Prefigurative protocols, change the game

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As connectivity increases and the pace of change accelerates, we will likely face more frequent extreme events and nonlinear outcomes that defy conventional prediction and control. While rare events, both positive and negative, disrupt the status quo and demand adaptive responses, even small events can trigger significant consequences.

This last point got me thinking about the notion of ‘prefigurative protocols’. These protocols acknowledge that, in complex systems, small changes can have outsized effects. In this sense, prefigurative protocols are sets of rules, practices, or structures deliberately designed to bring about a desired future. They offer a way of ‘changing the game’ by recognizing that the future is not something that merely happens to us, but something we can influence or nudge through our present actions and choices.

By nudging complex systems in favourable directions, we open up new pathways while gaining immediate experience and understanding of their implications and challenges. By revealing alternative possibilities, prefigurative protocols challenge dominant assumptions and inspire others to join in.

Adopting prefigurative protocols means moving away from top-down control and embracing practices that foster self-organization. This could involve creating spaces for experimental projects, implementing decentralized decision-making, or establishing feedback loops that allow for continuous learning, unlearning, and adaptation.

This raises several questions: Are prefigurative protocols fractal? Is there a single, canonical prefigurative protocol? If not, what should such protocols look and feel like? Perhaps there is no single “one-size-fits-all” prefigurative protocol.

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Interesting. I think @celerae used the same phrase in describing what we did in the Singapore workshop. Any design that includes an attempt to follow the Chesterton Fence principle (figure out why the fence is there before considering tearing it down) is a prefigurative protocol design. Prefigurative actions are usually understood in a forward-looking “dress for the job you want, not for the job you have” sense, but they are rarely consequential unless they engage the past. So how you engage the past determines how you prefigure the future. The simplest element of that is whether the prefiguration tries to understand the past before tearing it down or tear it down regardless of understanding.

I sometimes think the opposite of Chesterton Fence design is Gordian Knot design, where you recognize intractable and inscrutable incumbent complexity as impossible to grok beyond a point and tear it down while fully aware of the risk. This is also valid, though rarely done in the spirit of bold risk management. Usually, as in the case of the American Right wanting to “dismantle the administrative state,” or in the historic case of socialist collective farming etc., it is done in a spirit of simple tribal hatred of the incumbent infrastructure. This is also why pre-figurative politics often seems to have a destructive streak to it.

The top-down/bottom-up angle may be somewhat cosmetic because the incumbent is usually the institutional power with top-down leverage and historic sunk costs. The “top down” part is itself neutral. Sometimes top-down design works better, sometimes bottom-up, and usually you have to cycle between them anyway. But what’s not neutral is historic incumbency and sunk cost fallcies.

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The Chesterton Fence vs Gordian Knot perspective may not capture the implications of scalability. Prefigurative protocols can operate not just at one level, but across various scales from individual interactions to teams, to org structures, and even to broader societal changes. So when a prefigurative protocol is adopted at one level, it may not just change things in isolation but can introduce a source of ‘adaptive tension’ that can ripple through an entire system, potentially leading to emergent behaviours and outcomes not initially anticipated. In other words, adaptive tension could be the very mechanism by which small, localized changes like those introduced by prefigurative protocols end up triggering broader transformations.

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Prefigurative protocols could be considered as the first order protocol that directs how other protocols should behave or better conceived as an opt out protocol?

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Viewing prefigurative protocols as a “first order protocol” suggests they incorporate principles of flexibility, inclusivity, and openness that can inform the creation and evolution of more specific protocols. However, viewing them as an “opt-out protocol” suggests they might function as alternatives to conventional protocols, allowing participants to choose more open-ended methods when traditional approaches feel restrictive or inadequate. My sense prefigurative protocols likely need to incorporate both aspects otherwise it sets up a bit of a paradox.

A couple of quotes from the entry for ‘prefigurative politics’ in the Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology I think are interesting:

Philippe Pignarre and Isabelle Stengers (2011) aptly illustrate the significance of open-endedness for prefigurative politics. Inspired by the writings of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1987), the authors argue that capitalism operates through apparatuses of capture by creating boundaries to autonomous thinking and paralysing collective action. In remaining open to multiple ways of imagining and rebuilding society, the Seattle protests had a ‘rhizomatic’ character: for being non-institutionalised, spontaneous, and made up of activists supporting diverse causes, viewpoints, and activist strategies, these kinds of protests are meant to be more resistant to capture by institutional politics. An open letter, petition, or even a march against the WTO conference would have constituted a more easily recognisable repertoire for politicians and the police. It would have enabled them to enact standard protocols to either repress or ignore such expressions of dissatisfaction. A carnivalesque demonstration, on the other hand, shows how resistance can also be aestheticised, making it difficult for politicians, business people, and the police to curb the protest.

Since most scholars exploring prefigurative politics seem sympathetic to it, there is a lack of studies on prefiguration’s antagonists, such as the police and mass media who frequently link anarchism with chaos and direct action with violence detached from clear political agendas. For similar reasons, few studies analyse prefiguration among old left and right-wing activists, which culminates in the aforementioned misapprehension of prefiguration as a strictly New Left strategy. Aside from helping us to better understand the present-oriented efforts to build alternative societies, learning about prefigurative politics also provides us with tools to experiment with grassroots initiatives in our everyday lives and in our academic discipline. Ultimately, would not action anthropology (Smith 2010) be in line with such horizontal and inclusive practices? Remaining true to prefiguration, it is better to just leave this and other questions open.

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Since prefigurative protocols came to mind, I’m starting to sense their patterns. By sensing patterns, I mean recognizing instances where the principle that in complex systems, small changes can have significant effects is at play, even if it’s not explicitly labelled as such.

This article in particular seems to tap into the idea of prefigurative protocols and that our actions and choices can influence the disposition of larger systems. I am using the term disposition here specifically to refer to the overall tendency, mood, or inclination of a system and how it’s likely to behave or react.

It makes me wonder how often we encounter prefigurative protocols without realizing it. And what might we gain by recognizing them more often?

What I am saying is that those evils “out there”, over which we as individuals have little control, make it even more important for us to make use of the agency we do have in our own lives. To do that, we need to recognise and understand our own contribution to our stuckness: the relationship patterns we repeat time after time; the evenings spent scrolling on social media instead of really living; the keeping things as they are because it feels easier than making a real, profound change.

What has also been crucial for me is acknowledging where all those social evils out there begin: with each of us. In order to build not just a better life but a better world, we need to understand that society would not be this discriminatory, misogynistic, abusive and the rest, if these tendencies did not exist inside all of us in some form – a feeling of being special and superior to others, or a disrespect for anything feminine or maternal, or a mocking neglect of emotional vulnerability, our own and in others.

Want to change the world? Start by changing yourself – however terrifying it might be

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Related: x.com

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Adopting prefigurative protocols means moving away from top-down control and embracing practices that foster self-organization.

This reminds me of this guest post I wrote 10 years ago.

I think there’s a lot of background here in the words “prefigurative” and “first order” that I’m missing at the moment, so I’d appreciate pointers to background. Or a concrete example of a prefigurative protocol.

Edit: the article on prefigurative politics above does help a lot.

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When this thread started, I couldn’t wrap my head around the “prefigurative” concept. The best I could do is imagine it as “adaptive / flexible”, but that feels too simplistic.

I’ve re-read the article linked twice and, although I still feel I don’t really get it, at least I can articulate what the problem (for my understanding) may be. The article mentions protests that are usually viewed as “failed” in the sense of “not achieving any goal”. But, if I understand correctly, it presents them as processes that induce changes in their participants.

It reminded me of Stewart Brand’s fast and slow system / processes:

Fast learns, slow remembers. Fast proposes, slow disposes. Fast is discontinuous, slow is continuous. Fast and small instructs slow and big by accrued innovation and by occasional revolution. Slow and big controls small and fast by constraint and constancy. Fast gets all our attention, slow has all the power.

Those protests “failed” if we look at them as “fast processes”. There were no immediate goals being achieved, but they also operated at the slow level. I personally experienced part of that in the 15-M Movement (2011).

[Getting on my soapbox…] Which brings questions of scale to the table. Maybe the changes induced by these prefigurative protocols are too slow to perceive them?

Any help to undertand it better is welcome, including negative feedback.

Exploratory raw thought: Could there be an analogue for Brandolini’s law * in this context? I mean, how can prefigurative (slow) strategies outpace the industrial-global processes that try to counter?

* The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.

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Thank you both for your feedback and thoughts.

@akkartik I enjoyed rereading The Legibility Tradeoff. It has given me several paths to explore. As you suggested, I am compiling a set of prefigurative protocol examples applicable to different levels of granularity: individual, group, and national/societal.

@Crul You offer an interesting perspective. I agree that a clearer articulation of prefigurative protocols is needed, in addition to examples. I am reading The Future Is Now: An Introduction to Prefigurative Politics to broaden my understanding of prefiguration and I’m working on a follow-up essay.

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@JohnGrant Thanks for the reference. I dug a bit more* into that book and the one recommended in the first footnote (“Prefigurative Politics: Building Tomorrow Today” by Paul Raekstad and Sofa Saio Gradin). I begin to understand why it is so difficult to define the term.
* just a quick diagonal read of the introductions

In Lara Monticelli’s book I didn’t see a single and concrete definition:

Throughout the chapters, the reader will encounter many definitions and attempts to characterize prefigurative politics

The closest I have found is this (click to expand)

One particular feature, though, makes prefigurative politics unique with respect to other forms of political engagement: its ontological and epistemological nature. Unlike conventional or contentious politics, prefigurative politics focuses on the creation of alternative ontologies: alternative ways of being in the world and, one might even dare to say, ‘alternative worlds’. Change is sought on multiple and interconnected levels: the private and the public, the individual and the collective, the socio-economic and the subjective–emotional.

IMHO it misses the idea that “the process must reflect the goals” (see below) that the other definitions emphasize.

“Prefigurative Politics: Building Tomorrow Today” has two concrete definitions, the original one by Boggs (1977), also cited in the anthroencyclopedia page, and one proposed by the authors:

  • Boggs: those forms of social relations, decision-making, culture, and human experience that are [its] ultimate goal.
  • Paul Raekstad, Sofa Saio Gradin: the deliberate experimental implementation of desired future social relations and practices in the here-and-now.

Please correct me if I’m missing something, but to me it sounds a lot like a strong rejection of “the end justifies the means”. One must remain ontologically faithful to one’s goals.

Which fits with the limitations acknowledged in Lara Monticelli’s Introduction. Restricting yourself from the beginning to tactics compatible with the end goal limits your options.

Rereading your first post in this thread, I would like to comment on this:

In this sense, prefigurative protocols are sets of rules, practices, or structures deliberately designed to bring about a desired future.

From those last two definitions, and using your words, I would say that “prefigurative protocols should themselves embody the desired future”. They are not prefigurative if the protocol is ontologically different than the desired future.

If I understand correctly, The Archipelago: An Island Network In Practice would be an example of a prefigurative protocol.