The Broken Pipe

Translator’s Introduction

Militant philosopher Antonio Negri, who died on December 16, 2023, made several contributions to e-flux (see issues 53, 65, and 87) and his ideas are well known to its readers. Far less well known to any readers is Negri’s only work of narrative fiction, translated here for the first time. This story was originally published in July 1980, while Negri was in prison awaiting trial on charges of armed insurrection against the Italian state. It was part of the first Giallo Verità (“True Pulp” or “True Detective”) series, a supplement to the magazine Panorama edited by Valeria Numerico, which also published fictions written by three-time Italian prime minister Giulio Andreotti, Bank of Italy governor and Confindustria president Guido Carli, leader of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) Giacomo Mancini, Milan prosecutor and later Berlusconi lawyer Guido Viola, and onetime president of Alfa Romeo Ettore Massacesi. Like all the supplements in the first series of Giallo Verità, Negri’s story was illustrated by Dario Mellone (1929–2000), an accomplished abstract painter and staff illustrator for the Corriere della Sera starting in 1967.

Unlike Negri’s stage plays, which have been published in English and French and staged in several European countries, his sole work of fiction has gone almost entirely unnoticed (though it was translated into German almost immediately after it appeared). In terms of genre, it is a murder mystery set against the backdrop of a science-fiction future, as the world recovers from environmental catastrophe through radical social and political reorganization. The pipe of the title alludes to the smoking accessory associated with center-left politicians like Alessandro Pertini and Luciano Lama, who colluded with the Italian right to criminalize the radical left social movements with which Negri was associated. The tale’s combination of a tentatively hopeful collective vision of the future and a plot focused on the inevitability and intractability of subjective antagonisms dramatizes Negri’s complex notion of “disutopia.” In a 2020 interview focused on his literary interests, Negri explained the circumstances leading to this anomaly in his oeuvre and passed his own judgment on the story: “I read a lot of [science-fiction literature] in prison, the classic kind, that is, from Isaac Asimov to Frank Herbert of Dune, from James Ballard to Philip K. Dick, passing through Ursula Le Guin. I read a lot of it, but in an estranged way … [and] it came to nothing, just a prison experience, when not only I, but dozens of comrades locked up in prison, tried to reinvent ourselves as writers.”1 Readers can make their own judgments as to whether this short text “comes to nothing,” but at very least it provides unexpected insight into the imagination of one of the most influential philosophers of the past half-century.

As a longtime translator of Negri’s writings and his correspondent for more than thirty years, I would like this last contribution to express my gratitude for his example, advice, and friendship.

—Timothy S. Murphy

***

Lucien Oi was lying on the beach: the sea, in that sunset, was finally showing the colors of the sky. All of them, a clean rainbow. It had taken fifty, sixty years of work—and it wasn’t completely finished yet. Year 127 since the great nuclear massacre. Lucien had spent practically his whole life decontaminating the sea, reinventing its color. Imagination represented the past to him as a transfiguration, a divine comedy, an exit from the darkness and the dirt, through varying bands of opacity. Now, the transparency of things—touching them, loving them—was possible again: it was once again possible to love each other. Lucien Oi was old, sometimes tired, as happens when a task is finished and everything, as a result, is changing. But the refoundation of the world had been an operation that had changed him too: it had installed peace within him, as a state, as a condition. At least it seemed so to him. Not only the sea, but also his consciousness and that of others enjoyed a perfect transparency. At least it seemed so to him. In any case, the previous evening the relationship had been perfect: fish soup and octopus, and then oysters from the new marine farm.

And yet something gnawed at him. Just the previous evening, before he had sat down to dinner, the Commune commission set up to investigate the murder of Katy Cain had decided to disband. Over nothing. Lucien had reluctantly participated in the commission: he wasn’t interested in discovering the murderer, the author of this first bloody act in the Commune since the refoundation. He pushed his thoughts aside, in fact they frightened him, because he had the impression that an enemy far more powerful than the one he had fought all his life had reappeared: a subject as enemy. Pollution represented a powerful but objective enemy: the antagonism was total, dual. The murder instead represented, perhaps, the end of the homology, which Lucien had experienced, between the transformation of nature and the transformation of humanity: a subjective enemy, therefore, no longer simple antagonism but dialectic. And then he didn’t understand: why kill Katy Cain? She was the one who had contributed most to defeating pollution-induced leukemia and to developing the theory of mutation. Her loss was irreparable, years of work, of discoveries and innovations had been squandered. The commission had dissolved with nothing accomplished. Lucien had understood that his unease was widely shared. The dynamics of the crime were unknown. And when an attempt was made to restore the parameters of a possible inquisitorial rationality, the best in the collective of new humans had reacted with disgust. The inquisition is suspect, it lowers spirits, building and accumulating a kind of universality of evil intention. Like the production of detective novels [libri gialli] had at one time, before the great massacre … The opposite of the whole philosophy of the new world, which was founded on a transparency that, if it did not yield to softness and if in any case it was strong and even capable of violence, was in no way cynical. The clues? Nothing. Except a pipe, an artifact no longer in circulation but common in archaeological collections—a pipe Katy’s friends did not remember ever having seen on her table. She had been killed with a laser blade—the common tool of decontaminators. But not only them. Her calm face, with that serenity that had always been her incredible gift. But why? Lucien was not interested in who, he was interested in why. He was not searching for a motive, but posing a theoretical question: he did not like the dialectic, he was obsessed by its ability to confuse, he hated its irreparable opacity, the unease it induced. Now the sun had reached the far edge of the sea: it was the best moment to measure the spectrograph of decontamination. It was, for Lucien, the moment to confirm one success built over a life of struggle. And instead, some Cain had reintroduced the dialectic into the Commune!

***

Lucien chuckled to himself: that devil Aristotle, as far as he could see, had managed to pass unscathed through the censorship of history this time too; Aristotelianism seemed to him the reason why that evening in the Commune they were showing films of archaeological finds, films that had survived the nuclear devastation, a sensational discovery, without a doubt. The programmers were probably aiming for cathartic effects: to show the terrible, and even the horrid, in order to arouse noble and elevated feelings! Lucien chuckled: to him these men, these forms of conviviality from the period immediately preceding the great catastrophe, seemed so comical. Not so to the younger ones, to those who had grown up during the mutation. Lucien felt the chill in the room when the images of the work on the production line appeared on the screen and the working day of the proletariat, of men and women, was shown, the monstrosity of work and the even worse one of free time. Here Lucien too was deeply affected. The commentator explained the characteristics of the period of the great mystification: his speech was clear, it was not the usual pedagogical fable at which young people often snorted. On the other hand, everyone knew that back then slavery had been called freedom, and capitalism socialism, and that every scoundrel and leader called himself a dissident: and that all this could only lead to the great nuclear massacre. The images of the suffering of the exploited followed one another on the screen. And then those of the exploiters, in flocks, like clouds of flies on the swollen and bloody face of Christ on the cross. Lucien had sometimes wondered if the great massacre was not welcomed by the oppressed! But he was also ashamed of the thought. In any case, seeing all this live, in these excellently made films, could really be shocking. Not for me, Lucien said to himself. His work as a decontaminator had in fact brought him to a full knowledge of the destructive will that had been typical of the world of the great mystification; in healing, in rebuilding, he had encountered all its technology, the materiality of its will, the complexity of the subjective articulations that had consciously achieved a fate of death. But seeing is different. The film rolled on. “Textile factory with extreme fragmentation of work,” said the commentator. A guard smoked his pipe while watching the work flow. And the voice continued, to the rhythm of the images: “Commodity of labor-power at work”: he smoked his pipe serenely. Then other incredible liturgies of political representation: in reality they were places where profits were divided. Three-year plan, five-year plan: what a strange conception of time, time subordinated to profit quotas and not directed to the constitution of knowledge, of nature, of freedom! Economists: and who are they? I need to find out, thinks Lucien. And then pipes: economists, football coaches, bosses and petty bosses. Then representatives again: here’s one who speaks to justify the system of exploitation, saying that this is the most beautiful world possible … him, in front of the fireplace, with his pipe. Then more liturgies and massacres … Here the commentary returns to the old original: a language of hate, conscious and harsh, sometimes playful and refined, always safe. A fit of black humor struck Lucien. He remembered the story of the man condemned to hang and taken to the tree where the ceremony was to take place who, while waiting, tries to rest on the shady side. This must have been the last days of the great mystification, those people there on the Kielland drilling rig during the storm in the North Sea … They smoked pipes, them, the exploiters!

***

Werner Feilbogen, forty-five years old, was the archaeologist of the Commune. Both young and youthful in appearance, he lived alone, a truly strange custom in the new society that included communities of large composition. Lucien Oi had unexpectedly decided to go and see Feilbogen a couple of days after seeing the film on the age of mystification. In reality he did not understand the reasons why he wanted to meet him. He was not following a deductive train of thought but rather a strong curiosity: he was gathering information, it was in fact Feilbogen who had found that store of precious films. Despite Feilbogen’s fame and undisputed skill, Lucien was prejudiced against him: generic prejudices, about archaeologists more than about archaeology, you could not study a world without partly loving it … Yes, during the investigation into Katy Cain’s death, it was established that Feilbogen knew her well: nothing more than that.

Illustration by Dario Mellone.

“Good morning, Comrade Werner.” “Good morning, Comrade Lucien. To what do I owe your visit?” Lucien did not know what to answer. He muttered that he wanted some information on the recovered films, that he was passing through, that he also wanted to talk to him about a possible new research site that, based on some surface indications, might be thought to exist in a zone that was nearly decontaminated. And the conversation began precisely from this last point, but it quickly ended with some operational decisions. Now it was Werner who spoke, talking about his work enthusiastically but coldly. Lucien followed with boredom. He looked around the room. It was full of archaeological objects in great disorder, presumably waiting to be classified. “What was the pipe in the age of mystification?” Lucien asked suddenly, almost rudely, interrupting Werner. Feilbogen became attentive: this did not escape Lucien. “What exactly do you want to know, Lucien?” he asked. And Lucien explained that he had been very struck, in the films he had seen in the previous days, by the continuous reappearance of that gadget, in the hands and in the mouths of men in power. Lucien’s eye had meanwhile stopped on a rack containing pipes, many pipes, behind Werner. “Ah, yes, of course. From our research it seems in fact that the pipe was a symbol. The pacifying sign of a power exercised in a mystified manner but presented in a paternalistic and consensual way. It had positive effects of representation especially in the visual mass media. In the last years of the age of mystification, smoking a pipe seems to have become a habit of almost all men in power. Perhaps one can even think that the object had taken on a ritual form and efficacy.” Lucien asked for further information, especially about the ritual: as far as he knew, he said, the age of the mystification was profoundly secular and, from what he understood, the specificity of mystification consisted precisely in the fact that private and bureaucratic appropriation was cloaked in political forms. “Of course,” said Werner, “political, democratic, but not for all that nonritualistic. We must be careful not to reduce rituality to generically formal terms: rituality is a sense of necessity and beauty. The democratic rituality of the age of mystification is spectacular: the dominant oligarchy, capitalist and/or socialist, entrusted the symbolism of power to abstract—apparently egalitarian—signs. It was the repetition of the image, not its intrinsic meaning, that exalted its function. Rituality consisted in this: in the legitimization of functions through the repetition of images that were sometimes even trivial.” Lucien did not understand well: all this seemed senseless. Werner continued: “The fundamental problem had become the control of technology. A technology that, at that level of complexity, in that society as in ours, implies the participation of the generality of the proletarian population. The private and/or bureaucratic appropriation of technology could therefore only occur through the determination of opacity, the negation of the transparency of the generality of the production process, only through the ritual and spectacular sacralization of the functions of appropriation.” Well, thought Lucien, I know that too, but what does the pipe have to do with it? “Probably,” continued Werner, “the spectacular frequency of the rite of pipe smoking derives from the banal need to break up the immobility of the torso in television broadcasts. The pipe is an object that allows a not unnatural movement of the hands. It also helps to construct a composed and thoughtful image during the pauses of the performance. Given the fact that the pipe is an uncomfortable object, it happened that—little by little—only those who had to participate in the representations of power smoked the pipe.” “Did you know Katy Cain?” Lucien suddenly blurted out. “Yes, quite well,” Feilbogen replied, “a few nights before she was killed we met and, among many other things, we also talked about the ritual use of the pipe in the age of mystification.” “Do you know if Katy owned a pipe?” “Yes, I left one with her the night we met. She was curious about the object.”

***

When the committee of the Commune met—it was a heterogeneous committee, composed of old people, people who should have had a higher and more complex experience but who, like all old people, had only a different experience—when the committee met, attention naturally fell on the pipe. The clue. But what the devil, who knew anything about it! And then a clue is a clue and that’s it! An element of particular knowledge, not a foretaste of an exhaustive knowledge of the event. Too often the clue makes the truth rather than leads to it: there is no necessity in it but only the suggestion of suspicion. A pipe, then. That Feilbogen had given it to Katy, as Lucien had now ascertained, could certainly not be enough to prove guilt. It was therefore necessary to change the framework, to enter, instead, into Katy’s life. How had she lived those last days? As usual. Everyone knew how Katy lived. Even Lucien—oh, yes, he knew it well. They had loved each other, an old dream, a long pleasure. And absolutely banal—as always, when love combines the freedom of individuals and the needs of the environment: that is, as almost always. Lucien and Katy had been, for a certain time, companions. It was fine, with a relationship based on intellectual esteem, physical pleasure, a shared project. They had broken up the day that Katy—but also Lucien—had met another, equally interesting partner. The discontinuing of a relationship did not deny its fullness. They would meet again. Katy—a companion. But then, again, why kill her? Certainly not for reasons of passion. No, just imagining it made everyone laugh. Ultimately it was like this: it was impossible to connect any clue to any aspect of Katy’s life. Unless … The new society was abstract, entirely constructed, above all in the feelings of its inhabitants and builders. The clue, on the other hand, is concrete, it is a material indicator, a very small opening onto a historical sequence. But here, what value can it have? A life, a society built on the concept, on the discontinuity of continuous creation, on intelligence, cannot accept the clue as a mediation of truth. Unless we proceed in the opposite direction: the only possibility of understanding was perhaps to sink our attention into the abstract. Katy, her work, her science. Her power. Here was the only ground on which to work. And so, the women and men of the Commission had said to each other, let’s look at Katy’s work. There were undoubtedly some interesting elements here. There was the declaration that Katy had made to her fellow biologists that she had now found the solution to the problem of genetic engineering: complete technical control of the biological cycle was theoretically possible. Death, the Cartesian dream of defeating it, became real, now, after the great destruction. Precisely the induced mutations, that enormous quantity of pain, allowed us to say enough to pain. Nothing other than the possession of that secret could have provided a sufficient reason to kill. But why? That possession, if you think about it carefully, could not provide a reason for killing, a particular motivation, that is, because the general value of Katy’s discovery did not exclude the particular: death was defeated for everyone, life was conquered for everyone. And so, assuming that the possession of this truth constituted a motivation for the crime, it was not a sufficient motivation. Something else had to be added, discovered. The commission had not reached a conclusion. Yes, now Lucien knew that Feilbogen had given Katy the pipe. So what? Was this supposed to mean that the pipe included a sign of hatred and a drive to kill? The thing, so evident, did not make sense. Of course, the pipe was a symbol of domination—a sign of the bosses’ command, a small tool in the sequence that led to destruction: Feilbogen had just confirmed this to Lucien. But Lucien’s conscience could not transform disgust into suspicion.

***

The evening that Katy and Feilbogen met. Katy’s thought that evening: “I can’t take it anymore. Science has put too much power in my hands. Mutations are irresistible. They must be led, directed. But who gives me the right to do this? Who am I to be able to make gold out of base material? When humanity acquires this power, humanity becomes small. Pascal must be overturned: I am too powerful, and it is in the face of this power that I recognize myself as a reed shaken by the wind. The problem is not the void that surrounds me but the fullness that the revolution has created. And I no longer know how to measure myself against the risk of this superior humanity. I am tired. This evening I am also a little drunk. Why not? Is drunkenness forbidden to angels?”

Werner’s thought that evening: “It is not power that interests me, not the appropriation of collective knowledge, no, Katy, that is not the problem. It is not the things that motivate, not the experience, but the idea; some in this society foolishly call the idea a “larva,” a larva of a reality. The effort of decontamination and the liberation of productive forces destroy the idea. And above all one idea, that of beauty. The world that preceded the great massacre was a world where beauty and its rites took place. It was a world of beauty. They call it mystification. I am for this beautiful mystification. This is the direction in which we must move.”

Katy’s thought, that evening: “The only beauty is our collective existence. It is so strong and grand that we cannot endure it. This is the sacrifice of our reason, the only possible one, to accept the risk of our power. Your idea of ​​beauty is truly a larva of reality, a larva of a corpse.”

Werner’s thought that evening: “The insult strikes, not me, but what the history of humanity had created and that mutation is now destroying. That history is our nature. The insult is therefore illicit. It is filthy.”

Katy’s thought that evening: “You are a reactionary, Werner. Not history, not nature, but the genesis of the collective is irreversible and sacred.”

Illustration by Dario Mellone.

***

Cold and unpleasant, that’s how Lucien described Werner Feilbogen as he left his house. So the last, the last convoluted clue had disappeared. In fact, Lucien only now recognized it, he had gone to Feilbogen to investigate. Nothing then, just a cold, stiff professor, abstract enough not to be in any way exciting. But, after all, what did he understand about people? And yet there could have been no other motive for killing Katy Cain than the desire to take possession of the secrets she possessed. It could have been nothing other than the desire for private appropriation, however it’s called and reemerging again. Katy was the biologist who, working within the theory of mutation, had come closest to the secret of life. The science of mutation, the science of the “clinamen”—theoretical approximation and initiative taken on the element of freedom that always makes physical determinism new. Her enormous scientific production and her work were stored in computers: but she, her intelligence, her beauty had been destroyed. The more Lucien felt she was equal to himself, the more desperate he felt. The pipe, the damned pipe: the only clue. But not a clue to the murderer, perhaps, but to the reason for it. An obsession: the rebirth of the sense of private appropriation. This will mean, tomorrow, once again, bureaucracies and exploitation. A nightmare: to be thrown back into that ancient and cruel temple that the great massacre had demolished and communism had tried to uproot from the foundations, with the hard work of reason—to be thrown back there, mad, like bands of monkeys among the ruins of Angkor. Lucien could no longer reason, he found himself crying, he suddenly experienced the reality of the failure of his entire life, of all his work. Katy was dead, in the fullness of her scientific work. He was so tired. He would have given his life, gladly, in exchange for Katy’s. Katy murdered. No. His anger did not grow driven by the desire for revenge but by the theoretical emotion of a terrible and unforeseen event. An event that could not be resisted in the new civilization that they had so laboriously built? Is transparency weakness? And the hope of freedom, constructed, constituted by everyone and for everyone, is it an abstruse illusion? Perhaps only the banality of private appropriation and exploitation has strength? The damned pipe obsessed him: this private, dirty, symbolic, smelly, spectacular gadget … The black irony—which had been his companion in the previous weeks and which also represented rest amid the daily tension—fell away completely. Anger took hold of him. He went down towards the sea, kicking stones, breathless, almost running. Lucien, you are very old and tired and useless. That world for which you fought, you see, reproduces barbaric idols. The crossing of the desert is over, communism is only an ideology of war and misery. Now humanity rises again with all its triviality. Katy is dead. That damned pipe on his table. He reached the sea: a thin but continuous dark fog stretched across it. Fog on the horizon: as in the days of pollution, in the days of death—because if you breathed it, then, that fog, when Lucien was a child, you died. Those days, closed up in caves, with the big lead doors his father had built and with oxygen tanks at his disposal. Damned childhood! Lucien felt he had an extraordinary amount of pain inside him, like a lizard that survived having its tail cut off by nuclear power: now it had grown back but only the lizard knew it was not the original. Today the fog was not harmful—but it was advancing on him, he did not want it to touch him, he could not be touched by it. It was death, the opacity returning to the world, against the revolutionary work that Katy and he and millions of other people had done. Pipe, damned pipe. He ran up the steep road that led up from the beach to the center of the Commune. He entered the great hall, the warehouse, found the box of films from the age of mystification, piled them up and set everything on fire. The flames rose high: he heard people rushing, “fire, fire.” He was already far away. He entered Feilbogen’s house, this other warehouse of archaeological artifacts, and here too he began to smash everything. One thing after another and all at once. Ah, there’s Feilbogen, defending the objects, they fight. Feilbogen is young, Lucien is old. But he is a powerful old man and anger reinforces his muscles. They fight violently, the old man is crazy, yes, really crazy. The old man shouts incoherent sentences: “They killed her, they are reborn …” Warner Feilbogen is about to succumb, one last blow, he is on the ground. He takes out the laser, points it at Lucien. He screams: “It was me, I killed Katy Cain.” The blade has struck the great old man. He stands motionless, fixed by the deadly ray. His transparency is now luminous. This is how the magicians who treated people from the early Middle Ages must have been. The arms are stretched high and in one hand you see the cursed pipe. The fist crushes it. Then the body of the great old man falls.

***

Dear author, your tale is already beautiful, but perhaps something more is missing. The intrigue lacks passages that help the reader reconstruct the motive and occasion for the crime. It is a suspense story and the main intellectual pleasure that a detective story [giallo] offers is the possibility of establishing the causality of human actions. In all the questions concerning our existence we must content ourselves with the calculation of probability; only history, much later, can provide us with information on events, to the extent that the protagonists have not managed to keep them completely secret. The detective story is about reality. In the fictional detective story we are provided with the elements to solve the crime. In short, in order not to bore you with so many words, what I mean is that the motive and occasion of the crime are too subdued, on the one hand; merely proclaimed, on the other. A description of a few more facts would be necessary. Dialogues or sequences of events that help to shape an overall picture. Mine are obviously just suggestions and you can use them as you wish without any problems. I just hope you are willing to add a few pieces to a mosaic that is already fascinating but that should rely on its detective story [gialle] background to reach a wider audience.

The editor

Dear editor, how much longer can this fiction of the detective story [giallo] last? The science-fiction novel has already burned out the excrement and fiction of rest that the detective background brings about in the reader. With the world that exists, the detective story is already within reality, within the daily succession of events. The detective story is no longer useful for escaping the hours on the train: science fiction or the newspaper is more useful for this purpose. I was reading Barthes’s treatise on photography the past few days: in the sense you were referring to, photography is precisely the genre that most recalls the logic of the pulp detective story. It is no coincidence that the specifically photographic innovations in Hitchcock’s direction are innumerable. What does Barthes say? In his analysis of photographs, he distinguishes the “studium”—that is, the general image depicted—from the “punctum”—that is, the significant detail that makes the single photograph, what? a work of art? No: simply a detective story. And so, for example, in the photograph that documents the killing of Katy by Feilbogen (it was found later—the photographic system to catch the danger of pollution, installed in every room of the Commune, had evidently reacted to the laser), therefore in the photograph the important thing is not the exceptional event that is documented but the fact that pipe is on the table. The depiction shows it as an irresolvable element. And so I’m fine with Lucien accusing Feilbogen on the basis of a simple “unmotivated” suspicion. In fact, suspicion here is not the incarnation of a logic, but rather the element that creates logic (the criminal process, from the Inquisition to the Constitution, is precisely this: the logic of suspicion, inquisitorial logic). Suspicion in this case is the identification of the “punctum,” that is, the intuition of the enemy. It is a vital drive of rationality that punctually opposes the uselessness, repetitiveness, and insipidity of concrete logic. It is the human episode of the identification of the enemy of a reality thought, constructed, loved: that the old logic of the pipe would like to destroy. I am not surprised by this. Finding myself with the photograph of Feilbogen killing Katy in my hands, I did not know how to react differently. Any other consideration would have been improper. How could I make it credible, credibly tell the story of madness? And thus, how could I have credibly recounted the fact that, after the great massacre, there are still men who, like Feilbogen, reason about beauty and think about power? And they contrast this with the rainbow and transparency?

The author

***

The “plenum” of the Commune was assembled, preceded by days of discussion. Werner Feilbogen reads the public confession of his crimes. He does not even try to justify them: for the murder of Katy he says only that she had insulted him when he had proposed to make the discoveries of the theory of mutation and biological engineering the key to a new social hierarchy. The free discussion, after Werner’s declaration, goes nowhere: obviously—in fact, as has been said, in the previous days it had been so insistent as to lead to boredom and repetition. The emotion of the judicial rite was rejected by the new society. Immediately, the first to intervene is Carlo Ugaden, an electronic engineer. Our proposal, he says, is that Werner Feilbogen be hosted, and allowed to work, in a kindergarten or in any case in an elementary school. There is no contraindication, he emphasizes: the communitarian and loving aggressiveness of our formidable children, in this period of irresistible mutations, would force Werner to revise his antisocial tendencies. The proposal is accepted, but accepted coldly. The second speaker is Francis Wearmouth, director of the Institute of Biology and Genetics. She proposes a thorough self-criticism. Katy’s death is an irreparable loss. The great researcher was too individualistic. We must make the course of research more collective. But the Institute can commit to this only if the whole Commune further self-criticizes and revises its methods of socializing scientific work and organizing collective invention-power [forza-invenzione]. The assembly approves. The third speaker is George Xendung, an eighteen-year-old student-worker: he proposes to expand the projects for building collective sites to be dedicated to recreation, and to make the decision to produce hash pipes operational. The assembly approves. “If not reactionary,” notes Ugaden, “ambiguity is physiological within development. The dream of transparency … poor Lucien!”