Rereading Prefigurative Participation as Re-Doing Culture. The Case of CSAs in Germany

The aim of this contribution is to develop another understanding of phenomena such as CSA which currently are described with the help of concepts like prefiguration or lifestyle participation. While it is commonly assumed that these projects serve the communicative aim of expressing or transmitting a consensus-seeking proposal to the public that calls for the uncritical and apolitical adoption of sustainable lifestyles, the contributions aims at rereading such forms of prefigurative politics. These forms of engagement are political participation that aims at re-doing cultural hegemony. Hereby, the main mode of action consists of creative, material and critical action. With reference to newer approaches to the topic, it is argued that these projects are rather to be understood as a material contestation and reworking of a pervasive matrix of cultural unsustainability. This cultural matrix both subjects and enables individuals to perform as subjects of their lifestyles so that unsustainability reproduces as the dominant way of life. Change towards an alternative role model of the good life seems not to be possible in the mode of a creatio ex nihilo or an abrupt passage, but affords to overcome the paradox of how to rely on the existing society of unsustainability but nonetheless to advance to an incommensurable and thus new model of the good life within planetary boundaries. Against this backdrop, these activists engage in three main tasks. First, they start from the existing culture of unsustainability through their practices. This finding helps overcoming understandings of these projects as forms of exiting or retreating to enclaves. Second, they intentiously develop an alternative “prefigurative” culture which is full of polysemic practices, of ambivalences and of double binds. These provide, third, for the necessary preconditions to inverse and distort the hegemonic meaning of practices such as agricultural, retail and consumption. Prefiguration is thus a complex experimental process of redoing this cultural matrix “from within” towards an outside that is not rationally plannable beforehand. Against this backdrop, the vulnerabilities of this strategy consist of its incommensurability, openness and outward-orientation rather than its non-contentious, inward-oriented character of prefigurative niches. Correspondingly, the main danger for projects such as CSA currently is to be culturally co-opted, watered-down, distorted or staged as the stabilizing other of the existing cultural matrix. Examples are fake-projects by white suprematists or framings of these projects as means of social distinction.