Andrea Muehlebach

The Body of Solidarity: Heritage, Memory, and Materiality in Post-Industrial Italy

This paper explores the rise of “industrial heritage” and the forms of memorialization proliferating around it. The site is Sesto San Giovanni, Italys “City of Factories,” which was also a bastion of communist mobilization and which is now bidding to be recognized on UNESCOs world heritage list. Sestos bid is an attempt not just to recuperate and reinvigorate the landscape of Sestos ruined factories and its massive, crumbling machinery, but also to capture and render visible and graspable the traces of what this built environment expressed and left behind—the sentiment of solidarity. I thus argue for an understanding of solidarity not just as an emotion or value, but as a structure of feeling mediated by specific material and corporeal forms, in bodies collectively inhabiting a built environment and rhythmically moving within and out of infrastructures and lived landscapes. Such a materialist conception of solidarity must account for bodies and embodiment, rhythm and refrain, as well as for how certain material forms allow for the generation of proximities, coordination, and likeness across difference. It means thinking of solidarity as an arrangement and assembly of bodies in time and space, and of these bodies and their movement as generative of political feeling and action. Based on ethnographic and archival research in Sesto San Giovanni between 2011 and 2013, I tell the story of the afterlife of a twentieth-century sentiment and its fate in an era that has rendered solidarity precarious.

Commonwealth: On democracy and dispossession in Italy

ABSTRACT This article explores the trajectory of the water movement in Italy to argue that the process of accumulation by dispossession as it is unfolding in Europe is necessarily accompanied by the evacuation of democracy as well. I suggest that Italians have been dispossessed of a thing (the right to public water) and a capacity (to efficacious democratic action). But what they cannot be dispossessed of is the sensorium and practical activity of democratic assembly; of being and having laboured together as a social body in all of its corporeal materiality and resistant subjectivity. Having made democracy their own through years of assembly and collective law-making that sought to imagine a world outside of the ‘Republic of Property’, the Italians I met reminisced not only about water but also about this practical process as a kind of inalienable commonwealth. Today, they face the state’s refusal to recognize their claims to democracy and its willingness to overrun popular will, even as their democratic process has left its traces.

The price of austerity: Vital politics and the struggle for public water in southern Italy

This article approaches austerity from the vantage point of its alter ego, financialization, in so far as the radical depletion of public funds creates the conditions for private investment in public goods – including water. It tracks the intense volatilities generated out of the financialization of water by exploring the Italian water movement’s campaign of ‘civil obedience’ – an attempt on the part of citizens to stabilize and thus render just the volatile price of a vital good. It argues that these ‘vital politics’ of citizen price-setting are a form of valuation emerging from below, an anti-financialization emerging in our era of predatory finance.