“[P]ower no longer resides in the institutions. There are only deserted temples there, decommissioned fortresses, nothing but stage sets – real traps for revolutionaries. […] [P]ower now resides in the infrastructures of this world. Contemporary power is of an architectural and impersonal, and not a representative or personal, nature.” The Invisible Committe, To Our Friends
Continuing the work of Zones: Topologies of Power, the counter | infrastructures reading group picks up some of the threads to examine the conditions of collective existence and sustenance. We focus, more precisely, on two apparently opposite but intricately entangled questions regarding infrastructures: How do infrastructures, as striations, wield and transform power, both generally and in the concrete? And which infrastructures, in turn, may help loosen the grip of these infrastructural powers?
So far, we have read work by James C. Scott, Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, Michel Foucault, Pierre Clastres, Invisible Committee, Alberto Toscano, Jasper Bernes, Deborah Cowen, Thomas Hughes, Dominic Boyer, Timothy Mitchell, Brian Larkin, Eyal Weizman, AnnaLisa Meyboom, Sven Opitz and Ute Tellmann, Martín Arboleda, Andreas Malm, Anna Tsing, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Angela Davis, Oonagh Ryder, Daniel Loick and Vanessa Thompson, Daniel Loick, Franziska Dübgen, and Jeanette Ehrmann and Vanessa Thompson, and we decide together what to read next.
Meetings take place on Tuesday evenings, 7 pm, every three weeks, at diffrakt and online.
If you’re interested in joining, please send an email to mail@diffrakt.space.
