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:
| Aglio | Garlic |
| China | Quinine |
| Cocco | Coconut |
| Cotogno | Quince |
| Donnola | Weasel |
| Gelso | Mulberry |
| Lauro | Bay |
| Lince | Lynx |
| Lupino | Lupin |
| Malva | Mallow |
| Mastino | Mastiff |
| Menta | Mint |
| Mora | Bramble |
| Nocciola | Hazelnut |
| Ortica | Nettle |
| Pepe | Pepper |
| Scilla | Squill |
| Spinone | Griffon |
| Talpac | Mole |
| Valeriana | Valerian |
| Verbena | Vervain |
Part One
1
The cellars are a maze of passageways lit every twenty or thirty yards by dusty fluorescent strip-lights swinging from long ragged electric wires that hang from the ceiling its rough cement fissured by long deep cracks it seems to go on for ever and here and there bulges downwards as if pushed by some enormous weight up there crushing buckling breaking through and every four or five yards props made from great beams hold it up the wood rotten mouldy the ground covered in a film of putrid water the cloying sickening stench of putrefaction mingling with the stench of mould every so often at a turn-off or the junction of two passageways are little piles of sand of cement sodden collapsed trampled shovels and other rusty tools left lying there the air is damp and from our mouths come little puffs of vapour as we breathe that nauseating air
the irregular shuffling of the small silent procession merges with the continuous jangling of the chains the sound echoes whenever the gangways of rotting wood are crossed the shadows lengthen behind each step whenever it gets close to the sections lit by strip-lights they disappear and all of a sudden reappear ahead and the steps lengthen they move forward slowly paying attention to where they tread and to the chains so that they don’t drag too much in front or behind trying always to leave the same distance between the one in front and the one behind taking care not to brush the right shoulder against the slimy wet wall and on the left keeping
