4 Historical narrative, mundane political time, and revolutionary moments: coexisting temporalities in the lived experience of social movements

This paper responds to the challenge to conceptualize political activity through temporal as well as spatial perspectives, and does so by means of a discussion of the different temporalities experienced by union and social movement activists. It is based on fieldwork with activists from two public sector workers’ unions in Buenos Aires and residents and street vendors’ organizations in the city of E l A lto, B olivia. I discuss two coexisting temporalities, or social experiences of time (Munn): ‘historical time’, a sense of emplacement within a historical narrative of political action that looks back to the past and to illustrious ancestors and forwards to an imagined set of possibilities for the future; and ‘attritional time’, one of constant protest or negotiation, the continuance of the day to day of political life when there is no resolution in sight to a particular conflict or problem, coupled occasionally with a dramatization of what can become quite banal over time. Finally, I discuss a kind of event‐based mediation between different temporalities, specifically revolution as a clash or meeting of attritional time and historical time, coexisting but separately experienced temporalities. This mediation involves both the revolutionary actions themselves and the practices of hailing, both contemporaneous and retrospective, which include scholarly research as well as other forms of social commentary. I suggest that this hailing might be in part enacted through a promise or assertion of discontinuity and rupture in the flow of time (Harris), even when events may not have been experienced as such at the time itself. Thus, different social experiences of time meet in a politics of time, to co‐construct kairos , or revolution.