“The Ecological Face of the Commune Form” with Kristin Ross, Critical and Visual Studies Symposium Talk

When the State recedes, the commune-form flourishes. This was as true in Paris in 1871 as it is now whenever ordinary people begin to manage their daily lives collectively.

Contemporary struggles over land, from the zad at Notre-Dame-des-Landes to Cop City in Atlanta, from the pipeline battles in Canada to the movement of Soulèvements de la terre, have reinvented practices of appropriating lived space and time that transform dramatically our perception of the recent past. Rural struggles of the 1960s and 70s, like the “Nantes Commune,” the Larzac, and Sanrizuka in Japan, appear now as the defining battles of our era. In the defense of threatened territories against all manners of privatization, hoarding, and infrastructures of disaster, new ways of producing and inhabiting are devised that side-step the State and that give rise to unprecedented kinds of solidarity built on pleasurable, fruitful collaborations. These are the crucial elements in the present-day reworking of an archaic form: the commune-form that Marx once called “the political form of social emancipation,” and that Kropotkin deemed “the necessary setting for revolution and the means of bringing it about.”

Kristin Ross is the author, most recently, of The Politics and Poetics of Everyday Life (Verso, 2023) and The Commune Form (Verso, 2024). Her earlier books, which include The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune (1988; 2008); Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (1995); May ’68 and its Afterlives (2003); and Communal Luxury(2015), have all appeared in French translation. She is also the translator of Jacques Rancière’s The Ignorant Schoolmaster and of an account of the zad at Notre-Dame-des-Landes by the militant collective, Mauvaise Troupe: The Zad and NoTAV: Territorial Struggles and the Making of a New Political Intelligence (Verso: 2017). She taught for many years at the University of California at Santa Cruz and at New York University.

Critical and Visual Studies Symposium 2024 Talks

Tis event is open to the public and will be recorded.