Balancing Stones

Balanced Stones Yucca Valley, California & Savary Island, British Columbia

My Favourite Boulder

This beautiful boulder, the residue of glacial movements during the last ice age, sits in front of our house on Savary Island. The light changes from a deep red to orange to light and dark blues...my favourite time is the time of dark blues when the sea, sky and stones all blend into one.

Italy-Germany 2-0

A long game. Much longer than what time tells. Hard fought on both sides, but also a careful and organized game. Italy much more together in first half and it seemed that if they did not score then it might be cause for worry as the tired. Both teams played the second half about the same as the first half with Germany putting a bit more effort into the game with some scoring opportunities. Extra time proved to be the time for Italy...a post, a crossbar..and then, right toward the end Grosso's goal with a quick follow-up by Del Piero...and game's done...Italy in finals vs. either Portugal or France...
see you then!

Italy-Ukraine 3-0 GAZZETTA DELLO SPORT

3-0 all'Ucraina
Germania ci siamo
Gli azzurri ad Amburgo schiacciano l'Ucraina: gol di Zambrotta e doppietta di Toni, poi dedicano la vittoria a Pessotto. Il 4 luglio a Dortmund la sfida più attesa con i padroni di casa

Cannavaro mostra il suo omaggio a Pessotto. Afp
AMBURGO (Germania), 30 giugno 2006 - Damen und herren, signore e signori, Italia-Germania è servita! L'avevano desiderata e l'hanno ottenuta. E anche Shevchenko diventa piccolo piccolo davanti alla Nazionale, perché un 3-0 non ammette repliche; anche se l'incredibile Buffon non regala la gioia di un gol all'Ucraina. Marcello Lippi rivede la luce persa, ritrova un bel pezzo di Totti e soprattutto Toni che polverizza i suoi tormenti con una doppietta d'autore. Tipica del suo repertorio.
Il c.t. schiera il 4-4-1-1, rinunciando a un attaccante per inserire un centrocampista in più, Camoranesi, rinforzando cosi le fasce. Alla sua destra Pirlo e poi Gattuso e Perrotta. In difesa Barzagli dal primo minuto con Zambrotta a destra, Cannavaro e Grosso a sinistra. Oleg Blochin rinuncia all'idea Rebrov e alla chioccia Sheva affianca Milevskiy, quello del cucchiaio: i due punti di riferimento. Strana la disposizione dei gialli dell'Est che marcano a uomo e propongono un gioco piuttosto prevedibile che i gli azzurri assimilano subito; soprattutto l'evidente inferiorità numerica davanti all'area di rigore.
Camoranesi intuisce per primo e scalda le polveri con un azione centrale e un tiro dal limite che esce di poco. Quasi una prova generale del gol di Zambrotta dopo sei minuti: stessa falcata che taglia in due l'Ucraina e bolide che Shovkovskyi devia appena in rete. Ecco l'Italia che piace a Lippi, veloce sulla fasce, aggressiva a centrocampo, dove Gattuso conquista palle e si immola per la causa. Che ritrova Pirlo e alcune intuizioni di Totti, anche se al romanista manca ancora il passo in più che fa la differenza.
Blochin davanti allo strapotere degli azzurri corregge in corsa con la soluzione migliore: un attaccante, Vorobey, per un difensore, Sviderskyi che va a comporre con Sheva e Milevskiy un tridente davanti a Buffon. Ma non c'è storia davanti alla difesa azzurra e l'immensità di Cannavaro. Che si concede solo al 41' con il primo vero tiro degli ucraini, non a caso di Shevchenko, che Buffon lascia sfilare sul fondo. L'Ucraina perde Rusol per in infortunio al piede destro; al suo posto entra Vashchuk; due terzini di ruolo. Alla fine del primo tempo all'Ucraina resta solo il 58 per cento di possesso palla: macchinoso e micragnoso.
Secondo tempo e Toni scarica sul fondo. Ci prova il viola, ci mette il cuore. Appesantito incalza, lotta. Fa quasi rumore. Un gol gli cambierebbe la vita. Monta però la banda di Sheva; non ha nulla da perdere. Si mantiene alta e pressa. Il gol lo sfiora, ma dalla mischia spunta Buffon che devia in angolo, con un gesto innaturale, il colpo di testa ravvicinato di Kalinichenko. Prepariamoci a soffrire. Santo Buffon si ripete al 13'; respinge non si sa come su Gusev, la palla finisce a Kalinichenko che va sbattere su Zambrotta, il terzo palo.
Ma poiché Dortmund non è più un opinione, l'Italia si scuote a torna a battere sul chiodo. Grosso ci riprova e dalla bandierina allarga per Totti che cambia la vita a Toni: il suo solito colpito di testa, rapinoso, per questo bello. La fortuna ci assiste: la traversa dice no a Gusin. La Nazionale è stanca, corre. Camoranesi merita il rigore. Lippi decide: fuori Pirlo e Camoranesi per Barone e Oddo: la benzina per arrivare alla meta. Ma l'ottano in più ce l'ha Zambrotta: sontuosa penetrazione in area dalla sinistra e tocco per Toni che fa il tap in. E chi lo ferma più? Chi ci ferma più? Perdonaci Sheva, ma la standing ovation è per il tuo amico Gattuso che lascia a Zaccardo. Damen und herren stiamo arrivando.
dal nostro inviatoGaetano De Stefano

Italy-Australia 1-0

A hard-fought game for both sides that ended with a controversial penalty kick...was it or wasn't it?
Whatever one might think...that Italians are "fakers" as an eloquent columnist for the San Diego Union Tribune put it in his column...or that they are cheaters...it was the ref who made the call. Are the Italians the only ones who fall in an attempt to get a penalty? Are they the only one who fall and writhe around after a foul? No, of course not! The penalty shot France got to beat Portugal and go into the finals vs. Italy came after a nice dive as well...watch the replay and see if the dive doesn't seem like an afterthought...but it doesn't really matter...the ref made the call...Zidaine took the shot...and France is in and Portugal is out. Should football use replays to review decisions? Maybe, maybe not...football is exciting and unpredictable because it is what it is...slow it down, replay it, review it, put two or three refs in to cover the whole field and you change the game...it's all like opera and drama and melodrama and acting and rhetoric and faking and crying and laughing and everyone gets the short end of the stick some time or other...don't forget the ref in the Italy Korea game a few years back...there are toilets named after him in Italy, and justly so! Anyway...the game goes on!

SIENA SOCCER SHIRTS AND RASTA

JUNE 17TH WC 2006 ITALY-USA 1-1

Well, it didn't go down as hoped...Italy came out and played the USA game for the whole first half. Going as far as scoring a goal for them. The Italian goal was a beautifully executed play...then the chaos and bad timing showed through with the autogoal resuting from a badly timed kick to clear the ball by Zaccardo only 5 minutes after the go-ahead goal by Gilardino. But...autogoals count just as much as any other and so the game went that way. The second half was a bit better for Italy when it came out as its own team but it still could not cash in on the opportunities...so now while still in first place the whole group is in a tight holding pattern until next thursday until Italy meets the Czecs and USA vs. Ghana. If Ghana plays like they have been doing they will be the group leaders...and then either Italy or Czec Republic...so, either Ghana or Italy vs. Brazil?

WORLD CUP 2006 ITALIA-GHANA 2-0

One supports the other

LEFT CURVE

American Jack, Pasquale napoletano

Read at City Lights with Jack Hirschman and others in occasion of the lauching of LEFT CURVE No. 30, which includes a special dossier on Pasolini. Had not seen Jack in years...also met molto simpatica Agneta Falk. Wonderful reader. He is putting together a Pasolini anthology with Lawrence Ferlinghetti for City Lights...Lawrence was at the reading on Thursday night. The editor of Left Curve, Csaba Polony, was a great host and made the stay very comfortable and a pleasure.

Horizontal Languages and Insurgent Cultural Alignments

Horizontal Languages and Insurgent Cultural Alignments:
National Popular Culture and Nationalism



Pasquale Verdicchio


“Unification is falsification/Sicily abandoned by the government
of the nation/Falsification of unification/and the government of the nation
has abandoned my region.” The refrain of “Unification=Falsification”, by
the Sicilian Rap group I Nuovi Briganti (The New Brigands), speaks directly
to the issue of Italian nationhood and the relationship of the North and South
within that country. The group’s questioning of history on their CD Fottuto
terrone (Fucked Southerner) goes to the heart of the matter with clear and
unambiguous accusations of falsification of history, neglect and colonization
of the South at the hands of the North.

Three kilometers of sea separate us from Italy
but the distance is even greater for our history
1861 is the year of unification
and I ask: is it reality or fiction?
Garibaldi slave of power
first incites and the massacres
great masses of rebelling Sicilians.
Victor Emanuel has condemned them.
Out with the Bourbons new landlords
new taxes and everything’s the same.
Not enough water, the earth is hard
little to eat and worse than in the war.
Illiteracy in the crowd
all against all, if you give up you’re lost
meanwhile we work up North
roads, railroads, and industrialization


Ref: Unification is falsification
Sicily abandoned by the government of the nation

Falsification of unification
and the government of the nation has abandoned my
region.


Italian unification (1861/71) has been propagated as an instance
of decolonization by which the Kingdom of Sardinia (actually an area under
the rule of Piedmont which included the island of Sardegna), having rid
itself of its Austrian governors, supposedly set out to liberate the South
of its Bourbon rulers. The contradictory history of this period, known as
the Risorgimento,is well documented in the works of writers and intellectuals preceding and following unification, among them the Marxist intellectual and
founder of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) Antonio Gramsci. In fact this liberation,
as demonstrated by the long and hard fought battles of resistance by what the
new state defined as “brigands,” turned out to be nothing more than an
instance of re-colonization of Southern regions by a newly autonomous and
expanding Piedmontese state eager to take its place among the European
nations.

Born in Sardegna, a region that had known only foreign domination
for over 1000 years before its absorption into the nascent Italian nation
in 1861, Antonio Gramsci is representative of innumerable others for whom
birth outside of “official” regions meant education into Italianness. This
background provided Gramsci with the lens through which to analyze the
construction of the Italian nation and its various of components. In his
essay “The Southern Question” (1925), Gramsci considers this North/South
rapport under the urgency of Fascism’s rise, which represents another instance
of nationalist discourse attempting to overwhelm and erase the complexity of
the national complex it supposedly represent. Stressing the inadequacy of
the Italian state regarding the representation of the majority of its
population, in general Southerners and the inhabitants of the Islands of Sicily
and Sardegna, and more specifically of the workers and peasants both Northern
and Southern, Gramsci delineates the role of culture as a major factor in
structuring the Italian socio-political reality. His discussion of the
“Southern Question” includes analyses of the development, role and function
of intellectuals, the place and province of culture for particular classes,
and the possibility of providing a corrective to the social and economic
unbalances that had arisen as a result of cultural constructs proposed an
anthropologically divergent description for part of the peninsula’s
population.

No doubt, Antonio Gramsci’s observation that “the South is a great
social disintegration” (Gramsci, 22) is no longer applicable in the same
terms today as it was in 1925. With the Italian nation’s progress toward
its place among the world’s leading industrial nations, the conditions in
Southern Italy changed somewhat. The disintegration that continues to
characterize the South is identifiable today in the poverty or lack of
public services, in the degradation of the educational system, in the
continued crises of employment and housing, in the lack of a political
infrastructure able to guarantee proper representation at all levels of
government and, last but not least, the overwhelmingly oppressive presence
of what has come to be known generically as the “Mafia.”

The 1994 national elections, in which a Rightist alliance came to
government, somewhat reemphasized a North/South division. The newly
formed party Forza Italia, representative of Northern industrialism, the
neo-fascist MSI, reborn as Alleanza Nazionale, and the Lega Lombarda (Lombard
League, a federalist party with a strongly racist platform based in the
Northern regions) defeated a Left that actually gained in the Southern regions,
but as a fragmented series of parties with very localized agendas. These
developments are indicative of a trend that has plagued Italy since 1861, and
that take the country toward a centralized “European” vision and culture.

The Lega Lombarda, in its meteoric rise as the dominant party in
the North, has not been reluctant to adopt 19th century positivist attitudes
to explain the straggling of the South as a symptom of the ethnic/racial
inferiority of the region’s inhabitants. Views of the South characterizing
it as a weight impeding the progress of the North, hand in hand with an
historical revisionism that has cast the North as a region colonized by less civilized hoards, are well expressed in the public statements made by Umberto
Bossi, leader of the Lega Lombarda:

In these little less than disastrous conditions, we witness day after day the
imbalanced conflict between an Italy that aspires to become European with its
head held high, creating a modern nation, democratic and civil, and the
forces that orbit around the public machinery and are fed by it, the forces
whose objectives are to become part of the African peninsula. (Bossi, 53)


The Italian state, tending toward the establishment of a European
entity, has once again instrumentalized negative representations of the South
to emphasize its difference from it and its affinity to other Northern
European nations. The conditioning of thought regarding the South has been
so powerful that, in a recent book on the nature of the Italian nation, Se
cessiamo di essere una nazione (If We Cease to be a Nation) (Il Mulino, 1993),
Gian Enrico Rusconi identifies the Lega Lombarda’s attitudes toward the
South as stemming from “the intentions of Leaguists who want to punish a
southernist politics conducted up till now by the state as well as the Mafia
stigma that in their eyes marks the South as such”. (29) These views, which
Bossi obviously manipulates to the benefit of his political agenda, propagate
the myth of a state government has long been representative of, and
favorable toward, the South to the detriment of the North. Supposedly, the
national government drained national coffers for the sole benefit of the
South since the creation of a “Fund for the South” in 1950.

Meant as an attempt to balance investment and development in all
regions, the “Fund” became instead a scheme by which many of the resources
earmarked for the South were deviated via contractual agreements to
Northern companies engaged to provide services and fund projects in the
South, many of which never actually saw the light. And, in fact, the “ball
and chain” South that threatens to drag Italy into the Third World was the
most important source of labor for the development and success of Northern
industries. During a period in which Northern and Central Italy were
undergoing tremendous structural changes, the Southern situation was to a
certain extent alleviated with the new availability of jobs in the North.
Emigration became part of the solution, while also contributing to the
undoing of much of the social fiber of Southern towns and cities. The
horrendous amount of emigration from South to North that took place from
the 1950s to the 1970s, no less than 10 million, and its apparent resolution
of the “southern question,” legitimized the state’s inattention toward
the South.

Adding to the numbers of internal emigration the millions of
emigrants that left Italy altogether in the period spanning 1876 to 1976,
one can begin to argue that for the South emigration resulted in a depletion
of social, cultural, and economic alternatives. The Post-unification
installment of a “national cultural tradition” through the establishment
of a national educational system and a standardized language, further
aggravated the conditions by which regional and localized cultures might
negotiate their future. Unemployment, the absence of a coherent civil
structure, and the fraying of the social and cultural fabric through
emigration are among the problems that the institution that is the Mafia
was fully capable of manipulating to its advantage. The corrupted flow
of developmental funds to the South met with full Mafia support and
participation. Historically, the presence of the Mafia (Sicily),
Camorra (Campania), and ‘ndrangheta (Calabria) is tied up in complex
systems of governance in which these organizations functioned as
negotiators between foreign dominators and indigenous peoples, between
the aristocracy and the masses. Today, these organizations, in as much
as they profit from state mismanagement and neglect, and are in some areas
the only guarantors of employment, can be said to collaborate with the State
in the business of exploitation.
The re-effectuation of a Southern cultural voice, plural yet cohesive,
hindered by an antagonistic and reactive relationship with the Italian nation-
state, must take place away from the fiction of “Italian culture” through the
elaboration of intellectuals deeply committed to a sphere of discourse that
values the local alongside the global. Aspects of this expression that are
of utmost importance, and which inform the following series of considerations,
are the re-establishment of local languages (officially demoted to dialects)
as viable primary forms of communication, and the explicit and direct
affirmation of the South’s colonized condition. It is only through the
presentation of an alternative history that the possibility to establish the
Italian South within a post-colonial frame of reference by which an analysis
akin to Nuovi Briganti’s assessment can take place. These demands have
resulted in the exploration of oppositional alternatives to nationalism and
the reassertion of subaltern cultures in dialogue with other peripheral
cultures outside of their own immediate sphere of contact. Hip Hop’s
accessibility and ability to communicate across cultural and national
boundaries facilitates its adoption as an instrument to aid emerging or re-
emerging cultural discourses.

The application of the terms of postcolonialism to the Italian
situation requires that this fairly new field of inquiry expand its sense
of a fixed adversarial relationships that overlook the inherent complexity
of nations such as Italy. While I don’t intend to challenge postcolonialism
per se, I imagine it as a concept that can be expanded to include variations
on the colonial/postcolonial dichotomy such as e/im-migration and colonial
conditions within apparently uncomplicated national situations. I would
therefore propose the reformulation of postcolonialism as a category engaging
the concepts of hegemony and historical bloc, where all come to be
interdependent aspects of similarly drawn cultural tendencies.

In addressing the Italian situation in terms of North/South it becomes
important, therefore, that the above named terms be seen in function of a
shifting yet continuous paradigm of interferences. Through the
problemitization of terms and categories it is possible to arrive at a
descriptive set of parameters by which hegemony and colonialism, and historic
bloc and postcolonialism become articulated pairs of an expansive deconstructive
methodology vis-a-vis nationalism and its symptoms, rather than fixed
points of reference for describing diachronic and synchronic relationships.
If hegemony is taken to be the crossover function of thought and action, then
the formation of an active historical bloc is participant in the process of
hegemony that goes to define post-colonialism as the acquisition of a
conscience of disruption.

In “The Southern Question,” the formation of an historical bloc is
proposed by Gramsci in the form of an alliance between Northern workers
and Southern peasants. Had this taken place, aside from creating a bloc to
give representative voice to a large excluded portion of the population, it
might also have effectively deflated Fascism’s rise in the late teens of this
century. Today, to bring up the topic of a cultural identity that is
constituted through alliances and coalitions between groups that share similar
yet not identical concerns, but which are mutually supportive and beneficial,
is to emphasize that no alliance was constituted in Italy. The effect of this
should be to revive a dialogue on the concept of “national popular culture.”
In fact, North/South divisions, within the trajectory of a nationalist program,
though not those of seventy years ago, persist. The elaboration of a functional
“national” political program involves an analysis of what constitutes
“national culture,” a culture that in order to be effectively democratic must
be reflective of localized concerns and preoccupations.

The mechanisms by which the Southern Italian condition, deprived of
the terms of postcoloniality by the presumptions of nationalism, has today
found in “Occupied Autonomous Social Centers” a new venue by which to
negotiate this deferred sense of expansive hegemony are deeply situated in
the activity that defines its information of historical blocs. These Centers
(from now on CSOA), established without the sanction of any of the
traditional social or political institutions such as the state, party politics,
and the Mafia, provide support in areas where these beauracracies have either
failed or have attempted to stifle organization. Given the history of Italian
nationhood, the CSOAs, though present throughout the country, are of
particular importance in the South. The emergence of horizontal notions of
cultural communication that the CSOAs represent undermine traditional
expectations of isolationism and provide an expansion in the network of
resistance cultures that goes beyond the separationist/nationalist paradigms.

The terms established by the contemporary phenomenon by which
Southern Italian culture has, at least in part, come to be identified with Hip
Hop, and of which the Nuovi Briganti are but one example, are to be carefully
considered and assessed. New cultural products, such as what the
hybridization of Hip Hop and local cultures engender, are important because
they define points of reference external to their own immediate experience.
As such, they become indicative of the failure of separationist projects or,
better, the failure of anti-nationalist movements that are nationalist in their
own aspirations. What emerges is a notion of resistance culture that aligns
itself horizontally with groups or cultures reflective of similar positions,
rather than vertically to define themselves in relation to the restrictive camp
that is “nationalism.”

CSOA: Decentering Culture Toward the Centers

The struggle toward the decentralization of cultural norms in Italy
has a long history which unfortunately remains mostly untold. Much of this
history suffers from a characterization that has served to strengthen ideals
of national culture that regards cultures that serve themselves of the languages
designated as dialects, or that have emerged from particular areas, as lesser
derivants or folkloric manifestations of an officially sanctioned culture.
Today, some of the most effective agents of decentralization have become the
CSOA.

The negotiative position of CSOAs in a post-industrial environment,
and the strategy that they employ in creating a distance between themselves
and any traditionally active political party or ideology, is reminiscent of the
earlier Italian Autonomia movement and its extensive network of
autonomist labour groups. Given Italy’s young status as a nation, this sort of
political strategy makes perfect sense. The social, linguistic, political and
economic specificity of each region, though greatly altered since the end of the
Second World War, is still varied enough that an institutionally based
classification of Italian polities is intrinsically absurd. This condition,
almost unknown in most other post-industrial nations, is one of the factors that
facilitated the rise of the “autonomist movement” as a strategy for activism.

The PCI (Italian Communist Party), which sanctioned the view of
workerist intellectuals, for whom society was made-up of workers and
“unproductive workers” (women, the unemployed, students, etc.), failed to
properly articulate the distance between the two poles in the dichotomy.
Even Autonomia, born in Northern factories in the 1950s, as a movement
devised mainly by Southern emigrant workers in defiance of their non-
representation by union bosses, did not develop as an alliance of the sort
Gramsci had envisioned. A cultural gulf subsisted between Northern and
Southern workers which prevented their full collaboration; in addition to
which, the interests of immigrant workers also became somewhat divorced
from the interests of Southerners who remained home. The lesson of
Autonomia, however, was that it proposed a way for collective action, a
lesson which is being extended today by the CSOAs.

In fact, both the rise of the “autonomist movement” and the
emergence of CSOAs can be interpreted as critiques of the PCI’s blind
valorization of the workerist model along with compromises taken toward
participation in the parliamentary system. The establishment and existence
of the centers proposes the need to review certain Gramscian concepts such as
“national popular” and “educative alliances,” which, through the PCI’s
modified ideology, came to represent little more than compromise.
Autonomia and the CSOAs, apparently twenty or so years distant from each
other, but in reality forming almost a continuum from the early 70s to today,
take the above named Gramscian propositions to their most fully realized
level by refusing to “separate economics from politics, and politics from
existence [and culture].” (Branzaglia, 9) The stated inter-relationships must
be given weight to rescue the notion of “national popular” from divisive
interpretations that would represent it simply as either a cultural or a
political concept.

The history of the most famous of all social centers, the Leoncavallo
in Milano, subjected to continued scrutiny and threats of expulsion by the forces
of public order, illustrates quite well the struggle for survival of un-official
activity. The Southern CSOAs range from the Fata Morgana of Messina,
Sicily, to Contro l’emarginazione of Brindisi, Puglia, to Officina 99 in Naples,
Asilio Politico in Salerno, and Lavori in Corso in Acerra. In the South, due to
the lagging economic situation, the high rate of unemployment, and the
opposition of organized crime to any activity that works to empower the
citizenry, the difficulties for CSOAs are multiplied.

The CSOAs social activism brings them into direct confrontation with
local criminality. The Esperia Center, of Catania, for one, became victim of
this conflict when it was firebombed four times and forced to relocate.
(Branzaglia, 47) Well aware of the criminal mechanisms at work in the
locations where they function, the activists involved with Guernica (which
replaced the Esperia) testify that:

the reproduction and valuation of bourgeois systems is emphasized by the
restructuration tendencies at work within the historic center of the city.
The Mafia activates their system of control over the proletarian masses on
behalf of the bourgeoisie. As such, their illegal activities assume the role
of controlling and organizing the population. This in particular differentiates
Southern urban renewal from the North. (49)

Nevertheless, the CSOAs survive and thrive, they relocate and re-emerge,
they organize and overcome. Their coerced urban nomadism provides
alternative spaces where to “live negated things” (Branzaglia, 11). As
alternatives to traditional institutionalized and apparently stable versions of
opposition (voting, political representation, boycotts, etc.) the CSOAs become
autonomous social and political spaces and sites of resistance.

The philosophy of the CSOAs falls somewhat within a Gramscian optic
in that they represent an eventful manifestation of collaborative agency for
disenfranchised groups and individuals. This in a society that, while taking
less and less interest in their plight, more often than not poses them as the
cause of societal ills and decay. The population of the CSOAs is made up
mostly of “youth involved in the underground economy or black markets,
the unemployed, ex-addicts, students awaiting an opportunity to enter the
labor market, extra-communitarians, rural youths in search of places where to
spend their empty evenings.” (12/13)

The CSOAs primary program is the occupation of unused or
condemned schools, apartment buildings, government buildings, university
cafeterias, factories, industrial plants. They all become the target of CSOA
activists who seek to improve the conditions caused by lack of housing and
services through the unauthorized take-over of unused or abandoned
facilities. Such activity, by establishing a fracture with institutions, comes
in fact to represent the precarious existence that many of the participant
members of CSOAs live day to day and offers the possibility of regaining a
certain amount of control over one’s own existence (19). The internal
activities that define the CSOAs’ existence include informational services, the
struggle against heroin (drug abuse), political antagonism, and self-
administration of housing, daycare, language classes for immigrants, etc. Self-
administration assumes an ideological tone that qualifies the total experience
of CSOAs, as based on the value of the “horizontality of decision making”
(27), and emphasizes their distance from the influences of organizational and
party hierarchy. The concept of allowing differences “to deepen at the base
without trying to synthesize them from above, to stress the collaborative
power of similar positions without imposing a ‘general line,’ to allow parts
to co-exist side by side, in their singularity” (8) is part and parcel of the
CSOAs philosophy and history.

While these Centers have established a national, as well as an
international network, their activity fulfills its role at a local level.
Functioning as gathering places, as spaces of autonomous cultural and
political strategy, these islands within the urban scape also have a
transformative effect on the spaces that surround them. As is made clear by
both a member of Officina 99 and a resident in the area of the Center, the
choice of neighborhood is not haphazard:

This is a neighborhood that lacks everything, the State is truly absent,
and the only forms of escape are the artificial paradises of heroin. (Branzaglia,
57)

and

I believe that the occupation has been a positive thing, because Gianturco
lacks everything and they have organized celebrations, concerts and other
initiatives. (57)


True to the dictum “act locally, think globally,” the CSOAs communicative
spaces expand beyond the neighborhood to an international arena in which
the particularity of each element is presented and upheld as an important
node within a more expansive network. ZEROnetwork, a communication
network associated with CSOAs, represents one aspect of this globality
through which information, strategy and news are exchanged:


We are attempting to connect, as a Neapolitan reality, with the European
network of communications of the Social Centers [...] it is above-all a way in
which to interact with the reality of the neighborhood in which [the Center] is
occupied. (56)


Part and parcel of the activity of the CSOAs is the emergence from within
their walls of cultural expressions that define the local struggle and identify
it globally with similar manifestations.

One of the most visible (audible) modes of opposition to emerge from
the CSOAs, one which continues to define the terms by which to
communicate its location and situation, is music. Associated to musical
expression, and an aspect of utmost importance, is the fact that the notion of
autonomy extends into the parameters of cultural self-production, in which
the Centers function as alternatives to large publishers, recording studios,
promoters, and the like.

Southern Hip Hop and “National Popular” Culture

The influence of Hip Hop culture is readily discernible in the music
and art emerging from within the CSOAs. Graffiti and Rap are an integral
part of the Centers’ identity. While graffiti is by no means a new presence in
the Italian urban environment (political and sports graffiti have a long
tradition) the influence of U.S. (New York) graphic elements is undeniable.
The urban landscape is defined by graffiti and logos, and the CSOAs
themselves are decorated, inside and out, with the work of local artists.
Two aspects of graffiti appear to be markedly different in their
application and function in the U.S. First of all, while in recent years
individual tagging and personalized graffiti have become more common, in
general the Italian city is divided in zones and tagged according to political
and ideological identification, and not necessarily neighborhood gang
affiliation. For example, the move from a Leftist neighborhood to a Rightist
neighborhood is marked with the colors, symbols and slogans associated with
such ideologies (the hammer and sickle, or the swastika, or countless
variations). Secondly, rather than decorating/tagging train-cars and other
public transport vehicles, as was/is the custom in North American cities, the
walls along the transit route are marked so as to offer all passengers film-like
social and political commentary (the access route to the Bologna station is
particularly interesting).

Musically, there are groups associated with various Centers: Officina99
gave rise to 99 Posse (Alma Megretta is also associated with this center); in
Messina, Sicily, even though no center existed at the outset, I Nuovi Briganti
eventually came to be associated with the Fata Morgana; on the east side of
the peninsula, in the rural Salento area where no Center exists, Sud Sound
System formed and, true to their name, represent a roving band of musicians
who hold their communal concerts in town squares or out in the fields of the
region.

Undoubtedly, Rap has become a universally imitated phenomenon
that often has nothing to do with the social and political aspects that it
represents for a portion of the African American population. Little more
than a novelty, Rap invaded Italy in the late 80s through the figure of
Jovannotti, and soon many more imitators followed this successful
introduction, picked up by commercial recording studios and packaged for
general consumption. While the compositions did touch on social issues
now and then, the pieces limited themselves mostly to clever phrasing and
word play to offer up the same sort of subject matter that informs most other
pop music. Much of the rap in this early period was done either in English or
Italian.

Just as the identity and activity of the CSOAs is rooted in the
specificity of local experience, the cultural expression that emerges from
these social organizations is also rooted in local experience. With this premise, the association of Rap groups with CSOAs becomes an important cultural
development because these bands, reflecting the regional specificity of the
Centers, have replaced English and Italian with the particular languages of
their regions in most if not all of their lyrics. Neapolitan, Sicilian, Pugliese,
etc. are therefore not only the languages of the audience but also of the
cultural product they receive. Most importantly, the subject matter of the
compositions concerns social and cultural dilemmas directly connected to the
experiences of the audience.

Rap music in Southern Italy works much in the same manner as it
does for Black youth in the U.S., it “expresses the desire of young [...] people
to reclaim their history [...] and contest the powers of despair and economic
depression [...]” (Dyson, 15). Therefore, the use of Rap by Southern Italians is
not merely a straight across use of the form, and upon hearing the
compositions one is struck by the infusion of Southern rhythms within the
Rap shell. The rhythms of tarantella and other folk musics are easily
distinguished in many works. Not only have folkloric sounds been sampled
into the expressive field but old popular tunes have been readapted to reflect
their continued importance for today’s young Southerners. The famous “O
sole mio” has been redone as “Lu sole mio” by Papa Ricky, from the Salento
region, who has cast it as a universal chant to the sun. “O sole mio is not
really a song / only for Southerners ... / the sun heats the earth and therefore
... / Let’s all use it together, this heat!” Sud Sound System, also from the
Salento, has adapted a traditional piece about emigration (“The Trains of
Lecce”) and recast it in Rap style as a commentary against the conditions that
impose emigration.

Raggamuffin and rappamuffin have engendered tarantamuffin; to rap
has become “rappare” in Italian; sound systems, related to those of Jamaican
djs, take music and pleasure out to rural working areas. And all, all are
expounding a music of autonomy and liberation. Sa Razza, a Sardinian
group, reflects that island’s plight for autonomy, as I Nuovi Briganti do for
Sicily. Sud Sound System and Alma Megretta emphasize Southern otherness
and alliances with Northern African and Mediterranean cultures. The liner
notes to Alma Megretta’s first cd release, Hannibal’s Children, read as follows:

guidance and inspiration: brother malcom x, on-u sound system, benjamin
zephaniah, lkj, sly & robbie, material, sly & the family stone, massive attack,
rebel mc and all the funky dreds, lee’s scratch perry, ras robert nesta marley
and all the un-recognized popular artists of the mediterranean, north, south,
east, and west. (jacket)

As the title of the cd suggests, Alma Megretta’s view of Southern
history offers an alternative to official history by favouring African influences
to emphasize differences between North and South. Hannibal’s army comes
to represent the genetic pool for Southerners and a matter of prideful boasting
in answer to Umberto Bossi’s view that there is an “other” Italy, not
interested in joining Europe but more apt to “join Africa” (Bossi, 53).
Unquestionably, Bossi’s reasons for joining Europe are different form what
they might be for many Southerners, for whom Europe might represent the
only opportunity that will keep the South from further Northern
exploitation. It is this sense of alternative fate and history that is reflected
in the work of Southern Italian Hip Hop groups, the likes of Alma Megretta and
Nuovi Briganti. They, along with Possessione, 99 Posse, Sud Sound System,
and others carry out a declaration of place that emphasizes, as one of
Possessione’s most popular tunes says, “il posto dove vivo[no]” (“they place
in which we live”).

The place where I live is like a big sewer / Nothing is recycled but it’s absorbed
like a sponge [...] / The place where I live is a jungle / where people kill each
other and no-one gets involved [...] / The place where I live is ripe with
corruption / connections between the Mafia and the Justice system [...] / The
place where I live is a land of sadness / the more you look around the more
bitter you become [...]

These are the places that, despite their decadence, will only improve with the
effort of those who live there. Always neglected, the only hope for an
improved life has been emigration. Today that option is dismissed by the
generation that forms the nuclei of the CSOAs.

As hinted above, the adoption of Hip Hop to Southern Italian
situations, the conscious connection made to parallel situations around the
globe, the establishment of a horizontality of resistance, is akin to the
workings of the Gramscian concept of “national popular.” While this
terminology is useful only when referring to a situation within the
boundaries of one specific nation, in Italy and elsewhere the “national
popular” is being represented by the coalition building between disparate
groups with parallel interests, the adoption of Hip Hop and Rap represents
cross-national interests. If, for example, we take the work of I Nuovi Briganti,
from Sicily, 99 Posse, from Naples, Marxman from Ireland, Apache Indian, a
British Indian, and The Boyz from the Rez, Native Americans, the sense of
overlap and influence that Hip Hop culture acquires stands as a powerful
indicator. These groups’ horizontal connection to each other via a product of
African American culture, and their expression of similar, though
particularly situated conditions, necessarily cause the sense of “national
popular” to shift and expand.

In closing, I would propose that Gramsci’s “national popular” might be
extended to inter/national-popular in order to reflect the horizontal
identification and communication that the language of Hip Hop provides.
The revitalization of this terminology most properly represents the terms of
the struggle of horizontality in today’s environment of cultural
neutralization. Telematic networks and self-produced and distributed
cultural products, while apparently participating in the production and
consumption of culture, extend the possibilities of communication between
previously distant communities by their position within an alternative mode
of production. As such, the trend toward an inter/national-popular sense of
culture does not aim to unite all subaltern or non-dominant cultures as one
but rather, it proposes to represent what is a local minority as a global
majority and thereby offer a wider ranging resistance to notions of culture
that fall under the purview of nationalism.




Bibliography
99 Posse. Curre curre guaglió. Napoli: Esodo Autoproduzioni, 1994.

Alma Megretta. Figli di Annibale. Roma: Anagrumba Records, 1993.

__________. Anima migrante. Roma: Anagrumba Records, 1993.

Bocca, Giorgio. La disUnità d’Italia: Per venti milioni di italiani la
democrazia è in coma e l’Europa si allontana. Milano: Garzanti, 1990.
Bossi, Umberto. Il Bossi Pensiero. Introduzione di Enzo Biagi. Milano:
Panorama Documenti, 1993.

Branzaglia, Carlo, Pierfrancesco Pacoda and Alba Solaro. Posse italiane: Centri
sociali, underground musicale e cultura giovanile degli anni ‘90 in
Italia. I marzzziani. Firenze: Tosca, 1992.

Dyson, Michael Eric. Reflecting Black: African American Cultural Criticism.
Minneapolis: University of Minnessota Press, 1993.

Gramsci, Antonio. The Southern Question. Translated, annotated and
introduced by Pasquale Verdicchio. Lafayette: Bordighera, 1995.

Nuovi Briganti. Fottuto terrone. Cyclope Records, 1994.
Papa Ricky. Lu sole mio. EP. Bologna: Century Vox Records, 1992.

Possessione. Il posto dove vivo. EP. Napoli: San Isidro Records, 1993.

Rusconi, Gian Enrico. Se cessiamo di essere una nazione. Contemporanea
60. Bologna: Il Mulino, 1993.

Teti, Vito. La razza maledetta: origini del pregiudizio antimeridionale.
Roma: manifestolibri, 1993.

Verdicchio, Pasquale. “Bound by Distance: Italian Canadian Writing as De-
contextualized Subaltern” in Voices in Italian Americana, vol. 3, no. 2,
(1992).

A boat, a cup, a hand

A window faces east
A balcony north
Cardinal points remain.



Days and nights of early winter
Back pain and insomnia
A gecko between the shutters.



Blue screen and loose
Connection across continents
Difficult homework.

Pasolini: Censoring the Body of Ideology

Pier Paolo Pasolini, writer, film-maker, and essayist, is possibly the most controversial figure in modern Italian culture. His debut in writing consisted of a slim volume of verses written in his mother's dialect of the Friuli (an economically depressed region of Northeastern Italy), previewing the author's subsequent interest in subaltern cultures. In the late ‘40s, as a teacher and active member of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) in the Friuli, he began to suffer the animosity of conformist forces of the time. Pressed by a local priest to resign from the PCI or else, he refused. As a result of this he was denounced for making advances on his young male pupils. The ensuing scandal caused him to be relieved of his teaching position and to be expelled from the PCI in 1949. That incident brought into even greater conflict the already seemingly contradictory dimensions of Pasolini's life: homosexuality, Marxism, and Catholicism. This would colour Pasolini's artistic expression and his rapport with Italian society until his controversial death in 1975.
From 1949 to 1977, two years after his murder, Pier Paolo Pasolini was the subject of approximately 33 trials on various charges brought against him, his writings and films. These include: "offensiveness toward good customs and to the common sense of morality and decency" (for Mamma Roma, 1962); "contempt toward the state religion, under the pretext of cinematographic description, by mocking the figure and value of Christ through musical commentary, mimicry, dialogue etc." (for La Ricotta, 1963); "scenes offensive to the public decency in the depiction of intercourse between the guest and the maid, the woman of the house, and with the male components of the household, as well as the homosexual tendencies of the head of the household, the father, which are contrary to every moral value, social and familial." (for Teorema, 1968); "blasphemous, subversive, pornographic, indecent, etc." (for The Decameron, 1971); "a film full of obscenities ... nothing more than a series of vulgar exhibitions of sexual organs, all very clearly photographed." (for Arabian Nights, 1973).
While all charges take aim at what may most obviously be offensive to a sector of any population, they hide a more insidious challenge to cultural and ideological diversity. As a cursory viewing of any Pasolini film will reveal, the author does not merely seek to shock for its own sake, but rather to present a world view that is ideologically conflictual and compromising for the dominant culture. In order to negate the presence of alternative cultures, the dominant takes refuge in catch-phrases such as "public decency" and "common sense of morality and decency." So as to expose this strategy, in the article "Pornography is boring," (1969) Pasolini presents his own view of pornography in order to differentiate his work from it, and qualifies his dislike for pornographic films as a matter of aesthetics. While he condemns the censors who take it upon themselves to protect the morality of others, rather than pornography, which he considers dangerous to him as author. Because of the possibilities for censorship that pornography allows, it also functions to justify restrictions in all forms of expression. As a result, Pasolini argues, pornography becomes the pretext by which ideological expression is attacked and silenced.
What exactly is subversive in Pasolini's work? What scandalizes? Simply, the effectiveness of this artist's production lies in what he portrays, "it is something that scandalizes for its being what it is. It scandalizes because of its nature: because for one reason or another it is a diverse nature.” Pasolini proposes and produces art "as an exploration of the unsaid in common and official ideological discourses;" of great importance to this art is the author's own concept of "diversity." "Diverso," which would literally translate to "different," carries with it the secondary meaning of "diverse," and is used in Italian as a colloquialism in reference to homosexuality. In order to diffuse the negative connotations of the word, Pasolini set himself the task of infusing it with a sense of cultural importance and militancy. While the concept was largely biographical at its inception, with time it acquired cultural and political dimensions by which the author sought to bridge various kinds of "diversity" (his homosexuality, the subproletariat, the Third World) in a common oppositional front against official cultures. As such, censorship, applied to a cultural expression not condoned by officialdom, becomes strictly a political exercise.
In Pasolini's view, the subjects of marginalized cultures, products of specific socio-economic conditions and/or a-historicity, represent their condition by their physicality, their bodies and sexual organs. And, since "the language of action or simply of offensive presence [is a] stage of pre-revolutionary contestation," official culture finds it necessary to silence and render these bodies invisible. The uninhibited display of subproletarian bodies present in most of Pasolini's films is offensive to societal norms because it offers a code of being that demystifies the ideal body of bourgeois representation. The "language of action," aside from signifying the potential for revolution represented by those bodies, is also, literally, the spoken language, the dialects, the modes of expression of those marginal masses; these too stand as infractions to accepted cultural codes of conduct.
For Pasolini, the diverse yet bourgeois intellectual, it becomes essential that he give up his own language and be initiated to a revolutionary one if he is to establish a bond with the groups he represents in his art. Initiation into language takes place twice for Pasolini: once into the language of Marxism, and then into the language of marginalized cultures (such as Friulano). The two are integrated and then restated in the author's own language of social critique which, through literary and filmic production, privileges specific sites (the body of the subproletariat, for example) to engender a discussion of marginality, exclusion, repression, and confrontation. Pasolini's works are an attempt to dissipate the officiality of particular discourses by juxtaposing them to disparate elements. For example, in Accattone (his first film), the verses of Dante or the music of Bach, very definitely representative of a dominant cultural code, are used as backgrounds to the actions and bodies of subproletarian characters. Such acts of transgression are not easily forgiven by the keepers of the code; as a result, the bodies scripted by Pasolini in his films, and the language that emanates from them, become the focus of the scrupulous defenders of the "common good."


Abjuration and Confrontation

The Decameron (1970), Canterbury Tales (1971), and Arabian Nights (1974) form Pasolini's "Trilogy of Life," a series of films in which the author's scope was to represent the revolutionary power of subproletarian bodies, and highlight their potential through the highly imaginative narratives of tales and fables. In his "Abjuration from The Trilogy of Life," Pasolini comes to deny these films as an error in judgment. But this abjuration was by no means a surprising turn for Pasolini. He had described the frustration of not being understood in these verses from "A Desperate Vitality"(1964):

Death lies not
in being unable to communicate
but in the failure to continue being understood.
(14)

This then developed into feigned adaptation and conformism, as in this "Communiqué to ANSA [stylistic choice]" (1971):

I have ceased to be an original poet, it costs
freedom: a stylistic system is too exclusive.
I have adopted accepted literary schemes
to be free. For practical reasons, of course.

In his renunciation, Pasolini takes a very cynical stance by which he claims that the bodies, meant to represent the last stand in opposition to the subculture of mass media and consumerism, were in fact doomed long before he made the film. The culprit was none other than the famed "economic boom" of the 60s, a phenomenon that threw Italy into the realm of post-industrialism and neo-capitalism, which Pasolini blamed for its cultural and anthropological deterioration.
However, criticism of his work, and accusations of a nostalgia for an irretrievable past, continued to be leveled against him. Pasolini's response to those who called for him to describe contemporary society, to show a conscience of the present, results in the rhetorical abjuration of the “Trilogy” that in effect comes to justify his last project: Salò (1975).
A loose adaptation of Sade's 120 Days of Sodom, Salò was Pasolini's way to revive the last days of fascism during W.W.II, as an instrument by which to suggest a matrix for contemporary fascism's homogenization and objectification of the human body and being. The degradation of bodies, their use and abuse, torture, sadism, the corruption of eroticism and sexual relations, are the subjects of Salò. In effect, Pasolini believed that the fascism that had found fertile ground during the early to mid part of the century was never shed, it merely changed form. Consumerism, the new fascism, had, in his opinion, decimated the Italian subproletariat as it threatened to decimate the populations of the so-called Third World. Of course, Salò was no less susceptible to censorship than previous works. While Pasolini's early works had been threatening for their portrayal of the pre-revolutionary potential of the subproletariat, Salò is subversive in its out and out identification of the perverse power of fascism.
That fascism works its spell by insinuating itself as protector of accepted norms, order and clarity is addressed ironically by Pasolini in the previously quoted "Communiqué to ANSA." Freedom through "accepted ... schemes" is, of course, not at all freedom, but Pasolini succeeds in subverting this too in Salò. In fact, he gives prominence to the narrative of fascism by having each set of atrocities prefaced by the narrative voice of the captors. The scheme in Salò is much more direct than in other films and, as the fascist initiation of stories degenerates into the subjugation of the unsaid subjects, the "practical reasons" of Pasolini's rhetoric come to light.
Thus, one distinction between the "Trilogy" and Salò can be made at the level of communication. The works of the "Trilogy" still preserve a hope in the dialectic potential of the eroticism of subproletarian bodies, as communicative of their condition. Salò, on the contrary, dismisses any chance for communication through the total objectification of sexuality. The dialectic is wholly disrupted and interjected for the sole function of a system of consumption. Communication, or the lack thereof, defines eroticism and pornography respectively, and Salò becomes Pasolini's accusatory finger by which he links fascism, censorship, and pornography. The film elicited a negative reaction even from those who had been supportive of Pasolini. Italo Calvino, in "Sade is Within Us," suggests that

A "moral" effect can be drawn from Sade only if the "accusation" keeps its finger pointed not at the others but at ourselves. The "place of action" can only be in our conscience (111).

Complaining about how Pasolini was wholly discounting of Sade's intentions in The 120 Days of Sodom, and of how poorly that text transfers as a vehicle for the recounting of the last days of fascism in war torn Italy, Calvino suggests that the film-maker was out of touch with the world in which he lived. But Pasolini was painfully aware of his inescapable situation as a privileged bourgeois intellectual in society, and the effect that the maintenance of the status quo has on those considered expendable. Calvino's suggestions may in fact be symptomatic of the very loss of diversity in contemporary society, and the conviction that pedagogically we are restricted to the lessons of the dominant culture.
In closing, I would like to suggest a reading strategy for Pasolini's films that undoes the accusations listed at the beginning of this piece. This strategy is dependent on an aspect of the filmic process itself, as outlined by Pasolini in "Observations on the Sequence Shot," where editing is described not merely for its practical function in putting together a film, but also as a descriptive concept for life, production, and death. In that 1967 article, Pasolini insists that the life of an individual, or a person's work, is comparable to the long sequence shot, that only takes on significance after its completion. Death becomes an important editorial component by giving a sequence its significatory start. In Pasolini's words: "Until I die, no one can guarantee to really know me, that is, to be able to give a meaning to my actions, which therefore, as a linguistic moment, can be deciphered only with difficulty ... Death effects an instantaneous montage of our lives." In concurrence with this definition, any attempt to edit an author's works before the end of his discursive reality is a premature act that can only be qualified as censorship. It is, in fact, as applied to works such as Pasolini's, a premeditated act meant to distort and question their worth and integrity. Partial or total censorship led to the removal of the films from theaters, to the cutting of scenes in some versions, or to the films being shown in porno theaters rather than regular run movie houses.
Salò, in conjunction with the author's death, provides a revelatory glance backward that gives Pasolini's works a strength that may escape if the films are viewed as individual moments of expression. This is not to diminish their value as singular pieces, merely a suggestion to provide yet another viewing angle for this complex corpus. By splicing together the parts that spurred official censorship one may in fact have, as an end result, Pasolini's ideology represented most clearly. A censorship in reverse which brings to the foreground that which we would ordinarily not be allowed to see would both legitimize the excerpts, and deny censorship. By focusing attention on something other than the forbidden, censorship diverts attention from the true subject of the work as well as from its own function. In fact, in acting upon selected portions of a film or a body of literature, it becomes an act of violence against the ideas that the work seeks to represent. What we are not meant to see or hear are the parts that are connected by the interstitial frames upon which the accusations are based.
What we have in conclusion is a correlation between censorship and pornography, both of which negate communication and deny presence. Eros, on the other hand, is the possibility of reaching outside of a given system, of reaching outside of the norm in order to savour alternative presences. Eros is the force that strains a system and foresees its death. The move to censor the revolutionary eroticism of Pasolini's subproletarian bodies is also aimed at disrupting their communicative power, the threat of their presence. In Pasolini's eyes, the subproletarian body represents a challenge to consumer society's advance; its test of society brings upon it charges of subversion, making it a most likely subject for censorship.

Pasquale Verdicchio, San Diego

PASOLINI'S LAST INTERVIEW

WE ARE ALL IN DANGER
The last interview with Pier Paolo Pasolini
By Furio Colombo

This interview took place on Saturday, November 1, 1975, between four and six in the evening, a few hours before Pasolini’s assassination. I want to emphasize that the title as it appears was his, and not of my own making. As a matter of fact, at the end of the conversation, which, as in the past found us on opposite sides of certain points, I asked him if he wanted to give me a title for the interview. He thought about it a while, said it was not important, changed topic, and then something brought us back to the subject that had emerged time and again in the answers that follow. “Here is the seed, the sense of everything – he said – You don’t even know who, right at this moment, might be thinking of killing you. Use this as a title, if you like: ‘Because, we are all in danger’.”


FC: Pasolini, in your articles and in your writings you have given various accounts of what you detest. You have carried out a solitary struggle against so many things: institutions, trends, people, and power. So as to make things easier I will refer to it all as the “situation”, by which you know that I mean the whole of which you generally battle. Let me propose one objection. The “situation”, with all its evils as you describe it, also contains all that makes Pasolini possible. What I mean is that, even with all your talent and merit, your tools are provided by the “situation”: publishing, cinema, organization, even objects. Let’s say that yours is a magic thought. One little gesture and everything that you detest disappears. What about you, then, would you not be left all alone and without any of the tools you need? I mean, the means or tools of expression, I mean…

PPP: I understand. But I not only attempt to achieve that magic thought process, I believe in it. Not as a way to mediate with the world, but because I know that by constantly hitting the same nail on the head one can possibly make a whole house fall down. We find a small example of this among the Radical Party, a motley crew who is able to influence the whole country. You know that I don’t always agree with them, but I am about to leave right now for their conference. Most of all, it’s history that gives us the best example. Contestation has always been and essential act. Saints, hermits and intellectuals, those few who have made history, are the ones who have said “no”, not the courtesans and Cardinals’ assistants. So as to be meaningful, contestation must be large, major and total, “absurd” and not in good sense. It cannot merely be on this or that point. Eichmann had a good lot of good sense. What was he lacking then? He did not say “no” right away, at the beginning, when he was a mere administrator, a bureaucrat. He might have said to some of his friends “I don’t really like Himmler”. He might have whispered something, the way it’s done in publishing firms, newspaper office, in sub-government, in the newsrooms. Or he might even have objected to the fact that some train had stopped once a day for the deported to do their business, for bread and water, when two stops might have been more practical and economic. But he never stopped the machine. And so, there are three arguments to make here: what is what you call the “situation, why should we halt it or destroy it, and how?

FC: Well, describe the “situation” then. You know very well that your observations and your language are like the sun shining through the dust. It’s a beautiful image, but things are sometimes a little unclear.

PPP: I thank you for the sun image, but expect much less than that. All I want is that you look around and take notice of the tragedy. What is the tragedy? It’s that there are no longer any human beings; there are only some strange machines that bump up against each other. And we intellectuals look at old train schedules and say: “strange, shouldn’t these train run by there. How come they crashed like that? Either the engineer has lost his mind, or he is a criminal. Or, even better, it’s all a conspiracy.” We are particularly pleased with conspiracies because the relieve us of the weight of having to deal with the truth head on. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if, while we are here talking, someone in the basement were making plans to kill us? It’s easy, it’s simple, and it’s the resistance. We might lose a few friends, but then we’ll gather our forces and wipe them out. A little for us, a little for them, don’t you think? And I know that when they show Paris is burning on TV everyone sits there with tears in their eyes, wishing only that history would repeat itself, but clean and beautiful. The effect of time is that it washes thing clean, like the walls of house in the rain. It’s simple, I’m on this side, and you’re on the other. Let’s not joke about the blood, the pain, the work that people then too paid with so as to “have a choice”. When one keeps one’s face flat against that hour, that minute in history, choice is always a tragedy. But let’s admit it, it was easier then. With courage and conscience, a normal man can always reject a Fascist of Salò or a Nazi of the SS, even from his interior life (where the revolution always begins). But today it’s different. Someone might come walking toward you dressed like a friend, very friendly and polite, but he is a “collaborator” (let’s say for a TV station). The reasoning goes that first of all he needs to make a living somehow, and then because it’s not like he’s hurting anyone. Another one, or others, the groups, comes toward you aggressively with their ideological blackmail, the admonitions, their sermons, and their anathemas that are also threats. They march with flags and slogans, but what separates them from “power”?

FC: Well, what is power in your opinion? Where is it? How does one cause it to reveal itself?

PPP: Power is an educational system that divides us into subjects and subjected. Nevertheless, it is an educational system that forms us all, from the so-called ruling class all the way down to the poorest of us. That’s why everyone wants the same things and everyone acts in the same way. If I have access to an administrative council or a Stock Market maneuver, that’s what I use. Otherwise I use a crowbar. And when I use a crowbar I’ll use whatever means to get what I want.
Why do I want it? Because I’ve been told that it is a virtue to have it. I am merely exercising my virtue-rights. I am a murderer but I am a good person.

FC: You have been accused of not being able to make political or ideological distinctions. It is said that you have lost the ability of differentiating the sign of the deep difference that there is between Fascists and non-Fascists, among the new generations for example.

PPP: That’s what I was talking about when I mentioned the train schedules before. Have you ever seen those marionettes that make children laugh so much because their body faces one direction while their heads face another? I think Totò was quite adept at such a trick. Well, that’s how I see that wonderful troop of intellectuals, sociologists, experts and journalists with the most noble of intentions. Things happen here, and their heads are turned in the opposite direction. I’m not saying that there is no Fascism. What I’m saying is: don’t talk to me of the sea while we are in the mountains. This is a different landscape. There is a desire to kill here. And this desire ties us together as sinister brothers of the sinister failure of an entire social system. I too would like it if it were easy to isolate the black sheep. I too see the black sheep. I see quite a lot of them. I see all of them. That’s the problem, as I said to Moravia: given the life I lead, I pay a price…it’s like a descent into hell. But when I come back – if I come back – I’ve seen other things, more things. I’m not asking you to believe me. I’m saying that you always find yourselves changing topic so as to avoid facing the truth.

FC: And what is the truth?

PPP: I’m sorry I used that word. What I wanted to say was “evidence”. Let me reorder things. First tragedy: a common education, obligatory and wrong that pushes us all into the same arena of having to have everything at all costs. In this arena we are pushed along like some strange and dark army in which some carry cannons and other carry crowbars. Therefore, the first classical division is to “stay with the weak”. But what I say is that, in a certain sense, everyone is weak, because everyone is a victim. And everyone is guilty, because everyone is ready to play the murderous game of possession. We have learned to have, possess and destroy.

FC: Let me go back to the first question then. You magically abolish everything. But you live from books, and you need intelligent people who read…educated consumers of an intellectual product. You are a filmmaker and, as such, you need large venues (you are very successful, and are “consumed” avidly by your public) but also an extensive technical, managerial and industrial machine that is in the midst of it all. If you remove all of this, with a sort of magical paleo-catholic and neo-chinese monasticism, what’s left?

PPP: Everything. I am what is left, being alive, being in the world, a place to see, work and understand. There are hundreds of ways to tell the stories, to listen to the languages, to reproduce dialects, to make puppetry. The others are left with much more. They can keep pace with me, cultured like me or ignorant like me. The world becomes bigger, everything is ours and there is no need to use the Stock Market, the administrative council or the crowbar to plunder. You see, in the world that we dreamed about (let me repeat myself: reading old train schedules from either a year or thirty years ago) there was the awful landlord in a top hat and dollars pouring out of his pockets, and the emaciated widow and her children who begged for mercy, as in Brecht’s beautiful world.

FC: Are you saying that you miss that world?

PPP: No! My nostalgia is for those poor and real people who struggled to defeat the landlord without becoming that landlord. Since they were excluded from everything, they remained uncolonized. I am afraid of these Black revolutionaries who are the same as their landlords, equally criminal, who want everything at any cost. This gloomy ostentation toward total violence makes it hard to distinguish to which “side” one belongs. Whoever might be taken to an Emergency Ward close to death is probably more interested in what the doctors have to tell him about his chances of living than what the police might have to say about the mechanism of the crime. Be assured that I am neither condemning intentions nor am I interested in the chain of cause and effect: them first, him first, or who is the primary guilty party. I think we have defined what you called the “situation”. It’s like it rains in the city and the gutters are backed up. The water rises, but the water is innocent, it’s rainwater. It has neither the fury of sea, nor the rage of river current. But, for some reason, it rises instead of falling. It’s the same water of so many adolescent poems and of the cutesy songs like “singing in the rain”. But it rises and it drowns you. If that’s where we are, I say let’s not waste time placing nametags here and there. Let’s see then how we can unplug this tub before we all drown.

FC: And to get there you would want everyone to be ignorant and happy little unschooled shepherds?

PPP: Put in those terms it would be absurd. But the educational system as it is cannot but produce desperate gladiators. The masses are growing, as is desperation and rage. Let’s say that I’ve flung a boutade (but I don’t think so), what else can you come up with? Of course I lament a pure revolution led by oppressed peoples whose only goal is to free themselves and run their own lives. Of course I try to imagine that such a moment might still be possible in Italian and world history. The best of what I imagine might even inspire one of my future poems. But not what I know and what I see. I want to say it plain and clear: I go down into hell and I see things that do not disturb the peace of others. But be careful. Hell is rising toward the rest of you. It’s true that it dreams its own uniform and its own justification (sometimes). But it’s also true that its desire, its need to hit back, to assault, to kill, is strong and wide-ranging. The private and risky experience of those who have touched “the violent life” will not be available for long. Don’t be fooled. And you are, along with the educational system, television, the your pacifying newspapers, the great keepers of this horrendous order founded on the concept of possession and the idea of destruction. Luckily, you seem to be happy when you can tag a murder with its own beautiful description. This to me is just another one of mass culture’s operations. Since we can’t prevent certain things from happening, we find peace in constructing shelves where to keep them.

FC: But to abolish also means to create, unless you too are a destroyer. What happens to the books, for example? I certainly don’t want to be one of those people who is anguished by the loss of culture more than for people. But these people saved in your vision of a different world can no longer be primitive (an accusation often leveled at you) and if we don’t want to repress “more advanced”…

PPP: Which makes me cringe.

FC: If we don’t want to fall back on commonplaces, there must be some sort of clue. For example, in science fiction, as in Nazism, book burning is always the first step in the massacres. Once you’ve shut down the schools, and abolished television, how do you animate your world?

PPP: I think I already covered this with Moravia. Closing or abolishing in my language means, “to change”. But change in a drastic and desperate manner such as the situation dictates. What really prevents a real dialogue with Moravia, but more so with Firpo, for example, is that somehow we are not seeing the same scene, we don’t know the same people, and that we do not hear the same voices. For you and them, things happen when it’s news, beautifully written, formatted, cut and titled. But what’s underneath it all? What is missing is a surgeon who has the courage to examine the tissue and declare: gentlemen, this is cancer, and it is not benign. What is cancer? It’s something that changes all the cells, which causes them to grow in a haphazard manner, outside of any previous logic. Is a cancer patient who dreams the same healthy body that he had before nostalgic, even if before he was stupid and unlucky? Before the cancer, I mean. First of all one would have to make quite an effort to re-establish the same image. I listen to all the politicians and their little formulas, and it drives me insane. They don’t seem to know what country they are talking about; they are as distant as the Moon. And the same goes for the writers, sociologists and experts of all sorts.

FC: Why do you think that some things are so much evident for you?

PPP: I don’t want to talk about myself any more. Maybe I’ve said too much already. Everyone knows that I pay for my experiences in person. But there are also my books and my films. Maybe I’m wrong, but I’ll keep on saying that we are all in danger.

FC: Pasolini, if that’s how you see life – I don’t know if you will accept this question – how do you hope to avoid the risk and danger involved?

It’s late, Pasolini did not turn on any lights and it’s become hard to take notes. We look over what I’ve written. Then he asks me to leave the questions with him.

PPP: There are some statements that seem a little too absolute. Let me think about it, let me look them over. And give me the time to come up with a concluding remark. I have something in mind for your question. I find it easier to write than to talk. I’ll give you the notes that I’ll add on tomorrow morning.

The next day, Sunday, Pasolini’s body was in the morgue of the Rome police station.

Sabina Guzzanti

If you don't know Sabina Guzzanti...if you haven't see her film Viva Zapatero...if you have not seen her performance about the current political situation in Italy and its resemblance to that past merger of state and corporate power that ruled the peninsula from 1922 to 1942...you MUST!!!

PASOLINI Il romanzo delle stragi / The Novel on the Massacres

I know.
I know the names of those responsible for what has been called a “coup” but what is actually a series of “coups” carried out to ensure the security of power).
I know the names of those responsible for the Milan massacre of December 12, 1969.
I know the names of those responsible for the massacres in Brescia and Bologna in early 1974.
I know the names of the “committee” that manipulated the old fascists into actualizing the “coups”, the names of the neo-fascists who carried out the first massacres and, finally, those of the “unknown’ authors of the most recent massacres.
I know the names of those who directed the two different yet opposite phases of the tension strategy: first, the anti-communist phase (Milano 1969), and then the second, anti-fascist phase (Brescia and Bologna 1974).
I know the names of that group of powerful men who, with the help of the CIA (and then by the “Greek colonels” of the mafia), first created (yet failing miserably) an anti-communist crusade to halt the ’68 movement and then, always with the help and inspiration of the CIA, they reconstituted an anti-fascist virginity so as to stall the disaster of the “referendum”.
I know the names of those who, between Holy Masses, gave their directives to young neo-fascists, or better neo-nazis (so as to give full weight to the anticommunist tensions). They further assured them and common criminals of their protection, alongside old Generals, whom they kept as a standing reservist organization for an eventual military coup. These privileges are still active today and will most likely last forever for these nameless individuals who will be used to create the next antifascist tension. I know the names of the serious and important ones who are behind the comic characters like that general of the Forestry Corps who was in Città Ducale (while the forests of Italy burned), or some of the gray and purely organizational characters like General Miceli.
I know the names of the serious and important people who are behind the tragic young men who chose the suicidal fascist atrocities and the common criminals, Sicilians or something else, who made themselves available, like hired guns or hit men.
I know all these names and I know all the actions (massacres and attempts on a variety of institutions) of which they have made themselves guilty.
I know. But I do not have the proof. I do not even have the clues.
I know because I am an intellectual, a writer who tries to keep track of everything that happens, to know everything that is written, to imagine everything that is unknown or goes unsaid. I am a person who coordinates even the most remote facts, who pieces together the disorganized and fragmentary bits of a whole, coherent political scene, who re-establishes logic where chance, folly and mystery seem to reign.
All this is part of my art and of the instinct of my art. I think it quite unlikely that the “plan of my novel” might be wrong; that it may not be in touch with reality, or that my references to events and actual persons are wrong. I also believe that many other intellectuals and writers know what I know as an intellectual and a writer. The reconstruction of the truth regarding what has happened in Italy after 1968 is not that difficult after-all. That truth – and one feels it with absolute certainty – forms the background of most journalistic and political commentaries and opinions: in other words, not works of imagination or fiction such as my work is by its very nature.
One last example: it is clear that the truth sought to emerge, with all its names, from behind the editorial in the Corriere della Sera of November 1, 1974. It is very likely that journalists and politicians even have some proof or, at least, some clues.
But the problem is this: journalists and politicians, even having some proof, and most certainly some clues, do not name names.
Whose responsibility then is it to pronounce these names? Obviously, it is up to whomever has not only the necessary courage but also someone who is not compromised in his relationship with power, and someone who has nothing to lose. This person is an intellectual.
Therefore an intellectual could very well publicly pronounce those names: but he has neither the proof nor the clues.
Power and the world, that even while not being power maintains a practical relationship with power, have excluded free intellectuals (for their very nature) from the possibility of having proof and clues.
Someone might object that I, as an intellectual, as an inventor of stories, could enter that explicitly political world (of power or close to power) and, through compromise participate in the right to share in the proof and clues.
But to such an objection I would have to answer that it is not possible. It is the very repugnance of entering into such a political world that defines my potential intellectual courage to speak the truth, to name the names.
The intellectual courage of the truth and political practice are presently two irreconcilable realities in Italy. Political practice imposes upon intellectuals – who are profoundly and viscerally despised by the whole of Italian bourgeoisie - a falsely high and noble mandate. In reality, the task of debating moral and ideological problems is servile at best.
If he is given this mandate the intellectual is considered a traitor to his duty. Shouts go up of a ‘betrayal of the clerics” that is a gratifying alibi for politicians and the servants of power.
But along with power there also exists and opposition to power. In Italy this opposition is so widespread and strong that it represents a power of its own. I am referring, of course, to the Italian Communist Party.
It is more than certain that at this moment the presence of a great party of opposition such as the Italian Communist Party is the saving grace of Italy and its poor democratic institutions. The Italian Communist Party represents a clean Country within a corrupt Country, an honest Country within a dishonest Country, an intelligent Country within an idiot Country, a wise Country within an ignorant Country, a humanistic Country within a consumerist Country. The Communist Party is a compact unit of leaders, base and voters. During these recent years a period of negotiation has opened between the Italian Communist Party, an authentically unified group, and the rest of Italy. The Italian Communist Party has, as a result, become a “Country onto itself”, an island. And it is for this very reason that today, as never before, it is able to have a very close relationship with actual power, corrupt, inept and degraded as it is. But these are diplomatic relationships, similar to those between nations. In actuality the two realities are incommensurable, understood in their concreteness, in their totality. It is possible to project on this very basis that realistic “compromise” that might in fact save Italy from falling apart at the seams. This “compromise” might be considered to be an “alliance” between two bordering states, or between two states jammed one inside the other.
But everything positive thing that I have said about the Italian Communist Party makes up its relatively negative aspects as well.
The division of the country into two separate nations, one up to its neck in degradation and degeneration and the other intact and uncompromised, cannot be a good reason for peace and constructivism.
Furthermore, conceived in this way as I have outlined it, as a nation within a nation, the opposition identifies with another power, which is nevertheless still and always power. As a result, the politicians that make up this opposition cannot but behave themselves like men of power.
In the specific instance that at this moment so dramatically concerns us, they too have deferred to the intellectual a mandate of their making. So, if the intellectual does not meet the expectations of this purely moral and ideological mandate he is, to everyone’s satisfaction, nothing more than a traitor.
And now, why do not even the politicians of the opposition, if they have – and most likely they do – proof or at least clues, name the names of those truly responsible, of the politicians, of the laughable coups and of the terrifying massacres of the last few years? Simple: they do not name them as a result of the fact that they make a distinction between political truth and political practice, something an intellectual would not do. And so, naturally, they too keep the intellectual in the dark about proof and clues. Given the objective factual situation, they do not even give it a second thought.
The intellectual has to continue to keep to what is imposed on him as his duty, to reiterate his codified mode of intervention.
I know very well that presently in Italian history, it is not the case to make a public declaration of distrust against the political class. It is not diplomatic; it is not an opportune time. But these political categories, and not political truth, are what the impotent intellectual is required to serve, however and whenever.
Very well, for the very reason that I cannot name those responsible for the attempted coups and the massacres (and not in place of it) I cannot make my weak and idealistic accusation against the entire Italian political class.
Let it be known that I act fully believing in politics. I believe in the “formal” principles of democracy, I believe in the Parliament and I believe in political parties. Obviously these beliefs are filtered through my own particular communist view.
I would be ready and eager to recall my motion of non-confidence if some politician would decide to name the names of those responsible for the coups and massacres. But his decision would have to be not opportunistic, because the moment has come, but rather as a way to create the possibility for such a moment. This politician might decide to name the names of those responsible for the coups and the massacres, which he evidently knows as I do. The difference between us is that he cannot but have the proof, or at least some clues.
Most likely – if the U.S.A. will permit – maybe “diplomatically” deciding to concede to another democracy that which American democracy has conceded itself in the case of Nixon – these names will be named. But, even if this happens, men who have shared in their power will pronounce the names. It will be a case of those least responsible against those most responsible. And, as in the American case, it does not mean that they will be any better than the others. That would most definitely be a true Coup d’etat.

First Published in Il Corriere della Sera, 14 novembre 1974

Antonio Gramsci's SOUTHERN QUESTION

Guernica Editions, Toronto, Canada, has just released the new edition of my translation of Antonio Gramsci's THE SOUTHERN QUESTION. It includes an updated (as much as possible) introduction and notes to the original text.

At Home Here

AT HOME HERE

Not of this going on day trips
a habit to break
through with some thought or other
it is just around the corner
related incidents would suggest

the very old and very young susceptible
new strains develop
these maladies
are all enveloping

very large and no one in charge
of what might happen

people try to survive
property of someone else’s attempts
but ready for anything

and where I am not here
when there is another place
appear or someone else
and when I am at home here.