In Dialogue with the More-than-Human: Affective Prefiguration in Encounters with Others
Ann Light
Abstract
<p>I am talking about practices that give people the chance to feel differently. Not only the chance to feel different, but to feel relationships that are not ubiquitously available at present. I am calling this <em>affective prefiguration</em>.</p>\n<p><br></p>\n<p>We have seen the idea of prefiguration enter design, related to prefigurative politics. Carl DiSalvo championed it (2016) and there is inspiring work now from, for instance, Mariam Asad and Alix Gerber. Prefiguration is commonly understood, in its political form, as enacting the change one wants to see. Much of this thinking has concerned itself with alternative and progressive organizational structures – new economies, different legal systems, regenerative care facilities – emerging in niches and created as part of social movements determined to do better. Sometimes the new structures become absorbed; others persist as alternatives and some exist only as long as needed to make a point. These structures and the imaginaries that accompany them are what Davina Cooper has called everyday utopias (2014). They leave a legacy, giving us something to aspire to: a direction of travel. In ways akin to utopian science fiction, they present us with a hopeful but practical vision. Even those that fail to take hold signal how difference could arise. Graeber and Wengrow’s colossal book “The Dawn of Everything” (2021) presents, in this spirit, the diverse ways the anthropologist/archaeologist authors believe people configured their societies in prehistory – making a manifesto on the mutability of political structure by showing both variation in societal framework and the processes for negotiating it.</p>