Post-Society : Social Life After the Pandemic 9781509553907, 9781509553914

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Praise for Post-Society ‘Post-Society is a concise and profound reflection on the state of our world, trying to grasp how we have slowly shifted away from modernity and how the rules that bind individuals to society have been redefined. Our confused and anxiety-ridden world needs sobering analyses of the kind Post-Society so illuminatingly offers.’ Eva Illouz, University of Jerusalem ‘This thoughtful analysis offers glimpses into what ‘the next society’ might become when physical distancing is paired up with intense communication and emotions play a dominant role. Despite the voluntary submission to surveillance, the utopian hope remains that our post-social sensibilities will create a new form of collectivity – humanity.’ Helga Nowotny, Professor Emerita, ETH Zurich ‘Carlo Bordoni combines courage and imagination – he opens new paths into the newer present which confronts us all.’ Peter Beilharz, La Trobe University, Melbourne ‘Carlo Bordoni’s new book provides a much-needed analysis of some of the latest developments in the catalogue of challenges that confront liquid modern society. Bordoni elegantly demonstrates and discusses the rise of a “post-society” as a new sort of phenomenon, which calls for public and political attention. The book highlights some of the new cleavages and chasms that begin to appear between individual and society, emotions and rationality, freedom and surveillance, power and politics. I strongly endorse this book, since, perhaps especially in pandemic times such as the present, we do need analyses that point to some of the main challenges of contemporary society – and this is indeed what Bordoni’s book so convincingly provides.’ Michael Hviid Jacobsen, Aalborg University, Denmark

Post-Society

Post-Society Social Life After the Pandemic

Carlo Bordoni Translated by Wendy Doherty

polity

Copyright © Carlo Bordoni 2022 Originally published in Italian as Post-società: Il mondo dopo la fine della modernità, copyright © Luiss University Press 2021 The right of Carlo Bordoni to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This English edition first published in 2022 by Polity Press Polity Press 65 Bridge Street Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK Polity Press 111 River Street Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5390-7 ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-5391-4 (pb) A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Control Number: 2022930390 Typeset in 10.5 on 12pt Sabon by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate. Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition. For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com

Contents

Acknowledgements vi Introduction: After a Liquid Society

1

1 From Social to Post-Social

7

2 Proximity and Social Distancing

50

3 The Primacy of Emotions

75

4 Voluntary Submission

108

5 What Is Left of the Future

135

Conclusion: On the Ineffectiveness of the Sociologist

162

References 170 Index 178

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to John Thompson for welcoming this book to Polity, the publisher of most of Zygmunt Bauman’s books: it was a great honour and an immense pleasure. But thanks are also due to those who made it possible, beginning with the anonymous Polity reviewers, then to Neil de Cort, who oversaw its production, and in particular to Manuela Tecusan, my accurate and knowledgeable editor, who allowed me to improve and refine the English text. Thanks also to my historical translator, Wendy Doherty, and to my wife Daniela for their advice and insights. Florence, May 2022 Sono grato a John Thompson per aver accolto questo libro in Polity Books, l’editore della maggior parte dei libri di Zygmunt Bauman: è stato un grande onore e un immenso piacere. Ma i ringraziamenti vanno anche a coloro che ne hanno permesso la realizzazione, a partire dagli anonimi reviewers, e poi Neil de Cort, che ne ha curato la produzione, e in particolare Manuela Tecusan, editor accurata e sapiente, che mi ha permesso di migliorare e affinare il testo inglese. Grazie anche alla mia storica traduttrice, Wendy Doherty, e a mia moglie Daniela per i consigli e le intuizioni.

Introduction After a Liquid Society

We are in transit. This is not a metaphor. After so much aimless wandering in the liquid society, we have run aground and we do not know where we have arrived. The place resembles the world we left behind, but it has certain characteristics that are new to us. Those who hoped for a return to complete social relationships and for the recovery of lost values will be disappointed. In this new phase we can glimpse the signs of the rapid decline of modernity – signs typical of Zygmunt Bauman’s liquid society, which was only a short transition, a warning of what was to happen a few years later. Again, as in the past, when we were faced with the same characteristics of uncertainty and impermanence, we needed to find solid foundations. This was because, in the first phase of liquidity, the feeling of unease and the disintegration of consciousness were perceived as being perpetual: the impression that the crisis was here to stay imposed a need to reconfigure the world to come. Post-society is different from the liquid modern world. I refer to liquidity because it is the social condition that preceded it. Liquid modernity is a change from which there is no going back, and it should be seen as a negative development of the ‘solid’ social structure. Indeed, it was in liquidity that the process of destroying social ties began; but liquidity itself is subject to transformation. After an initial phase of great dispersion, we have witnessed a sort of thickening, of resilience, as if

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society wanted to restrain this wavering trend that was leading nowhere. The traits of liquidity have not disappeared but have ‘solidified’ within the post-social; they have become endemic and chronic. We can call this phase of resilience to liquidity an interregnum, as Bauman did, or an extreme attempt to restore lost solidity, but the name does not change its meaning. This phase is linked to the presence of sovereignism in politics, the primacy of neoliberalism in the economy, and the systematic reduction of the achievements of the trade unions and workers’ rights. These are inalienable human rights, because they are closely linked to life. Overall, the extreme phase of liquidity tried to impose limits on society, which was too mobile, and therefore uncontrollable. If we look closely, beyond the negative aspects that Bauman pointed out, the liquid society was in a certain sense free. It was free to the point of generating confusion – the point where traditional patterns of behaviour, both public and private, had broken down. The idea of liquidity, conceived of as the last phase of modernity, contained clear signs of social unease: insecurity and uncertainty in human relationships, disintegration of solidarity, individualism translated into a frenzied search to satisfy personal interest. These signs were then accompanied by more disturbing demonstrations of unstoppable change, including the crisis of work, which is increasingly precarious and dematerialized, together with the supremacy of new technologies in communication and production processes. To all this we can add the lack of confidence in politics, which is clearly deprived of any effective power: such power has now passed into the hands of supra­national entities and large financial groups. The result was, to be sure, a society lacking in certainties and values to rely on, and for this reason elusive, flaky, devoid of prospects. The state of crisis denounced at the time, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, was to be understood in its original sense, as a moment of choice – a unique opportunity for choice that could be settled in any way: all options were open. Reactionary forces inserted themselves into this rift and tried to use this ideal opportunity so as to bring order to a world that was unhappy and insecure. In consequence, post-society is a state of disorder provoked deliberately, with the intention of



Introduction: After a Liquid Society

3

reinstating the system of domination that modernity had lost along the way. The sudden spread of Covid-19 helped to speed up the change and made it necessary, given the tragic nature of the pandemic and the immediacy and urgency of the need for security, continuity, and reconversion. This acceleration has imposed an unimaginable rhythm on a process that had already begun because of the crisis of modernity but would have taken longer to complete. It also interrupted the interregnum, that unstable period of time interposed between liquid modernity and the new social system still in its embryonic phase, forcing it to reveal itself, at least provisionally. What happens now, after liquid modernity and after the interregnum? According to some observers, and the sociologist Alain Touraine is one of them, a disturbing prospect of ‘desocialization’ – the end of the social – awaits us. We could, then, call it ‘postsociety’, this new time that looms. Post-society is a condition in which the multitudes prevail, the mode of social relations changes, and the relationship between the public and the private is altered. Here is a brief description of its characteristics: • gradual move away from individualism, autonomy of the masses; • social distancing, rejection of physical contact; • remote relationships – weak ties predominate; • the public sector absorbs the private and universalizes it; • voluntary submission to social control; • re-evaluation of the emotions, cyberempathy; • completion of the process of globalization, but only in relation to trade and cultural–informational exchanges; • sedentariness, smart working, less inclination to travel; • primacy of online commerce, decline of the traditional shop; • elimination of nation-states, which are replaced by non-political supra-national collaborating bodies and service agencies; • regionalization of states, dominance of local politics; • greater human–machine interaction. Post-Society is a non-academic analysis of society in the aftermath of the pandemic. The title, with an apocalyptic quotation from Alain Touraine, draws attention to a future in which social ties will change significantly. The basic idea is

4 Post-Society

that the individualism of recent years will not disappear as a result of Covid-19, but will take other paths, trying to adapt to the situation. In the meantime, the premises of Bauman’s liquid society are disappearing, being replaced by new, more solid roots. Such roots are represented by the need to ‘create community’, albeit a remote one. But we are still in transit. We can see here some trends that are worth looking at in greater depth – re-evaluation of the emotions and voluntary submission being among them. The two central chapters of the book are devoted to these aspects. Emotions take on a primary function, not only through exposure on social media but because they have been freed from that ‘repression of emotionality’ that characterized modern society, which used to consider them an obstacle to the development of civilization. Indeed, today we speak of a ‘sociology of emotions’. The other characteristic of our time is voluntary submission to surveillance for reasons of health and personal security. This is a complete reversal of the traditional defence of privacy. The acceptance of a subtle form of control, induced by the use of smartphones and computers, is increasingly fostering a conscious need for reassurance. In addition to it, the practice of social distancing imposes new rules in proxemics and encourages longdistance relationships. Control is perhaps the dominant element in the new development. This is a peaceful submission to control, willingly accepted in the name of security, which liquid modernity was no longer able to guarantee. We have moved from undesirable and oppressive control to voluntary and even desirable control. *** It is clear that we find ourselves in conditions very similar to those that preceded the formation of modernity in the period between the end of the seventeenth and the first half of the eighteenth century: we are in statu nascendi (‘in the process of being formed’), to use Max Weber’s famous characterization of charisma – that is, we are in a state of particular exceptionality, which preludes the affirmation of a new time. In every epochal change, the keyword is always fear: it is the oldest feeling in the world to determine social action, together with a sudden acceleration of events and the race for survival



Introduction: After a Liquid Society

5

of the species. Fear (Bordoni 2017) is a state or condition of stress in which humanity finds itself thrown in conjunction with particular historical events, which threaten the very integrity of society and can cause epochal changes. Why is the re-evaluation of emotions not in contradiction with the new, post-social condition? We have to start from a preliminary observation: it concerns the need to distinguish humanity (the main characteristics of the human being) from sociality. Up until now it has been taken for granted that one encompasses the other, since the human being is implicitly a social being and, as such, is determined by his or her relationship with others. This concept is sound and corresponds to the reality of the facts, but it is rather imprecise and confused, as if it had been accepted uncritically in all its complexity. In this shapeless structuring of everything that appears to be linked to sociality as humanity, the need to differentiate the two components has never surfaced. Sociology itself, as a humanistic science that emerged from the heart of modernity to interpret its signs and changes, could only unite the human element with the social one, fusing them together in a single behavioural scheme. But now that the time of modernity appears to be definitively over after the ‘long goodbye’ characterized by the phenomenon of liquefaction, it finally seems that a distinction has to be made – namely one that pays heed to the substantial differences that have emerged in the social context. Sociality has undergone a different and divergent process; to use a term borrowed from aesthetics (as much as from chemistry and psychology), we could say that it is now sublimated. In sublimation, especially as understood in psychoanalysis, the perversion, that is, the act of straying or turning away (vertere, ‘turn round’) from the right path, occurs as a result of an inability or impossibility to continue along the predetermined path, be it the right, the known, or the predictable one. In response to this proven impossibility, an alternative path is generated – unknown, sometimes even surprising or unusual, but also intriguing, precisely because it goes beyond the limit (limen, ‘threshold’) of what is normal, usual, or known. If we were to think of a sociality different from the modern one, we could say that it is a sublimated sociality, in the sense that it is experienced differently but no less present, no less substantial, and no doubt combined with human sensitivity at

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a higher level. It is as if the emotions (a characteristic feature of humans) received an impulse from the change that gave them a lot of weight in the new condition of society, as if the emotional (human) component had slowed down during the last phase, that of liquid modernity. We were in fact aware of this, if we consider that liquefaction entailed instability, insecurity, and egoism. What happened in this relatively short period of time to bring about such a vast paradigm shift, and to do it with such unpredictable speed? The emotional component in humans is being re-evaluated. The sensations and feelings received from another person are not enough; the other person needs to be part of a whole, and relationships are built more extensively through the other and beyond the other, whose identity has no value except as a representation of the collective that determines the recognition of the self. It is here that the main characteristic of an unprecedented postsocial sensibility manifests itself, in the form of a long-distance relationality that operates in a virtual environment, without any physical contact, but not without a great capacity for communication. This is a new, post-social condition, which can well be captured by the phrase ‘more humanity, less sociality’.

1 From Social to Post-Social

1.1. The Isolation of the Global Citizen When we speak of a post-social condition, we do not mean the end of society – its disintegration, or the dispersion of the social bonds that had hitherto held it together. The post-social is the unprecedented and therefore never before experienced prospect of proxemic diversity, accompanied by an individualistic culture, innovative working conditions, advanced mechanization, massive use of new technologies, new information systems, and new ways of consuming. These actions and behaviours, some of which have already been in place for a long time while others are in the process of being implemented, all share the same common denominator: the isolation of the individual. The individual’s progressive loss of openness to the outside world is mitigated through the availability of enhanced technological mediators, and these are so complex and empathic that they themselves become the object of a privileged relationship. Smart working and distance learning are not emergency methodologies, introduced only to be put to one side once the health crisis is over. In fact they have been used before, and in the absence of any emergency situation. Already in the last decades of the past century, working from home was considered an innovative measure, designed to save resources and time,

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to concentrate services when people’s physical presence in the workplace was not necessary, and to make one’s working time more flexible. In education for instance, training, degree, and specialization courses have been held online for years, first through television, then through sophisticated digital platforms that allow carrying out all the necessary teaching, from lecturing to interacting with students and correcting their exam papers and theses. This is nothing new, then – just an abrupt shift from optionality to prevalence. It should be noted that these innovations do not entail any additional costs for employers or end users; on the contrary, they produce considerable savings and economic benefits for all those concerned. But they do this at a psychological and social cost. In fact distance learning, as a substitute for face-to-face teaching, has raised many doubts and objections precisely because of the isolation it forces young people into, a feature that accounts for its reduced educational effectiveness. There is no condition of normality to be restored, no return to the former status quo. Those ways of life have been erased forever. As in all great divisions, there is no going back. The unexpected we have to deal with is now part of the reality we are constantly facing. Past experiences are no longer useful: they have lost their factual value and must be relegated to history, as documents of our past. In point of fact the new digital technologies, just like postmodern practice, have taught us to dispense with experience, to reject the heritage of a culture, the modern one, and to do so under the illusion that this culture no longer belongs to us, that it ceased to be useful because technological progress and knowledge are evolving so rapidly that we cannot keep up with them. This gives rise to insecurity: I’m talking about the insurmountable state of anxiety generated by not finding points of reference or values in which we could believe. Everything had to be experimented ex novo, as if history had started again from the beginning and needed new certainties; but this time round they are short-term certainties, disposable knowledge, to be used once or twice at the most, because it has an expiry date, just like any other consumer product. This conviction that one is not being able to rely on past experience has actually given us a sort of learning experience, a course to prepare us for the complexity of a future that is still



From Social to Post-Social

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nebulous and uncertain. Perhaps such a future cannot be planned or mapped out precisely because it lacks any sign of continuity with the present, and therefore does not even constitute a minimum to work on. Learning a new method, like any other preparation for change, suggests that the new society we are moving into after the pandemic – and, at least in appearance, in its aftermath – is not an irremediable break with the recent past but rather something that evolved from it. It is its natural continuation, obviously after a transitional phase: the interregnum that Bauman spoke of. This is the necessary inertial time before the leap forward. It is the same time that elapses between the moment when the trigger of a gun is pulled and the moment when the shot is fired. The difference is that, in the social sphere, that brief moment of inertia is diluted into months or years, such that it feels like an eternity and the explosion never seems to happen. The interregnum leads us to think of an individualized society and of the very liquefaction of social relations, a process that has opened up a world of possibilities and exchanges: distances have been shortened, we communicate in real time, and we already have a preview of what awaits us in the post-social world. It is important to realize that the new condition we are about to experience is not modernity. It is not liquid modernity, not the second or third modernity, and not even hyper­modernity, because there is nothing ‘hyper’ in it, no augmentative or superior quality, which this prefix of Greek origin suggests, that could be a refinement of or an adaptation to the complexity of the present. Modernity spent itself in the extreme attempt to rationalize the world, which proved to be disastrous when, by intensifying the drive for rationality, it bypassed the emotional and sensory component of the human being. Nevertheless modernity could not have done otherwise, since the demand for rationalization is inherent in the very principle that inspired modernity since its inception and that Max Weber rightly pointed out to us, at the beginning of the twentieth century: disenchantment with the world. Disenchantment means elimination of any irrational, magical, or emotional presence that might in any way hinder, or just influence, the practice of economic and interpersonal relations, including relations with formal institutions. This is what makes modernity perfectible and guides it unequivocally towards progressive improvement

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and unalterable, stable structures whose reliability is needed for the realization of long-term projects. For years now there has been talk, from scholars such as Maffesoli, Morin, and others, of a re-enchantment of the world that, more than a return to the origins, appears to be a legitimate recognition of the human qualities that have so far been sacrificed on the altar of efficiency and progress. At the same time, by recovering the emotional area in a wider operation of re-enchantment, we have confirmed the end of our relationship with modernity. It ends for the reason explained here, as well as for many other reasons that may appear insignificant in the eyes of those who hope for a re-establishment of the status quo ante but that, taken together, assume the weight of an epochal change. It is epochal because modernity has indeed come to an end, and that type of society has ended with it.

1.2. From Society to the Individual In a 1987 interview for Woman’s Own, Margaret Thatcher said: ‘There is no such thing as society. There are only individual men and women, and there are families’ (https://www.margaret thatcher.org/document/106689). In this she anticipated the conclusions of Alain Touraine, the greatest living French sociologist. Touraine has dedicated a book to this idea, which represents the summation of his thought and an extreme effort to understand modernity. It is a provocative work – starting with the title, La fin des sociétés [The End of Societies] (Touraine 2013) – in which he denounces the destruction of social institutions such as the city, the school, the family, and democracy itself. The fiscal crisis and the state’s difficulty in managing the resources needed to enable the social institutions to function create a separation between resources and cultural values. Thus the institutions begin to lose their content and we can speak of the end of the social – or, better, the end of societies – so much so that civil rights are prioritized and social rights are undervalued. Is it, then, possible to reconstruct social control over the financial economy? Touraine argues that it is cultural values that replace institutionalized social norms, as they are against the logic of profit and power. These are real ethical values whose



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origin is extraneous to social organization, and their universal content is so strong as to place them above the laws, almost like a natural right that belongs both to the Christian tradition and to the spirit of the Enlightenment. In this epochal destruction, only the subject survives, that is, the individual who is no longer a ‘social subject’. The return to individualism was the leitmotif of post­modernity, with its reference to the loneliness of the global citizen caused by the loss of the values and ideologies on which modernity had built its certainties. Looking at today’s society, which is increasingly made up of individuals in search of an identity and fascinated by the limitless yet precarious opportunity to build relationships online, we are often under the impression that we are dealing with Spinoza’s multitudes rather than with the people of a nation. Touraine, however, does not seem to believe in multitudes but rather in the power of the individual, a central figure who takes possession of every right, even that of being above the law. This is in breach of an ancient pact between the individual and the nation-state signed four centuries ago: the pact forged an alliance in which individuals gave up part of their prerogatives of autonomy and freedom to the sovereign in exchange for some fundamental certainties. This is when modernity was born – in the second half of the seventeenth century – with Hobbes’ monstrous Leviathan, on which Touraine has worked at length, starting from his fundamental Critique of Modernity (1995). But it is above all in his next book, A New Paradigm for Understanding Today’s World (2007), that Touraine began to expound the theses on the disintegration of the social fabric that would lead, with lucid and implacable determination, to his La fin des sociétés. What society is he announcing the end of? Might we think of modern society, or perhaps postmodern society, since Jean-François Lyotard and Gianni Vattimo had already declared the death of modernity? Or could it be Bauman’s liquid society, drained and evaporated as it is by the ethical, economic, and social upheavals of a financial system that has escaped the control of politics and is on a collision course with industrial capitalism? It is more likely that we are facing the end of a certain type of society rather than the end of all societies, period. We have

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witnessed irreversible changes, followed by the greatest ‘great divide’ of the pandemic; and it does not matter much whether these are described as ‘liquid modernity’, ‘postmodernity’, or ‘hypermodernity’. What is essential is that they have altered our behaviour, our social, economic, and political relations, our culture and communications, and the relationship between the state and its citizens. In this context, the role of the subject, which Touraine sees as emerging, plays a decisive role. As early as 1978, Jean Baudrillard feared the end of the social, as he related it to a natural evolutionary process – ‘It could be said that the social regresses to the same degree as its institutions develop’ – and, above all, to the objective responsibility of the media (Baudrillard 1983: 66). Baudrillard argues that, while the media appear to promote socialization, ‘deep down they neutralize social relations and the social itself’. When he brought this indictment on the desocializing potential of the media, the Internet had not yet been created – let alone social media, which were to come a quarter of a century later. Yet he had already understood the threat that they presented, if misused: ‘At the other extreme, our “society” is perhaps in the process of putting an end to the social, of burying the social beneath a simulation of the social’ (1983: 67). Desocialization, therefore, has a long history: it starts long ago, in Durkheim’s feared ‘anomie’, and passes through postmodernity and the insights of Baudrillard and Touraine, to end up, in all its gravity, in the period of pandemic crisis, when the simulation and virtualization of relationships are forcibly combined with the physical distancing practised to avoid contagion. *** So when I talk about the end of society, I do not mean the end of social relations between individuals, or between them and the institutions. I mean rather a delegitimization of those bureaucratic systems and rules that no longer meet the requirements of democracy, equality, and freedom to which people aspire. It is a sort of ethical rebellion against the rigidity and anachronism of the social norms that govern contemporary life. Its ‘narratives’ are being challenged, starting with the idea of democracy. Democracy is a multifaceted concept, which constantly changes meaning according to the period of time and the type of society. The original ancient Greek meaning of ‘rule by the



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people’ (dēmos ‘people’, kratos ‘power’) could take on even a negative undertone in Pericles’ fifth-century Athens, since it incorporated a form of what we may call today oppression against minorities. From that classical usage we have moved on to the recognition of democracy as the preferred – almost the ideal – form of government. Despite Rousseau’s misgivings about representation, democracy – government of the people, of the will of the majority – has been passed down to us after continuous transformations and revisions made necessary by changing political and social conditions – up until Marx’s classist interpretation. Around the same time it was reinterpreted by Alexis de Tocqueville (1835–40), who imported from America the most up-to-date idea of democracy as the recognition of equal rights and obligations for everyone. With Touraine, we find ourselves faced with yet another adjustment of focus. After La fin des sociétés, he continued his analysis of modernity in a subsequent volume, Nous, sujets humains [We, Human Subjects] (Touraine 2015), in which he gives a decisive twist to the idea of democracy, making the ‘human subject’ take priority in all rights. This affirmation may seem to be a simple reinforcement of a widely shared principle, but in fact it conceals a substantial shift, namely from the rights of all humans, conceived of as a group, to the universal right of single individuals, regardless of the context in which each one lives. Through this updating and adapting to the new social trends of valuing the individual, Touraine’s position changes the very idea of democracy, granting the subject the importance that they had hitherto been denied, or rather that had been (partly) recognized since antiquity but lost with the passing of time. This is an important conquest (or reconquest): it puts an end, once and for all, to a long process of re-evaluation of the subject set in motion by the ideas of Husserl and Heidegger at the beginning of the twentieth century – a process that continued through Sartre and Derrida and reached us in the form of the Indignados, Occupy Wall Street, and Arab Spring movements and the 1977 massacre of the demonstrators in Taksim Square in Turkey. Like Stéphane Hessel, who sees these movements as fuelled by indignation, Touraine treats them as a resource and defines them as ethical–democratic. They are not revolutions, he observes, but ‘flashes of vigorous subjectivation, incapable of transforming

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themselves into political organization and strategy’. While revolutions lead to civil war and terror, subjectification ‘is first and foremost a liberation’ (Touraine 2015: 23). In opposition to these stand the ‘social anti-movements’, which emerged from the failure of the nationalist aspirations of states that had been subjected to the experience of colonialism or economic and cultural dependence on the West. Social antimovements prefer to use religious (fundamentalist), linguistic, or traditional causes as a weapon against forces they consider hostile and far removed from their own spirit. They are characterized by being enclosed in isolated communities and driven only by the desire to prevaricate and destroy others, in an attempt to reassert an identity of their own. *** The crisis that grips the West is not just economic in nature. The development of technology and communications has introduced a new form of totalizing power, similar to that of the dictatorships of the twentieth century, but more widespread and pervasive. Change has taken place before our very eyes: finance capitalism has replaced productive capitalism. We are immersed in an immaterial world that can be defined as a ‘society of knowledge’ rather than a ‘society of communication’. In a sort of time span, the most recent phase of modernity reveals itself through a sequence in which a highly industrialized society is succeeded by a post-industrial one – a term that Touraine himself coined – where consumerism prevails over production. However, instead of post-industrial, it would now be better to speak of a post-social society, a society that is no longer recognized for its ability to modify the environment thanks to technology, but one that is fully aware of its own creativity – not least because, as Bernard Stiegler notes, industrialization has spread to every aspect of human life: ‘more than ever we are experiencing the industrialization of all things’ (Stiegler 2014: 47). The term ‘post-social’, even considering the perplexities that arise from its misleading use, designates a society that is open to globalization, uses technology without being subservient to it, has increased the dignity of the subject, and has acquired a strong sense of liberation from all political and religious conditioning. This is because ‘what we used to call society has



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been reduced to a kind of hybrid, which has thrived thanks to the displacement of conflicts outside the social field’ (Touraine 2015: 32). Indeed, if society used to be characterized by internal class opposition, now the opposition comes from forces outside the social context; hence this society is post-social. This allows Touraine to unburden himself of historical materialism and any illusion of secularization in one fell swoop. During industrialization, the watchword among workers who opposed the domination of capitalism was ‘solidarity’. Now that, sociologically speaking, the working class no longer exists – at least not in the West – although workers continue to exist, solidarity has been replaced by the right to dignity. Freed from ideological and political dependence, the individual has acquired full self-awareness as a bearer of universal human rights. As for secularization, in other words liberation from religious influences, Touraine is even more categorical: ‘I cannot accept that a society in possession of the experience of its own creativity can freely decide to submit to the decisions of a god, as interpreted by priests or dictators.’ Not only that, but ‘[a]ny appeal to a sacred principle, in a society that possesses the experience of its own unlimited capacity for creation, transformation and destruction, can only be the result of an act of force carried out by a minority that lacks legitimacy’ (2015: 31). Touraine therefore advocates full individual autonomy, which it understands in the etymological sense, as the property of having, or being guided by, one’s own (autos) rule or law (nomos), and therefore not having to submit to impositions that limit one’s freedom. *** Universal human rights must be placed above political institutions, even above constitutional rules and the law. This can be interpreted as a step beyond the Hobbesian idea of the modern state that holds absolute power over the citizen, whom it offers guarantees of security, stability, and certainty in exchange for freedom. It sounds almost like the liquidation of the modern state; a sort of ‘freedom for all’, when one waits for a new entity to restore the socio-political system and declare that the break is over. Such a formulation is revolutionary in its own way, since it overturns Carl Schmitt’s Machiavellian principle according to

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which the sovereign places him- or herself above the laws that s/he him- or herself issued. Now it is the human subject – the common individual, the person in the street – who comes before any law, while the laws themselves are placed hierarchically below the subject, as does the figure of the sovereign – now incoherent, given the senselessness of conceiving of someone ‘higher than all’. Touraine’s work presents a continuous contrast or alternation between what has been and what must be, in line with a voluntarist principle aimed at achieving an ideal society: although it starts from the symptoms of the present, it does not try to conceal a utopian undertone, marked by a thin layer of anarchism that shrouds his thinking in an immense sense of freedom. If all this is not immediate, it is at least desirable. *** The theme of modernity is fundamental to Alain Touraine, and it is not surprising that his next book, Défence de la modernité [Defence of Modernity] (Touraine 2018), completes the long and passionate journey that began with Critique of Modernity and in which he tries to salvage the positive features of modernity and extols its historical merits. Over a period of thirty years, Touraine has discussed, analysed, and promoted the discourse on modernity, proposing a sociology of the non-social actor (the subject), no longer motivated by social and economic interests but by the desire to defend their rights. Thus Touraine has created a separation between subject and political institutions that determines the post-social condition. Such a break shows the individual as becoming part of a project of subjectivation through self-affirmation as an autonomous, free, and creative being. In Touraine’s vision, the transition takes place in a phase that he calls ‘hypermodernity’, where the dynamics of the modern phase are radicalized. While in the two previous works discussed here the denunciation of modernity is the dominant theme and triggers a provocative interpretation, which gives prominence to human ideals over the conditioning of society (in this respect Touraine sides with ‘culture’ more than with ‘civilization’), the strenuous defence of modernity in this latest book leaves room for some perplexity. A comparison with previous writings reveals a kind of revisionism in Touraine’s critical thinking. Besides, he seems now



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to ignore the debate around the transition to a ‘second modernity’ (Beck), ‘surmodernity’ (Augé), ‘postmodernity’ (Maffesoli), or ‘liquid modernity’ (Bauman) – as these others variously called it. Touraine’s hypermodernity does develop the original project of Hobbes, who had been wary of subjectivation, fearing its libertarian implications. This explains the incongruity that hypermodernity continues to exalt subjective autonomy, whereas modernity tended towards social control and submission of the individual in order to build a society of equals. It based its educational project on repression, so much so that the past centuries witnessed continuous attempts at the affirmation of the individual against modern restrictive policies; and such efforts led to totalitarianism, where social control and the negation of the individual find their highest expression. It is in the crisis of modernity that the subject reappears; even more, the subject ends up taking a decisive role, namely through ‘individualization’, the bad conscience of individuation. In the ambiguity of the phase we are living in, the exaltation of individual rights is far from being a prelude to some liberation from minority status. The subjectivation of rights is always extremely dangerous, not only because it weakens equality before the law (i.e. any equal conditions of applying the law) but also because it increases isolation and reduces solidarity, leaving individuals at the mercy of invisible powers that no one is able to control; and these latter effects are by now manifest. Relying on creativity may be an alternative. It is a pity that Touraine does not focus more on the subject of work, which was his strong point in the 1960s. In modernity, work is one of the fundamental categories – together with the state, the nation, democracy, class, and the family – so much so that renouncing, since the origins of modernity, the complete affirmation of the individual is achieved by transferring personal identity to another entity, present in the person’s work. Modern humans recognize themselves in their professional roles, in the jobs they do, in the social functions they perform – in short, in something that is separate from them. The problems become more acute when, as a result of the crisis, these persons lose their identity. They no longer recognize themselves in their profession or in the functions they perform; the self splits into a variety of roles, amid which personal identity becomes elusive and exchangeable.

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In the crisis of modern categories, the transformation of work, its precariousness, and its scarcity or dearth heavily condition people’s lives; in addition to the loss of identity, these phenomena cause distress, imposing a painful existence and, as Göran Therborn has shown in The Killing Fields of Inequality (Therborn, 2013), even shortening life expectancy. The dematerialization of production processes happened as a result of the introduction of increasingly advanced technologies, which allow workers to bypass repetitive and tiring tasks. It is now clear that this dematerialization does not eliminate work but changes it: it makes it ‘immaterial’. Intellectual production and creativity are prioritized, and I mean creativity in the sense of design skills and ability to plan on the basis of new knowledge; in other words creativity not as spontaneous improvization but as the result of teamwork, human–machine interaction, and artificial intelligence. This is, in short, social creativity, which is not exclusively subjective. If we look at the western world, we realize that material work is coming to an end; but not so proletarianization, which is being transformed into casualization. But, whether work is material or immaterial, there is no end to the devaluation of human beings, either in modernity or in the post-social world. They continue to be oppressed and are now exploited as terminals of the consumerist system. This is an erosive process, fuelled by bureaucracy, an intrusive and constraining technology, and economic and financial issues. To contrast all this, we have the representation of a bright future of liberation from economic, industrial, and consumerist constraints, a future characterized by the primacy of the individual; and here creativity, albeit utopian, includes hope. Indeed Touraine deserves credit for his great optimism. But how can we escape the domination of the economy? Behind the desire to escape it lies the fear of a cultural push towards a non-economic meaning of equality. The focus is on achieving individual rights and personal freedoms; one forgets that the first condition of equality is social and economic. In the opening pages of his book, Touraine claims to have been inspired by Joseph E. Stiglitz, Nobel Prize winner for economics and author of the famous slogan ‘We are the 99%’, which denounces the unsustainable concentration of wealth in 1% of the American population. Given such



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huge disproportions, the idea of avoiding economic issues is illusory, to say the least. Modernity has always preached equality without ever actually achieving it and has reduced it to a secondary issue, as if granting civil rights could compensate for the lack of it. Everyone is equal before the law; nevertheless, inequality is above all a social matter. It is pointless to imagine that giving more power to the individual would solve the problem of inequality in society. Exalting the individual is not the way to do it. We should restore sociality and recognize individual autonomy within a system of relationships. It is true that this can be limiting, but it is necessary if we want to achieve what Amartya Sen considers to be the basis of equality: respect. Is Touraine impolitic, utopian, or visionary? His analysis challenges the very existence of sociology as a science of society – a science whose crisis was announced by Alvin W. Gouldner back in 1970. But perhaps what we need today is not a crisis of sociology so much as a sociology of crisis.

1.3. The Interregnum, a Suspension What does post-social mean? It is a new concept of collectivity, absolutely unprecedented; it does not correspond to any previous standards. The term ‘post-society’ is provocative, almost dystopian, because it envisages an inverted utopia: the representation of an undesirable world. It does not imply that society no longer exists: the post-social is obviously based on a form of sociality, but one that differs from the sociality of the previous type of society, to which we refer as ‘modern society’. This form is not postmodern but something more radical, which questions the very principles on which public and private relations were founded and drastically changes them, thus altering its reference values. We could call it digital society, or perhaps individualized, adiaphoristic, or hypertechnological society, but these are partial descriptions and would not give the same strong feeling as the term ‘post-society’. The post-social takes the process of psychological and collective de-individuation to the extreme (Simondon 1989; Stiegler 1994), favouring the natural instinct of self-preservation and allowing aggression to resurface. The individual feels pressurized, forced

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to be involved with others with whom one has no affinity and no recognizable share in the same existential condition, and sees the other (a neighbour, a work colleague, an acquaintance) as a potential threat to his or her integrity, be it physical, economic, or professional. This gradually builds an avoidance of direct personal relationships, a tendency to stay within the family environment, and, when this is no longer enough, a staunch defence of one’s own individuality, to the point where the person turns self-referential. In post-society the illusion of being able to dominate technology prevails, as one counts on the latter’s intuitive and user-friendly functionality. However, more importantly, social isolation becomes acceptable in a predominantly civilized culture that defends individual rather than social rights. The notion of the social is no longer relevant: it is being paid lip service to, just like the ideals of democracy and equality, already asserted in modernity, which are in fact ignored. What prevails is the human being, the exaltation of the subject, the key role of single individuals, their right and duty to assert, express, and prove themselves, almost in a reaffirmation of democracy on different bases. But all this develops at the expense of every form of solidarity, participation, and tolerance. *** We must forget the classic contrast between community and society, between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, so dear to Ferdinand Tönnies. The configuration that is now taking shape has autonomous characteristics, in which we can find elements of both community and society, such as the need for reassurance or the need to overcome social fears and have trust in the future; but it also introduces new ones, most of which are still in the embryonic stage and are therefore susceptible of further developments and surprises. If we analyse this new phase of post-society, we can find in it certain behaviours that had been predicted or even glimpsed during the phase of declining modernity – that phase of existential liquidity that, we now discover, was a prelude, a notice to mariners, or, better still, an interregnum, as Keith Tester and Zygmunt Bauman had rightly sensed at the very moment when liquidity, that preeminent characteristic of modernity in crisis at the beginning of the third millennium, began to show signs of



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drying up. So then, liquidity itself contained unequivocal signs of the post-society to come: the uncertainty of personal and sentimental relationships, the cancellation of social solidarity, widespread uncertainty, the lack of prospects and projects. To these were added other, more pivotal symptoms of a change that was already in an advanced stage of implementation, as it had been confirmed since the last decade of the twentieth century: the dematerialization of work, the affirmation of new technologies, globalization and the liberalization of finance, the loss of power of nation-states. All these features have contributed to destabilizing the precarious balance of modern society – a society in the grip of pain and suffering. The new social configuration embraces some of the elements of liquidity but transcends the others, while introducing important innovations that had remained hitherto unforeseen. Much of this change was brought about by the coronavirus pandemic – or perhaps it would be better to say ‘accelerated’, because the move out of modernity was now at an advanced stage and would continue in the same direction until complete dissolution, just requiring more time to reach the end. The pandemic simply quickened the process, giving it an abrupt jolt, and, if it interrupted anything at all, it was only the interregnum. As with all transitional periods, we know when it begins, but we have no idea how long it will last; it may carry on indefinitely. As Bauman reminds us, quoting Gramsci, the interregnum lasts until the new rules are set out. ‘Denotes a time when the old ways of having things done no longer work properly, but new and more effective ways have not yet been made available’ (Bauman and Bordoni 2014: 83). While no agency has already written and promulgated the rules of post-society, we can already imagine some aspects that will be significant. In the first place there is social control. Control is bound to alter human behaviour radically. We are talking about peaceful and voluntary submission to control, which is willingly accepted in the name of that need for a long sought after security and reassurance, something the liquid society was no longer able to provide because that society was an integral part of the previous, solid one. But there is more to say on the subject of social control, since its very close connection with personal identity, with group solidarity, which had been somewhat weakened, and with the

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natural tendency to conform – which goes hand in hand, at an emotional level, with the feeling of protection and defence captured in the idiom ‘there is strength in numbers’ – give it an innovative quality. There is much to say about the evolution of social control, too: introduced in early modernity as an additional way of confirming the dominion of a single sovereign over the citizens or subjects in a nation-state, it has always been the subject of a laborious process of liberalization. We need only think of Michel Foucault’s analysis of institutions, the excesses of totalitarianisms, and even the fears conjured up by dystopias, which are all centred on individuals’ difficulty to free themselves from oppressive and dehumanizing control. Then there is the question of the change that new technologies have introduced. Bauman and Lyon (2013) spoke of a new panopticon with no guards or, more decisively, of ‘personal panoptics’ that one carries around in the form of gadgets and of our permanent availability and sense of guilt or unease when these devices do not work or have been inadvertently forgotten. There is now a need for conscious control that renders individuals responsible, makes them ready to use any app that may protect them from risks, and integrates them into a network of equals. We have moved from undesirable and oppressive control to a form of voluntary and even desirable control – which clearly has nothing to do with modernity. But in addition to surveillance there are other, more strictly psychological features that suggest a departure from the usual parameters of modern society, such as a different expression of the emotions. It is clear that a re-evaluation of the emotions has been made. Individual pleasures are enjoyed physically, in solitude, but still depend on the response and availability of an abstract, networked relationship. The pleasure that can be derived from the other is no longer enough, but the other needs to be part of a group and, more generally, the relationship is established through the other and beyond the other, because the identity of this other has no value except as an image of the mediation with the collective whole, which determines the recognition of the self. This is the founding element of the new post-social sensibility: a form of long-distance relationality that could be described as



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abstract and that goes beyond physical contact, proximity, and the personal quality of individuals. *** In ‘Interregnum’, a short but fundamental essay published in 2010, Bauman takes up the insightful ideas put forth the previous year by Keith Tester, a disciple who had died prematurely (cf. Tester 2009 with Bauman 2010a). Bauman’s piece is fundamental because, by incorporating into the concept of liquidity the Gramscian definition of an extraordinary situation as one in which rules that applied earlier have become obsolete, it significantly modifies the earlier iterations of this concept. Gramsci detached the idea of ‘interregnum’ 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. (Bauman 2010a: 120)

Bauman described the last condition of modernity from the threshold of the third millennium, in a deservedly famous book, Liquid Modernity, which would change the way we look at society (Bauman 2006). Bauman’s liquidity is an existential condition induced solely by change and the natural evolution of things. It is the unwelcome but inevitable effect of a continuous process of corruption of the ‘solid’ state of modern society; and this metaphor is inspired by a statement hidden in the pages of Marx and Engels’ Manifesto of the Communist Party: ‘All that is solid melts into air’ (Marx and Engels 2012 [1848]: 77). Liquidity is a natural consequence of modernity itself, an inescapable effect of the evolutionary process. The statement in the Manifesto was taken up by Marshall Berman, who made it into the title of a classic (Berman 1988, originally published in 1982); and quite probably Bauman used Berman’s study in his research. The introduction of the variable ‘interregnum’ gives the idea of liquidity a conceptual limit that had not been anticipated; nor could it have been, as long as liquidity was deliberately left to float around indefinitely in our present.

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The liquidity we are immersed in, Bauman warns, is only a momentary phase, a transition to a new modus vivendi, which means that it is limited in time and will end as soon as the new rules and the new existential conditions have been defined. It is also significant that these ‘notices to mariners’ are each time a decade apart: in 2000, the announcement of liquidity; in 2010, the limitation of the interregnum; and now, in 2020, the recognition – for reasons beyond our control – of a new existential status. We are witnessing the end of the liquid world, which quickly thickened in the face of one of the most serious pandemics that have ever struck mankind; but we are also witnessing the end of the interregnum, that in-between period, the stagnant wait for an enactment of new laws that had left society bereft of certainties and values. Why did the interregnum come to an end? Its conditions or main characteristics were well defined: absence of stability, rarefaction of personal relationships, loss of consistency in basic reference values, exaggerated individualization, and loss of social solidarity. To this picture we can add the cancellation of borders between territories. This feature allowed greater ease of exchange and established a new phase of large-scale migration, but also caused the loss of one’s sense of belonging – not so much to the nation as to the community, understood as a cohesive group that shares the same principles, culture and traditions. Even if community members do not share the same religion, they all have tolerance for different and even opposing beliefs or non-beliefs, for agnosticism and marginal positions, and find them all worthy of the same respect. The interregnum was, by its very nature, closely linked to liquid modernity: it was its natural, even necessary continuation. The next phase presents the same characteristics of uncertainty and insecurity, but introduces elements of temporariness: by definition, any interregnum is situated between the end of one condition and the beginning of another – two points in time – and with that comes the spasmodic expectation of the new (Bordoni 2016). During the first phase of liquidity – that is, in the first decade of the third millennium – uncertainty and instability, as well as the disintegration of consciences, were in fact perceived



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as being perpetual: the crisis is here to stay, some said, and an attentive observer such as Edgar Morin (2016) wondered whether it was possible to ‘live the crisis’ rather than suffer it. He proposed trying to learn to live in a condition of crisis, in the face of a change that appeared to be the effect of the deterioration of modern civilization. Already from the end of the nineteenth century on, this idea had been challenged, criticized, and rejected from different points of view (e.g. by Nietzsche); then it was retracted in the second half of the twentieth century by postmodernists, who disclaimed great narratives, ideological foundations, ideals of progress, trust in science, and the value of history. At the beginning of the third millennium modernity seemed to be weakened, tired, emptied of all disappointed hopes, and even of utopianism, on which it had relied to build a peopleoriented society ever since 1516, when Thomas More imagined his fictitious island. The modernity that Bauman portrayed is now spent, reduced to a liquid swamp in which the texture is lost, shattered, and dispersed in the continuous ebb of the backwash, constantly stirring human lives and pushing them adrift. Such a condition was not sustainable for long. It brought out the worst in human beings: aggression, antagonism, renunciation of ethical principles, cravings to possess, and an extreme exploitation of resources. In short, modern liquidity put society at risk, or at least what we used to think of as ‘society’, now replaced by a non-homogeneous multitude of living beings who no longer know how to love; their only remaining emotions are anger, hatred, and indifference. Nor can they interact decently without technological mediators. With these purely negative, aversive emotions it is not possible to build and maintain a social fabric. Bauman imagined ‘the prospect of the present interregnum lasting for a rather long time’ (Bauman and Bordoni 2014: 84) – but the interregnum has ended as well, and with unusual speed. Now that it is over, along with a period of desperate expectations and frustrated hopes, people are suddenly faced with the new world. It is in fact so new that no one could have imagined it, not even in the boldest of science fiction stories. It has made a clean break with the past and in the space of a few weeks has wiped out a modus vivendi and imposed its own rules, which must be scrupulously followed.

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Those who deplored the absence of rules have been satisfied: new laws, of a kind that no national or supranational body has so far been able to impose, are being drafted, while others have already been issued or are in the process of being corrected, adjusted, and perhaps even tightened up. Those who lamented the absence of values have suddenly seen the recognition of a primary value of any civilized society – a value so basic as to be taken for granted and almost forgotten or ignored: the value of human life. Its importance resurfaced when that life was threatened by an internal enemy, which could not be fought with traditional weapons or with the medical knowledge and drugs available to us. Those who moaned about the unbearable supremacy of science and fought against the administration of vaccines, which they believed to be useless and harmful, now appeal to the good practice of scientific research and pray that someone will quickly find a remedy to restore health amid the general public. The interregnum is over and we have just entered a completely new era that forces us to revise our beliefs, casts doubts on our culture, and, because we are made up of culture, calls everything about us into question – our lives, our priorities, and our values. We must not be frightened, nor should we think that everything has come to an end. This is rather a new beginning and it will have to play out on an unknown terrain, with difficulties and hidden dangers that for the time being we can no more than imagine. We need to understand whether the end of the interregnum also means the end of liquid modernity. In the meantime, it is clear that we find ourselves in very similar conditions to those that preceded the formation of modernity between the end of the sixteenth and the first half of the seventeenth century: to repeat (see p. 4), we are, in Max Weber’s words, in statu nascendi, ‘in the process of being formed’, that is, in a situation whose exceptional nature forecasts the affirmation of the new, in the sense that we can distinguish only its initial moment but not its actual characteristics. The fundamental characteristic here is, once again, fear, just as in those troubled years that preceded modernity – the years when the consequences of the long wars of religion had convinced thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes to propose the formation of a different social system.



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The state of fear is typical of certain historical moments in which the human condition is put under pressure, being so closely threatened or subjected to such unbearable stress that it changes as a result. Of course, if we analyse the period of the origins of modernity, we realize that timescales back then were much larger. We are speaking of whole decades, if not of half-centuries or more, that separate important landmarks such as the publications of Jean Bodin and Thomas Hobbes, from the founding of nation-states after Westphalia to the end of the European wars of religion in 1697. Today, instead, the speed of communications and the ubiquity of the new technologies that facilitate them have reduced the need to wait for events to develop, especially if unforeseen tragic events such as a pandemic hasten the outcome. Come to think of it, there actually was a time for a new understanding of history to get started, because the idea of a crisis of modernity has been debated since the end of the nineteenth century, that is, even before the modern desire for invasive control of others, for the power of dominating states, and for methods of selection and annihilation could create the illusion of having achieved a totalizing perfection in the twentieth. Just when that loathsome practice of regulating human lives – ‘social gardening’, in the words of Oswald Spengler (2021 [1918]) – was being carried out, the decline of the West was declared. The most alienating attempt of modernity at its height was its own dissolution. According to Lyotard (1984), that was when modernity, having reached its ultimate goal, could do nothing but decline, leaving room for a series of dispersions, identity crises, and false revivals of vitality, from postmodernism to social liquidity – a pageant that looked like a ‘long farewell’ and dragged on until the first decade of the third millennium. It then remained silent and immobile throughout the interregnum, a period that seemed never to end. *** A century seems to have passed since Zygmunt Bauman wrote, with Walter Benjamin’s reflections on Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus in mind: Past and future, one may conclude, are in that drawing captured in the course of exchanging their respective virtues and vices, listed

28 Post-Society – as suggested by Benjamin – 100 years ago by Klee. It is now the future, whose time to be pillorized seems to have arrived after being first decried for its untrustworthiness and unmanageability, that is booked on the debit side. (Bauman 2017: 2)

In reality, only a few years have passed. What has changed is the perspective. The nostalgia that drove Bauman to build in haste a ‘retrotopia’ – which would justify the return to origins, to the womb of the community, by appeal to the impossibility of accepting the present – has been swept away. It has been cancelled in one fell swoop by the global expansion of a deadly virus that seems to have thrown our world into the plot of a science fiction film – except that the setting is too realistic to be fictional. And yet not even reason allows us to accept it. The reality we are watching is too stark, but we cannot leave the cinema or change the channel. At every attempt at evasion, this reality is always there, ready to grab our attention; it is there every time we awake, demanding the utmost precaution. The nostalgia for a solid past has been swept away too, together with the liquid mode life, which used to be its constant companion. There is nothing desirable in the past any more, be it recent or distant. Both are closely linked to our present and are its founders and guardians; what happens today is merely the consequence of yesterday. Yet we are well aware, ever since Jean-Jacques Rousseau, that catastrophes, even natural ones, are almost always ‘moral’ and therefore attributable to lapses in human responsibility. We are masters of our own destiny, even if we should discover that the Covid-19 virus was leaked from a research laboratory. We are such creators that the reality we live in moment by moment, detail by detail, is the direct consequence of choices that were made before our time and for which we are in some way responsible as a species. So this is not a matter of individual responsibility; the responsibility is collective and encompasses everyone, those present and those absent, those who lived before us and those still to come. The search for a scapegoat, for one guilty party (or several), is nothing but a miserable attempt to evade this collective responsibility. No one has an alibi. We were all there, from Homo habilis in Pleistocene to Homo technologicus today; no one was excluded – and we knew perfectly well what the risks were. No alibi



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can save us; the human possesses a quality that no other living being has: imagination – the faculty to construct mentally every possible and even impossible occasion, evaluate it, examine it, dream of it, and reject or endorse it. Now that the nostalgia for an undesirable past has been definitively eliminated, we have to contend with modernity, with its false promises of freedom, democracy, equality, and progress. We wanted to keep that modernity alive at all costs, even in a disintegrated, liquefied form, as long as it meant not abandoning it, not feeling orphaned of its transient illusions. We can see well and clearly that the angel in Walter Benjamin’s story has not reversed the direction of his flight, but continues to spread his wings so as to get far away from the ruined world. This time, however, he does not look back. He does not wish to look at those much-loved places where he spent happy days with any disappointment or regret. He does not feel any nostalgia but flies away quickly, hoping to reach his new objective as soon as possible.

1.4. Liquid Metaphors, Late Utopias The end of a century is always a time of crisis, of decline, of questioning established certainties; let us think of the end of the nineteenth century. That decadent era that we read about in school books, with its somewhat mawkish and complacent literary taste and the sudden emergence of the popular masses detached from the class framework, as Marx had anticipated, was a period of great uncertainty, when not even the revolutionary idea of power to the proletariat could be confirmed in the rapid succession of events. Everything was uncertain, from political ideas to the visual arts; all these forms were caught up in a generalized upheaval that found comfort only in the exaltation of the movement, in other words of the fervent chaos that western society had thrown itself in at that time; and the only response, at the level of introversion, could be found in reflecting on the subject, in contemplating on the self, in allowing oneself to be swept into the current of an uncontrolled life and passively give in to it, overwhelmed by that conception of an era in decline that finds its most stimulating representation in Baudelaire’s Spleen de Paris.

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In the face of this movement, this chaotic social effervescence that was perceived as a threat to political and economic stability, it was only natural that a drastic return to order should take place. The order returned to was not the natural order of things, but the pre-existing order that modernity had patiently constructed through the implementation of democratic procedures, the protection of rights, the division of state powers, the affirmation of conditional freedom (yet freedom nonetheless), and the identification of a secular teleology that was functional to the expectations of the individual. However, a forced order, hastily concocted on the drawing board, gave a totally different – and even, one might say, almost perverse – imprint to the idea of rationality of modern times. And it was here, in this forced deviation, that the tragedy of the western world took place – and I mean the emergence of totalitarianism and the upheaval of modernity. It was a reactionary acceleration with no cultural and historical foundations, which changed the main structures of modernity. Things would not have happened like this, the acme of dehumanized rationality would not have been reached, had there not been such drastic reactions to the existential uncertainties of the late nineteenth century. But history cannot be changed, except in those representations of unsatisfied desires labelled ‘uchronia’, non-times or fictitious history, which tell an alternative story in the most imaginative way: what would have happened ‘if’ various events had taken a different turn. Now, if the last years of a century tend to be destabilizing, just imagine being faced with the end of a millennium. We have been spared the false prophets, barkers, and apocalyptics who preached the end of the world at the beginning of the second millennium (‘a thousand and no more’), but we had instead a pandemic, perhaps the most serious upheaval to challenge our way of life. This upheaval seems to have caused a profound break with the past. The constant recurrence of the prefix ‘post’ makes us aware of this phenomenon: everything is ‘post’ because everything – from postmodernism to post-industrial society, and even to the post-human – belongs to a mode that looks now outdated. This prefix unveils our anxiety about an aftermath of the pandemic that has many unknowns and opens an obscure horizon. Even if the ‘post’ era were really over, wiped out by events, we must



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bear in mind that its cultural components have become part of a vision that the pandemic, at least for the time being, has not undermined. If, by using ‘post’, we mean to indicate opposition to a certain way of interpreting modernity, then our usage is undoubtedly outdated. But we have to consider that this intriguing little prefix, which has forcefully become a ubiquitous part of our language, can take on different meanings, and not always necessarily negative ones: its value depends on the conceptual synthesis we want to represent more effectively. In short, these are processes of naming that neither invalidate nor legitimize the attribution of deeper meanings to the entities signified by those names. But there is one consideration to make: finding neoliberalism entirely responsible for our condition, accusing it of all the world’s ills, is just as dangerous as allowing it to thrive unfettered, precisely because such an attitude is reductive and minimizes other important responsibilities of a political order and economic choices that politics has not managed to evade. As for the nature of the transformations that have taken place since the post-war period – the ‘fastest’ seventy years ever – it must be understood that their social, cultural, and technological aspects are appreciable deviations from the ‘natural’ course of modernity, from what modernity would have wanted itself to be, according to its inspiring principles, but has no longer been because something has diverted its destiny. Postmodernism and then liquidity were important attempts to understand the reasons for the change. Perhaps postmodernity has been more resolute, playing on irony and demythologizing the great modern ideals; it has debased them and reduced them to empty simulacra of a glorious past. Perhaps postmodernity has measured itself against history too harshly, focusing on the negative aspects and refraining from offering alternatives; instead of deconstructing in order to reconstruct on new bases, it may have limited itself to denial, being worried about completely wiping out a world that had profoundly disappointed. Bauman’s idea of liquefaction was an attempt to understand, with greater intellectual rigour than before and through passionate involvement in people’s lives, the kinds of choices that had led to that situation. If postmodernity, together with all the other ‘posts’ that can be linked to it, has contributed to the affirmation of an

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individualistic turning point, to the prevalence of a cynical and destructive irresponsibility, liquidity has instead worked to counter this change of direction. In short, it presented itself as a cure and remedy for the damage produced by postmodernism, but only when the latter was at the end of its journey. If Bauman can be blamed for anything, it is for having privileged the responsibilities of postmodernity and neglected those of modernity. By doing so, he abandoned the process he had begun at the end of the 1980s, with Modernity and Holocaust in 1989 and Modernity and Ambivalence in 1991, along the lines already laid out by Lyotard, who had understood that totalitarianisms were only an outer margin – the extreme to which modernity could aspire, driven as it was by an obsessive need for order and social control. Given these assumptions, two alternative paths were possible. One was to analyse the reasons for the reactionary change, in other words to attempt a historical, political, and social understanding of what produced modernity’s reversal of direction, its ‘perverse’ turning away from initial intentions that had proved to be valid, at least until the second half of the nineteenth century. From that point on we witnessed the beginning of an illiberal and repressive sequence that led to the aberrant solutions of the twentieth century. So in essence this was a matter of finding out what form modernity would have taken if those deviations had not occurred. It is true that history is not made of ‘ifs’, but this exercise of hypothesizing would have made it possible to look at postmodernity as an attempt to deny not the past, but only that fraction of the past that had betrayed the democratic expectations; hence it would have been a constructive reading of postmodern deconstruction. The other path, which is more brutal in its inflexibility, was that of considering modernity a closed issue, a social model that had completed its task and had nothing more to tell us. On that scenario, postmodernity was the irrational but somehow justifiable response to an excess of rationalization that had caused incalculable damage. However, this response, too, had devastating effects of its own. Bauman’s liquidity is presented as a mediator between two irreconcilable positions, almost like a tertium datur; it introduces the original idea of a structural modification of modernity itself. For a variety of reasons whose root can be found in the



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acceleration of vital movements, in the ease of communication, and in the introduction of new technologies, modernity has lost its solidity. Instead of depicting a deviated or depleted modernity, Bauman opened our eyes to the changed consistency of modernity; and this, in essence, comes down to salvaging the modern spirit while waiting for its rehabilitation or for a suitable ‘adjustment’. Here, as we have seen, chronological sequencing acquires considerable importance: Bauman’s initial analysis addressed postmodernity. We are speaking about the 1990s; and his interest in a postmodern vision of society wears out within the compass of this decade (the ten-year span is significant). In 2000 Bauman published Liquid Modernity, where he distanced himself from his earlier postmodernist faith and elaborated a new vision, aimed in fact at saving modernity – but it did not stop there. During the decade 2000–10, the idea of liquidity also began to show signs of weakening. It became increasingly difficult to apply it to a reality that was changing too rapidly, before our very eyes. The sociologist had no choice but to acknowledge the inadequacy and depletion of that concept; it was still useful if one wanted to understand a particular historical moment, the beginning of the third millennium, but was no longer sufficient. Hence, in 2010, the idea of an interregnum crept in; but this was only in part a replacement. The new concept portrayed the reality of that time as a ‘void’ between two normative orders – one that had no value left to it and whose laws were no longer needed, another that had not come into force yet. The interregnum was the absence of regulation between these orders – a place of existential solitude that we visualize as a wasteland. In a place like that individuals move around frantically, with no awareness of their future, uncertain of the decisions to be taken, oblivious of a past that, far from constituting a valid point of reference, seems pointless and obsolete. The interregnum is a state of waiting in which the characteristics of liquidity subsist, together with the need to find new rules and new prospects with which to build the future, because, as the Romans knew too well, every interregnum must be as brief as possible if it was not to end up in chaos. Durkheim has pointed out long ago that this threat exists in every context in which anomie – the absence of rules – prevails. Today this anomie continues unchallenged; and Bauman felt the need to end it as soon as possible, perhaps

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finding in a new social regulation the opportunity to solve most of the critical issues of liquid modernity. The interregnum, then, is the condition captured in photography, as it were, at the beginning of the decade 2010–20; and it continued for a few years, with no major developments or great insights. During its years, Bauman must have begun to doubt that his idea of liquid modernity would last and continue to account for a rapidly changing society. His advanced maturity, his late style – Spätstil, as Theodor W. Adorno and Edward W. Said would say – shows evidence of diminishing conviction by comparison with the determination and accuracy he displayed in the first years after 2000. In the light of his last works (such as Retrotopia, published posthumously in 2017), it is to be assumed that, if he had had the time, Bauman would have been able to find other solutions; he would probably have come to agree that modernity has now delivered everything it could during its three centuries and that the time has come for it to declare itself defunct, with all due honours; and he might have placed the liquid phase in its proper perspective, seeing it as modernity’s extreme attempt to cling to a reality that does not belong to it – an agony of modernity attested by pain, anxiety, despair, and regret. In the face of evidence of the dissolution of the mirage – a mirage so fascinating that no one had the audacity to denounce – it was high time to surrender. This was more painful and difficult to admit for those who had lived in modernity as if it were their home and the home of those before them, the place where memories, experiences, convictions, and even an idea of reasonableness were stored and a place that, until that moment, had represented the deepest self: humanity built through centuries of experiences and struggles, studies and imagination, fantasies and personal relationships, loves, events, disillusionment, emotions, compromises, defeats, satisfactions, and hopes. *** Bauman passed away on 9 January 2017; he did not live to see how the phase of interregnum was abruptly interrupted at the beginning of the next decade. The year 2020 does not lead to new norms (at least not ‘new’ in a positive sense), but to a pandemic that brings every social process to a standstill, questions alternatives and hopes, shelves any results obtained,



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and above all puts an end to the interregnum and, with it, the idea of a liquid society that shaped and characterized the whole of the West between the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first. On the other hand, it is true to say that there are new social norms, which were issued in haste, to deal with emergency situations, and force us to rethink proximity, collective behaviour, lifestyle habits, relationships between people, future prospects, and even consumption. They are norms in the making, not definitive ones, and this makes them look like fortuitous, provisional interventions made while everyone is waiting for the emergency to end and for things to go back to how they used to be. And what was that? It was the liquid society, the period of interregnum with its bleak expectation: the depressing stagnation of waiting for something or someone to intervene and change things. The false hope of a return to stability, to a comforting and reassuring situation, is what remains of the illusion that not all the recent past is lost, that it is still there, within our reach – all we need is the will to turn back and grasp it again. Nothing is more illusory than this hope of certainty: a new ‘great division’ has already taken place while we were waiting to be given new rules from a new auctoritas, capable of directing a bewildered world towards other prospects of salvation. The rules are those that we have to give ourselves when confronted with an epochal change that imposes unprecedented behaviour and they are all to be verified, tested, and codified, because it is the task of these generations, which have found themselves living in a particular fraction of time, to face the new and the unexpected and to make it a cultural project, a new social mode. If we look back, we can see that modernity is indeed over. Its end has been announced by many groups and in different languages: denounced, threatened, invoked already at the end of the nineteenth century by Nietzsche, celebrated in the first part of the twentieth by Heidegger and then hastily dismissed by post-modern thinkers, it continues in Bauman’s liquidity, being broken down into Beck’s second or third modernity, Augé’s surmodernity, and Lipovetsky’s hypermodernity. Each one of these authors has narrated how modernity has been surpassed, but none has ever definitively excluded it. It was not a new

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philosophy or a powerful and innovative cultural movement that did it, putting paid to every glimmer, every opportunity for rebirth, every meticulous reform hoped by all those who, in the footsteps of Bauman, still believed in modernity. All it took was an unforeseen event. Initially it was considered no more than a flu complication; within a few months it turned out to be the most serious pandemic of the modern age. Ironically, when we consider modernity’s long goodbye, its deeply ingrained resistance to leaving the field, we are reminded of H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds, where the Martians are defeated in the attempt to take over the earth not by human technology or by the most sophisticated weapons, but by a simple cold: a virus attacking an immune system that is not able to deal with it. Covid-19 may not have succeeded in annihilating the human species (although unfortunately it killed quite a few of the most fragile humans), but it certainly ended an era. In the history books that are still to be written, the end of the modern era will not be Lyotard’s postmodernity, or Bauman’s liquid society, but a crisis in the healthcare system induced by the devastating event of a globally spread pandemic. In retrospect, can we say that the theorization of the liquid society was an ideological feat? Could it have represented a kind of mystification of reality? The problem seems to lie in the change that took place within ideological processes themselves, which do not remain stable over time. In the beginning, as Marx and Engels record in the Manifesto, the bourgeoisie had an absolutely innovative and revolutionary position by comparison with the historical period before its hegemony. When they refer to its ability to revolutionize constantly the instruments of production, it is to that historical period that they are looking; but things are not expected to remain the same over time. In the years after 1848, that is, after the publication of the Manifesto, the bourgeoisie withdrew to more conservative positions. In essence, it gradually lost the aptitude to promote change and, with it, a whole series of libertarian guarantees that it had originally endorsed, and sought instead the stability and solidity of a production system that would allow it to maintain the privileges it had acquired. It is here that modernity, not entirely identifiable with the modernization of the bourgeoisie – the bourgeoisie is only one



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of its components, albeit a substantial one – begins to decline, as it fails to keep up the objectives of world domination that it had set itself. In the twentieth century it will try to make up for lost ground by imposing a return to order through violence and the oppression of totalitarianism, but this position can hardly be called revolutionary. In reality, what seems to be fundamental in the Manifesto is that the ‘vanishing’ – in Berman’s (1988) words – of solid relations is not attributable to the bourgeoisie as the dominant class of the first half of the nineteenth century but to the idea of modernity itself, as the product of a culture and conception of the world that, by its very nature, has a tendency to crumble. There are in fact two or three regulating principles of modernity that do not belong to bourgeois culture but that the bourgeoisie has used for some time, and they can serve as an example: in the first place, work. In the modern universe, work becomes fundamental to the functioning of an ordered society, in which everyone has their own primary task to perform. For the first time in human history, work is considered a founding element of individual identity and gives human beings dignity, which until then was guaranteed by faith, by the awareness of being children of God. Modernity is secular and its ideology is that of the Enlightenment: belief in science and in the use of instrumental rationality. The object of the new faith is progress – another founding principle, like work, and one that will end up disintegrating because of the impossibility of unlimited growth and as a result of the systematic exploitation and consequent depletion of the planet’s resources. Hence the claim to dominate nature unqualifiedly no longer holds, unless it were possible to replace that form of hubris with some other ‘revolution’ even when the economic forces had done everything to preserve the current course. Finally, constant, reassuring social control may have seemed feasible in the first phase of modernity and was perhaps even easy to implement, not only through exceptional instruments of an invasive nature, like Bentham’s panopticon, but through continuous and painstaking work, from the registry office through training to public education. But it could be that the demand for this kind of control proves to be flawed when indistinct and threatening masses emerge and are ready to rebel and challenge the social

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order, which they regard as unjust and aggressive. Foucault wrote several memorable pages on this theme, and it is worth reflecting on it before embracing the view that the bourgeoisie has always been able to change and adapt to the needs of the moment. Bauman made it clear, however, that at a certain point, perhaps when trade union struggles and revolutionary outbreaks started all over the West, the banner of progress in the race to revolutionize productive relationships – which meant seeking well-being, personal fulfilment, and the primacy of science – passed from capitalism to socialism; from capitalism, mark, not from the bourgeoisie, a social class by then dispersed within the masses and devoid of cultural identity. The events of the second half of the nineteenth century are crucial to understanding this change. After that the banner passed on to communism, as happened in the case of the Soviet Union – and not through a ‘nominalist’ process of labelling ‘progressive’ those who recognized themselves in socialist ideas, but because there was a real need to compete with capitalism in the same field of work, of development, and of the ancient plan to dominate nature. But the unresolved problem remains modernity, this cage in which capitalists and proletarians, oppressors and oppressed move around without being able to get out, limiting themselves to taking up the baton of history from time to time. Whether protagonists or executors, whether legislators or interpreters, they all remain within the robust logic of modernity, and also within its dogged conviction about the materiality of existence – a conviction based on work, production, and consumption, all gathered around a sublimated concept of ‘economy’ (from oikos ‘house’, ‘home’, ‘estate’), whose original meaning is ‘administration of the house’ elevated to rule of life. *** Can Bauman be considered a Marxist thinker? At the beginning, perhaps yes, if you look at his education; but then, while still being left wing-oriented, he turned away from the communist faith after the Hungarian Uprising in 1956. In this generation of unconscious Marxists clarity needs to be given to the meaning of certain labels that cause confusion, starting with ‘ideology’, which is misused and applied too widely. Ideologies – not those of the eighteenth-century French



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idéologues, who wanted an ideology to be an act of freedom of thought and who were therefore opposed by Napoleon – proved to be formidable inhibitors of critical thought. They required an act of faith, absolute and uncritical adhesion, which ended up being dogmatic, that is, being relative to a truth that had to be accepted en bloc, with no possibility of being questioned. This is why the very concept of ‘ideology’ has been harshly challenged in postmodernity, which, among its merits and demerits, has had the opportunity to dispense with all ideologies and with the whole ideological system. In this way it left exposed and unprotected a set of values that relied on uncritical certainties. If there is one certainty in this world of uncertainties, it is that we are no longer governed by ideological systems. Neoliberalism, which is widespread in economic policy, is in fact a non-ideology. Neoliberalism is based on human, instinctual weaknesses; it allows the law of the strongest to prevail; it eliminates social solidarity; it liberalizes the economy and finance in the absence of any state control; it takes away the state’s functional prerogatives, thus leading to its institutional crisis. Despite its name, it is a far cry from liberalism, which had quite different aims and its own dignity of political purpose. To think that liquid modernity represents the ideology of neoliberalism is misleading (to say the least), both because neoliberalism is pragmatic and because liquid modernity is not an ideology but a metaphor for a particular condition of western society. If it is feared that the metaphor may conceal society as a whole, one could retort that Bauman has not tried to conceal real society at all: if anything, he has emphasized it, pointing it out even to those who did not want to pay heed to critical issues and upheavals in human relations. What Bauman wanted to analyse was the profound change in people’s personal behaviour and behaviour with other persons that has occurred as a result of the major economic changes brought about by globalization. In fact globalization came about thanks to the advent of real-time communications, followed by the opening up of markets in search of new outlets. Cultural exchange preceded economic exchange, which demonstrated once again that culture is not a superstructure of society. Globalization is the result of the possibility of recognizing and exchanging ideas, information, goods,

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and services on a global scale, of breaking down the cultural borders first, and then the physical ones. The fact that Bauman does not place any special focus on economic structure and does not attribute to it any cause for change immediately puts him outside any Marxist logic. Neoliberalism and liquid modernity are two incompatible visions: neoliberalism is not the cause of social liquefaction, but rather stems from modernity in crisis. If anything, neoliberalism seized the opportunity, which the absence of social solidity created, to become the protagonist of an economic season scarred by crisis. And, as observed earlier in the chapter (p. 31), it would be a mistake to lay all the blame at the door of neoliberalism. The people who chose to modify the conditions of work, the rules, and the economic laws day after day are the ones who liberalized work, thereby making it more precarious in order to achieve greater efficiency and flexibility. Now it is true that social liquidity represented a particular moment in history and cannot be taken as a common denominator or as a universal key to understanding society. It characterized only a fraction of time. But it offered an opportunity to interpret reality in a way that everyone could understand, and for this reason it was trivialized and inappropriately used – overused and misused – like many terms that enter everyday language; and this happened at a time when its effectiveness had run out and it was no longer suited – society had changed. This does not mean that the concept of social liquidity was a mystification, or that it suggested that society no longer exists as a whole.

1.5. Modernity and Modernization If there is a link between liquid society and Marxism, it is the idea of the dissolution of modernity, and it comes perhaps more through Berman’s interpretation of the Manifesto of the Communist Party than directly from Marx. The conviction that the supposed solidity of modernity is only apparent and that in reality everything tends to dissolve as a result of capital’s need to renew itself constantly is well explained by Marshall Berman and shows how important this conception of continuous mobility is to the very existence of modernity. If the principle of an absolute mobility that aims to achieve constant renewal is part of modernity itself, then we can



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understand how Bauman’s liquidity is compatible with modernity; it rather represents the moment when modernity very rapidly breaks up, in anticipation of a new balance. ‘Modern men and women’, warns Berman (1988: 95–6), ‘must learn not to long nostalgically for the “fixed, fast-frozen relationships” of the real or fantasized past, but to delight in mobility, to thrive on renewal, to look forward to future developments in their conditions of life and their relations with their fellow men’. Remarkably, Berman wrote this in 1982, almost half a century ago, and yet his affirmations are now more relevant than ever. The warning is unavoidable: if you want to keep up with the times, you have to accept change not as the exception but as the norm – as the normality of life, at least life of the modern variety. Again, translated into sociopolitical language, this means that, if you want to oppose capitalism, as Berman suggests, you have to embrace change, perhaps even anticipate it in order to glimpse future directions. Knowledge allows us to choose, not simply be subjected to events. In essence, change is not a prerogative of capitalism; it is not that capitalism has chosen this working hypothesis because it is more effective than others, or because it allows it to circumvent all obstacles and maintain a pre-eminent position in the economy. The reason is, clearly, capitalism’s need to survive in modernity: this – in other words, modernity as a founding principle – is what imposes change. Modernity feeds on modernization, the continuous consumption of resources, ideas, processes, and products. It absorbs and dissolves them relentlessly, drawing energy from this incessant movement towards new balances that never stand a chance of stabilizing. In this continuous cycle of consolidation and dissolution, modernity consumes the planet’s resources without restraint, wipes out life, and exploits people for its own ends. It does so in order to survive and maintain itself, like any open system – in which, according to systems theory, the prevailing disorder generates information and tends to be incorporated and dissolve into a new equilibrium, until other disorders appear to undermine it and generate new information. The pattern is a continuous alternation of unpredictability–information and predictability– dissolution. Only in this way can an open system avoid entropy – that is, death due to the fact that it reaches equilibrium at

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every point (in thermodynamic physics, this type of entropy leads to thermoneutrality). Modernization concerns the economy and politics; therefore it is about production methods, technological development, and, more generally, progress – the objective of an infinite improvement that tends towards the well-being of society. Modernism, on the other hand, according to Marshall Berman, consists of culture, and hence is about literature, the arts, thought, and feelings. Normally these two elements, modernization and modernism, albeit initially united, tend to diverge; and the further apart they grow, the more modernity loses consistency and enters into crisis. Modernization is a liberation and a condemnation at the same time. It is liberalizing and innovative in its aims, but in the long term has had socially destabilizing effects – not so much via the upheavals of the Industrial Revolution, although these are its immediate and most striking effects, as via the powerful cultural drive it has impressed on the western world. This drive was not immediately discernible but its work was carried out unseen, underground, as it were. Over time it caused a profound change, whose consequences are now felt at the social level. If we consider, as Hartmut Rosa explains, the processes that modernization set in motion – ‘rationalization’ (Weber, Habermas), ‘differentiation’ (Durkheim, Luhmann), ‘individualization’ (Simmel, Beck, Elias) and ‘domestication’ (Marx, Adorno) – we realize how much both us and our perception of the world have changed, starting with that of time. All modern­ ization processes are linked to time, not only because ‘the manner of our being-in-the-world depends to a great degree on the temporal structures [Zeitstrukturen] of the society in which we live’ (Rosa 2013: xxxviii), but especially because modern­ ization has led to a rapid acceleration of the pace of life. This acceleration can be seen in working relationships, in business, in everyday life; we find it even in the precociousness of young people and in generational exchanges, and it is related to the constant feeling of not having time, the obsession to hurry, the fear of being left behind by others who are running faster. At the end of the last century, James Gleick had already denounced the effects of acceleration on technology in a book titled Faster: The Acceleration of just about Everything (Gleick



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1999). This trend, which he observed with curiosity, would soon become a rule of life. Nevertheless, we have to realize that social acceleration is not caused by technological innovation, which is commonly invoked as the main driver of change; on the contrary, with its increasingly sophisticated ability to save us time, at least in appearance, technology is merely the pragmatic response to a cultural need imposed by our society. In short, technology develops along the path laid by culture and consumption. We are not the victims of technology, we promote it; we are the sorcerer’s apprentices when it comes to technological innovation, and it does not matter if later we are unable to control its effects and become enchanted by it. The need to run faster – to accelerate in order to attain old and new objectives, previously out of our reach, that are on the horizon and seem now attainable – generates anxiety, creates expectations, and fosters competition, since acceleration is also a cultural fact and involves the whole society. There is a force behind it, a flywheel that modernization set in motion centuries ago and that, despite everything, is still making its effects felt through the idea of progress. It is a secular idea that lends itself perfectly to interpreting the spirit of the contemporary human being. ‘The acceleration of the pace of life’, Rosa rightly acknowledges, ‘is externally driven by the cultural promise of acceleration in the form of a secularization of the religious promise of eternal life’ (Rosa 2013: xxi). Faced with this opportunity, we have to run, otherwise we will miss out on it. Eternity also takes on the characteristics of a consumer good. In its own way, capitalism, which has found in modernity a suitable place for it to develop, adopts the same method of alternating between order and disorder to avoid entropy or stasis, death caused by immobility. And as long as modernity exists, in other words as long as the methods and culture of modernity are passively accepted, capitalism, too, will be able to continue to flourish, incessantly modify its production processes, and force people to adapt to them. This is because to be modern or to pursue the demands of cultural modernism means continuing to think and act according to the same unchanged principles and to remain trapped within the same rigid logic.

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If we compare the three poles of analysis considered so far, we can see that both Marx and Berman remain, for reasons of age, anchored in modern logic and tied to the obvious need to move, be it critically, in the world that modernity has created, with no possibility of getting out of it. Even Marx’s proletarians, acting in the class struggle to overthrow the system, are naturally modern and look at the same principles that the modern spirit has imposed as if they were universal. This applies to work, for example, as well as to the idea of progress: the same logic, the same destiny. The factors change, but not the result, as demonstrated by those countries where communism came to power. Bauman is the one who breaks out of this logic. Out of the three, he is the only one to lay bare the perverse mechanism that precludes the prospect of surpassing modernity. He does not do so by theorizing liquid society, but by resorting to the notion of interregnum: he formulates a hypothesis of extraordinary change – not of the modern kind, so to speak, which dissolves what already exists so that everything remains the same (to paraphrase Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s The Leopard), but rather structural. There is a deep fracture that undermines the previous rules and, while new ones still wait to be issued, temporarily leaves humanity in a desolate land or space–time, one where anomie prevails. This middle time is far worse than liquidity: it is a period in which everything stands still, waiting for something to happen, for a new world order to take the reins of the economy and politics, to create a new system, different from the previous one. It does not look like a continuation of modernity, even if it is liquefied. Instead it has all the characteristics of a ‘historical’ abandonment of the idea of liquidity, which was useful for making us understand a particular fraction of time at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first but has now run its course. As a transitional phase in a period of uncertainty in which reality is difficult to understand, liquidity gives way to an interval of stasis in which time seems to stand still. Everything is motionless and liquidity thickens into a frenzied, still image, which looks more like the eye of the storm: the wind dies down and the sense of oppression crushes souls and keeps them suspended. This was the feeling that Bauman intended to convey



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when faced with the impending new time that could only be sensed. In the last years before his death, Bauman had developed a less optimistic attitude, which was less inclined to hope and almost presaged an imminent social disaster. After all, every interregnum, by virtue of its inability to look ahead, is anxiety-inducing: it depresses us through the very feeling we get that any attempt at planning is useless, because any project needs an open horizon if it is to be realized. This feeling that any future is closed was in fact the prevailing emotion that the interregnum produced, and it went on from 2010 to 2020, when the pandemic broke out. That year, 2020, was crucial: a year of turning points in which the state of inertia, waiting, and uncertainty was suddenly unlocked in the face of an unprecedented scenario, which none of the numerous literary dystopias on record had been able to predict or imagine. To this apocalyptic scenario, mankind reacted in the only possible way, namely by considering it surmountable. In fact the first reaction is to resist to the bitter end, with all one’s forces alerted to the emergency, in the belief that sooner or later everything will return to the way it was before, to normality. Moreover, in this state change appears not as something definitive, a change of paradigm, but as a temporary obstacle, to be overcome as quickly as possible. Covid-19 has been described as an unexpected or unwelcome guest, an inconvenience that could very well be overcome through patience, care, and the contribution of science. Vaccination is seen as a means of restoring the broken order, of recuperating our previous way of life. Which life was that? The liquid one? Or is it the undesirable and painful life that had tarnished social relations, deprived people of security, used technology to enslave them, even psychologically, and to deprive them of their freedom and work? Is it perhaps life from even before liquidity, life – more idealized than real – within a modernity that offered security, stability, material well-being, hope for the future, and faith in progress? Berman’s analysis opens up new perspectives on the interpretation of modernity through a comparison with Marx – in particular, with the idea of dissolution, which Marx and Engels incidentally introduce in the Manifesto and then Marx takes up again in Capital. In light of what Bauman writes about the liquid

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society, this concept acquires a very different substance, going as far as to explain the development of today’s society much better than does the Marxist idea of dissolution. More than a century has passed between Marx and Berman, and only twenty years between Berman and Bauman; but these twenty years were long enough for the utopia of postmodernity to burn out and reveal how modernity itself, considered obsolete or surmountable in the 1980s, still has something to say, given its stubborn ability to withstand every crisis. Let us reread Marx and Engels’ own words about the bourgeoisie’s practice of continually upsetting the state of things, because this is the cue for Berman to introduce his new line of thought: The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. … Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind. (Marx and Engels 2012: 89)

Destroy and rebuild, change and question, innovate relentlessly: for the bourgeoisie, this is the instrument that allows it to improve continuously and to maintain power at the same time. Peter Beilharz understood the inaccuracy in the translation of this passage, which by a lucky coincidence makes sense in any case: The appeal of All That Is Solid is partly, emblematically to be found in its title, the symptomatically mistranslated passage from The Communist Manifesto, with its own associative genuflection to Shakespeare’s Tempest … Indeed, Berman manages to capture the sense of the moment, and the way in which Marx, mistranslated or not, captures it symbolically. (Beilharz 2016: 293)

Indeed, in the Manifesto Marx and Engels wrote: ‘Alles Ständische und Stehende verdampft, alles Heilige wirt entweiht.’



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Translated literally, this means: ‘All that is permanent and standing evaporates, all that is sacred is desecrated.’ The interpretation of Marx’s words thus offers a broader sense of the reductive concept of the original: even without intending to, the result produces a definition of the bourgeoisie that continuously destroys and reconstructs, with no interruption. If we replace the term ‘bourgeoisie’ with the term ‘modernity’ – keeping in mind, of course, that the aims of the two entities thus designated do not always coincide – we would get a realistic picture of a culture so sophisticated and complex as to be capable of renewal and self-destruction in order to survive. Marx adds an important corollary to this observation: those who do not adapt to such a mode of action are forced to remain behind, to fail. In the confrontation between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, it is the former that has the better chance, precisely because it possesses the quality of innovation and is able to undermine anyone who does not adopt its practice, dissolving everything that appears solid. This is why, Marx warns, the proletariat needs to adopt a similar methodology and must not tarry in the quest to maintain stability at all costs. If, then, modernity is based on change, on the continuous dissolution of all that is solid and on the construction of the new, it means that Bauman was right to consider liquidity an intrinsic aspect of modernity. The Marx–Berman axis and, above all, the Berman–Bauman axis clarify the modern character of dissolution: it responds to the need to be versatile in different situations and to adapt to different forms, just like a liquid. If anything, the problem lies in the meaning of liquidity in the given historical context, since it represents the last phase of an attempt to adjust to a changed reality, and this attempt is no longer followed by consolidation. For Berman, every dissolution entails a repositioning, a new concretization on other bases, as in the continuous demolition and reconstruction of buildings in New York: this is the most concrete, immediately perceptible example of the modern mode of renewal. In fact, the questioning of acquired certainties and the creation of new ones enable infinite progress. But now, according to Bauman, reconsolidation no longer succeeds. The mechanism is broken: the latest dissolution has no continuation, it is an end in itself. Liquid modernity thus becomes the last act of the modern era, slowly consuming itself

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without an alternative. It is a bleak prospect indeed. Instead of a new consolidation, there is an abrupt transition to a state of waiting, the interregnum, where modernity withers, having lost the strength to react. The bourgeoisie, if we still want to use this obsolete term – otherwise we could call it capitalism, the great powers, the financial economy, or something of this ilk – has already disengaged itself from modernity and its tragic destiny. It has taken other, more efficient and profitable paths, less fraught with obstacles. Modernity and capitalism are no longer together. They were still together in the 1980s, when Berman wrote All That Is Solid, but had parted company by the time of Bauman’s Liquid Modernity. It took only twenty years for them to split without any possibility of reconciliation. The causes can be related to the new technologies, the dematerialization of work, speed, and globalization. The possibility of communicating more easily has changed things, opened up borders, and created opportunities to evade national laws and constraints that bound capital to the territory. This greatest divorce in history, between capital and modernity, marked the former’s transition to a higher, global level, but sealed the end of the modern era. Capitalism is not solid any more; it is volatile, ethereal, and yet no less incisive in determining the destiny of mankind, since it uses more sophisticated instruments than in the past and unilaterally renounces the guarantees that modernity had envisaged: equality, democracy, and freedom. It no longer needs them to assert itself. Its project aims straight at the goal of keeping men and women locked in a self-referential logic where technology means purpose, pleasure, disindividuation, consumption, and self-induced social control. Happiness is found exclusively in the realization of personal intentions, and this happens in marked solitude, which is seen as defence against the world’s threats. Everything we need for a ‘free’ life, from self-fulfilment to learning and entertainment, can be found in our own narrow circles – colleagues, friends, loved ones – without any need for others, or at least for direct relationships with others. Everything is mediatized. The mediatization of the world is the victory of capital. ***



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In the next chapters we will examine together the three main factors that distinguish post-society from the previous condition that we left behind. These are the new concept of proximity, the prevalence of emotions such as the rediscovery of human attributes, and the undisputed voluntary submission to surveillance – three characteristics that clearly were not part of the modern world.

2 Proximity and Social Distancing

2.1. The Stay-at-Home Generation Even before the pandemic, Elisa Maino, queen of TikTok with 4 million followers, had said, with prophetic timing: ‘You don’t need to go out to get to know the world.’ This points to something that was already in the air, part of youth culture, and that was simply confirmed by the hashtag #StayHomeStaySafe, soon to emerge during the pandemic. The latest trend among the younger generations, the millennials and postmillennials, is a countertrend. Instead of going out in the evenings and partying late at clubs or on the streets, with a glass in their hand, they prefer to stay warm and well protected within the walls of their homes. They spend their time comfortably on the sofa, in front of a computer screen or the old indispensable TV screen, watching their favourite series, a concert, or a game and while they enjoy a pizza ordered online with a good bottle of wine or beer. They like to spend this time alone, but also with their partner or just a few friends; and it is even better if their parents go out. They, the fathers and mothers of the previous generation, are the ones who went out in the evening, filling up the restaurants and trendy bars, meeting up for an aperitif and endless games of buraco – as this card game tends to replace any social game in the popular imagination (and in practice, too).



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This was, in the early 2010s, the ‘Netflix and chill’ generation, a phrase that originally captured young people’s addiction to television series: its members chilled out while watching the likes of Game of Thrones, Jack Ryan, The Man in the High Castle, or Breaking Bad. (The phrase has changed meaning since about 2014 and is now an established invitation to sex.) These people found a way of getting both the thrill factor and the relaxation at no risk and, above all, at little cost. They are tired of spending huge amounts of money on an evening out that often proves more stressful than a day of study or work. The comfort of a sofa and enjoyment of a problem-free evening are priceless, but how can we explain this behaviour? The first answer that comes to mind and that everyone obviously expects is that the explanatory factor is the inevitable technological conditioning: the behaviour is induced by the overuse of smartphones and other digital gadgets, by the isolation it causes and resolves, and by the consequent decline of social relationships. One has fewer real friends to meet ‘offline’ and many new virtual friends to chat with; thus one becomes more isolated, introverted, and reserved. Yet, if we think of nightlife, this behaviour has already been tried and tested. Like-minded strangers mingled in a crowd, at the very most exchanging a few words with some privileged interlocutor; the rest was background noise. In spite of the impression of being in company, loneliness was total. One might as well have stayed at home, where one finds more satisfaction, more well-being, and more concentration. And this is what explains the countertrend: at home you don’t chat, you don’t isolate yourself with the help of your smartphone, which is often a means of containment used against the (feared) intrusiveness of others, you don’t go on the Internet to pass the time. Your home is a protected environment where you can be yourself without fear of being judged, observed, questioned, and reprimanded. You can play freely, watch your favourite show, pause it and pick it up again as and when you like, binge-watch ad nauseam. This is the beauty of it: members of the Netflix generation can enjoy audio and video content indefinitely, without having to suffer the interruptions imposed by classic serialized films, which monopolize the TV viewer’s time.

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The stay-at-home choice also creates an opportunity to appreciate another value that has been rediscovered: silence. Having silence as an alternative to noise, clamour, traffic, the background music of pubs and clubs is now a matter of personal choice. One can lower the volume of technological devices, limit oneself to watching just images, or listen to that marvellous expectation of noise that suspends the time and refreshes the soul. We can add that silence befits an extreme choice, the most unexpected and revolutionary one, which makes the person who pursues it appear truly original and worthy of the greatest attention and respect: the choice of reading a book.

2.2. Noli me tangere The ban on social gatherings has affected social habits. Even when the coronavirus threat will have lessened and most people will have been vaccinated, there will still be a feeling of unease when people are together in a group, be it around a dinner table, at a party, at a concert, or at a show. There will be a sense of guilt, unavoidable especially in this generation and springing from the feeling that we are doing something wrong, because there are things that leave their mark on the unconscious in each one of us. Induced behaviours take root and become systemic through practice; caution becomes habitual over time, through the repetition of gestures seen in others and adopted as good practice. Leaving the house without a face mask will make us, if not feel naked, at least sense that something is amiss. Proxemics, the science that studies interpersonal distances in terms of communicative meaning, measures the average distance people tend to maintain when meeting; and it is clear that the shorter the distance, the closer their relationship is. Now there is a standardized distance, measured in centimetres, which encodes ‘neutral’ separateness between strangers or acquaintances. It is a safe distance, which gives no cause for alarm, and functions just like an alarm bell: it ‘rings’ when the measure dangerously decreases and one invades the territory of another. This may happen by pure chance, through an involuntary gesture, and is immediately perceived as an intrusion into one’s private sphere. The reaction to this violation of respect for the area of interpersonal distance is an immediate sensation of



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discomfort, which makes one withdraw, perhaps gracefully, to reassert the physical neutrality within which one feels safe and sheltered from unsolicited closeness. During the pandemic, things have changed. The distance has increased considerably, because people wanted not so much to maintain the two metres that prevent contamination – as healthcare warnings have repeated for months – as to indulge the inner feeling of unease at getting too close to others. The impulse that spontaneously brings one towards one’s interlocutor, be that a friend met in the street or a stranger in need of directions, is curbed by an act of restraint, by a silent warning signal, and possibly also by a feeling of regret at being unable to get closer. This is a step back from the norm, and one made reluctantly. It will undoubtedly become the new norm, a habit no longer to be forgotten or put to the side. Proxemics will have to draw new demarcation lines for the respect of personal space, which will be wider and will no longer include any joyful, perhaps exaggerated gestures, any physical contact with the other person in the form of handshaking, hugging, or talking loudly. People will assume instead a more composed and controlled demeanour, which will come across as a lack of amiability. The act of touching now becomes improper. Noli me tangere, ‘Don’t touch me’, the resurrected Jesus said to Mary Magdalene as she approached him. His gesture of reticence has been universalized in religious iconography by Giotto, Michelangelo, Titian, Correggio, Jacopo da Pontormo, Annibale Carracci, Duccio da Boninsegna, Valentin de Boulogne, Giulio Romano, Agnolo Bronzino, Beato Angelico, Tintoretto, Pompeo Batoni, Evaristo Baschenis, Nicolas Poussin, Claude Lorrain, Hans Holbein, and many other artists. This behaviour will be incorporated into the etiquette of the third millennium. Like all manifestations of good manners that have been preceded by a requirement for hygiene, physical contact will be avoided on all occasions, being limited to close family members, to the exclusion of everyone else. In time, the reasons will be forgotten and the avoidance of physical contact will become a question of good manners. ‘Do not touch me’ is probably an over-literal translation of Jesus’ Noli me tangere, which should rather be understood

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as ‘Do not hold on to me’. But ‘Do not touch me’ is about to become the imperative of a new social paradigm – more respectful, more detached. This is because in network communications, which will become prevalent in direct or ‘face-to-face’ communication, the space of respect for privacy tends to become smaller and smaller. We could say that on the net there is no physical contact, it is impossible to become infected (the only viruses are computer viruses), and therefore there is nothing to fear. We see others through the mediation of a digital instrument; seeing and hearing, but nothing more. There are only images and words, emotions, self-exposure at an advanced level, almost like being in front of a virtual confessional, but in complete safety. *** There is always a route of escape from the network, a technical modality that is guaranteed to get you out: you can simply delete yourself from social networks or not reply to invitations, chats, and e-mails. If we want to or need to, we can do the same with the telephone. The feeling of extreme freedom that the Internet gives us does not immediately reveal the public involvement it implies. Even if we resort to disconnection, one of the escape routes available, the images, the words spoken, the confessions we either let slip out or provokingly stated remain forever. They can be retrieved and retransmitted, and become public knowledge precisely because they are difficult to erase. Relinquishing our privacy, whether consciously or involuntarily, is in curious contrast with the increase of the physical distance between bodies. It could be a form of compensation, or perhaps a need to socialize that the reduced physical presence of others cannot satisfy, and so it finds sublimated forms of expression. The problem of physical contact remains. During fascism, Mussolini had banned the handshake, considering it a barbaric and unhygienic custom, and replaced it with the Roman salute. In more recent times, the church introduced the handshake as a symbolic gesture of peace. During the pandemic it was immediately replaced by elbow touching or a wave of the hand. We just have to think that the practice of handshaking emerged from the need to demonstrate that a person did not have a concealed weapon; thus shaking hands with someone is proof of having no offensive intentions. Now, on the other hand, extending a hand



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appears to carry a hidden threat. It is a gesture that reveals the underlying intention to transmit an invisible virus. Hands must never be shaken again unless they are gloved, yet in the past the glove was a sign of mistrust, and therefore of bad manners; consequently, when shaking hands, it was good practice to take it off. In conclusion, it is better to avoid compromising gestures that, despite being signs of good and peaceful intentions for centuries, even to the point of sealing amicably a verbal agreement or certifying a deal in the absence of a contract, now take on disturbing meanings. It is time, in the post-social era, to review the signs, gestures, and behaviour we have used until now and adapt them to the new reality of keeping rigorously at a distance.

2.3. Living in Remote Mode Why does the community like it? Why is it almost a new trend? Today more than ever, we need to see each other, hear each other, exchange thoughts, give ourselves wholeheartedly in caring and listening and in the commitment we make. It is not just a trend, it is linked to our roots, since the time when staying together as a group, sharing efforts and resources, was the only way to survive. Our coexistence was united by the act of mutual giving. In fact the word ‘community’ comes from the Latin adjective communis (com-munis < cum-munis), itself a derivative of munus, a noun that meant ‘duty’, ‘service’, and also ‘gift’; and the gift, we may assume, could be a commitment to be sensitive to the needs of the other and responsible for the other, in a bond so close that it risked being overwhelming. Even though we are well mannered and inclined to create our social relations on a base of detached and neutral behaviour, which is necessary if we want to ensure a civilized standard, today we deeply feel the lack of community benefits. While they are so reassuring and pacifying, they are also limiting, because the community is an emotional bond from which it is difficult to break free. Modern society relieved us of the obligation to give and imposed a set of rules dictated more by reason than by instinct: it is Rousseau’s social contract, which enshrines both the citizen’s autonomy and duties to the state in exchange for rights and freedom of action. What remains of the community is found in

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the family environment, where care and understanding should be guaranteed. Up until 2020, we were wondering how to get out of the quagmire of a liquid world that urged people to isolate themselves, to close themselves off in the narrow circle of selfish interests, and thereby diminish solidarity and the understanding of others. Obviously, isolation prevents the personality from developing and causes anxiety, dissatisfaction, and aggression, which is why the obsessive search for recognition has become so intense on social networks. People seek out friends on Facebook because they want to be recognized rather than really get to know each other. They post pictures on Instagram to receive admiring likes, they tweet and chat to find approval for their ideas, because without recognition they have a desperate feeling of not existing. Recognition, which according to Axel Honneth (2001: 39) is people’s ‘positive understanding of themselves, that they have acquired intersubjectively’, became one of the major problems of the last part of the twentieth century. It distresses the individual and calls his or her identity into question, because one’s selfawareness and social role depend on it. It is not something that we can give ourselves in a sort of do-it-yourself recognition, but depends instead on others and on how much they are willing to recognize us. It is therefore a social issue, and as such it is obtained and resolved solely in relation to society. It must be said here that in a community recognition is implicit, it happens automatically, by virtue of the reciprocal gift, whereas in society it must be earned. In consequence, it has a cost; and the more complex society is, the higher the cost. In social crises, recognition is denied for a number of reasons, all of which can be traced back to the imbalance created by the crisis, for example in the form of job insecurity. Because of the dignity that accompanies people’s professions, work is one of the most powerful identity factors that lead to social recognition. When the community is far away and the family does not fulfil its rebalancing function, signs of community life are sought where they are still vibrant or can be built ex novo. We can see this in youth gangs – the ‘tribes’ that Michel Maffesoli (1996) speaks of: clumsy attempts to re-create community ties through rituals, dress, and language – and also in temporary communities, those that occasionally form in stadiums, in town squares, or during



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concerts and give people the feeling of being part of a cohesive group until they return home. Partly because it is always available, the Internet represented a great opportunity to build virtual communities and to achieve wider recognition in a space where it is possible to exist without corporeality but brimming with emotions, opportunities, and knowledge. Many thought that they could find in it, in the form of a free and non-committal game, the lost community, the very chance to restore some certainties and to attain a healthy self-recognition. The legacy of change is situated at two levels, behavioural and structural. With respect to the former, there is no doubt that the Internet strengthens remote relationships, those defined as ‘weak’, on which our ability to relate, grow, find work opportunities, and be recognized depend. Psychologically (because psychological reactions have social connotations), we are witnessing a re-evaluation of the emotions, insofar as distancing and isolation must be rewarded through injections of spirituality and emotionality and through a search for the most authentic human qualities. If there is anything that will bring us back in that direction, it is the emotions: feelings, passions, and sensations. The whole emotional sphere – which in the long course of modernity has been repressed in order for us to develop rational thought, since the latter is more effective and functional for economic and productive purposes – is now being re-evaluated. This is because the emotions are the most representative component of the community, the one that takes us back to our natural roots and will probably become prevalent in the future social order. Recognition of the primacy of the emotions over reason could give us back the sense of community that we are seeking. At a structural level, the pandemic has speeded up the process, taking a sudden leap forward where we expected it to come further down the line, for instance by spreading smart working, distance learning, online meetings, home delivery of goods and services, and a dependence on technology. The future has crashed in on us ahead of time, forcing us to adapt in haste. It has congealed our time into a lump of impotence and distrust; it has exacerbated the state of isolation, making it endemic. This is not just a transitional phase from which we will soon emerge, but a permanent condition of constraint.

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There is no normality to return to. Instead there is a reality to be faced, and in front of radical changes previous experience is of little use. The new technologies had already prepared us to do without experience, to deal with new situations without the aid of consolidated knowledge. Thus the society we are entering does not represent an irremediable break with the past, only its evolution. Not everything will go back to the way it was, but nothing will obstruct our need for community either – that deep need to feel part of a group.

2.4. The Privilege of Immunity Immunity has become a buzzword, one that could be voted word of the year: invoked, anxiously pursued by the vaccination campaign, which assures us that immunity will rid us of the nightmare of the pandemic. We want to feel immune – and perhaps we already are, even if not from a medical point of view. If we look up the meaning of this salvific word, we discover that to immunize means to free from obligation. The Latin etymon, immunis – another compound on munus, this time with the negative prefix in- – meant ‘free from’, ‘exempt from’, or ‘devoid of’ – usually a public service, a burden, or a charge. In keeping with its original meaning, immunity indicates privilege. It constitutes an exception to the rule that everyone must comply with, be that about some financial obligation or some personal bond. Courtiers at the king’s court claimed immunity from paying taxes or from military service. But these cases were always exceptions, because the law stipulated the payment of munus – ‘the obligation’ or what was due. This is what forms the community, based as it is on a reciprocal obligation that cannot be disregarded, on pain of dissolving the social bond. The dissolution of community bonds finds a space to unfold at the moment when modern society comes into being, when the relationship between citizens is no longer determined by mutual obligations but by a social contract, that is, by a set of laws established by the sovereign state. We speak of a ‘rule of law’ when relations cease having a personal base and are built instead on a base of laws that are the same for everyone. Having left the community, having been freed from obligation, we obtain



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immunity in the sense of becoming free to act as long as we respect the laws. Most importantly, we acquire individual rights (Esposito 2011). *** What Simone Weil wrote about civilized behaviour – that the individual ‘only has duties, amongst which are certain duties towards himself. Other men, seen from his point of view, only have rights’ (Weil 2001: 2) – does not seem to apply to modern society, where the individual claims rights and tries to evade obligations, today more than ever. In their own way, individuals aspire to immunity. However, when a society maximizes individual rights and tends to isolate individuals, to restrict the scope of their collective action, the result is a loss of the achievements civilization has made. A kind of regression to pre-communitarian conditions takes place – that is, to a state in which loneliness, fear, and uncertainty drive men and women to seek the warmth of contact with other men and women, giving up a part of their autonomy in exchange for survival. There are many reasons why today’s society, through that epochal transition that Bauman defined as liquid, has seen the predominance of violent and selfish behaviour, of intolerance to others, of renunciation of solidarity, and of loneliness, which seeks an outlet primarily in the virtual worlds of the web. The pandemic has exacerbated this condition of isolation, has legitimized ‘social distancing’ – something that, even if not perceivable, was already practised in the form of living close together without noticing or considering the others (which is pure hypocrisy) – and has dissolved the last shreds of sharing in the world of work and school. Immunity is already here, and it only takes the last mile, the immunity offered by vaccination, for the picture to be complete. To avoid the destruction of sociality – what Touraine (2013) called ‘the end of societies’ – we will have to resort to another type of vaccine, which is neither stored at low temperatures nor inoculated intramuscularly. This is hope, and it is realized by recovering the positive aspects of community and society, or rather of communitas and societas: the Latin terms should not mislead, since, as the anthropologist Victor Turner (1966) observed, societas cannot exist without communitas – not without warmth, mutual dependence, exchange, and conviviality. This dynamic is inevitably accompanied by immunitas, which is

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a form of release from the bonds of community. As Roberto Esposito writes, immunitas allows liberation from obligation, because ‘only by dissociating themselves from any relation can individuals avoid lethal contact’ (Esposito 2010: 27). In fact, if we add that tertium datur, that there is a third option – that both freedom for the individual and protection from contagion for community and society are possible – we will have come full circle, because when privileges such as immunity belong to everyone we called it a ‘democracy’.

2.5. Recognition and Socialization Recognition is a crucial aspect of socialization. Its importance becomes apparent when social bonds break up and the definition of the self is left with no confirmation. Axel Honneth, who has devoted much of his work to the subject of recognition, highlights its ambiguous conception, while strictly maintaining its social function. The notion that we have already involved in relations of recognition has taken on such a variety of meanings in modern thought, [that] I will operate on the hypothesis that these differences are linked to the national particularities of the cultures in which the term is employed. (Honneth 2020: 4)

Is recognition, then, a cultural fact? The same is also pointed out by Reinhart Koselleck (2002), who believes that this variety of meanings is merely the consequence of certain models that have taken different evolutionary paths over the centuries and that the linguistic distinction between the terms that designate the bourgeoisie – citoyen (‘citizen’) in French, Bürger (‘citizen’) in German, ‘middle class’ in English – is nothing more than a very obvious symptom of this phenomenon. In his analysis of recognition in three European countries, France, Britain, and Germany, Honneth notes substantial differences in how recognition occurs, depending on the socio­political imprint that has developed in each. It seems that the French aspire to recognition out of a need for social legitimiz­ ation and for their qualities to be noticed, so they adopt a behaviour that tends towards conformism and social homo­geneity and is accompanied by the dreaded pensée unique.



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The British, on the contrary, would not be held hostage to the judgement of others but would act as ‘players’ in a shared social game, where everyone tries to elicit positive reactions from their interaction with others. As for the Germans, Honneth sees them fighting for their autonomy, acting as rational subjects, and managing, thanks to reason, to limit themselves. Self-restraint allows considerable autonomy even as the subject lives up to what the community expects of him or her, even sacrificing him- or herself and maintaining a dignified mode of behaviour. The French case seems to be the one that best fits the current situation: dependence on the judgement and approval of others is a recurring theme and seems to prevail, especially when it comes to network communities. Honneth admits that this dependence is not positive but reveals a deep personal insecurity, which has negative repercussions on one’s individuality. Indeed, it is observed that the rapidly spreading predominance of the subject in contemporary society does not go hand in hand with greater awareness and personal maturity. On the contrary, there is a yearning for reassurance and confirmation, but these do not come from society, which remains indifferent, so to speak, to such demands, unwilling to satisfy the wishes of increasingly aggressive people who want to impose themselves at all costs and for no reason. The masses of rampant individuals, anxious to be recognized, are inclined to project onto society their inability to become autonomous, holding society responsible for their failure to fulfil their obligations, and invariably end up turning to network communities. It is here, in a universe devoid of obligations or restrictions, that they find the right terrain on which they may aspire to satisfy their enormous appetite for approval. And their hunger grows out of proportion as a result of the vast competition created on the net, where millions of users with similar problems converge, and also because they find it difficult to form relationships with real people from whom they might expect humanly understandable reactions. On the web, direct contact is denied; in addition to the mediation of technology, which imposes distance and diminishes empathy, anonymity prevails. The faceless audience heightens the frenzy for recognition, which is quantitative rather than

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qualitative. In fact, there are no words of comfort, no indications of emotion, or participation, but only numbers. The more feedback one receives – and this feedback is often limited to ‘likes’ – the more one believes to be socially approved; but this is an ephemeral type of gratification and remains so even when one receives the millions of positive signals in the form of followers and comments. In fact, much to the contrary, the more ‘likes’ one receives, the more one feels lonely, misunderstood, and worthless. The legitimation of our own behaviour and opinions – that crave for acceptance that enables a full assertion of the self – does not find an adequate solution on the net. This is because legitimation is implicit; it does not require a specific, finalized action on the part of the subject. It happens spontaneously, emerging from the subject’s belonging in the social group and simply being him- or herself, with genuine attributes, which may not be immediately appreciated or recognized, and with an ability to interact and affirm his or her personality. What happens in the social sphere cannot take place on the net because on the net the subject is purely virtual. Hence some action is needed, some self-promoting initiative through which one can show oneself in order to stimulate other people’s interest. In this ‘active’ mode spontaneity is lost and recognition is no longer felt as authentic, but as a deliberately provoked reaction. Recognition acquired on the net, rather than legitimizing the subject, depresses him or her still further, instilling feelings of inadequacy and self-dissatisfaction; one’s actions are meaningless. The consequences are there for everyone to see; they range from depression to self-harm. What is not visible, what remains hidden deep down, is a process of dis-individuation that is induced in this way: it erodes sociality and has adverse effects such as the dissolution of ethical principles. We need to understand that society is based on moral principles, which constitute the force that unites us and guarantees our coexistence and on which a culture develops. Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot (2006 [1991]) clearly expressed the risk of the dissolution of the social when the moral structure of society is undermined, a state that follows with great precision from Durkheim’s anomie. This is not just about laws, which regulate human beings’ relations with a rationality that enables the organization of the



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social fabric. At stake here is an ethical substratum that makes us capable of distinguishing, beyond laws, what is good from what is evil, what is right from what is wrong. In this connection it is disturbing, as Honneth notes, that moral categories have disappeared from the theoretical vocabulary of sociology. Sociology views the object of its study either as anonymous processes of self-organization or as the result of cooperation between strategic actors. The disciplines that serve as a model for these studies are biology or economics, whose conceptual models are considered adequate for explaining a process as complex as the reproduction of societies. In light of these theoretical reorientations, one cannot avoid the impression that contemporary sociology is striving to finally leave behind its founding fathers. After all, for Max Weber and Émile Durkheim, as well as Talcott Parsons, it was obvious that a basic conception of the social world could only be gained by making use of the concepts, models and hypotheses of a theory of morality. (Honneth 2012: 98)

If modernity is characterized by a set of normative principles that legitimize the social order and justify it just as they justify its policies, then we have further confirmation of a crisis of modern times. We are dealing here with more than the breakup of moral principles, namely with the impossibility of justifying current policies, which are no longer based on shared principles. Moreover, the practices of justification that are used online to gain recognition appear increasingly to be accompanied by a sort of ‘demoralization’ of society – by which I mean placing society outside the sphere of morality.

2.6. Cold Ethics Émile Durkheim assigns morality a fundamental role in society, taking up Saint-Simon’s (2014 [1869]) suggestion that the two have identical origins. Nomos, the law that regulates human relations, is not only a rule attested by law; it is above all an ethical conviction on which solidarity depends, in other words it is the binding force that is necessary if we are to be able to speak of society. There can be no solidarity without morality; consequently, what Durkheim finds in any social order derives primarily from the sharing of ethical principles.

64 Post-Society Thus we may state generally that the characteristic of moral rules is that they enunciate the basic conditions of social solidarity. Law and morality represent the totality of bonds that bind us to one another and to society, shaping the mass of individuals into a cohesive aggregate. We may say that what is moral is everything that is a source of solidarity, everything that forces man to take account of other people, to regulate his actions by something other than the promptings of his own egoism, and the more numerous and strong these ties are, the more solid is the morality. We can see how inaccurate it is to define it, as has often been done, in terms of freedom. It rather consists much more in a state of dependence. (Durkheim 1984 [1883]: 310–11)

As in the community, in society at large morality is a condition of dependence, of obligation to submit to certain implicit norms that, for better or worse, are able to ensure solidarity. It is one of the fundamental characteristics that still bind community and society together and make sure that the latter, while being distinguished by the obligation of giving, maintains a relationship of dependence among individuals – albeit not dependence as alienation of the self and surrender of autonomy, which the gift of the community envisaged, but rather as a state of depending on a recognized, accepted, and binding code. This still means mutual dependence, but in the case of society it is a form of conscious dependence, to which the subject submits in exchange for the benefit of being recognized as a ‘social being’. Liberation from the condition of dependency amounts to breaking the social relationship. It is no coincidence that Durkheim insists on the importance of not falling into anomie, of continuing to construct and maintain good ethical norms. Anomie, meaning lack of laws, is essentially the absence of moral norms. Why this insistence, this constant concern, which pushed Durkheim to devote an entire chapter to it in the conclusion of The Division of Labour in Society? Durkheim was writing at a time when industrialization was already at an advanced stage; the world had changed as a result of the introduction of mechanization into production processes – and of electricity, too. Great transformations were taking place and only a few years later Max Weber would highlight how ethics – at least in the sphere of economic relations, which Marx had called ‘structural’, thus treating them as a cornerstone of society – had adapted to the new demands of production.



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In these decades, between the end of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth, the effects that modernity had encouraged through the idea of progress became apparent. Progress construed as continuous improvement ignored all moral barriers to the achievement of its goals. It would overcome any obstacle, even at the cost of generating collateral damage. For the first time, controlled exceptions were introduced into an ethical code that had hitherto given priority to the interests and protection of the human being. The idea of progress allowed for the (quantitative, statistical) acceptance of collateral damage as ‘calculated cost’ within a project that had a socially useful purpose. However, this is purely occasional, since capitalist ethics, which Weber discusses with masterly insight in his studies on the sociology of religion, had already granted substantial derogations from socially shared moral norms; hence Durkheim’s concerns. The derogations essentially allowed freedom of action in the economic sphere. The ethical norms that apply in civil life would not apply in the vast and vital fields of industry, commerce, and finance; here they had to be suspended or circumvented, even if only for the time strictly needed to conclude business deals. It was like fighting a war in which blows could not be spared if the goal of every transaction was to be achieved: profit. It is the law of the market that imposed this criterion on winning or losing, just as the law of the jungle, which decides who survives and who succumbs, pays heed only to aggressiveness, cunning, readiness, and cynicism. There were no concessions, no mercy, and, above all, no regard for collateral damage. This ‘cold ethics’ adopted by capitalism could work only if it was limited to the business sector and used with caution within specific territories of it, namely on the stock exchange, in banking, in financial transactions, and in the movement of large amounts of capital. This is because, as Durkheim rightly feared, such an ethics would destroy the social fabric if it were extended to other areas of civilized life. If it had expanded beyond a controlled and visible boundary, it would have jeopardized solidarity, the fundamental principle on which any social consortium rests. If we are to talk about ethics, it seems clear that modernity has created its own rules of social behaviour, appropriate to the type of society it has set out to build. Modern ethics is capitalist ethics

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and, according to Hegel, in economic relations a set of strict moral rules has been put in place to guarantee the correctness of productive and commercial exchanges, even if the rules are not always respected; indeed, rules are made to be broken, but this does not prevent them from being recognized as shared values. In The Great Transformation, Karl Polanyi (2001 [1944]) expressed an opposition to this assumption of a capitalist ethics as the nomos of modernity, a sort of ‘deregulation’ that envisages an iron law of profit regulated by supply and demand, that is, by the logic of the market – in essence, by the dissolution of any moral conditioning that could hinder or limit the freedom of free trade in any way. Despite Hegel’s confidence and Durkheim’s optimism, what Polanyi anticipated, through an objective analysis of the facts, was a double (and antithetical) division of modern ethics. That split was to separate the private sphere, which pertains to the family and sociable relations, from the public sphere, in which business and economic activities are regulated. While in the political sphere the moral norms of private life are more commonly followed, or at least the universality of values such as trust, responsibility, and solidarity is accepted, in economic relations the norms are different. Here, unlike in politics, the polity likes to present itself as having the same characteristics as groups with strong ties, in order to get closer to the citizens and maintain consensus. Perhaps we are not dealing with the liberalization of ethics, as Polanyi seems to fear, but the capitalist system has certainly taken note of what Max Weber announced at the beginning of the last century, namely that the separation between a familybased economy and a public one had already taken place. This distinction not only involved productive and commercial practices but also modified the worldview. Two incompatible ethics emerged and from that moment on had to move along separate lines. They had different intentions and effects, and each time an attempt was made to reconcile them, that is, to bring economic ethics in line with private ethics, it proved to be a disaster. All this functioned well as long as modernity continued to hold primacy. But already in the liquid society, where the reference values of modernity were challenged, disregarded, or rendered unimportant as a result of a general or cultural crisis, the double



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ethics that had prevailed in the capitalist economy proved lethal. The crisis of modernity devastated the private ethics that governed family ties and the bonds between individuals – that is, relationships that were usually considered social – while it made the public ethics of economic relations harsher, absolving it from even the slightest scruple that might previously have restrained it. In short, the crisis created the conditions for the extension of a full-blown cold ethics to every sector of society. In fact, when we talk about the demoralization of society, we must specify the part of society we are referring to: once private ethical values have been cancelled – or at least suspended, pending the re-emergence of a culture of the private sphere on an authentic basis – according to Weber, only cold values that impose themselves forcefully have economic importance. They are the ones that determine the new social ethics, justifying the behaviour and relationships between people. As Boltanski and Thévenot’s (2006) study demonstrated, justification becomes loud and convincing when basic interests are threatened – and this means, first and foremost, economic interests. Confused by the contradictions of a devalued culture, people take to the streets not to defend the principles of freedom and solidarity in the face of a public health problem of apocalyptic proportions, but to assert their economic interests and to uphold the moral rules of an economy that is now separated from the social – or at least from what we used to understand by ‘the social’. In post-society, a pragmatic and merciless modus operandi has taken hold. Those who follow it focus firmly on their goal, make no concessions, and above all apply a particular set of moral rules to all personal relationships: they look to their survival as individuals and are prepared to do anything to ensure their own continued existence. The division between traditional ethics and cold ethics inevitably leads to individualism and the end of the social. So we can speak of a demoralization of society only if we identify moral value with private ethics. The disenchantment of the world, which Weber pointed out as being the most effective change in the socioeconomic structure, is not limited to wiping away from culture any sign of magic, irrationalism, or credulity with regard to transcendental spiritualism; it certainly encompasses in its sweep the ethical values that have so far held humanity together. These values developed within the community

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and helped to reinforce the social ties by creating a dense texture of interdependence, a fabric in which economic relations were closely linked to familial and societal relations. They made it an economy in which personal relationships based on mutual trust and direct knowledge prevailed. In this context, the ethical question does not so much concern economic relations – which are nevertheless involved – as personal ones: on their basis an ethic is created that concerns the community as a whole, becomes culture, and unites all the subjects, regardless of gender, age, or role. This balance, as Karl Polanyi has pointed out, was turned upside down not by the introduction of industrial mechanization so much as by the changes in agriculture during the premodern era, between the fifteenth and the seventeenth centuries, when, little by little and with unceasing determination on the part of the ruling classes, an attempt was made to modify the pre-existing status quo in the name of an innovative concept that would allow more satisfactory economic results. In this dramatic transition, the shared ethics of the community began to split and take different paths, which were unclear to those who had to bear the consequences but useful when it came to justifying the choices made, all aimed exclusively at increasing profit. An official document of 1607, prepared for the use of the Lords of the Realm, set out the problem of change in one powerful phrase: ‘The poor man shall be satisfied in his end: Habitation; and the gentleman not hindered in his desire: Improvement.’ This formula appears to take for granted the essence of purely economic progress, which is to achieve improvement at the price of social dislocation. (Polanyi 2001 [1944]: 36)

The separation between the two ethics not only marks the class distinction between the old peasant class, which was to end up being dispersed by the profound transformations that affected the predominantly agricultural territory, and the new entrepreneurial bourgeoisie; it also justifies in an unprecedented way a new form of thought and action of the modern individual, and one that will result in greater domination of nature. The separation into two ethics is consonant with the capitalist economy and is able to assert its impact as long as modernity prevails, but as soon as the structural and cultural crisis consumes



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the solidity of the modern era, it fails. In fact the effectiveness and practicality of this second ethics created by capitalism, blessed by modernity, and driven by the aim of achieving its rational ends has increasingly broadened its scope, affecting the sector closest to the economy: politics. On the strength of the Machiavellian assumption that the end justifies the means, this new ethics has invaded and contaminated civil life, imposing a duplicity, a sort of bizarre behaviour split into what is expected in the family sphere, in personal and private relationships, and what is legitimate to indulge in in the public sphere, in work relations, in commercial, financial, and political transactions – in sum, in a universe where economic interest and personal success prevail. A private ethics is offset against an exceptional ethics, which we might call ‘cold’, and which is increasingly accepted and practised in human relationships. And, as often happens, in the case of two irreconcilable ethics, the more aggressive one gains ground and prevails over the other. *** Is it possible, then, to speak of an evolution of ethics? If we go back to the original etymology of the word ‘ethos’ – which means ‘habit’ and, as Aristotle reminds us in Eudemian Ethics, habit is not innate but ‘it develops from habit, and a thing gets habituated as a result of a pattern of conduct that is not innate, by repeated movement of one sort or another, so that it is eventually capable of being active in that way’ (Aristotle 2013: 19) – we realize that this is a cultural fact and, as such, is subject to change according to the society and the time in which it develops. The more complex societies are, the more their ethical principles tend to be challenged, to appear ambiguous, to be interpreted according to the needs of the moment, and to be at the mercy of social change, which tends to modify the common opinion on values and behaviour, and hence the habits themselves. In simple societies values may appear to be clearer, more transparent, with no grey areas, and it is recognized that the common good is supreme, and hence superior to the good of the individual, just as Aristotle tells us in the opening pages of the Nicomachean Ethics. These systems of ethics, which may appear arguable to us today, clearly carry an inbuilt imperative to defend the species.

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In archaic communities that were subject to continuous threats of extinction from disease, famine, and aggression from other peoples, this imperative was fundamental. It came before any other need, even before personal freedom and life. The sacrifice of the individual was considered ethically admirable if it served to safeguard many lives and the existence of the community. While remaining a generally accepted principle, over time the idea of the common good started to generate exceptions in a limited sphere. This was due to particular conditions, in which there was a need to apply certain rules in order to carry out specific tasks or achieve certain ends. Examples can be found in various sectors, but where the deviation from recognized ethics is most evident is in the economy. Here more than anywhere else, the end justifies the means: and the end is (almost) never the common good, but rather the achievement of the goal set by those who invest capital, namely profit. Unlike archaic communities, modernity considers the presence of a double ethics ‘compatible’, and therefore admissible, if applied only to economic relations, where the general interest is sacrificed, or at least suspended, in favour of the interest of the individual or the few. Obviously this exception to the rule is hidden behind the most audacious justifications that are based on the persistence of inequality, expressed in all its possible and imaginable variants. We do not know whether it really all originated from the introduction of private property, as Rousseau claims, or from the human desire for self-improvement and from the need to develop conditions for future progress, by sacrificing the present generations; but the fact is that the double ethics met with considerable success and ended up being accepted as a necessary evil – something connected to the harshness of life and that had to be endured. ‘The extension of market relations creates a world without rules, without morality, and without justice, a world in which the polity falls apart’, write Boltanski and Thévenot (2006: 286). It was no surprise that one could acknowledge this state of affairs publicly, as did Albert Carr, who had the courage to express in a provocative manner the idea of double ethical standards, widely shared by liberalist economic operators such as Milton Friedman, who inspired the policies of Reagan and Thatcher. Carr (1968) asks whether it is ethical to bluff in



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business. The answer can only be in the affirmative, recognizing that it is permissible to lie in certain cases, such as in the game of poker, in diplomacy, and in business. Basically Carr agrees with the statesman Henry Taylor: ‘falsehood ceases to be falsehood when it is understood on all sides that the truth is not expected to be spoken’ (Carr 1968: 143). The statement appears legitimate: if ethics is a habitus, to use Bourdieu’s terminology, if it is considered to be something commonly shared and accepted even in its exceptionality, then the statement cannot be seen as a perversion. It has full right to exist and to assert its principles, as long as – Carr warns – they are circumscribed to specific areas. It is curious that these areas lump together card playing and business, giving them the same dignity of recognition; that a pastime, a game of little social importance, is equated with the economic activities that determine the lives of millions of people. This superficiality of approach has the task of downplaying, through glib extension to fields so far apart, the seriousness of the statement and of emphasizing its ‘normality’, the fact that it is applicable to different contexts, and not necessarily vital ones. Making it easy, minimizing its importance, does not mean underestimating it, but only recognizing its pervasiveness in all spheres, from a trivial card game to the stock exchange. Contrary to what might have been expected, cold ethics ends up prevailing and wiping out private ethics. This is the contradiction of our time, the poisonous legacy of modernity: based as it is on good feelings, trust, and relationships, but also on strong ties, that moral system is swept away. The logic of self-interest has invaded non-economic relationships, those pertaining to the family and the personal sphere, even when it is not strictly linked to an economic return. This interest is nourished and activated only on the basis of an absolutely disenchanted convenience, which serves the purpose of reaching certain objectives. These may relate first and foremost to a self-recognition where the social component is purely instrumental and aimed at the ego, at individual survival, at prevailing over others, and at the fulfilment of personal needs. Cold ethics comes out on top. It enjoys the complicity of growing individualism, and it matters little that it brings solidarity – so dear to Durkheim – to an all-time low. The process of desocialization has now adopted cold ethics as the

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official moral code; it has entered into the consciousness and culture of a way of life that has renounced sharing, preferring isolation, and needs the interposition of suitable tools of technological mediation. This way of life no longer needs solidarity and defines social and virtual relationships as remote. What has become essential to it is the egoistic principle of survival, which was once ensured through unity with others but now is subordinated to self-serving interests and makes autonomy a strictly personal practice. The nomos of cold ethics is dictated by the advantage of not needing the other, except in a virtual and quantitative form. The other, seen as a figure of opposition, is the intruder, the antagonist, the enemy; this figure merely serves to realize the egoistic recognition of the self. This form of recognition is expressed also through the realization of the functional tasks of conservation, collaboration, or supply of necessary goods, but in a strictly anonymous form. *** There is a tendency to confuse ethics with morality, as if they were two synonyms for the same concept. Michel Foucault warned us against this easy identification, which loses sight of the difference between a constitutive character of the community and the judgement that derives from it. We are faced with two aspects of the Aristotelian soul: the ‘alogical’ nature of the unreflective character (the ethos) and the ‘logical’ nature (the logos) of rational thought. If, indeed, ethics is the set of convictions shared by a society that form a person’s character, the nature of these convictions is unreflective and so, in Aristotle’s language, is alogon (‘irrational’), without logos; that is, it occurs before the intervention of rational thought. Moral judgement is therefore a ‘pre-judgement’ involving an uncritical evaluation on the basis of an unproven truth. Basically, ethics has the dignity of being a disposition of the individual and contributes to forming that individual’s personality, while morality is a judgement expressed on the basis of the person’s convictions, with no discernment, in other words without the moderating intervention of the intellect. It is as if those who make a moral judgement apply the terms of their own personal character to the behaviour of others



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and, in doing so, make that judgement absolute. Ethics, on the other hand, is the balance formed in the relationship between individuals and the society in which they live; between what society expects of individuals, their behaviour and actions, and what individuals perceive of themselves. It is part of the process of individuation; but, precisely because of this, ethics cannot be extended or expected, and when this happens it is something forced, a form of psychological violence and illiberty. In fact moral judgement has value only when it concerns the self and regulates our character; it serves to approve or disapprove of our actions or thoughts. Therefore using it to evaluate ethically the choices of others is a pre-judgement based on our own relative conception of good and evil, right and wrong. Pierre Bourdieu proposes a system of durable dispositions that allows having the same perception of social values. As we have already seen, he defines this perception as habitus, something very similar to the Greek ethos; this, according to Bourdieu, becomes the regulator of social behaviour. In consequence, the habitus is not so much an imprinted ‘character’ as one that becomes a constant, that continually corrects itself to adapt to the different situations and occasions with which it is confronted. The habitus is a dynamic entity composed of a basic consciousness that starts from the acquired certainties of the individual – from self-knowledge and knowledge of one’s virtues and weaknesses; keeping these in mind, the individual prepares to deal with the world. This is why the habitus is modifiable. It is not a fixed system that clashes with reality, but one that is open to change; it starts from a set of certainties but is always willing to challenge them. However, the concept of habitus covers more: it is about the very awareness of the person who moves from the kind knowledge accrued within oneself (the socially acquired whole, i.e. one’s culture) and uses it in his or her relationship with the outside world. We fully understand that our self-awareness risks being challenged at the very moment in which this opening to the world takes place. What we perceive as certainty can be undermined, contradicted, denied, or not recognized when it is socially shared. It is our personal way of comparing ourselves with others, our ability to become social beings. ***

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Faced with a sudden change, the habitus suffers a major psychological impact. One of the reactions that we should pay attention to, since it represents an innovation with respect to the past but almost a contradiction with respect to the post-social, is the return to a spontaneous, uninhibited, and even ostentatious emotionality, in an attempt to recover our most human and authentic side: what we could call the primacy of the emotions.

3 The Primacy of Emotions

3.1. Emotional Communities One of the founding fathers of sociology, Émile Durkheim, has said it long before it became a subject: when the codified social norms weaken and one no longer complies with them, it does not necessarily follow that people are – or claim to be – freer. On the contrary, they end up falling prey to their own impulses and trusting their sensations, which they consider to be of universal value. The current drive towards instinct that is seen as an affirmation of spontaneity and transparency pushes us more and more in the direction of the primacy of emotions. It seems to contradict what Steven Pinker (2019) wrote in his passionate defence of Enlightenment thought: with the crisis of modernity, the ancient promise to follow a path that runs ‘according to reason’ fades away, perhaps because rationalism did not live up to expectations. Thus the outcome of elections is decided on the market of emotions: aversion and disgust, empathy and compassion regulate public behaviour and direct political choice, for example the choice of governments. In the same way, in private, people’s choices are determined by their emotions, almost as if to reconnect them, ideally, with the spirit of the lost community. Indeed, we need the community: we need to see and hear one another, exchange thoughts, share and give. This is because

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the act of giving ourselves – in caring for others, in listening, in the commitments we make over time – is an integral part of community life, of our living with others. Although educated and accustomed to create our social relations according to detached and neutral rules and behaviour, which are necessary to ensure a standard of civilization, we suffer from the absence of the benefits the community can give – so reassuring and pacifying, yet also limiting, since the community is an emotional bond from which is difficult to break free. It embraces us with chains of love, and even stops us from growing. Until recently, we were wondering how to get out of the quagmire of a liquid society that has driven people to isolate themselves and has locked them within the narrow circle of their own selfish interests, depriving them of solidarity and empathy for others. The liquid world appeared to be inhabited by a multitude of insecure individuals with no values who wander aimlessly, having no reference point for the time being except the one that could be traced back to the virtual world – that nebulous place where it is possible to exist without a physical body, although it brims with emotions, opportunities, knowledge, and consequences. Many seemed to find in it, under the form of a free and (apparently) undemanding game, the lost community and the missed opportunities that could restore some certainties and self-recognition. When modern society no longer offered satisfactory answers or prospects of recognition and stopped treating the individual as a social being, it was repudiated in favour of a community, albeit a virtual one. Since time immemorial, there has been a strong opposition between community and society and there are those who, starting with Nietzsche, have found that a solution to this issue could lie in a return to ancient community ties. Or perhaps a careful mediation between the two extremes, as the anthropologist Victor Turner wisely suggested, can guarantee the right balance between the reassuring (but binding) condition of the community and the ordered (but liberating) structure of society. The sudden intrusion of the pandemic has congealed our time into a lump of impotence and distrust; it has exacerbated the previous situation of isolation, making it endemic. This is no longer the transitional phase from which it was possible to



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emerge once the right points of reference had been found; it is now a permanent constraint. We are still not aware of this, or perhaps we are beginning to suspect it, given the difficulties that science encounters in its attempts to eradicate the virus completely: and yet the change is implicit in the warning that runs through the media and through our consciences, telling us that we will necessarily have to ‘live’ with the virus. As one can well imagine, this entails a structural change in society, an adjustment, a reconstruction on a different basis, where work and study, travel, meeting people, and even simple acts such as having coffee in a café will be characterized by new forms of behaviour, which will soon become routine. If there is anything that will take us back in that direction, it is our emotions. Feelings, passions, sensations: the whole emotional sphere, which, in the course of modernity – as the sociologist Eva Illouz (2007) reminds us in Cold Intimacies – has long been repressed in order to exalt rational thought, which is more effective and functional for all economic and productive purposes, is now re-evaluated. This is the most exquisitely representative component of the community, the one that takes us back to our natural roots and is likely to become prevalent in the future social order. Recognition of the primacy of emotions over reason could give us back the sense of community we are looking for. Illouz observes that, since emotions are ‘situational’ and ‘indexical’ in that ‘they point to the ways in which the self is positioned within a particular interaction’, when this indexicality is lost as a result of procedural rules, ‘adequate and standard speech patterns’ are substituted for it, and thus ‘emotions are increasingly disembedded and disentangled from concrete and particular actions and relationships’. It follows that ‘the precondition to “communication” is, paradoxically, the suspension of one’s emotional entanglements in a social relationship’. There is, then, a tendency to ‘disengage from my position in a concrete and particular relationship and to take the position of an abstract speaker, affirming my autonomy or understanding’. In the final analysis, ‘communicating means to suspend or bracket the emotional glue that binds us to others’ (Illouz 2007: 38). Although neutral and rational communication is ‘accompanied by a highly subjective way of legitimizing one’s feelings’,

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there is no doubt that this behaviour, made necessary by the use of a communicative language, demonstrates the repressive nature of emotionality, which is imposed by civilization. The translation of the emotional and sentimental components into conventional, neutral, and rational schemes has the job of disambiguating the message, making it objective and eliminating the risk of its loss of complexity. It is also an attempt to render the message public, that is, fit to be expressed outside the intimate sphere – the most private area, and one in which the manifestation of emotions uses non-verbal language for the most part. Only here is it acceptable, even if not always, to allow full freedom in the externalization of emotions. In fact this may even become an obligation that cannot be avoided, if we do not want to be accused of insensitivity or inhumanity. Self-censorship directed at the free expression of feelings in public remains strong among individuals, especially men. On the other hand, what the use of digital and social media permits us to observe – and with progressive clarity, as these communication tools become predominant, is an absence of any inhibition when the expression of emotions is mediated by technology.

3.2. Premodern Emotions Sixteenth-century men and women were extremely emotional. They were frightened by everything and lived in a state of constant tension. Modernity, the true reducer of social fears, has taken on the task of eliminating this fear, or at least significantly limiting it, by stabilizing order and by passing punitive laws against all types of crime. With its complex social construction and the implementation of the principle of dignity of work, modernity filled a void in human existence and offered certainty, solidity, and hope. The crisis of modernity did not reactivate the old premodern social fears, since in four centuries of evolution human beings have developed greater emotional stability, which suggests that they have even greater control over emotions and feelings. In effect the crisis has privatized fears, leaving them to each individual. With the privatization of fear, writes Bauman (2006: 136), ‘it is left now to individuals to seek, find and practise individual



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solutions to socially produced troubles – and to do all that by individual, singly undertaken and solitary actions, equipped with individually possessed and operated tools and resources that are blatantly inadequate to the task’. Among individual escape routes, the most immediate one appears to be closure within one’s own self, which presupposes detachment from any external relationship that might in some way engage, let alone threaten, the integrity of one’s being. In this radical operation of self-defence, to which the new technologies are an excellent ally, there is a progressive reduction in emotionality. Is this a step up on the evolutionary ladder by comparison to sixteenth-century mankind, or is it an impoverishment of the most exquisitely human qualities? The fact is that the inescapable resemblance between these processes and those of the machine, with its characteristics of speed, indifference, productivity, insatiability, autonomy, and organization, does not bode well. There is increasing evidence of a functional split of the emotional sphere in social relationships. On the one hand, impulses are released – irrational and spontaneous urges to act impetuously, to follow one’s intuitions and opinions in the heat of the moment, to trust them to be a liberating expression of the inner self. On the other hand, feelings and emotions are repressed, either because they are interpreted as a sign of weakness and inadequacy in a rational world or because they are seen to be detrimental to one’s freedom of action and decision. In this way, at the beginning of the third millennium, mankind, which has lived and experienced first-hand the phase of liquidity and is preparing to live in a new era full of unknowns, seems disunited and emotionally fragile, but in possession of formidable defences. People are able to find strictly personal escape routes when faced with the fear of emptiness, but are dangerously inclined to give in to their impulses. They make crude affirmations about the strength of their will, but have no rational support to back them. All things considered, this humanity could have itself dehumanized, left without reason and feeling, ready to be properly assimilated into mechanization in a post-human future perfectly equipped for the survival of the species – but what species would that be? ***

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Is there a direct relationship between the emotions and human frailty? One might say that, whenever mankind has gone through tragic times, great upheavals, or misery, it has rediscovered the importance of emotions. It has also withdrawn within itself, in a sort of interior reflection that carefully analyses the self and takes consolation from it. It is as if the sudden realization of our own fragility imposed an evaluation of our emotional side. This means that we have to reassess it, since in normal conditions, when fears are dormant because the mind brings into play the protective mechanism of oblivion, emotions are left on the sidelines, overshadowed by more urgent reasons, which concern the continuity of survival. This is in the first place because, as Martha Nussbaum (2001: 1) writes, ‘[e]motions shape the landscape of our mental and social lives … they mark our lives as uneven, uncertain, and prone to reversal’. Irregularity, uncertainty, and unpredictability are features that society tries to avoid: in history, since the emergence of modernity in the seventeenth century, there has been an attempt to instil a sense of security and trust, so that men and women may live in peace, in greater tranquillity, and may look to their future plans and expectations with serenity. From this perspective, reason was of paramount importance; following rational principles was considered of primary importance to one’s ability to face adversity, be victorious, and look ahead with determination. On the contrary, emotions appeared as an obstacle to progress, a force that slowed it down, diverting it in order to satisfy other needs, making room for passions and compassions, and consequently allowing people to lose sight of their primary objectives. For this reason education in the modern age sought to place rational thinking in the foreground. In a misunderstanding of gender roles and of the differences between them, emotions were categorized as things to do with women and not to be fostered in men. From this state of affairs it quickly followed that those who let themselves be carried away by their emotions and did not privilege rational behaviour in their life choices were frowned upon and placed in a negative light. In this way a sort of opposition was created between rationality and emotionality in which the latter was identified with irrationality and hence treated as something negative. It was forgotten that the human



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being is made up of both reason and emotion, that the two are inseparable, and that they contribute together and equally to everyone’s personality; neither can claim to be superior or preferable to the other, and there is both rational knowledge and emotional knowledge. ‘Establishing that the emotions have rich cognitive/intentional content helps dispel one objection to them as elements in deliberation, namely the objection that they are blind forces that have no selectivity or intelligence about them’ (Nussbaum 2001: 33). *** It must be acknowledged that, from its very beginnings, modernity has relied on reason, fearing that an overly permissive attitude to emotions would prevent it from definitively freeing itself from a past characterized by superstitious thinking, conflicting passions and feelings, and an inability to develop coherently the kind of logical and unambiguous thought that guarantees development. Because they were not founded on rational principles, religions, too, with their dogmatic beliefs, appeared as an obstacle to knowledge. In their aspiration to unify as well as to establish much needed behavioural norms, ethical principles, and moral teachings valid for all, religions presented all these as universal obligations based on irrefutable truths. The risk, as the case of Galileo demonstrates, was that religion – in this case, Christianity – would exceed the spiritual sphere and invade all knowledge. Such tendencies were supported by a deep conviction that knowledge led to disorder, to the rebellion of the masses, and to chaos. This idea had a long history outside religion as well; in fact Christian dogmatism exercised a clear function of social control in a world that was not only in the grip of ignorance but even forced to cultivate it for the sake of order. Thus the emotions – starting with fear, the oldest feeling in the world – did not have an easy life in modernity. They were kept under strict surveillance until the end of the eighteenth century, when the pre-Romantic sensibility began to release them in literature. This was the beginning of the end: end to a period of unjustified latency and to the misused prejudice about the prevalence of rationality that the Enlightenment had helped to consolidate. A poem by the pre-romantic poet Thomas Gray (1716–71) titled ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ (1751) can be

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considered a sign of reawakening, or maybe new awareness, of the importance of the emotions in modern society, even if, as we must admit, this process was limited to popular culture. However, in everyday reality throughout the nineteenth and most of the twentieth centuries, that is, during a period in which modernity was at its height, the ideal portrait of a human being was marked by rationality and life choices devoid of any sentimental conditioning. The absence of emotionality from this ideal is proved, albeit indirectly, by the character of those literary, musical, and theatrical works that garnered success in the nineteenth century: such works featured love stories, dramas of strong passions, and a riot of emotions tailored to an audience that was thirsty for excitement and enthusiasm. One could surmise that such audiences were keen to spice up a dull and monotonous existence. Drained of all emotional weakness, rationality is all the more exalted as an exemplary model of life the further we move into the twentieth century. Nazism, fascism, and all other totalitarian regimes imposed a rigid education from which there was little chance of escaping. It tended towards total militarization of society and imposed authoritarian values that exalted violence, force, determination, order, and recourse to war as the only way to resolve conflict. What are the main reasons that led to the marginalization of emotions in modernity? In the first place, we can cite the prevalence of logical and dialectical thought – the values that sprang from ancient Greek logos and, to put it very simply, from the traditional dichotomy muthos–logos, with its Socratic–Platonic origins and huge ramifications in classical and Hellenistic philosophy. Despite being a ‘new time’ (what Germans call Neuzeit), modernity was able to synthetize the main values and concepts that had characterized the past. It did not reject or question them, but welcomed them, so as to avoid making too clean a break. Salvaging everything could be useful: it conferred legitimacy and guaranteed continuity with a tradition that could not be cancelled without causing major traumas in society. Thus, on the horizon of modernity, we can find elements taken from the Christian religion, such as the idea of hope and sacrifice with a view to future benefit and recognition for a life led honestly and humbly; however, this is transferred to earthly



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existence, without the need to wait until after death. In this crucible of elements deeply rooted in consciences, some new ideas and deviations from the norm are painlessly inserted, allowing us to move towards a new vision of the world, more open, more willing to accept change. In this context, the preference for the Greek logos wins the day, and this sentiment lays the foundations for an exaltation of rationality. Secondly, in addition to the prevalence of logos, there was a need to do away with all irrational beliefs, not only for theoretical reasons but also in order to combat ignorance, which was fuelled and fossilized by superstitious thinking, religious dogmas, false beliefs, and unjustified moralizing. The body of widespread irrationality that had grown disproportionately over time not only made society ungovernable but also gave rise to a constant state of fear, which pervaded the world and conditioned the behaviour of individuals. As a result of these ancestral fears and of constant threats to safety, people became more aggressive, more lonely, more desperate, and therefore more willing to believe in transcendental intervention of any kind. Modernity is the most appropriate response to the state of uncertainty and fear, to the need for security and defence against aggression from one’s fellows, to the instinct of self-preservation not mediated by civilization.

3.3. Repressed Emotions The repression of emotions has been a determining factor in the development of modern civilization. Its causes are diverse and are themselves motivated by complex controlling mechanisms. Among the latter, we can undoubtedly identify the need to ‘normalize’ social behaviour that had become uncontrollable and even dangerous. Norbert Elias speaks of this when he refers to the ease with which people may pass from laughter to aggression, personal reactions being guided by instinct, where the strength of extreme emotions is dominant. The social drive towards what Elias (2000) calls ‘the civilizing process’ is aimed at controlling emotions precisely because they are unpredictable, whereas the stabilization of the social order,

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its regulation on sound bases demand predictability. When personal reactions are predictable, our anxieties are quelled and it becomes possible to trust, to rely on others, and to live in a more relaxed and therefore productive environment. Progress can exist only in the context of a predictable social body. This is the awareness that was attained when modernity forged a culture of social order. The kind of control involved here is not just a question of good manners, of being polite to other people by adopting the refined attitudes and habits of the upper classes at court – that is, of appearing to be ‘courteous’. At its heart lies a broader and more ambitious programme, which concerns the whole system of modernity and its future: the political need to build an ordered society, in which the behaviour of individual citizens is predictable not only demographically (i.e. when they are categorized according to age, residence, marital status, job held), but also with reference to their emotional reactions, and hence to the expectations that the community should have from them in every solicitation, in any event that may occur. So this is not only about the control of aggression; the whole wide range of natural emotions must be repressed – that is, contained within parameters compatible with the social rules that modernity itself imposes. Within modernity, Max Weber distinguishes between an ‘emotion-free rational action’ and an ‘emotional irrational action’ conditioned by emotion (Weber 2019: 80–1), while Hochschild finds that Weber confuses irrationality as it refers to thinking and doing with irrationality as it refers to feeling. He implies that emotion and feeling are not positively required for individuals both to really grasp what’s going on and to pursue a rational course of action. He implies, too, that institutions don’t need people who listen well to their feelings and those of others in order to adapt to their environment and act rationally. (Hochschild 2003: 78)

For Georg Simmel, too, as Illouz rightly points out, ‘the typically modern attitude … is that of the “blasé,” a mix of reserve, coldness and indifference, and, Simmel adds, always in danger of turning into hatred’ (Illouz 2007: 1–2). The repression and control of emotions in favour of a more rational and standardized behaviour, recognized as admissible



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and approved, lies at the base of modern culture, as it emerged at the end of the seventeenth century and carried on. The principle on which the repression of emotional spontaneity is based is essentially a regulating principle, aimed not only at civilizing but above all at social control. This is visible in the particular importance that modernity gives to the education of the citizen. Starting from the assumption that the multitudes that make up the majority of the population are in no way prepared for civil coexistence, as they are dispersed, aggressive, ignorant, and therefore unpredictable in their behaviour, the task of ‘normalization’ becomes necessary if one wants to mould and train people’s behaviour so as to make them more suitable to be part of the newly emerging state system. The initial condition is the one described by Thomas Hobbes and captured by the Latin proverb he adopted, homo homini lupus, ‘man is wolf to man’, which exposes the human propensity for violence, survival by any means, and self-promotion at the expense of the other. It also conveys lack of confidence in the human capacity to be tolerant, respect others, and show solidarity. The education of citizens, then, more than their schooling, becomes decisive. It is no coincidence that the concept of education was being differentiated from that of upbringing precisely during this phase in the construction of modernity. In the mid-eighteenth century education was not so much a matter of imparting notions to future citizens so as to make them share in the wealth of knowledge accumulated over the previous centuries – and one should not forget that this knowledge risked generating intolerance and rebellion against social ties, or even promoting the much-feared critical spirit. Education was really about imposing standardized behaviour and instilling in these minds a sense of duty, sacrifice, dedication to the state, and submission to authority. One is not born a citizen but needs to become one; and this requires a learning process that finds its most effective form in education, as the double Latin etymology of this word indicates (educere, ‘to draw out, summon, lift up’; educare, ‘to bring up, rear’). School – or rather the institution for the few that received this name before the innovation of compulsory education in the

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nineteenth century – was primarily aimed at educating citizens, but not at lifting them from a state of abysmal ignorance. *** According to Jonathan Turner (2011), emotions are unequally distributed in society. The wealthy classes, it would seem, enjoy an overabundance of positive emotions, while the negative emotions, which are a cause of greater stress, appear to be reserved for the less well off, and especially for the poorest in society. In short, emotions follow the same logic as inequality, which increases the levels of dissatisfaction, aggression, and insecurity. Obviously, then, up to 90 per cent of the population may feel negative emotions for the most part, and this would explain why emotions are becoming a major social problem, especially if we bear in mind the famous slogan ‘we are the 99%’, which is usually associated with a 2011 article by Joseph Stiglitz published in Vanity Fair. This truth becomes even more compelling if we consider that fear – the main emotion in a critical situation such as the ones we typically experience – has long since been downgraded to individual status: it is not something that touches the community, but rather a matter of personal scope and responsibility. This effect becomes all the more widespread and worrying in a phase of individualization, when everyone is left to their own devices, without instruments for dealing with their fears. It should be noted, however, that during the current pandemic this phenomenon seems to be temporarily regressive and fears, at least some of them, or at least in part, have become social fears, shared by all and felt as belonging to the entire community. While this may give the impression of being something positive, since it brings people together and thereby distributes and alleviates the burden of a strong emotion, we should be aware that it inflates the critical mass of declining modernity, because individual fears have been the means by which modern society has been able to obliterate the social fears that prevailed in the past and that were responsible for the widespread feeling of uncertainty characteristic of a chaotic society. As for the other primary emotions – anger, sadness, and the only positive one, happiness – we know that they, too, remain anchored at a personal level, and in any case revolve around



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fear. There is sadness for the existential condition of those who cannot fully realize themselves or feel marginalized, misunderstood, and disheartened; and anger is probably a consequence of fear, on a par with other secondary emotions such as guilt, shame, envy, and remorse. In proposing a sociology of the emotions, Arlie Russell Hochschild pointed out how the market and, more generally, economic relations intervene in everyday emotions, conditioning or even determining them. On closer inspection, this is an attempt to ‘socialize’ the emotions and to recover their participatory quality in a society such as the current one, that has tried to isolate them, treating them as a private matter that must be shared only within the family and not spill outside it. We must take into account that ‘unconscious emotional phenomena and social structure are linked but again conscious feeling is omitted’ (Hochschild 2003: 79). In the process of civilizing, whose origins go back much further than we can imagine, the separation between private and public life was well established as early as classical antiquity. In the private sphere people were entitled to the free expression of all emotions, but this freedom had to be mitigated and concealed once the person left the family environment to interact with the public, in other words with the community. The two different spheres, the home and the city, commanded two opposite modes of behaviour. Personal emotions were not admitted in public life. The only ones that were approved by the community were social emotions: joy in the face of political success, sense of jubilation at victories, bereavement in the presence of death, and, of course, fear. We always come back to fear when serious and threatening events endangered public health, the safety of the entire population, and the defence of the city. Emotions were thus ‘socialized’ and created a deeper bond between people. This enhanced their intensity if they were positive and diminished their impact if they were negative. An example survives today in the collective enthusiasm or disappointment at the stadium. Two other, more remote examples are the overwhelming acceptance of the words of dictators in the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century and, during wartime, the psychological incitement before battle – an attempt to sublimate fear.

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As civilization developed, it gradually became more and more inappropriate to display in public one’s personal emotions, be they positive or negative, and modernity completed the great process of privatizing fear. But it left the door open to positive emotions in order to control individuals better. Only by rationalizing fears and breaking them up individually was it possible to counteract them. Illouz believes that the emotional sphere has ‘cooled down’ in order to adapt to the demands of instrumental reason and the models imposed by the capitalist market. Today we speak of an ‘emotional capitalism’ where ‘emotional life – especially that of the middle classes – follows the logic of economic relations and exchange’ (Illouz 2007: 32). In this rationalization of feelings we are witnessing a kind of disconnection, a separation between the self and the emotions felt, which lend themselves to being transformed into marketable commodities. But rather than being fungible, emotions modified in this way lose their spontaneity and authenticity. They become constructions external to one’s personality, artificially elaborated and publicly presented as pre-constituted elements, in a form that is recognizable and acceptable to others. In short, they respond to pre-packaged models, to which we subscribe in order to be able to demonstrate in public the emotions we should feel and encourage the same kind of circumstantial emotions in others. The response these models tend to elicit is not understanding, emotional participation, or sharing the same feeling so much as an automatic, rationally produced reaction of approval or dissent. This is exactly what modernity demands: an instrumental rationality of domination – or rather what modernity demanded, given that, in this phase of crisis, emotions are prevailing again.

3.4. A Sociology of Emotions Emotions are subject to a constant process of repression, in line with the modern choice to privilege rationality. All historical analyses of the development that began with the crisis of the aristocracy in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries highlight the explicit tendency to control one’s emotions, in other words to hide them rather than showing them.



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Norbert Elias states this explicitly throughout his studies, which bear witness to the fact that this kind of control has been one of the most evident cultural aspects of the process of civilization that led to modernity. With the centrality acquired by the masses, Elias observes, ‘usually under heavy social pressure, members of the lower strata grow more accustomed to restraining momentary affects, and disciplining their whole conduct from a wider understanding of the total society and their position within it’. We gradually see ‘the assimilation of the lower urban and agrarian classes to the standards of civilized conduct, the growing habituation of these groups to foresight, to a more even curbing and more strict control of the affects, and a higher measure of individual selfconstraint in their case too’ (Elias 2000: 381, 386). When Sigmund Freud dealt with this topic at the beginning of the twentieth century, he did no more than to confirm and define more precisely a process that had already been observed and that was firmly rooted in the western world. In Freud’s wake, other scholars, from Marcuse to Morin, would go on to discuss it, to the point of delimiting a ‘sociology of the emotions’ as a separate field that has met with considerable success in recent years. The picture is complete; but, just when the commonly shared repression of emotions as a result of the development of civilization seems to be strengthened and unanimously accepted, the certainty around it begins to break down. Signs of a U-turn or change of direction in the appraisal of emotionality emerge in different ways and with increasing persistence, and the general context is not the rejection of rationality as much as the recognition of a balance that has hitherto been ignored. The reappraisal of the emotions passes through the renewed centrality of the individual; and this was visible in the tendency to individualism manifest ever since the 1970s, in conjunction with postmodern sensitivity and a gradual exit from mass society. Demassification is a relatively rapid change, which feeds on the opportunities offered by the new communication technologies, but has its roots in the dissolution of the concept of the mass along with that indistinct group of people whose individuality was repressed and suffocated in the name of social participation: that was what the system wanted, and it was useful for the maintenance of the system itself. When the conditions are no longer in place for the maintenance of a controllable

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and homogeneous mass, individuals find themselves isolated, without any points of reference, without the certainties that the mass system was able to guarantee, and anguished by the absence of the rules and instruments that guided their existence. Without the reassuring support of peers, without anyone to offer an interpretation of the facts, without adequate instruction, left alone in a world that changes in incomprehensible ways, each person is forced to search within him- or herself for a meaning that can replace the lost values. What was immediately available to everyone, what represented the truest, most authentic part of oneself, were one’s emotions and feelings, the irrational part that had been repressed in favour of rationality. Now suddenly this part became necessary; what is more, it could be expressed and made public in order to affirm each person’s uniqueness. We are not dealing here with complex reasoning or demonstrations of knowledge, but rather with manifestations of one’s own humanity: only in and through those emotions, thanks to their sincerity and authenticity, can one demonstrate the strength and the importance of the self. The ability to feel and to transmit feelings and emotions is unique and non-repeatable, like a fingerprint, and sets one person apart from all the others. The race to represent oneself in the world is equivalent to the affirmation ‘I am alive’ or ‘I exist’. This is as close as one can get to the Cartesian cogito – the principle ‘I think, therefore I am’. If the weight of the cogito fell on rationality, on the ability to reflect on oneself and see oneself as a thinking being, today, when this demonstration is taken for granted, the weight of the new principle shifts to the psychological ‘quality’ of emotional thinking, to the ability to communicate one’s feelings, seen as the highest and most meaningful expression of a living being. Although emotional expressions are valuable and at the social level represent a sort of democratization of existence that makes them all equal regardless of the differences in gender, age, social class, or political beliefs between the people involved, they are exposed to two fundamental risks. First of all, there is the risk of reduction of rational thought: giving priority to the emotions as a characteristic of personal qualities puts the objective and logical aspects of thought in second place and makes the acquisition of knowledge relatively unimportant when it comes to creating a satisfactory public



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image of oneself. When one’s personal success is recognized by others thanks to the quality and richness of one’s emotions, that part of one’s personality that is based on the accumulation of knowledge through study, education, and cultural training is devalued. To put things in Kantian categories, we could say that a priori knowledge is ‘pure’ or ‘transcendental’ because it precedes experience, whereas study, learning, the acquisition of notions and practices – all these things lie in the sphere of experience, even indirect sometimes. But at the same time the kind of instinctual knowledge that draws support from spontaneity leaves too much room for emotionality as the most authentic source of the self. Hence to allow pure knowledge to prevail or to accord it a higher place invites self-referentiality; one is prompted to overestimate oneself in relation to others. This translates into an inability to relate to these others and a refusal to accept anything that does not conform to one’s own convictions, since one believes them to be the only valid and reliable ones. In line with this logic, knowledge becomes relative and debatable, and no longer worthy of consideration because it is not subjected to the scrutiny of one’s own judgement, the only one that can corroborate it; it is questioned and challenged not because the opposite has been demonstrated but because it is not consistent with one’s own mental schemes. This is the apotheosis of prejudice as a universally recognized forma mentis. A sort of conceptual relativism is generated that questions everything and judges according to arbitrary and impromptu criteria of the person’s own making that are far removed from any area of proven scientific competence. The relativism of thought, together with its reduction and abbreviation, is as unstable as it can be, being justified only by the central position of the individual, who presumes to be able to impose his or her opinion as if it were a revealed truth. Above all, self-referentiality causes isolation and inability to confront others, to tolerate, and to discuss. This is because self-referentiality is the very renunciation of the logos, the mythologization of one’s personal convictions, and the exaltation of one’s ego. The other negative aspect of the prevalence of the emotions is their lability. Since they are mainly produced by spontaneous impulses of the soul, they are subject to rapid changes, to

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irresolvable contradictions, to arbitrary, unjustified variations over time. The self is the absolute ruler and creator of its own truth. However, there are positive sides to self-referentiality, when it is moderated by the need to communicate, to listen to others, and to be heard. The emergence of the social self, which feels the need to recuperate a communitarian sense of its own existence, urges us to find reasons for empathy with our neighbour through the movements of the soul. Emotions therefore become instruments of relationships and communication. Irrational and illogical as they may be, they are nevertheless authentic in the atypical game played in a society that is disintegrated and devoid of concrete points of reference. *** Considering the observations made by Elias, Weber, Simmel, and Durkheim and, more recently, by Nussbaum, Hochschild, and Illouz, we should not think that emotions have not been important for modernity, or that they were repressed in order to have their existence denied: on the contrary, they have always determined human behaviour in social relations, and sometimes even political decisions. What should be noted above all is the need for self-control that modern culture has imposed, in the conviction that emotions should not be displayed and that civilized and socially valued behaviour presupposes the dignified management of one’s feelings. Sometimes this self-control is pushed even into the sphere of private life. The repression of emotions, as often happens in voluntary slavery or indentured servitude, for example, is so well introjected that it becomes a form of self-repression. After all, self-control is nothing but repression imposed by one’s conscience: it is the individual’s own choice, which depends on the convictions accumulated through experience or induced socially. Nussbaum explicitly refers to the cognitive and evaluative function of the emotions. Feeling, the actual perception that takes place through sensations, is an integral part of the process of accumulating knowledge and therefore has a profound influence on the intentions and choices of the individual. This does not alter the fact that rationality has prevailed, often



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coming into conflict with emotionality and sometimes mitigating the harshness and raw side of feelings and making difficult choices more humane. With the crisis of modernity and the loss of faith in science, we can say that we are witnessing an upheaval in the primacy of rationality: reason, which has yielded tragic results over the last century, is being overshadowed by emotions. Of course, this is a phenomenon that we can currently observe; but it is still evolving and its outcome is uncertain, because it is dangerous to venture down a path marked solely by the dominance of emotions, with no counterbalancing input from reason. Yet this is what is happening, in a worrying escalation of the personal and the private over the public and the political. The old division between private and public emotions has been surpassed in the name of a supposed transparency that wants to remove every shadow, every dark corner in which bad conscience could hide; thus every aspect of life would be clear and visible, from the most intimate to those related to public actions and behaviour. It should not be forgotten that Jeremy Bentham’s terrible contraption, the panopticon, was purposely designed to achieve absolute visibility too, and not only in prisons and correctional institutions but in every kind of collective, from factories to schools, and this was in line with Enlightenment thinking. But not even Bentham, in his voyeuristic obsession, had gone so far as to pry into homes, into the private lives of families. Doing so would certainly have been considered taboo. The Enlightenment’s notion of surveillance cannot be applied to our present world because, despite various points of analogy between this world and the eighteenth century, contemporary transparency is not supported by reason. Our world’s visibility does not depend on social order, on effectiveness and regular­ ization in social behaviour; nor is it to be found in that complete faith in the power of scientific thought to guarantee knowledge. Although it submits unintentionally to the much more radical and invasive control of the panopticon, it gives free rein to emotional impulses and encourages ambiguous, contradictory, illogical, and counterproductive choices. Any distinction between the public and the private spheres disappears as a result of online exposure; but this is not all. This is a space where everyone tries to show sensitivity, courage, and personal qualities to the best of their ability. Yet

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even the so-called good feelings disappear there – for instance compassion for others, a good-natured disposition based on sharing and understanding. Perhaps compassion for others is too corny, excessive, and therefore liable to be criticized for its sappy hypocrisy. Be that as it may, we no longer talk about good feelings, spontaneous or contrived; we replace them with more incisive emotions. We exalt our own emotionality, in an exasperated attempt to make it look like a demonstration of sincerity and authenticity or, at the opposite end, of aggression towards everyone. While we can understand the attitude of those who promote themselves in an attempt to make up for the lack of love or attention from others – and it is difficult to pay attention to an ever-increasing number of digital postulants – the hatred concentrated in the jumbled and ungrammatical words of haters cannot be immediately explained. These serial haters of the internet, occasional or professional, target anyone who dares to express publicly an opinion or an emotion, be it joy, hope, relief, worry, or fear. This exchange of emotions released on the Internet between those who expect to be recognized for their immediacy and those who impose themselves instead through an angry reaction – which amounts to a different, albeit unpleasant, form of selfassertion – is really a representative example of an unprecedented way of relating socially. Here not only are good feelings banned, but the negative charge dominates, because, even when emotions are spread for a good purpose and appear to be harmless or naive representations of the self, they have very damaging effects. First of all, they devastate that reserved part that lies at the core of one’s private, intimate self, thus erasing an essential personality trait. Secondly, they give the false impression that, to demonstrate absolute authenticity, it is enough to show yourself in public either physically, through photos and videos, or virtually, by confessing to your emotions. This is done in the false belief that being authentic means exposing oneself, saying everything one thinks, without filters or mediation, and that whatever one releases in this fashion has absolute value and is of decisive importance simply because it is expressed freely. It is instead a mistake that generates a net loss, with no return other than the ephemeral pleasure of a ‘like’ or of a fleeting comment. Unleashing emotions and allowing them to prevail over reason



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are forms of regression – especially if such processes do not remain confined to social media, and hence to ranting at the individual level, but expand into public life, where they produce a generalized feeling, a collective habitus that affects every public sector, including politics. In short, a collective habitus becomes ‘culture’ and determines common feeling. It is a form of irrationalism that risks being hailed as the positive recognition of the most human qualities, which previously received little consideration or were altogether repressed. It seems to exalt what is most exquisitely distinctive about us and can no longer be overlooked. And it is significant that all this is happening at a time when technology is dominant, so that personal relationships themselves are mediated by it. However, the fear of the machine is concealed; we have an unconscious desire to differentiate ourselves from the artificial devices we use to communicate. In this recovery of the emotions despite their being chaotic, frantic, and disordered, there is all the horror and rejection of mechanization, of a world increasingly dominated by technology. Every single human activity, every action we perform in our daily lives, at work or elsewhere, takes place through or is enabled by technology, and the more human relationships are mediated by technological devices, the more an offended and bewildered humanity seeks to distance itself from the machine. This is not the fear felt by the men and women who lived through the first Industrial Revolution, when the machine was seen as a threatening adversary. It is a more subtle and pervasive fear, which makes one feel powerless in the face of the progressively crucial need to depend on the machine itself. We have to relate to machines, since they are now indispensable mediators in our relations both with the world and with other human beings; they are necessary to ensure support, comfort, care, nourishment, and life. In response to this humiliation, we are possessed of a strong desire to display an attribute that is far removed from the machine: the ability to feel emotions – at least until artificial beings are endowed with it too. But this prospect is still a long way off, which gives us time to metabolize the problem. In the meantime, it is worth reflecting on the social conditioning of emotions. Is Karl Mannheim’s statement that people do not think as isolated individuals but as groups still valid?

96 Post-Society It is indeed true that only the individual is capable of thinking. There is no such metaphysical entity as a group mind which thinks over and above the heads of individuals, or whose ideas the individual merely reproduces. Nevertheless it would be false to deduce from this that all the ideas and sentiments which motivate an individuality have their origin in him alone, and can be adequately explained solely on the basis of his own life experience. … It is not men in general who think or even isolated individuals who do the thinking, but men in certain groups who have developed, a particular style of thought in an endless series of responses to certain typical situations characterizing their common position. Strictly speaking it is incorrect to say that the single individual thinks. Rather it is more correct to insist that he participates in thinking further what other men have thought before him. (Mannheim 1954 [1929]: 2, 3)

In the first half of the last century, when Mannheim was writing, it seemed that the processes of thinking and feeling were not a purely individual matter, linked to some innate or (in Kant’s terminology) ‘transcendental’ sensibility, but social acquisitions, developed and adopted by the group in which the individual lived. Therefore they constituted a cultural issue. To summarize somewhat schematically, if we were to trace the ability of subjects to produce their own thoughts and emotions spontaneously and unconditioned by the outside world back to Kant’s Enlightenment thought and autonomous ethics, and the faculty of being influenced by the social context back to Hegel’s idealism and ‘heteronomous’ ethics (again, as Kant would describe it), we could say that Mannheim makes manifest a Hegelian potentiality that was prevalent in the 1920s and 1930s. Our forms of thinking, our feelings, and our emotional expressions are modelled – both in their characterization within the self and in their external production – on expectations considered compatible with other people. An adaptation to shared judgement takes place not only in the act of communication but in the very genesis of thought itself; and its source is the proven need to be heard and understood by the social group. Thoughts and emotions, then, seem to be determined by an expectation of acceptability and by a sympathetic will that seeks recognition in others. ‘Empathy’, writes Illouz (2007: 49–50), ‘is the ability to identify with the point of view and feelings of the other – it is both a symbolic and [an] emotional ability, since the preliminary condition of empathy is to have deciphered the



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complicated imprints of another person’s behaviour.’ This is all the more so if thoughts and emotions are recognized as social constructions that themselves derive from personal relationships and interactions with the group in which we live. Belonging to a group therefore implies not only sharing but also producing thought on a common basis. In fact, in the community, reactions and ways of expressing feelings use the same ‘language’, not just because they have to be understood by the community (which is quite obvious), but because they are produced by the very same cultural matrix. In this connection, one could make reference to Karl Marx’s general intellect (also of Hegelian descent), which foresees collective knowledge induced by belonging to a specific society and at a particular historical moment. The very fact of living during the same period produces a personal consciousness in which thoughts, emotions, and in this case also knowledges that are ‘breathed’ in that context form the culture of a given society. So far, so good, where Hegel is concerned: we all know how a subject reacts to a compliment or to the manifestation of obvious uninterest. The question becomes more complicated when we move into changed times, where the certainties of collective behaviour are challenged by the continuous assertion of individualism. This happens according to the process that Bernard Stiegler (1994) called ‘disindividuation’, which creates a loss of social ties and prompts the individual to focus strongly on him- or herself. To continue the philosophical metaphor, we could say that there has been a resurgence of Kantianism along the lines of Husserl, Heidegger, and Derrida, if this were not invalidated by the negation of the Enlightenment spirit that pervades this shift towards an absolutism of the subject. Indeed, there is little that is rational in today’s individualism, which – through a deeply passionate opposition to science in the name of a selfreferentiality that, with unprecedented presumption, finds the authority for discernment primarily in itself – proclaims the end of modernity. This is the negation both of the Enlightenment and of dialectics, which has hitherto represented the foundation of a culture that identified itself in constructive dialogue. Likewise, it is a denial of the principles of community that, by an irremediable contradiction, are nevertheless anxiously

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sought after, in full awareness of its not being possible to live without social recognition. In this profound existential crisis, it is not society, understood as a modern construction based on the contract between the citizens and the state, that is profoundly felt to be lacking, but rather the community. Society is now off the table, as if the end of modernity and the abrupt passage through an interregnum full of uncertainties had also wiped out any acceptable prospect of sociality as it is traditionally understood, and we are now faced with a post-social reality where all the parameters that belonged to it are considered obsolete and no longer applicable. What is left and perceived as being absent, like something that is missing, is precisely the community, its warmth and understanding, free from any intellectualism and all the more appreciated as it is also without rationality: the community is pure instinctuality, a space in which (to depict it with excessive reductionism) the emotions are exalted, and hence sensitivity and personal convictions are exalted too.

3.5. Languishing, a Prevailing Emotion Once upon a time there was the spleen, that fin-de-siècle melancholy around 1900, the existential malaise that affected an entire period of contemporary history, especially through the work of Charles Baudelaire, the greatest chanter of this feeling; and when it comes to anxiety, the spleen was accompanied by taedium vitae, that ‘weariness of living’ so well captured by Leopardi. However, the concept of spleen is extremely dated. No one today would dare to use this term to explain or describe the new psychological unease caused by the pandemic. The word itself has been replaced by ‘languishing’, but in practice it’s the same thing. We could call this state of dejection and insensitivity to external reality ‘languor’ or ‘apathy’, thereby indicating a condition of crisis that does not allow us to take the initiative. In a state like that we are limited to observing events passively, without participating in them. Sociologists, psychologists, and philosophers investigated the increasingly isolated state of humanity, which is unable to recover the sense of solidarity it lost, and observed a weakening of social ties and insecurity in behaviour.



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The new ‘positive psychology’ now seeks to trace the causes of social distress. Corey Keyes, who works in the field of mental health, coined the usage of ‘languishing’ as a noun in an antonymic pair with ‘flourishing’, to indicate two opposite existential states (see Keyes 2002). In flourishing (from ‘flourish’, which comes from the Latin florere ‘to bloom’ and is related to ‘flower’ and to the French fleur, fleurir) we find a positive condition of the mind, of those who are able to have an active and constructive relationship with reality, to realize themselves, and to have a sense of well-being. Languishing prevents us from feeling good and from regenerating. It is a condition of indifference, almost resignation to having no way out, and it reveals an underlying emotion of sadness, an absence of joy that thwarts any happiness or motivation. This state of languishing drags on day after day, while the person in its grip has no desire to go out or to do anything. Life is passively endured; one is closed in a cage of indifference and frustration. This is social rather than psychological anxiety: it is abulia, a state of emptiness, of shutting oneself off from the world. It has nothing to do with depression, Keyes warns, because it is not a psychological disorder; nor does it have anything to do with burnout, the exhaustion typically caused by overwork. This is why it has received a name of its own, and it is the prevailing emotion of 2021. Samantha Pope and Adam Grant wrote a couple of articles respectively in the National Post and the New York Times that immediately went viral. Both put their finger on the sore spot: it is well known that anxiety, depression, and other psychological and mental problems have been on the increase for the past ten years. According to research carried out at San Diego University, almost 13 per cent of adolescents and young adults are affected, and it is precisely on this group of individuals most at risk that the pandemic and the subsequent lockdown have had a devastating effect. It would seem that languishing is a result of overusing the new technologies and, above all, of the loss of socialization. Both are multiplied by isolation, by the closure of schools and meeting places, and by restrictions on socializing with friends, by the very fact of not being able to go out freely, to meet and associate with people.

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This is a social problem, since it increases the risk of creating an isolated generation, whose members have difficulty in relating to others and are unsure of themselves and dissatisfied. Yet the pandemic, at least at the beginning, encouraged sharing and feeling united in the face of a common threat. During the 2020 lockdown, in the movement initiated under the hashtag #Istayathome, we were able to follow the recovery of ideas of community and national pride, with flags flying and songs of hope sung from balconies. All this outpouring of emotions displayed without embarrassment, of feelings expressed without inhibitions, was so overwhelming that there was talk of a recovery of the sensitivity that modernity has hitherto kept repressed, out of a misplaced sense of modesty. With languishing, especially among young people, the lack of interest in others becomes dominant once again: the negative emotion takes over. We might ask ourselves whether Jonathan Turner’s observations on the distribution of emotions has a basis of truth: emotional inequality conditions our existence as heavily as economic inequality does. This is why it is necessary to fight emotional inequality. Adam Grant recommends becoming aware of the problem to begin with. Next, it is important to give it a name, because knowing what we suffer from already helps towards finding a cure. But mostly we need to immerse ourselves in a project, anything that may revive our interest and desire to participate, even something as small as following a TV series and engaging in the emotions of the protagonists. This is a way of going back to sharing and empathy. Then we need to try to break free, at least in part, from our dependence on technology and the media. The overuse of smartphones and generally the practice of shutting people inside forms of communication mediated by technology bear some responsibility for the proliferation of languishing. In order to recover from the malaise of our times, we need to return to socializing. We need to resume face-to-face relations, albeit with the necessary precautions; we need to see one another and talk to one another. At first it will be difficult, given that social distancing has changed even the rules of proxemics, but it is important to try. Most importantly, we should aim to reduce the role of technology-mediated communication in determining our ability to relate to others.



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At the emotional level, the pandemic had yet another effect: while modernity had reduced social fears to individual fears, the pandemic brought the former back to life.

3.6. Individual Fears and Social Fears There was a time when emotions were not repressed. Fear, in particular, dominated the world and governed people’s lives. It was the prevailing emotion, the one that characterized the premodern era more than any other. Its presence was so invasive that it was necessary to find adequate means of defeating it; one had to give people a sense of security and enough reassurance to allow them to work productively. This is where knowledge comes in: most of the fears were nested in ignorance, so it was possible to dispel them by using the light of reason as the main antidote. But, to eliminate the problem fully, one needed an ordered society, governed by effective rules that set the limits of individual freedom and subjected citizens to a single authority, in which they could recognize themselves and to whose laws they submitted. As for fears, the light of knowledge was not enough to conquer them all. To eradicate this unproductive emotion, it was necessary to get rid of social fears, the widespread emotion that affected the community as a whole and posed a constant threat to stability. The reassurances offered by the modern state eliminate most social fears and translate them into individual fears. These are the ones that will create problems from now on; but they will have to be dealt with individually, one by one, without involving society as a whole. Individual fears are an innovative way of breaking up the force of this feeling, weakening it and passing it on to personal capacities to cope with it and resolve it. Psychoanalysis, which emerged at the end of the nineteenth century, was to be one of the tools with which the relatively mature modern society would take care of individual fears. Unfortunately, as we can see, social fears have not been eradicated forever. In the third millennium, in conjunction with the crisis of modernity itself, they re-emerged overwhelmingly with the pandemic. For the most part social fears are irrational, and indeed the Greeks attributed them to a god named Phobos (‘Fear’) believed

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to uphold blind fear. This is blind fear, which drives people into panic and pushes them to flee from a danger whose texture and origin they don’t know, as they are overwhelmed by an uncontrollable terror, a strong emotion that makes them imitate other people’s confused reactions. Modernity, through an act of power justified by the goddess of reason, erases irrational fear from the dictionary and reduces it to a ‘craze’: a mania, a minor emotion that no longer has the dignity of being called a ‘fear’, something that is tolerated and is even curable. The ‘fear’ part gets compressed into a suffix, as in ‘arachnophobia’ – and such states are catalogued among the many small personal fixations that afflict individuals: negligible conditions of distress, psychopathologies that do not amount to more than a state of anxiety. Rational fears, those attributable to the god Deinos (‘Dread’, ‘Terror’), are still significant in modern society and are presented as being more comprehensible, since their origins are known. The rational quality implies that, because they are known, they can be controlled, prevented, and even dissolved. With the advent of the pandemic, we are now witnessing a revision of the long-established community project in which mass vaccination, represented as an antidote to individual fears, sees an alarming return to the social fears. What matters at the moment is to make them promptly go back to being individual fears, so that post-society may be free of them as soon as possible and may declare that this unwelcome emotion has been eliminated from public life. *** If fear is considered to be the oldest feeling in the world, utopia represents its defeat. Fear and utopia are two antithetical concepts, so much so that fear can be placed only in a negative utopia: in dystopia, the very negation of the concept of hope and improvement that a would-be eu topos, ‘happy place’ (rather than Thomas More’s ou topos, ‘no place’) implicitly contains. The ambiguity that Thomas More wished to include in his extraordinary imaginary creation cannot be separated from the fact that, although Utopia is a non-existent island, it is also described as an ideal society of perfection and peaceful coexistence among human beings. Yet we must not forget the ultimate meaning of More’s foresight, which lies in the profound link between fear and hope. Recuperating the original spirit of



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Plato’s Republic, More introduced, for the first time in centuries, a secular idea of hope, which until then had been the absolute domain of transcendence. He detached it from its religious substratum in an innovative way, and in doing so he proved that he was a forerunner of modernity and made this secular idea of hope a constitutive instrument of a broader vision of the future. This aspect of utopia, its opening to the future and anticipation of modern principles, so far insufficiently evaluated, should be analysed more carefully. And it should be examined also with reference to the close connection between utopia and fear, especially fear of the unknown: we have to imagine that the idea of thinking about the future was not common in the fifteenth century any more than in classical times, when, as we know, the future could only be worse, the better world being only the legacy of a distant past. According to this cultural interpretation, which is highly topical today, the passage of time leads to an inevitable involution, manifest not just in the corruption of the body, ageing, and death, but in the realization of growing difficulties in the economic and political spheres that have repercussions on the social field. Even Bauman’s liquid modernity can only be considered pejorative compared to the solid modernity of the past. Youth, the very essence of memories, only takes us back to a happy time that precedes the current one and leaves a void full of unknowns in the one to come. Fear is the first and most powerful restraint on innovation; its force of inertia holds back the present and continually harks back to the past, making people welcome tomorrow with a sort of resigned expectation of something worse to come. This vision was attenuated by utopian hope: the idea that planning for the future was a positive possibility, which allowed us to look ahead with confidence, thus overturning the classical vision of a golden past, where unrepeatable perfection lay. The modern vision, which More’s Utopia discloses with great acuity, transfers the golden age to an indeterminate future, where anything can happen, where humanity can improve its existential condition, where the difficulties of the present and those of the past can be overcome, in short, where happiness lies. This is an abstract concept and one that is not easy to understand, except for the aura of completeness that lies at the heart of every motivating force to act, to strive, and to hope and whose keyword is the hitherto unknown term ‘progress’. The

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‘progressives’, then, will be those who look ahead to a better world and do so with hope, certain of finding satisfaction in the distant future; those who fight, work, and sacrifice in order to achieve it. But happiness is only a perspective, not a temporally and spatially defined goal. The great intuition of modernity, from the very beginning, has been to use the idea of progress so as to push forward a humanity otherwise unmotivated to produce and commit itself, and to make people sacrifice their life for the sake of a common ideal. Modernity, then, is characterized by a dual intent: on the one hand, to affirm a positive, progressive, and forward-looking vision; on the other, to use this vision in practice, as a tool for initiating, consolidating, and maintaining industrial development. This perfect union of ideality and profit kept populations chained for centuries, at least until that balance was broken and the idea of progress proved a fallacy. *** The other emotion that has never been dormant is hatred. It is a negative emotion, as strong as fear and in permanent contrast to love, yet it cannot be denied that hatred, albeit abominable, has had its importance in history. More than love or any other positive feeling, it represented an aggregating force, an unequalled binding tool that kept archaic communities together as close-knit groups, because such a group felt bound by a single destiny in its opposition to hostile people. Umberto Eco (Eco 2012: 2) indeed remarked that the absence of a historical enemy is one of the reasons why the unification of Italy took so long. It is on the basis of this aggregating effect that totalitarian states usually unleashing hate campaigns against a common opponent or an ideology, overloading them with ethical, religious, or economic content. In this way they were able to maintain power and invoke the inevitable state of emergency, thanks to which all democratic guarantees are suspended. If, as Erich Fromm claims, hatred can be divided into two categories, reactive and character-based, social hatred can be only the result of a reaction deliberately provoked by a regime or a political group. Moreover, Carl Schmitt, philosopher, jurist, and prominent member of the Nazi party, identified the core of politics in the enemy. ‘A world in which the possibility of war is utterly



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eliminated’, he writes, ‘a completely pacified globe, would be a world without the distinction of friend and enemy and hence a world without politics’ (Schmitt 2007: 35). Having an enemy, even a completely fabricated one, to point the finger at and to focus the population’s hatred on translates into a kind of power: it guarantees internal stability and allows repressed energies to be vented elsewhere. Today we can speak, more than of social hatred, of social media hatred. In fact the Internet is rife with serial or occasional haters who are ready to take out all their anger on other people – on an adversary singled out on the spot and without any particular reason. These serial haters emerged with Web 2.0 and, whether occasional or habitual, they target anyone who dares to express publicly an opinion or an emotion, be it joy, hope, relief, worry, or fear. Their reaction to such expressions is invariably one of anger or, at best, spiteful disapproval. It makes one wonder where these people were hiding until now, when technology gives them a voice. How were they able to show their dissent? Their silence was probably part of the generalized repression of emotions. Now that the crisis of modernity has unleashed them, we witness a real return of the repressed. The haters are finally given the opportunity to unburden themselves by saying frankly what they think of their fellow humans, having been hitherto prevented from doing so by a veneer of civilization that, one would imagine, they endured with acrimony and impatience. Haters of the web are the new mythomaniacs, heirs to selfcentred and aggressive individualism. They insult and verbally hurt anyone who has a public role or expresses an opinion that differs from their own. They are also anonymous, but only up to a point: like serial killers, they leave some evidence at the scene of the crime, so that their identity can be traced; or in some cases they even confess to their crimes. Like all those afflicted with protagonism, they aim with every gesture to provoke, and thereby to assert their identity publicly. This is just sterile, temperamental hatred that boomerangs on those who unleash it, isolating them, marginalizing them, and effectively rendering all their actions futile. It has a narcissistic component, like any exuberantly expressed emotion in which one attempts to dominate and show off in front of others. Of all the classical myths, the myth of Narcissus is the most topical and

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the one that best suits contemporary society. As Ovid interpreted it in his Metamorphoses, the story of the young man of extraordinary beauty who falls in love with his own image and, out of sheer desperation at not being able to possess himself, throws himself into the water in which he sees his reflection is today the basis of the most widespread behavioural disorder in the West. To a greater or lesser extent, we are all narcissistic, not so much because we are in love with ourselves as because we are so convinced of our importance and superiority over others. In the name of this deep-felt conviction, even if we deny it, we are ready to act and to fight so that our qualities are recognized, even if this means harming others and hurting ourselves. In order to emerge, to make their personality stand out in a society that tends to be inattentive, narcissists are ready to do anything, even to sacrifice themselves; but, more than anything, they are ready to give up their privacy. They are prepared to expose their feelings and emotions, their errors and defects, in a misunderstood sense of transparency and sincerity; they even confess to the most shocking and unreal things just to make an impression. This could well be a consequence of creating an individualized society – that self-centred deviation with little inclination towards solidarity – which has long placed the individual at the centre of the world: isolated, self-referential, and angry, and now forced into social distancing on top of all that. The mirror in which we see and admire ourselves is no longer the clear water of a pond but the screen; and if television is not sufficiently open to compulsive self-assertion, the web has become the global arena in which all can engage in their favourite activity. None of the spirituality of Hermann Hesse’s Narcissus is to be found here, or of the naturalness of his antagonist Goldmund, but only violence, fed by the urgent need to impose the self. This is because one of the strategies used by the narcissist is the coping strategy, that is, the ability to deal with stress by physically attacking or even just punishing the other with emulative acts, in an attempt to regain one’s lost balance. More recently, psychologists have come up with a notion of digital narcissism, defined as dependence on new technologies and development of a sort of cult of one’s own personality, but basically narcissism hides a lack of self-esteem. It causes the person to feel inadequate and imperfect and to see others as



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possible enemies or adversaries to watch out for. These are all behaviours that can be observed in individualism, which leads us to think that an individualized society is in effect also a narcissistic society. Narcissists feel undervalued, misunderstood, ignored, and unjustly marginalized; their reaction may go as far as self-harm or gestures that are counterproductive, compromise their dignity or role, and damage their self-image. Depending on the case, there are narcissists who incite the crowd to celebrate their waning power and narcissists who merely insult gratuitously, like the haters mentioned earlier – the indigenous species of the Internet that flourishes with worrying dynamism. More rarely, narcissists carry out deadly challenges, which they film carefully on their smartphones and publicize online as a record of their feats, for future reference. They use disparate means, but all inevitably aim at drawing attention to themselves in order to appear better than others, because narcissists are born, not made. *** If narcissism is part of the primacy of emotions that has taken centre stage in social relations and in personal identity, there is another aspect of post-society that begins to take on a worrying appearance. This is social control. It is well known that social control is one of the cornerstones of modernity: control imposed by a system that opposes the libertarian demands of the population. We could even say that, in this respect, modernity has been characterized precisely by the constant, unstable balance between social control (as a form of order and organization) and the recognition of autonomy. It has experienced many ups and downs and has registered only precarious results; there have been periods of restoration of the shattered order, but the tendency to break free from any form of control was always there. The transition from liquid modernity to post-society is instead governed by an unprecedented attitude. There emerges for the first time a desire for voluntary submission in the form of a demand for tighter control and surveillance. Freedom is exchanged for security, just as in Hobbes’ time – a sign of deep social unease, which does not look resolvable in any other way. Security is the post-social need of the moment; and it has all the characteristics of an individual need.

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4.1. A Society of Exposure George Orwell had foreseen this: in his novel 1984, he described a society oppressed by obsessive control, in which there was no room even for freedom of thought. Every individual was monitored twenty-four hours a day and the infamous Big Brother entered their private lives with no respect for privacy. The strategy of oppression was based on the annihilation of desire, and extinguishing desire is tantamount to castrating instinct, to erasing the vital impulse. However, in his bleak vision of a dystopian future, Orwell made an error of perspective, or perhaps that was his real intention, since a negative utopia is always a warning: it serves to prevent what is feared from actually happening. If the protagonist, Winston, could affirm that ‘desire is a thought crime’, then contemporary society has made desire the instrument of a soft form of surveillance, but a totalizing one nonetheless. In comparison with Orwell’s characters, we are more exposed and more transparent, but ‘we are giving it out so freely and willingly, with so much love, desire, and passion’, writes Bernard Harcourt, showing how the liberation of desire and the pleasure principle – which in Freud was supposed to be held in check by the reality principle – are responsible for an increasingly totalizing control that makes us live in an ‘expository society’. ‘It



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is our passions – in tension with our ambivalences, anxieties, and discomforts, to be sure? that feed the expository society’ (Harcourt 2015: 17, 36). On the one hand, we fear being controlled by invisible powers and claim our right to privacy; on the other hand, we do not hesitate to reveal ourselves on social media, posting our photos on Instagram and Tumblr, publishing our CVs on the Internet, sharing our experiences with strangers we contacted on Facebook. Our desire to attract attention and the temptation of availing ourselves of a free form of publicity are stronger than restraint or any sense of shame. We lose what is left of our privacy, our interiority, and our uniqueness. The notions of private and privacy have become separated from our lives and appear to be governed by different and perhaps irreconcilable rules. *** The fact that social media are formidable instruments of social control has long been evident: whatever one does on the network, whatever message, e-mail, or post one sends, it leaves a permanent electronic trace that can be used by those interested in it for the most diverse reasons. Zygmunt Bauman and David Lyon (2013) described it in detail in the co-authored Liquid Surveillance. There the two sociologists discuss the new panopticon of today’s society: the global network, where the whole humanity, regardless of class, ethnicity, wealth, and culture, becomes visible and can be easily observed, say, by a power that is not visible and does not need to show itself, because it has no face. Such a power operates easily, without having to resort to force, since it is the users themselves who demand it – so much so that they can even feel guilty if or when they do not. Just as snails carry their homes, so the employees of the brave new liquid modern world must grow and carry their personal panopticons on their own bodies. Employees and every other variety of the subordinated have been charged with full and unconditional responsibility for keeping them in good repair and assuring their uninterrupted operation (leaving your mobile or iPhone at home when you go for a stroll, and thereby suspending the state of being constantly at a superior’s beck and call, is a case of serious misdemeanour). (Bauman and Lyon 2013: 59)

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Thanks to facial recognition software, the webcams of commercial networks can trace the profiles of customers available on the network (on Facebook, Instagram, and other social media) and learn about their habits, preferences, and wishes. There is nothing to stop such practices from being extended into the area of political power, where they could enable politicians and governments to intervene in our lives for security reasons. The system is able to cross-reference confidential information on income, expenditure, and propensity to consume with the data obtained from personal communications; and then it can decide how to use the results of cross-referencing. Despite this, individuals show no fear of being controlled and let themselves caught in the current of self-exposure; they readily communicate sensitive data and accept privacy violations, in the belief that this will serve to keep them in touch with the world. This is because, in addition to invisibility and lack of social recognition, another of our worst nightmares is being overtaken by events, not being updated and firmly in touch with the present. The instruments of control are becoming ever more stringent, not least because the individual has progressively become less knowable: fleeing massification, we experience a fragmentation of our relational role, a sort of compulsive ‘multitasking’ that produces a split in our public persona. We are thus witnessing the fragmentation of everyone’s social role. The whole is replaced by segments, even conflicting ones, which make each social role indistinguishable from any other, insecure, and therefore uncontrollable. *** Let us forget Orwell’s Big Brother. Surveillance has become something else, claims Lyon (2018) in a book titled The Culture of Surveillance. A real culture has been formed and has a new sensibility, which changed our lives. Unlike in 1984, in our new world there is no one watching from above. The great innovation is not only in the automatic processing of the data, which are collected, distributed, and used according to specific programmes, but also in the fact that control is exercised by the very people who are themselves under control. This is internal, mutual, participatory, even democratic surveillance. We are all watched and observed: parents use devices to watch over their children; friends and strangers use tweets,



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followers, likes, and comments to follow one another on social networks; and let us not forget those who watch themselves with the help of health or fitness apps. Security and the need to feel protected are a powerful factor when it comes to explaining why users request (or rather demand) so much surveillance when they call for more cameras in public places, on transport, and in the streets. In this general trend to rely on surveillance and to look at it as a social benefit rather than as an invasion of privacy, only private homes have managed to evade being watched – for the time being. But even these could be made of glass, as in Yevgeny Zamyatin’s (1993 [1924]) novel We. Transparency, clarity, visibility – these are values already introduced by Enlightenment thinkers for the purpose of dispelling any suspicion, any shadow. In our neo-Enlightenment phase, the idea that transparency and authenticity are added values that need public display in order for people to be accepted as good citizens has gained currency. If the present conditions of life impose egocentric behaviour and invite solitude and social distance, then opening up to others without inhibition, without any fear of laying bare one’s intimate life, is construed as the current alternative to communicating, in the proper sense of pooling or sharing. In this light, surveillance takes on a positive, almost harmless connotation, which is part of the game played online of knowing and being known. It is probably for this reason, as Lyon notes, that most Internet users care very little about data, images, and information about themselves, which they divulge with extreme ease. A real culture of surveillance has taken shape and changed our way of life. It seems normal, even advantageous, to see and be seen; we believe that we have nothing to hide. This is almost a demonstration of trust in the world. Activities like watching our children at a distance, defending private property, or learning what our friends are doing and letting them know what we are doing have now become ingrained in our daily lives. All this gives the impression of being part of a big community where everything is transparent: it looks like a sort of revision of the concept of democracy. But it hides a dark side, namely the (certain) control of our habits, tastes, and personal consumption and the (uncertain) political control. As Siva Vaidhyanathan (2012: xiv) writes, ‘to search for something on the Web using

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Google is not unlike confessing your desires to a mysterious power’.

4.2. State of Surveillance ‘No voluntary servitude!’ Bauman strongly advised, quoting the sixteenth-century philosopher Étienne de La Boétie, when he observed servile or overly obsequious behaviour that demeaned individual freedom – as in those travellers who, forced to camp out at the airport because of delayed or cancelled flights, are impatient and aggressive but ready to accept discomfort if justified in the name of their safety. That magic word, ‘safety’, quelled the protest and turned the restless crowd into grateful citizens, thankful to the airlines for their caution. In the sixteenth century, when La Boétie uttered the imperative ‘No voluntary servitude!’ in a clearly critical spirit, no one would have thought that it would become relevant three centuries later. However, its relevance is certainly not linked to the question of submitting to a higher power. Nor is it about political expediency or cowardice; it is about collective security, the feeling of protection that involves accepting a small sacrifice for the common good. In the spirit of warning against the pressures that lead to voluntary servitude, if Bauman was writing at a time when the instability of the liquid society had not yet made it clear what direction events would take, the direction is now clear to everyone. We have all been guilty of voluntary or involuntary servitude in the consumer society, solid or liquid alike, when advertising and sophisticated instruments of taste coercion have urged us to submit to the suggestions of the great factories of unnecessary needs. These have persuaded us to consume, to build loyalty, to desire things in the false belief that we are free to choose. In the name of that conditioned and carefully guarded freedom, we have allowed ourselves to fall prey to a form of voluntary servitude that was convenient – or so it seemed, since it was credited with fulfilling our dreams. After the liquid society, now that we are abruptly part of a world that has to come to terms with the end of modernity, the parameters have changed. Consumerism has lost its appeal, its glamorous veneer, and with it went our illusion of having an



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immense choice. People have become more serious and more prudent. They buy what they need, without joy, without any hope that consuming can bring happiness, not even happiness of a momentary nature. The servitude to compulsive and obsessive consumerism has been transformed into a servitude to reassurance. Post-society is pragmatic, realistic; it has now abandoned the mirages of the happiness of possessing and built itself around concrete certainties that speak of ecology, health, and protection. All these terms are linked by an ancient activity that was long considered undesirable, illiberal, and almost synonymous with political control and an undignified human condition. It is called ‘surveillance’ and immediately brings to mind dystopian scenarios that are oppressive, intrusive, and detrimental to private freedom. Surveillance is carried out on children and those who, despite their age, have not emerged from a minority status, and also on servants, prisoners, factory workers, and students at school. Its perfection was achieved with Jeremy Bentham’s eighteenth-century panopticon, a circular prison whose ingenious architecture allowed seeing without being seen. Such a building was the ideal prototype for asylums, for prisons, and for assembly lines – places of constriction and suffering. For this reason, surveillance has always been perceived as a sign of lack of freedom and trust and endured, when one had no choice, as a form of imposition and abuse (Bigo 2012). If surveillance and voluntary servitude are now combined and take on a positive meaning, this means that something has indeed changed. It means that the culture of modernity, in which both were criticized and rejected as undesirable forms of control, has been definitively surpassed. The culture we live in is no longer modern. The problem is complicated by visibility, which has become an inalienable right a long time ago. This is primarily due to a totally contemporary awareness that one’s existence is perceived as a result of being visible. The idea that everything visible is real is now widespread and deeply rooted in society. Indeed, Jonathan Crary wrote: Television was crafted into a machinery of regulation, introducing previously unknown effects of subjection and supervision. This is why television is a crucial and adaptable part of a relatively

114 Post-Society long transition (or changing of the guard), lasting several decades, between a world of older disciplinary institutions and one of 24/7 control. (Crary 2013: 81)

Being visible is no longer an optional extra or an occasional occurrence that can happen to the lucky few and give them fifteen minutes of fame: it is now a must – a need, or rather a right – because not being visible is the same as not being there. Television has taught us in the first place that visibility is essentially mediative. It has removed visibility from the old-fashioned drawing rooms where it was necessary to be seen in order to be fashionable. In the past people had to make the effort to frequent public places, especially the right ones, in person. Television has transferred the concept of visibility from the physical plane to a virtual place – almost always a closed television studio, not accessible to the general public but amazingly open to the gaze and the curiosity of everyone. This transition to virtual visibility has been fundamental because it has, so to speak, ‘democratized’ visibility itself and made it available to anyone who is in possession of suitable technology – all the more as the medium is universally accessible and easy to use and requires no intervention from the organization behind it. At the very moment when visibility becomes media-driven and available to millions of people, the perception of its necessity and inalienability becomes more widespread, as a demonstration of existence and, in short, as a right or duty that cannot be avoided. But being visible also means being watched. Michel Foucault sees this as something negative, in that it represses individual freedom. Hierarchized, continuous and functional surveillance may not be one of the great technical ‘inventions’ of the eighteenth century, but its insidious extension owed its importance to the mechanisms of power that it brought with it. By means of such surveillance, disciplinary power became an ‘integrated’ system, linked from the inside to the economy and to the aims of the mechanism in which it was practised. It was also organized as a multiple, automatic and anonymous power; for although surveillance rests on individuals, its functioning is that of a network of relations from top to bottom, but also to a certain extent from bottom to top and laterally; this network ‘holds’ the whole together and traverses it in its entirety



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with effects of power that derive from one another: supervisors, perpetually supervised. (Foucault 1995: 176–7)

Evading surveillance means therefore less visibility, as for example in maintaining a low profile or being private, but this is precisely what is firmly avoided today. On the contrary, people are doing their best to make themselves visible through the most commonly used apps in order to get as many likes, followers, and other unequivocal signs of feedback as they can – a task they perform successfully and with satisfaction. Surveillance is initially feared and endured as a necessary evil – namely the cost of proving one’s existence. Otherwise it is hard to explain the ease or superficiality with which users of social networks or any other digital platform hand over their personal data, knowing full well that these will be used to profile their tastes and their political, sexual, and consumer tendencies, then sold to other service providers to form the largest database in history. Few people are shocked to learn that, even if they deny consent to the use of their personal data, the software still records everything and uses it. You only have to search for something on Google, and immediately afterwards, in your e-mail inbox, on the pages of online newspapers, or in the pop-ups that follow anyone surfing the net, commercial advertisements related to your search magically appear. It seems normal; it is all part of the game, but it is a game that has become increasingly intrusive and even aggressive, akin to an absolutist regime of colossal proportions, delocalized and anonymous, which controls, gathers information, and judges. Lyon (2018: 125) was not exaggerating when he revealed that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) of the United States adopted Facebook as its source for users’ personal data. Moreover, ‘[t]he disclosures from Edward Snowden about what is often called “mass surveillance” help us see in bold relief how mundane interactions by cell phone and via the internet become the unprecedented means of making people and populations visible to corporations and government agencies’ (Lyon 2016: 365). The simple act of joining Facebook is tantamount to handing over one’s privacy to a police system. Not even Orwell’s Big Brother had gone that far. The process has the (unconscious?)

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complicity of the interested parties themselves who, like so many lemmings, throw themselves in droves, serene and happy, into the jaws of the Moloch. So far, this is involuntary servitude. Things become more complicated when the feeling of insecurity, already present in a liquid society, is heightened as a result of the pandemic. Then the reaction is no longer one of passive acceptance of a disservice, justified by routine security checks – as in the analogy with travellers at an airport – but one of active emergency, an urge that cannot be postponed but must be satisfied as soon as possible. The same surveillance that we used to tolerate with indifference has now become a requirement demanded by many, even clamoured for, reclaimed by citizens as a service of prime necessity. In order to be protected, immunized against an invisible enemy that insinuates itself into our lives, we are prepared to renounce every principle of freedom. This new and unprecedented form of voluntary servitude requires complete submission to an apparatus that allows some individuals to preserve the life of others, to offer the privilege of health in exchange for servitude. This completes the circle that has opened with visibility. Visibility integrates perfectly with surveillance to form around the individual a tight control conducted not so much by the state as by a superior abstract entity that has no face or name but has been entrusted with the destiny of a disoriented and frightened humanity. *** The pandemic marked another important step in the handling of sensitive data. It made it clear that, at least for the two decades since the end of the twentieth century, the ‘surveillance capitalism’ that Shoshana Zuboff (2019) speaks of has been busy exploiting the data of network users for its own commercial ends, while revealing that the ‘freedom’ to surf and shop on the net, use social networks, and communicate is not a free service at all. And yet not only is no one outraged by the massive collection of data amassed from users or by the loss of privacy, but an increasing number of people are explicitly asking to be recorded, monitored, and controlled in all their actions, be they carried out online, on computers or smartphones, or in person,



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in three-dimensional life, and received through videos, communications, text messages, photos, and documents. Basically perceptions about using one’s own data on the net have reversed: such behaviour is no longer seen as an act of misuse, a violation of privacy. A new culture of exposing one’s private life has developed, in which all the embarrassment about making public details of one’s personal life has disappeared. What is more, the idea that making oneself visible to Big Brother is the best way to guarantee personal safety has been introduced and accepted. If society becomes completely transparent, it will be easier to protect it; hence making oneself visible is vital. Surveillance is no longer to be seen as a drawback, an intrusion, an outrage; it is now a ‘fringe benefit’, an extraordinary opportunity that would not exist without a particular technology. If we look at the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which broke out in March 2018, we can see how this event was quickly digested, making data collection and storage seem ‘normal’; in the disheartening impossibility of getting hold of the complex algorithms that govern Facebook or other social media, it is now the users themselves who call for surveillance for their own security. In Italy, for example, the Immuni contact-tracing app, which notifies users of the risk of Covid-19 infection while guaranteeing privacy, is one of the personal tracking tools that are being added to smartphones, tablets, webcams, and personal computers with an always-on connection. And, if Immuni helps to safeguard one’s health, facial recognition apps guarantee physical security, together with cameras deployed in certain parts of cities: they help to prevent crime and aggression by tracking down the perpetrators of violence or terrorism. Being watched makes one feel safer, protected by an anonymous device that is designed to maintain the well-being of the community. Voluntary submission is still the lifeline of an alarmed humanity, the ultimate resource for a kind of protection that does not rely on personal strength, on intelligence, or on the cooperation of others, let alone on some superior entity supposed to take care of the whole community, such as the state. Voluntary submission finds support in complex, nontransparent, and pervasive technology – the force that has now escaped human control, just as Günther Anders feared.

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Technology does not require the intervention of human beings to guide it; it moves autonomously, along paths that are in principle predetermined but could be gradually corrected and adapted to objectives whose logic escapes even those who had designed them. This dehumanization of social security could give rise to the suspicion that mankind prefers to believe, at least for the time being, that there is a political interest behind this immense deprivation of personal freedom (of all freedoms) in the name of security. Only this would explain a machine that endlessly grinds mountains of information, probably for no good reason, like a hidden god to whom freedom is sacrificed in exchange for nothing – no security, no protection, just a simple placebo effect. Just clicking on an image is enough to record a significant number of data; and it is disturbing to know that the masses of data culled from continuous interactions on social media are used to generate ‘predictive’ products. This means that, on the basis of preferences, relationships, behaviours, and things done in the past, it is possible to predict, with a fairly high probability index, people’s future behaviour: what they will do, whom they will see, or what they will buy. This may seem to be a consumerist type of targeting, aimed at knowing the probability of someone’s buying a new car and of what type, whether they will prefer a certain brand of cat food, or whether they’ll need to take out a mortgage to buy a house. So it may be an unpleasant marketing operation that is being played out behind our backs. We may not like it but, all things considered, it is useful for preparing companies to produce the goods that will be most in demand. But there is much more to it, as we can easily imagine. The so-called predictive products, even if used by companies to orient their investments, cannot separate cat food from the predisposition to risk, accumulated dissatisfaction, the desire for new relationships, economic problems, tastes, and trends. Given the immensity of the data processed, it is possible to predict with a good level of accuracy the behaviour of not just one person, but thousands or millions of people. This is mass prediction, social tracking on a huge scale. And it is the worst nightmare: knowing not so much what we do, but rather what we will do. If it is a machine that knows it without our knowledge, then that is indeed tragic. Of course, algorithms work on a statistical basis: they record, process, and draw probable conclusions, without absolute



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certainty. They cannot predict whether we will change our minds (the famous free will, an indispensable resource), whether chance will produce unexpected events, and what those might be. They only give an assessment of the current situation, from which possible consequences can be drawn. But let us imagine what might happen if machines could interfere in future choices, inducing people, through subtle informational intrusions or psychological solicitations, to modify their behaviour. In that case they would not limit themselves to offering predictive products but would direct us, through a special sort of feedback that, after going from the human to the machine, returns to the human, completing the loop; and that feedback would not be consciously perceived. In the 1950s, when advertising was still experimental and the industry was looking for non-traditional forms of persuasion, there was talk of ‘hidden’ advertising – the hidden persuaders of Vance Packard’s (1957) title – and of the possibility of inserting fleeting images, say, of a drink in a television or film commercial. Those few frames were not perceivable to the human eye, but one was assured that they would be registered at an unconscious level and that the subliminal message would arouse a feeling of thirst in the unsuspecting viewers. The effect was never proven, but who is to say that there are not other, more sophisticated forms of manipulation, capable of convincing or modifying people’s behaviour, especially when detailed information about their personal history can be used for that purpose? Humanity is faced with a critical dilemma. Should it break free from its dependence on technology, eliminating once and for all any possibility to be controlled, but also to enjoy the benefits of real-time communication, research, and information? Or should it resign itself to a progressive dependence on technology, deluding itself into believing that technology will protect it and will not use the enormous power it has accumulated to condition it? Tertium non datur. What seems unlikely is the controllability of the machine, its submission, even partial, to human will. At present not even a division of competences is possible: perhaps it would have been, in the nascent phase of digital technology, but now it is too late. Such a division would have given the machine

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a reserved space for action, preventing it from interfering in the lives of men and women. There would have been two separate entities, each able to relate to the other and neither prevailing over the other. Both horns of the dilemma present strong critical elements. On the first scenario – breaking free from technology – resistance and backlash would be extraordinary, unleashing insurmountable opposition. This has nothing to do with machine rebellion (and Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), based on the novel by Arthur A. Clarke, has given us the perfect imaginary model of machine rebellion in HAL 9000, the devious computer that eliminates the crew of the spaceship); the real difficulty would be managing without tools that are vital for survival. Technology, as has been affirmed many times since Aristotle, is innate in humans. It is part of their being, because they could not survive without it. Surveillance capitalism, as investigated by Zuboff, could become its opposite, the surveillance of capitalism. As for all other actions, choices, and desires of humanity, this happens when power becomes so impersonal, so distant and extraneous to active life, that it is not exercised. Power is useless when it does not have the tools to act. The phenomenon Bauman described – the separation between politics and power, between the ability to decide what to do and the instruments needed to do it – is actually taking place. Up until now we have observed politics being deprived of its operational arm and therefore being made sterile; but if we look at power without politics we see a force that is incapable of deciding what to do. Bauman believed that power detached from politics follows other supranational logics, imposed without mediation by financial and managerial interests whose aim is profit. Now it is easy to believe that this immense power without politics and without masters is even beyond the control of capitalism, that it is an autonomous force, all the more alarming as it belongs to no one and can be exploited by anyone. It is a neutral power, produced by machines, and therefore devoid of any qualification or colour. It is an empty power because, as long as it remains within the machine, it has no impact on human lives. It is only power in its potential state and, as such, it is dormant. It will belong to whoever wakes it up and hence, like any neutral entity and force, it will depend on how it is used.



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4.3. A Society of Vision The society of vision and the visual is modern society. It has developed and privileged every communicative, artistic, aesthetic, and political aspect that has something to do with sight, from the press to the cinema, from monuments to instruments for scrutinizing the depths of the universe. Seeing is indeed the imperative of modern times. Used to dispel the darkness of ignorance in the age of the Enlightenment, it equates vision with the power to understand and clarify the unknown aspects of existence, the dark side of power, the complexity of human relationships and cast upon them the light of reason. Vision is a primary component of progress, the new secular hope of a better tomorrow, in which one can foresee things and plan with a view to the future. Visibility requires transparency, and it is significant that, in every crisis that modernity had to face, transparency was claimed to be the standard: if we go all the way back from Gorbachev’s Glasnost in the Soviet Union of the 1980s to Bentham’s panopticon in the eighteenth century, we find that people constantly sought the confirmation, truth, and reassurance that only complete visibility can offer. In fact the model of visibility that contemporary society turns to is the eighteenth-century one, which can be considered the forerunner of digital surveillance. The panopticon is the place in which and the point from which everything is visible, transparent: it was designed as an ideal prison, conceived of according to rigorous criteria of rationalizing the space. Circular in shape, it allows a single guard to control an entire floor, in an unprecedented innovation on the traditional prison: the guard sees everything, but cannot be seen. The prisoners, too, are separated from one another visually. The impediment of vision is an additional sentence. Their condition is one of stress, since – knowing that they cannot see the guard – they could not tell when exactly they are being monitored. This is a rational but extremely alienating idea, which for eighteenthcentury culture seems to be an improvement on the past, when the classic sentence of exclusion from social life was in force. Since classical times, when ostracism was practised in ancient Athens (and a few other parts of the Greek world), anyone guilty of a crime against their fellow human beings was exiled, removed from the polis, and therefore no longer visible. In premodern

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history, the phrase damnatio memoriae (‘condemnation of memory’), first attested in the seventeenth century, described a similar practice of erasing all the signs of a person’s existence. This form of concealment goes far beyond the exclusion of the person’s physical presence: it eliminates even the ‘visibility’ of one’s memory, one’s possessions, and one’s home. This process of erasing was subsequently transferred to the dungeon, an underground place where the condemned person was locked up and no longer visible to the world. As in ostracism, the prison eliminates the most significant social aspect of modernity: the very visibility of the person. Being invisible means not existing. It is interesting to see how this identity statement is still reflected today, not only in the obsessive presence, on social media, of a humanity that struggles hard to be seen rather than to see, but also in the effects of the lockdown imposed by the pandemic. Confinement to the home and restrictions on going out, adopted either voluntarily or through quarantine orders issued by the health system and local governments, have meant physical inactivity as well as compulsory cohabitation, and above all the repression of visibility. Isolation does not allow one to see or be seen. Now the human brain is ready to assimilate changes and adapts to them, albeit with difficulty, so that it quickly comes to consider them ‘normal’. But this is exactly what we witnessed in the past two years: a change of habits in which the new ones soon became customary and ‘the new normal’. In this situation, we may wonder whether the pandemic has not in fact dealt the decisive blow to a modernity that was already going through a profound state of crisis. Eliminating social visibility, even though it is transferred in part to the virtual world via technology, may be another step towards the desocialization of a human race that no longer recognizes itself in the values of the past. *** Although not being visible is equivalent to not existing, visibility is not always positive. On the contrary, as Foucault remarks on the panopticon, it can be a trap: Full lighting and the eye of a supervisor capture better than darkness, which ultimately protected. Visibility is a trap. To begin with, this



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made it possible – as a negative effect – to avoid those compact, swarming, howling masses that were to be found in places of confinement, those painted by Goya or described by Howard. Each individual, in his place, is securely confined to a cell from which he is seen from the front by the supervisor; but the side walls prevent him from coming into contact with his companions. He is seen, but he does not see; he is the object of information, never a subject in communication. (Foucault 1995: 200)

In the darkness of the dungeon the prisoner maintains a minimum of privacy, something that is abolished in the panopticon. If we then consider a disturbing observation attributed, among many others,1 to the Nazi Joseph Goebbels, minister of propaganda under Hitler (if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear), we realize how transparency can turn into illiberty through inquisitional practice: that statement sounds false already in its first part. Zuboff (2019: 472) tried to deflate the threat by injecting a dose of irony: ‘If you have got nothing to hide, then you are nothing’, she said, playing on the element of curiosity for the supposedly interesting unknown. On the contrary, the social media are quick to demonstrate that the condition for being loved and recognized is precisely absolute transparency. Indeed, it is the demonstration of one’s fragility, weaknesses, and mistakes that guarantees success. The same was true in the age of the Enlightenment, whose values seemed to have been recovered in the present phase of cultural disorder. Today, however, technology is rewarded and science is suspected, with a fatal misunderstanding. While Foucault places the emphasis on transparency, on a society intent on regulating behaviour, Gilles Deleuze looks more at the element of control. Thus, in ‘Postscript on Control Societies’, we read: Control societies are taking over from disciplinary societies. ‘Control’ is the name proposed by Burroughs to characterize the new monster, 1

Cf. esp. Upton Sinclair, who used it much earlier than Goebbels, in The Profits of Religion: An Essay in Economic Interpretation, Pasadena, CA: Author, 1918: ‘Not merely was my own mail opened, but the mail of all my relatives and friends – people residing in places as far apart as California and Florida. I recall the bland smile of a government official to whom I complained about this matter: “If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear.”’

124 Post-Society and Foucault sees it fast approaching. Paul Virilio too is constantly analyzing the ultrarapid forms of apparently freefloating control that are taking over from the old disciplines at work within the time scales of closed systems. (Deleuze 1995 [1990]: 178)

The two aspects complement each other and contribute to perfecting the idea of a modernity that is open, positive, and democratic, yet also capable of exercising precise control over its citizens. It is the dual function of visibility, which starts from ideal ethical principles and ends up achieving effective political goals. In this, modernity has been ingenious and has been able to maintain a stable equilibrium for almost three centuries. What is more, it has attenuated the function of the prison (if we are to linger on this subject, which absorbed Foucault) by managing to apply to it a principle of marginalization that concealed it from the eyes of the community and that combined the visibility of convicts with the idea of their rehabilitation. *** Prisons are well represented in Piranesi’s drawings, in all their darkness and atrocity. And yet, like other places removed from the light (which functions as a metaphor for reason), they are not an equivalent of the tombs and sepulchres in which the convicts are buried. If anything, they invoke a temporary suspension of visibility, which has the purpose of hiding them from the sight of the living; and this is a punishment with an educational purpose. It was implicit in the intentions of the legislator that the prisoner was granted the opportunity to be useful to society once again, through work or study. In the panopticon, unlike in a dungeon, the prisoner is spared the added punishment of living in darkness and in the fear it generates; on the contrary, a pervasive luminosity that cancels any shadowy area allows the guards absolute control at all times, day and night. This eighteenth-century prison is therefore a metaphor for a transparent society, in line with the Enlightenment vision of a world free of mystification and superstition but also of dogmatic religion, free of complex and incomprehensible political systems, corruption, and the entanglement of passions. This would be an open society, visible to all, but one that, precisely because of these attributes, can



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also see: another sacrifice, another curtailment of freedom for the good of the system, the same as what happened when the contract with the modern state was signed. If the prison loses its function of segregating, of causing total burial and oblivion, in favour of the noble function of rehabilitating convicts with a view to their reintegration into society, the question of separation from the public sphere and invisibility remains unresolved and continues to make this reintegration difficult, since more weight is placed on the side of suspension and of waiting than on the rehabilitative aspect. However, the prison, albeit paradigmatic, is not the only place in which the project of visibility is applied in the modern world. Although, as Bentham’s words indicate, the prison was the first to attract attention in this respect, any other sector in which a communal activity is carried out is open to the exercise of applying visibility in such a way as to maintain an orderly and functional society. Indeed, the structure of the panopticon will be found applicable, I think, without exception, to all establishments whatsoever, in which, within a space not too large to be covered or commanded by buildings, a number of persons are meant to be kept under inspection. No matter how different, or even opposite the purpose: whether it be that of punishing the incorrigible, guarding the insane, reforming the vicious, confining the suspected, employing the idle, maintaining the helpless, curing the sick, instructing the willing in any branch of industry, or training the rising race in the path of education: in a word, whether it be applied to the purposes of perpetual prisons in the room of death, or prisons for confinement before trial, or penitentiary houses, or houses of correction, or work-houses, or manufactories, or mad-houses, or hospitals, or schools. (Bentham 1995: 33–4)

Absolute transparency is recognized as a fundamental quality necessary for progress and continual improvement, and is particularly suited to the so-called totalizing institutions, that is, those public or private institutions that operate in a delimited place (again, the physical boundaries within which they operate are essential and must be clearly marked) and stipulate their own implementation rules. The moment we cross the threshold of each of these institutions, we implicitly accept the logic that governs them and we have to conform to its laws, even if they are not codified and do not come under a generalized system.

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In totalizing institutions, individuals are stripped of personal identity in order to adopt the role envisaged for them within the institution. Depersonalization is necessary for achieving the functionality and recognition of the institution itself, its authority, its social task. For this reason, internal relations are hierarchized and the different roles must be made visible through appropriate and distinctive signs. These can be items of clothing (uniforms, gowns, overalls) or accessories (badges, nameplates, rank insignias), but also spatial arrangements (locations, offices, waiting rooms, furniture) that are not necessarily linked to the clothing worn, but that can be immediately attributed to the functions carried out. The old balance that the Enlightenment had managed to impose through visibility began to falter with individualism. There is in fact a close relationship between visibility and individualism, in that individuals make increasing demands for attention, and thus for greater visibility. We could trace some of the reasons for this to the development of communications, but others relate to a culture that places individuals at the centre of society, granting them the power to attribute meaning to things – a power they never had before: at least up to that point, it had belonged to the collectivity. Thus the centrality of the individual is the first symptom of crisis in modernity. We need only think of the history of the nineteenth century: the importance of social movements and the rise of mass society, and in particular of that great objective of finding the reasons for cultural processes in the collectivity – art, literature, poetry, music. Sociology itself, with its ramifications into cultural and communicative processes, emerged in this context as a search for laws of behaviour and an attempt to interpret them on the basis of observation and analysis. Everything has been attributed to the social, which designates what has been produced by the continuous interaction between subjects; even works of art once attributed to the solitary genius and to an extraordinary ability to ‘see’ (Arthur Rimbaud regarded the poet as a visionary) have been studied as products of a given society and its time. It was disciplines such as the sociology of art and literature (initially of a Marxist or post-Hegelian character, which is not surprising) that analysed and explained to the general public the



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genesis of works of art and how the masterpieces of the past could be the highest representation of a civilization, but also what close social links existed between the products of various forms of culture that targeted a popular audience – in other words, products that are socially characterized and recognized as ‘works’. This in no way diminishes the figure of the artist or author, but rather rewards their indispensable function as mediators, as sensitive actors or agents of a creative thought elaborated within society that can be represented only with particular methods and special tools. ‘The Marxist conception of realism is realism in which the essence of reality is exposed perceptually and artistically’, wrote György Lukács (1971: 79), one of the foremost theorists of Marxist aesthetics, in presenting his reflection or mirroring theory, which emphasizes that the meaningful content already present in society is just waiting to be brought to the foreground. The socialization of existence, or at least the attribution of successes and failures to a generic society, reached breaking point around the 1970s. Generally identified as postmodernist, this new sensibility or philosophical tendency, intolerant of ideologies and ready to challenge the past, decisively expressed the need to re-evaluate the individual, restoring to this figure the centrality and authority that socialization had taken away. In those years there was talk of a crisis of sociology (see Gouldner 1970), and the rapid decline of every attempt to apply the sociological method to human creativity began. The 1970s can therefore be considered a crucial point in the return of individualism. Some were tempted to speak, with excessive enthusiasm, of a new renaissance. This was not exactly an edifying return, since, as Bernard Stiegler pointed out, the revaluation of the individual was effected through de-individuation, that is, through a misinterpretation of individual autonomy that brought together aggression, egoism, self-referentiality, immodesty, conceit, loss of social solidarity, and even isolation – all in the process of regaining personal dignity and self-importance. These are the very aspects that the socialization of existence intended to avoid and modernity had managed to prevent, but that inevitably re-emerged at the moment of its crisis. We can add to them visibility, because with de-individuation comes the need to be visible. Modernity has combined visibility with

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socialization, making it less invasive, but the natural predisposition to gain recognition that goes hand in hand with visibility is never too far away. It should not be forgotten that recognition is always social. It therefore depends on sharing one’s values and emotions with a group, small or large, which could consist of family, friends, or strangers who share the same tastes, inclinations, or cultural heritage. In the drift towards individualism, recognition becomes more important than ever, given the lack of certain social shock absorbers such as sharing, understanding, and mutual trust. In this lonely turn towards self-concentration, being recognized is vital and consequently demands a high degree of visibility, but with one important distinction: it is not the quality of the recognizer that is needed, only the quantity.

4.4. Visibility and Modernity ‘Looking at someone who looks at you is, in a sense, the beginning of all society’: these are the words with which Andrea Mubi Brighenti (2010: 1) opens his essay on visibility, which identifies the eye as the basis of all contact. Visual contact, then, comes even before physical, vocal, and olfactory contact. The eye is essential; more information is obtained from vision than from any other sense. Think of animals, of the function that the eye has for them, between them, or between animal and human. The most impressive thing I experience when I look into the eyes of my cat and see her looking at me is how similar we human animals are to other superior animals. We are united by our gaze, by our ability to look into each other’s eyes, and even more impressive is our ability to acknowledge each other just by looking. When you observe someone, whether it is a human being or an animal, you instinctively look for their eyes, as if it were an automatic, spontaneous gesture. It is needed to establish contact, but is immediately lost once the other person looks away. This reflection is important precisely because this action of looking for the eyes of another human being could be considered a cultural fact, induced by a formative process that has been passed down for millennia and repeats itself at every birth. But



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how can a cat or a dog have developed the same culture? How can a wolf or a bear know that they need to look us in the eye to understand our intentions, to understand whether there is fear, defiance, or kindness? Looking in order to ‘understand’ the other, then, is not a cultural fact, but a physiological one that is part of the living being. Mubi Brighenti observes how action in modernism is detached, rational, and efficient, qualities that are perfectly suited to the new sensibility. Rationality, in particular, is necessary because ‘it is governed by the free will of an aware and self-conscious subject’ (Mubi Brighenti 2010: 7). Above all, visibility enables the perfect detachment from the object observed; it ‘understands’ it and enters into a relationship – because seeing, as I have said, is in any case a relationship, even if it refers to an object – but a relationship without interference, without physical contact. Seeing is a matter of virtual appropriation, as can be well understood when someone observes their object of desire, be it sexual or materialistic. In the end, seeing is efficient because it gives an exact and well-defined image of the object observed. As in the past, one exercises control through vision: then through the panopticon and its many applications, and today through cameras outside public buildings and in city streets. Visibility, to which modern society has given a privileged meaning, is now being challenged by the new technologies. It uses signs that are neither readable nor visible to the naked eye, but which are able to count on greater reliability, since they cannot be falsified. The digital trail questions the primacy of physical visibility: it has already replaced the eyewitness as evidence in court cases, thus challenging the reliability of visual feedback, which is easily undermined by ambiguous appearances or bad memories. Thus the crisis of modernity, in which visibility is replaced by traceability, also brings with it a crisis of traditional visibility. Is the culture of visibility dissolving? The answer to this question can only be negative, since the signs of the predominance of vision are still evident, perhaps now more than in the past. It is the ‘modern’ component, namely modernity’s conception of visibility, that has been altered. If we look at communication, visual perception has become dominant to the point of undermining writing (let alone that even writing requires visual input

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insofar as it has to be read). There has been talk of replacing writing with simpler elements of communication, where images prevail over words and are able to say more in terms of information, emotion, and meaning. This aligns with fears of a cultural regression towards a simplified and even illiterate civilization, which would use immediate iconic and verbal communication, of a kind that does not require study or concentration. In practice, this would impoverish, trivialize, and flatten the complexity of knowledge in the name of an alleged ‘democratization’ of knowledge. Such knowledge would be comprehensible and usable by everyone; but, for this very reason, it would also be simplified and reduced to its lowest terms. In reality, what is happening before our eyes is nothing so apocalyptic, and certainly does not call writing into question: it simply transfers the culture of visibility to other media and further exalts it by different means. It is true that the risk of an excessive reduction in complexity is very probable (indeed, it is certain), but it corresponds to a proportional enrichment in collateral fields; there is an unexpected expansion in the range of information, such that the visual aspect has new room for manoeuvre. Above all, there is speed: the new culture of visibility, which differs from the traditional culture of modernity, is characterized by immediacy, by the instant ability to transmit information directly, without recourse to interfaces that require some ability or know-how if they are to be used. In digital terminology, this culture is user-friendly, that is, it can be learned by intuition alone, like all new technologies. Before, when it seemed that specialized knowledge of the main computer languages was necessary in order for someone to access a computer, mastering such knowledge required overcoming a difficult initial teething period, whereas the new technologies have been designed so as to be easily grasped. It may even be that they are modelled on the functions of the human brain. They imitate its logical paths, managing to establish the empathic human–machine relationship that serves to make the technology acceptable – so much so that, as we can see, using technology is not boring. At least in this case, it is not the human who has to adapt to the machine; it is the machine, in its flexibility, that has to bend to the needs of the diverse levels of intelligibility of humans, so that a programme to reduce the variable digital divide is



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necessary. This gap is not so much generational as intercultural, and is deeply embedded in social inequalities. *** We can find asymmetry in visibility. This is already evident in the panopticon, where there is no longer a balance between seeing and being seen – the normative aspect of social relations. For purposes of control, an imbalance is created such that the person who is seen is not able to see the person who watches. Another form of asymmetry is created by those who remove themselves from visibility, especially if this control interface is implemented through consumption. There is a threshold of visibility, in this case, that reaches consumers and registers their propensity to spend. When consumption does not reach a certain level of interest, visibility cannot be activated. In fact, writes Lyon (2016: 371), ‘some, such as Bauman’s “flawed consumers,” slip below this threshold and are excluded’. This shows that visibility is closely linked to consumerism: there is a substantial part of the population that makes itself visible through consumption, by paying with credit cards, debit cards, or other electronic instruments, but also by using loyalty cards or making online purchases. The imperfect or flawed consumers, as Bauman labels them, are those who do not spend enough, who fall under the bracket of ‘the poor’, and who are consequently blamed for not doing their duty. First and foremost, the poor of today (that is, people who are ‘problems’ for the rest) are ‘non-consumers’, not ‘unemployed’. They are defined in the first place through being flawed consumers, since the most crucial of the social duties which they do not fulfil is that of being active and effective buyers of the goods and services the market offers. (Bauman 2007: 126)

This strictly consumerist sector of visibility is accompanied by the more specifically communicative one, which is present on social media, mobile phones, chat platforms, e-mail, and even Google searches, where everything is indexed and referenced. But if the immediate purpose of monitoring consumption is to identify the client, to personalize him or her as an economic agent, which can also be used for tax purposes (standard of living,

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purchasing capacity, ratio between declared income and volume of expenditure), then the monitoring of communications cannot but have a political value. The two sectors of visibility – consumerist and communicative – complement each other, providing a clear picture of citizens so that everything is known about them, from what they eat to whom they meet, from how much they earn to what medicines they take. The healthcare aspect also plays a role here, which has grown during the pandemic. *** The consumer can avoid control to some extent by not using credit cards, by paying in cash, and by not using loyalty cards. However, many advantages and marginal benefits are lost in this way – for instance, many supermarkets operate a points collection system – and it has to be acknowledged that the state has undertaken campaigns everywhere to promote the use of electronic money. An example is cashback, a reward programme that has the double function of controlling consumer spending and countering tax evasion by retailers. No doubt visibility is social and socializes, which is why it was used in modernity as an absolute paradigm – and not only from the point of view of control. Bentham’s Panopticon captures only one aspect of what can be made of the visible, but its use extends across cultural system, encompassing the entire wide spectrum of symbolic communication. Of course, visibility is not an invention of modernity. But it is only with the ‘new time’ that it takes a pervasive and decisive function, becoming a point of reference for every aspect and function of collective life. When modernity goes into crisis, we do not see a drastic decrease in the culture of visibility, but a transformation: a progressive transfer from direct visibility to a visibility mediated by technology. This transition is crucial to understanding how modernity in decline gives way to other cultural forms. When we notice that people prefer to look at the world through a screen – starting with the TV screen and ending with the smartphone screen – we realize that the old good culture of visibility has gone. *** On board a bus in a city of art, you may notice that some people watch videos on a drop-down monitor or screen rather than



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looking out of the window. On the train, in the metro, or in public places, even though people are close to one another, they avoid making eye contact. Their gazes are absent or, more often, directed at the mobile phone in their hand. They do not see their surroundings directly but prefer to look through a mediator, which shields them from these surroundings and at the same time has their full attention. A great deal more could be said about the habit of looking away from reality, which is an equivalent of foregoing social interaction – now pursued virtually, on the net. Direct vision is no longer preferred – the eye framing a space, focusing on the details, catching a movement or looking for the other person’s gaze to convey a feeling – but the impersonality of the screen is. Viewing mediated by electronic impulses, by the bits that break down the real image and recompose it in pixels on a glassy support, is nothing but false, an artificial perception. The use of technology to mediate one’s visual contact with reality is tantamount to the negation of the vision of reality itself or, better, to the negation of seeing as a privileged approach to reality, as it has been until now. This calls into question a modern culture based on direct vision; it rejects the personal relationship and exchanges it with what is artificial, the non-human. Even in the sphere of control, direct vision is banned, simplified, or entirely replaced by the machine. Prison guards – like the security guards in supermarkets, railway stations, airports, or public places – sit in front of monitors that transmit images of corridors, entrances, halls, and car parks; they are not seen, but are not able to see physically either. Their vision is parcelled out, fragmented, alienating, and more stressful than the condition of the panopticon prisoners locked in a cell where they know they are subjected to continuous or random visual surveillance. Moreover, the guards’ control is purely virtual and as such can be artfully altered, as happens in those films – and sometimes in reality – in which recorded or static images are sent to the screen, showing a reassuring absence of movement, while all the time the intrusion is underway. *** Faced with this post-social prospect, the future may appear gloomy and difficult to imagine, and therefore impossible to plan. Imagining a catastrophe risks making it a self-fulfilling

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prophecy, as Robert Merton (1968: 477–8) reminds us. This is especially true if, as in the case of post-society, the signs are already before our very eyes, but predicting social collapse can also have the opposite effect. ‘Prophesies of catastrophe’, notes Bauman (2016: 29), may well inspire their recipients to change their potentially disastrous ways of acting (or desisting action) – and so prevent the prediction from being fulfilled. … The prophets of Hebrew antiquity, painting in lurid colours the imminent catastrophe, were concerned mostly with that alternative role of their prophecies. They abhorred the idea of being proved ‘to be right from the very beginning’. They dearly wished to be proved wrong – and this is why they selected most sombre, pernicious, sinister and threatening colours for the palette with which they set to paint their vision of future.

As observers of post-society, investigating what is left of the future gives us the opportunity to make other choices.

5 What Is Left of the Future

5.1. A Look into the Future The future is unpredictable. Even though it is a human construct (we decide it through our choices), it is always subject to the unexpected. Unfortunately, how to deal with the unexpected is something that cannot be taught, because often this is not a matter of experience. Moreover, the negative effects are devastating when they affect an already fragile and crisis-tested humanity. But it is precisely when the most improbable future manifests itself in all its gravity that humanity reacts by fighting back. Added to our lack of confidence, or mixed in with the conflicting feelings of existential instability that we have experienced until recently, is the courage we found in our confrontation with the pandemic. It is a newfound strength, a result not of despair but of the hope of being able to go back where we left off: to renewal, enthusiasm, a yearning for a future that looks back on the recent past as a time that is over. Until yesterday there was talk of an interregnum, of an indefinite interval of time, of waiting for new rules to replace the ones that no longer apply. But the pandemic has muddied the waters. This prompts me to make two considerations. One is related to the state of emergency. Naturally, our attention is focused

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on the battle against the pandemic and, of course, the debate revolves around this issue; but it is also true – and this my second consideration – that there is a strongly felt desire for the future after a period of stagnation. We have not just the desire to leave a condition of duress behind us, but the hope of taking back control of our own destiny. While our attention is fixed on the present, our gaze is turned to the future. The eternal present is no longer eternal; it was expended in the Covid-19 pandemic. It is only an agitated clamour of conflicting opinions that hold us against our will. The impression is that yesterday the world was moving too fast and it was impossible to keep up with it. We were swept along by innovative technologies, competition, and the fear of marginalization, which did not give us time to reflect on our being. Something has changed, that blind race into the present has stopped. The still image of a world on standby no longer seems actual, but rather consigned to a past that does not belong to us. We can try to look again at tomorrow, we can try to imagine it. We wonder more and more often what is going to happen in a few months, what the next few years are going to be like, what we are going to do when this dramatic experience is completely over. *** Fareed Zakaria is a Washington Post columnist who hosts a programme on CNN. In a recent book he acknowledges that ‘we have created a world that is always in overdrive. Human development in every sense has dramatically accelerated over the last two centuries and that pace has quickened further in the last few decades’ (Zakaria 2020: 15). As Hartmut Rosa (2013) and James Gleick (1999: 42–3) write, acceleration is in fact the keyword of our present: time seems to run faster. This is because there are not only ‘flat-earthers’ but also ‘fast earthers’: in fact some people with a sense of humour have tried to argue that the earth must have increased the speed of rotation on its axis, given the general feeling that the hours of both day and night have shortened. We live under the impression that there is not enough time. The sense of urgency to get everything done quickly generates performance anxiety in every sector, from work to private life. As Jacques Derrida (1992) reminded us, time is the most precious



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commodity that can be gifted today to an increasingly impatient humanity. The idea of acceleration comes from a distant past, when the first machines disrupted the rhythms of human life until then attuned to the passing of days, to seasons, and to the rhythms of nature. The machine – exalted by the Futurists, who regarded speed as the quintessential feature of an evolving reality – imposed a different pace. Doing things quickly has been equated with being able to do them, in the material sense, in an era that expects every task to be performed immediately and to readapt the future within an extended present. There has been talk even of an inability to plan for the future that is manifest especially in young people, for whom prospects have not been scrubbed but rather compressed into the immediacy of today. Then suddenly everything stopped. The pandemic interrupted the virtuous circle like a freeze-frame from a film, immobilizing everyone in the positions they held in those early days of March 2020. It captured a barely noticeable movement, evacuating the streets, emptying the towns, keeping people confined to their homes – people, that is, who did not occupy the intensive care units of hospitals. Human beings were forced to slow down, but the machines did not stop. At the time of this writing in 2022, the fall in the number of infections and the gradual easing of restrictions (wearing face masks, for instance, is no longer required by law) have triggered an interesting social phenomenon: a frenzy due to the removal of Covid-19 restrictions. More than during the summer of 2021, today there are signs of a different, more confident attitude, borne in the knowledge that progress in vaccinations is allaying fears and instilling courage. However, it is best to remain cautious: there may still be new waves of the infection lying in wait. Despite everything, the atmosphere we breathe is similar to what we feel coming out of a tunnel or emerging from a painful condition of oppression. Is the state of emergency over? It would seem so, judging by the crowded bars and the open-air venues where not a free table is in sight. Restaurants are once again packed, bookings for summer holidays are pouring in. Above all, there is an influx of tourists: a species that suddenly seemed extinct has returned to our cities of art. It is the dove back to the ark after

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the flood. In this climate of freedom, a strange social frenzy is spreading. Frenzy, from the Greek word phrēn (‘midriff’; also ‘mental faculties’), is that feverish inner urge that drives us to move, to take action. We could compare it to a spring that has been compressed for too long and that, when the pressure is released, overwhelms everything. Classified among the less noble emotions and believed by the ancients to have its seat in the diaphragm, frenzy has little to do with reason. Its substance is ambivalent, since it is produced by a positive stimulus to move faster, but its uncontrolled irrationality can make it have undesirable effects. This is because catastrophes are always just around the corner. In order to avoid them, according to Zygmunt Bauman (2010b: 15), ‘one needs to believe that the impossible is possible. That the possible always lurks, restlessly, inside the protective carapace of impossibility, waiting to irrupt.’ Through haste or oversight, people are often inclined to dispense with preventative systems, or at least to deactivate them temporarily. It seems like a harmless gesture, which people do without really thinking when they believe that they have everything under control but in fact they don’t. The result is that the desire for normality turns into a desire for abnormality. If we think about it, we are the victims of moral, man-made disasters rather than of natural disasters (from earthquakes to floods). Underneath the apparent irrationality of frenetic activity, cloaked as it is in spontaneity – a quality that is particularly trendy but turns out to be counterproductive – we can see a hidden purpose, an instrumental rationality that works for its own benefit. This is the legacy of an ancestral culture that pops back up at times of crisis, when the patina of civilization is cracked by the instinct to survive. Frenzy is one of the most obvious symptoms of this phenomenon. We have the idea that everything is at an end, but the exact deadline is not known. Hence the frantic behaviour of grabbing whatever comes along, even if one does not strictly need it, is justified by basic insecurity. Frenzy is based on the fear of not having the time to enjoy a benefit or a privilege, in case the rules will change at any moment. Frenzy is grafted onto the habit of being in a hurry – but not just on that. In fact the pandemic dictated that people had to



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queue in order to buy bread as well as in order to get vaccinated. The act of waiting in line subtly reveals the desire to participate in a civilized manner, as well as the urge to be the first to take advantage of a service or to access a benefit, and in any case to avoid being last or, worse, excluded. It reactivates old, wartime fears, deep-seated in the collective memory, which frenzy wants to get rid of as soon as possible. The watchword is to keep moving – and it does not matter where to or why. From scooters to rolling chairs, everything seems to offer an invitation not to stay still. What is on the horizon remains uncertain. The sense of the limit appears blurred, its features indistinct. Perhaps this is because of the uncertainty that has characterized certain communications in various areas of science; or perhaps it is due to those early messages that affirmed the uselessness of devices only to acknowledge them later as indispensable.But this fading out of limitations is an invitation to frenzy. The limit is a powerful driver of human progress: knowing what our limits are leads to awareness, while it drives us to overcome them in order to grow. It is no coincidence that Aristotle considered the apeiron (what is without peras, ‘limit’) a negative concept, similar to that of infinity – the very same concept that Jorge Luis Borges believed to be extremely dangerous precisely on the grounds of its lack of measure. This is because, if we place the infinite on our horizon, as finite beings, the imbalance that results generates collective malaise. It borders on anomie, the absence of rules that are needed to limit human behaviour; and without rules we cannot survive. While we are waiting for rules to be reintroduced and divulged, frenzy, the urge to do something, takes hold. This is just one of the possible reactions to the current state of things. Its effect is not long-lasting, but another of those occasional manifestations that point to the presence of distress. The same also happens with languishing (see p. 98), which is the exact opposite of frenzy: a tendency to detach oneself from reality and observe it with apathy. Everyone reacts at their own level of sensitivity. There are as many emotional facets to us as there are aspects of society. If languishing represents a minority reaction, a passive response to the pandemic, frenzy is its active counterpart, being imbued with resilience and fighting spirit and heightened by the fervour to reinstate the previous conditions.

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Between languishing, waiting for events with the most absolute indifference, and taking the initiative there is only one spurt of awareness. Moving is a way to compensate for the lack of limits, to translate it into things to be done before the intervention of new limitations. And if the limit is ethical, socially useful for breaking out of minority status, the absence of limit, as long as it is temporary, disrupts a consolidated system and creates new balances. The frenzy that characterizes our present, then, is a prelude to a new time. After slow food, which taught us to slow down and pay more attention the quality of our food, what we need is slow business – ‘slow biz’: a way of living, working, and fulfilling ourselves without haste, respecting our biological times. After all, the earth’s rotation, at least for the time being, will not change. *** An unexpressed fear that has always loomed over the human race (or rather genus) is the fear of its own extinction: no one can be sure that we will remain in this world forever. If we remove the fear of individual death, the fear of extinction is firmly in our consciousness, since the various species of Homo became extinct one after the other, up to Homo sapiens, whose members are left alone to govern the earth after the disappearance of their antagonists, the representatives of Homo neanderthalensis. If we think about it, this disappearance seems to be a rather recent event: it dates back only 40,000 years ago – practically yesterday, considering the age of our planet. If the fear of extinction resurfaces now, it is because technological changes have radically altered the existence of the Homo sapiens variety to the point of making it unrecognizable. There is a risk that we will be the last sapientes (‘wise’) exemplars of our species. Therefore we need to exorcize this catastrophic hypothesis and understand what choices to make for the future, through a general review of the history of technological evolution. It will clearly emerge that the last century saw a process of exponential development that became increasingly rapid and complex, as well as unstoppable. We are approaching the point of singularity, that is, the moment when technological progress will accelerate so much as to surpass our ability to understand events and predict their development. This was the fear that, in the post-war period,



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prompted Günther Anders to qualify as ‘antiquated’ the person whose technology had outperformed that person. Philosophers and sociologists share with scientists the same concern for the future of humanity, but there is something they fear more than the threat of nuclear weapons, something more insidious yet seemingly harmless: artificial intelligence (AI). Designed to aid and expand the cognitive capabilities of the human brain, AI proves capable of making autonomous decisions. This gives rise to the fear that one day it could dominate the world and enslave humans to their own technology, just as they are today to their smartphones. The reaction to such a catastrophic hypothesis is usually that a machine, no matter how perfected it is, will never be able to feel, or to understand or create art. However, we have already achieved the former, if the results of research on ‘emotional’ robots are anything to go by; and we are now working on the latter, considering our inclination to allow artistic and creative skills to wilt while we privilege technological and practical ones. Then there is the prospect of human–machine integration, where AI will be linked to the human brain through artificial neural networks. Behind this fusion is the spectre of the posthuman, in a future where only a few will be privileged: the real technosapientes, the ‘technical whizzes’, who will ultimately live longer and will dominate the less fortunate vetero­ sapientes, the ‘old-style whizzes’ (these are very similar to the Morlocks of H. G. Wells’ 1895 Time Machine). This scenario is possible, provided that the last sapientes are not followed by the subspecies Homo insipiens (‘the foolish human’). With total reliance on technology and less dependence on knowledge, this is the most likely of dystopias. *** Dystopias, that is, negative utopias, have taught us to fear the future: they have destroyed it, disfigured it. We imagine it no longer as a desirable place, enlightened by progress and blessed by material well-being, but as a degraded environment where humanity is forced to live a miserable existence. It could be said, to echo the words of Paul Valéry, that the future no longer is what it once was since dystopias, with their need to warn us and to prepare us for the worst to come, have shown its dark side. They repeat on every occasion that we must be careful: if we do

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not change our way of life, we will face extinction, or at least (but more rapidly) the end of human society. But societies do not end, except in dystopian stories such as Stephen King’s The Stand in 1978, or Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake in 2003. Even in the most apocalyptic stories, where humanity is reduced to a glimmer of light, the need re-emerges to rebuild the social fabric, to put people together again and reorganize the system. It is an arduous task indeed, but it is always accompanied by that great virtue that marks the history of humans: hope. Today we are not exactly living in a dystopia, even though the threat is present every time an environmental disaster, a war, or a state of emergency is announced; but we cannot deny that something is changing and that something has already changed. We are not fully aware of what has changed in the past few years, because this is what normally happens when we experience a change in the long or medium term. We suffer it and live it as if it were an unpleasant event that would eventually end, because everything is supposed to go back to the way it was before. Even if in 1939 Norbert Elias has already predicted a ‘society of individuals’, today we really observe a rarefaction of social ties, of emotional bonds, and of solidarity. And yet we have never managed to lose our yearning for community – that natural need for social belonging, for feeling part of a group. Then there are the things that suddenly change, and of course we notice them. They are sudden, unexpected, overwhelming events that force us to reformulate our expectations and modify our behaviour. But they do not spell out the end of society. Perhaps we should rather speak of a post-society, of an ‘after’ that we can only imagine through the signs we perceive in everyday life. Such signs are not to be ignored, because there will be no turning back. What is certain is that we have left behind not only the changing solidity of modernity but all the subsequent steps that have marked its progressive decline, from postmodernity to liquid modernity, which has proven to be the most ambiguous and elusive form of the modern spirit and of its extraordinary ability to adapt to constant change. It has disrupted our lives, but what is left now of the liquid world? What remains of the great theory that Bauman advanced more than twenty years ago?



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The answer is complicated, since the normal social evolution that continued in the meantime was followed by the pandemic’s emergency, which had inevitable repercussions on social behaviour. Examining the effects that the change has brought about in public and private spheres, we see an emergent world that has moved away from liquidity and is almost dystopian, a world in which negative tendencies are in danger of being exacerbated. Very little remains of the liquid world, yet liquidity has been of great importance, because it lies at the root of the current change: we cannot understand today’s conditions, let alone those that we will experience in the near future, if we do not take into account the drift that began at the turn of the century and became more radical with the economic crisis of 2008. The current condition can be defined as ‘post-social’; its deformation of social relations distinguishes it from the liquid modern world that preceded it. Insofar as it is a change with no return, liquidity should be seen as a negative development of the solid modern structure. In fact the process of destruction of social ties begins from liquidity itself. First we saw the emergence of individualism in the form of greater focus on the rights and autonomy of the individual vis-à-vis the collective. This trend came about as a result of withdrawing from mass society and was accompanied by the end of ideologies, the decline of progressive ideas, and the advance of new (or old) economic processes such as neoliberalism. In the absence of a solid social support network, whenever people were left alone, to deal with problems of survival all by themselves, the economic crisis heightened the feeling of uncertainty. Added to this was the climate of insecurity that arose from a combination of factors ranging from difficulties in politics to the mediatization of relationships through technology. In short, liquefaction was the last effort of modernity, its extreme attempt to resist, under the blows of an irreversible social change as a result of which all its tenets were gradually removed or rendered ineffective. It is as if liquidity had become thickened, solidified, and hardened over the years; as if it had become incapable of describing the new forms of life that were emerging, and consequently left us in a state of anxious waiting (which has been defined as an interregnum). That waiting period was interrupted by the pandemic, which, at least at the beginning, strengthened family unity,

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partially recovered the lost solidarity, and allowed for social fears to be shared, thus overcoming the individual fears of the liquid world. Such solidarity has manifested itself through immunization, a real mass operation in which we can glimpse a return to the principles of the community, but not to those of society – if we consider society to be the product of an evolution characterized by close collaboration, mutual solidarity, and dependence on the others as members of the community. We are now able to see the limits of liquidity when it surrenders to change; even modernity gives way to a new time, which has new rules of behaviour just as rigorous as the previous ones. Or perhaps they are even more stringent, aiming as they may at the affirmation of human rather than social characteristics. This is why the new time can be called ‘post-society’.

5.2. The Coming Post-Society Sociologists are often asked to comment on the future of society. This request is justified by the fact that the sociologist is recognized as having the ability to understand and interpret the present. However, while it is fairly possible to make an interpretation of the present society, predicting what will happen tomorrow is an uncertain game: it depends on too many variables, and most of all on the political and social choices that will be made by people who have not been born yet. Therefore, given that the sociologist is not psychic, it is always imprudent to venture predictions about future society. Bauman, who was well equipped to depict future scenarios, has always refused to do so. It is better to make observations, not predictions, and only over very short periods, starting from an accurate analysis of the existing conditions. By this I mean that, in the current state of affairs, a limited number of events are possible; therefore it is important to work more on the basis of probability laws than on the basis of logic, and in particular to refrain from the natural tendency to take a pessimistic view. Indeed, it has become a universally practised norm to see the future as being worse than the present, in a dystopian manner that has taken roots in western society during the interwar period (1918–39),



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when the certainties acquired by modernity began to crack, and especially when the rise of totalitarianism pointed to a liberticidal drift from which there was no return. Better, then, to avoid absolute pessimism – but also blind optimism. We can try to outline the ongoing trends in order to clarify what the future scenarios will be, without claiming to have the truth in our pocket or to be infallible. The first aspect is fundamental and concerns the framework of states in this historical phase in which modernity, with its rules, promises, and certainties, is declining, or perhaps has run out of steam, as the supporters of postmodernity suggest. Even though the experience of modernity has not come to an end, there is no denying that the tendency of nation-states to enter a state of crisis proves to be irreversible. A scenario of the future could see the gradual dissolution of nation-states and their amalgamation into supranational bodies, which no longer have characteristics of the state as we know it. Already in the 1990s, Arjun Appadurai spoke of post-national states, which emerged as a consequence of the massive and growing presence of diasporic communities. The causes of the phenomenon are intrinsic to these communities and go back to the end of colonialism and the political choices of post-colonial states. As we can imagine, there are deeper and more determining reasons behind this dissolution, and they depend on historical processes and on the political and social consequences of a modernity that proposed the utopia of social control over populations, thereby creating mass societies and totalitarianism. If the collapse of this supremacist conception of the state could be used to guarantee the survival of people, as in Hobbes’ time, now it proves fatal in the separation between politics and power. This landmark separation weakens and sometimes undermines the very credibility of nation-states, whose functions are taken over by higher powers, disconnected from the territory and especially from the people. The impression is that the system of representative democracy, as practised today, is becoming a formal ritual of no practical use, since the decisions are taken elsewhere. While waiting for the emergence of new supranational entities to replace the current state, after the example of the European Community, the world has to face the risks and difficulties of Bauman’s interregnum. It is therefore necessary to promote the new condition and to ensure that the interregnum is as short as

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possible, since periods of anomie are very dangerous, as history teaches us. It is pointless to think of turning back the clock and trying to revive the nation-state, as sovereignists would like to do, or retreating into localism. These are reactionary forms of conservation, demonstrations of resistance that would inevitably be swept away by history. In his last book, Retrotopia, Bauman (2017) is forced to admit that there will be no utopia in the future; and utopia is one of the cornerstones of modernity, the base on which it is possible to build the idea of progress. The only chance to recover utopia, according to Bauman, is – not without irony – to go back to the past, to the oldest utopias, even those before Hobbes. This appears to be the only possible hope for an improvement; but it is also an implicit admission that modernity is now a closed issue. This is a pessimistic vision that excludes alternative solutions, for example to use divergent thinking, or to leave behind the narrow logic of what is already known and taken for granted. Such solutions are in any case still possible, especially if we can observe the world from a different angle. In the meantime, what is needed is an assessment of the changes that are perceived in relation to the territory, bearing in mind that it is the dissolution of the nation-states that is fuelling globalization and the great migrations. As long as the nation-states were strong and jealous of their autonomy, borders remained closed: they would never have emerged from immobility. Now the rights associated with the national territory are no longer stringent and continue to weaken. The idea of the fortuity and temporariness of settling on national terrain is gaining ground and gradually turns into a broader principle, which could be described as the right of people to inhabit the world. This means that individuals are no longer limited to the land of the state to which they belong; a sort of globalization of residence rights has taken place. This expansion does not affect private property, of course, but affects the right of citizenship, which is closely linked to the nation-state. If the right of territoriality of the state is denied – a right that was sanctioned by the Peace of Westphalia, in which the principle cuius regio, eius religio (‘whose land, their religion’) was put into effect, to be conveniently replaced later by the more pragmatic eius natio (‘their nation’) – then the question of



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national citizenship also fails. In the light of this development, the debate between ius soli (right conferred by territory) and ius sanguinis (right conferred by blood), which was reduced to a false problem, seems to have been surpassed. The principle of ius sanguinis, that is, citizenship obtained automatically by virtue of descent from citizens of a given country, originates from Roman law, where it served to protect the transmissibility of the quality of belonging to the state through inheritance. This type of access to citizenship was adopted by modernity for the same reasons and, even more, in order to guarantee the homogeneity and closure of the nationstate as an entity made up of citizens who share the same language, culture, laws, and religion. As early as the sixteenth century, Jean Bodin (2022 [1576]) reaffirmed the need to apply ius sanguinis, recalling that it was not the place of birth that made a citizen a child of foreigners; on the other hand, someone born in Africa to Roman citizens was no less a citizen than if born in Rome. With the end of modernity and the emergence of post-national states, the distinction between ius soli and ius sanguinis no longer has any reason to exist and the (temporary) right to settle on a territory becomes generalized. After all, this was already the case with the opening of borders and the phenomenon of migration; and this is the big question that we should focus on – the fact that the opening of borders and migration are, together, a direct consequence of the crisis of the nation-states. The phenomenon is a natural one, given that human history is a history of great migrations and that internal migrations, within individual countries, including Africa, are far greater than migrations to the outside world. The trend points to a gradual increase in migration, although it is likely to involve more and more qualified people determined to find alternative employment opportunities. The effects of this change on the economy are there for all to see and can be summed up in one word: crisis. It has already been said many times that this is not a temporary crisis, and when we hear people repeat that the crisis is here to stay, it means that we need to deal with economic issues differently from how we did it in the past; we must equip ourselves for it with new tools. For example, we need to start thinking that money will have less and less importance in tomorrow’s society, where the ability

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to influence others will be essential. This will be the tool with really great power in a world that increasingly needs certainty. The diminishing importance of money will also affect ownership, since owning an asset will not be as necessary as the ability to use it freely. More generally, the current trends point to an economy that is more autonomous and less connected to the territory and that can operate at a supranational level through sophisticated and uncontrollable financial instruments – at least until such time as a new form of global control is implemented. At the moment, however, this appears to be a long way off. The uncontrollability of the economy has considerable consequences for people’s social and existential conditions, and these people are likely to continue to bear the brunt of a permanent crisis. Unfortunately the immediate prospects of real social and economic equality are not optimistic. Such equality has always been promised, pursued, and inevitably postponed. It is feared, however, that inequality will worsen, that the gap between the haves and have-nots will become greater. Increasingly wider pockets of poverty and marginalization will join the narrower groups of wealthy or even affluent people, confirming the famous statement that 1 per cent of the world’s population holds 99 per cent of the world’s wealth, which goes back to Joseph Stiglitz and inspired the slogan of Occupy Wall Street. Internal differences within each country will continue to grow, and they will do so to a greater extent in the more developed and industrialized countries – a phenomenon that is already evident today, also as a result of migration – while economic differences between the various states are already decidedly in decline. The trend is therefore towards a gradual standardization of world economies while internal differences are escalating, with an important innovation: equal rights at global level. This means that equality is guaranteed at the legal and formal level but not at the economic level, which implicitly recognizes social differences. There will be a third and, for the moment, definitive ideological shift in the concept of equality, after the ones produced during the Enlightenment by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in the nineteenth century by Alexis de Tocqueville, and in the twentieth by the American experience. This shift will establish rights for all the inhabitants of a country – rights related to citizenship, health, education, social services, public



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transport, universal suffrage, political participation; but it will also impose the sharing of risks, as Ulrich Beck (2016) warns us in his last book, The Metamorphosis of the World, while conveniently ignoring the question of economic equality, which no state can guarantee.

5.3. Subjects of a Technological Regime It is not true that today’s individual has no values. A new value has emerged and has replaced the vacuum left by the collapse of ideologies. It is the unlimited faith in technology, which has its counterpart in the positivist faith in science during the second half of the nineteenth century. That nineteenth-century faith has long since fallen into a deep crisis of credibility, as a result of the disappointments caused by an ill-considered and self-defeating use of science. In fact one can observe a difference of attitude to science and to technology: in a climate of widespread scepticism about science, we find ourselves placing an unquestioning trust in everything technological and user-friendly – which is quite the opposite. It is mainly its simplicity and intuitiveness that makes technology accessible to everyone, from pre-school children to elderly people with no computer skills. At the click of a button, countless universes open up: this ease of use is fascinating to a point where users are not able to do without their gadgets of choice; but it is also dangerously addictive. Technology is considered reliable because of its apparent neutrality. It looks like an almost empty value that can be filled up with meanings according to the needs and desires of the subject. It is a versatile tool, available at any time of day or night, ready to produce pleasure and satisfaction, remedy loneliness, communicate, learn, even fight with others or denigrate the ‘enemy’. Technology can do everything, for it has now taken on a quasi-magical, almost superhuman quality, which hides behind an opaque structure and the mystery of a higher knowledge that is unknown to most people who use it. For this reason, today’s individuals rely on technology with unlimited faith. As Mauro Magatti observes, we have moved from an ‘ideological regime’ to a ‘technological regime’, which we

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embraced with the same passion and uncritical adhesion, and when we live completely immersed in a regime, we discuss and confront ourselves with the culture (and language) of that regime, which seems to be the only truth, the only reality, without having the strength to consider other alternatives. In the technological regime, individuals become aware of their power, and this sense of power makes them feel so independent that they believe, each, to be able to survive without needing other people. They enjoy the absolute freedom and autonomy guaranteed by technology on a human scale, without masters and without God. ‘We can expect to achieve salvation from technology. … The intellectus agens of Thomas Aquinas becomes rationality with respect to the purpose of the industrial age; eternal salvation becomes the aspiration to immortality; conversion becomes innovation; sin becomes inefficiency’ (Magatti 2018: 161). Thus we seem to have made a huge step forward with respect to the past, but in reality we have gone back to our origins instead; the only change is in the terms used to express the argument. *** When did faith in the future begin to weaken? If we look further back in time, up to a century ago, it becomes possible to imagine the disillusionment that was felt at the end of the First World War. One could point to it as an unprecedented disappointment with science. The machine, extolled by the Futurists and praised by philosophers, politicians, and the military, had been considered capable of replacing the human person, not only in the work­ place but also in the art of war. A war fought by machines was expected to be a ‘good’ war, indispensable to solving political problems. Instead, the First World War proved to be one of the bloodiest conflicts in human history, with more than 37 million victims. But definitive distrust in the capabilities of science and technology to deliver the wonderful tools for human elevation and progress was to come at the end of the Second World War, also burdened with 54 million victims and, on top of that, with the explosion of the two American atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. ***



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In his chronic pessimism, Anders asserted that contemporary human beings were ‘outdated’ by comparison with the technology they had created, and risked being overwhelmed by it. In the years immediately after the war, there was a very strong feeling that highly destructive technology such as the atomic bomb could be the prelude to the much feared apocalypse, the extinction of the human race. The fact that it was self-inflicted extinction made it even more absurd, and perhaps everything started precisely from the unpleasant feeling of not being able to dominate scientific progress. Confronted by this prospect, the future suddenly seemed to come to a halt, to withdraw in the face of a present scenario that was full of threatening events. A future for humanity after the end of the modern and postmodern can be contemplated in a conscious use of science, in respect for nature, in degrowth, and in a globalization carried out in a positive way. This would be a step towards its liberation, by which I mean the enhancement of everyone’s natural capacity to be and express themselves – a capacity that will obviously be hindered, restrained, and controlled by antagonistic forces for economic, political, and power-related reasons. Ever since the human species took possession of the earth, the personal fulfilment of a large part of its members has been achieved at the expense of the remaining others, either thanks to them or in spite of them. To get us here, the most diverse methods have been devised over the centuries: organizations, systems, and regulations have been created and moral laws capable of manipulating consciences have been imposed – all in the name of the collective good; chaos was avoided by regulating relations, foisting on them an order that did not exist in nature. What modernity achieved and the ways in which it formed its world and kept it under control are part of a past that can no longer be renegotiated, but will undoubtedly find new modes of expression. But, whatever structure it will adopt, the new ethics on which this past will base its values cannot be free of the original biological conditioning, the innate hubris that prompts humans to prevail over one another and over nature. Force, violence, and physical oppression have long been preferred instruments: we have seen tangible proof of this in the totalitarianisms of the last century, all of which paid lip service to the popular, the social, and the democratic. Only recently have

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more refined instruments been used to achieve a form of control that is no less intrusive and oppressive. Such instruments resort to psychology, information technology, and economics. They are milder, less visible, and more complex to use, but extraordinarily effective, as scientific knowledge continues to refine and enhance their potential. The humans of tomorrow will be highly individualized and isolated. They will have weaker social ties than us and fewer opportunities to escape social conditioning and oppression than to escape physical violence. They will mourn the days of crude and despotic authoritarianism, because then at least they were free to think, write, denounce abuse, be aware of injustice and alert others to it. Perhaps tomorrow they will be denied even regret: living in a condition of illusory freedom, they will not have the consolation of history. Their future will be marked by an almost absolutely unavoidable interaction with the new technologies. *** What will the cities of the future be like? Will they look more and more like those fantastic images depicted in science fiction in the 1940s, with huge beehive apartment buildings, elevated motorways, flying cars, and air shuttles? Leaving exaggeration aside, it is likely that the cities of tomorrow will closely resemble Marc Augé’s ‘non-places’, made up of dormitory buildings where humans live isolated from one another or in small groups of two or three at the most, with no contact other than virtual and with few opportunities for travel as a result of the development of teleworking, which is carried out mainly in the home. The most shocking aspect – for us, people of the twenty-first century – will be the elimination of shops: shop windows will disappear, along with the display of goods and the habit of strolling and shopping, which had changed the face of cities and towns since the nineteenth century. Does this mean the end of consumerism? Not in the slightest. Consumerism will continue, or rather will grow in proportion to prosperity, but it will be done strictly through online channels: virtual shops and Internet sites with home delivery. We will also see the end of supermarkets and large-scale distribution. Everything will go directly from the producer to the consumer, through an efficient delivery system that collects



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orders from warehouses and dispatch hubs invisible to the public, a system of the type adopted by Amazon but extended to all kinds of goods, from food to clothing. The absence of shops will lead to the gradual disappearance of the city as we know it – a space where shops, stalls, artisans, and shopping centres have characterized the public environment, flanking and often overlapping historical buildings, monuments, places of worship, museums, administrative buildings, and schools. Cities will lose the primary characteristic that has made them successful since the establishment of the Greek polis: the ability to socialize.

5.4. The New Work Ethic Hardware is necessary while software is dominant. It is software that will fill the world, will have absolute value, and will create jobs. Beyond the computer metaphor, it is now clear that at the end of the post-industrial age, of a flexible and agile industry that is physically transportable and has taken the place of heavy machinery, one will find the primacy of intellectual work. There will be gradually fewer manual jobs and more capillary technologies; we shall see nanotechnologies capable of supplying all the products that humanity needs, but also thinking and creative programming brains capable of working alongside machine users (operators will take the place of workers). Where will these new thinking brains come from? Not from schools, for the simple reason that the knowledge needed to create new ideas will have no didactic basis; there will be no human teachers capable of transmitting skills fit for a very rapid change in knowledge – in fact not even individual geniuses will be able to do it. The sun will have set on the inventor of genius, the solitary figure, the creative personality disconnected from its social context and the culture of its time. The romantic idea of the isolated genius has long since been replaced by the notion of teamwork, which will be complemented by interactions with the machine. The new, creative individuals will learn from machines and will work together, united with one another in an aggregation of skills that can produce something original, but only through the reciprocal relationship between human being and machine.

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Software will indeed dominate the world; but it will be the product of ultra-human work, in the sense that it will take place with the active participation of artificial intelligence – human intelligence plus cybernetic intelligence, coupled together so closely as to make it impossible to distinguish between the contributions made by humans and those made by machines. Humans will learn to think with artificial intelligence, and machines will understand human logic. In this continuous mutual adaptation and integration, the human brain will undergo very significant structural changes. It will not only learn to unlearn quickly and be open to the acquisition of new knowledge, which it will need to keep pace with the machine; it will also think together with the machine, thus gaining new horizons of knowledge. The machine will be part of the human brain – not just physically (this process is pursued in other ways and has been going on for a long time) but above all intellectually. The meaning of the terms ‘post-human’ and ‘ultra-human’ will become more complex, in ways primarily related to brain activity. Humans will go beyond their biological limits of intelligence and thought, gaining new potentialities that are unimaginable today. They will go beyond the human, but without losing their humanity, which is to remain a quality of collective individuation. We will increasingly move towards the loss of any sense of privacy, only not for the sake of self-assertion in the absence of any other self-value, as happens today, but as a result of the progressive integration with the machine and, consequently, with other individualities. This integration will create a network of weak links, distant from one another but no less useful in producing shared knowledge and social capital. Marx’s old idea of ‘general intellect’ – of a collective intelligence that sums up the global knowledge of humanity and is produced through active interaction with the machine – will gain a different meaning, probably becoming more effective. It is likely that two rival social classes will appear, as they always do. The dominant one would consist of the creatives: those who produce ideas and are capable of maintaining an equal and collaborative relationship with the machines, constituting the pars sana of what we might call the ultra-human. The other social class, the subordinated one, will be made up of the operators: those who operate the machines. These do not carry



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out hard, physical work but are necessary for the maintenance and control of the hardware. Here, too, it is software that prevails over hardware. The working class will remain in its subordinate position and will be functional to the system until it earns the right to think creatively, reclaiming superior knowledge. The Mechanical Turk – von Kempelen’s chess player, the anthropomorphic automaton created in 1769 – seemed to move and win in two moves; this was a difficult thing to do. This device was built to entertain the public, like the selfpropelled automata that dance, play, or write, the wonders of Enlightenment technology created through the meticulous work of craftsmen such as Jacques de Vaucanson or the brothers Charles and Henri Jaquet-Droz. Moreover, von Kempelen introduced a principle of interactivity, that is, the opportunity of ‘playing’ with the machine. This opportunity would easily find favour with the public and was immediately seized by epigones, including Johan Nepomuk Maelzel, who built a mechanism similar to von Kempelen’s and toured the United States around the middle of the nineteenth century, achieving extraordinary success. The simple secret of the Mechanical Turk – a human player of great skill hidden amid the noisy gears designed to distract the spectator – is mentioned by Edgar Allan Poe in ‘Maelzel’s Chess Player’, an essay published in the Southern Literary Magazine in 1836. From then on, the mechanical chess player raised the suspicion that it might contain something deceptive or fraudulent. Today Mechanical Turk (MTurk), with transparent irony, is the name of a software used by Amazon to find micro-jobs and make micro-earnings online. These jobs are part of what has been called ‘the gig economy’ (see Crouch 2019), a system in which work is not only precarious but also fragmented into many small activities. It is characterized by ‘crowdworking’ and ‘crowdsourcing’, an innovative method of finding resources within the Internet community. This great melting pot encompasses a reserve army of low-cost intellectual labour: people marginalized by the job market or demoted, who can be counted on for small jobs, services, translations, cataloguing, and secretarial work. The work is all carried out directly from the home, thanks to an Internet connection and a computer, in the illusion of realizing the eternal utopia of liberation from physical

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fatigue through mechanization. The machine is an indispensable interface, no longer at people’s service but their employer and master. It decides how and when human intervention is needed, but more and more often it works in complete autonomy. The subject of machines replacing humans is a very sensitive one, because it touches a wound that the economic crisis has opened up. It is also a long-standing problem: its age-old roots go back to the first technologies in existence, which, albeit rudimentary, were meant to free humankind from physical hardship as well as to save time, improve performance, and broaden knowledge. Education stole work from the scribes, while the printing press stole it from the amanuenses. However, as Michel de Certeau (2011) reminds us, technological innovation does not precede change but always follows it: it is a practical response to pressing social needs. In this way the culture of the Renaissance, through trade, the introduction of money, and the banking system, forged future innovations. This is where modernity took its first steps, tracing a path that will be increasingly rapid and more defined. The idea of progress, this great invention of modernity, eliminated any conservative resistance and imposed the machine as a necessary tool for the infinite improvement of humans, overcoming their fears and anxieties. It is a modern idea that proved to be successful because it was aimed at the future rather than at the present or the past and combined, for the economic benefit of the bourgeoisie, the pre-existing Christian concept of hope and the more recent and productive ‘spirit of sacrifice’. The idea of sacrifice was based on the construction of a work ethic and on the deferral of profit or benefit – on the painful and passive acceptance of a strenuous reality for the sake of seeing one’s hopes realized and of obtaining a better future for oneself, or at least for one’s children. The double logic of immediate benefits for the few and sacrifices and hopes for the many has become so ingrained in modern thought as to condition even revolutionary hypotheses such as the Marxist one. *** Behind every Industrial Revolution lies a work ethic that has devastating effects. It forces a drastic separation between our time for living and our working time, the acceptance of a productive task that is socially necessary, not perceived as



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our own but carried out for others, and hence alienating. For almost four centuries, the work ethic coincided with the needs of industrial production, representing a positive ideology in it, dignity, and a necessity oriented to progress for the common good. But by now this ethic has become so involving and penetrating as to modify human life and to characterize it according to its values, upsetting it and, in its own way, modernizing it, because being modern no longer means being free. ‘The work ethic was, basically, about the surrender of freedom’ (Bauman 2005: 7). The extraordinary ability of humans to create a personal identity and to design a world actually limits them, locking them in a complex system of cogwheels whose rules and mechanisms they must learn in order to survive. Today, when the number of jobs ‘stolen’ by technology is no longer counted, no one thinks of breaking free from machines – as Samuel Butler imagined in his utopian dream of Erewhon (1872), which was in reality an anti-utopian novel at the height of positivism – or of systematically destroying them, as advocated by a certain Ned Ludd, credited with inspiring the pre-ecological movement of the Luddites, whose violence exploded inside factories in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. More than abolishing the machine, the modern utopia looks to the machine as a substitute for the human being. But if robots replace humans, jobs disappear. Not only does work diminish as a result of the introduction of new technologies; it becomes virtual – yet no longer in the dignified sense in which André Gorz (2010) understood it, foreshadowing immaterial labour in a post-industrial society, but in the more dismissive sense of intellectual labour linked to the instrumental use of computers. Jeremy Rifkin (1997) had already anticipated this situation in the late 1990s, together with Beck (1992), probably without realizing to what extent the rapidity of the technological evolution (let alone the still-to-come economic crisis of 2008) was to speed up the process and create blatant distortions. The advance of machines in itself would not have been enough to take work away from humans, if others had not intervened to make things worse through their choices. That situation is already compromised far beyond what we can see, and beyond what still does not really touch us (but

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not for long). The threat of a transformation that moves too quickly for human adaptation timescales is clearly perceived: what could have happened within a single generation, modifying seemingly consolidated realities and scrapping obsolete professions, happens now within a decade or so, severing the continuity of professions that suddenly find themselves useless and uneconomic and forcing into retirement people who have not yet reached retirement age. The situation is serious in the United States, where social protection and social security are weaker than in European countries. We are facing another industrial revolution (the fourth?), which is just as serious as the first: the massive introduction of digital technologies, the Internet, and cybernetics is reproposing the same process of devaluation of workers; it takes place now in a hypermodern environment, but the social consequences are identical to the ones in the past. The introduction of computer­ iz­ation, unregulated by ad hoc laws and political defences (these are now devoid of power), enables the explosion of an underpaid workforce, thus widening the gap that already exists within industrialized countries between the haves and have-nots. Crowdworking, initially invented by the indefatigable surfers of the net, who like to stay up late, and conceived of as an amusing way for them to scrape together a little money, is becoming the main occupation for those who have lost their jobs or have a pitiful pension. It is stressful and underpaid work, which often runs into the night and into holidays: 24/7, as hyperconsumerist logic dictates. If we think that the average earnings are under two dollars an hour, we can understand what a social anomaly is being generated here. The fourth Industrial Revolution is in danger of throwing more people out on the street than the first and of turning this globalized world into a wasteland populated by shadows. The new entrepreneurs are called ‘requesters’ and the workers are called ‘providers’. The terminology is reassuring, but in substance nothing has changed: they are still precarious, employed at home, without any form of insurance, and paid a pittance for every operation. The employment contract is called a Human Intelligence Task (HIT), but has very little in the way of creativity. It is easily found online, where it is available to huge numbers of unemployed people, people who have been laid off, and retirees with pensions below the minimum subsistence



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level. They all compete for this kind of work. Payment is little more than nothing, but for those who have lost their jobs it can be vital. Sixty-nine per cent of the workers on Mechanical Turk are women (traditionally less well paid and less appreciated), the average age is around 30 (the generation with the most difficulty in finding stable jobs) and the second largest ethnic group, after Americans at 57%, are Indians (32%, well educated and much cheaper). (Staglianò 2016: 192)

Many years ago, before the Internet, there were companies that sent home mechanical parts to be assembled and shoes to be sewn, in exchange for a few pence a piece – piecework aimed mainly at housewives who sought to supplement the family income. We could call this crowdworking avant la lettre, without the Internet and without misleading advertising: poor earnings and sleep deprivation. All traces of that small-scale activity have been lost, but the idea has now been adopted by transnational digital technology and the objective is still the same: to obtain a service for as little as possible. This innovative type of autonomous work, crowdworking, gives the illusion of great freedom of action and takes place exclusively in the home, with the help of a computer connected to the Internet through which the company can monitor the operators, record how many keystrokes they make per minute and whether they are distracted or waste time, then sanction them accordingly. Because it is piece-rate work, those who do not keep up the optimum pace are quickly replaced. This is very much reminiscent of Jeremy Bentham’s eighteenthcentury panopticon, the workshop with a circular construction that allowed workers to be constantly monitored without being seen. The difference is that now there is no need for a building: control takes place in one’s home, thanks to the inflexible eye of the webcam. If Bentham envisaged permanence in a defined and circumscribed place where human activity was entirely controllable by a superior power, which dictated conditions of access and stay, modern panopticons have a limited territory: the laws that govern them apply only within them and bind individuals only for the duration of their stay. For this reason, the boundaries between inside and outside are well defined: the entrance

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is represented by a very strong symbolic boundary, such as a guard, a reception desk or a password. In the modern model of the panopticon, physical distance is not a consideration. A case in point is the Silicon Valley receptionist who lives in a different place entirely, in Boston, and looks at the monitor when someone enters the company building. She costs less than an in-person receptionist, but soon enough she will be replaced by an app, a voice assistant, or a virtual image, whose cost will be increasingly close to zero. Human labour gets devalued through comparisons with the activity of a machine, and it is striking to live in a reality where the more sophisticated the technology becomes, the less the human contribution is valued, especially if this contribution is not a decisive one. People are forced to resort to online resources such as the Mechanical Turk, where they flock in search of ephemeral employment. Thus they struggle, with the help of a machine, against the intrusiveness of machines, in order to make a living. *** In the 1950s, when the first computers emerged – those giant Molochs that swallowed up punch cards – observers such as Herbert Marcuse wondered what the people of the future would do with all the free time they would have had left once they no longer had to work. So far from approaching the state of a happy human race that lives in blissful eternal idleness, we find ourselves dealing instead with the spectre of a growing mass of people unable to satisfy their basic needs. After the Second World War, Marcuse noted in Eros and Civilization that automation threatens to distort the relationship between ‘leisure time’ and ‘work time’, undermining ‘one of the principal repressive factors imposed upon the pleasure principle by the reality principle’ (Marcuse 1966 [1955]: 152). He expresses concern that the increase in leisure time may jeopardize the roots of the capitalist system in its classical setting, where labour, besides being a source of wealth, is an instrument of social control. The interpretation that ‘leisure time’ triggers a false freedom of action follows the same logic as Theodor W. Adorno’s criticism of the culture industry, a term by which he meant to designate mass culture, that is, a culture piloted and spread through communication channels managed by a higher authority. Just as



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the culture industry is accepted and sought after by the masses as a genuine expression of their taste, the deception of ‘free time’ is also unconsciously experienced as a gratifying achievement, a liberation from hardship, and a recognition of the individual’s right to freedom. Only awareness, and therefore the recognition of the distance between reality and its representation, is the necessary prerequisite, according to Adorno, to be able to transform free time (Freizeit) into freedom (Freiheit), thus transcending its easy illusion (Adorno 1991: 197). Change is part of the biological fabric, so much so that we cannot speak of evolution or progress, since one does not necessarily foresee an improvement, but a continuous ‘variation’ of conditions that are the direct consequence of inventions and discoveries, of needs and choices made over time. These are neither good nor bad, but they modify human existence and cannot be retracted. Sometimes the change has been so profound that it has even modified the human brain, as did the introduction of writing in the fourth century bc in civilizations with a mainly oral tradition. In other cases it has shortened the distances between places in the world thanks to cars, ships, and planes. The world is moving forward, whether we like it or not, and constant change is an ongoing reality that it is better to try to understand than to oppose. While it is true that machines have led to the dematerialization of work, it is also true that designing and building increasingly sophisticated mechanisms still requires computer scientists, engineers, architects, designers, technicians, clerks, and testers for management and routine maintenance. Even when, one day, other robots will ensure the maintenance and management, there will still be a need for humans to design them, to build them, and to allow them to continue to function and improve. There is still hope invested in utopia.

Conclusion On the Ineffectiveness of the Sociologist

One of the secondary observations repeated during the months of forced isolation is that we will have to change our way of life. What we did before, our routines, the things familiar to us, and even the way we study or work will have to be reformulated. In this adjustment phase, the question that arises is not ‘When will it end?’ but ‘What will change in our lives?’. Then the first thing that comes to a sociologist’s mind is that all his/her work has been in vain – not in the sense that it is a failure but in the sense that it has been surpassed and is no longer usable: in short, that it should be archived, as a historical document. The studies that were underway were abruptly interrupted, burnt out, because they do not respond to the primary need of helping to understand the society we live in. As we wait to form an idea of the direction we should move in, we have the drastic feeling of pointlessness about everything that has been thought, discussed, and defended. Was it all wrong? In this specific case, the theorization of the state of crisis, formulated in collaboration with Zygmunt Bauman, now presents contradictions that require careful revision. If Bauman were still with us, he might have been able to offer indications and suggestions of great wisdom and competence. As it is, I must try in his absence to carry on along his line of thought, continue and develop it, and find acceptable answers.



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We need to start from what no longer works in that vision of the crisis that swept through the western world at the beginning of the third millennium and dragged on throughout the first decade. Today we are in a new phase, as if the year 2020 had closed an era with its own worldviews, critical issues, and hopes and had opened another one, completely different, whose comprehension requires a totally new language. Beyond the discussion on liquid modernity, which requires a separate and more in-depth treatment, the theses expounded in State of Crisis (Bauman and Bordoni 2015) are based on a few basic principles: the crisis of the nation-state, individualization, and the debate on postmodernity. Ever since Arjun Appadurai denounced the crisis of the nation-states, there has been much talk about the end of these great apparatuses, which delimit the territory politically and govern large populations that identify with one and the same language, culture, and religion. It seemed to be an unstoppable process, and the premises were all present and evident, from the opening of borders to the flow of migration, from the dematerialization of finance and its transnationalization to the so-called devolution, that is, the delegation of some state functions to other bodies or to private individuals, from the affirmation of supranational organizations such as the European Community to the separation between politics and power – one of Bauman’s happiest insights and a phenomenon that has confronted us with the impossibility of managing forces and flows, since these now escape national laws. The only solution could be found in a political system capable of regaining the effectiveness of a global power, for all the risks that such a leap into the dark could have for democracy. Now it appears that the change in the nation-state, which seemed close to coming to a definite conclusion, is being called into question. It has been temporarily suspended, pending investigation, or filed among the obsolete things that belong to the era before the pandemic. We look at these things with uncertain surprise and well-founded doubts: did we really think that it could end this way? Events are happening in opposite directions. The nation-states are closing their borders, shielding, this time against the great migratory flows that have characterized recent decades. They are not doing this in order to resist, perhaps in vain, an invasion or

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the dissolution of their own culture, its inevitable mingling with other cultures. They are doing it for health reasons. *** The closing of borders is not just a return to nationalism, which would represent a regression, traditionalism. Every reactionary movement includes something new, the implicit acceptance of the experience that has taken place in the meantime. The nationalistic past cannot return in the forms and ways that were known to us, but it can produce a reformulation of the old content, revised and updated differently. An example could be the maintenance and perhaps even extension of the freedom of international trade and commerce, which foster communication and cultural exchange and liberalize business and investment relations with other countries. At the same time, this kind of freedom could slow down personal exchanges and keep individuals in their places of origin. As already happens now, borders are crossed by goods and merchandise, but much less by people. More extensive sedentariness, the automation of services and transport, smart working, and the use of online services are conditions that basically bring about a sort of dematerialization of the territory, since there will be no need to move from one place to another: it will be possible to do everything from anywhere, even from very far away, provided that the appropriate technological tools are available. In this mass immobilization, states will once again have the power to manage their territories, as part of a kind of regionalization of the world whose task will be to provide services that ensure the functionality of transport and supplies, health, education (albeit at a distance), and everything that residents may need. In this race for new, regionalized nations, the European Community seems to be less important and, as it is currently structured, it, too, is in need of a thorough review, if not a refoundation. This is not about challenging Altiero Spinelli’s Europeanist ideals or questioning the single currency; it is about reformulating Europe’s functions and aims in the light of the new situation. Europe would need to be more economic than political, it should leave more room for autonomy to the individual nations, renounce the pretence of imposing neoliberalism, and guarantee



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the greatest possible exchange between its members. Common rules would be needed for major issues related to freedoms, responsibilities, and guarantees of civil and social rights; such rules would allow the region-states to organize themselves autonomously in order to achieve common goals. The renewed power of states would encourage more effective rules and the instruments needed to enforce them, thus instilling certainty and faith in the population. This state of mind would result in an enhancement of democracy, as it ensures greater participation in public affairs. And if public affairs are in the interest of the community and for the benefit its members, that community will find itself having to organize its own area of competence. *** The work of the sociologist is based on the observation of behaviour and the use of quantitative and qualitative data to reflect on and to derive significant constants and trends from. These are not real laws, since the subject of investigation, society, is in continuous evolution. It is a practice that works when changes are slow and leave clues that could be useful for the investigation, but it is useless if the change is sudden. Sociologists have no weapons; past experience does not count and suppositions have no scientific basis. Their opinion is equivalent to that of the man and woman in the street, if there is still someone in the street to ask. Nevertheless, a sociology that has been silenced can still be self-critical and revise its judgements. Such revision is not an exercise carried out in vain: it helps to equip sociology with new tools and greater speed of analysis. There have been many signs that reality was running faster than the sociologist was able to depict it, but now it is time to resort to a sociology of emergency if we want it to contribute to making the right choices. The ineffectiveness of sociologists becomes apparent when they no longer have the tools to understand change and are forced to deal with it just like other people. They stop being detached observers; they are overwhelmed by events and by the urgency to survive, materially and spiritually. It would be opportune to have an independent theory of the observer to establish how much of the social analysis made in moments of crisis is actually correct and is not the result of the observer’s conditionings and emotions. In any context, the presence of an

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observer inevitably changes the perception of reality, and this is especially true if the observer is a sociologist. In the situation we are experiencing, where the state of emergency is the primary consideration and the urgent need to find immediate solutions risks producing overhasty and distorted judgements, sociologists are aware of their own impotence. There is no point in looking for solutions by making comparisons with historical events, because there is none. Nor is it easy to envisage future solutions that can in some way give comfort and hope to the suffering populations. The exceptional nature of the current situation is all the more difficult to understand and control through reason as it is characterized by the concomitance of two determining factors: the end of modernity, including the liquid modern phase; and the global pandemic. The combination of these two factors creates a perfect storm, which we have called post-society. What can we do? When the emergency is over, when we will have achieved herd immunity and the dreaded Covid-19 will have been reduced to the level of other viruses we’ve been living with, there will be need for a process of reconstruction. This will involve attempts to mend the broken social bonds, to piece together the parts of a civil society that has lost its self-awareness, and to find ways of rethinking the autonomy of individuals without compromising their role as members of the community. Perhaps sociology will have the task of discovering new ways of doing all this, in the knowledge that we cannot go back: we can only try to find new bases on which to build the next chapter. The challenge ahead lies in finding this ability to invent the future for a society that is no longer post- but is open, tolerant and inclusive. We can recognize the symptoms of a sociopolitical overhaul in the fact that nation-states close their borders and shield – and do so for health reasons rather than to protect themselves from migratory flows. In the name of public health, governments are regaining power and reinforcing it within those borders, which were under scrutiny before the pandemic; they deploy the army and restrict the freedom of movement of citizens, while Europe fears the collapse of the Schengen Agreement signed in 1985 and will have to rethink its terms. ***



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The individual has long been exalted as the privileged subject of a world that has lost the characteristics of community; but what about the present loneliness of the global citizen? Looking at contemporary society, we can perceive a tendency to shut oneself off from other people, gradual regression into cultivating selfish interests, loss of solidarity, and difficulty in relating to one’s neighbours, especially those closest to one. Long-distance relationships and weak ties are favoured because they are temporary (and therefore characteristic of a liquid society) and expected to break up more or less immediately, on a unilateral basis. They are preferable to strong ties to family or friends, because they are less invasive and less demanding, and yet still yield those relational benefits (new experiences, exchanges, work opportunities, culture, and integration) commonly referred to as ‘social capital’. The classic image of the reality described here used to be a couple seated face to face at a table in a restaurant without talking to each other, without even looking at each other, both busy with their mobile phones. Their physical proximity did not correspond to mental closeness or emotional involvement. Their communications, which may be very personal, or perhaps just trivial and done out of boredom, were directed outwards, addressed to distant recipients in a non-place suspended in the digital space. This image is no longer valid. There are reasons to believe that two variations have been introduced: first, strong ties are rapidly being reaffirmed. Ties are being strengthened between couples, parents and children, brothers and sisters, and even neighbours. All share a physically constrained existence, confiding in each other, recovering points of contact even when it seemed impossible to find any, because of incompatibility, aversion, or just fatigue. The second variation is the re-evaluation of the means of communication. In these changed circumstances, the means of communication prove their social usefulness by extending the tentacles of strong ties while keeping the ties themselves at a distance. In times of pandemic, when people are forced to stay at home, avoid contact, and give up on meeting friends and relatives, we are bound to witness a rapid conversion of existing communication technologies to completely new uses.

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As luck would have it, the new media exist and we are accustomed to using them. The millennials, digital natives, have already reached the age of reason, although their grandparents cannot exactly be considered digitally illiterate, since they have been using the Internet for at least thirty years, since the introduction of personal computers. The new condition generates an increase in communication mainly through social channels, which until recently were considered to be pastimes, superficial showcases for the externalization of the self where users could count how many selfies, how many false friendships, and how many likes of approval they had – and then boast about them. Now the importance of digital media is being recognized. It is as if they had passed their childhood stage; in much the same way the first computers, Commodores and Macs, were initially used to play, to learn, and to amaze. This looks like the repetition of an identical practice, which in the past has welcomed the first self-propelled mechanical constructions by Vaucanson, Jaquet-Droz, and other ingenious craftsmen: in the beginning all those brilliant, clockwork mechanisms were seen only as useless gadgets designed to entertain bored aristocrats, when in fact they paved the way for robots. Today smart working not only allows people to work from home without having to be present in the office or at school, but also provides opportunities to maintain social relationships, share emotions, and exchange information, advice, and life experiences. Seeing one another seems to be more important than hearing one another. This is made possible by webcams and smartphones, which have so far been the object of widespread (and justified) perplexity. After all, the prevalence of vision over words has been affirmed through self-referential content, public confessions of private facts, and public exhibitions of the self, all in a desperate quest of isolated individuals, increasingly ignored by an indifferent community, to be recognized, reconfirmed, and loved. *** Being forced to stay at home shows the other side, the good side, of the new technologies. When it is all over and the virus is eradicated, as was the fate of all other terrible pandemics that struck



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humanity, this period will be remembered in history books as the turning point of the new media. It is the payback of the social media. The countless Facebook friends whose names are not even remembered, the outbursts on Twitter, the pictures exchanged on Instagram, and also the video conversations and chats on WhatsApp and Skype – all these are needed again, at least psychologically. They serve to make us feel that we are still united, perhaps more than ever, in an emergency situation that requires us to keep the distance, to accept confinement and absence. We rely on communication, on every support that allows us to share our emotions with others, to keep in touch with people, to make them feel alive and part of a community, even to do things we would never have imagined doing before, out of a sense of discretion or good taste. Even the sociologist ends up posting a photo of his/her freshly baked lasagne on social networks.

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Index

acceleration 3, 4, 30, 33, 42, 43, 136, 137 Adorno, Theodor W. 34, 42, 160, 161. Anders, Günther 117, 141, 151 anomie 12, 33, 44, 62, 64, 139, 146 Appadurai, Arjun 145, 163 Aquinas, Thomas 150 Aristotle 69, 72, 120, 139 artificial intelligence 18, 141, 154 Atwood, Margaret 142 Augé, Marc 17, 35, 152 autonomy 3, 11, 15, 17, 19, 55, 59, 61, 64, 72, 77, 79, 107, 127, 143, 146, 150, 156, 164, 166 Baschenis, Evaristo 53 Batoni, Pompeo 53 Baudelaire, Charles 29, 98 Baudrillard, Jean 12 Bauman, Zygmunt 1, 2, 4, 9, 11, 17, 20–25, 27, 28, 31–36, 38–41, 44–48, 59, 78, 103, 109, 112, 120, 131, 134,

138, 142, 144, 145, 146, 157, 162, 163 Beato Angelico 53 Beck, Ulrich 17, 35, 42, 149, 157 Beilharz, Peter 46 Benjamin, Walter 27–29 Bentham, Jeremy 37, 93, 113, 121, 125, 132, 159 Berman, Marshall 23, 37, 40–42, 44–48 Bigo, Didier 113 Bodin, Jean 27, 147 Boltanski, Luc 62, 67, 70 Boninsegna, Duccio da 53 Bordoni, Carlo 5, 21, 24, 25, 163 Borges, Jorge Luis 139 Boulogne, Valentin de 53 Bourdieu, Pierre 71, 73 bourgeoisie 36–38, 46–48, 60, 68, 156 Bronzino, Agnolo 53 capitalism 11, 14, 15, 38, 41, 43, 48, 65, 69, 88, 116, 120 Carr, Albert Z. 70, 71 Carracci, Annibale 53

Index catastrophe 28, 133, 134, 138, 140, 141 Certeau, Michel de 156 civil rights 10, 19 civilization 4, 16, 25, 59, 76, 78, 83, 88, 89, 105, 127, 130, 138, 160, 161 communism 23, 38, 40, 44, 46 community 4, 20, 24, 28, 55–61, 64, 67, 68, 70, 72, 75–77, 84, 86, 87, 97, 98, 100–102, 111, 117, 124, 142, 144, 145, 155, 163–169 consumerism 14, 112, 113, 131, 152 consumption 35, 38, 41, 43, 48, 111, 131 Correggio 53 Crary, Jonathan 113, 114 crisis 1–3, 7, 10, 12, 14, 17–20, 25, 27, 29, 36, 39, 40, 42, 46, 56, 63, 66–68, 75, 78, 88, 93, 98, 101, 105, 121, 122, 126, 127, 129, 132, 135, 138, 143, 145, 147–149, 156, 157, 162, 163 Crouch, Colin 155 cuius regio, eius religio 146 Deleuze, Gilles 123, 124 dematerialization 2, 18, 21, 48, 161, 163, 164 democracy 10, 12, 13, 17, 20, 29, 48, 60, 111, 145, 163, 165 Derrida, Jacques 13, 97, 136 desocialization 3, 12, 71, 122 disenchantment 9, 67, 71 Durkheim, Émile 12, 33, 42, 62–66, 71, 75, 92 dystopia 19, 22, 45, 102, 108, 113, 141–144 Eco, Umberto 104 economy 2, 10, 18, 38, 39, 41,

179

42, 44, 48, 66–70, 114, 147, 148, 155 education 8, 17, 37, 38, 80, 82, 85, 91, 124, 125, 148, 156, 164 Elias, Norbert 42, 83, 89, 92, 142 emergency 7, 35, 45, 104, 116, 135, 137, 142, 143, 165, 166, 169 emotion 3–6, 22, 25, 34, 45, 49, 54, 55, 57, 62, 74–102, 104–107, 128, 130, 138, 139, 141, 142, 165, 167–169 Engels, Friedrich 23, 36, 45, 46 Enlightenment 11, 37, 75, 81, 93, 96. 97, 111, 121, 123, 124, 126, 148, 155 entropy 41–43 Esposito, Roberto 59, 60 ethics 64–73, 96, 151 capitalist 65, 66 cold 63, 65, 67, 71, 72 private 66, 67, 69, 71 Europe 27, 60, 145, 158, 163, 164, 166 evolution 12, 22, 23, 58, 60, 69, 78, 79, 140, 143, 144, 157, 161, 165 extinction 70, 140, 142, 151 fear 4, 5, 18, 22, 26, 27, 42, 51, 54, 59, 66, 78–81, 83, 86–88, 94, 95, 101–105, 109–111, 123, 124, 129, 130, 136–141, 144, 148, 151, 156, 166 social 20, 78, 86, 101, 102, 144 individual 86, 101, 102, 144 flat-earthers 136 Foucault, Michel 22, 38, 72, 114, 115, 122–124

180 Index frenzy 61, 137–140. Freud, Sigmund 89, 108 Friedman, Milton 70 Fromm, Erich 104 future 3, 8, 9, 18, 20, 27, 28, 33, 35, 41, 45, 57, 70, 77, 79, 80, 82, 84, 85, 103, 104, 107, 108, 118, 119, 121, 133–137, 140, 141, 143–146, 150–152, 156, 160, 166. Galilei, Galileo 81 general intellect 97, 154 generation 35, 38, 42, 50–52, 70, 100, 131, 158, 159 Giotto 53 Gleick, James 42, 136. globalization 3, 14, 21, 39, 48, 146, 151 Gorz, André 157 Gouldner, Alvin W. 19, 127 Gramsci, Antonio 21, 23 Grant, Adam 99, 100 Gray, Thomas 81 great division 8, 35 Habermas, Jürgen 42 habitus 71, 73, 74, 95 Harcourt, Bernard E. 108, 109 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 66, 96, 97, 126 Heidegger, Martin 13, 35, 97 Hessel, Stéphane 13 Hobbes, Thomas 11, 15, 17, 26, 27, 85, 107, 145, 146 Hochschild, Arlie Russel 84, 87, 92 Holbein, Hans 53 Honneth, Axel 56, 60, 61, 63 hubris 37, 151 Husserl, Edmund 13, 97 hypermodernity 9, 12, 16, 17, 35 identity 6, 11, 14, 17, 18, 21, 22,

27, 37, 38, 56, 105, 107, 122, 126, 157 ideology 37–39, 104, 157 Illouz, Eva 77, 84, 88, 92, 96 imagination 29, 34, 50 immaterial 14, 18, 157 in statu nascendi 4, 26 individualism 2–4, 11, 67, 71, 89, 97, 105, 107, 126–128, 143 individualization 17, 24, 42, 86, 163 industrialization 14, 15, 64 inequality 18, 19, 70, 86, 100, 148 insecurity 2, 6, 8, 24, 56, 61, 86, 98, 116, 138, 143 interregnum 2, 3, 9, 19–21, 23–27, 33–36, 44, 45, 48, 98, 135, 143, 145 Jaquet-Droz, Henri and Charles 168, 155 Kant, Immanuel 91, 96, 97 Keyes, Corey L. 99 King, Stephen 142 Klee, Paul 27, 28 Koselleck, Reinhart 60 La Boétie, Étienne de 112 languishing 98–100, 139, 140 Leopardi, Giacomo 98 limit 2, 5, 23, 101, 139, 140, 144, 154 Lipovetsky, Gilles 35 liquid 25, 28, 29, 34, 45, 47, 56, 59, 109, 112 society 1, 2, 4, 11, 21, 35, 36, 40, 44, 66, 76, 112, 116, 167 modernity 1, 3, 4, 6, 9, 12, 17, 23, 24, 26, 33, 34, 39, 40, 47, 48, 103, 107, 142, 163

Index world 24, 56, 76, 142–144 liquidity 1, 2, 20, 21, 23–25, 27, 31–33, 35, 40, 41, 44, 45, 47, 79, 143, 144 logos 72, 82, 83, 91 Lorrain, Claude 53 Luhmann, Niklas 42. Lukács, György 127 Lyon, David 22, 109–111, 115, 131 Lyotard, Jean-François 11, 27, 32, 36 Maelzel, Johann N. 155 Maffesoli, Michel 10, 17, 56 Magatti, Mauro 149, 150 Manifesto (Marx and Engeels’) 23, 36, 37, 40, 45, 46 Mannheim, Karl 95, 96 Marcuse, Herbert 89, 160 Marx, Karl 13, 23, 29, 36, 38, 40, 42, 44–47, 64, 97, 126, 127, 154, 156 Merton, Robert K. 134 Michelangelo 53 migration 24, 146–148, 163 millennials 50, 168 modernization 36, 40–43 More, Thomas 25, 102, 103 Morin, Edgar 10, 25, 89 Mubi Brighenti, Andrea 128, 129 multitude 3, 11, 25, 76, 85 Mussolini, Benito 54 neoliberalism 2, 31, 39, 40, 143, 164 network 22, 54, 56, 61, 109–111, 114–116, 141, 143, 154, 169 Nietzsche, Friedrich 25, 35, 76 Nussbaum, Martha 80, 81, 92 Orwell, George 108, 110, 115

181

Packard, Vance 119 pandemic 3, 9, 12, 21, 24, 27, 30, 31, 34, 36, 45, 50, 53, 54, 57–59, 76, 86, 98–102, 116, 122, 132, 135–139, 143, 163, 166–168 panopticon 22, 37, 93, 109, 113, 121–125, 129, 131–133, 159, 160 Parsons, Talcott 63 Pericles 13 Pinker, Steven 75 Plato 103 Poe, Edgar Allan 155 Polanyi, Karl 66, 68 politics 2, 3, 11, 31, 42, 44, 66, 69, 95, 104, 105, 120, 143, 145, 163 Pontormo, Jacopo da 53 Pope, Samantha 99 posthuman 141 postmodernism 25, 27, 30–32, 127 postmodernity 11, 12, 17, 31–33, 36, 39, 46, 142, 145, 163 Poussin, Nicolas 53 privacy 4, 54, 106, 108–111, 115–117, 123, 154 progress 7–10, 25, 29, 37, 38, 42–45, 47, 65, 68, 70, 80, 84, 103, 104, 110, 119, 121, 125, 132, 137, 139–141, 146, 150, 156, 161 proximity 23, 35, 49, 50, 167 rationality 9, 30, 37, 62, 80–84, 88–90, 92, 93, 98, 129, 138, 150 rationalization 9, 32, 42, 88, 161 Reagan, Ronald 70 recognition 6, 10, 13, 22, 24, 26, 56, 57, 60–63, 71, 72, 76, 77, 82, 89, 95, 96, 98, 107, 110, 117, 126, 128,

182 Index repression of emotions 4, 83–85, 89, 92, 105 revolution 13, 14, 37 industrial 42, 95, 156, 158 Rifkin, Jeremy 157 Romano, Giulio 53 Rosa, Hartmut 42, 43, Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 13, 28, 55, 70, 148 Said, Edward W. 34 Saint-Simon, Claude-Henri de 63 Sartre, Jean-Paul 13 Schmitt, Carl 15, 104, 105 Sen, Amartya K. 19 Shakespeare, William 46 Simmel, Georg 42, 84, 92 Simondon, Gilbert 19 smart working 3, 7, 57, 164, 168 smartphone 4, 51, 100, 107, 116, 117, 132, 141, 168 social action 4 control 3, 10, 17, 21, 22, 32, 37, 48, 81, 85, 107, 109, 145, 160 distancing 3, 4, 50, 59, 100, 106 gardening 27 media 4, 12, 78, 95, 105, 109, 110, 117, 118, 122, 123, 131, 169 relations 1, 3, 9, 12, 45, 51, 55, 64, 76, 77, 79, 92, 107, 131, 143, 168 system 3, 26, socialism 38 socialization 12, 60, 99, 127, 128 sociology 4, 5, 16, 19, 63, 65, 75, 87–89, 126, 127, 165, 166

solidarity 2, 15, 17, 20, 21, 24, 39, 56, 59, 63–67, 71, 72, 76, 85, 98, 106, 127, 142, 144, 167 solitude 22, 33, 48, 111 Spengler, Oswald 27 Spinoza, Baruch 11 Staglianò, Riccardo 159 Stiegler, Bernard 14, 19, 97, 127 Stiglitz, Joseph E. 18, 86, 148 subjectivation 13, 16, 17, 18, 77 submission 3, 4, 17, 21, 49, 85, 107, 108, 116, 117, 119 surmodernity 17, 35 surveillance 4, 22, 49, 81, 93, 107–117, 120, 121, 133 Taylor, Henry 71 technology 2, 7, 8, 14, 18, 20–22, 27, 33, 36, 42, 43, 45, 48, 57, 58, 61, 78, 79, 89, 95, 99, 100, 105, 106, 114, 117–120, 122, 123, 129, 130, 132, 133, 136, 140, 141, 143, 149, 150–153, 155–160, 164, 167, 168 Tester, Keith 20, 23 Thatcher, Margaret 10, 70 Therborn, Göran 18 Thévenot, Laurent 62, 67, 70 ties 1, 3, 56, 64, 67, 68, 76, 85, 97, 98, 142, 143, 152, 167 strong 66, 71, 167 weak 3, 167 Tintoretto 53 Titian 53 Tocqueville, Alexis de 13, 148 Tomasi di Lampedusa, Giuseppe 44 Tönnies, Ferdinand 20 totalitarianism 17, 22, 30, 32, 37, 82, 87, 104, 145, 151 Touraine, Alain 3, 10–19, 59

Index Turner, Jonathan H. 86, 100 Turner, Victor W. 59, 76 uchronia 30 uncertainty 1, 2, 21, 24, 29, 30, 39, 44–46, 59, 80, 83, 86, 98, 139, 143 utopia 16, 18, 19, 29, 46, 102, 103, 108, 141, 145, 146, 155, 157, 161 Vaidhyanathan, Siva 111 Valéry, Paul 141 Vattimo, Gianni 11

183

Vaucanson, Jean de 155, 168 visibility 93, 110, 111, 113–116, 121, 122, 124–132 von Kempelen, Wolfgang 155 Weber, Max 4, 9, 26, 42, 63–67, 84, 92 Weil, Simone A. 59 Wells, Herbert George 36, 141 Westphalia 27, 146 Zakaria, Fareed 136 Zamyatin, Yevgeny I. 111 Zuboff, Shoshana 116, 120, 123

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