Complicity, Dissent and the Work of Confession in Neoliberal Italy

ABSTRACT

Italian leftists in the twenty-first century often remark that the Left is dead, and problematise their own complicity with Neoliberal politics and its influence on contemporary culture and society. Leftist anxieties about the seeming impossibility of dissent in contemporary Italy surface in the narrative convention of confession in Roberto Andò’s film Le confessioni, Christian Ceresoli’s dramatic monologue La Merda and Walter Siti’s novel Resistere non serve a niente. The unique form of confession operative in these works is distinct from its Catholic iteration, as well as that of its secular counterpart, the psychotherapeutic ‘confession.’ It constitutes a narrativizing of the self in which the life story appropriates touchstones of Neoliberal market logics, and posits the subject as an entrepreneur. The article argues that confession is a type of work, what Michael Hardt calls affective labour, that positions these works’ protagonists as complicit with these Neoliberal logics.

KEYWORDS:

• Italian cinema
• Italian literature
• leftist politics
• Walter Siti
• Cristian Ceresoli
• Roberto Andò

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ Perry Anderson, ‘An Invertebrate Left’ in London Review of Books, 31:5 (12 March 2009), p. 15.

² For such characterisations of 20^th century leftism in Italy, see Perry Anderson, ‘An Invertebrate Left’; Michael Hardt and Paolo Virno, Radical Thought in Italy: a Potential Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996); David Ward, ‘Intellectuals, Culture and Power in Modern Italy’, in The Cambridge Companion to Modern Italian Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 81–96. It is important to note that while these authors recognize the power of leftism in 20^th century Italy, they also recognize its failures.

³ For theorisations of life under late capitalism, see, for example, Ida Dominijanni’s Il trucco: sessualità e biopolitica nella fine di Berlusconi (Roma: Ediesse, 2014); Maurizio Lazzarato, Signs and Machines: Capitalism and the Production of Subjectivity (Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2014); Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, Precarious Rhapsody. Semiocapitalism and the Pathologies of the Post-Alpha Generation (London: Autonomedia, 2009).

⁴ In a recent interview, Massimo Cacciari suggested: ‘Non c’è più spazio per la sinistra tradizionale, che si ricicli o meno.’ Francesca Paci, ‘Cacciari: La sinistra in Europa è morta per ragioni strutturali’, Nuova Atlantide, 11 March 2017, https://www.nuovatlantide.org/cacciari-la-sinistra-morta-europa-ragioni-strutturali/ [accessed 11 September 2017].

⁵ Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2015), p. 17.

⁶ Asor Rosa critiques recent studies of populism because, to his eyes, they avail themselves of an idea of the ‘people’ that is not operative (it is unclear, however, if he is au courrant with studies of populism after Laclau). ‘La massa’, Asor Rosa observes, ‘sta a significare quella realtà umano-sociale in cui caratteri e funzioni delle principali forme associative e identitarie sono sempre meno visibili e sempre meno rilevanti (dai sindacati ai partiti): mentre prevale una caratterizzazione individuale in senso stretto, di singolo individuo accanto a singolo individuo.’ Alberto Asor Rosa, ‘Il popolo si è dissolto nella massa’, in La Repubblica, 6 April 2018.

⁷ See Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism (Duke University Press, 2011) for an account of the pernicious effects of such a ‘good life’ fantasy in late capitalism.

⁸ My account of confession narratives in neoliberal Italy is thus quite different from what American Studies scholar Leigh Gilmore calls ‘neoconfessional’, those narratives that prioritise the ‘national fantasy of individualism’ as they foreground the individual’s painful journey. Failing to critique or engage in deep reading practices that attend to how hurt and trauma can often be produced by historical and social condition, the neoconfessional, for Gilmore, ‘promotes an increasingly non-specific and generic self” and provides ‘an endlessly renewable narrative template’: Leigh Gilmore, ‘American Neoconfessional: Memoir, Self-Help, and Redemption on Oprah’s Couch’, Biography, 33 (2010), 657–79 (p. 658). In my argument, it is the finite and unique nature of a life narrative – far from a generic or infinitely renewable resource – that fuels the territorializing impulse animating neoliberal imaginaries.

⁹ My account of confession builds on Michel Foucault’s conception of confession as a discursive practice that strengthens the operations of modern power. See his History of Sexuality (New York: Random House, 1984); Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1974–1975 (Picador, 2007); and, for an in-depth explication of the conception across the thinker’s oeuvre, Dave Tell’s ‘Rhetoric and Power: an Inquiry into Foucault’s Critique of Confession’, Philosophy and Rhetoric, 43:2 (2010), 95–117.

¹⁰ ‘Paul Ginsborg: Renzi e Berlusconi uniti dal neoliberismo’, Nuova Atlantide, 30 May 2017, https://www.nuovatlantide.org/paul-ginsborg-renzi-berlusconi-uniti-dal-neoliberismo/ [accessed 8 June 2018].

¹¹ Dominijanni writes, ‘mi sono accorta con inquietudine di quanto l’estetica berlusconiana si sia insinuata anche nel linguaggio di chi lo ha sempre contestato, trascinandoci tutti in una rincorsa degli effetti speciali che produce a getto continuo titoli sparati, lead brillanti, ironie ammiccanti, descrizioni barocche, deprecazioni altisonanti’, Ida Dominijanni, Il trucco: sessualità e biopolitica nella fine di Berlusconi (Roma: Ediesse, 2014), p. 13.

¹² For an account of neoliberal instrumentalisation of girlhood on Berlusconi’s television, see Elisa Cutter, ‘Non è la RAI: on the Becoming-Girl of Late Capitalism’, Gender/Sexuality/Italy 4 (2017), http://www.gendersexualityitaly.com/5-non-e-la-rai-or-on-the-becoming-girl-of-late-capitalism [accessed 8 June 2018].

¹³ William Davies, ‘The New Neoliberalism’, New Left Review 101 (2016), 121–34 (p. 127).

¹⁴ For Foucault’s initial definition of governmentality, see his 1977–1978 lectures compiled in Security, Territory, Population. Lectures at the Collège de France (New York: Picador, 2007). He broadens his definition of the term governmentality in his 1980 ‘On the Government of the Living’ lectures: ‘this notion being understood in the broad sense of procedures for directing human conduct. Government of children, government of souls and consciences, government of a household, of a state, or of oneself’: Michel Foucault, The Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, ed. by Paul Rabinow and James Faubion, Vol. 1 (New York: New Press, 1997), p. 81. Sokhi-Bulley’s coining of ‘governmentable’ in her reading of Foucault emerges from her exploration of the verb to govern in French: ‘gouverner covers a range of different meanings; it can have a material and physical meaning of “to direct or move forward,” or “to provide support for”. It can have a moral meaning of “to conduct someone” in a spiritual sense or, tangentially, to “impose a regimen” (on a patient, perhaps) or to be in a relationship of command and control’: Bal Sohki-Bulley, ‘Governmentality: Notes on the Thought of Michel Foucault’, in Critical Legal Thinking, http://criticallegalthinking.com/2014/12/02/governmentality-notes-thought-michel-foucault/ [accessed 11 September 2017].

¹⁵ Hardt writes that affective labour ‘is immaterial, even if it is corporeal and affective, in the sense that its products are intangible: a feeling of ease, well-being, satisfaction, excitement, passion – even a sense of connectedness or community…what is essential to it, its in-person aspect, is really the creation and manipulation of affects.’ M. Hardt ‘Affective Labor’, boundary 2, 26 (Summer 1999), 89–100 (p. 96).

¹⁶ Berlant, p. 2.

¹⁷ Here Dominijanni’s particular reading of the way that neoliberalism redefines the subject through the idea of ‘human capital’ is important; she notes that the individual is formed in the crucible of competition, entrepreneurship and self-discipline: p. 46–47.

¹⁸ Walter Siti, Resistere non serve a niente (Milan: Rizzoli, 2012), p. 242.

¹⁹ Le confessioni, dir. by Roberto Andò (Bi Bi Films, 2016).

²⁰ Catherine O’ Rawe, ‘Brothers in Arms: Middlebrow Impegno and Homosocial Relations in the Cinema of Petraglia and Rulli’ in Intellectual Communities and Partnerships in Italy and Europe, ed. by Danielle Hipkins (Peter Lang, 2012), pp. 149–67 (p. 155).

²¹ See Lucia Grillo’s interview with Andò: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fXQ_k8wKXA4&list=PL-HcDuhvxl1T1xMQKPN5-3b6d0BMK3xkf [accessed 8 June 2018].

²² Murray Smith, Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion and the Cinema (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995).

²³ Dom Holdaway claims that ‘the urgency for the political text emerges repeatedly as a result of a certain pleasure to be taken in participating in the broad political discourse’, ‘The Pleasure of Political Readings: Participation and the Anti-Mafia Film’, The Italianist, 33:2, 279–84 (p. 280). ‘This pleasure’, Holdaway continues, ‘emerges at the point of combination of a series of emotional reactions within the film’ (p. 281).

²⁴ To make this argument, Muehlebach draws on Carl Schmitt’s theory of hegemony elaborated in the essay ‘Roman Catholicism and Political Form’: ‘Schmitt develops a theory of hegemony that, much like Gramsci’s, makes it possible for seemingly incommensurable cultural materials to be thought of as tied together in one formation, or what he calls a complexio oppositorum (complex of opposites). For [here she quotes Schmitt] “imperialism must be a complexio oppositorum or else it is not true imperialism.” According to Schmitt, the paradigmatic imperial force is Catholicism in its miraculous elasticity and ambiguity, its capacity to enter into coalitions with the most antithetical political and social forms’. Andrea Muehlebach, ‘Complexio Oppositorum: Notes on the Left in Neoliberal Italy’, Public Culture 21:3, p. 498. Carl Schmitt, Römischer Katholizismus und politische Form (Roman Catholicism and Political Form) (Stuttgart: Klett/Cotta, 1923), p. 8–11.

²⁵ Her vision of fame recalls veline at Berlusconi’s Sardinian villa and being recognised in even the most banal moments of daily life: ‘E io divento alta e non c’è più nessun problema, ma soltanto dei ministri che mi portano in vacanza e che mi baciano la schiena e che mi tengono sulle ginocchia come faceva il mio papà, e se poi metti un pomeriggio sono in coda, in autostrada, e quelli che stanno nell’auto di fianco mi riconoscono, e mi battono sui vetri, e mi dicono ma guarda ma tu non sei quella là…’ Cristian Ceresoli, La Merda (Rome: Gallucci, 2017), p. 13.

²⁶ Danielle Hipkins, ‘“Whore-ocracy”: Show Girls, the Beauty Trade-Off and Mainstream Oppositional Discourse in Contemporary Italy’, Italian Studies, 66:3 (November 2011), 413–30 (p. 414).

²⁷ See the fourth thesis of Guy Debord’s Society of Spectacle: ‘The spectacle is not a collection of images but a social relation between people mediated by images’. G. Debord, Society of Spectacle (Detroit: Black and Red, 1970), p. 10.

²⁸ Hipkins, p. 430.

²⁹ Quoted in Ceresoli, pp. 33–78.

³⁰ Here I have in mind Carolee Schneeman’s 1975 piece Interior Scroll or Marina Abramović’s 1975 Balkan Baroque as well as Ann Liv Young’s Snow White (2012).

³¹ Gianluigi Simonetti, ‘La letteratura e il male. Resistere Non Serve a Niente di Walter Siti’, Allegoria, 65–66 (2012), p. 180. Simonetti’s reading of Resistere situates it in relation to two earlier Siti novels, Scuola di nudo and Troppi Paradisi, suggesting that Resistere negotiates questions of evil, the viability of political models, and eros that these prior novels explored. Simonetti also emphasises Siti’s long-standing habit of inserting himself into the novel through a confessional framework in order to talk about his own sexuality.

³² ‘… lo confesso, sono un feroce bankster.’ Walter Siti, Resistere non serve a niente (Milan: Rizzoli, 2012), p. 26.

³³ Simonetti observes that this confessional structure that had long inflected Siti’s novels is abruptly modified in Resistere: ‘il racconto di sé in prima persona – ossia lo schema confessionale che sosteneva la lunga “autobiografia di fatti non accaduti” messa a punto da Scuola a nudo a Troppi paradisi, e riaffiorante a tratti nel Contagio e nell’Autopsia. Il resto di Resistere non serve a niente, cioè il grosso del libro, sarà infatti dedicato al racconto della vita di un altro’, p. 179.

³⁴ Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rousseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust (New Haven: Yale University Press), p. 278–302.

³⁵ Simonetti, ‘La letteratura e il male’, p. 181.

³⁶ Simonetti, p. 179. The passage he refers to is the following: ‘La condanna di Antonio Franchini (l’editore della Mondadori) a proposito del mio ultimo’, Walter addresses the reader at the beginning of the first chapter, ‘era stata esplicita, lapidaria nella sua rozzezza: “sei tornado a scrivere un libro per froci”’, Siti, p. 19.

³⁷ Walter explains, ‘Ho accettato perché alla fine tutto si è risolto in un patto: lui mi fa questo favore e io in cambio scriverò un libro sulla sua vita (“devi dirmi tu chi sono”)’: p. 49.

³⁸ Palumbo Mosca explains how ‘io sociologico’ comes to speak for a larger collectivity in Siti’s fiction: ‘Poco importa che gli eventi raccontati coincidano o meno con quelli effettivamente vissuti, poiché l’io dell’autore deve sempre raggiungere la generalità del “noi”, deve diventare, insomma, un “io sociologico”’: Raffaello Palumbo Mosca, L’invenzione del vero. Romanzi ibridi e discorso etico nell’Italia contemporanea (Rome: Gaffi Editore, 2014), p. 154.

³⁹ Walter Siti, ‘Siete voi che non vedete’, Nazione Indiana, 17 September 2006. https://www.nazioneindiana.com/2006/09/17/siete-voi-che-non-vedete/ [accessed 8 June 2018].

⁴⁰ Siti, ibid.

⁴¹ Siti, ibid.

⁴² Walter Siti, ‘Il romanzo sotto accusa’, in Il romanzo I. La cultura del romanzo, ed. Franco Moretti (Turin: Einaudi, 2001), p. 155.

⁴³ For a genealogy of impegno, see Pierpaolo Antonello and Florian Mussgnug, Postmodern Impegno: Ethics and Commitment in Contemporary Italian Culture, (Bern: Peter Lang, 2009), which I address in more detail in the conclusion to this essay.

⁴⁴ Amazon.com, Customer Reviews of Resistere non serve a niente https://www.amazon.it/Resistere-serve-niente-Walter-Siti/dp/8817058467/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1505158008&sr=8-1&keywords=resistere+non+serve+a+niente [Accessed 11 September 2017].

⁴⁵ Loredana di Martino and Pasquale Verdicchio, ed., Encounters with the Real in Contemporary Italian Literature and Cinema (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2017), p. vii.

⁴⁶ ‘Io ho sempre avuto un rapporto gravoso col mio corpo… difficile per non dire tragico… soprattutto da giovane’, p. 240.

⁴⁷ Rebecca Schneider, The Explicit Body in Performance (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 6.

⁴⁸ Hipkins attends to how ‘oppositional responses to “velinismo,”’ extend ‘long-standing stereotypes about the “velina”, and a whole category of “other women”, who wear too much make-up, have cosmetic surgery, and sell their bodies in one way or another’, p. 428. She goes on to ask ‘where are the “veline” in this debate (other than in the right-wing press)?’ (p. 429), and ultimately suggests that there is ‘a potential within Italy for re-engagement with the agency and the pleasures of both the female spectator and the “velina” or prostitute figure herself, repeatedly tramped upon in these debates in much Italian oppositional discourse, and urgently demanding address’, p. 430.

⁴⁹ Adriana Cavarero, For More Than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005), p. 207–08.

⁵⁰ Alan O’Leary, ‘Marco Tullio Giordana, or the Persistence of Impegno’ in Antonello and Mussgnug, Postmodern Impegno, p. 213–15.

⁵¹ Catherine O’Rawe, ‘The Italian Spectator and Her Critics’, The Italianist 30:2 (2010), p. 282–86 (p. 283).

⁵² See David Ward’s account of the Togliatti’s attack of Vittorini and his cultural review Il politecnico. Ward observes, ‘Vittorini aimed to give culture real power in the world; yet, at the same time, this necessitated some accommodation with politics and political parties. It was the failure to find a middle way between intellectual freedom and party discipline that proved to be the review’s undoing. Vittorini’s insistence that culture be autonomous complicated his allegiance to the PCI, provoking the anger of the party leader Palmiro Togliati […] who had originally welcomed Il politecnico. For Toglatti, in particular, the review had promised to be a useful tool in the construction of the PCI’s cultural hegemony – Gramsci’s precondition for assuming the leadership of society’ (p. 89–90).