Rebibbia, 10 March 1982
Cher David,
We’ve already touched on this in our discussions, you remember? For me New York was like . . . it’s hard to find the exact words . . . a shock, a revelation, a punch in the stomach, I don’t know. Certainly it was a big experience. By 1977 I was becoming a citizen who was less and less pleasing to my government. So in 1977 and 1978 I set out for Europe and America. Was this to meet Carlos and terrorism’s Mr Big? Or was it a visit to the world’s terror network? That’s what the filthy whore Claire Sterling claims. They even claimed to have photographed me with Carlos in Algiers . . . Actually I was neither a fugitive nor a troublemaker for the sake of it. I was driven by something other than the usual desire for escapism or mere intellectual curiosity: it was a practical need for understanding, a journey into a fiction – into a future that the immediate experiences of the struggle did not allow me to grasp intellectually. This was a matter of both urgency and necessity. ‘Fiction’, precisely – the opportunity to imagine my own future and the future of all of us. Listen to William Blake: ‘What is now proved was once only imagined.’1 So America, but basically only New Amsterdam, Manhattan. And Asimov’s Foundation series. The centre, the motive point of every possible circle. The world of worlds. I felt as if I was standing before Tantor, where all dialectics is removed because the capital accumulated there is so enormous that it allows no relationship. Consequently, as in Asimov’s story, free and living labour is placed outside of any dialectics and the doux commerce takes place on the edge of the worlds. The first sensation was one of being stunned and impotent. You asked yourself – do freedom and life still exist, in some independent universe? It was not by talking with economist friends that you found hope – but Asimov answers in the affirmative, with optimistic determinism: from that liminal world living labour will be able to attempt a refoundation. The shock subsides, you continue to observe, you analyse data and statistics, and you look around: here and there a few bubbles break the surface of the swamp. Then the surface begins to move. Gradually you realise that here in New York the two separate universes intertwine: you begin to grasp it and you smile the smile of a child discovering something for the first time. The massive displacement of power lives alongside an enormous vitality of social labour, which is diffuse and full of potentiality. But in what form? Social labour operates in a scenario of social decomposition and disaggregation – and this makes analysis difficult, because it is ‘jeopardised’ in the face of the towering, inaccessible heights of power. This is a logical challenge. A puzzle. The obvious normality of this situation strikes both your intellect and your passion. But one could not remain in doubt or try to apply old and suspect stereotypes. Here the proletarian separation was given in the form of disaggregation and was nevertheless both recognisable and alive. ‘Loss of animal spirits’? Alienation? ‘Desire to die’? Certainly the disintegration contained these elements. But on the other hand in the great social factory a great power of invention was being released – a crazy, multicoloured people was moving frenetically, like toiling ants among the towers of the giant. It expresses itself through symbols of freedom – care for the body, Saturday nights, jogging, lofts . . . – through many, many things that have nothing to do with power. And yet they produce – they produce more than what capital is able, in this wild flowering of initiatives, to organise and to expropriate. The immediate socialisation of the disaggregation valorises the subject. Certainly it also recomposes – simultaneously – the processes of reproduction and the mechanisms of production, because these universes overlap. But who knows any longer on which side stands command and on which side the moment of recomposition? At the top or at the bottom? This tugging, which each does from their own side, is real, and the wealth diffuses itself within the disaggregation, building circuits that nobody any longer knows how to traverse. The crisis of New York, the problem of public spending cuts and the failure of all monetary control . . . The economic crisis is fully prefigured by the social crisis. The rollback of Keynesianism. Where is the top and where is the bottom? The working day has gone crazy – the terms of value bounce between reproduction and production, between immateriality and materiality – the quantity and the quality of value can no longer be separately perceived, and the distinction between necessary labour and counter-power is not perceivable either. Where now is the compelling power of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, and where is its providential logic? A huge war is in progress at this stellar scale. The strength of the contenders is stretched across all the terms of the relationship; you have to forget about manuals of military strategy because positional warfare and guerrilla warfare become interchangeable. A Thirty Years War that is confused and changeable – which, equally and simultaneously, disrupts and dissolves an old world order and, through mighty travail, reveals a new world – a war that wipes out domestic and international law and all formulae of distribution of wealth – a war that distributes plague and wealth in equal measure.
When you find yourself in this situation, your lazy mental habits set you asking the usual classic questions of the communist militant. But, no matter how keen and diligent you are, you don’t find the answer. A poverty of theory. So locating yourself at this point of theoretical imagining, applying critical reason to New York, forces you to deal with the displacement of the logic of capital and to operate an equally vigorous forward shift in revolutionary logic. This in order to understand the relations of class forces within this complexity and to be able to take the independence of the social subjects as your necessary starting point.
One after the other, the images reinforce these arguments – on the one hand, the imaginative presence of the metropolis and its proletarians, people’s angry realism in their use of the city, and the attraction and pleasure of its continual renewal, the joy of the streets, the violence, the assault on public spending, the social dimension of the community, and the beauty of its people. On the other hand, yet further images. It comes as something of a shock. Under the attack of this living disaggregation, in the sea of huge towering buildings, the closed, windowless skyscraper emerges – perhaps the most amazing symbol of power ‘in the final resort’ that human reason can imagine. It is a huge square mass whose internal biology one can only guess at. Social disaggregation has a thousand souls, whereas the skyscraper is power, rigidified and irreversible. Just as the people’s reality in this city is disaggregated and all-embracing and ungraspable and dissolved and dissolute, so at the outset you are barely able to imagine the physiology of that other power. I try to imagine it by way of paradox, from the perspective of negativity, of ruin, of death. Herein lies its specificity: it cannot recycle itself into life, it cannot innovate. Unlike the factory of old, the closed skyscraper cannot be rehabilitated, reinhabited, or transformed into lofts. As soon as the physiological pulsations of its arteries deteriorate, as soon as old age hits its facilities and its circulation – once it loses its ability to produce command – it dies. A Mayan ruin? Like some crumbling temple of that great civilisation? Is this the fate ordained by the American god? Pushing the imagination of command to the limits, and thereby overstepping the limits of the reasonable and conjoining itself only negatively, as a symbol of damnation, to the magnitude of the heavens? A new Babel? Maybe. But this Babel is not in the Mesopotamian desert. Instead it is surrounded by a wealth of vegetation, a luxuriance of wild potentialities. The Mayan temples sank into the ancient wilderness of nature. This present temple will sink into second nature, into civil renewal, and into the new wealth of the communism of the masses. But it is a gamble. New York gives you the impulse to gamble, but not the certainty of winning. For the moment, as evening falls, the unseeing skyscraper falls dark, falls silent – and then you see it, this huge beehive, you see it already finished, dried out. In the shadows you find it easy to imagine the falling apart of its powerful décor. No longer does it have that concert of monstrous insects flying around it, the helicopters and the jumbo jets. Now it becomes the habitat of rats and cockroaches. Shit capital. In contrast, the local neighbourhoods, which during the day are rendered insignificant by the towering of the skyscraper, light up with renewed vigour and almost forget their wounds. Come on in – we spend the nights arguing with youthful vigour, and the old theories of revolt and freedom find new gestures and expressions. (Reading James Stephens’s The Crock of Gold this week has brought Manhattan back to my mind, and the idea of how this world of extraordinary lightness – of spirit and of instinct – is the only possible sociological basis of an ethics of radical irreducibility. And perhaps also of a language to match: Finnegans Wake.)
What is left of class struggle here? It is life – present – as an alternative to an equally present accumulation of death. Here an enormous wealth is in movement – pores and empty spaces of being are filled with an independent production wherever capitalist command is not able to impose its violence and is obliged to permit the existence of sponge-like and receptive tissues. The story of the closed skyscraper is that of a power that, from the core of its structure, demands to articulate every initiative that might permit the reproduction of its biological rhythm: autocracy plays out the recurring dream of autarchy. But at each of these articulations power encounters something else – barriers, counter-power. Heterogeneous lines of development. Forces that do not want to enter into the Palace, that indeed hate it. And with this do they cause it to die? Even if only through this active estrangement? Who knows? This is, however, the point: one struggles outside of and against the Palace. This antagonism between death and new life is continuously in process. Capitalist nostalgia for dialectics. (Even for socialism? Reagan, the great reactionary, now wants mass workers of the old kind, Stakhanovites dedicated to the production and reproduction of that baroque arsenal that has become his power. A vain nostalgia!) Master and servant, however, no longer sublimate themselves in solidarity. Thus, in the ostentation of wealth, the imperial palaces weep tears of gold – the ruins of the glory of the conquistadors are always the same. Among these great masses life carries on, disaggregated and harsh. A huge framework and a huge wrapping. Chaotische. A thin gas passes through the big aggregates, a deep poison. Is this world so ridiculously weak that a Cortes or Pissarro could destroy it with a mere handful of knights? What is certain is that this world has a fatal disease in the form of power, and powerful antibodies in the form of people and societies: these cannot coexist. Power succeeds, day after day, in stealing this social substance as its foodstuff – but with increasing difficulty, laboriously, poisonously. The linear logic of exploitation has run its course. What we have instead is a frontier practice that traverses the metropolis. Labyrinths, mathematical réseaux that have no centre – robbery now replaces the logic of surplus value – discrete or bloodthirsty, the effort and the design of social control are continuously remodelling themselves. The game is over, its theory has become confused. Power has been filibustered out. Can all this be coming to an end? But where’s the sense in talking about an end when we have denied all beginning?
Cher, David, you know New York and the rest of the world better than me – many times you have given me intelligent accounts. The fact that I was so fascinated and shocked when I looked into the crystal of New York seemed somehow to have offended you. Maybe you thought that mine was a naive provincialism . . . However, it is difficult to deny that in this crystal is formed the scene of the whole world. I know Americans who see New York as the shitty umbilical cord of the world – and it is! I know Europeans in New York who have fallen for it head over heels! It’s true: love and hate, contempt and passion, dislocation and disintegration. Until we learn to call the negative positive immediately, and to understand the shifting of reality – its catastrophic becoming and its settling into potenza – we do not understand New York. This is why our senses are thrown when we fail to grasp this potenza in theoretical terms – but if, on the other hand, we succeed, then our feelings and spirits can be educated.
My thoughts turn back to Europe, and to Italy. I hear children’s cries, and only cries and images of childhood, in the face of this great human beast that is New York. And yet everything that I have lived for and struggled over, all seems to me essential: as indeed it is to have brought up things that are new and freshly come to light – from the prospect of a future that I have already seen lived, vergangene Zukunft [past future], and that is antagonistic and open and can therefore be changed. This is the feeling that still brings me to bet on the new generation, that both loves and hates the great American human beast – loves it as a parent and progenitor, and hates it as a beast and as power. Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit [Captured by sword, Greece captured its captor]? Nonsense. Slogans from history prevent you from understanding, as well as mystifying the form of events. This is a recurring European illusion: what is the value of it? It is fraudulent, if it seeks to fill in subjectively for an objective potenza that is as yet unknown. And if you think, as indeed you sometimes do think, that this formidable reality will produce a revolutionary subject to match its scale – there is no such necessity in this relationship. And yet the lack of necessity in the relationship does not deprive you of the possibility. So you would be doubly fraudulent, which would be totally unacceptable, if you did not think that the revolution is born, and can only be born, at the highest point of development of the beast.
(Carl, my black friend, lives on the edge of the Bronx. His barefoot wife, his two sons, their African clothing – beautiful. He talks to me about the 1960s, and then about the revolt of the New York blackout in July 1977. He tries to explain to me the Afro-American revolution of that whole period. He has an awareness that is incredibly attentive to the limits and the potentiality of the black and proletarian movement. He describes the big attempt that was made: a dynamic centralising of community experiences, organisational mobility and a coalition of class strata, counter-power as a non-delegated expression of political leadership and determination of outcomes, and a ‘prophetic’ formalising of leadership . . . And on the other hand the reaction – which passes through the corporatism of the middle class and the terrorism of the lumpen elements, through the destructive factionalism of ideologies and the physical extermination of the movement’s radical leadership. As I listen to him talking I take notes on what will be my future. But he also throws into the mix the future of the future – and explains defeat as a discontinuity and already sees in the revolt of the blackout (and also in the ever new, variable and stronger institutional intersections of the movement) signs of progress. Moments of mass experimentation and the operation of a revolutionary power – both black and white. Carl has a body more beautiful and better proportioned than Jesse Owens.)
America, America: so no one will ever conquer you. But there, under that huge sky, this new revolution, of a labour power that is intelligent and mobile, full of desires and of civilisation, as destructive and creative as ever man saw, will unleash itself – and already we have progressed a long way on this journey, inside this future history, on both this and that side of the Atlantic.
And what about on this side of the water? The intellectual spectacle in Paris during those years was quite another thing. Nouveaux philosophes and other ingredients were seasoning the soup of power. Quantities of self-criticism piled up, and in their ineptitude they deployed an ethical malaise of a kind that subsequently I found only in the Italian phenomenon of pentitismo [criminals turning informants]. However, in France there was fortunately no open war, and rediscoveries of Jehovah did not end in confessions at the police station. But, as soon as you broke that mystifying screen, the problem of philosophy – and the problem that revolutionary culture and youth culture were breathing – was the same as that in Greenwich Village. Higelin, Renaud and others were playing a new tune. The fragility and the invincibility of power: this terrible paradox, which no one had the strength to stop. So let’s run with it, this paradox, after the defeat of the assault on the heavens, within the desire for renewal that characterised 1968. The world is a totality without foundation. It cannot be destroyed, it does not have a heart that can be ripped out. Only cunningness can permit us – the stratagems of Derrida! – to move. This insistence on strategies and cunning was sweet for me. The Italian movement had moved on this and had articulated a proposal. As the French turned phenomenology in a critical and semiological direction, so the Italians developed phenomenological critique in the direction of ethics and politics. The strategies were moving on the trail of the real. They were on the streets of Manhattan.
Until the point where – and here began the really new – this moving around in bands, on the trail of a truth, revealed itself as production, as desire – as ontological difference and autonomy. Certainly not all that glittered was gold – because, just as had happened in the Italian experience of politics, as a reflection of what had happened in France, a hiatus was gradually created between difference and production; and that which configured itself as the highest theory and the most effective practice of ontological potenza was blocked within an unbearable tension and an extreme urgency – a sort of haemorrhaging of subjectivity, a dispersal of intentionality into arabesques of damp spots. ‘Shit work.’ ‘Underground economy.’ ‘Slump city.’ It was what I had seen in Italy in the maturation of the new social subject – and now I was compelled, in this scenario that was open on all sides, to address the problem anew. And I ended up with the conviction that an era had come to an end, that an end of time had been arrived at, an end to the time in which I had lived and within which all my experience had been measured. That time was over because all possible measure of it had been lost, and all my experience – and that of the generations that had grown up with me – inasmuch as it was renewed, had been polluted by that same measure. The very maturation of the new subject, with the enormous scale of its development, could not be understood if we could not change the theoretical framework – radically. The coexistence of opposites, in the theoretical horizon in which most of the comrades lived, had reached the perfection of the ineffable and the insignificant: a before and an after, no longer classifiable, no longer affirmed in their determination – so that, in circulating every different aspect, both the before and the after ended up being ungraspable faces of sameness. I had not yet reached the point where I could think of disaggregation as potenza. I was not yet able to bring the discourse to that point of radicalism in which the ideological perspective was no longer there – a recognised nonexistence – and which left space for the actuality of free strategy. But this, my inability to find the words – and particularly this now shouting, now silent haemorrhaging of subjectivity that I was witnessing – were only inscribed in the existent as a residue of a past. My thinking returned to New York, returned to the perceivable representation of a realised antinomy, to the physical and determinate experience of an alternative. The present, in this case, is filled with future.
It was in this situation that I set myself back to working on Marx. Was this a nostalgia for theoretical order? Cher David, how can we be nostalgic for our being? It was not nostalgia. When Spinoza was reading Leone Ebreo, I believe that his remembering fulfilled, for him, the same function that the reading of Marx can have for us today: to seek, among our kind of people, the sense of the most potent utopia of love, and to relate it back to the most potent and effectual subjectivity. With Leone Ebreo, in the Spinozan meaning of potenza, and with Marx, beyond Marx. In other words, where we recognise a Marx made actual, a living proletarian potenza. We start from being as potenza. The potenza of the streets of New York, the productivity of the proletarian disaggregation. The revolution is not of tomorrow but of today. The revolution is nothing but ourselves. Those were years, cher David, in which the tumult of our passions perfected our sentimental education. Now I feel old. I cannot even narrate it, this becoming. I risk, like an aged Goethe, refinding it ironically in a classicising epic narrative – or like an aged Malraux, reliving it in intellectual tourism. No, the prison that I am currently enjoying keeps such stereotypes at bay. However, it does not take away the pleasure of having witnessed, at least once in one’s life, this formidable ontological drama – the birth of a new revolutionary period, played by a new subject, opening with happiness to hope. The big blocks of nostalgia and of tradition were gradually falling to pieces. Aus Geschichte lernt man nur eben Geschichte [From history one learns only history]. From history one learns nothing. A breath of relief. The tenderness you feel, and you feared was going to lead you astray, is guaranteed to you instead in its ontological basis. As in the great pastors of the church, from St Francis to Roncalli. Or in the great feminists, from the great Rosa to the beautiful Rossana. The philosophy of Spinoza and Nietzsche, the revolutionary imagination of Machiavelli and Lenin. The classical is no longer memory – as the world lives the experience of revolution, its intimidating fascination of the classical disappears and you discover its paternity. The tenderness – this opening of a virgin being, of the nights of Manhattan, of the proletarian fires in Italian cities. And now of prison. Was that trip to New York a sign of things to come? Certainly, for the first time since the beginning of this research, the continuity and the indifference do not scare me. Because they cannot be crushed into a single unmoving sameness but rather expand into a revolution in action. To live, to have lived the future. As in Walt Whitman: ‘Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.’2
Cher David, sometimes I fall into the pomposity of baroque imagery – forgive me. I also fear the opposite, to which I am equally prey: the bloodless lyricism of philosophers, their inability to lift themselves out of concepts. Here I have the impression that the poverty of my language and its Po valley shortcomings are reaching some kind of absolute limit. This may be so – it is a language that is still rural, not geared to the functional abstraction of the industrial way of life, presumptuous in seeking to express the metropolis, its problems, and its revolt. I am an immigrant – and I don’t look into the means – perhaps even throwing stones, because everyone has anyway realised this miracle that I have understood and lived: the revolution under way. It’s rude to throw stones – but not for the immigrant – and for Chaplin’s Kid it is innocent. Today I have this great longing. I have a great yearning for this delicate air of spring, which reaches me even in the exercise yard. And a great desire to say the words ‘Burn, baby, burn!’ Burn the past that binds and deceives you, in order to live the future that you are. To you I write and to you I dedicate, at this moment, my desire. Ciao.