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ABSTRACT
Recent uses of performativity have been engaged with bridging the gap between the economy and politics. The concept of performation has for instance been used to enable discursive and material assemblages that challenge this dichotomy, with the general aim of transforming the economy. While the overall intent of this article is to contribute to this bridging, its direction of travel is the opposite: to bring the economy into politics. Specifically, it situates the notion of performativity within studies on grassroots politics in a material sense. First, it discusses some of the leading scholarship on grassroots movements, focusing on their take on the economy. It moves on to suggest that some of the problems that are identified can be addressed using performativity theory, the benefits of which are discussed in the second part. Finally, it empirically illustrates the theoretical discussion by analysing the performativity of the discourses, things and people that are jointly fighting the Mafia today. The article places social movement studies in dialogue with scholarship which is preoccupied with the economic-political cleft, in order to encourage thinking of the economy as a space for political possibility and social struggle, rather than seeing it as a place of capitalocentrism, structural exploitation and inescapability.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Hermann Ruiz, Isaac Lyne, Katherine Gibson and Stephen Healey for their insightful comments on a previous version of this article. I would also like to thank the Institute for Culture and Society, University of Western Sydney, for providing a stimulating and kind workspace. I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their intelligent feedback, as well as Colm Power, Tom Hoctor and William Frost for their stylistic suggestions.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. The direct quotations that follow come from my ongoing fieldwork in Sicily, Apulia, Campania and Emilia Romagna (Italy). I have been using participant observation methods and recorded several discussions between anti-mafia activists, as well as with myself, in the contexts of libera, addio pizzo and 10 anti-mafia social cooperatives. The translations are my own and the names are pseudonyms.
2. The 5 Star Movement is an anti-establishment party founded in 2009 by comedian Beppe Grillo.
3. As I am not endowed with Derridian creativity, throughout the paper I partially enter this discursive split (politics-economy) with my own utterance. In order to criticise language exercising, one has to enter the discourse that is being exercised.
4. A political example of this could be the erection of the Hungarian border barrier which is the material counterpart of the discursive securitisation of the refugee crisis. The construction of the wall is the performation of the nation-State, which materially separates and protects ‘us’ from ‘them’.
5. Here, I refer to the broader study of non-institutional politics and not only the social movement tradition specifically.
6. In 2010, Anonymous DDoS-attacked several anti-piracy groups as a form of retaliation for trying to shut down Pirate Bay and similar sites.
7. North American constructivist approaches on the other hand seem to be more of a reaction to institutional approaches, and thus often look at movements that are not directed at institutions but that challenge symbols, identities and cultural norms (Goodwin & Jasper Citation2004). Again there is a dichotomy similar to the politics-economy one: social movements are either looked at as prosthetic to State politics or as outside State politics.
8. See Borch (Citation2012) for a rigorous historical analysis.
9. Affittanze collettive
10. For a comparison of today’s cooperatives with those of the 1900s see Jerne (Citation2015).
11. Zen is a particularly difficult neighbourhood in the North of Palermo. The area has experienced high crime rates and mafia infiltrations.
12. Giovanni Falcone is a judge who was murdered in 1992 because of his effective work in incarcerating Cosa Nostra affiliates.
13. The term prefigurative politics is most commonly used to denote movements whose practices are a reproduction of their overall world views on a smaller scale. For an in depth account of its origins and current uses see Yates (Citation2015b).
14. An example of the latter is the use of the #illridewithyou hashtag following the Martin Place siege in Sydney in 2014. Here the islamophobic discourse propagated by the media was shifted directly through the same device (Twitter) into a large solidarity network that offered to accompany or provide transportation to Muslims who were frightened of being seen in public wearing religious clothing. The power of the media industry was directly challenged by the power of online-crowds in setting the tones of the discourse through a particular set of practices.
15. Addio Pizzo is an association of consumers and entrepreneurs that refuse to pay protection money.