An Artificial Christmas Tree Mourns the Loss of its Roots

Here is New Labour’s Ed Milliband, one of the four little pigs currently competing with Diane Abbott for the leadership of New Labour. He is looking from above with some dismay at the result of the UK election:

‘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.

Politics as Bullfight

Politicians are like bogus toreadors, with all their banderillas and their lances, and the public in its entirety yelling and egging them on. But there isn’t any bull any more. The bull is in the biotech labs, in the garages where they write software, in the production houses of imaginary futures, in Hollywood, in the MIT Media Lab in Boston.

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

Conjunction versus Connectedness

At last year’s Radical Philosophy Art & Immaterial Labour conference at Tate Britain Bifo spoke of a shift from conjunction, the world of the connotative where subjectivities interact, change one another unpredictably, become ‘other’, to the connectedness of machine like functionality, a denotative and objectifying world of unaltered and non altering singularities. In Infanzia e storia Agamben looks at the decline of experience as accumulation into time as mere succession.

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.

Freedom and Revolt

The 1909 Manifesto began a process whereby human beings, the collective organism, quickly became machines. This was the era which saw ‘a financial system based upon the futurizing of the entire economy, upon debt and economic promise. That future is now over.’ (Bifo’s introduction to his Post Futurist Manifesto 2009)

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:

‘and amongst them was a bishop

who gave everyone his blessing.’

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)