Experimenting the Alternative. Prefigurative Politics, Subjectivation, and Social Transformation.

This article analyses the concept of « prefigurative politics » currently spreading in social sciences, to describe the growing concern of contemporary social movements with using present ways of organizing or acting consistent with their ultimate goals, in line with the ideal principles they promote. After a retrospective review of it the emergence and diffusion, it will argue that, besides qualifying innovative practices, this concept theoretically allows us to identify a specific form of political action, distinct from both institutional and contentious politics. Prefigurative politics is a non-conventional political action, which aims at generating a sociopolitical change, through an original strategy: experimenting concrete alternatives in order to change political subjectivities. Such a strategy relies on a processual conception of political action and social change, operating on a long-term temporality, through the complex and unpredictible interactivity between plural actors, initiated by the restructuration of interstitial spaces within the present society.