ABSTRACT
In the concluding chapter I suggest that the Chilean movement opened up the political in a way that allowed a silenced subject to speak and enter an antagonistic discussion and debate. It argues that this was possible, to a great extent, thanks to communicative and mediated practices mending the social fabric in realms of trust; creating spaces for being together and making a representation of the ‘we’; gaining recognition as political actors and achieving the creation of an imagined commons; and finally, expanding participation and the image of the ‘we’ into a larger web-scale that, whilst disruptive to a neoliberal way of life, could not sustain deliberative and collaborative relationships in the long term. In other words, it says that the movement built a commons with capacity for the political to exist in Chile’s neoliberal democracy only in the short term because of its incapacity for subverting neoliberal logics of communication in time. In this way, the book ends up reflecting on the relevance and theoretical contribution of using and developing the notion of the commons in media and communication studies – due to the opportunity it affords to overcome outdated frameworks of liberal democracy, such as the public sphere – and giving guidelines projecting political and democratic paths contesting the media and communicative ecologies of neoliberal democracies.
