The Unseen

Praise for
The Unseen

‘What [Balestrini] narrates is not a fairy tale, but a terrifying experience. Not just his own, but also that of a lost generation who thought possible another world beside the world, who dreamt of workers' power, of autonomy, who revolted against everything, school, family, clergy, political parties, “historical compromise”, State, police, boredom . . .
The Unseen
is, perhaps, the first true novel of the European Left.'
Libération

‘Balestrini offers a very lucid document, which is both the memory and the assessment of a disoriented generation. The Left now has its novel.'
L'Événement du jeudi

‘
The Unseen
isn't documentary writing, but it tells us far more than any documentary about a troubled phase in our history; how it was experienced, and most of all how it was lived in the imagination.'
Corriere della Sera

‘We should be grateful to Nanni Balestrini for having engaged his writing with this cruel sentimental education of a young man living in the seventies.' Rossana Rossanda,
il manifesto

‘The political passion of the rebel Balestrini is equalled by his literary vocation
. . .
the finale is not unworthy of Bontempelli or Calvino.'
Il Giornale

‘A work of high literary quality. Among many novels and elegantly crafted pieces of fiction
. . . The Unseen
has the courage to face an incandescent matter of reality, rich in implications that involve not only the literati but also a wider public.'
L'Unità

‘Not just a beautiful novel
. . .
it is the story of part of a generation in our country, who dreamed a different future and believed in it, believed in the possibility of making it real.'
Linus

NANNI BALESTRINI
was born in Milan in 1935 and was a member of the influential avant-garde Gruppo 63, along with Umberto Eco and Eduardo Sanguineti. He is the author of numerous volumes of poetry, including
Blackout
and
Ipocalisse
, and novels such as
Tristano
,
Vogliamo
Tutto
, and
La Violenza Illustrata
.

During the notorious mass arrests of writers and activists associated with Autonomy, which began in 1979, Balestrini was charged with membership of an armed organization and with subversive association. He went underground to avoid arrest and fled to France. As in so many other cases, no evidence was provided and he was acquitted of all the charges.

He currently lives in Rome, where he runs the monthly magazine of cultural intervention
Alfabeta2
with Umberto Eco and others.

The Unseen

Nanni Balestrini

TRANSLATED BY LIZ HERON

WITH A FOREWORD BY ANTONIO NEGRI

First published in English by Verso 1989

This updated paperback edition published by Verso 2011

This updated edition © Nanni Balestrini and Derive Approdi, Rome 2005

Translation © Liz Heron 1989, 2011

Foreword © Antonio Negri 2011

First published as
Gli Invisibili

© Bompiani, Milan 1987

All rights reserved

The moral rights of the authors have been asserted

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Verso

UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG

US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201

www.versobooks.com

Verso is the imprint of New Left Books

Epub ISBN-13: 978-1-84467-837-2

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

Typeset in Janson MT by Hewer UK Ltd, Edinburgh

Printed in the US by Maple Vail

for Sergio

Contents

Begin reading.

Foreword

Nanni Balestrini's book, now republished here, tells of unseen actors in the class struggle between the 1970s and '80s, particularly in northern Italy, and inside the jails of the Realm. These subjects are invisible because they are elusive, mutating beings in the act of metamorphosis. But what can we say about them today (and also about this novel) if not that rather than being an old, outdated story this is now very much of the present moment, one caught sight of at that time and followed in the course of its unfolding? The republication of
The Unseen
therefore has the advantage today of telling us about proletarian subjects whose class nature has finally been revealed: the unseen individual of yesterday is the proletarian of today, the immaterial worker, the cognitive precariat, the new figure of the worker as social labour power in the movements of the multitude. Those poor wretches did it, they managed to get through a revolution in the composition of labour and a ferocious political repression and to struggle on from the factories to society and (still productive) from society to the jail (still fighting back). And now where will they go? The elite of the working-class movement who betrayed and dragged the unseen into prison now look around, fearful and unable to build a politics, afraid of losing out if they do not resume contact with that age-old movement of transformation; but that elite will never win! Indeed, regardless of this betrayal by the working-class movement (which has been so serious, especially in Italy), the unseen have gone forward. In the '80s, they were organizing prison revolts and the first autonomous social centres in the cities; in the '90s they organized the Panther movement; in the late '90s they turned into Zapatistas and
tute bianche
, the anti-globalization movement and everything else that has happened and will happen.

It is interesting to note that each one of these movements always sought to give itself ambiguous, hard-to-pin-down names that could have been white but also dark in the shadow that the white produced, that could have been soft like the tread of a feline, that could moreover position itself as tireless resistance precisely in the name of the singular ambiguity of its disobedient behaviour. Since the '70s, these movements have all understood that starting all over again doesn't mean turning back but rather expanding, reaching into new spaces and new times, being coordinated and coordinating, seeking confrontation in the measure of consensus and consensus in the measure of confrontation. The fact is that, in contrast to the parties and the survivors from the
ancien régime
, the unseen place themselves in the here and now. Balestrini's unseen, right from the early '80s, were beginning to give shape to a multitudinous, singular, transversal subject that wanted never to be reduced to a mass but wanted in every case to be a whole. And even when ideological reminiscences drew them inside names and terminologies that sounded out of date, at that same moment this subject was able to invent itself anew. Think of the scene where the prisoners in the Trani revolt are locked up in their cells after the bloodbath and shed with their flaming torches a light that illuminates the night of every proletarian prison of the decade. This is the language of the multitude. But if it were no more than this, this reality in its biting descriptions, Balestrini's book might only be a piece of historical or sociological documentation. What is great about this novel is that the unseen individual becomes a literary subject.
Larvatus prodeo
– the proletarian advances masked by his invisibility. And with this transformation in those years of the '70s – which the bosses and their servants within the working-class movement failed sufficiently to curse – he represents the invisible yet powerful transformation from material work to immaterial work, from revolt against the boss to revolt against the patriarchy, along with the metamorphosis of bodies brought about within this movement, and the imagination that this new historical condition (social and political to be precise) brings to speech.

Balestrini's book is a great new experiment (the first was
Vogliamo tutto
[We Want Everything]) that shows us the body of the exploited as an actor in the revolutionary process. And we can add: in the passage from modern to post-modern, from the era when socialism dreamed of itself to the era when communism is beginning to be lived. Without a doubt this is a didactic novel; but who learns from whom? The novel of the Real or – this seems the mark of revolutionary literature – the reality of the novel? It pleases me to bet on the second hypothesis and ask the anatomist/physiologist of the language in question (Balestrini) to agree with me: in its ambiguity, in the difficulty it registers, this book has nonetheless anticipated reality and transformed the Real. In this case the ambiguity is between the real actor and the author of the narrative, a key connected to a mechanism of political and constituent potency, one poor in its genesis and yet of great richness in the series of effects it produces.

An act of love? This book is dual in character; it is a biopolitical tissue of postmodernity, another of the great concepts of contemporary revolutionary thought that Balestrini intuits and invents, along with the idea of the multitude. One could discuss this at even greater length and most of all one could insist on the question of the function, the vocation, the joy of the writer! How frequently lumpen proletarians reproach writers or intellectuals for describing phenomena they have not endured. This time there is great satisfaction in being able to acknowledge that Balestrini too has been invisible, that he has suffered the transformation to trace long years of poverty and love.

Antonio Negri, 2011

Translator's Note

The Unseen
is anchored in the social movements of Italy in the second half of the 1970s and, especially, in the rise of Autonomy, a widespread network of extra-parliamentary alliances involving school and university students, the young unemployed and various groupings of the socially marginalized and economically disenfranchized (the
emarginati).

Autonomy's political origins can be traced back to the factory strikes and occupations of 1969's ‘Hot Autumn', but a number of immediate issues spurred its growth: price rises and cuts in public spending, a series of neo-fascist shootings and bomb attacks, rising unemployment, dissatisfaction with the education system. This was also the time of the Communist Party's attempted ‘historic compromise', the move towards a hoped-for partnership with the ruling Christian Democracts. The party's tacit support for the government's economic policies and refusal to oppose legislation drastically extending police powers were the object of fierce criticism from the left.

Protests reached their height in 1977, when street demonstrations and violent, often armed, clashes with the police occurred almost daily in some Italian cities. It was also a year of explosive cultural opposition – through alternative radio stations and magazines, and through the theatrically staged actions of the ‘Metropolitan Indians'. An outbreak of posters and slogans re-invoked the surreal challenges of 1968.

As divisions and tensions multiplied within Autonomy, especially over the question of organized violence, terrorism escalated. The wave of repression which followed made few distinctions. Mass arrests, guilt-by-association and the imprisonment, frequently without trial, of hundreds of people, had profound consequences for an entire generation.

Of the many prison revolts during this period, the one whose events are most closely paralleled in the novel took place at Trani, near Bari, in December 1980.

Translation of the protagonists' names in the text would have resulted in excessive artificiality. So that their literal meanings are not altogether lost, I offer the following glossary: