Refigurative Activism and the Late-Modern Self: Collective Alternative Everyday Practices between Repoliticization and Post-Politics

In recent time, there has been a resurgence of lifeworld-centred activism in Western societies, such as community gardens, repair cafés, food sharing or clothing swap initiatives. These collective alternative everyday practices (CAEPs) have been celebrated as transformative laboratories for prefiguring a utopian society and expressing a radically different Self. At the same time, however, CAEPs have been found highly heterogeneous regarding the attitudes of practitioners: individual vary in their oppositional stance towards the political-economic system and in their commitment towards a consistent lifestyle. This implies a conceptual problem for New Social Movement Theory, which has traced collective action to the desire of individuals to construct themselves as autonomous and integrated – solid – subjects. In this article, I tackle this puzzle by fusing the subject-theoretical strands of New Social Movement Theory and Prefigurative Politics with those of Theories of the Late-Modern Society. According to this synthesis, modernization processes such as commercialization, acceleration and flexibilization have rendered the norm of the solid Subject precarious. While it is still important for individuals to act autonomous from market requirements and in consistence with personal values, it is increasingly difficult to achieve exactly that. Based on this conception of contemporary subjectivity, collective alternative everyday practices are a way for individuals to rescue and maintain the norm of the solid Subject. The varying degrees of systemic critique and lifestyle consistence of practitioners indicate that this refigurative activism involves at least two strategies: fully realizing the solid Subject as a way to overcome the liquefying force of modernization, and occasionally performing the solid Subject as a way to better manage that force. Whereas the former politicizes the new elusive state of the dominant social order, the latter allows to cope with that very order in a post-political manner. As such, refigurative activism is a heuristic concept for analysing how emancipatory impulses are affected by modernization processes in various ways.