Giuseppe Feola presents at AFPP 2023 in Manchester

Giuseppe Feola presented the paper ‘Schismogenesis and prefiguration in grassroots transformative spaces’ at the Alternative Futures and Popular Protest 2023 conference in Manchester.

Abstract: The aim of this paper is to advance the theorization of prefigurative grassroots initiatives (e.g., community supported agriculture, autonomous peasant/food collectives) as spaces of sustainability transformation beyond capitalism. The paper’s main contentions are that (i) prefigurative grassroots initiatives involve conscious self-determination by differentiation through a range of sociocognitive and socio-political processes leading to what I call ‘unmaking’ of capitalist structures and relations, and that (ii) such processes of unmaking are generative and possibly preconditional to the prefiguration of grassroots alternatives to capitalism. In other words, I posit that grassroots sustainability transformation involves a ‘negative’, but generative moment that co-constitutes and is entangled with the hopeful creation of alternatives to capitalism, which is more important for prefiguration than theorized to date. My argument builds on the notion of schismogenesis and revisits it in the light of literature on prefiguration, social movements, refusal and autonomous  geographies. The notion of schismogenesis was originally developed by G. Bateson (1987) and more recently employed by D. Graeber and D. Wengrow in their explanation of the formation of autonomous, egalitarian societies of the past (Graeber, 2013; Graeber and Wengrow, 2018; Wengrow and Graeber, 2018). Schismogenesis identifies cultural
differentiation – as a self-conscious political project – as the social force for the genesis of new sociotechnical, socioeconomic and socioecologic al formations. In other words, prefigurative grassroots initiatives, as instances of emerging postcapitalist formations, generate social change not only through their ability to socially innovate, construct and institutionalize alternatives, but by disabling, dynamically confronting, and refusing capitalism. The paper condenses a theorization of the generative function of unmaking processes, and of their entanglement with prefigurative creation, in a typology that is critically discussed and illustrated with empirical evidence from European and Latin American agri-food grassroots initiatives.