giovedì 2 gennaio 2014

Schizo - Culture @ Semiotext(e) - somewhere in NY, somewhere in 2014


Schizo-Culture

Edited by Sylvère Lotringer and David Morris


I think “schizo-culture” here is being used rather in a special sense. Not referring to clinical schizophrenia, but to the fact that the culture is divided up into all sorts of classes and groups, etc., and that some of the old lines are breaking down. And that this is a healthy sign.

—William Burroughs, from Schizo-Culture


The legendary 1975 “Schizo-Culture” conference, conceived by the early Semiotext(e) collective, began as an attempt to introduce the then-unknown radical philosophies of post-’68 France to the American avant-garde. The event featured a series of seminal papers, from Deleuze’s first presentation of the concept of the “rhizome” to Foucault’s introduction of his History of Sexuality project. The conference was equally important on a political level, and brought together a diverse group of activists, thinkers, patients, and ex-cons in order to address the challenge of penal and psychiatric institutions. The combination proved to be explosive, but amid the fighting and confusion “Schizo-Culture” revealed deep ruptures in left politics, French thought, and American culture.
The “Schizo-Culture” issue of the Semiotext(e) journal came three years later. Designed by a group of artists and filmmakers including Kathryn Bigelow and Denise Green, it documented the chaotic creativity of an emerging downtown New York scene, and offered interviews with artists, theorists, writers, and No Wave and pre-punk musicians together with new texts from Deleuze, Foucault, R. D. Laing, and other conference participants.
This slip-cased edition includes The Book: 1978, a facsimile reproduction of the original Schizo-Culture publication; and The Event: 1975, a previously unpublished and comprehensive record of the conference that set it all off. It assembles many previously unpublished texts, including a detailed selection of interviews reconstructing the events, and features Félix Guattari, William Burroughs, Kathy Acker, Michel Foucault, Sylvère Lotringer, Guy Hocquenghem, Gilles Deleuze, John Rajchman, Robert Wilson, Joel Kovel, Jack Smith, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Ti-Grace Atkinson, Francois Peraldi, and John Cage.

Read more

mercoledì 1 gennaio 2014

Eyal Weizman: Walking Through Walls @ EIPCP (January 2007)


Eyal Weizman: Walking Through Walls @ EIPCP (January 2007) - Read more @ EIPCP

The maneuver conducted by units of the Israeli military during the attack on the city of Nablus in April 2002 was described by its commander, Brigadier General Aviv Kochavi, as “inverse geometry,” which he explained as the re-organization of the urban syntax by means of a series of micro-tactical actions. During the attack, soldiers moved within the city across hundred-meter-long “over-ground-tunnels” carved out through a dense and contiguous urban fabric. Although several thousand soldiers and hundreds of Palestinian guerrilla fighters were maneuvering simultaneously in the city, they were saturated within its fabric to the degree that most would not have been visible from an aerial perspective at any given moment. Furthermore, soldiers did not often use the streets, roads, alleys, or courtyards that constitute the syntax of the city, as well as the external doors, internal stairwells, and windows that constitute the order of buildings, but rather moved horizontally through party walls, and vertically through holes blasted in ceilings and floors. This form of movement is part of a tactics that the military refers to in metaphors it borrows from the world of aggregate animal formation as “swarming” and “infestation.” Moving through domestic interiors this maneuver turns inside to outside and private domains to thoroughfares. Fighting took place within half-demolished living rooms, bedrooms and corridors of poorly built refugee homes, where the television may still be operating and a pot may still on the stove. Rather than submitting to the authority of conventional spatial boundaries, movement became constitutive of space, and space was constituted as an event. It was not the order of space that governed patterns of movement but movement that produced and practiced space around it. The three-dimensional movement through walls, ceilings, and floors across the urban bulk reinterpreted, short-circuited, and recomposed both architectural and urban syntax. The tactics of “walking-through-walls” involved a conception of the city as not just the site, but as the very medium of warfare – a flexible, almost liquid matter that is forever contingent and in flux. 
According to geographer Stephen Graham, since the end of the cold war a vast, international “intellectual field” that he called a “shadow world of military urban research institutes and training centers” has been established in order to rethink military operations in urban terrain.[1] This responds to the urbanization of insurgency. The expanding network of these “shadow worlds” includes schools, urban-research institutes and training centers, as well as mechanisms for the exchange of knowledge between different militaries such as conferences, workshops and joint training exercises. In their attempt to comprehend urban life, soldiers – the urban practitioners of today – take crash courses to master topics such as urban infrastructure, complex system analysis, structural stability, building techniques, and appeal as well to a variety of theories and methodologies developed within contemporary civilian academia. There is thus a new relationship emerging between a triangle of three interrelated components: armed conflicts, the built environment, and the theoretical language conceived to conceptualize them.
Following global trends throughout the last decade the IDF established several institutes and think-tanks in different levels of its command and asked them to re-conceptualize strategic, tactical and organizational responses to the brutal policing work that came to be known as “dirty” or “low intensity” wars. Notable amongst these are the Operational Theory Research Institute (OTRI) set up in 1996 and the “Alternative Team”[2] set up in 2003. These institutes were composed not only of military officers but of civilian academics and technological experts. Two of the main figures affiliated to these institutes – Shimon Naveh, a retired Brigadier General, director of OTRI, and Aviv Kochavi, a serving officer – are extensively interviewed in the following pages. 

Inverse-urban-geometry
The tactics of “walking through walls” that the military employed in the urban attacks on the refugee camps were developed, not in response to theoretical influences, but as a way of penetrating the previously “un-penetrable” refugee camps. Aviv Kochavi, then commander of the Paratrooper Brigade, explained the principle that guided the attack of the refugee camp of Batala and the adjacent Kasbah (old city) of Nablus: 
 “This space that you look at, this room that you look at, is nothing but your interpretation of it. Now, you can stretch the boundaries of your interpretation, but not in an unlimited fashion, after all, it must be bound by physics, as it contains buildings and alleys. The question is: how do you interpret the alley? Do you interpret the alley as a place, like every architect and every town planner does, to walk through, or do you interpret the alley as a place forbidden to walk through? This depends only on interpretation. We interpreted the alley as a place forbidden to walk through, and the door as a place forbidden to pass through, and the window as a place forbidden to look through, because a weapon awaits us in the alley, and a booby trap awaits us behind the doors. This is because the enemy interprets space in a traditional, classical manner, and I do not want to obey this interpretation and fall into his traps. Not only do I not want to fall into his traps, I want to surprise him! This is the essence of war. I need to win. I need to emerge from an unexpected place. And this is what we tried to do.”
 “This is why that we opted for the methodology of walking through walls. […] Like a worm that eats its way forward, emerging at points and then disappearing. We were thus moving from the interior of homes to their exterior in a surprising manner and in places we were not expected, arriving from behind and hitting the enemy that awaited us behind a corner. […] I said to my troops, “Friends! This is not a matter of your choice! There is no other way of moving! If until now you were used to move along roads and sidewalks, forget it! From now on we all walk through walls!”[3]
If moving through walls is pitched by the military as its “humane” answer to the wanton destruction of traditional urban warfare, and as an “elegant” alternative to Jenin-style urban destruction, this is because the damage it causes is often concealed within the interiors of homes. The unexpected penetration of war into the private domain of the home has been experienced by civilians in Palestine, just like in Iraq, as the most profound form of trauma and humiliation. Since Palestinian guerrilla fighters were themselves maneuvering through walls and pre-planned openings, most fighting took place in private homes. Some buildings became like layered cakes, with Israeli soldiers both above and below a floor where Palestinians were trapped.
Urban warfare increasingly depends on technologies developed for the purpose of “un-walling of the wall,” to borrow a term from Gordon Matta-Clark. As a complement to military tactics that involve physically breaking and walking through walls, new methods have been devised to allow soldiers not only to see but also shoot and kill through solid walls. The Israeli company Camero developed a hand-held imaging device that combines thermal imaging with ultra-wideband radar, which much like a contemporary maternity-ward ultra-sound system has the ability to produce three-dimensional renderings of biological life concealed behind barriers.[4] Weapons using the NATO standard 5.56mm round are complemented with some using the 7.62mm one, which is capable of penetrating brick, wood, and adobe without much deflection of the bullet-head. Instruments of “literal transparency” are the main components in the search to produce a ghostlike (or computer-game like) military fantasy-world of boundless fluidity, in which the space of the city becomes as navigable as an ocean. By striving to see what is hidden behind walls and to move and propel ammunition through them, the military seems to have elevated contemporary technologies – using the justification of (almost contemporary) theories – to the level of metaphysics, seeking to move beyond the here and now of physical reality, collapsing time and space.

Academy of Street Fighting
Shimon Naveh, a retired brigadier general, was until May 2006 the co-director of the Operational Theory Research Institute. In an interview I conducted with him, Naveh explained the aims of the institute: “Jenin was a complete failure of the IDF, the damage that this destruction has caused the IDF is larger than what it caused the Palestinians [sic], it was commanded by extremely inexperienced officers who just panicked and stopped thinking.” He suggested that the IDF should further develop the kind of approach employed in Nablus and Balata. He saw his work as making IDF actions more efficient, smarter… and thus more humane.” On the theoretical references the institute employs he said: “We read Christopher Alexander […] can you imagine? We read John Forester. […] We read Gregory Bateson, we read Clifford Geertz. Not just myself, but our soldiers, our generals are reflecting on these kinds of materials. We have established a school and developed a curriculum that trains ‘operational architects’.”
In a lecture I attended, Naveh presented a diagram resembling a “square of opposition” that plots a set of logical relationships among certain propositions relating to military and guerrilla operations. Indications such as “Difference and Repetition – The Dialectics of Structuring and Structure”; “‘Formless’ Rival Entities”; “Fractal Maneuver: Strike-Driven Raids”; “Velocity vs. Rhythms”; “Wahhabi War Machine”; “Post-Modern Anarchists”; “Nomadic Terrorists”, and so on, employed the language of French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.
In the interview, I asked Naveh: “Why Deleuze and Guattari?” He replied that: “Several of the concepts in A Thousand Plateaus became instrumental for us […] allowing us to explain contemporary situations in a way that we could not have otherwise explained. It problematized our own paradigms. […] Most important was the distinction they have pointed out between the concepts of ‘smooth’ and ‘striated’ space […] [which accordingly reflect] the organizational concepts of the ‘war machine’ and the ‘state apparatus.’ […] In the IDF we now often use the term ‘to smooth out space’ when we want to refer to operation in a space as if it had no borders. We try to produce the operational space in such a manner that borders do not affect us. Palestinian areas could indeed be thought of as ‘striated,’ in the sense that they are enclosed by fences, walls, ditches, roadblocks and so on. […] We want to confront the ‘striated’ space of traditional, old-fashioned military practice [the way most military units presently operate] with smoothness that allows for movement through space that crosses any borders and barriers. Rather than contain and organize our forces according to existing borders, we want to move through them.”
Naveh has recently completed the translation into Hebrew of some of the chapters in Bernard Tschumi’s Architecture and Disjunction. In addition to these theoretical positions, Naveh references such canonical elements of urban theory as the Situationist practices of dérive and détournement. These ideas were conceived as part of a general approach meant to challenge the built hierarchy of the capitalist city. They aimed to break down distinctions between private and public, inside and outside, use and function, to replace private space with a “borderless” public surface. Naveh made references to the work of Georges Bataille as well, who also spoke of a desire to attack architecture: his call to arms was meant to dismantle the rigid rationalism of a postwar order, to escape “the architectural straitjacket,” and to liberate repressed human desires. 
These ideas and tactics reflected a general lack of confidence in the capacity of state structures to protect or further democracy. The non-statist micro-politics of the time represented in many ways an attempt to constitute a mental and affective guerrilla at the intimate levels of the body, sexuality, and inter-subjectivity, an individual in whom the personal became subversively political. As such, these theoretical positions offered a strategy for withdrawing from the formal state apparatus into the private domain. While these tactics were conceived to transgress the established “bourgeois order” of the city, with the architectural element of the wall – domestic, urban or geopolitical – projected as an embodiment of social and political repression, in the hands of the Israeli military, tactics inspired by these thinkers were projected as the basis for an attack on an “enemy” city. Education in the humanities – often believed to be the most powerful weapon against imperialism – has here been appropriated as the powerful tool of colonial power itself. 
All this is not outlined here in order to place blame on this theory, its makers or the purity of their intentions or promote an anti-theoretical approach, but in an attempt to turn our attention to the possibility that, as Herbert Marcus suggested, with the growing integration between the various aspects of society, “contradiction and criticism” could be equally subsumed and made operative as an instrumental tool by the hegemony of power – in this case post-structuralist and even post-colonial theory by the colonial state.[5]
 
Swarming 
According to Naveh, a central category in the IDF conception of the new urban operations is “swarming.” It refers to a coordinated joint action undertaken by a network form of organization whose separate units operate semi-autonomously but in general synergy with all others. The RAND corporation theorists credited with the popularization of the military implications of the term, David Ronfeldt and John Arquilla, claim that swarming was historically employed in the warfare of nomadic tribes, and is currently undertaken by different organizations across the spectrum of social political conflict – terrorists and guerrillas organization, mafia criminals as well as non-violent social activists.[6]
In our interview, Kochavi explained the way the IDF understands and employs the concept: “A state military whose enemy is scattered like a network of loosely-organized gangs […] must liberate itself from the old concept of straight lines, units in linear formation, regiments and battalions, […] and become itself much more diffuse and scattered, flexible and swarm-like… In fact, it must adjust itself to the stealthy capability of the enemy […] Swarming, to my understanding, is simultaneous arrival at a target of a large number of nodes – if possible from 360 degrees […] which then dissever and re-disperse.” According to Gal Hirsh, swarming creates “noisy humming,” that makes it very difficult for the enemy to know where the military is and what is its direction of movement.[7]
The assumption of low-intensity conflict, as articulated by Arquilla and Ronfeldt, is that “it takes a network to combat a network.”[8] An urban combat is thus not the action of a living force upon a lifeless mass, but the collision of two networks.[9] As they adapt, mimic and learn from each other, the military and the guerrilla enter a cycle of “co-evolution.” Military capabilities evolve in relation to resistance, which itself evolves in relation to transformations in military practice. However, claims for total breakdown of vertical hierarchies in contemporary militaries are largely exaggerated. Beyond the rhetoric of “self-organization” and “flattening of hierarchy,” military networks are still largely nested within traditional institutional hierarchies. Non-linear swarming is performed at the very tactical end of an inherently hierarchical system.[10] Spatial non-linearity is achieved because Israel still controls all linear supply lines – the roads within the West Bank and those that connect it to its large bases within Israel proper, as well as the multiplicity of linear barriers constructed throughout it. Furthermore, “swarming” and “walking through walls” are successful when the enemy is relatively weak and disorganized, without an ability to coordinate resistance, and especially when the balance of technology, training and force is clearly on the side of the military.
The years spent successfully attacking the weak Palestinian organizations was no doubt one the reason for the incompetence that the same Israeli soldiers demonstrated when they faced in 2006 the stronger, better armed and well trained Hizbollah fighters in Lebanon. Indeed the two officers most implicated in the summer of 2006 events in Gaza and Lebanon are none other than two Israeli military graduates of OTRI, veterans of the Balata and Nablus attack in 2002, Aviv Kochavi (commander of the Gaza Division) and Gal Hirsh (commander of the northern Galilee Division 91). Kochavi, who commanded the summer 2006 attack on Gaza, stuck to his obfuscating language: “we intend to create a chaos in the Palestinian side, to jump from one place to the other, to leave the area and then return to it […] we will use all the advantages of ‘raid’ rather than ‘occupation.’”[11] In Lebanon Hirsh called for “raids instead of occupation,” and ordered the battalions newly attached to his command and unused to the language he acquired at OTRI to “swarm” and “infest” an area. However his subordinate officers did not seem to understand what this was supposed to mean. Hirsh but was later criticized for arrogance, intellectualism and out-of touch-ness. Naveh, pondering the results, himself admitted in the popular media that “The war in Lebanon was a failure and I had a great part in it. What I have brought to the IDF has failed.”[12]
The chaos was indeed on the Israeli side. Continuous fire and shelling by the increasingly frustrated IDF gradually cumulated villages and neighborhoods into sharp topographies of broken concrete and glass sprouting with twisted metal bars. Within this lunar landscape, the hills of rubble were honeycombed with cavities of buried rooms, which paradoxically offered more hiding places to the guerrillas. Hizbollah fighters, themselves effectively swarming through and between this rubble and detritus of wars, sometimes using an invisible system of tunnels, studied the maneuver of Israeli soldiers, and attacked them with anti-tank weapons precisely when they entered, organized and moved within Lebanese homes as they were used to from the cities and refugee camps of the West Bank.

Lethal Theory
Non-linear and network terminology has its origins in military discourse since after the end of WWII and was instrumental in the conception in 1982 of the US military doctrine of AirLand Battle which emphasized inter-service cooperation and the targeting of the enemy at its systematic bottlenecks – bridges, headquarters and supply lines – in attempts to throw it off balance. It was conceived to check Soviet invasion in Central Europe and was first applied in the Gulf War of 1991. The advance of this strand leads to the Network Centric Doctrine in the context of the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) after the end of the Cold War. Network Centric Warfare conceptualizes the field of military operation as distributed network-systems, woven together by information technology across the entire operational spectrum. This type of transformation, promoted by neo-conservatives such as Donald Rumsfeld, faced strong opposition within the US armed forces. This opposition recently accelerated in the context of American military failures in Iraq. The IDF is similarly, since the early 1990s, undergoing institutional conflicts in the context of these transformations. In the context of these internal conflicts, a special language based on post-structuralist theory was used to articulate the critique of the existing system, to argue for transformations, and to call for further reorganizations. As Naveh explained: “We employ critical theory primarily in order to critique the military institution itself – its fixed and heavy conceptual foundations […].”
One of the internal conflicts within the IDF, which was conceptual as much as it was hierarchical, was articulated in the context of the debate that followed the closing down of OTRI in the spring of 2006 and the controversial suspension of Naveh and his co-director Dov Tamari. This took place in the context of the change of staff that followed the replacement of Chief of Staff Moshe Ya’alon with his rival Dan Halutz.[13]After dismantling OTRI Halutz set up an alternative institute for “operational thinking” which was based on the model of a similar department Haluz previously set up within the Air Force. Naveh understood his dismissal as “a coup against OTRI and theory.”
The military debate reflects upon political questions. Naveh, together with most of his former colleagues at OTRI, supported the Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip as well as the Israeli withdrawal from South Lebanon prior to its actual undertaking in 2000. He is similarly is in favor of withdrawal from the West Bank. In fact, his political position is in line with what is referred to in Israel as the “Zionist left.” His vote alternated between Labor and Meretz parties. Similarly, Kochavi enthusiastically accepted the command over the military operation for the evacuation and destruction of Gaza settlements, and regardless of the atrocities he was accused of in Gaza is similarly understood as a “leftist” officer. According to Naveh, Israel’s operational paradigm should seek to replace presence in occupied areas with the capacity to move throughthem, and produce in them what he called “effects,” which are “military operations such as aerial attacks or commando raids… that affect the enemy psychologically and organizationally.” The new tactics are meant to maintain security domination in the Palestinian areas evacuated, and their development was seen in fact as a precondition for withdrawal. Withdrawal is understood within the IDF as depending on Israel’s capacity to cancel it in emergency situations it could itself define. This undoubtedly undoes much of the perceived symmetrical nature of borders, embodied by the iconography of West Bank Wall, and by all the recent diplomatic rhetoric that would like to regard whatever polity remains (fragmented and perforated as it may be) on the other side of this Wall as a Palestinian state. Following this logic Naveh claimed that “whatever line they [the politicians] could agree upon – there they should put the fence [Wall]. This is okay with me . . .but as long as I can cross this fence. What we need is not to be there, but […] to act there. […] Withdrawal is not the end of the story.” In this respect, the large “state wall” is conceptualized in similar terms to the house wall – as a transparent and permeable medium that could allow the Israeli military to “smoothly” move through and across it. 
A comparison between the attacks in 2002 on Jenin and Nablus would reveal the paradox that renders the overall effect of the leftist officers even more destructive. A hole in the wall may not be as devastating as the complete destruction of the home, but considering local and international opposition, if the occupation forces were not able to enter refugee camps without having to destroy them as they did in Jenin, they would most likely not attack refugee camps, and definitely not as often as they do now that they have found the tool to do so. Instead of entering a political process of negotiation with Hamas, military confidence is finding a solution for the government to avoid politics. 

Walls/Laws
In siege warfare, the breaching of the outer wall signaled the destruction of the sovereignty of the city-state. Accordingly, the “art” of siege warfare historically engaged with the geometries of city walls and with the development of equally complex technologies for approaching and breaching them. Contemporary urban combat, on the other hand, is increasingly concerned with methods of transgressing the limitations embodied by the domestic wall. In this respect, it might be useful to think of the city’s (domestic) walls as one would think about the (civic) city wall – as operative edges of the law and the condition of democratic urban life. 
According to Hannah Arendt, the political realm of the Greek city was guaranteed by these two kinds of walls (or wall-like laws): the wall surrounding the city, which defined the zone of the political; and the walls separating private space from the public domain, ensuring the autonomy of the domestic realm. “The one harbored and enclosed political life as the other sheltered and protected the biological life process of the family.”[14] The very order of the city relies thus on the fantasy of a wall as stable, solid, and fixed. Indeed, architectural discourse tends to otherwise see walls as architecture’s irreducible givens. The military practice of “walking through walls” – on the scale of the house, the city or the “state” – links the physical properties of construction with this syntax of architectural, social and political orders. New technologies developed to allow soldiers to see living organisms through walls, and to facilitate their ability to walk and fire weapons through them, thus address not only the materiality of the wall, but also its very concept. With the wall no longer physically or conceptually solid or legally impenetrable, the functional spatial syntax that it created – the separation between inside and outside, private and public – collapses. Without these walls, Arendt continues, “there might have been an agglomeration of houses, a town (asty), but not a city, a political community.”[15] The distinction between a city, as a political domain, and a town (here, the antithesis to the city must be understood as the refugee camp) is based on the conceptual solidity of the elements that safeguard both public and private domains. Agamben’s well-known observation follows the trace left by Arendt: in the camps, “city and house became indistinguishable.”[16] The breaching of the physical, visual, and conceptual border / wall exposes new domains to political power, offering thus a physical diagram to the concept of the “state of exception.”
When Kochavi claims that “space is only an interpretation,” and that his movement through and across the built fabric of the city reinterprets architectural elements (walls, windows, and doors); when Naveh claims that he would accept any border as long as he could walk through it, they use a transgressive theoretical approach to suggest that war and fighting is no longer about the destruction of space, but rather about its “reorganization.” If a wall is only the signifier of a “wall,” marking scales of political orders, un-walling also becomes a form of rewriting – a constant process of undoing – fueled by theory. If moving through walls becomes the method for “reinterpreting space,” and if the nature of space is “relative” to this form of interpretation, could this “reinterpretation” kill? 
If the answer is “yes,” then the “inverse geometry” that turns the city “inside out,” shuffling its private and public spaces, and that turns the idea of a “Palestinian State” outside in, would bring about consequences for military operations that go beyond physical and social destruction and force us to reflect upon the “conceptual destruction” of political categories that they imply.


[1] On such a military conference organized in 2002 by the Faculty of Geography at Haifa University see: Stephen Graham, “Remember Falluja: Demonizing Place, Constructing Atrocity,” Society and Space, 2005, Vol. 23. pp. 1-10; and Stephen Graham, “Cities and the ‘War on Terror’,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Vol. 30.2 June 2006, pp. 255–276 
[2] Yedidia Ya’ari and Haim Assa, Diffused Warfare, War in the 21st Century, Tel Aviv: Miskal – Yediot Aharonot Books and Chemed Books, 2005 [Hebrew] pp. 9-13, 146. 
[3] Eyal Weizman and Nadav Harel, interview with Aviv Kochavi, 24 September 2004, at an Israeli military base near Tel Aviv [Hebrew]; video documentation by Nadav Harel and Zohar Kaniel.
[4] Zuri Dar and Oded Hermoni, “Israeli Start-Up Develops Technology to See Through Walls,” Ha’aretz, 1 July 2004; Amir Golan, “The Components of the Ability to Fight in Urban Areas,” Ma’arachot 384 (July 2002): 97; also see Ross Stapleton-Gray, “Mobile mapping: Looking through Walls for On-site Reconnaissance,” the Journal for Net Centric Warafre C4ISR, 11 September 2006.
[5] “With the growing integration of industrial society, these categories are losing their critical connotation, and tend to become descriptive, deceptive, or operational terms. […] Confronted with the total character of the achievements of advanced industrial society, critical theory is left without the rationale for transcending this society. The vacuum empties the theoretical structure itself, because the categories of a critical social theory were developed during the period in which the need for refusal and subversion was embodied in the action of effective social forces.” Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society, Boston Mass., Beacon Press, 1991
[6] David Ronfeldt, John Arquilla, Graham Fuller and Melissa Fuller, The Zapatista “Social Netwar” in Mexico, Santa Monica, Ca.: RAND, 1998. 
[7] Gal Hirsch, On Dinosaurs and Hornets: A Critical View on Operational Moulds in Asymmetric Conflicts, RUSI Journal (August 2003), p .63
[8] Arquilla and Ronfeldt, Networks and Netwars, p.15
[9] “War […] is not the action of a living force upon a lifeless mass but always the collision of two living forces.” Carl von Clausewitz, On War, p. 77
[10] On this, see Ryan Bishop, “‘The Vertical Order Has Come to an End’: The Insignia of the Military C3I and Urbanism in Global Networks,” in Ryan Bishop, John Phillips, and Wei-Wei Yeo, eds., Beyond Description: Space Historicity SingaporeArchitext Series, London & New York: Routledge, 2004. 
[11] Hannan Greenberg, “The Commander of the Gaza Division: The Palestinians are in shock,” Ynet 7 July 2006 http://www.ynet.co.il/.
[12] Amir Rapaport, “Dan Halutz is a Bluff, interview with Shimon Naveh,” Ma’ariv, Yom Kippur Supplement, 1 October 2006.
[13] Halutz did not directly confront the theoretical concepts produced at OTRI. The General Staff’s Operational Concept for the IDF is still rooted in OTRI’s theoretical doctrine of systemic operational design. See: Caroline Glick, “Halutz’s Stalinist moment: Why were Dovik Tamari and Shimon Naveh Fired?,” Jerusalem Post, 17 June 2006 and Rapaport, “Dan Halutz is a Bluff”. Currently Naveh is employed by US Marine Corps Development Command as senior mentor to their operational experiment “Expeditionary Warrior.” 
[14] Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998, pp. 63-64.
[15] Arendt, The Human Condition, pp. 63-64.
[16] Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 188.

martedì 31 dicembre 2013

Simon Glezos: Embodied Virtuality: Speed, Perception and New Media @ CPSA 2013


Simon Glezos: Embodied Virtuality: Speed, Perception and New Media 

@ CPSA 2013

This paper really constitutes the introduction to a much larger chapter, which is itself part of a larger research project. The goal of the overall project is to trace out the dynamics of the interaction between speed and politics as they function at the micropolitical level; looking at how individual bodies, minds, perceptions, subjectivities, and collectives are bound up in, and shaped by, accelerating flows in the context of global politics. In this chapter I seek to engage with the radical acceleration of information and communication technologies, and the impact they have on human perception. At stake is the charge levelled by critics such as Paul Virilio that such ICTs constitute a fundamentally disembodying force, capturing and paralyzing human perception. Against this image, I will argue that perception, even technologically mediated perception, is always profoundly embodied, and as such productively engaging with the effects of new ICTs requires would require a mode of analysis that takes seriously their material and corporeal characters. At the end of the paper, I gesture towards what such a mode of analysis would look like, a theory I pursue in the rest of the chapter.

Speed, Perception and Virtuality
Speed not only allows us to get around more easily; it enables us above all to see, to hear, to perceive and thus to conceive the present world more intensely. Tomorrow, it will enable us to act at a distance, beyond the human body's sphere of influence and that of its behavioural ergonomics...
...Doomed to inertia, the interactive being transfers his natural capacities for movement and displacement to probes and scanners which instantaneously inform him about a remote reality, to the detriment of his own faculties of apprehension of the real, after the example of the para- or quadriplegic who can guide by remote control – teleguide – his environment, his abode, which is a model of that home automation, of those 'Smart Houses' that respond to our every whim. Having been first mobile, then motorized, man will thus become motile, deliberately limiting his body's area of influence to a few gestures, a few impulses, like channel surfing.

In the passage above, Paul Virilio describes a central conception of his work, what might be
termed the prostheticizing image of speed. In this image of speed technologies are figured as
prosthetics which, as they are grafted on to the human body, begin to sap its vitality, and slowly hollow it out. From Virilio's perspective the acceleration of transportation and, most importantly, communication technologies paradoxically make us more immobile. Speed technologies turn the (...)

Read full paper in PDF


domenica 29 dicembre 2013

Judith Butler's Istanbul Lecture: ‘Freedom of Assembly, or Who are the People?’ September, 2013

Judith Butler's Istanbul Lecture: ‘Freedom of Assembly, or Who are the People?’ September, 2013 from Columbia Global Centers on Vimeo.

Watch Professor Judith Butler’s lecture, ‘Freedom of Assembly, or Who are the People?’ held on September 15, 2013 in Istanbul at Boğaziçi University. Judith Butler’s lecture was a collaboration of Columbia Global Centers | Turkey, the 13th Istanbul Biennial and Boğaziçi University. Prof. Butler was based at the Center from September 16-19, co-directing a workshop with Prof. Zeynep Gambetti as part of Columbia’s Women Creating Change initiative on ‘Rethinking Vulnerability and Resistance: Feminism and Social Change’. Learn more about Women Creating Change through this link: socialdifference.columbia.edu/projects/women-creating-change

sabato 28 dicembre 2013

Lapo Berti: interview on Crowd, Power and Post-democracy in the 21st Century


We have translated Lapo Berti's interview on populism and recent European political phenomena, held on 19 November 2013 with the authors of this blog and of Obsolete Capitalism. Here are the other interviews from the cycle which have been published in English: Parikka, Newman, Sampson, Choat and Toscano; and in Italian: Parikka, Newman, Sampson, Choat, Berti and Parisi & Terranova.

 EDIT: We collected the Berti's interview in one PDF file that you can download or read online. All interviews on digital populism - in English language (HERE !) and  Italian language  (HERE !) - are collected in one single file.

Crowd, Power and Post-democracy in the 21st Century 

Rural fascism and city or neighborhood fascism, youth fascism and war veteran's fascism... fascism of the couple, family, school, and office. Only the micro-fascism can answer the global question: 'Why does desire long for its repression? how can it desires its very own repression?'

—Gilles Deleuze, Fèlix Guattari, A thousand plateaus, pg.271

    On the micro-fascism

    OC Let us start from the analysis Wu Ming set out in their brief essay Grillismo: Yet another right-wing cult coming from Italy and which interprets Grillo’s Five Star Movement as a new authoritarian right-wing faction. Why did the desire for change of much of the electorate long once again for its very repression? We seem to witness the re-affirmation of Wilhelm Reich’s thought: at a given moment in history the masses wanted fascism. The masses have not been deceived: they have understood very well the danger of authoritarianism; but they have voted it anyway. Even more worrying is that the authoritarian Berlusconi's Freedom People (PDL) and Grillo’s Five Star Movement (M5S) conquer more than half of the Italian electorate together. A very similar situation arose in the UK in May 2013, with the UKIP’s exploit in the latest local elections. Why and in what measure are the toxins of authoritarianism and micro-fascism present in contemporary European society?
LB Empty Democracy. We have long since ceased to live in a political regime that can be defined genuinely democratic with regards to the way citizens elect their representatives and monitor their work. This means that citizens are now denied the chance to lead the process by which decisions are relevant to the community. In some extreme cases, like the Italian one, they are also subtracted from the formal power to choose their own representatives which should be the hallmark of a representative democracy and an inalienable political value. Paradoxically in most cases this power seems to be strictly adhered to, but in reality the actual power is permanently transferred into other hands and the citizen is only given an opportunity to participate to the farce of democratic elections. A carnivalesque celebration of a four- or five-year long privation of any form of control on the objectives pursued by the elected representatives and on the ways these objectives are achieved. No democratic regime has probably never been effective in creating a real 'people's power' — except in nascent stages. However it can be said that during certain periods, which vary from country to country, the delegation to the elected ones has been exercised in a way that used to represent an acceptable compromise where an actual popular will was able to determine with accuracy the objectives of the public action and the exercise of the governmental power. It is no longer so in any of the countries that we still call democracies.

The return of the elite. For a long time now - and not just in Italy - the power of government has been steadily requisitioned by elites who derive their strength from holding a dominance in the economic, political and social setting. These groups, generally interconnected and characterised by a considerable exchangeability of the positions that contributes to their stability, form an oligarchy that has its own fundamental elements in finance as well as its founding ties. To fully understand the scope of this process, we need to realise that globalization is not the result of spontaneous market dynamics as it is often claimed but rather a landing place consciously pursued by the world economic elites to avoid the possible interference of political constraints and the limits imposed by the national courts in which the old and obsolete power of the states expresses itself. 
Globalization is first of all the creation of an area free from politics and law in which the financial oligarchy can freely unfold its plans for wealth and power. It is the extreme result of a war that was fought throughout the XX century between those who wanted to build a control of the politics on the world of economics and finance - in the name and on behalf of the community - and the economic elites who eagerly pursued  the return to the pre-crisis status of laissez-faire. The break was represented by Roosevelt's New Deal and the decades of the social democratic compromise that followed the Second World War inspired by the Keynesian doctrine. The attempt was to make possible the coexistence of democracy and capitalism in a situation where the state acted as a regulator of social conflicts through the medium of public welfare. Since the beginning this breakthrough - imposed by the trauma of the Great Depression - was perceived from one part of the world-capitalist-elites as a dangerous drift able to jeopardize the survival of the capitalist system, therefore some projects of revanche were brought about, as the thirty years old neo-liberalism which then flew into the grand scheme of globalization.This is the result - today confirmed at a universal level with the formation of a global hidden oligarchy - of a long process that saw the formation and affirmation of the power of the elites in all spheres of social life. This process - of which there are plenty of signs throughout the period that saw the spread of democracy throughout the world- began to coincide with the first major wave of democratization which occurred as a reaction to the crisis of '29 being it perceived as a clear manifestation of the limits of the laissez-faire capitalism. From the moment it became clear that the leaders of the capitalistic world, starting from the American ones, were under attack, initiatives to establish a line of resistance against "excessive" demands of the democracy or against the project to put under control the initiatives of industrial and financial capitalism started to take form. Throughout the West, the political parties were sucked into the process of social penetration of the elites and have become the ganglion cells of the elite power, transforming themselves into powerful elites, custodian of the conferred power in the representative democracies by the vote of the citizens and empowered to exercise the faculty of government on behalf of and in the interests of the above-mentioned capitalist elites in return for an involvement in the economic power and in the wealth it wields.The degeneration of the democratic systems has been produced and driven from the subjection of the leaders of the parties to the strategies of the economic elites . The parties, even those more popular as the mass parties, turned out to be permeable to the economic and financial power through their leaders . Corruption has permanently installed in the political landscape as an instrument of perversion of democratic mechanisms in favour of the interests of the ruling elites. The response of the people has taken many forms .The main one was an estrangement from a vote more and more perceived as a useless if not ridiculous act in front of the impermeability of a political world that has become entirely self-referential. We generally tend to consider the abstention from vote as a moving away from politics. It is not said. It may also be the product of a political awareness over the average that leads into skepticism in a faster and clearer way. In democracy the result does not change. When you start voting slapdash because there is no longer any hope of making your voice heard it means that something is irretrievably broken in the mechanism of representation. And when -as in the case of the last Italian elections- abstention reaches nearly half of those entitled to vote it means that the break is serious and that it is very unlikely to be reversible in the short term.
The second reaction is even more insidious because it tends to transform and even to distort the entire democratic ethos. It is the populist response which shows increasingly conservative and anti-democratic connotations -if not reactionary- even when its roots stretch into the ground of the left wing area. Populism becomes a viable perspective when you create a huge void in the relationship between the expectations and the needs of the citizens and the political life which finds its only expression in the abstention from voting or in the renounce to participate in what is now perceived as an empty ritual: the mandate to the representatives of the people. Populism makes its way when citizens lose hope of being able to be protagonists of the democratic life and take refuge in the search for a surrogate who represents their aspirations and who generally takes the shape of a figure of salvation, of a character which is imposed for his/her communicative skills, very often enhanced or even constructed by the media.
In Italy we have two forms of populism today; they seem very different on the surface but are essentially homogeneous from the point of view of the impulses that foster them and the social- political consequences that they bring about .They are the result of the crisis of XX century politics based on the ability of large mass parties to reflect and represent the social composition generated from Fordism. The traditional parties have become an oligarchic self-referential power aimed at the reproduction of an immovable ruling class. Moreover the interests of the different social groups have gone into the background replaced by a dense network of patronage. Large segments of the population have lost the confidence that the solution to social problems can come from the parties. The rites of the politics have become an abstruse game to the majority of the population. The populist parties have been looking for shortcuts, direct and simplified solutions. They have prepared the ground for the advent of miracle workers through the fiction of a direct relationship with the people and with the supposed willingness to set the agenda according to what people really wanted and through the game of surveys or the illusion of democracy on the web. In this regard Grillo and Berlusconi are identical. They both have paradoxically detected a desire for a real change and for the modernization of the country in the midst of primeval fears and anger but they have folded this purpose to their personal affirmation. Therefore the originally animated pulse for a spirit of reform has turned into a conservative result which makes people wait for the messianic single man who will save and find solutions. A push toward populist outcomes is probably inherent in the type of society that have been forged by the process of globalization. The discomfort that grabs millions of people when they perceive that their lives do not depend only by neighbourly relations altogether but by what millions of strangers scattered in different places of the planet do and decide, the anguish that results in front of a destiny we do not feel more in control of but perceive as threatened by external dark forces, the feeling of helplessness that we feel in the face of a world that has become too complex, all these impulses result in a generalized unthinking request of simplification. And here again populism reappears with its enticing selection of shortcuts, with the illusion of being able to delegate someone the solution of all problems in exchange for visceral, fideistic adhesion which does not necessarily require the political reasoning or the well-aware commitment of the individuals. In this sense populisms are always right-side and undemocratic.
    1919, 1933, 2013. On the crisis
    OC In 2008 Slavoj Zizek said that when the normal run of things is traumatically interrupted, the field is open for a ‘discursive’ ideological competition. In Germany in the early 1930s Hitler won the competition to determine which narrative would explain the reasons for the crisis of the Weimar Republic — the Jewish conspiracy and the corruption of political parties. Zizek ends his reflection by stating that the expectations of the radical left to get scope for action and gain consent may be deceptive as populist or racist formations will prevail: the Greek Golden Dawn, the Hungarian Fidesz, the French Front National, the UK Independence Party are examples. Italy has had farcical groups such as the Lega Nord or the recent Five Star Movement, a bizarre rassemblement that seems to combine Reverend Jones People's Temple with Syriza, or ‘revolutionary boyscoutism’ with the disciplinarism of the societies of control. How can one escape the crisis? What discursive, possibly-winning narratives should be developed? Are the typically Anglo-Saxon neo-Keynesian politics an answer or, on the countrary, is it the new authoritarian populism that will prevail?


LB If, as I sustain, we are faced with a crisis of paradigm, in that some parameters of the capitalist paradigm at work until the financial crisis of 2008 have exploded and the main processes which structured its ‘mechanics’ no longer run, and therefore, the paradigm as a whole is no longer able to run the society, it follows that (1) the analysis should be focused on the symptoms that herald a new paradigm and (2) collective imagination should commit to project possible developments. Which in the case of Italy, but the same applies to the entire capitalist asset, means nobody should interfere with this inevitable transition in order to influence its outcome on the basis of traditional economic policies, whatever the doctrine behind them and considering a fundamental acquisition of collective experience from the ‘short century’, namely that there is no possibility to influence the economic and social processes according to a rational plan — to the extent of guiding them toward predetermined goals. Government-implemented policies are but a channel, however powerful, through which an actor, the political apparatus, seeks to interfere with the processes originating from the interaction of millions of decisions which are constantly being made ​due to the most diverse reasons. Apprised of this fundamental limit characterising the ‘global society ‘ we live in, it is valuable to indicate some directions in which it may be worthwhile pursuing the maximum social pressure that we are able to exert.

An issue that needs to be eradicated from the old order by an external action - as there is no mechanism within the system that can effectively or independently counter it - is that of privatized economic and financial power, in particular as it acts outside of any context of rules and, therefore, jurisdiction. This is an emptiness that characterizes the constitutional system of our democracies. When constitutionalism was born economic power had not been taken into account, perhaps because it was a vector of the change of regime that was taking place: the aim was defusing the socially destructive force of powers fostered by the new political order, subjecting them to the rules and mechanisms of balance. The institutional context in which economic power was left free to develop and practice in its own exclusive interest, triggered the development of powerful economic activities driven by the interest of those who foresaw a new powerful tool to access wealth - once a monopoly of the landowners.
This issue is centenarian and it entered the political agenda when Americans became wary of the disruptive power of trusts and therefore invented a means of control called Antitrust, an instrument supposed to tame this very power, bringing it back among the democratic processes. We know how it went. The Antitrust, today extended to almost every country in the world, proved to be little more than worth the paper it is printed on: always late, always chasing the metamorphosis of capitalist enterprise and above all incapable, today, of effectiveness on a global level.
Since Antitrust was established, large firms that abuse their monopoly power, however temporary or permanent, local or global, have always been looking for solutions, tricks, organizational changes in order to evade the rules and control of so-called trustbusters — organizations that oversee the proper functioning of the market. To an extent, globalization is the result of the pressure of large companies involved in circumventing nationally imposed rules. An improper competition between jurisdictions aiming to attract global enterprises arose, together with tax havens and a shadow banking system which, in turn, encouraged the formation of a global finance, also released from the rules that states are trying to put in place .

A - possibly global - movement needs to be born. One that knowingly places this issue at the centre of information and awareness campaigns. Occupy Wall Street and all its possible variations in different countries are not enough, even though these spasms are the lively demonstration that the global civil consciousness is far ahead of the academic and political discourse. A different capitalism, for this and nothing else can be considered,​ in line with the new demands of the global society can only arise on the basis of a new constitutional pact that emplaces the perception of a perimeter to be placed around economic activities, starting with the level of wealth, inequality and economic power that a company is able to tolerate in order to maintain its cohesion and attractiveness.
The second point is a joint or, better, a projection of the first. A sustainable capitalism can only be the product of a collective mobilization large enough to induce significant disruptions in the trajectories of current economy, left to the dominant influence of strong actors, big business and Governments. Through the viral multiplication of (small) individual choices, it is within the market, and not against or out of it, that the lines of an alternative model can assert themselves, forcing large and globalised companies to acknowledge a framework of preferences determined by the will of citizens rather than induced by the wild use of advertising. First and foremost needed is a cultural revolution which generates a collective awareness of the need to impart a powerful push for change to our model of society, regaining a taste for a quality life that is compatible with the economical use of resources and rich in values.
    On the organisation
    OC In his La Peste brune Daniel Guérin argues that the conquest of Hitler’s power in Germany in 1933 occurred primarily due to "micro-organizations giving him "an unequaled, irreplaceable ability to penetrate every cell of society." The movement of Mr. Grillo has branched into society thanks to the territorial formula of meet-ups borrowed directly from the American politician Howard Dean (see Wired). However the movement is even different from the meet-ups: is it possible to propose an analysis of its escalation as a new-energy carrier in swirling mutation (Félix Guattari would have called it "the absolute motion” of Grillo-machine)? What segments, threads, streams, leaps and heterodoxies make up Grillo’s abstract war machine?
LB I find it quite difficult to grant the status of a social / political movement to Grillismo. Not that I underestimate the extent and novelty of a phenomenon which causes turmoil in the traditional categories of political analysis. As a simple observer of grillismo, I have the impression that it is the joint, and transient, product of very diverse processes cutting across Italian society. I would suggest four of these which are, as always in social realities, interconnected and partially overlap.

The first is the divergence that took place among a growing share of the public opinion and the political class. This separation has gradually eroded trust in political parties as possible tools to guide society, even imperfectly, towards shared goals and achieve the greater good for the greater number of people. The generalized lack of trust in the political system has sometimes resulted in an open hostility towards its main representatives. The rejection of parties has often taken the form of a visceral reaction, complete with the dismissal of any form of mediation and, therefore, tools of representation — without which it is unlikely for a democracy to survive. The widespread political culture has impoverished to the point of becoming rude indifference, marked by brutal but effective slogans on the lines of ‘they are all the same / they are all thieves’ and the highly popular ‘vaffa’, or ‘f**k off’. Political debate and reasoning, which together with the taste for mediation and compromise are the essence of politics, have been replaced by a stream of invective. The right of free speech, sacrosanct in itself, gave rise to a political Babel without construct, to which Social Networks contributed substantially.
A new space was born, and this is my second point, in which the most extravagant solutions were advanced in conjunction with an illusion of a direct democracy, enacted by social networking instruments operating on a virtually unlimited scale, thus overcoming the very inherent limitation of this form of democracy. The contortions of grillismo show how uneven this road is. However, this politically empty space exposed a positive phenomenon that is both a resource and a problem: the new will to embark on politics of a growing number of, especially young, individuals reluctant to delegate and therefore to accept representative rites. The best kind of grillismo is the one that stimulates these energies, starting points of the restoration of a democratic life that can tackle the scandal of non-constitutionalised powers, from economy to communications. One of the key political issues today is how to input such energies into the channels of representation in novel, or at least refurbished, ways.
The third observation is that grillismo, at this time, is mainly a vehicle available to those who wish to express their detachment from the current ruling class, and not just the political one. As such its rhetorics are re-appropriated by the electorate of the left, exasperated by the inadequateness of their representatives.
While my first observations feed into the sphere of questions and expectations flowing into the FSM channel, the last point I wish to make concerns the way in which the grillismo tries to answer them. Here we have, and without any doubts, an eclectic populism that seeks to convey the protest in an attempt to seize power, exerted by an illegitimate team, and most importantly played by a comic persona whose role as a showman is used to plastically represent the protest and easily obtain consent in the piazza. The contents are not supposed to embody a perspective of a functional society in the interests of the majority, but only to capture an immediate form of consensus, without the fatigue of building on the convergence of a coherent program.

In extreme synthesis, the grillismo presents itself as two-faced phenomenon. On the one hand, it converges elements of a protest and a disapproval arising from the vacuum left by a political class that largely manages the interests of an oligarchy — one built on economic relationships. On the other hand, it attempts to turn the crisis of representational politics into a form of mediated direct democracy behind which hides the specter of the charismatic leader who lives in symbiosis with his people. A people solely entitled to applause. The repeatedly expressed and delirious will to conquer 100% of the electorate is the utmost example of the negation of politics and of a totalitarian pulse.
    On tidal waves
    OC Franco Berardi wrote on MicroMega.net that the defeat of “liberist” anti-Europe begins in Italy with the last general election. According to him Italians would have said: “We will not pay the debt”. Insolvence. According to your point of view, what happened in Italy on February 24th, 2013? Gianluca Passarelli conducted an electoral study for Istituto Cattaneo that showed how the Five Star Movement electoral datum was the most homogeneous in terms of votes on the whole national territory. The “party nationalization”, defined as the extent to which parties compete with similar strength across sub-national geographic units, obtained a score of 0.9 out of 1, more than the PDL (0.889) and the left-wing Democratic Party (PD) (0.881). How could a newly-born movement not only compete with, but even beat well-established voting machines such as the ones of Mr. Berlusconi and of the organized left?
LB Simply put, the mechanism of representation jammed and stopped producing meaningful results. The electoral results of February 24 represent both a confirmation of this jam and a point of non return within the Italian political system.
The most direct way to describe the problem of representation is to use the metaphor of the market. Because of a number of easily identifiable reasons, the political offer, or ‘supply’ and the ‘demand’ drifted apart so much that a large proportion of citizens - nearly half of the potential voters - has ceased to express interests in voting, while other large shares of voters grabble, trying to articulate the anger that they have built up. Some additional considerations:
  • The ideological barriers within which both traditional parties and, albeit to varying degrees, novel ones try to attract consensus no longer reflect the composition of our society or the configuration of social interests. These are but a facade masking sectional interests which are not always commendable and facilitate an inept ruling class to maintain their positions of (personal) power. In this regard, forces must emerge that are capable of giving a coherent expression to homogeneous aggregations of interests in the name of shared perspectives. The bodies of the representation must go back to representing something actually existent and active in society. We have not reached this point yet. The extreme disempowerment of autonomous politics we are witnessing is still able to ensure the survival of a ruling political class that can nonetheless stand on the last shreds of consensus that social inertia still grants. The lack of votes has not been fruitful so far, as it is absorbed and compensated for by a purely formal operation of the mechanisms of democratic representation. I do not foresee radical enough changes.
  • The atomization of the social composition combined with the oligarchic involution of politics and the intrusiveness of an economic power capable of dictating the agenda of governments, as well as the disappearance of the ideological tie proper of popular cultures of the XX century, represent a difficult and likely insuperable obstacle for the recovery of large areas of social consensus gathered around political plans complex enough to be projected as a possible form of government. Ephemeral alliances prevail: they are limited in range and overall incapable of having a significant impact on those power structures inherited from the era of the social-democratic compromise. Occupy Wall Street is a prime example as, while appealing to the interests of the overwhelming majority of citizens, it fails to express an effective political opposition. The only solution that seemingly offers a possible way out of the ‘ghetto’ of political irrelevance for the State is to reconstruct the ‘society of the middle’ which used to saturate the network of representation and which today is largely overwhelmed by the implosion of our political system. This means starting from the bottom, from the forms of both aggregation through which changes of behaviour and lifestyle occur and resistance of the economic actors who operate in a territorial dimension aspiring to confront the challenges of globalization.
  • The biggest and almost insurmountable problem in Italy is that of a society which evolved in the shelter of a genuine process of modernisation, enabling the survival of cultures, customs, behaviors, values and forms of relationships that drew from a pre-modern social context and established themselves to ensure the survival of both an individual and a community in a world barely touched by the capitalist modes and the pressures of globalization. The unfinished modernization has strengthen a series of hostile attitudes among the deepest layers of society, where people’s opinions form, which seemed to reject the ‘modern’ in all its forms, in spite of naively getting excited for its ‘inventions’. They inflamed with the fascist narrative, went through, almost unchanged, the great cauldron of Demo-Christian reformism and returned to exalt the anomaly of Berlusconism who revealed, once and for all, their populist and undemocratic fund. They speak today and did yesterday for a good half of the Italian people and when triggered have influenced, and still influence, the destinies of the country.
    On the missing people
    OC Mario Tronti states that ‘there is populism because there is no people.’ That of the people is an enduring theme which Tronti disclaims in a very Italian way: ‘the great political forces use to stand firmly on the popular components of the social history: the Catholic populism, the socialist tradition, the diversity in communism. Since there was the people, there was no populism.’ Paul Klee often complained that even in historical artistic avant-gardes ‘it was people who were lacking.’ However the radical critique to populism has led to important results: the birth of a mature democracy in America; the rise of the theory and the practice of revolution in the Tsarist Empire, a country plagued by the contradictions of a capitalist development in an underdeveloped territory (Lenin and bolshevism). Tronti carries on in his tranchant analysis of the Italian and European backgrounds: ‘In today's populism, there is no people and there is no prince. It is necessary to beat populism because it obscures the relations of power.’ Through its economic-mediatic-judicial apparatuses, neopopulism constantly shapes “trust-worthy people” similar to the "customers portfolio" of the branded world of neoliberal economy: Berlusconi’s “people” have been following the deeds of Arcore’s Sultan for twenty years; Grillo’s followers are adopting similar all-encompassing identifying processes, giving birth to the more confused impulses of the Italian social strata. With institutional fragility, fluctuating sovereignties and the oblivion of left-wing dogmas (class, status, conflict, solidarity, equality) how can we form people today? Is it possible to reinvent an anti-authoritarian people? Is it only the people or also the politics itself to lack?
LB I do not know if you can make a people; the democratic people was perhaps a great invention that persuaded us, for a while, that the issue of rights and individual freedoms had finally been resolved. The people, in fact, is a metaphor that tries to give unity to what is not unitary: society is far from a unitary body and rather undergoes a myriad of cracks, splits, joints which transform it in depth and often emerge in the form of contrasts and local conflicts, intermittent or permanent, eventually finding their way of recomposition through the thousand streams of political representation. This is at any given moment in history the very essence of a society and what determines its evolutionary dynamics.
However we need(ed) politics, that activity and accompanying institutions able to reduce social complexity and rearrange it as a subject of possible decisions. Which is exactly what seems to be missing now: over the last thirty years the political practice drifted away from social dynamics, crossed with the sphere of economic interests and has become self-referential. The process of public decision-making, fundamental output of a democratic society as much yesterday as today, has become the preserve, or private affair, of a few small groups of elites, including the political one, interconnected with each other.
The rogue individualism that thanks to the globally dominant oligarchy gained momentum and became the most widespread and shared ideology, even at a popular level, undermined those elements of connection, culture, politics and organization which, taken together, formed the basic social nexus of a collective life. Society almost disintegrated and seemed to have lost the ability to produce co-operative values​ and behaviours.
    On control
    OC In Postscript on the Societies of Control, published in 1990, Gilles Deleuze states that, thanks to the illuminating analyses of Michel Foucault, a new diagnosis of contemporary Western society has emerged. Deleuze's analysis is as follows: control societies have replaced disciplinary societies at the beginning of the twentieth century. He writes that ‘marketing is now the instrument of social control and it forms the impudent breed of our masters.’ Let us evaluate who stands beyond two very successful electoral adventures such as Forza Italia (Berlusconi’s first party) and M5S: respectively Publitalia 80 owned by Marcello Dell'Utri, and Casaleggio Asssociati owned by Gianroberto Casaleggio. The incontrovertible fact that two marketing companies stand behind these political projects reinforces Deleuze’s analysis. Mechanisms of control, media events such as exit polls and infinite surveys, im/penetrable databases, data as commodities, continuous spin doctoring, influencers that lead consensus on the net, opaque bots, digital squads, dominant echo-chambering. Evil media. These are the determinations of post-ideological (post-democratic?) neoliberalism. The misery of the new control techniques competes only with that of the glass house of transparency (web-control, of course). Jacques Ranciere says we live in the epoch of post- politics: how can we get out of the neo-liberal cage and free ourselves from the ideological consensus of its electoral products? What will the reconfiguration of left-wing politics be after the exhaustion of Marxist hegemony?
LB I am not persuaded that neo-liberalism created a cage-like situation. Today we witness the ultimate stage of a process that has seen the emergence of an unchanged ideology drawing from the large family of ‘liberalism’, but which in reality shares but a few points with classical liberalism. This ideology was inspired, endorsed and most of all supported by some epicenters of world capitalism that have set themselves the goal to regain cultural hegemony as a means to assert their economic and political dominion. A cultural hegemony that was turned into driving force of a large and decisive work of dismantling the ‘social democratic pact’ or so-called ‘Keynesian compromise’, in other words the ‘mixed economy’. This was the only time and the only form, with all its variants, which granted life to democratic governments that could ensure cohesion and social progress on the basis of a compromise with the forces of global capitalism. As these powers had been weakened by the Great Depression, they had agreed to reluctantly share the premises of a social project that limited their freedom to act and, more importantly, asked them to co-operate in the construction of a more equitable reality.
Following the financial crisis of 2008 we now find ourselves at a similar turning point. If the global society is not be able to field enough energy to impose yet a new compromise, the discourse of global economy, and hence of world politics, will be jeopardized by the oligarchy that emerged victorious from the confront with the Keynesian compromise, giving life to a world order based on the dynamics of a market on which a small group of mega-organizations linked by a dense network of (mostly hidden) relations will exert domain.
The victory of this accumulation of interest on a global scale is a consequence of the ideological war fought at all levels to conquer cultural hegemony around the world. As a result the major ideologies that had innervated the political struggle of the XX century weakened and had not been able to face or even acknowledge the challenge, failing to radically renew their analysis and prospect. The most serious consequence of such a defeat is that the collapse of socialist ideology in particular dragged the whole political apparatus away, and firstly the political parties, a key protagonist of the last century’s conflicts. In representative democracies the Parties had the function to represent the needs and aspirations of the people, to organize consent, to define the ruling class, to organize governments and formulate their programs, to monitor the implementation of laws. Without these basic functions a democracy does not exist, or rather turns into something else. This is our situation today; real power has been transferred elsewhere and is exerted without any legitimacy, without any democratic control, in a mostly hidden fashion.
At present time in all societies of the world citizens are taking on the role, more or less consciously, of remedying to the situation by, for instance, re-establishing a communication channel with the democratic branch of formal power. However most initiatives remain hopelessly powerless and hardly deal with the problem of a huge democratic rebirth.
Both the economic and related political processes of the last thirty years have disintegrated the social fabric that kept Western communities together, threatening the formation of a collective will that can be translated, with the limitations of the case, into a form of government of social processes.
The illusion, typical of early modernity, of a political system that is able to guide society towards the goals of a shared project has vanished. As gone are the days of politics understood as a project. The void left is great and not only for the failures that it produced, the illusions it fed or the suffering it imposed; it is a great void because nobody can fill it and because those elites that form the global oligarchy are left scampering in it.
The decline of left wing culture, whether of Marxist, socialist or communist origins, depends on the absence, except in some cases, of an actual confront with the real liberalism and the consequent failure in advancing a market culture of their own. Thinking - something the left did not do often in recent decades - of the market meant considering it as a transient institution, a crude, barbaric kingdom reigned by the animal spirits of capitalism, hence destined to be supplanted by a rational order pivoting on the role of the state. There wasn’t the analytical intelligence to understand that the market is, in fact, a necessary institution in a capitalist structure and one that, properly understood, could tame the animal spirits and make them compatible with a democratic social order. Perhaps capitalism was intended as a temporary phenomenon, expected to be quickly passed, instead of a supporting structure of our economies and societies destined to last, although through continuous crisis and metamorphosis. To think capitalism was given over as it was to identify possible modalities of its coexistence with a society rich of democratic institutions in the era of global challenge. As a result, the political culture of the left doomed itself to irrelevance and sought refuge in a sort of reserve inside which, sometimes, it seems satisfied, away from the harsh challenges of the present and in the comfortable remembrance of times gone by.
What strikes me of the attitudes of much of the left today is the stubborn obstinacy of clinging to an ideology which is mostly unable to grasp the essentials of our society and therefore unimaginative of corrective measures that bear a coherent view of the existing reality. We behave as if we could still engage, with voluntaristic stretching, in solutions from an imagined past, a time deemed mythical by the founders of a community that has long dissolved under the blows of a conflict mutating in forms and contents. The ultimate political defeat of the left derives from this cultural void, result of an unjustified sense of anthropological superiority that alienated it from the rest of society. It goes without saying that the political culture of the left can not produce an analysis of social composition and instead continues to invent new enemies and ephemeral conflicts which dissolve without a trace.
To break free from the neoliberal hegemony that has emerged in the last three decades — as a result of a cultural battle waged long before, a civilizing battle of opposite sign is needed, one that stimulates a vision of society both shared and sharable. It is not an easy challenge; the common people do not normally have the same means to campaign as the neoliberal pundits do. A starting point, however, is to abandon any ambition to recreate conflict scenarios from the previous century, giving rise to a ‘left’ alternative to a ‘right‘ which also lost its solid roots in social realities. Furthermore, a careful enquiry of the dividing line along which two fundamental ideas of society and two opposed understanding of the exercise of power alternate must be practiced. To do so we must break another myth of the left: the idea that the matrix of social conflict driving history is always and solely the configuration of relationships that are defined in the workplace. Work is still a fundamental dimension of social life, but is no longer one that structures its fundamental dynamics.
At present, the fault line that bisects the social body and writes the geometry of power relations no longer passes through the geography of their production relationships and positions - employees ⁄ managers, workers ⁄ staff, employed ⁄ unemployed, manual workers ⁄ intellectuals, labourer ⁄ freelancer - but along the ridge that ultimately separates those who own the fate of the world, moving enormous resources and powerful organizations, from everyone else. 99% against 1%. The powerless mass against the totalising oligarchy.
The future conflicts, if any at all, will occupy the squares first and the workplaces later; the contents will be the quality of our lives, the survival of our environment and, above all, the need to set limits to an oligarchic power that has taken over the world without knowing how to handle it. Today’s individuals - and not the masses, incapable of expressing subjectivity - must acknowledge the fact that their lives, made very interdependent by globalization, can be free and proper only if cooperating on a global scale, rediscovering those tools of expression of a collective will that the first democracy gave us but could not protect from the elites around them. We can not do without politics as a culture booster and an instrument to tame those powers threatening society. Nor can we do, presumably, without parties; although not today’s ones but intermediate bodies which empower the role of individuals turning it into the engine of politics.
 

Lapo Berti, Italian economist, worked at the Italian Antitrust Authority from March 1993 to July 2010. He has been Professor of Economic and Financial Politics. He has worked on problems of monetary theory and history of economic thought as well as on economic politics. He is the author of L’Antieuropa delle monete (with A. Fumagalli, Il Manifesto 1993) and of Saldi di fine secolo. Le privatizzazioni in Italia (Ediesse, 1998). Most recently he has published  Il mercato oltre le ideologie (Università Bocconi Editore, 2006), Le stagioni dell'antitrust (with Andrea Pezzoli,Università Bocconi Editore 2010) and Trattatello sulla felicità (LUISS University Press, 2013).  From 1964 to 1966 he worked with the left workerist group of the magazine "Classe Operaia" of which Mario Tronti was one of the founders (with Massimo Cacciari and Alberto Asor Rosa) and during the Seventies he was one of the editors of the militant projects  Primo Maggio.


Bibliography 
1) On micro-fascism
Wu Ming, Yet another right-wing cult coming from Italy, via Wu Ming blog.
Wilhelm Reich, Psicologia di massa del fascismo - Einaudi, 2002 
Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Mille Piani, Castelvecchi, 2010 
Gilles Deleuze, L’isola deserta e altri scritti, Einaudi, 2007

2) On the crisis
Slavoj Zizek, First as Tragedy, then as Farce, Verso, Uk, 2009 (p. 17) 

3) On organisation
Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Millepiani (Castelvecchi, III edizione, Novembre 2010): Nono Piano: 1933 Micro-politica e segmenterietà. (p. 265)
Daniel Guérin, The Brown Plague, DUP, Usa, 1994
Gilles Deleuze, Fèlix Guattari, Apparato di cattura - Sezione IV di Millepiani (Castelvecchi, I edizione, maggio 1997): Piano 15: Regole concrete e macchine astratte (p. 150)

4) On tidal waves
Franco Berardi, La sconfitta dell’anti-Europa liberista comincia in Italia, Micromega
Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Millepiani (p. 249)

5) On the missing people
Mario Tronti, C’è populismo perché non c’è popolo, in Democrazia e Diritto, n.3-4/2010. 
Paul Klee, Diari 1898-1918. La vita, la pittura, l’amore: un maestro del Novecento si racconta, Net, 2004 
Gilles Deleuze, Fèlix Guattari, Millepiani (in '1837. Sul Ritornello' pg. 412-413)

6) On control
Jacques Ranciere, Disagreement. Politics and Philosophy, UMP, Usa, 2004
Gilles Deleuze, Pourparler, Quodlibet, Ita, 2000 (p. 234, 'Poscritto sulle società di controllo') 
Saul Newman, 'Politics in the Age of Control', in Deleuze and New Technology, Mark Poster and David Savat, Edinburgh University Press, Uk, 2009, pp. 104-122. 

Painting: Stelios Faitakis