Chapter 1: Subjective Figures of the Crisis ... - Negri in English

epresentatives further enrich themselves. Second, what truths
can ever be politically constructed if one doesn't control powerful
media Lobbies and capitalist financing campaigns are extremely
effective in shepherding into office the political castes that
dominate us. The symbolic overdetermination of the dominant
media always contains—and often blocks—the social
developments of independent struggles, popular alliances, and
the dialectic between movements and governments. In short, the
dominant media create obstacles to every emergent form of
democratic participation. Third, the fear of the securitized is
produced in an insidious and lurid way by the scare tactics of the
dominant media. Watching the evening news is enough to make
you afraid to go outside: reports of children kidnapped from
supermarket isles, terrorist bombing plots, psycho-killers in the
neighborhood, and more. The associative nature of social
relations is transformed into a fearful isolation. Homo homini
lupus est: to other men, man is a dangerous wolf. Original sin is
perpetually present, and fanaticism and violence constantly
generate, often for a fee, scapegoats and pogroms against
minorities and alternative ideas. Through the processes of
representation, politics dumps this world of filth on the
represented.
In the modern bourgeois society of the twentieth century',
the citizen, as well as the exploited and the alienated (including
the disciplined working class), still had some avenues for political
action through the (often corporatist) institutions of the state
and civil society. Participation in trade unions, political parties,
and more generally the associations of civil society opened some
spaces for political life. For many people the nostalgia for those
times is strong but is often based on hypocritical attachments.
How rapidly have we witnessed the withering and extinction of
that civil society! Today the structures of participation are
invisible (often criminal or simply controlled by lobbies, as we
said), and the represented acts in a society bereft of intelligence
and manipulated by the deafening imbecility of the media circus,
suffering the opacity of information as an absence of virtue and
registering only the cynical transparency of the power of the
wealthy made more vulgar by a lack of responsibility.
The represented recognizes the collapse of the structures of