Abstract

This essay analyses the cultural transformations arising from 15 years of decoro politics and their integration into common sense. Specifically, by examining the construction of a nocturnal social emergency (the so-called malamovida) in the city of Cagliari, the analysis centres on processes of subjectivation among those typically stigmatized as the folk devils of nightlife: youth. On the one hand, youth utilize language, rhetoric, and categories borrowed from institutional, political, and journalistic discourses to frame their presence in nightlife as both a cause and consequence of urban blight. On the other hand, from an ethnographic perspective, the lives of degrado are far more intricate and layered than their portrayal suggests. Employing various research methods, including critical discourse analysis of institutional acts, photovoice with 18- year-old individuals, and ethnographic fieldnotes, degrado is conceptualized as an affective atmosphere. This atmosphere exists within a lawscape dictated by securitarian discourse, but does not preclude practices of re-appropriation, ordinary encroachment, and minute forms of resistance.