Beyond Empowerment: Alternative Visions at Work

In the era of Empire, life has become the field of social conflicts, and hence territory of what Michel Foucault has called ‘bio-powers’, in the form of ‘governamentality’. This explains why ‘rurality’ – and the elements surrounding the definition of rurality – has become a contested terrain, around which innumerable collective practices (for example critical consumption, solidal economy, social enterprises, Solidal Buying Groups, and so on) are stimulating new directions of analysis (as, for example, the stream of “stop the growth”). The paper intends to explore the novelty of these new collective actions, by utilizing two interpretative frames: the debate of the 80s on the ‘new social movements’ (Touraine, Melucci, Offe) and (part of) the theory of ‘multitudes’ (Negri, Hardt, Virno). It will be shown that these new forms of political action have the potential for a paradigm shift, in that they are not only producing resistance: involving the transformation of individual and collective daily life, they constitute an immediate practical creation of an alternative world vision.