Social movements, politics and heterochrony in a Sicilian city

Abstract

In this paper, through the analysis of a Sicilian case study, on the one hand, I will reflect on the relationship between economic and political crisis and the possibility of shaping new practices and innovative political imaginaries; on the other hand, I would like to investigate the complex contradictions that, working within disjointed and conflicting local, national and global political scenes, have affected a social movement suddenly transformed in a government force. According to some recent analysis of the temporal dimension of social movements and of the political conflict in late-capitalism, I shall also show the working in the contemporary political scene of a Sicilian city of multiple and asynchronous temporal rhythms, whose different qualities and implications have been emphasized by the economic crisis. More specifically, I will focus on the tension between a “messianic time” which is typical of a social movement as Cambiamo Messina dal Basso (CMdB), and two other temporalities, the “bureaucratic” and the “structural”, which are consubstantial to a different “economy”, and are tied to the workings of the administrative machinery.