Berlant — Vermiculture

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One might respond to my infrastructuralism with the idea that any specific address to transforming the aspiration called the sensus communis is at best a mere episode to hang a wish on. But that’s what an episode is: a goad to rethink seriality, continuity, analogy. Every transformative example implicitly disturbs an analogy, decouples coupling. Every broken analogy releases affectively bound energy back into the world. Andrés Green writes that when discourse stops binding “word-presentation, thing-presentation, affect, bodily states, [and] act,” the unbound affect might “snap the chain of discourse,” inducing a “qualitative mutation.” The commons concept requires infrastructures for sustaining the mutations that emerge from the chains that are breaking in the popular resistance to austerity regimes and anti-Black and patriarchal capitalism.

I’ve argued in this chapter that the inconvenient gesture of breaking analogy, rather than hastily, anxiously, or needfully asserting it, is a prime device for opening up the figural world of what’s held to be common. Ian Bogost writes, “Sometimes there is nothing more refreshing than a startlingly bad analogy. It’s like a crisp cucumber bursting from the dip of a bad day’s sphincter. Like a restorative rain drenching the vomit of last night’s bender. Like a cool breeze tousling the blood-matted fur of roadkill.”98 He doesn’t mean this in a positive way. I do. The commons produces riffing on the other side of assurance: What isn’t mixed? The political and epistemic problem for the politically autopoetic, which is what all world-creating subjects in co-ordinated struggle are, is that the placeholders for our desire can too easily seem solid and ironed out rather than affective figures for delivering a convergence process we can cling to and with which we draw lines of belonging in the sand, in the air, on the streets, in liveable spaces.

What remains for the pedagogy of unlearning that we derive from the aspirational commons, then, is to build affective infrastructures that admit the work of desire and the work of ambivalence as the tactics of commoning. What remains is the potential we have to common infrastructures that can absorb the blows of our aggressive need for the world to accommodate each and all of us and our resistance to adaptation, and, at the same time, to hold out the prospect of a world worth attaching to that’s something other than an old hope’s bitter echo. A failed episode is not evidence that a project is inerror: by definition, forms of common life are always going through a phase, as infrastructures do.

-Lauren Berlant, The Commons in “The Inconvenience of Other People”

All the tentacular stringy ones have made me unhappy with posthumanism, even as I am nourished by much generative work done under that sign. My partner Rusten Hogness suggested compost instead of posthuman(ism), as well as humusities instead of humanities, and I jumped into that wormy pile.

We are compost, not posthuman; we inhabit the humusities, not the humanities. Philosophically and materially, I am a compostist, not a posthumanist. Critters—human and not—become-with each other, compose and decompose each other, in every scale and register of time and stuff in sympoietic tangling, in ecological evolutionary developmental earthly worlding and unworlding.

-Dona Haraway, Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene in Journal #75 September 2016 - e-flux

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