Uri Gordon
Prefigurative politics between ethical practice and absent promise
Gordon, Uri
Authors
Abstract
'Prefigurative politics' has become a popular term for social movements' ethos of unity between means and ends, but its conceptual genealogy has escaped attention. This article disentangles two components: an ethical revolutionary practice, chiefly indebted to the anarchist tradition, which fights domination while directly constructing alternatives; and prefiguration as a recursive temporal framing, unknowingly drawn from Christianity, in which a future radiates backwards on its past. Tracing prefiguration from the Church Fathers to politicised re-surfacings in the Diggers and the New Left, I associate it with Koselleck's 'process of reassurance' in a pre-ordained historical path. Contrasted to recursive prefiguration are the generative temporal framings couching defences of means-ends unity in the anarchist tradition. These emphasised the path dependency of revolutionary social transformation and the ethical underpinnings of anti-authoritarian politics. Misplaced recursive terminology, I argue, today conveniently distracts from the generative framing of means-ends unity, as the promise of revolution is replaced by that of environmental and industrial collapse. Instead of prefiguration, I suggest conceiving of means-ends unity in terms of Bloch's 'concrete utopia', and associating it with 'anxious' and 'catastrophic' forms of hope.
Journal Article Type | Article |
---|---|
Acceptance Date | Jun 26, 2017 |
Online Publication Date | Oct 2, 2017 |
Deposit Date | Oct 4, 2017 |
Publicly Available Date | Oct 4, 2017 |
Journal | Political Studies |
Print ISSN | 0032-3217 |
Electronic ISSN | 1467-9248 |
Publisher | SAGE Publications |
Peer Reviewed | Peer Reviewed |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1177/0032321717722363 |
Keywords | Prefigurative politics; temporal framing; anarchism; Marxism; utopia |
Public URL | https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/886131 |
Publisher URL | http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0032321717722363 |
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