An Aesthetics of Solidarity: Collective Becoming After Neoliberalism

If the COVID-19 pandemic has been experienced, in some ways, as an unprecedented historic crisis, then this is precisely because it has posed—to many societies—the question of the necessary conditions, the possible forms, and the institutionalised limits of solidarity today. In the US and the UK, the political and social crisis of the 1970s marked the end of a period during which state institutions had worked to mitigate, and even counter, the social logics of capitalism in various social spheres, in order to foster higher levels of both social mobility and social solidarity. Neoliberalism has been characterised in many different ways: as an ideology, a philosophy, a political programme, a regime of government, a project to restore the power of finance capital, and even as a continuation of certain forms of imperialism. The word solidarity was directly imported into English from French during the early decades of the nineteenth century; the original solidarité first appeared a few decades previously.