Decolonising the Commons: Fugitivity and Future Planning in End Times

They say the global proliferation of colonial and neoliberal (ir)rationalities and the techno-managerial enclosure of the ‘commons’ (Hardt & Negri 2000; Harvey 2004) has resulted in a ‘foreclosure of politics’, prompting calls for a renewed technocultural hegemony for a post-capitalist future (Srnicek & Williams 2015) or a return to the revolutionary party (Dean 2012). Departing instead from (fugitive) theories and practices of (under)commoning from peoples (presumed to be) excluded from ‘modernity’ suggests however there is much more and less to the picture than is often presented, and perhaps, following Benjamin (2001[1940]), it’s the past to (and from) which we should look in our efforts of and for futurity. Cautious against the often totalising and universalising accounts that constitute much of ‘radical left’ (or whatever) thought, this thesis instead recognises those insurgent and inventive intensities that remain elusive(ly everywhere), fugitive and excess yet never forgotten despite the serial efforts of (the) settlement. By centring the unsettling and unsettled, this thesis hopes (against hope) to offer a decolonial intervention in left discourses of the commons, media communication technologies, and futurity—namely via the examples of Cooperation Jackson, Open Source Gender Hacking, and Indigenous Ranger programs—emphasising the insurgent generativity of diverse local contexts in (de)forming and (un)settling fugitive modernities from the 'bottom-up' (Mignolo 2009; Smith 2012; Moreton-Robinson 2015; Moten 2018). Moving with and from Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s (2013:28) visionary call to “inhabit the ruptural and enraptured disclosure of the commons that fugitive enlightenment enacts”, this research suggests ultimately ‘a way forward’ is not only (im)possible but (always) already everywhere underway