I recently had the pleasure of participating in a two-day series of workshops at the EUI in Florence (I was there remotely) on ‘Law & Revolution: Prefiguration v Abolition?‘. Apart from being a fantastically generative couple of days, the workshops were a prompt for thinking more about what an ability capitalism lens can suggest in terms of remedies. Can we prefigure more inclusive societies, or must we abolish the institutions and structures that currently construct oppression?
In the paper I wrote for the workshops, I suggest that we can place prefiguration and more contestatory actions on a continuum by appreciating both through Frerichs’ four-fold ranking of social interactions. Prefigurative actions tend to be those at the micro- and meso-levels of actions and interactions: those small(er) scale actions that seek to construct the world anew in the here and now. Prefigurative politics struggles to scale up.
By contrast, at the macro-level of regimes, we can think of contestatory actions such as revolution and abolition: those movements that seek to reshape (or do away with) the institutions and structures that perpetuate our currently existing conditions of oppression.
However, as I set out in my book, there are feedback loops between the four levels, and of particular relevance here are those meta-level rationalities, or ways of thinking. These are the deep epistemic categories through which we organise our understanding of the world. These, inevitably, take time to change, but the smaller-scale, prefigurative movements can step in here, offering a blue print for what comes next and how things might work. In short, prefigurative movements can set the stage for the embedding of rationalities that can enable contestatory actions to succeed.
So where does ability capitalism come in?
I identify three types of prefiguration that might be relevant: prefigurative methodologies, prefigurative politics, and prefigurative legality. Prefigurative methodologies are those ways of doing research that can create the conditions for us to safely and inclusively interrogate the areas we are seeking to research, as if conditions were otherwise. Here, we might think about visual contracts, or virtual reality, or model making, for example.
Prefigurative politics refers to movements at the local level that seek to construct alternative, preferred ways of doing and thinking. We might think of cooperatives, mutual aid societies, credit and housing unions, and so on. In short, these are groups of people who come together to achieve goals via means that differ from the typical market regimes and rationalities that comprise our current institutional structures. Of relevance here are personal assistance cooperatives, as well as housing and worker cooperatives. Interestingly, while cooperatives can offer alternative structures that might not reproduce ability capitalism to the same extent, as Graby’s research demonstrates, great care must be taken not to dismantle the market-based structures that can offer some protections to disabled people.
Finally, prefigurative legality refers to those practices of playing with, within, or between the rules: taking the existing rules and realising different, preferred outcomes. Examples here are those given by Cohen & Morgan in their paper where they discuss Amelia Thorpe’s book on PARKing Days, or, more relevant for our present purposes, the use of charity law by Disabled People’s Organisations (DPOs). Charity law (in the UK and elsewhere) recognises the ‘relief’ of disability as a charitable objective, entrenching medicalised and individualised models of disability. Yet many DPOs are legally constituted as charities, enabling their access to funding. DPOs, however, offer routes into paid employment for disabled people not despite, but because of their disability, subverting typical labour market outcomes. So, we have an example of playing within the (legal) rules to realise quite different (market) outcomes.
In future posts, I’ll say more about these examples and the possibilities of prefiguration for challenging the (re)production of ability capitalism.
Clare's research blog 