<nettime> fwd: 'Accatone' - THE ACCIDENTED DEATH OF AN ANARCHIST

[matthew fuller <matt@axia.demon.co.uk>]

THE ACCIDENTED DEATH OF AN ANARCHIST


"How many political dissidents find themselves in the same
situation of being murdered - suicided by society because of
their original aim of realising language - of introducing
the necessary, vivifying political insertion of unreason,
which has its own  rationality,  into the coherent,
instrumental and manipulative discourse of the normal ones."

- David Cooper: The Language Of Madness (Pelican 1980)



The death of Carlo Guiliani, shot, run over, in Genoa. Cops
say "Pieces of shit. It is you who killed him!" Protesters
chant: "Assassins, Assassins!"

"Hours after Carlo Guiliani's death, protestors have created
a makeshift shrine, heaping red flowering plants they
uprooted from a nearby public garden. A piece of notebook
paper, weighed down with a teargas cannister, is "scrawled
with the words. 'Made in G8'" (John Vidal: Guardian 21/7/01)


Carlo Guiliani one more lying prone and bloodied on the
Italian asphalt...


"If there is a simple logic here, it is that the more we can
 connect with all our stakeholders the more possibilities
everyone has to help create a better world" (BT advert in
Guardian 21/7/01 - www. Bt.com/ betterworld).

Carlo Guiliani deaded by G8

- Feel faintly sickened by my own texts in light of the
protestors in Genoa. But surely this is a modality of my
comitment, the 'impulse-semiotic' of my support for them?

Carlo, I am trying to call on Pier Paolo: "Our guilt as
fathers could be said to consist in this - that we believe
that history is not and cannot be other than bourgeois
history."

How strange, Carlo, that this is from a piece by Pier called
'Unhappy Youths', how miserable he felt in 1975 about
"revolt becoming part of a code", but that attack on the
copdrover, that wasn't coded, that was too real, too real a
hatred for the 'violatingly impotent'.


Carlo, we won't listen to Geldof & Bono - their 'drop the
debt' an absurdist statement played straight-facedly,
believed in. Just earlier in the week I'd heard a chief
economist of the IMF look stone-facedly, bemusedly, at
journalist John Pilger's same insistence about debt - for
such an economist, such a functionary, debt is the stake
with which we play the game of capital. He said as much,
much more, with all the reassurance of one, too, firm in his
belief in 'economic law'. Bob & Bono don't see capitalism.
Like Sisimondo and the buffoons Marx lambasts (the"parvenus
of the day before yesterday"), they see just one of its
aspects in the framework of rectifiable justice; as if debt
could be dropped and capital could then be a just and
equiRtable relation! This is not even socialism. It is
the political economy of charity! The IMFist  knew full well
that debt is the stake, that debt perpertuates capital,
keeps it circulating by enabling it to change form. Of
course 'debt' could be 'dropped', it would make good sense
for G8 to conspire in the illusion of this, to make a
'sacrifice', in order to give capital a PR slot, to make a
virtue out of a necessity - but, what of credit, what of
accumulation, accumulating accumulation, and what of debt
starting all over again from its false zero? What of debt as
a form, as a relation? What of debt as the still
undiscredited infrastructure of capital? So, poor Bob &
Bono, they can't succeed without your revolution Carlo,
they'll soon be back at square one (false zero), blinded by
the process of capital, blinded by the way debt, too, can
change form - what after all is a mortgage, what is rent
etc. etc.


Carlo, we can't stop, won't ever stop : - "I have heard
voices say: 'he is conscious of his life'" Still conscious
Carlo, conscious to know there'll be a cop let off, or a cop
to be 'homo sacer'. Same thing, substitutable scapegoats,
indebtedness.


<... INSERT QUOTE BY BATAILLE ON THE CONSECRATION OF WEALTH
BY MEANS OF OSTENTATIOUS SACRIFICE...>


Carlo, of course you know that debt is an ancient rite

your death, as pain, makes it clear: you are an angered
debtor, your debt, your life tax, cannot be repaid. For how
could you repay centuries of contractual debt?

you were obliged, like us all, but not obliged to be
guilty...

your attack absolved you from the contract, absolved us too

Carlo, you're no martyr you know no cruel joy

Carlo, it is no risk for Bob & Bono to appear, and their
manner, their imploring liberalism, says it all: we are used
as link to the 'common people', we're no experts, we're
celebrated substitutes, we're mouthpieces for other
consciousnesses, for an 'unknowing' would-be outrage,
switchpoints between corporations and colonial charity  -
sick, thick, flattered, aimless, indebted. Carlo, they
called you 'mindless'!

Carlo, why is it a sentimental sin to write to you just
because you are dead? How sophisticated we've become, I've
become, how embarassed by contaminant emotion, how clever in
our double-think, doppelganger guise, how remote from
experiences we're to think we've surpassed.

- To experience someone else's experiences is a 'crime'. All
else just creditable.


Carlo Guiliani, I am trying to call on Dylan T. "bury the
dead for fear that they walk to their grave in labour"

How strange Carlo, you're assassins will get you to bury
yourself, but you're in labour, dead, but giving birth...

I feel I remember you now I feel I know your name I feel
your name I feel and I remember I remember I feel I don't
need to remember I feel...

Carlo Guiliani Carlo Guiliani your's a name full of other
names and not a pseudo differentiated naming

- Call on Cooper. A quote from the 'Language Of Madness':
"My thoughts are all drawn out words, they ought to be
pin-pricks". A word 'drawn out' as if to get something else
into it, something other, some other feeling. 'Pin-pricks',
of course, pin-pricks are goose-bumps, goose-pimples (on the
forearm to the back and across the shoulders, lovelyly
cold, a 'semiotic of the impulses'). Or again, the mad
language in  the textbook of medicine speaks of a death in
life: "If I should return during my absence, keep me here
until I come back". Strange, that death is not as alienating
as the made dead that made a one capable of saying this. Or,
maybe more, it is absence of self, the presence of
becoming...


Carlo, you are not Pasolini's Carlos, nor are you Pelosi his
killer, but, like Pier Paolo, you too are flat and mangled


Carlo, I won't listen to the woman from the Institute Of
Ideas. She's on Sky News as I wake on Day Two and she
criticises you for having no political discourse. She shifts
the heterogeneity of you and your comrades to the new centre
ground of 'politics'. She's only seemingly different from
Tony Benn (he'Ss there too) who at least (last) links you
to a history of struggles before bringing you back into
their polis. But the former we know as former RCPist,
instrumental Trots (no Durruti's there), and we heard them
back in 1990 offering support for Sadam ("RCP you are barmy,
go and join the Iraqui Army!"). How sophisticatedly
malformed they were, and here today, missing an opportunity
for outrageous affectivity, becoming entangled in a blunted
strategy, a mediatised strategy of double-think that seeks a
 power over you Carlo, that seeks to tell you what you're
'politics' should be. Already a world democratic council
unfolds and I wonder too what overly defined 'politics' it
will tout, what exclusions will ensue. Carlo, you were on
the asphalt; apparently there's no politics there, no
politics recognisable to power ('viable pretence'), our
politics on the asphalt - tarmac and blood, plastic and
blood - the politics of realisable dreams and mad language,
enlivening language.

Carlo, there's open golf on the radio - "immaculate bunker"-
as, in Genoa, the fences come down, and, at its outskirts,
fresh food, nibbled at, is dumped to join credit notes,
wrappers and white goods


< INSERT G8 MENU AND WINE LIST>


Carlo, why is it that your exceptional act, your attack,
your realising language, demands from me such an
unexceptional form? But is it hasty of me to relate to this
lingo as a 'poem'; and to your act as one that
deculpabilises? - as a decadent aside I think of Pier
			Paolo's poems, how their unexceptional form
(versus his exceptional films - 'the written language of
reality') make a space for his direct emotivity, makes his
			emotivity direct because the /
				unexceptional form seems to disappear behind
his habitually emotive use of it. What haste, then, in
making free, marking the limits of freedom, marking the
ideology of freedom out as the only dialectical limit
capital can't ethicalise = the language of acts, realising
language, detourning democracy. Just as, then, the content
the words of the 'poem', mark the limit of form, the form's
edge that Pier Paolo tottered around on - new form, new
forums.

Carlo, your assassin was 20 years old, he is too young to be
given another name that will weave him into a state fiction
- too exceptional now to name himself Carlo Guiliani

Carlo, Bob & Bono dropped out from the funeral march, they
spat at you with all their accredited Christian spite - and
just as they can't see or feel fully their own violence
against you, so too, they cannot see the violence of the
'system' they try to want to reform. How they are used ...
used beyond press-pass visibility ('viable pretence') and
entry into code (subsumption of even the symbology of
revolt) ... used beyond studied sincerity (Bono's finger is
placed across his lips, its tip beneath his nose, his eyes
looking out with a concentration that defends him from a
trap he can't sense: faciality) ... used  instead to
personify the reasonableness of capital, its dissembling
distance from its own violence... used as the ideologues of
corporatist charity and philanthropic profits (the only
allowed sign of super-surplus). Carlo, these are the
Chartists that sought-out Parliament to sing its praises,
these are the Chartists that pray away the 'cruel joy'
of) businesses like their own.

Carlo, even Nietzsche was no nihilist, he who named it,
scorned it, depassed it


Carlo, Claudio Martini, president of the Genoa Social Forum
- Tuscan Region, is reported as saying: "It is a young
movement, it is very naive at times, it is idealistic. It
must learn to defend itself from the Nihilists and seek
protection from the State." (Observer, 22/7/01)


Bob & Bono - an image of a rift in the movement that will be
worked and prised into a useful, visible, too visible,
reformism and Carlo Guiliani - a submerged, vociferous
proliferating revolutionisation that will be worked and
prized as another start for emergent becomings


<INSERT GRAFITTI OF ALL LANGUAGES>


Carlo, I'm sure you're not missing Il Giornale, it accuses
"centre left (=neo-liberal) governments of breeding a
genetically modified generation of youngsters' who blame
Western Democracy (=Empire) for the world's evils"
(Observer, ibid)


Scaffold poles are the same the world over. A million take
fake aim, a bank is ransacked, its cash (=non-being) is
burned as cops take to sanctuary, cowering in reinforced
steel trucks.


Carlo, reading Noreena Hertz's diary of her travel to Genoa
makes me sick. Perhaps because I am a 'writer' too. But her
ingratiating use of 'we' whilst she quips in with the
common-sensical classificational asides of a normopath,
makes me feel less ashamed to be using words. I'm not
touting information but a sentimental semiotic. Of course,
Carlo, I am acutely culpable, word wieldly, but only to be
deculpabilisable, only to be socially implicated.

Carlo,  Carlo, your  your ashes code will  will unstill
unstill caches of revolt

Carlo, apparently yours was a rage, a rage against
everything 'modern society' has provided, apparently yours
was a rage, making bonfires from noted journelese and
empirical cameras, a rage against the modern as mediated
modern, against a form of communication that is lacking  all
modes and registers with which to communicate.


Carlo, apparently you are a 'wild boy', an 'outsider' who
belongs where he now is You didn't want 'inclusion' so you
set your own fate, you made them kill you, even in death, to
give you the death you wanted, it was they who gave you
this, you got what you wanted because capital provides for
all needs


Carlo, one of capital's agents, versed in its means of
expression, one of its functional personfications, one Rory
Carroll, turns in his copy on Day One and I learn from him
what it is you are: "... a history student, petty criminal
and outsider ... " "... lived in a squat..." "... he
used to beg and hang out with
   friends and stray dogs..." But of course, Carlo, what is
this 'to learn' from such as Rory Carroll, he who can calmly
write your life story as so much compacted information, so
many police-fed facts, so much sign-exchange-value: "...
assault, carrying offensive weapons, public disorder,
resisting arrest, drink driving..." And what does it mean,
then , for me to write of you, to you? Perhaps, that I am in
your conversation, a conversation that continues on with
more than a 'me', a 'more than' that is to be a student of
history.

Carlo, on Day Two, I read Cooper on a bus: "We go back all
the time not to be back but to recuperate our
(r)evolutionary origins and then to throw them in the face
of a future that no one occupies" (Cooper, ibid p28).

Carlo, to be a student of history is to be a becoming�,
is to fight back with anything to hand.

Carlo, history doesn't paginate, it enrages; so much
reneging to avenge.

And our conversation, risky and impulsive, has to be, for
now, two sides of the same becoming: a language of acts, an
enactment of words, and an act of language, an eventuation
of words.


<INSERT PICTURE OF NOREENA HERTZ AND RORY CARROLL >


Carlo, is there a Via Fani in Genoa? A Piazza Fontana? I
think back to Fo - think of a title: The Accidented (or
Accidentable) Death Of An Anarchist - and to 'Pino' Pinelli.
It's 1969 and 'Pino' falls from the twelfth floor window of
Milan's police HQ. Carlo, he is alleged to have said "this
is the end of anarchism" as he fell, guided down there to
the same strata of asphalt.


Carlo, was it the 'black block' attacking the shops of the
petits-bourgeois or was it the 'black shirts' attacking
their own?


Carlo, it's Day Three and there's more figures to
negotiate. More screens, more tell-tale slips of the tongue:
"The summit cost $200m dollars to stage... Genoa will
receive $45m dollars in aid" (Guardian, 23/7/01.)

Carlo, I'm in the laundrette reading up on more reports as
queues form for the washing machines and municipal gardeners
across the way leisurely prune, plant and smoke in the local
park... The events are getting muddy: "I saw groups of
French and German people dressed in black with iron bars
inside the police station near the Piazza di Kennedy". But
'Communist' MP Malabara is doing the talking, and it sounds
familiar, after the 'historical compromise', for what is a
'communist' doing in a police station during these days?.
But the Green Matone, one of your many local senators harks
'back' to the days of Pinelli, days when anarchists were
fingered for neo-fascist atrocities in Piazza Fontana (See
the P-Report, Observer 7/12/69). He utters an
unpaginated history of collusion that undermines the
beginnings of alliance and social learning. Elsewhere today:
"video evidence collected by protestors... suggests that men
in black were seen getting out of police vans near protest
marches. They were noted for never attacking the police..."
But this is from short article acredited to no less than
five journalists (including your biographer, Rory Carroll).
So you see Carlo, our conversation is interrupted by the
bank of facts, unverifiable facts, fructiferious facts that
supply and demand suspicion, that work to cast doubt upon
your language of acts, set it in a criminal situation.

Carlo, I feel sure we could agree on what the State made
Pinelli say. It is the 'end of anarchism' when the language
of acts can so easily be used, as easily used as the
language of words can be used to effect 'corporate
responsibility' or to form a communique

Carlo, the red zone is a language, as was the sudden
declaration of an imigration zone in Genoa airport, as was
the hospital, taken over by cops, following the attack on
the Diaz secondary school. So many 'states of exception',
Carlo, so many zones for the suspension of life in favour of
the non-being of a law as gilded and 'violatingly impotent'
as the cash that pays for its upkeep, its continued
circulation. All these zones, Carlo - unlike ours, described
as the 'fringe of the fringe' but which lets us converse  -
all these zones are zones of defensiveness where words
freeze into codes and money talks its agency through agents,
personfications of capital, functionaries that alow capital
to change its form. These are the differences that make no
difference.


FTSE4Good.
'Accatone' @ Movement of the 21st-24th July

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