Not everything can be maintained: depresencing, cosmotechnics, and the (re)potentiation of the common(s)
Topics: Human-Environment Geography
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Keywords: depresencing, toxic commons, infrastructure, ecomodernism, degrowth, racial capitalism, settler colonialism
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Saturday
Session Start / End Time: 2/26/2022 03:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/26/2022 05:00 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 40
Authors:
Bruce Braun, University of Minnesota
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Abstract
There is a growing sense today that many of the infrastructures, ecologies, networks, and platforms of late capitalism, insofar as they contribute to “toxic” or “debilitating” commons, cannot be destituted and turned to new use (Agamben, 2014), but must instead be “depresenced” or “dismantled”. In the words of Bonnet, Landivar, Monnin, and Allard (2019), “not everything can be maintained.” Distinguishing depresencing from maintenance, repair, decay, and abandonment, and drawing on specific proposals to dismantle material infrastructures in the U.S., this paper seeks to situate efforts to “depresence” within the uneven geographies and ecologies of racial capitalism/settler colonialism in order to better understand its varied forms and complex politics. From whence do proposals to depresence usher forth? What is gathered within or excluded from the common(s) imagined to be rehabilitated or repotentiated through arts of closure? Should depresencing be understood as a kind of dis-innovation, as Bonnet, Landivar, and Monnin (2021) have recently suggested, or does it entail the concretization of new technical ensembles, knowledges, and practices? What comes to presence in depresencing? What is assembled in acts of disassembly? Working against an understanding of depresencing simply in terms of negation and refusing to assume depresencing to be allied naturally with racial or environmental justice, I propose that we understand depresencing in terms of what Yuk Hui (2017) has called “cosmotechnics”, that is, as contested technological practices that involve innovation alongside dis-innovation, produce space, time, and nature rather than reserve or restore them, and add (to) worlds through practices of subtraction.
Not everything can be maintained: depresencing, cosmotechnics, and the (re)potentiation of the common(s)
Category
Virtual Paper Abstract
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