Introduction

While the strategy of political prefiguration developed in Chapter 2 may have provided an account of how different types of political transformation occur within several different representational processes (coding, overcoding and axiomatisation), it remained radically insufficient for understanding how revolutionary prefigurative strategies, in particular, are able to cohere and distribute themselves into distinctly non-representational kinds of political bodies. How is it possible, for instance, to carry out and sustain the consequences of a non-representational revolution? Is there a new type of body politic that would no longer be predicated on the party-body of the nation-state, the market-body of capital, or the territorial-body of the vanguard? Under what conditions would such a political body operate? How might one determine the relative benefits or detriments of the practices within its domain? And how might we understand the efficacy of different forms of agency without the reflection, contemplation and communication of self-knowing (that is, representational) subjects?

This chapter answers these questions. Non-representational revolutions, I argue, do not simply establish new conditions for political life based on a ‘more just’ sphere of political action whose foundational principles are controlled by political representatives. Nor do such revolutions merely aim to establish counter-institutions, whose sole purpose is to undermine all forms of representation and await the possibility that something new, and hopefully better, may emerge.