Commons as Infrastructures for Troubling Times

* Article: Berlant, L. (2016). The commons: Infrastructures for troubling times. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 34(3), 393-419. doi

URL = https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0263775816645989 pdf

Contextual Quote

"In contemporary commons talk, social institutions that deliver mass resources are deemed worthy only if they provide an infrastructure for the common rather than privatizing it, along with providing something like what the state does, an exterior-looking focalizing point of material and imaginary survival for its often desperately nonsovereign members. Seeing world building as immanence, as infrastructure-making, starts where the universalist sovereign fantasy is expelled as a primary figure for mass flourishing: it is here that the Spinozan tradition finds its limit. As the Spinozan Transcendentalists and their heirs in Deleuze, Hardt and Negri (2011), and, from a queer perspective, Lee Edelman (2004) and Leo Bersani (2009) demonstrate, it is very hard to move through symbolization without becoming overattached to a primary analogy or figure. Institutions generate the positivity of attachment and protocol even while destroying the livelihood of the attached lives. The notion of structure as calcified, as a thing, also negates the ontology of adaptation and adjustment by casting them as epiphenomenal.

The figure—whether of desire’s negativity or the positivity of Commonwealth—can block movement, establishing an anchor in a tableau and barring the formal productivity of movement. But institutional failure leading to infrastructural collapse, from bridges to systems to fantasy, here leads to a dynamic way to disturb the old logics, or analogics, that have institutionalized images of shared life."

- Lauren Berlant [1]

Description

1. Via ChatGPT:

"Lauren Berlant's essay "The Commons: Infrastructures for Troubling Times" explores how infrastructures—such as roads, schools, and norms—shape our social experiences and responses during periods of crisis. Berlant defines infrastructure as "the living mediation of what organizes life," emphasizing its role in connecting individuals within a shared world. She introduces the concept of a "glitch" as an interruption that reveals infrastructural failures, prompting a reassessment of how these systems function. The essay encourages reimagining infrastructures beyond mere repair, considering how they might transform to better support communal life amid ongoing challenges."

2. From the author:

"This essay comes from my forthcoming book, On the Inconvenience of Other People, which has three broad aims. The first is to provide a concept of structure for transitional times. All times are transitional. But at some crisis times like this one, politics is defined by a collectively held sense that a glitch has appeared in the reproduction of life. A glitch is an interruption within a transition, a troubled transmission. A glitch is also the revelation of an infrastructural failure. The repair or replacement of broken infrastructure is, in this book’s argument, necessary for any form of sociality to extend itself: but my interest is in how that extension can be non-reproductive, generating a form from within brokenness beyond the exigencies of the current crisis, and alternatively to it too. But a few definitional problems arise from this observation. One is about what repair, or the beyond of glitch, looks like both generally and amid a catastrophe; the other is defining what kind of form of life an infrastructure is. These definitional questions are especially central to contemporary counter-normative political struggle.

Infrastructure is not identical to system or structure, as we currently see them, because infrastructure is defined by the movement or patterning of social form. It is the living mediation of what organizes life: the lifeworld of structure. Roads, bridges, schools, food chains, finance systems, prisons, families, districts, norms all the systems that link ongoing proximity to being in a world-sustaining relation. Paul Edwards (2003) points out that the failure of an infrastructure is ordinary in poor countries and countries at war, and people suffer through it, adapting and adjusting; but even ordinary failure opens up the potential for new organizations of life, for what Deborah Cowen (2014) has described as logistics, or creative practicality in the supply chain (see also Masco, 2014; Rubenstein, 2010). So the extension of relations in a certain direction cannot be conflated with the repair of what wasn’t working. In the episode of a hiccup, the erasure of the symptom doesn’t prove that the problem of metabolizing has been resolved; likewise, the reinitializing of a system that has been stalled by a glitch might involve local patching or debugging (or forgetting, if the glitch is fantasmatic), while not generating a more robust or resourceful apparatus. All one can say is, first, that an infrastructure is defined by use and movement; second, that resilience and repair don’t necessarily neutralize the problem that generated the need for them, but might reproduce them. At minimum resilience organizes energies for reinhabiting the ordinary where structure finds its expression: but that’s at minimum."

(https://collective-n.com/fff/beyond/images/ak/berlant%20-%20infrastructures.pdf?)

Excerpt

Lauren Berlant:

"As communal spaces in the US and Europe—town squares, streets, schools, sidewalks, roads, and beaches—are diminished into nonspaces and zoned byways by the ballooning marketplace, and as what used to be called public utilities on the ever more archaic Monopoly board are now sold off to sustain shrinking urban and small town tax bases, a spirit of resistance is taking hold around the world. People are reclaiming bits of nature and of culture, and saying ‘‘this is going to be public space.’’ Those public spaces are, like Emerson’s, placeholder forms for the commons to come. In other words, through the commons concept the very concept of the public is being reinvented now, against, with, and from within the nation and capital. Through the neoanarchist reinvention of infrastructure down to the body’s processual retraining a collective presencing is seeking its genres, which may or may not transform what the sense of the commons is. Negri claims that any such actions are precarious, as on the terrain of the reproduction of life ‘‘capital will reduce its opposition to a unity by sucking dry its living power’’ (Curcio and Zseluk, 2010). Likewise, older forms of populism, state socialism, and religious community are drawing energy from the concept as a way of recasting what the figure of community is that the public can imagine living and attaching affect to. Betsy Taylor, while optimistic, nonetheless reminds us that the commons must enter ‘‘through a phase of destruction into a complex process of material transformation that becomes the basis for renewal or ‘natality’’’ (2003). She imagines locality as the solution to the violent fungibility and displacement of all production and life in contemporary capitalism (Taylor, 2002; 2003).

This is to say that what Naomi Klein calls the ‘‘radical reclaiming of the commons’’ (2001) will involve not only debate about the new ordinary to come and transformation of the vast wealth of the world into a part of a thriving sustainable life, but will also involve unlearning the expectation of sovereignty as self-possession, a mechanism for control and evidence of freedom. For the commons always points to what threatens to be unbearable not only in political and economic terms but in the scenes of mistrust that proceed with or without the heuristic of trust.

The commons wants terms in which trust would become more robust. In liberal capitalist contexts, and as our mirror in austerity politics has insisted, this will involve rethinking work as well as labor, and the political as well as politics. It will involve a massive recasting of the relation of economy to modes of intimacy, which is to say to obligations and practices of worlding and care, and in such a way that debunks the productivist ideology that collapses the citizen with the worker.

Meanwhile, in the situation tragedy of the present, we live on the precipice of infrastructure collapse economically, politically, and in the built and natural worlds. Mid-twentieth century forms of expansive world building toward the good life have little or unreliable traction. In a fundamentally unstable economy, planning can be seen as a neurotic reminder of the previous era’s optimism that everyone, or anyone, could be significantly necessary to capital: now, what used to be called alienation, a structure that felt alienated, is experienced at once as sensual saturation and physical exhaustion; now, work has taken on a contradictory status as perpetual and impossible, as only an increasingly lucky few can afford to retire and progressively fewer can find economically adequate occupations. When inheritance and planning are up for grabs, when disturbed relations of cause and effect induce the present as a management crisis, time appears as a disturbance of continuity rather than an ordinary ground of anyone’s or any institution’s control. What ought the reproduction of life involve if life in the near future cannot move beyond superintending its own destruction in a contentious encounter of debt with discipline? What will it take to reorganize constituent power beyond the claim that society should be a club for constant growth, with the vast wealth that there is more justly distributed? What good could happen to personal life, to kinship, to the world of unsaids that house the reproduction of intimate life in the material and fantasmatic ordinary? Will the state’s abandonment of its publics lead to abandonment of the state or an intensification of the demand for a sovereign?

Spahr’s work slides consciousness of all of this into suspending its judgment without evacuating judgment, absorbing the noise of the world, and breaking the world into noise. This training in unlearning the world through reading it across many profoundly malfunctioning genealogical machineries produces an infrastructure of patience and appetite, an unusual pair. But if there is a flatness to what’s evoked in her broken figuration of what also continues, and if the poetry evokes the violence of indistinction as a way to figure democracy, it is also haunted by the universalist desire to mechanize change rather than to stop for or to be stopped by the inconvenient. This was the bourgeois world-wish too, imagining the commons from the position of a rich life that manages the transition into fantasy, desire, and material exchanges that no longer governed by possession. We write out of where we write from. In our final case, the fantasy of losing the world gestures beyond the machinic, though: perhaps because it’s already lost the plenitude and the resources of the promise."

(https://collective-n.com/fff/beyond/images/ak/berlant%20-%20infrastructures.pdf?)