Eterotopie della resistenza e classi subalterne. Infrapolitica e mobilitazione per il lavoro in un'azienda sanitaria del Mezzogiorno

This article focuses on a social struggle for the right of employment lead by a group of precarious temporary workers of the main hospital of Messina, a city of South of Italy. Starting from the exposition of a heterogeneous ethnographic materials, we analyze the political emergence of subaltern subjectivity able to overcome the egoistic and individualist typical relationship frame of the public sector in the South Italy in order to claim an effective right of employment, based on institutional backbone (supported by a trade-union, the CGIL, means of collective bargaining based on law, the 2007 and 2008 financial laws, set out to stabilize temporary employed people). The framework of this social struggle collectively claimed as right (i.e. as stemmed not from biased interest but from common interest) takes spatial shape through a permanent picket line, during 7 months, in the hall of hospital direction in a Sicilian city. The ability to resist in this picket line is crucial for the positive outcome of the dispute. The operative ways of such picket line allow to describe it as a heterotopy able to organize the space and the imaginary through informal and expressive resources that by an original way come up to sustain customary trade-union representation. After the description of the events, we highlight how trade-union organizers, even if they enact a discourse depicting temporary employed people as “subaltern”, come anyway to create a space of negotiation which become productive for the struggle. Then, we show how the strategic practices of subaltern people within the discursive field of institutional agents succeed to overturn such field and to present a new narration of “oppressed rebellion”. This narration provide a symbolic texture indispensable for the collective subjectivation of the group. Thus, we stress on the infrapolitical dimension including a range of informal resources, discursive practices, and forms of theatrical performance capable to transform the picket line in a real heterotopic organization which allows to resist in the struggle. At the end, we outline a theoretical framework in which we deal with the critical tension between the crises of representation and the forms of subaltern subjectivation, making clear both the categories used in the ethnographic analysis and the whole line of reasoning bridging the parts of this article.