Abstract
Recent ethnography of radical democracy in protests such as alter-globalization movement, Indignados or Occupy Wall Street scrutinizes its dimension known as prefigurative politics. As Marianne Maeckelbergh points out, there are two crucial components of prefigurative strategy - the confrontation with existing political structure and the construction of alternative versions of society.
Even though they are inseparable in practice, the anthropologists have favored almost exclusively the latter in their empirical studies. Our 26-months-long ethnographic inquiry of political militants organized in the confrontative assemblage of Black Bloc in Germany intends to fill in the void.
While following militants into riots and other confrontative direct actions, we discovered that the confrontation reveals a lot not only about activists, but also about the power. Confrontation is a strategical situation where radical democracy of militants meets actually existing democratic order which is reaffirmed, reestablished and even expands through varied repressive, preventive, legal, discursive, corrective protest policing practices and techniques operated in ordoliberal Germany mostly by the state.
Our interdisciplinary paper combines ethnography of mass demonstrations with discursive analysis of state documents and focuses mostly on two of those contemporary techniques - personalizing the protesting matter and the production of separation of "political deviants" from democratic citizenry.