Commons as Infrastructures

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* Essay: The commons: Infrastructures for troubling times. By Lauren Berlant. Society & Space, 2016, Vol. 34(3) 393–419

URL = http://epd.sagepub.com/content/34/3/393.full.pdf+html

Description

"This essay proposes an alternative use of the object.7 It proposes that the commons concept is a powerful vehicle for troubling troubled times. For the very scenes in which the concept attains power mark the desire for living with some loss of assurance as to one’s or one’s community’s place in the world, at least while better forms of life are invented and tried out. The better power of the commons is to point to a way to view what’s broken in sociality, the difficulty of convening a world conjointly, although it is inconvenient and hard, and to offer incitements to imagining a livable provisional life. The close readings that follow aim to extend the commons concept’s pedagogy of learning to live with messed up yet shared and ongoing infrastructures of experience."