PUZZ

An afterword 

     Puzz was one of the most interesting magazines to appear around the mid 1970s in Italy (& not only in Italy). In many ways it was loudly, very loudly ignored. Rather sadly in one Puzz mag 'they' - whoever they are - complained while reading the magazine of the Collegimenti collective  - an interesting ultra leftist set up -  Collegimenti never returned the favour by reading Puzz. In fact only recently has Collegimenti, abandoning some of its woodenness, made real moves in something like a Puzz direction. Puzz marked the great break from the 1960s. The world was becoming a lot more weird and peculiar and those who persisted in emptily shouting "revolution" were often the farthest from it. Puzz used  comix strip style but the bubble-speak deployed was not the simplistic, "All Power to the Workers' Councils" etc but somewhat perverse and psychologically deeply troubled (e.g. a visit to Milan's prisons was called: "Leave Me To My Paranoia"). Their graphic style was often dreadful with the exception of occasional one-offs (like "Violenza" illustrated here) but at least they kept clear of from an all too easy imitation of American models. And if in the UK, H. Bunch's "Nasty Tales" were better graphically, content-wise they simply couldn't compare with Puzz. In Puzz there are many drawings of Red Indians and one says: "Let's Decolonise the West" as a frontispiece so it's not hard to see whom and what they shortly were to influence. ....

  More to the point perhaps, Puzz slowly noted how a largish section of the late 1960s insurgents were becoming part of  capital's re-structuring, it's new 'enlightened' face as it were. They grimly observed via a related mag called "Gatti Savaggi" (Wildcat) that ex-students consciously becoming factory workers invariably ended up in a petty power position in the trade unions seeking greater glories as worker bureaucrats. Puzz did not refer to history in the same way as the almost comic academicism of Mao Dada later in 1977 as their own immediate observations were more important than historical pedigree and in all of Puzz's magazines there's only one reproduction of Dadaist art, a George Grosz painting depicting the 'socialist' butcher Noske of the Freikorps in the days of the failed German revolution of 1918-21. Puzz's greater empirical awareness though had its downsides laying itself wide open to  the younger generation of recuperation with those who exchanged negation for style changes. When Puzz proclaimed: "There's something happening and you don't know what it is do you Signor Dylan" little could they have realised such comment would become the acceptable stock-in-trade of the new wave super stars of punk heading for their first million bucks. Unfortunately Puzz had some illusions about music (see some of the following translations) even though well noting how youth was becoming "90 years old". 

     Sad to say some members of the Puzz collective were killed in Beirut in the late 1970s when holidaying, caught between the murderous cross fire of the Lebanese civil war between various fractions of capital disguised with masks of religiously oriented militias. Ironically, one of their comments had been "a war called a banality"!

(BIS comment: 1978-9) 
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                    PUZZ PUZZ PUZZ PUZZ PUZZ PUZZ PUZZ . (June 1975)                                           
    "HOW TO ENJOY YOURSELF BY READING THE PLEASURE OF NEGATION"

     Puzz criticized the publication in Chile during Allende's popular front regime of "How to read Donald Duck" by Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart and its appearance in Italy with a written introduction by two Italians, Marovelli and Saccomano, saying "it is not for nothing they are university lecturers" not having the least doubts of the progressive 'content' of the book which is in fact neo-capitalist. (John Berger wrote an article in 'New Society' praising this book about the same time). Dorfman and Mattelart express, "not the optic of the logic of capital so much as the one dimensional vision of a hegemonic class that drives social contradictions underground strewing the tomb with flowers. The two Chileans place the accent more on the class that has produced Donald Duck than on Donald Duck". Only marginally "examining the relations of production; for them, as for the left, capital is not these relations but ends up being the class that manages it and struggle is expressed through a change in power; capital is not undermined, on the contrary it is a moment of its restructuring". 

    In the introduction, the Italian editors remark that "what is lacking in Donald Duck to pass to the stage of being a revolutionary - (if one had directly written the word role it would have been expressed perfectly) is one thing, only consciousness, that is Donald Duck ideology, lacks a specific ideology in order to re-valorise itself, to leap from the terrain which is the limbo between reactionary and progressive to land in this second camp definitively enslaved to neo-capitalism. 

     These four gentlemen (Chilean and Italian) swiftly moving in the ideological battle do not put one foot forward against capital". 
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   See Further:Italy in 1977