Interregnum: Beyond Liquid Modernity 9783839435151

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Carlo Bordoni Interregnum

X T E X T E

Carlo Bordoni

Interregnum Beyond Liquid Modernity

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de © 2016 transcript Verlag, Bielefeld

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Cover layout: Kordula Röckenhaus, Bielefeld Translated by Wendy Doherty Typeset by Francisco Bragança Printed in Germany Print-ISBN 978-3-8376-3515-7 PDF-ISBN 978-3-8394-3515-1

Table of content

Preface | 7

I Why we cannot define ourselves as modern | 11 1. 2. 3. 4.

From modernity to the interregnum | 11 Anomie and absence of “regnum” | 20 The voice of politics and the silence of power | 25 If the liquid society is no longer able to explain the present | 29

II The return of the subject | 37 1. 2. 3. 4.

Modernity as a “discrete object” | 37 Towards a demassification | 41 Disappearance of the middle class | 49 A totalising desire | 55

III A matter of class | 67 1. In the beginning was the class struggle | 67 2. Class as an invention of the modern spirit | 73 3. Modernity and class consciousness | 81

IV The lost community | 91 1. 2. 3. 4.

Communitas and societas | 91 Multilocalism or cosmopolitism? | 100 Urbanisation and globalisation | 109 The destiny of global cities | 116

References | 121 Index | 127

Preface

The king is dead, long live the king! This book stems from a controversy, a special kind of controversy that arose with Zygmunt Bauman on the subject of modernity. Bauman claims that we live in a liquid modernity, where everything has become unstable, precarious, temporary and uncertain. For this reason, we are not dealing with postmodernism; in actual fact, we have yet to reach the peak of modernism. Even Lyotard, to whom we owe the definition of “postmodern”, in his later writings overturned the concept, saying that “we cannot be modern without first being postmodern”.1 “We have not even come close to modernity – argues Bauman – I prefer to speak of liquid modernity. I am opposed to the use of the term postmodern because it is a negative concept. It says that we are something that in fact we no longer are. I have tried to get rid of this formula. I see a world that is leaning towards modernity, a liquid modernity, because I firmly believe that the solid version was no longer adequate.”

That is to say, a sense of positive continuity with the past, where even the liquidity is presented as a progressive value, in that it is an adaptation to the changing living conditions. Undoubtedly, between solid and liquid societies (albeit characterised by insecurity and impermanence), there is no doubt that the preference goes to the 1 | Z. Bauman, “Liquid Modernity Revisited”, in Liquid Modernity, Polity, 2013, p. IX.

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latter: solid societies are outdated, inadequate to the times and unable to understand and accept the changes. Hence, his idea of modernity is determined by a world that is constantly changing, where the “novum” is always the best, and man must strive to understand it. Everything lies in the ability to “cum-prehendere”, that is, to take as one’s own, accept and understand what is happening around us. However, faced with this positive and optimistic vision, we cannot deny the obvious epochal changes that have interrupted, modified and distorted the human journey. The task of the sociologist, if not to find solutions, is, however, to warn, to explain the reasons that have led to that change and identify the critical issues and the risks because it is not necessarily true that every change is both welcome and acceptable to those who are at the mercy of it, and is not in any way opposable or amendable. It is a delicate and dangerous task, since sociology has renounced the freedom from value judgements postulated by Max Weber, but not less essential, unless we want this science to be nothing but a gregarious, mercenary tool at the service of the powers that be and also of politics. First, by confronting itself with history, its main ally, that provides sociology with the fundamental knowledge needed to benefit from past experience. History continues on its course for periods, for centuries, in synthetic schemas that are useful to have a clearer picture of the objectives of human actions and their consequences. It is, therefore, beneficial to define temporal “cuts” that are united by the same cultural, social and political characteristics: an operation that is purely “methodological” and has no intention of breaking the continuity of history or of human action, but to provide flexible instruments of interpretation, bearing in mind that each label given is pure nominalism. A name is given to a thing to make it more easily distinguishable from the others. The first doubts fall on “liquidity”. Why should we continue to call society “modern” after “something” has upset the reference parameters, the features that defined its face? It is not a question of names: what is important is to understand where we are and where we are going. This is what is needed in order to correct the route and

Preface

avoid mistakes. If it is true that our present seems unchangeable, having been prepared by the actions of those who have gone before us, our choices will determine tomorrow’s society, because that is how history works: we write it, but it will be our children who will suffer the consequences. In consideration of the decline of modernity, it might be better to speak of “Interregnum”, a period of time and a waiting condition between the end of the power of a sovereign and the assumption of power by another. During this interruption of continuity an atmosphere of suspension is felt, as if the laws were devoid of any validity, as if pending others that the new ruler will waste no time in issuing. Meanwhile, the absence of the principle of authority that the sovereign personified causes imbalances, uncertainty and confusion. Normally, the interruption is brief, just long enough to attend to administrative affairs, and to prevent the country from falling into chaos. The sense of continuity is well represented by the proclamation announced loudly by the royal criers, “The king is dead, long live the king!”, which communicates the immediate handing over of the throne to his successor. Zygmunt Bauman uses the concept of “interregnum”, according to Gramsci’s meaning of an unexpected break of continuity with the past, to better represent the present, surpassing that of “liquid modernity”, around which he built up his critical way of thinking. But the interregnum is established when a power system ends, the symbols of the authority are challenged by the new order on the horizon that has not yet imposed its laws: in our case the deceased sovereign is modernity, with its ethics, its expectations and its trust in progress. This nerve-wracking wait, which extends beyond the limits of human endurance, assumes the characteristics of the time in the life of a generation, whose rules are the absence of rules, the predominance of the strongest, the questioning of democratic achievements, the primacy of an unbridled economy that overwhelms everything with the expectation of an abstract gain, the purpose of which is dispersed in virtual spaces.

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Understanding the interregnum, being aware of its instability and the social degradation that it entails, can help us to make the right choices. Understanding if the light that we can glimpse at the end of this interregnum really coincides with the end of liquid modernity or the restoration of the same: modernity is dead, long live modernity?

C. B.

I

Why we cannot define ourselves as modern

1. F rom modernit y to the interregnum Stating that modernity is over does not mean ignoring its merits, nor the extraordinary importance that it has had in human history. Its end does not depend on an accumulation of errors, or on an internal breakdown, but only on the natural evolution of society, within which the characteristics of the modern no longer find space; they have been surpassed and are therefore inadequate to deal with the needs of the present. Knowing modernity through its main innovations, highlighting the critical issues that now arise in the face of rapid changes, can help us to understand our situation and help us make the right choices to get out of the “state of crisis” that proves to be – on closer inspection – not so much an accidental interlude, while waiting to return to the status quo ante, as a turning point towards a new humanity. Understanding modernity means highlighting its points of reference, the fundamental principles on which its certainties are built, but also its fragility, its promises that, after more than three centuries, appear only partially kept. It is on the lines of broken promises that we make our analysis, taking into account the fact that all that modernity formulated at the time of its establishment appeared to be as open as possible towards the liberation of man and the realisation of his life plans. The prospect was so wide and evolved and there was a level of optimism for the future that had never been attempted thus far.

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The long journey through modernity began on an icy morning in October 1648, when the news of the peace treaty of Westphalia was officially released in the cities of Münster and Osnabrück, though it had already been signed some months prior to that, at the end of the Thirty Years War, and reconfirmed the principles established almost a century earlier by Charles V with the Peace of Augsburg in 1555. On that fateful date, which was shortly before the publication of Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651), we can definitely recognise the universal validity of the principle of the so-called Cuius regio, eius et religio (“whose realm, his religion”), that is, the power of the sovereign to lay down the law and religion in his country. Hence, the birth of the modern state and the recognition of national unity that, according to Jürgen Habermas, is probably a direct result of the political community. However, for Habermas, as for Bauman, modernity remains an unfinished project, while, for Fredric Jameson, modernity is not so much a period or an era, but rather a narrative or “a trope, but one utterly different in structure from the traditional figures as those have been catalogued since antiquity”.1 From the solid political affirmation given by the Peace of Westphalia flows the promises of modernity, which from now on will find a sound foundation on which to consolidate. All of significant social value, such as to substantially modify the structure of populations and their fate: since then, we can speak of “postWestphalian States”. First, the promise of equality among men, then of the domination of nature, of social security and, finally, the work ethic and the belief in progress.In this short list lurks everything that appears to be right, good and beautiful; a life that is worth living and, ultimately, that can be summed up in a promise of happiness. It is an optimistic teleology that, in the secular and pragmatic spirit, based on economic principles of human relations, as endorsed by the ruling class, the bourgeoisie, which is dedicated to shape the world 1 | F. Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present, Verso, 2002, p. 34.

Why we cannot define ourselves as modern

according to their own aspirations, promises to realise the happiness that religion always remanded to an afterlife after death. Innovation is revolutionary and successful: happiness can be achieved here on earth, and it is only deferred in time. Closer and closer, and more and more within reach, but only obtainable through work, the spirit of sacrifice, commitment, the good bourgeois virtues of the “self-made man”, the new man that makes his own way and his own name, independent and determined to reach his objectives, who pursues knowledge not just for pleasure, but in order to achieve his goals. These include the domination of nature, and therefore the concrete possibility to change the world around him. Thanks to the advances in science and technology, dominating nature is an exciting project; it means the acquisition of an enormous and unimaginable power, but it is also a defiant hybris that brings man closer to the divine prerogatives – appropriating nature and, at the same time, desecrating it by subjecting it to his will. Man believed in these promises; he elaborated them, assimilated and renegotiated them, in part they were fulfilled, but he never lost his trust in them, even when the conditions of life proved to be unbearable and the achievable goal, happiness, was further and further away. Even when the most coveted of the promises, the achievement of real equality between men that Marxism tried to make possible through the revolutionary act of demanding rights even for the most humble, all took place within the system of modernity, without calling the underlying principles into question. Today those promises are appearing more and more in their true light, which time and experience have made clear: good intentions that served to overcome the difficulties at that time, but that are now threadbare and inappropriate to solve the current problems. On the contrary, they themselves are the cause and reason for problems that plague us; in part because the promises were not fulfilled (equality between men), in part because they turned out to be misleading (the domination of nature) or they were utopian (the idea of progress). Some were actually withdrawn in haste (social security), while its most pivotal political representative, the State, is undermined

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by the same structural and economic changes that modernity had encouraged, such as free movement of goods, competition, exchange, ease of communications, the opening of borders and, ultimately, globalisation. However, in order to face up to the complexity of the present, it is necessary that the disappointment of the promises not kept or withdrawn unilaterally give way to the calm and collected realisation that that world has exhausted its historical mission, has taken the path of a parable that, for better or for worse, is the past which we come from, the certainty of an existential experience that had its raison d’être, and that must be respected and understood. However, this does not mean that it can be recreated slavishly; we must realise that it is not possible to restore the fundamental criteria, but only reconstruct new ones on their bases. We have to become objective observers, disillusioned by the last flashes of modernity, driven unconsciously – and no one had the foresight or intelligence to warn us in time – into a dead zone, where the values that we were taught as universal and eternal suddenly prove to be inconsistent and of no use in showing us as to how to continue. Embracing the recommendations Gramsci made almost a century ago, in this interregnum, indeed we do encounter uncertainty, loneliness and the immense grief that envelops humanity of the face of the unknown, but also the extraordinary and unique opportunity to choose what shape to give our future. The point being that only now, in this difficult transition, we are given the opportunity to make the right choices, bearing in mind that after the interregnum there will not be a society that is already predefined and characterised, but one that is unknown and unprecedented that we will have to construct ourselves. “That aspect of the modern crisis – Gramsci writes in ‘Wave of Materialism and Crisis of Authority’ (Past and Present) of his Prison Notebooks – which is bemoaned as a ‘wave of materialism’ is related to what is called the ‘crisis of authority’. If the ruling class has lost its consensus, i.e. is no longer ‘leading’ but only ‘dominant’, exercising coercive force alone, this

Why we cannot define ourselves as modern

means precisely that the great masses have become detached from their traditional ideologies, and no longer believe what they used to believe previously, etc. The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear. [...] Will the interregnum, the crisis whose historically normal solution is blocked in this way, necessarily be resolved in favour of a restoration of the old?”2

Every moment of crisis, as its etymology reminds us, is an opportunity for choice and change: we must seize this opportunity, which is offered to us just now and which is unlikely to be repeated, to set up the new order according to our aspirations and our needs, without giving up, without surrendering to pessimism and fatalism and, above all, with no regrets for what has been. There has been no lack of criticism of modernity and already during its phase of violent assertion in the Industrial Revolution it was clear to see the extremely high human cost that had to be paid, the enormous sacrifice, the exploitation of the work force, the ripping apart of the social fabric, the barbarisation and marginalisation of the poorest and the most defenceless classes. After all, every symbol that is a cornerstone of modernity has been represented by an act of violence, beginning with the French Revolution. But beneath the violent assertion of driving force with the power to crush anyone who opposed it, there lies an anti-modernist vein of varied consistency: Jean-Jacques Rousseau disclosed that it was rationally impossible to achieve real democracy, denouncing the inequality between men that modernity actually consolidates and dreams of a return to the state of nature, to the myth of the noble savage. Friedrich Nietzsche’s denunciation is even more radical and his Birth of Tragedy3 is an indictment against modern civilisation and its 2 | A. Gramsci, “Wave of Materialism and Crisis of Authority”, in Id., Prison Notebooks, ed. Joseph A. Buttigieg, Columbia UP, 2011, p. 276. 3 | F. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy, ed. Douglas Smith, Oxford Paper​ backs, 2008.

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hypocrisies, confirmed by the ruthless analysis made by Ferdinand Tönnies who in Community and Society4 laments the destruction of a “culture” belonging to the community and replaced by a forced “civilisation” that has shattered its authenticity. Among the antimodernists closest to us stands out Heidegger who, in the wake of Nietzsche, denying the continuity of the historical process in favour of the uniqueness of the event, strengthens the project of a return to the pre-modern state, based on natural existence, on the primordial values of “blood and soil” and on the centrality of the individual. In any case, a distinguishing factor of anti-modernist criticism has always been its restorative desire of a remote past, re-proposing in the present the characteristics of a mode of existence that is more mythical than real, veiled in heroic spiritualism, mysticism, ritual and racial purity, unable to look to the future and to propose really innovative and credible alternatives. Only postmodernism has made a more significant and operationally effective criticism, but has taken it too far on the external aspects of the new, with the result that it has but a superficial value and fleeting duration. Basically, it gave the impression that it was very easy to break free from modernity, simply by wiping away the deep scars and replacing them with pretty trimmings that were surprisingly pleasing to the eye. The extreme ease with which it reported the change, more established outright that really understood, did not allow for a warning against the risks of a drastic change (now underway) and of the urgency to timely prepare for a possible (now certain) interregnum. That is to say, a latency period the social and economic consequences of which was not something to be taken lightly. We are dealing with an interregnum not only of ethical turmoil, insecurity and uncertainties, liquefaction of social relations, impoverishment and frustration, but also of violence and blood.

4 | F. Tönnies, Community and Civil Society, ed. Jose Harris, Cambridge UP, 2001.

Why we cannot define ourselves as modern

On the one hand, scholars such as Steven Pinker5 assure us of the decline of violence, the extent of which is much less in our society than in the past (a beneficial effect of modernity?), even though the massive frequency of communication makes it appear more substantial, while others, like Göran Therborn,6 point to the cost, in terms of human life, that such a serious and long-lasting crisis has, so much so that it can affect the life expectancy of people. According to the Swedish sociologist, the effects of the crisis, the depression and its psychological consequences will have a strong impact on the average lifespan of EU citizens in the next decade. This, too, will be another cost of the crisis, a price to pay in order to leave modernity behind. The term “interregnum” comes from Roman law, which meant attributing power temporarily to the “Patres”, members of the Senate, in a period in which there was no “Rex”, and they exercised power in turn. However, today, in the face of the decline of modernity and its certainties, there is no “interrex”, nor a return to the “Patres” (symbol of auctoritas paterna), but only a void where there should be values. In ancient times, the interregnum was designed to ensure the continuity of power when, in the case of the sudden death of the king, a legitimate successor was not immediately designated. This latency of power was planned, controlled and limited in terms of time, so as to avoid disruption, the loss of certain points of reference, of rules of conduct that the absence of the “Rex”, the only one in possession of supreme authority and believed to be invested with divine powers, could cause. The absence of the sovereign was equivalent to the death of God: man could feel deprived of protection, feel that he was at the mercy of events and thus justified in acting according to his nature, since the loss of God was equivalent to the loss of his laws. 5 | S. Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature. A History of Violence and Humanity, Penguin, 2012. 6 | G. Therborn, The Killing Fields of Inequality, Polity, 2013, pp. 79 sg.

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Only the presence of God (and the fear of his punishment) ensures compliance with the rules. Translated into today’s terms, this principle may still be valid if we substitute the figure of the sovereign with the rules of civilisation imposed by modernity. Once these fall short, there is no substitute to fill the void of the interregnum. Above all, there are no “Patres” and therefore no principle of authority, albeit virtual, that ensures the transition to another power without excessive disruption. This had not been foreseen for modernity. Some prophets had predicted its ruin, predicting the most disastrous apocalypse, while others had been busy trying to subvert the instruments and symbols of power. No one had thought about ensuring the stability of the transition period, but only of destroying the existing one. Gramsci was the first to attribute the meaning of unexpected to the interregnum, considering its uncontrolled nature. But he could certainly not have imagined that there would have been no frame of reference left standing in the aftermath, i.e. that modernity with all its components collapsed, including the State. Zygmunt Bauman now uses the term interregnum more and more frequently, giving it a comprehensive quality of liquidity. In this, he is indebted to Keith Tester who has reused this concept in an article, taking it from Antonio Gramsci and combining it to the Freudian theory that was formulated in the twenties: “Globalisation has meant the collapse of the reality principle of the Modern Era and the present can be identified as a moment of interregnum.”7 Tester sees in the crisis of modernity, the denial of the reality principle, in favour of the prevalence of the pleasure principle (today we would say “hedonism”). However, according to Freud,8 the reality principle is related to the rational and productive activity, since 7 | K. Tester, “Pleasure, Reality, the Novel and Pathology”, in Anthropo­ logical Psychology, 21, 2009, p. 25. 8 | S. Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (1920), Penguin, 2003. See also H. Marcuse, Eros and Civilisation (1955), Sphere Books, 1969.

Why we cannot define ourselves as modern

civilisation is based on the permanent repression of human instincts: thus, the weakening of this principle gives rise to the loss of control of impulses (including social) and an inevitable crisis of authority. It is exactly to a “crisis of authority” that Gramsci alludes, imputing it to the wave of materialism which, in the post-First World War years, opens the season of Fascism and the sceptical, disenchanted and agnostic masses, who were ready to experience the charm of the charismatic personality that was in a position to re-propose, as spectacularly as superficially, that “principle of authority” which they felt was lacking. It is indeed astounding this analogy with the present and the acuity with which Gramsci takes the political fragility of every interregnum, in which nothing good is foreseen, translatable into a warning that has universal validity: in the absence of the reality principle and when the pleasure principle prevails, it is possible that someone or something will undertake to fill the void in some way. “Gramsci detached the idea of ‘interregnum’ – Bauman points out – from its time-hallowed association with an interlude in a routine transmission of hereditary or elected power. He attached it instead to extraordinary situations: to times when the extant legal frame of social order loses its grip and can no longer keep burgeoning social life on track, and a new frame, made to the measure of the newly emerged conditions responsible for making the old frame useless, is still at the design stage, has not yet been fully assembled, or has not been made strong enough to be enforced and settled in place.”9

9 | Z. Bauman, “Interregnum”, in 44 Letters from the Liquid Modern World, Polity, 2010, p. 120.

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2. A nomie and absence of “ regnum ” As regards our time of uncertainty, we really have come to the end of a “regnum”, where there is no longer a sovereign as a point of reference and where the laws are no longer observed. In Latin “regnum” was considered in opposition to “res publica” (the government of the people), and so negatively denoted as “dominion over the people”, exercised by a monarch. It follows that the interregnum could also be seen as a moment of liberation from an oppressive power, or a moment of emancipation from the sovereign power. The end of a “regnum” (similar to the crisis of modernity) recalls the ancient concept of “anomie”, but in an updated form, compared to how Durkheim used it, as a deviation from social norms, such as to call into question the principle of “organic solidarity”. The current anomie rather follows the meaning that Robert K. Merton gave it in the fifties: “As initially developed by Durkheim, the concept of anomie referred to a condition of relative normlessness in a society or group. Durkheim made it clear that this concept referred to a property of the social and cultural structure, not to a property of individuals confronting that structure. Never­ theless, as the utility of the concept for understanding diverse forms of de­ viant behavior became evident, it was extended to refer to a condition of in­ dividuals rather than of their environment. [...] Anomie is then conceived as a breakdown in the cultural structure, occurring particularly when there is an acute disjunction between the cultural norms and goals and the socially structured capacities of members of the group to act in accord with them. In this conception, cultural values may help to produce behavior which is at odds with the mandates of the values themselves.”10

More recently, Daniele Giglioli11 points to the disturbing juxta­ position to the Scriptures, given that a chaotic period takes place 10 | R. K. Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure, Macmillan, 1968, pp. 216–217. 11 | D. Giglioli, Stato di minorità, Laterza, 2015, p. 9.

Why we cannot define ourselves as modern

in each “regnum”, and which the followers of Paul of Tarsus feared as the advent of the Antichrist. Beyond the religious significance, the Antichrist represents the breaking up of a consolidated order, tradition and harmony among men, that is, their system of social relations governed by laws that, thus far, had been maintained by the Kathékon (the right action). The break-up (the rapture) is thus characterised by anomie, a feature of each interregnum, of every time period in which the order that holds men together according to a system of rules of behaviour is overturned. The task of the Kathékon is, in some way, absolved by modernity and when, as it happens, it loses its power of coercion and its “holding” of the law – whether it be religion, ideology or politics – we have the advent of the Antichrist. However, not in the form of a physical being, the enemy of Christ (the anti-Messiah), but more in the form of a humanity devoid of meaning, that has lost control of itself and its social function, of the utility for the other: o anthropos tès anomìa, the man of lawlessness, the absence of any law which, simply because it is in opposition to the kingdom of Christ, is an “anti-kingdom”, a denial of collectively recognised common sense. Therefore, the Messiah is nothing more than, metaphorically speaking, the sense of community with others, selflessness, individual sacrifice, solidarity and the value of human coexistence. Consequently, the interregnum does not present as a time of waiting, of the absence of agency (as defined in sociological terms), but as a tumultuous alternative to the “regnum”, i.e. to the established order, where the absence of rules (anomie) causes imbalance, tragedy and turmoil, toppling the unchecked power against the weak and the unarmed that politics (the Kathékon) once had the task of keeping under control. Therefore, we are not faced with a short period of impasse, represented by a liquefaction of human relationships and the absence of valid points of reference, separated by an unbridgeable distance and condemned to live a fearful time that precedes and accompanies the destruction of society, at least as we know it.

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For that matter, Alain Touraine had already anticipated it in one of his latest more intense, apocalyptic works, where he predicts the end of societies: “The situations are defined in terms of less and less social and, in parallel, the actors cease to be social, i.e. to be defined by their position in the social organisation, to be increasingly more defined in ethical terms.”12 Clearly, Touraine’s hypothesis is provocative because he does not mean the end of societies at all, but is questioning the rules that have governed it until now, in view of a new social order that we are not yet able to imagine.Our time can then be defined as the time of anomie, of that lost paradise which, for better or for worse, modernity has been and the long, painful process of destruction (Heidegger’s Destruktion, Derrida’s déconstruction) urging us on to another place. If we talk about the future, modern society has established its certainties (provisional) on the idea of a future that is already preordained and fixed right at the outset. Unlike pre-modern societies in which the future was full of unknown and erratic variables and whose development was in the hands of the gods (the same prediction was reserved for irrational formulas that harked back to the supernatural, for magic, for the numinous, confirmed by the etymology of “divine”, referring to a transcendent quality), modernity, in all the structural transformations it underwent over three centuries – from absolute monarchies to massification – has anticipated a sustainable tomorrow. This was made credible not only in the fundamental ideology that supports it (the belief in progress), but in economic matters: savings, credit, loans, insurance, social security – a prearranged and reassuring future, where everything has been thought of and which paradoxically cannot be escaped from. In this systematic predictability, we witness the manifestation of a total absence of the future, given the substantial impossibility of any change, or of anything unforeseen. 12 | A. Touraine, La fin des sociétés, Seuil, 2013, p. 91.

Why we cannot define ourselves as modern

This is the price to pay for security, also in terms of individual freedom. In pre-modern societies of a religious nature, the future hinges on the continuity of life after death and therefore a kind of reward for a life lived virtuously. Social control follows simple methods, almost crude in their implementation: the Christian religious ritual simply amounts to marking each event in life in a fixed, immutable, way from birth to death, enunciating each step with a sacrament (baptism, communion, confirmation, marriage, the last rites), but without forcing the outcome, which is largely left up to the free will of the individual. As a secular sociopolitical organisation, based on bourgeois culture, modernity is more restrictive and materialistic. It stops at the physical limits of human life and does not look beyond (if it does look, it does so in a collective sense, in connection to the species, in consideration of the future of humanity). The future ceases to exist beyond the average lifespan and the objectives that a life can legitimately expect in terms of health, success, enrichment and personal fulfilment. Happiness is a material satisfaction which is part of earthly expectations and which can be obtained through well-being, through luxuries and our readiness to consume. In short, in having, in which the task of human action is carried out and resolved. In an article based on the James Lecture presented at the New York Institute for the Humanities in 1982, Nadine Gordimer uses the term “interregnum” to explain the condition of South Africa in the years when a revolution against apartheid was on the horizon. These years mark a period of uncertainty and contradiction in which a serious commitment was necessary in order to get through them. “Historical coordinates don’t fit life any longer; – she writes – new ones, where they exist, have couplings not to the rulers, but to the ruled. It is not for nothing that I chose as an epigraph for my most lately written novel a quotation from Gramsci: ‘The old is dying, and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum there arises a great

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diversity of morbid symptoms.’ In this interregnum, I and all my countrymen and women are living.”13 It is the state of “disintegrated consciousness” which Hegel had already referred to in The Phenomenology of Spirit, citing the work of Diderot, Rameau’s Nephew (1762), where he defines the young protagonist as a despicable fellow, who is not part of society, therefore a “disintegrated conscience”, “and credits him with great wit, for it is he who breaks down all the normal social values and makes new combinations with the pieces”.14 According to Hegel, “The distraught and disintegrated soul is, however, aware of inversion; it is, in fact, a consciousness of absolute inversion: the conceptual principle predominates there, brings together into a single unity the thoughts that lie far apart in the case of the honest soul, and the language conveying its meaning is, therefore, full of esprit and wit (geistreich).”15 Because it refuses to follow the order of things, a torn conscience can be creative and contribute to the construction of something new. However, not all torn consciences are productive; some are limited to destroying the existing and, in any case, every act of destruction always produces a reaction and the need to reach a new equilibrium, even if temporary. What is a torn conscience if not a consciousness that is ill at ease in the reality in which it lives? It is the inability to recognise the values that society imposes, not necessarily because one refuses those values as an act of rebellion, but because they are perceived as false, empty and only formal, but to which the others, the majority of those who possess a sound conscience (albeit obtuse), submit, in recognition of supremacy. 13 | N. Gordimer, “Living in the Interregnum”, in The Essential Gesture. Writing, Politics and Places, ed. Stephen Clingman, Penguin, 1989, p. 263. 14 | L. Trilling, “Freud and Literature”, in The Liberal Imagination, Viking, 1951, p. 35. 15 | G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J. B. Baillie, Theophania, 2012, p. 521.

Why we cannot define ourselves as modern

The torn conscience is actually a “critical consciousness”, which is separated from the world and which observes it from the outside. It already has within it the seeds of demassification, i.e. the desire to emerge from the crowd and from that standardising condition resulting from uncritical acceptance, from the one way of thinking, from the passive recognition of a logic and the resignation to a destiny of domination. The condition of interregnum is, therefore, a very delicate moment, because everything can be questioned and the validity of the “stories” can be challenged. “Believe no longer” could be its slogan, repeated countless times, and whenever the order of things is shaken in the history of mankind. Do not believe in promises, especially when it is already known at the outset that they cannot be maintained.

3. The voice of politics and the silence of power The word has never been so widespread as in this interregnum: it is the privileged expression of communication, amplified by the general media and the social, used to inform, create bonds and prove self-existence. Existence is not a physical matter, but a vocal one. To speak, intervene, be heard, publicly confess, express one’s own opinion or simply to say something means demonstrating that we exist in the world. In this, speech has transcended the permanence of writing. Until recently, based on Walter Ong16 and research of the School of Toronto, it seemed that we were to witness the prevalence of orality at the expense of literacy. There were many pointers that foreshadowed a major new divide or, according to the apocalyptics, a leap back in history. In fact, it soon became evident that writing was taking new directions, taking advantage of the tools provided by 16 | W. J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, Routledge, 1982.

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technology: it became more concise, terse, almost telegraphic, so as to adapt to the brief thought process that the speed and immediacy of communication made mandatory to those who wanted to be listened to or read. Yet speech, though so much used – appropriately or inappropriately – is losing its original power, as if devoid of authority, while remaining a sound that envelops the world but without determining its fate. The interregnum is cloaked in words that fill the void of waiting, expressing audible signs of existence in life, that accompany the discomfort of a suspension of time with a babel of accents, strident and deep, wavering and harmonious, but that seem to have lost their ancient power to command, the power of decision, the power to address. The speech of the interregnum is a lamentation, a constant cry for help, a repeated request, a formal declamation that is listened to but only superficially. As the monologues of the tribal leaders of certain primitive communities described by the French anthropologist Pierre Clastres; primitives, though shrewd in the management of power, where the right to speech is kept separate from the right to decision. In an article entitled “The duty to speak”, Clastres explains how the power of speech is kept separate from power in the primitive communities of Paraguay and Brazil, in which there is no concept of state. “Speaking presupposes the power to speak, or rather, the exercise of power ensures the domination of speech: only the masters can speak; as for the subjects, they are bound to the silence of respect, reverence or terror. Speech and power maintain relations such that the desire for one is fulfilled in the conquest of the other. Whether prince, despot or commander-inchief, the man of power is not always the man who speaks, but the sole source of legitimate speech: an impoverished speech, a poor speech, to

Why we cannot define ourselves as modern

be sure, but one rich in efficiency, for it goes by the name of command and wants nothing but the obedience of the executant.”17

Speech has always been a manifestation of power, indeed its exclusive right, since power, either in public or in private, has always expressed the “command”, the principle of authority, through a voice. Starting from the Bible, where God speaks to man and dictates his laws. God does not write, but speaks: “the word of God” precedes writing and gives form to its content. The power of speech is ancestral, primordial and instrumental in determining action. Without speech there is no communication, no social bond, no community and no politics either. The power of speech can determine violence, the exercise of which is up to the powers that be and when power is in the hands of the sovereign or of the state, it is their right to exercise it in the manner and in the form that the word, first publicly announced and then transcribed for future reference, has delineated. Power and politics have lived side by side thanks to speech, making free use of it as a practical tool to communicate decisions and their enforcement. Ready to expand through the means of mass communication, to enter homes, to reverberate in the streets, to be repeated countless times, on demand, with recording and playback devices. The radical division, actual or potential, that runs through societies, depending on they have a state or not, must affect the way in which power and speech are closely connected. How this connection is operated in societies without a state is shown in the example of the Amerindian tribes:

17 | P. Clastres, “Le devoir de parole”, in Nouvelle Revue de Psychanalyse (Pouvoirs), 8, 1973, pp. 83 sg; Id., “The duty to speak”, in Society Against the State: Essays in Political Anthropology, trans. Robert Hurley & Abe Stein, Zone Books, 1990.

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“Indian societies do not recognize the chief’s right to speak because he is the chief: they require that the man destined to be chief prove his command over words. Speech is an imperative obligation for the chief. The tribe demands to hear him: a silent chief is no longer a chief [...] The discourse of the chief is empty precisely because it is not a discourse of power. The chief is separated from discourse because he is separated from power. In primitive societies, in societies without a State, power is not found on the side of the chief: it follows that his word cannot be the word of power, authority or command. An order? Now there is something the chief would be unable to give; that is the kind of fullness his speech is denied.”18

Today the right to speech is not denied to anyone, and the consequence of such a wide spread of freedom of expression is the draining of power from speech, of its ability to assert authority and represent the will of the sovereign. Politicians’ speeches are like the speeches of the tribal chiefs of Clastres: they are listened to out of tradition, the local colour; they also contribute to filling the void, together with the variety of voices that have been granted the right to speech, but have lost their role of manifesting power. They are part of politics and politics is divided by power. That we have divorced politics from power, characterising the globalisation of this irreconcilable dualism, has long been known: politics, i.e. the ability to decide what needs to be done, and power, the ability to do those things, have gone different ways. In fact, they move on two different levels, intended never to meet, except for violent forays of the one (power) in the field of the other (politics). But it is a divorce sanctioned and recorded in the history books, whose livelihood is ultimately likely to continue well beyond the limits of the interregnum and resolve, if it ever will, with the second or third marriage with partners that have not yet made themselves known. There is a third wheel in this divorce whose presence, of a more symbolic than physical consistency, helps to better understand the dynamics of an upheaval that has no equal. It is speech. Always 18 | P. Clastres, “The Duty to Speak”, cit., pp. 153–154.

Why we cannot define ourselves as modern

a faithful companion of power and, consequently, politics, when the couple’s relationship was strong, it represented on a social and communicative level the presence and strength of both. The third wheel, or willing servant or even winged messenger, was always at the service of power and politics as long as the couple was united. Upon divorce, at the moment of the division of property, where each one takes away their personal belongings, speech remained in the realm of politics. A balanced choice we could say, perhaps to compensate for too great a loss, which nevertheless left power without a voice. Thus, speech, that until now had enjoyed the extraordinary benefit of power, found itself powerless, lost its value, a rhetorical exercise to be listened to with patient condescension, like the chief of the Amerindian tribes.It is obvious that remaining in the service of politics has deprived speech of authority and effectiveness. In this way, we have politics that maintains the right to speech, but without the ability to act, and power deprived of speech, which acts in silence.

4. I f the liquid socie t y is no longer able to e xpl ain the present It is not necessarily true that everything comes to a halt at the end of a reign, that time undergoes an abrupt suspension followed by an agonising wait. The interregnum period is marked by disorder, a painful condition in which uncertainty and violence prevail, and where the traditional values at the basis of society are called into question. Everything becomes fragile, temporary and insecure. Yet the state of disorder, as we know from past experience, and confirmed by studies on its complexity, is itself the creator of the new. Not only of the social, economic and cultural systems, that is to say, human systems, but also of physical ones. It is part of the structure of the universe in which we live: it is only thanks to disorder that a new order can be reached, based on a different, more complex balance,

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which takes into account and comprehends the disorder that has challenged it. However, the new order will be threatened and its newly acquired concrete certainties will be undermined by new and unforeseen fears, such that it will herald other crises in an eternal succession of evolutions/involutions/revolutions. It is only a question of how long it will take disorder to reach the most acute phase, the one that immediately precedes the collapse of the previous system and the establishment of a new equilibrium, an arduous and at first sight incomprehensible feat. According to the limitations of human perception, which are indeed so brief and restricted compared to the great changes, the condition of disorder may appear longer or shorter. It will affect many generations, well beyond the life of every single individual. Perhaps it will remain in the collective memory as an atavistic recollection, buried in the depths of the unconscious, and ready to re-emerge in the form of unease, of the feeling of danger, and fear. Today, society is experiencing one of these extraordinary moments of change, now at its worst phase and close to an explosion, but with an important difference compared to similar moments in the past: its extent. For the first time in human history, it involves the whole planet. It is a global disorder, where, in past centuries, the crisis of transition only affected a limited number of territories. Today, thanks to the speed of communications, to the immediacy of information, to the substantial standardisation of the rules that govern human behaviour, whereby we are no longer confined within the impregnable borders of nation-states, disorder is felt in every part of the world, in every country and, above all, at the same time. This makes it pervasive, with a tremendous impact on our lives and on our consciences because, for the first time, we discover that there is no better haven to take refuge in. There is no alternative to a global system that is collapsing. Wherever we look, we can see signs of malaise dysfunction, problems and crises, which appear to us to be a world in ruins, while it is actually only a world undergoing a change. Our inability to embrace the interregnum, i.e. the delicate transition phase between the old that is breaking up, and the new

Why we cannot define ourselves as modern

that is not yet on the horizon, urges us to have a threefold reaction that, though comprehensible, does not produce any result: 1. Nostalgia: looking at the past as a model of order with a feeling of yearning and regret; 2. Waiting: believing that the crisis is only temporary and hoping that by paying a high cost we can return to the former state; 3. Selfishness: trying to survive the disorder at an individual level, forgetting the shared values and fundamental principles that human relations are based on. These three attitudes merge and intersect in varying degrees in each person, often preventing us from seeing the reality of things, by covering it with a veil of anger, impatience, distrust and resignation. They obstruct our understanding of the present and every choice regarding the future. In this book, we will try to analyse the interregnum that we are experiencing, from the decline of modernity and its impact on our lives because the end of modernity challenges the traditional reference values such as community, it subtracts the instruments needed to understand social complexity like class division, and it nullifies the economic security of a system based on production/ work/consumption/consumerism. Above all, it questions the idea of progress that, for centuries, has led man to look at the future with confidence and faith. The end of modernity also coincides with the disintegration of mass society, which, for almost a century, had represented the most advanced methods of policing and social control. The vast and unstoppable process of demassification produces destabilising effects, together with a climate of social uncertainty, which is perhaps the strongest feature of our present. The idea of liquid society is perhaps not enough to depict the condition in which we live, which is marked by growing disorder, contradictions, opposition, fears and misunderstandings that prevent us from looking ahead with serenity.

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When we speak of liquid society, we immediately think of a “snow globe”, a transparent glass sphere containing a winter landscape enclosed in water and white particles, and when shaken, gives the effect of snow falling. If we assimilate the contents of a snow globe to today’s society, we can see some features that help to have a better understanding of Bauman’s intuition. The globe is filled with water and the world represented inside it is completely immersed in it; the atmosphere is dense and impenetrable because of the snow, which makes the contours of the figures unclear and blurred. But this effect is produced by an energetic action that upsets the order within: it is not just because there is water, it takes a force to shake the contents and churn up the particles that would otherwise be left lying at the bottom. Once the effect of the shaking action ceases, these particles (snow) tend to settle again, but this time covering the landscape with a white mantle. This has the effect of modifying it in our eyes and making it unrecognisable until it is once again disturbed by another force. Basically, it is not the water on its own that disrupts the contents of the globe (society), but it needs the intervention of an external force to move the particles, and only when the action stops and the particles are deposited, can the change be perceived. Translated into sociological terms it means that the phenomenon of social liquefaction is only a “fraction” of the change taking place, the time segment corresponding to the churning up of the particles, where the world is covered in a fine dust that makes it impossible to recognise the contours of reality, the direction to take or the choices to make. Thus, if we consider the interregnum in its entirety, as an interval between two conditions of equilibrium (order), even though different from each other, the liquidity corresponds to the first one, the one in which visibility (certainty) is thwarted by a sudden force that has churned up the particles. However, the consistency of the interregnum is more complex and cannot be limited to the phase of “churning up the liquid”, but needs a more extensive investigation, including the subsequent phases, until the establishment of the new

Why we cannot define ourselves as modern

order, when the snow deposits. Only then can we look beyond the end of the interregnum. If we look at our recent past in the light of the crisis of modernity, we can see that society has experienced and is still undergoing, at least two periods of transition towards the new one that is not moving forward: on the contrary, the evidence that the latest world news points to every day has raised fears that other transitions will follow, the duration and gravity of which we cannot even begin to speculate. Despite our ability to imagine the future, to look beyond the boundaries of human life, at the moment we cannot predict how it will end. What will the new society be like? What are the features of the system that will be the foundations of tomorrow’s society? What is certain (barring unforeseen events) is that we will have a society that is different from the one we know: it will view modernity as we viewed the Middle Ages or other past historical periods in an overview, understanding the positive and the negative aspects, the hopes and illusions, the efforts to improve the quality of human life on earth, but also the defeats and mistakes, the contradictions and misinterpretations in a single, final judgement of history. Only when everything is over, closed within the well-defined boundary of time, will it be possible to judge, appreciate or criticise with hindsight. For the moment, we are still part of this modernity that is painstakingly coming to an end and that detains us, preventing us from looking further, disallowing us to distinguish and therefore to comprehend. A long time has passed since Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History19 (Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus) fled from the city in ruins, without taking his eyes off the lost world that he was forced to leave. Today, if we could still use the metaphor illustrated by Klee, the Angel would be well aware of the need to leave and would know that it was not possible to go back. His eyes would be lost in an infinite space, 19 | W. Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History”, in Illuminations, trans. H. Zohn, Schocken Books, 1969, p. 257.

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in a vacuum devoid of light and of points of reference. He would not know how long his journey would take, but only that sooner or later he would come across another world, a new, hospitable world but still invisible. The interregnum is not only a period of time. It is also a distance that separates a world that has exhausted its life cycle from another, a statu nascenti (a “nascent state”), and requires great effort to reach it. As in all distances, it is necessary to physically move: it cannot be reached by standing still and waiting for it to come to us. The interregnum is the journey, the need to collect our personal belongings, leave our familiar places, give up our certainties and embark on the path of our journey. Every trip entails both discovery and risk; we do not know what we will encounter, what obstacles or unexpected events will delay it, and even if we arrive at our destination as scheduled. Sometimes the port or station of destination may be changed, it does not meet our expectations or we are refused entry. We may lose our way: our destination may be an unattainable mirage, a continuous search, an illusion that eats away at life. In any case, the certainty of each interregnum is its uncertainty. We know where we came from and we do not know when or how we will arrive or what to expect there at our landing place. This is what generates anxiety and consternation. The two moments of transition from the old world that resist to the new one that is not moving forward can be identified as the postmodern and the current interregnum. The former has more well-defined features: it is situated between the seventies and the end of the twentieth century, but, above all, it is marked by its destructive actions, its strongly oppositional position of the past. The prefix “post” applied to the noun “modernity” gives it a negative sense, the implicit need to distinguish it from what precedes it, but in an aggressive, highly innovative and irrational form. It is no coincidence that the most eminent philosopher of postmodernism is Jacques Derrida, with his “déconstruction” that is implicitly affected

Why we cannot define ourselves as modern

by an anti-modernist school of thought ranging from Nietzsche to Heidegger. However, Bauman rejects the negative meaning of postmodernism, preferring a more neutral and less distant term that indicates a substantial change though maintaining the same basis. Liquid modernity has come to be defined as the last phase of post-modernity, emphasising that modernity is not over, has not carried out its historical task, but has only changed as a result of events, conditioning and economic upheavals that have weakened its stability. In this sense it has come to lose the negative judgement, replaced by a suspension of the judgement itself, and is even seen as having positive qualities, since it is clear that the loss of a certain rigidity typical of the modern is looked on in a positive light, above all thanks to the greater ease of human relationships and to new technologies. If postmodernism and liquidity are to indicate the social and cultural change of the opulent thirties, i.e. of the last years of the twentieth century, it is also true that, with the postmodern experience at an end, the concept of liquid modernity will not really survive it, proving to be insufficient to define the crisis that characterises the present, starting from the event symbol of the attack on the Twin Towers in New York in 2001. Today, it seems to be preferable to speak of interregnum, which goes beyond the too mobile idea of liquidity and restores the idea of stability, if only to establish a starting point (the end of a rule) and anticipate a point of arrival (a new rule), even though unspecified. Forsaking a liquid form, the interregnum is rather like a desert of values, where frightened and lonely individuals wander aimlessly, obliged to defend themselves (to kill or to be killed) and try to survive. Interregnum is a new formula but an old one too, which well represents the present human condition, where we are no longer floating unconsciously, pushed on by the waves, at the mercy of the currents with nothing to hold on to, and at the risk of drowning. It gives the impression of an unknown territory in which to venture and where it is necessary to regain those ancient “qualities” that

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guaranteed survival and seemed to have been stifled by organised civilisation: strength, cunning, violence, tyranny, deception, corruption, selfishness and theft. State of Crisis, co-written with Zygmunt Bauman,20 deals with the question of the crisis of modernity because of the decline of its political functions, in the state and in democracy. Herein, on the other hand, its social functions have been addressed, analysing the key aspects that have characterised modernity, the broken promises and their changes in the face of a long goodbye. To begin with, there was the abatement of the promise of social equality, accompanied by the elimination of the concept of class and class struggle, long before the collapse of the ideologies announced by Lyotard. The interregnum is also characterised by the transition through the demassification process towards an increasingly individualised society. Given the reformulation of the masses, that modernity had sacrificed, we are witnessing an adjustment of social control thanks to the use of the new media and Internet communications. However, in order to fully understand the reasons for the end of modernity, it seems to be of fundamental importance to analyse the rapid development of globalisation and the consequent reassessment of the idea of community, together with the new structure of cities, into which there is an ever-growing migration flow. The result is a picture in which the reasons for the persistence of modernity are put to the test, instilling doubt that its “liquefaction” mechanism is no longer enough to explain the massive change we are witnessing.

20 | Z. Bauman, C. Bordoni, State of Crisis, Polity, 2014.

II The return of the subject 1. M odernit y as a “ discre te object ” Modernity has long been the subject of intense debate, to which sociologists and philosophers have given their contribution in an attempt to understand and explain the major changes of our time and their contradictions. In his study of modernity, Peter Wagner1 points out how, before the 1960s, the problem presented in a very simple way, based on the widely accepted belief that the idea of modernity belonged to the Western world and was seen as a solid model of development which the rest of the planet, and in particular the most underdeveloped countries (grouped under the term “third world”, the second being the Soviet bloc countries) tried to approach gradually, albeit with difficulty. This western model of development was firmly based on the principles of freedom and democracy sanctioned by the French Revolution and the subsequent struggles for emancipation, coupled with a capitalist economic system. However, the sixties was merely a sort of a decline, the last remnant of a process of deterioration, first ideological and then cultural, which had begun in the late nineteenth century (with the formation of mass society) together with the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century.

1 | P. Wagner, Modernity. Understanding the Present, Polity, 2012; Id., A Sociology of Modernity. Liberty and Discipline, Routledge, 1994.

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If we are to believe Bauman,2 the turning point of modernity is represented by Nazism, which incorporates all the elements pertaining to modernity, but in the worst form, taken to the extreme, exaggerated and distorted, to the point of making monstrous simulacra: nationalism, the defence of traditions and language, the link with territory, socialisation and the social order, the domination of nature, mechanisation and, above all, submission to a single secular sovereign. With Lyotard, we could also add rationality. Nazism had reached the highest expression of rationality through the gas chambers and the well thought out massacre of the Jews, consciously organised with meticulous precision and the allocation of roles (which meant dividing up and, therefore, limiting personal responsibility). After the sixties, the perception of a crisis of modernity could no longer be remanded, since it involved the economy to a considerable degree. The third industrial revolution, the electronic and digital one, determined the post-industrial choice, the immateriality of labour and calling into questioning such development that has exhausted the resources of the planet. On the one hand, we started to speak of post-modernity, helping to create an atmosphere of superficial enthusiasm of freedom from the ideological and cultural cages of the past, while on the other hand, we began to make hypothetical interpretations of modernity and its meaning. For example, that it is a modernity that loses its solidity and liquefies, transforming its main features (Bauman), or phases of modernity following one another in chronological order until the traces of a third modernity can be found (Beck), if not multiple modernities that develop independently of each other (Eisenstadt), or even parallel modernities. Wagner focuses on a key aspect that cannot elude the observer: the structural diversification of the very idea of modernity in the 2 | Z. Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, Blackwell, 1989; Id., Modernity and Ambivalence, Polity, 1993; Id., Legislators and Interpreters. On Modernity, Post-Modernity and Intellectuals, Polity, 1987.

The return of the subject

countries of Africa and the Middle East, where their models of development are very different from those of the West, thus dismissing the single concept of modernity which, until then, had seemed the right example to follow. These are modernities that are profoundly different, that progress quickly along new lines not previously seen, refusing the established parameters that the West considered indisputable and entering into a collision course with other visions of modernity, where culture, tradition and religion (especially the Islamic one) play a decisive role. Modernity is closely linked to the idea of progress. Though it is also debased by the profound crisis taking place, Wagner has no doubt that it still endures and remains a possible model: his interest in the idea of progress is also borne out by his recent work devoted specifically to this concept,3 considered to be the last opportunity to access the future of humanity in the “modern” sense as stated by Koselleck, who recognises the central role it has, from the moment that finally the “horizon of expectations” goes beyond the scope of experience: “the horizon of expectation, therefore, is creative of new experience. The gain in experience exceeds the limitation of the possible future presupposed by previous experience.”4 In State of Crisis5 I discussed with Bauman the persistence of modernity, albeit with a modified organic structure; this implicitly means that it is not a rigidly constructed monad, but that it can easily adapt to social change and even become liquid. However, I believe that the concept of modernity has been expanded and extended too much beyond the confines of history that are well characterised both culturally and politically and that, therefore, it should be brought back to its specificity, making it a true “discrete object”, belonging to Western experience and erroneously

3 | P. Wagner, Progress. A Reconstruction, Polity, 2016, pp. 76 sg. 4 | R. Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe, Columbia UP, 2004, p. 262. 5 | Z. Bauman, C. Bordoni, State of Crisis, cit., pp. 55 sg.

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considered to be exportable around the world, as an advanced model of civilisation. Moreover, we can agree with Wagner that the opposition between the theory of neo-modernisation of Talcott Parsons and that of multiple modernities of Shmuel Noah Eisenstadt6 (the two extremes that are at the centre of the debate) has ignored the vision of “Western rationalism” of Max Weber, whose scepticism about the fate of modernity (limited to what he calls stählernes Gehäuse, “iron cages”) urges us to review the parameters of civil progress, but also to reconfigure/rework the principles connected to it of freedom, democracy, equality, and welfare, along with those of the nationstate. If modernity can be considered as a “discrete object”, it means that, in addition to a definite beginning (there is complete agreement as to its origins), there is also an end. We could discuss at length the reasons that led to the crisis of modernity and its replacement with an “interregnum” dominated by anomie, but we will have to admit that the end of modernity, as it developed and became asserted in the West, is a definitively closed chapter. It is a process that began moving slowly towards its inexorable decline through a complex series of irreversible changes, among which we must not underestimate the renewed centrality of a primary agent, whose importance had already begun to dwindle at the end of the seventeenth century, at the dawn of modernity, replaced by the growing importance of the collective, the social, the common and mutual interest: the individual subject and his unique feature, individualism.

6 | S. N. Eisenstadt, “Multiple Modernities”, in Daedalus, 129, 1, Winter 2000, pp. 1–29; Id., Multiple Modernities, Transaction, 2002.

The return of the subject

2. Towards a demassification With the return to individualism and the primacy of the subject, the crisis of modernity is determining an inconspicuous social change, which we are starting to notice, but rather late in the day: demassification, i.e. the coming away from mass society. It is not easy to break away from the mass. It is a long and painful process, behind which a sticky aftermath is left. The mass is reassuring, causing lethargy and habit. It is beset by an oppressive greyness that comes alive at times in the rituals of collective exaltation, during which that empathetic and violent chain reaction is triggered, that Elias Canetti has so well described in Crowds and Power.7 The revolt of the masses, with devastating effects that can overwhelm everything just by following an irrational impulse, is the most acute of reactions, feared by authoritarian/totalitarian systems that were set up with the very precise objective of containing subversive forces. As the Roman emperors had already done, having learned to curb the mob with panem et circenses (bread and circuses), in the same way the social systems of the massification period adopted adequate relief valves in mass demonstrations (football matches, games, concerts), in which subversive violence is directed towards indirect targets and then sublimated, deadened and drained with no political consequences. The process of demassification, which, in itself is disturbing, breaks the family ties and opens the door to existential uncertainty. Having abandoned the traditional patriarchal model, typical of the rural world, the family members are increasingly looking for their own autonomy, by seeking new job opportunities in the cities, aided by progressive urbanisation. In the private sphere, there is an increased trend towards the nuclear family, consisting of the couple and any offspring. It is more and more insistently defined as a society that tends to weaken the strong bonds, opening up the 7 | E. Canetti, Crowds and Power, trans. Carol Stewart, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984.

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prospect, albeit painful, of agonising loneliness. The woman bears the burden of the traditional family unit and sets off on a journey of personal autonomy and liberation (the phenomenon of feminism emerged in the seventies and coincides exactly with the advent of postmodernism), thus contributing to the transformation that is taking place. Separations and divorces accentuate the phenomenon, reducing the nuclear family even more to the singularity or the dual coexistence of parent–child relationships. But it is possible to get out of mass society also through progressive education. If, at first, compulsory education had guaranteed an excellent instrument for supervision and standardisation of thought, the spread of acculturation and critical consciousness threw stability into crisis. Modern society, under the impetus of democratisation, had forfeited this improper weapon of social control without fully weighing up the subversive potential. Public education, representing for the system a dangerous means of liberation and removal of any control, tends, therefore, to be emptied of meaning through a process of impoverishment and widespread privatisation, in an attempt to recuperate the ancient privilege of knowledge reserved to the few. The speed with which social changes originate and develop often leaves observers disarmed: sociologists, who (by definition) should be prepared to understand, are not always able to keep up with the history in order to understand the events until the events themselves are practically concluded or on the way out. The fact is that, while we still speak about the masses and mass culture, we have just witnessed, though with a natural unawareness, the greatest process of demassification of society and the emergence of multitudes that incorporates every definition of population and class. Actually, present society cannot exactly be defined as a mass society: it has lost the substantial connotations of it; it is instead directed at the exaltation of individuality, of singularity, of the peculiar and of difference. This has been to the detriment of the social concept, favouring isolation, the nuclear family and individual solitude.

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The face of the masses has changed in the space of a century. The fluid, uncontrollable, elusive mass that stirred up anguished fears among the middle classes at the beginning of the twentieth century to the point of justifying authoritarian control through coercion now seems to have been tamed, almost sedated. Its most disturbing qualities have been put under constant surveillance, analysed in depth and dominated in order to make them less dangerous. It seems that now we can no longer speak in terms of the masses. It has been replaced by widespread individualism that is unable to recognise itself in any ideal, in any system of common values; reluctant to believe in anything that does not have an immediate correspondence and is sensitive to personal interests. Thanks to a radical process of demassification in which the means of mass communication played an important part, today we can speak more of “multitude” rather than masses.8 The multitude seems to be the natural replacement of the mass. It is only in the multitude that we can find the single representatives of a time of uncertainties and the absence of common values, though with never-before-seen selfawareness, self-determination and facilitated ability to communicate with others. The multitude has this fundamental characteristic that the mass did not have: the awareness of its own individuality within a nonhomogeneous social organisation, but not less equal for this. Also, the possibility to communicate has great importance for the development of the multitude: or rather, communication is an essential element, while the mass, on the other hand, is characterised by a univocal system of communication, a sort of showman’s megaphone which involves everyone with the same intensity and the same language. In the mass, communication is a one-way process, from above to below, given that the mass needs to be guided. But a mass prepared, able to critically comprehend the informative data supplied from above and, above all, able to effectively communicate with other individuals, is 8 | About the idea of multitude cf. M. Hardt, A. Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, Penguin, 2004; P. Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude, Semiotext(e), 2004.

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already ready to become a multitude and to overcome the obstacle of the passive condition which has, so far, characterised it. How can the process of demassification be defined? As the most disturbing social event to characterise the postmodern period? As the inevitable consequence of the crisis of mass society? There can be several causes, not all of which can be put down to political or economic reasons. Regardless of which angle to consider it from, demassification – the social and cultural conditions in which we live and in which we are so immersed to the point of not even noticing – represents a social change of incredibly vast proportions involving culture, politics, economics, behaviour and the very existence of each individual. The long and contrasted process of subjectivisation or individualisation which stems from the early twentieth century as a reaction to the emergence of an aggressive and uncontrollable mass and which established itself during the control of the masses within totalitarian regimes ended up causing a split in the compact front of society, favouring an exasperated rarefaction, characterised by fragmentation, by separatism, solitude, personal benefit, by the defence of private interests. The most advanced phase of massification, the consumer one, began to show signs of weakening at the end of the sixties, in concurrence with the working class and student protests, which contested the equilibrium of the middle class well-being and highlighted the political contradictions. This continued into the seventies with the emergence of alternative movements that questioned the lifestyle imposed on consumerism. They were against savage industrialisation (the post-Ford production method and also exploitation of natural resources thanks to the emergence of ecology awareness), and sought alternative ways of political participation, that privilege public gatherings: in a word they were

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heading towards a critique of “biopolitics” (the forms of power over life), according to the meaning of Foucault,9 closer to human needs. Demassification has strongly demonstrated a preference for moving away from traditional politics, in the sense of the delegation of power, in the implicit refusal of the system of representation, expressed in a widespread denial of consumerism and in the emergence of anarchical movements just between the seventies and the eighties. Its highest point proved to be in that “end of the great narratives” which was postmodernism at the end of the seventies, so well represented by Jean-François Lyotard.10 As a matter of fact, the end of the seventies coincides with the crisis of ideologies, which has profound political repercussions, to the point of leading a decade later to the dissolution of the communist system in the Soviet Union, the last surviving totalitarian state in the western world. These changes of great social and political significance, though, as a whole, directed towards the disintegration of mass society, as it was during the fifties and the sixties in Europe (in the United States ten years before), would not per se be sufficient to justify speaking about demassification if they had not been accompanied by other elements of a more cultural nature, of a culture induced by technology and supported and dilated by it, which has the capacity to go well beyond the level of political dialectics and deeply influence the habits and behaviour of each individual. Technological innovations determined (for better or for worse) the changes in the twentieth century, sometimes imposing as “great divide” factors compared to the past, and making permanent fractures from which there is no going back. Mainly two of these innovations have revolutionised social relationships, interacting to the point of developing effects that were unthinkable even for those who had designed, handled or used them. On a cultural level 9 | Cf. M. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-1979 trans. G. Burchell, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. 10 | J.-F. Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition. A Report on Knowledge trans. G. Bennington and B. Massumi, Manchester UP, 1984.

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demassification, by a curious effect of short-circuiting that Marshall McLuhan11 could not imagine, would not have assumed the importance we recognise in it if it had not found two precious allies in the same means of mass communication – especially television – and in the culture of the web, which revolutionised communication globally since the nineties. Television and the web: two innovations made possible by technological progress, so very similar to each other, and yet so different, above all because of the unexpected effects they brought about in mass society immediately. Meanwhile, the timeline is crucial: television has established itself the most effective means of communication and family entertainment since the end of the fifties; in the nineties it was the web that took up a prominent position at the beginning of the new century. In the space of less than forty years, we have seen the most profound socio­ c ultural change, which was bound to radically influence the daily habits of the masses to change their own lives. Both these technological innovations got under way for different reasons which in daily practical usage are subverted as if power over their use had been lost. Television began as a means of mass communication, as a sophisticated instrument of cultural hypnotism, of homologation, of control of citizens’ consent, subjected – as for the other media already used by totalitarian states, radio and press – to a systematic informative/formative purpose and to propaganda, of a univocal type (from top to bottom, from One to the many), with no possibility of retroaction. The mass media are characterised in the way of effective control of the masses by individualising the consent for the achievement of a pensée unique (“single thought”) and a monopolised information by the state, pushing for privatisation, as they reassure the individual closing him within the four walls of his house. They privilege the subjectivity and weaken family ties, replacing the evening conversation, where they talk about and share the day’s experiences. 11 | Cf. M. McLuhan, Understanding Media (1964), Routledge, 2001.

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This is the absolute demassifying power of television: it shuts the individual into a private place, cuts out all desire for interpersonal communication, in the false conviction that it is sufficient to look into a monitor to open a window onto the world and not be cut off from society. For many, especially for the elderly in the sixties and seventies, only what comes through the TV looks like real and true. Often it is the only contact with the world: the vision of a mediated reality, indeed stir, which in some cases is the only antidote to existential loneliness without alternatives. Television multiplies its alienating effect, totalising, inducing the viewer to prefer a passive enjoyment that produces pleasure and addiction, since it allows the viewer to participate in the events without being involved in them. A voyeuristic and narcissistic pleasure that fosters self-esteem since the viewer is not up for discussion; he is protected in a safe position of virtual domain, sheltered from every consequence with regard to what is being watched, which leaves ample room for the ability to judge, to the arbitrary exaltation to evaluate freely the information received, to reject it or ignore it. This is an enormous power, almost divine in nature, that satisfies the user and encourages him to prefer the reality mediated by television to the immediate one. The society of the individual, no longer massified, so tragically dispersed, does not assume the form of the exaltation of individualism in the strict middle-class sense, but of its depressing reduction, a fading appearance. The mass that is split through losing its compactness, its indistinct unity, can no longer be defined as a mass, because it has lost its amorphous quality, diffuse and immutable, which it is difficult to break into. Web culture, after television, has exalted the process of demassification, taking its effects to extremes: it has exasperated personal addiction, strictly confidential and privatised to the screen, through which it is possible not only to see the world, but also to interact virtually.The action of “demassifying” does not only mean to take away the mass effect, liberate from the oppressing condition that makes everything interchangeable or promote individualism, the exaltation of the unique personality

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that dwells in every man. It also means to destabilise, to remove the certainties that man relies on, to reduce him to a state of anguished and despairing solitude, which sometimes leads only to a refusal of himself or of others, in a word, to “liquefy” modernity. The process of moving away from the mass society has thus spread and become more complex, moving from passive reception of data to interaction with the data ( feedback). The viewer is no longer a passive person, but becomes a protagonist, “surfs” the net, has the power to decide, to choose, to do: above all he has the opportunity to exchange and to produce information, not only to receive them. The viewer becomes an “operator”, since he is able to see, hear, write, communicate, but also to react, modify, contribute, making the most of multimedia opportunities. Everything he does in the web and for the web, and it seems unnecessary to leave an environment, substitutes reality and represents its most pleasant side where the “solitude of the global citizen”12 seems to free them from a painful and dissatisfying existence. Unfortunately, the lack of reference values may also lead to bad choices from which it is difficult to recover.In this context, the issue of the multitude and its meaning of individual liberty within a collective autonomy, responsible and able to self-regulate, should be re-read. However, this does not mean that demassification, this traumatic process aimed at breaking ties, sometimes diseased, obsessive and hateful, with a levelled society, will resolve itself, without any effort, into a multitude, and therefore into a society of free, conscious, mature and satisfied individuals. A tormented passage is necessary, a long and difficult apprenticeship that leaves several wounds and visible traces along the way.If now it is possible to talk about the prevalence of the multitude in Spinoza’s sense, it is only at the price paid by one or two generations who have had to suffer the brunt of the output from the mass society. With a little care, since those scarce results obtained cannot be considered definitive, given that the condition of the multitude is unstable, 12 | Z. Bauman, La solitudine del cittadino globale is the title of the Italian edition (Feltrinelli, 2000) of In Search of Politics, Polity, 1999.

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historically temporary: it is only an opening, which can soon be closed again, or side-tracked by further reactionary tendencies, by new temptations of an unforeseeable “return to order”: the catching off balance of the reaction, always lying in wait around the corner of every qualifying social change.

3. D isappe ar ance of the middle cl ass The middle class wanted to be a class of equals, so it aspired to a perfect equality of individuals and conformity. Equality was guaranteed by the very prospect of consumption, achievable through trade union struggles, wage increase and the recognition of equal dignity of work. For a time an attempt was made to eliminate the difference between the incomes of blue-collar and white-collar workers so that everyone could enjoy the same privileges and could access the same conditions of life. Basically, even communism shared the same equality of treatment, a society of equals that eliminates the differences and moves solidly towards progress. In the West, it is the petty and middle bourgeoisie, while in the communist countries it is the proletariat that aspires to greater prosperity: the two faces of the middle class that includes the vast majority of the population. However, equality is a myth and the spark of social differentiation has been rekindled in society. Every man wants to be (have) something more than his neighbour. Strangely, this phenomenon begins to be sensitive when consumerism is at its peak and exceeds the limits of natural resources. It was once said that innovations or changes in social customs happened first in the United States and then reached the other Western countries about ten years later. This is what happened with the automobile, divorce and the ban on smoking. On this side of the Atlantic we lived protected by a solid time barrier that gave the time needed – to those who could see it – to take cover: to get ready, get protected, almost get themselves vaccinated. But that barrier has been shrinking more and more due to the rapid flow of ideas,

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to the instant adaptation to the dominant culture: what once came after a sufficiently long time, now happens in a time frame that is getting shorter and shorter, in the space of a few months or weeks, sometimes even less, thanks to the complicity of the Internet. And yet, at least this time, sociologists such as Bauman, Beck, Castel, Morin, Sennett and Touraine, and vigilant philosophers and historians, like Attali, Augé, Bourdieu, Hobsbawm and Rorty, warned us against it. Let us talk about the crisis of the middle class, or rather, its end: beaten down by economic manoeuvers, by the signs of the recession, the restrictions imposed on welfare and the reduction of social services. The middle class, which, according to Alain Touraine, “is defined on the basis of profession and consumption, rather than on the basis of rules of social conduct”13 and is therefore in danger of extinction. The middle class had certainties that the difficulties of the present time have wiped out: job security, annuities, the dependability of investments, pensions. It was made up of the lower end of the entrepreneurial middle class (the so-called petty bourgeoisie), which gradually ended up in crisis starting from the end of the sixties, with winding down of the economic boom. But while the privileged classes, the so-called upper class, possessing huge financial resources, are able to escape the crisis, by rising above the current problems, for the petty bourgeoisie, whose cultural image and social respect have been tarnished, there is no escape. The middle class or the petty and middle bourgeoisie, who have been the engine of development in the United States, as in Europe, does not suffer as a result of the wrong economic policy, but as a result of an unprecedented historical change: their exodus from mass society. With the end of the era of mass production, of excessive consumerism and the new economy, the historical process

13 | A. Touraine, Critique of Modernity (1992), trans. David Macey, WileyBlackwell, 1995, p. 188.

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triggered by the “liquefaction” of society finds its weak point in the middle class. The middle class is the one most affected by the crisis and suffers more than the others. President Obama realised this and announced a tightening of the tax burden aimed at the richest sectors of society (in which he also included himself) in an attempt to restore a balance that has so far proven difficult to do. Barak Obama knows (or should know) that his is purely a demagogic manoeuvre, a dramatic placebo effect that can set minds at rest and hush up, for the moment, those who took to the streets with placards saying “Don’t throw us out” (“Don’t tread on me”). It is undoubtedly a measure that will increase the American president’s popularity, but it will not solve the problem. Now, it is quite evident that manoeuvres such as this one by Obama or the various “spending reviews” are, however, only slowing down an inevitable process, without being able to stop or reverse the movement. What is to be done? Suffer its devastating effects without reacting? Surely the sensible thing would be to try and understand what is happening and why. Especially if, behind the crisis and behind the interregnum that follows, there are unspeakable interests that ride it and promote it in order to restore a class society. This would be a less just society, where clear social differences reemerge, though still controlled by a widespread guarantor, by the trade union victories and the rights acquired in decades of civil wars. An entire, hard-won patrimony, which now seems to be up for question by virtue of a social “liquidity”, as an excuse to justify its transient, temporary, precarious nature: all terms that confirm the atmosphere of uncertainty and existential occasionality which our present is cloaked in. At a time like this we should be wary of perfunctory solutions along the lines of Obama, like taking something away from the rich to give to the poor, and also distrust a policy of rigor, consisting of drastic cuts and sacrifice of the welfare system, the effect of which is depressing and recessive. Two extremes that fight against each

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other in a sort of silent duel: on one side, the recovery of a reassuring “stability”, at the price of new and sharper class divisions; on the other, a sort of drowning in an exasperated liquidity as a prelude to a distressing interregnum – almost the apocalyptic scenario of some dystopian novels and films that depict violent communities that have reverted to the state of barbarism. Both represent frightening threats whose task it is to help us find the right path. In order to do that it is necessary, once again, to go back in time to the origins of modernity, that is, to the time of the formation of the kind of society that was so special, so innovative, so eager to open up to a “new time” (Neuzeit) and to deserve the title of “modernity”.14 The same kind of social organisation that today is in crisis and we would like to get rid of without trauma. If we analyse the condition of that time, around the seventeenth century, we already stumble on the concept of the multitude. The multitude had interesting qualities from a social point of view, but striking shortcomings from the point of view of controllability. It was sacrificed in favour of “the people”, a group of individuals who recognised themselves as citizens of a nation, the subjects of a sovereign power to whom they trust, deciding freely to respect the laws in return for their safety and the opportunity to prosper. In this concept lies the principles of modernity: the bond with one’s own territory, the work ethic as a dignified identity, the guarantee of safety from the state, representative democracy. If you look in the present for those principles on which modernity has been founded for over three centuries, we immediately realise that they have all – in one way or another – lost their validity: the bond with the territory is broken, and the world is more and more a “non-place” without borders. The work ethic has been dissolved under the impetus of consumerism, the practice of intangible work and unemployment. The state no longer appears to be capable of guaranteeing the safety of its citizens; natural and moral disasters join forces with the inefficiency caused by disorganisation. Repre14 | Cfr. R. Koselleck, Futures Past, cit., p. 224.

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sentative democracy is experiencing a crisis of credibility, undermined by anti-politics. What remains of modernity? A little more than enslavement of the citizen to the state laws, but the ancient social contract is about to be denounced for breach of contract. We have a return to the multitudes: people, individuals characterised by awareness, responsibility, honesty, solidarity towards others and capable of selfdetermination, people who are able to form a mature society. This time, all the conditions would be there, even the technology that provides the instruments to communicate with greater ease: what is the Internet, if not the most suitable representation of the multitude, with its hubs, exchanges between equals, the lack of centrality, reciprocity? We are mean multitudes when it comes to the people filling Tahrir Square in Cairo, Taksim Square in Istanbul or the gatherings in front of Wall Street, hoisting the banner that says “We are the 99 %.” People take to the streets for various reasons, enjoying being together, having a vague common purpose, which only the sheer numbers can make it a trend and socially sensitive. However, today, as at the time of Hobbes, the multitude is feared and viewed with suspicion because of its libertarian, elusive, totally anonymous and uncontrollable nature, so different from the mass that, by contrast, is easily led. It is so dangerous because it can think. So, we really should suspect that, in the face of social change that favours the multitude with respect to the masses, someone or something that decides our destiny is taking the necessary steps to prevent this from happening. Therefore, it is useless to think that the difficult period we are going through is only temporary. Those who do not see it as such should look at the consequences that it has had for many people: the bankruptcy of many businesses, in the first place. The news has recorded numerous cases of suicide stemming from despair at having lost everything. People who had suddenly found themselves in a hopeless situation and, for them, the adjective “temporary” was not enough to save them. The figure for Greece is staggering: more than 1,700 people killed themselves in 2012.

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Added to this are the numerous lay-offs. Countless businesses, companies and services have had to cut down on staff numbers in an effort to reduce operating costs, or even to close down their business altogether. The people laid off, often not very young (but not yet old enough to enjoy retirement benefits, the age limit of which tends to be deferred to comply with European directives), find themselves stuck at a crossroads with no idea of which direction to take, little chance of finding a job, a loss of identity (sometimes even of personal dignity) and depression. For them, whatever improvement the future may bring, it will not change much. It will be too late. No one can give back to them what has been taken away from them too lightly. Because the effects are immediate, people feel them first hand, with long-lasting consequences. A myriad of personal situations that are forced to come to an abrupt halt, a diversion, a hindrance: for many, the economic crisis is much more than a momentary sacrifice, doing without that which is unnecessary, but a different condition of life that will blight them forever. Young people who cannot find work; those who fail to pay the mortgage on the house and are forced to sell it; those who want to borrow a loan to start a business and end up getting refused by the banks. The recession seems to be the goal to reach in any case and in any place, the determination of governments and the basis on which to rebuild, yes, these are new certainties – the certainty of broader social differences. And on the social differences it is much easier to plant the roots of a renewed economic stability for the rest of the new century.

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4. A totalising desire The idea that modernity aspires to political equality (with its own ethics, before the law and the state), but that does not worry about, nor can it ensure, as was the intention of the Enlightenment, effective social, economic and existential, equality, can be explained by a need for social control that otherwise could not be achieved. Social control is the most changing mainstay of modernity. Adapted, revised and updated in the course of the centuries to adapt to the conditions of the time; a flexible but effective tool that has proven to always rise to the occasion in every circumstance. The winning weapon capable of dealing with more threatening imbalances and taking roots intertwined with the ideology and the ethics of work. More than any other archaic society, given its complexity, modernity requires extraordinary social control, subtracted – on a par with ethics – from the Church and assigned to the institutions of the state. This is the project of “secular” social control which, before, was reserved for religious organisations. The cornerstone of this transfer of powers from the Church to the state is represented primarily by the Protestant Reformation that “secularised” religious principles, hitherto alien to any contamination of an economic type, and introduces the logic of interest, success and success in business, freed from any suspicion of “sin” and elevated to the same level of religious precepts. The Church as a powerful instrument of social control was further strengthened in the centuries before the Industrial Revolution, thanks to the Lutheran Reformation – which was well suited to the new mercantile and entrepreneurial mentality in northern Europe – opening up to dialogue with the now urbanised masses who were perturbed by the mechanisation of work. In particular, the work of Ignatius de Loyola, founder of the Society of Jesus, with his Spiritual Exercises (1527) had helped to persuade the new masses, “restless and insecure in view of the process of world secularisation, initiated by the scientific findings and technological inventions from Copernicus

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to Galileo”.15 It is a time of great insecurity, of deep crisis and social unrest that threatens the stability of the newly formed states in Europe that have just recovered from the wars of religion and are preparing to cross the threshold of modernity. The phenomenon of urbanisation, coupled with a sudden increase in population, unleashes forces that had not yet been seen and for which the state itself must be responsible for containing. Looking at how the care to the poor was organised in England in the eighteenth century, which before was the responsibility of parishes, and then increasingly entrusted to public institutions, where manual work was required, and then directly entrusted to the factories, where female and child labour was used, together with the underprivileged and the beggars, we can see how the bourgeoisie gradually replaces the Church in dealing with social control. The transfer of social control from the Church to the state marked the beginning of modernity. This kind of handover, which took place gradually between the sixteenth and the eighteenth century, is one of the major “sociological” changes that can be observed from the Middle Ages to the present day. The paradigm of modernity, says Alain Touraine, “was built on the idea that society has no other foundation than a social one. It was not the first paradigm to become established, when the religious order of the world disappeared. It was in fact the political order that took the place of the latter – in the first instance, the state. The formation of modern states, of Absolutist monarchies, but also of city-states, and later of nation states, was the major product of this period, which can also be called the age of revolutions.”16 An epochal change that is accompanied by a progressive secularisation of the State and the definitive separation between Church and State. Teaching, hitherto a privilege of the Church, 15 | R. Runcini, Abissi del reale. Per un’estetica dell’eccentrico, Solfanelli, 2012, p. 91. 16 | A. Touraine, New Paradigm for Understanding Today’s World, trans. Gregory Elliott, Polity, 2007, p. 44.

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becomes a public service of the community, then becoming mandatory and guaranteed by the state, was approved first by Great Britain in 1876 and later by other European countries. The continuity between the religious and the middle class, secular control, is ensured by the confirmation of the same morality of sacrifice, of endurance, of fatigue and the abuse of power, as well as the acceptance of one’s own destiny, which were important to restrain the common people of society feudal, but are also perfectly suited to the needs of the new industrial society. The same culture of resignation applies to the proletariat class in the factories and the marginalised. The lower classes had been accustomed to this for centuries, in the belief that would not be difficult to adapt to it, if not by divine will, at least for progress. “The factory – Bauman affirms – like the poor-house, was, before anything else, an institution of public order and morality. This continuity between poor-houses and factories explains why the early entrepreneurs found it particularly easy to apply their all-pervasive surveillance.”17 Ideology is gradually replacing religion and becomes the new act of faith, the new dogma to trust and commit to, and, if necessary, to sacrifice one’s own life to, in view of a change. And of a concrete improvement which, in the transition from religiosity to modernist secularism, is no longer reserved for the afterlife, life after death, but is materialised in the measurable and tangible earthly life. Given the personal sacrifice, satisfaction becomes increasingly close as we push forward into modernity; it loses its abstract, spiritual form and takes on a material quality that helps to lower the level of personal expectations, translating it into an immediately marketable stability: money. Modernity not only betrayed the promises it made at the time of its affirmation, which coincided with the rationalism of the Enlightenment, but somehow, along the way, it managed to lose its libertarian and democratic impulse that had characterised the 17 | Z. Bauman, Memories of Class. The Pre-history and After-Life of Class, Routledge, 2010, p. 51.

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bourgeoisie in its ascending phase. Most of the historical texts inspired by Marxism always distinguished the progressive phase of the enlightened bourgeoisie from a reactive phase in consideration of the risk of a proletarian revolution which threatened to seize power. The turning point between these two phases is indicated by the uprisings of 1848, a date that coincides with the publication of the Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels.18 According to this interpretation, which has all the limitations of every schematic approach, the bourgeoisie – at first open and collaborative – clung to conservative and undemocratic positions to oppose the unstoppable advance of a proletariat fighting for the final victory. In retrospect, the society that is asserting itself in those very years, between the nineteenth and twentieth century, right from the start is a society that envisages the need for tight social control, basically of the authoritarian type, which reserves privileged conditions and special treatment for a minority not yet formed, as in the past to the nobility through birth, but to a “nobility” by virtue of wealth, merit and social success. It is this minority that represents (to their own advantage) the declarations of democracy and progress that the Enlightenment had firmly put in place and which, in fact, do not fall short even after 1848. On the contrary, those principles give shape to the entire period of modernity. So there is a basic continuity in the behaviour and aims of modernity that the uprisings of 1848 do not call into question in any way, but rather make the reinforcement of social control increasingly tight as the masses become uncontrollable. This control is accompanied, however, by formal concessions in terms of wages, individual rights, conditions of employment, social security and participation in public life. In reality, on closer inspection, the trade union victories for a reduction in working hours and higher wages, achieved after years of struggle, are not absolute victories after all, but only limited and prudent concessions necessary to maintain social balance, given the 18 | K. Marx, F. Engels, The Communist Manifesto (1848), Penguin, 2004.

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implicit recognition of the subordinate condition of the masses with respect to the ruling class. Factory work is the first tragic experience of totalitarian control of modernity. The individual is forced to live in an environment from which he cannot escape, which keeps both mind and body occupied, and that imposes hectic paces of life, forced choices, even moral ones: he is imbued with bourgeois ethics, from which he cannot escape even if he tried fighting against it, because it has become part of his culture (among which, the sense of sacrifice, dedication to work, subjection to a higher authority and the deferment of gratification). A tight control indeed that, in the previous century, Jeremy Bentham had advocated in his Panopticon building in which it was possible to “see” and control the behaviour of the inmates (and therefore the workers) without being seen.19 It is not just the prerogative of the state to take care of its citizens, but a real need on the part of society to control its citizens, in an invasive way. For centuries the prerogative of the Church, social control becomes the task of the bourgeois state, which is modelled on the factory system, or rather the workshop industry, as they called the first industrial realities of the eighteenth century, and they transfer it to the lives of citizens, with the same characteristics: transparency, diligence, loyalty, routine, corporal and economic punishment and fewer civil rights. To withstand the complex framework of modernity, to cope with the changing conditions of the society closest to us, there are centrepiece pillars that could be called “totalitarian institutions”. These are places organised in a private environment that bring together a group of people, either voluntarily or forced to by law. Within these places individuals lose their capacity as citizens, even just temporarily, and are subjected to special rules that apply within them. It is an incredible invention and socially very significant, 19 | The Works of Jeremy Bentham, published under the superintendence of his executor, John Bowing, Tait, 1838–1843, vol. IV. Cf. J. Bentham, Panopticon; or, the Inspection-House (1791), Dodo Press, 2008.

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substantially altering the lives of millions of people, because no one is free of it, and everyone has had to undergo the experience during their lifetime. In times closer to us, the need for tighter and more effective social control for the complexity of the masses who are less and less willing to passively accept the conditions of life imposed on them by an undemocratic state and by a brutal economic system (a phenomenon that appears from the second half of the nineteenth century and that is destined to explode in the early years of the twentieth century) leads to the emergence of totalitarianism, namely, to a more extreme form of social control, implemented with violence and the systematic intrusion into the private lives of citizens. Totalitarianism, as a condition of extreme authoritarianism, is both the answer to the incipient massification of society and its exaltation, through the use of means designed to maintain consensus, to exercise coercive power over consciences, to induce a soporific condition through mass culture. It is interesting to observe how the totalitarian systems of the twentieth century tried to imitate the control over individuals had already been established by the factories of the eighteenth century. The coercive system of the factory becomes the model adopted by the totalitarian state. The same commitment to manage and control the citizen-worker from birth to death, the same constant attention to his education, his initiation into the work environment, his leisure time, his ethical principles and also his religious ones. The same guarantee of the minimum subsistence, but also the same economic and even corporal punishment in cases of transgression. Constant repression and control at all times; an absolute State-master of the body and mind of his subjects, with the difference that it is not accessed by necessity or by virtue of an employment contract, but simply by birth. In late modernity, we have the emergence of the total institutions in which people in them have to obey the rules in force regulating conduct and imposing restrictions on individual freedom, which distinguish them from the outside: prisons, asylums, hospitals,

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nursing homes, barracks, boarding schools, colleges, universities, even brothels. “Taken one by one, most of these techniques have a long history behind them. – wrote Michel Foucault, who dedicated a fundamental study to total institutions – But what was new, in the eighteenth century, was that, by being combined and generalized, they attained a level at which the formation of knowledge and the increase of power regularly reinforce one another in a circular process. At this point, the disciplines crossed the ‘technological’ threshold. First the hospital, then the school, then, later, the workshop were not simply ‘reordered’ by the disciplines; they became, thanks to them, apparatuses such that any mechanism of objectification could be used in them as an instrument of subjection, and any growth of power could give rise in them to possible branches of knowledge.”20

The authoritarian state does not apply this mechanism to the entire country: if in the eighteenth century totalitarian institutions served to solve the problems of “social diseases”, two centuries later they have been extended to all, even to the healthy part of the population. This status has had a precise historical parable that can be observed sociologically only now that modernity has entered into crisis, that it has shown its structural limits and, in addition to broken promises, has seen its foundations being called into question. How can we deny the importance of these institutions in maintaining social cohesion that takes no account of differences in caste, class or level of education? Such a generalised mode of social cohesion that levels and bears down on each individual to justify the use of the term “mass”. Whoever enters one of those institutions loses his individual characteristics, is no longer “recognised” for his own individuality, his merits, his qualities (in some cases he even loses his identity), specifically because of the need for equal treatment for all, with no exceptions. 20 | M. Foucault, Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975), trans. Alan Sheridan, Vintage, 1995, p. 224.

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The evolution of modernity is marked by a progressive attempt to extend the scope and scale of these institutions, in order to adapt the need for progressive social control to the growing complexity of the social fabric, to the extreme point of making the state itself the total institution par excellence, the totalitarian state, where social control is so overwhelming as to concern every moment of the public and private life of the individual citizen. The dystopian narrative is a literary genre that depicts an un­ acceptable future, often describing the consequences of an exasperated massification, where the individual is reduced to a nonentity. The threat seen in the totalitarian states of the twentieth century is well represented in the collective imagination by scenes of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1923), in which groups of faceless workers alternate in the lifts leading them inside the Moloch, the underground machine that governs and feeds the world, and in which the frightening image of Hobbes’ Leviathan can be glimpsed. But if the totalitarian state is the “last ratio” of the process of social totalisation, it is also the weakest point, bound to enter into crisis with the other pillars of modernity. The crisis of the modern state is accompanied by the crisis of all its total institutions that, gradually and with different results and outcomes, have been showing signs of weakening since the Second World War. The Italian Basaglia law closed down the mental institutions, perhaps the most inhuman forms of segregation and also the most useless. And others are breaking down or at least showing disturbing cracks in their precarious structure. Think of schools, for example. Once a strict places where students were treated in a military fashion, who had to observe strict rules of behaviour, as well as of clothing; subjected to corporal punishment and bullying by their older peers. A reading of The Confusions of Young Törless by Robert Musil21 can give an idea of what the atmosphere was like in educational institutions at the beginning of the last century, i.e. at the peak of modernity. 21 | R. Musil, The Confusions of Young Törless (1906), Penguin, 2011.

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School, today, has changed dramatically. Behind the apparent process of democratisation (relaxation of the rules, abolition of corporal punishment, elasticity of the rules and introduction of parents into the management bodies) hides the deterioration of its totalising principles, which are manifested primarily in a much lower educational efficacy. The loss of the primary objective of this institution, now accompanied and even replaced by other educational tools that convey knowledge, is the cause, as often happens, of the resulting loss of respect towards teachers and faith in the function of public education. As for the factories, they have undergone a different process, following the dematerialisation of work and the profound innovation that industrial production experienced after the introduction of new technologies. The factory was the first among the total institutions to begin a process of internal liberalisation, by virtue of pressure made by the unions that is obviously not present in other cases. None of the other institutions, in fact, has such a direct economic function and so to speak “load bearing” in modern society. More than deteriorate and lose effectiveness, as in the case of the school, the factory was dismantled instead, separated into its essential components, thus breaking up the unity which determined that physical proximity, togetherness, the unity of its being an institution and the solidity of its actors the workers. Separating the workers and the individual departments, displacing them geographically, making them independent and therefore denying them an overview of the production process (from design to marketing) – a phenomenon that can be said to have started when the assembly line was introduced – has not damaged the functionality of the factory. On the contrary, it seems to have optimised output in economic terms. But it has undoubtedly deconstructed its totalising form, thus accompanying it towards the crisis of modernity. It is now giving rise to a social condition in which the totalising institutions, as they had been created in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, are no longer suited to a

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transformed society and appear rather as something left over from an obscure past. The total institutions, on the one hand, urge the people who access them to take on a homologous behaviour, to feel solidarity and perceive the rules imposed (including their de-personalisation) as an injustice they are subjected to. On the other hand, they induce those who are not easily subordinated (those in whom the spirit of autonomy prevails) to reject the institution – in cases where it is possible to do so for legal or economic reasons – and turn to similar private institutions, where, instead, individual recognition and ad personam service is guaranteed. If the public hospital does not provide the treatment required in a timely manner, we turn to a private clinic; if the public school does not meet the needs of the family, there is always the exclusive college, unlike the case of the prison and the factory. In the factory it is necessary to apply the principle of transparency for more effective control of the workers, which was then extended to the prison, according to the principles already explained by Jeremy Bentham: transparency is an Enlightenment requirement endorsed by modernity. This points towards the evolution experienced by the concept of “punishment”: in ancient times it meant the removal of the offender from civil society (ostracism). Therefore, physical separation was expected, of the spatial type. This was subsequently modified to a visual removal, by imprisonment in a closed place, where the convicted person is not only separated from the community but is also “out of sight” of the community and therefore forgotten. Freud would say “removed”. To this removal of the offender is added the Enlightenment variant of Bentham, which envisages one-way, limited visibility, to permit greater control. This is the modern idea: exclude and segregate, while maintaining visual supervision. Imprisonment, i.e. the removal from active social life of those who have broken the law, is a typical choice of modernity and falls into the scheme of total institutions. As in archaic societies, culprits were removed from the social context because they were considered

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unworthy to be part of it; modernity hides them from view of others in the belief that the prisoner has a chance to redeem himself. However, for the most part, prison does not redeem or punish in the right way, if anything, it is merely a barbaric annihilation of human dignity. As in many countries, mental institutions have been closed (in Italy as a result of the Basaglia law of 1978), and sooner or later also the prisons will have to be closed and other less uncivilised ways will have to be found to inflict punishment on those guilty of a crime against society. Ostracism was more humane, and at the same time terrible. At a time when life expectancy was only guaranteed within the polis and outside of them there was only a desert full of hidden dangers and enemies, removal from society was tantamount to a death sentence. Certainly to a civil death, even more than a physical one. The condemned man had at least some hope, as a castaway who is abandoned on a raft at the mercy of the ocean. Modern prisons guarantee life, provide food and bedding, health care and even ways of passing the time (books, work, television), but erases the dignity of being human by locking the person in a cage. Many strides have been made towards the humanisation of the places of imprisonment and the first is undoubtedly the abolition of the death penalty, which still exists in some countries (including China, Iran, North Korea, the Yemen and the United States), but there is still a long way to go. The weakening of the total institutions, in the long road towards demassification, allowed for the re-evaluation of individualism, sometimes even to an exaggerated level, within them: that has contributed to erase that sense of solidarity that was created among peers, both to further undermine the credibility, reliability and prestige enjoyed in the past. Whoever comes into contact with one of those institutions, it is always with reluctance, with a sense of unease, with little trust and with the mental reservations. Ready to criticise, to despise and to protest about the lack of recognition of his rights, among which is, in the first place, respect for the person and his quality of individual different from others. Which leads

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to the tendency to expect proper treatment for oneself, regardless of whether such treatment is also offered to others, so giving precedence to one’s own selfishness, one’s own centrality and own needs, as opposed to those of everyone, thus losing the sense of social solidarity. The solidarity that was only possible because of the passive and reverential submission and that the total institution demanded from its citizens. However, massification is based on psychological subservience and on the deception of the democratic principle that not only the laws, but public services, treatments, concessions, are equal for everyone; anonymous and impersonal, aimed at a uniform and undifferentiated mass. It is on this principle of equality that modernity was based, believing, from the French revolution onwards, in the ability to eliminate social differences. And modernity has tried to impose and maintain this very purpose, in spite of evidence to the contrary, obstacles, objections, exceptions, misrepresentations and contradictions; despite the social problems that the uprisings of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries brought to light. Despite the emergence and affirmation within modernity of theories to the contrary that aimed to revolutionise or mediate, or at least to correct that balance, modernity has pushed its totalising idea of equality among human beings to its extreme consequences. It is precisely the degradation of total institutions – the loss of their social authority – that clearly marks the sense of insecurity and disorientation that afflicts today’s society. And it is this same degradation that appears to be largely responsible for the process of demassification taking place, with the results that we have seen in the last century, where the principle of totalisation has been taken to the extreme and extended to the state in its entirety. This is the last product of modernity: the unthinkable conclusion of the delusion of equality and social equity that had inspired the creators of the Leviathan in the seventeenth century. A monstrosity that, as such, is likely to self-destruct.

III A matter of class 1. I n the beginning was the cl ass struggle The representation of modernity would not be complete without going back to the theory of the social classes and to Karl Marx’s interpretation of history as a class struggle to seize power: an organic project of great sociological importance that had its ups and downs and could not be developed in the third volume of Capital, which remained unfinished. The idea of a society divided into classes is a Marxist idea, but it is also the most innovative of modernity: for the first time in human history, it is acknowledged that society has a layered structure based on economic distinctions – therefore no longer linked to values, strength or blood – that tasks and roles correspond to, which make all the members of the same social stratum compact and integratable with each other. The relationship between the different strata is conflicting by nature, given the differences in their interests, and history, in the interpretation Marx gives it, is an ongoing “history of class struggle”.1 That is, it is the result of a continuous contrast, a constant opposition to the dominance of the interests of either party. Such a pessimistic vision of the social composition, but at the same time so realistic, ruthless in his analysis of human nature, Marx extends it to the majority of human relationships, makes of it a universal law 1 | In the Manifesto of 1848 classes are spoken of explicitly in the plural form: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles”. K. Marx, F. Engels, The Communist Manifesto, cit., p. 14.

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that expresses the eternal struggle for the prevalence of the fittest, the real engine of progress, which in some ways anticipates, in economic terms, what will be the basis of biological evolution for the survival of the human species in Charles Darwin. The coexistence of these two great theories in the same part of the century, both based on the clear recognition of natural human aggression, on life as violence, on progress achieved with abuse, at the expense of the weak, it may appear cynical and cloaked in tragic pessimism aimed at justifying the post-1848 popular uprisings and to consider revolutions a flexible means to obtain better living conditions. In fact, Marx’s theory of the class struggle is nothing more than the most successful attempt – and most suitable to explain the structure of society of that time – to transfer the great conceptions of the Enlightenment to politics and the economy: the recognition of the materiality of existence, the secularisation of the state, the importance of technology in industrialised work, the prevalence of theory over practice, the need for transparency and clarity in social relationships, the implementation of real equality between men. The society in which Marx lived was dominated by a privileged class, the bourgeoisie, which began to emerge in the sixteenth century and became powerful thanks to the economic turmoil produced by the industrial revolution and the affirmation of capitalism. Next to the emerging middle class, the last representatives of the aristocratic class resist, coming to the end of a long process of economic and cultural decline, the reference point of which being the French Revolution of 1789. And then, the working class, the most numerous, on which the Marxist doctrine pins its hope of redemption, freedom from want, collectivisation of work, and the creation of a classless society. This last phase, preceded by the dictatorship of the proletariat (a transition of a revolutionary nature) would lead to the definitive liberation of man and social peace. The story is no longer characterised by a sequence of class struggles, but by peaceful coexistence among men who strive for progress, now that the root cause of

A matter of class

unhappiness, social difference, has been eliminated. Here the Marxist theory betrays its fundamental utopian matrix, typical of all the socialistic movements of expression that emerged in the midnineteenth century. The theory of classes is shown as the most powerful process of rationalisation of social reality, born out of need and which can no longer be postponed, to understand the deep reasons for social action, making them predictable and, in some way, controllable and therefore changeable. There is no denying that at the basis of the Marxist theory of classes lies the same principle that moves positivism, that is, the belief that change can take place only if there is knowledge: which, all things considered, is an instrumental idea of knowledge, on which the whole issue of ethics of knowledge and its use (or misuse) will engage in directing development towards a preordained direction. Marx’s theory stems immediately from these two questionable assumptions: the unproven claim of universality of the class struggle and the hybris to impose a single project for the future of mankind on the basis of knowledge conditioned by what would have been called the “syndrome of the observer”, that is, the involuntary participation of the subject in the value judgement. In his theories, therefore, Marx takes his inspiration from social inequality, the principle already established by Rousseau, who saw the cause of human misery as lying in ignorance, in violence and in superstition. Here, Marxism is confirmed as the legitimate child of the Enlightenment, maintaining the same deeply rational character, together with the same criticism of religion and the fight against ignorance (the proletariat must educate themselves and become selfaware), while also transferring the issue of equality to economics and materialism. It is confirmed that the push towards democratisation is not an original idea of Marxism, but need that was strongly felt: these are the same libertarian principles that had inspired the rise of the bourgeoisie in its early stage, when he was fighting against the aristocratic obscurantism and the conservation of absurd privileges. The bourgeoisie has long been the most motivated inspiration of

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every plea for democracy, with the primary emphasis of its political blueprint on the idea of equality among men, only to introduce corrective measures and limits, once in power, and having to fight to maintain of the privileges acquired. The equality, that modernity had indicated among the fundamental principles of bourgeois virtues, exalting them as essential in the building up of the Neuzeit, the “new time” that opened up after the crisis of the aristocracy, is indeed taken up by Marx, but then deferred to the society of the future, where the classes will be dissolved and where social differences will no longer exist. For the moment, equality remains a matter of “limited sovereignty”, valid within the individual classes, but especially within the working class, of that proletariat who become self-aware (“class consciousness”), who see themselves as united in the same conditions of exploitation and oppression, and who, therefore, “have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.”2 It follows then that the inequality remains. According to the spirit of the time, it even seems confirmed by the first sociological studies: Émile Durkheim, in The Division of Labour in Society,3 published in 1893, portrays the need for diversity, not so much between individuals, as between personal “roles”, so that they may constitute a balanced society in which the community can live together without giving rise to problems and aggression, which are otherwise unavoidable. While denying diversity on an ideological level, in practice modernity seems to favour it and justify it, pointing out the need for it as the complexity of economic relations gradually increases.4 Durkheim himself, like Rousseau, sees an easier recognition of 2 | K. Marx, F. Engels, The Communist Manifesto, cit. 3 | É. Durkheim, The Division of Labour in Society, trans. W. D. Halls, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. 4 | “Thus we may rest assured – Durkheim writes – that the farther we go back in history, the greater the homogeneity. Moreover, the more we reach the highest social types, the more developed the division of labour.” É. Durkheim, The Division of Labour in Society cit., p. 92.

A matter of class

equality in the past, but the inequality that modernity imposes is not so much a worsening of conditions, as the need to adapt to technological, work and economic development. The distinction between roles is crucial to modernity and in the classes the roles are well defined: one becomes part of the proletariat, the working class that represents the pars sana of society, by right of birth, but then this association is established by culture, by education and by work. It is difficult to move from one class to another: the class divide serves to keep the roles, skills and cultural boundaries distinct from one another. Every community that is subdivided into classes cannot allow transition from one class to another, because it would endanger the value and the legitimacy of the social fabric. However, we must not forget that class is still synonymous with social separateness and that the term “working class” is used to indicate being part of a subordinate group, with precise connotations that make the meaning incontrovertible: the fact that having productive capacity and moral sanity does not redeem them from a definitive condemnation. These features make the working class a social body favoured by modern sociological theories, which put it at the centre of every social change and every idea of progress. Their productive capacity makes the working class the only social corpus that can be a practical utility for economic development and for the maintenance of the entire society. It is this body that creates wealth and supplies and distributes what is needed for survival; it does it without having ownership of the means of production, in exchange for a salary that is often not fair in consideration of the quantity and quality of the work carried out. These are details of considerable importance, which reveal the gregarious condition of the working class, who continue to play an instrumental role with respect to the upper, non-working, classes, who do not produce and do not transform the goods for themselves, but for others. The fact that of not owning the tools of the trade, or the goods produced – which remain “something other than oneself”, separate or even subdivided from the assembly line, the exclusive property of the employer, the only one to have the right to sell or do

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as they please – makes the job of the working class unrewarding, alienating and easily replaceable. The definition of “class society”, based on a rigid distinction of social roles, and therefore founded on inequality, is the most serious charge that can be brought against to modernity. To say that this type of society still survives today is quite another thing. The idea of class, from a strictly theoretical point of view, is better suited to the “solid” societies of the first industrial revolution, characterised by the production of “heavy” material, by exploitation and oppression, by a clear division between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, between wealth and poverty: a fairly simple type of society, in which it is easy to distinguish good from evil within a brutal and inhuman economic system. On closer inspection, class is not determined by class struggle,5 but by working conditions: it is these that mould people’s behaviour and make them homogeneous, aware of their existential affinity, as well as to create that sense of solidarity needed to stand up to the employer. As soon as working conditions are diversified, the idea of class fades and dissipates. Class struggle is nothing but the attempt to escape from a state of exploitation, to go beyond the concept of class, get free of its economic and social boundaries, to form a society of equals, where the guarantee of equality of rights in itself constitutes the first right. It could even be recognised that the classes – not as theoretical concepts, but as a social practice – disappear much earlier than Marx could have imagined: they dissolve in the overwhelming phenomenon of massification, which began in the late nineteenth century. It is no coincidence that in a fully communist society, advocated by historical materialism, the idea of classes no longer makes sense: if anything we are looking at a society of equals, fully equalised, who implicitly recognise the negative, inhuman and

5 | The statement “the class is determined by the class struggle” still reappears in more recent studies. Cf. M. Hardt, A. Negri, Multitude, cit.

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oppressive meaning of class division, which is no longer seen as something to value, but rather as a condition to overcome.

2. C l ass as an invention of the modern spirit Modernity and the middle class go hand in hand. It was only with the rising middle class that the concept of class was born. It is only natural that classes, given that they are the creation of the same bourgeois culture, are bound to follow the evolution of modernity and decline with it. This social division based on social status and ownership of the means of production is dealt with in Bauman’s historical text, Memories of Class,6 the basis of which is still valid thirty years later. His theory, though not carried to the extreme, is that the concept of class and class struggle was actually born in the modern era, and not before, following the systematic implementation of waged labour in the factories. Looking at the study of Edward P. Thompson 7 and other thinkers of the twentieth century, Bauman sets out a series of considerations that, in the light of the changes that took place, appear stringent. First of all, he refutes the Marxist theory that history is characterised by the continuous struggle of one social class to prevail over the other. That is one of the cornerstones of Marxist theory. If so, class struggle is no longer a universal mode of social behaviour, but a contingent fact, caused by a particular economic and social condition (industrialisation) and therefore bound to evolve because of that change in the social–economic condition. As a thinker who was very much bound to the period in which he lived, quite rightly tried to scientifically explain and interpret the reality of the time and its analysis (including the solutions he put 6 | Z. Bauman, Memories of Class, cit. 7 | E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, Gollancz, 1963.

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forward) Marx has value only within that context. His ideas cannot be exported or adopted as a universal law of the historical process. Class society, which was a product of modernity, is an invention of the modern spirit. The classes as the “social construction” of modernity are necessary to its adaptation and functional to its design, based entirely on conflict and economic inequality. It is therefore not a “natural” condition of the human being, but a consequence of the division of labour. The very idea of class is a modern concept, free from a rigid hereditary transmission, but based on the function practised within the social context. It depends more on “where” and “when” you were born, rather than from whom. Before the advent of modernity, the son of an artisan or a serf was destined to have the same fate as his father with no chance of improvement. The environment in which he grew up, his circle of friends and level of education then contributed to amplify the initial difference and make the gap unbridgeable. On the other hand, the son of a gentleman or a nobleman remained such in spite of all kinds of adversity, misfortune or economic ruin. Society advanced by imprinting and, for this reason, it can be said to have been a rigid society. Modern principles, on the other hand, have made it possible to have a place on the social ladder on the basis of aptitude, individual abilities, the quality of spirit, the nature of the work carried out, whilst abolishing the privileges of birth that had hitherto contained the right to belong to the aristocracy within narrow confines. In this way, it is work, not birth that determines class: from this moment the work ethic, the sense of social and personal identity derived from it (modern man identifies himself with his profession more than any other at all times) become crucial. The division of labour, a necessity in every social context (which is what Durkheim’s sociology will study during the nineteenth century) takes on a further function in modernity because of the guarantees it gives to the state. If the duty of every citizen is to contribute to the advancement of the state through his own work and through sacrifice, the daily

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grind is no longer a private matter of survival, necessary to feed himself and his family, but it becomes a collective act, a recognised social function to be proud of. This revolutionary bourgeois ethic, matured over the course of the previous centuries and welcomed as a release from a past that was obscurantist, oppressive, illiberal and unworthy of a civilised community because it requires the contribution of all according to what each can give, ultimately proves to be classist at the very moment in which it separates those who have to do the “dirty” work from those who are exempt from it. With the understanding that it is not because of a privilege “a priori”, but because they are assigned to carrying out a different social function that requires particular qualities, specific training or accessibility to money. It is money, along with the other key element, private property, that characterises modernity. Let us not forget that the spirit of the Protestant Reformation – a “modernist” reform, adjusting religion to the spirit of the new times, not coincidentally studied by Max Weber,8 the most representative sociologist of modernity – assigns a spiritual attribute to economic success, as if success in business was a demonstration of divine favour. It is money that makes the social ladder possible and of course the transition from one class to another. The ownership of the means of production does the rest, and distinguishes those who have to make do with a tiring and servile job (the working class) from those who do their duty to the state and the community by investing, trading, setting up new industrial enterprises and creating jobs (the middle class). That liberation from a fate determined by birth and impossible to change, which modernity had decided to achieve in the new society, is thwarted by the new economic “cage” that forces men to remain confined within a lower class because of limited economic means.

8 | His classic text is The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905): Translated and updated by S. Kalberg, Oxford UP, 2011.

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Work is not enough through which one can be redeemed, overcome the differences, despite ethics, dignity and professional pride, because it does not allow the accumulation of enough money to access a higher status. The first and the most distant promise of modernity is at once betrayed by the onset of new social differences as strict as those of the past, which, however, have a content of ambiguity and deception, since they allow us to catch sight of an opportunity for social and economic advancement open to all, but in reality non-existent and almost impracticable in everyday life. An extremely rigid separation in the heyday of modernity, but destined to fade and dissolve in the process of massification that becomes established at the end of the twentieth century, during which the separation between the different classes will no longer make sense and will be replaced by opposition between the mass and the leader. A prelude to authoritarianism and totalitarianism: betrayal of the libertarian principles of modernity or their extreme consequence? What is it that gives rise to the formation of class? It is undeniable that it is “class consciousness”, that is, the awareness of being part of a particular social condition shared by many. A special feature (completely new for the times, the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries) determined by the contiguity, the uniformity and commodification of labour. For the first time the factories force a growing number of people to work side by side, sharing the time and the concrete object of their own labour. The phenomenon of forced urbanisation, then, urges people to leave the countryside and live in the slums, the dilapidated houses that sprung up overnight in the suburbs. Factory work, repetitive and arduous, is a source of uniformity among workers: all are equal in face of the owners, the differences and peculiarities are erased. The hours of work and the wages are the same and the individual is reduced to being a number that can easily be replaced. No one is indispensable; there is no room for the individual to stand out or to make a career for himself.

A matter of class

Commodification is the determining factor: even in retrospect, the underhand transformation of the worker into a commodity is clear. Bought and sold on the market. Exploited as much as possible and then replaced by a better one. The first to speak of work as economic component of the business system was the economist David Ricardo, forerunning Marx. However, what appears to be significant in the transition from the pre-industrial to the industrialised economy, in the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution, it is the unusual relationship that is established between the worker and the employer. It is no longer an equal relationship between the one who requests a service and the one who is able to provide it in exchange for an agreed sum. Hiring in the factory, as every submission to dependent employment, is the downright selling of one’s body and soul. Forgoing freedom in exchange for a hardly sufficient salary soon reveals the condition of servitude and causes alienation. Not only is the employer the absolute owner of the plants, the machines and tools necessary to do the work, but also of the finished product that leaves the factory. The worker, emptied of his status of homo faber and transformed in a passive instrument, experiences the unease of the non-availability of what he produced with his hands. Now the time of the social classes and class struggle can be confined to the period that goes from the first Industrial Revolution (late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries) to the second half of the last century. Almost three centuries: with their Manifesto of 1848, Marx and Engels are located right in the centre of this crucial phase. However, these are just conventions, while the substance lies in the realisation that modernity is in crisis with post-Fordism and the dematerialisation of work. The assumptions of an industrialised economy, born of the Industrial Revolution, have failed. It coincides with the decline of the middle class, the class in power until the advent of modernity, which is under attack from a proletariat which should succeed them (according to Marxist theory) in the management of power.

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The bourgeoisie as the ruling class (the crisis of the middle class resulting from demassification should also be considered) was dissolved but not without problems, without being replaced by a proletariat. For the simple reason that there was no proletarian class ready to succeed it. The rigid class distinction is blurred; contemporary society has become more widespread, complex and differentiated. Above all, “class consciousness”, which was the foundation of that theory, has been lost. Ideology has been lost along the way, at a time when ideologies and their false certainties were challenged. This is demonstrated by the fact that in the West there are more political parties (except for modest fringes) that invoke the class struggle and make it the core of their programme. The new formations appeal to federalism, localism, anti-politics, collaboration, social equality, democracy, liberalism. If class is a contingent and temporary factor, determined by a particular condition of status, then it seems logical to be able to speak of the dissolution of classes when those conditions change. The sign of change is obvious when the contiguity of work is being lost, through diversification, relocation, job insecurity. What has changed is precisely the sense of social solidarity and contiguity in the workplace, which has challenged an ethic that had long been considered a question of fact. Frequent job changing – Richard Sennett speaks of a change on average every ten years9 – makes you lose solidarity with other workers and privileges individual interest, which is to be safeguarded at all costs before collective interests and even going against them. Another powerful tool of dissolution of the classes is the progressive dematerialisation of labour which, on the one hand, frees man from the fatigue of work, while on the other hand it undermines one of the strongest powers in the hands of the entrepreneur: the ownership of the instruments of work. Because 9 | R. Sennett, The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism, Norton & Co., 1998.

A matter of class

immaterial work is essentially intellectual work, based on personal qualities and on communication, which needs low-cost equipment and therefore reduced capital investment. Contiguity, that was once practised in the factories, in political party branches, in union meetings, in street demonstrations, but also in the social housing of urban peripheries, is now reborn in the “non-place” of the net. Because interpersonal communication has changed. It is impersonal and therefore looks for distant contacts which are weak and easy to break. While in the past intensive urbanisation forced people to share limited spaces, apartments are now a symbol of social separation, exacerbated by the massive use of social networks. A separation to which people are often subjected, but which is even more frequently sought, as in the case of gated communities, closed communities in which people are locked up in order to defend themselves and send out the signal of their unwillingness to mingle with each other. These are weak ties, which lie outside the physicality, but experience moments of collective exaltation in improvised gatherings, where people get together to protest or to celebrate, without really knowing each other, often with different motivations, and then disperse and return to their own lives. This is an effect of demassification. The new contiguity is no longer experienced in the factory, but in the town squares. However, this type of contiguity is not enough to produce lasting effects. It is not enough to forge solid ties between people, to give birth to that spirit of solidarity which induces them to intervene when the other is in need, to make sacrifices, to share what they have with others. On your own computer, you simply have to press a button to delete a friendship that you have grown tired of or to forget people met by chance. The network is able to bring people together easily, but can also drive them away quickly. The ties created in the network are weak ones and their lack of physicality prevents the formation of “class consciousness”, the awareness of sharing the same destiny. That physicality, the close

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daily contact that Marx could not find in the world of the peasant farmers and found that it was, on the other hand, very much present in the urban proletariat. “The most important communication the proletarians have – according to Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt – and that the peasants lack, is enacted in the physical, corporeal being together in the factory. The class and the bases of political action are formed not primarily through the circulation of information or even ideas but rather through the construction of political affects, which requires a physical proximity.” And so “Facebook, Twitter and the Internet and other kinds of communications mechanisms are useful, but nothing can replace the being together of bodies and the corporeal communication that is the basis of collective political intelligence and action. In all the occupations [...] the participants experienced the power of creating new political affects through being together.”10

The young people who took to Tahrir Square, who gave rise to the Arab Spring or the Occupy Wall Street movement, felt the need to be physically close, as well as virtually close through the usual social networks. But this, too, like any instrument that can be used in the Internet, is not enough to create class consciousness. However, it has been observed that, once the demonstration has broken up, the enthusiasm for the sit-in is over, everyone returns to his own home and carries on with his life. The party remains indeed a political act, but occasionally, a kind of event organised by the network and that peters out in the network with the inevitable comments. In order to build up class consciousness, neither the network nor the occasional physical contact at events is sufficient. What is needed is that particular painful constraint and the sharing of an identical fate that used to characterise social class and that now no longer exist.

10 | M. Hardt, A. Negri, Declaration, Argo-Navis, 2012, p. 14.

A matter of class

3. M odernit y and cl ass consciousness The question of a working-class aristocracy, i.e. a part of the proletariat that has acquired a privileged status, a satisfactory income and better living conditions, emerges as early as the end of the nineteenth century and is referred to by Friedrich Engels in a letter to Marx in 1858. “The English proletariat – writes Engels – is actually becoming more and more bourgeois, so that the ultimate aim of this most bourgeois of all nations would appear to be the possession, alongside the bourgeoisie, of a bourgeois aristocracy and a bourgeois proletariat.”11 For the founders of dialectical materialism such an event was so unexpected, to the point of invalidating the impact of the famous summons that closes the Manifesto: “Workers of the world, unite!”,12 because the difference had already been established within that class which, in the eyes of Marx, appeared to be homogeneous, altogether similar in every part of the world. Inequality, as a result of wage increases, the trade union movement and the improvements brought about, where the industrial revolution began to make its effects felt, was no longer only between bourgeois and proletarian, but crept into the working class itself. Not so much within the same country, as a transnational level. The internationalisation of proletarian equality, which has always been a distinguishing feature of Communism, falls in the face of the strict delimitation of every trade union benefit, as of every improvement in the quality of life within national borders. Throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, the inequality of the proletariat (or what remains of this class, since the advent of mass society) is measured between different nations. Among the industrialised countries of the West and the poorer ones of the so-called third world, where industrialisation is slow to take off, an ever-widening gap opens, 11 | K. Marx, F. Engels, The Marx-Engels Correspondence: The Personal Letters, 1844-77, ed. Fritz J. Raddatz, Littlehampton, 1981. 12 | K. Marx, F. Engels, The Communist Manifesto, cit.

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destined to a sudden reversal in the decline of the last century. The crisis of industrialisation, in what has been called postindustrialisation, along with other crucial economic and social changes, including the dematerialisation of work, the development of new technologies and the opening of borders, which put an end to the post-Westphalian model of nationalism, has not created the conditions needed to regain equality between the working classes (workers all over the world), which would have revived and justified proletarian internationalism. Instead, it resulted in the growth of inequality within individual countries, becoming more serious as the external differences decreased, between different countries. It is no longer about a difference in class, but more diffuse and particular social differences that do not correspond to a specific classification, which evolve, change sign and expand with unexpected speed in a relatively short time, following the fluctuations of the financial markets or the trend of the economic crisis. Referring to Weber, who had already glimpsed its nature, Beck acknowledges that “the classes are only one of the historical forms of inequality”.13 So today the problem of inequality appears to be more and more difficult to solve: the huge number of distinguished commentators and the equally endless number of interpretations and proposals is a measure of a confusing situation where there are no fixed points of reference. There are no ideologies or absolute truths to cling to, which can provide a rational explanation: the greatest attempt of modernity to rationalise the problem of inequality, the Marxist one, is a god that failed. First, the mare magnum of massification that struck the Berlin Wall with a pickaxe. Massification, with its arrogant anxiety to eliminate diversity and homologate the fabric of society, has proved to be more a “Procrustean bed” than a democratic process, resulting in the dissolution of the classes.

13 | U. Beck, Die Neuvermessung der Ungleichheit unter den Menschen: Soziologische Aufklärung im 21. Jahrhundert, Suhrkamp, 2008, p. 20.

A matter of class

Also the working-class aristocracy was wiped out by the crisis, weakened first by the loss of job security and the opening of markets that, while on the one hand encouraged the export of capital, on the other hand also fostered competition with the work force in developing countries. A process that has led many entrepreneurs to relocate industrial plants abroad, but also to reduce salaries internally, with the dual effect of depleting domestic resources and increasing unemployment. Just as had Marx envisaged, classes have long disappeared, but not as a result of state welfare or social policies (no economic policy, even as innovative as the Keynesian one, is able to produce an upheaval of such magnitude). The cause can be traced back to a most striking phenomenon, whose importance is often underestimated, and which has characterised Western society in the late nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries: this phenomenon is massification. The emergence of mass society, the composition of which is also due to acculturation, the development of science and technology, the increased availability of products, the emergence of consumerism and the increase in life expectancy, as well as the recognition of social rights of the poorer classes, whose needs and the existence of which the ruling classes should have noticed since the fateful year 1848. The current trend towards the reconstitution of class differences must take into account the fact that this phenomenon occurs after a long period in which the differences were limited, perhaps even eliminated in part, thanks to the process of massification. It is only after the end of mass society that class differences may reappear, but in a different form with respect to the past and, in particular, with respect to Marx’s classification. There is no longer a proletariat or the bourgeoisie in the traditional sense, but patchy and transitory classes, in which the differences within the various social groups are more evident than the privileged classes and where the phenomenon of marginalisation has grown so much that it is approaching a critical point.

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Thus, inequality changes. It evolves, it adapts to the complexity of the world, to its economic uncertainties and job insecurities, to its basic unstable liquidity. Once, it was marked by class division. Belonging to a social class was already in itself a demonstration of an implicit “diversity”, handed down through birth, from father to son, and then sealed by culture and work. Climbing the social ladder, securing a position in the upper class, was an uncommon way (by marriage or by coming into an unexpected fortune) granted to a few favoured by fate, but a humble origin still remained imprinted like an indelible mark on people’s skin. The same was true for those living in countries far from the centre of the empire, whose cultural distance (compounded by skin colour, language or religion) was unbridgeable and had long-lasting effects. Modernity, thanks to the receptive mind of the bourgeoisie, was the first to invent a new way to undermine the rigidity of the division by birth, using an instrument that is as flexible as it is neutral: money. Amassing wealth is the easiest way to climb the social ladder and secure the approval of others. – securing equality on the basis of a goal achieved, or a quality demonstrated, and not longer based on social extraction. In this context, class division can continue to exist and is indeed favoured because it is necessary for the social equilibrium imposed by a rigid and individualistic economic system, where the proletariat – that is, those who have no wealth except their offspring – is denied virtually every opportunity to be recognised as being equal to their masters. In this situation, in this relatively short fraction of time, which is collocated between the crisis of the aristocracy of their inability to renew themselves and overcome the logic of passive income, and the rapid technological innovations introduced in the early twentieth century, Karl Marx instilled his vision of the world, claiming it to be (as a fully involved observer) a general law of history. It is true that the changes of the new century would not have taken place if the working masses had not raised their heads and challenged

A matter of class

the order imposed by a deaf and insensitive bourgeoisie, but it is equally true that the Marxist theory in its economic schematism was not able to predict either the process of massification (in which we can find a form of sublimated egalitarianism) or the establishment of a totalising control by the public authorities, which were set up specifically to handle the masses. But it is exactly massification that is the great social leveller, mainly responsible for the dissolution of the classes. The immense historical process of the recognition of the rights of the poor, of the exploited, the marginalised and the oppressed causes a gradual increase in the quality of life and a shortening of the distances between the various social groups within an increasingly growing middle class that ends up absorbing everyone – from small landowners to industrial workers; from professionals to civil servants – united by the same existential perspective, by the same cultural background provided by the state school system, by propaganda and the first mass media (press, radio and cinema) that provide univocal information, as well as by the same incentives to consume. Massification brings with it the propensity to consumerism, according to the new, economically directed secular creed, that happiness consists in having. Satisfying our own needs and showing others our disposable income becomes a reason for living14 and wisely directs any discomfort and protest within channels that the state can manage with ease. The social equality, that increasing the well-being for all promises in exchange for conformism and an alienating job, stifles the class struggle, making it useless and reduces it to the more prosaic battles for a salary increase that allows us to buy a refrigerator or car in instalments. 14 | This tendency to publicly display their privileged condition is represented by the well-known analysis at the turn of the century by Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of Leisure Class (1899), Oxford Classics, 2009.

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Not until the decline of the twentieth century and the end of the frenzy of hyper-consumerism, which puts at risk the resources of the planet, could we see how consumerism has lost its “appeal” as guarantor of materialistic happiness and witness a rapid process of demassification in which the multitudes emerge, individualism is suppressed by a century of collectivising expectations and even the old social classes, with an ideological resurgence of the old motto “strength through unity”. The social classes, levelled by massification, tend to recur in different forms in times of crisis. The crisis is, at the same time (and depending on how you want to judge it), both cause and consequence of inequality. Even where the social differences were smoothed out, e.g. by the greatest social leveller that is consumerism, forms of class distinction reappear between those who possess or do not possess an adequate income, between those who have or do not have a job, between those who live in privileged conditions and those who suffer. The distinction is no longer determined by birth, education received or possession of the instruments of production, which the technological evolution has made immaterial, but by a set of far more volatile, inconsistent and unstable factors that can change from one day to the next and that have, therefore, given rise to the condition of liquidity that Bauman has suggested as a feature of contemporary society. The gap between the haves and have-nots is on the increase and the phenomenon is most visible in the more developed countries, like the United States and Britain, but also (surprisingly) in those who have experienced a communist regime, where classes – on the basis of a legalised ideology – had been suppressed. There are more glaring social differences in Putin’s Russia than in Erdogan’s Turkey or in Rousseff’s Brazil. Globalisation, with the removal of physical and cultural barriers, with its unique ability to extend communications anywhere and in real time, does not eliminate inequality. On the contrary, it increases it. It emphasises it; it blows up its contradictions in the eyes of the spectators all around the world, but does not find a solution.

A matter of class

The class of those who have not and that includes the whole of society, more or less, in its infinite variety – from the marginalised to the unemployed, from the underemployed to pensioners bordering on poverty – has increased so much that it has reached a fateful 99 %, i.e. almost the entire population, according to an effective slogan of Occupy Wall Street, excluding a very low 1 % of privileged people. But how do you define the “class” of such a small group? Even the term “overclass”, coined by Richard Rorty15 to describe those who take major economic decisions who are completely above the law of the land and who live above the common people, does not seem appropriate, being a random group that exists outside the class division. If classes no longer exist and are merged into a muddle of unequals who do not have, for the reasons already stated, their own “class consciousness”, then we lose the only prerequisite needed in order to talk about class struggle. Not only are classes an invention of the modern spirit, but also class struggle can be traced back to its “strategy” value within a historical condition that is otherwise insuperable. But, like all strategies, it makes sense (and success) only in the presence of those same conditions and at a given moment of social evolution. It is not exportable, it is not a universal law, it is not comparable to the law of gravity or the principles of thermodynamics. To claim that it can be used as a universal key to understanding history – as we frequently hear in the words of certain nostalgics – is a serious mistake, a false ideology that threatens to block every possibility of understanding the current condition and, therefore, every opportunity to find a solution to benefit the weaker part of the population. Of course, these changes occurred as a result of the class struggle – as pointed out by Domenico Losurdo16 – and of the sacrifices, of 15 | Cf. R. Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope, Penguin, 1999, p. 233. 16 | D. Losurdo, La lotta di classe. Una storia politica e filosofica, Laterza, 2013.

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the trade union struggles, of battles won and lost, of the barricades, protests and riots, but the reactions, the balance that ensued, to which must be added the rights and honours, achievements and concessions, as well as the maturation of the collective consciousness, have profoundly altered the social framework. The eternal conflict between capitalism and democracy has taken on, from time to time, different shapes and outcomes, which need to be examined very carefully in order to understand its actual scope, risks and trends. Capitalism without a state, precisely the years in which Marx and Engels drew up their revolutionary programme, was succeeded by a state capitalism, whose worst effects were felt in European countries during the first half of the twentieth century. It is not true that the United States has not developed a “social state”17: in reality, their type of government intervention was milder and less invasive, with a preference for the liberal approach, from the Wall Street crash of ‘29 onwards. Implementing the Keynesian policy then meant the implementation of a social policy with undoubted beneficial effects, without affecting personal liberties. Very different from the choices that prevailed in Europe, where the decisive intervention of the state, in an attempt to solve the social question and put an end to the bloody uprisings, implemented totalitarian policies of violent repression of freedom, whose social component is represented by public intervention in the economy: a misguided attempt to apply Keynesian logic to an authoritarian regime. The end of totalitarianism and, consequently, of the capitalist state (the last in chronological order is that of the Soviet Union) caused the liberal spirit to resurface under the new wording “neoliberal”, freed from the constraints of the state, but also from localisation encumbrances and long-term investments. The class struggle invoked by the aggressive and impatient “maîtres à penser” is not fought between the proletariat and 17 | Ibid., pp. 9–10.

A matter of class

the bourgeoisie, between workers and bosses, but between the unemployed and the privileged, between citizens and politicians, between the marginalised and right-minded people, between pensioners and early retirees. That is to say, between groups who live within the same social instability, where the roles can be reversed at a moment’s notice and, above all, who have no decision-making powers – these having been taken from them by abstract supranational entities that cannot be fought and who do not even have symbols of power to destroy. The ancient monstrous Leviathan, made up of many heads of the people, is crushed and dispersed in such infinitesimal volatile fractions that it is impossible to reassemble. At the beginning of the new millennium, the forms of domination have become untouchable, distant and uncontrollable.

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IV The lost community 1. C ommunitas and socie tas Community is an archaic concept. In its current meaning it refers to the first forms of social or tribal groups made up of individuals who live within a limited territory and are identifiable by common features and by their mutual dependence. Community precedes society, being its natural evolution, characterised by a set of complex relationships, by the division of labour and by a social conscience. The term community is also attributed to the small groups that live within larger societies, who maintain their own identity or cultural and religious characteristics that can distinguish them from the others. When we talk of community we immediately think of the oppo­ sition to society raised by Ferdinand Tönnies in 1887 and advocated by the philosophy of Nietzsche, which aimed to re-evaluate the naturalness of existence given the masking of human values that were imposed by industrial civilisation. When Tönnies wrote Community and Civil Society, at the end of the nineteenth century – a century of great change, of accelerated industrialisation, in anticipation of an increasingly technologised future, but also of metropolitan utopia – the community was considered to be an outdated concept that belonged to the past. The community was looked at with nostalgia, with the same spirit of Nietzsche who, in modernity, in the novum, retraced the cause of the dispersion of the community, sacrificed in favour of civil society. Society is totalising, ever increasing, uncontrollable and therefore unknown, resulting in insecurity and fear of living in it.

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It tends to identify itself with the whole world, that we cannot take in a single glance; to use a technical term, we cannot “com-prehend it”; it remains so far from us and makes us feel marginalised, even inadequate to the new conditions of the present. Even if we want to return to the community to feel at home, taking refuge in it is not enough, nor does it even seem possible. Our needs concerning work and family, professional and practical, the decision to move away from a provincial place and the search for autonomy, take us far away. The consequence of this dichotomy between community (the origin) and society (the destination) is a painful feeling of solitude, combined with a poignant nostalgia for security and warmth that we can find only in the totality of being. In this context, the idea of community takes on a higher value than that of society, which is instead guilty of “corrupting” good human relations, imposing hypocrisy and social conventions (good manners) that distort spontaneous behaviour. Nietzsche and Tönnies capture the violent opposition underlying “community” and “society” between two irreconcilable concepts, lamenting the overlapping of artificial and conventional society with the more natural community, which ended up disappearing, obviously with ill-concealed regret for what has been lost. The attribution to the idea of a community of a surplus value and an “instinctive” quality has actually produced considerable consequences, considering the fervour that gave rise to Nazism, influenced by Heidegger’s philosophy, which advocates that everything that is natural, original, pure, closely linked to the land and the rural world, has enjoyed a mythologised privilege. However, from this reactionary interpretation there ensues a different meaning, more neutral and topical, deduced by the Scottish anthropologist, Victor Turner, who recuperates the coexistence of communities and societies in the modern world, redefining it with

The lost community

the Latin terms of communitas and societas.1 According to Turner, communitas has a positive character of “belonging” and “solidarity”; an eternal present that goes far beyond the conventional social bonds and maintains the family and blood ties. In short, it is not so far away from the Blut und Boden (“blood and soil”) which was essential to the German Pre-romantics in order to echo back to the naturalness of human relationships and the establishment of stronger ties with the land, in anticipation of the birth of nationalism. Turner’s idea of an “unstructured communitas”2 brings to mind the multitude of Spinoza: a collection of individuals who are not hierarchically structured, who are free and uncontrolled and who live within a reticular system of absolutely equal relationships. It would be a community-dominated society, a return to our origins, but making a return to human origins is something the so-called liminal movements also speak of,3 such as the hippies, who tend towards the idea of communion, induced by alcohol, drugs and music, that is, by a Dionysian intoxication that wipes out the individual consciousness and drags him into one single unit. Is this annulment of the self or a search for the totality of primitive man, indistinct from nature? The most surprising aspect of communitas is the absence of time, its eternal present, which, according to Turner, is affirmed in tribal communities that still exist in the twentieth century: a situation without time, an eternal now, as “a moment in and out of time”,4 or as a state to which it is not applicable. In ancient civilisations before the introduction of writing, the community is an element of stability, where everything, object, symbol or knowledge, tends to 1 | V. Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure, Aldine, 1969. 2 | Ibid., p. 51. 3 | V. Turner, “Passages, Margins, and Poverty: Religious Symbols of Communitas”, in Drama, Fields and Metaphor. Symbolic Action in Human Society, Cornell UP, 1974, p. 231. 4 | V. Turner, The Ritual Process, cit., p. 96.

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be preserved forever, fearing that the loss of something may bring about irreparable damage. The conservative and static structure of the community (where everything is known and can be found every time you return to it) also has a reassuring and cohesive function, making the individual feel part of a whole, in which individuality is of secondary importance. However, the condition of an eternal present is also to be found in today’s “digital society”, where the value of memory has lost its importance, is placed in the hands of technology and is reduced to an instrument to fall back on in an emergency. Unlike the past, where the perennial now had the task of preserving the cultural heritage of the community, today it is used to deal with rapid change, in which previous experience takes on a relative value. In consideration of this aspect, if we compare the two concepts of community and society, we can see that society is characterised by progression, an accumulation of knowledge in constant evolution and by a succession of time periods. Here, the before and after become of fundamental importance, since what happens after is necessarily a consequence of what happened before (hence the idea of progress, which was unknown to ancient civilisations), and so the concept of history becomes obvious. Inaction, tradition and the eternal present pertain to the community, while history, progress and innovation to society. Today’s society is characterised by this (at first sight unintelligible) contamination between the functions of continuous renewal, by accelerated progress and those instead of the community, such as the reclamation of certain rituals that suggest a need to gather together, establishing new bonds. In this most current reformulation of the community, it is the communicative aspect that becomes prevalent. Also family relationships have always been based on a close communicative relationship characterised by coexistence and physical proximity: parents and children, husbands and wives, grandparents and grandchildren. In the present community (virtual or real), the requirements of coexistence and proximity are no longer needed.

The lost community

What prevails is the communicative aspect and the creation of a common area of interest and/or objective, on which to build a relationship of a temporary nature, free from the constraints imposed by the community, simply because it does not depend on an economic need or the need to cohabit. What we are witnessing then is the distortion of the idea of community and its replacement with new and original parameters of contiguity which disregard the so-called strong ties. Despite the reassurances of Turner, the type of communitas that emerges in the liquid societies of our time has little to do with the traditional conception of this idea. But on one point Turner is indisputable: the community has not been completely erased and it remains co-present in society, stronger than ever, re-evaluated and recovered in the most characteristic modalities, aspects and rituals of contemporary life. So, even for Bauman, the community is here to stay.5 It remains within us as a kind of imprinting that follows us wherever we go, like a sort of sentence that weighs upon us, and one that no exorcism is able to erase, being deeply rooted in our culture, behaviour, language and relationships with others. If, from a certain point of view, the inseparable link with the community can be considered an embarrassing and unwelcome burden, which we sometimes try to hide, it is, however, universally recognised as the most intimate and true part of the self, which fights against the veneer of “civilisation” acquired through education and learning. It is increasingly clear, as Bauman argues, that the place of belonging, that is, the area of relating to the communitas, has expanded out of all proportion because of the ease of communications. If this space has expanded, it is true, however, that the territorial expansion has hindered physicality, undermining the personal identity of individuals who feel disoriented, forced into unfamiliar territory inhabited by strangers, with all the difficulties and uncertainties 5 | Z. Bauman, Community: Seeking Safety in an Insecure World, Polity, 2000.

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arising from the coexistence with other people. In fact, you only have to move just a few metres outside your neighbourhood to meet unfamiliar faces, feel like an outsider and sense the difference. Separation and anonymity are a consequence of urban concentration in the big cities, where the reality of being in close proximity does not guarantee the formation of a community. On the other hand, you are likely to entertain friendly relations with people hundreds or thousands of miles away, with whom you have elective affinities, common interests and a liking for: these are the new weak ties, less conditioning on a personal level, but richly productive in social capital. The idea of community expands rapidly over great distances to finally encompass the whole world. In essence, it undergoes a process of globalisation and ends up losing its “physical” quality, rising up into the clouds, to that indeterminate and virtual space where communications are exchanged and stored. Individuals have rediscovered their truly communicative aspect, which, in times of difficulty in personal relationships – due to a lack of adequate resources, language difficulties, cultural differences or political reasons – was aided by proximity, that is, by the physical presence in the same limited space, by daily contact or by sharing the same experience. So, it is true that communities and societies live together, as Turner claims: perhaps it is more true today than when he was writing (in the sixties and seventies), but in different ways, which are affected by the profound social change brought about by new technologies. However, the community is no longer the same, it has changed: it is not the place you belong to, where you were born and where you were educated and where you go back to in order to find yourself. That form of communitas is obsolete, it is part of cultural archaeology, perhaps even a sort of mythology that serves (and has served) to justify the absurd choices made in the past. What differentiates communitas and societas is, therefore, their structural condition. The change (or liquefaction) of communitas started as a liberating act of fleeing from one’s own origins, pulling

The lost community

up the roots with one’s past, with one’s place of birth; escaping from a primitive condition which no longer fits. As we can see, linked more to individual action rather than social, but when this happens in the same way for a very large number of people and involves several generations of individuals, it takes on a social value. The new community survives along with the previous one and, if anything, it represents the carrier. It has evolved and moved away considerably from that romantic image that conditioned the whole of the nineteenth century and a large part of the twentieth. The break with the past comes at a time when the community gets rid of the burden of the strong bonds and becomes independent. It has expanded and spread, has lost sight of the boundaries of its territory; it is not even identifiable with a specific place. Such an effect is due to the speed of communications: current communities are not restricted, as in the past, to the country, to the neighbourhood, the condo-hive. They go beyond the borders, they interlace and expand. Today the community is a weak bond, more fragile and temporary than any other economic or structural social bond, but capable of great performance. It has shaken off most of the influences of the past and has assumed a freedom of action over a long distance, which makes it the most versatile and useful tool of social relations. It is a new and completely original idea, well represented in a hitherto unpublished version: virtual communities. We returned to speak of community when a series of relationships and communications were transferred to the Internet, resulting in the setting up of social networks, where heterogeneous and temporary groups of people were formed attracted by the same interests and by the desire for participation or self-assertion. In contemporary language, the “virtual communities” have taken the place of the ancient community in the social consciousness, re-presenting the old dilemma between community and society. In this way, the social relationships of our time no longer integrate according to a spatial logic, but push beyond the boundaries of the territory we inhabit, creating weak ties that produce social capital more than strong family and friendship ties.

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The virtual communities have the reassuring function of the archaic community, places to go back to in order to be with other people in a relationship without time, where everything remains stationary and can be resumed at any time or deleted without any remorse. You just have to avoid responding, change your nickname and with one click you can delete a world, a friendship you thought would last, the confidence in a group in which you finally seem to be at home. No regrets, guilt free and, above all, without having to explain yourself. Network communities also have this advantage: of being able to quickly get out of a relationship that you have grown tired of, which is becoming too cramped or unsatisfactory, and to create another. These are the disposable communities in the liquid world, our prêt-à-porter identities that can be worn and replaced as required. They may even be multiple when interacting with more community networks at the same time, assuming different identities depending on the state of mind of the moment or the want to satisfy different needs. This “multicommunity of use” well provides for the desire to recover a lost identity and experience different conditions as a result of the sense of anguish and loneliness that we cannot shake off. It is more difficult to get rid of the real community, whose ties are never broken, that draws us in, conditions our whole life, even if we leave it, grow up or change jobs. The old opposition between community and society is thus resolved by transferring it to unreality, abandoning the field as in a great strategic retreat and leaving to the tangible society the daunting task of mediating between ethical, legal, religious and political problems created by the need to coexist in a globalised world. According to Michel Maffesoli,6 the crisis of modernity is characterised by a return to archaic forms of socialisation, fostered by the technological development and, in particular, by network communication. Among these archaic forms there is the community, the need 6 | M. Maffesoli, The Time of the Tribes. The Decline of Individualism in Mass Society (1988) trans. Don Smith, Sage, 1996.

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to forge strong ties based on common interests, empathy, willingness to believe in the same values, which are no longer ideological values, but emotional values, personal needs, selfstatements, areas of the imaginary. Values rediscovered or constructed artificially in a narrow field and lived by as self-imposed rules, which make you think – just as in a definition dear to Maffesoli – tribal rituals. The building up of a culture and common values to be used within a privileged group, with its own language and symbols, in which they can identify themselves. The need for identification, which was lost with the postindustrial work ethic, is temporarily recuperated in the communities of the imaginary or immaterial. Alain Touraine writes that “Inter-cultural communication is possible only if the Subject has already succeeded in escaping from its community.”7 In recent years, it has become increasingly apparent that the subject (the individual or the social being, now distinguishable from the mass) has freed himself from all ties with the community. Not only because the territorial scope of the community has expanded dramatically, but because the community has lost its roots with the territory and has become “exportable”. Therefore, we can no longer talk of ties with the territory: community disengages itself from its physical, material relationship with the country and the earth and is configured as belonging to an idea of self within a culture, a set of traditions, a “modus vivendi”, which is the sum of what has been, what is and what will be. Everyone has an idea of himself in relation to the world, that is not lost with change or in moving elsewhere or in crossing borders, but it has become a “portable” idea, exportable from one place to another, because everywhere he is able to recognise himself and be recognised in the extreme variety of “multilocalisms”, i.e. in the coexistence of groups, cultures, ethnicities and different ways of living that make up the new liquid society in perpetual transformation.

7 | A. Touraine, Can We Live Together? Equality and Difference, trans. David Macey, Polity, 2000, p. 169.

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2. M ultilocalism or cosmopolitism ? Cosmopolitanism is a requisite to become citizens of the world, albeit a globalised world, with no borders or, at least, with permeable borders. Crossing over borders to look for a job or a better life forces you to exit from a limited perspective, one defined by a community and a culture, and deal with new points of view from which to observe reality. Migrating, in the broadest sense of this verb, means to travel from one place to another, not just occasionally, and stop only for a limited period and then go on the move once more. It is a new philosophy of life that is far from the permanence necessary to the industrial and agricultural economy, when settling down in a given place was the necessary and sufficient condition to thrive, cultivate the land and raise children or work as a labourer in the nearby workshop or factory. For a long time this close link with the territory was an indication of the evolved condition of a primitive society of nomads, because it allowed them to both forge a strong bond with nature and to maintain close relations with the inhabitants of the same place, whose union served to safeguard the common values of their culture and tradition. Unlike the nomadic populations, those who settled had the opportunity to create a stable and fruitful relationship with their neighbours: it is not possible to create a tradition without stability and the routine repetition of carrying out the same activities over time and in the place where the future generations will form blood ties and strong relationships with the other members of the community. On the absolute solidity of “blood and soil”, civilisations, empires, ideologies and reactionary demands have been built, that have simply made reference to the “naturalness” of the wild man, without taking into account that that naturalness was not necessarily compatible with permanence. Early man was rather an eternal migrant, forced to move constantly because of adverse climatic conditions, famine, geological

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changes, floods, volcanic eruptions, invasions and pressures from more aggressive populations. The migration process involves the transfer of cultures, of the relative support (language, religion, but also the instruments of work) that every migrant carries with him to the place where he decides to settle. Unlike the sedentary groups, who tend to jealously preserve their culture and to close circle in defence of the privileges they have acquired (property, interests, rights of land use, access control, social relations based on blood ties), migrants have to deal with the culture with which they come into contact: they are necessarily open to this, with the result that they learn how to assimilate the new, but also to modify the existing culture within the host country. In modern cosmopolitanism, as explained by Ulrich Beck,8 it is this relationship, possibly even a confrontational one, which is created between the different cultures that come into contact as a result of migration processes, that will not necessarily become burned out in the integration process, i.e. in the definitive homogenisation and in the obliteration of differences within the same country. Cosmopolitanism presupposes a creative and continuing contrast with different cultures, together with the creation of a new formula of “collective vision” of the other, which inevitably arises at a supranational level. Multilocalism, on the other hand, is something else: it is the ability to live in more different and distant places as if they were one’s own; to influence them and be influenced by both. They both are independent of the territorial aspect, of the indissoluble bond with the land and seem to be representative of the tendency of the present society to live the experience of globalisation as an opportunity and not as a defeat. Tomorrow’s society will be a society of migrant men and women who still choose to move autonomously along the roads of the world, not out of obligation, nor because of political or economic obligation, but to seek out new opportunities for personal development, growth and general improvement in their conditions 8 | U. Beck, The Cosmopolitan Vision, trans. Ciaran Cronin, Polity, 2006.

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of life. In short, cosmopolitanism is the good face of globalisation; the affirmation of a fundamental principle that goes beyond the narrow limits of sedentary society and opens up the prospect of a new way of living, forging ties that are weak and not permanent, and constantly calling into question one’s own attitudes and assumptions. It is seen in the constructive perspective offered by liquid society, i.e. assuming uncertainty as a positive value that allows you to grow and face the challenges of the future. Unlike cosmopolitanism (a voluntary choice), cosmopolitanisation, i.e. the transfer of the effects of globalisation on society and culture, is instead determined by a programmatic, top-down imposition, passively endured by the population under global change of an economic and social nature, whose consequences may prove disastrous. Cosmopolitanisation involves everyone, eliminates boundaries, breaks down barriers, brings faraway people and cultures together, allows them to share the same fate; it is the simultaneous inclusion/ exclusion of the other (distant) and thus marks the end of the other global that lies between us, but does not eliminate the differences. On the contrary, it increases them. It makes us more than ever dependent on each other, radicalising the social differences within the same place; distances lose their importance, the hic et nunc is dilated in an eternal present that extends worldwide, in the proclaimed insistence of favouring the so-called integration, which postulates the cancellation of diversity and integration with the resident people. Such a process is less and less sought after and disrespectful of different cultures: however, respect for differences should not be an excuse to justify inequality, which is what happens in the case of “multiculturalism”, i.e. in the mere acknowledgement of the coexistence of different cultures in the same place. Zygmunt Bauman has serious misgivings towards multiculturalism, which he calls “indifference to difference”9: he denounces it as an act of social hypocrisy that, while asserting the respect and dignity of cultural diversity on the one hand, on the other hand, the conditions 9 | Z. Bauman, Community, cit.

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of immigrants are left unchanged, denying them a share in the resources and reinforcing the de facto inequality. The progressive and massive rapprochement between different cultures and peoples, however, is also, unfortunately, the cause of manifestations of racism, rejection and violence. The fact that there is no need for a process of integration does not rule out the risk of exclusion, present in different forms, which is not less injurious to human dignity. Its most critical issues are apparent in social inequality, in the huge and growing differences that make the rich richer and the poor poorer, more vulnerable and fragile. The cultural differences thwart any relationship between the rich and the poor; individuals end up not by interacting, living according to their own ways, ignoring the others, those who do not count. People may live near each other, but they often ignore and fail to communicate with each other. They become more and more “distant”, despite living next to each other in the same city, or a few metres away from one other. This too is a form of exclusion that takes place within the same country and that makes the difference. This detached and silent acceptance of false integration is the more odious of cosmopolitanisation. So where does it all stem from, this anxiety to assimilate/ integrate, and make equal at all costs, without ensuring that equality is effectively put into practice and is not only a formality? It is likely a direct consequence of nationalism, dating back to the need of the modern state to give itself a definite identity, where the population is as homogeneous and recognisable as the traditions, language, religion, laws and culture. Today, inequality cannot be considered on a national basis, but involves the entire globe: every evaluation at a local level is the result of a nationalistic vision of the problem. Beck emphasises the magnitude of the effects of cosmopolitanisation in a world marked by increasing inequality, but also the risks contemporary society runs by persevering in its idea of modernity. He affirms that modernity, taking a different stance from Bauman, which we experience in a liquid society, is a blueprint for suicide: it is now

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more necessary than ever to retrace our steps and rethink our future. “The principle of performance legitimates national inequality, while the principle of the nation state legitimates global inequality [...] The inequalities within national societies are greatly magnified in their perception; at the same time, inequalities between national societies are blurred. The ‘legitimacy’ of global inequalities, therefore, rests on an institutionalised ‘turning a blind eye’.”10 Nationalism involves the assimilation, just as the annulment, of diversity. Something that has to do with egalitarianism, the bad conscience of equality that produces, in the words of Goethe, a Falsche Subjectivität, a false subjectivity of individualism. “Goethe foresees the dilemma of modern bourgeois society – as Leo Löwenthal writes – in its timeless historicity up to our time: on the one hand, a pattern of consumeristically and conformistically orientated behaviour, the bad conscience of equality and egalitarianism, which annihilates the nuances and denies the individual and the idiosyncratic and, on the other, a bad concept of subjectivity [...] that does not conceive of the individual as essential to the development of a unified, moral and intellectual way to behave and live with others, but as a clandestine realm, in which individuals only pursue their own ends, and in the overestimation or underestimation of which, what is obtained is, at the same time, again dispersed in the massification of society.”11 Where assimilation is not possible, the result is removal or rejection: one who is perceived as “different” and therefore potentially threatening or disturbing, from the moment when he alters the pattern dictated by the nation, is banished, repatriated, refused permission to cross borders or locked up, segregated in a secure location and then forgotten.

10 | U. Beck, Die Neuvermessung der Ungleichheit unter den Menschen, cit., p. 13. 11 | L. Löwenthal, “Goethe and False Subjectivity” (1982), in Telos, 60, Summer 1984; now in Schriften, Band IV: Judaica, Vorträge, Briefe, ed. Helmut Dubiel, Suhrkamp, 1990, pp. 106–120.

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The national community has these two alternatives at its disposal to achieve their egalitarian project: assimilation or exclusion. Separation from the social fabric, as with prison, the modern invention of controlled exclusion, amounts to a “removal” of the problem and can be read in a psychoanalytic way, forgetting what constitutes an unsolvable problem. Sociologically, it is the strength of a cultural pressure needed to persuade those who offer resistance, but also to justify adherence to conformity, as good practice to enjoy freedom and other benefits that living in the community has to offer. Therefore, to conformism an ethical value is assigned, spread through education and the repression of anomalies. There is no culture of diversity, which, though understandable (but not excusable) in nationalism, has no reason to exist in an advanced society, in which it is becoming increasingly clear that the idea of nation is surpassed. Conformity gives way to a variant of egalitarianism: there is a great deal of talk about integration as a solution to the problems of immigration, but it is nothing more than the well-meaning face of forced assimilation, which requires that those who have “differences” – whether they come from outside or from within the country is not important – give up their diversity and accept the cultural norms in force, so as to render them “harmless”, indistinguishable from the rest of the population. Herein lies the fragility of the promise of equality within the nation-state: eliminate formal differences, exercise power over a population of similar beings to whom the same laws apply and from whom the same behaviour is required, but at the same time glossing over living conditions, and economic and social factors that instead make the difference. For this reason, the issue of inequality stops at state borders. It does not go beyond, but looks with short-sighted eyes only within its own territories, subject to national sovereignty, according to the principles of the indisputable post-Westphalian model.

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With regard to international inequalities, Max Weber had already explained their maintenance with the principle of “legitimacy”,12 that modern states apply strictly to the national context, with the implicit recognition that inequality outside national borders is not “politically relevant”, in that it is not perceivable socially. This observation of Weber’s, with hindsight, no longer corresponds to reality, since the internal differences within individual Western countries have become more conspicuous and significant with respect to the external ones, among different countries. Until a couple of decades ago, this phenomenon was foreseeable and has developed with incredible speed because of globalisation. One of the causes of this change is the opening of borders, or rather their “permeability” to financial transactions, which, until a few years ago, were restricted to national level and regulated by a system of laws that restricted their scope. According to what Wolfgang Streeck effectively defines “the age-old tension that has always affected capitalism and democracy”,13 the function of the modern state has always been understood in the sense of ensuring a balance between two, otherwise irreconcilable sides, by granting limited freedom to democracy and curbing the aggressive interests of an unstoppable capitalism. This is no longer possible with the introduction of so-called deregulation, where it is felt more strongly, recalls Beck, “the emancipation of economic interests from constraints and from national audit institutions. This means the separation of dominion from politics.”14 This reference to Weber’s concept of the capitalist rationalisation of the economy, carried out at the supranational level, is particularly important, in the well-known

12 | M. Weber, Economy and Society, 1 vol., ed. G. Roth and C. Wittich, California UP, 2013. 13 | W. Streeck, Buying Time: The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, trans. Patrick Camiller, Verso, 2014, p. 57. 14 | U. Beck, Die Neuvermessung der Ungleichheit unter den Menschen, cit., p. 20.

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“separation between domestic and business administration”.15 For Weber, modern capitalism is characterised by this fundamental distinction which, however, when transferred to the administrative practice of the modern state, does not allow an effective control of economic choices, which are left to float above the national territories. It is in what Bauman will develop in the concept of “separation of politics and power”, with information more specifically related to economic policy: among the lost powers of the modern state this is the most painful sacrifice. It has the greatest and most widespread repercussions for the citizens. In addition to the separation of power and politics, the opening of borders has also led to other consequences, which could be called “side effects”, but it should be made clear that this international permeability was not intended to encourage immigration, but rather for other purposes not declared openly that are hidden by the extraordinary, large-scale cross-border flow: focusing the problems of globalisation on migration flows, singling out these as being responsible for the crisis, is both an attempt at diverting attention away from the real issue, as well as being racist. But today, something unimaginable is happening, something that globalisation, in its various forms, had not foreseen. If the opening of borders has brought to light the problem of management of migratory flows, the process of cosmopolitanisation in course shows that exclusion has taken other directions. In reality, no one can ever be excluded in the proper sense of the word, not even those who live in faraway countries, since they are reachable by the Internet, by the new technologies, by multinational corporations that saturate every market and lead to equality of consumption. It is the territory that loses its configuration as an exclusive container of a culturally defined community; it becomes the crossroads of flows, a place of exchange where the multitudes establish relationships, live side by side for a longer or shorter time, without losing their identity. 15 | M. Weber, The Sociology of Religion, ed. Talcott Parsons, Beacon Press, 1993.

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Breaking the close relationship between community and territory, of citizenship (connected to belonging to the nation), consequently, also the problem of integration begins to crumble: predominant communities no longer exist, nor do superior cultures in which integration is necessary in order to survive. Today, a more open vision towards “multilocal” prevails. While cosmopolitanisation is one of the downsides of social transformation, multilocalism represents the positive aspect: it is the product of the desire for change and the need to accept the change that is taking place around us. The summation of identities constructed in the place where we live with those of the places we love, where we have been, but also the places that others have shown us. The multilocal replaces the global because it defends individuality and the right to maintain an emotional bond not only with one place but with several places interacting with each other, which represent our being, our idea of the world. In other words, almost a global that has been reworked and brought back to a manageable scale. Multilocalism is a powerful idea and so innovative that it can exceed the scope of globalisation and affirm the original perspective of a multitude that is certainly not uniform and indistinct, but made up of different people that share the same place in which to live. The temporal logic assumes a greater significance than the spatial: in multilocalism, relationships develop with increasing complexity for a limited time, regardless of the place. Personal identity is no longer connected to territory and is not distressed by the invasion of other ethnic groups, or by destabilising social or religious groups. This perspective expresses the real possibility of coexistence between different identities and cultures, who are characterised by not wishing to enter into conflict, given that they have forfeited an exclusive link with the place, a logic of domination that envisages an appropriation of the territory in which the community has established itself and has, over time, planted its cultural roots. The so-called diasporic communities composed of migrants (we no longer speak of immigrants, since they are not favourably disposed towards a definitive relocation) who move freely within the

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territory do not need to give up their identity. After leaving their homeland, they bring with them their native culture, preserving its essential characteristics; they reject integration that would force them to embrace the customs of the host country, not out of ingratitude, but because this “resistance” is the only opportunity to cross borders without erasing their own identity, their own history and their own humanity.

3. U rbanisation and globalisation Urbanisation is a phenomenon of great social significance, which mainly took place because of the Industrial Revolution, when millions of people left the countryside to settle in the vicinity of the factories, on the suburbs of the industrial cities. People have always moved in search of work, moving away from their places of origin, even more than once during their lifetimes, in search of employment opportunities and better living conditions. The phenomenon we have been witnessing for some time now – the great mass migrations from the poorest countries, especially from Africa, towards the most economically developed countries – looks more and more like an industrial revolution overturned. Vast masses of migrants converge on the city, in the anonymous constellations of shopping centres in the suburbs, between the intersections of the major routes of communication (motorways, railways, airports), but also in the degraded historical centres. They come not only from neighbouring countries or from the developing ones but also from within the same country: they leave the countryside, the villages and small towns where there is no work to be found and seek refuge in the big cities, in the hope of finding new opportunities to enable them to start over. In the cities it is easier to find food, sustenance, some sort of makeshift accommodation and a minimum of solidarity that naturally arises among those who share the same fate.

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Thus, we have two migratory flows: from the inside and from the outside. Two different backgrounds settling in the same places and with the same basic motivations in common: to change in order to survive. Driven by the desire for liberation from need, by the hope for improvement, but as a result of their voluntary transfer, regardless of their origin, the migrants end up becoming social outcasts. People who, in their own community, had an identity, led a dignified existence, albeit poor, and who were recognised and respected suddenly find themselves stripped of their humanity, made anonymous and viewed with suspicion, distrust and, at best, with compassion. Marginalisation is the price to pay for a choice that has become necessary in order to survive. And identity is a burden that can mean repatriation: the Harragas, migrants from the Maghreb coast of North Africa, challenging the “wall of the Mediterranean”, are forced to give up and become anonymous human beings and stateless persons. “The harragas – writes Branko Milanovic – are ‘those who burn their papers’, but we could also call them ‘those who erase the borders’. They burn their documents to confuse the police forces of the European countries when they try to deport them: it is difficult to understand whether a harga (the singular of harragas) comes from Morocco, Algeria or Tunisia.”16

It is also highly unlikely that the journey undertaken comes to a successful conclusion: every year hundreds of people do not make it and lose their lives at sea. The most desired destinations for those who manage to enter Europe are often the major cities, real mirages of well-being which both the internal and external migrations flow into. After an apparent reversal in the process of urbanisation, which had seen substan16 | B. Milanovic, The Haves and the Have-Nots. A Brief Idiosyncratic History of Global Inequality, Basic Books, 2011.

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tial movement from metropolitan cities as a result of de-industrialisation and the emergence of a cultural trend in favour of a return to country life, the revaluation of small towns far from traffic and pollution, now the flow of migrants goes back to crowd the cities. It is a global phenomenon that affects all countries and all the major populated areas, where all the business and trade activities are concentrated. In contrast to the urbanisation of the industrial revolution of the eighteenth century, migration to the big cities today is not a choice made out of the need to find work, but out of desperation. Industrial centres used to be hungry for a general labour force: now there is no call for it, there are no offers of work or, if there are, they are mainly for highly skilled workers. Those who arrive without any financial resources and marketable skills have to adapt to a disadvantaged state of poverty. The cities now take on the function of shelters offering basic necessities to those who no longer have anything to lose; real lifelines in the desert created by globalisation, by the economic crisis, by profound changes that disrupt the social order and exacerbate differences, opening chasms of inequality which are unprecedented in human history. The alarm comes mainly from Africa and Asia: Donald Kaberuka,17 president of the African Development Bank, estimates that by 2030 over 2,7 billion people will have emigrated from their native country to settle elsewhere, thus helping to fuel the social differences within the same country, since these people will have no choice and will be forced into conditions of marginalisation, with no hope of improvement. This phenomenon of mass urbanisation pushes the flow of migrants mainly to the towns, both large and small, in search of employment and income, where the migrant population is much higher than that recorded by the Industrial Revolution of the 17  |  D. Kaberuka, “The Inequality Nightmare”, in Social Europe Journal, January 13, 2014 (http://www.social-europe.eu/2014/01/inequality-​nightmare/).

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eighteenth century and an impact of unimaginable consequences. It is also Kaberuka points out that populated centres like Mumbai (India), Nairobi (Kenya) and Kinshasa (Congo) are actually small towns surrounded by vast slums – “pockets of wealth in a sea of despair”18 – where a growing number of people amass in search of hope. This trend is not limited only to the cities that Kaberuka stated, but is more closely concerned with the world metropolises, without sparing New York, Tokyo, London, Paris or Rome, and no longer making any distinction between internal and external migration. The outcasts of industrialised society were tolerated because they represented a labour reserve, ready to be used when the need arose. Now, in post-industrial society, there is no need for an extra work force. If anything, the problem is how to get rid of excess workers and replace them with highly sophisticated numerical control machines. There is no integration because there is no work. The phenomenon of internal migration on a global scale is the most topical news in recent years: more important than international migration, of the large population flows moving from country to country, which, however, always begin as internal migrations, from the most remote regions to the coastal areas or towards the borders, where it is easier to leave the country. The World Savvy Monitor confirms that “most migration in the world today is internal”19: it is a continuous movement that continues unabated and will be the most critical emergency in the coming years because it is a unidirectional flow: “The trend towards a concentration of immigrants and ethnic minorities in the centre is also evident in other major cities of the developed world, the well-known case of London to the little-known of Tokyo.” A flow 18 | Ibid. 19 | “Internal Migration”, in World Savvy Monitor, 7 January 2009 (http:// worldsavvy.org /monitor/index.php?option=com_content&view=aric​ le&id=442:inter nal-mig r at ion&cat id=176:special-is sues-in-migr at i​ on&Itemid=848).

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directed mainly to the big cities, the “global cities”, as defined by Saskia Sassen,20 but with a huge difference compared to twenty to thirty years ago: they are not limited to large cities like New York, London, Paris and Tokyo but now extend to many other centres that are inevitably destined to become “global”, possibly even reluctantly so, in so-called developing countries – Africa, South America and the Far East. The very concept of the “global city” is changing, which, according to Sassen, must have an effective system of communications, a hub for international flights, the headquarters of organisations and cultural initiatives of worldwide interest. The new face of “global cities” is characterised more by the increasing urbanisation, an endless flow of internal migrants in search of work, food and social assistance. The city is seen as a dynamic place in which it is easier to survive and find shelter, a privileged place in which global and local meet and where you can rediscover fragments of that community that has all but disappeared. Rather than glittering windows of excessive consumerism, examples of refined technology and testimonies of sophisticated and desirable progress, global cities turn out to be more refuges of humanity in distress – a humanity that does not aspire to high-speed trains, deluxe airplanes, five-star hotels and stunning architecture, but a real opportunity to survive that is denied to them elsewhere. The figures are impressive: already more than half the world’s population – nearly 3 billion, 300 million people – live in urban areas and nearly 1 billion live in slums in the suburbs. From the favelas of Brazil to the Mokattam quarter in Cairo. One can only be in agreement with the statement made by the World Savvy Monitor that “the history of globalisation is the history

20 | S. Sassen, “The Global City: Introducing a Concept”, in Brown Journal of World Affairs, 11(2), 2005, pp. 27–43; Id., The Global City. New York, London, Tokyo, Princeton UP, 1991.

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of urbanisation”.21 Thus, the “global cities” in frenetic growth as a result of internal migration are no longer New York or Tokyo, but more like Shanghai (with 37 million inhabitants), Lagos (Nigeria) 15 million, Ḍhākā (Bangladesh) 14 million, Mumbai (India) 14 million, São Paulo (Brazil) 11 million, Kinshasa (Congo) 10 million, Kolkata (India) 5 million. These centralising cities, where the highest population density ever recorded before is concentrated – 45,000 inhabitants per km2 in Ḍhākā, 31,000 in Mumbai and 27,000 in Kolkata – in terms of importance, exceed the state and incorporate it within them. At the same time, the distances between global cities are increasing dramatically, leaving the surrounding territories empty and turning them into anthropic deserts that will be “skimmed over” in fast means of transport, where the brevity of the trip makes us indifferent to the landscape. If modernity has spread the population all over the country, in an attempt to unify it in terms of language, religion, laws and culture, within strictly defined boundaries, facilitating the process of equality, the crisis of modernity has resulted instead in a reversal of the process of nationalisation, going back to centralising the collective interest in the cities, eliminating the boundaries and being open to exchange. Contrary to what one might have expected, globalisation has not meant a “dispersion” of the population over larger areas, but rather its concentration in the most important urban centres: a sort of retreat to defensive positions, which has significant consequences at a political level. First of all, the inconsistency of a national policy, its loss of importance and therefore its worthlessness in consideration of a supranational policy that slipped from the hands of democratic control and came under the rule of the strong powers of finance, of the multinational corporations and the elites that are above and not subject to national laws.

21 | “The Story of Globalization Is the Story of Urbanization”, “Internal Migration”, in World Savvy Monitor, 7 January 2009, cit.

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For a long time Bauman has spoken of the separation of politics and power: a correct observation of the state of transition between modernity and a future in the making. On closer inspection, this divorce between power and policy concerns the national level in particular, while they remain firmly married – a marriage of convenience, obviously – on a global scale. At this level, however, there is no link with the recipients of any political decision, that “fiduciary bond” which legitimises the action taken and which we define with the term “democracy”. In the absence of proxy, or if this is granted by implication or by an official source, there is absolutely no possibility of control from the lower end: the population ends up having to passively abide by it, without understanding the reasons for the decisions and for the sacrifices enforced on them, and with no possibility to oppose it. It is a clear phenomenon of de-democratisation that is made possible by the elimination of nations, i.e. those sociopolitical boundaries within which the democratic relationship with power is exercised, which is now so distant and so anonymous as to be alien. However, thanks to centralisation in the cities, politics has found a space in which to re-establish itself. As Saskia Sassen quite rightly reminds us, the only occasion in which politics can have room to manoeuver and maintain a direct relationship with the citizen is the local or regional sphere.22 Here, albeit reduced in proportion and in accordance with the rules imposed by the global powers, politics can still give its contribution to the management of the community. It does so by following the rules of democracy, but with limited power whereby it is not allowed out of the city environment, nor can it oppose the great laws of economics, whose definition eludes them. We can no longer speak of a separation between power and politics in a general sense, but of an exasperation of it between infinitely large and infinitely small, where the “middle state”, which 22 | S. Sassen, “Towards Post-national and Denationalized Citizenship”, in Handbook of Citizenship Studies, eds. Engin F. Isin and Bryan S. Turner, Sage, 2003, p. 278.

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was previously the norm, the rule of the good living, has been erased forever. What remains is the “small” democracy, which has to make do with the management of this great condominium: the global cities. But the very concept of democracy has reached a turning point, in the face of another one of those “great divisions” that allow the citizens to grow and adapt to the needs of a changing society. Just as, at the time of Tocqueville, a broader and more liberal concept was adopted – in the American tradition – of equal rights and opportunities, now the “old” liberal democracy is too inadequate to deal with the complexity of the liquid world.

4. The destiny of global cities The flows are multidirectional and follow the tracks of momentary development; they are uncontrollable and unpredictable, and more and more complex in their composition, behaviour and condition. They concern people who are strongly determined not to integrate, to maintain their habits, their culture and their laws, while respecting the diversity of others, which in any case is their duty. They will be a growing problem for the cities that have welcomed them. Already, according to Bauman, cities are comparable to garbage cans into which all the problems that have emerged from the process of globalisation have been randomly and haphazardly poured.23 Already, cities are responding to this emergency by acting on their own initiative and without the intervention of the state, thus becoming real laboratories in which the appropriate instruments to solve social problems are produced, tested and applied without any project coordinated by a higher authority, with no supervision or monitoring. Thus, the cities fulfil the dual function of being both the receiver and a surrogate agency: the receiver of the migratory flows, 23 | Z. Bauman, Community, cit.

The lost community

surrounded by an ever-growing population belt in need of more and more attention, and an agency/laboratory for the problems created by globalisation. All within an inert and formal desert (but not free of charge to the public): the modern state is the great absentee; it has lost its function as a collector and distributor of national wealth, political/economic coordinator of a defined territorial space in which to exercise national sovereignty following the tried and tested postWestphalian model. The elimination of borders, the globalisation of the economy, the freeing of financial markets from territory and from state control, but especially the drastic separation of politics and power, namely the power to choose and to make decisions and the ability to implement them, have transformed the modern state into a Leviathan without arms, that is, devoid of the executive instruments that allow it to exercise its authority in its territory. Therefore, the cities are forced to compensate for the lack of an agency and assume the burden of the impending critical issues that can no longer be postponed. Weighed down by growing urbanisation, by the need to resolve these issues locally and with the availability of limited means, the enormous challenges of a globalised, multicultural world devoid of centrality is dangerously close to the organisational structure of the “city-state” of ancient Greece, but with the addition of greater open-mindedness towards the outside. This could be possible if you look at the importance that cities are taking on at world level, even if they have to cope with the problems created by migration and the ensuing uncontrolled urbanisation. The developed or developing cities attract large numbers of people, attracted by the mirage of a better life. These are lights in the dark, headlights in the fog of the economic crisis. The most striking consequence is the drastic decrease in the economic differences between different countries: but it is not an improvement, because – as we have seen – this levelling of international differences is correlated to an increase in internal inequality. To come across scenes of degradation and misery you no longer need to travel to the outskirts of Mombasa or the favelas in Brazil: you just have to go to

117

118

Interregnum

the outskirts of a metropolis, to the shadow of the skyscrapers, next to a six-lane highway or under the noisy, steel viaducts on which the high-speed trains run. The third world (if it can still be called that) is here with us, no longer relegated to the most remote regions of the planet. It spread as a result of globalisation and has become a problem for all of us. Also, mayors and their cities are called upon to deal with this, to strive to resolve these issues locally and with the availability of limited means, the enormous challenges of a globalised, multicultural world devoid of centrality It is not a coincidence that Benjamin Barber can speak of the enormous importance that the mayors are acquiring in the global context,24 with a position of prominence and centrality in an unknowable world, insecure and lacking certainty. The city embodies the positive values of the community: the lost bond with the territory (amplified beyond the limits reached by the new means of communication and transport), creativity, cultural tradition, social solidarity, multilocalism and respect for diversity. But it has to come to grips with the emergent critical issues in this unique condition: mainly the social inequality on the inside: the coexistence of people in the same place, a few tens of metres away from each other, whose incomes, lifestyles and living conditions are extremely diversified. Cities are increasingly more a point of reference, a safe haven at which to land. In the general unease of a globalisation that erases the identity of places, cultures and traditions, they have the merit of preserving the integrity of a community albeit enlarged. Individuals have the opportunity to regain the lost identity that the principle of globalisation seemed to have swept away forever. However, this defensive position, this eager search for communitas in which to find oneself, does not mean, as François Lenglet 25 believes, that the era of globalisation is over and that there is return 24 | B. Barber, If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities, Yale UP, 2013. 25 | F. Lenglet, La Fin de la Mondialisation, Fayard, 2013.

The lost community

to the local, to home, when the after-effects of a solemn hangover have passed. Globalisation has not been a fleeting moment of intoxication, but a far-reaching change that has radically modified the way we communicate, think and relate to people far away. On the economic front it has changed the mode of production and trade, of financial markets and employment relationships: even though now we are witnessing a reversal of the trend (or rather, adjustment) that Lenglet records in many American industries that decided to relocate their production within national boundaries. That does not mean wiping out in one fell swoop the global revolution that globalisation has triggered. It would be difficult to return to the status quo ante, to the closure of borders, to the politically controlled economy before deregulation, but above all, it would be impossible to stop the great migration process that is changing the demographic and cultural reality of Western countries. In the new city-states with their unprecedented composition, in addition to the preservation of local tradition, there will still be a need to respect diversity in all its subtleties, also with regard to inequality, which, instead of diminishing will, unfortunately, see an increase. In this “interregnum” – as Bauman puts it, taking inspiration from Gramsci26 – in this sort of space–time interval characterised by the liquefaction of society, corresponding to a “long goodbye” to modernity in crisis, this represents a huge void of power and values that leaves the individual at the mercy of events, a prey to the insecurity and fear for what the future holds. As in all the interregnums that precede great epochal transformations (the last of which is well documented is the industrial revolution), men – by nature – suffer to the point of not being able to see the end and lose all hope. Thus, every age builds up its own future and the world to come after this “interregnum” will be determined by the choices and actions of those who live it.

26 | Z. Bauman, C. Bordoni, State of Crisis, cit., p. 99.

119

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Interregnum

As a result of a strange, general tendency, the more globalisation advances, broadening the space for manoeuvre and dissolving boundaries, the more people tend to polarise in small spaces, to settle around cities of refuge, recognisable points of reference, almost seeking human contact to meet their need for unity, certainty, comfort and safety. Globalisation is a process of desertification that burns the ground on which it passes and wipes out any anthropological traces. For now, and as long as there are potential differences between different nations – not yet globalised – the multinationals will continue to relocate and move elsewhere in search of tax benefits, moderate regulations and lower costs. But when the planet is entirely levelled, a reversal will take place: something like that is already happening in the United States. The phenomenon is still sporadic and limited, but it is an indicator of a turnaround. This does not mean that globalisation is over or has failed, but rather that it is completing its process and will continue to do so until the world is completely uniform and perfectly undifferentiated, where the goal of equality can be reached, at least from certain points of view. Cities, therefore, represent the last stand for uniformity, a sort of “Fort Apache” where people fight so as not to succumb, a safe place where there is still a guarantee of difference, where tradition is cultivated, where the idea of community is transferred, with all the difficulties that this move entails and where all these diversities are allowed to coexist, concentrated into a very limited space, with reciprocal respect. They no longer have walls of stone and have no doors or drawbridges, but multi-coloured belts of refugees, migrants and marginalised people who surround them in ever-widening circles and make them into megalopolises built on destitution and despair and comfort. This will be the face of the great cities of tomorrow: places for wounded humanity to stop off, waiting for returning to the path of hope.

References

Acemoglu, D., Robinson, J. A., Why Nations Fail, Profile Books, 2012. Barber, B., If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities, Yale UP, 2013. Bauman, Z., Modernity and the Holocaust, Blackwell, 1989. Bauman, Z., In Search of Politics, Polity, 1999. Bauman, Z., Community: Seeking Safety in an Insecure World, Polity, 2000. Bauman, Z., Liquid Modernity, Polity, 2000. Bauman, Z., 44 Letters from the Liquid Modern World, Polity, 2010. Bauman, Z., Memories of Class. The Pre-history and After-Life of Class (1982), Routledge, 2010. Bauman, Z., Bordoni, C., State of Crisis, Polity, 2014. Beck, U., Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (1986), Sage, 1992. Beck, U., The Cosmopolitan Vision, Polity, 2006. Beck, U., Die Neuvermessung der Ungleichheit unter den Menschen, Suhrkamp, 2008. Beck, U., German Europe (2012), Polity, 2013. Beck, U., World Risk Society, Polity, 1999. Benjamin, W., Illuminations, ed. H. Arendt, Schocken Books, 1969. Bentham, J., Panopticon; or, the Inspection-House (1791), Dodo Press, 2008. Canetti, E., Crowds and Power (1960), Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984. Castells, M., Networks of Outrage and Hope, Polity, 2012. Clastres, P., “Le devoir de parole”, in Nouvelle Revue de Psychanalyse (Pouvoirs), 8, 1973.

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Clastres, P., Society Against the State: Essays in Political Anthropology (1974), Zone Books, 1990. Crouch, C., Post-democracy, Polity, 2004. Derrida, J., Writing and Difference (1967), Routledge, 2001. Durkheim, E., The Division of Labour in Society (1893), Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Durkheim, E., The Rules of Sociological Method (1895), The Free Press, 2014. Ehrenberg, A., The Weariness of the Self: Diagnosing the History of Depression in the Contemporary Age, McGill-Queen’s UP, 2009. Eisenstadt, S. N., The Political Systems of Empires (1963), Transactions, 1993. Eisenstadt, S. N., Multiple Modernities, Transaction, 2002. Elias, n., The Society of Individuals (1987), Continuum, 2001. Foucault, M., Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975), Penguin, 1991. Foucault, M., The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-1979, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Freud, S., Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (1920), Penguin, 2003. Galbraith, J. K., The Affluent Society (1958), Penguin, 1999. Gallino, L., Il colpo di stato di banche e governi. L’attacco alla democrazia in Europa, Einaudi, 2013. Gallino, L., Il denaro, il debito e la doppia crisi, Einaudi, 2015. Gehlen, A., Man in the Age of Technology (1957), Columbia UP, 1989. Giddens, A., The Consequences of Modernity, Polity, 1991. Giddens, A., The Politics of Climate Change, Polity, 2013. Giglioli, D., Stato di minorità, Laterza, 2015. Gordimer, N., The Essential Gesture. Writing, Politics and Places (1988), Penguin, 1989. Gorz, A., The Immaterial (2003), University of Chicago Press, 2010. Gramsci, A., Prison Notebooks, ed. Joseph A. Buttigieg, Columbia UP, 2011. Habermas, J., The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1985), Polity, 1990.

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Hardt, M., Negri, A., Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, Penguin, 2004. Hardt, M., Negri, A., Declaration, Argo-Navis, 2012. Hegel, G. W. F., Phenomenology of Spirit, ed. A. V. Miller, Oxford. UP, 1976. Hobbes, Th., De Cive. The Citizen (1642), CreateSpace Independent, 2013. Hobbes, Th., Leviathan (1651), Oxford Paperbacks, 2008. Jameson, F., A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present, Verso, 2002. Kaberuka, “The Inequality Nightmare”, in Social Europe Journal, January 13, 2014 (http://www.social-europe.eu/2014/01/inequalitynightmare/). Koselleck, R., Begriffsgeschichten: Studien zur Semantik und Pragmatik der politischen und sozialen Sprache, Suhrkamp, 2011. Koselleck, R., Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (1979), ed. Keith Tribe, Columbia UP, 2004. Lasch, Ch., The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations, Norton, 1991. Lenglet, F., La Fin de la Mondialisation, Fayard, 2013. Losurdo, D., La lotta di classe. Una storia politica e filosofica, Laterza, 2013. Löwenthal, L., Schriften, Band IV: Judaica, Vorträge, Briefe, Suhrkamp, 1990. Lyotard, J.-F., The Postmodern Condition. A Report on Knowledge (1979), Manchester UP, 1984. Maffesoli, M., The Time of the Tribes. The Decline of Individualism in Mass Society (1988), Sage, 1996. Maffesoli, M., Apocalypse, CNRS, 2009. Maffesoli, M., L’ordre des choses. Penser la postmodernité, CNRS, 2014. Marcuse, H., Eros and Civilisation (1955), Sphere Books, 1969. Martuccelli, D., Forgé par l’épreuve. L’individu dans la France contemporaine, Armand Colin, 2006. Marx, K., Capital, Vol. I (1867), Penguin Books, 1990.

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Marx, K., Engels, F., The Marx-Engels Correspondence: The Personal Letters, 1844-77, ed. Fritz J. Raddatz, Littlehampton, 1981. Marx, K., Engels, F., The Communist Manifesto (1848), Penguin, 2004. Merton, R. K., Social Theory and Social Structure (1957), Macmillan, 1968. McLuhan, M., Understanding Media (1964), Routledge, 2001. Milanovic, B., The Haves and the Have-Nots (2011), Basic Books, 2012. Musil, R., The Confusions of Young Törless (1906), Penguin, 2011. Nietzsche, F., The Birth of Tragedy, Oxford Paperbacks, 2008. Ong, W. J., Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, Routledge, 1982. Piketty, Th., Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Harvard UP, 2014. Pinker, S., The Better Angels of Our Nature. A History of Violence and Humanity, Penguin, 2012. Polanyi, K., The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (1944), Beacon Press, 2002. Riesman, D., The Lonely Crowd (1948), Yale UP, 1989. Rifkin, J., The End of Work: The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era (1995), Putnam, 1997. Rorty, R., Philosophy and Social Hope, Penguin, 1999. Rousseau, J.-J., A Discourse on Inequality, Penguin Classics, 1984. Rousseau, J. J., The Social Contract (1762), Oxford, 2008. Runcini, R., Abissi del reale. Per un’estetica dell’eccentrico, Solfanelli, 2012. Sassen, S., The Global City. New York, London, Tokyo, Princeton UP, 1991. Sassen, S., “Towards Post-national and Denationalized Citizenship”, in E. F. Isin and B. S. Turner (eds.), Handbook of Citizenship Studies, Sage, 2003. Sassen, S., “The Global City: Introducing a Concept”, in Brown Journal of World Affairs, 11(2), 2005. Sassen, S., Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages, Princeton UP, 2008.

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Index

A Africa  23, 39, 109, 110, 111, 113 Agency  21, 116, 117 Anomie  20-22, 40 Attali, J.  50 Augé, M.  50

B Baillie, J. B.  24 Barber, B.  116 Basaglia, F.  62, 65 Bauman, Z.  7, 9, 12, 18, 19, 32, 35, 36, 38, 39, 48, 50, 57, 73, 86, 93,100, 101, 105, 113, 114, 117 Beck, U.  38, 50, 82, 99, 101, 102, 104 Benjamin, W.  33 Bennington, G.  45 Bentham, J.  59, 64 Biopolitics 45 Blood and soil  16, 93, 100 Bordoni, C.  36, 39, 117

Bourdieu, P.  50 Bowing, J.  59 Burchell, G.  45 Buttigieg, J. A.  15

C Camiller, P.  104 Canetti, E.  41 Capitalism  68, 75, 78, 88, 106, 107 Castel, R.  50 Church  55, 56, 59 Class  12, 14, 15, 31, 36, 42-44, 47, 49, 50-52, 57, 59, 61, 62, 67-89 Clastres, P.  26-28 Clingman, S.  24 Communitas  91, 93, 95, 96, 118 Community  12, 16, 21, 27, 31, 36, 57, 64, 70, 71, 75, 91-100, 102, 105, 107, 108, 110, 113, 115, 116, 118, 120 Conformity  49, 105

128

Interregnum

Consciousness  24, 25, 42, 70, 76, 78-81, 87, 88, 93, 97 Consumerism  31, 44, 45, 49, 50, 52, 83, 85, 86, 113 Control  19, 21, 23, 31, 36, 4244, 46, 55, 56-60, 62, 64, 85, 101, 107, 112, 114, 115, 117 Copernicus, N.  55 Cosmopolitanism 100-102 Crisis  11, 14, 15, 17-20, 30, 31, 33, 35, 36, 38-42, 44, 45, 50-54, 56, 61-63, 70, 76, 78, 82-84, 86, 98, 106, 107, 111, 114, 117, 119 Cronin, C.  99

D Darwin, Ch.  68 De-democratisation 115 Demassification  25, 31, 36, 4148, 65, 66, 78, 79, 86 Democracy  15, 36, 37, 40, 43, 52, 53, 58, 70, 78, 88, 106, 115, 116 Deregulation  106, 119 Diderot, D.  24 Discrete object  37, 39, 40 Dubiel, H.  102 Durkheim, É.  20, 70, 71, 74

E Economy  9, 38, 50, 68, 77, 88, 100, 106, 117, 119 Education  42, 60-63, 71, 74, 86, 95, 105 Eisenstadt, S. N.  38, 40 Elliott, G.  56 Engels, F.  58, 67, 70, 77, 81, 88 Enlightenment  55, 57, 58, 64, 68, 69 Equality  12, 13, 36, 40, 49, 55, 66, 68-72, 74, 78, 81, 82, 84, 99, 103, 104, 105, 107, 114, 120 Erdogan, R. T.  86 Ethics  9, 12, 16, 22, 52, 55, 59, 60, 69, 74-76, 78, 99, 105 Europe  45, 51, 55-57, 88, 110, 111

F Fascism 19 Foucault, M.  45, 61 Freedom  8, 23, 28, 37, 38, 40, 60, 68, 77, 88, 97, 105, 106 French Revolution  15, 37, 66, 68 Freud, S.  18, 24, 64 Future  11, 14, 16, 22, 23, 27, 31, 33, 39, 52, 54, 62, 69, 70, 91, 100, 102, 104, 115, 119

Index

G Galilei, G.  55 Giglioli, D.  20 Global city  113, 114, 116 Globalisation  14, 18, 28, 36, 86, 96, 101, 102, 106-109, 111, 113, 114, 116, 117-120 Goethe, J. W. von  102 Gordimer, N.  23, 24 Gramsci, A.  9, 14, 15, 18, 19, 23, 117 Great divide  45, 116

H Habermas, J.  12 Halls, W. D.  70 Hardt, M.  43, 72, 80 Harragas 110 Harris, J.  16 Hegel, G. W. F.  24 Heidegger, M.  16, 22, 35, 90 Hobbes, Th.  12, 53, 62 Hobsbawm, E. J.  50 Hurley, R.  27 Hybris  13, 69

I Identity  52, 54, 61, 74, 91, 95, 98, 103, 107-110, 118 Ideology  21, 22, 55, 57, 78, 86, 87

Individual  16, 20, 23, 30, 31, 35, 40-49, 52, 53, 59-65, 66, 76, 86, 92-99, 103, 104, 106, 108, 118, 119 Industrial Revolution  15, 38, 55, 68, 72, 77, 81, 109, 111, 119 Industrialisation  44, 73, 81, 82, 91, 111 Inequality  15, 17, 69, 70-72, 74, 81, 82, 84, 86, 102-106, 110, 111, 117-119 Integration  101-103, 105, 108, 109, 112 Internet  36, 50, 53, 80, 97, 107 Interregnum  9-11, 14-22, 2426, 28-36, 40, 51, 52, 119 Isin, E. F.  113

J Jameson, F.  12

K Kaberuka, D.  109, 110 Kalberg, S.  75 Kathékon 21 Keynesian theory  83, 88 Klee, P.  33 Koselleck, R.  39, 52

129

130

Interregnum

L Labour  38, 56, 70, 73, 74, 76, 78, 91, 100, 111, 112 Lang, F.  62 Legitimacy  71, 104, 106 Lenglet, F.  116 Leviathan  12, 62, 66, 89, 117 Liberalism 78 Liquid modernity  7, 9, 10, 35 Liquidity  7, 8, 9, 10, 18, 19, 29, 31, 32, 35, 39, 51, 52, 84, 86, 95, 98, 99, 102, 103, 116 Loneliness  14, 42, 47, 98 Losurdo, D.  87 Löwenthal, L.  102 Loyola, I. de  55 Lyotard, J.-F.  7, 36, 38, 45

M Macey, D.  50, 97 Maffesoli, M.  96, 97 Manifesto  58, 67, 70, 77, 81 Marcuse, H.  18 Marx, K.  58, 67, 68-70, 72-74, 77, 80-85, 88 Marxism  13, 58, 69 Mass  58-61, 66, 76, 81, 83-85, 98, 99, 109, 111 Mass media  46, 85 Massumi, B.  45 McLuhan, M.  46 Merton, R. K.  20

Middle class  43, 44, 47, 49-51, 57, 68, 73, 75, 77, 78, 85 Migration  36, 101, 105, 107, 109-112, 114, 117, 119 Milanovic, B.  108 Modernity  7-18, 20-23, 31, 33-41, 48, 50, 52, 53, 55-67, 70-77, 82, 84, 90, 98, 103, 114, 115, 119 Morin, E.  50 Multiculturalism 102 Multilocalism  99, 101, 108, 118 Multiple modernities  38, 40 Multitude  42-44, 48, 52, 53, 72, 86, 93, 107, 108 Musil, R.  62

N Nazism  38, 92 Negri, A.  43, 72, 80 Network  79, 80, 97, 98 Nietzsche, F.  15, 16, 35, 89, 90

O Obama, B.  51 Occupy Wall Street  53, 80, 87 Ong, W. J.  25 Overclass 87

Index

P Panopticon 59 Parsons, T.  40, 105 Pinker, S.  17 Pleasure principle  18, 19 Politics  8, 21, 24, 25, 27-29, 44, 45, 48, 53, 68, 78, 106, 107, 115, 117 Postmodernism  7, 16, 34, 35, 42, 45 Power  8, 9, 12, 13, 15, 17-21, 25-29, 41, 45-48, 52, 55, 57, 58, 60, 61, 67, 70, 77, 78, 80, 89, 105, 107, 108, 114, 115, 117, 119 Progress  9, 12, 13, 22, 31, 39, 40, 46, 49, 57, 58, 62, 68, 71, 94, 113 Proletariat  49, 57, 58, 68-72, 77, 78, 80, 81, 83, 84, 88 Putin, V.  86

R Raddatz, F. J.  81 Reality principle  18, 19 Reformation  55, 75 Religion  12, 13, 21, 39, 56, 57, 69, 75, 84, 101, 103, 107, 114 Revolution  13, 23, 30, 56, 58, 66, 68, 75, 88, 119 Ricardo, D.  77 Rorty, R.  50, 87

Roth, G.  104 Rousseau, J.-J.  15, 69, 71 Rousseff, D.  86 Runcini, R.  56

S Sassen, S.  111, 113 Second world war  62 Sennett, R.  50, 78 Sheridan, A.  61 Smith, D.  15 Smith, Don  96 Societas  91, 93, 96 Solidarity  20, 21, 53, 64-66, 72, 78, 79, 93, 109, 118 Spinoza, B.  48, 91 Statu nascent  34 Stein, A.  27 Stewart, C.  41 Streeck, W.  104 Struggle of class  36, 67-69, 72, 73, 77, 78, 85, 87, 88 Subjectivity  46, 104

T Technology  13, 26, 45, 53, 68, 83, 94, 113 Tester, K.  18 Therborn, G.  17 Thompson, E. P.  73 Tocqueville, A. de  114

131

132

Interregnum

Tönnies, F.  16, 89, 90 Totalitarism  37, 41, 44-46, 5962, 76, 88 Touraine, A.  22, 50, 56, 97 Tribe, K.  39 Trilling, L.  24 Turner, B. S.  113 Turner, V.  90, 91, 93, 94, 113

U Urbanisation  41, 56, 76, 79, 109-111, 113, 114, 117 Utopia  13, 69, 91

V Veblen, Th.  85 Violence  15-17, 27, 29, 36, 41, 60, 68, 69, 103 Virno, P.  43

W Wagner, P.  37-40 Weber, M.  8, 40, 75, 82, 104, 105 Welfare  40, 50, 51, 83 Westphalia  12, 82, 105, 117 Wittich, C.  104

Z Zohn, H.  33