Reconstructing the ‘Bond’ of Labour Through Stories of Precarietà: Storytelling According to Beppe Grillo, Aldo Nove, and Ascanio Celestini

Abstract

Italy's experience of workers' movements in the 1970s and the singularity of its 'creeping May' has led radical thinkers linked to the left-wing political group Potere Operaio to conceive of this particular part of history as a 'laboratory' for the globalized post-Fordist society of the 1990s. The key concepts of autonomia, comunità, fare società, auto-organizzazione, and esodo have become the ingredients for a politics of counter-narration and of 'ambivalence' (Virno) through the feminist practice of self-narration (Cavarero), while a new 'sense of self' has been constructed through narratives of precarietà that valorize the interactive and ethical aspects of storytelling (Brooks, 1994; Kearney, 2002). By examining Beppe Grillo's blog-book Schiavi moderni (2007), Aldo Nove's 'docudrama' Mi chiamo Roberta, ho 40 anni, guadagno 250 euro al mese…(2006) and Ascanio Celestini's narrativized documentary Parole sante (2007), I will demonstrate that the subjectivity of precariousness in Italy is still linked to a sense of 'community' that is constructed against and outside the system of (post)capitalist society.