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2013
Alberto Toscano: "My inclination would be to bracket the explicit invocation of fascism, bound to distract us from a proper physiognomy of our political moment, and stress instead Wu Ming's reference to the way in which the M5S had piggy-backed on, but also sapped, many struggles against the dispossession of public spaces and common livelihoods (e.g. No TAV), bending them to the benefit of a remote-controlled anti-politics of the 'angry citizen', and drawing them away from their profound continuity with other anti-systemic or far left movements. The M5S itself, in all its ideological ambiguity, is a pretty precarious condenser of all the loose political energies, destructive and constructive, that the crisis has thrown up. As repugnant as the figure of Grillo might be, or as depressing as we may find the political culture of many of his followers, the stresses and strains that Grillo has suffered ever since February – which he accompanies with ever shriller doses of pompousness and braggadocio – should perhaps warn against excessively gloomy prognostications." (...) Alberto Toscano, Italian, lives and works in London. He is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Sociology at Goldsmiths College, University of London (UK). He is a cultural critic, sociologist, philosopher and translator, known in the anglophone world for his translations into English of works by Alain Badiou including Logics of Worlds (Continuum, 2009) and Theoretical Writings (Continuum, 2004) of which he was also the curator. He has translated works of Franco Fortini, Antonio Negri and Furio Jesi. He's a columnist for The Guardian with interventions on Italian politics. Toscano's research focuses on the contemporary political and sociological thought, on Marxism, political economy and the history of ideas. He is author of publications including The Theatre of Production. Philosophy and Individuation between Kant and Deleuze (Palgrave Macmillan, UK, 2006), The Italian Difference: Between Nihilism and Biopolitics (Re:press, UK, 2009) and Fanaticism: The Uses of an Idea (Verso, UK, 2010). Toscano is a member of the editorial board of the journal Historical Materialism: Research in Critical Marxist Theory. He regularly writes on Mute, an English cult magazine of 'hybrid media and cultural politics after the Net'. He's currently completing a book on the aestethics of capital with Jeff Kinkle, Cartographies of the Absolute (forthcoming from Zero Books, blog @ http://cartographiesoftheabsolute.wordpress.com) Alberto Toscano's interview on digital populism and recent European political phenomena, held on 17th November 2013 with the author of Obsolete Capitalism and Rizomatika.
2014 •
Paolo Godani: "I believe that macro political reflections, as Wu Ming’s one, and the micro political analysis should be carried out separately. They should be considered, at least theoretically, as different structures, each having its own categories and inner organization. Wu Ming’s thoughts and of others after them — ideas expressed for instance in a recent text by Alessandro Dal Lago, Clic. Grillo, Casaleggio e la demagogia elettronica (Cronopio 2013) — look at what is evident, therefore using the same categories of ordinary political debate; they reflect on the global and visible distribution of consent as it is emblematically reproduced by the general election. On the other hand, a micro political analysis ignores global tendencies, since it turns its attention to trends that are not visible straightaway, often they are unconscious, and they cut through the entire social field, giving a different insight to the one emerging from ordinary political discourse. For this reason, it is essential to identify those microfascist instances that are to be found across Italian society, precisely because they are found where they should not be, according to the macro-political analysis. I would answer the question on authoritarianism and the one on micro-fascism separately." (...) Paolo Godani is an Italian, philosopher. He was a research fellow at the Department of Philosophy, University of Pisa, and Professor of Aesthetics. Currently, he is working as a researcher at the University of Macerata. His studies look at the following areas: aesthetics, contemporary and theoretical philosophy. Some of the authors he analyses are Heidegger, Nietzsche, Schmitt, Bergson and Deleuze. He published the following books, among others : Il tramonto dell’essere. Heidegger e il pensiero della finitezza (ETS, Pisa, 1999), Estasi e divenire. Un’estetica delle vie di scampo ( Mimesis, Milano, 2001), L’informale. Arte e politica ( ETS, Pisa, 2005), Bergson e la filosofia ( ETS, Pisa, 2008) Deleuze (Carocci, Roma, 2009). In collaboration with Delfo Cecchi he published Falsi raccordi. Cinema e filosofia in Deleuze ( ETS, Pisa, 2007); together with Dario Ferrari, he published La sartoria di Proust. Estetica e costruzione nella Recherche ( ETS, Pisa, 2010). He translated and edited: Jacques Rancière, Il disagio dell’estetica ( ETS, Pisa, 2009); Pierre Macherey, Da Canguilhem a Foucault. La forza delle norme ( ETS, Pisa, 2011). His forthcoming book will be released in May 2014 by Derive e Approdi: Senza Padri. Economia del desiderio e condizioni di libertà nel capitalismo contemporaneo. Paolo Godani's interview on digital populism and recent European political phenomena, held on 24th January 2014 with the author of Obsolete Capitalism.
2013 •
Lapo Berti: "We have long since ceased to live in a political regime that can be defined as purely democratic: this is proved by the way citizens elect their representatives and monitor their work. Nowadays citizens are denied the chance to lead the process through which decisions become relevant for the community. In some extreme cases, such as the Italian one, citizens are also deprived of the power to choose their own representatives: this option has a unique political value and should be the hallmark of any representative democracy. Paradoxically, in most cases this power seems to be guaranteed, and yet the real power is constantly transferred to other institutions : the citizen can only participate in fake democratic elections. This ‘carnivalesque’ celebration lasts four- or five-year, during which it is made impossible to control the objectives pursued by the elected representatives and the ways these objectives are achieved. No democratic regime has ever allowed a real 'people's power' probably — except during its initial phase. However, it is likely that during certain periods, which vary from country to country, the elected representatives mediate popular objectives and are able to turn those objectives into effective policies. Unfortunately, this is no longer the case in any of the countries that we still call democracies." (...) Lapo Berti's interview on digital populism and recent European political phenomena, held on 19th November 2013 with the author of Obsolete Capitalism Lapo Berti is an Italian economist. He worked at the Italian Antitrust Authority from March 1993 to July 2010. He was Professor of Economic and Financial Politics. His practice looked at problems of monetary theory and the history of economic thought, as well as economic politics. He is the author of the books L’Antieuropa delle monete (with A. Fumagalli, Il Manifesto 1993) and Saldi di fine secolo. Le privatizzazioni in Italia (Ediesse, 1998). Most recently, he published Il mercato oltre le ideologie (Università Bocconi Editore, 2006), Le stagioni dell'antitrust (with Andrea Pezzoli,Università Bocconi Editore 2010) and Trattatello sulla felicità (LUISS University Press, 2013). Between 1964 and 1966, he worked with the left workers group on the magazine Classe Operaia, which was founded by Mario Tronti, Massimo Cacciari and Alberto Asor Rosa. During the seventies, he was one of the editors of militant projects, such as Primo Maggio among others.
When Roberto Saviano published Gomorrah in 2006 he exposed the Camorra, an organized crime network with global reach emanating from Naples. This ground-breaking work became an international best seller, inspired a film, and a new TV series. The author received so many death threats from the Camorra that he remains under police protection. Italy beyond Gomorrah investigates the conditions and modalities by which the huge media phenomenon developed around Roberto Saviano after the publication of Gomorrah and the ways in which this has engendered a political discourse starting from his ‘denuncia’ of the mechanisms of the modern mafia and its bosses. Focusing on Saviano’s disruptive work and the representation of his ‘charismatic body’, redefining the figure and task of the modern intellectual, the book stresses the agency of literature and the relevance of the internet and major social networks in the creation of networks of subjectivities and establishing ethical-political duties which are grounded in a ‘passional communication’ between the writer and his audience, as well as on a micropolitics of affects. Through the interpretation of Saviano’s work it also provides provide a cross sectional insight into Italy in the post-Berlusconi age.
In the last 20 years, during the so-called period of the berlusconismo, new form of politics and new reality of the MoVimento5Stelle, created by Beppe Grillo and Gianroberto Casaleggio, have risen in Italy, reaching an essential role after the 2013 election. Aim of this paper is to show how, with Beppe Grillo’s activities, the teatro della politica has began a "teatro della crisi" both in the use of a theatrical language and contemporary dramatic expression, renewing completely the idea of the political performance and collective ritual. In this way, the MoVimento5Stelle and Beppe Grillo in particular do not use only new technologies (such as blogs), but also forms of direct communication. The crisis of the first 10 years of "berlusconismo", has already analyzed, from a theatrical perspective, by Nobel laureate Dario Fo, in his portrait of Silvio Berlusconi titled "L’anomalo bicefalo" (2004). Dario Fo has became one of the noble and intellectual fathers of the MoVimento5Stelle, having being invited regularly to the events of the movement. Beppe Grillo, entertainer and then political activist, has theatralized and dramatized the crisis with forms of one-man show events and others similar to theatre happenings, such as the V-Day, where the performance component was essential. The dialectic between Dario Fo and the two founders of the movements, Beppe Grillo and Gianroberto Casaleggio, is evident in the book "Il Grillo canta sempre al tramonto". Edited by Fo, the book is not a real dialogue among the authors, but, after a deep analysis, it is constructed as a theatrical play where the chapters are more similar to acts, the sub-chapters to scenes; there are also “stage directions” and theatre is more than a simple metaphor for the Italian crisis.
2013 •
Luciana Parisi: "We first of all need to understand whether micro-fascism is intended as a desire of repression, and thus of negativity, or in cybernetics terms of opposing order to entropy, or as a dissemination of entropy. One has to engage with the idea of entropy itself to understand this notion of micro-fascism. Let’s assume that entropy is to information as chaos is to order, or as death drive is to life or to the self-organizing ability of a body (whether social, biological, cultural). Let’s then frame the thermodynamic thesis that informs the idea of micro-fascism. From the standpoint of thermodynamics, micro-fascism is an insane distribution of the desire for destruction, rather than creation (considered positive by many). This gap between creation and destruction upon which the concept of micro-fascism you are referring to is built, is, at best, limiting and, applied to political movements, fails to see the trajectories of micro-fascism in terms of the tension between energy and information. Not in terms of the way, according to the mathematical theory of information, information overcomes noise (and the energetic tendency of a system to collapse), but rather in relation to emergence of new information dynamisms that ignore the perspective of a subject longing for its repression. Instead, micro-fascism could be conceived as the production of new dynamisms, almost counter-entropies, which do not coincide with organic energy. I would then commence by asking what kind of entropy are we talking about, and what can it tell us about political movements at a different level of analysis. Micro-fascism does not necessarily translate to a desire for repression understood in terms of death drive." (...) Luciana Parisi, Italian, lives and works in London. She is Senior Lecturer in Critical Theory at Goldsmiths College, University of London (UK) where she runs the PhD program at the Centre for Cultural Studies. Her research examines the links between science and philosophy, cybernetics and information, technology and policy in order to formulate a critique of capitalism and at the same time investigate the possibility of real change. During the nineties of the last century she has been working with the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit at Warwick (UK) and has written several essays in collaboration with Steve Goodman (known in the music world as dominus of dubstep as Kode9). In 2004 she published the book “Abstract Sex: Philosophy, Biotechnology and the Mutations of Desire” (Continuum, London, 2004), where she described the critical impasse between the notions of body, sexuality, “gender” and the current status of the studies of science and technology. Her latest work on architectural models is “Contagious Architecture. Computation, Aesthetics and Space” (MIT Press, USA, 2013). Tiziana Terranova, Italian, lives and works in Naples. She is a contemporary researcher, and lecturer of " Cultural Studies and Media ' and ' Cultural Theories and New Media" at the University of Naples 'L'Orientale'. After graduating from the Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures at the Department of American, Cultural and Linguistic Studies at University of Naples she continued her research on media, cultural studies and new technologies, driven by a passion for this area. The study of these issues took place in England where she achieved a master's degree in "Communications and Technology" at Brunel University. She also achieved the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Media and Communications at Goldsmiths' College in London. In the mid 90’s Tiziana Terranova dealt with technological subcultures, cyberpunk and published one of the first doctoral thesis on the internet newsgroups and the techno culture in California. Another important experience for her intellectual journey took place in London at the Department of Cultural Studies of the University of "East London" where she founded and directed along with Helene Kennedy one of the first courses in Multimedia, starting the new university course in "Media and New Media Studies”. Her current interests include digital culture and the phenomena that develop around it. Of international importance is her book “Culture Network” published in Italy in 2006 by Il Manifesto. Her last essay entitled 'Capitalism cognitive and neural life' was inserted in May 2013 e.Book issue called 'The state of technological mediation' by Giorgio Griziotti (Special Hypermedia - Alfabeta editions). Luciana Parisi and Tiziana Terranova's interview on digital populism and recent European political phenomena, held on 11 December 2013 with the author of Obsolete Capitalism and Rizomatika blog.
Glocalism
Culture and Politics in the Age of Globalization: Some Suggestions from Two Italian Philosophers2018 •
Over the past few decades, the global phenomenology of political power has changed. Unlike what happened in the past, increasingly the practical applications of scientific discoveries are no longer immediately or exclusively used by the legally formalized political power. They are consumed and disseminated throughout civil society escaping from the old logic of the legitimate power or judicial power and generating a new political power, which could be defined as “glocal”. All these new dynamics can be better understood through the lenses offered by past philosophical dialogues on the same topics and in this case we can enrich our perspective from a discussion, which was developed in mid-twentieth century Italy. In 1950, the formal establishment of the Société Européenne de Culture took place in Venice with the hope of building a bridge between West and East political Europe. Through constant reflection on the general development of European society, this cultural institution tried to focus on priorities regarding theory and practice, in order to foster cultural positions that could take ethical-political responsibilities regarding understanding, collaboration and peace. This commitment was theoretically founded on the concept of “politics of culture”, formulated by Umberto Campagnolo and expressed in a session of the General Assembly in November 1951 and later in January of 1952, Norberto Bobbio gave notice of it in the “Rivista di Filosofia” (“Journal of Philosophy”), sharing the principles expressed by Campagnolo. The theoretical dialogue between the two philosophers intensified at the beginning of the 60s, when it became clear that the common civil commitment sprang from a different conception of philosophy and politics.
The dissertation develops the concept of repurposing as a means for thinking with activists and the issues they confront. It moves alongside pirate television collective insu^tv as they draw on a variety of histories, traditions and technological resources for their practices. Repurposing functions on multiple levels and at multiple scales, from the recycling of materials and spaces to the harnessing and relaying of encounters and events within an ever-expanding field of social relations. When seen as a way of connecting activist groups and communities, the repurposing of media contributes to strengthening an often fragmented and conflicted activist field. Indeed, insu^tv’s use of information and technology brings to the fore the value of media activism for the creation of social assemblages in which the “media” literally mediates between individuals and among individuals and their environment, instituting and developing an ontogenetic relation (Simondon, 1989). Yet, rather than simply making sense of insu^tv’s practices, the concept of repurposing also provokes a discussion regarding the ethics of connection. For insu^tv, this connective ethics can be understood as a set of rules and principles that facilitate the evaluation of actions, communication, and thought according to an immanent mode of collective existence (Deleuze, 1988; Simondon, 1989). For the author, herself a member of insu^tv and an academic researcher, this immanent position helps challenge traditional models of knowing and envisioning social change and instead proposes alternatives that attend to the singularity and relation among new political movements, and to the political potential of research methods that focus on process and fold activism into academia. The methodology is inspired by the militant research methods of the Italian Autonomia movement (conricerca or inchiesta), as developed and performed by activists themselves. While attending to the complexity of social struggles, the concept of repurposing enables an approach to research and experimentation as modes of sociability, where these modes are themselves repurposed through an ethics of connection. This line informs the relation between ethics and subjectivation, as well as between ethics and micropolitics, facilitating the emergence of new modes of political action through the repurposing of the social field itself.
International Journal of Communication
Matrix Activism: Media, Neoliberalism and Social Action in ItalyUsing the case of the Rome-based media group ZaLab, this article examines the articulations that shape and define the multiple dynamics of connected activism in contemporary societies. The first section engages the existing literature on convergence, commodity activism, and connectivity as theoretical frameworks of my analysis of ZaLab. The second section provides some context on the Italian mainstream and activist mediascapes, both of which shape ZaLab’s media practices. The last section examines a few specific examples of ZaLab’s productions and the activist campaign created to promote them. I conclude with some reflections on the nature of contemporary media practices as part of what I call “matrix activism.”
Research Square (Research Square)
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Constraints in Implementation of HIV and AIDS Curriculum Integration in Primary Schools in Bungoma County, Kenya2016 •
Asian Journal of Probability and Statistics
Modelling the Effects of Mindfulness Based Stress on Breast Cancer Survival Rate among Women in Meru and Nyeri Counties, Kenya, Using Cox Proportional Hazard Model2022 •
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Irrational Beliefs and Symptoms of General Anxiety Disorder among the General Population in Debrezeit, Ethiopia2016 •
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Social Science Research Network
Issues in Insolvency of Enterprise Groups2019 •
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A survey of community knowledge and practices on malaria control with indoor residual spraying in Kazerun, south Iran2018 •