as with Brown’s imaginary insurrection, is an attempt to tame the wild, to turn it into a colony. Her comments mimic a parental turn of phrase: ‘No, because I said no.’ However, whereas parental authority is quite clear (as far as stroppy toddlers are concerned the parent makes the Law) Ms Harman’s version moves about, shifting and evading responsibility, blame and anything else that might be awkward at some point.

First the Prime Minister is reported as having said something in a very performative sense, as though he were a Ruler making Law. But he’s not. Or at least not by himself. So it’s actually just an opinion. Therefore the authority (such as it is) is not legal or even deontic but doxastic.

Next Ms Harman denatures the Law, splitting legal accountability into ‘a Court of Law’ and ‘the Court of Public Opinion’. But the latter doesn’t exist and the former is already, in Hobbes’ sense, the People. In which case to go beyond that bold embodiment into something new involving what Ms Harman calls the ‘public’ but by which she really means the mob is to invite insurrection or what Hobbes calls ‘sedition’, ie the overthrow of civil governance by ‘the multitude’. Whilst to suggest as well, as she does, a connection between such a court and government is to invoke either a People’s Court such as might follow a popular revolution or, disturbingly, the Volksgerichtshof of Adolf Hitler.

But of course Ms Harman steers well clear of all that. Her Court will have no claws, not even theoretical teeth, despite what she implies. So Mr Goodwin’s right to take his booty will indeed be ‘not enforceable’ before her kangaroo court, which is hardly much of a threat. And he will take it anyway. People won’t much like that but they’ll live, and HMG will share their pain. They may fail to take to the streets. However, that will be no victory for any sound good sense. Rather it will be the memory of an almost fascist urge to victimise and punish, albeit not followed through. At least on this occasion.

Here to close is Mandeville’s Grumbling Hide in which the lawlessness of the multitude is incorporated into the polity itself as though it were the grit within the pearl within the oyster:

Presumably in his prelapsarian pomp, which is why he was given his knighthood in the first place, Mr Goodwin was just such a piece of grit. Or at least he was thus regarded. By a venal and dangerous government which at that stage believed in what it now disowns.

What Brown is highly unlikely to have meant was that insurrections were jolly good things. Instead of some rebellious version of the future (‘Let us together curb the power of the US,’  ’Let’s storm the Winter Palace,’  ‘Tear down that flag’ and so forth, or Bisca’s throwaway ’I don’t know if another world is possible, but this one is impossible’) in which what will happen is unknown, what he actually sought to put across was just the usual, victor’s version of the past turning into the present in which the known and comfortable apex of the present is supported and justified by an earlier courage and by the rhetorical preposition of future unknownness into what’s modally past. In other words, it was no doubt all just flattery intended for a US President who had already said, at the Eastern Inaugural Ball, ‘Today was your day. Today was a day that represented all your efforts, all your faith, all your confidence in what’s possible in America. They said it couldn’t be done. And you did it. And if we apply that not just to elections, but to jobs, to how we rebuild our communities, then when people tell you we can’t employ folks, [that] you are out of work, you say – ?’ To which the crowd had responded predictably, using the words of Bob the Builder, ‘Yes we can!’ like so many Annie Oakleys. The point of course was not that he ‘did it’ or would do it but that he’d won. He did it better than Mr McCain.

And yet ‘insurrections’ was a very nice touch indeed. Besides evoking indirectly but deliberately the US American revolution, Brown was hinting at some sort of popular movement independent of rationality, coming from beneath. (The US Declaration of Independence, as it happens, invokes a ‘natural law’. Within its first few sentences it arrogates apodictic truths that were meant to come from above, in line with Hobbes’ definitions of sedition. And maybe it even carries the memory of a crowd swarming beyond the confines in which they were contained.)

Back in 2004, Brown quoted Roger Scruton (England: an Elegy) wistfully evoking British ‘national character’ (actually ‘English’ character, though Brown doesn’t mention this) as something transcendent or external which exceeds ‘the crowd’ and which Brown called ‘a golden thread’: ‘When people discard, ignore or mock the ideals that formed our national character then they no longer exist as a people but only as a crowd.’ In other words, according to Brown and/or Scruton, there is something mereologically bigger that contains us and which we really ought to respect.

But insurrection finds its origin with that ‘crowd’, with overflowing, with breaking out of containment and not at all with something that falls within the purview of (let’s say) English Heritage. So by saying what he did when he did in Washington, what Brown was expressing was real abjection, albeit in a patronising way: ‘I tip my hat to the new generation’ (The Who, in Won’t Get Fooled Again); the crowd that comes from below and overwhelms me, overtakes me and reforms itself into a ‘people’ has been a process of becoming a new sort of public to which I am subject but to which I do not belong. Although I could not have been that crowd nor am I now that public I still carry the idea of the crowd within me as a keepsake, a sort of memory. I find it soothing when I put my feet up in the evenings.

It isn’t insurrection of the imagination or by the imagination that’s being evoked, in other words, but merely an imaginary insurrection (‘I could have been a contender’), a sense of what might have been. Or insurrection tamed and trapped like a snowstorm inside another glass paperweight on this Prime Minister’s desk.

(Paolo Virno, from Gli operaisti)

(Lettera ad una professoressa)

It’s not true that we are helpless faced with images. It’s images that are helpless faced with their own sound track. It’s hearing that will save us.

(Tiziano Scarpa: Kamikaze d’occidente)

(Luca Doninelli: La nuova era)

To put that another way, what made email distinctive wasn’t personal tone of voice as an unrepresented thing (as with Stephen Hawking’s synthesiser or, to some degree, with all communication) but the fact of anonymity, the fact that email cut across cultural contexts and boundaries, its occasion for false identity, pure creation.

It has turned us into cartoons.

Here is Wittgenstein, in a letter to Paul Engelmann:

‘[I]f only you do not try to utter what is unutterable then nothing gets lost. But the unutterable will be – unutterably – contained in what has been uttered.’

Here is Wittgenstein again, in a letter to Ludwig Picker:

‘I once meant to include [...] a sentence which is not in fact there now but which I will write out for you here. What I meant to write then was this. My work consists of two parts: the one presented here plus all that I have not written. And it is precisely this second part that is the important one.’

And here is Guy Debord in Critique de la séparation:

‘The sectors of a city…are decipherable, but the personal meaning they have for us is incommunicable, as is the secrecy of private life in general, regarding which we possess nothing but pitiful documents.’

So what is lost is fugitive in the way that the connotative is, that qualia are fugitive. It runs away with the writer, leading him into alleyways in which what happens simply can’t be spoken of or said. And it runs away from the reader, leaving him with alleyways in which something unknown presumably must have happened, in which what is possible is either happening or may be going to happen but is possibly not the same set of experiences but another. In which talking about what is visible, publicly available, is at once necessary and rather beside the point. In which interpretation and/or translation is in one sense like Tennyson’s views on love. In which it’s better to try and fail than never to try in the first place. ‘In place of hermeneutics we need an erotics of art,’ as Sontag puts it in Against Interpretation, as though undressing a virgin text for which undressing itself is the point:

(Billie Holliday: These Foolish Things)

However, there is another aspect which concerns both the nature and the ownership of those alleyways (or cigarette or airline ticket; or stockings, in the version by Ella Fitzgerald, or whatever) and how they come about. And it isn’t at all about applying (say) Rachel Whiteread’s approach to the negative space of what’s not there or can’t be reached. As though the artwork or the poem had, by definition, to be about containment or capture (or its failure) within form, or about apparent form and content and about the transcendence either of the structure as Platonic form or of what’s within some ‘visible’ structure as the content that goes beyond obvious ‘content’ and which is something that cannot be grasped. This is one version (the wrong one) of Wittgenstein’s view that ‘An aphorism doesn’t need to be true,’ that ‘it should go beyond truth. It should, as it were, go beyond it with one satz.‘

And so here, as an alternative, is Simondon (L’individuation psychique et collective à la lumiere des notions de Forme, Information, Potentiel et Métastabilité). What’s important, in this view of how things work, is ‘to know about the individual through individuation’, not the other way around. Moreover:

‘In the process of individuation the living human being is both the actor and the theatre. His becoming is a permanent individuation, or rather a series of bouts of individuation that proceed from one state of temporary equilibrium to another.’

All of which is probably the other and very much better sense of Wittgenstein’s assertion. Or as the Bible puts it (John, I: 14)  language is being created as a living thing:

‘And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us [...] full of grace and truth.’

(Significantly the title of Paolo Virno’s Quando il verbo si fa carne. Linguaggio e natura umana  turns ‘word’ back into ‘verb’, into individuation and the process of becoming.)

And as Dickinson puts it also:

Or as de Gregori puts it in La storia siamo noi:

Or as unknown Greek demonstrators interviewed by the Observer put it:

Now what’s important, of course, is to avoid any slippage whatsoever either into mere aspiration or nostalgia or into assertions of bogus causality or (worse still) deterministic cynicism.

‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad,’ according to Philip Larkin. So don’t be a parent yourself. A dystopic reading of Darwin and an abject determinism in which people are as separate and as imperviously solid as atoms used to be and humanity is envisaged as a collection of disparate individuals through whom faults are passed on down through the generations and to whom accrete further faults, apparently through mutation. The group has ceased to exist. So too has the individual, except as the consequence of the actions of individual others who are themselves the consequence of individual others in an infinite recursion in which subjectivity is kept all too firmly offstage. Whoever the actor may be, in other words, he is never ever the speaker. So choose childlessness instead.

And here too are The Who in 1971 (Won’t Get Fooled Again from Who’s Next) rejecting transcendent ideals (and rejecting music as exemplary act, as though it were blowing up bridges) in favour of a cynicism as corrosive as that of Larkin (or New Labour) about a history to which they have allowed themselves no access and so can provide no answer:

Because what Simondon offers is useful. Because the trick in the dynamic and aspectual approach to History of which he is a part is to substitute for what is fugitive and/or omitted the idea of a surplus, of something that’s not included, which always exceeds the taking: ‘The concept does not exhaust the thing conceived,’ according to Adorno (Negative Dialectics). Except that in this context the interpretable meaning of a poem, say, which is in no way subsumable under the rubric of concept, constitutes itself. It is brought into being not by the writer, not by the reader nor even in the interstitial space between the two as though it were something subordinate, but as performance: as language acting in the theatre of writer, poem and reader (because performative language always performs that trick of bringing into being, or it attempts to) and, simultaneously, as writer, reader and poem acting in the theatre of language, inherited and to come. And it always leaves something behind.

‘The problem we had was that we were under clear instruction we could not give out any information until the company said so. That caused a lot of concern from the workforce over the last couple of weeks. Although we are a trade union we are employed by the company.’

On the one hand:

 And on the other:

According to the reusable metaphor which Wright Mills then goes on to create out of the birth of British industrialisation, the opinionated public thus conceived ‘is the loom of classic 18th Century democracy’ in which ‘discussion is at once [both] the threads and the shuttle’, tying things together as it were.

And yet, then as well as now, this description is implausible: merely ‘a set of images out of a fairy tale: they are not adequate even as an approximation of how [...] power works [...] The idea of the community of publics is not a description of fact, but an assertion of an ideal’ which ‘is recognized by all those who have considered it carefully as something less than it once was.’

Writing out of his own particular time and place, Wright Mills develops out of what he finds a notion of a ‘society of masses’ in a way that parallels the identification of the ‘mass worker’ by Italian operaisti. In the latter, not wholly brave new world of post miracular Italy the opinion-forming Estates had either broken down or become irremediably repressive, rather as the unions and the trade and craft distinctions had either come to break down or had become oppressive in the Republic founded on Work:

(Alfredo Bandelli: La ballata della FIAT)

Or as an Autonomist slogan put it not long after dear, democratic Doctor Kissinger’s splendid 11 September coup against Allende: ‘In Chile they’ve got the tanks, but we’ve got the unions.’

And so, speculating now, out of this particular time and place, long after we got what we asked for, which wasn’t at all what we wanted (who was it, by the way, who described Berlusconi, friend of Tony Blair and client of David Mills / Mr Tessa Jowell, as the bastard child of Radio Alice?), we can recycle. Indeed Wright Mills’ metaphorical observations seem to need updating only slightly. In the era of cognitive capitalism, of immaterial labour, of precarity, the loom has been dismantled, or possibly repossessed. Instead there are simply small transmitter/receivers bobbing on the surface of the boundless ocean, linked only by the thread of their capacity endlessly, repetitively, to transmit and to receive. This is Negri’s multitude, but before it achieves self consciousness as a social subject. The movement of the ocean is titanic. Events go on ‘elsewhere’. Until the crash. But until then, in the thin and airless little world of the post Fordist polity as a viable public space, presence is everything, so that whilst these devices may disperse and recombine, whilst they float upon it they do not partake of the ocean in any active way, so that the overall effect is (at best) one of empty, mutual advertisement, of our affectless reincarnation as mindless, self documenting emoticons. Cf, for example, the examples of the bishop who would put confirmations on Twitter, as though the act of being formally received into the Church were a sort of spiritual happy slapping, or of Gordon Brown, looking and behaving like a gloomily aspirant Celtic Tony Hancock, over on You Tube. But there are plenty of non Establishment examples of the same sort of thing.

And meanwhile actual or social disappearance, not now the effect either of a real historical iceberg or of a metaphorical one but just a process of slow or rapid withdrawal, of absence, is merely radio silence, over and out, of death amidst white noise.

And we are, most of us, for the most part, still living out that death.

 (C Wright Mills: The Sociological Imagination, 1959)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/feb/16/pakistan-torture-mi5-agent-binyam

(Franco Berardi, aka Bifo, in Settantasette, la rivoluzione che viene, eds Sergio Bianchi & Lanfranco Caminiti)

But is this accurate? Aside from whether we differ from animals in this way, one must (of course) distinguish between two different sorts of situation.

On the one hand there are those in which apprehension itself is suspect, insufficient, in which there is a surplus which vests beyond either capture or control: a possessed without a possessor, neither something which is open nor yet some sort of Commons. In this sense History is just a  frosting over of what was warm and freshly baked. The point about History being its potential for the future: ice can melt.

And on the other there is the missing surplus of advertising: the Exchange & Mart of the damned in which all one’s yearnings for what might be or might have been in some longed for bulky package achieve a passing, spurious satisfaction through receipt of the package alone, of its contentless appearance, of its bits of cardboard, paper, sellotape and string. And this is deficit, the emptying out of History in the furtherance of a numb and endless present: bogus product, successive bogus rewards, the prancing ninnies of New Labour; politicians not as the citizenry acting as sovereign participants in some polity nor yet (in the representative model) both inspiring and being inspired by the citizenry but as narcissistic menials in some ‘customer facing department’ (offstage but grandly self important, as though speaking for grand ideals); the politician as porn star, writhing for the camera in the name of missing Love.

Just as advertising and pornography ‘escort the commodity to the grave like hired mourners’ (from La comunità che viene) so the modern professional politician empties political institutions of their life force and makes of them hollow tombs.

Or to put that more concretely:

‘To whom is [the porn star] indifferent? To her partner, certainly. But also to the spectators, who become aware (to their surprise) that the porn star, whilst knowing perfectly well that she is exposed to their gaze, is not complicit with them in the slightest. Her impassive features thus shatter any relationship between what is seen and what is expressed. She doesn’t express a single thing any more but makes herself available to be viewed as a locus chaste of any expression, and purely as a means.’ (from Profanazioni)

*

‘Please don’t seize power.’  (A/traverso, September 1977)

Here is part of a letter from Miliband published on page 32 of today’s Observer:

‘Your leader (“Tell us the truth about torture, Mr Miliband”, Comment, last week) suggested that I had “suppressed evidence” linking British officials to serious offences allegedly committed against Binyam Mohamed, and that my decision to seek public interest immunity against public disclosure of the documents might be from “fear of offending an ally”.

‘The truth is quite the reverse.’

And here is The Observer itself rebutting Mr Valiant-for-Truth on page two:

‘The Foreign Office (FCO) solicited the letter from the US State Department that forced British judges to block the disclosure of CIA files documenting the torture of a British resident held in Guantánamo Bay, the Observer can reveal.

[...]

‘A former senior State Department official said that it was the Foreign Office that initiated the “cover-up” by asking the State Department to send the letter so that it could be introduced into the court proceedings.

[...]

‘The former senior State Department official said: “Far from being a threat, it was solicited [by the Foreign Office].” The Foreign Office asked for it in writing. They said: ‘Give us something in writing so that we can put it on the record.’ If you give us a letter explaining you are opposed to this, then we can provide that to the court.”

‘The letter, sent by the State Department’s top legal adviser John Bellinger to foreign secretary David Miliband’s legal adviser, Daniel Bethlehem, on 21 August last year, said: “We want to affirm in the clearest terms that the public disclosure of these documents or of the information contained therein is likely to result in serious damage to US national security and could harm existing intelligence-sharing arrangements.”

In other words, once again Mr Miliband is correct. Rather than wishing to cover US backs, as The Observer shamefully alleged, it was the back of the UK government which he had intended to protect. Meanwhile he appears intent on applying the bad apples / Abu Ghraib defence to Britain’s role in government sanctioned torture.

Good for him!

These two observations are by no means unrelated. Read by their lights Lucarelli’s Un giorno dopo l’altro becomes a sort of road novel about that connectedness, constructed out of the subjective experience of three quite separate individuals of the (objective) links between them, and about how time and distance now present themselves as repetition.

Alessandro is a youth who works for an ISP, where he monitors internet chat rooms. Time has stopped for him since his girlfriend went back to Denmark. So he has set Luigi Tenco’s song Un giorno dopo l’altro, itself about repetition, to play as an infinite loop: ‘Day after day / time disappears: / the streets are always the same, / the same houses. // Day after day / and everything as before; / step after step, / the same life.’ He has a docile dog (called Dog) which others mistake for a pitbull. When he first encounters Vittorio (as he himself squats in an otherwise silent chat, surrounded by the empty noise of other rooms)  it is simply as lines of text replying to earlier text from someone called ‘the old guy’.

Vittorio is a contract killer. He is not a serial killer, though he constructs that image for himself: ‘the pitbull’. This, however, is a sort of nickname or tag used with the aim, apparently, of returning (once it becomes appropriate) back to his former anonymity through a semiotic death: ‘In order to kill himself the pitbull had first had to be in existence.’ His real death is experienced, subjectively, paradoxically, as a semiotic death, a literal loss of signal, as descending into white noise, as ‘fading into a hissing whiteness, like plunging into a sea of grass. He thought: it’s ending. He thought: for real. He thought: here.’ End of signal, end of journey, end of time.

Grazia is a police officer. She is one of a team keeping villains under surveillance. In the course of her work (and the novel) she is objectified at various points by the male gaze of Alessandro, of Vittorio and of her fellow officers. Initially she encounters Vittorio as an absence, a murderer of three people who has somehow managed to slip through the net of hidden microphones. So technology fails at this stage. But her method of tracking down her suspect is taken straight out of set theory (‘Narrow down. Connect. Exclude and narrow down again.’) just as Alessandro’s initial and very indirect contact with the person behind the ‘pitbull’ nickname, mediated through his colleague Luisa, is by checking through IP numbers.

Throughout the novel runs a network of roadways traversed (subjectively) by Vittorio not really as the means towards some end but as the pattern of life itself: ‘On the motorway life is movement. If you stop it’s because you need help.’  As well as two different binaries. Grazia’s putative pregnancy, which could still be resolved by a test which Grazia never quite administers but instead reveals, more or less accidentally, first to Alessandro then to her fellow officers, as a sort of item of her trailing or extruded subjectivity. And the dilemma Alessandro faces: to get his girlfriend back or move on; ie What to do about time? Which he resolves (or fails to resolve) by flying to Copenhagen, winding back the tape, turning the clock back, foreshortening distance, right at the end of the book.

(Marc Augé, in interview)

Why come here to Trude? I asked myself. And already I wanted to leave.

You can resume your flight whenever you please, they told me. But you’ll arrive at another Trude, exactly similar to this one in all its particulars. The world has been covered over by a single Trude that neither starts nor stops. The name that’s shown at the airport is the only thing that will change.

(Italo Calvino: Trude, from Le città invisibili)

[...]

When driving along the motorway you can still do lots of things. Listen to music, speak on the phone, think, sing, drink. You can give yourself a scratch. [...] What you can’t do is raise your legs onto the seat and knot them into the lotus position. You can’t read a book or watch television. Or sleep. You can’t maintain your gaze in another direction that isn’t straight ahead.

(Carlo Lucarelli: Un giorno dopo l’altro)

(Lenin on Hegel’s Science of Logic, according to Raya Dunayevskaya, 1987)

(Cornelius Castoriadis: The Immaginary Institution of Society)

(Karl Marx, supposedly in 1867, though it’s probably an urban myth, as quoted by Marco Niada, retiring correspondent of Sole 24 ore, at a farewell dinner held in his honour in the City, presided over by the Italian Ambassador to London and attended by a number of Italian bankers, 3 February 2009)

When we were at school together, I and another friend brought Carol Thatcher to see David Miliband. She had been a friend too until she’d offended him in some way. Anyway, we held her down whilst David stamped on her hands. Naturally we felt badly about this afterwards, although our consciences were clear since only David had done the stamping.

And so time passed, as it always does…

One year at the school reunion I said to him, ‘David, don’t you think you behaved rather badly, stamping on Carol’s hands?’

‘What do you mean?’ he replied. ‘I only held her down along with you. It was Hassan who stamped on her hands.’ And, of course, he was right. I remembered that after he said it.

A short time later, we were all sitting together in the green room of a well known TV company when we overheard Carol Thatcher saying in her inimitably loud and rather vulgar way, ‘You know three of them attacked me after school and took turns to stamp on my hands.’ And, obviously, after a breach of trust like that, no friendship can survive. So we dropped her. And, in addition, we sued her for defamation.

Well eventually the case did get to Court, where it was heard before Jonathan Ross LJ, a Law Lord of some note. In his rather testy summing up, Ross stated:

‘I am unable to try this case. The plaintiffs have hidden the evidence. I find it intolerable that any Court should be put under this kind of pressure.’

Tonight David and I are going round to Ross’s house. We are going to stamp on his hands.

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The Soviet agent and Keeper of the Queen’s Pictures, Anthony Blunt, famously defended himself with E M Forster’s observation that it was better to betray one’s country than to betray one’s friends.

David Miliband has adapted this principle. It is, in his view, better first to go along with torture in secret and then to go against international law than to go against whichever friendly country carries out these acts.

A Good Childhood is a so called ‘landmark report’ from the UK Children’s Society. According to a selective article in the Telegraph, it argues, inter alia, that television makes children mentally ill partly through advertisers’ messages that ‘you are what you own’ and partly through that medium’s practice of celebrity:

‘Children today know in intimate detail the lives of celebrities who are richer than they will ever be, and mostly better-looking. This exposure inevitably raises aspirations and reduces self-esteem.’

The reference to ‘aspirations’ here is peculiar. For a start, aspiration is more usually seen as one of capitalist society’s major drivers: you look across at the field belonging to that other chap, you see that it is greener, you apply some fertiliser to your own field and very soon everyone gains. It is this that underpins the hugely patronising (and often White) belief that inhabitants of US projects and slums are going to look up at Obama over the coming years and see not only a brave fulfilment of the dream of Dr King but also an inducement to themselves to give things one further heave.

And that, essentially, is its function in this view of how things work, an inducement to further effort, to fit in. But it’s a position from which, even though Tim Gill, for example, notes that children need to be autonomous, self directing and so forth, the Report as a whole will probably not dissent, its own sort of aspiration, other than at the margin. Aspiration, in other words, doesn’t seesaw with self esteem. Rather it works as social control in a way that desire, for instance, never can; which is what makes desire so subversive.

So here we have it: the dynamic model of capitalist aspiration. A carrot moves forward endlessly and therefore you do too, failing again and failing better, goaded onwards by a stick. Don’t do drugs and/or go to prison. Join the Democrats instead.

In a more topological model, one reaches towards the object of aspiration which always lies on the boundary of the very system within which one starts aspiring in the first place. In L’Europa e l’Impero, for example, Toni Negri notes how the US ‘empire’ is the skin or outer surface of a container for which we provide the contents, within which we live. And this, no doubt, is why (in a British context) the same mindless New Labour clique has looked successively to the vibrancy, if that’s the word, of WJ Clinton, GW Bush and now of BH Obama. Policy here is secondary if it’s relevant at all, because the issue is one of marques.

Nor are things much different in some Christian contexts. Christ is the object of imitation, the source of ‘living waters‘. However, that imitation is always radically incomplete. Either one never reaches that boundary (becoming fully alive is therefore always postponed) or else imitation fails in some other way: ‘[they have] hewed them out cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water’ (Jeremiah).

As to the message that ‘you are what you own’ here are the children of Don Lorenzo Milani’s school in 1960s Barbiana (from Lettera ad una professoressa):

‘The poor create different tongues and then they struggle to renew them for ever. The rich crystallise these so that they can keep down those who do not speak as they do.’

Now what these children were complaining of was this: firstly that they were excluded from or dispossessed by others of a language which was theirs and secondly that a false and ‘crystallised’ form of that language (and this is similar to the commodification of ‘dead labour’) was then turned back on them prescriptively and proscriptively as a source for their (new) identity.

And this is actually quite serious. On the one hand there is an asymptotic relationship pre-existing between two aspects of language, a sort of ecology of the potential, which must not be destroyed:

‘The true culture, that which no one has so far possessed, is made up of two things: belonging to the group and possessing the power of individual speech.’  (Lettera…)

And on the other hand there is the sort of observation about that destruction which is made by Roland Barthes:

‘To rob a man of his language in the very name of language; this is the first step in all legal murders.’ (Mythologies)

But of course children living today are by no means dumber (or less dumb) than were their counterparts in Barbiana. Certainly they are experiencing a similar negative loop whereby they too become forced consumers of their own production, now fed back at them in crude and distorted ways: for example as reflections of their desire to be like their peers or like their older siblings, or as their desire to create new friendships, now reflected back as the bogus friendship of celebrity. And, almost certainly, like the children of Barbiana, they know this at some level. Yet they are hardly unique in this. Rather they are victims of the process common in cognitive capitalism and which applies both to children and to adults whereby (as Alquati and others have noted: tourism is an example) production and consumption coalesce:

‘They have sold us one by one. They have sold our poor lives and our history to make a history combined with others, a fake history, that doesn’t even have a happy ending, one that finishes in indifference for everything and for everyone.’ (Stefano Benni: Saltatempo).

‘The lift is a machine for ignoring one’s co-tenants. The car for ignoring people who go by tram. The telephone for not looking people in the face or going into their houses.’ (Don Lorenzo Malini: Lettera ad una professoressa)

Or to turn that around entirely, ‘Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose.’ The emptying out of the self; the ‘imaginary institutions’ of whatever greater (but absent) entity instantiated, made carniferous through not entirely elective prosopopœia. These walls may not have ears, but they certainly do have tongues.

Or as Hegel said (or at least Engels summarising Hegel, later quoted by Plekhanov), ‘Freedom is the recognition of necessity.’ And Necessity, the Law, is dark or occluded only insofar as it is insufficiently understood, the container that’s to be breached, the potential for destruction, from within. This is subjectivity conceived in Avicenna’s terms, as ontological Russian dolls. Not the ground beneath one’s feet (elephants all the way down) but successive ceilings, the impositions stemming from others’ objectification, against which subjectivity has to push. Until some terminus ad quem is eventually reached, be it God, Historical Necessity, the biggest dead whale in Lombardy (Cf Aldo Nove). Or whatever. And Pie in the Sky When We Die.

Joe Hill offers ‘pie in the sky when we die’, whence the phrase. But right now we have to ‘work and pray [and] live on hay’, which is a nicely acerbic sneer at the tension running through so many parts of Christianity (as a religion of achievement) between the modally present, optative and aspectual (‘God be with you’) and the temporal, deontic and modally future (‘Heaven shall await you’: God postponed).

Guccini’s God is Dead draws a somewhat similar contrast, this time between a world in which:

and ‘a new world’ which is in the making, precisely because:

but also in which the Resurrection precedes, as it were, the Revolution rather as velleity precedes conation before the arm can be raised. Or in this case the whole of the body from the not yet emptied tomb.

And there may be still other ways into this notion of active passivity, always presuming it exists, one of which might be to think not about inaction versus action but instead about how presence relates to pretence, of presence without pretence, and about absence. From outside each ontological boundary (ie looking in) content is an image, a representation: its reality is subordinate, diminished. Whereas ‘there could be another way, of making of it only presence, only absence.’ (This is Antonio Moresco.) So ‘to hell with representation! This is the time for presence. Fewer metaphors, fewer mediations. Meaning things directly. Making literal sense.’ (Tiziano Scarpa)

And if meaning now becomes key, is meaning itself then simply a series of jugs or boxes in which to capture the world? This is ontological containment, meaning conceived of as though it were mastery over the world. Or is it a set of tails which one haplessly attempts to pin upon the donkey flux of sensation, which is what the world, as we experience it, comprises? This is nominalism, whose two ontological realms, somewhat estranged, comprise Reality on the one hand and the Naming of Reality on the other, rather as essentialism (which treats of what is true and thus unchanging against a flux of names) and nominalism (not quite vice versa, but nearly) are themselves estranged. Or is it rather a suit of clothes with which to cover up the nakedness of being? Maybe. Because Nature abhors undressed emperors above all things and therefore so should we? Or because Tinkerbell exists precisely through our belief?

But I don’t, in saying that, wish to make fun of what is simulation semantics at a personal level, social constructivism at the interpersonal. The creation of meaning, the production of some sort of glow of value, maybe if only a glimmer even, is a much more important and complex thing than its pricing through re-production, through the quotidian exchanges of all our busy social lives.

(Mario Tronti)

(Stefano Benni: Saltatempo)

The Futurist Manifesto sings of aggression and speed against a literature of ‘painful immobility’: ‘We want to exalt aggressive movement …the route march, the leap in the dark … The world has now been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. We want to praise the man who holds the steering wheel, the column of whose lance crosses Earth, launched at a run, over the course of its orbit.’

In 1982 Francesco de Gregori sang of the Titanic’s Captain Smith, fused with his vessel along with ‘a million horses’: ‘Look at the muscles of the captain, all plastic and methane.’ ‘This ship does 2,000 knots… / and it has an engine made up of a million horses / and in place of hooves they have wings. / … / In this swift and electric night … / the future is a burning cannonball and we are almost about to reach it.’ The end comes ‘peacefully’ enough, as it were, to the strains of a much earlier song about the Sirio, whose wreck preceded that of the Titanic, with its own hundreds of dead, on 6 August 1906:

This is probably the fate of bishops (and commentators) everywhere: to gloss the inevitable even as they go under.

Anyway here is Francesco Guccini singing in 1972 of how on 20 July 1893 Pietro Rigosi, a railway fireman, deliberately drove train 3541 into the first class carriage of another train just outside Bologna. This was when the ‘Holy War’ of the anarchist pezzenti ‘was beginning’ and ‘the train too seemed a myth of progress / launched over the continents / …  a strange monster.’ This train is the generic train of strength and speed whose ‘dynamite’ power is controlled by hand and brain, formed by the transfer of imaginative energy from the natural world into that of the machine. But it becomes an image of luxury, velveteen and golden, parked in a dead end. Meanwhile, even as it ‘grips the rails with muscles of steel’, the generic iron horse status of the fireman’s train is transformed back, as though undoing a magic spell, first into a true ‘living thing’, into ‘a young colt that has just thrown off the reins’. And it is this ‘immense destructive force’ within the system itself, which ‘runs and runs and runs ever faster / and runs and runs and runs and runs towards its death’ which ‘nothing can now hold back’.

It is presumably not always the case that new horizons do not (potentially) exist out there or that they have been conceived of inappropriately. But when freedom itself is destroyed the ‘freedom of philosophy’ (this is Adorno, of course) becomes no more than ‘the capacity to lend a voice’ to that unfreedom’. Or else there is simply silence:  ‘To breathe the same air / as a warder doesn’t suit me / Therefore … I’ll give up / my hour of freedom.’ (Fabrizio de André: Nella mia ora di libertà, 1973)

We’re all crazy. We don’t actually drive anything any more. They drive us.  (Stefano Benni: Saltatempo)