D onatElla i zzo “Who thinks I should fly the plane? ” Leadership, Charisma, Expertise, and Other Superstitions� The Interregnum In a passage from Notebook 3 of his Prison Notebooks, dated 1930, Antonio Gramsci writes: The aspect of the modern crisis that is deplored as a “wave of materialism” is related to the so-called “crisis of authority.” If the ruling class has lost consensus, that is, if it no longer “leads” but only “rules” - it possesses sheer coercive power - this actually means that the great masses have become detached from traditional ideologies, they no longer believe what they previously used to believe, etc� The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum morbid phenomena of the most varied kind come to pass� (Gramsci, Prison Notebooks vol� 2, 32-3)� This passage, repeatedly taken up by sociologists and political philosophers in recent years, has become a popular quote with bloggers and journalists in the wake of Donald Trump’s election� An especially popular version of the quote has been the short one used by Slavoj Žižek in an essay he wrote for the New Left Review in 2010, “A Permanent Economic Emergency,” where Gramsci’s final sentence reads as follows: “The old world is dying away, and the new world struggles to come forth: now is the time of monsters” (95). 1 It does not take much speculation to understand why this apocryphal creative mis-translation of Gramsci - with monsters instead of morbid phenomena 2 - would appeal to the imagination of people appalled at Trump’s election� Gramsci’s wording in Italian, “fenomeni morbosi” (Gramsci, Quaderni vol� 1, 311) is in fact less evocative and almost clinical in its precision, since the 1 In his essay, Žižek uses the quote from Gramsci to advocate a leap of faith for the Left - “Today we do not know what we have to do, but we have to act now, because the consequence of non-action could be disastrous� We will be forced to live ‘as if we were free’. We will have to risk taking steps into the abyss” (95). 2 This quote is a favorite one with Žižek, who since his 2010 article (the earliest occurrence I have been able to trace) has used it repeatedly in his writings, tweets, posts, and interviews, though without ever providing an exact reference� No published translation that I know of actually uses this phrasing; the monsters, though, are also present in another widespread French version of the quote, also apocryphal (“Le vieux monde se meurt, le nouveau monde tarde à apparaître et dans ce clair-obscur surgissent les monstres”), which may have originated from some unpublished and unauthorized French translation of Gramsci� 126 D onatElla i zzo phrase refers not just to abnormal mental or psychical states but also and primarily to physical illnesses and epidemics� 3 The monsters, though, might finally prove to be truer to some deep undercurrents of the public imagination� I will go back to this point later in this paper� In his 2012 essay “Times of Interregnum,” Zygmunt Bauman proposes “to recognize the present-day planetary condition as a case of interregnum” (49), describing it in terms of a political crisis of the territorial nation-state that leaves sovereignty in an “unanchored and free-floating” (50) condition. This “planetary state of affairs,” induced by neoliberal globalization, which has increasingly shifted power to entities that are “unconstrained by political control,” produces an “emaciation of the political sphere (in its institutionalized orthodox meaning)” (52). In “Out of the Interregnum,” posted on the Open Democracy website the following year, 4 Étienne Balibar builds on Bauman’s use of Gramsci’s category with specific reference to the rise of nationalist rightwing populism in Europe, which “seek[s] to mobilize the electorate against official representation” in response to the rapid dismantling of “the solidarities and securities of everyday life” once provided by the welfare state. The “purely competitive economic order” of neoliberalism, Balibar writes, “has unleashed in Europe a quasi-Hobbesian ‘war of all against all.’” The growing inequalities, distributed along national, ethnic, gender, and generational lines and concerning “income and wealth, … but also education, opportunities or social recognition,” create what Balibar terms “a second degree of inequality, or inequality within inequality,” dramatically increased by neo-liberal dogmas, and which has “destructive effects on the legitimacy both of the national and the supranational institutions” (emphasis in the original). In her 2005 “Neoliberalism and the Ends of Liberal Democracy,” Wendy Brown had also mobilized the concept of interregnum (47), though without expressly citing Gramsci, in describing that gutting of liberal democratic institutions and practices under the new conditions of neoliberal governmentality that she has since termed “de-democratization” (Brown “We Are All Democrats Now…” 46). Most recently, in an essay suggestively titled “The Return of the Repressed,” published in 2017, Wolfgang Streeck, a long-time proponent of Gramsci’s idea of the interregnum to describe the crisis induced by what he has effectively termed “the splitting of democracy from capitalism through the splitting of the economy from democracy” (Streeck, Buying Time 23, emphasis in the original), again evokes this notion to account for the resulting “unstable 3 These are the symptoms that Gramsci identifies: “The death of the old ideologies manifests itself as skepticism toward all theories and general formulas; as the singleminded pursuit of the pure economic fact (profit, etc.) and of a politics that is not only de facto realistic (as it always is) but cynical in its immediate manifestation” (Gramsci, Prison Notebooks vol� 2, 33)� 4 The post reproduces the text of Balibar’s statement at a panel discussion on “Europe as a Philosophical Project,” with Seyla Benhabib and Francis Fukuyama, part of the Conference The European Project Beyond Eurocentrism held at the Transatlantic Academy, Washington D�C�, on 2 May 2013� “Who thinks I should fly the plane? ” 127 configurations …, and chains of surprising events,” which include “the populist revolution,” Brexit, and Trump’s electoral victory (Streeck, “The Return of the Repressed” 14-5, emphasis in the original). American Fascism? The renewed popularity of Gramsci’s quote both with scholars and with bloggers and tweeters testifies to a widespread perception of the present-day instabilities as commensurable with the twentieth-century crisis that led to Fascism and Nazism� Nancy Fraser noted as much already in a 2013 essay, discussing the relevance of Karl Polanyi’s analysis to our own times: In many respects, today’s crisis resembles that of the 1930s, as described by Karl Polanyi in The Great Transformation� Now, as then, a relentless push to extend and de-regulate markets is everywhere wreaking havoc - destroying the livelihoods of billions of people; fraying families, weakening communities and rupturing solidarities; trashing habitats and despoiling nature across the globe� Now, as then, attempts to commodify nature, labour and money are destabilizing society and economy - witness the destructive effects of unregulated trading in biotechnology, carbon offsets and, of course, in financial derivatives; the impacts on child care, schooling, and care of the elderly� Now, as then, the result is a crisis in multiple dimensions - not only economic and financial, but also ecological and social. (Fraser, “A Triple Movement? ” 119) Fraser’s broad comparison between the systemic crises of the past and the present has acquired a new cogency in the wake of the 2016 elections, leading many other analysts to discuss the analogies or differences between the two historical moments� Some scholars, such as Dylan Riley, have explicitly rejected the parallel: Contrary to what some have suggested over the past eighteen months, on the left as well as on the platforms of outraged liberalism, Trump is not a fascist� The political conditions in which he operates are quite different to those that shaped inter-war Europe, when exhausted ruling classes were prepared to countenance the suspension of bourgeois liberties and installed in office hard-right thugs who would physically eliminate the threat of workers’ revolution� Trump lacks a party organization, a militia and an ideology; his foreign policy as so far announced is isolationist, rather than revanchist - and indeed, what territorial losses could the US wish to reverse? (21) Other scholars, instead, have embraced it, though not without some qualifications. “Trump as fascist? ” asks Judith Butler in “Reflections on Trump,” part of a series on “The Rise of Trumpism” published in Cultural Anthropology: This may well be a moment to distinguish between old and new fascisms� The key reference point remains the mid-twentieth-century forms of European fascism� With Trump, we have a different situation, but one which I would still call fascist� The fascist moment comes when Trump arrogates to himself the power to deport millions of people or to put Hillary in jail …� When he speaks that way, he acts as if he has the sole power to decide … No one is sure that he has read the 128 D onatElla i zzo Constitution or even cares about it� That arrogant indifference is what attracts people to him� And that is a fascist phenomenon� If he puts deeds to words, then we have a fascist government� Another case in point is Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny. Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, whose timely publication early in 2017 is itself clear indication of a wish to provide guidance in (or ride the wave of) a moment of widespread public anxiety� While studiously abstaining from mentioning Donald Trump or the 2016 election, Snyder explicitly presents the European history of the first half of the twentieth century as a memento that “societies can break, democracies can fall, ethics can collapse, and ordinary men can find themselves standing over death pits with guns in their hands. It would serve us well today to understand why.” That history, therefore, might hold a lesson for our present: “Americans today are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism in the twentieth century� Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience. Now is a good time to do so” (8-9). The insistence on “today” and “now” makes the point unmistakable, to the point that one has to wonder why the author, while clearly capitalizing on the suggested parallel, would refrain from making the point more overtly: scholarly scruple? Political shyness? Snyder, in fact, is not alone in this attitude of reluctantly acknowledging similarities that are simultaneously suggested and disavowed� 5 As a person born and raised in Italy at a time when memories of historical Fascism were still very vivid, and living in Italy at a time when attempts to reclaim and resuscitate its political legacy are still vigorous, I find myself recalcitrant to embrace a somewhat generic, wholesale notion of fascism (let alone its equivalence with communism, under the general rubric of totalitarianism, that Snyder seems to be proposing)� Apart from the emotional rewards of name-calling or the ideological rewards of the Jeremiad, I wonder if the word “fascism” is really needed, and adequate, as an interpretive framework and an analytics for the present moment. Cursory conflation entails a loss of specificity that may finally operate in obfuscating and even selfexonerating manners� And yet, in spite of my own reluctance, and the reticence and qualifications of most professional historians and political scientists, there are other ways in which the parallel between Trumpism and Fascism might prove significant. The post-electoral moment produced a spate of memes, comics, cartoons, caricatures portraying Donald Trump as Mussolini or Hitler, which 5 See Christopher R� Browning’s review of Volker Ullrich’s biography of Hitler in The New York Review of Books: “To begin I would stipulate emphatically that Trump is not Hitler and the American Republic in the early twenty-first century is not Weimar. There are many stark differences between both the men and the historical conditions in which they ascended to power. Nonetheless there are sufficient areas of similarity in some regards to make the book chilling and insightful reading about not just the past but also the present.” “Who thinks I should fly the plane? ” 129 circulated at light-speed through virtual networks and social media� 6 Less historical parallel than shorthand to express outrage and alarm, this proliferation nevertheless has if not historico-political, at least symptomatic value: it shows the extent to which the association had, at least at that moment, a definite hold on the public imagination� More than any hard facts of the national and global economy, it is the public imagination, as revealed, expressed, and shaped through representation, that I wish to explore in this paper - the ideological fantasy that both betrays and mystifies our “real conditions of existence,” as Louis Althusser would have termed it, or the emergence of the Real, in Slavoj Žižek’s terms. If the perceived experience of the current moment elicits comparison - in the here and now - with the European crises of the early twentieth century, could the analytics put in place to interpret early twentieth-century Fascisms provide an interpretative framework capable of being deployed for specific diagnostic purposes, in order to understand the fantasy of Trump supporters? In the next two sections, I will attempt this experiment, reading the present moment through Gramsci’s concepts and terminology, and adopting suggestions coming from other thinkers who dealt with twentieth-century fascisms� I will draw, rather purposefully, exclusively from European thinkers, before reverting to a set of more contemporary texts in the two final sections. Charisma Let us, then, go back to the interregnum� Most thinkers who have discussed it have done so in the general context of the political crisis of neoliberal globalization� Much less widely addressed have been the two other points that Gramsci touches upon in his note, and that he seems to consider major symptoms of the interregnum: the crisis of authority and the question of belief� The most immediate sense of the “crisis of authority” mentioned by Gramsci is clearly political: a failure of hegemony, that is, of the ruling class’s ability to lead as opposed to coerce� As is well known, political leadership for Gramsci is ultimately collective, grounded in the interests and ideology of a class, prepared by intellectuals and performed by the party, the “modern Prince” capable of producing and organizing a consensus within civil society� Parties, however, “are not always capable of adjusting to new tasks and new eras, they are not always capable of developing according to the development of the overall power relations (and consequently, the relative position of their classes) in a given country or in the international field.” When they fail to effectively “react against habit, against the tendency to become mummified and anachronistic,” and when the party bureaucrats “end up establishing themselves as a mutually supportive body, which stands on its 6 As Sheri Berman wrote in a widely quoted post, “An analogy is haunting the United States - the analogy of fascism� It is virtually impossible (outside certain parts of the Right-wing itself) to try to understand the resurgent Right without hearing it described as - or compared with - 20th-century interwar fascism.” Aeon (March 27, 2017), https: / / aeon�co/ ideas/ fascism-was-a-right-wing-anti-capitalist-movement� 130 D onatElla i zzo own and perceives itself as independent from the masses,” then “in moments of acute crisis [the party] becomes voided of its social content and is left as if suspended in mid-air” (Gramsci, Quaderni vol� 3, 1604, my translation)� 7 These moments of crisis take place when “social groups become disconnected from their traditional political parties” (Gramsci, Quaderni vol� 3, 1602, my translation), whether due to some major political failure of the ruling class which has alienated the masses, or to the new political claims and activity of formerly passive groups� Such moments, then, bring about “a ‘crisis of authority,’ and that is exactly a crisis of hegemony, or a crisis of the State as a whole” (Gramsci, Quaderni vol� 3, 1603, my translation)� It is at these moments that “the immediate situation becomes delicate and tottering, because the field lays open to solutions brought about by force, to the activity of dark powers represented by providential or charismatic men” (Gramsci, Quaderni vol� 3, 1603, my translation)� Gramsci devoted considerable critical attention to these “providential or charismatic men.” Developing Karl Marx’s considerations on Bonapartism in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, Gramsci repeatedly explored the phenomenon of “Caesarism,” to which he devoted several remarks both in paragraph 66 of Notebook 4 (1930-32) and in Notebook 13 (1932-34), where the whole of paragraph 27 is titled “Caesarism.” Gramsci understands Caesarism as the result of a political stalemate, a “static balance” (Gramsci, Quaderni vol� 3, 1604, my translation) in which none of the contending groups has the force to prevail and the balance is therefore “catastrophic” since “the continuing struggle can only result in mutual destruction” (Gramsci, Quaderni vol� 3, 1619, my translation)� While recognizing Caesarism as a historical solution that can be either progressive or regressive (and whose political function and significance, therefore, need to be assessed in each individual case through the analysis of specific forces and circumstances), Gramsci is consistently suspicious of the connected phenomenon of “charismatic leadership.” The notion of “charismatic leadership,” which Gramsci indirectly borrowed from Max Weber through the mediation of his pupil Robert Michels, 8 designates a direct relationship between the masses and an individual leader endowed with quasi-supernatural qualities: “When the leader exerts influence on his supporters because of qualities which are so extraordinary that they seem supernatural to them, he can be called a charismatic leader.” This definition - part of Gramsci’s comments on Michels’s 1928 essay “Les 7 This passage, like the ones that immediately follow, is from Paragraph 23 of Notebook 13 (as yet untranslated into English), containing “Brief notes on Machiavelli’s politics” and written in 1932-4� 8 A German sociologist, a pupil of Max Weber’s and Werner Sombart’s, Michels moved to Italy where he first joined the revolutionary syndicalist wing of the Socialist party, then in 1924 joined the Fascist party� He held university chairs in economics and political doctrines first in Turin, then in Perugia. The author of a book On the Sociology of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy (published in German in 1911), he upheld the idea of Mussolini’s charisma as effecting a direct link between himself and the popular masses, capable of improving the latter’s conditions by dispensing with bureaucratic political mediation� “Who thinks I should fly the plane? ” 131 partis politiques et la contrainte sociale,” to which he devoted paragraph 75 of Notebook 2 (1929-33) - is accompanied by a number of ironical remarks: “Michels has made a lot of noise in Italy with ‘his’ discovery of the ‘charismatic leader’ which, probably, was already in Weber [one should make a comparison]; …he does not even mention that a conception of the leader by divine grace has already been in existence, and how! ” (Gramsci, Prison Notebooks vol� 1, 319)� 9 Always averse to sociological generalization (as opposed to theorization based on scrupulous historical and political analysis of the causes and configuration of forces characterizing each unique event), and particularly hostile to Michels for his support of the Mussolini regime, Gramsci was very critical of what he regarded as Michels’s false conceptualizations, and he explicitly cited the notion of the “charismatic leader” as the epitome of the inadequacy of both Michels and sociology itself: The so-called sociological laws, which are assumed as causes - such a fact took place because of such a law etc� - have no causal value: they are almost invariably tautologies and paralogisms� Usually they are nothing but a duplicate of the fact being observed� A fact or a series of facts are described; through a mechanical process of generalization, a relation of similarity is derived, and this is then called a law, which is assumed and made to function as a cause� But where is the new discovery in that? The only new thing is the name given to a series of small facts, but names are not innovations. (In Michels’s treatises one can find a whole repertoire of such tautological generalizations: the latest and most famous one is the “charismatic leader”) (Gramsci, Quaderni vol� 2, 1433-4, my translation)� 10 In his long entry on Michels in Notebook 2, paragraph 75, Gramsci offers a trenchant critique of Michels’s celebration of charismatic leadership - whose immediate political function was singing the praise of Benito Mussolini - denouncing its historical inaccuracy, sloppy research, vague language, superficial categorization, and lack of argumentative rigor. And yet, in spite of his many political and scholarly reservations, and though he systematically distances himself by using scare quotes whenever he uses the expression “charismatic leader,” Gramsci returns to it again and again in his reflections on politics and history� Though he doesn’t make the connection explicitly, there is little doubt that Gramsci viewed charismatic leadership as one of 9 The notions of charisma and charismatic leadership have been in fact among the most controversial in Weber’s thought, partly out of dissent with the political model they evoke, partly because of the contradictory quality of Weber’s own thought on this topic, which he took up repeatedly at different moments in his career� First applied to religion and magic, the notion of charisma later emerges in the context of Weber’s sociology of domination, where he describes power as obedience, and investigates the subjective relationships between the obedient and the obeyed that stabilize domination by converting it into legitimate authority� Weber outlines three types of legitimation: traditional, validated by custom; legal-rational, validated by impersonal rules; and charismatic, validated by the extraordinary personality of the leader� 10 This passage is from Note 1, Paragraph 26 of Notebook 11 (as yet untranslated into English), containing “Notes towards an introduction to the history of philosophy and the study of culture” and written in 1932-3. 132 D onatElla i zzo the morbid symptoms of phases of political transition� In his observations on Michels’s essay, roughly coeval with the note about the interregnum, he actually offers an analytical exploration of the concept: so-called “charisma,” in Michels’ sense, always coincides in the modern world with a primitive stage of mass parties, the stage at which doctrine appears to the masses as something vague and incoherent, something that needs an infallible Pope to interpret it and adapt it to the circumstances� (Gramsci, Prison Notebooks vol� 1, 320) Interestingly enough, unlike Max Weber - who sees charisma as one of the three types of legitimate authority - Gramsci reads charismatic leadership not as authority, but as actually a symptom of its crisis: for him, as for other Marxist thinkers, charismatic leadership is another form of failed hegemony, originating in the party’s failure to ground itself on the coherent worldview of a historically progressive class: This phenomenon occurs all the more when the party comes into being and is formed not on the basis of a world view which is unitary and full of possibilities because it is the expression of a historically necessary and progressive class, but on the basis of incoherent and muddled ideologies that feed on sentiments and emotions which have not yet reached the final point of dissolution, because the classes (or the class) of which it is an expression, although in dissolution historically, still have a certain base and attach themselves to the glories of the past as a shield against the future� (Gramsci, Prison Notebooks vol� 1, 320) It is almost inevitable to recognize in the “incoherent and muddled ideologies” used “as a shield against the future” some of the typical features of recent right-wing populism, immediately evoking slogans such as “Make America Great Again,” but also Marine Le Pen’s “On est chez nous” (We are home, This is our home) or the UK Independence Party’s “We want our country back.” Establishing a direct relationship with the masses based on individual faith and unmediated collective representation rather than ordinary political mediation, the charismatic leader renders the people as an organic and territorially bounded community, to the exclusion of both alien intruders from outside - thus capitalizing on racism and xenophobia - and ordinary political representation inside - through the mobilization of antiestablishment, anti-politics, anti-elitist feelings� And yet, one must acknowledge that Barack Obama’s presidency relied on charismatic leadership no less that Donald Trump’s, although in a different style� Actually, it might be argued that his charisma was itself a product of what one might term, with Gramsci, the “mummified and anachronistic” state of the Democratic oligarchy, and that it in turn contributed to the doom of the Democratic party by dissimulating its ongoing crisis behind the façade of the President’s winning personality� Like populism - a term frequently associated with the emergence of charismatic leadership - charisma can cut both ways� Many critics - among them Dylan Riley and Wolfgang Streeck - have read the election of Donald Trump as a form of neo-Bonapartism, “a form of rule that substitutes a charismatic leader for a coherent hegemonic project” (Riley, 21-2). If the neoliberal settlement produces a hollowing out “Who thinks I should fly the plane? ” 133 of democracy and a systematic dismantling of political institutions and organized mediations (such as traditional parties or labor unions), charismatic leadership is what steps in to both replace these institutions and disguise their actual evisceration. Unlike the “invisible hand” of the global market, or the impersonal and intangible aloofness of the technocratic elites, the charismatic leader is individualized, visible, bodily, iconic, and can be the object as well as the producer of intelligible narratives� He or she (but it is mostly a he) thus provides the perfect alibi and symbolic compensation for the ungovernable, acephalous quality of global capitalism� In other words, what charismatic leadership amounts to is a narrative of governability at a time of crisis� Apocalypse Before going on to offer my reading of a few examples of the current narrativization of the question of leadership, I would like to emphasize two other points about leadership that I find embedded in Gramsci’s note about the interregnum quoted at the beginning: first, that the crisis of authority is not entirely or exclusively political, in the sense of state politics, but affects multiple levels of society and social interaction (in the rest of his note, Gramsci mentions questions of religion and of generational conflict); 11 and second, that - as Gramsci, again, underlines - what lies behind the crisis of authority is a crisis involving structures of belief: “the great masses … no longer believe what they previously used to believe.” In order to briefly explore the question of belief, I would like to introduce a set of concepts drawn from another prominent Italian thinker, strongly influenced by Gramsci but much less widely known in the United States, Ernesto De Martino� An ethnologist and historian of religions active between the early 1940s and his death in 1965, close to the Socialist and Communist party and best known for his studies on the social functions of magic and on mourning rituals in the South of Italy, De Martino, like Max Weber before him, was keenly interested in the connections between early religious forms of thought and ritual practices, and the social and political forms of modern life� In a retrospective account of his work, probably written in the 1950s, De Martino declared that his interest in ethnology had not been kindled by a wish for far-away ancestral experiences, but by his intellectual need 11 The paragraph immediately following the sentence on the interregnum reads as follows: “This paragraph should be connected to some earlier observations about the socalled ‘question of the young’ - a question that arises because of the ‘crisis of authority’ of the old generation of leaders and because those capable of leadership are automatically barred from carrying out their mission� … Will the interregnum, the crisis whose historically normal solution is blocked in this manner, necessarily be resolved in favor of a restoration of the old? Given the character of ideologies, such an outcome can be ruled out - but not in an absolute sense� Meanwhile, physical dejection will lead, in the long run, to widespread skepticism, giving rise to a new ‘arrangement’ in which, for ex., Catholicism will become even more an unadulterated Jesuitism, etc.” (Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, vol� 2, 33)� 134 D onatElla i zzo to understand the resurfacing of those phenomena in his own time, when Hitler was “shamanizing” - De Martino’s term - “in Germany and Europe,” like an “atrocious European shaman trying to bury humankind in a fire coffin” (De Martino, “Promesse e minacce dell’etnologia” 85, my translation). In the same essay, he discusses the risky ways in which mythical, folkloric, and ritual symbols may lend themselves to operating as the mediators of irrational and nostalgic attitudes at moments of crisis created by “the spread of technological alienations and the extreme dynamism of the radical transformations in regimes of existence, which once again lay bare the anguish of history” (De Martino, “Promesse e minacce dell’etnologia” 101, my translation). The specific collective political manifestations that De Martino repeatedly exemplifies through Hitler and designates as modern forms of shamanism, take root, in his view, at moments of failure in participatory democracy and perceived lack of control, when citizens no longer experience themselves as active protagonists of social life� 12 In the last decade of his life, De Martino gathered notes for another volume, published posthumously in 1977, which in an essay on Italian Cultural Studies, “Non Finito: The Form of Italian Cultural Studies,” Michele Cometa has rightly compared to Gramsci’s Notebooks and Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project for the cultural energy and interpretive possibilities emanating from its constellations of fragmentary thoughts and notes� In this volume (over 800 pages long), entitled La fine del mondo. Contributo all’analisi delle apocalissi culturali (The End of the World� Contribution for an analysis of cultural apocalypses) De Martino brings together an array of cultural phenomena ranging from Christian theologies to myths, from collective millennial movements to decolonizing struggles, from individual psychoses to philosophical, literary, and artistic works, to address the question of the apocalypse as a form of cultural compensation to catastrophic crises - more precisely, to those moments when our Dasein, our ways of being here-and-now in the world, are threatened by the impending or perceived collapse of the specific cultural and historical horizons within which our ways of being-in-the-world have taken shape� 13 Thus understood, the notion of apocalypse equally applies to the end of individual worlds and to the end of collective worlds, and points to the deep significance shared by psychic, bodily, social, historical, and anthropological catastrophes as radical crises of a “world” in the ontological, psychological, existential, socio-cultural, planetary, and ecological sense� 12 See the section “Furore in Svezia” in De Martino’s essay “Furore simbolo valore” (173-4)� 13 De Martino had offered a synthesis of the conceptual and methodological assumptions of his work in a previous essay, “Apocalissi culturali e apocalissi psicopatologiche” (Cultural apocalypses and psychopathological apocalypses), published in Nuovi Argomenti 69-71 (1964): 105-41� In that essay, he proposed to deal with the question of the perception of “the end” of a specific form of social world by comparing accounts of subjective psychopathological states and literary and artistic works equally revolving around apocalyptic representations� “Who thinks I should fly the plane? ” 135 In his focus on apocalypses, De Martino was interested in exploring the different outcomes and the historically specific cultural forms of response to diverse human catastrophes, which can take place as agony and destruction, or result in an overcoming of the crisis through what he terms an “ethos of transcendence,” aimed at producing a palingenesis, a transformative renewal of individual as well as collective life. “Transcendence,” here, needs to be understood as an immanent rather than metaphysical notion, pertaining to culture in an anthropological sense� His original Italian phrase, “etica del trascendimento,” actually translates better as “ethics of transcending”: “The ethos of the transcending of life - or ‘nature’ - into value is transcendental in the twofold sense of a principle of intelligibility of human, historical and cultural reality and of a regulatory ideal of the inexhaustibility of the process of transcending and valorizing” (De Martino, La fine del mondo 431, my translation). What is at stake, in other words, is not an affirmation of transcendence as a type of reality or a state, but an action, an active effort to find or create a subjective or intersubjective way of conferring meaning to the world� As such, it can refer to politics and ideology as well as magic and religion: indeed, one of De Martino’s recurrent examples of apocalyptic thinking is Marxism, with its “mythical structure,” its millennialism, and “the eschatological significance of its popular success” (De Martino, La fine del mondo 422, my translation)� One can recognize here a major point of De Martino’s thinking, namely that models of thought and behavior organized according to a metahistorical structure, such as magic, religion, and “mythico-ritual symbolism,” operate in the modern as well as the archaic world as institutionalized techniques for the containment of crisis, aimed at producing cultural re-integration by way of “dehistoricization”: a process of responding to a historically specific crisis through wilful alienation from an anxiety-producing condition, which allows individuals and groups to inhabit history “as if” they were not in it. It is easy, in view of De Martino’s former comparison of Hitler with a shaman, to see charismatic leadership as another form of this mobilization of magic thinking for dehistoricizing purposes� And yet, compared to Gramsci’s evident intellectual impatience for the “incoherent and muddled ideologies” fuelling charismatic leadership, De Martino examines them more dispassionately, not just rejecting them as backward, nostalgic, and irrational, but striving to understand their inner structural logic as the theoretical horizon available to certain individuals and groups, under given conditions, for articulating their relationship with material praxis in the face of individual or collective “ends of the world” - the kind of felt experience of precarity and “social quicksand” described by JoAnn Wypijewski in “The Politics of Insecurity” (9). To that extent, I would argue, De Martino, like Weber, attempts to supply the missing link between historical structures of power and domination, and the ways in which they are subjectively perceived and experienced� Thus, he might help us restore to our intellectual grasp of neoliberalism as an economic and political order, a sense of what he terms, as I mentioned before, the “regimes of existence, which once again lay bare the anguish of history.” It is when we view Gramsci’s description of the 136 D onatElla i zzo interregnum through De Martino’s lens that Žižek’s apocryphal monsters erupting from the throes of the transition between the old and the new may begin to appear, in their etymological sense of portentous and awe-producing manifestations, finally more adequate to account for subjective experience than Gramsci’s diagnostic “morbid symptoms.” Flying the plane In a short lecture recorded in 2011 as part of the Ten Years of Terror project on the “Histories of Violence” website, 14 Zygmunt Bauman resorts to an effective metaphor to convey the felt and lived experience - the “regime of existence” - of living in the neoliberal age. Let’s imagine ourselves sitting on a plane, up there in the sky, sitting very comfortably: some of us are reading, some of us are drinking, some are having a nap, some play computer games, some simply think, anticipate the pleasures or the chores which will meet them after the landing� But suddenly the news come in that the very pleasant information coming in through the loudspeaker in the cabin has been recorded quite a long time ago somewhere else, there is no one actually speaking to you� And then you discover that the pilot cabin is empty and that the automatic pilot probably leads you to some airport, but you learn also that the airport in question is still in the planning stage, or rather on the drawing boards, because the application hasn’t been submitted yet to the proper authorities� It’s a frightening image, really, but it is roughly, in a nutshell, what our contemporary fears are like. They are fears of nothing being in control, of first of all being ignorant of what’s expecting us, not really knowing what will happen next moment and secondly, even if we knew, we suspect there is very little we can do about it, to stop the danger and to get out of the trouble� No one is in control, that is the major source of contemporary fears� Bauman then proceeds to list a number of possible exemples of these fears of the uncontrollable - natural catastrophes, loss of job, crash of the stock market, terrorism - that result from the disconnection between power and politics, “the ability to get things done” and “the ability to decide which things need to be done,” under the conditions of neoliberalism. Let me now juxtapose Bauman’s striking apologue of the airplane with this other image, from which I have borrowed the title of this essay: 14 https: / / www�historiesofviolence�com/ full-lectures-c1nc8� “Who thinks I should fl y the plane? ” 137 “These smug pilots have lost touch with regular passengers like us. Who thinks I should fl y the plane? ” This controversial cartoon by Will McPhail, published in the December 27, 2016 issue of The New Yorker, 15 has been universally read - and resented by many - as a satirical comment on the recent presidential election� By pushing it to an absurd extreme, the image lampoons the populist excesses of anti-establishment feeling, transposing that attitude to the one setting where none of us would ever wish to endorse bottom-up leadership� It thus ridicules both the feeling and the practice as insane, exposing the rise of populist leadership as the rallying of presumptuous ignorance and festering resentment, which induces what amounts to mass-suicidal behavior in the easily misguided electors� The binary that implicitly sustains the cartoon is the opposition between charismatic leadership and expertise� Though Max Weber would have recognized both as types of legitimate authority, 16 the charismatic leader is the very opposite of the expert: the former mobilizes a faith that is empty 15 http: / / www�newyorker�com/ cartoon/ a20630� 16 To Max Weber, Western modernity coincides with capitalist rationalization and operates by way of specialization and division of labor. Every fi eld of social operation, whether private or public, therefore, needs its bureaucratic organization, which is run by trained specialists� The impersonality, calculability, and effectiveness of experts marks the superiority of the modern forms of state organization over the old ones and has a standardizing and therefore democratizing impact: “The more complicated and specialized modern culture becomes, the more its external supporting apparatus demands the personally detached and strictly objective expert, in lieu of the lord of older social structures, who was moved by personal sympathy and favor, by grace and gratitude” (Weber 975). The expert thus stands at the intersection between epistemology, mode of production, and forms of social and political domination: he is the fi gure of a specifi c harnessing of secular knowledge to capitalist rationality and to its ways of organizing political power: “Bureaucratic administration means fundamentally domination through knowledge. This is the feature of it which makes it specifi cally rational” (Weber 225)� 138 D onatElla i zzo of factual content and rich in what could be called, in De Martino’s terms, “mythico-ritual” symbolism, and is based on identification and idealization; the latter presents itself as based on facts, knowledge, and specialized training, appealing to reason and experience� We saw those two poles at play in the presidential campaign of 2016: on the one hand, Hillary Clinton’s bid for trustworthiness based on competent knowledge and political expertise, which frequently made her come across as nerdy and didactic; on the other hand, Donald Trump’s boastful display of personal incompetence, claimed as proof that he was not one of those corrupt politicians in the Washington swamp, and his overt rejection of experts as part of an ineffective and unreliable oligarchy: They say, “Oh, Trump doesn’t have experts.” Let me tell you, I do have experts but I know what’s happening. … And look at the experts we’ve had, ok? Look at the experts� All of these people have had experts� You know, I’ve always wanted to say this - I’ve never said this before with all the talking we all do - all of these experts, “Oh we need an expert - ” The experts are terrible. Look at the mess we’re in with all these experts that we have� Look at the mess� Look at the Middle East� If our presidents and our politicians went on vacation for 365 days a year and went to the beach, we’d be in much better shape right now in the Middle East� 17 While specifically aimed at undermining his rivals for the Republican nomination as well as Hillary Clinton’s status as a consummate politician, legitimizing instead his own common sense and lack of political experience as a reliable form of “folk wisdom,” Donald Trump’s mockery of the experts in this speech from the early phase of his presidential campaign proved to be tapping into a large reservoir of popular resentment against not just Washington politicians and decision-makers, but experts as such� 18 However ludicrous Trump’s performance of the ordinary man in the street might appear to be, given his billionaire status and quasi-royal style, one should keep in mind that, as much sociological work has shown, many working class and lower-middle class people, and especially rural and uneducated people, tend to admire the billionaires, seen as remote iconic figures of achievement, and to resent instead the doctors, the lawyers, the educated professionals - in other words, the experts - with whom they have actual, mostly unequal dealings, and therefore tensions, in the field of daily social relations. 17 Donald Trump, speech delivered at La Crosse, Wisconsin, Apr� 4, 2016, https: / / www� youtube.com/ watch? v=imOjgLTTnsY. 18 The role of experts has been variously analyzed, defended, and reclaimed over the last few years, especially in the political, juridical, and economic field, and the wide diffusion of an anti-expert attitude has been the object of much recent comment� See for instance: Philip E� Tetlock, Expert Political Judgment. How Good Is It? How Can We Know? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); Harry Collins and Robert Evans, Rethinking Expertise (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007); David Kennedy, A World of Struggle. How Power, Law, and Expertise Shape Global Political Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016); Tom Nichols, The Death of Expertise. The Campaign against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017)� “Who thinks I should fly the plane? ” 139 It is certainly no accident, in this sense, that the twitter debate over the cartoon immediately expanded into a discussion of the reliability of doctors, teachers, scientists, and vaccines, 19 manifesting the pervasiveness of the “crisis of authority” associated with the condition of the interregnum. Of course, the cartoon draws its force from what is in fact - as some of its critics have noted - a faulty parallel between two incommensurable fields: expertise based on a thorough technical or scientific training, and political leadership and representation� We - the educated classes, the readers of the New Yorker - recognize that distinction, though we accept that the cartoon’s satirical effect depends on transposing the two planes� And yet, despite my personal outrage at the reactionary demagoguery of many political leaders, in my own country and continent no less than in the USA, this cartoon contains something that is deeply troubling to me, something that goes well beyond the indictment of the political choices of a part of the American electorate� First, because of the way in which it uses technical expertise not just as a metaphor but also as a measure of political leadership, implicitly endorsing exactly the kind of technocratic rule that has been so crucial to the neoliberal voiding of the political sphere� And second, because the metaphor actually works both ways, implicitly suggesting that not just piloting, but also politics had better be left to the experts, rather than being subjected to the vagaries of an electorate whose ability to collectively act as a rational agent is clearly put into question by its emotional malleability� But what if, as in Bauman’s apologue, there is no one in the cockpit? What if the pilot is there, but really has no clue? What if the airplane is crashing? The Experts Of course I have no idea whether Will McPhail had Bauman’s image of the pilotless airplane in mind when he created his cartoon� I suspect he did not, and I suspect that the cartoon was meant more as a satire of anti-establishment populism, venting impatience and frustration with the outcome of the election, than as a critique of democratic processes as such� Either way, by the time I saw the cartoon in The New Yorker, the different versions of the apologue of the airplane had already begun to feel almost like a twenty-first century equivalent of the Medieval “ship of fools”: exemplary parables of contemporary government and contemporary governmentality� So I will now turn to my third and last parable of the airplane - possibly in some ways the most troubling one. This final airplane, however, is not a metaphorical but a fictional one, at least ostensibly unrelated to the political domain. During the last weeks of the presidential campaign, CBS started airing the first season of a new drama TV series, which - probably because of its juxtaposition with the presidential debates - soon came to strike me as a troubling political allegory� The series is titled Bull, starring Michael Weatherly 19 See online debate at http: / / uproxx�com/ news/ new-yorker-trump-cartoon/ 140 D onatElla i zzo (formerly of NCIS) and it is based on the early career of controversial psychologist and TV celebrity Phil McGraw - Dr� Phil - as the founder of a successful trial consulting firm. 20 The formula of the show is easily explained: the fictional Dr. Jason Bull uses his talent and training and the various fields of expertise of his team - which includes a lawyer, a neurolinguistics specialist from the Department of Homeland Security, a detective, a fashion expert and former football star, and a genius hacker - not simply to find out the truth about the various cases being tried in court, but more specifically, to convince the jurors of the innocence of Bull’s client� In order to do so, he investigates the individual jurors’ backgrounds and personalities, and secures mirror jurors whose response during mock-trials, recorded and analyzed through sophisticated technologies, will enable him to predict the real jurors’ reactions: “I know what they’re thinking before they do,” he boasts in the opening credits sequence� As a result, he is able to produce narratives accurately geared to each juror’s emotions, weaknesses, and inner needs, thus winning them over to his client’s side� In other words, Bull employs neurolinguistic programming and subliminal manipulation of the same kind used in marketing communication - or else, as the Cambridge Analytica scandal has revealed, political consultancy - meant to produce the desired affective response and thus direct the behavior of people who are entirely unaware of being placed under observation and control (and of course unaware that their personal data are being hacked and mined, in ways that are sometimes clearly illegal)� In the fictional world, the legitimizing assumption of the whole process is Bull’s moral certainty of the client’s innocence; but it is clear that in principle, this technique would work equally well if the client were guilty� The show, of course, presents this manipulation as entirely legitimate and desirable, since it is in the best interest of justice, and in fact proposes it to each client, and by extension to the audience, as an object of wonder - interestingly, Bull’s skills and techniques are frequently referred to, whether ironically or admiringly, as “magic.” The CBS website presents the series protagonist as “Brilliant, brash and charming … the ultimate puppet master.” 21 In other words, Dr� Jason Bull - named after a mythological hero and an animal conveying a sense of masculine potency, courage, and physical power - is a charismatic leader if ever there was one� And yet, the most striking feature of this show is that it revolves entirely around experts - a word that is obsessively repeated in each of the first episodes� The experts are not just the protagonist and his team but, at least during the first 8 episodes (aired from September 20 to December 6, 2016) in one way or another also most of his clients: a famous rock ’n roll singer, a genius biochemist, an emerging chef, a star surgeon, and - predictably - an airplane pilot� All need to be rescued from hostile jurors and reclaim the unique value 20 Created by Phil McGraw and Paul Attanasio, produced by Amblin Television and distributed by CBS, the show premiered on September 20, 2016� After running for two seasons, it has just been renewed for a third one, scheduled for 2018-9� 21 http: / / www�cbs�com/ shows/ bull/ about/ “Who thinks I should fly the plane? ” 141 of their expertise in spite of mishaps and against prejudice and resentment� An exemplary instance of this is episode 6, “Bedside manner,” concerning a brilliant gynecological surgeon sued for malpractice for having performed an emergency operation on her patient that made it impossible for her to have children - her original reason for undergoing surgery - though it actually saved the woman’s life� The doctor’s egotism, arrogance, God complex - “the closest thing that we have to God on earth is a surgeon at the top of his game” - and lack of empathy alienate every one of the jurors, and neither the surgeon’s flawless record, nor his technical explanations, nor the facts unearthed by the team’s investigative work change their negative opinion� Bull is only able to win the case by manoeuvering the jurors into emotionally connecting with his client’s human side and sympathizing with the overwhelming pressure and responsibility of his job, in spite of his social and relational inadequacies as a human being: “there are a dozen more decisions to be made every second after that, decisions that call on every ounce of my education, my expertise, my judgment� Decisions that threaten life, alter life, save life. Decisions that none of you are qualified to make! None of you want to make! ” As a human being he is a jerk, but as a surgeon he is the best: who would you like to be operated by, a nice friendly doctor or the most capable one? Each one of the episodes similarly operates as a relentless vindication of expertise against its uncomprehending and superficial detractors. But let me now turn to my third and final airplane parable. In the episode broadcast on September 27, 2016, “The Woman in 8D,” Bull’s client is a highly experienced woman pilot, Taylor Mathison, a former fighter pilot who flew 139 survey flights in Iraq, whose commercial plane has crashed due to wind shear, killing all of its 62 passengers and crew� The only survivor, she is accused of having lost control of the aircraft by disregarding the standard protocol, and is brought to court on charges of gross negligence� Due to concussion during the crash, she has no memory of the event and is unable to defend herself� Her lawyer, provided by the airline, urges her to settle in order to minimize the costs for the airline and maximize his own fee, though that would mean for her to take the blame, be fired, and be forever unable to work as a pilot� When Bull - himself a licensed pilot - takes on her case, his team finds that the jury would acquit her if she were a man, but is going to convict her out of mistrust for a woman pilot, in spite of her unimpeachable military and civilian record� This gender bias is made evident everywhere in the episode, from Bull’s colleague Marissa Morgan mistaking Captain Mathison’s male lawyer as their client when they first meet, to the airline mechanic’s assumption that the woman pilot who inspected the aircraft before the flight must be the co-pilot rather than the captain, and to the Captain’s lawyer’s easy way of asking a woman member of the Bull team to get him a cup of coffee. So, in order to have her acquitted, Bull does not simply need to find and prove the facts about the case: he has to trick the jurors into acknowledging their unconscious gender bias� Only at that point are they prepared to recognize the facts that he has unearthed: the pilot had in fact kept control of the aircraft to the end, and her apparent breach of protocol was the result of 142 D onatElla i zzo a split-second decision to have the doomed airplane crash on an empty road instead of a crowded neighborhood, thus averting an even worse tragedy� Captain Mathison is in fact an indomitable fighter and a hero: she has good judgment and the capacity to make life-and-death decisions, she has leadership and responsibility� Am I overinterpreting if I read this episode, aired in the thick of the presidential campaign, as a kind of subliminal Hillary Clinton ad, aimed at confronting the electorate with their implicit gender bias, and convince us of an expert woman’s capacity to fly the plane? Indeed, the show’s insistence on the exceptional reliability of the experts, even in the middle of death and catastrophe, sounds almost as an updated version of the Jeremiad - an invitation to a counter-intuitive leap of faith in the middle of crisis, which casts crisis as an accomplished fact, both inevitable and unpredictable, and the expert as a specialist in damage control� Doctor Jason Bull - a charismatic leader who is also an expert - operates under a kind of permanent state of exception in the interest of other, less charismatic experts who learn to trust him and whom he invites us to trust, however misguided or harmful their acts may appear at first sight. This twofold mutual validation thus operates as an almost desperately paedagogic vindication of expertise and of the reliability of the expert elites� What strikes me most about this show, however, is not just its way of reclaiming expertise as a life-saving quality that ordinary people should learn to respect rather than question, but the way in which, like the post-electoral cartoon, it raises the question of the proper limits within which democratic consensus should be exercised� This is made strikingly evident in the function of the jury� The forms of the adversarial trial system are respected, the jurors vote, but their vote has been pre-empted as the expression of a freely and rationally formed conviction by the trial consultant’s invisible technological control and psychological manipulation� Isn’t this a veritable political allegory of the technocratic voiding of the meaning of procedural democracy, where the vote of the man in the street is still required, but the real decisions have been invisibly taken elsewhere? Perhaps, then, Bull’s characterization as a pilot is not merely functional to the episode I just discussed, but responds to a sort of metaphorical necessity inherent in the current reconfiguration of political representation as leadership� What makes the airplane parable such an effective, if scary, narrative of neoliberal governmentality is the way the logic of the metaphor operates to reinforce and naturalize a sense of invisible and sealed off leadership, casting citizens in the position of passengers being passively led, whose revolt would be dangerous and misguided� Yes, we want to trust our pilots� But we should at least have a right to decide where we want the airplane to take us� “Who thinks I should fly the plane? ” 143 Works Cited Balibar, Etienne. “Out ofthe Interregnum.” Open Democracy (May 16, 2013)� https: / / www� opendemocracy�net/ can-europe-make-it/ etienne-balibar/ out-of-interregnum Bauman, Zygmunt. “Times of Interregnum.” Ethics & Global Politics 5: 1 (2012)� 49-56� http: / / dx�doi�org/ 10�3402/ egp�v5i1�17200� Brown, Wendy. “Neoliberalism and the Ends of Liberal Democracy.” Edgework� Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics� Princeton: Princeton UP, 2005� -----. “We are all democrats now…” Agamben, Giorgio et al. 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