Anny, that's an interesting response...
<snip>
I think you are overpraising Balestrini, or projecting what does
not belong to him. [AB]
<snip>
I probably need to distinguish between my view of Balestrini's technique and
my judgement of its effectiveness, for a start.
I'm sticking to my view that what he strives for is the sort of radical
subjectivity I had tried to describe: one that surfaces from below and is an
_aspect_ of what I called 'social subjectivity' (just as private space can
be an aspect of public space and not mere property, which is created by
carving up or removing public space). So the interplay between conflicting
points of view is very different. Another effect (or maybe it is a cause) is
a sort of radical disconnection from the author. The implied author is there
only in the negative sense that dispossession is one aspect of possession:
the texts feel conspicuously anonymous. (Both these elements are part of
what Balestrini might regard as 'epic' in his work, I suspect. I also think
they are the aesthetic reflection of what Negri means by the emergence of
'new social subjects', in the sociological sense.)
As to whether he succeeds, *Gli invisibili* seems to me emotionally very
powerful, his strongest by some way and not at all something lazy. The rest,
from what I've read, is much more uneven. *Vogliamo tutto* reads a bit
crudely, *L'editore* is formally interesting but *Sandorkan*, for example,
seems to me disappointing.
CW
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'It was really only in spelling out the decrees of the high
command that we came to understand ourselves'
- Kafka
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