‘Don’t just do something, sit there’: contemplative activism and ‘being political’ as prefigurative politics

Abstract

ABSTRACT In recent years, scholars have considered how activists are ‘being the change they want to see in the world’ and have developed the concept of prefigurative politics to describe how movements for social change align the means of their changemaking practices with the end goals of their organisations. Whereas being and embodiment seem to be central to this slogan, relatively little systematic scholarly reflection has occurred on how ‘being political’ emerges as a form of prefigurative politics. This article introduces one example of how being can be a form of prefigurative politics by thinking through contemplative activism: the use of contemplation as a way of responding to global challenges. It shows that the political imagination of transformation that contemplative activists offer is a form of being (a state of existence) rather than doing (working towards a particular goal). This article considers how a study of contemplative activism as a prefigurative form of being political can contribute to three main debates within the literature on prefigurative politics: the specific relationship between means and ends, temporal distinctions between the present and the future and the actualization of goals. Ultimately, the article argues that considering social change to occur on an ontological level contributes to advancing a broad understanding of prefigurative politics that not just includes non-hierarchical models of organization but also comprises affective, embodied, and spiritual experiences as forms of prefigurative changemaking.