Papers by Andrea Muehlebach
Economy and Society, 2023
This paper explores the forms of debt that come into play as public water utilities are privatize... more This paper explores the forms of debt that come into play as public water utilities are privatized and financialized. On the one hand, the financialization of water utilities sets in motion a politics of frantic municipal debt repayment. As infrastructures become financial assets, they also become vehicles for future financial returns. On the other hand, the financialization of water infrastructures often provokes a very different calculus of debt, articulated by people mobilized into protecting 'their water' from privatizationthat of the human debt to water as life. Based on research conducted in Europe, particularly Italy, I show how water movements insist on a very different kind of valuean incalculable, that is to say transcendent value that derives from life's indebtedness to water. I argue that water movements' insistence on the human debt to water as life opens up powerful pathways for a critique of capitalism's extraction of value from life, and of the financialization of value as such.
Journal of Cultural Economy, 2023
This article explores the contract as a mediating device at the financial frontier. Focusing on c... more This article explores the contract as a mediating device at the financial frontier. Focusing on contracts signed and breached in two instances across 150 years in Berlin, Germany, I argue that contracts are frontier devices that are both durable and volatile in that they seek to bind together two unlikeeven incommensurablecontracting parties into formally equal partnerships. Contracts thus seek to enforce certainty and predictability into potentially risky environments and relations and attempt to fix futures in specific ways. I show that the recurrent strategy of extracting value from water infrastructures through contractually regulated private debt financing must be accompanied by an analysis of the intense politics of public secrecy and disclosure that erupt around the contract as labile frontier device, over and over again.
A Vital Frontier: Water Insurgenies in Europe, 2023
In A Vital Frontier Andrea Muehlebach examines the work of activists across Europe as they organi... more In A Vital Frontier Andrea Muehlebach examines the work of activists across Europe as they organize to preserve water as a commons and public good in the face of privatization. Traversing social, political, legal, and hydrological terrains, Muehlebach situates water as a political fault line at the frontiers of financialization, showing how the seemingly relentless expansion of capital into public utilities is being challenged by an equally relentless and often successful insurgence of political organizing. Drawing on ethnographic research, Muehlebach presents water protests as a vital politics that comprises popular referenda, barricades in the streets, huge demonstrations, the burning of utility bills, and legal disputes over transparency and contracts. As Muehlebach documents, Europe’s water activists articulate their own values of democracy and just price, raising far-reaching political questions about private versus common property and financing, liberal democracy, sovereignty, legality, and collective infrastructural responsibility in the face of financialization and commodification. Muehlebach shows that water-rights activists can successfully resist financial markets by exposing the commodification of water as the theft of life itself.
Roar Magazine: How to kill the demos: the water struggle in Italy, 2016
The politics of water in Italy starkly reveals the crisis of legitimacy that is rocking governmen... more The politics of water in Italy starkly reveals the crisis of legitimacy that is rocking governments and compels us to ask how democracy can be regained.
Roar Magazine: The Irish water insurgency: no more blood from these stones, 2017
Public Books, 2020
What does it mean to declare water a human right? Or rather, what does it mean to do more than si... more What does it mean to declare water a human right? Or rather, what does it mean to do more than simply announce that this is so? Most often, these questions are answered with the broadest of brush strokes, as some say that governments should ensure water as a right through political means. Others insist that an excessive focus on human-rights discourse obscures water's actual value, and that its true price will thus not be recognized. For them, only the treatment of water as a commodity will do that. Through the thicket of this epochal debate, Andrea Ballestero's new book, A Future History of Water, treads a much more subtle path. Ballestero moves away from sweeping predictions of the coming global water crisis and the debate regarding "public" versus "private" water. Instead, she leads us toward the intricacies of what it actually takes to distinguish water as a human right from water as a commodity. Surprisingly, she argues that what it takes is achieved mostly through bureaucratic sleights of hand and the fine-grained labor of "bifurcation" on what is exceedingly slippery terrain.
Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge/ Blackwell Gallery, 2018
blackwoodgallery.ca The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge is a serial broadsheet publ... more blackwoodgallery.ca The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge is a serial broadsheet publication produced by the Blackwood Gallery, University of Toronto Mississauga, as part of The Work of Wind: Air, Land, Sea, a site-specific exhibition, public program, and publication series designed to expand perspectives on climate change through artistic practices, cultural inquiry, and political mobilization.
H-Diplo, 2018
Party. 2 The publication of Melinda Cooper's new book, Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and t... more Party. 2 The publication of Melinda Cooper's new book, Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism, offer the most compelling explanation. Cooper, an Associate Professor in the School of Social and Political Science at the University of Sydney, argues that we are mistaken to think that neoliberals "privilege atomized individualism over familiar solidarity, and contractual freedom over inherited status." On this reading, neoliberals, such as Freedom, Gary Becker, and others, attacked the necessity of the welfare state by claiming that the family was responsible and obligated to provide for health, education, and economic stability. In doing so, and this is the central claim of the book, they revived an American poor law tradition that had been challenged by the New Deal. For their part, neoconservatives like Kristol and Bell made a direct connection between the faltering welfare state of the 1970s and the hedonistic values of the baby boomer generation. To maintain the Fordist Family wage, they argued, would demand the inculcation and adherence to traditional family values. Although neoliberals and neoconservatives were motivated by different economic and cultural concerns, it was the family, Cooper maintains, that provided the conditions for an overlapping consensus between them. A similar argument is made for why the Religious Right entered into the fray, despite the fact that their concerns were ultimately rooted neither in economics or culture, but theology. A return to traditional family values would make America Christian again. In this way, Cooper is able to provide a convincing account of the driving forces that brought together a rather strange cocktail of thinkers and ideas. Participating in this H-Diplo roundtable are four scholars from different fields who are united by their scholarly interest in the family. Gabriel Rosenberg-a professor of Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies at Duke University-raises a question of pressing importance: How does Trump fit into Cooper's narrative, given the reasonable suggestion that in certain ways his presidency is a revolt against neoliberalism? Moreover, Trump seems anything but the typical proponent of traditional family values. Andrea Muehlebach, an anthropologist at the University of Toronto, raises the pivotal question as to what Cooper sees as the alternative. For the New Deal was based on a rather exclusionary Fordist family model, despite its challenges to the poor law tradition. How do those on the Left, therefore, not only challenge the neoconservative/neoliberal dismantling of the welfare state but the limitations that were inherent to the welfare state from the very start? Charlotte Walker-Said is a historian of Modern Africa who teaches at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Walker-Said asks whether shifting a woman's dependency from her husband to the state is really all that liberating. Moreover, she suggests that Cooper has not demonstrated why imposing economic obligations on the family as an alternative to public relief is, in itself, unethical.
History and Anthropology, 2018
This article explores the trajectory of the water movement in Italy to argue that the process of ... more This article explores the trajectory of the water movement in Italy to argue that the process of accumulation by dispossession as it is unfolding in Europe is necessarily accompanied by the evacuation of democracy as well. I suggest that Italians have been dispossessed of a thing (the right to public water) and a capacity (to efficacious democratic action). But what they cannot be dispossessed of is the sensorium and practical activity of democratic assembly; of being and having laboured together as a social body in all of its corporeal materiality and resistant subjectivity. Having made democracy their own through years of assembly and collective law-making that sought to imagine a world outside of the 'Republic of Property', the Italians I met reminisced not only about water but also about this practical process as a kind of inalienable commonwealth. Today, they face the state's refusal to recognize their claims to democracy and its willingness to overrun popular will, even as their democratic process has left its traces.
Special Collection on Whiteness and Crisis in Europe, 2018
In late spring 2013, when I was in Milan to conduct fieldwork, I wandered around the city's subwa... more In late spring 2013, when I was in Milan to conduct fieldwork, I wandered around the city's subway stations and was struck, again and again, by the figure of a child abstractly rendered in red and white, staring at me forlornly from a series of huge white posters plastered on the subway system's walls. The figure came in three versions , one girl and two boys, whose eyes pleaded with me—us, the commuters—insisting that we rise up against an " act of theft " that was robbing entire generations of Italian children of their future. Initiated by Italy's branch of Save the Children, the campaign, called Allarme Infanzia (Childhood Alarm), argued that Italy's crisis of austerity and " years of absence on the part of politics and the lack of interventions in favor of children and youth " had " ransacked " (saccheggiato) young people's perspectives and left Italy's children facing " lives without dignity " (AllarmeInfanzia Manifesto 2013). This campaign was organized around a manifesto stating that a third of all Italian children were at risk of poverty and that 18 percent had dropped out of school. It further claimed that 1.5 million children live in toxic environments and that the youth unemployment rate is at 40 percent. This meant that stakes were high. As the campaign put it in its press release, surveys that document child poverty put Italy at the tail end of European misery, with only Greece and Bulgaria worse off (AllarmeInfanzia Press Release 2013: 1). 1 Allarme Infanzia thus appealed to Italians to denounce the " serious deficit in futurity that young generations face " (il gravissimo deficit di futuro delle giovani generazioni), calling for a " massive mobilization on
Anthropological Quarterly, 2016
Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. 232 pp.
Anthropology Today, 2017
This article approaches austerity from the vantage point of its alter ego, financialization, in s... more This article approaches austerity from the vantage point of its alter ego, financialization, in so far as the radical depletion of public funds creates the conditions for private investment in public goods – including water. It tracks the intense volatilities generated out of the financialization of water by exploring the Italian water movement’s campaign of ‘civil obedience’ – an attempt on the part of citizens to stabilize and thus render just the volatile price of a vital good. It argues that these ‘vital politics’ of citizen price-setting are a form of valuation emerging from below, an anti-financialization emerging in our era of predatory finance.
Comparative Studies in Society and History, 2017
This paper explores the rise of “industrial heritage” and the forms of
memorialization proliferat... more This paper explores the rise of “industrial heritage” and the forms of
memorialization proliferating around it. The site is Sesto San Giovanni, Italy’s “City of Factories,” which was also a bastion of communist mobilization and which is now bidding to be recognized on UNESCO’s world heritage list. Sesto’s bid is an attempt not just to recuperate and reinvigorate the landscape of Sesto’s ruined factories and its massive, crumbling machinery, but also to capture and render visible and graspable the traces of what this built environment expressed and left behind—the sentiment of solidarity. I thus argue for an understanding of solidarity not just as an emotion or value, but as a structure of feeling mediated by specific material and corporeal forms, in bodies collectively inhabiting
a built environment and rhythmically moving within and out of infrastructures and lived landscapes. Such a materialist conception of solidarity must account for bodies and embodiment, rhythm and refrain, as well as for how certain material forms allow for the generation of proximities, coordination, and likeness across difference. It means thinking of solidarity as an arrangement and assembly of bodies in time and space, and of these bodies and their movement as generative of political feeling and action. Based on ethnographic and archival research in Sesto San Giovanni between 2011 and 2013, I tell the story of the afterlife of a twentieth-century sentiment and its fate in an era that has rendered solidarity precarious.
History and Anthropology, 2016
American Anthropologist , 2013
In this article, I track the ways in which Catholicism articulates with contemporary neoliberalism.
American Anthropologist, 2013
I dedicate this essay to anthropologists' heightened attunement to precarity but also to what Mic... more I dedicate this essay to anthropologists' heightened attunement to precarity but also to what Michel-Rolph Trouillot, who passed away last year, called our "moral optimism." As I show, much of our work is written from within and against precarity while at the same time being committed to this specifically anthropological ethic.
Anthropological Quarterly, 2012
The days were golden, the nights were dim and strange. I still recall with trembling those loud, ... more The days were golden, the nights were dim and strange. I still recall with trembling those loud, nocturnal crises when you drew up to a signpost and raced the engine so the lights would be bright enough to read destinations by. I have never been really planetary since. I suppose it's time to say goodbye. Farewell, my lovely! (White 1936:20) F ordism would seem to survive only in the form of abandoned ruins and post-industrial landscapes that bear testament to an era as monumental as it was contested, fragile, and now forever past. The very term comes enveloped with a retrospective valence, evoking a bygone period that will never again (must never again?) be recuperated. And yet, some of Fordism's most paradigmatic institutions continue to bring forth powerful affective attachments. Across the globe, people are mourning an era that carved its indelible marks upon the affective topographies of entire populations. For some, these marks consisted of the promise of relative economic security and well-being, plausible middle class aspirations, and a sense of linear biographical legibility; for others, it was personal and political futurities that allowed for an orientation toward safety and affluence, the hopes that such futurities spawned, and the practical, quotidian investments that were elaborated under their spell. For others still, it entailed the figure of a strong state, robust unionism, or the normative order of a heterosexual patriarchy.
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Papers by Andrea Muehlebach
memorialization proliferating around it. The site is Sesto San Giovanni, Italy’s “City of Factories,” which was also a bastion of communist mobilization and which is now bidding to be recognized on UNESCO’s world heritage list. Sesto’s bid is an attempt not just to recuperate and reinvigorate the landscape of Sesto’s ruined factories and its massive, crumbling machinery, but also to capture and render visible and graspable the traces of what this built environment expressed and left behind—the sentiment of solidarity. I thus argue for an understanding of solidarity not just as an emotion or value, but as a structure of feeling mediated by specific material and corporeal forms, in bodies collectively inhabiting
a built environment and rhythmically moving within and out of infrastructures and lived landscapes. Such a materialist conception of solidarity must account for bodies and embodiment, rhythm and refrain, as well as for how certain material forms allow for the generation of proximities, coordination, and likeness across difference. It means thinking of solidarity as an arrangement and assembly of bodies in time and space, and of these bodies and their movement as generative of political feeling and action. Based on ethnographic and archival research in Sesto San Giovanni between 2011 and 2013, I tell the story of the afterlife of a twentieth-century sentiment and its fate in an era that has rendered solidarity precarious.
memorialization proliferating around it. The site is Sesto San Giovanni, Italy’s “City of Factories,” which was also a bastion of communist mobilization and which is now bidding to be recognized on UNESCO’s world heritage list. Sesto’s bid is an attempt not just to recuperate and reinvigorate the landscape of Sesto’s ruined factories and its massive, crumbling machinery, but also to capture and render visible and graspable the traces of what this built environment expressed and left behind—the sentiment of solidarity. I thus argue for an understanding of solidarity not just as an emotion or value, but as a structure of feeling mediated by specific material and corporeal forms, in bodies collectively inhabiting
a built environment and rhythmically moving within and out of infrastructures and lived landscapes. Such a materialist conception of solidarity must account for bodies and embodiment, rhythm and refrain, as well as for how certain material forms allow for the generation of proximities, coordination, and likeness across difference. It means thinking of solidarity as an arrangement and assembly of bodies in time and space, and of these bodies and their movement as generative of political feeling and action. Based on ethnographic and archival research in Sesto San Giovanni between 2011 and 2013, I tell the story of the afterlife of a twentieth-century sentiment and its fate in an era that has rendered solidarity precarious.