Prefigurative politics between ethical practice and absent promise

Gordon, Uri

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.

Citation

Gordon, U. (in press). Prefigurative politics between ethical practice and absent promise. Political Studies, https://doi.org/10.1177/0032321717722363

• 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