Spontaneity and the prefigurative feel

When talking about prefiguration what is often talked about is the creation of formal anti-oppression protocols, sometimes critiqued as the self-bureaucratization of anarchist social movements. The result is what I refer to as the protocolization of daily life, a situation where the day-to-day is formalized into defined rules or norms. In doing so, activists often reproduce the control found at the heart of mainstream organizational forms. Such control often works to the detriment of the democratizing goals of social movements, excluding minorities and working-class people, generating the often-critiqued homogenization of social movements. This paper explores an antonym of such protocolization, what I refer to as the prefigurative feel. I will define prefigurative feel as a concern with the nature of the relationships between the people inhabiting such projects, the way they relate to each other, to time and to space. In the paper I relate this feel to an antonym of control – spontaneity. My own personal experience within social movements prompted a 12-year investigation into the issues of control and spontaneity within activism. Within it, arts-based participatory research provided rich ethnographic and biographical data of two case studies, two organizational ecologies where protocolization was tempered by a concern for the feel of the alternatives created. This data prompted the explorations presented here, not about what social movements mainly do, but about what they tend to do less of, and about the possibilities such actions less taken might afford.