Download This PaperTowards an Adventurous Institutional Politics: The Prefigurative ‘As If’ and the Reposing of What’s Real
The Sociological Review, 2020
35 Pages Posted: 16 Jul 2020
Date Written: April 15, 2020
Abstract
Discussion of prefigurative politics typically focuses on the re-visioning of means to ends within grass-roots activities taking shape against or apart from the state. This article takes a different approach. Addressing prefiguration through the terms of the ‘as if’, it explores the assertion of counter-hegemonic meanings, facts, norms and authority both by and about institutions, including state ones. Through four contentious acts: municipal expressions of international solidarity; legislating new gender categories; role-playing micro-states and new money; and acting like a feminist law reform commission, the article considers what prefiguration, and reading for prefiguration, can contribute to a progressive trans-formative politics. While rehearsing, anticipating and representing alternatives are important, well-recognized prefigurative attributes, this article also addresses less explored dimensions. Specifically, it considers how institutional prefiguration retroactively constitutes its conditions of legitimacy and authority, its depiction as fiction, the performative constraints it faces from diffuse and unequal circuits of power, and the work done by recognition (and non-recognition) of new facts, rules and norms. Together, these dimensions speak to the complicated and plural character of what is real when institutions are enacted as if they were otherwise. This quality of being both real and not real, in conditions of wider opposition, support and torpidity, constitutes the crux of prefiguration’s efforts and promise.
Keywords: gender, institutions, legal activism, prefigurative politics, radical politics
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
Davina Cooper (Contact Author)
King's College London - The Dickson Poon School of Law ( email )
Somerset House East Wing
Strand
London, WC2R 2LS
United Kingdom