Arguably one of Occupy Wall Street’s most characteristic features was ‘the people’s mic’ –which, like many of its inventions, was ‘mothered by necessity’ (Gould-Wartofsky 2015: 67). The New York police would not permit the use of electronic amplification in Zuccotti Park, and so its occupiers resorted to another, more archaic means of mass communication. The idea is simple: anyone who wants to make an announcement shouts the words ‘mic check’. Those within earshot will respond by repeating these words, and then those within a hearing distance from them again repeat the ‘mic check’ until a large crowd has become silent and is listening to the speaker –who then makes their statement in short intervals, which allows the people’s microphone to repeat the message sentence by sentence. When Slavoj Žižek came to address the occupiers with a short speech, his message was thus amplified by repetition. Frequently interrupted (and visibly annoyed) by the people’s mic, Žižek praised the movement for its ability to imagine alternatives to the failing, capitalist order. But he also warned the occupiers: ‘There is a danger: Don’t fall in love with yourselves. We have a nice time here. But remember: Carnivals come cheap. What matters is the day after when we will have to return to normal life. Will there be any changes then?’ (Žižek 2011: 68).

How can prefigurative democracy lead to social and political change in the long term? In the course of the past decade prefigurative movements have often been dismissed as ‘failures’ because they did not immediately result in any durable and concrete changes at an institutional level. However, it is debatable to what extent the meaning of prefigurative democracy, or the value of the experiences that it entails, really depend on its concrete outcomes. It is precisely this instrumentalist understanding of political action that prefigurative democracy seeks to challenge (Van de Sande 2013). This does not mean, however, that prefigurative democracy does not or cannot lead to radical change in the long term. How may it a have a lasting impact, after the streets have been cleared out and the activists have returned home (or even ended up in prison)?

In this chapter I reconstruct two metaphors for political change that can be encountered in the political thought of Laclau and Arendt: sedimentation and crystallisation.