Paper short abstract:

Drawing on Benjamin, I propose the concept of postfiguration to name the project of bringing the past into a present or desirable future, while exploring traditional popular culture as containing living elements that inspire alternatives to a capitalist-growth-driven future.

Paper long abstract:

Within the productivist leftism discourse, entrenched in a linear and evolutionary temporal framework, traditional popular culture typical of rural areas is often associated with the past. This past, in turn, is loaded with associations of nostalgia, conservatism and even reactionism. In contrast, the non-productivist left with its critique of the idea of progress, where degrowth finds its ideological footing, opens up the opportunity to develop a different perspective of the past and tradition. Drawing on Walter Benjamin's dialectical vision between the past and the future, I propose the concept of "post-figuration" to refer to the project of dialogue with the past and tradition that can give rise to ignite today, in Benjaminian terms, "revolutionary sparks". If prefiguration consists in bringing elements of the desirable future into the present, post-figuration would consist in bringing inspiring elements of the past into the present or the desirable future. As a way of nurturing this project, my research explores living elements of rural Iberian popular culture, usually disdained, that challenge dominant conceptions of governance, work and leisure: “concejos abiertos”, or bodies of direct democracy that have existed for centuries; “hacenderas”, or traditional forms of work sharing; and rural carnivals as rituals of subversion that have existed since time immemorial. These traditional legacies contain living elements that inspire alternative ways of life rather than a unilateral future of capitalist growth. I rethink the relationship between tradition and degrowth using these examples and showing how a future-oriented socio-ecological transition can be reconfigured as a "returning forward".