In Italy, the representative institutions, and the parties that should manage them, are neither in good health at the moment nor do they have a good reputation. In particular, according to the most recent surveys, only 4% of citizens still have some kind of trust in them. The Parteienstaat (party state) is on its last legs and the commissioner candidates are crowding it out. At least this is the Italian situation and I wouldn’t know whether to consider it an avant-garde political laboratory, where we can see the manifestation of the problems and of the solutions that in the next few years will spread all over Western countries, or to think about it as an extreme case of degeneration, taking place in a marginal and recessionary area if compared with the strong European core and even more with the USA of Obama or the rising BRIC economies. The decline of classical sovereignty, the advent of technocratic governance, the shift of the decisional centres from nation states to supranational entities and financial structures deprived of any popular representativeness, are common features of the entire continent. As are some forms of protest and resistance, generally defined as “tumults” – a term used also in relation to the North-African commotions that have overthrown or limited the local authoritarian regimes in the middle of a crisis strictly connected to neoliberal policies and the failure of the knowledge society. It is probably worth thinking beyond these simple descriptions and the perhaps generous and hasty enthusiasm for a season of sudden changes. When we speak of tumult – a term that Machiavelli drew from the history of the Roman Republic in his Discourses on Livy, and that is transmitted through Spinoza and Algernon Sidney to Atlantic republicanism – we refer to a specific idea of a political body, according to which inside every city there are parts, aggregations, groups. The political body is mixed, in that it is traversed by power relations and the city is never a smooth or pacified space, but is crossed by differentials of power whose energy and antagonism are not exhausted once a political unity is instituted, but maintain their unbalancing and innovative dynamism. The tumult generates institution – Machiavelli uses the tribuneship as an example, as the result of the tumultuous contrast between patricians and plebeians – because its destituent and cathartic appearance (unpredictability, elusiveness, project desertion) is not an instantaneous deed for its own sake and at the same time it doesn’t resolve without leaving a mark in the origin of the institution. In fact it is a constituent power (defined in this way since Sieyes), a conflictual extrajudicial moment, never fully juridical but always in tension with constituted power. The institution never revokes conflict definitively. The tumults arise again, changing, moulding, re-inventing the established forms. Democracy, intended as a group of institutions and the movement that produces and changes them constantly, is a practice connected with the tumult and with the inclusion of the parts as they appear and name themselves – they come into play, according to Rancière’s expression – while where there is tumult, there is never pure disorder but a positive creation of institutions. In short, democracy is not just a collection of procedures, but is firstly an expansive structure that embraces all the new that emerges from social contradictions and from the innovation of the lifestyles and the expectations of participation. Democratic is what includes the excluded and excludes the obstacles to inclusion. This is said in Luke 1, 46-55, and in the music of the Magnificat by J.S. Bach: deposuit potentes de sede, / et exaltavit humiles; / esurientes implevit bonis, / et divites dimisit inanes.
The tumult questions the place of the dunastás apò thronon (the mighty from their seat) and the ploutoûntas (the rich) ( Greek words that the European troika could also understand, should they wish to) and raises the tapeínous (the humble). The crisis of sovereignty and of representation, and their tendential replacement with administrative command, wear away the institutions from above, and functionalise them according to the logic of financial rent. The first ones to be targeted are those considered less “useful”; the cultural institutions that are the first to be abandoned when the monetary orthodoxy and the productive myopia impose cuts in expenditure. In this way, the self-management of cultural structures means mostly the occupation of abandoned spaces, the regrouping of forces that were discarded as superfluous and hindered for being opposed to dynamics of pseudo-productivity, and therefore to the fusion of rent and profit. The obsolete meta-political argument about democracy, both in its cultural contents and in its form of forced self-management, suddenly becomes an effective democratic procedure, which fills the procedural void with political alternatives, with affects and the cooperative sharing of differences. At the same time, the tumultuous flame gives itself a shape, the creative disorder refrains itself in the production of rules, it speaks to the residual articulations of civil society, increasing its network of consistency and alliances, thus it really does become the voice of the 99%. This applies both in the cases of abandonment and in those of centralized maintenance of cultural institutions (therefore, in cases of occupation or co-management as responses). On the same line, we can find the episodes of resistance to censorship and to the administrative control of political and cultural expression that recently took place in Hungary, Ukraine and in Russia. A common fight for a common Europe in both culture and institutions is taking shape; a common Europe that overcomes the triple barrier of Schengen, of the Euro zone and of CEE recognition. The neoliberal philosophy is rotten and, if only at the edges, has lost ground in public opinion, and confronts a logic of the common goods and the common use of institutions which it wasn’t ready for. Sometimes, a “war on intelligence” explodes; a war that spreads on the institutional level with the reduction of “unproductive” public expense on education and research and with the enterprise-like reorganization of the University (the Bologna process), and on the mediatic level with the excesses of demagogic anti-intellectualism that remind one of the anti-subversive campaigns of the 50s against “bad culture” and the eggheads. A trick that never fails when they want to safeguard revenues and privileges by calling out to those excluded from a class-limited culture. Unsurprisingly, nowadays the targets of those campaigns are the artists, the student movements and all those who defend the common goods. The fundamental trait of many of the counter-practices that oppose the faults of financial governance is a reference to the common. A lot of theoretical work has been done on this topic, on the background of the historical propensity of the movements and the ideologies of the left to prefer common and communitarian property over private appropriation – omnia sunt communia (all things should be common) was the philosophy of religious anti-feudal millenarianism (the Joachimites, the followers of Saint Francis), in the rural insurrections (from John Wyclif toThomas Müntzer), and at the dawn of the worker movement. The disillusionment and subsequent dismantling of the Keynesian social state’s regimes, where the distortions of private property were compensated for with public intervention, led to a neat (even if not oppositional) distinction between “public” and “common”, detaching the latter from a mythology and a statist praxis and giving a new role to initiatives coming out of the private and the non-profit sectors. All this is from the theoretical point of view. However, the news is that claims on specific, concrete goals have coagulated, for instance in support of the (re)nationalisation of water on a local basis, started in South America with the Cochabamba experience, and re-launched in Europe (from Paris to Berlin to Naples) against the attempt of large Corporations to put their hands on an indispensable and universal resource. In both areas, significant effects were produced that changed the political and even the constitutional reality, putting a stop to neoliberal strategies – as happened in Italy with the referendum that, for the sake of the common goods and interests, rejected the privatisation of water and nuclear power, mobilising 27 million voters, certainly not a minority of “utopians”. Experiences like the occupation of Teatro Valle and similar structures, that evolved into the formation of Foundations for common management, show the extreme relevance of such practices in the cultural sector. We conclude with a suggestive symbolism in these days of crisis: water and culture could turn into two campaigns for the common goods to develop on a European level, thus marking a resistance to neo-liberalism on the double field of the body and of the mind that it tried to colonise.
AUGUSTO ILLUMINATI
Former Professor of History of philosophy at the University of Urbino (until 2009).
His publications include: Sociologia e classi sociali (Einaudi, 1967), Gli inganni di Sarastro (Einaudi, 1980), Winterreise (Dedalo, 1984) and Tumulti (DeriveApprodi, 2011).