A/traverso: One of a Thousand Little Machines

A/traverso, the movement sheet produced by Franco 'Bifo' Berardi and others from 1975-1981, was one of thousands of revolutionary news sheets circulating Italy during the close of the 1970s. The printed word, to paraphrase Lenin, acted as the scaffolding around which Italy's historic 'autonomia' movement was constituted, characterised as it was by the mass youth refusal of work and experimental culture drawing from influences including William Burroughs, Mayakovsky, Deleuze & Guattari. This paper will explore how movement sheets were constitutive of autonomia — and their production and distribution are as fundamental to the history of the movement as their content is. It draws upon a recently published volume of essays by Franco 'Bifo' Berardi, of which I was a co-editor along with Seth Wheeler — the first half of this paper covers arguments and histories that Seth and I wrote together, and can be read in our book. I will use the example of Italy's 1970s movement sheets not only to explore autonomia's history and ongoing legacy, but also to discuss media production as fundamental to the shape and form of social movements, and what that might mean for militants today.