through europe

Our task is to investigate how ultimately corruption can be forced to cede its control to generation

Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri

In a lecture hold in 1978, Michel Foucault addresses the question of critique as follows:

“Critique is the movement by which the subject grasps the right to question truth in relation to the power it gives rise to, and power in relation to the discursive creation of truth. From this point of view, critique becomes the art of deliberate escape from servitude, of reflected non-conformability. In the realm of the game which can be described as the politics of truth, critique would thus function as an act of desubordination.” [1]

There’s a haunting image that’s grabbed my attention like no other. It’s been circulated frantically and has appeared on countless newspapers and websites in the past weeks. Its’ focal point is unclear, the colours are faint and muddy, the lens has bloated the centre of the frame, distorting the portrait. The image undercuts our current habits as viewers, used to a form of direct unequivocal communication, to clear rhetorical symbolism: the protester high atop the vandalized police van, the politician admonishing, protected by a forest of microphones, the young hooded student, arm high and tense, throwing an object overhead; something in this photograph resonates beyond this imaginific regurgitation of 68, yet it is happening now, amidst the rest of the rhetorical scenarios.

I'm deep breathing. I am.

Lucky I can. With the knowhow. It stands to reason relaxing's not the easiest thing in the world otherwise there'd be relaxed people wherever you went. I was at the Facility at 2.30 and the Unit at 4 and I didn't see too many relaxed people round there. At the Annexe I didn't see any at all.

Lungs in good running order. What do you expect, immaculate bodywork? It goes doesn't it?

I’m a person.

I’ve got money. I went in a shop. I’ve got my cassette. It’s in my pocket. I bought it in the shop. Brother James and Sister Sue will play it when I get there. They’ll play it and they’ll sing and I’ll sing.

She’s not really called Sister Sue, that’s what I call her. She doesn’t mind. My feet are wet. They’re wet inside my trainers and they’ll be all wrinkly. They gave me these trainers at Makepeace House, when I left. Before that I wore slippers. When I was at Makepeace House I wore slippers and in the grounds I wore Wellingtons.

Imagine you're living in a country not very different from Italy. You can breath the corruption in the air, the great public works cost three times more than anywhere else and are never finished and the winners of the public auctions are decided by a phone call. The press - when not "porniphicated" - is declared by the authorities "a menace for the national security" and the opposition - when it's not the government's accomplice - is only patient and waiting for the electoral wheel to turn in its favor.