In Italy, the term precarizzazione (precarious‐ization) refers to the process of implementing neoliberal policies to transition toward a semipermanent and privatized labor regime but also to the normalization of psychic uncertainty and hypervigilance of worker‐citizens. In this article, I examine “precarious workers” and a psychological harassment called “mobbing,” specifically, and suggest that these practices of labor exclusion of a transitional work regime produce emergent subjectivities through an analytics of anticipation. I illustrate the social, political, and psychic effects of imagining neoliberalism, as Italians do in this context, not as complete but, rather, as a metadiscursive object of emotionally charged apprehension and anticipation.
Beginning in the mid-1990s and continuing through the 2000s, Italy’s population of semi-permanent or sub-employed workers doubled, while its safeguarded workforce was halved, a trend particularly salient in Northern Italy. In historical tandem with this immense socio-economic transformation, outstanding public attention, originating in the field of occupational psychology, has been focused on a form of workplace harassment called mobbing ( il mobbing ). Mobbing, I show, both as praxis and site of public discourse, articulates the inchoate threats and ravages of intra- and inter-class solidarities which have become the affective trademarks of post-Fordism. It is but one example of everyday labor practices which signal a far deeper proximity between the detached and atomized workers of a market-oriented labor regime and the Fordist ideals of material stability, valorized toil, and, crucially, affective ties. Italy’s working populations confront Fordist ruins not only as intangible and nostalgic remnants but as a labor force deprived of solidarity between workers even though workers’ affective investment in their labor has intensified. I interrogate how the eerie presence of capitalism’s affective past is reincarnated in mobbing discourse, redeployed to signal at once the solidarity-stripping capacity of post-Fordism and the affinity-affirming spirit of Fordism.
How does humor serve political leaders widely seen as inept? How does political satire shift when a country's own prime minister is both media mogul and object of ridicule? I examine humor of and about Italy's Silvio Berlusconi and look at the country's top news parody program, especially its mascot: a big, red puppet named Gabibbo, who is praised as a “civil defender.” I argue that Berlusconi's own humor forges ties to an Italian citizenry habituated in the 1980s to political spectacle—the carefully staged and sensational exhibitionism of national politics—and, subsequently, to the media saturation of late‐liberal politics. I show how political spectacle gave way to a cynicism capable of simultaneously propelling Berlusconi's peculiar popularity and transforming puppets into truth‐tellers.
In this article, I examine the codification of an Italian work‐related illness caused by mobbing, a type of psychological harassment that emerged at the moment neoliberal policies transformed Italy's historically protectionist labor market. I trace how the medicalization of mobbing has expanded workers’ access to compensation, resources, and discursive tools for criticizing neoliberal labor conditions, even as it has produced new structures of surveillance. I unravel the neoliberal politics of a state that protects workers’ health yet governs worker–citizens through an apparatus of medical experts. I find that workers’ labor problems are experienced and managed as bodily problems in ways important to remaking Italian citizenship. [neoliberalism, state, labor, biopolitics, citizenship, bodies, Italy]
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.