Marco Briziarelli

We Want Your Success! Hegemony, Materiality, and Latino in America

In this article we offer a detailed examination of CNNs documentary Latino in America and of the ways in which a particular group of viewers responded to it. Our goal is to show how we can explore the nature of hegemonic processes in a way that more fully incorporates the role of material reality in the reproduction of a particular social order. Thus, our analysis will shed light on how the material conditions of a specific segment of the Latino population interact with the dominant representations of this group in ways that need further exploration. As this analysis shows, a closer look at this interaction reveals that the embracement—or not—of the ideological messages embedded in a particular text is not only based on the rhetorical aspects of these messages, but also on the extent to which their implications are in consonance with the material needs, wants, and priorities of those interpellated by it.

Social drama in the academic-media nexus: Journalism’s strategic response to deviant ideas:

This article applies ‘social drama’ – adapted from the anthropology of Victor Turner – to portray a performance of media ritual in control of critical academic discourse. Insights from newspaper coverage of a controversy surrounding Ward Churchill allow us to trace theoretical connections between strategic ritual at the occupational level and media ritual in cultural practice. We observe a fractal-like structure, such that ritualistic punishment of deviant ideas as a cultural response is encoded in textual production. We discuss implications of social drama as media ritual for the prowess of US journalism in patrolling boundaries of acceptable ideas in the academic-media nexus.

Neoliberalism as a state-centric class project: The Italian case

This essay sheds light on the neoliberal aspects of the Italian political-economic system exemplified in the relationship between capital, state and media. The main argument is that the specific marriage between neoliberalism and neocorporatism that characterizes Italy reveals a distinctive characteristic of neoliberalism: a class project relying heavily on the state. As Polanyi has suggested through the concept of ‘embeddedness’, capitalism has consistently developed through the double movement of preaching the independence of the free market from the state and requiring the states protectionist interventions. After describing this state-centric framework to interpret neoliberalism, in the second part of the paper, I consider the political-economic history of Italys recent decades, paying particular attention to the media system. I will examine the ‘communicative performance’ of neoliberalism in Berlusconis discourses and concrete political decisions taken in the name of neoliberalism. The articulated relationship between media and politics reveals the continuous attempts by the advocates of neoliberalism to seize the state, not to reduce its intervention but in fact to manipulate the market.

Introduction: Wind of Change: Podemos, Its Dreams and Its Politics

This chapter provides an introduction for the volume. We do that by framing the Spanish political group Podemos as both a product and an agent of a more general political cycle, thus opening up to a perspective that takes into account its historical specificity as well as suggesting the need for a comparative analysis with similar experiences. Accordingly, we first offer a brief account of Podemos’ genealogy and the political context in which emerges and operates. Second, drawing on Tarrow’s ‘cycle of protest,’ we understand Podemos’ development in two phases, the moment of ‘madness’ and the moment of ‘institutionalization.’ Third, we consider Podemos’ ideological positioning vis-a-vis several thinkers, such as Gramsci, Laclau, and Mouffe. Fourth, we contextualize Podemos in the wide-ranging international dynamics of left-wing populism. Finally, in the last section we discuss the structure and content of the book.

To “Feel” and to “Understand” Political Struggle The National-Popular Rhetoric of Podemos

While communication scholars who have invoked the Gramscian concept of hegemony have approached it primarily as a designation for cultural stability and domination, there have been fewer calls for its closer consideration in relation to human agency in the process of social change. Receptive of these calls, in this article, I develop an alternative to the dominant reading of the concept to show its productiveness in the analysis of a political group’s rhetorical situation. I claim that such a conceptualization advances the discussion toward a dimension of rhetorical intervention that passes from an oppressive to an emancipatory understanding of hegemony. I take as my case study the national-popular rhetoric of Podemos, a recently formed political party in Spain, which, in the context of the recent economic crisis, is building hegemony by successfully synthesizing public sentiments and intellectual involvement against austerity policies.

Left-Wing Populism and the Assault on the Establishment

The new political political cycle operates beyond Spanish boundaries. In fact, the emergence and rapid electoral growth of Podemos as the political party has been accompanied by other political experiences that share some similarities with the Spanish case: the development of left-wing populist parties, the redefinition of the political centre, together with another aspect not so present in Spain, namely the existence of radical right-wing parties.

Spatial politics in the digital realm: the logistics/precarity dialectics and Deliveroo’s tertiary space struggles

ABSTRACT This paper uses the case of mobilization of delivery workers from digital platform Deliveroo in order to illustrate the production of space of resistance, which develops as a result of the tension of two emerging factors shaping the digital labour realm: logistics and precarity. On the one hand, I consider how logistics in the digital capitalist context produce precarious workers whose ICT-driven connectivity and flexibility responds to the logistical imperatives of effective commodities circulation. On the other hand, taking advantage of the tech-savvy precarious position they were hired for, Deliveroo workers display the capability to strategically cut across “abstract” and “differential” space, and therefore re-territorialize a third space dimension where digital labour can organize and antagonize digital capitalism.

The Spectacle 2.0

Spectacle 2.0 recasts Debords theory of spectacle within the frame of 21st century digital capitalism. It offers a reassessment of Debord’s original notion of Spectacle from the late 1960s, of its posterior revisitation in the 1990s, and it presents a reinterpretation of the concept within the scenario of contemporary informational capitalism and more specifically of digital and media labour. It is argued that the Spectacle 2.0 form operates as the interactive network that links through one singular (but contradictory) language and various imaginaries, uniting diverse productive contexts such as logistics, finance, new media and urbanism. Spectacle 2.0 thus colonizes most spheres of social life by processes of commodification, exploitation and reification. Diverse contributors consider the topic within the book’s two main sections: Part I conceptualizes and historicizes the Spectacle in the context of informational capitalism; contributions in Part II offer empirical cases that historicise the Spectacle in relation to the present (and recent past) showing how a Spectacle 2.0 approach can illuminate and deconstruct specific aspects of contemporary social reality. All contributions included in this book rework the category of the Spectacle to present a stimulating compendium of theoretical critical literature in the fields of media and labour studies. In the era of the gig-economy, highly mediated content and President Trump, Debord’s concept is arguably more relevant than ever.

Spectacular Precarity the Condition of Knowledge Workers in the Context of Informational Capitalism

The goal of this paper is to revisit the media theory-informed framework originally advanced by Debord’s Society of the Spectacle in order to acknowledge the changes implied by the shift to a post-fordist information and knowledge driven capitalism. We use the Debordian theory as a lens through which we critically explore both the subjective and objective conditions of precarious labor. More specifically, we will make reference to the concrete setting of informational/knowledge labor in Turin by reporting excerpts of interviews with professionals and their precarious conditions. That will provide an empirical engagement with the subjectivities inhabiting what we define as the Spectacle of precarization, a condition of labor mediated by current information and communication technologies that describes precarity as being characterized by the tensions between autonomy and exploitation, informality and stable structures of value creation. We claim that the notion of Spectacle contributes to explain how informational capitalism produces precarity by creating both a stable system of representation for collectively shared meanings and practices of knowledge working, at the same time, producing a scenario that systematically places its actors in a dependable condition of impermanence.

Mediating Social Media's Ambivalences in the Context of Informational Capitalism

This essay explores the dialectics of media, by considering the socially reproductive and transformative function of social media from a political economic perspective. The authors claim that while media have consistently generated aspirations and fear of social change, their powerful capability of shaping societies depend on the historically specific social relations in which media operate. They engage such an argument by examining how the productive relations that support user generated content practices such as the ones of Facebook users affect social media in their capability to reproduce and transform existing social contexts. In the end, the authors maintain that the most prominent mediation of social media consists of the ambivalent nature of current capitalist mode of production: a contest in which exploitative/emancipatory as well as reproductive/transformative aspects are articulated by liberal ideology.