GM:... that there were positive and constitutive sides of it ... So to speak
precisely about an extremely contemporary matter, the question of commu-
nication, of the media, you are famous for having been one of the organizers,
perhaps theorganizer, of Radio Alice in the 1970s. So you were very aware
of the importance of communication in political discourse and the discourse
of subjectivation. When you met Guattari, either in person or in his works,
were you inspired to keep working in this direction? In the Telestreet project
that you and others created at the start of 2000, over the last few years?^8Bifo:Certainly, Guattari’s thought, especially in his later years, in the
1980s, played an illuminating role for all sorts of questions, for
example the principle of the Web, that is, what Guattari called at one
point ‘the post-mediatic’. I do recall very well a meeting we had at
Guattari’s house near La Borde, around 1982-83. He told me: ‘Note well
that we must speak about the “post-mediatic era”,’ to which I said, ‘But
you’re crazy, how can that be, since we are just entering the period in
which television will rule everything?’ So he said: ‘No, no, that is only
on the surface; the truth is much deeper.’ And I recall that moment
when he tried to convince me without succeeding. However, I was
much more obsessed with centralizing powers than with the post-
mediatic potential.
Ten years later, the Internet concerned me greatly from a practical,
professional and even intellectual perspective, and in the Internet
experience, I understood what Guattari was trying to say ten years
earlier. So from the theoretical perspective, Guattari clearly anticipated
questions of post-media and of the proliferation of sites as the decisive
element in the mediatic game that is the Internet paradigm. From the
practical perspective, perhaps things are different in the sense that, in
France, the radio movement was a bit behind, born with great atten-
tion paid to the experiences we had in Bologna and, more generally, in
Italy.
And also on the level of data transmission, you know that Minitel
was born in 1981: hardly was it created when President Mitterand was
elected and decided to informatize all of France by giving out a million
Minitel terminals. From a certain perspective, this was an act of great
foresight, but paradoxically Minitel blocked France rather than moving
it forward. This is a story that is really worth being known since well
before the USA, France had entered the terrain of mass information,
but conceptualized it completely as a French, a national problem. At
some point, the engineer who had constructed the Minitel system,
Thierry Gaudin, went to Mitterand, or one of his people, to propose toInterview with Franco Berardi (Bifo) 1519780230_221192_14_inte.pdf 10/3/08 11:37 AM Page 151