Rebibbia, 25 February 1982
Cher David,
If you had happened to be passing through Milan in July 1976, you would have found it hard to avoid Parco Lambro. Indeed I’m sure you’d have rushed straight down there. A huge festival of young people, organised by slightly frivolous alternative groups, but reinvented by the movement. There were so many people there, heaps of them, like sheaves at harvest time in the old days, out in the sunny fields – and, as the days passed, the groups moved around. Even during the day they moved around, looking for shade and coolness. A short-sighted person who, like myself, had taken up a vantage point at the top of the valley inside the park might have imagined being in some technicolour film of generals and pitched battles, set in the period of the absolutist state: a continuous to and fro of masses of people – each group bringing with it carts and tents, musical instruments and basic tools. The dirt was like that described in historical accounts of Albrecht von Wallenstein’s campaigns [in the Thirty Years War] – but not more, despite the stories that were going around and despite the fact that the municipal authorities deliberately cut off the water supply. And the movements of these bands of people were accompanied by a halo of dust – so you might have thought that you were watching regiments on the move, until you caught the oriental whiff of that smoke, which went right up to the top of the valley. When you came down from the top, you found yourself immersed in a kind of sinuous, coloured bundle, as full of desires as it was free from taboos. People were smoking, making love, listening to music, spending their time gently coming together and feeling united. Light shadows in search of a collective time and a collective body.
Amazement was the first thing you felt – so it was true that, in those years, resistance and refusal had created this potential for liberation! The emotion was confirmed when you realised that the style was predominantly proletarian. A lot of so-called sociological phenomena were right there, in plain sight, but they didn’t have the mercantile characteristics – a bit infamous, a bit eccentric – in which (so-called) scientific descriptions like to dress them. Here there was nothing excessive, nothing that was not fundamentally human. It was actually a carnival of the poor – but, unlike a carnival, it could not resolve itself into rituality, going for excesses and then annulling its behaviours in a state of exception. Rather it was a carnival that consciously sought to be liberation. Maybe it resembled the ancient Greek mysteries more than the Christian carnival. Indeed the second emotion that struck you was one of knowledge. A short circuit between the poverty of the new proletariat and the very high form of its intellectual composition, a game that made up for dire poverty by being played by an intelligent multitude.
But was there really a specific enjoyment of this intellectuality? No. It was and remained a short circuit. The truth of liberation cannot just rest on the particular. The intensity of desire was notable. The naked dancing girl was the image of grace and hope, but the desire did not limit itself to artificiality and convention. The drugs and the music could be an excess. You began to breathe a restlessness. An Aufstand der Körper [revolt of bodies], a search for the collective body and at the same time a revolt of the body. You noticed – little by little, but with the rational certainty that filters out from the mass of a thousand sensations and perceptions – that what was happening was the first movements of storm in a clear sky: first you feel in the air and in your nerves and muscles that bad weather is about to arrive, and then you suddenly become aware of the clouds piling up.
The first day of Parco Lambro 1976 was quiet. Then, already on the second day, you had the proletarian expropriation of the organisers’ food trucks; then on the third day groups of people headed off out of the park looking for supermarkets to rob – there were sounds of gunshots, and the police turned out in force, albeit at a distance.
Then it was doubted whether, to meet the greater scourge
of the crabs that would now come from outside
like a proud and fast-moving stream,
it was better to come out halfway and confront them
or rather to retire into the city with good reserves
and close the gates to scorn their wrath.1
It was hellishly hot. All the political firefighters were mobilising their powers of persuasion: don’t come out of the park. ‘Oh Wallenstein, don’t occupy Prussia!’ The local Milan newspapers – but we know that the Milanese newspapers build national policy – repeated the threat: stay in the ghetto. Indeed, passing through the fences that bordered the park was like stepping into another world – but it is also true that what was being poured into that funnel was something that had already been fermented, consciousnesses had been transformed, their potentiality was already throbbing, and a multitude was now emerging from the park. Die Jugendproteste haben den Körper neu entdeckt [Youth protests have revealed the bodies again]. A refoundation of bodies. A multitude: stoned on hashish, maybe even out of their minds, but new and wild.
Beautiful virtue, whenever it gets hold of you,
my spirit is uplifted, as if by a happy event.
Nor does it believe you to be worthy of contempt,
even if you were fed and nourished on mice.
Before your beauty, which surpasses any other,
it always bows, whether you are known and resplendent
or you find yourself forgotten; and it is inflamed by you
even if you are not true and steadfast, but imagined.2
So how could this mass now return to that world of normality, of ‘the necessity of sacrifices’, of cheap patriotism, on which the Historic Compromise was being built? No; Lent did not come after carnival. Probably only during the Wars of Religion, if you had put yourself at the edges of the two contesting camps, could you have identified so clearly not two armies, but two souls. The trumpeters of sacrifice and emergency played in one camp – strident, low key, ambiguous in the composition of the orchestra. They were promising war.
You should have heard all the orators
thundering war in their speeches:
the likes of Leonidas, Themistocles and Cimon,
Mucius Scaevola, Fabius the dictator
Decus, Aristides, Codrus and Scipio . . .3
How could they have hoped that the mice were going to fall in line? And in the other camp were ingenious and sophisticated animals – the best of music, the best of human passions. And these people were running – young but confident in themselves, anxious but with glimmers of ingenuous hope ready to unfold. Kraft der Angst und Wut gegen die Zukunft [power of fear and rage against the future].
If I now think back, cher David, to the non-retractable words, the irreparable actions and the pathways of death that sprang forth from there – from that same Parco Lambro, from that real congress of the social autonomy of the movements – and came flowing down the valley; if I think of this now, I really am not able to convince myself that death is half of life and that there is necessity and a close concatenation in this. Why does it have to be like that? What terrible image of life requires such an insistence on necessity and on death? No, defeat is not a destiny, nor is it even an unknown. Schicksal inkognito [unknown destiny], as in Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s tedious play? Once again, no. This event was rather woven on the web of the variability of the balance of power, and thus it was a varied and alternating mixture of luck and virtue, of freedom and necessity. Yet, in this restless season, the naive emergence did not enjoy – and did not have sufficient awareness of – its own quota of necessity. It was struggling ‘against’, and not ‘for’. It was fighting against the colonisation of the body, and only intuitively did it sense the new nature of the collective. The initiative was in the hands of the others, it was at home in the vocation of the masters of war; and there they were, outside of Parco Lambro, reciting novenas and calling for sacrifice. From within Parco Lambro, on the other hand, struggle, fortune and virtue presented themselves as dance and as hope. Still today it is too early to say who won – the struggle continues. And we have not yet freed ourselves from the pathways of death. And yet . . .
A small aside here. I think back to the front pages and the newspaper headlines of that period. The left was riding high; it had electoral successes. The politics of the Historic Compromise, aka national unity, aka solidarity, and so on. Big solid headlines on the front pages.
Already through the middle of the shifting dust cloud
you see the solid mass of the crabs
that, quietly and without noise,
was moving gravely forward, with assurance.4
We had given them our votes and they had cheated us. Torpid political bodies, the rustling of robes of cardinals and diplomats, court whisperings: all against us. The monstrous unchangingness of an immobile power. In the face of all this, petty news reportage, small memories. A friend and colleague was watching all this – a Christian democrat, administrator of a few hundred limited companies and expert in today’s public law. With the irreverent humour of a Venetian intellectual he thought that the Historic Compromise was like a big net – one day they would pull in the net, and the fish would be trapped. How nice to see them make sacrifices! he added. Then I think back to the communist intellectual whom not even the party whippings had managed to subdue in his nostalgia for the movement. He chuckled bitterly: we shall meet again soon these closet Freemasons who enter into our administrations; they are necessary but they have nothing to do with us. The Communist Party is travelling in heroin. So let’s get together for a rethink, he suggested. But, caro Uliano, what do you want to rethink, I answered him – and together! Don’t you see the storm that is gathering? Erasmus of Rotterdam, the independent, is no longer in fashion, even if today there are plenty of ships of fools around. Together again? But how? You should come down too, Uliano, come down to Parco Lambro. Here desires are flying high, like kites. But soon the kites will become violence. Beautiful virtue:
Ah, but where are you? Are you always dreamed of or pretended?
Does nobody ever see you in your true nature?
Were you already killed along with the rats, long ago,
and does your beauty no longer smile among us?
Oh if you were not painted in vain from then on,
nor perished with Theseus or with Alcis!
Certainly since then your smile became more rare
and less adorned day by day.5
Scandal is useless now; for how many years have we seen the deepening of this division? And now what do you want to add to the situation? Factum infectum fieri nequit [what has been done cannot be undone]. Militant Communist Party members, whatever way you take them, weren’t allowed into Parco Lambro. I myself (as I explained to Uliano) was in crisis – the crisis did not affect my ethical consciousness, but its surface, yes. Because here what was directly at issue – perhaps for the first time since this story began – was the very fact of the individual behaviour of the militant – the shape of the wave and not simply the colour of the sea. And there the conversation ended.
But not reflection. When the theoretical enthusiasm of anticipation comes up against experience, then the need for analysis, study and criticism becomes urgent. There was certainly no lack of documentation: it was as rich as daily experience. You found it hard to follow the flow of events. For months now, the expropriation of luxury stores had been followed by expropriations of supermarkets and the self-reduction of phone bills, transportation, electricity bills and tickets for shows; and this went hand in hand with occupations of housing and mobile pickets organised against the small bosses of the black labour market. All this built pathways for a restructuring of the social and political struggle of the new and diffuse proletariat. The squares where fascists and drug dealers operated were cleared out – and in schools there was a renewal of agitation, and factory and neighbourhood communities were beginning to come together in territorial and working-class organising committees – in short, you could no longer keep up with all the ongoing struggles. And this incredible circulation of struggle was accompanied by a leap in people’s ways of associating with one another – new types of family were being created and new figures of social aggregation. What the feminist movement had sown as critique and dissolution now reappeared as consciousness and behaviour. Touching the whole of life, the new had a thickness that had a flavour of the old. Of oak, you might have said. It was no accident that the shadow it shed was so dense that parasites and charlatans could hide themselves in it. Grunf, grunf, grunf. But more of this later. What we should talk about now is the amazing quality of our life. We were entering a new era, in which there was a paradox: the immediate presented itself as value, and value presented itself as collective, as power, and as hope. Truth was a pre-reflexive essence, a free dissemination of life. From the crisis of the law of value, from the collapse of every objective parameter of value, there leapt forth a tension towards projectuality, which was diffusely and directly interpreted by collective subjects. This transition had a central resonance in the lives of individuals. The personal is political. Intimist and defeatist interpretations, lyrical and miserable interpretations, all followed hard on each other’s heels. But there were many, and many disappeared in a flash – lightning without thunder. The personal is political because persons and their immediate values are drawn into a collective function, responsibly collective, and only there is enjoyment given – collective enjoyment of the personal; not representation, not mediation, not institution, but collective immediacy.
But within what figure, within what projection of value? We had already seen all this at the level of analysis, and there the formation of a social force of production appeared clear – enjoyment means producing. But here the problem changes, because, while analysis leaves space for the imagination, life on the other hand constrains it to determination. So here we had to identify that productive thread that turned the new conditions of the collective into a real project. We had to locate ourselves at that discriminating point, without fear of the fierce winds that were striking the crest of the watershed. Towards what was it proceeding: the collective constitution of the subject? In its concrete genesis you found festivity as a creative element – but creative of what? Creation is, first of all, a pleasure in and of itself. Then, later, it has to show itself as an enjoyment of being – but we had certainly not arrived at the seventh day, nor was the day of rest granted to us. The surface should have revealed its own self-formation as a desiring machine, as a war machine, as potenza – to put it in the terms that we would be using a while later.
But this was to re-pose the problem, not to solve it – not even to find a route to its solution, the first steps to take. We were installed in a syllogism whose premise was certain – the descent to consequences was a logical tangle and a spasm. All this was clear there, at Parco Lambro, and we discussed it with discretion but with rigour. And with no solution. We insisted hugely on the need to restore the personal as a dimension properly deployed in the collective, and the older comrades – veterans of every kind of battle, perhaps more than others, and certainly less naively so – were prepared for this constructive self-criticism. But at the very moment at which this individual transformation was coming about, precisely the older and more aware comrades were posing the problem of the next stage of the project. Because, if it was not defined, then our living of that moment would only be an episode of abstract seduction. And not potenza. And not antagonism.
Hard drugs were banned at Parco Lambro. A number of heroin dealers were beaten up. But drugs were everywhere and you could not curb the flow. Heroin had found itself a position right on the edge of the unresolved problem: it was simultaneously the highest construction of desire and the mark of the absolute negativity of any claim – when the path of desire was not collective, practical and real. Heroin was imagination that, in demanding its due, denied the problem and dissolved the collective. Heroin was our anguish. From the personal to the collective there ran – I said it, I wrote it, I shouted it – a single path; we had to transform our anguish into a higher enjoyment of the project. Shut up you old fool, was the answer that came back – you’re running on empty, you’ve been overtaken by life. There is, in desperation, the same generosity that exists in love: it is on this point that the processes are reversed – this is how I replied in attempting an answer. Shut up you old fool, again. So let’s try it ourselves – let’s try to discover the link between despair and love on this ontological point that is more powerful than both, because it determines both of them: at the point where there is production. Production of self and production of antagonism. That lessened the force of the ‘shut up, idiot’.
Why not try? Is it not basically reasonable to seek to find our reconstruction at the point where our angst has been created? For the angst is not only mine, it is everyone’s. It is in our workplace and in our wage; it is within the poor everyday realities of family life; and it is within the rigid measure of the working day. It is the angst of those who are exploited. Exploitation is the opposite of happiness, exploitation is the same as angst. You cannot understand angst without understanding exploitation. But the destruction of exploitation means the liberation of work – realistically, in this condition it is in fact the refusal of work. The refusal of work is a new productivity. But where is there – here, and not tomorrow, here, at this point – a project that can be pursued, a hope of living? A horizon of angst opens. Maybe, maybe . . . But is there a difference between the angst of exploitation and the angst of the unknown to be discovered? On this distinction – on the optimism of an intellect that can affirm its virtue and discover the unknown – is based the whole movement, together, of subversion and transformation. ‘No future’ is the destiny that they, the bosses, want to impose on us; but the lesson is coming again today – from Zurich, Berlin and Amsterdam – that destiny can be changed by the power of alternative intelligence. The founding of the new revolutionary subject is therefore not generically to remove the angst, but to determine it within the potentiality of a new project. Papageno becomes Ulysses, both of them covered in mud and bird feathers. Instead of waiting for the big clatter of brass and percussion and for Mozart’s Enlightenment foregrounding of the chorus, liberation presents itself to Ulysses as nomadism and adventure, as labour and intellectual graft. Parco Lambro opened on the short circuit between poverty and multitude, on the tendency towards recomposing the personal in the collective. It lived its angst when the projectual substance of the new subject found itself unable to arrive at the intellectual and productive enjoyment that it demanded – it closed itself into the self-conscious determination of a task.
Cher David, the ‘go forth and multiply’ of apostolic memory took place on the morning when those poor returned to their various towns and cities. On that day, the ancient historic body of this Italic nation of madmen must have experienced a certain tingling. And then they soon got used to it, as they always do – or they tried to get used to it. (The so-called ‘movement’ journalists then began, with a sudden vocation, to launch the most audacious mystifications – they were simultaneously victims and butchers, these homunculi. Their outpourings were worthy of a Pulitzer Prize: Parco Lambro came to be seen as Woodstock. Romulus dug there the walls of the first ghetto. When power gives you its blessing, things start to go awry and you can come a cropper . . . I did not want to get emotional when, after some years, I saw, from the bitter window of my prison, these writers falling prey to despair and suicide . . .)
Parco Lambro was like a melting together – like the start of the production process in the steel industry. The joining together of people’s lives with the historical enactment of liberation has never been played as sweetly as in those days. A new steel had been created, tender and very powerful. A new body. Spinoza: ‘the more perfection each thing has, the more it acts and the less it is acted upon; and conversely, the more it acts, the more perfect it is.’6 It was a challenge for philosophy and a new opportunity for practice. It is strange how the light and the terrible can come together intimately in situations where innovation breathes. But, in the very process of melting together, the diversity of the materials feeds a tension: different diapasons can follow their various veinings with different resonances. In fact, within this coming together, you stand as if trembling after a long embrace. Surges of desire lift you up; moments of sadness depress you. It seems to you that physical tiredness takes the place of theoretical doubt and effort. Did I say ‘seems’? No, it really is that way: the interchange between intellect and will is ever present. Perhaps this is the state of birth? Enough, enough of this babble, of these descriptions that avoid the essence, whereas a poet could describe it in a moment, in a single phrase. Only movement can solve the expectation and render it positive. A new vitalistic presumption? But, by God, if there is an expectation, then there is potentiality. Apollo sows the seed of Dionysus. The ontological inversion of all the terms of the discourse is here the matrix that permits us to define the enormous potenza of the waiting as a pressure for transformation. Otherwise we cannot succeed in making connections, in putting together a writing. We find ourselves back with Métal Hurlant – continuous flashes – cheapskate postmodernism. Parco Lambro was not an element of this contorted hyper-design. It was a definition of the positive. So let us head down into the streets, into the squares, let us again press forward this explosive potenza.
I look back and cannot bring myself to admit, even if we ended up with an abortion, that this act, the sowing of this seed, was stupid. Walter Benjamin:
The spirituality of Socrates had a character that was entirely sexual. His concept of spiritual conception was that of a pregnancy, his concept of spiritual generation is tantamount to a discharge of desires . . . The Socratic question, in the same way as irony, was an erection of knowledge (if I may be allowed this terrible image for an equally terrible thing).’7
So I arrive at the seventh day, and the restlessness finds rest – because the practical turmoil of that subject shows itself to be protected from reality. The future – in that complexion of reality – I saw it as being graspable in terms of the weeks of creation that would follow. You, cher David, you will know how to interpret these, my bits and pieces of the collective hope of those days. So I embrace you. With such sweetness.
PS It often seems to me that what I’m writing is unnecessarily convoluted. Or maybe convoluted is not the right word: overloaded, rather, with content added to the basic theme – baroque, because it seems that I can’t avoid alternatives, variants and derivations. Bombastic. This redundancy conceals, it does not clarify. Please forgive this limitation of mine – and also its complement, which is that sometimes I am clumsy, irritated, inattentive, late, dreamy, writing in shorthand – and this happens each time that some involuntary memory pushes itself forward in me and brings to the surface that other aspect of life that is my ego, my history, my private things, my memories, my loves, and all that. Samuel Pepys, that extraordinary writer of diaries, at a certain point invented a cryptic writing for himself, for when he was writing about indelicate things. Am I creating some kind of convoluted shorthand in order to hide my humanity? Indelicate, shameful? Perhaps – but no more so than anyone else. Often politics has separated the human being from the intellectual. This may be a bad thing, but it’s a given. Does it show in writing? Certainly. But how can we overcome this – and other structural limits? By falling back on the private? By pretending and pressing as one’s own that which was lived as separate? Or by sailing uncertainly along that coast, which memory gives only as a wild horizon and a dark line? And how can we use a raw material that is so crude? Make the dream, the delusion, talk – they say. I don’t dream – or rather I really don’t remember my dreams. I cannot undo what has been done, even if it was done badly. And so? Is not this situation of mine entirely commonplace? I think that only a language that is collectively capable of delirium can win back the unity of being as an expression – we cannot go back, we have to go forward. The collective must, of course, reveal the singularity, but how? Small talk, the ontic dimension, the common distribution of signs, customary images – all reveal our interiority, how it is now made; and they carry it forward in an expressive rhythm, to the point of representing a non-disfigured common sense, a non-asphyxial revelation of singularity itself. Otherwise, in private – in this private that is a sign of a past species – love becomes exhibitionism, narcissism rules, and even suffering is told with satisfaction. And this is even uglier than either the baroque or the shorthand – because the private is no longer human.