Abstract
New social orders
I live close to Christiania, the self-proclaimed Copenhagen freetown that has sustained itself for 51 years and which is featured in The Future is Now as an exemplary empirical case of prefigurative politics in practice. Though I know the history and culture of Christiania, I never considered it to be a community established with a prefigurative intent. After reading the book, I know better.
Lara Monticelli has edited a neat 241-page book that assembles cutting-edge contributions from 23 scholars. It is divided into three parts that sets the context for, describes the practices of, and present reflections on researching prefigurative politics. The afterword by Davina Cooper asks, among other things: “what is being prefigured?” (p. 230). In a sense, the foreword by Arturo Escobar is a reply: “throughout this volume’s chapters . . . prefigurative politics is amply shown to involve not only a struggle against both capitalism and the state, and the multiple forms of power and material-semiotic arrangement of everyday life they deploy, but a diverse set of political experiments to bring about new social orders” (p. xxiii, my emphasis). Chapters are short, to the point, like a good hardcore punk rock tune and, indeed, the book reminds me of a high-quality anarchist A ’zine like Inside Front or Maximum rock’n’roll (which, to be sure, is a good thing).
Critique of prefigurative reason
If in doubt, then observe. At the back of the book cover, prefigurative politics is aptly summarized as the act of “envisioning alternative futures,” and The Future is Now is subtitled an “introduction to prefigurative politics.” However, this book can be observed to produce a critique of prefigurative political reason, in the Kantian sense, as it sets and establishes the limits of the validity of prefigurative reason. What kind of reason might that be? While Kant’s critiques asked: “what can I know?”; “what must I do?”; and “what can I hope for?”, the present salient questions are either “what imagined future social order may I enact?” or “what is the future social order immanent to my present agency?” The questions are substantially different but reflect prefigurative reason all the same. At the heart of the matter lies the problem of living today the life that you wish would be the life tomorrow, speaking in future perfect: when the new order has been established, some of us will have already experienced it. Bergson (2007) analyzed this problem in The Possible and the Real (p. 73ff): whenever something profoundly new happens, its possibility is born too and is projected back in time. Even if we could hitherto not imagine it to be possible, then from now on it has always been possible to imagine and it has always been an ontological possible. It took the event of something new happening to demonstrate that it has always been possible. The point is that the concrete, experienced real conditions the imagined possible. Not the other way round. Derrida (2005) performed a similar kind of magic when he mused “perhaps the impossible is our only chance of something new” (p. 36). As the Future is Now demonstrates, prefigurative politics is all about placing facts on the ground so that the realm of what can be imagined to be possible may be enlarged. It is possible to imagine reaching effective decisions by consensus because some folks have already been doing it; what may seem utopian is already practiced now.
Imagination, experiments, maybe-logic, and warding-off hierarchy
At least two kinds of activities are at work then: radical imagining and experimental practice. The former, as Komporozos-Athanasiou and Bottici conceptualize, means that “how and what societies imagine defines the horizon of what seems possible, and thus bears real consequences for our collective ability to act in the present” (p. 65). The second section of the book (chapters 6–11) demonstrates that prefigurative politics involves active experimentation, trial and error, and learning while doing (which the Danish State understood, when it legally recognized Christiania as a “social experiment” in 1972). Prefigurative reason works by maybe-logic, it does not provide definitive answers: “Will this work? Maybe.” It is not the digital logic of either-or, but the associative logic of both-and, the kind of logic that Deleuze and Guattari (1988) conceptualized as “conjunctive” (p. 25). This raises a problem: what should prefigurative reason commit to be bound by? To illustrate, a juxtaposition of two interesting sentences: Yates and de Moor argue that the concept of prefigurative politics “does too much when prefiguration comes to stand in for certain kinds of activity even when the typical criteria of the concept are not fulfilled. It does too little when prefiguration is applied very selectively, suggesting an implicit shared understanding that prefigurative politics are intrinsically progressive and non-hierarchical” (p. 184). Laamanen observes: “at the roots of prefigurative politics are the four anti-positions of anti-authoritarianism, anti-capitalism, anti-oppression, and anti-imperialism” (p. 192). The problem is whether to commit to either a broadly applicable concept with limited explanatory power (which would include, say, White Pride groups) or to a strict concept faithful to its normative roots (which would exclude White Pride groups due to their inherent authoritarian reason). Descriptively speaking, prefigurative politics are bound by their roots in radical Left and anarchist political imaginaries of the 20th century. Normatively, should they continue to be so?
The empirical studies of Auroville (Clarence-Smith), Ecovillages (Centemeri and Asara), the matristic praxis in the context of Rojava’s revolution (Piccardi), and time-banks (Laamanen) are important contributions that bring out the concrete messiness and complexity of prefigurative politics in action. Perhaps because it is closer to home, I am intrigued by Jilly Traganou’s study of Christiania describing the pragmatic compromises and paradoxical effects that the freetown has endured. One example is how the community works to dismantle and destroy the internal hierarchies that constantly emerge as a response to practical needs and community organizing. Christiania caretaker, Emmerick Warburg, articulates what might be a common ethos of prefigurative communities in general: Hierarchy is a good thing, a very good thing. But it is not good to have a stable hierarchy. So don’t organize it too well. Because then you just have it on your back. It’s like fire. It’s a very good servant but it’s a bad ruler.
Keeping hierarchies from festering indicates that prefigurative reason operates by a logic of warding off the institutionalization of emergent hierarchies, and the informal power that comes with the formal authority of stable organization. This makes organizing by prefigurative logic different from the logic found in rational organization. It also makes prefigurative reason a tightrope, balancing act which du Plessis and Husted show in their five challenges to research on prefigurative politics: (1) do not assume that prefiguration is effective, show it; (2) avoid applying puritan ideals; (3) do not only study those you agree with; (4) discriminate rigidly between using the concept as an analytical premise and possible conclusion; and finally (5) avoid ascribing too much performative agency to a particular practice by calling it “prefigurative.” In other words, do not allow your research to be enamored with prefiguration. Walk the line.
The book is an entirely relevant contribution to the theorization and empirical study of prefigurative politics, social movements, and anarchist culture and organization. Organization and management scholars (critical or not) might want to pay attention too. Fleischmann et al.’s (2022) focus on “organizing solidarity in difference,” beyond capitalocentric logics, resonates with prefigurative reason. Also, those studying alternative organization (e.g. Just et al., 2021), commons and commoning (e.g. Fournier, 2013), critical performativity within the context of critical management studies (e.g. Parker and Parker, 2017) might find that The Future is Now has much food for thought. While The Future is Now’s critique of prefigurative politics does not provide a definite delineation of the valid domain of prefigurative reason or a consensus on what prefigurative reason is, it certainly raises a pressing question for the 21st century: in the era of socially and ecologically unsustainable capitalism, what does it mean to envision an alternative future?
