Premium
Precarious Subjects: Anticipating Neoliberalism in Northern Italy's Workplace
Author(s) -
Molé Noelle J.
Publication year - 2010
Publication title -
american anthropologist
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.51
H-Index - 85
eISSN - 1548-1433
pISSN - 0002-7294
DOI - 10.1111/j.1548-1433.2009.01195.x
Subject(s) - neoliberalism (international relations) , psychic , ambivalence , context (archaeology) , sociology , apprehension , anticipation (artificial intelligence) , harassment , politics , political economy , political science , social psychology , psychology , history , alternative medicine , medicine , artificial intelligence , computer science , law , cognitive psychology , archaeology , pathology
In Italy, the term precarizzazione (precarious‐ization) refers to the process of implementing neoliberal policies to transition toward a semipermanent and privatized labor regime but also to the normalization of psychic uncertainty and hypervigilance of worker‐citizens. In this article, I examine “precarious workers” and a psychological harassment called “mobbing,” specifically, and suggest that these practices of labor exclusion of a transitional work regime produce emergent subjectivities through an analytics of anticipation. I illustrate the social, political, and psychic effects of imagining neoliberalism, as Italians do in this context, not as complete but, rather, as a metadiscursive object of emotionally charged apprehension and anticipation.