counter | infrastructures

Tuesday, 27 July 2021, 7 pm, online

Reading group

“[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?

We set out from a collection of shorter texts by the anthropologist James C. Scott, Two Cheers for Anarchism. From there, the group will decide collectively where to move next.

Meetings take place on Tuesday evenings, 7 pm, every three weeks, online (with the possibility of moving to a hybrid format in the future).

If you’re interested in joining, please send an email to mail@diffrakt.space.