An Archaeology of the Affective Commons

Summoning the Border in Motion

Abstract

An Archaeology of the Commons stages an encounter between two systems: the commons – as place and practice – and archaeology understood as materially grounded storytelling. Following Lauren Berlant’s invitation to attend to detail, both may be treated as affective infrastructures that become legible through instruments of urban governance: title plans, parcels, cadastral surveys, easements, and public works. The commons are most intensely performed at their boundary where unlike a border, they become dynamic, constitutive processes through which social, ecological and political relations are continually remade.

Working with Melbourne’s vestigial town common, I describe a re-enactment of “beating the bounds” – a reactivation of a dormant colonial edge – not as a revenant to be feared but as material to be reworked. Here archaeology-as-commoning is developed as a performative method – walking, drawing, filming and incantation – in order to reanimate erased sites and redistribute their narratives into shared cultural life. Attention to micro-details – fence lines, survey coordinates, species names, culverts and benchmark stones – guides a practice that both records and makes space.

Here as well, methodologically, cartography, technical drawing, field inscription and film are gathered into critical dialogue. Maps are read as cultural instruments that stabilise abstraction while insisting on generative frictions between representation and lived ground. Through slow, materially attentive inscription and speech, the work exposes how colonial spatial logics persist in urban seams – offset grids, easements, utility corridors, “paper roads” – and how they can be unsettled.

The contribution is threefold: a reframing of commons boundaries as infrastructures of relation; a method for their excavation through performative, multi-scalar practices; and a demonstration that detailed attention can open new imaginaries for urban common land.