Collective A/traverso, "Radio Alice--Free Radio"
posted by jim on Wednesday March 05, @12:40PM
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from the from-the-Italian-autumn dept.
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 ioperating 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."
c/
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Se arrivi a un bivio...prendilo!!
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www.materialiresistenti.clarence.com
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