How to kill a zombie? Dismanteling (and survival) of outdated fossil infrastructure

Abstract

Amidst the crises of the last years, there has been a growing interest in questions of resilience and adaptation, and, where these fail or reach their limits, in forms of living, or rather, surviving despite catastrophy and ruination. While the idea of living in a permanent state of exception has earlier been discussed predominantly as limitation or reduction to ‘bare life’ (Agamben), more recent work has looked more closely into the networks, subjectivities and forms of life such strategies of survival might produce.

In this contribution, I want to engage with this work from a different perspective, looking more closely at what, according to some, should not survive (and often still does). While it is often assumed that certain things in our contemporary world must be brought to an end - p.e. socio-economic systems like capitalism, narratives like endless growth, harmful practices or the infrastructures that enable or sustain them - in order to allow the survival of humans, non-humans, ecosystems or the planet as a whole, in practice the dismanteling of outdated narratives, material or non-material infrastructure often proves to be very difficult or even fails. Drawing on the work of Bonnet, Landivar and Monnin (2021) and their call to develop new ‘arts of closure’, and I am using two examples from different parts of the world - the planned dismanteling of the highway A103 in Berlin and the closure of two coal-power plants in South Africa - to discuss the problems arising around attemps to ‘depresence’ such ‘negative commons’ (Monnin 2021) as fossil fuel-based infrastructures, the resistance they meet from both humans and non-humans, and the temporalitites and spatialities they relate to to ‘survive’.