Carlotta Molfese (Ca‘ Foscari University of Venice)

Online via Zoom, https://uni-frankfurt.zoom-x.de/j/68167462379?pwd=oMOO9YmE1BhbmtXGFK910Jjyrack4d.1

Building on the paper “Towards a more-than-human theory of resistance” (Molfese 2023) in which I have reflected upon some of the theoretical tensions that more-than-human perspectives bring to traditional conceptualisations of resistance, in this contribution, I engage the anarchist concept of prefiguration to advance a less-anthropocentric framework. The concept of prefiguration is often presented as being ontologically radical, having an experimental ethos and manifesting in multiple, situated forms. However, like resistance, it also remains tightly enmeshed within modernist, dualist notions of Nature-Culture that abstract human subjects from their more-than-human relations, deny the latter any agencies, and privilege human-to-human relations. After briefly reviewing traditional conceptualizations of resistance and prefiguration in social science literature, I advance a less-anthropocentric understanding of prefiguration using more-than-human perspectives. This reconceptualization builds upon (1) a post-phenomenological rethinking of subjectivity and intentionality, and (2) a reframing of prefigurative politics as a form of ontological organization. The first theoretical move attends to the becoming of prefigurative subjects through affective, more-than-human relations, and it shifts attention away from human individuals to forms-of-life. The second move focuses on the crafting of infrastructures as a form of doing-with more-than-human others, which reconfigures the form and transformative agency of prefigurative politics.To ground this conceptual framework, I draw upon my (auto)ethnographic research into the back-to-the-land movement, attending to both the becoming and doing-with the land of radical farmers.

Carlotta Molfese is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Economics at the Ca‘ Foscari University of Venice. Carlotta has a multidisciplinary background in biology and environmental social science and works at the intersection of cultural and environmental geography using more-than-human and critical perspectives. In her PhD thesis, she developed an original theoretical framework that combined more-than-human with anarchist perspectives in geography to examine the affective journeys and everyday doings of countercultural or radical „back-to-the-land“ farmers.