IN THE CONJUNCTURE

Source: Cultural Critique, Vol. 87 (Spring 2014), pp. 163-165

Published by: University of Minnesota Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/culturalcritique.87.2014.0163
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In the Conjuncture

Conjuncture: from the Latin conjungere (to bind together, to connect, to

join). A combination of circumstances, a convergence of events, an inter-
section 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 Cri-
tique, consisting of short pieces meant at once as soundings, interven-
tions, 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 sec-
tion 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 sec-
tion, 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 Stud-
ies 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 Wrst
“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 move-
ment is alive and well and is having a profound effect on the Indian

Cultural Critique 87—Spring 2014—Copyright 2014 Regents of the University of Minnesota

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164 I n t h e C o n j u n c t ure

political system, if one is to judge, for example, from the recent elec-
toral 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 Legisla-
tive Assembly. And two years later, “In the Conjuncture” zeroes in on
the spectacular rise and success of another antipolitical political popu-
list 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 Wrst 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 contempo-
rary historical conjuncture. Far from suggesting that all these various
populist movements are the same or even similar, and far from sug-
gesting that that most nebulous and most debated of political catego-
ries 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 deWnite symp-
tom 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 to-
gether Franco Berardi (aka Bifo), Ida Dominijanni, Carlo Galli, and
Giuliano Santoro to comment on the emergence of the Five Star Move-
ment in a country whose political history has been marked indelibly
by several very powerful populist movements practically from its incep-
tion 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 Wnancial
crisis and the sexual politics of neoliberalism—in which to situate the
Five Star Movement, so as then to deploy her critical assessment of

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 A Spect er Is Haun tin g the Wor ld 165

this movement as a litmus test for some of the hypotheses articulated

by Ernesto Laclau in his On Populist Reason; Berardi moves instead across
a longue durée of Italian as well as of European history, politics, and
culture, as he places his own critical assessment of the Five Star Move-
ment in the wake of a twentieth century dominated principally by two
rather similar political Wgures—namely, Benito Mussolini and Silvio
Berlusconi—whose cultural roots dig deep in the complex legacies of
the Counter Reformation and of the Baroque; Santoro turns more decid-
edly back to the future by following and elaborating some of J. G. Bal-
lard’s most dystopian political visions and by highlighting the uncanny
similarities between the Five Star Movement and Berlusconi’s own
brand of populism, both of which are found to derive their appeal and
strength from a certain deployment of the media within the logic of
the society of the spectacle; while Galli—who wrote his essay in 2012
and hence before the electoral triumphs of the Five Star Movement—
argues for an understanding of “indignation” (especially indignation
in the face of government corruption) as a political concept in its own
right that indexes critical fault lines in the foundations of the social
contract and warns, rather prophetically, that if not engaged and mobi-
lized by the Left, the widespread popular indignation against corrup-
tion in Italy today may well translate into votes for the Five Star
Movement. Galli’s essay is the only one to have been written in 2012,
while the other three essays were all written after the February 2013
elections, in the spring and summer of 2013.

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