This article is a dialogue with the Italian autonomist media theorist Franco Berardi,
also known as Bifo. The discussion turns on how to conceptually frame Italian
experiments in media activism—from the pirate broadcaster Radio Alice to the
networked microemissions of Teletreet. Throughout, special emphasis is put on the
importance of Foucault, and Deleuze and Guattari to the creative wing of Italian
autonomist thought which focused on media, communication, and culture. Thus
“the Italian Foucault” is presented as an apposite conceptual persona. Finally, both
the Foucault-inspired dispositif and the more autonomist composizione (elsewhere
presented as either composition or recombination) are suggestions for better
theorizing new networked organizational forms. Thus, media is presented as
constitutive of the social body; that is, media is not understood as an additive with
“effects” but as comprising and calibrating those constitutive elements, their affective,
communicative, and signifying capacities.