Power

Revolution isn't seizing power but seizing the power of life and over life. Seizing power isn't the culminating moment of the revolution but rather counter revolution in its purest form, in its triumph and its mockery.
(Pino Tripodi, in Gli autonomi vol I)

*

'Please don't seize power.'

(A/traverso, September 1977)

Miliband Exposed

David Miliband, the torturer's friend, continues to deploy the 'simple sword of truth and the trusty shield of British fair play', inherited from the almost equally squalid Jonathan Aitken.

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!

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.

Active Passivity II

Very simply I mean that we are the objects of messages and treatments that we must absolutely be aware of and learn about. The images 'addressed' to us 'preform' us, giving culture an appearance of naturalness that we must be vigilant about. Distance and observation are permanent necessities.

(Marc Augé, in interview)

The Metropolis

If during the touch down at Trude I hadn't read the name of the city written in nice big letters I would have thought that I'd arrived at the very same airport from which I'd taken off. The suburbs they made me cross were no different from those other ones: the same houses, yellowish and slightly green. I followed the same arrows, I drove round the same flowerbeds in the very same piazzas. On display in the streets in the centre were goods, packages, signs that didn't change, not even slightly. This was the first time I had come to Trude, but already I knew the hotel in which I happened to be staying; I'd already gone through my dialogue with the ironmongers; other days, exactly the same as this one, had ended with me looking through the same tumblers at the very same undulating navels.

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)

Driving II

On the motorway what matters isn't being but moving. At a reasonable distance you can talk about being at Pescara even if you're not there, because that's where you're going. For a body in continuous motion direction is more important than any particular point that won't be there moments later [...] On the motorway life is motion: continuous, constant, without interruption.

[...]

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)

Power and Opposition

The consecration of power must not carry greater weight for us than the halo of irreducible opposition.

(Cornelius Castoriadis)