Wednesday, December 6th at 9am Pacific StandardTime.
Guest Speaker: Andre Sales, Brazilian political psychologist and a post-doctoral fellow at Sao Paulo Pontifical Catholic University.
Andre Sales will be discussing Chapter 3 of his book on A Political Psychology Approach to Militancy and Prefigurative Activism at our next Coffee Hour. Chapter 3 is focused on events in the winter of 2015-16 when students occupied more than 200 public high school facilities in the state of Sao Paulo to prevent the state from closing their schools. The chapter connects the Brazilian sit-ins with the broader transformations in contentious politics taking place around the world. Andre uses a sociohistorical approach to human development to discuss the relevance of future-oriented actions, commitments, and agency to understand how people grow and change throughout their lives. His talk will be an invitation to researchers in the social sciences to address the challenge of theorizing how people interpret their world while changing it.
As is out custom, participants are asked to read the text and send a question or comment to mcole@ucsd.edu. Your input is important for enriching the discussion and ensuring that it is inclusive of the many voices present.
You can access the PowerPoint slides from Andre Sales’ presentation HERE.
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Shannon Brincats presentation on Oct 20,2022 oñ Imagination and International Relations that raised the question about the importance of play. You can find the video and Shannon’s publication under Dialogues on the Cultural Praxis web site.
From Francine, at the very beginning of this. Coffee Hour, Mike mentioned
I am posting this message from Andy Blunden which I think adds to Andre’s stimuating coffeehour – Mike
Andre is dead right about these two words, militant and activist, being tokens of two traditions or currents of political action. Activist is the word which emerged in the 1960s, but only overtook militant, which is very ancient word, in recent times.
What is happening I think is this. The upsurge of social struggle c. 1968 represented the emergence of new forms of labour, of a change in the labour process. As industrial capitalism declined, a new generation of young people whose thinking had already surpassed the era of industrial capitalism were thrown into struggle but with only the forms of organisation and consciousness (ideology) which had been developed during the industrial era. As the industrial-era conceptions increasingly proved ineffective, these new ideas of militancy moved to the front. Consequently, militancy and activism declined over the following 30 years. The key moment in this process was 1999 with the protests in Seattle, and the OCCUPY movement which followed. These protests were (1) led by anarchist, but (2) not identity claims, but claims for “the 99%.” It was in my view the transcendence of identity struggles which made them so spectacular in their political-psychological impact. But they changed absolutely nothing.
Nonetheless, a view inevitably arose that these forms of struggle and identity are the new, the future. I prefer to think that a kind of transitional process is in place. Many of the present day activists actually regard as a virtue that there is no consensus about future aims, no agreed leadership or structure. In fact, these are weaknesses. Overthrowing the old industrial era structures did not mean that structure was inherently bad.
I believe that play indeed has a place in organising for social change in adult organisations. See in Aydin Bal’s work (or my article on Collaboration Learning Spaces). The moment of play is psychologically/organisationally necessary for devise new approaches. But that moment has to be surpassed in action. A whole movement who aim is play (such as OCCUPY) is bankrupt and elitist.
Andre writing from Brazil is a real asset. He is in the heart of powerful social movements there and well placed to further this science. CHAT is by far the best theory to understand what he calls “political psychology,” because for us “culture is in the middle.” I’ll see if I can interest Andre in my book “Origins of Collective Decision Making.”
Andy
https://www.academia.edu/82996899/Alterglobalization_and_the_Limits_of_Prefigurative_Politics
This quote from Brecht de Smet, whose paper is available at the url above, was contributed by Andy as a supplement to his earlier post on prefiguration
One important aspect that these authors paved the way for us to ask is:
What roles does prefiguration play in strategies of transformation, and what implications does it have for understanding of strategy?
I am quoting here Luke Yates, in the article I mentioned in my previous comment.
In the analysis, he will convincingly argue that:
Based on literature about strategy, three essential categories of applied
movement strategies are identified: reproduction, mobilization, and coordination. Prefigurative dynamics are part of all three, showing that the reproduction of movements is strategically significant, while the coordination of movements can take various ‘prefigurative’ forms.
I will try to get Andy interested in the article. https://doi.org/10.1177/0032321720936046
Thanks for posting this. I will talk with Andy soon, but let me keep the public conversation going here.
Just to echo Andy’s argument, it is worth mentioning that when the dispute between ativistas and militantes started to gain momentum in Brazil in a turbulent and ambiguous context in June 2013, some analysts highlighted the similarities with May 1968 in France.
I am also convinced that CHAT can offer a strong and powerful foundation for people interested in Political Psychology . It has always struck me that most scholars working in this field inform their research with old psychoanalytical conceptions of subjectivity or narrow concepts of motivation and intra-group conflict, critically embracing variations of the S-R model. I hope my current book can be useful for them to get to know a bit more about chat.
I would dispute the idea that militancy and activism declined over the following 30 years after 1968. I would say this because, as political cultures informing collective action, they were still present in the claims made by the New Social Movements and in the actions of organized labor parties in Europe and Latin America.
As for the need to bring non-institutional forms of political action – and social movements are one of the most popular ones – I would look a bit earlier than Occupy and the Seattle protests. The logic of the World Social Forum has embraced anarchist and autonomist ideas and principles that were present – even if not expressive – in local struggles and punk culture in major cities during the 1990s.
As much as I agree that the aversion those groups had to traditional organizational structures decreased their capacity to produce long-lasting change, I would not say that they achieved nothing. If we consider political experiments like Podemos in Spain, Syriza in Greece, and, more recently, the boom of collective candidacies and mandates in Brazil, we can see how they embraced Occupy and their counterpart’s legacy. If they invested in alternative forms of governing and ruling collective action, it is because those people who occupied public squares and claimed they did not represent us reenchanted a stance on political action anchored in autonomy as a value and as an art of organizing hope.
Finally, on prefiguration, play, organization structures, and strategy, one might be very mindful of the role they exert in the short and long run; as well as in its consequence for the internal actions of the movement – bonding, developing goals, and repertoires of action, drafting political identities – and those that are external – making demands, mobilizing new members and so on. If someone wants to know more about this, I strongly advise this text
Prefigurative Politics and Social Movement Strategy: The Roles of Prefiguration in the Reproduction, Mobilisation and Coordination of Movements – https://doi.org/10.1177/0032321720936046
Once again, thank you for having me, Mike. I was nervous but I am glad my talk triggered this conversation.
Thanks for a fantastic and relevant presentation, Andre! I wanted to ask how you see your concept of prefigurative activism applied in the context of Green Education or Education for Sustainability addressing climate change.
In terms of thinking about green education. I feel like it could inform a series of practical-oriented workshops in which students could try to live a day, or a week, playing in pairs on how to change their habits in class to make them more sustainable. The idea could also be used in a project in which students would prototype a series of rules/laws to an imaginary community, then, they could decide collectively which ones the class should try to live under for a week. Does that make sense for you?
I have just joined Cultural Praxis and will do my best to attend the coffee hour on Wednesday the 6th.
As a South African, who is old enough to have lived through the apartheid years & the transition, I am absolutely fascinated with this topic. It is the first time I have encountered the concept of “prefiguration” & it sparks so many thoughts of what was happening in SA during the eighties – both in education and in industrial relations. There are so many similarities between SA & Brazil & some key differences.
While I remain extremely positive about the potential of South Africa, I have to admit that we have lost our way in terms of the envisaged post-apartheid vision.
So we may need a post-prefiguration – not just progress since 1994, but a cultural historical/socio-historical review – back to the eighties. Now I’m wandering off into the need to write.