"A Re[inter]view with Wu Ming"

Snafu

1954, a decade of Post-War. The Korean conflict has just shaken the world, the French are withdrawing from Indochina, McCarthy's witches hunt is almost over, the KGB is founded in Moscow. New lifestyles and desires for freedom are wriggling under the Cold War blanket.

This is the essence of 54, the novel authored by the Bologna-based Wu Ming collective ("No name") which was recently published in Italy (Einaudi, Turin, 666 pages, 15 euros). 54 is about the dialectical relationship between those two empires (which were going to become one, as Negri & Hardt would put it) and a manifold mankind that dreams of moving beyond the modern age and Fordist discipline on the workplace. 1950's Italy is still a rural nation, with a very few industrial areas, mostly under reconstruction. To escape everyday life and work is utopian, especially if there isn't any working.

Pierre Capponi may be an ace of *filuzzi* dancing and draw crowds in all dancehalls of Bologna; he may even conquer Angela, the young wife of comrade Odoacre Montroni (a mythical leader of the local federation of the Italian Communist Party); and yet he cannot elope with her, for he is just a bartender in a working class hang-out, he hardly manages to make ends meet.

Steve "Concrete" Zollo is a professional murderer from NYC and the right arm of Lucky Luciano; back on the Hudson Bay he used to make "concrete boots" for the enemies of Luciano. Zollo's bird-cage is neither Bologna nor poverty: his cage is named Naples, where women are buxom but they all look like "peasants dressed up on feastdays", where business (international smack smuggling) is excellent but alleys are stinking and noisy and everything sticks to you like flypaper.

What they've got is not enough to get another life. The other life is just movie-fueled dreams and unfulfilled wishes, like that of being like Cary Grant. Cary Grant, the perfect leading man, the ace of style who came from nowhere. If you cannot be Cary Grant, at least you can look like him, even if you work in a butcher's shop, or meet him by chance and try to tell your friends, but nobody believes you. You can also try to sell the lot of heroin you've stolen from the Boss of the Bosses, in order to change your life and leave for a far country.

Besides the longing for escape there is a dark design, the long arm of History. The MI6 (British intelligence) try to get Cary Grant involved in a motion picture on Marshall Tito, a project that may help Yugoslavia to get farther from Moscow. The new-born KGB led by General Serov try to sabotage the mission. In the meanwhile, television comes to Italy and RAI (state-owned TV network) begins to broadcast. Families and gangs grapple with each other in order to turn on an American TV set, a glorious McGuffin Electric Deluxe which is always off but whose screen reflects the comedy acts staged in front of it. It does not work because there is nothing inside it, nothing but a lot of stolen heroin.

54 is a sharp, clean-cut look on a year of living dangerously. It is a spy story set in the Mediterranean area (from Marseille to Naples, from Genoa to Croatia), whose plot unfolds on the razor's edge of greater history, like happened in "Q" — the best-selling novel by Luther Blissett, which Wu Ming started from as a project — or in Pynchon-inspired post-modern fiction.

However, 54 is also another persevering book on Resistance, both historical and individual. Resistance is not only the collective defense of inalienable ideals, but also a progressive myth which points at the desire to live with dignity. In this novel, America and Europe live side by side. America is the new frontier, the country that inherited the tasks of the French Revolution, to free mankind and make them happy (it is even written in the Constitution). Italy and the Italians are at the window, they watch the coming of television and all mod cons. They don't realize that they are being watched already by those devices.

Q: In a recent interview, you state that “pop-culture is a pre-requisite for communism”. Cary Grant and David Bowie — the protagonist of Havana Glam, a novel by Wu Ming 5 — would be “bottom-up icons, shaped by the desires of the multitudes”. Nevertheless, Bowie and Grant entered the star system through an accurate (industrial) process of selection and filtering. Living in novels like 54 or Havana Glam, and coming in touch with a sweating and stinking humanity, those saints release part of their immortality. Does communism pass through a sort of "fame sharing" ? Or do we need to fabricate new, decentralized, P2P, icons?

A: Uhm... Aren't we supposed to talk about genre fiction? :-) Yes, we did state that XXth century Western popular culture (which is now turning into something completely different, and way more complex too boot) was often closer to socialism than XXth century Eastern "socialist" regimes ever were. We even added that Andy Warhol's serial icona of Mao Zedong has been more important to revolution than those Mao Zedong official portraits waved by maoists at demonstrations.

This has to do with our manifold background: Antonio Gramsci's notion of "cultural hegemony", autonomist Marxism (Toni Negri and the likes) and the fact that some of us are ex-Mods, ex-Skinheads and ex-Punks.
You know, autonomist Marxism emphasized the creative and revolutionary power of workers on their own, apart from state and party. Next to typical left pessimism, autonomists can even seem dreamily optimistic, seeing struggle and victory where others see apathy and defeat. Where most people (across the political spectrum) see capital as acting and labor as reacting, autonomists see capital as the reactive side of the relation.
Of course, by "labor" we mean living labor in the social factory, i.e. all creative power and social cooperation, which is necessary to capital but is not completely tameable. Life keeps emerging from underneath.

We still think that a new and fair mode of production can only be established through the re-appropriation of the existing networks of social cooperation. Socialism must be based upon the collective nature of capitalist production.

This is why, unlike such people as the Situationists (who are obsessed with "recuperation" and the "spectacle"), we always lay the stress upon the creative side of the relation between capital and the class. We lay the stress upon the power of the multitudes.

The making of pop culture (we don't draw a clear distinction between the "underground" and the "mainstream" here) was a collective process during which the borders of ever-changing open communities were constantly re-traced, subcultures constantly re-shaped themselves around myths. We'd better understand what "pre-requisites of communism" were at work in that process, instead of believing that millions of people were being brainwashed.

Nowadays, many things are changing for better as far as reappropriation, nay, “de-propriation” of culture is concerned. Copyright infringement, CD-burning, DVD-ripping, P2P exchanges, MP3-sharing, OCR-scanning, plunderphonics, free software... There is a general uprising, gallons of cold sweat are running down the bosses's spines. The institutions of intellectual property are crumbling down to pieces, people are fucking them over. This is a wonderful grassroots process, and it's closer to Socialism than China ever was.

Q: I was referring more to the aura (in Benjamin’s terms) which surrounds pop icons. The star system create icons who are able to reflect people desires, to produce identification, new “life-styles” and new subcultures. In this sense, Luther Blissett — considered as a decentralized, bottom-up myth — will never have the same aura of Bowie or Grant. Is it a question of a lack of distance or what? How can we create popular stories, that people can use to reinvent their own lives? Role games and do-it-yourself subcultures are the only answer, or a collective of writers like yours can suggest something different?

A: We can only speak for ourselves: we *do* play a role game (what else is collective fiction writing at the end of the day?), and a DIY subculture prospers around us. We try to manipulate literary genres in order to create *popular* fiction. We use the term "popular" in its original sense, like in Romance languages (Italian, Spanish, French...), where it means "belonging to the people" or "made by the people". Think of those folk ballads who seem to have no author, they are credited as either "popular" or "traditional". Here we are: we want to get rid of such myths as Authorship, Genius, Inspiration etc.
As far as the "aura" is concerned, we side with Benjamin rather than with Adorno, who was an utter bore and even wrote racist comments on jazz musicians.

The fact that cultural artifacts lost their auratic (i.e. aristocratic and elitist) power was essentially positive, it allowed multitudes of people to get more involved in the re-manipulation of culture. Benjamin called for the democratization of culture, in a way he foresaw DIY culture and P2P culture. Everybody ought to read "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction", it is still very fresh and absolutely brilliant, and it's a good antidote for nihilist/post-situationist intoxication.

Q: As for Q, in 54 micro-stories cross continuosly the frame of “official” history. Thus, this frame is never accidental nor rigid. The novel gives the reader the chance to read the cold-war game not only as a binary match, but also as a challenge within the challenge, with many options which are left open and undetermined. What if Tito would have decided to make a movie with Cary Grant? And what if Dijlas would have influenced Tito politics? If hystory is so rich of strata and possibilities, there are some threads you use to weave all the strata toghether… Can you explain what they are and how you select them?

A: We guess our method allows the stories to tell themselves and reproduce themselves by parthenogenesis (self-fertilization). Of course there is a starting point, we believe that history is neither straightforward nor cyclical, it is “catastrophical”, “fractal”: conflicts produce bifurcation (branching off) and discontinuites all the time. History as a science hardly manages to deal with such discontinuities, it appears that all rational investigation ends up producing even more disquieting shadow-cones. Such gloomy areas are intersections between history and mythology. The only way to explore them is by playing games with history. You see, we don't write the usual kind of "ucronic" speculative fiction, like P.K. Dick's The Man In The High Castle (except Havana Glam, which is a sci-fi divertissement about 1970's glam rock). We prefer to investigate the “possibility” of a bifurcation in history, the moment when history “might have gone” in a different direction. We are not interested in depicting the bifurcation itself, or its consequences. We usually think of an historical period which seems fascinating to us, then we spend months watching microfilms, reading sources, doing research, writing down all kinds of stuff, then the brainstorm comes and it lasts several weeks. We have hallucinations, sort of. Historical research is like peyote to us. After we recover from all the shocks and flashes, we start to write.

Q: The mirror is one of the core themes of the novel. A glorious TV, the McGuffin, travels throughout the novel, “ a mute witness of any sort of violences and squalors”. Everybody wants to see the first TV programs but nobody knows how to turn the TV on. But they do not realize that they are already on the screen, in the shape of pale reflected shadows. How can we compare this '50s quest for dreaming with contemporary banal reality-fictions such as "Big Brother"? What is the function of television today and who take cares of our dreams and nightmares?

A: In Italy the 1950's were the dawn of the TV era, people wanted to dream because the situation was very tough, there was violence everywhere. The 1990's (we started to work on 54 in 1999) were the laboratory of the network-propelled "Big Brother"-fuelled semio-fascism that turned a 40-year long quest for dreaming inside out, reflecting all nightmares ("Criminals are everywhere!", "What do all of these fucking Moroccans and Albanians want from us?") and rotten beliefs ("the Commies are back!"), producing a vast amount of symbolic violence which can only be compared to 1950's McCarthysm in the US. Last year this symbolic violence helped the Berlusconi gang to take over government. Now they are trying to push the country back to the 1950's by erasing all changes and reforms the social movements (workers, students, feminists, gay rights and free speech activists etc.) have achieved since 1968. Italy is looping the loop. After S11, the whole West seems to be doing more or less the same. However, we think that history is neither straight-forward nor cyclical, there is no way the powers-that-be are able to grasp its complexity and plan everything. Like in our novel, present-day Italy mirrors herself in 1950's Italy, and yet she isn't the same country anymore. Berlusconi and his buddies are going to be unseated, nay, “unsaddled”. Their regime shall come tumbling down sooner than anybody expects, and the whole world is likely to take lessons from this.