ABSTRACT
This chapter examines Occupy in order to explore the incredibly complex and temporarily situated realities of political action and the ways of organising that social movements are engaged in. In particular, it analyses some of the practices of prefigurative politics as well as highlighting the multifaceted character of living and researching real democracy in this movement. It is an example of a militant research(er) trying to ‘feed back in’ and speak to all those Occupy participants and observers who found themselves feeling cynical and disillusioned by the movement. I do not aim to defend or idealise Occupy but I do want to give a taste of the complexity and multidimensionality of this movement situation. It is very easy (perhaps even too easy) to claim that some things were done wrong and some were not accomplished at all. To do so, in a constructive way, is an important part of the movement’s reflection process, but being cynical about the movement while not appreciating that it had its own complex dynamic can hardly bring us to a better place. Even if one claims that Occupy failed to achieve its goals, one has to admit that it nevertheless succeeded in showing that it is always possible to significantly disrupt the business-as-usual reality and practise a different form of self-government. And if nothing else, its strength lies in first, reaffirming, to a new generation, that such a possibility is always real and, second, in mobilising our appetites for more and better through popular self-education in struggle. Below is a story that highlights just how much was going on within the movement and that democracy – as practised in many aspects of Occupy – was not an ideal form of society. It was a real democracy characterised by a degree of messiness and uncertainty that is connected to the realities of all political action. This chapter proceeds in four steps. In step one, I will introduce the historical idea as well as the contemporary usages of prefiguration. Subsequently in step two, I will explore the current discourse about prefiguration in the particular empirical context of Occupy as well as outlining some of the mechanisms and effects of prefiguration thus understood. In step three, this chapter will seek to go beyond the theoretical framework that prefiguration provides and introduce the notion of the movement’s living temporalities. In the last step, I will show how I apply this notion for the analysis of a number of empirical phenomena and processes in Occupy.
