Update content/article/popularillegalisms.md
This commit is contained in:
parent
b7eb008f42
commit
26d605b1ea
1 changed files with 10 additions and 17 deletions
|
|
@ -6,7 +6,7 @@ title = "How do we get away with (from) it? - Popular Illegalisms in a Neolibera
|
|||
**By Valeria Graziano**
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
## Call It What You Will
|
||||
# Call It What You Will
|
||||
|
||||
The exhortation “Snađi se, druže!”—”Figure it out, comrade!”—originated purportedly during WWII when partisans had to come up with solutions under harsh conditions. When tasked with a seemingly impossible mission, they would often ask, “But how do I do that?”; and the answer was often, “You figure it out, comrade.” Later, during the socialist period, the phrase described everyday workarounds for bureaucratic or material constraints, like smuggling western clothes (in slang: “šana”) and petty theft. Today, it endures as a cultural symbol of hacking systems for personal advantage.
|
||||
|
||||
|
|
@ -35,7 +35,7 @@ In the 1920s, the philosopher Benedetto Croce brought to public attention a 1600
|
|||
Franco Cassano and Franco Piperno’s works, *Il Pensiero Meridiano* and *Elogio dello spirito pubblico meridionale*, explore political uses of the southern way of life.[^20] Cassano depicts the South as an “imaginative periphery," stating, “[g]enerally, in the North’s imagination, the South exists only as a tourist paradise or a Mafious hell.”[^21] He presents a “Meridian style,” inspired by Camus and Pasolini, valuing freedom and skepticism toward institutionalized emancipation. Piperno, a founder of *Potere Operaio*, critiques the modern state’s legitimacy crisis, advocating southern Italian “municipalities” as self-regulating entities, where local genius and urban political life thrive, contrasting state sovereignty with embodied sociability.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
## Where I’m Coming From
|
||||
# Where I’m Coming From
|
||||
|
||||
For my own research trajectory and the conception of the bonfires, the Italian cultural landscape of politicized plebeian illegalisms that influenced me growing up was a foundational element.
|
||||
|
||||
|
|
@ -48,11 +48,11 @@ Similarly, in *Andare ai resti*, Emilio Quadrelli delves into the transformation
|
|||
Both Montaldi and Quadrelli relied heavily on the voices and stories of the protagonists, wrestling with the complexities of their own mediation. They aimed not to romanticize the material, but they understood that these self-narrations were not merely accounts of reality—they were acts of self-authorship, ways to construct a political identity and assert a stance. Both authors thus allowed their subjects to speak to the contradictions of their lives, illustrating how their illegal acts were not just transgressions, but expressions of agency against the encroachments of capital and state authority.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
## Striking while it’s hot
|
||||
# Striking while it’s hot
|
||||
|
||||
Illegalisms—those everyday acts of maneuvering around bureaucracy and market forces—are vital to today’s far-right appeal. Thus, engaging with illegalism from a leftist angle can tackle three urgent problems. First, it reveals how far-right leaders use law-breaking to build their power: figures like Trump and Berlusconi have built iconic personas by openly flouting the law, presenting themselves as anti-systemic figures, while leftist movements often find themselves cornered into defending legality, despite knowing the system’s flaws. Second, it critiques the fetish of transparency in technocratic bureaucracy, where automation pretends to create fairness but instead strips away human agency in co-determining contextual decisions. And finally, the study of popular illegalism can help dislodge the moralizing horizon of hard work as a path to a successful life as presented in the hustle-and-grind cultures. The figure of the virtuoso,[^24] the self-made entrepreneur, etc. stand to receive the delinquent as their hidden doppelganger. Ingenuity is, in this sense, the big absent from the values celebrated in modern capitalist societies. Ingenuity is to class struggle what creativity is to arts and innovation is to technologies.
|
||||
|
||||
## Notes
|
||||
# Notes
|
||||
|
||||
[^1]: Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. "" In *Engaging Contradictions: Theory, Politics, and Methods of Activist Scholarship*, edited by Charles R. Hale, 31–61. University of California Press, 2008; Povinelli, Elizabeth A. **. Duke University Press, 2011; Spade, Dean. **. Duke University Press, 2015..
|
||||
|
||||
|
|
@ -62,7 +62,7 @@ Illegalisms—those everyday acts of maneuvering around bureaucracy and market f
|
|||
|
||||
[^4]: Friedli, Lynne, and Robert Stearn. "" *Medical humanities* 41.1 (2015): 40-47.
|
||||
|
||||
[^5]: Wacquant, Loïc. “Crafting the Neoliberal State: Workfare and Prisonfare in the Bureaucratic Field.”: 248.
|
||||
[^5]: Wacquant. “Crafting the Neoliberal State: Workfare and Prisonfare in the Bureaucratic Field.”: 248.
|
||||
|
||||
[^6]: Glissant, Édouard. “For Opacity.” In *.* University of Michigan Press, 1997: 189-194.
|
||||
|
||||
|
|
@ -72,20 +72,15 @@ Illegalisms—those everyday acts of maneuvering around bureaucracy and market f
|
|||
|
||||
[^9]: Rai, Amit S. **. Duke University Press, 2019.
|
||||
|
||||
[^10]:
|
||||
Gago, Verónica. *Neoliberalism from Below: Popular Pragmatics and Baroque Economies*. Duke University Press, 2017.
|
||||
[^10]: Gago, Verónica. **. Duke University Press, 2017.
|
||||
|
||||
[^11]:
|
||||
Ong, Aihwa. *Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty*. Duke University Press, 2006; García Linera, Álvaro. “Sindicato, multitud y comunidad. Movimientos sociales y formas de autonomía política en Bolivia.” In *Tiempos de rebelión*, by Álvaro García Linera, Felipe Quispe, Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar, and Luis Tapia. La Paz: Comuna and Muela del Diablo, 2001.
|
||||
[^11]: Ong, Aihwa. **. Duke University Press, 2006; García Linera, Álvaro. “.” In *Tiempos de rebelión*, by Álvaro García Linera, Felipe Quispe, Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar, and Luis Tapia. La Paz: Comuna and Muela del Diablo, 2001.
|
||||
|
||||
[^12]:
|
||||
Echeverría, Bolívar. *La modernidad de lo barroco.* Ediciones Era, 2000.
|
||||
[^12]: Echeverría, Bolívar. ** Ediciones Era, 2000.
|
||||
|
||||
[^13]:
|
||||
Gago. *Neoliberalism from Below*, 21.
|
||||
[^13]: Gago. *Neoliberalism from Below*, 21.
|
||||
|
||||
[^14]:
|
||||
Ibid, 69.
|
||||
[^14]: Ibid, 69.
|
||||
|
||||
[^15]:
|
||||
Curcio, Anna. “’Un paradiso abitato da diavoli’ … o da porci. Appunti su razzializzazione e lotte nel Mezzogiorno d’Italia”, *UniNomade*, 5th September 2012. https://uninomade.org/un-paradiso-abitato-da-diavoli-o-da-porci/ (accessed October 2024).
|
||||
|
|
@ -120,5 +115,3 @@ Illegalisms—those everyday acts of maneuvering around bureaucracy and market f
|
|||
Virno, Paolo. *A Grammar of the Multitude: For an Analysis of Contemporary Forms of Life*. MIT Press, 2004.
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
## Notes
|
||||
|
||||
|
|
|
|||
Loading…
Add table
Reference in a new issue