Lorenzo Galluccio
2024-01-10T12:00:01+01:00

Bologna, early 1980s: in the spread of commercial advertisements, horror became glamour and glamour horror. There were the screams of punk, the premonitory irony reduced by the Seventies, the psychopathic and lysergic cultures. Franco Bifo Berardi tells us in STORIA VERA about the legendary base of these movements: the Traum Fabrik.
More

CULTURE 10.01.24

THE IRONIC NIGHTMARE OF TRAUMA FABRIK

WRITTEN BY: FRANCO BIFO BERARDI

IN PARTNERSHIP WITH: ZERO

The beginning of the 1980s. The television and advertising monster announces itself on the horizon of the collective imagination, as a promise and as a threat. The horror that we now, thirty years later, fully understand, appeared then as a shadow, as a premonition. Traum Fabrik sketches on paper the sentiment of the coming time with a mixture of disdainful irony and self-injurious experimentation. Neither cynical nor rebellious, the spirit of Traum Fabrik is expressed as a narcotic premonitory nightmare.

During the transition of those early 1980s, we were witnessing the shift from the predominant irony in the language of free radios to the cynicism that dominates the language of commercial television and rampant advertising. Traum Fabrik positions itself in the middle, at the point of transition, with those acid colors, with those detourned advertising images, transforming glamour into horror, and horror into glamour.

In the 1970s, we had tried to combine the lyrical and the epic, and we had attempted to avoid the tragic. “From the lyrical to the epic, avoiding the tragic” is the title of an issue of A/traverso that was published in the spring of 1977, while rebellious poets were being imprisoned or fleeing from judges and policemen. The play on words contained in that title could be read at two different levels. Firstly, it was a message addressed to the workers who gathered at the Teatro Lirico in Milan, just at the time when students and unemployed people had launched a Dadaist and autonomous insurrection that reached its peak in the cities of Rome and Bologna. Secondly, it contained an interpretation of the past and present evolution of the insurrectionary movement and held a hope for its future evolution.

Lyrical, epic, and tragic were linguistic, poetic, and mythical forms of a community that sought the liberation of the entire society from the dominance of capital and also from the Dictatorship of Meaning and Severity. The lyrical moment was the one long experienced in the experiences of the previous years, in the formative years of the desiring, affectionate, loving, and dreaming community that Enrico Palandri talks about in his unforgettable Boccalone, the novel that tells the stories of love and rebellion of Bolognese students.

In the early 1970s, behaviors of joyful rejection of work, bourgeois boredom, and economic competition had spread in Italy, as well as rejection of Catholic familiarity and Stalinist authoritarianism. We had read Anti-Oedipus by Deleuze and Guattari, we had read the poems of Antonin Artaud and Mayakovsky, and for us, workers’ communism had blended with schizo-politics and the themes of libertarian desire.

However, the desiring community in our imagination had a historical task, or at least it seemed so in that period of intense insurrectionary and political activism. Our task was to move from existential and poetic autonomy to the conquest of spaces in the city, to the rupture of economic dominance, and to the libertarian political revolution. Revolution is a big word, a word that we borrowed from the tradition of the early 20th century. We didn’t take it too seriously, as demonstrated by a leaflet we published in June 1977, with an ironic title that said: “THE REVOLUTION IS OVER WE HAVE WON.”

We didn’t take the revolution too seriously because we didn’t believe in the possibility of turning the world upside down, of subverting from the bottom to the top and from the top to the bottom. We didn’t believe that there was a truth to be restored by reversing the order of the dominant discourse and replacing it with another order. No order was to be respected, not even that of the revolution. Instead, we believed in a desiring insurrection in which everyone could go in their preferred direction without predetermined and obligatory positions like the positions affirmed with severe certainty by the revolutionary dialectic of the past. We didn’t take the revolution too seriously, but we liked that word.

Therefore, we thought of the revolution as an EPIC moment that necessarily had to come after the LYRIC moment of reunion, of coming together, after the moment of social and political recomposition of the working class and cognitive workers in an insurrectionary movement. Playing with words, we called the workers’ movement that had gathered in the Milan theatre to proceed from the lyrical moment of joyful recomposition to the epic moment of unleashed subversion. But we knew very well that along this path the movement had already had to go through moments of violence, terror, self-destruction, and totalitarianism. It was the tragic that we intended to avoid.

Did we avoid it? No, we didn’t avoid it, as the history of the following years shows: terrorism spread throughout Italy as a result of state repression and the influence of ancient ideologies that still had a deep root in Italian social and cultural reality. After the libertarian and joyful phase of the movements, the tragic and totalitarian moment of terrorism came. And heroin spread in the recesses of desire, dragging the community into the suspended ecstasy of a dream waiting to sink into the imminent nightmare of the dependence of fear and cold turkey. Traum Fabrik was the space where that ecstasy, that suspension, and that nightmare were experienced in existence and creation. We had promised ourselves to transition from the lyrical to the epic, from the affectionate joy of the desiring community to the epic explosion of liberating social potential. And at the same time, we wanted to avoid the tragic, violence, repression, and terror. We didn’t succeed in that project, but it didn’t depend solely on our will. The history of that movement and those years of transition from late modernity to the post-modernity of the 1980s could be read through the magnifying lens of rhetorical figures and poetic (and ethical) forms: different styles of expression that succeeded each other in the spirit of the time.

Lyrical, epic, and tragic were certainly significant forms of expression in the history of the movements of those years. When the lyrical language (intimate, whispered, and friendly) tried to transform into an epic language (historical, lofty, and aggressive), it often encountered the tragedy of history stemming from the history of the great revolutions of the twentieth century and the tragedy of a future that seemed to be erasing itself, as punk was announcing. Traum Fabrik announces the message of punk to the peaceful Emilian province and translates it into schizoid colors and psychopathic forms of scribbled cards, waiting for the pusher to arrive. How can we linguistically define the style of Traum Fabrik? There is irony, but there is also tragedy, and above all, there is an obscurely luminous premonition.

What is irony? A very difficult question. Scholars say that irony is a rhetorical figure that allows us to say one thing while apparently saying its opposite or saying something very different. Of course, this is one possible definition of irony, but I wouldn’t say it is a perfect definition. In fact, there is no perfect definition of irony. Irony is indefinable. To define irony is something decidedly lacking in irony. If you really ask me to define this word, I would say that irony is a linguistic gesture that produces an effect of suspending reality. Suspending reality means not feeling its weight. That’s it, I would say that irony is a linguistic gesture that allows the person who performs it to not feel the weight of reality, to feel free from the weight of reality. The omnipotence of language, the effect of lightness.

Traum Fabrik stages a form of premonitory tragic irony. Irony suspends the weight of reality, plays the signifier against the signified, and chooses among the countless possible interpretations the one that appears lighter, airier, more volatile. Irony infinitely expands the field of meaning to make any meaning connect to any signifier semantically possible. Freedom from the weight of the relationship of meaning, that is irony. Expansion of the field of interpretation to liberate oneself from reality.

But reality loomed over the historical and social scene in the years when Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan began the neoliberal offensive that over time has wiped away the traces of solidarity among human beings. In the years when war regained its place, a dark lord of human affairs.

Traum Fabrik exhibits ecstasy and torment, jokes about the inevitable, inscribes it into the flesh, sinks into the psychopathic abyss. Premonitory nightmare maps the future.

SEE WHAT'S NEW