The commons: Infrastructures for troubling times*

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. (1) 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 counternormative 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. The glitch of the present that we link to economic crisis, for example, threads through other ongoing emergencies involving the movement of bodies into and out of citizenship and other forms of being-with, occupation, and jurisdiction: so contemporary antiausterity politics point not only to new ties among disparately located and unequally precarious lives, but also mark the need for a collective struggle to determine the terms of transition for general social existence. (2) Terms of transition provide conceptual infrastructures not only as ideas but also as part of the protocols or practices that hold the world up. To attend to the terms of transition is to forge an imaginary for managing the meanwhile within damaged life's perdurance, a meanwhile that is less an end or an ethical scene than a technical political heuristic that allows for ambivalence, distraction, antagonism and inattention not to destroy collective existence. Jeremy Gilbert adapts Georges Simondon's concept of provisional unity or metastability for this matter, allowing us to see transitional structure as a loose convergence that lets a collectivity stay bound to the ordinary even as some of its forms of life are fraying, wasting, and developing offshoots among types of speculative practice from the paranoid to the queer utopian (Gilbert, 2014: 107-118). …