laradiosiamonoi

“Radio Alice retransmits: some music, news, gardens in bloom, a torrent of words, inventions, discoveries, recipes, horoscopes, magic potion, love, war bulletins, photographs, messages, massages, lies”

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Contents

IntroductionMillions and Millions of Potential AlicesPopular free RadioFelix and Alice in WonderlandThe media utopia of the avant-garde Bifo on Radio AliceThe end of Radio AliceIl Trasloco

Talks, discussions, screeningsLearn-insConcerts and sound-eventsNeon worksThe Kafka MachineLapTopRadio Most relevant literature and references

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Contents

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White RabbitJefferson Airplane

One pill makes you largerAnd one pill makes you smallAnd the ones that mother gives youDon’t do anything at allGo ask AliceWhen she’s ten feet tall

And if you go chasing rabbitsAnd you know you’re going to fallTell’em a hookah smoking caterpillarHas given you the callCall AliceWhen she was just small

When men on the chessboardGet up and tell you where to goAnd you’ve just had some kind of mushroomAnd your mind is moving slowGo ask AliceI think she’ll know

When logic and proportionHave fallen sloppy deadAnd the White Knight is talking backwardsAnd the Red Queen’s “off with her head!”Remember what the dormouse said;

“Feed YOUR HEAD”

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La Radio Siamo Noi. Extended Nervous Systems and White RabbitsA project by LapTopRadio

26.04 – 26.05.2012

Exposition, discussions, talks, screenings, performances, concerts, broadcasts, learn-in

With Radio Alice archives, Sophie Alphonso, Leila Amacker, Fabrizio Basso, Sacha Beraud, Francesco Bernardelli, Stefan Brüggemann, Federico Campagna, Yann Chateigné, Mathieu Copeland, Alfredo Cramerotti, Stephane Devidal, Pablito El Dritto, Cerith Wyn Evans, Vianney Fivel, Jonathan Frigeri, Eugen Georg, Samuel Gross, Ceel Mogami de Haas, Nelly Haliti, Romain Hamard, Anne Hildbrand, Jefta Hoed, Richard John Jones, Gosia Kaczmarek, Charlotte Khouri, Lars Bang Larsen, Jelmer Luyting, Renaud Marchand, Andrea Marioni, Federica Martini, Maurizio Nannucci, Liliane Puthod, Lena Quelvennec, RAM radioartemobile, Vincent de Roguin, Alexander Schierl, Laurent Schmid, Emma Souharce, Teatrino Elettrico, Alan Vega, Emeline Vitte, Willem van Weelden, Seda Yildiz, ZonaRadio archives …

La Radio Siamo Noi, an event at LiveInYourHead, Geneva aims to provide a platform for an exchange on self-organized media, media-activism, radio-mag-ic and related artistic practices during and around the 1970s in Italy, and a reflexion on the impact and the aftermath of this set of innovative concepts today. Which are the possibilities to integrate and harness the good energy of these movements and projects –

Introduction E

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which ideas, which concepts are worth transferring into the actual discourse? What is the role of self-or-ganization and self-teaching in the field of free radio-making and related cultural practices in a completely different, but still difficult political and cultural con-text? What does it mean in a situation in which cul-ture has become one of the most prestigious forms of consumption and social activities can be translated into financial figures, where “Friendship” suddenly becomes an information that can be sold?

Although the situation has deeply changed, and the boundaries between consumption, information, cognition and communication have even more been blurred, there are reasons to look back to this scene, that showed a a high level of critical consciousness with explicit and well articulated discourses. The structures collapsed in the meantime and also the weaknesses of some of these projects and concepts emerge nowadays, but this specific situation led to a unique interlacing of design, media, arts and critical culture.

Can we escape the recuperation of experimental strategies from that period, but voided of any contes-tatory dimension and with the implicit resurgence of a mode of signification, a sympathy for “progressive” form without critical stakes? How to ensure that the symptoms of this disengagement are recognized and what are possible counter-models?

Events and shows feature a wide variety of art-ists, writers, radio-activists, musicians, self-publish-ers. Speakers and participants include Lars Bang Larsen, Francesco Bernardelli, Federico Campagna, Alfredo Cramerotti, Federica Martini, Willem van Weelden among others. An open, free learning and exchange space, a teach-in laboratory is part of the project, permitting self-organized learning together with some of the invited guests. This structure stays

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open to everyone who is interested in these questions, without fees, and rendering possible learning in the means of the process of sharing and disseminating knowledge in multiple flows on different levels.

A part of LaRadioSiamoNoi is conceived by students of the IDUM (Interaction Desgin Unstable Media) department of the DOGtime course at the Rietveld Academie Amsterdam, and Willem van Weelden: The Kafka Machine: a three Hours Testament,

a project on Autonomia, Abstract Machines, Voices & the Production of Subjectivity!

Updated program on www.laptopradio.org/lrsnBroadcasts on www.laptopradio.org

An updated version of this booklet can be ordered at www.laptopradio.org/lrsn/publication

LaRadioSiamoNoi is organized by LapTopRadio at LiveInYourHead, curatorial institute of HEAD–Geneva.

The exposition is curated by Mathieu Copeland, Samuel Gross, Ceel Mogami de Haas and Laurent Schmid. Concerts are organized by Jonathan Zonoff Frigeri, the whole program has been concieved by the LapTopRadio team at WORK.MASTER, HEAD– Geneva with the help of Francesco Bernardel li, Alfredo Cramerotti, Lars Bang Larsen, Federica Martini, Willem van Weelden and a group of students of DogTime, Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam.

Great thanks to the artists, to the LiveInYour-Head team, Yann Chateigné – dean of HEAD’s vis-ual arts department, Serafin Brandenberger, Livia Gnos, Damiàn Navarro, Jonquille Pfister Bengoa, and the lenders.

Introduction E

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Design of this booklet: B & R Grafikdesign, Noah Bonsma and Dimitri Reist

LapTopRadio is a research project funded by HES-SO.

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La Radio Siamo Noi. Extended Nervous Systems and White RabbitsUn projet de LapTopRadio

Avec Radio Alice archives, Sophie Alphonso, Leila Amacker, Fabrizio Basso, Sacha Beraud, Francesco Bernardelli, Stefan Brüggemann, Federico Campagna, Yann Chateigné, Mathieu Copeland, Alfredo Cramerotti, Stephane Devidal, Pablito El Dritto, Cerith Wyn Evans, Vianney Fivel, Jonathan Frigeri, Eugen Georg, Samuel Gross, Ceel Mogami de Haas, Nelly Haliti, Romain Hamard, Anne Hildbrand, Jefta Hoed, Richard John Jones, Gosia Kaczmarek, Charlotte Khouri, Lars Bang Larsen, Jelmer Luyting, Renaud Marchand, Andrea Marioni, Federica Martini, Maurizio Nannucci, Liliane Puthod, Lena Quelvennec, RAM radioartemobile, Vincent de Roguin, Alexander Schierl, Laurent Schmid, Emma Souharce, Teatrino Elettrico, Alan Vega, Emeline Vitte, Willem van Weelden, Seda Yildiz, ZonaRadio archives …

Exposition, discussions, conférences, projections,performances, concerts, émissions, learn-in

26.04 – 26.05.2012

Articulant exposition, événements et enseignement, La Radio Siamo Noi accueille un large nombre d’artistes, écrivains et critiques, activistes radiopho-niques, musiciens et éditeurs indépendants à partic-iper à une plateforme d’échange dédiée aux médias coopératifs et activistes, à la «magie radiophonique» et aux pratiques artistiques qui y sont liées des an-nées 1970 à nos jours.

Introduction F

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A partir d’une étude de ces pratiques autonomes, des radios libres, de la créations sonores politique en Italie depuis les quarante dernières années, ce projet propose une réflexion sur les impacts de ces concepts innovants sur les pratiques artistiques et la pensée, aujourd’hui. Quelles sont les possibil-ités d’implémenter, de nos jours, dans nos projets, l’énergie positive de ces mouvements historiques? Quelles idées, quels concepts peuvent être transférés dans le discours actuel? Quel est le rôle de l’auto-or-ganisation dans le champ de la radiophonie et les pra-tiques culturelles qui y sont liées, dans un contexte politique très différent d’alors? Quelle place pour l’auto-apprentissage dans une société en crise, dans laquelle la culture est devenue l’une des formes de consommation les plus prestigieuses, une activité so-ciale transformée en figure financière, dans laquelle «l’amitié» devient soudain une information qui peut être vendue?

Bien que la situation ait profondément changé, les frontières entre consommation, information, cog-nition et communication sont toujours plus floues. Il existe des raisons pour porter un regard rétrospectif sur une scène qui montra un niveau de conscience cri-tique parmi les plus élevés, fondé sur autant de dis-cours explicites et articulés. Les structures esthé-tiques, sociales, politiques, dans le même temps, ont été minées et l’on pointe aisément les limites de cer-taines des notions qui émergèrent il y a quarante années, mais ces projets menèrent à un tissage in-édit des pratiques entre art et design, médias et cul-ture critique. Pouvons-nous échapper aujourd’hui à la récupération des stratégies expérimentales de ce-tte période, vidées de leur dimension contestataire? Pouvons-nous assumer la collusion de cette radical-ité originelle avec une forme de «progressisme» sans

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point de vue critique? Les symptômes de ce désen-gagement sont-ils identifiés? Et quels sont les con-tre-modèles?

Le projet s’organise autour d’un ensemble de programmations sonores dont le contenu, changeant, s’actualise au fil de l’exposition et agence créations radiophoniques et documentation sonore, archives historiques et productions actuelles spécifiques. Une série de pièces lumineuses structure l’espace qui of-fre également un bar, un espace de lecture, un micro-studio de radio et une imprimerie légère, permettant une infrastructure éditoriale simple et efficace. Un programme d’événements associe projections, séanc-es d’écoute, performances, discussions, tables rondes, concerts, podcasts et émissions de radio en direct.

Les learn-in constituent en outre un espace d’apprentissage et d’échange libre offert à tous, et centré sur les questions soulevées par le projet. Gra-tuite, effectuée sans rémunération, cette forme d’enseignement rend possible un partage des savoirs et des savoir-faire disséminant les connaissances de manière horizontale et ouverte. Le programme est formé des propositions des invités, mais aussi de cha-cun. Il peut donner lieu à des éditions, des enregis-trements ou des émissions en direct. Enfin, une pub-lication, ou reader, composée de textes, d’images et de matériaux d’archives est éditée chaque semaine durant l’exposition. Elle est disponible gratuitement sur place, et téléchargeable en ligne. Le contenu de ces éditions sera partiellement utilisé pour une pub-lication plus complète, à paraître fin 2013. Design: B & R Grafikdesign.

Programme des événements sur www.laptopradio.org/lrsn

Introduction F

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Millions and Millions of Potential Alicesby Félix Guattari

Millions and Millions of Potential Alices

Danger, Watch out. The slightest deviation and eve-rything will go up in smoke. A specially close watch must be kept on those unsavoury little groups whose words and turns of phrase and attitudes could easily contaminate whole populations. Above all we must neutralize any who have any access to a transmitter. What we want are ghettoes – autonomous if possi-ble – micro-Gulags, as small as the family, the cou-ple, even the individual, so that everyone is restrict-ed, day and night.

They talk, oh yes indeed, they talk all the time. They emit signs, words, fragments of signs, fragments of words, all trying to make us accept our roles – son, wife, father, worker, stu-dent – to get us sit up and beg, to be disci-plined, obedient, hard-working …

Fear is deep-rooted in our daily lives – fear of the prison and the looney-bin, of the army, of unem-ployment, of the family, of sexism. Fear to ward off desires, so as to reduce the daily round to the miserable slate in which church, family and slade have always kept it. But the class strug-gle is destroying domination in the workplace, sharing things is destroying the domination of isolation, desire is transforming the daily round. And the writing is moving from one order to an-other, rearranging them creatively and cutting across barriers.

Millions and Millions of Alices

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The Desire of power of the discourse of order, or the power of desire against the orderly dis-course …

The viewpoint of autonomy towards the mass media of communication was that a hundred flowers should bloom, a hundred radio stations should broadcast …

The guerrilla war of information, the organized disruption of the circulation of news, the break in the relationship between broadcasting and the making known of facts … is to be found with-in the general struggle against the organization and domination of work …

The interruption and subversion of the fluxes of production and the transmission of the signs given by authority represent a field of direct action …

We have to start historically with the crisis of the extreme left in Italy after 1972, in particular that of one of the liveliest groups – both theoretically and in action: Potere Operaio. One whole sector of the extreme left was to be dispersed during that crisis, but only in order to animate movements of revolt in various autonomie (an Italian word for partic-ular groups of women, young people, homosexuals, etc.). There then came into being a number of polit-ical-cum-cultural groups, like the Gatto Selvaggio (Wild Cat) group in Bologna, which launched Radio Alice in 1974.

After the dispersal phase, there was a new process of reassembling the movement (another very

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important word in the new Italian vocabulary: Ra-dio Alice was a station in the movement).

After the suppression of the State monopoly, masses of independent stations were to develop, from the most extreme left to the far right, or as mouth-pieces for particular groups.

What was unique about Alice was that it went beyond what we may call the purely ‘sociological’ na-ture of the others, becoming a project in its own right.

Radio Alice entered the eye of the cultural storm – subverting the language, producing a paper called A/traverso, but also being directly caught up in the po-litical action it sought to ‘transversalize’.

Alice, A/traverso, rivista per l’autonomia, Potere Ope-raio, Rosso, giornale nel movimento – collective utter-ance actually being produced: theory – technology – poetry – imagination – slogans – groups – sex – soli-tude – joy – despair – history – meaning – nonsense.

The true work of art is the infinite body of man moving through all the incredible mutations of one lifetime.

Stop the blackmail of poverty. Value of desire – value in use – labour value.

Working-class aristocracy and Lumpemprole-tariat … What poverty? What work? Time must be reappropriated. It is our right to forget what time it is.

‘I was lying on my bed.’‘That’s right, comrade, You’re tired and you’ve

a right to rest …’‘l wasn’t resting – I was reading.’‘Quite right, comrade. You’re reading to raise

your level of awareness and prepare yourself for fur-ther struggles …’


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‘I don’t know. Maybe. I was reading Diabolik …’

No more the blackmail of poverty, the discipline of work, the hierarchical order, sacrifice, patri-otism, the general good. All this has been silenc-ing the voice of the body. All our time has always been devoted to working, eight hours’ work, two hours getting there and back, then relaxing over television and family supper. As far as the police and the law are concerned anything outside this routine is depraved.

Alice. A radio escape line. A whole engagement of the-ory – life – praxis – group – sex – solitude – machine – affection – caressing. No more of the blackmail of ‘sci-entific’ concepts. ‘Organic intellectuals’ are the bu-reaucrats of ideas. You know, the semiological battle. Of course, but this business is rather like Nanterre in ’68 with sociology, or Ulm with epistemology, or St Anne with psychoanalysis … Let’s re-read Marx, Freud, Lenin, Gramsci.

Perhaps … but there are also the words and ac-tions, the outline of a world we are ourselves creat-ing, the major changes we are achieving with our mi-nor languages.

When people are happy together, it becomes sub-versive behavior.

In Bologna it all began with no more than a hundred people, trying to work out what to do. Radio Alice cat-alysed a process, something – not exactly something they had in common, but it is hard to know how else to describe it.

Yes, a process at work in all the various au-tonomies – school students, feminists, homosexuals,

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migrant workers from the south. Then there began to be great developments in the movements of self-reduction and appropriation, refusal to work, absen-teeism, etc. In 1976, Bifo, one of the moving spirits in Radio Alice, was arrested for ‘morally instigat-ing revolt’.

All this led to the riots of March 1977. The great shop-window of new-look communism was shattered into fragments. Thirty years of good behavior and loyal service now went for nothing in the eyes of the bourgeoisie.

Up to then they had thought the PCI (Italian Communist Party) and the unions could control the masses better than anyone. They used, for instance, to say, ‘In Cile i carri armati, in Italia i sindicati’ (‘In Chile armoured cars, in Italy the trade unions’). But the communist Mayor of Bologna, Zangheri, called in the forces of repression in their most violent form, actually getting armoured cars brought into the city. He personally urged the police to do their worst, with the words, ‘This is war! These people must be elimi-nated – by their own actions they have cut themselves off from the community.’ There were 15,000 people in the streets – such a thing had never happened in Bologna before. Alice kept us informed about every-thing as it happened, by directly broadcasting reports from comrades who telephoned in to the station. All the arrests and trials that followed were claimed to be necessary because of Radio Alice’s ‘military’ role.

Conspiring means breathing together, and that is what we are being accused of; they want to stop us breathing, because we have refused to breathe deeply in their asphyxiating work-plac-es, in their individualist relationships, their fam-ilies, their pulverizing houses. Yes, I plead guilty


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to assault – to assault on the separation of life from desire, on sexism in inter-personal rela-tions, on reducing life to a wage-packet.

Alice, how wicked it all was! All those lower-mid-dle-class bastards, drug addicts, queers, degener-ates, layabouts, trying to poison the mind of our love-ly Emilia. But they won’t succeed, because everyone here has had a strong class-consciousness for thir-ty years. Even small employers here have their Par-ty cards. And our hard-working young people aren’t going to let themselves get caught up in this sort of nastiness. It’s the people themselves who will turn it down. No one can accuse the PCI of being anti-dem-ocratic: we have supported people’s committees and delegates’ councils being set up everywhere – in all the factories, the neighbourhood, the schools. And it is those committees and councils that are today be-coming the best guarantees of law and order.

Our needs are having to be put forward every-where by ‘spokesmen’, by delegates – they say we’ll be able to speak for ourselves in the future. Mini-parliaments, school councils, neighbour-hood councils cultural decentralization, all sorts of different kinds of delegations where nothing actually changes – we have no real power. The management produce a sociologist here, a psy-chologist here, an anthropologist, a philanthro-pist, and, when it comes to the crunch, a cop with a truncheon.

An error of history. We went to them openhanded, trying to explain the correctness of our party line. Lama (General secretary of the CGHIL, the larg-est trade-union in Italy) came to Rome University to

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propound to them the workers’ point of view – and they drove him out and threw stones at him. They’ve got no respect for anything. ‘I Lama stanno nel Tibet,’ they said. (‘The Lamas live in Tibet’). How could the Italian Communist Party, the party of the workers and all the people, let itself go on being intimidated by a handful of extremists, irresponsible agitators – why, they even call themselves ‘city Indians’! Our only mistake is that we’ve been patient for too long. The legality of the State power today depends upon us. And in the last resort, it is up to our party to rec-ognize what is good for the masses and what is not.

We love you. We are with you heart and soul, and that gives us the right to utter a warning. You have among you the best and the worst, and you must sort out one from the other. Of course you can’t be blamed for the present chaos, and it must be recognized that a lot of you were at the end of your tether, and it is our duty to tell you this: ‘Keep calm – don’t go too far.’ Remember, there is a crisis; think of the danger of fascism. In other words, think as we do! Some of the things you say are wonderful, but you often deterio-rate into confusion, tedium and a gratuitous obsceni-ty that is far from attractive. Pull yourselves together, and be what you have never really stopped being – nice, high-spirited children!

You can’t frighten us any more with talk of cri-sis and fascism. We want a crisis, and we won’t help to calm things down. In fact we’d like to see it get worse, and even spread beyond Italy. It could easily happen, because Italy today is largely supported by the great capitalist powers – they are in panic at the thought of its total col-lapse. The result is a kind of self-reduction on an


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international scale. Other classes, other coun-tries will be affected: a whole world is crumbling. We don’t want to stop at questioning the relation-ship between exploiters and exploited – we want to get at the root, the whole business of capitalist-bureaucratic exploitation, of working for a wage, of passively accepting the discrepancy between work and desire, of putting one’s energies into work as a drug to abolish all desire that opens out onto the world. As for the fascists in Italy today – they are just a joke. They influence fewer and fewer people. The main danger isn’t from them at all: it lies in the alliance between the capital-ist state system and the bureaucratic systems of the PCI and the unions.

This new repressive alliance , with it’s tentacles spreading out in all directions, is trying by eve-ry means it can to keep the economic and politi-cal struggles of the workers separate from all the possible faces of autonomy. Its aim is to get the work of controlling and subjugating the mass-es done by the masses themselves, and to ensure that a majority conservative consensus is estab-lished among them against all the minorities of every kind – though in fact all those minori-ties together would add up to far more than any such majority! This seems to us to be the direc-tion from which the danger of a mass reaction-ary movement will come. So don’t let anyone use some imaginary anti-fascist crusade as an ex-cuse to get us to ally with these people who re-ally represent the embryonic form of a new sort of fascism.

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In Bologna and Rome there have been kindled the fires of a revolution quite unlike the revolutions that overturned history in the past. This is a revolution that will sweep away not only capitalist regimes, but also the bastions of bureaucratic socialism – be they under the banner of Euro-communism, of Moscow or of Peking – and the lines of battle cannot be foretold: they may cover whole continents, but they will some-times be concentrated in one urban neighbourhood, one street, one factory, one school. Not only are ma-jor economic and technological options at stake, but also people’s attitudes, their relations with the world, particularities of desire. Managers, policemen, poli-ticians, bureaucrats, professors, psychoanalysts – all will join forces in vain to stop this revolution, lo ca-nalize it, to take it over; in vain will they sophisti-cate, diversify, miniaturize their weapons to the nth degree: they will never regain control of that mas-sive movement of escape, the multitude of molecular mutations of desire that have now been let loose. The economic, political and moral order of the twentieth century is breaking up everywhere, and the people in power hardly know which way to turn. The enemy is intangible – you hear a twig snap beside you, and you find your son, your wife, even your own desire is be-traying your mission as guardian of the established order. The police got rid of Radio Alice – its perpetra-tors were pursued, condemned and imprisoned, and its premises ransacked – but its work of revolution-ary de-territorialization still goes on unabated, even affecting the nerves of the opposition.

But all this is hardly constructive, it will be ob-jected. Perhaps not – though it would be hard to prove - but that is not the problem. The people who cre-ated Radio Alice would say something like this: it seemed to them that a movement that could succeed


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in destroying the vast capitalist-bureaucratic ma-chine would, a fortiori, be capable of constructing a new world. Collective competence would grow with collective action; it is not necessary at this stage to be able to produce blueprints for a substitute society.

First published by collectif a/traverso in “Radio Alice, radio libre”, 1977, “Des millions et des millions d’Alice en puissance”, préface de Félix Guattari

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Popular Free Radioby Félix Guattari

The Evolution of the means of mass communication seems to be going in two directions:

– toward hyper-concentrated systems control-led by the apparatus of state, of monopolies, of big political machines with the aim of shaping opinion and of adapting the attitudes and uncon-scious schemas of the population to dominant norms,

– toward miniaturized systems that create the possibility of a collective appropriation of the media, that provide real means of communica-tion, not only the “great masses”, but also to mi-norities, to marginalized and deviant groups of all kinds.

On the one hand: always more centralization, con-formism, oppression; on the other, the perspective of a new space of freedom, self-management, and the fulfillment of the singularities of desire.

How is that a relatively old technology like radio has set the stage of a breakthrough in this second di-rection – in Italy and France – through the phenome-non of the Free Radio stations? Why not video, which, not long ago, raised so many expectations? Why not cable? Why not Super-8? It would be very difficult to disentangle all the factors that permitted Free radio to take off. Bug there are two factors that seem to de-mand particular attention:

– with video and film, the technical initiative remains, essentially, the object of big industrial enterprise;

Popular Free Radio

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– with Free Radio, an important part of the tech-nology depends on the improvisational ability of its promoters.

For here as elsewhere, the technical choices always conceal political and micro-political choices. For ex-ample, in the domain of television, the technical op-tions have all been centered on family or individu-al consumption. Hence, a very narrow definition of the broadcast framework results (the division of la-bor between technology, production, and conception of programs; its perpetual reorientation toward the studios as a closed vessel; the national vocation of the programs …) which leads ineluctably to an ab-solute passivity of the consumer. Yet nothing, at the outset, imposed such a political choice on the tech-nical level! It was possible right away to conceive of technical equipment for the kind of production and consumption that was adapted to “group-subjects” and not to subjugated groups. But with capitalist and state decision-makers lacking any interest in such an orientation, it is the people “of means” that have triumphed. And today one has a tendency to base the legitimacy of this choice on the nature of things, on the “natural” evolution of the technology.

With Free Radio, we find ourselves before the same type of technicopolitical problem. But here, because of the confrontation with power, it’s the people “of lesser means” who assert themselves as if by necessity. In fact, at the present stage, the only way to resist the jamming and the searches is by multiplying the number of transmitters and my miniaturizing the material in order to mini-mize the risks. (This daily guerilla warfare the air-waves is perfectly compatible with the kind of pub-lic airing that takes place whenever the balance of

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power is poised for it: public broadcasts, national holidays, etc.)

But the point the organizers of the popular Free Radio stations particularly emphasize is that the to-tality of technical and human means must permit the establishment of a veritable feedback system be-tween the listeners and the broadcast team: whether through direct intervention by phone, through open-ing studio doors, through interviews or making pro-grams on cassettes by listeners, etc. The Italian ex-perience, in this regard, shows us the immense field of new possibilities that is opened in this way; in par-ticular, the experience of the Bologna group that or-ganized Radio Alice and the journal A Traverso. We realize here that radio constitutes but one element at the heart of an entire range of communication means, from daily, informal encounters in the Piazza Mag-giore to the newspaper – via billboards, mural paint-ings, posters, leaflets, meetings, community activi-ties, celebrations, etc. We are far, very far from the technocratic conceptions of the French partisans of

*local* radio, who insist, on the contrary, that those who express themselves on the air represent their interests; or from the conceptions of the tradition-al left, which is concerned above all that only the party line and certain mobilizing propositions be ex-pressed on their wavelengths! (On Italian Free Ra-dio, it is often the case that very serious debate are directly interrupted by violently contradictory, hu-morous, or even poetico-delirious interventions.) We are equally far from the conceptions of the modernist technicians who declare that what is important to-day is the content of the broadcasts and the care one brings to the production, and who refer to the entire mythology of the “modern look” and the “new sound”. All these “preliminaries” relative to the quality of

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the spokesman, to the content of the messages, and to the form of expression, come together here. In ef-fect, the “locals”, the militants, and the modernists have this in common: in one way or another, they set themselves up as *specialists*: specialists of contacts, of watchwords, of culture, of expression … Yet, to be precise, the way opened up by the Free Radio phe-nomenon seems to go against the whole spirit of spe-cialization. What becomes specific here are the col-lective arrangements of enunciation that absorb or

“traverses” specialties.Of course, such an assumption of direct speech

by social groups of all kinds is not without conse-quence! It fundamentally endangers all traditional systems of social representation; it puts in doubt a certain conception of the delegate, the deputy, the au-thorized spokesman, the leader, the journalist … It is as if, in an immense permanent meeting – at the surface level of listening – anyone, even the one who is most hesitant, who has the weakest voice, has the means of expressing himself whenever he desires! In these conditions, one can expect certain thruths to find a *new substance of expression*. Some time ago, Bertrand Boulin launched, on Europe No. 1, a broadcast in the course of which children, coming out after school, could express themselves directly by telephone. the result was absolutely surprising and upsetting! Through thousands of testimonies, cer-tain aspects of the real condition of childhood were revealed, the very accent and tone of which no jour-nalist, educator, or psychologist could otherwise have recognized. But the names, places, and precise cir-cumstances were also communicated: it caused a scandal, a cover-up, and, finally, the neutralization of the broadcast …

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To draw up the *Cahier de doleance* in 1789, the spokesman of the Third Estate literally had to invent a new means of expression, a new language. Today the Fourth Estate is also in search of a sublanguage to bring problems to light that, in reality, concern so-ciety as a whole. It is in this context of experimenting

with a new type of direct democracy that the ques-tion of Free Radio is inscribed. Direct speech, living speech, full of confidence, but also hesitation, contra-diction, indeed even nonsense, is the vehicle of de-sire’s considerable burdens. And it is always this as-pect of desire that spokesmen, commentators, and bureaucrats of every stamp tend to reduce, to settle. The language of official media is traceable to the po-lice languages of the managerial milieu and the uni-versity; it all gets back to a fundamental split be-tween saying and doing according to which only those who are masters of a licit speech have the right to

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act. Languages of desire, on the other hand, invent new means and have an unstoppable tendency to lead straight to action; they begin by “touching”, by caus-ing laughter, by provoking, and then they make one want to “go towards,” towards those who speak and towards those stakes that concern them.

One will object that France is not Italy and that there is a great risk in letting the cohorts of private, com-mercial stations and the sharks of advertisement rush into the breach made in the monopolies of state! It is with this kind of argument that one pretends to denounce Free Radio and to justify maintaining the monopoly, or adjusting it slightly, which would drive the local radios into the service of the bigwigs and un-der the indirect control of the prefects! it takes a holy dose of bad faith to raise the question of advertising in the context of the development of popular radios. They are clearly two separate problems: on the one

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hand, there is the question of liquidating the (state) monopoly as the first condition of expanding Free Ra-dio and, on the other, there is the bigger question of how to control commercial advertising – but *wher-ever* it can be found: on walls, in newspapers, on TV, and eventually on Free Radio itself. Why should the issue of intoxication raised by advertising – suppos-ing the Left had really committed itself to address-ing the issue – imply control, censorship or institu-tional protection of Free Radio? With lots of money on hand, advertisers are eager to launch numerous private channels. Well! Let’s regulate advertising – indeed, even prohibit it on all the airwaves. It would be very surprising if these people were still prepared to undertake such ventures! Yes, surprising if these people were still prepared to undertake such ven-tures! Yes, but one will say, the government secretly supports the advertisers (not to mention the local big-wigs) while it represses true Free Radio stations, as we have recently seen with the seizure of materials from Radio 93, Paris Free Radio, and Rocket Radio.

Who will win out in the final analysis: regu-lation, underground power maneuvers, or an open balance of power? Let the dozen existing Free Ra-dio stations give way to hundreds of new groups and let whole stratas of the population, ever larger and more diversified, begin participating, financing, and protecting these new stations; then we shall see just how strong the present alliance between the govern-ment, local notables, and the private sector is! Mo-nopoly and regulation would not really guard the public from advertising anyway – as we see on TV. And yet, is it not up to the masses themselves to or-ganize against the pollutant of advertising? People are not children – and besides, children themselves refuse more and more to be treated like irresponsible

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people! They have no need of any protection, despite themselves, against “bad influences” that might car-ry them off the trash heap prepared for them by the advertisers! The day they can tune in to a hundred different stations, they will simply choose what suits them! The prudent attitude (at least an amusing one) of the parties of the left and the unions toward Free Radio reveals an outmoded conception of mass inter-vention in the social sphere. The texts, the petitions, the regulations, the delegations are one thing, but living, social groups taking real control is another. If one really wants to organize a struggle on a grand scale against the advertising blitz, against all forms of physical and moral billy-clubbing, and against all forms of domestication (on which not only the pow-er of the state and the employers rest, but also that of the very organizations that claim to fight them), then one can only hope in the meantime that mili-tant bureaucrats will cease bullying those who are striving, for better or worse, to create a *real* instru-ment of struggle against such forms of intimidation and domestication!

(Translated by David Sweet)

Source: Radiotext(e), Neill Strauss, Dave Mandl (Ed.), Autonomedia Press,New York, 1993

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Felix and Alice in Wonderland:The Encounter between Guattari and Berardi and the Post-Media Eraby Michael Goddard

Introduction: The Enigma of the Post-Media Era

Towards the end of his life, Félix Guattari made sev-eral enigmatic suggestions about the emergence of a Post-Media era that would have the effect of dis-placing or at least decentring the hegemony of the mass media as we still know them today. Some of these references are extremely hermetic, for exam-ple the essay entitled “Entering the Post-Media Era” tells us almost nothing about what would constitute it, except that it would be the result of a schizoana-lytic, minority production of subjectivity whether on an individual, relational, group or micropolitical lev-el leading to “soft subversions and imperceptible rev-olutions that will eventually change the face of the world, making it happier.” The rest of the essay is devoted instead to an articulation of schizoanalysis along these lines. Elsewhere, in the essay “Regimes, Pathways, Subjects,” he referred to a third pathway/voice of subjective self-reference complementing those of power and knowledge (clearly referencing Foucault) and associated this path directly with the post-media era: “Only if the third path/voice takes consistency in the direction of self-reference – carrying us form the consensual media era to the dissensual post-media era – will each be able to assume his or her proces-sual potential and, perhaps, transform this planet – a living hell for over three quarters of its popula-tion – into a universe of creative enchantments.” One

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might be tempted to interpret these enigmatic uto-pian statements with respect to subsequent develop-ments of such interactive communicative technolo-gies as the Internet and their related social practices of network culture; after all Guattari’s interest in the then primitively developed French Minitel system is well-known. But since Guattari was always less in-terested in new technologies per se than in the col-lective assemblages of enunciation that they become the operators of, it is necessary to take a step back from any naïve assumption that what Guattari was envisaging was simply the coming culture of digital networks. Furthermore this technological essential-ism is ruled out by Guattari, himself, who earlier in the same essay poses this key question: “Why have the immense processual potentials bought forth by the revolutions in information processing, telemat-ics, robotics, office automation, biotechnology and so on, so far only led to a monstrous reinforcement of earlier systems of alienation, an oppressive mass-me-dia culture and an infantilising politics of consensus? What would make it possible for them to finally ush-er in a post-media era, to disconnect themselves from segregative capitalist values and to give free rein to the first stirrings, visible today, of a revolution in in-telligence, sensitivity and creativity?” This is not to say that Guattari’s post-media era has nothing to do with network culture, whose development can cer-tainly be seen to realise and confirm some aspects of the rhizomatic, machinic thought Guattari developed alone and with Gilles Deleuze. Rather this link will be shown to be more complex and to pass via other fields of media experimentation and thought, espe-cially that which emerged around ‘popular free radio’ in Italy in the 1970’s and which was strongly asso-ciated with Guattari’s friend Franco Berardi or Bifo.

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The key element in any media or post-media assem-blage is that of the production of subjectivity, which for Gauttari is a directly political or micropolitical phenomenon and this is why the example of Italian free radio and Radio Alice was of such interest to him. To show the transversal relations between the the-ories and practices of Guattari and Berardi we will largely use as a map Berardi’s own book Felix, which much more than a simple memorial or record of a friendship is a continuation of Guattari’s rhizomatic thought that brings out very important and neglect-ed aspects of both Guattari himself and his thought, precisely in relation to the question of an emergent postmedia sensibility. But before this, it is worth ex-amining the other side of this relation, by means of some of the texts Guattari devoted to these Italian media or rather post-media experiments such as Ra-dio Alice that Berardi was directly involved with.

Millions and Millions of Alice’s in Power

In the late 1970’s Guattari devoted several texts to the phenomena of popular free radio and especially that taking place in Italy. “Why Italy” is the essay that gives the clearest indication of why he consid-ered this such an important phenomenon. First of all there is the concrete context that he has been asked to introduce the French edition of Alice e il Diabo-lo the principle documentation of this radio and its political trajectory, which interests him since it is a radio of an explicit situationist and Deleuzo-Guat-tarian inspiration thereby constituting an auto-ref-erential feedback loop between rhizomatic thought and media subversion. More importantly, Radio Al-ice and its conflict with the apparatus’s of state con-trol that eventually resulted in a massive wave of


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repression, demonstrates very clearly how the me-dia is a key site of struggle over the contemporary production of subjectivity; in Guattari’s terms, de-spite its apparent economic and technological back-wardness at that time, Italy was the future of Eng-land, France and Germany. The molar aspect of this is that the polarising of politics into the mutually reinforcing duality of state violence and terrorism was developed first of all in Italy before being ap-plied elsewhere and could be seen as a embryonic of the global economy of fear under which we live today. However, what is behind this polarisation was the emergence of a new regime of consensus or control in which all previously existing forms of resistance such as trade unions or the communist party would be tolerated provided they fit into the overall regime of consensual control, for which they provide very use-ful tools for subjective reterritorialisation: the histor-ic compromise between the Italian communist par-ty and the social democrats being just one example of this process. However, groups that still advocated violent rupture with this consensus would be hunt-ed down and eliminated, with no pretense of liber-al models of justice or legal rights, which was indeed what happened first in Italy and then in Germany. But Guattari isn’t primarily interested in terror or state repression but rather the molecular revolution that was taking place around Radio Alice, that the emerging consensual state apparatus was not able to tolerate. For Guattari, this is not a mere shift away from traditional apparatus’s of struggle such as the communist party which have become completely com-promised with the state in favour of new micropoliti-cal groupings such as Gay liberation or the Women’s movement; these new groupings are no less suscep-tible to becoming reterritorialisations finding their

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institutional place in the manufacture of consensus. As he puts it, “there is a miniaturisation of forms of expression and of forms of struggle, but no reason to think that one can arrange to meet at a specific place for the molecular revolution to happen.” While Guattari doesn’t state it explicitly here, this corre-sponds very closely to the rejection of even micropo-litical identities or political forms such as organisa-tional autonomia enacted by Radio Alice; it was not just a question of giving space for excluded and mar-ginalised subjects such as the young, homosexuals, women, the unemployed and others to speak but rath-er of generating a collective assemblage of enuncia-tion allowing for the maximum of transversal con-nections and subjective transformations between all these emergent subjectivities. Guattari refers to Al-ice as a “generalised revolution, a conjunction of sex-ual, relational, esthetic and scientific revolutions all making cross-overs, markings and currents of deter-ritorialisation.” Rather than pointing to a new rev-olutionary form, the experimentation of Radio Alice was a machine for the production of new forms of sen-sibility and sociability, the very intangible qualities constitutive of both the molecular revolution and the post-media era.

Guattari is somewhat more specific about these practices in the essay “Popular Free Radio.” In this essay he poses instead of the question of why Ita-ly, that of why Radio? Why not Super 8 film or ca-ble TV? The answer is not technical but rather mi-cropolitical. If media in their dominant usages can be seen as massive machines for the production of consensual subjectivity, then it is those media that can constitute an alternate production of subjectiv-ity that will be the most amenable to a post-media transformation. Radio at this time had not only the


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technical advantage of lightweight replaceable tech-nology but more importantly was able to be used to create a self-referential feedback loop of political com-munication between producers and receivers, tend-ing towards breaking down the distinctions between them: “the totality of technical and human means available must permit the establishment of a verita-ble feedback loop between the auditors and the broad-cast team: whether through direct intervention by phone, through opening studio doors, through inter-views or programmes based on listener made cas-settes.” Again the experience of Radio Alice was ex-emplary in this regard: “We realise [with Radio Alice] that radio constitutes but one central element of a whole range of communication means, from informal encounters in the Piazza Maggiore, to the daily news-paper – via billboards, mural paintings, posters, leaf-lets, meetings, community activities, festivals etc.” In other words, it is less the question of the subver-sive use of a technical media form than the genera-tion of a media or rather post-media ecology, that is a self-referential network for an unforeseen proces-sual production of subjectivity amplifying itself via technical means.

As Guattari points out this is miles away both from ideas of local or community radio in which groups should have the possibility on radio to rep-resent their particular interests and from conven-tional ideas of political radio in which radio should be used as a megaphone for mobilising the masses. In contrast, on Alice, serious political discussions were likely to be interrupted by violently contradic-tory, humorous and poetico-delirious interventions and this was central to its unique micropolitics. It was even further removed from any modernist con-cern with perfecting either the technical form of radio

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(for example through concerns with perfecting sound quality) or its contents (the development and perfec-tion of standard formats); listening to the tapes of Ra-dio Alice is more than enough to convince about this last point! All of these other approaches to alterna-tive radio, that is the local, the militant and the mod-ernist, share an emphasis on specialisation; broad-casters set themselves up as specialists of contacts, culture and expression yet for Guattari, what real-ly counts in popular free radio are “collective assem-blages of enunciation that absorb or traverse speci-alities.”

What this type of radio achieved most of all was the short-circuiting of representation in both the aes-thetic sense of representing the social realities they dealt with and in the political sense of the delegate or the authorised spokesperson, in favour of generating a space of direct communication in which, as Guat-tari put it, “it is as if, in some immense, permanent meeting place – given the size of the potential audi-ence – anyone, even the most hesitant, even those with the weakest voices, suddenly have the possibil-ity of expressing themselves whenever they wanted. In these conditions, one can expect certain truths to find a new matter of expression.” In this sense, Radio Alice was also an intervention into the lan-guage of media; the transformation from what Guat-tari calls the police languages of the managerial mi-lieu and the University to a direct language of desire:

“direct speech, living speech, full of confidence, but also hesitation, contradiction, indeed even absurdi-ty, is charged with desire. And it is always this as-pect of desire that spokespeople, commentators and beaureaucrats of every stamp tend to reduce, to filter. [ …] Languages of desire invent new means and tend to lead straight to action; they begin by ‘touching,’ by


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provoking laughter, by moving people, and then they make people want to ‘move out,’ towards those who speak and toward those stakes of concern to them.” It is this activating dimension of popular free radio that most distinguishes it from the usual pacifying operations of the mass media and that also posed the greatest threat to the authorities; if people were just sitting at home listening to strange political broad-casts, or being urged to participate in conventional, organised political actions such as demonstrations that would be tolerable but once you start mobilis-ing a massive and unpredictable political affectivity and subjectivation that is autonomous, self-referen-tial and self-reinforcing, then this is a cause for pan-ic on the part of the forces of social order, as was am-ply demonstrated in Bologna in 1977. Finally, in the much more poetic and manifesto-like preface with which Guattari introduces the translation of texts and documents form Radio Alice, he comes to a con-clusion which can perhaps stand as an embryonic formula for the emergence of the post-media era as anticipated by Radio Alice and the Autonomia move-ment more generally:

In Bologna and Rome, the thresholds of a revolu-tion without any relation to the ones that have over-turned history up until today have been illuminated, a revolution that will throw out not only capitalist re-gimes but also the bastions of beaureaucratic social-ism [ …] , a revolution, the fronts of which will per-haps embrace entire continents but which will also be concentrated sometimes on a specific neighbour-hood, a factory, a school. Its wagers concern just as much the great economic and technological choices as attitudes, relations to the world and singularities of desire. Bosses, police officers, politicians, beuar-eaucrats, professors and psycho-analysts will in vain

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conjugate their efforts to stop it, channel it, recuper-ate it, they will in vain sophisticate, diversify and miniaturise their weapons to the infinite, they will no longer succede in gathering up the immense move-ment of flight and the multitude of molecular muta-tions of desire that it has already unleashed. The po-lice have liquidated Alice – its animators are hunted, condemned, imprisoned, their sites are pillaged – but its work of revolutionary deterritorialisation is pur-sued ineluctably right up to the nervous fibres of its persecutors.”

This is because the revolution unleashed by Al-ice was not reducible to a political or media form but was rather an explosion of mutant desire capable of infecting the entire social field because of its slip-pery ungraspability and irreducibility to existing sociopolitical categories. It leaves the forces of or-der scratching their heads because they don’t know where the crack-up is coming from since it doesn’t rely on pre-existing identities or even express a future programme but rather only expresses immanently its own movement of auto-referential self-constitu-tion, the proliferation of desires capable of resonat-ing even with the forces of order themselves which now have to police not only these dangerous outsid-ers but also their own desires. This shift from fixed political subjectivities and a specified programme is the key to the transformation to a post-political pol-itics and indeed to a post-media era in that politics becomes an unpredictable, immanent process of be-coming rather than the fulfilment of a transcenden-tal narrative. In today’s political language one could say that what counts is the pure potential that an-other world is possible and the movement towards it rather than speculation as to how that world will be organised. As Guattari concludes: “ The point of view


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of the Alicians on this question is the following: they consider that the movement that arrives at destroy-ing the gigantic capitalist-beaureaucratic machine will be, a fortiori, completely capable of constructing an other world – the collective competence in the mat-ter will come to it in the course of the journey, with-out it being necessary, at the present stage to outline projections of societal change.”

Apart form anticipating many of the subsequent problematics of the counter-globalisation movement, what this citation tells us most of all about the post-media era is that it is not something that can be giv-en in advance; it is instead a process of the production of subjectivity, the becoming of a collective assem-blage of enunciation whose starting point is the emp-tiness and coerciveness of the normalising production of subjectivity that the mass media currently enact. This already gives us some indications as to what aspects of digital network culture might be able con-tribute to this emergence of a post-media sensibility and which elements in contrast merely help to add so-phistication and diversity to normalisation processes under the guise of interactivity. However, to gain a different perspective on these questions we will now turn to the book by Berardi, Felix, which poses these exact problematics and constitutes the other side of the Guattari-Berardi, rhizomatic thought-media sub-version encounter.

Felix, from the Encounter to Rhizomatic Thought

The first striking element of this book is its ti-tle, Felix not Guattari, thereby indicating that this is an intimate portrait, not an abstract account of a body of thought. The name Felix, of course, also has

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the meaning of happiness, which this book also pos-es as a directly political question. The subtitle too is also instructive: “Narration of the encounter with the thought of Guattari, visionary cartography of the coming time.” This book is neither the personal, sub-jective account of Berardi’s encounter with Guatta-ri, nor an objective account of the latter’s thought but rather something inbetween, a form of free indirect discourse in which Guattari himself and his thought will be situated both in relation to his own time and our own present that he didn’t live to experience but anticipated through his rhizomatic and cartograph-ic practice of thinking.

For the purposes of this paper the focus will be on the first part of the book, particularly those sec-tions dealing directly with Berardi’s encounter with Guattari, his account, influenced by Guattari of plan-etary psychopathology and especially the chapter en-titled postmediatic sensibility. The second part of the book provides a reading of all four of Guattari’s works with Deleuze as well as his sole-authored Chaosmo-sis and argues strongly against the relative neglect of Guattari’s contribution to the rhizomatic machine he constructed with Deleuze across the works they au-thored together. Berardi is in no way taking the oppo-site position of devaluing Deleuze, in fact he devotes a chapter of the book to one of the most concise and in-sightful accounts of Deleuze’s thought without Guat-tari that one could find. Rather he insists that both thinkers constitute equal parts of a rhizomatic ma-chine that was put into motion by their encounter and that leaving one half of this machine in shadow pre-vents any understanding of its functioning. However, it is the first part of the book that is most relevant to the encounter between Guattari and Berardi and the question of the post-media era that concerns us today.


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The Encounter with Guattari from the Virtual to the Actual

If Felix comes out of the promise Berardi made on Guattari’s death to write a book about his friend, the fact that it took eight years to complete, gives some indication that the continuation, rather than the ex-plication of this thought is no straightforward task. Berardi points to some of the subsequent historical developments such as the development of the Net, the genome project and the development of the bio-informational paradigm, that indicate the becoming-rhizome of the world that Guattari had been able to foresee and pre-map. Simultaneously, the thought of Deleuze and Guattari which, at the time of Guat-tari’s death had a limited circulation, has gained a huge amount of attention especially on the Inter-net from those involved with that form of collective enunciation known as the network. Finally, new po-litical struggles over globalisation beginning with Seattle in 1999, have demonstrated the political ef-ficacy of this rhizomatic tendency. In Berardi’s words,

“collective agents of rhizomatic enunciation and the insurrectional process are the same thing.” On the plane of knowledge, there is the proliferation of ev-ermore journals and books in the fields of philos-ophy, politics, psychoanalysis and aesthetics based around rhizomatic thought. All the above fields, as well as those of biotechnology and cyberthought are thoroughly traversed by the concepts constructed by what Berardi calls the neo-logistic machine of De-leuze and Guattari.

Berardi’s initial encounter with Guattari took place in a very different context, however, and was in the first instance a virtual one. Desperate to es-cape military service in 1974, Berardi decided to fake


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madness in order to be sent home. A French friend had told him of a psychoanalyst who “saw the world more from the point of view of a schizo than that of a psychaiatrist,” and sent him one of his books, A Tomb for an Oedipus Complex. Berardi used this text to help him falsify a schizo episode, in front of a medi-cal colonel, who promptly sent him home thereby giv-ing Berardi the impression that Guattari had saved him from the military barracks. The second virtual encounter also took place in confinement, this time in prison in 1976 under suspicion of having placed a bomb in a the office of the Christian Democrats, when a friend handed him a copy of Anti-Oedipus. Accord-ing to Berardi, “inside was the map of the existen-tial and theoretical wanderings in which at this time I was going to get lost. To proliferate and lose one-self, this was the meaning of the collective enterprise that the movement was attempting in Italy.” On his release, and inspired by these perspectives, Berardi started with some friends the revue A/Traverso: A Little Group in Multiplication which would later lead to the formation of Radio Alice. Berardi acknowledg-es that the idea of contagion as a model of post-po-litical organisation implied by this title was directly inspired by Guattari: “the idea that social processes and political and cultural transformations are conta-gions, proliferations of a virus that spreads through-out the social body producing mutations is an idea that belongs to the molecular vision of Felix.”

The actual encounter between Berardi and Guattari only happened in June 1977, after the cre-ative insurrection that had taken place in Bologna around Radio Alice and the subsequent wave of re-pression had already been played out the preceding Spring. This worked out badly for Berardi who, from speaking at public meetings, meeting with other

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autonomists and publishing the beforementioned re-vue was accused of instigating class hatred and oth-er crimes. In the meantime violent conflict had bro-ken out in Bologna, as a result of the shooting of a young militant by the police, followed by a mas-sive wave of arrests. Although in June Berardi, like many others had fled to Paris, the Italian authorities had convinced the local police that he was a danger-ous figure, and the anti-terror squad came to arrest him while on the way to have lunch with a girlfriend. This time, Guattari really acted to release him from captivity, mobilising the whole network of the Paris-ian intelligentsia, creating in a short time the con-ditions for Berardi’s release and permission to re-main in France. The very day of his release he went to Guattari’s place and they wrote together an ap-peal against the repression in Italy and against the historic compromise between the Communist Party and the Christian Democrats, which would be signed by Deleuze, Foucault, Barthes, Kristeva, Sollers and Jean-Paul Sartre and which had a big effect in It-aly. This created the conditions for the convention against repression that took place in Bologna the following September, in which Guattari participat-ed. While this was a massive and joyous event with tens of thousands of people participating, it also for Berardi marked the end of the movement in Italy and the drift towards the duality of terrorism and the state anullment of dissident social forces that it was unable to halt. According to Berardi, it was as if every-one there was waiting for the “magic word,” capable of opening the path to a new history, a liber-tarian and egalitarian history that would avoid “the reflux, the violence, the catastrophe, the isolation and the dissolving of every solidarity.” As Berardi puts it, they “didn’t manage to find this magic word.” In


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retrospect, Berardi says that something was botched, maybe even in the very idea of a convention against repression, therefore buying into negativity and di-alectics rather than a meeting to affirm the crea-tive power and capacities of the movement itself. Of course this would not have changed history whether on an Italian or a global scale where the furious cap-italist counter-offensive, the imposition of Thatcher-ism, and the attacks on the form of life of the working class was already being prepared, but it might have helped transform a generation of rebels into auton-omous experimenters. While most of Berardi’s sub-sequent contacts with Guattari concerned the prob-lems of helping political expatriates from Italy and Germany in the wake of the rising tide of repression, Berardi claims that Guattari’s philosophical creativ-ity doesn’t bear many traces of these defeats and the need to struggle for mere survival. Instead it “suc-ceeds in delineating a panorama much broader than our forces are able even today to take in. In this way, the song of the times that must come are sung.” Fol-lowing Guattari’s death and during the radical shifts in the world from the fall of the Soviet Empire to the expansion of the global economy and the spreading of ethnic and religious conflicts, Berardi says he con-sidered Guattari’s rhizomatic thought as a map and tried to see the tracings of the real in continuity with the lines contained in this map. The map doesn’t rep-resent these developments but is rather a co-existing rhythm, an operation, a style, which he seeks in this book to reconstruct and so to “make the harmonies, refrains and dissonances of the contemporary plan-etary rhapsody resonate beginning with this map.”

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La Depressione Felix or Overcoming the Felicist Hypocrisy

At this point, Berardi poses a crucial problem affect-ing rhizomatic thought and one of its major critiques; he states that the “Felix Machine” attaches itself to the point of maximum openness of the provisory and nomadic community but doesn’t accompany its disso-lution. On a personal level this means dealing with the experience of depression, a subject which philos-ophy has tended semi-consciously to avoid as some-thing which shouldn’t be talked about publicly. In Guattari’s work depression is not a subject but a voice as indicated by the title of his book on the 1980’s, The Years of Winter. But not all the blame for depres-sion can be ascribed to this winter as it is fundamen-tal to desire itself. Berardi rather cryptically puts it like this: “desire is cruel, autonomy is cruel, beauty is cruel and the irresponsible dance is cruel. Desire presents the account and the subject cannot pay it, while singularity cannot not pay it. Depression is this account.” Depression is intimately related to desire, in that it is both the dispersion of desire and the en-tropy against which desire and sense must struggle to exist. This is not only an affective condition but a directly political one that was experienced by a whole generation involved with militant struggle, with the collapse of all the new movements of the 60’s and 70’s in the context of the realpolitik of Thatcherism and Reaganism. In works such as Anti-Oedipus with its Spinozist emphasis on the cultivation of joyful affects, there could be no place for such sad passions, which were instead associated with Oedipal repression and capitalist reterritorialisation (even the sad militant comes in for harsh treatment). However as Berardi points out there is also the time of depression, when


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the provisory community of desire or the joyful cre-ation of concepts both of which are conglomerations of desiring energy no longer have a hold on the world which instead tends towards dispersion and dissolu-tion. One could say that the affirmation of desiring-production in Anti-Oedipus has links with romanti-cism and the concept of extasis or pure expenditure, via Christian mysticism and Bataille; it is a youthful utopia. Berardi suggests that in Deleuze and Guat-tari’s last work What is Philosophy there is instead a senile utopia based around friendship rather than de-sire, in a markedly different social context in which there is a recognition of the illusions surrounding the idea of a revolutionary community of desiring produc-tion (Berardi compares this illusion to the Hindu con-cept of Maia and the Buddhist one of Samsara). But he claims that today we need neither a youthful nor a senile utopia but rather a sober cartography of the current conditions of the world, a cartography that Guattari undertook in the form of a prescient anal-ysis of “Integrated World Capitalism.” This concept which Berardi develops into one of planetary psycho-pathology rather than the now long dispersed psych-edelic social utopia of Anti-Oedipus is the starting point for any emergent post-media sensibility (Berar-di seems to be implying that while at the time Anti-Oedipus was not utopian since it was in direct con-tact with real social movements from 68 to Autonomy, with the dispersal of these movements it takes on an atmosphere of utopian nostalgia)

Integrated World Capitalism and Planetary Psychopathology

The concept of integrated world capitalism, the idea that capitalism was re-organising itself on a global

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scale is a commonplace today but when Guattari was first articulating it in the early 1980’s it was al-most a scandal; political commentators at that time, while not seeing the Soviet bloc as a genuine social alternative, still saw the horizon of politics as de-fined by the dualist conflict between these two pow-ers, a conflict that Guattari was prescient enough to see as a superficial mask for the real transfor-mation in the direction of integrated world capital-ism. The risk of nuclear holocaust which was the dominant theme in world politics at that time was of little interest to Guattari who saw instead the unleashing of a new “100 years war” along very dif-ferent lines, predominantly between the privileged north and the excluded south, a prediction the truth of which has been more than confirmed by subse-quent events. More importantly than just prophesis-ing globalisation, however, Guattari’s concept of In-tegrated World Capitalism, contains an analysis not present in most discourses of Globalisation, namely the recognition of capitalism not as an abstract cat-egory but as a semiotic operator. This means that the pervasiveness of capital is not dependent only on an effect of abstract overcoding mainly operative in the moment of exchange but on the technologi-cally mediated integration of the diverse moments of the production process from the project phase, to the informational and material phases. Capital be-comes understood as an imposed or rather prolifer-ated model understood as a semiotic operator, that is as a rule of generalised trans-codification. It also allows for the understanding of capital in relation to the new proliferations of margins, the residue of this process whether in the forms of diverse nation-alisms and tribalisms (reterritorialisations) or mi-norities and subcultures (deteritorialisations).


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Berardi takes this analysis further in his own con-cept of planetary psychopathology, which takes Guat-tari’s concepts and places them in proximity with the contemporary world as transformed by the accelera-tion of globalisation and virtualisation processes that took place since Guattari’s death. Basically the world itself has become more clearly rhizomatic than it was previously; for example, one only has to look at the

immediate relations between affects such as eupho-ria and depression and the contemporary function-ing of the global stock exchange to see the direct in-vestment of desire in the social field that Deleuze and Guattari anticipated in the 1970’s. Of course the fluc-tuations of the stock market were always dependent on mass affectivity but the global interlinking of the world’s economies coupled with the instantaneity of informational communications has turned it into a much more direct barometer of social desires.

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For Berardi much of this situation corresponds to Guattari’s concepts of mental ecology or ecosophy de-veloped in his last book Chaosmosis. Taking inspira-tion from Bateson who claimed that there is “an ecol-ogy of bad ideas just as there is an ecology of weeds,” Guattari wanted to broaden ecology to deal not only with the natural atmosphere but also the mental at-mosphere, arguing that these ecologies are insep-arable. For Berardi, this has been proven over the course of the 90’s in which the rise of Neo-Liberal-ism has had as a consequence not only devastating ef-fects on the physical environment but the destruction of “the psychic atmosphere in which humanity lives and communicates.” Berardi goes so far as to claim that “the cultural devastation produced by neo-liber-alism has incorporated the social investments of de-sire, provoking a drying up of productive social crea-tivity and determining a veritable emotional plague, an aggressivity of all against all, an obsessive fear of contact, a wave of ideology-free Nazism, a racism of pure proximity.” This is the condition for the emer-gence of a planetary psychopathology that both the monetary economy and new forms of infinite war-fare are intimately linked to (this would be Berar-di’s analysis in his most recent works such as The Sage, The Merchant , The Warrior.) This analysis, while seemingly far removed from Guattari’s analy-sis of integrated world capitalism is in fact its direct extension in relation to perhaps the central domain of Guattari’s thought namely schizoanalysis. Berar-di acknowledges the extent to which his vision of the psychopathic global condition is indebted to Guattari-an schizoanalysis in the following terms: “Felix Guat-tari taught me to see social processes as productions of the unconscious and to see the unconscious as the laboratory in which the scenarios of social actions are


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produced. There is no need to think of power as a cold machine composed of decisions and wills. When we use words like euphoria or depression or panic to de-scribe the behaviour the stock exchange or markets we shouldn’t think that these are only metaphors. It is instead an adequate description of the psycho-pathologies that traverse the social mind in a situa-tion of informational overload and competitive stress.” Disturbing as the devastation of the natural environ-ment might be, the de-eroticisation of social relations in the direction of cold functionality, in which the oth-er becomes perceived as a danger and potential fac-tor of contagion (Berardi is making here direct ref-erence here to the Aids crisis) is no less disturbing. Considering that the primary operator of this patho-logical subjectivation is the mass media it is probably time to return to the problematic of the post-media era, which presents itself as the need to confront this drastically psychopathological or at the very least de-pressing situation.

Is There a Post-Mediatic Sensibility? Felix and Alice in Wonderland

At this point Berardi narrates the story of Guatta-ri’s involvement with and enthusiasm for Radio Al-ice and other free radio stations, a story in which he was “very active.” He makes the point that unlike most critical thinkers with the exception of Walter Benjamin, Guattari had no fear of new technolgoi-es but rather embraced their potentials even when these had barely been developed. For example he was enthusiastic about the communicative potentials of the Net, well before the world Wide Web was devel-oped and when his only experience of it was the rath-er primitive French minitel system. According to

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Berardi his thought was already a network thought even before the existence of the technical network. At this point he takes on the criticisms of Richard Barbrook who form a state Marxist position accus-es Deleuze and Guattari (who he labels as holy fools) of collusion with neo-liberalism claiming that their thought operates by the same logic hence account-ing for its popularity with Californian IT develop-ers and enthusiasts of Wired magazine etc. Berardi acknowledges that there is a link between high tech capitalism and rhizomatic thought even going so far as to accept the derogatory (for Barbrook) label of techno-nomadism. The link is however not one of collusion but of adopting an immanent network ap-proach to both critique and subversion. Berardi ar-gues that it is this approach rather than an outdat-ed Marxist-Leninism that will have any possibility to subvert the reigning neo-liberal high tech ideolo-gy because it is able to intervene in its own lines and rhythms of development, which completely leave be-hind the powers of conventional Marxist-Leninism. It is only through a mobile techno-nomadic thought that one is able to discern the possible lines of flight operative in the current world situation. As Guat-tari put it in Chaosmosis, “democratic chaos con-tains a multitude of vectors of resingularisation, of attractors of social creativity in search of actuali-sation. This has nothing to do with the Neo-Liber-al affirmaiton of randomness and its fanaticism for the market economy.” According to Berardi, the free radio phenomenon was a kind of general proof of the existence of these vectors of resingularisation, or attractors of social creativity. Today, of course, it is clear that this phenomenon was a direct precursor of the phenomenon of the Internet model, which in-carnates what Guattari called “Postmediatic civil


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society.” According to Berardi these free radios and especially Alice, based as it was on an explicit mod-el of trans-semiotic communication and auto-organi-sation, “anticipated a process of techno-communica-tive self-organisation which in turn prefigures the overcoming of the mediatic epoch. The awareness of this fact makes Guattari a precursor of libertarian cyberculture.” For Guattari, Radio Alice was not an instrument of information but a device for destruc-turation of the the mediatic system aiming for the desturcturation of the social nervous system, which in the succeeding decades has continued with ef-fects of liberation but also of panic and catastrophe.

Perhaps we are at the point at which the ques-tion is no longer what is the post-media era but rath-er what are the lines along which it will develop and what interventions are possible along these lines. Because if the postmediatic era means the era of mass networks this is not in itself a positive devel-opment but one that holds as many catastrophic po-tentials as liberating ones, after all the spheres of both neoliberal economics and infinite warfare have also become rhizomatic and post-mediatic in their own way even if this is very far from the future of the media era hoped for by Guattari. The question is one of how to compose networks of subjective au-to-organisation that are able to assume an autono-my from neo-liberal economic and military networks and their associated deadening of relationality, af-fect and desire in the direction of pure functional-ity and aggressivity. This evaluation in Guattari’s work was expressed in terms of an ethico-aesthet-ic paradigm which saw in aesthetic practices indi-cations of how networks might operate as vectors of resingularisation and the conjugation of singu-lar events rather than instruments of normalisation

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and adjustment to the techno-economic-military ex-igiencies of the neo-liberal paradigm. It is in terms of this conflict between paradigms that the poten-tials for the post-media era envisaged by Guattari will continue to be played out and hopefully in some spheres actualised in an ethic-aesthetic auto-organ-isational direction.

published by generation-online.org


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The media utopia of the avant-gardeby Franco Berardi

The word avant-garde comes from the military lexi-con. Both Russian and Italian Futurism have a mili-tary background and a military conception of cultur-al action; but the word avant-garde is linked to the concept of utopia, as it implies the opening and pre-figuring of a possible historical future.

Neruda speaks of utopia in terms of a horizon. We walk and see the horizon, and we head in that di-rection. Although the horizon is shifting further and further and we can never reach it, looking at it gives meaning to our walking.

Utopia is like the horizon.As the etymology of the word implies, Utopia can

never be brought into existence, but the history of the 20th century avant-garde tells a different story. Gen-erally utopia becomes real, although in an inverted sense. The libertarian utopias of the century have mostly given birth to terrorist totalitarian regimes.

The utopia of the machine nurtured by Italian Futurism generated the overproduction of cars and the alienated production form of the assembly line. Communitarian utopia concocted the reality of na-tionalism and fascism. The utopia of Russian Futur-ism met the totalitarian violence of Stalinism.

Then, at the end of the century that had faith in the future, utopia induced a kingdom of dystopia.

The relationship between the utopian imagina-tion and dystopian reality is especially interesting when it comes to the Media.

In the first decades of the century, machines that amplify and spread the voice were an indispen-sable tool for the creation of political authoritarian power. Both democratic and totalitarian regimes

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based the creation of consensus on new electronic technologies of communication (the loudspeaker, the radio and cinema), giving leaders the possibility to fill massive urban spaces with crowds of followers and bring together large territories and distant pop-ulations. Futurism experimented with and foreran this utilisation of the media. The biographies of art-ists like Marinetti, Russolo, Cangiullo, Depero and many other Italian futurists attest to this anticipa-tion. Emphasizing electricity as the universal medi-um, Futurism was the premonition of the ultimate utopia of Cyber-culture that emerged in the last two decades of the century.

Paul Valery writes somewhere that, in the future, the citizens of the world would be able to receive infor-mation directly in their houses, like water that comes out from the tap. The universal flow of communication was foreseen as the actualization of an ideal human universality. The ‘wireless imagination’ that Marinet-ti speaks of is the origin of the network of technique, knowledge and sensibility that joined the planet to-gether throughout the century, until it turned it in an all pervasive global mind, as Kevin Kelly calls it in the book Out of control, published in 1993.

The contribution of Futurism to the develop-ment of the media sensibility is significant. The vis-ual experiments of French pointillism and division-ism at the end of the nineteenth century paved the way for cinematic technique and perception. In those years, when cinema was starting being developed, the works of Balla and Boccioni intended to experi-ment with visual techniques that provided the per-ception of movement in the motionless framework of the painted canvas.

According to Henri Bergson, cinema shows a close relationship between consciousness and the

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technical extroversion of movement in time. For the first time in human history, cinema made it possible to re-actualize an action that happened in the past, and gave us the possibility of going back to the fu-ture once the future had past.

In 1912 Delaunay, a pupil of Bergson wrote in a letter to the Italian Futurists: ‘your art has velocity as expression and the cinema as a tool.’

In the Manifesto tecnico della pittura futurista, written in 1910 and signed by Boccioni, Balla, Carra, Severini and Russolo, the idea of dynamism is pro-claimed as follows:

‘le geste que nous voulons reproduire sur la toile ne sera plus un instant du dynamisme univer-sel. Ce sera simplement la sensation dynamique elle-meme.’ [The gesture we want to reproduce on the canvas is no longer an instant of univer-sal dynamism. It will simply be dynamic sen-sation itself].

Futurist dynamism wants to infuse the canvas with the perception of the progression of time, as is evi-dent in Balla’s painting Signorina con cagnolino [Dy-namism of a dog on a leash], and Boccioni’s Stati d’animo [States of mind].

Futurist innovation has the rhythm of the in-novation of techno-media: photography, cinema and radio.

Cubo-futurist painters intended to capture the dynamics of movement by the simultaneous presen-tation of different sides of an object, preparing the sensibility of cinema and television.

Chlebnikov and Krucenich sing the praises of the radio as the medium of universal love and sym-pathy among men.


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After dreaming of the evolution of the media, after proclaiming the advent of universal communication and wireless imagination, in the second half of the century the Avant-garde perceived and witnessed the conversion of the media into tools of domination of the collective mind. But the ambiguity was already there at the beginning.

In 1921 Velemir Chlebnikov wrote an amazing paper entitled The Radio of the Future. In this text you can find everything and the opposite of every-thing: the exhilarating adventure of communication that spreads all over the planet, joining and connect-ing distant villages and communities, carrying words and images and enlightening every corner of the world. But in the same words and in the same tones of the text you can feel the prophecy of totalitarian control, of the centralized state domination that an-nihilates freedom. Utopia and dystopia emerge from Chlebnikov’s imagining of the radio, which is simul-taneously the irradiation of a light of love and knowl-edge, and the voice of an almighty power.

In the country of Guglielmo Marconi, Futurism translated the spirit of the new medium into the for-mula ‘wireless imagination’; whilst in the newborn Soviet Republic Chlebnikov chanted the glory of the irradiating medium. In Russia these are the years of civil war, massive scarcity and widespread star-vation, but the enlightened and naive spirit of the Futurist poet wandered beyond the fogs and clouds and saw the bright future of the media. In his words, the radio became a gigantic screen in the centre of all cities and villages that enabled people to receive news, suggestions, advice, lessons and medical in-structions. In his visionary text of 1921 Chlebnikov clearly foresaw something that we, today, call ‘The Internet’, that infinite connection of places without


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a place, and his imagination is simultaneously wild-ly libertarian and despondently totalitarian. His ra-dio broadcasted colours and images thanks to a sys-tem of mirrors that reflected what was happening in a distant place. But the flow of images and words that could be received by the web of radio-screens disseminated everywhere in the country came from a central place which was the Supreme Soviet of Sci-ences which broadcasted daily to all schools and vil-lages. Chlebnikov foretold a medium that today we call television.

The history of the twentieth century may be de-scribed as the struggle between the broadcast and the web, between the centralized medium of television and the proliferating medium of the internet. The two models are obviously intermingling and inter-acting, but the philosophy of one and the philosophy of the other are clearly distinguishable as the utopia and the dystopia of the mediascape.

However, in the imagination of the Futurist King of the Universe (as Velemir Chlebnikov named himself) these two faces are united in the same nightmare-dream.

London, May 2009published by generation-online.org

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An interview with Franco Berardi on Radio Alice, a free radio station in Bologna from 1973 –1977.by Carlos Ordonez

Radio Alice was a free radio station in Bologna from 1973 – 1977. Rather than attempting to ob-jectify events in the world, they set out to create a flow of sounds, information, messages and poet-ry, silences and abuse. Like the manifestations of Dada, transmissions were seen as immediate cul-tural subversions.

Bifo, who worked on Radio Alice was interviewed by Carlos Ordonez at a conference on Autonomy (’Af-ter Marx, April’) in London. The interview was con-ducted in English.

The autonomia movement in Italy during the seventies emerged from the new proletariat of dis-affected and unemployed youth, workers and intel-lectuals creating a radical opposition to institution-al politics.

‘Autonomy has no frontiers. It is a way of eluding the imperatives of production, the verticality of institutions, the traps of political representation, the virus of power. In biology an autonomous or-ganism is an element that functions independ-ently of other parts. Political autonomy is the desire to allow differences to deepen at the base without trying to synthesize them from above,to stress similar attitudes without imposing a gen-eral line, to all parts to co-exist side and side in their singularity.’

Sylvere Lotringer ‘The Return of Politics’, ‘Autonomia’ issue of Semiotext(e)

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How did Radio Alice begin, and what ex-periences did it attempt to address?

Radio Alice started in February 1976 with people who came from the experience of Potere Operaio, a leftist revolutionary group and people involved in the movement of Autonomia. We did not think of Radio Alice only as a political means but, first of all, as a possibility of organising the experiences of a homog-enous community. We were speaking of little groups – feminists, gays, workers. I emphasize this ’little group’ character because we did not conceive of the radio as a political organisation that has to ’state decide’ who can speak or can’t speak. We considered the radio as the point of intersection of different experiences – eve-ry experience being different from the other. We did not think about attempting to homogenise these dif-ferent groups and points of view.

How was the radio organised?

We had a weekly assembly of the different groups who were working in the radio, and we organised a gen-eral programme for the week. Anyone who wanted to propose something for the programme could come along. Of course, the programme referred, in gener-al, to the social and cultural areas that were some-what homogenous. The starting point for the radio was the different social experiences of the autonomia and, on the whole, the people who listened to the ra-dio were engaged in this social area. Another way of organising the transmission was with the use of the telephone which was connected directly to the radio station. This created a special kind of interchange of information.

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So you used the telephone as a means of bring-ing people together?

If you wanted to say something to the people listen-ing, you could. The people working on the broadcast also transmitted their own messages. We had a po-litical bulletin each lunch time for an hour and af-ter that, we had direct political information coming in from callers. We also organised ’listening groups’ and this created the possibility of a continuous feed-back involving a lot of these small listening groups. For instance, one listening group of students occupied a technical school and immediately called us in order to speak of the occupation. Immediately after, we re-ceived a lot of other calls from other schools asking for information and questions about the kinds of prob-lems the group faced. This gave rise to the possibility of not only the circulation of information but also the circulation of struggle.

Was there a critical examination of news as a phenomenon?

I am opposed to the idea of alternative news which at-tempts to expose the bourgeois news as lies. You see, I do not have truthful information opposed to the non-truthful of the bourgeois press. I have my information. That is all. And I prefer to diffuse or mix my infor-mation. I don’t know if that is the truth; I do not be-lieve that it is the truth; I do not believe that the truth exists at all. I believe that there are a lot of possible forms of information, every information being con-nected with a form of life. I choose a form of life and I diffuse the kind of information connected with this form of life – that is all.

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Did you explore the forms involved in radio as well as the content?

We gave special importance to the problem of form. I prefer to say to the problem of the language we chose. For instance, all the Free Radio’s in Italy generally have a framework except for the political bulletin and even that was loose. This kind of destruction of the framework gave rise to the possibility of speaking all kinds of different ’languages’. When we destroyed the framework it opened out all other possibilities, but of course, you still have to choose between the different possibilities. We rejected any kind of censorship, po-litical or aesthetic. (The idea was that we were an ar-tistic object).

Speaking about the forms of language we used, what I liked was information that was simulated (false information). One time, the police went to the biggest square in Bologna where young people meet, and arrested a lot of them under the pretext that they were dealing in drugs. It was a period of attack by po-lice due to pressure from the owners of businesses in the centre of Bologna who wanted a clearing-up oper-ation to get rid of these young people. I was at the Ra-dio and I called the head of police – the sheriff – tell-ing him that I was a journalist from a big newspaper in Bologna. I told him that I realised he had arrested 35 people and I wanted to know whether he would con-tinue to go on with these politics because the town had been asking him to get rid of these dirty people from the squares for a long time. He said yes, and that he had been waiting for a long time to do it but he would be arresting more people the next day. I then asked whether the arrests would just be confined to drug dealers or to extremists as well because it was surely not enough just to arrest the drug dealers. He agreed

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and was so happy to speak to a big journalist. But then another section of the police who was listening in to Radio Alice, went to the office of the sheriff to tell him what was happening, so that ended the call. But that was a form of real information. We were oblig-ing the sheriff to tell the truth by us telling a little lie.In Bologna in 1977, there was a movement in schools,

in the universities and in some of the factories and a zone of the city was occupied. The police came into the university and killed someone in the movement and for three days the town was occupied and barri-caded. In the period of the riots, Radio Alice was one of the means of communication, organisation and in-formation for the people. The way this coordination worked was that people on the barricades, for exam-ple, would go to the telephone and call the radio to say that they needed more people there as they were tired. People from another place would then come and re-lieve them. Radio Alice was not only the walkie-talkie

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of the riots; people were also ringing in to say that we were extremists or killers and that we should criti-cise the movement on the streets. It was 20 hours a day of free speech about what was happening on the streets. On the second day of the riots the police en-tered the radio station and destroyed everything. The press supported the police action by saying that Ra-dio Alice was instigating the riots through the use of false information. All the people arrested from the radio were charged with using false information and for instigating the riots by means of false informa-tion. We had a long theoretical discussion about the conception of true and false news and said that every newspaper is giving news that is true from one point of view. The news is not the reproduction of reality but the production of events, of facts, of reactions etc. so to tell something which is explicitly or evidently false may be the means ofproducing the effects con-nected with a truth – our truth.

To what extent do the people at Radio Alice feel that they were accountable to the movement?

The radio was open in such a way that any group dis-agreeing with something that had appeared on the radio, could come and put across their own point of view. One time a feminist group that did not like a transmission, came and occupied the station for half a day in order to put out their own transmission. But of course, this was an extreme example. We did not aim to be representative of the autonomia movement but we aimed to represent ourselves and I think that all the people coming to the radio had the same aim; to be representative of their own point of view.

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When I read the texts of Radio Alice, what I found unusual was the use of poetic language lyricism, mixed with music. They were inven-tive but also obscure, readings from Lautrea-mont, de Sade, discussions on Surrealism etc. Was that the kind of creativity going on in the movement and how did people respond to it?

First of all, there is a very particular set of problems in Bologna. There is a difference between the major-ity who make up the traditional workers’ movement and on the other side young people Bologna is a uni-versity city and a lot of young people come from the south to look for work. And so an opposition and sep-aration has produced a growing distance and break from the worker movement tradition, and this opened out the possibility of a close connection between pol-itics and artistic language, and immediate forms of speech. Secondly, there is a group experience that is the result of both the social situation of Bologna, and from 1973 onwards, a series of lectures, readings and workshops on Anti-Oedipus by Guattari and Deleuze. A concept of Mao-Dadaism emerged and an idea was that Dadaism was an attempt to break the separa-tion between art and life. We thought that Dadaism wanted to overcome this separation, but the experi-ence of the Dada movement meant that it was only a name without the possibility of realising and effecting this kind of overcoming; the idea of ’from the masses to the masses’ is the kind of projectory that may be made through the immediate artistic language. The aim of Dadaism becomes realistic in the condition in young proletarian forms of life. The young proletar-ian forms of life realise immediately the separation between art and reality.

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Why did the station stop transmitting?

First of all, we did not have money, but that was al-ways a problem from the beginning which we man-aged to solve. The real reason was that we felt there was a growing distance between our possibilities of information and the political organisation in oppo-sition to the repression. We faced the problem of a change in the feeling of the people. For instance, the audience of punk groups in Italy are more and more interested in drugs, images, videos and music and less and less interested in words, in politics and in the technology of spoken information. I think that ra-dio has been a very important moment of passage, a transition from the political speech and the paper that has moved from the print into the electronic forms of communications. Now, most of the people from Radio Alice are working in music bands, or musical publi-cations and video groups. This is our problem today. What we are doing now is a construction of a form of communication beyond words, beyond speech. We had reached the limit of what is possible just using words. Radio Alice was using more and more poetry in the transmission and less political messages. To read po-etry over the radio after 1977 was crazy. You had to speak about the hundred or so arrests every day. Yet to speak about the arrests means nothing if every day you have to announce a similar message. When you have to say each day that one, two, three hundred peo-ple had been arrested yesterday, you are completely impotent and powerless. You say the same things for 10 days and nobody will listen to the radio because it is only depressing information and It is not some po-litical indication nor is it some linguistic communi-cation. It is only depressing information. In that mo-ment we had the impression that the contradiction

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between our aims and the political needs was an im-possible contradiction to overcome. In fact we stopped the radio and some of us engaged ourselves in the de-fense of prisoners and most of us started to work also with video and music.

What kind of connection did you have with other forms of communication?

Before we started Radio Alice, a group of us were working on a publication called A Traverso which was especially concerned with problems of communication, information, relationships between forms of language. It was a paper of poetry, literature and political liter-ature. From the magazine we went to the radio with the feeling that we were passing to a more developed form of communication. There was no contradiction in this as we continued to produce the magazine.

On a radio, you can’t do things that you can with music, video or drugs. I think that drugs are a very important area of communication. We generally use drugs like a commodity. But I think that drugs are not a commodity but a communication technology. I think we can also do a scale in the relationship be-tween social forms of life and communication technol-ogies. The old working class did not use music or vid-eo but used newspapers and speeches. The meeting is overcome by the existence of the telephone. When the telephone exists in most houses, the meeting becomes less and less useful. The development of new forms of communication technology renders obsolete other forms of technology. It does not mean you have to for-get these obscure forms of technology because there is still a particular kind of specificity which remains.

The speed of written communication is much slower than the speed of radio-communication. But

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there is the problem of communication technology to produce greater and greater speed. The capitalist knows this very well. If speed is the problem then I think that radio is not fast enough. The radio needs a very rational and discursive relationship between the speaker and the listener. Also the feedback is very slow. I think that music, image and drugs make pos-sible a form of feedback which is absolutely immedi-ate and I think we have to work in this universe of SIMULTANEITY. Radio is the middlepoint between the very slow, distant communication of the written text and the simultaneous form of communications of music, video and drugs. Radio is by necessity, con-nected as a form of communication based on succes-sive items of information like the written text. The most important thing about electronic consciousness is that you don’t have the need for this succession of items of information – the linear sequence. You are faced by a wall, by alterations of mind. From writing to image is a trajectory that goes from teaching, from the transmission of items of information, to the alter-ation of consciousness; the immediate transmission, not of concepts of information of distinct items but a wall that changes you in one moment, and then in the next moment, another change. TV is the evident way of this way of alteration. Really TV is a drug, not a fantasizing sense, but in a concrete sense, a kind of alteration of your perceptions. But I think you have to deal with the alteration, with the change of percep-tion in relationship to reality and ourselves.

Do you think that TV is reformable?

No. It was a problem in the radio movement in 1977 when someone proposed that we should organise a TV network. The majority of the movement said that

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we did not accept this proposition because of the rela-tionship TV has with its audience. This relationship is very fixed and determined and puts the audience in the position of passivity. We cannot reform the TV and we cannot think of another form of transmission. Different forms of transmission do not create a differ-ent relationship with the object, with the gadget. So we have to think, not only of different video transmis-sions but also towards a different network of consum-ers and users of the image. What has to be changed is not only the contents, not only the transmission, but also the form of network – the relationship be-tween the people that the transmission may produce.

An interview by Rosetta Brooks of ZgPress on 10 July, 2010 / cc http://zgpress.com

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The end of Radio Alice

RA: This is Radio Alice. Any comrade who knows anything about what’s going on please give us a call here at RA, and we would really appreciate it.

– music –

Telephone: (panting voice) … so listen, the police are charging from via St. Petronio, and also from via Zamboni, at the end. They shot some tear gas, then they lined themselves up at the end of via Zamboni, I mean close to the Church of St. Donato, close to … they are there.

RA: Got it. Listen, where are the comrades now?

T: The comrades are in piazza Verdi, counterattack-ing, and also close to Economics; they have made one line, and they have also gathered some stones. Now listen, it should be said, perhaps … I mean, you know … that you should send as many comrades as you can to help us, because there are only a few of us now.

RA: OK.

T: Fine. Maybe later on I’ll drop in with some more news, or maybe somebody else will. Ciao.

RA: Ciao, thanks.

– music –

T: Hey, the police have entered the university zone.


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They’ve started spreading tear gas. And they’ve al-ready reached the second traffic light on via Zamboni. The comrades are withdrawing to a place where they can rally together. They are not opposing the police. They are rallying, but they are not yet moving ahead, while at piazza Verdi the police are already spreading teargas. Now the rally is beginning to move and they are heading to the zone close to St. Donato. That’s all.

RA: OK, ciao, thanks.

– music –

RA: There is an urgent message, it’s very impor-tant: the people of the political-juridical commit-tee should come here into our studio right away, or get in touch with us, anyway: it’s much better if they come here.

T: … so, comrades, the police are moving up. They’ve rammed into the barricades, marched onto piazza Verdi, and now they have occupied it. Now they are going down via Zamboni. The comrades are now be-tween Economics and porta Zamboni. Anyway, we need news and information for our comrades. Those who know if the police have reached porta Zamboni, via Ernerio, or the streets in the ring around porta Zamboni, please call us immeditately, because many people are listening to the radio. We need to know it badly because we must set up new barricades, and organize everything. Anyway, they’re moving up and they’re using a lot of teargas.

T: … so the university buildings have been emptied by the police and carabinieri, who have marched onto piazza Verdi from 3 sides: from via Zamboni, from

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via Riva di Reno, via delle Moline, and from piazza Oldobrandi. There has been very little or no resist-ance from our side because there was no fucking way. Those guys threw a lot of teargas bombs while they were still far away.

RA: Listen, where are the comrades now?

T: They’ve moved down along via Zamboni.

RA: What for? I mean what are they planning to do now?

T: Nothing, it’s a complete defeat.

RA: A complete defeat?

T: Yeah, a slaughterhouse.

– music –

T: M is calling. The end of the world is underway here. Police are behaving more or less like at the theatre, you know. Wait a minute. Here’s S. who knows what’s going on better than me.

T: (S.) Well, the police are not gaining ground any more, they are not using tear gas now. It’s proba-bly because the wind is blowing the tear gas back to-wards them. Matter of fact, the wind is now blowing in our favour. We have nice sunshine too and plen-ty of fresh air.

T: (M.) Oh it’s great, it’s springtime.

T: (S.) The comrades were able to throw back the tear


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gas bombs before they exploded. You grab it from the top and then you throw it back at the police.

RA: Listen, where are you now?

T: All the people who started the rally are now around via Zamboni. But the rally hasn’t started yet. They still have to decide. As of now the police are dug in around piazza Verdi, and we have a lot of very nice barricades that stretch all along the way down to the end of via Zamboni. Now l can hear the explosion of a bomb. I don’t know what kind, a teargas bomb or something else. Anyway, things are going well now. The point now is that if we decide to start the ral-ly we can move it to via. .. (noise), there are no po-lice there, so we can. But those comrades who are lis-tening to the radio, they can reach us of course from the side roads, to porta Zamboni, easily, and reach …

RA: That’s OK, now, thank you. Ciao.

T: The comrades have tried somehow to resist, but because the police were throwing teargas bombs, and they had only stones, you know, they could not reach that far with their throws so they had to withdraw along via Zamboni, and now they have all gathered around the gate of porta Zamboni, and perhaps it’s better that the rally does not start at all.

RA: Fine.

T: I’ll call later on.

RA: Hey, listen …

– music –


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T: I just wanted to tell you that the whole area around via Petroni, piazza Aldrovandi, all the side streets, via St. Vitale and Strada Maggiore, is completely closed. So if somebody wants to get out of there, they should try a different way, that is, through the malls, and not to go to piazza Maggiore and the other small streets that lead to piazza Maggiore from piazza Ver-di. I just wanted to tell you this because, you know, the police are right here and they’re not letting an-yone through. They stop and check everybody who shows up.

RA: OK, thank you, ciao.

T: Almost half an hour ago, maybe more, let’s say at 4:30 or 5 p.m., during the first clashes, we saw some firemen in uniform and with helmets and oxygen bot-tles running away along via Zamboni while teargas was being thrown all around. Naturally we asked where they were going and what they were doing. “We are looking for, a telephone because they cut firehoses and we don’t know how to put out the fire at the Can-tunzein.” Who cut the tire hoses’? “The police.” This is what I heard with my small blue ears. Here’s the other guy again.

T: (the other guy) Right now in via Rizzoli everything is still, but clearly, the cadres of the movement are not here. Three hundred and fifty of them, the tough-est, went to Rome, so now the people who are arriv-ing here are those who would like to do something but are a bit scared. That’s why there are only slo-gans. Anyway, the situation is very tense.

RA: But, then, the police are in the middle sur-rounded by the comrades.

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T: (woman) We were in via Rizzoli. At one point eve-rybody started to run. Then in piazza Maggiore a comrade arrived saying that the police charged or-dinary people, that is, passersby, children and sen-ior citizens. He also said that the police, the special corps, got out of their jeeps and started to cudgel the people. This comrade was really pissed off. Then we ran into the house of a comrade living nearby. Now we don’t know what to do.

RA: Thank you for the news. First some com-rades phoned saying that the comrades were surrounding the police and that the situation was very tense. We don’t know what the situa-tion is now.

T: There were people running.

RA: OK, someone please phone us, telling us more precisely what’s going on. We will see if it was a joke.

T: OK, ciao.

– music –

RA: This is always RA, don’t despair. We are continuing to transmit the fragmented news we have. Right now, there is great confusion. Some-one has asked if it is true that the police have sacked the Cantunzein. This is not true. They merely cut the tire hoses. Outside it is starting to rain. Inside, we will continue to transmit. – music –

RA: OK.


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T: Herein via Rizzoli, at first the comrades encircles the police. It was beautiful, because they were mov-ing forward, then sitting down, making fools out of the police, who were very bewildered. Anyway, about fifteen seconds ago they exploded … wait …

T: (another voice) It’s very important Jesus fucking Christ are you there? Can you hear me? Yes, OK, I’m Bonvi. The situation is this, the wonderful thing is this, there were comrades of the Communist Party who came on their own, independent of the Party or-ganization. They were sitting there in the piazza, be-coming more excited and more resolute. At this point the police shot some teargas. Via Rizzoli is full of smoke. My office is becoming full of people who are taking shelter from the side roads. OK guys, be qui-et . . . The situation is still very indeterminate, but anyway it is very nice. It seems to me that the peo-ple of the city are replying very well to this provoca-tion by the police. Here is Gabriele, ciao.

T: Listen, it is important to understand that we have nothing against the policeman as an individual, but that we are fighting against policemen as an institu-tion, as power …

T: (Bonvi) The most beautiful thing is that not only the “ultras” but the whole population, all the young people, also the teenagers, replying and not just to mess around but because they have had their balls and ovaries broken enough.

T: We agree. No one has ever fought against the po-lice personally but for what they represent, for what they have to do.

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T: This is the situation in piazza Verdi. The police have succeeded in occupying it. The comrades are barricaded near philosophy and behind the cafete-ria. Both sides are shouting.

RA: I don’t understand what you mean by both sides are shouting.

T: There is shouting from both sides. Or, at least, we can hear shouting from both sides and throwing of molotovs, etcetera. By the way it is likely that they have set fire to the faculty of law, but we don’t know for sure. There is a lot of smoke coming from there. That’s all I know.

RA: Thanks, ciao.

T: (voice of a man speaking angrily) Listen, we are a group of workers and we are trying to get organized and see if we can reach you and break your bones be-cause we are fucking sick and tired of listening to you cocksuckers, that’s what you are. Stop it, pigs! You should be ashamed, you are pieces of shit.

RA: It, instead of staying at home. you were here, you would learn that …

T: Come on, why should I bother, since I’ve seen you at work (great confusion, a lot of swearing and in-sulting)

RA: Yet you don’t know what’s happening …T: You assholes!

RA: We just got some news, something depend-able. A mass rally is coming from the Ducati


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factory, we do not know what they have in mind, what they are planning to do.

– music –

RA: Wait a minute, say it again.

T: So, our comrades have just regained conrol of pi-azza Verdi, after a whole afternoon of fighting, the police have been pushed back. They could not get through and had to withdraw to the two towers. Ap-parently, at the two towers, they are gathering to-gether again to go back to piazza Maggiore once more. That’s all. Ciao.

– music –

RA: We have some more news. Apparently it is dependable. It seems that outside Porta St. Vitale there is a rally of workers, a rather big one, judging on what they said, so there should be two rallies of workers around now. We don’t think they are chasing leftists, but that they are chasing cops.

– music –

RA: This is Radio Alice. We cannot use the tel-ephone because the line is busy, but we want to talk to Radio Citta, here in Bologna, to see if we can make a joint broadcast about the riots. Eve-ry now and then we expect to receive news from the comrades who have gone into the fighting zones and who should still be there. They should call us if they can. Our number is 273459. Con-sidering what’s happening, I would say that the

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best thing to do would be this joint program.

T: One more message. We will soon give you some news about … I mean some news about comrades in jail. We got this news from the Soccorso Rosso (Red Aid). A comrade has been beaten at the central police station. Ten comrades are 114 the prison of St. Gio-vanni. But later on we’ll give more details. Just lis-ten to what those pigs are doing. I mean, hang on …

– music –

T: (housewife) Today, in Piazza Maggiore, when the students were trying to get in, there were workers’ pickets who did not let them through. This has been the most hideous thing the people of Bologna could do. I found that very loathsome. At long last I learnt from you that at least these people have started to do something, and this cheered me up a little bit. Be-cause I was really sad, you know. Tomorrow I have to leave the city, but I was really sad. I was thinking that Bologna was fighting against her very children, see what I mean?

RA: I do.

T: Look, that really came as a. surprise, the biggest shame I’ve ever seen in my life.

RA: We too are glad to learn that the people of Bologna are now on our side.

T: (weeping) Right, otherwise it would have been tru-ly sad. Look, my children are going to school, but it is sad. One lives in Rome, the other one is here in Bo-logna. So I happened to be here right on these days.


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Since the 8th, Woman’s Day, when they beat that girl, since that day and the next one and so on I’ve been in the streets, but today I could not take it anymore. I wish you every luck. I’ll call you again from Morano. Ciao, thank you!

– music –

RA: Cops are not the only ones who can bug a telephone - we can too, listen. We’ve been given this news. Our good old minister, Cossiga, the very honest minister of Police, has given a cer-tain order, namely: the “blue meanies” should clean up Bologna gently and with a lot of tact, and should be very tough at Rome instead. This is the command given by Cossiga.

– music –

RA: Then it is of vital importance that Radio Citta get in touch with us. Radio Citta, please call the operator, number 10, and ask to be con-nected with our number. It is very important, we need to talk to them.

Radio Citta: We can tell you for sure that they have called exactly 180 soldiers in order to enforce “law and order” in this town. They have been brought to the “Minghetti” barracks. So far so good. There are 800 pupils from the Police School of Alessandria. Well, these pupils are kids around the age of 20, people with no experience at all, people who are now being sent inside a very harsh fight, thrown in it by murderous logic which has been seen so far only in “Westerns”. The more a guy is likely to lose control of his temper, the better it is, they think, in order to spoil the im-

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age of a city like Bologna. We are asking for an an-swer to this situation from every democratic institu-tion in Bologna, from every democratic force. And we are asking for it right now, while we, all the free ra-dio stations in Bologna, keep on receiving requests for explanations. They come from people who are ap-palled and fucking angry, people who are demanding explanations of why the police are behaving this way, to know what exactly is going on, and what Bologna is being turned into.

– music –

RA: This is a joint transmission with Radio Cit-ta. You were mentioning a message from eight comrades arrested by the police.

RC: Nine.

RA: Nine comrades in the prison of St. Giovanni.

RC: This is the message: “Ask about Isola Paolo and eight other people. Arrested without charges during the clashes yester-day,-they weren’t even at the rally and they weren’t armed. These are abusive arrests.” And a note at the bottom, “a comrade has been beat-en until he lost blood.”

RA: Are these comrades in St. Giovanni?

RC: 1 don’t know, but I think so. Anyway, I am not sure, but the message is reliable.

RA: It seems that the police want the Commune of Bologna to result. The police of Cossiga, of the state minister, of the minister for all seasons, of


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the control minister- the christian police, sup-ported by the leaders of the Communist Party, leaders by now discredited by the response of their own militants - these police want it, want the Commune of Bologna. They will have it.

– music –

RA: Is anybody answering? Listen, all the com-rades of the legal defence committee please phone the radio station, or rush here. Hello?

T: Hello.

RA: Listen, the police are here, we are RA. We are still waiting for our lawyers to come to let the police in. The police are trying to break the door down. I don’t know if you can hear the noise from the radio. If you are policemen then you can break it down! (talking to the lawyers:) I told them that I would not open the door if they don’t stop pointing their guns and unless they show me the search warrant. And since they haven’t put their guns down I told them we are not going to open the door until our lawyers arrive. Please come, rush. They have guns, bullet-proof jack-ets and all that kind.of shit. Via del Pratello 41.

T: OK.

RA: Ciao - Listen, Mauro … Hold it, our law-yers are coming. Alice! The police are at the door, leave the telephone Listen, this is RA, the police are behind the door … the police are be-hind the door with bullet proof jackets, guns in their hands and all that stuff. The police are at

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the door. Our lawyers are waiting. We positively refuse to let the police in until our lawyers are here because they are pointing guns and things like that. We cannot tolerate such things. OK –please, the comrades that are re-transmitting our program, please give us a signal via radio, I am listening. All comrades be in piazza Mag-giore before midnight. Radio Citta please give us a signal. Radio Citta try …. There is a phone call. Hello Comrades, anyway, the situation is stable.

T: I am the lady…

RA: Lady we are waiting for the lawyers. The police are sitting down … the police are still out there, waiting to get in, still with bullet-proof jackets and pointing guns. They said they would have broken the door down, and things like that … did you see the movie - fucking cow, what is its fucking name? - the one about Ger-many. I got it - “The Lost Honour of Katrina Blum”, they have the same identical helmets, the same identical bullet-proof jackets, the guns pointed at us, and things like that. It is really absurd, really unbelieveable, like in a movie. I swear it, if they weren’t making all this noise, I would have thought I was in a film! There are four of us here at the radio station; we were all doing our job of counter-information, and we are waiting to see what the fuck the police are going to do. Right now they seem to be quiet. They’ve stopped beating the door. Maybe they thought it was too strong. Give me a record, let’s put some music on … pigs … the telephone here is ringing all the time …


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– music –

RA: The police started again to pound on the door. (voices) Alice! There are the police at the door – they’re coming in! They are in! We have our hands up! They are in! We have our hands up!

Published in The Red Menace, Volume 2, Number 2, Spring 1978.

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Il Trasloco - Moving out the Futureby Federico Campagna

In 1972, Franco Berardi, aka ‘Bifo’, moved with cou-ple of friends into a flat at the number 19 of Via Mar-sili, in Bologna’s medieval city centre. In January 1991, a young man from Iran, one from Zaire and the 41 year-old Bifo were evicted from that same flat by the landlord. In between those two dates, not only 19 years had passed through those walls, but also an incalculable amount of people, stories, political move-ments, zines, free radios, police raids, and all sorts of poetic and existential experiments.

Leaving such an extraordinary place was sure-ly not going to be an easy thing to do. A friend of Bifo, a psychoanalyst, Felix Guattari, made a precise diag-nosis of what would have been the impact of this ‘mov-ing out’ (in Italian, ‘trasloco’) on those involved. ‘I am afraid, you will be depressed for at least six months’, he said. It was almost shyly that Bifo dared to question his friend’s prediction. In bumping into another friend of his, the film maker Renato de Maria, at the Termi-ni train station in Rome, Bifo desperately sighed ‘But I don’t want to be depressed!’. Renato, who had lived in the flat in Via Marsili for some months as well, didn’t lose his calm. ‘No need to be depressed,’ he said, ‘let’s take this into our hands and turn it upside down. Let’s make a documentary!’ Bifo took one second to think about it, then did what he had always done any time he had encountered an idea that resonated with him. ‘Ab-solutely! Let’s do it,’ he replied. Less than twelve months later, on Christmas night 1991, the third channel of Italian State Television, Rai Tre, broadcasted a 75 min-utes documentary titled ‘Il Trasloco’ (‘Moving Out’).

There is an unmissable, melancholic element in the film. One that is in a way also hopeful and lively,

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as if it was the double-faced feeling of that kind of death that is necessary in order to be born again. We can only wonder how this desperate and joyful feeling would have hit us if we had been in front of Rai Tre on the night of December 25th, 1991, when ‘Il Traslo-co’ was broadcast a few minutes after the news had shown the red flag going down forever on top of the Kremlin. On that day, the Soviet Union disappeared, the First Gulf War reached its 145th bloody day and the world entered a new age which, maybe, is only starting to end today.

Watching ‘Il Trasloco’ in 2010 is indeed like look-ing into another universe. It is not a matter of dis-tance in terms of chronological time, but of the un-bridgeable distance between two different registers of time. The flat in via Marsili wasn’t just a space in which a number of politically utopian and radical people had lived and worked, rather, it was an en-trance to a time in which utopia was already happen-ing. In other words, it wasn’t an else-where, it was an else-when. It is this connection to what Walter Ben-jamin calls Jetztzeit, the messianic and revolutionary ‘now-time’ that breaks with chronology, what made Via Marsili one of the most vibrant places of life ex-perimentation throughout the wildfire of the 1960s and ’70s, as well as during the spiritual desert of the 1980s.

While the rooms of the flat are slowly being emp-tied of all furniture, some of the people that had lived there appear and disappear from the documentary, cre-ating a uniquely disjointed texture of narrative, memory and performance. The famous history of the Italian Au-tonomia movement seems to fade into the background, outshone by the simple charm with which friends seem to be talking to each other through a camera, rather than to an unknown audience watching them on screen.

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Yet, the experience of Autonomia in the 1970s is an important key to understand a place, like Via Mar-sili, that today almost seems impossible. Those were the years when the Italian communist party was the strongest of its kind in the whole of Western Europe, when graffiti used to say ‘A thousand flowers have blossomed / they are a thousand armed groups’, while the Metropolitan Indian movement were shouting ‘It is the time today / to work only one hour a day!’ and the Italian government was sending the tanks to fight against rioting students. Although entirely set inside the flat, ‘Il Trasloco’ is traversed by a myriad of images and echos of those happenings, as if that place had been, throughout the years, more a ship deck than a house. The street constantly invades the rooms, turning what could have been a small com-munity of flatmates into an endless stream of lives that flow together for some time, disband, then per-haps meet again.

It must have been difficult, at the time, to try and represent this type of living. Maybe, the deci-sion of opening a pirate radio station worked both as a poetic and therapeutic strategy, as well as a po-litical statement. Bologna’s legendary Radio Alice still represents one of the brightest examples of how ‘counter-information’ has the potential of becoming a means to create new worlds, rather than to describe the existing one. It is not just by chance that Renato de Maria decided to cover the screen with a violent-ly scratched, funereal background, when ‘Il Traslo-co’ plays the recorded live broadcast of the police raid that closed Radio Alice forever on 12 March 1977. In fact, the struggle that the inhabitants of Via Marsi-li and the thousands of Autonomia people undertook during those years was political in the purest sense of the word. It wasn’t an attempt of taking power, or

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of pushing social change. It was the ultimate expres-sion of an exaggerated desire for freedom, of what Au-tonomia theorist Toni Negri calls ‘the creative power of the multitude’ (puissance), as opposed to the dom-ination of the capital (pouvoir). Truly, a matter of life or death.

Watching ‘Il Trasloco’ in 2010 is, for us, as nec-essary as it was for Bifo shooting it in 1991.

We should try not to be seduced by the ability with which Renato de Maria waves an intricate vis-ual flow and Bifo arranges together splinters of nar-ratives with its storytelling. Despite the wit and fun that run throughout the film, ‘Il Trasloco’ talks to us about something difficult, almost uncomfortable. Even if, at first, the people on screen seem to be play-fully mourning the loss of an utopia, in fact, at a clos-er listen, their words hide the hypnotic power of a call-ing. It matters little that this calling does not come from the realm of today’s life. Perhaps, the place that contains most existential potential is not supposed to share the same register of time of our current life-styles. This is why the strange feeling that we might experience, that of watching images that come from the future rather than from the past, is actually de-ceitful. The time of ‘Il Trasloco’ is not the past, not the present nor the future. Its space is not limited by the walls of a flat in Bologna. As it happens with the best cinema or literature, the stage where the action takes place is nowhere outside of ourselves. Different-ly from most films or books, though, with ‘Il Trasloco’ the curtain only opens once the screening has ended. This is because it is not even a film. ‘Il Trasloco’ is a map. The challenge is for us to use it to travel further.

CC by Through Europe – 2011, th-rough.eu

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Talks, discussions and screenings

Federico Campagna and Richard John Jones

Il Trasloco (Moving Out of the Future) is an inde-pendent documentary from 1991, which tells the sto-ry of the Italian Autonomia movement of the 1970s. Set entirely in the flat that used to be the unoffi-cial headquarters of the movement, and narrated by Franco “Bifo” Berardi, the film is a deeply personal account of the lives of those involved.

The translation and subtitling of this film is by Fe-derico Campagna (Through Europe) and Richard John Jones (Auto Italia South East). Federico Campagna and Richard John Jones will be introducing the film.

Federico Campagna spent more than twenty years in Milan, where he worked as a political and liter-ary activist, co-founding the street-poetry collective Eveline. In 2007 he moved to London, where he start-ed working at the Max Wigram contemporary art gallery. In 2009 he started a long-term collaboration with the Italian Autonomia philosopher Franco Be-rardi ‘Bifo’, whose reader he is currently editing.

After three years with the publishing workers’ cooperative Zed Books, in 2011 he has joined the rad-ical publisher Verso Books.

Richard John Jones has been based in London since 2004 after graduating from Central Saint Martins. He has been a core participant at the Unitednations-plaza ‘exhibition as school’ project in Mexico City and his work as an artist has been shown at institutions such as The Power Plant in Toronto and the Centro Cultural Sao Paulo. He works independently as an artist and also at the commissioning organisation


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Auto Italia. He specialises in moving image work and documentary and is currently developing a body of research on the archive as a site for cultural produc-tion through the social, political and economic fram-ing of unstable identities.

Francesco Bernardelli and Fabrizio BassoWaves: intercepting radio communication

Live display and aural performance of rare materi-als, described and commented during a common talk on alternative mode(s) of dissemination/information through the reappropriation of the free radio’s and street tv’s devices.

Fabrizio Basso is an artist, activist and curator. His critical art practice has been shaped from the the observation of social reality and the collective con-sciousness of everyday histories and micro-histo-ry. For more than two decades he has been work-ing with audio/radio works, videos and TV (as well street TV) exploring the related urban dimension and reality as framed by mass comunication devic-es, often subverting the very premises of private and public spheres.

Francesco Bernardelli is an art writer/curator/lec-turer working in the interzone of contemporary art, time-based media and performance. From 1999 un-til 2005 he took care of the video and film screening programs of Castello di Rivoli, Cont. Art Museum, Torino; in 2004/05 he co-catalogued its historical video collection and published essays on the histor-ical connections between early performance, vid-eo art and contemporary dance. Recent projects include Split Subjects (De Appel, Amsterdam),

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Figures of Excess (Beursschouwburg, Brussels) and Jef Cornelis: L’arte di rivelare l’arte (Castello di Ri-voli, Torino).

Willem van WeeldenTalk on on Felix Guattari’s Post-media ideas and on Franco Bifo Berardi’s friendship with Felix Guattari.

Willem van Weelden has a background in social phi-losophy and visual art. He is committed to new me-dia from 1990 onwards and has published on this topic in various magazines and catalogues. He was involved in numerous new media projects as a cre-ative director and coach. Currently his focus is on writing and teaching.

Alfredo CramerottiA Close-up on Violence

Talk on the concept of ‘implicit violence’ – that is, violence that involves all of us, none excluded, in our daily life.

Alfredo Cramerotti is a writer, curator, editor and art-ist working across a variety of media such as TV, ra-dio, publishing, internet, media festivals, photography, writing and exhibition curating. He directs Mostyn, Wales’ largest and leading contemporary art centre, co-directs AGM Culture, roaming curatorial agency and CPS Chamber of Public Secrets, media & art produc-tion unit (co-curator of Manifesta 8). He is Research Scholar at the European Centre for Photography Re-search, University of Wales, Newport, Visiting Lectur-er in various European Universities and Editor of the Critical Photography book series by Intellect Books.


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Federica MartiniCommented screeningof parts of Toto’s “Lo smemorato di Collegno” and “Lavorare con Lentezza”

After having studied Northern American Literature and Contemporary Art at the University of Turin, in 2007 she completed a PhD focusing on the evolution of the biennial exhibition format in the 1990s. From 2001 to 2003 she was research associate and Disser-tation Advisor for Northern-American Literature and Contemporary Art at the University of Turin. From 2003 to 2007, she has collaborated with the Curato-rial Department of the Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art, Rivoli-Turin. Since 2009, she is a curatorial associate at the Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne. She has lectured and written on biennials and national representation in contem-porary art exhibitions, exhibition history, collection theory and collaboration in the visual arts.

Lars Bang LarsenNew Spirits of Capitalism: A Radio Experiment

Karl Marx’s famously used occult metaphor to de-scribe the undead vitality of capital. In this lecture Lars Bang Larsen will try to reconnect a contempo-rary Marxian critique to the sounds of unseen intel-ligences. Because the ether isn’t blue: it’s red.

Born in 1972 in Silkeborg, Denmark, Lars Bang Larsen is an art historian at the University of Copen-hagen. He has co-curated group exhibitions such as

“A History of Irritated Material,” Raven Row, London (2010), “Populism,” Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2005), “La insurrección invisible de un millón de

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mentes,” Sala Rekalde, Bilbao (2005), and “The Echo Show,” Tramway, Glasgow (2003), a. o. His books in-clude The Model: A Model for a Qualitative Society, 1968 (2010) and Sture Johannesson (2002).


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Learn-ins

withFrancesco BernardelliFederico Campagna

The workshop «Moving Out of Il Tralsoco» will discuss some of the key concepts present in the documentary Il Trasloco. It will depart from that point, in order to attempt a critical explora-tion of contemporary issues of collectivity, crea-tivity and emancipation. The nature of the work-shop will be open and collaborative.

Vincent de Roguinon haunted radio

Willem van Weelden

Learn-ins are open to everybody who is interested in the topic. Please contact us for details by e-mail at [email protected]. It is a good idea to announce your coming. More informa - tions on www.laptopradio.org/lrsn

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Concerts and sound-events

Teatrino Elettricoconcert at the opening

Teatrino Elettrico was created from the need of mixing machinery sonorities with the emotion of live music.

The project focused on the expressive possi-bilities of the mechanical objects, in the creation of a totally real time a/v language without any sam-pling or recording.

Teatrino Elettrico is composed by Massimiliano Nazzi and Emanuele Martina.

www.teatrinoelettrico.org

RAM radioartemobilelive event and streaming

Radioartemobile founded in 2003, is a platform for contemporary art based at Via Conte Verde 15, Rome, dedicated to sound research and exhibitive activity which aims towards the creation of an internation-al network. RAM sets up exhibitions and projects in collaboration with both public and private spac-es all over the world, juxtaposing visual and sound art. In 2004, in the Rome office, RAM founded SAM, SoundArtMuseum, a permanent archive of SoundA-rt works open to the public and available on-line. The entirety of RAM radioartemobile’s activity is docu-mented at www.radioartemobile.it

RAM LIVE is RAM’s web radio connoted as a space for sound Art, focusing the interdiscipli-nary aim of creating a network, an experimenta-tion site, achieved through a selection and remix of interviews, debates, historical recordings and

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contemporary music. RAM LIVE’s programming is streamed live 24 hours a day at http://live.radioartemobile.it

Jonathan Zonoff FrigeriEsisto Anch’io ’70 – ’80

A listening session with musicians who have been forgotten over the years.

Don’t forget to check www. laptopradio.org/lrsn further concerts.

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Neon works in the exposition

Maurizio Nannucci, More than meets the eye, neon 55 × 1000 cm, 2012

Stefan Brüggemann, Obliteration neon, neon ca. 60 × 60 cm, 2012

Cerith Wyn Evans, E=Q=U=A=L=S, neon, 12 × 5 cm, 2010 (Parkett, Zürich)

Alan Vega, Untitled, 4 fluorescent tubes, wood, 130 × 100 cm, 1981 – 2010 (Circuit, Lausanne)

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The Kafka Machine: a three Hours Testament

a project on Autonomia, Abstract Machines, Voices & the Production of Subjectivity!

Is an evolving, interactive sound installation by stu-dents of the IDUM (Interaction Desgin Unstable Media) department of the DOGtime course at the Rietveld Academie Amsterdam, and Willem van Weelden (mentor and tutor of that department). It is an experimental piece done to probe in a given in-teractive/curatorial environment the use of sounds as a dramaturgy to deliver an exposé with five ‘tes-taments/legacies’ that are related to the theme of the ‘La Radio Siamo Noi’ project organised by the HEAD and Laptop Radio (Laurent Schmid, et all). As LRSN points to the Autonomia movement and the use of ra-dio as a media tactical weapon of alternative subjec-tivation, the project has set itself the task to inves-tigate and work on five legacies that connect to this (media tactical) history: the testament of literature in casu that of Kafka (as a machinic literature), the testament of the Autonomia movement in Italy (by fo-cussing on the trial of many of their members held in the early eighties), the testament of computopian ide-as to use new technologies to create a new participa-tory literature (Ted Nelson), the testament of a new arising media condition set forth by Fritz Lang with his movie ‘Das Testament of Dr Mabuse’, and the tes-tament of Felix Guattari’s ideas on post-media, desir-ing machines and minoritarian media. In the dram-aturgy of these investigations six virtual presonae have been staged as ‘vehicles’ to connect to these ‘tes-taments’: Kaspar Hauser, Dora Diamant, Max Weber, Gershem Scholem, Titorelli, and Dr Mabuse. These

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six ‘voices’ lead the visitor/participant into a trial in which he or she is, how Kafkaesque!, the accused par-ty! Once inside the room there is no clear distinction between inside or outside; yet, little time is availa-ble to speak out!

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LapTopRadio

LapTopRadio is a real nomadic radio: broadcasting irregularly on the internet with a most simple set-ting: a laptop with a modem connected to the mo-bile-phone network. If there is a mobile connection, we can broadcast. We want to make the old dream of independent pirate radio come true on the internet.

LapTopRadio is an experimental structure ex-ploring the possibilities of radio networking and streaming, which seek to counter or supplement forms of public broadcasting through creating unique forms of collectivity.

At the same time we want to question and un-derstand the parameters of radio’s, critical and aes-thetical potential, the notion of place, corporeality, so-cial exchange, and the politics of information. And we want to have fun doing this.

Radio does not only transmit sound but, mainly and above all, signals. It is thus – as has already been pointed out in the medium’s early phase – a space for communication that does away with, or redefines, dis-tances. LapTopRadio concept focusses on the trans-formation of distance trough mobility. Mobile inter-net access and smartphone technology can provide a system that is mobile on both sides: transmitter and receiver are constantly manipulating given temporal and spacial situations in order to turn them into ar-tistic opportunities. This also influences also the re-alism of sound as time-event and creates a new un-derstanding of the often cited immediate aspect of radio.

LapTopRadio addresses contemporary positions that underlie the “post-media” era as described by Félix

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Guattari in his later texts; e.g. in “Pour une éthique des médias”, Le Monde (6 nov. 1991). Guattari ex-pressed his hope to switch from consensual mass-me-dia era to the dissensual post-media, based on 1) for-seeable technological developments; 2) the necessary redefinition of the relations between producers and consumers; 3) the institution of new social practices and their interference with the development of me-dia; 4) the development of information technologies.

LTR thus tends to integrate technological ques-tions and to relate them to issues like the following: Initimacy, public and private sphere in spacial-tem-poral reasoning, radio-territories, common spacing.

But also: radio-magic, phantasmic radio, ether, non-visual and non-haptic space

Broadcast simultaneity, unexpected time slots, networked structures, collective appropriation of the medium radio.

These questions form the general conceptu-al and theoretical background for the LapTopRadio project. It is be done in an open self-organized and participatory form.

The possibility to do this with a mobile studio over the net and in a sporadic way offers completely new conditions we want to explore and verify. What is the potential of a studio that physically can be brought to back to the listeners?

http://www.laptopradio.org/about.html

Website: http://www.laptopradio.orgFB: https://www.facebook.com/LapTopRadioTwitter: @LapTopRadio

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Most relevant literature and references

On Radio and Audio Art

ARNHEIM, Rudolf. Radio Aesthetics. Manchester, NH: Ayer Co Pub, 1971 (original in english, London 1936)

AUGAITIS, Daina, LANDER, Dan. Radio rethink. Banff: Banff Center Press, 1994

BRECHT, Bertold, Der Rund-funk als Kommunikationsappa-rat. Rede über die Funktion des Rundfunks; Vorschläge für den Intendanten des Rundfunks; Radio – eine vorsintflutliche Erfindung? All in: BRECHT Bertolt, Werke, Bd. 21, Schriften I, Berlin: Aufbau Verlag. 1988.

CEBREROS URZAIZ, Carmen, Gallet, Bastien Labelle Brandon, eds. Radio Memory (Audio Issues). Berlin: Errant Bodies Press, 2008

DIEDRICHSEN, Dietrich, RUHM Constanze (eds.). Imme-diacy and Non-Simultaneity: Utopia of Sounds. Publications of the University of Fine Arts Vienna: Vienna, 2010

Literature and references

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FISHER, Margareth. Ezra Pound’s Radio Operas, The BBC Experiments, 1931–1933. Cambridge: MIT Press 2002.

GILFILLAN, Daniel. Pieces of Sound. German Experimental Radio. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009.

GRUNDMANN, Heidi ed./ Zimmermann Elisabeth et al. ReInventing Radio. Aspects of Radio as Art. Frankfurt a. Main: Revolver, 2008.

JOSEPH-HUNTER, Galen. Transmission Arts: Artists And Airwaves. New York: PAJ Publications, 2011.

KAHN, Douglas. Noise Water Meat, A history of sound in the arts. Cambridge: MIT Press 2001.

KAHN, Douglas, Whitehead, Gegory. Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio, and the Avant-Garde. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994

LABELLE, Brandon. Acoustic territories : sound culture and everyday life. New York, London: The Continuum International Publishing Group, 2010

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LABELLE, Brandon, Granly Jensen, Erik. Radio Territories. Los Angeles / Copenhagen: Errant Bodies Press, 2007

LABELLE, Brandon. Radio Memory (Audio Issues). Los Angeles / Copenhagen: Errant Bodies Press, 2008

MILLER Paul, D. (aka DJ Spooky That subliminal kid). Rhythm Science. Cambridge, Amsterdam: Mediawork / The MIT Press, 2004

ROSSET, Christian, Yann Paranthoën, L’art de la radio, Arles: Phonurgia, 2009

SILBERMAN, Marc. Brecht on Film and Radio, Bertolt Brecht. London: Methuen Pub Ltd, 2000

THURMANN-JAJES, Anne ed./ BREITSAMETER Anne / PAULEIT, Winfried. Sound Art, Zwischen Avantgarde und Pop-kultur, Schriftenreihe für Künstlerpublikationen. Bremen: Salon, 2005.

STRAUSS, Neill, MANDL, (Ed.), Radiotext(e), Neill Strauss. New York: Autonomedia Press, 1993


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WEISS, S. Allen. Experimental sound and radio. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2001

WEISS, S. Allen. Phantasmic Radio, Durham. London: Duke University Press Books, 1995

On Radio Alice

COLLETTIVO A/TRAVERSO, ed. Alice è il diavolo. Storia di una radio sovversiva, Milano: ShaKe Edizioni, 2007

COLLECTIF A/TRAVERSO, ed. Radio Alice, radio libre, Paris: Laboratoire de Sociologie de la connaissance, 1977

A short list on autonomia,post-media, F. Guattari

BERARDI, Franco. Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008

BRADLEY, Bill, HANNULA, Mika, RICUPERO, Cristina and SUPERFLEX. Self-organisation / Counter-economic Strategies. Berlin, New York: Sternberg Press, 2006

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DEULEUZE, Gilles, GUATTARi, Félix. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 1986

GENOSKO, Gary. Felix Guattari: An Aberrant Intro-duction. London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2002

GENOSKO, Gary, ed. The Guattari Reader. Oxford: Black-well Publishers, 1996

GUATTARI, Félix, NEGRI, Antonio. New Lines of Alliance: New Spaces of Liberty. London/New York: Autonomedia, 2010

LOTRINGER, Sylvere, MARAZZI, Christian. Italy: Autonomia, Post-political politics. New York: Semoitext(e), 1980

VIRNO, Paolo, HARDT, Michael, eds. Radical thought in Italy: a potential politics. Min-neapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 1996 more on www.laptopradio.org/refs


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