WORLD WORLDWIDE ITALY SICILIA News Journal Update - (en) Italy, Sicilia Libertaria, Nov. 23: andrea - So many stories (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 

Everything has a story and every story deserves to be told: it is the
mantra of these unfortunate times. Do you see this tree? It has a story.
Do you want to know the crazy history of the citrus juicer? Click here.
The world has always been populated with stories and now I will tell you
mine, for the modest price of 15 euros. Enveloped in a slow and
inexorable decline, the North of the world, and with it Italy, has
entered the era of stories. He prefers to tell them and tell them to
himself so as not to have to deal with his own impotence. Stories are
everywhere around us. They have colonized every form of story. Yet the
imagination remained small. The thousands of stories we are subjected to
in every moment of our lives, ultimately, are all similar. Because they
have standardized canons, they are scientifically designed to attract
and maintain attention: a hero's journey here and a twist there, a
flashback at the right point, now we need a detail to avoid boring, here
we need to break the tension and here instead we need to increase it.
Many of these stories are technically accurate and, therefore, boring.
There is no longer room for imperfection, for long times, for useless
details, for the foibles of those who tell the story. If today Edgar
Allan Poe wrote his masterpiece "The Adventures of Gordon Pym", no
publishing house would publish it for him, they would tell him "that is,
the book would be good, but there are too many technical descriptions of
the ship, people get bored, and then what does it mean that the
protagonist at the end sees a giant, snow-white human figure? are you
already planning a sequel? if you break it to me, maybe we'll make a TV
series or a podcast, you'll see." If story professionals fill (their?)
inner void with their work, the general tendency is to rely on stories
in any field of our lives, from work to leisure.

In a famous article in L'Unità in 2002, the Wu Ming collective wrote
that "stories are an infinite resource and belong to everyone, but in a
world dominated by economics there are those who want to limit and sell
them". Today we cannot see the horizon of this anxiety of limitation
while the economic purpose of diffusion remains. The problem here is not
that everything has already been told. On the other hand, the era of
stories has never experienced a crisis. The current phase, however,
consists of the capitalist reappropriation of a need as ancient as the
human being, which the first stories he began to tell, presumably,
around a fire while he was learning to warm himself with it. I'll tell
you a story because I want to get noticed, because I want to make this
my job, because I want to make you digest your work better, because I
want to sell you something or myself.

The individualistic approach then prevails. We can no longer tell
anything except in the form of a single testimony, a personal
experience, a memoir. At most the anecdote is worth it. And when we
immerse ourselves in other stories it is mostly to identify with other
characters and ask ourselves what we would have done in that situation.
There is also a double direction taken by this obsession. On the one
hand, we become passionate again about the stories of power: it is
something ancient but precisely, due to the pervasiveness of the
stories, it is something even more widespread. Series like the Italian
"The Lions of Sicily", which tells the story of the Florio family in
19th century Sicily, or the English "The Crown", which instead tells the
story of Queen Elizabeth throughout the mid-twentieth century, have the
main purpose of showing the known and hiding the unspeakable: they strip
the historical events of their complexity, overlooking the abuses and
victims of that power, preferring to concentrate the narrative on the
pomp and verve of the protagonists. On the other hand, a working class
literature and approach is beginning to spread, made up of
self-narratives of the working class and narrative reportages, but
always putting people at the center of the stories, with the context
becoming merely a pretext that limits itself to strengthening the
narrative in first person. More generally, the primary purpose of
stories remains entertainment. Even journalism and literature
increasingly focus their attention on stories and emotional aspects, and
obviously social media wallows in this sea. Proof of this is the old/new
obsession with crime news: a craze spread by the United States with true
crime, a definition that has also remained in current use not only
because US cultural dominance is still pre-eminent but also because true
crime has a 'a more fascinating and less prurient sense of crime news,
made up instead of lives observed through a peephole, a grim taste for
morbidity, a continuous thirst for macabre details. It could be observed
that the interest in crime news is also an ancient fact, and it is true,
but what is new is that now true crime rhymes not only with money, but
also with visibility: it is useful to those who tell it to be listened
to and to those who listen to tell their stories.

Finally, it should not be forgotten that in popular custom stories are
not understood in a positive way at all. We use to say "how many
stories" to indicate a person who does not want to carry out his own
task and therefore, in fact, invents stories; or we invite you to tell
"fewer stories" to urge a person to take on their responsibilities. Now,
this is a central point: today's stories seem to be an attempt both to
escape from reality and, above all, to digest it and make it swallow as
if it were something tamable. And instead reality and fantasy should
(also) be something outside the box, subversive, inciting to revolt.
Today's stories conform to storytelling manuals and are therefore
conformist. They talk about the present but don't face it. And then when
it comes to taking a position on important issues we step aside, using
the stock phrase that "it will be up to historians to judge". Bloch said
that the contemporary generation must claim the right to write its
history first and, let's add, its own stories. Not doing so means
avoiding your share of responsibility.

Andrea Turco

https://www.sicilialibertaria.it/
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S  N E W S  S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca