Franco 'Bifo' Berardi on Nanni Balestrini's 'Radically Formalist' Poetry

Literary Hub shares writer and theorist Franco 'Bifo' Berardi's introduction to Nanni Balestrini's Blackout, recently published by Commune Editions. Berardi writes that Balestrini's prose and poetry "can be useful" if we want to learn to understand (and appreciate) Italian social movements of the 1970s. He explains "Nanni Balestrini is simultaneously the most radically formalist poet of the Italian scene and the most explicitly engaged in a political sense. He follows a methodology of composition that may be named recombination, as he is always recombining fragments taken from the ongoing public discourse (newspapers, leaflets, advertising, street voices, politician’s speeches, scientific texts, and so on). But simultaneously he is remixing those fragments in a rhythmic wave that reverberates with passions and expectations and rage." Let's pick up there: 

The peculiarity of the Italian movement of what would be called autonomia may be found in the concept of refusal of labor. Workers’ struggles were viewed from the point of view of their ability to destroy political control, but also and mainly from the point of view of their ability to advance knowledge and the technological replacement of human labor time in the process of production. The reduction of labor time has always been the main goal of the Italian autonomist workerist movement.

The words “operai e studenti uniti nella lotta” (workers and students united in the struggle) were not simply a rhetorical call for solidarity, but the expression of the consciousness that the workers were fighting against exploitation and students bore the force of science and technology: tools for the emancipation of time from the slavery of waged work.

In this social and political framework, literature was conceived as middle ground between labor and refusal of labor. Literature may be viewed as labor, according to the structuralist vision purported by the French formalists of Tel Quel, but literature may also be viewed as an attempt to emancipate  the rhythm of language from the work of signification. Poetic language is suspended between these two attractors.

This double dimension is the defining feature of Balestrini’s poetics: formalism of the machine, and dynamism of the movement. Cold recombination of linguistic fragments, and hot emotionality of the rhythm. Although the event is hot, this poetical treatment transforms it into a verbal crystal, and the combination of verbal crystals gives way to the energy of a sort of a-pathetic emotion.

Read on at Literary Hub.