Theirs is a different way of organizing space and so that day at the University there was the clash also between two concepts of perspective, the one we might call Brunelleschian and the other cubist. True, anyone reducing the whole story to these factors would be mistaken, but anyone trying to dismiss this interpretation as an intellectual game would be mistaken, too. The Catholic Church, the French Revolution, Nazism, the Soviet Union, and the People’s Republic of China, not to mention the Rolling Stones and soccer clubs, have always known very well that the deployment of space is religion, politics, ideology. So let’s give back to the spatial and the visual the place they deserve in the history of political and social relations.
And now to another event. These past months, within that variegated and shifting experience that is called “the movement,” the men carrying .38’s have emerged. From various quarters the movement has been asked to denounce them as an alien body; and there were forces exerting pressure both from outside and from within. Apparently this demand for rejection encountered difficulties, and various elements came into play. Synthetically, we can say that many belonging to the movement didn’t feel like labeling as outsiders forces that, even if they revealed themselves in unacceptable and tragically suicidal ways, seemed to express a reality of social protest that couldn’t be denied. I am repeating discussions that all of us have heard.
Basically what was said was this: They are wrong, but they are part of a mass movement. And the debate was harsh, painful. Now, last week, there occurred a kind of precipitation of all the elements of the debate previously suspended in uncertainty. Suddenly, and I say suddenly because decisive statements were issued in the space of a day, the gunmen were cut off. Why at that moment? Why not before? It’s not enough to say that recent events in Milan* made a deep impression on many people, because similar events in Rome had also had a profound effect. What happened that was new and different? We may venture a hypothesis, once again recalling that an explanation never explains everything, but becomes part of a landscape of explanations in reciprocal relationship. A photograph appeared.
Many photographs have appeared, but this one made the rounds of all the papers after being published in the Corriere d’Informazione. As everyone will recall, it was the photograph of a young man wearing a knitted ski-mask, standing alone, in profile, in the middle of a street, legs apart, arms outstretched horizontally, with both hands grasping a pistol. Other forms can be seen in the background, but the photograph’s structure is classical in its simplicity: The central figure, isolated, dominates it.
If it is licit (and it is necessary) to make aesthetic observations in such cases, this is one of those photographs that will go down in history and will appear in a thousand books. The vicissitudes of our century have been summed up in a few exemplary photographs that have proved epoch-making: the unruly crowd pouring into the square during the “ten days that shook the world”; Robert Capa’s dying miliciano; the marines planting the flag on Iwo Jima; the Vietnamese prisoner being executed with a shot in the temple; Che Guevara’s tortured body on a plank in a barracks. Each of these images has become a myth and has condensed numerous speeches. It has surpassed the individual circumstance that produced it; it no longer speaks of that single character or of those characters, but expresses concepts. It is unique, but at the same time it refers to other images that preceded it or that, in imitation, have followed it. Each of these photographs seems a film we have seen and refers to other films that had seen it. Sometimes it isn’t a photograph but a painting, or a poster.
What did the photograph of the Milanese gunman “say”? I believe it abruptly revealed, without the need for a lot of digressive speeches, something that has been circulating in a lot of talk, but that words alone could not make people accept. That photograph didn’t resemble any of the images which, for at least four generations, had been emblems of the idea of revolution. The collective element was missing; in a traumatic way the figure of the lone hero returned here. And this lone hero was not the one familiar in revolutionary iconography, which when it portrayed a man alone always saw him as victim, sacrificial lamb: the dying miliciano or the slain Che, in fact. This individual hero, on the contrary, had the pose, the terrifying isolation of the tough guy of gangster movies or the solitary gunman of the West—no longer dear to a generation who consider themselves metropolitan Indians.
This image suggested other worlds, other figurative, narrative traditions that had nothing to do with the proletarian tradition, with the idea of popular revolt, of mass struggle. Suddenly it inspired a syndrome of rejection. It came to express the following concept: Revolution is elsewhere and, even if it is possible, it doesn’t proceed via this “individual” act.
The photograph, for a civilization now accustomed to thinking in images, was not the description of a single event (and, in fact, it makes no difference who the man was, nor does the photograph help in identifying him): It was an argument. And it worked. It is of no interest to know if it was posed (and therefore faked), whether it was the testimony of an act of conscious bravado, if it was the work of a professional photographer who gauged the moment, the light, the frame, or whether it virtually took itself, was snapped accidentally by unskilled and lucky hands. At the moment it appeared, its communicative career began: Once again the political and the private have been marked by the plots of the symbolic, which, as always happens, has proved producer of reality.
1977
6 DE CONSOLATIONE PHILOSOPHIAE
Cogito Interruptus
Some books are easier to review, to explain, or comment on aloud, than they are simply to read; because it is only by applying yourself to a gloss that you can follow their argumentation without distraction, their implacable syllogistic necessities, or the precise knots of relation. This is why books like the Metaphysics of Aristotle or the Critique of Pure Reason have more commentators than readers, more specialists than admirers. And there are, on the other hand, books that are extremely pleasant to read, but impossible to write about: because the minute you start expounding them or commenting on them, you realize that they refuse to be translated into the proposition “This book says that.” The person who reads them for pleasure realizes he has spent his money well; but anyone who reads them in order to tell others about them becomes furious at every line, tears up the notes he took a moment before, seeks the conclusion that comes after his “therefore,” and cannot find it.
Clearly it would be an unforgivable sin of ethnocentrism to consider “not thought out” a Zen tale that follows ideals of logic different from those to which we are accustomed; but it is also certain that if our ideal of reasoning is summed up in a certain Western model, consisting of “whereas” and “inasmuch as,” then in these unreviewable books we find illustrious examples of cogito interruptus whose mechanism we must bear in mind. Since cogito interruptus is common both to the insane and to the authors of a reasoned “illogic,” we must understand when it is a defect and when a virtue, and (against all Malthusian custom) a fertilizing virtue, what’s more.
Cogito interruptus is typical of those who see the world inhabited by symbols or symptoms. Like someone who, for example, points to the little box of matches, stares hard into your eyes, and says, “You see, there are seven . . . ,” then gives you a meaningful look, waiting for you to perceive the meaning concealed in that unmistakable sign; or like the inhabitant of a symbolic universe, where every object and every event translates into sign something hyper-Uranian that everyone already knows but wants only to see reconfirmed.
Cogito interruptus is also typical of those who see the world inhabited not by symbols but by symptoms: indubitable signs of something that is neither here below nor up above, but that sooner or later will happen.
The reviewer’s torment lies in the fact that when a person stares at him and says, “You see, there are seven matches,” the reviewer is already helpless to explain to others the scope of the sign or the symptom; but then when the same person adds, “And consider also, if you want to dispel any doubt, that four swallows flew past today,” then the reviewer is really lost. None of this means that cogito interruptus is not a great prophetic, poetic, psychological technique. Only that it is ineffable. And it takes real faith in cogito interruptus—and a wish that readers understand me—for me to venture to speak of it, no matter what. In discussions of the universe of mass communications and of the technological civilization, cogito interruptus is very fashionable among those whom, on other occasions, we have called the Apocalyptics, who see in the events of the past the symbols of a well-known harmony, and in those of the present
