The Politics of Repair in a Time of Collapse

• In Event: Experimental Infrastructures: Material Insufficiency, Scale, and the Question of (Im)possibility - II

Abstract

Increasingly, visions of the future as marked by ecological catastrophe and civilizational collapse have come to predominate within UK environmental movements. How do these movements experiment with the creation of alternate worlds and other infrastructures in a period where the future seems to have lost all potential? A number of political actors in the UK have responded to this vision of collapse by turning to a politics of repair, one orientated around a desire for autonomy from the constraints and social relations of existing infrastructure.

Working through a series of accounts of UK environmental groups, this paper explores the politics of repair as a form of thick justice at work on the conditions of life. These movements start from the reality and presupposition of crumbling infrastructure: crumbling signifying the material deterioration of existing infrastructure, the social effects of a persistent lack of investment in new or replacement infrastructures, and most importantly the lack of social autonomy produced through existing forms of infrastructural worlding. These groups engage with what are, and are understood to be, precarious conditions of life. The aim of the practices of these groups is to build an autonomy both from and within existing socio-infrastructural relations so as to be able to endure through civilizational collapse.

Ultimately what these movements present is an image of politics as collective survivalism, with repair (of place, of self, of social relations) as a crucial experimental practice, one being developed as means of enduring through social collapse.

Author

• Nicholas Beuret, University of Essex.