How do we define success in radical politics? This is a question I have asked myself throughout my research and writing on what many historians, politicians, and colleagues deem a sensational, unequivocal failure. The Attica Prison Uprising began with a flash of possibility yet ended with dozens killed and even more wounded, setting off a slew of pro-carceral propaganda from the Nixon and Rockefeller administrations amid intensifying mass incarceration. What does it mean to recognize the Attica Prison Uprising as a success, and what tools might we find in the language of performance for making this kind of political assessment?

Attica inmates describe feeling a kind of utopian astonishment at newfound freedom throughout their occupation of the prison’s D Yard. This is not to say they simply reveled in the anarchic rebellion and freedom from physical restraints—though this also may have been the case. The freedom experienced by men in the yard was an essentially prefigurative freedom, a sense of autonomy and possibility on the horizon of their social existence that were suddenly available for them to claim. This freedom was expressed, to be sure, in anarchy and pleasure. But it was also expressed in militancy, radical care, medical treatment, democratic procedures, and political development that were otherwise impossible under carceral structures.

The sustained occupation of the yard required militancy and thoughtful organization, mechanisms to facilitate democratic participation, the building of infrastructure like tents and latrines, medical assistance, and drafting collective demands. In a matter of days, these men became medics, political representatives, organizers, and trusted protectors. They were visited by state officials, radical lawyers, political organizers, and esteemed journalists. Through their protest of and negotiations with the state, they built a social world that was both anti-carceral and radically joyful: they played songs and shared meals, built lodging and exercised together in communion, sharing accountability and trust that is systematically denied and criminalized across carceral geographies.

The process of enacting these new social roles engendered new subjectivities and possibilities for intersubjective relationships between men in the yard. These possibilities, and the utopian striving they invited, continue to structure these men’s lives in the aftermath of Attica. As Frank “Big Black” Smith put it, Attica “was like a lifesaver to me. My value system changed. My awareness changed, my consciousnesses changed … my way of looking at life is different now. It feels better.” Smith formed the Attica Brothers Legal Defense Fund, winning millions of dollars from the state for surviving Attica brothers in 2005. How does anyone interested in political transformation dismiss Smith’s statements, or the broader resonances of Attica and its afterlives, as nonpolitical, or a cheap carnival, as Žižek implied of prefigurative politics at Occupy Wall Street?

What does it mean to define radical political success in terms of performance—in terms of social transformation, of realizing new social worlds as they are brought into being by transgressive, creative organizing against carceral strictures? Why are performance and politics so often positioned as opposites, and how can reconceiving their co-constitution open up new ways of thinking about political success and radical subjectivities?

Read more from Sophie Capobianco in the latest issue of TDR, available now.