In the Conjuncture

Conjuncture: from the Latin conjungere (to bind together, to connect, to join). A combination of circumstances, a convergence of events, an intersection of contingencies and necessities, a complex, overdetermined state of affairs—usually producing a crisis, leading to a breaking point, driving to a historic crossroads . . .

“In the Conjuncture” is a new thematic section of Cultural Critique, consisting of short pieces meant at once as soundings, interventions, and provocations regarding a cultural and political phenomenon of urgent and topical interest. Straddling the seldom-crossed border between critical-theoretical scholarship and op-ed journalism, this section will focus, each time, on a singular historical conjuncture, whose salient features may resonate with other situations elsewhere, and whose aftershocks may be felt rippling across the global terrain. In this section, we invite public intellectuals to write in the conjuncture.

The editors welcome proposals for this thematic section, which should be addressed to Cultural Critique, Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature, 235 Nicholson Hall, 216 Pillsbury Drive S.E., University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455, U.S.A., or via email to cultcrit@umn.edu.

A SPECTER IS HAUNTING THE WORLD—THE SPECTER OF POPULISM: THE ITALIAN CASE

Two years ago, in the spring 2012 issue of Cultural Critique, the first “In the Conjuncture” section of the journal focused on the remarkable emergence and development of an antipolitical political phenomenon, namely, the populist movement against government corruption sparked and spearheaded by Anna Hazare in India. Two years later, this movement is alive and well and is having a profound effect on the Indian political system, if one is to judge, for example, from the recent electoral success of the Aam Aadmi (Common Man) Party—a party that originated within the Anna Hazare movement, even as it broke from Hazare himself—in the December 2013 elections for the Delhi Legislative Assembly. And two years later, “In the Conjuncture” zeroes in on the spectacular rise and success of another antipolitical political populist movement whose primary call to arms has been a crusade against government corruption, namely, the Movimento 5 Stelle (Five Star Movement) in Italy, which won approximately a quarter of the Italian electorate in the national elections of February 2013.

We did not plan it this way. And yet we do not believe this to be a complete coincidence. Rather, it is the appearance of a vast number of highly diverse populist movements worldwide during the first decade of the new millennium—ranging from the left-wing populisms of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and of Rafael Correa in Ecuador to the right-wing populisms of Geert Wilders’s Partij voor Vrijheid (Party for Freedom) in the Netherlands and of the Tea Party in the United States—that may deserve to be called the noncoincidental coincidence of the contemporary historical conjuncture. Far from suggesting that all these various populist movements are the same or even similar, and far from suggesting that that most nebulous and most debated of political categories that is “populism” may be the best category to describe all or most or any of them, we do invite our readers nonetheless to consider the possibility that all these movements may constitute a definite symptom of the increasing obsolescence and even metastasis of modern political institutions (and especially of the institutions of parliamentary democracy) in the face of the current and ongoing phenomena that for lack of a better term we still name “globalization.”

In this issue of Cultural Critique, “In the Conjuncture” brings together Franco Berardi (aka Bifo), Ida Dominijanni, Carlo Galli, and Giuliano Santoro to comment on the emergence of the Five Star Movement in a country whose political history has been marked indelibly by several very powerful populist movements practically from its inception and especially from World War I onward. In their short essays, Dominijanni provides us with a detailed and clarifying map of the present political context—including the current and ongoing financial crisis and the sexual politics of neoliberalism—in which to situate the Five Star Movement, so as then to deploy her critical assessment of this movement as a litmus test for some of the hypotheses articulated by Ernesto...