In the 1970s, Italy experienced a difficult transition from Fordism to a flexible accumulation regime. The resulting changes in production relations led to the disappearance of traditional public spaces and meeting places such as open squares, workplaces, party offices or the premises of groups involved in the antagonistic, ie anti-capitalist and anti-fascist, movement. Within this context, in the 1980s and 1990s, these groups managed to create new social and political spaces by setting up Self-Managed Social Centers (CSAs), ie squatted properties which became the venue of social, political and cultural events. Over 250 Social Centers have been active in Italy over the past 15 years, especially in urban areas. Their organizational modes are examples of successful direct democracy in non-hierarchical structures and may provide alternative options to the bureaucratic organization of so many aspects of social and political life. Point number one on a Social Center's agenda is a daunting task: it must renovate and refurbish privately or publicly owned empty properties and turn them into public spaces open to the general public. For this task it relies exclusively on collective action, ie cooperative working modes which do not come under the provisions governing regular employment contracts and can thus be used to combat marginalization and exclusion processes which are becoming more and more dramatic in our cities. An analysis of the evolution of this original Italian movement provides the opportunity to address a number of issues associated with alternative practices to neoliberal globalization.

Resisting and Challenging Neoliberalism: The Development of Italian Social Centers

Neoliberalism is a diffuse and contested term; however, as an art of government, drawing on Foucault’s theorising, it posits personal responsibility as the basis of an ethical society. Neoliberalis...

Neoliberalism as an art of governance: reflecting on techniques for securing life through direct social work practice

In this article, I explore the management and construction of physical pain in video-clip-based television programmes, as well as the sociopolitical context in which these are embedded, and the form of subjectivity simultaneously celebrated and evoked. The analysis focuses on the popular MTV television series, Ridiculousness, in which internet video clips are commented on by the hosts for comedic effect. Many of these clips depict physical pain, usually as a consequence of a person having an accident. Drawing on Scarry’s The Body in Pain (1985), I show how a particular set of strategies are utilised and constructions are legitimated for the experience and interpretation of pain. These techniques not only bear a striking resemblance to the structure of torture but are also conservative in their effect as they promote neoliberal processes of subjectification and reiterate a particular form of masculinity.

Nocitainment: the contemporary construction of pain as amusement

The article examines neoliberalism’s impact on forms of subjectivity by looking at social centres (squatted activist community centres) in London from 2007 to 2009. With a focus on issues related to temporality, it explores the concept of outmodedness understood as a temporal misalignment away from the pacings required by neoliberalism. This is examined not only in terms of objects and spaces proper to social centres, but most importantly through a possible recomposition of the subject in this setting. Resistance to neoliberal norms through a particular experience of outmodedness is seen as ambivalent, leading to a possible immobilization of the subject and yet also towards non-capitalist modes of experience.

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1057%2Fsub.2014.8.pdf

Neoliberalism out of joint: Activists and inactivists in London’s social centres

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Neoliberalism out of joint: Activists and inactivists in London’s social centres