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Abstract

This article considers autonomist practices of communication commoning amidst the neoliberal enclosures. I reflect on recent theoretical distinctions between the notion of the common and the commons and argue for an approach that brings them together both conceptually and in practice. One place where we find the common and the commons converge is in globalizing communication infrastructures. And it is through the infrastructure of global communication, I argue, that one of the principle political technologies of contemporary enclosure comes into sharpest focus: fear. If, as many observers contend, the political use of fear is instrumental to modern processes of enclosure, we can look to the urban communication infrastructure is a site of resistance to the double enclosure of the common and the commons because it is a site that encompasses both the means of mediation and the wealth of human sociality. To illustrate, I briefly discuss three examples in which the communication infrastructures are appropriated by social movements whose aim is to resist the politics of fear while they re-claim the communicational common/s.

Keywords

common/s politics of fear communication infrastructures circulation of struggle space

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Communication Commoning Amidst the New Enclosures

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References