Prefigurative Politics as Events of Radical Materiality: Three Acts of Embodied Infrastructures

In this talk, Dr Jilly Traganou discusses research for an upcoming book that looks at the role of space, design and materiality in prefigurative politics. She defines prefigurative politics as a repertoire of sociotechnical action that presents a distinct modality of resistance: dissenting through making. Participants in occupied spaces, protest camps, and self-organized communities prefigure new politics through their collective and horizontally-structured creation of material forms, spaces and infrastructures that enact desired futures in the present (Boggs 1977; Breines 1981). The processes of materiality, in which participants in these movements are involved, include collective acts of maintenance and affective labor, in which both humans and things are deployed in precarious but dynamic relations. Central in these environments is a feminist materialist action, both because of women’s leading role in movements of prefiguration, and the anti-patriarchal principles embedded in their overall practices. During the talk, Jilly focuses on the notion of “embodied infrastructures,” as sociotechnical assemblages of humans and things that support prefiguration. The talk was presented as part of a seminar series hosted by the Counter-Framing Design project www.counter-frames.org