Prefiguration and utilitarianism: Refining justification of direct action

Maarit Laihonen

Prefiguration is an ethics of action in itself: It is inbuilt to direct action as a specific form of anarchist political protest. Interest towards general discussion on prefiguration is growing, also from moral and political philosophical point of view. In this reflection I aim to discuss some issues related to general justification of direct action although its internal ethics does not require this – but wider debate on political protest might. My purpose is to refine and widen the justification of direct action, and in future other forms of political action too, by synthesizing the existing prefigurative ethics with utilitarian thinking.

A synthesis of the two is not unproblematic but it is an intellectually interesting challenge.

Utilitarianism seems to be caught in all manner of Trolley problems, because it is seen as a theory that lets ends justify the means. Anarchist prefiguration, on the other hand, allows only action that is in itself a part of the solution. This could be an irresolvable clash but my tentative study shows the plausibility compared to other suggested ethical and political possibilities for justifying action.

Utilitarians have tried to modify their view so that it does not require us to sacrifice the innocent whenever the need arises. Still, specification of valuing the needs in action remains unsolved even in recent presentations of utilitarianism. As there are already compromises made within utilitarianism in order to solve the internal issues, making demands on the quality of the means employed to reach ends could be one possible solution. This is what I aim to offer. Rights have been suggested as side constraints for consequentialism before, but not means. This would be one of the theoretical starting points here. My interest of societal application of this project is in environmental direct action that adds compulsory real-world ethical dimensions to mentioned justificatory process.

Maarit Laihonen is D.Sc.Econ. and M. of political sciences in practical philosophy. Her written and practical work has concentrated on contemporary crucial issues of natural environment such as nuclear power, mining and most recently questions of forests and bioeconomy. She currently works at Aalto University, Finland.

Chaos and Hope –Nano-Utopian Moments of Activist Self-Organisation

Heather McKnight

This paper presents the idea of a nano-utopian moment as a mode of prefigurative analysis for spontaneously arising acts of resistance. First, it introduces Ernst Bloch's concept of utopia as a disruptive process, one that is forward-facing and aims to create a better world. This theory contains within it the normative assumption that a better world is possible given the right conditions, but that this must also be an unclosed system of ongoing critique. It then looks at some of the existing theories on modes of process-based activist utopias, exploring how these arguments are productive in developing the field of activist utopian studies. These micro-utopias mainly describe events and projects that are small, planned resistances and social experiments. However, there is scope to examine further descriptions of brief and unexpected utopian moments that may happen within, as a result of, or that are generative of the order and planning that lead to these micro-utopias.

Building on this, the new nano-utopian category aims to describe unplanned or spontaneous activist moments, viewing them as accelerated processes of self-organisation that appear to arise out of chaotic situations or breakdown. It draws on the work of Prigogine and Stengers. They note how under certain circumstances "entropy itself becomes the progenitor of order". Likewise, the nano-utopian moment while disrupting one system has within it the possibility (not a certainty) of creating a “higher level” of order, i.e. one that reaches towards a new horizon of hope for a fairer ordering of the world for the participants. Finally, this article looks at an example of nano-utopian activism, the initiation of the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong in 2014, where student protestors were holding up umbrellas to protect themselves from teargas went viral on social media, triggering massive spontaneous self-organisation.

Heather McKnight completed her PhD in Law Studies at the University of Sussex Law Department, studying resistance to the marketisation of higher education through the lens of a reimagining of academic freedom. She is a critical utopian scholar and activist with research interests in unions, protest and education.

Ah Bartleby! The pedagogical (im)potency of Occupy Wall Street

Darren Webb

On October 26th 2011—almost ten years ago to the day of this conference—a post appeared on the Occupy Wall Street Library blog titled “I would prefer not to”. The constant refrain of Herman Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener became one of Occupy’s defining mottos, appearing on placards, T-shirts and tote bags. The phrase became so symbolic that it was used on the posters promoting the general strike called for May 2012. Bartleby’s mode of passive resistance has been theorised to death by the great and the good. Agemben, Deleuze and Guattari, Hardt and Negri and Zizek have all had a go. His appropriation by OWS has been the source of much theorising too. What I want to do in this paper is use Bartleby as a useful analogy for exploring Occupy Wall Street as a pedagogical space/educative process. While Bartleby is held by some as an exemplary embodiment of study, the paper argues that the performativity of his resistance helps cast light on the pedagogical lacunae in Occupy Wall Street. What Bartleby signals is that an act of intransigent refusal does not in and of itself possess constituent power. Work is needed. This is not simply a case of needing a “vision”. It is also a case of working tirelessly to sustain the human relations from which such a vision can emerge. Bartleby wasted away, not because he did not articulate what he wanted, but because he relinquished his humanity. What I argue is that the lacunae within OWS were as much related to the neglect of human bonds at the level of daily life as they were to the lack of a grand strategic vision. What I also argue—crucially, because this has implications for prefigurative politics more generally—is that pedagogical work is needed to connect the two.

Darren Webb is Senior Lecturer in the School of Education at the University of Sheffield, UK.

Permanent Revolution: Utopia as Process

Matt York

The central problem this paper takes as its starting point is the nature of our current political utopias – that they are transcendent rather than grounded, or put another way – rather than here-and-now they are nowhere – in an ever-receding future/past, or otherwise in an alternate reality altogether. They are impossible. The paper will thus argue that if we are to move beyond our current states of bewilderment, disorientation and denial, we must set new political trajectories which aim not at our current utopias that are not-now and nowhere, but toward those that are both now and here and therefore possible. Drawing on classical and contemporary anarchist theory, and from a recent collective visioning project involving a global cross-section of anti-capitalist, ecological, feminist and anti-racist activists, the perceived antinomy of revolutionary and evolutionary theories of political and social change will be questioned and the anarchist concept of permanent revolution – an ongoing process without end – explored as an alternative model for radical social transformation. The temporal gap between current struggles and imagined futures will be problematised, prefigurative praxes critiqued, and a politics of immanence explored in remedy.

Matt York recently completed his doctorate at the Department of Government and Politics, University College Cork, Ireland. He is currently working on a book length manuscript exploring the themes of love and revolution.

Disaster Anarchism: How do disasters of the current conjuncture reconfigure state-capital relations, and how can movements resist without being co-opted?

Rhiannon Firth

Disasters are becoming more frequent due to the crisis of social and ecological reproduction in capitalism. Climate change, due to systemically-promoted fossil fuel consumption and mass production, is increasing the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events. Neoliberalism has also increased interconnectedness of regions, meaning localised disasters reverberate globally, and infectious diseases spread rapidly. Earlier protective measures such as welfare and well-prepared health services have been corroded. Neoliberal austerity and the decline of the oil economy and associated structures of governance mean we can no longer rely on our governments to save us from catastrophe (if we ever could anyway).

Decentralised, anarchist-inspired mutual-aid disaster relief efforts have arisen after nearly every major natural disaster in the United States since Katrina, and more recently in the United Kingdom. This paper draws on fieldwork and interviews undertaken with Occupy Sandy (OS) which mobilised after Hurricane Sandy in Northeastern United States in 2012, and on COVID-19 Mutual Aid Groups in the United Kingdom in 2020.

Even within conventional paradigms, OS was interpreted as ‘outperforming’ established relief organizations including FEMA and the Red Cross. Since Sandy, alongside an apparent increase in disasters, we have seen a growing trend for the state to rely on spontaneous community responses to compensate for its own incapacity and indifference. Rather than overt oppression, states increasingly rely on covert incentives, surveillance, mobilizing fear and moral panics, emphasis on individual responsibility, ideological co-optation and de-radicalization, and other forms of social control and counterinsurgency. There is a cynical use of policy and rhetoric that valorises the grassroots, only to turn them into a form of ‘social capital’ that is unthreatening and indeed helpful to capitalism and its states.

States are trying to solve in ways unthreatening to capital, things which anarchic social movements have been identifying and attempting to solve for decades in ways threatening to both capital and the state. This is not without precedent. When revolutions are defeated, states often end up taking on the tasks of the revolutionaries, performing what Gramsci terms a ‘passive revolution’. Revolutionary Marxists and reformist socialists often decry anarchist efforts as ineffective, co-opted in capitalism, and in need of unified leadership. This paper argues that these approaches fail to rethink issues of scale in the world-system. Focus on particular issues does not preclude awareness of structural problems, but rather, downscaling and localisation through prefiguration are effective responses to structural asymmetries.

Rhiannon Firth is Lecturer in Sociology at IoE in the Department of Education, Practice and Society. She works on anarchist utopias, anti-authoritarian social movements and prefigurative politics. She is the author of the books Utopian Politics: Citizenship and Practice (Routledge, 2012) and, with John Preston, Coronavirus Class and Mutual Aid in the UK and recently completed her second sole-authored monograph Disaster Anarchism: Theory, Mutual Aid and Utopia (Pluto Press, forthcoming).

From Prefiguration to Transfiguration: From Monad and Nomad to Communad

John Clark

There is promise in the prefigurative. Nevertheless, it can also be a more or less conscious capitulation to permanent marginality, an embrace of the politics of the gesture, or a contemporary incarnation of the Beautiful Soul. On the other hand, it can constitute a vital element of a deeply transformative community, one that is not only prefigurative, but, one might say, transfigurative. To use Reclusian terminology, it would be the evolutionary-revolutionary community. Such a community would learn profound lessons and take deep inspiration from the long history of intentional communities, affinity groups, base communities, and other forms of transformative communal practice. To succeed, such practice must be grounded in a deep, critical understanding of the preconditions for social transformation, and their relation to the various spheres of social determination. These include the social technological sphere, the social ideological sphere, the social imaginary sphere, the social ethotic sphere, and the ecological sphere (the larger context of materiality, including physical, chemical and biological dimensions, at various levels of complexity). All these (non-separate) spheres must be understood as dialectically interacting, mutually determining realms, and be addressed in practice at the personal, communal, and social levels, including in their virtual or transindividual dimensions. To stress its diverse qualities, I have conceived of the transfigurative, evolutionary-revolutionary community variously as “the community of liberation and solidarity,” “the community of awakening and care,” and “the Beloved Community.” The creation of such a community is, in a sense, a problematic of collectively evolving from diverse hybrids of the normally alienated monad and the marginalized, reactive nomad, into realized, communally individualized persons, or universally particularized singularities. We might then hope to become, not mere precursors of possibility, but harbingers of a liberated human community and Earth community.

John Clark is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Loyola University New Orleans and Director of La Terre Institute for Community and Ecology. His most recent book is Between Earth and Empire: From the Necrocene to the Beloved Community.

Politics of Circumvention: Four Theories of Self-Extrication

Ryan Alan Sporer

This paper reviews four attempts to understand social movements that are based on selfextrication and prefigurative processes in contrast to movements of reform or revolution. These movements have been referred to as flight, retreat, escape, exodus, desertion, “selfbarbarianization”, nomadism, withdrawal or what I term politics of circumvention. It is my contention, rather than being minor historical occurrence reducible to individualized states of anomie and a rejection of deontological subjecthood, the politics of circumvention expresses an immemorial tradition of humanity permeated with normative concerns. Consider the rich and diverse history of the phenomenon as exemplified by the fission-fusion of nomadic bands of Middle and Upper Paleolithic Period; European peasant flight from manorial land tenure systems; vagabonds from the enclosure of the commons; maroon societies of escaped slaves; Anabaptist sects like the Amish; migration of freed slaves of to the US West called Exodusters; the recurrent back-to-the-land movements of the 19^th and 20^th centuries; communes of the 1960s; and contemporary movements of ecovillages, transition towns, and the off-grid housing movement. Sociological, political, and philosophical literature has failed to recognize the common thread among individuals and groups which remove themselves from asymmetrical social relations and create assemblages to maintain their distance. Despite this relative dearth, I have identified four broad theoretical approaches to self-extraction (a prerequisite to prefigurative politics). The first is functionalism represented by Robert K. Merton and Albert O. Hirschman. The second is a rereading of classical liberal tradition spearhead by Jennet Kirkpatrick. The third is the anarchist tradition of James Scott. And lastly, Post-Marxist theories of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. Within their own conventions each attempts to grasp the orthogonal power inherent in self-removal. This work is part of a broader empirical study of the off-grid housing movement.

Dr. Sporer received a PhD and MA in sociology from the University of Illinois at Chicago and a BA from Purdue. His current research project “Off-Grid Living, Political Populism, and The Pandemic: A Diachronic Study of the Earthship Eco- Housing Movement” compares previous ethnographic and interview data of off-grid builders and dwellers of Earthships with interview data of off-gridders collected in 2021. He is particularly interested ontological questions of the role of nonhumans in both the gridding in place of populations and the co-constitutive process of removal.

Refusing what we are: political prefiguration in Foucault, Derrida and Rancière

Anat Ascher

This paper suggests an understanding of Rancière’s political thought as bringing together two notions of political prefiguration, found in the writings of Foucault and Derrida. The notion of prefiguration is not explicitly central in Foucault’s thought. However, in a later text in which he contemplates his entire theoretical endeavour, he writes: “Maybe the target nowadays is not to discover what we are but to refuse what we are. We have to imagine and to build up what we could be to get rid of […] the simultaneous individualization and totalization of modern power structures.” This realisation, the understanding of the tight bond between resistance to prevailing power structures and the ability to imagine different forms of socio-political existence, paints Foucault’s political thought in a rather prefigurative colour.

In Derrida’s political thought, the idea of prefiguration is manifested mainly in his formulation of the messianic, and its application to the political realm. According to Derrida: “The responsibilities that are assigned to us by this messianic structure are responsibilities for here and now. The Messiah is not some future present; it is imminent and it is this imminence that I am describing under the name of messianic structure.” Though the messianic always possesses the structure of the “to-come”, Derrida points out that in so doing, it compels us to act here and now, in anticipation to whatever is to come.

These two different interpretations of political prefiguration, can both be found in the political thought of Jacques Rancière. Rancière’s formulation of political action as enacting the principal equality in a political reality of inequality, should be perceived precisely as a form of prefiguration that brings together the elements of both resistance and the messianic structure. By doing so, it manages to transform these two models of prefiguration that can hardly be actualized by themselves, into one political practice that can be performed essentially everywhere.

Anat Ascher is a researcher and lecturer in the field of continental philosophy, focusing on political and aesthetic thought, and the relationship between the two. She is currently teaching at the Department of History, Philosophy and Judaic Studies at the Open University of Israel, where she also wrote, together with Dr. Michael Roubach of the Hebrew University, an introductory course on Continental Philosophy in the 20^th Century. Anat has published academic articles in her fields of expertise both locally and internationally.

Just do it! Direct action and the possibilities and limits of radical autonomous politics

Arnošt Novák (Faculty of Humanities, Charles University in Prague)

Based on long-term enthnographic research of squatting, environmental and climate justice movements in Czech Republic the paper deals with the politics of social movements using direct actions (Novák 2020, 2021; Novák, Kuřík 2020). The paper debates different types of direct actions (anarchistic and liberal), the anarchistic type using direct actions as a preffered way of doing things and the liberal type which uses direct action in an instrumental way as a last resort. There are also two different kind of politics with different logics. The politics based on anarchistic type of direct action is the politics of act (Day 2005). The underlying premise of the politics of act is that freedom and emancipation is not something to ask for and demand but something to practice and live in. Thus, the politics of act is oriented more toward creating alternatives to state and corporate forms of social organization. The politics of demand is pragmatist actions oriented ameliorating the practices of states and corporations through either influencing or using state power. While the politics of demand is state oriented, so the politics of act strives to be beyond the state. But in the paper I don´t use these two types as safely and fully different, separated and mutually exclusive. Instead, I argue that we should understand them as an interpretative framework enabling us to trace different trends and tendencies in the practices of various movements and forms of activism, which combine in many hybrid ways both politics. Using my research of grassroots social movements in Czech Republic I debate the possibilities and limits of radical autonomous politics striving for system changes.

To stand for Something: Prefiguration and (Political) Representation

Although the idea of prefiguration has been a key feature of several radical traditions since the 19^th century, it has acquired a broader meaning and a more widespread use since the emergence of ‘occupy movements’ (such as Occupy Wall Street and the Spanish 15-M movement) in the course of the past decade. But these recent mass movements differed from their predecessors (such as the alter-globalist movement around the turn of this century) in a number of important respects. First, they were politically more diverse, and often claimed to stand for the shared grievances or interests of a vast majority of ‘the people.’ They also did not always dismiss representative democracy in its every aspect, and in some cases were followed up by new political movements or initiatives that did engage with electoral-representative institutions or procedures at various local and national levels. This gives rise to the question how exactly the relation between prefigurative politics and political representation must be understood. Are they indeed incompatible, as previous accounts of prefiguration seem to have suggested? Or does prefigurative politics in its contemporary form imply at least some conception of political representation? And how does this challenge established (anarchist or anti-authoritarian) conceptions of prefigurative politics?

Mathijs van de Sande is assistant professor of political philosophy at Radboud University in Nijmegen (the Netherlands). In 2017 he obtained his PhD at the Institute of Philosophy (KU Leuven) with a thesis on prefigurative politics. He has published on prefiguration, social movement politics, and political representation in various outlets, such as Res Publica, Rethinking Marxism and Constellations. Mathijs is a co-editor of the volume The Representative Turn in Political Representation (together with Lisa Disch and Nadia Urbinati) and currently works on a monograph on prefigurative democracy (both at Edinburgh University Press). Since September 2021, he has been involved in a new research project on ‘Communalism as a democratic repertoire’ (Funded by the Gerda Henkel Stiftung).

Abolish Gender! as a Case of Linguistic Everyday Prefiguration

Michaela Fikejzová

The aim of this conference paper is the proposal of looking at the degendering linguistic praxis, an active usage of gender neutral pronouns (they/them, or neologistic e.g. thon, hu, xe, sie) and gender neutral descriptions (such as menstruating person, pregnant people etc.) in the light of an approach called everyday prefiguration, where we define prefigurative politics as “deliberate experimental implementation of desired future social relations and practices in the here-and-now” (Raekstad & Gradin 2020) and everyday as such an implementation, which takes place on everyday basis and micropolitical level.

Linguistic degendering can be a part of the strategy used by gender abolitionists, who aim for a society freed from gender roles. Radical gender scholars, such as Judith Butler, say that gender is primarily an oppression tool, rather than an inherent identity. Similar thought can be found within the works of trans feminist scholars, such as Talia Mae Bettcher, who debunk the idea of the “feminine essence”, or the theory of “being trapped in the wrong body” and map out how the gender binary is harmful for a plethora of individuals. These ideas put into (prefigurative) practice may be found in far-left, anarchist and socialist communities online, mainly on Twitter and Tumblr, just as well as in the academic sphere, where for example Dembroff & Wodak (2018) argue for using exclusively gender neutral pronouns in academic papers to protect the privacy of mentioned scholars, to fight essentialism, and to make the academic world inclusive. This paper analyses whether such a practice can be labeled as prefigurative and whether it can ward off the common arguments against prefiguration itself, e.g. not being based on in-depth analysis of the structural problem that it is trying to solve, or even worsening the problem itself.

Michaela Fikejzová (*1996, she/her) is currently finishing her master's degree at Charles University in Prague. In her research, she focuses on the intersections of gender studies and social and political philosophy of language.

The future and the trivial: Utopias of gender abolition and the specter of difference in French materialist feminist thought

Lila Braunschweig

This article explores the thesis of the abolition of gender difference in French materialist feminist theory through the central figures of Christine Delphy, Monique Wittig and Colette Guillaumin. I first show that the abolition of gender differences is the logical and unescapable result of those thinkers' analyses of the oppression of women. I highlight the strength of this proposition while defending it against the common criticisms raised by other feminist thinkers who have argued that such a goal will necessarily require the masculinization of women or would abolish singularities to mold all individuals into the same androgynous model.

However, I then underline some of the contradictions of the materialist argument. Conceived as a utopian result deriving from the end of gender hierarchies, the abolition of difference appears as a normative horizon, always postponed to a later stage. In materialist writings – with the noteworthy exception of Wittig’s-, emancipation strategies focus mainly on fighting against material inequalities and hierarchies in the name of women as a social class and embracing gender difference politically. But, in the meantime, I argue, using the example of segregated bathrooms and drawing on queer conceptions of gender as a social norm, the gender binary keeps reproducing itself in phenomena that are not directly or explicitly hierarchical.

The objective of this paper is to show that, in order to render sexual difference really insignificant, it is not enough to invest it politically by fighting for women’s material emancipation, but it requires also to look at and act on the minor and daily material reproductions and occurrences of this difference.

Lastly, I claim that projects of safe and inclusive bathrooms like Stalled! where gender differences are no more an issue – not even with the mention of the word or label “all-gender” on bathroom signs – can be seen as prefiguration of this world that French feminist materialists had envisioned. This analysis, finally, opens the way for an additional and neglected feminist strategy that would consist in suspending and alleviating the weight of gender differences in social spaces and interactions.

Lila Braunschweig is a PhD, candidate in political theory at Sciences Po, Paris, France

Everyday prefiguration: bringing the personal into our praxis.

Matthew Wilson

Davina Cooper refers to prefiguration as a praxis of acting as if – it invites us to be the change we want to see, as the popular saying has it. Yet prefiguration is most commonly associated with a broad political position that points to hegemonic structures which profoundly shape our worlds – reducing, even negating entirely, our capacity to lead the lives we want. This tension is perhaps most apparent in the everyday prefigurative praxis sometimes referred to as lifestyle politics. Some openly disavow such praxis, arguing it is a middle-class pursuit which, ultimately, does more to bolster capitalism than challenge it. Others actively defend this element of prefiguration. However, I argue here that there is a more profound, though unarticulated, culture of ambivalence towards our own ethical choices which follows a liberal logic that separates the private from the public/political. Although ultimately incoherent – there can be no such separation in practice – liberal culture shapes even the radical imaginary in this respect; some personal behaviour –using sexist language, for example – is open to challenge, whilst other behaviours – choosing to take a short-haul flight, say – are considered off-limits, as being purely personal choices. In this presentation, I want to explore this deep but often hidden aspect of our culture, and consider its implications for the prefigurative project. I argue that we need to understand all behaviour as political, and find ways to respectfully and appropriately bring our daily lives and our ethical choices into the political terrain. Such an approach does not seek purity, but it does recognise that our daily lives, like the structural forces which shape them, must form part of a genuinely radical prefigurative remaking of our world.

Matthew Wilson is an occasional academic and political organiser. He is heavily involved in the cooperative movement and is currently undertaking research into its more radical articulations. His published work includes the book Rules without Rulers, published by Zero Press.

“For the form of this world is passing away” - Reinterpreting Paulinian as if in light of the climate apocalypse

Jakub Kowalewski

The aim of this paper is to argue for two interrelated claims: firstly, that modern day ecological apocalypticism calls for an reinterpretation of St. Paul’s notion of “as if” (hōs mē) which frames apocalyptic expectation in the First Epistle to the Corinthians; and secondly, that the new interpretation of Paul’s “as if” can help to inform prefigurative politics of eco-apocalypse.

I begin this paper by defending a literal understanding of the “climate apocalypse” as a structural situation marked by a constitutive awareness that, as Paul puts it, “the form of this world is passing away.” I then turn to Paul’s recommendation to act “as if” in the face of the imminent apocalypse. More specifically, I consider two modern interpretations of the Paulinian notion proposed by Jean-Luc Marion and Giorgio Agamben respectively. Whereas for Marion, the “as if” produces an indifference toward the world’s possible non-existence, for Agamben hōs mē creates a distance between the subject and their worldly identity.

However, as I will show, both interpretations operate with abstract notions of the world and worldly identities, which make them miss the specific form of the modern world generated by capital and nation-states. I therefore suggest that, in order to be effective today, Paul’s “as if” should be reinterpreted in a political register, and applied not simply to the world and worldly identities, but to their shared, underlying structure: capitalism and nation-states. Consequently, to respond to eco-apocalypse in an “as if” attitude is to find oneself at a distance from, and expecting the passing away of the specific form of this world constituted by capital and nation-states.

The political reinterpretation of hōs mē, in turn, provides pointers for the prefigurative politics of eco-apocalypse: firstly, environmental action in an “as if” mode should aim to create a distance from the world’s capitalist and national-state form; secondly, and in line with traditional apocalypticism, this distance should imply either a passive expectation or an active hastening of the post-apocalyptic future. Importantly, however, in both its passive and active modalities, a distantiating ecological action in an “as if” attitude prefigures the redemption of nature and humanity released from the form of this world.

Jakub Kowalewski is an Associate Lecturer at the University of Winchester. He is the editor of The Environmental Apocalypse: Interdisciplinary Reflections on the Climate Crisis (Routledge, forthcoming), and the author of articles on philosophy of history, medieval heretics, political ontology, and philosophy of literature. He is currently working on a book on the phenomenology of self-awareness.

What if there were no cars? Connecting Cyclovia & Covid-19 lockdowns as prefigurative political mobility spaces for a degrowth world

Peter Cox

Cyclovia actions, which involve temporary closure of streets to motor traffic, have been recognised for a number of years as having significant impact in the planning and delivery of urban changes designed to shift travel away from private motoring. Without wishing to minimise in any way the tragic consequences of Covid-19, the widespread use of lockdowns as a containment tool has similarly cleared many urban streets of the majority of motor traffic. In many cases, vehicle numbers have been temporarily reduced to levels not seen since the 1950s. In any future scenario designed to meet the necessary targets for carbon reduction, significant changes to mobility patterns and practices is required. For scenarios consciously engaged with degrowth in a broader sense these shifts are doubly important.

This paper examines how cyclovia (and similar actions) and Covid -19 lockdowns act as experiential prefiguration, transformations of everyday life for a wide population, and their potential as a means of creating insight to possible change and the extent to which they have created momentum for it in a number of European Cities. It expands this to consider the role of such actions in working towards degrowth mobility alternatives as practical possibilities.

Peter Cox is professor of Sociology at the University of Chester, UK and chairs the international network, Scientists for Cycling for the European Cyclists’ Federation. He has authored edited and co-edited a number of books on the sociology of cycling and is currently working on a monograph on Cycle activism as social movement.

Prefigurative Politics from Municipal Office: The Case of the Kurdish Freedom Movement in Turkish Kurdistan

Mariona Bonsfills Clotet

Since the foundation of the Turkish republic, there has been a struggle between the state’s nation-building agenda and the Kurdish minority’s demands for cultural rights and political autonomy. Both liberal and Marxist-Leninist conceptions of self-determination struggles aspire to the formation of a nation-state. By contrast, the Kurdish Freedom Movement rejects statehood and instead proposed to attain autonomy from state control by constructing a radical democratic, self-sufficient and ecological society.

After 1999 pro-Kurdish parties (i.e. linked to the Kurdish Freedom Movement) have participated in municipal electoral politics, construing these as yet another form of activism to advance the movement’s goals. While these parties had engaged in parliamentary politics for the purpose of representation, local elections held the promise to a limited, but actual, space for self-governance: the unique available to Kurdish Freedom Movement activists in Turkey. Further, the legal cover pertinent to state institutions protected pro-Kurdish activism exercised through municipalities that was otherwise criminalized and persecuted as terror and a threat to national security.

Against this backdrop, this presentation examines how pro-Kurdish parties in municipal office attempted to remake state institutions into central organizing sites for the construction of autonomy via self-sufficiency. I trace how the movement’s richly theorised project of becoming an ecological society in the here-and-now was implemented through, or because of, pro-Kurdish parties holding municipal office.

To do so, I draw on archival material of the movement, although the bulk of my data comes from fifteen qualitative in-depth interviews I conducted with municipal officers and activists that had worked in collaboration with the Metropolitan Municipality of Amed [Diyarbakir], the unofficial capital of Turkish Kurdistan. Altogether, this presentation problematizes the distinction between prefigurative and electoral politics by detailing the ecological practices of a radical democracy movement that held municipal office for 17 years.

My name is Mariona Bonsfills Clotet, I am a currently enrolled in the second year of the MPhil in Development Studies at the Oxford Department of International Development, University of Oxford (2019-2021). I am writing a 30000-word masters thesis on the topic I detailed above under the supervision of Dr. Dilar Dirik. The presentation will be based on the primary data I compiled during 2020 for the composition of this thesis.

Taking back control? Prefiguring neighbourliness and environmental survival in Wingrove

Dave Webb

In a Liberal political economy the individual is freed from its obligations to community by a combination of economic freedoms and state responsibility for welfare. Until recently, a weakened capacity for local democratic organisation has led to increased reliance on a cycle of, often clumsy, externally imposed “task force” solutions to local problems. It also frees up neoliberal development processes to court external investment rather than grow endogenous initiative and action. This paper reports on efforts to challenge such political lock-out in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, looking both at the Socialist manifesto commitments of the North of Tyne mayor Jamie Driscoll and the prefigurative politics of Greening Wingrove neighbourhood co-operative. It raises empirical questions, and seeks international commentary, on the disjuncture between formal political processes and the prefiguration of alternatives.

Dr Dave Webb is Senior Lecturer in Planning at the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape, Newcastle University, UK. His recent work has included a focus on activism on London’s South Bank (Webb, Ruiz and Snelson, forthcoming) and tactical urbanist politics in Newcastle upon Tyne. Dave is a chartered planner by background and teaches and writes about planning systems and regulation. He is also secretary of Greening Wingrove CIC and Newcastle Central Constituency Labour Party.

All Politics is Local! Conceptualising municipal resistance

Imrat Verhoeven, Michael Strange & Gabriel Siles-Brügge

In this paper, we focus on the policy conflicts at the heart of what we call ‘municipal resistance’. This is where local authorities have sought to publicly express antagonistic frames openly criticising policies proposed or implemented by higher governmental authorities – usually national governments, but also supranational bodies, such as the European Union. Whilst contention by individuals in governmental positions is nothing new, the phenomena identified in this paper stands out because of the increasing frequency and level of engagement in acts of resistance by municipal government. Municipal resistance also challenges conventional models of how local government functions and its role within society. This paper focuses on developing a conceptual framework by which to enhance our understanding of municipal resistance, which differentiates between: a) municipalities which work alone and those which collaborate with non-state actors like private firms or non-governmental organisations; b) the type of municipal resistance, in other words, whether it demands only minor alterations to a policy as part of normal decision-making processes or is part of more radical drive for wider political and social reform involving lobbying, protest and prefiguration. It then illustrates this conceptual framework by drawing on case studies drawn from municipal resistance in the case of the Netherlands (the planning of windfarms, carbon capture and storage, natural gas-production, and fracking) and at the European level (the establishment of Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership ‘free zones’).

Imrat Verhoeven is Senior Lecturer in Public Policy at the University of Amsterdam. Michael Strange is Reader in International Relations in the Department of Global Political Studies at Malmo University (Sweden). Gabriel Siles-Brugge is Associate Professor in Public Policy in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Warwick (UK).

Prefigurative Politics ‘inside’ the government? A case study about Solidarity Economy in Brazil

Raquel Sobral Nonato and Mario Aquino Alves

The paper aims to answer the following question: How do actors in the solidarity economy articulate, interact and mobilize to influence institutional changes? This study explores the dynamics of action and the prefigurative policy instruments mobilized by different social groups to materialize the idea of this "other economy" in practice and its relationship with the institutional environment.

For the development of this study, the solidarity economy is understood simultaneously as a public action (Massardier, 2006), as a discourse (Fairclough, 2009; Esper et al., 2017), and social movement (Lemaitre & Helmsing, 2012; King, 2019), mobilized from the cognition of the actors and their social representation in order to understand the different versions and meanings that involve this theme in a temporal perspective, transforming the institutional relations and exploring such contradictions contributing to the broad theoretical debate about critical performativity (Spicer et al., 2009; Esper et al., 2016) and prefigurative politics (Yates, 2020; Zaimakis, 2018; Raekstad & Gradin, 2020).

From the methodological point of view, the research strategy is centred in the realization of a multi-case study (Stake, 1998) from Brazilian experience: Network of Public Policy Managers of Solidarity Economy; Solidarity Economy Women's Association and Public Center for Human Rights and Solidarity Economy. Data is analyzed by combining two methodological strategies: narrative analysis (Alves & Blikstein, 2006) and temporal bracketing (Langley, 1999).

Raquel Sobral Nonato has a degree in Public Policy Management at the University of São Paulo (EACH-USP) and a master's in Public Administration and Government at the Getúlio Vargas Foundation (EAESP / FGV). Currently, she is a Ph.D candidate in the same program of FGV-EAESP and researcher associated with the Study Center of Public Administration and Government (CEAPG), working mainly on the following themes: solidarity economy, public action and public policies, organizational studies (and their interface with theories about the State, civil society, and social movements).

Mario Aquino Alves holds a degree in Public Administration from Fundação Getulio Vargas - SP (1991), a law degree from the University of São Paulo (1996), a Master's degree in Business Administration from Fundação Getulio Vargas - SP (1996) and a PhD in Business Administration by Getulio Vargas Foundation - SP (2002). He is an Associate Professor in the Department of Public Management and Associate Dean of the Graduate Program on Public Administration and Government at FGV EAESP. He was visiting professor at HEC Montréal (2012-2013), at ESSEC Business School Paris (2018) and the Cardiff Business School (2019). He is a Fellow in Productivity in Research 1D of CNPq. He is a member of the Board of Directors and President-Elect of the International Society for Third Sector Research. He is a member of the Board of the Center for Studies in Public Administration and Government. With a strong background in Organizational Studies, the research carried out, and its master's and doctoral studies focus on the following themes: civil society (social movements, third sector, NGOs), corporate social responsibility (private social investment and corporate political action), qualitative research methods (discourse analysis and narrative analysis)

Capitalist Prefiguration: Learning lessons from the pest

Benjamin Franks

Though prefiguration is strongly associated with anarchisms/anti-state socialisms (see Carl Boggs, Wini Breines, Paul Raekstad and Safo Saio Gradin), it has been also a feature of reactionary and liberal democratic movements (see Uri Gordon, Vincent Ordóñez, and Paul Raekstad and Safo Saio Gradin). This paper explores the prefigurative forms of capitalism in abstract and in practice. Abstract capitalism will be discussed in terms of Karl Marx’s circuit of value (or circuit of capital) from Capital Volume 2, and its practical forms with reference to contemporary institutions (social work and higher education).

It explores how capitalism’s expansion is based on its prefigurative components and how it shapes - and is shaped by - two competing (and largely incompatible) forms of utopia identified by Chandran Kukathas. One, an open, unbounded and fluid utopia, which in Robert Nozick’s words fulfills the ‘aspirations of untold dreamers and visionaries’ and the other Nozickian utopia, based firmly on classical liberal principles and the night-watchman state. The paper contrasts capitalist prefiguration with the versions found in small ‘a’ anarchism and large ‘A’ anarchism. The former rejects stable ideological commitments and organisational rigidity and purportedly more fluid and diverse accounts of utopia and skepticism towards revolutionary teleology (what Gordon calls ‘presentism’). The latter has more historically stable revolutionary principles and goals to prefigure.

The paper argues that there are identifiable forms of capitalist prefiguration, but that it can be distinguished from different radical forms. It further contends that features of capitalist versions can be identifiable in supposedly radical groupings (especially, but not always, small ‘a’), because of the apparent indeterminacy of the utopias it wishes to prefigure, which can lead to the unintentional recreation of domination, co-option and failure to contest oppression. It also suggests that there are features of capitalist prefiguration that radicals can learn from, resituate and subvert.

Benjamin Franks is Senior Lecturer in Social and Political Philosophy, University of Glasgow, School of Interdisciplinary Studies. He is the author of: ‘Anti-Fascism and the Ethics of Prefiguration’, Affinities: A Journal of Radical Theory, Culture, and Action 8 .1 (2014), 44-72 ‘Prefiguration’ in Franks, B., Jun, N. and Williams, L. eds. Anarchisms: A conceptual approach (Routledge, 2018) and Anarchisms, Postanarchisms and Ethics (Rowman and Littlefield, 2020).

Revolutionary Practices of the Original Peoples from the North America Region in the Aftermath of NAFTA

Beatriz Paz Jiménez

It’s hard for us to conceive the practice and political strategies of a made-up future we crave to build. Or to analyze without a certain degree of nostalgia some sustainable patterns of production and consumption from pre-industrialized societies. While doing so, we often forget about the people who have gone from colonization to apocalyptic neoliberalism, through a never-ending transition in which their cultures, communities, and territories are dismantled.

Under the yoke of inequity, indigenous people in the three countries of the North America have constantly suffered what is now looming for the vast majority of us in the name of climate change. That is, lack of water, contamination of resources, dispossession of original seeds. At the base of their struggle, they have organized under the same ideals as the history of anarchism: solidarity, mutual aid, dual economy, freedom outside the frameworks of state legislation, self-determination.

Indigenous based movements such as Zapatismo and self-organized communities like Cherán in México, the Red Warrior Camp at Standing Rock in USA, Idle no More in Canada, defy societal structures of systemic racism, ecological destruction, and inequity/lack of access, to permeate all levels of social organization.

The talk I propose is a review of their strategies of how they struggle from within their worldviews, how have they developed models of organization nourished by anarchism and autonomy, theories fighting both State and organized crime, and the way their utopias are somehow the mixings of past yearnings and future imaginations. Because for them, utopia is not necessarily represented by the image of a fantasy about the still unknown but of a world lost under the logic of capitalism. And how that world seeks to be updated in the decisions of the present.

Beatriz Paz Jiménez is a researcher, publisher, artist, and an Indigenous rights, prison abolition and food sovereignty activist. She is of mixed Indigenous and settler decent. Beatriz has travelled internationally as a speaker on Indigenous topics like lack of water, land defense, and ancestral art. She is also part of seed-exchange groups and collaborates in the promotion of a gastronomic culture for the preservation of ancestral cooking techniques and recipes that are part of the identity of both indigenous and mestizo peoples, particularly from the Totonaca area/tradition in the state of Veracruz, Mexico.

The Angel and the Porcupine: Anarchist Prefigurative Politics, Revolution, and Utopia

Laurence Davis

Prefigurative politics is commonly conceptualised as a way of thinking about the relationship between political action in the present and the future goal of an alternative society or world regarded as qualitatively/radically better than the present (Swain, 2019; Raekstad and Gradin 2020). It may therefore be understood as a form of utopianism, albeit one very different from millenarian, teleological, or blueprint forms of utopia. In ideological terms, prefiguration features as an element of a range of different ideological perspectives. However, it is perhaps most closely aligned historically with anarchist ideology, in which it features as a core concept (Franks, 2018) umbilically tied to ideologically adjacent concepts of social revolution and grounded utopia (Davis 2012).

The primary aim of this paper is to elucidate this ideological triad (anarchist prefigurative politics, revolution, and utopia) by means of analysis of its temporal foundations. Against the grain of most existing scholarship, which rightly but reductively emphasises the present-tense orientation of anarchist utopian aspirations (Gordon 2009; Newman 2009) – anarchist utopianism understood as an element of everyday life rather than a rigidly fixed rational projection of a perfected society of the future to be realised once and for all ‘after the revolution’ – this paper argues that such presentist accounts tend to overlook the temporally extended nature of the present moment towards which anarchist aspirations are oriented. Anarchist prefigurative politics is thus as much about the re-enactment of the possibilities of the past as it is focused on the present, or indeed the future. The paper develops this argument with particular attention to the emerging ideological hybrid of feminist anarcha-indigenism.

Dr. Laurence Davis lectures in the Department of Government and Politics at University College Cork, where he is Director of the BSc Government and Political Science. He is a longstanding member of the Steering Committee of the Utopian Studies Society Europe, Co-convenor of the UK-based Anarchist Studies Network, and a Series Editor of the Manchester University Press Contemporary Anarchist Studies book series. Some of his conference-relevant publications are The New Utopian Politics of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (2005); Anarchism and Utopianism (2009); ‘History, Politics, and Utopia: Toward a Synthesis of Social Theory and Practice’ (2012); ‘Anarchism and the Rewilding of Utopia’ (2020); and ‘Anarchism and the Politics of Utopia’ (forthcoming in 2022).

DIY law reform: Gender politics and the challenge of experimental law

Can we prefigure law? What does it mean and what might it do? In this talk, I explore the challenge of DIY law reform, focusing on an academic law reform project to decertify sex and gender in Britain. Decertification would mean people no longer have a legal sex or gender status (although state and law could continue to address gender-based inequalities). Proposing to decertify sex and gender, in the current fraught context of gender politics, has many challenges. This talk explores them in relation to a proposal that can be read as pragmatic and purposive, on the one hand, and as oriented to wider social change and gender’s radical transformation, on the other. Can a law reform proposal carry such different intentions? What impact does this mixing have on questions of ontology in terms of the scope, timeliness, and “realness” of what is proposed? And what happens when pragmatic and more radical transformations coexist in the same imaginary legislative text?

Davina Cooper is a research professor in law and political theory at King’s College London. Her interdisciplinary work has two interconnected aspects: post-normative conceptual thinking and methodologies (particularly in relation to concepts of state, equality, gender, property, and power); and state and non-state forms of radical governance and governing out of order. She is the author of various books, including Feeling like a state (Duke, 2019) and Everyday utopias (Duke, 2014). She directed the AHRC Research Centre on Law, Gender & Sexuality; has been a locally elected politician; and is currently completing an ESRC project on the Future of Legal Gender.

Mystical and/or Revolutionary Subjectivity in Marguerite Porete, Meister Eckhart, Sergey Nechayev, and Tiqqun

Owen Joyce-Coughlan

This paper argues that there are profound similarities between the characteristics of the ideal revolutionary subject as suggested by Sergey Nechayev's "Catechism of a Revolutionary", Walter Benjamin's "Critique of Violence", Giorgio Agamben's The Coming Community, and in the journal Tiqqun, on the one hand, and those of the ideal Christian as represented in the writings of the 13th/14th century thinkers Marguerite Porete and Meister Eckhart, on the other.

I make a brief argument to suggest that each of these thinkers advocates an attitude which may fruitfully be considered a form of nihilism. I offer a definition of 'nihilism' that can embrace the movement of Russian Nihilism, as well as the understanding Nietzsche gave the term, which coloured so much of how the later philosophical tradition has used it. Namely, 'nihilism' is manifested in a particular mode of subjectivity in which a wholly negative character prevails with respect to the totality of a given order of things, e.g.: the created, temporal, material, profane, political, or social order. The attitudes or dispositions advocated by the thinkers I examine thus involve a complete negation of present earthly reality, considered in a certain respect.

I go on to examine the relationship of these wholly negative dispositions to the question of prefiguration. In each thinker I examine, individual subjectivity of a fallen kind is supposed to be totally annihilated through the cultivation of the appropriate disposition, and, with the exception of Nechayev, a mode of relating to the world which is in some sense ‘divine' or 'redeemed' comes to take its place. Concomitant with the birth of a new mystical or revolutionary 'subject', produced through a radical negation, is a radical affirmation of another order of things. I hold that such a nihilistic attitude must also be prefigurative in order to ground an adequate politics.

I am a fifth year PhD candidate at the University of Chicago Divinity School. My area within the Divinity School is Theology, and my research interests are the intersections of Christian theology and philosophy in pre- and early modernity. My dissertation deals with the question of nihilism in relation to the work of Meister Eckhart, Nicolaus Cusanus, and Giordano Bruno. I attained a BA in Philosophy from University College Cork in 2009, an MA in Continental Philosophy from the University of Sussex in 2011, and an MPhil in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy from KU Leuven in 2015.

‘Enargeia’, ‘tacit knowing’ and the ‘as if’ imagination

Dariusz Gafijczuk

This paper investigates one of the long-standing historical embodiments of the ‘what if’ dynamics and the type of imagination underpinning it deposited in the concept of vividness (Enargeia) - a configuration of perception depicting that which is spatially and temporally absent, ‘as if’ present, thus attempting to make ‘the implicit explicit’. Vividness/Enargeia goes back to ancient times, as a specific technique used to amplify or show things that are not there as such, inaccessible to direct perception. It shows itself in many forms throughout the centuries, including as historical method and literary trope, also forming the backbone of a specific type of observation based on evidence, demonstration and illustration (evidentia is a direct translation of energeia into Latin). It is also found at the core of classical epistemology of the human sciences based on ‘ideal-types’ (Gedankenbilder), or a unique deployment of imagination that depends of the construction of imaginative constructs (Phantasiebildern), according to Weber.

Picking up from this the question is: how can we find a way of using vividness systematically and routinely in re-casting the present? The argument concentrates on the concept of the past, and proposes a model for how the past can be reactivated and used analytically to deepen our understanding of contemporary life. The aim is to show how such vivid, enlivened past, can be readapted for use as a type of method that triggers the release of new forms of critical imagination. In this sense, energeia does not so much pre-figure as re-configure reality. It is its special aspect of ‘staging’ or ‘showing’ the inaccessible that creates what we may call a ‘refiguration effect’. As such, vividness in practice becomes what Michael Polanyi (1966) called ‘tacit knowing’ – or ‘a valid anticipation of the yet indeterminate implications’ of problems, actions and perceptions.

Dr Dariusz Gafijczuk is Lecturer in Sociology at Newcastle University, UK. His interests span social theory, cultural sociology, and history. He is currently engaged in two research projects investigating crisis as a type of experience, and the historical and conceptual instances of ‘asocial community’.

Toward a New Political Imagination

Madina Tlostanova and Tony Fry

A series of disjunctures fundamentally condition that contemporary politics, ruling political philosophies and practices are ‘out of joint’ with the ‘complexity of the complexity’ of the present-day worlds. There are multiple ways to describe this situation of unsettlement. It is evident in the geopolitical order reconfiguration as the global North is losing its position as centre of gravity and the dominant progressivist teleology and the trope of development give way to a ‘frenetic inactivity’ (Southwood) and contesting forms of ‘enduring time’ (Baraitser). The overlaying enviro-climatic impacts, attempted to be captured by the concept of the Anthropocene, are still underplayed but already occurring and destined to intensify in the coming decades, clearly leading to further loss of biodiversity, more pandemics, continuing rise of sea levels, and climate related conflicts. In addition to these four of many now assured certainties there is a growing disparity of our species as the gap between the abandoned and neglected and the technologically ontologically transformed (being named a ‘transhuman’) increases. While these ‘events’ play out, the epistemological authority of Eurocentrically grounded knowledge is becoming undone. These are then the contexts to which our paper responds.

Three basic conditions of limitation underscore our argument. First, the political agenda of government, no matter its political ideology, is demonstrably failing to grasp and engage the profound crisis that life on Earth now faces. As such, it displays an intellectual lacuna and absolute failure of leadership. Second, available political ideologies, including democracy, are completely inadequate to the situation. Third, the culture and institutions of contemporary politics cannot deliver a solution to what we define as a ‘defuturing crisis’, as they are part of it. So framed, our paper will make the case for a new political imagination, which is an argument we mobilise prefiguratively.

Madina Tlostanova is a professor of postcolonial feminisms at Linköping University (Sweden). Madina focuses on decolonial thought, feminism of the global south, postsocialist human condition and art. Her most recent books include Postcolonialism and Postsocialism in Fiction and Art: Resistance and Reexistence (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), What Does it Mean to be PostSoviet? Decolonial Art from the Ruins of the Soviet Empire (Duke University Press, 2018), and, A New Political Imagination, Making the Case, with Tony Fry, (Routledge, 2021).

Tony Fry is Adjunct Professor, Architecture and Design, University of Tasmania (Australia), and visiting Professor at the University of Ibagué (Colombia). Tony focuses on unsettlement, design futuring, redirective and prefigurative practices. His most recent books include: Unstaging War: Confronting Conflict and Peace (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), Defuturing, A New Design Philosophy, (Bloomsbury, 2020), and, A New Political Imagination, Making the Case, with Madina Tlostanova, (Routledge, 2021).

Brecht De Smet is a visiting fellow at the LSE's Middle East Centre and a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Conflict and Development Studies at Ghent University, where he currently teaches a course on 'Popular Politics and Technopolitics in the Making of the Middle East'. He has conducted fieldwork research on political and social activists and the process of revolution and counter-revolution in Egypt, with a focus on the dynamics of collective learning, prefiguration, and hegemony in social movements. Apart from his journal publications, Brecht's main works are A Dialectical Pedagogy of Revolt (Brill 2015) and Gramsci on Tahrir (Pluto Press 2016). He is presently working on a project about processes of marginalization and resistance in North Africa.

Paul Raekstad is an Assistant Professor in Political Theory at the University of Amsterdam. They work on methodological questions in political theory, theories of freedom and democracy, proposals for future economic institutions, and questions of strategy and transition, in particular prefigurative politics.

Education and Knowledge Production as a Prefigurative Practice in Chiapas and Rojava

Anna Rebrii

For both the Zapatista movement in Chiapas and the Kurdish movement in Rojava, education and knowledge production have been crucial sites of struggle. I attempt to show that in both cases, these spheres of social life not only function to promote and reproduce the movements' projects of social transformation, but that they also--and perhaps more importantly--embody and thus prefigure the principles that underlie the movements’ visions of “another world,” such as autonomy, direct democracy, decentralization, collectivism, pluralism, and gender equality.

Both movements are explicitly developing alternative pedagogies that reconfigure the purpose of learning and knowledge production and eliminate hierarchies and exclusions within these spheres. The knowledge produced and taught is decided upon by communities/movements in an autonomous, democratic way rather than being imposed by institutions from above. As such, this knowledge reflects and speaks to localized concerns and needs and draws on embodied, every day experience of community members. Learning and knowledge production take place not only in formal spaces of education, such as autonomous schools and academies, but also in collective spaces of decision making and organizing communal life, which challenges the conventional understanding of where and how learning and theorizing takes place. Educational practices transcend the separation between education and everyday practice as well as the dichotomy between experts/educators and the public, characteristic of the modern Western systems of education and knowledge production. In both Zapatista and Kurdish movements, women’s autonomous spaces are at the forefront in terms of both using education as a tool of conscientization, targeting gender discrimination and marginalization, and of creating democratized, decentralized and collectivized practices of knowledge generation and dissemination.

My intervention will explore how the above mentioned practices embody and reproduce prefigurative visions of both movements. It will also look at how the pedagogies the two movements develop resonate with and may inform the literature on critical, feminist and decolonizing pedagogies.

Anna Rebrii is a PhD student in Sociology at Binghamton University, doing a comparative research of women’s organizing within the Zapatista movement in Chiapas and the Kurdish movement in Bakur (Turkey) and Rojava (Syria). She has visited the Zapatista territories and conducted preliminary fieldwork in Bakur. She is a Steering Committee Member of Emergency Committee for Rojava (US) and volunteers as an English teacher and recruiter for the University of Rojava. She is also part of a collective translating two key books on Zapatistas from Spanish to English.

Cooperatives and Prefigurative Economy in Rojava and Chiapas

Emre Sahin

The autonomous movements in Rojava (NE Syria) and Chiapas (SE Mexico) have received global attention in the last decade through their economic organizing at a mass scale. Surrounded by capitalist modernity and hostile nation states, these movements have managed to carve out spaces where economic production, distribution, and consumption are going through a process of prefiguratization, democratization, and collectivization. Cooperatives play a key role in this process and are the focus of this intervention.

In both Rojava and Chiapas, cooperatives are predominantly agricultural (grains in Rojava, coffee in Chiapas), small in scale, and increasingly large in numbers. There are mixed-gender and women-only cooperatives in each setting, and women’s autonomous economic organizing has been paving the way for a more democratic and collective economy. In this section, I will use organizational documents and field interviews to show how both economic democratization in particular and prefiguration at large have been pioneered by women in Rojava and Chiapas; the two most prominent prefigurative movements of our century.

Emre Sahin is a participant and researcher of social movements, particularly the Kurdish movement, and a sociologist at Binghamton University. He has done extensive fieldwork in cooperatives and communes across Rojava (NE Syria). Currently, he is writing his dissertation on prefigurative mobilization and women’s autonomous organizing in Rojava. His research interests include Contemporary Sociology, Social Movements, Politics of Resistance, Prefigurative Mobilization, Political Economy, Jineology, and Rojava Revolution.

Prefigurative Societies in Movement: From Argentina to the Movements of the Squares

Marina Sitrin

In 2001 in Argentina, the popular rebellion sang, “Que Se Vayan Todos! Que No Quede Ni Uno Solo!”. Instead of asking power to change, communities and neighbors formed horizontal assemblies, creating that alternative in the present with new social relationships – recuperating workplaces by the hundreds, retaking land, creating new collectives and cooperatives. While many of these prefigurative movements do not exist in the same form, the current movements, from Ni Una Menos to abortion rights, reflect the continued proliferation of horizontalidad and prefiguration.

2011 witnessed a similar form of movements around the world – with millions shutting down space so as to open something new - prefiguring alternatives desired. From Occupy Wall Street to the Movements of the Squares in Greece and Spain. This intervention will address these various, seemingly disparate experiences, and highlight the commonalities in the forms of prefigurative horizontal self-organization - speaking in particular to the gendered nature of the organizational forms and the role of women in leading the movements.

Marina Sitrin is an associate professor of sociology at Binghamton University, a movement participant and the author of a number of ethnographic books, including, Horizontalism: Voices of Popular Power in Argentina, Everyday Revolutions: Horizontalism and Autonomy in Argentina and the co-author/editor of They Can’t Represent Us!: Reinventing Democracy from Greece to Occupy and Pandemic Solidarity: Mutual Aid in the COVID 19 Crisis.

On the Necessity of Prefigurative Politics

Lara Monticelli

The purpose of this article is to elaborate on the concept of prefiguration by outlining the necessity of its contribution to a progressive public philosophy for the 2020s. In the introduction, I explain how the object of critique for many social theorists has shifted over the course of the last decade from neoliberal globalization to capitalism understood as an encompassing form of life. In light of this, I enumerate the features that should define a progressive public philosophy: radical, emancipatory, and decolonized. The introduction is followed by an overview of the academic debates emerging after the North Atlantic financial crisis of 2007-2008. Among these, accelerationism fundamentally rejects the incorporation of prefigurative politics in any emancipatory political agenda. To better understand this position, I examine the origin and meaning of prefiguration and prefigurative practices in more detail in section three. In it, I argue that prefigurative politics entails a holistic approach to social change that digs its roots in feminist and ecological thought and focuses on social reproduction and the preservation of life rather than solely economic production. Subsequently, I deploy the case of Occupy Wall Street to show that a growing number of contemporary social movements are implementing a dualistic strategy that simultaneously combines repertoires of action typical of protest movements with prefigurative practices focused on the embodiment of alternatives. This dualism along with the limited success of Occupy Wall Street in concretizing its claims and goals has led prefigurative politics to being labelled as incompatible with, if not even hindering, any emancipatory strategy. My argument instead is that prefigurative politics constitutes a fundamental and necessary component of any political strategy aimed at transcending contemporary capitalism since it conceives progressive social change in an ontologically and epistemologically different way with respect to political parties and protest movements. Taking this into consideration, I conclude that conventional politics and prefigurative politics can be seen as having the potential to mutually reinforce each other and that prefigurative politics should be acknowledged as a pivotal concept in establishing a progressive public philosophy for the 2020s. Only by doing so, will this philosophy be truly radical, emancipatory and decolonial.

Lara Monticelli is Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellow and Assistant Professor at Copenhagen Business School. She is the co-founder of the research network "Alternatives to Capitalism" at the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (SASE) and editor of the newly launched book series "Alternatives to Capitalism in the 21st Century" published by Bristol University Press. Her ongoing Marie Skłodowska-Curie project (2018-2021), titled ‘EcoLabSS – Ecovillages as Laboratories of Sustainability and Social Change’, focuses on the (re)emergence of community-based, prefigurative social movements (e.g. sustainable communities, eco-villages, transition towns, solidarity networks) as living laboratories experimenting with practices of resilience and resistance to environmental, economic and societal challenges. Lara is especially interested in how these movements re-politicize and re-configure everyday life, thus representing radical attempts to embody the critique to contemporary capitalism and prefigure alternative, sustainable futures.

Polyp Labour: Prefiguration, Scale, and Strategy

Claudia Firth

In Everyday Forms of Resistance James C Scott uses the analogy of a coral reef to describe how many seemingly invisible acts of insubordination can add up to create something more visible, and potentially much greater in its effect, than the sum of its tiny parts (1989, p. 49).

A similar analogy is also used by Marx in his writings on cooperation. While ‘each individual depositor is puny, week and contemptible’, the aggregated result is mighty coral reefs rising from the depths of the ocean, on which, the ship of state can potentially run aground, when confronted by the power of organised labour power (1976, p. 452).

The coral simile is employed by Scott in his discussion of certain acts of imperceptible or inconspicuous resistance. He suggests that these kinds of action, as ones that are not designed to openly declare warfare with the state are perceived as being purely tactical, and therefore as trivial or self-indulgent. Social movements linked to prefiguration have also been seen in a similar light. The Occupy and square movements for example, were seen as essentially being non-strategic or more concerned with processes of self-management and identity than making strategic demands (Kreiss & Tufecki, 2103).

The aggregation of polyps in a reef remind us that as well as having a temporal structure that links present, past and future, prefiguration also operates on the level of scale. Pre-figurative practices are those which enact on a small scale that which is desired to exist on a larger scale at some point in the future. For this paper, I would like to explore this scalar aspect of prefiguration in relation to questions of strategy and tactics, particularly focussing on cooperative social relations, organisation and micro-politics and the invisible labour of social reproduction they entail (Federici, 2020, p. 125).

Claudia Firth is a precarious scholar having recently completed a PhD in Cultural and Critical Studies at Birkbeck which explored radical informal learning in relation to leftist political histories. She is currently associate lecturer at Ravensbourne University, and Birkbeck, University of London, UK.

How Is It To Be Done: Dilemmas of Prefigurative and Harm-Reduction Approaches to Social Movement Work

Ashley Bohrer

While debates rage about ‘What is to be done?’, in activist spaces, debates are just as common on the question of ‘How is it to be done?” In other words, activists question not only the content of our solutions, but our strategic orientation to implementing those solutions. While there are many dimensions to this debate, I would like to focus on one in particular: the divergence between prefigurative and harm-reduction approaches to enacting social change.

In activist work, there are often two counterposed maxims of organizing work that embody the debate between prefigurative and harm-reduction approaches.

One comes from Audre Lorde: ‘The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.’ Evoking imagery of the plantation, Lorde powerfully stages the impossibility of relying on instruments of oppression in order to undo it. She forcefully calls attention to the tendency for resistance movements to, even despite their best intentions, replicate theyvery domination and oppression they seek to contest. In part this unwitting replication is caused, Lorde tells us, by a reliance on the institutions, strategies, and discourses of power. But by mobilizing instruments of violence, Lorde says, we will never find our way out of it. In this sense, Lorde (and many others who follow her line of thinking) argue that liberation politics must be prefigurative, that is, we need to act always in accordance with the highest version of our values, or risk becoming the thing we hate.

But a competing maxim of social justice strategy comes from Malcolm X: ‘By Any Means Necessary.’ On a certain reading of this perspective, all tactics, all institutions, all discourses are at least potentially available to social justice movements – even potentially the master’s tools. In this approach to social justice organizing, the urgency of countering domination takes center stage. In this perspective, sometimes expedience takes precedence. Rather than a prefigurative approach to political work, this approach foregrounds the necessity of using every tool available to us, because the dangers of not doing so are too great.

In this presentation, I would like to raise some of the many considerations that activists consider in adopting one approach or the other. I counterpose these logics not in order to argue for one or the other, but in order to illuminate what is different in them, what is compelling about each, and what the limitations of each are. In this sense, I seek neither synthesis between them nor to crown one over the other as the more ethical approach to doing social justice work, but to highlight the developed philosophies undergirding these activist orientations.

Ashley J. Bohrer is a scholar-activist based in Chicago. She is Assistant Professor of Gender and Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame. Her last book Marxism and Intersectionality: Race, Class, Gender, and Sexuality under Contemporary Capitalism was published in 2020 with Columbia University Press and Transcript Verlag. She holds a PhD in Philosophy from DePaul University (2016). Along with Justin De Leon, she cohosts the Pedagogies for Peace Podcast. She currently serves as the Public Philosophy Editor for the blog of the American Philosophical Association. In addition to her academic work, Ashley devotes much of her time to social movements for intersectional and anti-capitalist liberation. At the moment, she spends most of her movement time working with The Center for Jewish Nonviolence, Jewish Voice for Peace, and the Chicago chapter of Never Again Action. You can read more about her work at ashleybohrer.com

Paul Raekstad is an Assistant Professor in Political Theory at the University of Amsterdam. They work on methodological questions in political theory, theories of freedom and democracy, proposals for future economic institutions, and questions of strategy and transition, in particular prefigurative politics.

Notes towards a Performative Theory of National Identity

Ng Qian Qian

How can we understand national identity? Numerous answers abound in the field of nationalism studies. Yet, few question both the geo-legal and ethno-cultural foundations of what is commonly thought of as national identity. In fact, most theories of national identity often assume, explicitly or implicitly, a pre-discursive people of common ethnicity, culture, and/or citizenship. Though the nation/state split has long been noted, few studies have looked into the implications of the gap between nation and state on the construct of national identity. These critical gaps in the literature on theories of national identity are mirrored by the increasingly ethno-national rhetoric and policies around the world.

I offer an earnest, though preliminary, attempt at applying Judith Butler’s theory of performativity to understanding national identity as a social construct. My hope is that this work will contribute to a performative theory of national identity––to be formulated in the near future,––and be a timely antacid to increasingly xenophobic sentiments arising in an undeniably interconnected world. I first critically survey the constructivist theories of national identity by Pheng Cheah and Michael Billig––both of whom drew on prominent theorists Ernest Renan and Benedict Anderson––and elucidate important insights and internal contradictions in their works. In my main analysis, I synthesise key learnings from Cheah’s spectral nationality and Billig’s banal nationalism with intersections from Butler’s gender performativity to arrive at a novel set of understandings for a performative national identity, and briefly demonstrate how performativity reconciles the contradictions in Cheah and Billig’s theories. My analyses point toward a global justice beyond the paradigm of nation-states. Specifically, I conclude with some thoughts on our ethical duties––especially towards those caught between nation and state, such as refugees but even citizens in poverty––if we were to understand national identity performatively.

Ng Qian Qian is a recent graduate of the National University of Singapore (NUS) and Australian National University (ANU), and is set to pursue a post-graduate degree researching Political Theory either in NUS or the University of Oxford..

Constituent power as prefigurative

Maxim van Asseldonk

Abstract This paper argues that ‘the people’ to which the concept of constituent power refers is best seen as prefigurative. Constituent power is a key point of reference for (radical) democratic theories. Most elementarily, constituent power revolves around the idea that all authority and legitimacy must originate in ‘the people’. Despite its democratic potential, constituent power is commonly associated with strong anti-democratic or even totalitarian tendencies. Specifically, it is argued that if ‘the people’ is conceived as a substantial unity prior to all normativity, maintaining the idea of constituent power may prove detrimental to minorities and to dissent. My argument in this paper proceeds in two main steps. Acknowledging the aforementioned problems, I first identify the source of this problem as lying in the ontologisation of ‘the people’. If ‘the people’ is interpreted as a determinately anchored being prior to the political, the likely result is a more totalitarian and identitarian form of politics. Second, if the people should not be seen as a being, this raises the question of how the people should be interpreted instead. This introduces my main contention: the concept of the people is best seen as prefigurative, in that any claim to “we, the people” amounts to a prefigurative exercise in which the claimants act as if they are the people. This means that ‘the people’ remains a crucial point of reference for constituent power and democracy more generally, but in a purely symbolic fashion; it is a name to be invoked rather than a being to be embodied. Finally, if the people is not a determinate being this suggests a distinct interpretation of prefiguration. The future which is prefigured (the people) is here not a status to be attained, but a horizon to be strived for, but which remains always to come.

Maxim van Asseldonk is a Marie Sklodowska-Curie funded PhD candidate in political philosophy at the Centre for Citizenship, Civil Society, and the Rule of Law at the University of Aberdeen. His key research interests are radical democracy, constituent power, civil disobedience, and political community. Recent publications have appeared in Constellations and Philosophy & Social Criticism.

Dissensual prefigurations. Jacques Rancière and the various politics of the “as if”

Michael Zangerl

While it has often been remarked that Jacques Rancière’s writings on politics provide a productive point of friction for thinking prefigurative politics, a systematic reconstruction of his conceptualization of acting “as if” is still pending. I consider this detrimental, as Rancière offers different accounts of the political dimension of counterfactual modes of acting. To help avoid homogenizing heterogenous views, I want to sketch two strands of arguments.

On the one hand, I will show that Rancière has continuously paid attention to emancipatory modes of acting “as if”. From his 1981 dissertation on 19^th century workers to his more recent examinations of occupations of public squares and parks, his oeuvre is informed by a sentiment that egality can only be realized by non-utopian, non-strategic modes of counterfactuality.

On the other hand, I will argue that this textual continuity points us towards significant differences regarding the concepts involved. This can be shown by contrasting 1995’s

Disagreement with Rancière’s later writings on aesthetics. In the former he argued that egalitarian interlocutions rely on a “practice of the as if that […] opens up an aesthetic community, in Kantian fashion”. In the latter this parallelism of politics and aesthetics is superseded by an agonistic view, in which prefigurative politics and aesthetic prefiguration both make each other possible, but also constantly threaten each other’s identity. Following

Rancière’s aesthetic writings, I want to suggest that they are of interest for debates on prefigurative politics, because they point us towards examining the suppositions involved in interdisciplinary dialogue in an exemplary manner.

Michael Zangerl is a graduate student of philosophy at the University of Vienna. Under the supervision of Erik M. Vogt (Trinity College Hartfort) he is currently writing a master's thesis on Jacques Rancière's reading of Hegel. He also contributed to a forthcoming anthology edited by Georg Stenger and Inga Römer (Grenoble) entitled Faktum, Faktizität, Wirklichkeit. Phänomenologische Perspektiven.

Dignity is not enough: contributive justice in a society of equals

Hugo Radice

In times of crisis familiar ways of thinking may be tested by unanticipated developments. This essay examines our ways of thinking about work and its allocation across society. In recent decades we have grappled with workplace discrimination based on gender, ethnicity, religion or disability, evident in structural biases in recruitment and advancement. But at present, against the background of the looming climate emergency, two major challenges are raising questions about how work in general is organised into specific jobs, and how a given workplace is organised among those who work there:

· Deregulation of employment has led to a marked increase in casual or precarious work, replacing jobs with regular hours, pay and conditions.

· Automation is extending its reach from manual and clerical work into higher-skilled professional, scientific, technical and administrative work.

Taken together these are causing an unexpected rise in existential insecurity, which is fuelling conflicts between and within countries.

I look first at two recent books, Michael Sandel’s The Tyranny of Merit and Jon Cruddas’s The Dignity of Labour. I suggest that their framing of the crises of work as a moral issue has great value, but does not expose the entrenched social forces of accumulation and exploitation at the heart of the present neoliberal social nexus. The second section explores the concept of contributive justice, which if fully developed, opens the way to a more critical approach. The final section links this to wider questions of citizenship, democracy and community in a society of equals.

Hugo Radice is Life Fellow at the School of Politics and International Studies, University of Leeds, UK.

"Whither Utopia?: Marcus Garvey and the Contradictions of Black Nationalism"

William Paris

Abstract: In this talk, I reassess the role of utopianism in Marcus Garvey's Black nationalism. I suggest that in Garveyism we find a peculiar transfiguration of the Black body into a space of geo-political concern. The future Black nation grows out of the Black subject's mastery over their own body. In other words, utopia is not some far off land, but resides within the frontiers of the Black body. From Garveyism we can contest contemporary conceptualizations of the "Black body" as a site of subjection and objectification with a practical revision of Black body politics and its utopian capacities. While I refuse a full endorsement of Garveyism I conclude that it remains a worthwhile endeavor carving out an ideological space for Black bodily capacity.

I am an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto. My research areas are Africana Philosophy, 20th century Continental Philosophy, and Social and Political Philosophy. I am currently working on my book manuscript Black Critical Theory and the Epistemology of Utopia.

Utopia and prefiguration: Marx, Marxism and the upsurge of manifold utopian conceptualizations

Sergio Martín Tapia Arguello and Mónica Soares

This presentation is centred on alternatives. Alternatives in a world where it seems to be no place for them. Alternatives for an age in which everything changes, but only to remain the same. Radical alternatives seem impossible and, for such reason, they turn out to be utopian. There is a wide common appeal to prefigure utopia or otherwise humankind seems to be condemned to a certain disappearance of the future (cf. Garfoth, 2009). But the insistence on utopia and its practical possibilities to prefigure it collide with the hegemonic liberal position of the end of history (Fukuyama, 2006) and the concomitant disarticulation of the major referents of social struggle like socialism and communism (Santos, 2009), as well as with the rampant farright popularity. Within this scenario, our goals will be twofold. For one hand, we aim to put emphasis on the synergies and tensions that exist between Marxian and Marxist visions of social transformation and the utopian thought. From the lens of this debate, prefiguration of utopia is better captured as the conscious of the possibility to endorse a better future. On the other hand, we will bring three contemporary conceptualizations that aim to make sense of such hypothesis within a Marxist perspective, namely in the figure of Erik Olin Wright (real utopia); another in a more libertarian trend by Michael Albert (practicable utopia); and finally the work of Ana Cecilia Dinerstein (concrete utopia) deeply inspired in theorizations of Ernst Bloch and supported in an autonomist trend. Besides their inroads in contemporary reinterpretations on the entanglements between Marxian and Marxist visions and utopian thought, implications and limitations for a critical understanding of prefiguring utopia will likewise be addressed.

Sergio Martín Tapia Arguello is a PhD researcher at the Center for Social Studies of the University of Coimbra. At the present moment, he is also an invited lecturer at the Catholic University of Portugal (Porto, Portugal) and of the Universidad Libre del Estado de Hidalgo (México). Between 2010 and 2015, he was lecturer at the Law Faculty of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM). He is also part of the research group “Latin American Critical Legal Thinking” (Crítica Jurídica Latinoamericana) since 2008. Research themes: human rights from a critical perspective; Marxism and law; ethics and human rights, power and law.

Mónica Soares, is a PhD researcher at the Center for Social Studies of the University of Coimbra. Also, visiting-doctoral student at the Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities Alfonso Vélez Pliego (Puebla, México). Between 2013 and 2016, she was a researcher and invited lecturer at the Faculty of Education and Psychology of the Portuguese Catholic University (Porto, Portugal) and, between 2016 and 2017, a mobility researcher under the ERASMUS MUNDUS program funded by the Carl Von Ossietzky University (Oldenburg). Research themes: autonomy and social movements, utopia, subjectivity, ideology, political psychology, feminism.

Migrant Nation: Deconstructing nostalgia, reorganizing hope

Sanaz Azimipour and Javier Toscano

Migration has been one of the main issues of Western democracies, yet it seldom forms part of a political utopist imagination. Nevertheless, it seems that if one is to imagine ideas and proposals to activate arts of living as everyday prefigurations, one cannot leave the migrant issue behind. Within it, integration has become the guiding concept. Integration means respecting the rules and traditions of the host country, abiding by its laws and ways of doing. But it also means, sometimes very bluntly, conforming to its nationalistic obsessions, obeying new indiscernible or irrational hierarchies and even imitating existing conscious or unconscious social pathologies. In this sense, the mindset of integration needs to be refunctionalized, allowing for an understanding of new forms of enrichment. For enrichment not only means recognizing rules and traditions, but also to be aware about different cultural backgrounds, alternative approaches to social problem-solving, diverse ways of communicating and sharing, and even to the advantages of contributing to pluralistic, non-identitarian and homogenous societies.

The narrative we propose in this empiric phenomenology is a vision of migrants living in Berlin, creating networks of self-support and qualitative encounters. The whole approach of network building aims to bypass patronizing views of support and evolve into creative connections that enable confidence, skill-sharing and mutual recognition. These networks are not yet fully-grown and mature, yet they are tinkering and reinventing slowly the city’s identity, along the horizon of cultural enrichment.

This vision is partly speculative and poetic, yet it is also ethnographic and factual. It provides a lead to an ongoing process, based on an active political imagination, and it is delineated with different voices and opinions from migrants having a say in specific topics. Our narrative is therefore a tile out of which a specific image evolves: that of a vibrant city, open to foreigners in a specific way; but it is also that of an unknown, unexpected space, yet to be configured. A manifesto of a migrant nation in the making.

Sanaz Azimipour (born in Teheran, lives and works in Berlin) is an activist and community organizer in the fields of migration, intersectional feminism and antiracism. She is one of the founders of Migloom e.V., an intersectional anti-racism platform for first generation migrant narratives.

Javier Toscano (born in Mexico City, lives and works in Berlin) is a philosopher, documentary filmmaker, writer and interdisciplinary researcher in the fields of new media and visual sociology. His work has involved a continuous search to generate and collaborate with minorities, communities and groups with disabilities towards the production of alternative narratives of self-affirmation and vital exploration.

‘What if tomorrow never comes?’ – Considering the social-psychological factors for social transformation through Ernst Bloch’s Principle of Hope

Alena Lynn Roth

This paper consults Ernst Bloch’s utopian consciousness to highlight the significance of a social-psychological dimension for discussing social transition. I argue that a Blochian understanding of utopian consciousness provides an authentic form of human agency, which facilitates thinking beyond neoliberalism, and establishes preconditions for transitioning out of neoliberal hegemony. For Bloch, one of the reasons human consciousness and actions reinforce the status quo is a lack of an authentic form of human agency. This behaviour poses a problem for the transition to alternative forms of social organisation. Through a consideration of Bloch’s work, with specific focus on The Principle of Hope, this paper demonstrates that addressing and responding to hopes and fears is integral to social and political change and integral to an authentic form of human agency. To put this into a contemporary context, the talk will discuss this argument in light of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Alena Lynn Roth researches Philosophy and Literature at the University of Sussex. In addition to this, Lynn has teaching experience in moral and political philosophy, poetry, and prose narratives. She is also a convenor, lecturer, and tutor for the Widening Participation Philosophy strand. Lynn’s main research explores how literary works facilitate a philosophical thinking about evil in modern thought. Beyond this her research interests encompass the study of Utopia, Political Philosophy and Critical Theory. This has culminated in the forthcoming book chapter publication “There is No Place Like Hope: Ernst Bloch’s Utopian Consciousness” in Harris N and Acaroglu O Eds. Thinking Beyond Neoliberalism: Theorising Transition and Resistance (2021). Furthermore, Lynn is currently working on a further book chapter on Bloch’s philosophy titled: “Re-thinking Social Transformation: Critical Thinking and Utopian Consciousness during the COVID-19 Pandemic” in Bunyard T and Denis C. Bosseau Eds. in Critical Theory in (a time of) Crisis? (2022).

Putting the Word Out There: sub.Media, the Generative Prefiguration of Arts-Activist Resistance

Kimberly Croswell, University of Victoria, Canada

Prefigurative politics and resistance are intertwined. Living the future we want to see in the present necessitates challenging conditions of injustice, inequality, and ignorance. It demands resistance to the status quo, whilst simultaneously planting seeds in preparation for the days to come. Yet, as Uri Gordon (2018) demonstrates, to be generative of social transformation, designs towards prefigurative politics must be consequential, following a logic of path dependency. However, consequentialism need not be authoritarian or self-serving; it must merely acknowledge that by shouldering responsibilities that strategically align actions to resist the status quo, certain outcomes will result. But what are they and by whose intention?

Arts-activist resistance is a unique case in the lexicon of revolutionary activities. Arts-activism is the mobilization of art for social, cultural, and political purposes. Activist artists do not merely speak for themselves as individuals: they represent subjects that may give voice to communities, and allow other resisters see themselves in their art. Arts-activism is a type of vanguard activity, insofar as the makers of such art inspire their audiences to take their opposition to greater heights and remind them that, together, we can build a better tomorrow.

A significant example of generatively-prefigurative arts-activist resistance is exemplified by the grassroots, anarchist mass media production of the sub.Media collective. Prefiguratively speaking, sub.Media’s ‘outcomes’ have been to articulate a parodic counterdiscourse to the mainstream, to educate viewers on anarchist values desired for a present and future world, but most of all, to demonstrate that resistance is not only possible, but necessary. Through their collective practices and creative output, sub.Media has become a counterinstitution, challenging the systems they are resisting, whilst carving a niche of supporters who see value in their resistance. They lead by ‘putting the word out there.’

Kimberly Croswell is an anarchist, community organizer, and an emerging academic in the field of Leadership, Adult Education, and Community Studies. She is currently completing her PhD dissertation, “Art as a Catalyst for Social & Environmental Justice: Leadership Development and Prefigurative Politics in Collective Grassroots Organizing.” In previous lives she was a welded steel sculptor and a street puppetista. In addition to writing a dissertation, Kimberly is also a member of the collectively-operated, volunteer-run Camas Books and Infoshop and the Victoria Anarchist Bookfair collective. She is located in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, unceded lək̓ʷəŋən and W̱SÁNEĆ territories (pronounced Lekwungen and Whe’sanic).

“Made in Migration”: using prefigurative practice to co-curate a public heritage exhibition on the material culture of forced displacement in contemporary Europe

Racheal Kiddey

From the Black Lives Matter movement and the U.K. Culture Secretary’s ‘War on Woke’, to the related decision by the Westminster government to defund three high-ranking university archaeology departments (Sheffield, Leicester, Chester), it is clear that ‘The Past’ remains Political. How we interpret the past, who does archaeological work, and which voices carry forth, matter more than ever. Contemporary archaeology is the application of established archaeological methods to the material environment that surrounds us right now, having emerged an important area of study through which values of equality, human rights, and social justice are redefined to shape our shared understandings of the past, explicitly intending to positively affect the present and future.

The Made in Migration Collective is a fluid group of displaced and non-displaced individuals based in several countries in Europe. We use cultural heritage methods to co-document the material culture – objects, personal belongings, places, buildings – of lived experiences of contemporary forced displacement in Europe. Applying prefigurative anarchist politics and working methods, we used film, photography, ethnographic interviews, drawing, and creative writing, to record and reflect upon significant material culture, and co-curated a digital heritage exhibition called ‘Made in Migration’ (launching June 2021). The exhibition is contextualised within Europe’s colonial legacies and British immigration law as ongoing colonialism. Through enacting anti-racist, anarchist prefigurative principles The Made in Migration Collective actively exposes neoliberal and nationalist ideologies which continue to racialise and immobilise people according to colonial categories, first developed in disciplines such as archaeology and anthropology. This mixed-media talk is co-presented by members of The Made in Migration Collective; we explain the background to the project and offer a clear example of the important role that anarchist interpretations of cultural heritage can play in disrupting powerful partial (western) historical narratives, redefining the recent past in revolutionary ways.

Rachael Kiddey is British Academy postdoctoral researcher at the School of Archaeology, University of Oxford. Her current project, ‘Migrant Materialities’, looks at the role of material culture in situations of contemporary forced displacement in Europe (2018-2022). Rachael received her PhD from the Department of Archaeology at the University of York in 2014. Her doctoral research involved developing pioneering methodologies for working archaeologically with homeless people, documenting how heritage can function in socially useful and transformative ways. This research was shortlisted for The Times Higher Education Widening Participation Award 2012. Her monograph ‘Homeless Heritage’ was published by Oxford University Press in 2017 and it won the Society of Historical Archaeology’s prestigious James Deetz Book Award 2019. Rachael is a Senior Common Room Member and College Advisor at St Antony’s College, Oxford and an elected Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, London.

Hope in the Shadow of Coal: Exploring Reproductive and Transformative Hopes in Everyday Life

Thembi Luckett

Throughout history and across cultures, there have been dreams, visions and hopes for a better world. Hope is understood as an ontological reality, emergent from the unfinishedness of the world. This gap of ‘not yet’ allows for possibilities, as multiple ontological potentialities exist in the present. The hopeful ‘rope’ towards the future contains contradictions, ambiguities and potentialities embedded in everyday life. Through ethnographic research methods, this paper seeks to explore manifestations of hopes in working class lives in Lephalale – a space of coal resource extraction and ongoing dispossession. In this context of extractivist production, hope and agency are often destroyed, with people reflecting that “we are nothing in Lephalale”. But hopes are also generated with, what I term, ‘reproductive hope’ representing the dominant form through which hope manifests. Reproductive hope captures how hopes are involved in reproducing the given order, constituting closed, repetitive cycles of social being – locked in a continued space-time with a permanent and linear deferment of the ‘good life’. However, even these kinds of hope can also be important, as they generate energetic movements towards horizons and uncontained surpluses. In contrast, through the concept of ‘transformative hope’, I capture the multi-temporal and multi-spatial aspects of horizons of possibility. In the particular post/neo-colonial context of past and ongoing suffering of Lephalale, the past folds into the present and future. Future imaginings are informed by past, inter-generational sufferings, as well as by what was lost or missed in the past – those ‘still not-yets’, which continue to haunt the present. As such, the movement towards future horizons is not one of linear forward movements of progress but rather one of ruptures, losses and inter-generational folds of time. Given the destruction of futures through coal extraction and coal energy production, as well as ongoing dislocations from pasts, the everyday in Lephalale can be seen as a site of significance and catastrophe. Living beyond the present moment, both in terms of what is drawn from the past and what is longed for in the future, generates possibilities for breaking the repetitive time of racial capitalism and constituting new subjectivities and collectives.

Thembi Luckett is a History Access Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Historical Studies, University of Cape Town. Her PhD, ‘Hope and Utopianism in Everyday Life in an Aspiring City of Coal’, explores the historical production of the space of the Waterberg (Limpopo, South Africa) and manifestations of hope and relations to time and space in everyday life in the context of coal extraction and coal energy production in Lephalale - an ‘aspiring city of coal’. Before her PhD, she completed an MA at Sussex University in Social and Political Thought with a research focus on Benjaminian historiography and South African liberation history. She has also worked for trade unions in South Africa and has been active in worker and student struggles for more than a decade.

Anarchism in Everyday Life: Libertarian Prefigurative Politics in Spain and Argentina, 1890-1930

Nathaniel Andrews

In the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, Spain and Argentina possessed the largest anarchist movements in the world. In Spain, the National Confederation of Labour – an organisation with markedly anarchist leanings – boasted nearly 800,000 members in 1919, and anarchists went on to play a pivotal role in the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39. In Latin America, anarchism laid the deepest roots in Argentina, aided by the Italian and Spanish migrants who arrived during the nineteenth century. By 1920, the FORA V – the explicitly anarchist iteration of the Argentinian Regional Workers’ Federation – claimed a membership of 180,000. These movements were deeply interconnected, with the continual exchange of ideas and people across the Atlantic creating a transnational network of activists, and producing a ‘cross-fertilisation’ of anarchist theory and praxis. The legacy of these movements has never been more relevant than today. Since the emergence of the Occupy Movement in 2011 and the 15-M protests in Spain in 2011-12, people across the world have, in many cases, turned to extra-parliamentary forms of political expression, inspired by the (still under-studied) anarchist movements of the period discussed here. In many cases, they have attempted to prefigure the world they wish to create through their everyday practices, and ‘build a new society within the shell of the old’. Nevertheless, since Carl Boggs’ initial work on prefigurative politics in the 1970s, scholars have failed to apply this theoretical framework to historical studies of Spanish and Argentinian anarchism. Accordingly, this paper draws on the insights of social theorists Pierre Bourdieu and Michel de Certeau to explore how, through their everyday cultural practices, these activists prefigured a libertarian society. Specifically, it examines the spatial, temporal, familial and transnational dimensions of anarchist prefigurative politics, as well as the relationship between prefiguration and James C. Scott’s concept of ‘informal’ resistance.

Nathaniel Andrews is a doctoral researcher in the School of History, at the University of Leeds. In 2015, he graduated from University College London with a First Class Honours in Hispanic Studies, before going on to achieve a Distinction in his MA in Modern History at the University of Leeds. In 2017, he secured an AHRC-funded doctoral studentship, and is now in the final stages of his PhD. Nathaniel’s research interests centre on the history of anarchism in the Hispanic World and historical anthropology. His current research focuses on the relationship between anarchist theory and practice and, specifically, the prefigurative political practices of anarchists in Spain and Argentina, between 1890 and 1930.

Between reform and revolution: prefiguration as a guide for action

Carissa Honeywell

Prefigurative anarchism focuses on immediate goals over distant or abstract ones and emphasizes current, tangible projects, believing that this is how people can connect to each other, improve their social environment and affect the future. The emphasis on the here and now is deeply rooted in anarchism’s non-dominating impulse, underpinned by a contingent understanding of change. From the anarchist point of view, if anything is possible and nothing is inevitable, then what happens next is a direct consequence of what we do now. Choices about how to relate to others, how to engage in the economy and how to use work and leisure time all have a transformative meaning from this perspective.

The kind of small-scale experimental construction of alternatives that we see practiced by anarchist movements concerned with, for example, harm reduction, food sharing, decarceration, animal liberation and migrant support are motivated by the impatience of the desire to act now without waiting for the revolution of the future, as well as by the fear of merely tinkering with the worst excesses of suffering and thereby perpetuating existing structures. Using examples from these movements, I argue here that a prefigurative approach helps activists to navigate the difficult task of distinguishing between pragmatic (reformist) efforts that strengthen the system and those pragmatic efforts that also erode or undermine current structures (transformation). The terminology of ‘reformist’ and ‘non-reformist’ reforms offered by twentieth century French social philosopher André Gorz helps to clarify and operationalise these distinctions. The dual prefigurative concern with ‘avoidable’ suffering (as identified by Johan Galtung) in the present and structural transformation in the future offers anarchists a guide to action that links engagements with other beings in the present with wider goals of reducing the harms caused by structures of domination.

Carissa Honeywell is a Senior Lecturer in Politics at Sheffield Hallam University and author of Anarchism (Polity, 2021). Her teaching, writing and practice focus on anarchist/transformative responses to contemporary dilemmas around unmet needs for food, care, justice and community. She has a particular interest in the use of dialogical tools offered by Non Violent Communication in these contexts.

Two Anarchist Conceptions of Prefiguration and Revolution

Wayne Price

Fundamental to anarchism (anti-authoritarian socialism) is a prefigurative approach. The society we seek to build right now is our program for the society we want. We do not think that a centralized, bureaucratic, socially-alienated, state machine can be used to create a society of freedom, radical democracy, equality, and cooperation. If a revolutionary movement spends all its efforts on building a state—which it hopes will eventually “wither away”—then what it will end up with, is a state. The movement for freedom and solidarity must itself embody freedom and solidarity.

However, there are more than one approach to embodying the beginnings of a better world. One is to withdraw from the present capitalist, statist, society and work to build up a new system, inside the old one. P.J. Proudhon tried to create a nonprofit labor-exchange mutual bank. He hoped it would grow, peacefully and gradually, to replace the existing capitalist economy and the state itself. There would be a minimum, if any, direct conflict with the forces of the state. This strategy of building alternate institutions (sometimes miscalled “dual power”) is widely held among today’s anarchists.

Revolutionary anarchists are critical of this approach. We do not believe that the forces of the state and of big capital would permit a peaceful and gradual destruction of their wealth and power. Instead, our concept of prefiguration is the democratic self-organization of popular movements. Unions, community organizations, anti-racist associations, anti-war movements, anarchist federations, and so on should be organized. They should be built from the bottom up in as radically democratic and equalitarian a manner as possible.

Wayne Price is a long-time radical activist and writer. He has written many articles and three books, including The Abolition of the State, Anarchist and Marxist Perspectives. He has a doctorate in psychology.