Prefiguration and the post-representational politics of anti-deportation activism

ABSTRACT

This article addresses a familiar dilemma in discussions of experimental forms of political practice in the context of state racism. On one hand, the predominant modes of engaging with state power through strategically representing claims to state actors often re-affirm the categories of state domination, mimic the hierarchies that radical actors intend to overcome, and tend to become invested in a reformism that limits the horizon of change. On the other, prefigurative politics seeks to craft resistance practices that instantiate desired future relations in ways that can seem hopeless against the institutional power of the state and the investments in racial dominance that underpins its actions, with the danger of producing an unstrategic and naïve inversion of the state logics that activists want to oppose. Drawing on interviews and participation with grassroots anti-deportation activist groups, this article argues that a third concept, that of post-representational politics, is a necessary tool for recognising and engaging with experimental forms of political practice that oppose state racism. It argues that both the practice and the notion of post-representational politics sensitise us to important aspects of radical political praxis in ways that enable responses to critics of prefigurative politics without ever-expanding the boundaries of that concept.

KEYWORDS:

• Prefigurative politics
• immigration detention
• migrant solidarity
• Post-Representational politics
• border abolition
• state racism

Introduction

The demise of Corbynism as a movement-centred, social-democratic project within the British Labour Party, the rise of mutual aid groups in response to Covid-19 and the Black Lives Matter contestations against racist state violence raise, once again, the question of how the diverse praxes of grassroots movements can resist and overturn structural oppression. In critical social movement studies, there has been a well-worn debate about the fruitfulness of grassroots, ‘folk politics’ that centres on the concept of prefigurative politics (Naegler, 2018; Srnicek & Williams, 2015; Yates, 2020). In contributing to this debate, this article draws on practices of migrant solidarity to argue that experiments in post-representational politics are a dynamic emergent form of praxis, an understanding of which helps to resolve familiar dilemmas about the limits of prefigurative politics in the context of state violence. The article argues that post-representational politics has become an important component of anti-border activism and that including post-representational politics, alongside strategic and prefigurative sensibilities in our toolkit of activist/scholar concepts can enrich our understanding of experimental practices in movements that aim to resist state violence.

Social movements seeking to challenge state racism have developed a diverse repertoire of responses. How we make sense of this collection of praxes and understand what they are doing is of great importance to both social movement scholars and those engaged in social movement organisation. In different historical moments and struggles, it has been necessary to articulate different distinctions. Ashe et al. (2016) examine the distinction between integrationist approaches to anti-racist violence in the 1960s Britain – those that work symbiotically with state institutions to challenge racism – and autonomous strategies in which Pakistani organisations mobilised self-defence. The prison abolition movement places emphasis on the distinction between reformist strategies, which bring about changes that bolster the system’s legitimacy and stability, and ‘non-reformist’ attempts to reduce and further destabilise oppressive systems (Ben-Moshe, 2013).

After the alter-globalisation contestations and especially since Occupy, social movement scholarship has frequently centred on the distinction between prefigurative practices and instrumental ones (Maeckelbergh, 2011). Prefigurative politics describes forms of political practice which attempt to embody or reflect in the present, the future society that one wishes to bring about. Prefigurative practices are diverse, finding expression in anarchist, socialist and anti-racist movements predating the coinage of the term itself. As Boggs (1977) argues, the prefigurative elements in the socialist tradition have often been at odds with the dominant currents of statist, party-based socialism. Raekstad and Gradin’s definition is most useful: ‘the deliberate experimental implementation of desired future social relations and practices in the here-and-now’ (Raekstad & Gradin, 2020, p. 10). Prefiguration attempts to create and defend spaces in which forms of lived emancipation can be embodied. It can also itself be a form of strategy that virally, or through some other means of proliferation, expands to replace oppressive systems: it is a building of the new world in the shell of the old.¹

This kind of praxis, which aims to develop the relations and practices of the emancipated societies of the future within the present (Starodub, 2015), is often presented as having multiple-interconnected forms (Yates, 2015). One typically centres on concern for the reduction of hierarchy and the practice of consensus within organised forms of resistance (see Boggs, 1977; Graeber, 2014; Ishkanian & Peña Saavedra, 2019; Maeckelbergh, 2011). Another involves building alternative forms of relating to one another to those imposed by hegemonic societal institutions and dominant practices of resistance, typically seen in communities that find refuge ‘away’ from the state. These include experimental social arrangements, institutions and intentional communities (Cooper, 2014) including ongoing protest camps or social centres (Finchett-Maddock, 2008; Mulqueen & Tataryn, 2012). This approach often ties prefiguration to spaces organised around common political interests and involving of close, continuous social bonds.

I follow Raekstad and Gradin (2020) and Cooper (2017) in holding onto this more diverse and experimental view of the realm of prefigurative practice, while resisting the tendency to differentiate sharply between the work of building alternatives and practices of opposition to oppressive state practices (see, also: Chatterton & Pickerill, 2010). The way in which prefiguration can be applied to granular elements and scales of a particular practice or organisation means that determining whether a practice is definitively prefigurative or not is rarely an interesting question. Furthermore, the implication that one has to choose between instrumental and prefigurative modes of political action (for example, in Breines, 1980) does not account for the prefiguration in and around centres of state power and the active need to resist the repression, encroachment and/or incorporation to the state that prefigurative projects frequently face. The idea that prefiguration has to exist without instrumental forms of resistance obscures forms of prefiguration that threaten the nation state and its investments in white supremacy, such as the Black Panther free breakfast programs (Jones, 1988), that become targets for state repression. This sense in which multiple tendencies may overlap and infuse movement activities continues to be relevant for my argument on post-representational politics below. As Swain (2019) argues, prefiguration does not require the absence of strategy; likewise, post-representational politics may sometimes be prefigurative without prefiguration being the only and/or most helpful way of understanding a movement’s activities.

However, this does not commit one to the idea that all radical experimentation is necessarily prefigurative – the deliberate experimental implementation of desired future social relations is not the only alternative to a rejection of the predominant or imposed modes of sociality and resistance. Through understanding a form of grassroots experimentation, that I name post-representational politics, I carve out a space for experimentation which disassociates it from a utopian drive.² As I argue in the last section, it is not that all post-representational politics is not prefigurative, it is that not all of it is. I also reject the idea that the value of experimentation is only in the rejection of normative modes of being and relating (Pellizzoni, 2020). Post-representational experimentation is key to forming networks of survival responsive to the evolving manifestations of state racism.

In crafting this account of activist experimentation, in the first section of this paper, I examine the politics of representation in the anti-deportation movement in the UK.³ I argue that the predominant modes of engaging ‘strategically’ with border enforcement rely on a dynamic of representation and recognition. This way of politically engaging with detention structurally embeds tendencies a) to limit the emancipatory horizons that persist in opposing border enforcement and b) to reinforce both categories and practices which entrench the hierarchies radical actors wish to overcome. In the second section, I define and exemplify the post-representational practices of anti-deportation activisms – differentiating them from both representational politics and prefigurative politics. In the third and final section, I argue that post-representational practices might be particularly important in times when desire and future seem to drift apart. I argue that notions of activist ‘edgework’ and dystopian prefiguration, concepts which I articulate in this paper, become vital orientations for political struggles in and around state violence.

The evidence and motivation for the claims made in this paper come from an empirical engagement with grassroots groups in the anti-immigration detention movement in the 2010s composed of a four-year participant-observation within several groups that worked with people resisting detention from within. I volunteered as a visitor and organiser with a detention visiting group from 2013 until 2018. Since 2015 I have worked with the collective that facilitates the detainedvoices.com platform to amplify experiences and demands from people in UK immigration detention. Alongside field notes from the meetings, events, trainings, visiting, protests and debriefs that were created from this work, I undertook 25 in-depth semi-structured interviews with other activist organisers both in and out of detention, found through my own contacts and snowball sampling. Of these, 22 interviews were with activists from a range of groups in the London and South of England outside of detention. The insights of those in detention that informed this project were gained from the three remaining telephone interviews and in conversations while working in the activist groups. Over 100 of these conversations were documented in statements that were published on detainedvoices.com. My field notes and interview transcriptions are stored electronically and analysed thematically drawing on concepts from social movement literature and from activist discourse. The groups I was working with were aware that my involvement in the groups was informing research and the questions, themes and ideas were discussed both formally and informally prior to the research starting and throughout the research process.

The limits of representational approaches to anti-border activism

UK immigration enforcement targets racialised poor migrants (Fekete, 2005), creates hierarchies of access to the means of survival and wealth through its categories (Anderson, 2010; Anderson et al., 2009), exposes people to physical and emotional violence and furthers the dispossession and disenfranchisement of colonisation (El-Enany, 2020). Each month £120 m of state funding is poured into the Home Office and private sector security companies, travel agents, tech companies and airlines in order to develop the infrastructure of surveillance, policing, imprisonment and removal (Atkinson, 2020). Yet, the Home Office is beset by incompetence and scandal; in addition to the numbers of successful unlawful imprisonment claims against the Home Office each year, the Windrush scandal showed that border control had attacked even British citizens who had lived in the UK since they were children through its manufacturing of a hostile environment that imprisoned and deported some and rendered unemployed and homeless others who could not provide documentation (Singh, 2014).

As Nadine El-Enany (2020) points out, immigration law plays an ambivalent role for those resisting this system. On one hand, it is one of the only means for any individual to fend off the surveillance, detention and deportation of border control. Competent, pro-active and diligent lawyering through private, legal aid and pro bono representation has not only succeeded in blocking individual removals but has made significant and substantial changes to the deportation infrastructure itself: ending fast-track, ending no-notice deportations, and disrupting Home Office attempts to target homeless people for deportation (Phelps, 2020).

On the other hand, immigration law is a ‘regime of recognition’ that traps both people and social movement organisations into pouring resources into making claims to the state to help those it targets. Engagement with the discursive regime through which that system functions means to mobilise around categories (citizen, refugee, family member) which have been developed in order to legitimise the establishment of an absolutist notion of nation-state bordering since the 1960s (El-Enany, 2020). The concepts operationalised by immigration law disarticulate people from their full histories, individualise histories of collective oppression and disenfranchisement. Dependence on them means advocacy has to depend upon moralising and normalising values systems such as innocence, deservingness and conformity with the heteronormative family (Keenan, 2011). It means mobilising around concepts whose legal meaning of is largely determined by officials of the nation state (Behrman, 2014). As well as limiting the political horizons of organising, engaging with immigration law’s processes almost inevitably means adopting roles and relationships that render those in detention disempowered ‘cases’ to be helped by the expert knowledge of citizen outsiders (Malkki, 1996).

From a social movements perspective, this predicament can be understood through the frame of representational politics that I will articulate in this section. Representational politics is a political approach that centres on actors that stand in for, act or speak on behalf of another person, group or cause. Representational politics enables vicarious action at a distance. As Pitkin writes, representation involves the ‘making present in some sense of something which is nevertheless not present literally or in fact’ (Pitkin, 1967). As such it provides a legitimising basis for action for those aiming to change oppressive institutions like immigration detention: in representational politics, citizen-activist groups place themselves as conduits for the interest of people in detention to reach and influence centres of power, primarily the ‘state’ and ‘public’. These terms are not used to imply the existence of unified entities but a constructed collection of state and public institutions and concepts.

Classical notions of representation have centred on formal and institutional democratic processes for becoming a representative and the responsibilities of representatives. This has led to a view of political representation as primarily happening within the state rather than within social movements and other social forms. Contemporary understandings of liberal representational politics have considered representatives as authors of claims to representativity, in which representatives participate in the construction of those they represent (Brito Vieira, 2015; Saward, 2009). This claim is made before an audience (for example, actors within the state) who then accept or reject the claim’s authority or substance. This understanding of representation is helpful in diversifying the idea of who can be seen as a representative and developing a critical understanding of processes through which different actors are recognised as representatives. It is also useful in articulating the structures and dynamics of representational political activisms.

Firstly, current academic approaches to representation stress the importance of the performative aspects of representation. Acts of representation contribute to the discursive and material formation of identities and groupings through the artistry of the claim to represent. These approaches deny that there is a meaning to terms ‘the people’, ‘people in detention’, ‘refugees’ or ‘migrants’ preceding their representation. This means that representational politics presents both opportunities and dangers for radical politics. Representation can help produce a class of people who can gain recognition to speak in certain public fora and who can be represented as having particular needs or rights. Yet it is also common for these categories to be naturalised and essentialised as a bounded collective with a set of consistent interests. So, as intersectional feminists (Crenshaw, 1989; Yuval-Davis, 2013) have argued, representatives that claim to speak for communities along singular axes create a false universal that excludes and obscures difference in experience as well as political disagreement.

Secondly, the constitutive view of representation brings into focus a greater diversity of representative actors. Alongside state representatives, we can see that the predominant forms of anti-detention organising (lawyering, lobbying and campaigning) operate according to a political imaginary of representational politics in which the primary aim of activism is to mediate between the claims of those affected by detention and the centres of power in the state and public. While these representative actors carry less power than those charged with wielding state sovereignty, they still carry a positional power in relation to those who resist from within detention, for example. They therefore pose challenges to the normative assumptions of liberal democratic theory that regard the legitimacy (Montanaro, 2012) and accountability (e.g., Ebrahim, 2003) of representatives as the product of an electoral, deliberative or consensual process.

The third implication of this view of representation is that ‘effective’ representations are an achievement that is dependent on acceptance by an audience. Activists who wish to make representational claims must be recognised as representative by those they are seeking to influence. This means that to represent people in detention, groups must be seen to know about them, to understand the pressures of government and articulate reasonable paths towards reform. Community representatives, therefore, must be responsive to both those they represent and the interests of the state.

The politics of representation is a useful framework in which to conceptualise and motivate political action against immigration detention. This approach primarily involves representing the experiences of people affected by detention and deportation to agents within the state or to the public who are then able to support campaigns for change. In particular, the role of activist representatives is particularly important in the struggle against detention, given the barriers facing people in detention from representing themselves legally or democratically. A politics of representation enables the mobilisation of privilege, social, symbolic and institutional capital and relative freedom to work for the benefit of those who are prevented or unable to put their case effectively. Representational politics provides a political imaginary that allows activists and professional services to see themselves as agents of change.

Importantly, representational politics also provides a means of legitimacy and accountability for political action. Rather than basing political action in personally held political critiques, representational politics is justified by the experiences, desires and interests of the people affected by detention. Representational politics can be judged on its ability to faithfully convey the experiences and interests of people detained, on its faithfulness to formal consent agreements and on the claim that reforms proposed will significantly improve the lives of people in detention. Representational politics, in this sense, has to work to present itself as backward looking – grounded in something that existed prior to the representation – even whilst what is represented is partially brought into being through the representation.

Representational activism has been the most visible vehicle for the significant detention reforms mentioned above; however, the politics of representation can lead to several limitations for social movements.

The first concerns the kinds of activist communities produced through representational work. Because speaking for others is seen to be the central mode of political practice, representative politics frequently cements patterns of agency in which citizen-representatives – and their knowledge, labour and voice – are more important and impactful than people held within detention. As such, it can reify a subject-object ontology where those who are detained are passive recipients of support by those outside who speak on their behalf. The agency of people in detention is reduced to a contractual model of individualised ‘informed consent’ in which their role is to mandate charitable actors to perform actions framed and shaped by people outside detention whose future and safety is not bound up with the direction of detention policy.

Because of this division of labour, representation is seen as being complicit in the emptying out of democracy (Tormey, 2015). By locating powers in structures and institutions and in the representatives that work on behalf of the oppressed, it fails to recognise and account for forms power that can be built through increasing cooperation and organisation among those resisting state power. Representational politics can mean failing to work with people in detention as partners and rendering them silent, or at best, tokenistic presences in campaigns (Malkki, 1996). Consequently, while anti-detention campaigning seeks egalitarian ends it sustains inequalities within its means: by privileging the voice of citizen campaigners; erasing the political acts of those subject to detention; and tending to adopt the language and framing of the state in order to formulate demands.

The second limitation concerns the limited range of representations that can be sustained by a praxis solely based on representational politics. As Saward (2006) argues, the success of a representative’s claim to represent (what Saward calls a ‘representative claim’) depends on its acceptance by an audience. In the case of anti-detention activism that audience is often hostile to their aims and the constituency that they are trying to represent. There is a resulting pressure to conform to the interests of state officials, to speak the language of immigration law, to be understood by the state and to appeal to currents within dominant discourses to gain attention. In order to convince the state to adopt a new path, campaigners can be tempted to reinforce narratives of vulnerability and innocence that will never be able to account for everyone that detention targets. Moreover, campaigns will frame themselves around ‘alternatives’ to detention that entrench and extend oppressive aspects of the state by not challenging the purposes for which detention is sustained. While complicity in the state is a necessary by-product of challenging and reshaping state power, this approach always carries with it the possibility of legitimising expansions of state power, especially when there are institutional pressures to show the impact of one’s campaigning work. In sum, the terms of recognition of the representative claim are usually determined by the interests of the nation state (Coulthard, 2007).

Anti-detention activism’s post-representational praxes

Post-representational politics

The features identified above are not reasons to abandon representational politics, yet they are reasons to seek alternative, supplementary engagements that expand the possibilities for political action. In this section, I argue that experiments in post-representational politics play a significant role in radical anti-border organising in Britain. Whereas representational politics centres on representing the interests of disenfranchised people to the state and public, post-representational politics recognises the resistance of those in detention and focuses on working collaboratively with them to resist and challenge the deportation system. Post-representational politics is concerned with the power dynamics of political organisation, where power is understood as contested, generated by, and circulated through situated forms of political praxis. Post-representational politics involves working in ways that attempt to address the vast disparities in the ability to shape relationships of cooperation amongst anti-detention activists in and out of detention. Whereas representational politics seeks to direct state power toward reform, post-representational politics is concerned with building power with and among disenfranchised groups. And while representational politics is grounded in a claim to represent the interests of another, post-representational politics involves loosening the instrumental connection between action and its radical ends. Post-representational practice is not the instantiation of a theory of disenfranchisement but often means an open-ended cooperation with others which involves embodied and situated thinking.

The ‘post’ of post-representational politics is not intended to signify a new era of activist practice. It locates an activist sensibility which displaces the primacy of representational acts towards state institutions, and places priority on cultivating bonds and networks amongst activists inside and outside detention walls. Post-representational politics retains a focus on the experience and interests of those in detention, yet attempts to engage with the people that hold those experiences in a collaborative way.

Post-representational politics is different from the notion of ‘non-representational politics’ which some authors have used to claim that the hierarchical, vertical structures of state-oriented representation are being replaced by new models of political action (Day, 2005; Pearce, 2007; Tormey, 2015). These claims to non-representation rely on a limited conceptualisation of representation that reduces it to liberal, formal and institutional modes of representation through election. But as we have seen, representational politics seeps into a wider array of activity and can indeed be read into all political action. As Thomassen writes, if representation is constitutive of political action, one cannot escape representationality completely (Thomassen, 2007). Choices about what aspects of oppression are responded to, how a movement is framed, and who can speak are all representative considerations. As in Spivak’s critique of Deleuze and Foucault (Spivak, 1988), representation still remains critical to any claim to bypass representation. Spivak argues that these claims are, in fact, attempts to mask the power of the representative voice, to seek to avoid accountability and to refrain from asking questions about who is being represented and who is being excluded.

As well as obscuring de facto representative relationships, support for non-representational politics appears to advocate the ‘retreat position’ (Alcoff, 1991) that views every attempt to speak on another’s behalf as problematic and wrong. This position refuses any opportunity to use one’s relative privilege and access to those with legal and policy-making power to further the cause of others. Rather than rejecting all avenues of speaking for others, Alcoff argues that each instance of representation needs to be analysed by looking at

the probable or actual effects of the words on the discursive and material context. One cannot simply look at the location of the speaker or her credentials to speak, nor can one look merely at the propositional content of the speech; one must also look at where the speech goes and what it does there. (p. 26)

Alcoff, here, gestures towards reframing our understanding of representational practices away from traditional representative considerations, such as how accurate or truthful they are or from what fixed social positionality they come from, and instead directs us to assess the effect of that speech and the context that structures these effects. It brings attention to what the language does – what it enables and brings into being – rather than solely on what it means. In so doing, a post-representational sensibility expands our understanding of the dynamics of the more-than representational politics at work in representational practices.

The post-representational sensibility is a reaction against the modes of representational action described above. Yet, rather than a complete rejection of representational politics, it is better conceived of as an adaptation and expanded political sensibility. Sometimes it is a refusal to represent in a particular way, at others, it is an experimentation in new ways to represent. To be post-representational is not to act without representation but to include representational acts within a wider array of considerations and sensibilities that shape political action. In particular, it is another example of radical activism which seeks to engage oppressive institutions in creative ways. However, in contrast to anarchist experiments with electoral politics (see, Ordóñez et al. (2018)) the interventions are an attempt to intervene in ways that the institution does not facilitate and recognise.

To get a sense of how post-representational politics operates in anti-deportation activism I briefly explain how it influences three areas of anti-detention activism below. These practices were predominant in migrant solidarity work between 2012 and 2018. This period of activist mobilisation around detention was shaped by the earlier abandonment of anti-racist commitments by the Labour Party who, in the New Labour period, built rather than opposed institutions of border control. That period also saw the incorporation of anti-racist movements into professionalised NGO structures and ultimately into the state through neo-liberal governance, outsourcing etc (see, Fekete, 2020). An opening was created for grassroots groups to take leading roles in opposing the detention regime and hostile environment, with groups such as Schools ABC, Docs not Cops, SOAS Detainee Support, Close Campsfield, Movement for Justice and Sisters Uncut taking prominent roles.

Anti-detention protest practices

The regular protests held outside Immigration Removal Centres across the UK during this period provide the first example of a post-representational political practice. These protests were organised every month outside Campsfield House in Oxfordshire since it was built in the early 1990s until it closed in 2018. There were periods of activity in the 2000s culminating in No Border protests that blocked coaches used to transport people to charter flights. In May 2016 noise demonstrations were held outside every detention centre in the UK as part of a national day of action against detention, a high point of regular ‘Surround Harmondsworth’ and ‘Shut Down Yarl’s Wood’ demonstrations spanning 2014 to 2018.

These protests could be read, as protests often are, as representational political action. The freedom to protest in liberal politics is a celebrated element of the freedom of expression and speech. Protests, in this paradigm, aim to bring issues to public attention, articulating dissatisfaction and demands to the state or some other public who will take them up if they think the concerns are valid. The detention protests certainly have the function of locating detention as a source of unacceptable violence that the state should address. They express political opposition to detention through embodied action that at least pushes up against the boundaries of the state’s law, inviting the opposition of security and police. They articulate these demands through slogans, calling for the centres to be shut down and naming specific abuses that have occurred within their walls. Calls to ‘Shut Them Down!’ and even more so, the later calls to ‘Set Her Free!’ are speaking to the state – demanding benevolent action to change its practice. The larger protests at Yarl’s Wood contributed to raising the issue of detention amongst anti-racist and pro-migrant movements more generally as well as amongst religious and feminist organisations.

However, this representational frame underestimates the significance of the protests to the detention movement and obscures the ways that the protests function largely as a post-representational political tool. The protests do not seek to represent the cause of detention to power located away from it. The banners, messages and voices of those outside are not directed to those away from detention but towards those within it. These demonstrations of solidarity were frequently reciprocated in the form of banners made from sheets with messages and telephone numbers on them.

Many of the protests were planned alongside those inside who alerted others on the wings to go to the windows, make banners and participate in the protest. This aim of the protest is captured here by Ali:

[The protests are] important because it’s aiming at horizontality – even while being a long way from it. It’s aiming at the idea of an organised protest by those that are captive and those that are free from detention. That doesn’t really exist in other ways in immigration activism and in that I’ve seen on a big scale. It’s not really like that yet but it aims at something that could be approaching a group protest, horizontally organised. (Ali, protest organiser)

Here, Ali emphasises the cooperation and coordination that occurs in the preparation and decision making when organising the demonstrations that is especially true of the unannounced demonstrations and the later Yarl’s Wood demonstrations. They also echo the idea, that I will return to below, of post-representational politics as the pursuit of a form of horizontal practice that is rendered impossible by the physical and political terrain of detention. Prior to, during and in the aftermath of these protests the creation and sustenance of relationships between activists inside and outside detention remained central to their purpose.

Detention visiting

Detention visiting is another post-representational political intervention into immigration detention. Visiting involves the building of long-term relationships of solidarity between those in detention and volunteers – removing the expectation that the primary purpose of this relationship is to endorse further representations by the volunteers to courts or the Home Office. In Kemp (2019), I argued that in post-representational detention visiting, activists can be understood as experimenting in the occupation of hospitality subject roles of hosting and visiting. In particular, this form of activism foregrounds visiting, in addition to hosting, as subject positions from which to develop post-representational anti-border practices. The shift from a bounded, service oriented, ‘hosting’ role to a more uncertain, responsive and conversational ‘visiting’ engagement with people in immigration prisons allows visitors to navigate the institutional dynamics of detention that tend to incorporate and co-opt practices of care to serve the ends of deportation.

Whereas representational politics consigns specific roles to activists and workers, such as case-worker, lawyer or campaigner, the post-representational position of a visitor is more ambiguous and less focused on achieving instrumental goals. Visiting primarily focuses on the maintenance of mutually supportive relationships with those in detention, rather than on becoming a representative of people in detention and calling on others to make change. As such, detention visiting is a site of practice-based thinking about the role of those with relative privilege intervening in spaces of acute state repression. While we might see the anti-detention protests as a post-representational play upon the street protest, detention visiting is an attempt to occupy care and advocacy roles in more creative and responsive ways.

Activist witnessing projects

From the perspective of representational politics, witnessing appears as an intuitive response to oppression. It works to uncover hidden injustices and enables the participation of those excluded from political discourse. Witnessing is a tool to inform and influence political actors and change the way debates are framed. For this reason, quotes from those in detention are often used as adjuncts to the campaigns of reform campaigners in ways that provide the depoliticised evidence for campaigns decided by paid citizen activists.

Yet, working with those in detention to witness abuses can be practiced as part of a post-representational politics. Arising from conversations with detainee protesters in 2015, the Detained Voices project became a means for publicising the protest firstly to mainstream media outlets, then to grassroots solidarity groups and finally to a wider online audience. After the protest, the project continued to use its networks as a means of recording the words of people held in detention and those of their families. It was a method of communication that bypassed the usual gatekeepers, such as the detention centre management, who were often unwilling to communicate about events inside detention as they occurred. Since March 2015, approximately 200 posts have been published on the basic WordPress blog and shared on social media platforms. ‘Statements’ for publication are solicited by sharing a telephone number via visiting groups, on banners at detention centre protests, through word of mouth within detention and by referral from other detention groups.

Activist witnessing projects that are not constrained by the reform efforts from NGO organisations are post-representational for a number of reasons. Since they are not concerned with communicating a particular form of messaging by appealing strategically to state interests, they are able to carry a plurality of messages including by those not seen as deserving and innocent by the state. They communicate not only the suffering of detention under the threat of deportation, but also organisation of resistance and the analysis of detention from within. For example, one statement by a protester detained in Harmondsworth in 2015:

People work as cleaners, in the kitchen, some people who wash pans, some that work in the library as an attendant, those who clean tables, people who clean the showers. Every essential part of the centre apart from security staff are all done by detainees who are paid £1 an hour … It’s all politically motivated. Nobody is talking about this. We are being used to make profit, as cash cows for the home office and for the security companies. G4S £148 million last year – where are they making this profit? (Detained Voices, 2015)

Or another, by a person resisting deportation in Yarls Wood in 2016:

It really reminds us of the history you read about slaves. When they used to take people and put them in the ships, to take them and go and sell them. Now, they are doing this here. Yarls Wood is a slave ship. They take you from here and put you on a charter flight. (Detained Voices, 2016)

The statements are primarily concerned with enabling communication between activist groups outside of detention and individuals and groups documenting and resisting deportation from inside detention. Finally, they allow – in some mediated sense – people in detention to document their experience without censorship or gatekeeping by those outside. Detained Voices allows a form of communication while allowing for a respect for what Glissant calls the ‘right to opacity’, that is the ability to retain an unintelligibility whilst also coordinating and collaborating with activists outside of detention (Glissant & Wing, 1997).

Post-representational and prefigurative politics

The three political practices that I have sketched out above are unconventional, non-instrumental approaches to anti-detention activism. Whilst they have some elements that align them with representational politics they focus on building responsive relationships and communities with those in detention. These relationships are not ends in themselves – detached from abolitionist political horizons of many activists – but neither are they means toward a definite end. They are, or at least attempt to be, a practiced openness to cooperation with those at sharpest end of the UK’s immigration system. They refuse to adopt rigid roles in which the person or group outside of detention is the active party acting on behalf of the person inside. They also do not accept that activism has to be consistently addressed toward the state or public and as such can sustain a wider array of representations that point to more radical horizons.

It is possible to think of these practices as a prefigurative alternative to the instrumental politics of representation. Perhaps post-representational politics can be read as prefiguring relations of a post-border world. Yet, there are good reasons not to absorb the experimental aspects of post-representational politics into a prefigurative form of representation. These reasons centre on the fact that to do so would stretch our understanding of prefiguration away from the deliberate experimentation with desired, future practices. From the position of both anti-detention activists and from our position of students of social movements, the relation between these practices and some utopian future, however partial and non-ideal, is weak.

For instance, the relationships borne through grassroots detention organising are structured and reliant upon the detention centre itself. The sustenance of openness and experimental forming of friendships is often enabled by the boundaries enforced by detention walls and guards. They long for and reach toward a more horizontal community but the relationships that can be built are limited to that which is enabled by the system. One consequence of this, is that the relationships formed can often only conform to very limited notions of consent. The offer of support in an environment where support is extremely limited and where there is clear desire for it means that those in detention have little option but to agree to the forms of support they are offered. The power to influence what support is offered and the relationship through which that support is offered therefore rests heavily on the person outside of detention. Furthermore, those relationships are frequently fleeting – unsustained beyond the protest or the act of documentation. Friendships formed through visiting rarely outlast the period of someone’s detention. The purposes which bring insider and outsider together are often misaligned, requiring time and the building of trust to fully understand. The power to leave or not pick up the phone always lies with those working from outside of detention.

While there may be prefigurative currents in post-representational politics, to say that these are prefigurative movements would be misleading. It would overstate the utopian elements and understate the willingness to engage in the partial complicities and cooptedness that is a necessary part of organising across detention walls (Kemp, 2019).

It could also be possible to argue that those engaging in post-representational activism are experimenting with desirable ways of dealing with structural power that will play a role in any lived, real utopia. Yet, to do so places undue idealism and pressure on movements that are more often focused on fire-fighting and mourning death and loss. More importantly, it inaccurately describes the relation between the practices themselves and the way these actors reach toward imagined futures, as I discuss below. Distinguishing post-representational politics from prefiguration avoids stretching the latter concept to a degree that detaches it from its specificity necessary in understanding how prefiguration and strategy can relate to one another. Post-representational politics is a domain in which experimentation and non-instrumental politics are enacted in ways orthogonal to prefiguration, developing a different and irreducible set of motivations and logics.

Post-representational politics, edgework and building networks of survival in hostile environments

If post-representational experimentation is not necessarily or only prefiguration, how might we conceptualise and understand the value and place of experimentation in anti-detention post-representational activism? This final section argues that post-representational politics sustains a logic of activist edgework.

Activist edgework pertains to political projects that are oriented toward horizontal organisation in contexts which produce severe imbalances of power within activist assemblages and where practices of consensus, and even informed consent, are impossible. The concept has been appropriated from anthropological studies of risk-taking (Lyng, 2004; Newmahr, 2011). In that context, edgework identifies a shift in the understanding of risk-taking from being read as a means – I risk A to get B – to risk-taking being understood as an end in itself – to those instances where the experience of the risk is in itself important. Most of the edgework literature focuses on extreme sports where the risk is a physical risk to one’s body, and the development of skill and control over one’s body is necessary in order to get as close as one can to nature overwhelming and defeating ones’ body without succumbing and going over ‘the edge’ (Celsi et al., 1993; Ferrell et al., 2001; Laurendeau, 2006).

Newmahr’s (2011) feminist critique and reformulation of edgework begins by identifying how this notion of ‘the edge’ fits within a masculine hegemonic world-view. It maintains a universalistic portrayal of the edge between man and the forces of nature, a focus on bodily risk and the mastery of mind over the body and has a preoccupation with the individual experience of approaching the edge rather than collective and cooperative practices not only of approaching a pregiven edge but constructing in the first place. Given that this edge is only edgy for those whose normality is being in control, Newmahr draws on her ethnographic research in a sadomasochist community and develops a more inclusive notion of edgework that illuminates forms of risk-based ‘serious leisure’. In this reworked vision, the edge is a constructed social and emotional boundary that is collectively and collaboratively formed and approached.

‘Activist edgework’, as I define it here, firstly, draws attention to the dynamics of working with those pushed to the edge of society by detention and bordering practices that create marginalised, disposable, dehumanised people on the brink of removal. Secondly, and more importantly, the notion of activist edgework locates forms of activism that seeks to understand how activists can perform horizontal forms of collaboration and cooperation with those fighting detention and deportation, while in the knowledge that horizontality is, in practice, impossible. Activists attempt to push towards the impossibility of working in anti-hierarchical, inclusive ways with people subject to the conditions of detention rather than assuming their inability to participate in political activity. As Lee acknowledges:

I think we strive towards horizontal forms organising whilst always being aware of the fact that it’s incredibly difficult to achieve if not impossible. (Lee, activist vistitor)

Edgework in this sense is a kind of response to feminist and anti-colonial discussions of representation as a ‘can’t yet must technology’ or an ‘impossible necessity’ (Neimanis, 2015). It is a response to the impossibility of working in non-hierarchical, collaborative ways with people held in a position of subjugation and subordination. It is undertaken as a form of hopeful and experimental politics, providing a setting through which imposed social divisions between citizen and detained migrant are undermined within the practice of resistance. With prefiguration, it is an attempt to understand what kinds of social relationships can be upheld through praxes of solidarity and resistance. However, against prefiguration, there is no attempt to form the relationships that can serve as the basis of a desirable future. Edgework is about recognising, mitigating and building upon the lived divisions and hierarchies in knowledge and power that cannot be overcome without structural change.

By building connections through activist edgework, post-representational politics allows for more responsive and reflexive means of building networks of survival in hostile environments such as the UK detention regime. The networks are built in order to anticipate intensifications and evolutions in the UK’s deportation system. Post-representational politics allows for experimentation in the construction of networks of survival and solidarity where the future is imagined pessimistically. As Hannah, anti-detention activist working in London argues,

abolitionism is against borders, prisons and punishment. It’s a very grand vision and as an abolitionist I don’t believe it will ever end. There is always going to be oppressive systems which shift and that we have to have means to fight against. (Hannah, activist vistor)

For Hannah, post-representational politics allows for what we might even think of as a dystopian prefigurative practice. The ‘future’ of dystopic prefiguration is not imagined as one in which emancipatory movements have succeeded but one in which the forms of oppressive institutions will continue to evolve and therefore the means through which activists resist and organise for the survival of those targeted will have to change with and against them. In the last few years, we can see how anti-detention activist have anticipated and adapted quickly to expanded use of alternatives to detention such as community surveillance measures and the use of hotels and barracks for refugee housing. The open ended, responsive forms of post-representational organising are key to this. As Hannah went on, the changing and intensifying of forms of oppression ‘isn’t something that you have to run away from. It’s the opposite – we’ve got to be dealing with these things now – if not then who, when, how?’ If post-representational politics is the opposite of running, it is a praxis of being present, of walking toward and of sitting with, of navigating the slow politics of imperfect collaboration. And through this collaboration it can prefigure the means of supporting survival within institutions of violence and work to build capacities for the ongoing resistance. By giving up experimenting with desired future relations, post-representational politics plays a similar role to Abiral’s (2015) notion of ‘anxious’ and ‘catastrophic hope’ that is discussed by Gordon (2018). These notions gesture toward alternative frames to prefiguration that can recognise the importance of experimentation in movements facing an uncertain and difficult future.

Conclusion

This paper has addressed debates about the experimental forms of political activism in the context of oppressive state violence. It has highlighted the grassroots activism of abolitionist anti-border groups and their experimental forms of enacting resistance with those in detention that go beyond traditional representative politics. I have argued that the value of post-representational politics to abolitionist anti-detention activism lies in its ability to creatively respond to conditions where dominant modes of representation frequently limit the horizons of radical politics and entrench rather than work against the inequalities between migrant- and citizen- activists. They allow for responsive means of building networks and capacities for survival and resistance which anticipate futures of evolving manifestations of border control. Finally, in forming relationships that are not predicated on representation to state institutions, they can sustain a plurality of radical representations that a broader abolitionist politics can be built around.

This case study has been used to explore the conceptual gaps between prefiguration and strategy. I have argued experimentation in the forming of relationships and communities with others can unfold without laying claim to those relations being desirable in an emancipatory future. I have traced a number of concepts – post-representational politics, edgework and dystopian prefiguration – which can coexist in productive constellation with strategy and prefiguration to support our understanding and ability to participate in radical movements against state racism.

Acknowledgments

This paper would not have been possible without the ideas and support of Davina Cooper, Rosie Mack, Koshka Duff, Joel White and Helen Brewer. I would also like to thank the editors and anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful contributions to this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

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Notes on contributors

Tom Kemp

Tom Kemp is a researcher in law and criminology at the University of Nottingham focusing on the law and politics of immigration detention, policing, and imprisonment. He is interested in social movements that oppose spaces of incarceration as locations of theory making and knowledge production about the nature of state power and the politics of solidarity. He writes about the connections between border policing and criminal justice and the ways law and coloniality come together in these institutions and in efforts to resist them.

Notes

1. As Gordon (2018) and Raekstad and Gradin (2020) note, prefiguration is a way of experimenting in the present with a view to establishing practices and institutions out of which a more desirable world will be built. However, what is desirable is not established by the concept of prefiguration itself and, as such, it can come in right wing and racist forms. Indeed, these may be the more common forms of prefiguration.

2. As Levitas (2011) and Cooper (2014) argue, utopianism can be partial, imperfect, uncertain and practical, and it is in this sense that I use this word. Prefigurative politics is experimenting to enact something that reflects a sense of a desired future; in this sense it is utopian even if prefiguration is opposed to abstract blueprints of an ideal future.

3. That is, rather than focusing on the politics of belonging and citizenship, as is more common when discussing the creativity of migrant solidarity organising (McNevin, 2006; Mensink, 2020). The reason for this shift may be to do with the far more limited means of creating community across within the confines of extended detention and imminent deportation.