[csaa-forum] Italian Effect reviews

[Brett Neilson]

The following reviews of the Italian Effect conference (9-11 September 
2004) were published in the Italian newspaper _Il Manifesto_ on 28 September.

http://www.ilmanifesto.it

These are collaborative translations, written after discussion between the 
authors. The first is my translation of Ida's piece in _Il Manifesto_. The 
second is the English version of my piece, which has been slightly altered 
after reading Ida's translation for _Il Manifesto_.

Archived in Italian at:

http://www.rekombinant.org/article.php?sid=2405
http://www.rekombinant.org/article.php?sid=2404




Fragility, Body, Love. A Practical Lexicon for the Italian Effect, a 
Conference in Sydney on the Influence of Radical Italian Thought over the 
Past Decade.

 From the Italian laboratory of the 1970s to the global laboratory of a 
politics opposed to the forms of war.

IDA DOMINIJANNI

There is an effect of globalisation that neither its most enthusiastic 
advocates nor its most apocalyptic critics manage to specify exactly; that 
is, what it provokes on the plane of thought. As in other fields, 
technology here tells us a lot but not everything. What we confront is not 
simply improved ease of communication and the diffusion of ideas, sources, 
and texts. With the exchange of experiences and direct contact with people, 
contexts, places, times, and other seasons comes a different mode of 
production of thought. Contrary to common belief, this effect is neither 
one of bland homogenisation nor easy contamination. Rather there is a risky 
but fruitful displacement that changes perspectives, alters dimensions, 
adds importance to neglected particularities, forces a rough confrontation 
with unfamiliar forms of otherness, and liberates mental associations that 
have been held under the surface. In Sydney, in the course of an 
international conference dedicated to the 'Italian effect' on radical 
political thought, all of this occurred, thanks partly to the welcoming 
environment of a 'global city' in which multicultural exchanges and 
translations (linguistic, political, and artistic) are at once an everyday 
necessity and a virtue.

The conference was organised by five researchers from a consortium of four 
universities, all of whom have an interest in the Italian political and 
intellectual scene: Brett Neilson (who writes alongside me here), Ilaria 
Vanni, Michael Goddard, Melinda Cooper, and Timothy Rayner. At stake was an 
attempt to verify the hypothesis that a shift is underway from the 
prevalent influence of French thought (Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida) on 
political studies in Australia-and more generally in the Anglo-American 
world-to an interest in Italian thought or, more precisely, what the 
organisers call, following the title of a book by Michael Hardt and Paolo 
Virno, 'radical Italian thought.' This encompasses the _operaismo_ of the 
60s and 70s, the _postoperaismo_ of the 90s, cyberculture, and the thought 
of sexual difference-in short, the legacy of the Italian 'political 
laboratory' from 68 onwards, rethought in the wake of the worldwide success 
of Hardt and Negri's _Empire_, the international reputation of the work of 
Agamben (especially in Australia where the theme of the concentration camp 
is imposed by the historical trauma of the relation with the Aboriginals 
and the political trauma surrounding the treatment of refugees), the 
explosion of the political potentiality of the Internet and mediactivism 
(particularly in a continent where, more than elsewhere, the Internet has 
meant a jump in quality for communication and associations), and the 
attention directed to Italian feminism (more alive than elsewhere thanks to 
the strong presence of Italian speaking female researchers in the 
universities).

The event, you will understand, was at risk of resulting in mere exegesis 
and idealisation of a political and theoretical patrimony. This would have 
been gratifying for us in Italy where there is still a tendency to label 
the 70s as the cursed decade, radical thinkers as 'wicked teachers,' the 
feminism of difference as an esoteric current, and so on. But it would not 
have been very useful for generating an exchange adequate to the present. 
Fortunately, the effect of displacement did its work, functioning to make 
the Italian laboratory a point of departure for rethinking the necessity of 
politics today (in a global situation that has already rendered out-of-date 
the premises from which 'radical Italian thought' departed in the 90s). 
Despite the elections that are soon to occur (the vote is on 9 October and 
the contest between Howard and Latham imitates that between Bush and 
Kerry), what counts most in a living intellectual context like that 
prepared by the researchers and students in Sydney is post-representative 
politics. And, in this respect, what rebounds most from the theatre of war 
is not the bombing of the Australian Embassy in Jakarta but the 
anthropological catastrophe that unfolds daily with images of torture and 
beheadings.

With a change of decade and a change of scene, there is also a change in 
the tone of antagonistic political thought. Under a sky in which Empire 
rediscovers flags and nationalist politics, the posthuman reveals itself as 
inhuman, the cyborg reincarnates itself as a kamikaze, and soldier Lyndie 
England tortures an Iraqi prisoner on a leash, can we still set Spinoza 
against Hobbes, bet on the future of a multitude that has never been 
crossed by the negative, keep alive a politics of desire, place trust in 
communication technologies and virtual agoras, or find value in sexual 
difference? 'The panorama has changed,' says Franco Berardi alias Bifo (who 
has also written about the conference on www.rekombinant.org) as he takes 
account of the Internet, mediactivism, and the theory of the cognitariat. 
The technological optimism of the 90s now encounters a double limit: the 
emphasis on virtual communication at the expense of the body and the 
emphasis on the infosphere at the expense of the psychosphere. 
Corporeality, sexuality, sensitivity, contact, emotionality, and the 
unconscious psychic elaboration of information have been cancelled in the 
name of cognitive power and communicative speed. Only now do the body, 
emotionality, and sexuality present us with the bill. From the theatre of 
war and the mediated settings of a politics of the imagination, we are 
manipulated from above. While, from below, we are unable to respond with 
practices that are equally capable of mobilising reason and unconscious, 
discourse and passion, body and mind.

Has the break between body and language, desire and rationality (from which 
modern politics has nourished itself since birth) also managed to insinuate 
itself in alternative postmodern politics? The risk exists and it is the 
same risk that feminism, at least on the Italian scene, registered from its 
beginning, when it 'cut' the political generation of 68 with a feminine 
exodus. How much more interesting it becomes today to rethink that cut, its 
effects, and the possibilities for renewed dialogue between women and men 
of that political generation and those that are forming now. It is a 
history that is partly written but that still remains to be written in the 
whole. The starting point would have to be the linguistic contaminations 
that move between 'radical thought' and the thought of sexual difference, 
but that nevertheless fail to lessen the distance on two crucial and 
connected points: the conception of subjectivity and the practices of 
change. It is not an accident, or so it seems to me, that under the sky of 
Sydney, in a milder climate than the Italian one (also as regards the 
political and intellectual exchange between women and men), some urgencies 
represented themselves in common. The need to put the body in first place. 
And the need to think the politics of love. Not, or not only, with the 
joyful boldness of the Vietnam era slogan: 'make love not war.' But with 
the awareness that the expropriating power of love is the only one capable 
of opposing the expropriating power of violence, and of turning the 
fragility and exposure of our 'precarious lives,' as Judith Butler calls 
them, to a relation with the other rather than to its annihilation.





Italy in Translation

Radical Thought Dislocated to the Antipodes

Language and practice, inheritance and utility of the Italian laboratory of 
movements for the elaboration of a politics capable of uniting body and 
language to meet the challenges of a globalised world

BRETT NEILSON

The 'Italian Effect' conference (9-11 September 2004) was an attempt to 
begin the task of inventing a present politics adequate to the era of 
permanent war, precarious lives, media torture, and postconstitutional 
democracy. Drawing on and taking inspiration from the panoply of 'radical 
thought' that has emerged from Laboratory Italy since the 1960s, the 
conference aimed to derive conceptual and political instruments not only to 
confront the current global situation but also to live in spite of it, to 
uncover modes of affect, imagination, and relation that might sneak beneath 
the screens of financial and military control. These are pressing ambitions 
to be sure, but ones approached with neither grandiosity nor desperation, 
under the blue skies of Sydney, far from the theatre of war in Iraq or the 
television studios of Berlusconi's Italy, but in no way outside the global 
logic of fear and command that encompasses both. What more tangible 
evidence of this connection than the way in which the conference's 
discussions were punctuated by news of two horrific (but by now almost 
expected) events: the abduction of the Italian female aid workers in 
Baghdad and the bombing of the Australian embassy in Jakarta. At a time 
when we have become so accustomed to the instantaneous mediation of distant 
horrors, horrors that always threaten to (and sometimes do) replicate 
themselves on our doorsteps, how does thought itself move about the globe? 
Does it arrive enthused and jetlagged like the international visitors who 
flew into Sydney for the 'Italian Effect' conference? Does it come dressed 
in ASCII characters like the messages we read on nettime or rekombinant? 
Must it, like the writings of Hardt and Negri, adopt the idiom of 'the 
international English' if it is to maximize its impact? All of these 
questions imply a politics, and each describes a mode of transmission and 
displacement that, alongside others, has facilitated the untimely global 
dissemination of 'radical Italian thought' over the past half-decade.

To assess the legacy and utility of the thought that has emerged from 
Laboratory Italy in a distant context is to ask questions about the limits 
and qualities of that thought, to 'provincialize' it, to identify both its 
possibilities for contagion with other theories and practices and its 
shortcomings in responding to questions and problems that are foreign to 
the Italian context. This process must involve always translation, not only 
in the linguistic sense but also in the wider political and cultural 
senses. And, as in all translation, there is something to be gained as well 
as lost. Nothing is more pretentious or ineffective in the Australian 
political context than the attempt to move concepts or strategies forged in 
Italy through to the practices of the local movements as if they were 
readily transportable commodities, thoughts extricated from contact with 
living bodies. How many social centres have failed in Sydney or in 
Melbourne? How many workers or youths have balked at the use of terms like 
'multitude' or 'social factory'? How many activists have idealized the 
expressions of the Italian movements, as if their impressive force and 
organization have never been crossed by negative feelings and actions such 
as fear, frustration, blockage, or (as was so clearly the case toward the 
end of the 1970s) violence?

The danger of attempting to separate language and thought from body and 
practice emerged as a consistent concern of the 'conference. Interventions 
by Ida Dominijanni and Susana Scarparo pushed this point as they explored 
the asymmetrical historical relation of the feminist philosophy of 
difference to _operaista_ and _postoperaista_ approaches. While Bifo, 
speaking in the context of media-activism, asked if the virtual 
communication that characterized the first phase of the global movement 
(from Seattle through to antiwar protests of early 2003) implied a mode of 
desexualization, a retreat from sensitivity that might prevent the 
construction of a zone of tenderness and love from which the present global 
conflict might be opposed. It was on this cusp between language and body 
that the collective thought of the conference turned in a surprisingly 
coherent affective register, bringing together academics, activists, 
computer geeks, and members of the local Italian community in an unusual 
and unprecedented way.

What practical directions can be salvaged from the analyses, discussions, 
conceptual inventions, and encounters that took place in Sydney? First, 
there is the need to ask what can be done with the political knowledge and 
practices that have formed themselves on the net? How can the contacts and 
communicative channels established in the cybernetic realm be returned to 
the body and the bios in ways that recognize the mutual implication of 
political relation with experiences of emotion, sensation, and desire? For 
Ned Rossiter this was primarily a question of the imagination and 
construction of new institutions, institutions like the Sarai Media Centre 
in New Dehli that emerge from organized practices of networking. Others, 
such as Tim Rayner and James Arvanitakis, identified the path ahead in a 
critical engagement with the concept of the multitude. For Ilaria Vanni and 
Marcello Tarì, who examined the aestheticized practices surrounding the 
figure of San Precario, there is a need to return the questions surrounding 
precarious cognitive labour to modes of engagement that recognize the joy 
and connection that exist on the flipside of human vulnerability and 
interdependence. Melinda Cooper emphasized the need to invent a politics 
that counters the logic of preemption not only as played out in the Bush 
doctrine of permanent war but also as manifest in contemporary practices of 
biogenetics and ecological intervention. Angela Mitropoulos located in the 
legal doctrine of habeas corpus a crucial hinge where power redefines the 
relation between body and political expression under the current 
catastrophe of global war. These are just a few of the multiple voices that 
populated the 'Italian Effect' conference, working toward a politics that 
would take the naked body of the human animal (in its sensitivity to 
touch/harm and its capacity to labour) both as its symbol and point of 
practical operation.

The challenge that such a politics must meet is to confront the complex 
geography of differences that populate the globalised world. The unequal 
distribution of vulnerability and of labour calls for an updating of class 
composition analysis. The encounter with the body introduces what Italian 
feminism calls the 'cut' of difference (of sex, race, and age) to the drift 
of political discourse. And cultural difference, no matter how much its 
constitutive hybridities have been integrated into the workings of the 
capitalist market, poses challenges for political relations articulated at 
the global level. To work through this complexity means to recognize that 
the translation of thought and political practices always works in two 
directions and that, for this reason, the reception of 'radical Italian 
thought' outside of Italy must remain of intrinsic interest to 'radical 
Italian thinkers.' Indeed, it is by acknowledging and working to overcome 
the political limits and stumbling blocks exposed by such translation that 
'radical Italian thinkers,' like their friends in other parts of the world, 
might hope to find an exit from the nationalism and violence that have 
descended on the globe.




Free Trade in the Bermuda Triangle ... and Other Tales of Counterglobalization
http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/N/neilson_free.html