Infrastructures of dissensus: repartitioning the sensible and articulating the political through the occupation of Greece’s public broadcasting service

Introduction

On the night of 11 June 2013, thousands of people assembled in front of the headquarters of Greece’s Public Broadcasting Service (ERT) in Athens to be joined by rallies in front of ERT’s buildings across Greece. Protesters were gathering in solidarity with ERT’s occupation by its workers. A few hours before, spontaneous workers’ assemblies had decided to occupy the infrastructure of the Service and broadcast self-managed TV and Radio programmes in protest to New Democracy’s (ND) government decision to dismantle ERT by that night. On midnight, despite popular discontent, the government proceeded in disconnecting the power in ERT’s transmission centres. However, the government’s authoritarian logic was met with the protesters’ and workers’ conviction to maintain the occupation and continue to broadcast online. In the days and months that followed,¹ ERT’s buildings, computers, cameras, microphones, monitors, cables and transmitters were transformed into infrastructures of dissensus: physical and virtual, embodied and non-human, infrastructures that enabled the staging and circulation of democratic disagreement against the twin logics of austerity and post-democratic closure that scripted the ‘Greek crisis’ and dictated ERT’s closure. On the one hand, the working existence of ERT’s occupation prefiguratively enacted alternative ways of doing and saying in-common revolving around the democratic self-management of public media in dialogue with society. On the other, ERT’s infrastructure spaces became a key node in the articulation of the broader political struggle against austerity acting as a meeting space for multiple movements and a key infrastructure in circulating their discourse and practices.

In this article I mobilize ERT’s occupation as a living laboratory for embodying and further exploring the spatialization and articulation of the urban political. Over the past decade, the concomitant unfolding of the 2008 economic crisis and urban uprisings across the globe spurred renewed interest in (re-)thinking the urban political (Swyngedouw, 2018). Rather than focusing on urban uprisings – as much of the literature does – however, occupied ERT offers an entry point to analyze the continuous efforts to open and sustain emancipatory urban political spatialities. It serves to unpack how urban emancipatory politics “move from outbursts of indignation to the slow process of sustained transformative strategies through which a new socio-political spatialization becomes imagined, practised and universalized” (Dikeç and Swyngedouw, 2017: 9). Indeed, the opening of new spatialities is a pivotal element of contemporary urban movements and collectives seeking to disrupt post-democratic neoliberalization and experiment with egalitarian and autonomous ways of organizing urban life (Arampatzi, 2017a; Minuchin, 2016). Foregrounding such spatialities draws attention to the infrastructures that make emancipatory politics possible. For as Judith Butler argues, living and material infrastructures “not only condition the action, but take part in the making of the space of politics” (2015: 127). The renewed emphasis on “political infrastructures” (Mcfarlane and Rutherford, 2008) and the “politics of infrastructure” (Young and Keil, 2010) in recent geographical debates, however, has largely focused on how infrastructural configurations become tools for governance and control, paying less attention to their role in the articulation of the (urban) political (cf. Vasudevan, 2015; Minuchin, 2021).

This article seeks to advance our understanding of this latter aspect by foregrounding the opening of infrastructure spaces and arrangements as a key node in the articulation of emancipatory politics. Building and critically expanding on Rancière’s understanding of politics as a world-making activity (2015), I propose the notion of infrastructures of dissensus to account for the socio-technical assemblages and spatial arrangements that make possible the staging of democratic disagreement. I position the fabrication of infrastructures of dissensus as a generative part of political activity that disrupts the language, practices and institutions of the police by opening up the scenes for the articulation of alternative ways of doing, being and saying in-common. Foregrounding the fabrication of such infrastructures enables a nuanced understanding of the staging and circulation of emancipatory politics and the inevitable challenges and limitations they face in their everyday encounters with the police.

The article proceeds in four parts. The first section revisits Rancière’s conceptualization of politics to argue that while his emphasis on the staging of politics foregrounds questions of spatiality, his schema can be fruitfully expanded through an engagement with the material and infrastructural dimensions of these stagings. The following two sections recount occupied ERT’s story as an infrastructure of dissensus. The second section situates the event of ERT’s occupation and self-managed trajectory in the conjuncture of the ‘Greek crisis’. The third section analyzes ERT’s occupation through three interrelated entry points: the prefigurative materialization of an emancipatory political imaginary and praxis that disrupts the order of the police by staging democratic disagreement; the convergence and articulation of diverse political movements and struggles that re-configures the distribution of the sensible; and the encounters and relations between emancipatory politics and the police. The concluding section brings the insights of the previous sections together to reflect on the possibilities and challenges of an emancipatory politics of infrastructure.

Fabricating infrastructures of dissensus: Spatialization, infrastructure and the re-partitioning of the sensible

A substantial body of geographical scholarship engages with Jacques Rancière’s work to inform readings of emancipatory politics. Schematically, there are two key focal points within this corpus. First, Rancière’s work informs accounts of the staging of dissensus and the emergence of new collective political subjects through the wave of urban uprisings unfolding since 2011 (eg. Davidson and Iveson, 2014; Dikeç and Swyngedouw, 2017; Karaliotas, 2017). Here, Rancière’s emphasis on politics as the disruptive staging of the ‘part that has no part’ allows foregrounding the spatiality of protests and how they challenge dominant politics. Second, geographers draw on Rancière’s work – albeit more sporadically – to analyze the contestations and disruptions of the police order by the sustained everyday activities of movements seeking to re-distribute the sensible order of our cities through the enactment of the presupposition of equality (Uitermark and Nicholls, 2014; Karaliotas and Kapsali, 2021). This paper expands and contributes on both these strands of work by tracing how Rancière’s understanding of politics as a world-making activity can be productively expanded through an emphasis on the virtual, embodied and material infrastructures that make possible the enactment of the presupposition of equality that disrupts the dominant scripting of our world. I begin with unpacking the work that space does in Rancière’s thought.

Space is pivotal in Rancière’s conceptualization of both politics and the police. Rather than conceptualizing space as closure and fixity (Dikeç, 2015), space for Rancière “is (…) a medium of distribution but also of co-existence” (2016: 58). Space is an integral part of what he calls the “distribution of the sensible” (le partage du sensible): “a certain cutting out of space and time that binds together practices, forms of visibility, and patterns of intelligibility” (2009: 31) to shape “the forms of part-taking by first defining the modes of perception in which they are inscribed” (Rancière, 2016: 44). Politics and the police are, for Rancière, two ways of distributing the sensible: “two ways of framing a sensible space” (2015: 100). The police is an always contingent spatio-temporal order (Dikeç, 2015) consisting of “all the activities which create order by distributing places, names, functions” (Rancière, 1994: 173). It “distributes bodies within the space of their visibility or their invisibility and aligns ways of being, ways of doing and ways of saying appropriate to each” (Rancière, 1999: 28). Politics, contrarily, is the disruptive engagement with such spatio-temporal orderings. It is “whatever shifts a body from the place assigned to it or changes a place’s destination. It makes visible what had no business being seen and makes understood as discourse what was once only heard as noise” (Rancière, 1999: 30). As Rancière suggests in an interview with Peter Hallward:

“In the end, everything in politics turns on the distribution of spaces. What are these places? How do they function? Why are they there? Who can occupy them? For me, political action always acts upon the social as the litigious distribution of places and roles.” (2003: 201)

Politics, then, is a profoundly spatial activity. “The essential work of politics”, Rancière writes, “is the configuration of its own space. It is to make the world of its subjects and its operations seen” (2015: 45). Rancièrean politics revolves around opening “polemical scenes” where “subjects that do not count” in the police order (Rancière and Panagia, 2000: 125) stage dissensus. Such dissenting subjects open up the spaces for politics where a ‘wrong’ can be addressed by staging and performatively enacting their equality qua speaking beings (Dikeç, 2013; Swyngedouw, 2011). This emphasis on the opening of spaces foregrounds politics as the configuration of a specific world; a world-making activity (Dikeç, 2013). And yet, the world of politics is not in isolation from the world of the police (Karaliotas, 2021). Conceptualizing space not only as a medium of distribution but also as co-existence, enables Rancière to think of politics as “the manifestation of dissensus, as the presence of two worlds in one” (2015: 45). Indeed, for Rancière, there are two contrasting structurations of the common world: one produced by the logic of the police and one that “empowers artifices of equality, that is, forms enacted by political subjects [that] re-figure the common of a ‘given world’ (…) by configuring a different world-in-common” (2015: 100).

This emphasis on the spaces, scenes and stages of politics is not merely metaphorical. As Davidson and Iveson argue, politics, for Rancière, are “fabricated through space” (2014: 141). Artifices of equality are precisely that: socio-spatial acts and forms that disrupt and reconfigure the distribution of the sensible through the embodied enactment of the logic of equality (Rancière, 2015: 93). In Proletarian Nights – his groundbreaking exploration of workers’ political subjectification in 19th century France – Rancière demonstrates how proletarian emancipation consisted precisely in workers’ re-appropriation of the times and places of the police to do what they were not supposed to do: instead of sleeping to reproduce their labor power reclaiming the night to debate political texts and recite poetry in theatres and cabarets; instead of working reclaiming the spaces of work to contemplate emancipation (2012). As Laura Quintana highlights, in focusing on such re-appropriations Rancière’s thinking foregrounds the embodied and material dimensions of emancipation (2019).

Nevertheless, Rancière’s primary interest on individual rather than collective political subjectification (Karaliotas, 2017) together with his predominant focus on the utterances stemming from such re-appropriations has resulted in less attention being paid on the work that infrastructural and spatial arrangements – what I propose to call infrastructures of dissensus – do for the staging and articulation of politics. Maurizio Lazzarato has, for example, powerfully argued that:

“Nowhere in their analyses do we encounter those technical and social machines in which ‘humans’ and ‘non-humans’ function together as component parts in corporate, welfare-state, and media assemblages. Rancière and Badiou have radically elided them altogether” (2014: 13).

Lazzarato correctly points out Rancière’s lack of engagement with the machinic. In light of the preceding discussion on the work that spaces do for Rancière’s thinking, however, Lazzarato’s conclusion that Rancière’s work “fail[s] to problematize the relationship between the discursive and the existential” and by extension the material (2014: 16-17) seems somewhat misplaced. The opening up of political spaces, Rancière insists, “is at once a material and a symbolical matter[;] (…) it is a new form of (dis)connection between the material and the symbolical” (2011: 6). Contra Lazzarato, then, I argue that Rancière’s conception of politics as a world-making activity opens up productive pathways to explore the role of infrastructures in the staging and articulation of politics. If (emancipatory) politics is a world-making activity, then, what are the socio-technical and spatial arrangements that bring this world to life and sustain it? What are, in other, words the infrastructures that support the staging of dissensus and the enactment of the logic of equality? In expanding Rancière’s thinking toward this hitherto unexplored dimension, the paper moves beyond merely equating infrastructures with the machinic, the non-human or the means of production and understands infrastructures as socio-technical assemblages and spatial arrangements of human and non-human actors.

The voluminous literature on infrastructure has highlighted how these complex socio-technical networks assemble material, people, imaginaries and spaces to not only make life possible but also shape it in profound and pervasive ways (Larkin, 2013; McFarlane and Silver, 2017). As Keller Easterling highlights, “[l]ike an operating system, the medium of infrastructure space makes certain things possible and other things impossible … dictating the rules of the game in the urban milieu” (2016: 14). A significant body of geographical work has demonstrated how socio-technical infrastructure networks mediate and propel state-political projects (Swyngedouw, 2007), shape deeply uneven and exclusionary life-worlds (Graham and Marvin, 2001), promote new forms of governance and governmentalities that choreograph everyday life and subjectivities (Graham and McFarlane, 2014). This latter aspect has also usefully included an engagement with the social infrastructures that urban dwellers assemble to support their life, often reworking and challenging the uneven infrastructural landscape of contemporary urbanism in creative ways (McFarlane and Silver, 2017; Simone, 2015). While infrastructure scholarship has productively highlighted how all infrastructure is in effect “political infrastructure” (McFarlane and Rutherford, 2008) and foregrounded the politics of urban infrastructure, less attention has been paid on the role that infrastructures might hold in articulating and circulating emancipatory politics (see also Vasudevan, 2015; Minuchin, 2021).

“The task”, however, Judith Butler convincingly argued in the aftermath of Occupy protests, is “to let the infrastructure become part of the new action, even a collaborative actor” (2015: 127). Indeed, politics and political subjectification cannot be fully separated “from questions of infrastructure[s] (…) [as] they not only condition the action, but take part in the making of the space of politics” (Butler, 2015: 127). In a similar line of argument, I contend that emancipatory politics entails the assembling and fabrication of infrastructures of dissensus: the physical and virtual, embodied and non-human, socio-spatial arrangements that make possible the staging of dissensus and the reconfiguration of the sensible through the “enactment of the egalitarian trait” (Rancière, 2015: 93). Infrastructures of dissensus do not emerge outside the police but are rather fabricated through “relocating, reshaping or redoubling” (Rancière, 2011: 5) its places and infrastructures. Thus understood, infrastructures of dissensus are pivotal in the articulation and circulation of emancipatory politics in three interrelated ways.

Firstly, infrastructures of dissensus provide the stage for becoming visible and audible and for prefiguratively enacting alternative imaginaries and practices. Scholarship on the Occupy protests, for example, documents how the re-claimed streets and squares were not a mere container for these movements but rather constitutive in the formation of new collective political subjects (Davidson and Iveson, 2014; Kaika and Karaliotas, 2016). In these reclaimed spaces imaginaries and practices of a political subject in-the-making were traced and negotiated – often through internal tensions and spatial differentiations (Karaliotas, 2017). My emphasis on Occupy protests and the occupation of space more broadly here is not limited to the role of occupied spaces qua infrastructures, though this is, indeed, an important dimension. Rather, it also foregrounds the role that socio-technical infrastructures play in making such occupations possible and ensuring their reproduction (see Iveson, 2017). It is through the assembling of infrastructures that supported the sustained occupation of the squares – the camp of tents, the solidarity kitchens, the media tools and teams and the makeshift hospitals – that protesters began to imagine and craft new spatial and political constellations. But infrastructures of dissensus are not limited to the protest camp. Vasudevan, for example, reflects on how occupation as “a radical politics of infrastructure” assembles “bodies, objects and practices” to re-imagine and re-construct a “common spatial field” (2015: 318) wherein the “ongoing interactions of participants continually produce sentiments, ideas, values and practices that manifest and encourage new modes of being” (Gould, 2009: 178). Furthermore, Arampatzi’s work on “struggle communities” in austerity-marked Athens draws attention to how everyday solidarity initiatives fabricated the spaces and socio-material support networks for the articulation of an emancipatory everyday praxis against the austere city (2017b). Here, rather than a purely technical question, “the fabrication and the arrangements of infrastructures for association, exchange, circulation and expression” become a means for the articulation of a new political language and praxis (Minuchin, 2016: 897).

Secondly, infrastructures of dissensus provide the socio-technical means for circulating the re-configuration of the sensible. If politics revolves around disrupting the distribution of the sensible and articulating alternative sensible worlds, then, the sound of what is uttered and the image of what is performed is constitutive of political activity (Butler, 2015). The technologies and infrastructures that enable circulating such images and sounds become an integral part in performing political activity. From ‘low-tech’ means like political posters and newspapers to TV and radio stations to social media, “‘media’ is not just reporting who the people claim to be, but media has entered into the very definition of the people” (Butler, 2015: 20). The extensive use of social media to popularize Occupy protests from the Arab Spring to Southern Europe to the US is indicative (Juris, 2012). In these events, social media were in and of themselves a terrain for both challenging the police ordering and negotiating the ongoing political action (ibid). Beyond communication infrastructures, the theaters, cabarets and pubs where Rancière’s nineteenth century workers assembled to recite poetry and debate political texts (2012) can be read along similar lines: they provided the grounds for debating and disseminating ideas playing an integral role in proletarian subjectification. Similarly, the multiple solidarity initiatives that dot the urban landscape in the aftermath of recent uprisings also enable the circulation of emancipatory imaginaries in and through their spaces by making visible and palpable an emancipatory praxis in the everyday life of the city.

Thirdly, infrastructures of dissensus act as “convergence spaces” (Routledge, 2003) for diverse political actors and the material and virtual articulation of diverse political practices and movements (Featherstone, 2008). On the one hand, the physical spaces opened up in and through infrastructures of dissensus embed political activity in the urban fabric enabling and facilitating the coming together of diverse political actors. Diarmaid Kelliher’s work on the 1984-85 miners’ strike, for example, documents how Unemployed Workers’ Centers initiated by the Trades Union Council, radical and alternative bookshops and social and community centers were politicized to bring together diverse groups in solidarity with the miners (2017). Such meeting spaces, from community and social centers to squats and occupied workplaces, commonly attract activists involved in other political initiatives, thus propelling the forging of solidarity bonds and connections among diverse struggles. In this, such spaces connect to one another forging solidarity networks that span the whole urban fabric and formulating trans-local connections. The extensive networking of solidarity initiatives – from solidarity kitchens and health clinics to occupied workplaces and local assemblies – within and across Greek cities during the ‘Greek crisis’ is a prime example of such convergences and connections (Arampatzi, 2017a; Karaliotas, 2017). The networking of these socio-spatial infrastructures and their practices played a pivotal role in sustaining and promoting their activities. Simultaneously, the articulation of their practices also enabled the fabrication of an alternative infrastructure network that prefigured new ways of (self-)organizing and sustaining urban everyday life, thus, opening and literally building an alternative city of solidarity in and against the austere city. Hence, the articulation of “prefigurative tactics, which facilitate the unfolding of alternative practices of exchange, labour, association and learning, provide the components and experiences from where to articulate an urban political programme” (Minuchin, 2016: 906).

Importantly, however, this reference to specific places and infrastructures like the squat, the social center and the radio station is not an effort to fix the location of politics. Infrastructures of dissensus are not the pre-existing and/or ever-lasting foundations of politics and equality but exist as such only if they remain the embodied enactment of the logic of equality that challenges the logic of the police (Rancière, 2015; Davidson and Iveson, 2015). It is, therefore, important to unpack how infrastructures of dissensus encounter and intersect with the police order, transforming it and being transformed by it (Karaliotas, 2021). In what follows, I read ERT’s occupation and self-management as the fabrication of such an infrastructure of dissensus.

The event of ERT: From the logic of the police to “something bigger than ERT”

In the following sections I mobilize the case of ERT’s occupation and self-management as a living laboratory to embody and further explore the work that infrastructures of dissensus do in the articulation and circulation of emancipatory politics. This analysis draws from research around ERT’s occupation between 2013 and 2017. This included my observant participation in the spaces and assemblies of occupied ERT in Thessaloniki – mostly between June and August 2013 –, interviews and informal conversations with participants in ERT’s occupation as well as activists and citizens in solidarity, and a close reading of the material – pamphlets, manifestos, public statements, and programmes – produced by occupied ERT. Occupations of ERT’s buildings and the broadcasting of self-managed programmes unfolded throughout Greece since June 2013 but lasted for varying periods and had different degrees of intensity. The occupation of ERT’s buildings in Athens, for example, lasted until November 2013 while its Thessaloniki counterpart – the most prolific of the occupations – up until June 2015 when ERT was re-instituted by SYRIZA. In the following analysis I focus on the full period of these 2 years discussing both Athens’ and Thessaloniki’s experience as this enables a more nuanced analysis of the trajectory of the occupation that also traces the transformations of ERT’s infrastructure of dissensus as a result of its encounters with the police order (from the eviction of Athens’ occupation by the ND government to SYRIZA’s decision to re-open ERT). I begin with briefly situating the event of ERT’s occupation in the conjuncture of the ‘Greek crisis’.

The ‘Greek crisis’ ushered an era of deep politico-economic transformations that radically altered the discursive, institutional and material co-ordinates of politics. The symptom of Greece’s failure was the accumulation of public debt. Debt, however, was also the nodal point in the articulation of hegemonic discourses aiming to legitimize the imposed policies. A massive discursive operation staged by national and international media and elites (Kouki and Liakos, 2015) sought to construct Greece and its citizens as indebted subjects who have enjoyed a lazy and hedonistic lifestyle on the back of financial mismanagement and irresponsibility. And if debt was the symptom of the country’s sickness, the underlying cause was ‘Greek exceptionalism’: the proliferation of an extensive and inefficient public sector and the ever-present corruption and political clientalism that led to the country’s deviation from ‘normal’ European states. The successive memoranda between Greek governments and the EU-IMF-ECB troika, revolving around the neoliberal mantras of austerity, privatization, deregulation of working conditions and downsizing the public sector, were portrayed as ‘the bitter medicine’ that would enable Greece to become a ‘normal’ European country.

It is against this background that the decision to dismantle ERT was introduced by the coalition government led by ND and supported by PASOK (Panhellenic Socialist Movement) and up until that point the Democratic Left (DEMAR)². The government’s decision to liquidate ERT and dismiss all of its 2656 workers constituted a continuation and deepening of the twin logics of privatization and vilification of the public sector that underpinned much of the memoranda policies (Hadjimichalis, 2017). The government’s spokesman Simos Kedikoglou – ironically enough himself a former ERT employee – clearly articulated the message when announcing ERT’s closure on 11 June 2013:

“At a time when the Greek people are enduring sacrifices there is no room for delay, hesitation or tolerance for sacred cows. ERT is a typical example of unique lack of transparency and a heaven of money-waste (…) ERT will stop broadcasting on midnight” (2013: n.p.).

Kedikoglou’s announcement also exemplified the government’s “hatred of democracy” – as Rancière (2014) would have it: its intolerance for democratic public media, public goods, culture, freedom of thought and creation. By dismantling ERT without having established another public broadcaster, Samaras’ government acted as if ERT was just another malfunctioning business owned by the government and bypassed constitutional provisions that posited the existence of public TV and radio stations as a cornerstone of democracy (Christopoulos, 2013). The decision-making process also constituted a qualitative shift in governance co-ordinates. The ratification of laws implementing the memoranda through summary procedures was one of the pivotal shifts in the re-organization of governance unfolding since 2010 (Karaliotas, 2021). However, the fact that ERT’s liquidation was introduced through “a ministerial decree, without parliamentary discussion or approval, constitute[d] an unprecedented act of authoritarianism” (Athanasiou, 2013: n.p.). This was made palpable when Samaras’ government cut off the power in ERT’s transmission centers turning TV screens black and silencing radio stations across the country; an inescapable sensorial manifestation of the impacts of austerity in every home across the country. As Stavrakakis argued, “[t]he thoroughly unexpected and violent blackening of the screens” symbolically condensed a governance logic and practice that was “not based on any type of ordinary hegemony” (2013: n.p.). It exemplified the government’s conviction to continue with the imposition of austerity through a brutal and nihilistic “decisionism” (ibid.).

ERT’s occupation unfolded against this backdrop. After Kedikoglou’s announcement, a spontaneous workers’ assembly was organized in ERT’s headquarters in Athens also including activists in solidarity. As participants in the assembly describe, the meeting lasted only a few minutes with everybody agreeing on the proposal for a working occupation of ERT’s buildings and infrastructure (Interview ERT Journalist 29/6/2015). From Athens the decision spread across Greece inspiring the organization of workers’ assemblies in ERT’s infrastructures in Thessaloniki and 19 other cities hosting regional ERT radio stations and journalists. The announcement of the General Assembly of ERT’s Journalists in Athens set the tone:

“ERT should be open: to society, its contradictions, its problems, its agonies, its ideas and actions.

ERT’s workers were determined to keep ERT open in a twofold sense. Firstly, ERT’s occupied infrastructure would serve as the platform for broadcasting TV and radio programmes voicing disagreement with the government’s decision and highlighting ERT’s role as a public media. Secondly, ERT journalists would mobilize the occupied infrastructure to address calls to citizens to gather in ERT’s buildings to protest the decision. And so it happened. Within hours thousands of people in solidarity gathered in ERT’s courtyard in Athens. In the evening of the same day, a massive solidarity concert was organized by ERT musicians and the now tens of thousands of people together with ERT’s workers made clear that they would not conform with the government’s decision. The people’s and the workers’ conviction to keep ERT open did not wither away when TV screens went black and radio stations were silenced at the midnight of the same day. Rather, the government’s “brutal nihilism” (Stavrakakis, 2013: n.p.) triggered a massive political struggle for ERT that would impact the broader political landscape in the country. It also fueled, however, “something bigger than ERT”, as one of the workers put it: “a struggle for democracy and the commons, an exciting political experiment revolving around equality, self-management and the forging of networks of solidarity” (Interview ERT Journalist, 25/6/2016).

In the days and months that followed ERT continued to broadcast self-managed TV and radio programmes building on the embodied and material support of a massive solidarity movement. Simultaneously, ERT’s courtyard in Athens remained packed with people in solidarity, artists and musicians as well as international visitors who came to speak to the public live and online (Leontidou, 2014). A solidarity assembly was held every evening in ERT’s courtyard in Athens and a number of grassroots unions and movements against austerity held their assemblies and rallies in front of ERT’s buildings. ERT’s infrastructure across the country was re-allocated from its role in serving the interests of the state and the markets and transformed into an infrastructure of dissensus: a socio-technical assemblage that articulated the scene for staging disagreement with austerity policies through direct democratic practices, solidarity and the self-management of the commons. Importantly, however, ERT was not an isolated experiment. Occupied ERT’s imaginaries and practices were drawing their inspiration from the wider politicization around the ‘Greek crisis’ (Mullis, 2021) and notably the squares movement against austerity and the multiple solidarity and struggle communities that emerged in its aftermath (Arampatzi, 2017b; Karaliotas, 2017). Besides, the people who supported ERT’s experiment were also coming from a background of participation in such initiatives. Hence, ERT can be seen as the continuation of the process of political subjectification that was inspired by the squares movement and carried through the various infrastructures of dissensus that emerged in its aftermath (Karaliotas, 2021).

ERT’s headquarters in Athens remained occupied for 5 months, up until 7 November 2013, when riot police forces evicted the occupation. Meanwhile, a new state broadcasting service, NERIT, was established attracting applications for employment from almost half of ERT’s former workers. These developments, however, did not signal the end of ERT’s experiment that continued to broadcast up until June 2015 when SYRIZA’s newly elected government re-instituted ERT and re-appointed its former employees. By virtue of being still occupied, ERT’s infrastructure in Thessaloniki was now transformed into the central node in ERT’s experiment as it provided the studios to host and the equipment to broadcast most of the programmes. Simultaneously, the arrival of workers from Athens gave renewed life to Thessaloniki’s initiative and fueled a further round of experimentation. The following section focuses on these 2 years of ERT’s working existence as an infrastructure of dissensus.

Occupy, resist, broadcast: ERT as an infrastructure of dissensus

In her insightful analysis of “the power of infrastructure space” in Extrastatecraft, Easterling argues that the disposition of infrastructure space “results from the circulation of (…) active forms within it” (2016: 73). Tracing the active forms within infrastructure space, she suggests, can “make more palpable the dispositions they inflect” but also provide important insights in discerning and manipulating the political character of infrastructures (ibid.). The “switch/remote” and the “wiring/topology” of infrastructures are two active forms that Easterling identifies. While the former “modulates the flow of activities” acting like a remote control that can “suppress or redirect”, the latter refers to “expressions of relative position and sequence in a network” that favor certain “activities and routines over others” (Easterling, 2016: 75–77). Thinking ERT’s infrastructure through these two active forms can help illuminate its political disposition as a mass-media network. In the radial network of ERT’s television and radio stations the wiring is such that one “single central point”, a switch, “controls the flow of information” (Easterling, 2016: 77). This wiring of ERT’s infrastructure allowed ND’s government to silence the radios and blacken the TV screens when disconnecting the power in ERT’s transmission centers. The occupation of ERT’s infrastructure, in juxtaposition, enabled workers and activists in solidarity to assemble an alternative wiring that bypassed the government-controlled switch to broadcast their self-managed programmes. More than that, the occupied infrastructure became a hub in an alternative spatial wiring that enabled the articulation of political activities throughout Greek cities and the configuration of an alternative sensible world. Notably, this alternative political wiring of ERT’s infrastructure was neither fixed nor purely horizontal: for as long as it existed, ERT’s occupation in Athens – by virtue of its visibility, the people it brought together and the infrastructure it controlled – was the key node in a rather vertical topology wherein TV and Radio programmes but also imaginaries, practices and events were emanating from Athens and circulated to the other occupations across the country. The eviction of Athens’ occupation in November 2013, in turn, led to a new wiring that saw Thessaloniki becoming the key node in ERT’s experiment. In this section, I unpack the possibilities, challenges and limitations around the fabrication and operation of this infrastructure of dissensus.

Conclusion: Toward an emancipatory politics of urban infrastructure?

Today, with ND back in power, ERT has fully returned to its hierarchical organization operating under the state’s close control and far from the democratic media prefiguratively enacted through ERT’s infrastructure of dissensus. But ERT’s trajectory should neither be seen as a reason to fully dismiss the emancipatory potentialities of political experiments like ERT nor accepted as the foretold conclusion of all similar experiments. Rather, it calls for a nuanced account of the possibilities, challenges and limitations facing emancipatory politics that seek to construct alternative spatial and infrastructural arrangements.

To provide such an account, this paper proposed the notion of infrastructures of dissensus to denote the physical and virtual, embodied and non-human, socio-technical and spatial arrangements that enable and circulate the staging of democratic disagreement. Bringing Jacques Rancière’s conceptualization of politics in dialogue with geographical scholarship on infrastructure spaces and the spatiality of politics, the paper advanced a conceptualization of infrastructures of dissensus as the assembling of bodies, objects and practices in space to reconfigure the partitioning of the sensible through the enactment of the logic of equality. On the one hand, this reading challenges the prevailing reading of infrastructures as just tools of governance and technologies of new modes and forms of (neoliberal) governmentalities by foregrounding the emancipatory potentialities that lie in the re-appropriation, re-purposing and fabricating of political infrastructures. On the other, it surpasses Rancière’s almost exclusive emphasis on the utterances stemming from political spaces, to expand Rancièrian scholarship on the political through an emphasis on the materialities, bodies and socio-spatial configurations that make possible and shape the articulation and circulation of the political. In this line of argument, the notion of infrastructures of dissensus pushes scholarship to unpack the work that material, virtual, and embodied infrastructures do in fabricating, circulating, and expanding political action as well as the challenges that stem from such efforts to create long-lasting political spatialities (see also Vasudevan, 2015; Minuchin, 2021). Infrastructures of dissensus can, thus, be seen as a heuristic device that enables a more nuanced, open-ended and plural reading of the everyday articulations of political action and the ways in which it encounters, intersects with and is co-shaped by the police order and assorted governance practices and logics.

Tracing occupied ERT’s trajectory, I documented how such a framing enables a rich reading of the potentialities and pitfalls of political experiments with an emancipatory politics of infrastructure. I argued that ERT’s working existence, constituted an opening of political spaces that significantly contributed to the re-politicisation of the urban at times of crisis. Occupied ERT’s infrastructure played a pivotal role in enunciating dissensus with the logic of the police and the devastating austerity policies implemented in response to the ‘Greek debt crisis’. It staged a disruption of the police order that sought to impose the logics of privatisation and enclosure as the only sensible solution for the commons of culture and information. More importantly, however, occupied ERT was not limited in resistance but also pre-figuratively imagined and materialized new ways of doing politics and of organizing everyday life in-common. The spaces opened up in and through ERT’s infrastructure of dissensus also held a pivotal role in the convergence of struggles against austerity and the articulation of multifaceted political movements and solidarity initiatives. Re-appropriating and re-wiring the infrastructure of the state TV and radio stations, ERT made visible and audible the numerous solidarity initiatives and political movements unfolding in Thessaloniki and to a lesser degree Athens, thus, supporting and strengthening them. In turn, ERT’s struggle and self-managed operation would have been impossible without the unprecedented support of activists and political movements. Hence, occupied ERT emerges as an embodied, networked and porous infrastructure that played a pivotal role in assembling and circulating emancipatory politics. In other words – and paraphrasing Rancière – ERT was a key node in the articulation of a political imaginary and praxis that put a city of equality – that is always in the making – in confrontation with the city of the police (Karaliotas and Kapsali, 2021).

Reading some of the challenges that marked ERT’s experiment, I highlighted that this is neither a linear nor a frictionless process but rather one without guarantees. Firstly, the convergence of movements and activists and the forging of solidarity bonds, ERT’s case attests, is a slow and demanding process that can be greatly hindered if infrastructures of dissensus are not radically open to society. The fundamentally different trajectories of ERT’s occupation in Athens and Thessaloniki clearly demonstrate that exclusionary lines might well be reproduced within such experiments posing significant limitations for emancipatory politics. Infrastructures of dissensus, and emancipatory politics more broadly, Rancière would insist, should never be understood as finished products of a fixed political community but rather need to always remain open to “newcomers” to “allow new objects to appear as common concerns and new voices to appear and be heard” (2016: 68). Secondly, infrastructures of dissensus are also challenged and reshaped by their encounters with the police. As ERT’s case demonstrates, this is not limited to questions of suppression and silencing but rather also foregrounds questions of institutionalization. ERT’s self-managed trajectory did not end through riot police intervention but when SYRIZA re-instituted ERT as a government broadcaster ignoring the 2 years of experimentation around building and sustaining a democratic public media. This is not to suggest that ERT’s case should necessarily be translated to a strategy of autonomy from institutional politics. Rather, it is to highlight that these dilemmas are inescapable, come with no easy answers, and therefore need to be kept open. In fact, it is precisely the fact that they have to negotiate these dilemmas that makes experiments like ERT the spaces in and through which the formation of new political imaginaries and practices is taking shape. Infrastructures of dissensus stage an emancipatory politics without guarantees: a politics that its outcome is never a given but that need to be kept radically open to the equality of each and everyone.