conferencia

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First of all, I would like to thank ‘Fragmentos’ and its entire team for inviting me to this unique space to give a lecture. I am delighted to share my thoughts with you and hope that you find them interesting and that my perspective, as an Italian and a southern European, resonates with you. We could then discuss it further. My only regret is that I cannot speak to you in Spanish; our common Latin roots allow me to understand it, but not to speak it properly.

I began to question the concept and condition of crisis in the aftermath of the global economic crisis that began in 2007-2008. At that time, there was much talk of a crisis of neoliberalism, of a crisis that would present an opportunity to end neoliberal hegemony. Yet that crisis did not lead to a significant turning point. It was said that this crisis would lead to the end of neoliberalism if an alternative was presented. And, within a few years, it was the so-called neo-sovereignisms that presented themselves as an alternative. In the wake of what later happened, with the financial markets reacting favorably to the authoritarian drift of democracies from then on, neo-sovereignisms turned out to be an aspect of the crisis itself rather than its solution: in that phase of real difficulty for the financial markets, they served the function of preserving the status quo and thus perpetuating neoliberal hegemony. In short, rather than representing a turning point, the crisis entailed a variation anyway within the same neoliberal order. It was this conviction that led me to work on a peculiar modality of this crisis: the crisis as an art of government.

However, I soon realised that the use of crisis as a form of government is by no means a recent phenomenon, but has been going on for some time, with the crisis of 2007-2008 being only a recent manifestation. In fact, economists speak of a “great stagnation” that has been affecting Western countries and the global North for several decades, that is, a gradual decline in economic growth rates, which have stabilised at around zero. This means that the capitalist system no longer profits from growth, but has instead become increasingly extractivist, deriving value and profit from existing resources, whose unconditional extraction requires the preservation of the status quo. The beginning of the “great stagnation” can be traced back to the early 1970s. Equally, in my opinion, the beginning of the contemporary crisis as an art of government can be traced back to the same period. It was the period of the great crisis of the first half of the 1970s, which ended to the economic growth of the “Glorious Thirties” (1945-1975) in the West. The era of crisis as a turning point is coming to an end, and the phase of crisis as an art of government is beginning. The moments that mark the crisis of the early 1970s are: the abandonment of the Bretton Woods Agreement, which meant an end to pegging the US dollar to gold and the beginning of the financialization of the economy (1971); the oil crisis (1973); and the coup against the Allende government in Chile and the establishment of the Pinochet regime as the first laboratory of neoliberal policies (1973). This is precisely the same period in which neoliberalism began to gain ground in the struggle for global hegemony over Keynesianism, and looking back at that era, we can understand how a conservative, if not authoritarian, politics is one of its defining characteristics, which is not limited to the present day.

Unlike classical liberalism, in fact, in neoliberalism state intervention is not to be minimized in favor of laissez faire market, but is to be functional to the market and the preservation of its order. Thus, for neoliberalism it is indifferent what form of government the state takes, as long as it serves the market. And often an authoritarian government serves this function better. In fact, it should never be forgotten that about the first country that served as a laboratory for neoliberalism, Pinochet’s Chile, Friedrich von Hayek – one of the leading theorists of neoliberalism – said that he preferred a liberal dictatorship to a democratic government without market liberalism. To show that such intolerance of democracy does not consist merely of opportunistic or strategic stances, but is rather an original trait of neoliberalism, one could even go back to 1927, when Ludwig von Mises – Hayek’s mentor – asserted that Italian fascism had saved European civilization and that its merits will remain eternally in history.

The fundamental question for neoliberal politics is thus how best to preserve the market environment. As Michel Foucault had understood, neoliberal homo œconomicus is shaped not so much by the discipline as by the ‘environmental’ conditions in which individuals are induced to act. Neoliberalism therefore does not intervene directly on individuals, but rather on the ‘environments’ – i.e. a ‘reality’ presented as ‘natural’, the most appropriate to a presumed ‘human nature’ – in which individuals believe they are acting freely, were it not that such acting is conditioned by the ‘variables’ that the economic rationality of neoliberalism introduces. These variables have the function of inducing the recursiveness of a ‘feedback mechanism’ to make a behavior predictable, measurable, calculable, and evaluable. Foucault, indeed, defined neoliberal economics as “the science of the systematic nature of responses to environmental variables”. And our actions become highly predictable when individuals perceive themselves to be in danger. Or, to put it another way, to quote Foucault again, individuals “are conditioned to experience their situation, their life, their present, and their future as containing danger”. Consider how common and shared this condition is for each of us, a condition of living constantly exposed to danger, threatened by violence, poverty, and unemployment, but also by more subtle yet no less insidious risks, such as loneliness and depression. I call this general condition precariousness.

Precariousness, then, is not only the outcome of the uncertainty of market fluctuations, but also a form of life whose behavior becomes predictable as it is induced by an environment that constantly exposes individuals to danger. An environment rendered fraught with danger by neoliberal variables not only stimulates ‘systematicity’ in reactions to such precariousness and therefore predictability of behavior insofar as it is oriented toward adaptation, but at the same time produces a demand for protection and security to which the right wing is historically better equipped to respond, as demonstrated today by neo-sovereignist demagogy. It is in fact always as a response to the real or only perceived precariousness provoked by neoliberalism that we must consider the anti-migratory policies, but also the return of a more traditional morality – found for example in the revaluation of the family as a surrogate for the Welfare State – and the claims of identity, whether national, gender, race, religion.

Although we are often reminded of our freedom of choice, this state of crisis forces us to choose from only a very limited number of options, almost always opting for the safest choice. The neoliberal order is one that, from within, proposes only those alternatives that balance its potentially ungovernable drifts. The neoliberal mantra ‘there is no alternative’ should therefore be clarified: there are no alternatives outside the existing order, choices are only possible within this order. This is its dictatorial aspect.

In addition to the economic crisis and neo-sovereignty as its complementary aspect, another recent example of crisis as an art of government can be cited. The belief that crisis serves to reinforce the neoliberal ‘there is no alternative’ was confirmed a decade after the 2007-2008 crisis, when we were faced with a global health crisis: the Covid-19 pandemic. Perhaps it is no coincidence that these two events belong to the two fields in which, in ancient Greece, the term krisis was used: the administrative and the medical fields. Going back to the Greek origin of the term, krisis means ‘judgement’, and its mode of judgement was clearly distinct from political decision-making, that is, ‘good deliberation in assembly’. If the assembly was the place and the way in which decisions were made to bring order to the community, the court was the place where that order was administered. It was in the court that the judgement of krisis was applied, characterised by being for or against, by establishing the guilt or innocence, the rightness or wrongness of an individual’s conduct. The context is forensic, and the judgement of krisis is the prerogative of magistrates, who administer justice on a case-by-case basis. In the medical field, similarly, the judgement of the krisis is the prerogative of the physician – like the magistrate, an ‘expert’ or ‘technician’ – who is called upon to express an opinion on the course of the patient’s illness and diagnose the outcome: return to health or death. In this case too, the physician’s judgement falls within a presupposed order, the cosmic and natural one, of which it is a matter of deciphering the signs – or, in other words, the symptoms – but not of understanding the order, let alone transforming it.

Like forensic judgement, medical judgement also falls within the administration of the existing, this time the administration of the health of the population. Although the physician must limit himself to the diagnosis of the outcome of an individual’s disease, as Hippocrates argues, he can nevertheless, based on the ‘expertise’ he has acquired, prognosticate under what conditions a given disease occurs and thus advise rulers to administer the conduct of the population: this is the case with epidemics. However, it must be emphasised that in the ancient polis, this ‘technical’ expertise, whether of the magistrate or the physician, was at the service of political power, that of the assembly.

Based on this premise, you may already have understood how the Covid-19 pandemic fits into the administration of the order, that is, into the crisis as an art of government. During the pandemic, we have often heard it said that the policies of the states have finally made the health of the population prevail over economic interests. Once again there has been talk of a crisis in the neoliberal model. Politics would finally rebel against its subordination to the market, finally regaining its autonomy from the economy. Yet, reading the documents of the major neoliberal institutions (the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank) in autumn 2020, the policies suggested are exactly those undertaken by most of the states, first and foremost the lockdown. Neoliberal policies assume care for the health of the population, health that ends up corresponding to the ‘human capital’ whose resources are to be preserved.

What the economic crisis of 2007-2008 and the Covid-19 health crisis seem to have in common is the government of individual precariousness, which leads individuals to adapt to the existing order because there is no other alternative. I am not arguing that these are not real emergencies (the ecological and climate crisis is another one), but rather that every possible alternative that emerges in a state of crisis is neutralized by the forced choice posed by the crisis as art of government. Both during the economic crisis and during the pandemic, forms of mutual support and social self-organisation emerged almost everywhere, which could represent alternative social models to the crisis as an art of government, but in the end the powerlessness to make them an alternative prevailed, accompanied by the fear that a possible alternative to the existing order was too risky. This too stems from the condition of precariousness, which leads to adaptation to an order and its therapies that make such precariousness chronic, but certainly do not resolve it. Hence, taking the point of view of crisis as an art of government and precariousness as a neoliberal way of life, the phenomena we have witnessed as the outcome of recent crises – neo-sovereignisms and chronicisation of distress – do not appear to us as alternatives to neoliberalism, but rather as therapies to make precariousness sustainable, that precariousness which nevertheless the neoliberal order itself constantly reproduces.

We have seen that the paradigm of crisis judgement originally belongs to the sphere of the administration of order, yet in modernity its judgement for or against has taken on a directly political significance when expressed on the existing order. In modern times, crisis thus becomes the opportune moment for a decisive political decision aimed at revolutionising the existing order. The revolutionary use of crisis judgement prevailed until the 1970s, when its administrative function returned.

One of the first to understand the decline of the revolutionary value of the crisis was Antonio Gramsci, despite belonging to the Marxist tradition, which placed the question of revolution at its centre. Gramsci is in prison and in his Notebooks he reflects on a situation not so dissimilar to the current one: in Italy, fascism is in power and in 1929 Wall Street crashes and the Great Depression begins. Gramsci understands that this crisis does not represent an opportunity for revolution – the socialist or communist revolution that had been defeated and repressed in Europe a decade earlier – but rather he recognizes its conservative nature and attributes the ‘use of crisis’ to the rulers: although it is not their immediate prerogative, its use is mostly under their authority. Gramsci explicitly defines as ‘organic’ a crisis which is governed by the ruling class without calling into question its hegemony. In fact, crisis ends up representing the opportunity, in the presence of a ‘mortal danger’, to convey the social body ‘under the banner of a single party’. ‘Organic’ crisis occurs when ruling class restores and strengthens its own hegemony from within the order. To be clear, the organic crisis could refer to the governance of crises that neoliberalism carried out until the crisis of 2007-2008, appropriating the most advanced demands of subordinate groups, thus neutralizing their political impact. Gramsci defined this governance ‘from above’ of the crisis as a ‘passive revolution’. 

However, in the case of a crisis of authority of the ruling class, Gramsci also envisages another type of crisis, the ‘non-organic’ one; a ‘mortal danger’ is governed and order is restored from the outside, with the rise on the scene of the charismatic leader: “When the crisis does not find this organic solution, but that of the charismatic leader, it means that a static equilibrium exists […]; it means that no group, neither the conservatives nor the progressives, has the strength for victory, and that even the conservative group needs a master”. Gramsci deploys the notion of non-organic crisis to explain the rise of fascism in Italy. Fascism – like today’s forms of neo-sovereignisms – appears on the political scene when the impasse in the class struggle allows the emergence of the ‘unorganized mass’ of the people, unorganized because the mass does not identify itself with a class or with common and shared demands, but rather with the particular interests of individuals, susceptible to the flattery of power and the promises of charismatic leaders. In this non-organic solution to the crisis there is a direct relationship between the charismatic leader and the mass that does not depend on the power relations between classes, which rule over the organic crisis.

What I find fundamental even today in Gramsci’s conception of crisis is that it – both in organic and non-organic form – involves a social symptomatology: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear”. Therefore, the interregnum does not simply define a period of transition, but a particular art of government that makes crisis its structural condition; an art of government that uses crisis to prescribe therapies that immunise the order from any possible alternative. Diseases continue to appear one after the other: “the development of capitalism has been a ‘continual crisis’, if one can say that, i.e. an extremely rapid movement of elements that mutually balanced and immunized one another”. It is important to point out that, for Gramsci, the immunisation of the crisis does not entail the cure of the disease, but rather the chronicisation of its symptoms. You well understand that the interregnum, as a chronic manifestation of social symptoms, corresponds exactly to the systematic reproduction of precariousness. In both cases, it is a matter of immunizing the existing order against any possibility of change that arises in society.

What then are the most evident symptoms manifested in the crisis – which, Gramsci always teaches us, is not an event but is ‘structural’ – that is currently infecting our societies? Gramsci certainly helps us to define neo-sovereignisms as phenomena of the ‘non-organic’ crisis we are going through, a crisis that the neoliberal order is no longer able to govern in an organic way. The extremisms – political ones but not only – that are increasingly emerging within Western societies and not only are equally symptoms of that crisis. Extremisms are the most morbid symptom of ‘the old is dying’, namely liberal democracy and its function of neutralizing precisely the political extremisms. So much so that extremisms often support neo-sovereignists in power and their function of preserving order regardless of its democratic form and procedures. In short, political extremism and social suffering are both symptoms of the same crisis, but while extremism today has conservative connotations, social suffering seems to me to be more a symptom of the systematic frustration of the desire for something new, for change.

We have thus come to the present day, amid the age of precarity; a widespread precariousness instigated by the most varied and diverse sides of the crisis as an art of government. It is no coincidence that the British economic historian Adam Tooze recently revived a term that Edgar Morin had used in the 1990s in reference to the climate crisis in particular: ‘polycrisis’. But no matter how multiple and diverse the crises are today – economic crisis, social crisis, political crisis, ecological crisis, migratory crisis, etc. – the effect is the same: the production of precariousness, which everyone perceives individually, however different their circumstances may be. Whatever its context, the crisis produces precariousness in individuals and therefore makes them governable, since the cure for precariousness is presented as coming from the same order that generates it.

And yet, we are witnessing today the emergence of something new. There is a widespread feeling of refusal for the existing order. This can be seen on the geopolitical level, with war returning to center stage in politics, with its unabashed rejection of what remains of the order established after the end of World War II. However, this rejection is also expressed within society; it may manifest itself differently from country to country, but it is nonetheless a reaction to the unsustainability of a precarious form of life. To give a couple of examples, such refusal can be seen in the ever-decreasing participation in institutional forms of politics or in strategies of defection from the labour market – think of the still indefinable but significant phenomenon of mass resignations from work during the pandemic, the so-called ‘Great Resignation’. Such refusal, however, has not at present taken the form of a common and shared desire. To use Mark Fisher’s expression, this desire ‘is real but is nameless’ or, one might even say, it manifests itself in its reverse, as psychic suffering, individual and social. Neoliberalism’s economy of promise produces less and less trust or less and less reassurance of redemption for the sacrifices suffered and more and more psychic suffering; it has reached a point of unsustainability for individuals of the frustration that procures the failed return – whether enjoyment or security – of the libidinal investment in the neoliberal order. It is no coincidence that in 2019, the World Health Organisation recognized burnout as a genuine work-related ‘syndrome’, while more and more leading companies are equipping themselves with their own welfare – in fact, we are witnessing an increasing expansion of the so-called ‘private social welfare’ – to chronicise it, normalize it and manage it in the manner of one of the most common and frequent seasonal illnesses. In this way, psychic suffering is provided for and liable to treatment, therefore immunized and thus maintained within the neoliberal administration. Rather, burnout and other similar syndromes are the result of the exhaustion of human resources in relation to the extractivism to which they are subjected by neoliberal capitalism, no more and no less than what happens with natural resources. 

Evidence of the normalisation of new psychopathologies is provided by psychoanalysts and psychotherapists Miguel Benasayag and Gérard Schmit, who consider themselves ‘technicians of the crisis’ in the neoliberal era of sad passions. They argue that the psychological crises they are called upon to intervene on are in fact ‘crises within crisis’, individual crises within a neoliberal order that makes crisis its art of government. It is therefore not to an exit from the crisis that the psychologist must lead, but rather, as the therapy remains directed at the individual, can at best chronicize the crisis. Unlike vulnerability, which is a common condition resulting from the mortality of our bodies, precariousness is a cultural construct, that is, a form of working, social and political life of the individual that requires therapy in order not to succumb to crisis. Individual discontent is only the symptom of a more general social suffering; therefore, it should not be reduced exclusively to an individual problem, as therapeutic neoliberalism intends. Therapeutic neoliberalism aims to keep society fragmented, that is, to fragment society into different and unrelated individual pathologies. Rather, the discontent that stems from an individual perception of the unsustainability of the neoliberal order should be shared, turning these individual fragments of suffering into pieces of a common and shared experience. I believe this is what this space, ‘Fragmentos’, intends to bear witness to. In this way, the conflict would not only define the actions of extremism as an end in itself, but could also represent an opportunity to initiate a process leading to the creation of a new ‘assembly’, which would be the foundation of a new form of democracy, arising from the current crisis of liberal democracy. A new form of democracy must involve a new form of sociality, no longer defined by the principle of competition induced by precariousness within the neoliberal state of nature, but by cooperation. We must recognize in the social distress and suffering a desire yet nameless, and give it a name: naming something common and shared is, in fact, the most important political act of an assembly. Then, to conclude with Gramsci, this neoliberal interregnum can end: the old can finally die and the new be born.

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