on the creation of autonomous sources of information, cultural pro-
duction and affective participation in society. In 1974 Bifo published
Scrittura e Movimento, an assessment of the cultural implications of the
workers’ struggles of the early 1970s. Written in essay form, this book
takes on many of the themes staged narratively in Vogliamo tutto(1971)
by fellow ‘post-workerist’ Nanni Balestrini who would also have to
exile himself to Paris in the early 1980s. And it is also during these all-
important years that Bifo read the 1974 Italian translation of Anti-
Oedipus, where in fact Deleuze and Guattari articulate a similar critique
of the primacy of authoritaritarian structures, both in psychological
and politicals terms. Together with the work of Foucault on dis-
ciplinary societies and Baudrillard’s research on the simulacra, this strand
of French post-structuralist thought was most influential on the Italian
autonomous movement in general, particularly in the media and cul-
turally oriented university town of Bologna and on Bifo himself.^5 In
1975, Bifo and his Bolognese pals created the publishing house Squi-
libri, which produced and distributed, among other projects, the type-
written political and cultural magazine A/traverso, and Bifo’s first novel,
also typewritten (and still untranslated), Chi ha ucciso Majakovski?
(Who killed Mayakovsky?). The creation of Radio Alice was perhaps
the most enduring contribution made by Bifo to rethinking the con-
ditions of cultural production in late-capitalist societies. This era was
later to be called ‘cognitive capitalism’, and Bifo was among the first
to recognize that the field of struggle between capitalist domination
and autonomous subjective constitution is nothing less than the
mind.
These activities and concerns help us understand why, when Bifo
found himself in Paris fleeing from an arrest warrant in Italy, he was fully
ready, politically and intellectually, to meet Félix and to engage in an
encounter that was productive on all levels. Besides Marxism and various
Marxist heresies, phenomenology, the formation of subjectivities and the
construction of machinic assemblages oriented towards the liberation of
the unconscious, the two activists also shared an interest in the thought
of Gregory Bateson and were engaged in creating what Bateson had called
‘an ecology of the mind’. During his stay in France, Bifo was also active
on the Parisian intellectual scene, contributing to the rebuttal of the
Nouveaux Philosophes– a philosophical and political project in which
Guattari took a keen interest – with the untranslated publication in
Italian of L’Ideologia francese: contro i nuovi filosofi(French Ideology: Against
the New Philosophers), that he co-authored with Pierre Rival and Alain
Guillerme (1977).x Preface9780230_221192_01_prexvi.pdf 10/3/08 11:31 AM Page x