Detournement, Drifting & Resistance

A British comedian recently offered the throwaway gag that when she used her GPS she found herself ‘gaming the road’.

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)

Imprisonment

‘Is it preferable to be free and harmless or to be dangerous and in prison?
[...]
‘I prefer to be in prison because I’ve set free one of my dreams than to be free because I have put it in prison.’
(Isabella Santacroce: Lulù Delacroix)

‘… 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 icarcerate 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)

(Re)production: Two Fragments from De Carlo

‘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)

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.

The Persistence of Technology

E Nesbit on how technology captures subjectivity.

‘There's a dreadful law here - it was made by mistake, but there it is - that if any one asks for machinery they have to have it and keep on using it.’

(E Nesbit: The Magic City)

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 on Sunday, in The Observer, September 2002)

Three Views of Duplicity

Alan Ayckbourn on corruption:

'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)

Christianity as a Narrative of Progress

'... in the Christian religious tradition there are two grand narratives: the story of Salvation, which tells of the shining path taken by man returning to God, and the story of the Fall, which instead narrates the dark business of the estrangement between creature and creator which followed Original Sin. Christianity in its pre-modern form developed the latter almost obsessively ... the modern version, by contrast, has insisted mainly upon the former, associating it with the layman's idea of progress: thus all would turn out for the best thanks to Science and Technology, which would resolve the problems of humanity, eliminating suffering and injustice from the face of the earth.

'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)

A Third View of Obfuscation

'I may not be able to love but I force myself to pretend to believe in it ... For the future I don't have the slightest hope but I constrain myself to disseminate faith in that future, projecting it like a trompe l'oeil onto the pealing plaster of the school hall. I don't have dreams, those I had have fallen from me ... and yet I feel I have a duty to nourish those of young people [...] I am hard with myself and soft with them. From them I expect everything, and for them everything good; of myself I don't expect anything any more. I feel pity for everyone except for my own person. For myself I reserve a more perverse sentiment and a punishment that's more subtle: I know that I am not happy, and I blame myself for that, and I condemn myself, by way of retaliation, to pretend that I am.'
(Antonio Scurati: Il sopravissuto)

Two Views of Obfuscation

‘One must always explain the matter clearly to an adversary. Only then can you be sure that you understand it better than he does.’
(Svevo: La coscienza di Zeno)

‘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)

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)

Taking Back Subjectivity

Operaismo, subjectivity and Marx's 'general intellect'.

'The problem is that operaismo needs to liberate the forces that have been chilled and frozen by the cognitive sciences just as, in a former age, it liberated the forces seized by neocapitalist and technicist ideologies. This is the problem if one means to have the general intellect as a subject.'
(Paolo Virno, from Gli operaisti)

Life in General

Life in general is possible in any, sufficiently dehumanised sort of place - but only provided you don't think about it.
(Luca Doninelli: La nuova era)

The Sociological Imagination

Wright Mills on the public / private split


Nowadays men often feel that their private lives are a series of traps. They sense that within their everyday worlds, they cannot overcome their troubles, and in this feeling, they are often quite correct: What ordinary men are directly aware of and what they try to do are bounded by the private orbits in which they live; their visions and their powers are limited to the close-up scenes of job, family, neighborhood; in other milieux, they move vicariously and remain spectators. And the more aware they become, however vaguely, of ambitions and of threats which transcend their immediate locales, the more trapped they seem to feel.

(C Wright Mills: The Sociological Imagination, 1959)

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)

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)

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)