is the author of Combined and Uneven Apocalypse; Roman Letters; Shard Cinema; and, forthcoming, The Grid Aflame. He is the translator, with David Fernbach, of Mario Mieli's Towards a Gay Communism. He teaches theory at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College and film production at Cooper Union. He is the cofounder of Thirteen Black Cats, a research and production collective for moving images, and is a member of the Viewpoint editorial collective.
Last December Viewpoint hosted a roundtable discussion on Steve Wright’s seminal history of Italian workerism, Storming Heaven: Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism.
The point is to place the human operator back in the frame, to ask after those who tended the machine before it was available as a spectacle, and to listen to how they understood what they were tangled in the midst of.
At the end of his 1975 introduction to his seminal 1964 Classe Operaia article, “Struggle at FIAT,” Romano Alquati concludes his reflection with a compressed glance back toward one of the impasses that faced him and the other “classical” workerists as they tried to articulate the early days of what would become two decades of social war, from the 1960 magliette a righe (the “striped shirt”) rebellions of Genoa on to a Hot Autumn, a Creeping May, and a range of other seasons, months, and years irrevocably marked by bitter struggle against capital and its stewards.
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