“Imminent danger. Be careful, the slightest line of flight can cause everything to explode.” Thus began Félix Guattari’s account of the closing of Radio Alice, the free antenna of Bologna, outlawed in 1977 by the mayor of the city, Renato Zangheri. In banning the radio, Zangheri, a member of the Italian Communist Party (PCI), governing one of the prominent “red” cities of Italy, was loyally toeing the party line, and actively contributing to the repression of the diverse “autonomies” emerged after the 1972 crisis of the extreme-left. “Autonomies” in the Italian political vocabulary of the time designated the independent mobilization of women, youths, immigrants, homosexuals, and marginals of various kind, groups that refused assimilation and identification in the “class struggle” controlled by the autocratic/bureaucratic machinery of the communist party and the unions. The volatile Italian situation and the dramatic clashes between militants and leaders of the PCI and autonomous assemblages searching for new forms of revolt and resistance were closely monitored by European thinkers and politicians. Leading French intellectuals including Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari, actively intervened provoking a number of exchanges and confrontations with prominent figures of the Italian left on the questions of power and revolutionary practices. The paper retraces one of such confrontations.
The Aula Magna in Tolentini (IUAV). Courtesy of Università Iuav di Venezia, Archivio Progetti SBD, Archivio iconografico Iuav.
In 1975, to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of Italy’s liberation from fascism, Carlo Aymonino, member of the PCI (Italian Communist Party) and recently appointed director of the Istituto Universitario di Architettura di Venezia (IUAV), inaugurated the newly restored Aula Magna (Great Hall) at the Tolentini in Venice. Supervised by Carlo Scarpa, the renovation included paintings of famous Venetian artists like Emilio Vedova, Vittorio Basaglia, Mario De Luigi and Armando Pizzinato. The centerpiece of the composition was a panel emblazoned with the first part of the slogan written on the front page of Antonio Gramsci’s newspaper L’Ordine Nuovo (The New Order): “Educate yourselves because we’ll need all your intelligence. Agitate because we’ll need all your enthusiasm. Organize yourselves because we’ll need all your strength.”1 Photographs taken two years after the inauguration show the word “intelligence” in Gramsci’s sentence crossed over and substituted with “sharpshooting,” a clear invitation to join the “lotta armata” (armed fight), while the white, pristine walls of the Aula Magna appeared insouciantly decorated with images and ironic slogans by the Indiani Metropolitani (Metropolitan Indians), the “creative and libertarian wing” of the political upheaval of the 1977 Movimento (Movement).
Mural by the Indiani Metropolitani at the Aula Magna in Tolentini (IUAV). Courtesy of Università Iuav di Venezia, Archivio Progetti SBD, Archivio iconografico Iuav.
Thus, while Venice remained marginal compared to the real epicenters of the 1977 Movimento (Rome, Milan and Bologna), IUAV’s Aula Magna closely reflected the troubled climate of the time exposing the ever-larger fracture separating the extreme left extra-parliamentary groups from the Communist Party, which, since 1973, under the leadership of Enrico Berlinguer, had been theorizing and negotiating the “historical compromise” with the Christian Democrats. The radicalization of the conflict between the far left and the Communist Party corresponded to a profound transformation of the Italian protest movement. Leninist-inspired organizations of 1968, including Potere Operario or Lotta Continua, dissolved to give way to new forms of creative quest or, along a radical diverging trajectory, recourse to terrorism. The intensification of the actions of the left-wing terrorist organization Red Brigades was the epiphenomenon of the last alternative, culminating with the 1978 kidnapping and assassination of the Christian Democrat leader Aldo Moro, in answer to Berlinguer’s “historical compromise.” What truly characterized the 1977 Movimento, however, was the vindication for “autonomy,” proclaimed and theorized in various forms: from the structured leftist movement Autonomia Operaia (Workers’ Autonomy), led by Oreste Scalzone and Toni Negri, to a heterogeneous assemblage of collectives and groups that systematically refused organization, hierarchy, and any kind of political manipulation. This last area of the Movement found inspiration in the writings of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, whose 1972 book Capitalisme et schizophrénie. L’anti-Œdipe and the first chapter on the rhizome from their Mille plateaux, were promptly translated in Italian. Guattari, in fact, became an active and acclaimed participant of the most spectacular demonstration of the 1977 Movimento, the three-day protest against repression held in Bologna in September of the same year. There, in the streets of the city, an awestruck Guattari assisted to the unfolding of his anticipated “molecular revolution.”2
An echo and a response to these events at the IUAV can be found in a slim volume printed in 1977 by the publishing cooperative of the school of architecture in Venice (CLUVA). Titled Il dispositivo Foucault (The Foucault Device), the book collected the papers presented at a crucial seminar by Massimo Cacciari, Franco Rella, Manfredo Tafuri and Georges Teyssot. Rella, quite possibly prompted by Cacciari, convened the meeting.3 Rella had arrived at the IUAV in 1975 after having published a number of texts on Freud later collected in La critica freudiana (The Freudian Critique) in 1977. During the academic year 1977–78, Rella taught a seminar on Freud as complement to Tafuri’s course on turn of the century Vienna. After being affiliated with Potere Operaio, Cacciari — an advocate of “negative thought” and professor of aesthetics at the IUAV — had joined the Italian Communist Party (of which Tafuri was also a member), and published Krisis. Saggio sulla critica del pensiero negativo da Nietzsche a Wittgenstein (Crisis. Essay on the crisis of negative thought from Nietzsche to Wittgenstein).4 Krisis, together with the 1975 Oikos: da Loos a Wittgenstein (Oikos: From Loos to Wittgenstein), written in collaboration with Francesco Amendolagine, were mandatory reading for the students enrolled in Tafuri’s class on Vienna.
With the notable exception of Teyssot’s contribution, which thoughtfully investigated and tested Foucault’s concept of heterotopy, the other participants used the important audience of the seminar (after beginning in Aula Gradoni where usually Tafuri taught his classes, the conference had to be moved to Aula Magna at the Tolentini) as platform to attack not only Foucault but also Deleuze and Guattari in direct connection with the momentous events that were taking place in Bologna.5 Cacciari’s essay was reprinted, almost untouched, in a special 1977 issue of the philosophy and culture magazine Aut Aut titled “Irrazionalismo e nuove forme di razionalità” (“Irrationalism and New Forms of Rationality”). Cacciari then became the center of a notorious controversy about the notion of power attributed by Italian communists intellectuals to Foucault (and by uninformed association extended to Deleuze and Guattari), which found response first in an essay published by the French philosopher in Aut Aut, and then in a letter addressed by Foucault, in December 1978, to L’Unità, the organ of the Italian Communist Party.6
Mural by the Indiani Metropolitani at the Aula Magna in Tolentini (IUAV). Courtesy of Università Iuav di Venezia, Archivio Progetti SBD, Archivio iconografico Iuav. (next page also)
In 1976, under the aegis of Aymonino, the Institute for Architectural History at the IUAV, which operated under the direction of Tafuri since 1968, was given more autonomy and renamed Dipartimento di analisi, critica e storia dell’architettura (Department of Architectural Analysis, Criticism and History). The tortuous appellation mirrored the appraisal of Tafuri and his colleagues of the state of the discipline. The establishment of the department included the creation of a new corso di laurea (degree program) in history of architecture that attracted numerous students competing for guidance in the development of their master theses. The aftermath of the colloquium on Foucault marked a distinct reshuffling among members of the department and in the distribution of the students. Cacciari suspended teaching at the IUAV to devote himself full time to politics as member of PCI and began to reflect on Catholicism. Tafuri rather abruptly dissociated himself and his classes from Franco Rella. Ironically, given the substantial presence of students in architecture engaged in Lacanian theory, Rella found himself directing Lacanian theses while Tafuri and Teyssot emerged as leading figures of the department in the following years. Teyssot introduced students not just to Foucault but to the large field of French literature on history of science and technology from Michel Serres and François Jacob to Georges Canguilhem and André Leroi-Gorhan. As for Tafuri he became interested in Carlo Ginzburg microhistory but slowly and inexorably turned his gaze to the Renaissance entrenching himself and his students in a sternly philological approach.