SoLiXG:Community
Community/commons
With commons, we refer to common property and the riches of the material commons; water; air; the fruits of the soil, but also, as added by Hardt and Negri, ‘those results of social production that are necessary for social interaction and further production, such as knowledges, languages, codes, information, affects, and so forth’ (2009: viii). From this purview, information technologies directs attention to a tension between common and property, material and immaterial, the private and the public, individual and the state. It does so by states' claim to air and radio waves through the distribution of spectrum, by private actors claiming vital parts of digital infrastructures moored to territory and space, such as data centres, cables, and satellites, and in turn, immaterial and intellectual property. There is an implication here of a dialectical process and ethics of commoning versus property claims, which is also related to how these are articulated as resources available to all members in specific communities (see Ostrom 1990).
The commons, as well as being in common, needs both protection and re-imagination for the future (Amin and Howell, 2016). The concept of the commons needs, as Berlant puts it, to ‘provide a pedagogy of unlearning while living with the malfunctioning world, vulnerable confidence, and the rolling ordinary’ (2016: 397) that extends beyond ideal materialist understandings. Similarly, Moten and Harney questions the commons as a space that autonomous people strategically enter. Such interpersonal relations, they argue, builds states and nations. The commons is, instead, unpredictable spaces of people who are already shared and already sharing (our italic, ref).
Femke: Would have to be related to the project, also in relation to the rather "media-theoretical" discussion on the keywords
Anna: Agree with Femke on the relation to the project (make it stronger), and I would say the text relates rather to Commons so I would get rid of Community/