Dario Fo at 85

‘It will be a ghastly birthday. For years I’ve waited for an ending not exactly happy but hopeful at least, informing me that I can go away in peace. Instead once again there’ll be no party, given current conditions that can only make us weep. [We’re] surrounded by people ready to throw their crooked cards on the table and each time they find some idiot who comes along and gets himself robbed senseless. It’s like the three card trick [...]

‘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)

Manufactured Fiction

‘The environment is so full of television, party political broadcasts and advertising campaigns that you hardly need to do anything. We’re just drowning under manufactured fiction.’
(J G Ballard, who died yesterday, in The Observer, September 2002)

Claiming the Rematch

‘Revolution isn’t showing life to people, but bringing them to life.’
(Guy Debord: For a Revolutionary Judgement of Art, 1961)

 
‘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)

The Post Fordist Social Machine

Commercial television is just a staging post on the way to the real, joined-up, post Fordist communication machine, on the way to the ‘infobahn’ (the information super-highway) where all the functions anticipated from control over the information flow will find their true technological realisation. If one doesn’t understand this one risks saying a lot of stupid things about the media and about the power of information. Certainly the media play a fundamental role in the matter but they are part of an entirely different series of links. In this new series of links we don’t see the same television we used to see, we don’t live the same set of media we used to live. It is the post Fordist social machine that explains the nature of the media, not vice versa.

(Maurizio Lazzarato: Lavoro immateriale, 1997)