Why Italy?

Why Italy? The first entry is relatively contingent. A number of people responsible for a free Italian radio station in Bologna, Radio Alice, asked me to introduce a French edition of their texts. That interested me because their inspiration was at once Situationist and "deleuzoguattarian," if one can say that. The second axis is the conjunction between the State apparatus in the traditional sense and the bureaucracies of the Worker's Movement. We have seen it at work in a spectacular manner in both the U.S.S.R. and China. The Western democratic tradition, the evolution toward Eurocommunism, and the humanism of the socialist parties made us believe that we weren't exposed to that kind of totalitarianism. It's true that the modes of subjection function differently. Yet there is an irreversible tendency pushing the State to exert its power no longer by traditional means of coercion, like the police or army, but also through every means of negotiation in every domain, from the systematic shaping of children in national education to the immense power of the media, particularly television. This State apparatus is highly visible but often powerless on the national level since real decisions are often taken at the international level. It is on the contrary more and more powerful in its miniaturized interventions. If one's nose is pressed too close to national realities, the impression is that England is very different from the existing regime in Germany, France or Italy. But stepping back, one can see that a certain kind of totalitarianism is being set up which goes along very well with traditional divisions. The machines of production, formation, and reproduction of the work force imply an immense machinery of State power, and then all kinds of cogwheels in politics, unions, education, sports, etc... In this regard I believe the Italian experience to be the most exemplary, for there we can see the lines of flight and the road that lies ahead. It doesn't lead to an alternative of the English type, or a French popular front, whether on the left of on the right. It amounts to making sure that the Communist Party, mass organizations, and unions will function at full capacity within a national consensus like the Italian political spectrum. A kind of State regime is now being devised which won't require an October revolution or even a Chinese revolution, but will produce the same result: the people will be controlled by every available means, even if they must be conceded a measure of political and regional diversity. Why Italy? Because the future of England, France and Germany is Italy. When I got involved with Italy the Common Program of the French left had not yet exploded, but I had already sketched out the idea that it didn't make sense, that things wouldn't happen that way. But integration is inexorable, and the Italian scheme will eventually be reproduced in France. What I'm saying can only be understood in relation to what I have called the molecular revolution. There is a certain level of desire, violence, and revolt which has become impossible and unbearable in societies such as they have developed at both the technological and social level. Let's take the example of terrorism: throughout the history of the Worker's Movement, there have been armed actions and acts of terrorism. There have been enormous discussions throughout the communist movement to put into perspective and to situate armed action. Nowadays it's no longer a theoretical problem, but a problem of the collective sensibility as it has been shaped by the State apparatus with its audiovisual tentacles: one doesn't accept any more the idea of death, the idea of violence, the idea of rupture, or even the idea of the unexpected. A general infantilisation now pervades all human relationships. If there's a strike at the National Electric Company, be careful. A code of ethics for the strike must be drawn up. Confrontation in Bologna? Be careful, a full negotiation must be made. And if one senses an aberrant factor, if there's a handful or resistors who don't accept the ethical code, it's a black hole. The most beautiful black hole that's been seen was New York during the black-out. When one can no longer see, anything - a great mass, strange gauna - can loom up out of the dark. A certain type of brutality inherited from capitalist societies of the 19th century was symmetrical with a certain truth of desire. Some people could still free themselves. The progressive tightening up by the Marxist worker's movement has put a stop to that. Today you can't desire rupture, you can't desire revolution, or indeed anything which puts in question the framework and values of contemporary society. Now the control begins in childhood, in the nursery and in school, for everyone must be forced into the dominant redundancies of the system. The repressive societies now being established have two new characteristics: repression is softer, more diffuse, more generalized, but at the same time much more violent. For all who can submit, adapt, and be channelled in, there will be a lessening of police intervention. There will be more and more psychologists, even psychoanalysts, in the police department; there will be more community therapy available; the problems of the individual and of the couple will be talked about everywhere; repression will be more psychologically comprehensive. The work of prostitutes will have to be recognized, there will be a drug advisor on the radio - in short, there will be a general climate of understanding acceptance. But if there are categories and individuals who escape this inclusion, if people attempt to question the general system of confinement, then they will be exterminated like the Black Panthers in the U.S., or their personalities exterminated as it happened with the Red Army Fraction in Germany. Skinnerian conditioning will be used all over. In no way is terrorism specific to Germany and Italy. In three months France could be crawling with Red Brigades. Considering how power and the media operate, how people are cornered, prisoners in these systems of containment, it's no wonder that some become enraged, and start shooting at people's legs or wherever. The molecular revolution, however, is produced neither on the level of political and traditional union confrontation, nor on the front of different movements like the Women's Movement, the prostitutes, the Gay Liberation Front, etc., which are often only provisional reterritorializations, even forms of compromise with the State power and the different political forces. There is a miniaturization of forms of expression and of forms of struggle, but no reason to think that one can arrange to meet or wait at a specific place for the molecular revolution to happen. At a deeper level in contemporary history, it hardly matters anymore whether one lives in Brezhnev's regime of gulags or under Carterism or Berlinguerism, all the powers are intricated in the same bizarre formula. To be sure there will be contradictions, confrontations, landslides, class struggles in the traditional sense, even wars, bit it's actually society as a whole that is now shifting. It won't simply be another bourgeois or proletarian revolution. The gears effected by this shift are so minute that it will be impossible to determine whether it's a class confrontation or a further economic subjugation. I believe that this shift in society, which implies not only a re-arrangement of relationships among humans, but also among organs, machines, functions, signs, and flux, is an intrahuman revolution, not a simple re-ordering of explicit relationships. There have been major revolutionary debacles in history before. In the 18th century, ranks, orders, classifications of all kinds suddenly broke down. Today no one or anything seems to be able to semiotize collectively what's happening. Panic creeps in, and people upon State powers more overwhelming and tentacular, ever more manipulative and mystifying. In Italy the Communist Party is often heard saying: let's save Italy, but the more uncertain Italy's future becomes, the more claims there are to save it. In Italy there is no tradition of State power, no civic spirit, nothing like the French tradition of centralism and hierarchical responsibility. The situation therefore is more favourable for bringing about a number of shifts. Entire regions will be downgraded because of the restructuring of capitalism on the international scale. As for the "Italian miracle", or the French miracle, we'd better forget about it. I am of a generation which really experienced a deadlocked society. Stalinism then was an institution, a wall blocking the horizon to infinity. I now sense an extraordinary acceleration in the decomposition of all coordinates. It's a treat just the same. All this has to crumble down, but obviously it won't come from any revolutionary organization. Otherwise you on the most mechanistic utopias of the revolution, the Marxist simplifications: at the end of the road lies victory... It's not the black hole of the 19th century, lots of things have happened since, like the barbarians at the gates. Political superstructures and systems of representation will collapse or crumble down in ridicule and inanity, but there are already an enormous number of things which function, and function remarkably well, whether at the level of science, esthetics, or in the inventiveness of daily life. There is an extraordinary vitality in the machinic processes. The Italians of Radio Alice have a beautiful saying: when they are asked what has to be built, they answer that the forces capable of destroying this society surely are capable of building something else, yet that will happen on the way. I have no idea what the future model of society or of relationships will be. I think it's a false problem, the kind of false problem that Marx and Engels tried to avoid. We can only do one thing, and that's to acknowledge the end of a society. The revolutionary process won't stem from a rational, Hegelian, or dialectical framework. Instead it will be a generalized revolution, a conjunction of sexual, relational, esthetic, and scientific revolutions, all making cross-overs, markings, and currents of deterritorialization. On the molecular level, things function otherwise. Looking through the glasses of traditional politics, there is nothing left, for example, of the American radical movement. If one changes glasses, if one peers through the microscope, there is another picture altogether. There is a new sensibility, a new way of relating, a new sort of kindness, all very difficult to define. Historians have a hard time dealing with these objects - history of tenderness! In all sorts of complex ways, through the history of the feminist movement and the history of homosexuality, through relationships in general, this new type of sensibility is also the revolution. If revolutionary glasses don't allow us to see that, then there is no more revolution, it's all finished. There will be no more October revolutions. Translated by John Johnston