Prefigurative Democracy and Cultural Co‐Production

This article advances a normative conception of political culture that resists its conventional treatment as a sociological fact. Instead, it proposes to understand culture as a generative field of norm production. Bridging normative political theory and cultural sociology, the argument demonstrates that culture, far from being a secondary reflection of political structures, performs constitutive work in shaping democratic imagination. Drawing on authors such as Saidiya Hartman and David Hebdige, the article highlights the power of aesthetic forms to translate private sensibilities into collective experiments in innovating political culture. Ultimately, it calls for a normative rehabilitation of culture as a site of democratic invention: a medium through which new values, solidarities, and institutional possibilities emerge. Rather than theorizing political change as a product of disruption or revolution, the article situates it within everyday creative practices that challenge treasured identities.