Pas de deux

di Girolamo De Michele

source Carmilla on line

Anna Curcio e Miguel Mellino, La razza al lavoro (testi di Sandro Mezzadra, Giorgio Grappi, Costanza Margiotta, Chiara Bonfiglioli, Luca Queirolo Palmas, Enrica Capussotti, Caterina Mieli, Gianluca Gatta e Renate Siebert), manifestolibri, Roma 2012, pp. 174, € 24.00

Ad occuparsi di “razza” e “razzismo” si corre il rischio di ritrovarsi in un terreno vischioso, sul quale è facile scivolare sulle asserzioni del senso comune. Dopo tutto, cos’altro c’è da dire che non sia già stato detto? La “razza” non esiste, lo sappiamo tutti: è solo un pregiudizio. Il razzismo è il prodotto dell’ignoranza, dell’irrazionalità, forse dell’arretratezza rispetto alla modernità: e allora, piuttosto che attardarci a spiegare e rispiegare ciò che tutti sanno, non dovremmo indirizzare le nostre energie verso la realizzazione piena e senza residui dei processi di modernizzazione? E poi, diciamocelo: in Italia il razzismo non è mai davvero esistito: non è, anche questa, un’asserzione di senso comune? E allora, perché attardarci su fenomeni marginali – in fondo, la Lega fa un uso puramente strumentale degli slogan razzistici, i neofascisti sono un residuo ininfluente del passato, l’assassino dei due extracomunitari di Firenze era solo uno squilibrato…

Se avete sentito almeno una volta una di queste asserzioni di senso comune, e vi è sembrato che in fondo ci fosse del giusto in queste parole, avete una prima, buona ragione per leggere questo libro collettivo. Rinchiudere il discorso sulla razza nell’ambito delle dottrine “scientificamente errate”, dunque in una sorta di pre-modernità, significa infatti attenuare, se non nascondere, il rapporto che si intreccia tra i discorsi e gli enunciati sulla razza e gli specifici rapporti sociali che costituiscono la modernità: quasi fosse, la modernità, un luogo neutro e asettico, e non il prodotto di uno specifico modo di produzione capitalistico. In secondo luogo, significa celare alla comprensione la dimensione materiale e strutturale del razzismo «al centro della stessa costituzione coloniale della modernità capitalistica, sia al cuore della costruzione e della narrazione degli stati nazionali moderni e quindi dei loro stessi concetti di “cittadinanza”». Come ribadiscono Curcio e Mellino, «la nozione moderna di razza, così come le diverse forme storiche di razzismo a cui ha dato luogo, rappresentano un dispositivo di comando costitutivo di tutte le formazioni capitalistiche moderne» (p. 8). «Il razzismo è per noi strettamente connesso ai rapporti di produzione e alla loro trasformazione, poiché trae la sua principale “linfa necropolitica” dai cambiamenti, dalle rotture e dalla crisi nell’organizzazione sociale e politica» (pp. 23-24). In altri termini, le “razze” esistono davvero, non come dati ontologici o biologici, ma come costruzioni discorsive, come prodotti degli apparati di governo e controllo della forza-lavoro; ovvero, come sottolinea Sandro Mezzadra, all’interno della costruzione dello spazio nazionale come “incrocio di entità mobili” impensabile «al di fuori dell’”insieme dei movimenti che si determinano al suo interno”. L’istituzione di un territorio nazionale e dei suoi confini […] ha sempre avuto a che fare con questa intersezione di corpi in movimento, con la gestione della mobilità» (p. 38). In questo senso, nella tarda modernità in cui ci troviamo il termine “emigrazione” è diventato anche in Italia «il nuovo nome della “razza”» (citato da Balibar, p. 40).

A partire da questo nucleo concettuale si aprono, in questo densissimo lavoro collettivo, una serie di piste di ricerca, indagate sia sul piano teorico, sia su quello dell’inchiesta sul campo. Ne sintetizzo alcune: l’intreccio tra il discorso della “razzializzazione” e i rapporti sociali; la “perdita di memoria” dell’origine razzistica della modernità in senso generale, e di quella peculiare forma di entrata nella modernità che fu per l’Italia il processo di unificazione nazionale; la presenza di un substrato razzistico, sempre negato e sempre nascosto, all’interno della storia italiana; il legame tra stereotipi delle rappresentazioni di genere e la produzione dei discorsi razzisti; il ruolo della razzializzazione nella costituzione delle soggettività identitarie e nazionali.

«Per razzializzazione, scrivo i curatori, intendiamo l’effetto sul tessuto sociale di una molteplicità di discorsi e pratiche, istituzionali e non, orientati a una costruzione, a una rappresentazione, gerarchicamente connotata delle differenze (“fisiche” e “culturali”, “reali” e “immaginarie”) tra i diversi gruppi e soggetti e quindi al disciplinamento dei loro effettivi rapporti materiali e intersoggettivi» p. 29). Lo spazio sociale viene così costituito in base a meccanismi di inclusione-esclusione, gerarchie tra migrante e sedentario, e all’interno dello spazio assegnato ai migranti tra migranti più o meno “buoni”, dove l’aggettivo “buono” designa la capacità del migrante di adattarsi alle condizioni di sfruttamento salariale, di lavoro subordinato o illegale; ovvero, di creare imprenditorialità migrante (dai migranti vietnamiti negli USA a quelli albanesi in Italia), collocandosi così in una posizione intermedia nella gerarchia sociale. Ma attenzione: non si tratta di praticare un approccio riduzionistico che risolve nella dimensione economica la complessità della questione: se la riorganizzazione del razzismo è funzionale ai bisogni della produzione e al governo del lavoro vivo, «la traduzione di questi bisogni esprime un’esigenza generale di disciplinamentoche trascende il momento dell’erogazione di lavoro, ma trova in esso uno snodo fondamentale. Il razzismo istituzionale funziona dunque utilizzando anche il colore della pelle e le caratteristiche fisiche o culturali, ma questo non costituisce il suo obiettivo. […] A definire la razza o l’etnia non sono soltanto, allora, caratteri preesistenti rispetto alla condizione di migranti, ma anche la classificazione burocratico-amministrativa che si articola a vari livelli, da quello della legislazione nazionale a quello delle politiche locali per l’integrazione, e che si pone alla base della costruzione dell’immaginario sociale» (Giorgio Grappi, p. 51).

La costruzione razzializzante dell’identità del migrante chiama in causa altre costruzioni identitarie: ad esempio, quella femminile. Lo evidenzia Chiara Bonfiglioli, introducendo il tema dell’omonazionalismo, «l’appropriazione di discorsi relativi all’uguaglianza di genere e di orientamento sessuale a fini razzisti e nazionalisti» (p. 77). Nelle rappresentazioni dei corpi, all’interno dell’immaginario piegato sul discorso mediatico-politico. Esemplari sono gli enunciati del cosiddetto “Ruby-gate” (“e se Ruby, anziché essere lo specchio di tutti i mali e di tutti i vizi del mondo, fosse un simbolo di emancipazione della donna musulmana?”; “è meglio essere appassionati di belle ragazze che gay”) e del caso Strauss-Khan, che testimoniano come «i corpi femminili – specialmente quelli delle donne velate – vengono usati per significare e imporre le dicotomie di progresso/arretratezza, noi/loro, cristianità/Islam, essere-europea-essere altra»: la donna europea è rappresentata «come libera ed emancipata, come simbolo della modernità occidentale, mentre le donne non-occidentali simboleggiano l’arretratezza del resto del mondo»; al tempo stesso, «l’omofobia viene presentata come una prerogativa delle popolazioni migranti» (p. 80).
Ma anche l’identità italiana si è costituita in un complesso intreccio tra italianità e razzializzazione: «le radici delle peculiari forme della razzializzazione nella storia italiana, scrive Caterina Miele, [vanno] ricercate in tre nodi problematici: la contiguità tra emigrazione e colonizzazione; la coevità del processo di unificazione nazionale con l’epoca del massimo sviluppo delle dottrine positiviste e biologiste sulla razza; la strutturalità del razzismo antimeridionale come controcanto del discorso sulla modernizzazione italiana». In altri termini, pur nelle sue storiche specificità, il processo di modernizzione in Italia non ha quei tratti di anomalia o di particularità che lo differenzierebbe dal resto dell’Occidente: la storia italiana si integra «a pieno titolo in quel comune destino europeo di crimini e violenza razziale, operati innanzitutto nel teatro coloniale, e di virulente prassi discorsive e politiche di costruzione della differenza finalizzata all’inferiorizzazione, al controllo e al domino delle classi sociali subalterne, dei colonizzati e, oggi, dei migranti» (p. 105). L’identità italiana si costituisce sulla scia delle dottrine razziali del positivismo, per un verso attraverso la teorizzazione dell’esistenza di «due diverse “razze” sul territorio nazionale, una ariana al Nord e una negroide (con un alto tasso di influenza africana) al Sud», la cui più chiara espressione è il pensiero di Alfredo Niceforo: dottrina che fu ampiamente utilizzata negli Stati Uniti come «supporto teorico alla costruzione di una precisa tassonomia di mansioni e a una conseguente gerarchia salariale fondata su basi razziali che permise di gestire le migrazioni di inizio Novecento» (p. 24). Come nota altrove l’eccellente analisi di  Francesco Festa, «secondo questa divisione, i popoli dell’Italia Meridionale sarebbero passionali, individualisti, con scarso senso morale e spirito organizzativo; mentre, i Settentrionali avrebbero una psicologia fredda, un “io” scarsamente eccitabile, tendente alla socialità, all’organizzazione, a interessi politici. Queste sono le distinzioni a cui, con altre implicazioni razziste e politiche, giungono gli antropologi positivisti, seguiti poi da criminologi, sociologi, biologi, psichiatri, ecc. Si coniano teorie, elaborando tipizzazioni rispetto a una presunta “meridionalità”, di modo che emergano paralleli fra gruppi di popolazioni che, secondo distinzioni razziali, sarebbero “inferiorizzabili” e “subordinati“, per natura». Quello stesso italiano diviso tra Settentrionale e Meridionale recupera il gap di inferiorità rispetto alle altre nazioni attraverso l’avventura coloniale, porta d’ingresso nella modernità: un vero e proprio processo di de-provincializzazione dell’Italia, cui non è immune la più “illuminata” borghesia progressista – ad esempio Luigi Einaudi, secondo il quale l’emigrazione coloniale dimostrava «quali tesori di energia e ostinata volontà possedesse la nostra razza» (Un principe mercante, 1900, citato a p. 110).
La linea del colore nelle colonie africane passa attraverso l’intreccio di brutale violenza militare, e di dottrina positivistica (da Lombroso a Cipriani), i cui esponenti «contribuirono a fare del razzismo il principio fondante della legittimazione delle conquiste coloniali. […] Le teorie sull’inferiorità dei “meridionali”, di cui si ipotizzava l’appartenenza alla razza “negroide”, si intrecciarono all’istituzione della linea del colore in colonia: la questione meridionale veniva così esorcizzata nelle politiche razziali dell’Impero, pur continuando ad interferire nell’elaborazione nazionali di discorsi sulla razza» (pp. 111-112).
L’assenza di una reale messa in discussione della supremazia bianca al cuore della narrazione nazionale ha poi consentito, nel secondo dopoguerra, «una nuova traduzione del razzismo» che ha interessato i migranti meridionali: «dentro diffusi processi di inferiorizzazione e subordinazione, centinaia di migliaia di giovani furono indotti a svolgere lavori dequalificati con posizioni irregolari dal punto di vista amministrativo. Molti lavoravano a cottimo o in subappalto nell’edilizia. Altri, tra cui molte donne, furono impiegati “illegalmente” in una sorta di “artigianato di ritorno” all’interno dell’indotto industriale. Solo chi era in possesso della residenza trovò lavoro negli impianti industriali, spesso con mansioni usuranti. E alla razzializzazione si affiancò ciò che possiamo definire un processo di illegalizzazione del lavoro sostenuto da una vecchia legge fascista contro l’urbanesimo. In questo modo, gran parte dei lavoratori immigrati si ritrovarono come “clandestini” in patria, sospinti nelle nicchie del lavoro irregolare» (pp. 26-27).

Non è difficile vedere un prolungamento di queste dinamiche nelle forme attuali della razzializzazione: sia in quelle esplicitate dall’asse Lega-neofascismo, sia in quelle annunciate da Grillo in più di un’occasione («Un Paese non può vivere al di sopra dei propri mezzi. Un Paese non può scaricare sui suoi cittadini i problemi causati da decine di migliaia di rom della Romania che arrivano in Italia. L’obiezione di Valium [= Romano Prodi] è sempre la stessa: la Romania è in Europa. Ma cosa vuol dire Europa? Migrazioni selvagge di persone senza lavoro da un Paese all’altro?»,  I confini sconsacrati) e mai criticate dai suoi adepti. Il perché è nel cuore della creazione del mito degli italiani brava gente con la quale viene tutt’ora riscritto il nostro passato: «l’incapacità della cultura italiana del dopoguerra di elaborare sia il suo criminale “passato coloniale”, sia il “passato fascista”». Questa incapacità avviene nelle forme di quella che Lacan chiama forclusione: il meccanismo di autodifesa con cui l’Ego espelle dalla cultura e dal Simbolico quel significante traumatico su cui viene a fondare la sua (sedicente, pretesa) integrità e coerenza: «non è difficile assumere che questa continua negazione dell’esistenza del razzismo nel dibattito pubblico e politico sta a significare proprio l’opposto: oggi in Italia buona parte dei conflitti sociali – e ancora di più con l’aggravarsi della crisi economica globale – riescono a trovare espressione (a divenire leggibili per gli agenti sociali) soltanto in termini razzisti e razziali. È proprio la forclusione della razza e del razzismo a rendere possibile al tempo stesso sia la razzializzazione come fenomeno materiale che il razzismo come fenomeno culturalmente impensabile» (Curcio e Mellino, p. 19).

Il processo di forclusione non è soltanto il modo in cui l’italiano medio si salva la coscienza allontanando dalla narrazione della propria storia il fondamento stesso della propria storia: è al centro della propria autocomprensione come “cittadino”. La necessità del migrante come fulcro di un dispositivo di inclusione-esclusione consente di definire la cittadinanza in relazione con ciò che è (o sarebbe) l’oltre della cittadinanza, e al tempo stesso di supportare un discorso razzista che non si autocomprende in termini di razzista: con le parole di Costanza Margiotta, «la figura del migrante è una componente essenziale del processo di inclusione-esclusione. Il migrante permette la riproduzione continua della figura del cittadino, non essendo il cittadino una presenza auto-evidente. La discriminazione del migrante irregolare o illegale è costruita grazie a una facile scorciatoia verso la legittimità: la cittadinanza. […] L’identità data di un non-cittadino è prodotta legalmente, e nel discorso pubblico diventa un nemico socialmente criminalizzato grazie alla retorica sulla sicurezza. Lo Stato ha il “legittimo” potere di discriminare tra cittadino e straniero, regolando l’accesso al territorio dei non-cittadini, ma è obbligato a permettere l’accesso a tutti ai diritti internazionalmente riconosciuti per il loro carattere eccezionale e non per il carattere eccezionale del caso specifico. Questo atteggiamento favorisce nell’opinione pubblica la credenza che la negazione della cittadinanza autorizza e giustifica automaticamente la negazione di qualsiasi diritto a coloro che sono titolari dello status personae» (pp. 73-74).

by Silvia Maglioni and Graeme Thomson

Source: East of Borneo

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Unless otherwise noted, all images are stills from Graeme Thomson and Silvia Maglioni, In Search of UIQ (2013). Courtesy of the artists.

In 2012, Paris-based artists and filmmakers Silvia Maglioni and Graeme Thomson visited Los Angeles to research an unpublished science fiction film script written in the early 1980s by French philosopher Félix Guattari. According to the artists, the script for Un amour d’UIQ“offers a blueprint for a subversive ’popular’ cinema through an imagined hyper-intelligent infra-cellular life substance—“UIQ” (Universe Infra-quark)—capable of controlling global communications networks and plugging into the “desiring machines” of a community of squatters” To mark the release of their film essay, In Search of UIQ (2013), which will have its world premiere on February 28 at REDCAT, we asked the artists to contribute an essay about the culmination of this multiform research project and reflect on their visit to Los Angeles last year.

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Nothing can come of nothing. The infinitely small is not the same thing as nothing, though it may be close. I seriously begin to doubt whether nothing exists. The Planck length, I discover, is the smallest calculable unit, though it apparently lies many million times beyond the scope of what our current instruments can measure. It is reassuring to know that something does.

If I try to picture nothing in my mind, it will usually be either all white or pitch black, depending on the mood, though I don’t know where this idea could have come from. I’ve been thinking a lot about things that don’t exist but are not nothing, or are nothing only in and of themselves, when no one is thinking about them.

Now I know. The white is like the empty screen before the lights go down, the black the moment just before the credits roll when the picture cuts out. But the film we are talking about does not actually exist, so the before and after are not black and white in the usual sense. Let’s say the white of the before merges with the black of the after, giving a grey like the fog now drifting down off the Hollywood hills or a mental block, or the way you might think of limbo, were you so inclined.

That’s the way it’s been for several days now, since we arrived. It’s kind of beautiful. You never see L.A. like this in the movies. A washed-out beige that slows all movement to a dazed and listless crawl. But here we are in Venice, a place that seems to have drifted off beyond the whims of time. You get the feeling that nothing of great concern will ever touch this place. That it would be, finally, oblivious to the arrival of a disaster so many times rehearsed. Morning rises in a dull temple throb of overcast. A red tractor draws wide circles in the sand as two Rollerbladers in mirrored shades skim past the clutch of homeless guys parked on the benches outside our hotel, the same we must have seen twelve years ago in more or less exactly the same spot. A desultory blues melismata lifts briefly from the muffled scree of beats, radio voices, distant sirens. It’s easy to see why the cult of UFOs is so strong here. Desertshore trance, parlor room cartomancy. Somewhere amid the stream of cash and credit card readings there is a certain readiness, the readiness of the exhausted, calmly awaiting an unlikely visitation.

Castaways of a new cosmic catastrophe. This was the phrase Félix Guattari used in his sci-fi screenplay, Un amour d’UIQ, to describe the community of squatters who make contact with what he called “the Infra-quark Universe.” I forgot to mention it when I spoke on the phone to Michael. It was thirty seconds into the conversation and I was already on first name terms with Michael Phillips, the producer of Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), to whom Guattari sent the first draft of his screenplay in 1982. But then I remembered it was only in 1986 that the phrase appeared in a note accompanying the third and final version ofUIQ, submitted to the Centre National du Cinéma et de l’image animée [CNC] where it’s clear that Guattari wasn’t on first name terms with anyone. Anyway, it turned out, not surprisingly, that Michael didn’t remember the script, didn’t know who Guattari was, and yet his producer’s instincts remained somewhat intrigued by the notion of an Infra-quark Universe. And so I found myself pitching the film back to him, a strange re-enactment of something that never occurred.

“So what is it now, is it a script that I can read?”

This story is pure science fiction. It’s the story of UIQ, the Infra-quark Universe; a dweller, I now see, of a Calabi-Yau dimensional manifold, one that knows no individuation, no gender, no distinction between self and other, without fixed limits in space or time. Axel, a brilliant young biologist, discovers a membrane permitting contact with this Infra-quark universe in a mutant strain of phytoplankton and then has to go on the run because the signals from the bacterium play havoc with communications networks. For, once contact has been made, UIQ is already potentially everywhere and everywhen, though invisible; a disturbance in the air that begins (if we can still use that word) to derail the physical laws of the known world. Axel hides out in a squat in Germany, recruiting its broken denizens to help him stabilize contact with UIQ via a DIY interface cobbled together from repurposed junk technology. UIQ begins to converse with the inhabitants, establishing more intensive relations with three in particular: Manou, a precociously intelligent little girl seemingly without parents; Eric, a schizophrenic who has a strangely intimate rapport with a washing machine; and Janice, a young punkish student and part-time DJ.

It is Janice who takes it upon herself to educate UIQ about the affairs of humanity, the nature of individuation and the distinctions between self and other, male and female, that—despite its vast intelligence—continue to perplex and fascinate our bacterial hero. And so UIQ attempts to individuate itself for her, to be “someone” for Janice, to conjure up a face and a voice. It finds that there are “others,” notably Axel, vying for her attention, and so it discovers, too, the meaning of jealousy and the desire to possess. UIQ in love? In the meantime, this face, a blurred enigmatic triangle of three black holes, begins to show its face everywhere: as an ineradicable stain of negative space on TV screens; in stirrings of pond water; in a flight of pigeons or a panicking crowd.

As I hurriedly try to convey to Michael the basic elements of the story over the phone, I’m at the same time imagining recounting this in a hypnotic flow of perfectly paced storytelling that will put all other concerns on hold—a pitch as black as the night of the world from which this new universe will be born. But is it a fantasy, or rather a parallel dimension where our conversation takes place in another timeframe? Storyteller’s time. Given time. All the time in the world. The time of UIQ.

UIQ is in love with Janice, but because it lacks bodily limits, its suffering is infinite. So it needs a body and, being a million times smarter than the smartest human or god, it manages to fashion one for itself, fully formed, without need of a test-tube or virgin’s womb. But the body, being a body and wondering what a body can do, rebels against its controller. UIQ, lacking the body it has made, can only float somehow holographically there, here, wherever, and watch, through those black holes of the face it has made, as the rebel body tries to take possession of Janice.

The fog is slowly lifting from the Ventura freeway. A steady procession of sedans and SUVs keep their distance as they blithely slip between lanes, heading towards downtown. GPS guided drones of purpose and intent, going through the motions of moving. Did Guattari ever visit Los Angeles? Somewhat narcotized by all this driving, we try to imagine the scene:

Félix in Hollywood

- He’s come to see if he can interest producers in the UIQ script, though he speaks virtually no English. He spends a lot of time driving on the freeways, racking up speeding tickets, or in his hotel zapping through the cable channels and smoking in cafes because it’s still legal to do so in 1982.
- How many would there be then?
- What?
- Channels.
- Not a lot though certainly more than in France. Anyway, as the weeks pass he starts hanging out in Topanga at the French cafe, where he’s routinely assailed by terse greybeards clutching voluminous theses on the Rosicrucian MKULTRA Krishna UFO acid conspiracy. He rents a trailer to work on a second draft. But at the studios, nobody is buying this Infra-quark nonsense. Hollywood doesn’t do ‘the invisible’. Maybe the problem is in the presentation.
- You mean the part when he says, “I want to explore the cinema’s capacities as an instrument for producing subjectivities and the relation between their individualized and machinic components?”
- Pretty much.
- So what does he do?
- To make ends meet, with the help of friends, he sets up a schizoanalysis practice. The buzz gets around and eventually it becomes the go-to therapy option for stressed-out A-listers, edging shrinks and scientologists out of business. Soon actors, directors, producers, scriptwriters, editors, studio executives, casting agents, are all lining up for schizoanalytical treatment. It’s like another La Borde, for a different tax-bracket of psychosis.
- Does he get a show on the rehab channel? Detox from capitalism?
- You forget video is still in its infancy. Reality doesn’t exist yet, nevermind its spawn. The only cameras are the ones that the patients use themselves in workshops. Collective delirium is encouraged as an incentive to creative thinking. Roles are continually being swapped around as clients learn to shut off the money block that is clogging up the desiring machines. Back at the studios, marketing experts and their spreadsheets are laughed off the lot. “Sorry, I don’t have time for you right now. I’m working on my plane of consistency.”
- Unshackled from target demographics, movies become more interesting.
- Audiences start dreaming differently.

Amid this confusion, the laboratory is discovered, the squat raided and burnt to the ground. Janice escapes. Government scientists seize UIQ and try to make it talk. Instead, the inconsolable Infra-quark Universe, torn from its beloved Janice, decides to wreak a terrible revenge, recoding the DNA of the human population and transforming people into half-amphibian mutants who slop newly acquired tentacles and fins across their clunky computer keyboards, intermittently diving into a fish tank or toilet bowl for relief. Following a long silence, UIQ expresses its one desire, to be reunited with Janice. She, sensing the gravity of the situation, comes out of hiding and reluctantly agrees to have the phytoplankton containing UIQ inserted into her brain. Merged with this boundless machinic subjectivity, plugged into the digital flows of information and desire, Janice, or what is left of her, attempts suicide by jumping off a building, only to discover that UIQ has made her immortal. Raising a bloodied skull from the pavement she pronounces the film’s last line in a voice of indefinite pitch and timbre: “May he give her back her death.”

Of course there isn’t time to explain, describe all this on the phone to Michael. The version of events I pile up like wreckage at his feet is a conflation of multiple drafts, multiple collapses of UIQ’s wave function, each discarded, sloughed off like so many botched avatars as though the problem of UIQ’s individuation had spread to contaminate the film itself. All the mutations and transformations had perhaps begun with a script for a short film about the free radio movement that Guattari had written back in 1977, the year of the Bologna uprisings and the release of both Close Encounters and Star Wars (whose phenomenal success, Michael says, was the result of “a burst of honest enthusiasm”); or else with Latitante, a project on two women fugitives of the Autonomia movement, considered as unknowable “alien” lifeforms whose powers of seduction permit them to move with ease between normally rigidly segmented milieus.

“So what is it now?”

We’ve begun to develop an aversion for the omnipresent signs you see here bearing a whole panoply of orders, laws, statutes and notifying the reader of potential violations and their dire consequences. But often, more than the signs themselves, it is the font in which these interdictions are couched whose violence seems particularly offensive, like the voice of an implacable drill sergeant barking hapless trainees into submission. One of these signs seems disquietingly symptomatic of the irreversibility of US-style modernity. The idea that there’s no going back, no changing your mind, no equivocation—once made, a decision is final. “Do Not Back Up.” The metal teeth are there to rip your regret, your desire, to shreds.

- And when the audiences start dreaming differently, then maybe it becomes possible to make this missing film, even if it’s no longer necessary, because in a way it will be already out there, in the flows of desire, a desire to undo this cosmic catastrophe, this ‘time is money’ mantra that’s destroying everything that lives, to claw the planet back from the predators.
- “…those intellects vast, cool and unsympathetic who regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us…”
- “…and early in the 21st century came the great disillusionment.”
- There you go! Welles didn’t even need to make a film. And his War of the Worlds had a much deeper effect than Spielberg’s. Is this our exit?

We are startled out of reverie by a hot glare of red and blue in the rearview mirror. Rude blurts of siren interspersed with snatches of a choleric alien speech. A UFO has landed. We slow down, not quite knowing how to respond.

- I think they’re telling us to pull over.

If we know the drill, it’s only from the movies. Several minutes of menacing silence and inactivity to stoke our anxiety, before one of the cops gets out of his “vehicle” and swaggers gravely up to the driver’s side. We decide to play the card of the alien. The card of never having seen an American film.

- LICENCEREGISTRATION
- I’m sorry I don’t speak English.

Said in perfectly accented English. Idiot. Not that he seems to have noticed the discrepancy.

- THEN YOU SHOULDN’T BE DRIVING.

Before we have either the time or the temerity to question this line of reasoning, he informs us of the nature of our offense. We’ve been driving too slowly, apparently.

- We only slowed down when we saw your lights. I didn’t know there was a law against driving slowly. Aren’t you supposed to give people tickets for speeding?

This phases him somewhat. He takes it as a cue to retire to his squad car with passport and papers. When he comes back it’s no longer him, but a pumped-up, bullet-headed up incarnation of THE FONT who barks out his intention of taking us to jail for not paying the fine he is about to levy for “DRIVING SO AS TO IMPEDE TRAFFIC,” and for not pulling over when he told us to.

- We couldn’t understand what you were saying. Actually that’s why we slowed down.
- DON’T UNDERSTAND? THERE’S NOTHING TO UNDERSTAND. IT’S THE SAME IN EUROPE. YOU SEE THE BLUE LIGHTS YOU KNOW WHAT YOU HAVE TO DO.

Blue lights? What blue lights? Such a lack of instruction on our part is obviously unthinkable and probably constitutes a more serious crime in his mind than the one we’ve allegedly committed.

- So how much is the fine?
- THAT’S NOT MY CONCERN. ANOTHER OFFICE DEALS WITH THAT. YOU JUST MAKE SURE YOU PAY WHEN YOU RECEIVE IT. OTHERWISE YOU’LL NEVER SET FOOT IN THE U.S. AGAIN.

As he hands us the yellow slip, something in him seems to soften slightly, some Planck length of concern for our well-being, as he offers the parting words:

- YOU KNOW IT’S DANGEROUS TO DRIVE SLOWLY. YOU COULD HAVE BEEN KILLED BY A DRUNK DRIVER.”

We remember the sign and we do not back up. We keep on driving down the freeway. Was it some kind of stubborn slowness that brought us to LA with the UIQ screenplay, 30 years on, or was it “the lightning speed of the past”? And this exposure to light, does it accelerate time, collapse it, or give it another chance, untimely, out of joint?

Appel à communications

Explorés depuis une vingtaine d’années par les sociologues et les politologues, les rapports entre images et mouvements sociaux s’avèrent peu étudiés par les historiens du contemporain. Or, au tournant des XIXe et XXe siècles, le processus de massification culturelle a donné lieu à l’avènement d’une société dite « médiatique ». Il semble dès lors pertinent d’étudier, sur la longue durée, les rapports qui se sont noués entre des documents iconographiques qui ont transité entre sphères privée et publique et des mouvements de contestation qui ont progressivement gagné en visibilité sociale. Aujourd’hui encore, les travaux relatifs aux contenus médiatiques et aux productions iconographiques se cantonnent souvent à une histoire des représentations collectives, quelque peu déconnectée des autres champs d’étude. Il est temps de désenclaver l’analyse d’images (fixes et mobiles), d’ancrer cette pratique dans un champ thématique fécond comme l’histoire des mouvements sociaux et de valoriser ces sources documentaires souvent mieux connues des archivistes que des chercheurs.

L’objectif du colloque consistera à établir quel(s) rôle(s) les images ont pu jouer dans l’émergence et la mobilisation de différents mouvements sociaux, ou, au contraire, dans le dénigrement et la démobilisation de ceux-ci. Tant les notions d’ « image » et de « mouvement social » seront entendues au sens large : d’une part, les communications pourront analyser des supports variés tels que des photographies, des tracts, des affiches et/ou des films amateurs ou professionnels,… ; d’autre part, le colloque se fondera sur la définition que Michel Pigenet et Danielle Tartakowsky donnent des mouvements sociaux qui désignent « toutes les interventions collectives destinées à transformer les conditions d’existence de leurs acteurs, de contester les hiérarchies ou les relations sociales et à générer pour cela des identités collectives et des sentiments d’appartenance ». Ces mouvements peuvent ainsi concerner les militants d’un parti, d’un syndicat, mais aussi d’un corps professionnel particulier, des femmes, des altermondialistes, des minorités ethniques, culturelles, religieuses ou sexuelles…

Les liens entre images et mobilisations collectives seront déclinés selon deux angles d’approche : un premier volet sera consacré aux images produites par les mouvements contestataires eux-mêmes ; un deuxième volet s’intéressera aux images produites sur ces mouvements, qu’elles appartiennent au registre journalistique ou artistique, notamment la couverture médiatique des manifestations, grèves ou pétitions. À partir de ces deux directions de recherche, qui peuvent aussi être croisées, les problématiques foisonnent : quelles images un mouvement social peut-il produire ou utiliser pour fédérer ses membres ou pour communiquer ses messages ? Comment tente-t-il de contrôler l’image que les médias véhiculent à son sujet ? Au-delà de la diversité des supports utilisés, peut-on dégager les traits définitoires d’une imagerie contestataire ? Quelles sont les conséquences de la médiatisation, traditionnelle ou artistique, des mobilisations pour les mouvements sociaux eux-mêmes ? Les journaux, les actualités filmées et la télévision jouent-ils selon les circonstances, le rôle de porte-voix, d’éteignoir ou de catalyseur vis-à-vis des mouvements contestataires ? Comment un tiers, qu’il soit artiste ou journaliste, assoit-il sa légitimité en tant que porte-parole ou portraitiste d’un mouvement dont il ne fait pas lui-même partie ? Finalement, comment les images de mouvements sociaux concourent-elles à (re)façonner l’image qu’une société se fait d’elle-même ?

En amont de ces questions de recherche, le colloque entend bien faire une place de choix aux contributions visant à présenter, définir et décliner les variétés et les potentialités des sources audiovisuelles, des collections iconographiques pouvant contribuer à enrichir cette approche croisée entre « images » et « mouvements sociaux ». Du point de vue archivistique, lesquelles de ces images (militantes, médiatiques ou artistiques) ont été conservées ? Comment sont-elles inventoriées, utilisées et/ou reliées à leurs producteurs ?

Par sa thématique, le colloque se situe aux frontières de plusieurs disciplines (histoire, analyse des médias, sociologie, histoire de l’art, archivistique, etc.) entre lesquelles il entend susciter des rencontres et des échanges. Si cet appel s’adresse en priorité aux historiens, il tend aussi à encourager un dialogue entre archivistes et chercheurs, une approche pluridisciplinaire des sujets abordés, ainsi que des contributions communes par des spécialistes de disciplines différentes.

Informations pratiques :
Le colloque se tiendra à Namur les 19, 20 et 21 mars 2014.

Comité organisateur : Ludo Bettens (IHOES), Florence Gillet (CEGES), Christine Machiels (CARHOP), Bénédicte Rochet (UNamur), Anne Roekens (UNamur).

Comité scientifique : Daniel Biltereyst (UGent), Gita Deneckere (UGent), Irène Di Jorio (ULB), Muriel Hanot (CSA), Dirk Luyten (CEGES), Hendrik Ollivier (AMSAB), Valérie Piette (ULB), Bénédicte Rochet (FUNDP), Anne Roekens (FUNDP), Pierre Sorlin (Bologne).

Propositions de communications à envoyer avant le 1er juillet 2013 à anne.roekens@fundp.ac.be

Des activistes du Parti Communiste d’Iran et de l’Organisation contre la violence envers les femmes en Iran protestent, le 3 mars 2013, à Stockholm, le sein nu, contre le Hijab.

[ Source: http://actualidad.rt.com/sociedad/view/88050-desnudas-activistas-comunista-iran-estocolmo-protesta-hiyab ]

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sortant hors de moi

d’un côté

alors que je passais au contraire

posé à peine

plan bleu

lié ensemble

comme il pouvait

entre-temps nous revenions

et nous l’avions

ne l’avions pas vu

personne ne s’était souvenu

de fermer à peine

plus fort bleu

n’arrête pas de

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nanni b., nina, francesca

www.redcat.org

World Premiere at CALARTS’ DOWNTOWN CENTER FOR CONTEMPORARY ARTS – The Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater (REDCAT) Los Angeles

With, in person, Silvia Maglioni and Graeme Thomson

Following the publication of A Thousand Plateaus, a work that marked a highpoint in his creative partnership with Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari began working on a screenplay for a science-fiction film, Un amour d’UIQ. This script, which preoccupied Guattari’s attention for seven years, represented a blueprint for a subversive popular cinema through an imagined hyper-intelligent infra-cellular life substance—“UIQ” (Universe Infra-quark)—capable of controlling global communications networks and plugging into the “desiring machines” of a community of squatters. After discovering the unpublished script, Paris-based artists and filmmakers Silvia Maglioni and Graeme Thomson initiated a multiform research project that culminates in their film essay In Search of UIQ, which takes on Guattari’s central quandary: how to give shape to a bodiless entity, seemingly without spatial or temporal limits.

Silvia Maglioni & Graeme Thomson (dir.), Isabelle Mangou (coll.), Félix Guattari,Un amour d’UIQ, Paris, Editions Amsterdam, 2012.

by Nina Power (found on radicalphilosophy.com)

Tiqqun, Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl, trans. Ariana Reines, Semiotext(e), Intervention series 12, Los Angeles, 2012. 144 pp., £9.95 pb., 978 1 58435 108 5.

How best to describe the colonization of the body at this particular juncture of capitalist life? Much recent theorizing has focused on a kind of war of affects where depression, euphoria and other states of being are read not merely as signs or symptoms, but as directly produced by (and productive of) particular economic relations. Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi’s notion of ‘semio-capitalism’ has attempted to track the implica­tions of cyberspace and cybertime for the increas­ingly depressed mind and body of the contemporary subject. Herve Juvin in the recent The Coming of the Body (reviewed in RP 165, January/February 2011) has similarly attempted to describe what it means for contemporary life when the body has become the ‘bearer’ of all meaning, where every aspect of exist­ence is exchangeable and where nothing is hidden or hideable. While the trajectory of this kind of analysis is not exactly new, even where it occasionally remembers the vast feminist literature on embodiment, affect and labour from the 1960s onwards, there is something novel about the peculiar combination of consumerism, despair, visibility and immaturity that characterizes postwar life in its later stages. It is this ‘new physi­ognomy of Capital’, where ‘the generalized credit that rules every exchange … strikes within the image of its uniform emptiness the “heart of darkness” of every “personality” and every “character”‘ that Tiqqun address in this short, wilfully fragmentary text first published in France in 1999. The question of gender is raised here, there and everywhere – from the title of the book, to the extracts from magazines marketed to women that Tiqqun scatter throughout the text, to something much more nebulous and disturbing at the heart of their endeavour.

Theory of the Young-Girl is a text that both parodies and mirrors the misogyny that resonates at the heart of a culture that celebrates youth and beauty above all else while simultaneously denigrating the bearers – young women, overwhelmingly – of these purportedly desirable characteristics. The translator of the text, poet Ariana Reines, has written of the visceral reaction the task engendered. The translation, she writes in the online magazine Triple Canopy, ‘gave me migraines, made me puke; I couldn’t sleep at night, regressed into totally out-of-character sexual behaviour’. It is indeed a book that disturbs in its relentless depiction of the fully weaponized, consumerist body of a world in which ‘[although everyone senses that their exist­ence has become a battleground upon which neuroses, phobias, somatizations, depression, and anxiety each sound a retreat, nobody has yet really grasped what is happening or what is at stake.’ The language of colo­nization, immunization, meat and fluids seeps through the abstract framework of image-analysis, economic structure and ruminations on modernity: ‘the Young-Girl doesn’t kiss you, she drools over you through her teeth. Materialism of secretion.’ If parts of the text read like a theoretically inflected revenge manual for male nerds, one assumes that this effect is – on one level – intentional. The quotation fromHamlet that appears at the beginning of the text, ‘I did love you once’, hints at past betrayals, as does the claim that ‘the “male sex” becomes both the victim and the object of its own alienated desire.’ But who is this ‘male sex’ if everyone is required to permanently ‘self-valorise’, that is to say, to be a Young-Girl? What is left of the body, love, personality when all life resembles a cross between a spreadsheet and a horoscope? ‘Unhappiness makes people consume’ reads one aphoristic statement, and yet unhappiness appears to be all there is, even as everything shrieks of fulfilment and perkiness.

But why Young-Girl’? Who is she, and what kind of ‘theory’ is presented here? Stylistically, Tiqqun operate in the speculative void-space created by situationist-style and Agambenian portentousness –detournement meets poetic ontologizing. The style is assertoric, even where the claims made are highly evaluative. Hundreds of sen­tences begin ‘The Young-Girl is…’ This grinding repeti­tion is ameliorated only slightly by the use of varied font styles and the insertion of quotations not only from women’s magazines, but also from Baudrillard, Witold Gombrowicz’s 1937 novel Ferdydurke, spiritual instruc­tion manuals and texts on eating disorders. To imagine that Tiqqun are talking about ‘real’ young girls would be an ontic grotesquery, of course, as the Young-Girl is ‘obviously not a gendered concept’ and besides, the book is little more than ‘trash theory’. Tiqqun explain that every postwar consumerist subject, every ‘model citizen’, every bearer of power is the Young-Girl: ‘All the old figures of patriarchal authority, from statesmen to bosses and cops, have become Young-Girlified, every last one of them, even the Pope.’ And yet the book is precisely not called ‘Theory of the Wizened-Pope’. So what to make of the embrace of gendered rhetoric in the service of a theory of the ‘total war’ waged on the bodies of everyone? The political point is the claim that ‘the process of valorization, in the imperial phase, is no longer simply capitalist: IT COINCIDES WITH THE SOCIAL.’ Love has transformed from ‘Fordist seduc­tion, with its designated sites and moments, its static and proto-bourgeois couple-form, to post-Fordist seduction, diffuse, flexible, precarious and deritualized, which has extended the couple factory to the entire body and the whole of social time-space’. Tiqqun’s equation of the social with ‘youthitude’ and ‘feminitude’ is, however, oddly old-fashioned, harking back to stereotypes of women as fundamental bearers of sociability in the form of gossip: ‘Chatter, curiosity, equivocation, hearsay, the Young-Girl incarnates the fullness of improper existence, whose categories Heidegger identified.’ The Young-Girl is idle talk substantiated, inauthentic life made Queen: ‘Precisely because of her nothingness, each of her judgements carries the imperative weight of the entire sovereign order, and she knows it.’

So, to remain at the level of the inauthentic, the temptation to read ontically, for a moment, is this a book about women, or about ‘women’ (or, rather ‘young women’)? The translator notes: ‘the genderedness of French is not the only way to account for the fact that this book, as it accumulates, does become – in some sections more than others – a book about women.’ It is indeed impossible not to reify the critique as the book progresses, to map the claims onto real, if vague, images of particular kinds of bodies (‘The Young-Girl sees herself as the holder of a sacred power: the power of commodities’; ‘THE YOUNG-GIRL RESEMBLES HER PHOTO’; ‘There is surely no place where one feels/as horribly alone/as in the arms of a Young-Girl’). While Tiqqun focus on women’s magazines, much as Mary Wollstonecraft did two hundred years before, it is easy to expand their analysis to encompass develop­ments in social media that have taken place since the book’s original publication: the direct facial and self-valorizing imperatives of Facebook, the endless memetic re-postings of tumblr, fashion blogs, and so on. But what does this domination of the Spectacle really mean? The Young-Girl is ‘Living Currency’, Tiqqun claim, picking up on Pierre Klossowski’s phrase. Her arse is a war-machine: ‘The Young-Girl’s ass doesn’t possess any new value, but only the unprecedented depreciation of all values that preceded it’ But does the spectacular domination of Pippa Middleton’s posterior, say, really tell us anything about the economy? ‘In the time of the Young-Girl, woman becomes the metaphor of money’ claim Tiqqun, and a thousand billboards would surely agree: yet this cover story masks rather more dowdy truths – women may be the metaphor of money, but they don’t empirically have very much of it at the moment. Tiqqun come close at points to pinning the blame on the Young-Girl herself, even as the reader struggles in her mind to replace an image of a socially integrated teen with that of, say, Berlusconi (he is quoted here: ‘They have offended the thing I hold most dear: my image’), the Pope or any number of male authority figures. But the Young-Girl is above all alienation in the sense of being profoundly unhappy – that the book finishes with a discussion of anorexia is no accident: ‘She is a body without soul dreaming she’s a soul without a body’ Ano­rexia is ‘the desire to free oneself from a body entirely colonized by commodity symbolism’. The Young-Girl may be ‘against communism’ as one section has it, but she is well aware of the world she finds herself in. What, ultimately, would it mean to let the Young-Girl speak for herself and not through the categories imposed upon her by a culture that heralds her as the metaphysical apex of civilization while simultaneously denigrating her, or even the categories that Tiqqun mobilize to take her apart in a subtly different way? Behind every Young-Girl’s arse hides a bunch of rich white men: the task is surely not, then, to destroy the Young-Girl, but to destroy the system that makes her, and makes her so unhappy, whoever ‘she’ is.