matthew fuller on Sun, 5 Aug 2001 22:50:26 +0200 (CEST) |
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<nettime> fwd: 'Accatone' - THE ACCIDENTED DEATH OF AN ANARCHIST |
THE ACCIDENTED DEATH OF AN ANARCHIST "How many political dissidents find themselves in the same situation of being murdered - suicided by society because of their original aim of realising language - of introducing the necessary, vivifying political insertion of unreason, which has its own rationality, into the coherent, instrumental and manipulative discourse of the normal ones." - David Cooper: The Language Of Madness (Pelican 1980) The death of Carlo Guiliani, shot, run over, in Genoa. Cops say "Pieces of shit. It is you who killed him!" Protesters chant: "Assassins, Assassins!" "Hours after Carlo Guiliani's death, protestors have created a makeshift shrine, heaping red flowering plants they uprooted from a nearby public garden. A piece of notebook paper, weighed down with a teargas cannister, is "scrawled with the words. 'Made in G8'" (John Vidal: Guardian 21/7/01) Carlo Guiliani one more lying prone and bloodied on the Italian asphalt... "If there is a simple logic here, it is that the more we can connect with all our stakeholders the more possibilities everyone has to help create a better world" (BT advert in Guardian 21/7/01 - www. Bt.com/ betterworld). Carlo Guiliani deaded by G8 - Feel faintly sickened by my own texts in light of the protestors in Genoa. But surely this is a modality of my comitment, the 'impulse-semiotic' of my support for them? Carlo, I am trying to call on Pier Paolo: "Our guilt as fathers could be said to consist in this - that we believe that history is not and cannot be other than bourgeois history." How strange, Carlo, that this is from a piece by Pier called 'Unhappy Youths', how miserable he felt in 1975 about "revolt becoming part of a code", but that attack on the copdrover, that wasn't coded, that was too real, too real a hatred for the 'violatingly impotent'. Carlo, we won't listen to Geldof & Bono - their 'drop the debt' an absurdist statement played straight-facedly, believed in. Just earlier in the week I'd heard a chief economist of the IMF look stone-facedly, bemusedly, at journalist John Pilger's same insistence about debt - for such an economist, such a functionary, debt is the stake with which we play the game of capital. He said as much, much more, with all the reassurance of one, too, firm in his belief in 'economic law'. Bob & Bono don't see capitalism. Like Sisimondo and the buffoons Marx lambasts (the"parvenus of the day before yesterday"), they see just one of its aspects in the framework of rectifiable justice; as if debt could be dropped and capital could then be a just and equi Rtable relation! This is not even socialism. It is the political economy of charity! The IMFist knew full well that debt is the stake, that debt perpertuates capital, keeps it circulating by enabling it to change form. Of course 'debt' could be 'dropped', it would make good sense for G8 to conspire in the illusion of this, to make a 'sacrifice', in order to give capital a PR slot, to make a virtue out of a necessity - but, what of credit, what of accumulation, accumulating accumulation, and what of debt starting all over again from its false zero? What of debt as a form, as a relation? What of debt as the still undiscredited infrastructure of capital? So, poor Bob & Bono, they can't succeed without your revolution Carlo, they'll soon be back at square one (false zero), blinded by the process of capital, blinded by the way debt, too, can change form - what after all is a mortgage, what is rent etc. etc. Carlo, we can't stop, won't ever stop : - "I have heard voices say: 'he is conscious of his life'" Still conscious Carlo, conscious to know there'll be a cop let off, or a cop to be 'homo sacer'. Same thing, substitutable scapegoats, indebtedness. <... INSERT QUOTE BY BATAILLE ON THE CONSECRATION OF WEALTH BY MEANS OF OSTENTATIOUS SACRIFICE...> Carlo, of course you know that debt is an ancient rite your death, as pain, makes it clear: you are an angered debtor, your debt, your life tax, cannot be repaid. For how could you repay centuries of contractual debt? you were obliged, like us all, but not obliged to be guilty... your attack absolved you from the contract, absolved us too Carlo, you're no martyr you know no cruel joy Carlo, it is no risk for Bob & Bono to appear, and their manner, their imploring liberalism, says it all: we are used as link to the 'common people', we're no experts, we're celebrated substitutes, we're mouthpieces for other consciousnesses, for an 'unknowing' would-be outrage, switchpoints between corporations and colonial charity - sick, thick, flattered, aimless, indebted. Carlo, they called you 'mindless'! Carlo, why is it a sentimental sin to write to you just because you are dead? How sophisticated we've become, I've become, how embarassed by contaminant emotion, how clever in our double-think, doppelganger guise, how remote from experiences we're to think we've surpassed. - To experience someone else's experiences is a 'crime'. All else just creditable. Carlo Guiliani, I am trying to call on Dylan T. "bury the dead for fear that they walk to their grave in labour" How strange Carlo, you're assassins will get you to bury yourself, but you're in labour, dead, but giving birth... I feel I remember you now I feel I know your name I feel your name I feel and I remember I remember I feel I don't need to remember I feel... Carlo Guiliani Carlo Guiliani your's a name full of other names and not a pseudo differentiated naming - Call on Cooper. A quote from the 'Language Of Madness': "My thoughts are all drawn out words, they ought to be pin-pricks". A word 'drawn out' as if to get something else into it, something other, some other feeling. 'Pin-pricks', of course, pin-pricks are goose-bumps, goose-pimples (on the forearm to the back and across the shoulders, lovelyly cold, a 'semiotic of the impulses'). Or again, the mad language in the textbook of medicine speaks of a death in life: "If I should return during my absence, keep me here until I come back". Strange, that death is not as alienating as the made dead that made a one capable of saying this. Or, maybe more, it is absence of self, the presence of becoming... Carlo, you are not Pasolini's Carlos, nor are you Pelosi his killer, but, like Pier Paolo, you too are flat and mangled Carlo, I won't listen to the woman from the Institute Of Ideas. She's on Sky News as I wake on Day Two and she criticises you for having no political discourse. She shifts the heterogeneity of you and your comrades to the new centre ground of 'politics'. She's only seemingly different from Tony Benn (he' Ss there too) who at least (last) links you to a history of struggles before bringing you back into their polis. But the former we know as former RCPist, instrumental Trots (no Durruti's there), and we heard them back in 1990 offering support for Sadam ("RCP you are barmy, go and join the Iraqui Army!"). How sophisticatedly malformed they were, and here today, missing an opportunity for outrageous affectivity, becoming entangled in a blunted strategy, a mediatised strategy of double-think that seeks a power over you Carlo, that seeks to tell you what you're 'politics' should be. Already a world democratic council unfolds and I wonder too what overly defined 'politics' it will tout, what exclusions will ensue. Carlo, you were on the asphalt; apparently there's no politics there, no politics recognisable to power ('viable pretence'), our politics on the asphalt - tarmac and blood, plastic and blood - the politics of realisable dreams and mad language, enlivening language. Carlo, there's open golf on the radio - "immaculate bunker"- as, in Genoa, the fences come down, and, at its outskirts, fresh food, nibbled at, is dumped to join credit notes, wrappers and white goods < INSERT G8 MENU AND WINE LIST> Carlo, why is it that your exceptional act, your attack, your realising language, demands from me such an unexceptional form? But is it hasty of me to relate to this lingo as a 'poem'; and to your act as one that deculpabilises? - as a decadent aside I think of Pier Paolo's poems, how their unexceptional form (versus his exceptional films - 'the written language of reality') make a space for his direct emotivity, makes his emotivity direct because the / unexceptional form seems to disappear behind his habitually emotive use of it. What haste, then, in making free, marking the limits of freedom, marking the ideology of freedom out as the only dialectical limit capital can't ethicalise = the language of acts, realising language, detourning democracy. Just as, then, the content the words of the 'poem', mark the limit of form, the form's edge that Pier Paolo tottered around on - new form, new forums. Carlo, your assassin was 20 years old, he is too young to be given another name that will weave him into a state fiction - too exceptional now to name himself Carlo Guiliani Carlo, Bob & Bono dropped out from the funeral march, they spat at you with all their accredited Christian spite - and just as they can't see or feel fully their own violence against you, so too, they cannot see the violence of the 'system' they try to want to reform. How they are used ... used beyond press-pass visibility ('viable pretence') and entry into code (subsumption of even the symbology of revolt) ... used beyond studied sincerity (Bono's finger is placed across his lips, its tip beneath his nose, his eyes looking out with a concentration that defends him from a trap he can't sense: faciality) ... used instead to personify the reasonableness of capital, its dissembling distance from its own violence... used as the ideologues of corporatist charity and philanthropic profits (the only allowed sign of super-surplus). Carlo, these are the Chartists that sought-out Parliament to sing its praises, these are the Chartists that pray away the 'cruel joy' of) businesses like their own. Carlo, even Nietzsche was no nihilist, he who named it, scorned it, depassed it Carlo, Claudio Martini, president of the Genoa Social Forum - Tuscan Region, is reported as saying: "It is a young movement, it is very naive at times, it is idealistic. It must learn to defend itself from the Nihilists and seek protection from the State." (Observer, 22/7/01) Bob & Bono - an image of a rift in the movement that will be worked and prised into a useful, visible, too visible, reformism and Carlo Guiliani - a submerged, vociferous proliferating revolutionisation that will be worked and prized as another start for emergent becomings <INSERT GRAFITTI OF ALL LANGUAGES> Carlo, I'm sure you're not missing Il Giornale, it accuses "centre left (=neo-liberal) governments of breeding a genetically modified generation of youngsters' who blame Western Democracy (=Empire) for the world's evils" (Observer, ibid) Scaffold poles are the same the world over. A million take fake aim, a bank is ransacked, its cash (=non-being) is burned as cops take to sanctuary, cowering in reinforced steel trucks. Carlo, reading Noreena Hertz's diary of her travel to Genoa makes me sick. Perhaps because I am a 'writer' too. But her ingratiating use of 'we' whilst she quips in with the common-sensical classificational asides of a normopath, makes me feel less ashamed to be using words. I'm not touting information but a sentimental semiotic. Of course, Carlo, I am acutely culpable, word wieldly, but only to be deculpabilisable, only to be socially implicated. Carlo, Carlo, your your ashes code will will unstill unstill caches of revolt Carlo, apparently yours was a rage, a rage against everything 'modern society' has provided, apparently yours was a rage, making bonfires from noted journelese and empirical cameras, a rage against the modern as mediated modern, against a form of communication that is lacking all modes and registers with which to communicate. Carlo, apparently you are a 'wild boy', an 'outsider' who belongs where he now is You didn't want 'inclusion' so you set your own fate, you made them kill you, even in death, to give you the death you wanted, it was they who gave you this, you got what you wanted because capital provides for all needs Carlo, one of capital's agents, versed in its means of expression, one of its functional personfications, one Rory Carroll, turns in his copy on Day One and I learn from him what it is you are: "... a history student, petty criminal and outsider ... " "... lived in a squat..." "... he used to beg and hang out with friends and stray dogs..." But of course, Carlo, what is this 'to learn' from such as Rory Carroll, he who can calmly write your life story as so much compacted information, so many police-fed facts, so much sign-exchange-value: "... assault, carrying offensive weapons, public disorder, resisting arrest, drink driving..." And what does it mean, then , for me to write of you, to you? Perhaps, that I am in your conversation, a conversation that continues on with more than a 'me', a 'more than' that is to be a student of history. Carlo, on Day Two, I read Cooper on a bus: "We go back all the time not to be back but to recuperate our (r)evolutionary origins and then to throw them in the face of a future that no one occupies" (Cooper, ibid p28). Carlo, to be a student of history is to be a becoming ì, is to fight back with anything to hand. Carlo, history doesn't paginate, it enrages; so much reneging to avenge. And our conversation, risky and impulsive, has to be, for now, two sides of the same becoming: a language of acts, an enactment of words, and an act of language, an eventuation of words. <INSERT PICTURE OF NOREENA HERTZ AND RORY CARROLL > Carlo, is there a Via Fani in Genoa? A Piazza Fontana? I think back to Fo - think of a title: The Accidented (or Accidentable) Death Of An Anarchist - and to 'Pino' Pinelli. It's 1969 and 'Pino' falls from the twelfth floor window of Milan's police HQ. Carlo, he is alleged to have said "this is the end of anarchism" as he fell, guided down there to the same strata of asphalt. Carlo, was it the 'black block' attacking the shops of the petits-bourgeois or was it the 'black shirts' attacking their own? Carlo, it's Day Three and there's more figures to negotiate. More screens, more tell-tale slips of the tongue: "The summit cost $200m dollars to stage... Genoa will receive $45m dollars in aid" (Guardian, 23/7/01.) Carlo, I'm in the laundrette reading up on more reports as queues form for the washing machines and municipal gardeners across the way leisurely prune, plant and smoke in the local park... The events are getting muddy: "I saw groups of French and German people dressed in black with iron bars inside the police station near the Piazza di Kennedy". But 'Communist' MP Malabara is doing the talking, and it sounds familiar, after the 'historical compromise', for what is a 'communist' doing in a police station during these days?. But the Green Matone, one of your many local senators harks 'back' to the days of Pinelli, days when anarchists were fingered for neo-fascist atrocities in Piazza Fontana (See the P-Report, Observer 7/12/69). He utters an unpaginated history of collusion that undermines the beginnings of alliance and social learning. Elsewhere today: "video evidence collected by protestors... suggests that men in black were seen getting out of police vans near protest marches. They were noted for never attacking the police..." But this is from short article acredited to no less than five journalists (including your biographer, Rory Carroll). So you see Carlo, our conversation is interrupted by the bank of facts, unverifiable facts, fructiferious facts that supply and demand suspicion, that work to cast doubt upon your language of acts, set it in a criminal situation. Carlo, I feel sure we could agree on what the State made Pinelli say. It is the 'end of anarchism' when the language of acts can so easily be used, as easily used as the language of words can be used to effect 'corporate responsibility' or to form a communique Carlo, the red zone is a language, as was the sudden declaration of an imigration zone in Genoa airport, as was the hospital, taken over by cops, following the attack on the Diaz secondary school. So many 'states of exception', Carlo, so many zones for the suspension of life in favour of the non-being of a law as gilded and 'violatingly impotent' as the cash that pays for its upkeep, its continued circulation. All these zones, Carlo - unlike ours, described as the 'fringe of the fringe' but which lets us converse - all these zones are zones of defensiveness where words freeze into codes and money talks its agency through agents, personfications of capital, functionaries that alow capital to change its form. These are the differences that make no difference. FTSE4Good. 'Accatone' @ Movement of the 21st-24th July # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net