The Kolektivne NSEAE militant hijacking movement against the Papal State Italian art

Ivan Pozzoni

Hijacking has been defined by Douglas B. Holt—in a more modernist vein—as “[…] turning expressions of the capitalist system and its media culture against itself[…]” (Douglas B. Holt, Cultural Strategy Using Innovative Ideologies to Build Breakthrough Brands, Oxford University Press, 2010, 252). Our duty is to exaggerate and direct, like a hand grenade, the seductiveness of modernism, causing its implosion/explosion. The praxeology of hijacking, born from the Situationist blague and, through punk actions, arriving at the culture jamming (accompanied by guerrilla communication) of the late 20th century, finds its legacy in the millennial neo-avant-gardes and their anti-consumerist hijacking. Late modernism shifts its strategy: it acts on the counter-strategy of the consumerist structure of recuperation (through the labeling approach of the dysform) and shifts, with a counterattack on behavioral change, through the artist’s “dedoublement de Man” and the reader’s (fake) Šklovskijana, from a mere attack on the brand to the entire technical language of aesthetic marketing, fostering “shock, shame, fear, and anger” (Erika Summers-Effler, “The Micro Potential for Social Change: Emotion, Consciousness, and Social Movement Formation,” in Sociological Theory, 20/1, 2002, 41–60). Artistic boycott/sabotage is accompanied by retaliatory actions (legal consequences), modeled on the anachronistic Monochrom or CrimethInc movements. Mark Dery traces the origins of culture jamming to the medieval carnival, which Mikhail Bakhtin interpreted, in Rabelais, as an officially sanctioned subversion of social structure. Pozzoni thus considers hijacking, dedoublement, ostranemies, carnivalization, and Lucinian humorism/irony to be central to his praxia. For example, he does not consider the tactic of the meme (masterfully employed by Lucio Tosi) or the appreciated but not shared strategy of dystopianizing the semantic Trojan horse as central to détournement in the triad “Every statement is an end in itself,” “Every statement or semi-statement contradicts the following or preceding statement,” and “Every statement or semi-statement finds itself in a relationship of contradictory and counterintuitive inference, or of no inference at all, with the other statements” (Linguaglossa, Leone, and Rago). The risk is the creation of a new, “experimental” late-modern aesthetic ontology, far removed from the political science and sociology of art and the militant activism of the KNSEAE.

The extreme vulgarization of ordinary language, with a rejection of technical languages (aesthetics), characterizes the Kolektivne NSEAE. This semiotic strategy should imply the implosion of lyrical/elegiac, seductive, and consumerist language. The riot, subversive verse, used in Athens, Bucharest, Baghdad, Santiago, and others, rejects the rhetorical figure, central to the Papal States, and metaphor. Semantics died in the 20th century. The analysis of a text involves: implications, implicatures, illocutions, deictics, perlocutions, text-context. The introspective attempt at the (fake) semiotics of modern aesthetic ontology leads to a “non-natural meaning” of the text (Grice) far removed from the subordination to verification/falsification (new epistemology). Vagueness is the realm of twentieth-century “poetry,” epigonized in the twenty-first: everyone introduces verses ad cazzum, citing inspiration as their foundation, without knowing the very latest studies in neuroaesthetics: inspiration and expiration, inspiration and expiration. The Kolektivne NSEAE demands clarity: and, through the tools of legal theory and semiotic analysis, it is able to demolish every form of Orphic and elegiac “poetry”, desecrating lyrical/elegiac pieces and demonstrating their universal “nonsense” or “multi-sense” (everyone is able to subjectively interpret what they wish), as happened with Freudianism, Marxism and other non-scientific theories (theories) that cannot be subordinated to mechanisms of verification/falsification. Archaeological finds by Cucchi, Magrelli, Cavalli, Nove, Lamarque, and Piersanti (the list is extremely limited and includes the major examples of seductive and consumerist art from the 20th century) are analyzed through participant observation (not anatomopathological), with references to Malinowski, Mead, and Garfinkel, with due corrections to Glaser and Strauss’s Grounded Theory, by the Kolektivne NSEAE. In the theory of Italian literary criticism (?), we are stuck with the archaeological find Lacan or are inappropriately citing Baudrillard. I recall and point out that the 21st century has other references: Sloterdijk, Morozov, Saito, Berleant, Leddy, Curi, Lipovetsky, Didi-Huberman, Baumgarten, or Onfray. When we read quotes from Freud, Lacan, and Marx, we close the essay/article: only an academic culture is capable of being current. Il resto è noia (F. Califano).

Bionote

Ivan Pozzoni, an internationally acclaimed writer and poet, received prestigious awards like the Raduga, Montano, and Strega Prizes before halting his writing in 2018. Featured in the Atlas of Contemporary Italian Poets and Gradiva, his poetry has been translated into over 25 languages, including French, English, Spanish, and Chinese, among others. A proponent of internationalism, Pozzoni collaborates with literary magazines in over 100 countries, from Albania to South America. He played a key role in the NeoN-Avangardia movement, authoring the Antimanifesto, endorsed by luminaries like Zygmunt Bauman and Umberto Eco. Currently associated with Kolektivne NSEAE, Pozzoni remains a significant figure in global literary and artistic circles.