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)

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)

(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)

The Roar of Battle

What is the future anterior? Here is Scurati on Foucault’s ‘distant roar of battle’ from which his novel takes its name:

‘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)

Articulating Despair

Thoreau and Tondelli

*

‘The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. […] A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work. But it is a characteristic of wisdom not to do desperate things.’
(Thoreau: Walden)

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)

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)

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)

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

How post Fordism explains contemporary media, not vice versa.


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)

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)

After the Mass Society

C Wright Mills and post autonomism


In The Mass Society (from The Power Elite, 1956) C Wright Mills looks at 'public opinion' as the mythic seat of democratic power. This is what New Labour's Gordon Brown deceitfully invokes whenever he bleats about 'the British people', whose needs he always knows. Essentially it is 'an 18th Century idea' which 'parallels the economic idea of the market of the free economy': a world of freely competing actors where price (not value) is formed by 'anonymous, equally weighted, bargaining individuals' and opinion arises out of 'little circles of people talking with one another'. So that autonomy is assumed in both cases and autonomy of discussion in particular is important for the idea of how it legitimates, of how 'no one group monopolises the discussion or by itself determines the conditions that prevail.' So that 'the discussion of opinion is the important phase in a total act by which public affairs are conducted.'

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:

'Boss, you haven't fooled us
with your creations, with the unions
your plans have gone up in smoke,
it's us you're up against.

And the qualifications, the trade distinctions,
we want them all abolished.
The divisions are at an end.'

(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.

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)

Technology

'Technology is a way of so arranging the world that we do not have to experience it.' (Max Frisch)

'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)