Post-Humanist Interventions: Ethical and Political Challenges to Neoliberalism in the Transmedia Project of the Wu Ming Collective Paolo Saporito Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures McGill University, Montreal February 2020 A thesis submitted to McGill University in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy © Paolo Saporito 2020 Saporito 2 Table of Contents Abstract ........................................................................................................................................... 4 Résumé ............................................................................................................................................ 5 Acknowledgments........................................................................................................................... 6 List of Figures ................................................................................................................................. 8 Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 9 Neoliberalism 101 ................................................................................................................................... 12 Being and Agency from a Post-Humanist and Eco-Centric Perspective ................................................ 19 The Methodology and Originality of This Study .................................................................................... 22 Content and Structure of This Study ....................................................................................................... 25 Chapter 1: Mapping Wu Ming’s Activism: Material, Linguistic and Discursive Forms of Intervention ................................................................................................................................... 29 Introduction ............................................................................................................................................. 29 1.1. The Materiality of Streets: “Tenere il culo in strada” ...................................................................... 32 1.1.1. Wearing White Overalls ............................................................................................................ 35 1.1.2. The Embodiment of Political Imagination ................................................................................ 40 1.1.3. The Street in Literature: Between Language and Practice ........................................................ 44 1.2. Literary Paths: Imagining a Different World ................................................................................... 49 1.2.1. Wu Ming: a Pseudonym to Challenge Individualism ............................................................... 50 1.2.2. A New Linguistic Arsenal to Challenge Mainstream Historical Accounts............................... 58 1.2.3. The New Italian Epic: Towards a New Idea of Literature ........................................................ 62 1.3. Transmedia Networks ...................................................................................................................... 67 1.3.1. Making Content Circulate Across Media .................................................................................. 68 1.3.2. Interactivity, Participation, Transmedia Storytelling ................................................................ 70 One Last Look at the Map Before Leaving ............................................................................................. 77 Chapter 2: Performing the Multitude: Linguistic and Material Enactments of Plurality and Singularity ..................................................................................................................................... 78 Introduction ............................................................................................................................................. 78 2.1. “Dalle moltitudini d’Europa in marcia contro l’Impero e verso Genova” ....................................... 80 2.2. The Concept of Performativity ........................................................................................................ 86 2.3. Multitude and Empire: Face-Off ...................................................................................................... 94 Saporito 3 2.4. A Close Reading of the Manifesto and its Material Embodiments ................................................ 101 2.5. New Directions in Wu Ming’s Forms of Interventions ................................................................. 112 Chapter 3: The Production of Subjectivity in Wu Ming’s Literary Forms of Expression .......... 122 Introduction ........................................................................................................................................... 122 3.1. Rethinking the Speech Act with Lazzarato .................................................................................... 127 3.2. Plurivocal Dialogic Dimensions in 54 and L’armata dei sonnambuli ........................................... 133 3.3. Don’t Say a Word: Affective Exchanges between Humans, Animals and Technology ................ 149 3.3.1 (Non)Human Synesthetic Intra-Actions ................................................................................... 152 3.3.2 “Hey, Commodity, How Does That Feel?” ............................................................................. 158 3.4. What the Hell is That? Machinic Enslavement as a Narrative Entity ............................................ 165 3.5. Walking: Exploring Existential Alternatives beyond the Boundaries of the Text ......................... 173 Chapter 4: Machinic Assemblages of Political Interventions across Transmedia Networks ..... 184 Introduction ........................................................................................................................................... 184 4.1. From Collectivities to Machinic Assemblages and Back Again .................................................... 184 4.2. Sharing Is Caring: Wu Ming’s Implementation of Copy-Left Policies ......................................... 191 4.3. Sharing Knowledge, Affects and Relations through Transmedia Linguistic Practices ................. 194 4.3.1. Giap: The Newsletter .............................................................................................................. 195 4.3.2. Giap: The Blog ....................................................................................................................... 200 4.3.3. From Giap to Twitter and Beyond .......................................................................................... 207 4.4. Tenere il culo in strada 2.0: the #Renziscappa Campaign ............................................................. 211 4.4.1. Tracking, Sharing, Organising: The Uses of the Hashtag ....................................................... 213 4.4.2. A Space for Reflection: The Role of the Blog ........................................................................ 218 4.4.3 Visualizing the Campaign: The First Map ............................................................................... 222 4.5. A Transmedia Assemblage of “Enunciation:” The Story-Map ...................................................... 226 4.6. Embodying (Non)Human Rhythms: a Molecular Challenge to Neoliberal Apparatuses .............. 233 Conclusion .................................................................................................................................. 240 Bibliography .............................................................................................................................. 247 Primary Sources: ................................................................................................................................... 247 Secondary Sources: ............................................................................................................................... 260 Saporito 4 Abstract This dissertation focuses on the cultural forms of intervention of the Italian writing collective using the pseudonym Wu Ming (2000). As Wu Ming’s activism is grounded in a clear- cut ethico-political position against neoliberal ideology, I will analyse it to challenge the naturalization of this ideology and demonstrate that cultural interventions can imagine and bring about alternative ethical relations and political subjectivities. Drawing on theories of performativity, post-workerist political theories and post-humanist thought, I argue that Wu Ming’s combination of embodied, literary and online interventions fosters the formation of practices, life rhythms and political subjectivities alternative to anthropocentric, fast-paced and hyper-individualized models imposed by neoliberal ideology. The first chapter of this dissertation maps out the evolution of Wu Ming’s activism and provides a comprehensive analysis of the scholarship on the collective. The second chapter draws on post-workerist political theories in order to analyse Wu Ming’s participation in the alter-global movement and demonstrate that their early strategy was to negate neoliberal discourses without producing any constructive political alternative. The third chapter shows how Wu Ming later concentrated on constructing this alternative in the literary field, where they used their imagination to explore post-anthropocentric dialogic dimensions