hydrarchist writes:
"A snippet of history. Political media is pretty dull and earnest as a rule, but the years since 1968 are peppered with exceptions that have broken the strictures of discourse and allowed individuality and subjectivity to break through. In Bologna, Italy, Radio Alice, although short-lived was a crucial experience in this regard for an important part of the movement of '77. In comparison with the other radio stations of the 'movement', Alice allowed voices of youth and difference to emerge over the air in ways that were not possible for broadcasters operating with a narrowly ideological agenda. Here is a taste of their own inimitable collective style. Enjoy."
"Radio Alice--Free Radio"
Collective A/Traverso
After the events of March 1977 - Radio Alice
became the symbol of the free radios. It was
emitted from Bologna, one of the strongholds
of the ICP and the explicit showcase for the
Historical Compromise.
When the accusation of obscenity was flung at us, we were a
little disconcerted. We had thought about many possible
accusations: pirate station, underminers,
communists, subversives, but we did not anticipate this one.
But that's natural and proper. Language, when it is freed from
the sublimations which reduce it to the code and makes desire
and the body speak, is obscene (literally: obscene).
The body, sexuality, the desire to sleep in the
morning, the liberation from labour, the possibility to be
overwhelmed, to make oneself unproductive and open tp tactile,
uncodified communication: all this has for centuries been
hidden, submerged, denied, unstated. Vade Retro, Satanas.
The blackmail of poverty, the discipline of labor, hierarchical
order, sacrifice, fatherland, family, general interests,
socialist blackmail, participation: all that stifled the voice of
the body. All our time, forever and always, devoted to labor
Eight hours of work, two hours of travel, and, afterward, rest,
television. and dinner with the family.
Everything which is not confined within the limits of that order
is obscene. Outside it smells like shit.
All the ''unstated" is emerging: from the Chants de Maldoror to the
struggles for reducing the work-day. It speaks in the Paris
Commune and in Artaud's poetry, it speaks in Surrealism and in
the French May, in the Italian Autumn and in immediate
liberation; it speaks across the separate orders of the language of
rebellion. Desire is given a voice, and for them, it is obscene.
Alice looks around, plays, jumps, wastes time in the midst of
papers illuminated by the sun, runs ahead, settles down
elsewhere.
And yet everything functions in the order of discourse.
Discourse connects, explains, allows no interruptions, organizes,
participates, reprimands...
Like an invitation to talk with you about your work where they
don't give you anything to eat.
Silence
The subject has changed.
Pant, hiss, don't think you're right.
The silence, the uncanny, the "unstated," that which
remains to be said, frightens.
In the program, so many dense headings, as dense as in a
newspaper... A half-hour with your Carlo... Cheek to cheek with
folks... All that Jazz... 1, 2, 3 o'clock bulletin.
Alice hisses, yells, contemplates, interrupts herself, pulls.
Go tell him that it's spring.
We have received a telephone call from the Technological
Institute: "We have occupied the president's office and we are
calling from his phone, listen how he yells... He wanted to impose
upon us a vote by a show of hands and then he'd shove it up our
ass."
It's better that way.
The discourse of order's desire for power
or the power of desire against the order of discourse.
Radio for the participants
or radio for the uncanny?
In the first case the language is univocal: the announcer's, who
announces that the event has happened. They talk about something
which means something else and can therefore never be captured
because it is over.
A mirror.
In this sense, attempts at imitation are pathetically ridiculous:
dialects and accents are not tolerated. In the second case something
continues to flee from language. This is manifest in outbursts of
laughter, words in suspension. the word which cannot be found
and which refuses to change into another one. stam
mering, silence.
Well, "let's talk about the uncanny."
Well, "let's talk about the uncanny."
One cannot pass from one discourse to another (from inside Italian
Radio to outside Italian Radio).
The subject changes? The new subject is collective and does not
speak.
Or speaks when it wants to.
Silence: a hole.
Let's allow holes to grow, let's not fear orifices, let's fall into
them and pass on elsewhere.
Wonderland.
Another direct phone call:
"We are workers on strike, we want you to play some music and
we want to talk to you about the 35 hour week, it's time they
talked about that in contracts."
Another direct phone call:
"Dirty communists. we're going to make you pay dearly for this
radio station, we know who you are.
Another direct one:
"We are from the anti-fascist committee of the Rizzoli Hospital,
don't worry about anything, and call us if something happens, we
are here night and day."
Break the cycle of the valorization of capital in the process of
circulation of the sign-value (no more appropriation of
merchandise to interrupt the A-M-A'.cycle, but a savage strike in
the circulation of the single sign-value A-A').
Interrupt the language of machines. of the work-ethic, of
productivity.
An invitation not to get up this morning, to stay in bed with
someone, to make musical instruments and war devices for
yourself."
Gray are the coats of the cops who have imprisoned comrade Bifo,
gray are their instruments of death. Gray is the prison where
he has been locked up, gray are the bedroom communities, gray
are the streets of the business district. Obtuse is the
constable who holds in his hand the hoods of his colleagues who
rummage through the comrade's effects, obtuse are the police who
for three months recorded the phone calls (what are we having for
dinner today? let's get together on this), obtuse is television.
Dangerous are the organs of repression, dangerous because of the
latest submachine gun model, dangerous is the judge who arrests
first then looks for proof. Dangerous are the roads and squares
infested with the angels of death of a system always more
minoritarian. dangerous are the factories and the shipyards,
dangerous to decide whether or not to let a child see the
light of day.
Gray, obtuse, dangerous, they want to impose their scale on the
world: gray, obtuse, dangerous.
The totalitarian society of capital lives on the monotonous
repetition of the existant. It serves the owners, the cops, the
judges. None of them are indispensable to the structure they
serve.
They make a life of shit the only model of life possible.
But communism is young and beautiful.
COMMUNIQUE No. 2 - from the San Giovanni in Monte Prison,
3/20/76. They arrested me on the fifteenth, submachine guns in hand, in the house
where I was sleeping with my comrades. First they accused me of
belonging to the Red Brigades. In the space of two days this
accusation became so ridiculous that they had to invent another
one. So they accused me of being the ideological organizer
of an incredible series of criminal plots committed in Bologna in
the last few months.
Not the slightest bit of proof of these subversive activities that
were supposed to have been mine exists. They are trying to give a
recognizable appearance to the incomprehensible (for Power)
course of liberation located in the space of separ/Action, of
ignor/Action which constructs liberating spaces and moments of
collective transformation of existence.
But then let them say it clearly:
The practice of happiness is subversive when it becomes
collective.
Our will for happiness and liberation is their terror, and they
react by terrorizing us with prison, when the repression of
work, of the patriarchal family, and of sexism is not enough.
But then let them say it clearly.
To conspire means to breathe together.
And that is what we are accused of, they want to prevent us from
breathing because we have refused to breathe in isolation,
in their asphyxiating places of work, in their individuating
familial relationships, in their atomizing houses.
There is a crime I confess I have committed:
It is the attack against the separation of life and desire, against
sexism in interindividual relationships, against the reduction of
life to the payment of a salary.
But then let them say it clearly:
It is dada that terrorizes the gray, the obtuse, the dangerous.
Guardians of order and of the exploitation of poverty - for them,
the transversal writing which runs through the separate orders
and reunites isolated behaviors is not just obscene, any more, it
is a crime.
What makes me crazy is the uncanny. Bifo, Fontana, and
Marchi are in prison.(2)
Bifo, Fontana, and Marchi are still in prison; Bifo,
Fontana, and Marchi are always in prison. There isn't
a single comrade who does not ask me, "And what do we
do now?" Silence. And they take advantage of our
silence. A month has already passed. But it was like a
month in the mind of someone who isn't thinking: an
instant. A month has already passed since the arrest
of Bifo and we have not gotten him out of there. There
is no proof, it's all a plot, we know it. And now what
do we do? And now what do we do? We must do
something, I want to do something, it isn't true that
we are powerless before the monsters. the angels of
death, the gray, the obtuse, the dangerous, I cannot
keep quiet much longer.
They have killed Mario Salvi(3) in Rome. Silence.
Either the prison must explode or my head must
explode. Radio Alice is quiet, the comrades are quiet,
they invent words, the habitual masks. They don't
speak and they don't even have any ideas. Lethargy. We
are already creating the little ghetto: we are or we are
not wild cats running through the town. Let's not give
free rein to our jailers, strike the tiger's heart every
day, in every way, according to our differences,
against the sadness and the solitude of cells of
confinement, 24 hours of air. This is an invitation to
speak and to think, and invitation to be always present
in the situations in the town the neighborhoods the
schools the barracks the factories the roads, let's
exhaust the enemy, let's wear out the giant
monster by beating it all over its body. Let's not talk
about desires anymore, let's desire: we are desiring
machines, machines of war.
Translated by Richard Gardr.
& Sybil Walker
1. San Vittore: a prison in Milan. San Giovani in Monte: a
prison in Bologna
2. Fontana. Marchi: Bolognese students thrown in jail.
3. Mario Salvi was killed in the vicinity of the judiciary
prison in Rome after a motorcyclist
launched a Molotov cocktail against the prison."
