Thinking the Commons through Ostrom and Butler ... - SAGE Journals

Article

Thinking the Commons through Ostrom and Butler: Boundedness and Vulnerability

Theory, Culture & Society 0(0) 1–19 ! The Author(s) 2018 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0263276418757315 journals.sagepub.com/home/tcs

Irina Velicu University of Coimbra

Gustavo Garcıá-Lo´pez University of Puerto Rico

Abstract In this paper we propose an ‘undisciplinary’ meeting between Elinor Ostrom and Judith Butler, with the intent to broaden the theory of the commons by discussing it as a relational politics. We use Butler’s theory of power to problematize existing visions of commons, shifting from Ostrom’s ‘bounded rationality’ to Butler’s concepts of ‘bounded selves’ and mutual vulnerability. To be bounded – as opposed to autonomous being – implies being an (ambiguous) effect of socio-power relations and norms that are often beyond control. Thus, to be a collective of bounded selves implies being mutually vulnerable in power relations which are enabling, albeit injurious. A politics of commoning is not a mere technical management of resources (in space) but a struggle to perform common livable relations (in time). We argue that the multiple exposures which produce us are also the conditions of possibility for more just and equalitarian ‘re-commoning’ of democracies around the world. Keywords boundedness, commons, commoning, power, subjectivities, vulnerability

Introduction: Constructing and Deconstructing the Commons The commons has become one of the keywords for transformative politics in our times (Caffentzis and Federici, 2014; Chatterton et al., 2013), ‘central to the material struggles and imaginaries of collective well-being’ (Amin and Powell, 2016: 1). The Nobel Prize in Economics given in 2009 to Elinor Ostrom for her work on this topic (see Ostrom, 1990;

Corresponding author: Irina Velicu. Email: [email protected] Extra material: http://theoryculturesociety.org/

2

Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

Poteete et al., 2010), and the increasing use of the concept by new social movements and critical scholars, suggest its relevance for both political theory and practice. Different theoretical perspectives coincide in pointing to two key characteristics of commons: they represent an alternative to state and market-led solutions to common problems such as environmental degradation and provision of health, education, and food; and they are based on self-organized cooperation (or solidarity). For Ostromian scholars, the so-called ‘tragedy’ of the commons – where commons become overused to the point of collapse – lies in the absence of relations of trust and reciprocity, collective action (cooperation) and rules (institutions). By contrast, critical scholars insist that the underlying problem is not lack of institutions but commons enclosures and individualist subjectivities generated by capitalism: they propose to focus on the social practices engaged in re-claiming and sustaining the collective reproduction of commons, i.e. commoning (Bollier and Helfrich, 2014; Caffentzis and Federici, 2014; Chatterton et al., 2013; De Angelis, 2013; Linebaugh, 2009). They further argue that commons should not be just ‘dykes against neoliberalism’ (Caffentzis and Federici, 2014), but a process to create a common(s) society with ‘qualitatively different social relations’ towards more equalitarian and ecological re/production (Federici, in Open!, 2014; also Amin and Powell, 2016; Antonio, 2013; Dawney, 2013; Gibson-Graham, 2006; MacKenzie, 2010). The commons has figured prominently in recent years in Theory, Culture & Society. Terranova (2015) proposes that capitalism has been producing a new commons’ ‘tragedy’ leading to a process of self-destruction. Drawing on Hardt and Negri (2012), Vercellone (2015) proposes that commons cannot be mere marginal spaces between markets and state, and argues for the ‘common’ as a mode of social production ‘based on the democratic reappropriation of the welfare state and the re-socialization of money’ (Vercellone, 2015: 9). Similarly, Parr (2015: 77) sees the commons as ‘modes of sociality that offer alternatives to the production and realization of surplus value’, while Smart (2011: 132) argues that they are a challenge to a world that ‘routinely places emphasis on the immediate and/or short term, on individual self-interest and material well-being, to the detriment of medium and longer-term communal and/or collective interests’. As we can see, there are great expectations from commons, commoning and commoners. This is a welcome gesture related to how much better ‘another world’ could be by re-creating ‘alternatives’. However, we depart from the premise that in these arguments there is a tendency to develop dualist assumptions about an altruistic human essence suppressed by the ‘Empire’ (Pasquinelli, 2008). Some scholars caution against idealizing or homogenizing the commons (De Angelis, 2013), obscuring the messiness and skirting in ‘the reproduction of everyday life’ (Federici, 2011: 4; Linebaugh, 2008: 19; Amin and Powell, 2016:

Velicu and Garcıá-Lo´pez

3

7). We build on these debates to broaden the theory of commons by thinking about commoning as a relational politics that engages with humans’ boundedness and mutual vulnerability as well as with the performativity of such subjectivities: since subjects are performative – i.e. they are constituted in action/doing – their constitution itself is a set of relations. From this perspective, sustaining the earth’s commons is not a mere technical management of resources (in space) but a struggle to perform common livable relations (in time). In the following section, we show that commons’ scholars – both institutionalists and critical – tend to instrumentalize the commons as ‘pro- or against’ capital power relations: instead, we draw on the work of Butler to analyze the implications of subject production as part of power relations, a crucial starting point for politicizing the debate on the commons. In the third section, we show how commoners engage in commoning as non-autonomous (bounded) subjects, which does not imply a denial of individual agency: individuals are effects of power (i.e. subjects), (re)producing these power relations that both sustain and limit them. In other words, instead of being ‘blinded’ by a ‘bounded-rationality’, subjects (commoners) also suffer from a ‘relational opacity’, as ‘bounded selves’. In the fourth section we discuss how boundedness of selves makes humans not only mutually constitutive but also mutually vulnerable. We argue that more than a fragility to be mitigated, vulnerability could be conceived as a condition of power and agency to be performed: who we are is in the ‘doing’ but any doing usually implies some forms of relation and a vulnerability we can never fully avoid. Yet while the concept of performativity has been widely discussed (for instance in TCS 16(2), introduced by Bell, 1999; also Bell, 2010, 2012; Rothenberg, 2006), there is still little work discussing its implications for emerging discussions on commoning (Garcı´ a-Lo´pez et al., 2017). In the last section, we will clarify the political relevance of performing our-selves in relations of commoning as ‘bounded’ and mutually vulnerable.

From Commons to Commoning The mainstream theory of the commons, as developed by Elinor Ostrom and others, sought to document and explain the possibilities of cooperation (or ‘collective action’) between individuals to address common problems. Ostrom (1990) directly challenged the traditional ‘rational egoist’ model in neoclassical economics – adopted by Garret Hardin in his famed ‘tragedy of the commons’ fable – in which individuals were not expected to cooperate when facing a common problem. Drawing on anthropology and economics, she argued that individuals do indeed cooperate often to solve common problems, and identified institutions (rules) regulating human behavior in collective organizations. She maintained that without collective action humans could not sustain

4


common resources, which are always vulnerable to enclosure, overuse, and social dilemmas. Ostrom proposes that individuals cooperate by adopting norms of ‘trust and reciprocity’ when they can communicate through repeated interactions and observe others’ behavior (Ostrom, 2009: 10; also Ostrom and Walker, 1994). In her model, autonomous individuals with relatively stable preferences (i.e. interests) and ‘bounded’ rationality1 – limited information and ‘processing’ capabilities – decide whether to cooperate through cost-benefit calculations striving to maximize their personal ‘welfare’. This welfare could include social norms and the ‘welfare’ of others, i.e. altruism. Ostrom believes that the vast majority of individuals are ‘conditional cooperators’: they cooperate as a ‘test’ to see the outcomes; if cooperation is not reciprocated, or the results are not beneficial, then they can simply ‘exit’ the relationship (Ostrom and Walker, 2003; Ostrom, 2009). Over time, people gain more trust of each other and cooperate more. However, the norms and acts of reciprocity are not enough to sustain cooperation, because one act of non-cooperation could lead to a downward cycle of ‘retribution’. Therefore, according to Ostrom, there need to be rules that establish incentives for cooperation as well as clear penalties for those who ‘skirt’ their ‘duty’ to reciprocate or to use a common resource according to the existing norms (Ostrom, 2009: 25; Saunders, 2014). This would provide stability of expectations, reducing uncertainty and vulnerability. Further, for Ostrom, setting clear ‘boundaries’ of the group’s membership to maintain smaller sizes and homogeneous identities would increase cooperation, since people who share certain characteristics tend to ‘know’ and trust each other more (Poteete et al., 2010). As she argued, collective actions emerge in groups of people who ‘share a past, and expect to share a future’ (Ostrom, 1990: 88). Ostrom made important contributions that serve as points of departure for a critical discussion on commons. First, she recognized an inherent (material) inter-dependence amongst commoners, in a double sense: that to achieve many of our everyday needs we need others, and that people do internalize socialized ‘norms’ and rules of behavior – including concerns for others – into their behavior (Ostrom, 2009). Second, she stressed the broad diversity of human behavior and preferences, pointing to the substantial variety of observed actions which challenged predictions based on a purely egoistic model of the individual (Ostrom, 2009). This opens the door to critical scholars’ calls for recognizing that ‘rational choice’ behavior is real but contingent, as there are other dimensions of human subjectivity (cf. Wynne, 2010). Third, Ostrom’s emphasis that humans are bounded in their knowledge and fallible can be seen as an invitation to be humble about commoners’ limitations and capabilities and to remain open to continuous processes of deliberative learning and


5

experimentation; indeed, in her later years she stressed that there was no ‘panacea’ to solve commons problems. Nevertheless, Ostrom’s theory has been questioned for her rationalchoice model, which still retains the central assumptions of individuality/ autonomy, rational calculation, and utility maximization. Critical commons scholars point out that face-to-face communication is inevitably embedded in local-global political economies and their (micro)-power relations. Instead of acting to maximize utility or to comply with rules, people also make decisions based on their relations of subordination to others (Saunders, 2014). In a context of power inequalities, we cannot assume that more (face-to-face) communication necessarily leads to cooperation, as proposed by Ostrom; indeed, it may rather contribute to increasing aggression (Pasquinelli, 2008, citing Virlo). Furthermore, the institutional theory’s emphasis on sameness, cooperation, and consensus, while often beneficial for commons’ preservation and selforganization, also reproduces existing power relations and patterns of exclusion, creating enclaves of (homogeneous) ‘community’, which become new sites of enclosure and come with potential violence in narcissistic, nationalistic, patriarchal, or racist overtones (Caffentzis and Federici, 2014; Creed, 2006; Stavrides, 2015). Critical scholars also emphasize the little attention paid by institutionalists to how subjectivities are formed in commoning, e.g. how power relations, structural conditions and past experiences influence people’s perception of (and relation to) themselves and others. Institutionalists take the actors and interests ‘as already present . . . as existing fully formed’ (Agrawal, 2005: 211). A growing body of critical scholarship shows that behaviors are not based on conscious calculation but on relatively unconscious ‘habitus’ (see Collet, 2009), conditioned by government/disciplinary practices which produce/form the political subjects (e.g. Agrawal, 2005; Li, 2007; McNay, 2009). This work tends to stress that neoliberal capitalism privileges selfish individualism and enclosures of commons relations: ‘individualizing social actors in their separate automobiles and in front of separate video screens’ (Hardt and Negri, 2000, cited in Read, 2011: 120) and imparting ‘the habits of diligence, responsibility and the careful weighing of costs and benefits that characterize in liberal thinking the ideal autonomous subject of rights’ (Li, 2007: 20). Therefore, as unorthodox economists have argued, instead of taking individuals’ preferences as assumed and stable, we should analyze where they come from, and ‘how people interpret their situation’ to define their goals (Hodgson, 2012: 95). Recently, critical scholars have focused on commoning to describe an opposite instrumentalization of the commons, based on humans who transcend self-interest to produce a life ‘in common’. They see commons not as resources/things but as a relational process with potentially ‘far-reaching political implications in terms of resisting neoliberal

6


forms of life and experience’ and the building of a convivial, communal way of life (Dawney, 2013: 33). The commons are understood as a ‘quality of relations, a principle of cooperation and of responsibility to each other and to the earth, the forests, the seas, the animals’ (Federici, 2012: 145), a ‘vibrant counter-culture of non-utilitarian living and associating’ (Amin and Powell, 2016: 2), which provides equality in participation and cultivates ‘an active, civic-minded citizenry appreciative of their ties to others’ (Antonio, 2013: 20). At the same time, critical scholars have stressed the need to consider the plurality, contradictions and fluid identities, ways of being, interests, which are always evolving in commoning processes (Blomley, 2016; Creed, 2006; Linebaugh, 2008; McDonald, 2002; Noterman, 2015; Papadopolous, 2012; Stavrides, 2015), including those of strangers with whom commoning often happens in urban contexts (e.g. Huron, 2015). These approaches propose that the task is to challenge and transform existing social boundaries/norms and allow for fluid, ‘liminal’ boundaries in which communities and their commons are a heterogeneous multiplicity ‘always in the making’ (Stavrides, 2015: 14). Lastly, some studies have attended to the processes of (re)subjectivation that can take place in commoning, partly drawing on Butler’s theory. Gibson-Graham (2006: 25) suggests that commoning against enclosures creates moments of ‘interruption in ritualized practices’ of subjection, challenges the dominant ‘capitalocentric imaginary’, and activates ‘new senses of self’. Through daily commoning practices such as taking care of degraded forests (Garcı´ a-Lo´pez et al., 2017; Singh, 2013), fisheries (Nightingale, 2011), and community land trusts (Mackenzie, 2010), or struggles against housing dispossession (cf. Garcı´ a-Lamarca, 2015), citizens can transform their individual and collective subjectivities, embracing a ‘being-incommon’ to (re)produce and care for the commons. In these various ways, commoning scholars have created an important basis for attending to the relational politics of sustaining the commons by engaging with the process of subject (trans)formation. However, we see a potential threat in this literature to assume that commoning will necessarily result in an ‘alternative’ commoner. This is related more generally to the tendency of left scholars to assume a revolutionary subject – rather than critically examine its production (Read, 2011; also Pasquinelli, 2008). The critique of the ‘egoistic’ capitalist subject ‘makes it appear as if one could simply choose ‘‘individuality’’ or ‘‘collectivity’’’ (Read, 2011: 122). Here, we argue that the commoning scholarship would thus benefit from a deeper theorization of the process of subject production in all its performative complexities. We problematize the tendency to make dualist distinctions between individualism and collective solidarity, and neoliberal/capitalist and anti-capitalist commons (e.g. Caffentzis, 2009; Caffentzis and Federici, 2014; De Angelis, 2013), or corrupted versus non-corrupted commons (Hardt and Negri, 2009; see also


7

Amin and Powell, 2016: 8). As Pasquinelli (2008: 32) argues, ‘only an acknowledgement of the dark side of the multitude [i.e. the commoners] can establish a true ‘‘radicalism’’’. We contribute to these debates using Butler’s theory of subjection which, we argue, suggests that resisting capital through commoning is not the same as resisting the constitution of our subjectivity by capital (Butler, 1997). From this perspective, commoning may be analyzed as an ongoing political struggle to perform the ‘within/against’ of power and agency – a relational constitution of our collective selves – which faces us with the opacity (boundedness) of selves rather than a fully-formed alternative/communal subjectivity (Butler and Athanasiou, 2013: 100). More than bounded rationality, we also invite reflection on boundedness of selves; more than social dispossession, we also reflect on self-dispossession and mutual vulnerability. We detail these aspects and their political relevance for commoning in the next three sections.

From Bounded Rationality to Bounded Selves: A Butlerian Take on Commons The ‘I’ has no story of its own that is not also the story of a relation – or set of relations – to a set of norms. [. . .] always to some extent dispossessed by the social conditions of its emergence. (Butler, 2005: 8) We are not even conscious of all of the rules, norms, and strategies we follow [. . .] the option of optimal design is not available to mere mortals. (Ostrom, 2005: 5, 31) Ostrom and Butler share the concern for the limitations we face in the process of acting collectively. Counter-posing the two quotes above indicates an important difference: in a positivist fashion, Ostrom sees the limits at the site of individuals’ knowledge to meet specific goals collectively. She recognized the unknown surfaces of our unconscious, but her concern was how we could still be (boundedly) rational within those confines. She was not interested in exploring the ethical-political implications of that ‘opaque’ side of the psyche. By contrast, Butler’s philosophy is centrally concerned with the ‘psychic life’ of power, and sees human limits at the site of subject production itself: it is not only knowledge about the outside world that is limited but also about our own ‘self’ as a relational product. What gives ‘natural’ appearance to our different forms of identity and rationality (e.g. the selfish egoist, the ‘rule-breaker’ or the solidary commoner) is in fact a naturalized politics which denies historicity (Butler, 2005, Bell, 2010; Foucault, 2003). Butler emphasizes that being a ‘subject’ does not simply mean being subjugated by power but also formed/sustained by it. This is the ‘double valence’ of power,

8


subjection and agency: ‘a power exerted on a subject . . . is nevertheless a power assumed by the subject (Butler, 1997: 11, emphasis added). Indeed, even leaders or ‘strategists’ (rulers, ‘the bourgeoisie’) had to go through a process of formation, self-moralization and self-discipline (Foucault, 1978). Butler problematizes teleological positions which talk about the increased ‘utility’ of cooperation: her interest is to show the indeterminacy of any model based on presuppositions/expectations about ends and essences of human nature. A crucial question in Butler’s work is how to think about subjection and how it can become ‘a site of alteration’, that is, of transgression of existing norms (1997: 12–14): who is the ‘I’, and how can the ‘I’ tell the ‘truth’ about who it is, when one sees the ‘operation of norms in the very constitution of myself as a subject’ (Butler, 2005: 9)? Butler thus argues for a ‘boundedness of selves’ as political subjectivities: because we are socially (relationally, normatively) produced, our ‘selves’ (identity, autonomy) are bounded by conditions of livability which we do not fully choose or even grasp. Who ‘we’ are is a social construct (an ego, identity(ies)) which helps us survive in a world of complex relations, norms and political-economic structures. Contrary to the mainstream commons’ model of autonomous rational individuals, Butler stresses that the ‘ego’ is not some clear substance we came with into this world but an ‘array of relations and processes, implicated in the world of primary caregivers’ (Butler, 2005: 59). It is not that, like Ostrom would say, we know what we want and the point is ‘how to get there’: our ‘bounded selves’ indicate inability to know ‘up to what point’ we can know (our)selves and ‘where to go’. Even our childhood influences our political subjectivities since ‘early and primary relations are not always available to conscious knowledge’ (Butler, 2005: 20). The ego emerges since infancy in interdependent vulnerability to those whose emotional bonds produce it into adult subjection (Butler, 2004; also Bondi, 2005; Gallagher, 2011; Holt, 2013). Accepting an emotional and physical interdependency which ‘we never leave behind’ (Butler, 2004: 24) helps us broaden our views on subjectivity (Butler, 2004; also Bondi, 2005). All these Others mark us ‘throughout life as part of a not fully articulate sensibility’ which becomes our way of being towards another (Butler and Athanasiou, 2013: 96). We are ‘dispossessed’ (of things and ways of feeling/being) by our relations in the exact process that helps us survive and live as subjects with a social identity. In that sense, our ability to ‘common’ is also shaped by how we deal collectively with such constitutive relations in performing our-selves, which are also contingent, emotional and rather opaque processes of self-formation. Self-boundedness is also about not knowing ourselves fully, given no pure and stable self to be ‘known out there’. With both anguish and excitement, we embody our proximities or relations – often unchosen – both within and ‘against’ ourselves. Even when making


9

claims to ‘own our body’ (as gender for instance), it is relationalities of bodies that we are aiming at. Marked by complex power practices, our bodies themselves are constantly becoming ‘battlefields that are never simply our own’ (Butler and Athanasiou, 2013: 18–19). In these struggles, we do not even own ourselves, we are indeed bounded, primarily selfdispossessed in events of ‘multiple exposures [. . .] by norms, prohibitions, self-policing guilt, and shame, but also by love and desire’ (Butler and Athanasiou, 2013: 32). Butler (2005) points out that all political ideologies (such as the rational model) are ways to create some forms of predictable patterns in order to solve the enigma of our ‘boundedness’. By virtue of offering intelligibility (recognizability), they become dominant regimes of truth, which simultaneously obfuscate alternative rationalities. The subject is fragmented by the vacillation among various forms of rationality (e.g. egoist-altruist), and therefore, we cannot fully understand the processes of subject-formation without understanding how the ‘other’ rationalities come to haunt the subject. Being addressed as a fixed subject, being demanded to show a particular behavior, and being expected to perform in a particular way (be it solidary or rational-egoist) disavows our lack of immunity to power-relations which produce the terms of our recognition in the first place (Butler, 1999). Butler’s political ethics is inspired by Simone de Beauvoir’s (1976) ideas: juggling with the opacity of who we are, as well as with the openness that comes with that. However, prevailing politics is based on fearing subject ambivalence and freedom: institutions are meant to mitigate exposure to various vulnerabilities coming from lack of trust in collective action. This is mostly visible in totalitarianism, precisely because in such regimes subject indeterminacy and mobility are officially unacceptable. In other words, what prevails is ‘immunitary’ biopolitics where uncertainties or risks coming from ‘dangerous’ others (from refugees to hurricanes) are met with prophylactic enclosures and securitizations or distantiation, albeit uneven and unjust (Brossat, 2003; Esposito, 2008, 2011; Swyngedouw and Ernstson, forthcoming). . . . the demand for self-identity or, more particularly, for complete coherence . . . [creates] a certain ethical violence, which demands that we manifest and maintain self-identity at all times and require that others do the same. (Butler, 2005: 41–2) A commoner-subjectivity is immersed in a variety of conscious and unconscious forms of identification, subjection and relations which have to be addressed more seriously as the contextual base of commoning, a form of human interdependency which makes us into ‘boundedselves’ vulnerable to other socio-political forms of deprivation (Butler and Athanasiou, 2013). Ostrom argued that without collective action

10


we cannot sustain the commons, which are vulnerable to enclosure, overuse and social dilemmas. For her the problem was a lack of knowledge, trust and rules that incentivize cooperation and dissuade overuse. Butler’s view on subjectivity developed in this section suggests that collective action and commoning are also vulnerable to the same problems: enclosure of our relations in spaces with clear boundaries or identities and often in axioms of profitable ‘exchange’. Overuse as abusive/exploitative relations that may be seen as a form of social ‘commons’. Social dilemmas as relational traumas at micro and macro-level. Our ‘commons’ world needs a politics ‘based on our shared and partial blindness about ourselves’ (Butler, 2005: 41), on the limits of the ‘knowing’ subject rather than accumulation of more knowledge. It demands a non-violent politics which considers transformation and production of norms as open (ontologically and epistemologically) to what is foreign, unknown, uncertain, or unborn yet. As Butler (2012) writes in Precarious Life, we have to loosen the self’s boundary which is a function of relations: no immunitary prophylaxis may change the fact that we are fundamentally sustained and limited by others in a situated-ness within ongoing relational power-politics – what we call our commons boundedness. This also creates a mutual vulnerability, which we discuss next.

Our Common(s) Vulnerability We are in our skins, given over, in each other’s hands, at each other’s mercy. This is a situation we do not choose. It forms the horizon of choice, and it grounds our responsibility. (Butler, 2005: 101) The ‘tragedy’ narrative proposed by Hardin portrays the commons as vulnerable, in need of being reclaimed and managed. Commons scholars have emphasized that the tragedy is not inevitable and have sought for ways to ‘avoid’ it by reducing/mitigating vulnerability. On the one hand, the Ostromian tradition does not really question the tragedy in its essence – rational individuals who, if not able to communicate, will egoistically overuse resources. They see cooperative institutions as the ways to reduce vulnerability. On the other hand, the critical commons scholars argue that institutions are an end-of-pipe solution and seek to address the structural problems that produce enclosures and vulnerability. For them, the real tragedy is of enclosures and of displaced commoners, and the solution is to resist and build commoning alternatives. As we discussed, these ideas help us de-naturalize the ‘tragedy’ narrative as a taken-for-granted vision of individuals; more so, they help us shed a different light on the issue of vulnerability. We use Butler’s ideas to further these arguments.


11

Butler does meet Ostrom in the recognition of humans’ mutual vulnerability. However, she would add ‘without precisely eradicating’ vulnerability (2013: 158). For Butler, vulnerability is not a pathology of our shared humanity but an inevitable exposure to others, ‘a common physicality and risk’ (2005: 100). Bounded and vulnerable is a human condition given by the many unchosen proximities that (re)make us throughout our lives, challenging expectations about self-sufficiency or autonomous choice-making. As discussed previously, we are ‘dispossessed of ourselves’ (losing our sense of self, lost in ambitions, passion or grief) as a result of our encounters with the others. During our lives, from the start, we owe ourselves to others, we are affected by others in often unpredictable ways. All power relations include the possibility of altruism/cooperation as well as harm/exploitation. We are always already potentially hurt and loved, sustained and damaged in all our relations. Furthermore, Butler invokes Arendt to point to the ‘unchosen character of earthly cohabitation’ (2013: 122), a vulnerability which can only be ignored by those engaged in genocide (or ecocide). Crucial for thinking our planetary commons and contrary to Ostrom’s theory where individuals choose who to cooperate with, ‘we are obliged to cohabit with others’ (Wark, 2016). Being ‘dispossessed’ is usually described in critical scholarship as the politically induced deprivation of lands, rights, livelihoods, in which certain groups become differentially exposed to poverty, debt, or death. Butler points to the relational character of such vulnerability: the political practices that make some ‘sovereign’ selves, reproduce others as vulnerable, precarious or ‘let to die’. Butler places her interest in vulnerability in the context of neoliberal policies which obfuscate responsibility in order to promote an ‘invulnerable and irresponsive self-mastery’ (2013: 105) – a striving for immunity – and to explain failures in individual terms, further making some lives ‘unlivable’ (see also Butler, 2015; Harvey, 2006). Part of the neoliberal efforts to ‘mitigate’ vulnerability is precisely the universalization of (collective) disempowerment as fear and impotence in the face of dispossession. Independent individual positions are ‘effectively built through a denial of one’s own vulnerability’ (Butler, 2015: 145), acting as if they, themselves, cannot be subject to devastation/ damage or catastrophe. ‘Wanting’ to do something – the ‘will to improve’ (Li, 2007) – is supposedly enough for achieving it: the losers are demonized. This narrative engulfs countries across the world, seeking ways of improving their ‘competitiveness’ and security against future threats (from climate change and resource scarcity to terrorism). The contemporary perpetual wars of global politics are an illustration of the ‘less human’ the planet is becoming in the process of defending itself against vulnerabilities (Butler, 2005). But as Butler and Athanasiou (2013: 4) discuss, being ‘already outside ourselves’ – or self-dispossessed, even before being dispossessed of livable

12


conditions – makes our survival dependent on sustaining collective and equalitarian socio-political environments. It is this relational production of subjection that is often neglected when discussing vulnerability of commons. In this case, the tactical exploitation of our dependability is the issue, rather than dependency itself. The question remains of how to liberate ‘dependency’ from its tainted connotation: what may seem a fragility and dependency is also an empowering relational condition of humanity, a terrain of ‘agency’. Such agency is to be located not within the rejection of subjection but ‘within the possibility of a variation’, interruption and transformation in the (social) performance of environments (Butler, 1999: 185). Mutual vulnerability is thus a condition that makes more possible a ‘response-ability’, that is, the ability (of all) to counteract violence because it ‘already establishes a principle of equality’ (Butler and Athanasiou, 2013: 107; also Butler et al., 1997). This vision of vulnerability moves our focus from commons management to engaging with a politics of performativity as the embodied agency of those who have been made invisible or disposable from the public reason (Swyngedouw, 2011, Rancie`re, 2006). In other words, our mutual vulnerability is a constitutive part of the common(s). To mobilize vulnerability is not to say that humans (or commons) are ‘in need of protection’: taking to the streets their disproportionately vulnerable bodies is equally a deliberate ‘risk of exposure’ and a use of power to defend and sustain our commons (from water or forests to relations of solidarity, justice and peace).When acting in concert, interdependent vulnerabilities (not to be confused with ‘harmonious’ or homogeneous) may be mobilized in ways that make ‘power’ the synonym rather than the antonym of ‘being vulnerable’. This designates a ‘form of political activism’ (Butler, 2015: 123) that is often neglected in the literature on commons. It is obvious that Butler’s vision of vulnerability is different from Ostrom’s since the understanding of ‘the political’ is different. While Ostrom’s politics is populated by autonomous rational citizens who can freely engage in the cooperative design of collective norms, for Butler, such autonomy and norms have to be continuously problematized in performing the political stage with the ‘response-ability’ of all as equal political agents. These practices are not just about technical or participatory management of resources but also about exclusions/inclusions deeply engrained in colonial, capitalist, patriarchal, heteronormative, militarist, and ethno-nationalist histories and relations of power. In other words, one cannot expect transformation in the ‘managing’ of eco-systems without a radical transformation of global socio-ecological relations of inequalities (Swyngedouw and Ernstson, forthcoming). The efforts to enact a relational politics of commons require ‘re-commoning’ of global democracy (Reid and Taylor, 2010) and the everyday of life itself.


13

Concluding Remarks: Commoning as a Relational Politics In this paper, we argued that the communal sharing of our fragile commons (resources) cannot be separated from the sharing of our messy socio-political relations (commoning). We see commons as fragile not only because they are vulnerable to enclosure, limited, and hard to sustain and regenerate: their fragility is also our own boundedness as humans exposed to each other, self-dispossessed and mutually vulnerable in never-ending problematic and unequal connections. We have placed our argument within the emergent debates related to commoning, where ‘the commons’ is not just an ‘enclave’ or marginal alternative to ‘state’ and ‘market’ – as in Ostrom’s analysis – but rather the socio-political struggle to challenge the hegemony of states and markets and expand it from within (Vercellone, 2015). As we have shown in the first section, critical scholars are rethinking commons as an interrelation of resources, communities and commoning. Here we proposed to focus on commoning as a relational politics: the re-constitution of our-selves as subjects in relations of power. This approach suggests more attention to the internal processes of the commoning movements as well as to the subjectivities that are (re)produced through them. We saw as relevant Butler’s theory of performing radical democracy and equalitarian universalism (Lloyd, 2009), for it ‘locates relationality as a central condition for new political possibilities’ (Routledge, 2015: 1325, citing Butler and Athanasiou, 2013; also Garcı´ a-Lo´pez et al., 2017; Reid and Taylor, 2010). Therefore, the potential of commoning counter-hegemony is not related only to nurturing particular norms or subjectivities but also to performing a radical claim for political equality (cf. Rancie`re, 2004, 2012; Swyngedouw, 2011). Such a claim may be based on, as Butler argues, the human condition as bounded and mutually vulnerable. Building and sustaining ‘mutual livable lives’ through the politics of commoning is not simply about universalizing different values or identities for a better moral project. We see forms of (common) subjection as modalities of power circulating within the fabric of society, inevitably uneven, often violent. We do not point to the will to ‘improve’: our ‘self’ is bounded by the exact continuously evolving relations we are embedded into, which is why Butler talks about the need for ‘insurrection’ at the ontological level. While Ostrom was more preoccupied with the (ethical and epistemological) norms that incentivize or impose responsibility as duty to comply, Butler’s ideas on boundedness and vulnerability invite us ‘to live with others precisely when there is no obvious mode of belonging’ (Butler, 2005: 28). Not knowing what the other will do – harm or cheat, love, help, surprise – is for Butler more than a state of inter-dependency or attachment: it is a state of ‘being given to the other’ (2005). Instead of mitigating such a ‘gift’, a relational politics of commoning could be about risking ourselves ‘precisely at moments of unknowingness’ (Butler, 2005:

14


136) towards ongoing re-making of selves and of modes of existence that are not supported by prevailing norms. Since agency lies in the exact terrain of the norms which determine and limit it, performance of the political through commoning implies both the doing and continuous undoing of norms: a way to ‘maintain fidelity to the political events choreographed in the new insurrectional spaces . . . mobilizing a wide range of new political subjects who are not afraid to imagine different commons, demanding the impossible’ (Badiou quoted in Swyngedouw, 2017: 56). There is, indeed, a risk in loosening the boundaries of ourselves; but so is the opposite. Both Ostrom and Butler believe in the potential of learning to re-build the collective-body politic through continuous experimenting, learning and practicing. For Ostrom, the key was learning to trust and cooperate, beyond the fear of compromising one’s own interests. For Butler, engaging politically means ‘undoing’ ourselves to interrupt the exact norms (and relations) that constitute us. Being a collective of bounded, vulnerable selves is not the opposite of agency: rather, this condition enables the performance of power as a practice of all (Velicu & Kaika, 2017). For such a relational politics of commoning to happen, we need to abandon ‘the fear of failing, as fail we shall’ (Swyngedouw and Ernstson, forthcoming).

Note 1. A concept she derived from Herbert Simon. For a critique of Simon, see Collet (2009). Acknowledgements A special ‘thank you’ goes to Prof. Stefania and the Political Ecology group at the Center for Social Studies, University of Coimbra for encouraging the debate and suggesting ways to further the arguments of this paper. We recognize the support of Foundation for Science and Technology-Portugal for the postdoctoral grant of Irina Velicu, SFRH/ BPD/94680/2013.

References Agrawal, Arun (2005) Environmentality. Durham: Duke University Press. Amin, Ash and Powell, John (2016) Thinking the commons. In: Amin, Ash and Powell, John (eds) Releasing the Commons: Rethinking the Futures of the Commons. London: Routledge. Antonio, Robert J (2013) Plundering the commons: The growth imperative in neoliberal times. Sociological Review 61(S2): 18–42. Bell, Vikki (1999) Performativity and belonging: An introduction. Theory, Culture & Society 16(2): 1–10. Bell, Vikki (2010) New scenes of vulnerability, agency and plurality: An interview with Judith Butler. Theory, Culture & Society 27(1): 130–152. Bell, Vikki (2012) Declining performativity: Butler, Whitehead and ecologies of concern. Theory, Culture & Society 29(2): 107–123.


15

Blomley, Nick (2016) The boundaries of property: Complexity, relationality, spatiality. Law and Society Review 50(1): 224–255. Bollier, David, and Helfrich, Silke (2014) Patterns of Commoning. Amherst: Levellers Press. Bondi, Liz (2005) Making connections and thinking through emotions: Between geography and psychotherapy. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 30(4): 433–444. Brossat, Alain (2003) La De´mocratie Immunitaire. Paris: La Dispute. Burton, James and Tam, Daisy (2016) Towards a parasitic ethics. Theory, Culture & Society 33(4): 103–125. Butler, Judith (1997) The Psychic Life of Power. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Butler, Judith (1999) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. Butler, Judith (2002) What is critique? An essay on Foucault’s virtue. In: Ingram, David (ed.) The Political: Readings in Continental Philosophy. London: Basil Blackwell. Butler, Judith (2004) Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge. Butler, Judith (2005) Giving an Account of Oneself. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Butler, Judith (2007) I merely belong to them. London Review of Books 29(9): 26–28. Butler, Judith (2012) Precarious Life. London: Verso. Butler, Judith (2015) Notes towards a Performative Theory of Assembly. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Butler, Judith, and Athanasiou, Athena (2013) Dispossession: The Performative in the Political. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons. Butler, Judith, Laclau, Ernesto and Laddaga, Reinaldo (1997) The uses of equality. Diacritics 27(1): 3–12. Caffentzis, George (2009) The future of ‘the commons’: Neoliberalism’s ‘plan B’ or the original disaccumulation of capital. New Formations 69: 23–41. Caffentzis, George and Federici, Silvia (2014) Commons against and beyond capitalism. Community Development Journal 49(S1): i92–i105. Chatterton, Paul, Featherstone, David and Routledge, Paul (2013) Articulating climate justice in Copenhagen: Antagonism, the commons and solidarity. Antipode 45(3): 602–620. Collet, François (2009) Does habitus matter? A comparative review of Bourdieu’s habitus and Simon’s bounded rationality with some implications for economic sociology. Sociological Theory 27(4): 419–434. Creed, Gerald W (2006) The Seductions of Community: Emancipations, Oppressions, Quandries. Santa Fe: SAR Press. Dawney, Leila (2013) Commoning: The production of common worlds. Lo Squaderno 30: 33–35. De Angelis, Massimo (2013) Does capital need a commons fix? Ephemera 13(3): 603–615. de Beauvoir, Simone (1976) The Ethics of Ambiguity. Trans. Bernard Frechtman. New York: Citadel Press.

16


Esposito, Roberto (2008) Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Esposito, Roberto (2011) Immunitas. Cambridge: Polity Press. Federici, Silvia (2011) Feminism and the politics of the commons. The Commoner, 24 January. Available at: http://www.commoner.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/federici-feminismand-the-politics-of-commons.pdf (accessed 11 May 2011). Foucault, Michel (1991) Question of method. In: Burchell, Graham, Gordon, Colin and Miller, Peter (eds) The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 73–86. Foucault, Michel (1994) The subject and power. In: Michel Foucault, Power, Vol. 3 (Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984), ed. Faubion, James D. New York: The New Press. Foucault, Michel (1997) What is critique? In: Lotringer, Sylve`re and Hochroth, Lysa (eds) The Politics of Truth. New York: Semiotext(e). Foucault, Michel (2003) Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Colle`ge de France, 1975–1976 (Vol. 1). London: Macmillan. Gallagher, Michael (2011) Sound, space and power in a primary school. Social and Cultural Geography 12(1): 47–61. Garcı´ a-Lamarca, Melissa (2015) Insurgent acts of being-in-common and housing in Spain: Making urban commons? In: Dellenbaugh, Mary, Kip, Markus, Bieniok, Majken, Mu¨ller, Agnes and Schwegmann, Martin (eds) Urban Commons: Moving beyond State and Market. Berlin: Birkhaüser. Garcı´ a-Lo´pez, Gustavo A, Velicu, Irina and D’Alisa, Giacomo (2017) Performing counter-hegemonic common(s) senses: Rearticulating democracy, community and forests in Puerto Rico. Capitalism Nature Socialism 28(3): 88–107. Gibson-Graham, Katherine-Julie (2006) A Postcapitalist Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Hardt, Michael, and Negri, Antonio (2009) Commonwealth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hardt, Michael, and Negri, Antonio (2012) Declaration. New York: Argo-Navis. Harvey, David (2006) Spaces of Global Capitalism. London: Verso. Hodgson, Geoffrey M (2012) On the limits of rational choice theory. Economic Thought 1(1): 94–108. Holt, Louise (2013) Exploring the emergence of the subject in power: Infant geographies. Environment and Planning D 31: 645–663. Huron, Amanda (2015) Working with strangers in saturated space: Reclaiming and maintaining the urban commons. Antipode 47(4): 963–979. Kallis, Giorgos (2016) In defense of degrowth. Available at: https://indefenseofdegrowth.com/ (accessed 10 June 2017). Li, Tania Murray (2007) The Will to Improve: Governmentality, Development and the Practice of Politics. Durham: Duke University Press. Linebaugh, P (2009) The Magna Carta Manifesto: Liberties and Commons for All. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lloyd, Moya (2009) Performing radical democracy. In: Little, Adrian and Lloyd, Moya (eds) The Politics of Radical Democracy. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, pp. 33–51.


17

Mackenzie, Fiona (2010) A common claim: Community land ownership in the Outer Hebrides, Scotland. International Journal of the Commons 4(1): 319–344. McDonald, Kevin (2002) From solidarity to fluidarity: Social movements beyond ‘collective identity’: The case of globalization conflicts. Social Movement Studies 1(2): 109–128. McNay, Lois (1999) Subject, psyche and agency: The work of Judith Butler. Theory, Culture & Society 16(2): 175–193. McNay, Lois (2009) Self as enterprise: Dilemmas of control and resistance in Foucault’s The Birth of Politics. Theory, Culture & Society 26(6): 56–78. Mueller, Christa (2012) Practicing commons in community gardens: Urban gardening as a corrective for Homo economicus. In: Bollier, David and Helfrich, Silke (eds) The Wealth of the Commons: A World Beyond Market and State. Amherst: Levellers Press, pp. 219–224. Nightingale, Andrea J (2011) Beyond design principles: Subjectivity, emotion, and the (ir)rational commons. Society and Natural Resources 24(2): 119–132. Noterman, Elsa (2015) Beyond tragedy: Differential commoning in a manufactured housing cooperative. Antipode 48(2): 433–452. Open! (2014) Revolution at Point Zero: Discussing the commons [interview with Silvia Federici and Tine De Moor], 18 April. Available at: http://www.onlineopen.org/essays/revolution-at-pointzero-discussing-the-commons-withsilvia-federici-and-tine-de-moor (accessed 25 March 2015). Ostrom, Elinor (1990) Governing the Commons. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ostrom, Elinor (2009) Building trust to solve commons dilemmas: Taking small steps to test an evolving theory of collective action. In: Levin, Simon A (ed.) Games, Groups, and the Global Good. Berlin: Springer Heidelberg, pp. 207–228. Ostrom, Elinor and Walker, James (eds) (2003) Trust and Reciprocity: Interdisciplinary Lessons for Experimental Research. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Papadopolous, Dimitris (2012) Worlding justice/Commoning matter. Occasion 3. Available at: http://occasion.stanford.edu/node/79 (accessed 5 June 2014). Parr, Adrian (2015) Urban debt, neoliberalism and the politics of the commons. Theory, Culture & Society 32(3): 69–91. Pasquinelli, Matteo (2008) Animal Spirits: A Bestiary of the Commons. Rotterdam: Institute of Network Cultures/NAi Publishers. Poteete, Amy, Janssen, Marco and Ostrom, Elinor (2010) Working Together. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Rancie`re, Jacques (2004) Introducing disagreement 1. Angelaki: journal of the theoretical humanities 9(3): 3–9. Rancie`re, Jacques (2012) Momentos Polı´ticos. Madrid: Clave Intelectual. Read, Jason (2011) The production of subjectivity: From transindividuality to the commons. New Formations 70(1): 113–131. Reid, Harry and Taylor, Betsy (2010) Recovering the Commons: Democracy, Place and Global Justice. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Rothenberg, Molly A (2006) Embodied political performativity in excitable speech: Butler’s psychoanalytic revision of historicism. Theory, Culture & Society 23(4): 71–93.

18


Routledge, Paul (2015) Engendering Gramsci: Gender, the philosophy of praxis, and spaces of encounter in the climate caravan, Bangladesh. Antipode 47(5): 1321–1345. Saunders, Fred P (2014) The promise of common pool resource theory and the reality of commons projects. International Journal of the Commons 8(2): 636– 656. Simone, AbdouMaliq (2015) Drawing lines: A response to Adrian Parr’s ‘Urban Debt, Neoliberalism and the Politics of the Commons’. Theory, Culture & Society 32(7–8): 309–316. Singh, Neera M (2013) The affective labor of growing forests and the becoming of environmental subjects: Rethinking environmentality in Odisha, India. Geoforum 47: 189–198. Smart, Barry (2011) Another ‘great transformation’ or common ruin? Theory, Culture & Society 28(2): 131–151. Stavrides, Stavros (2015) Common space as threshold space: Urban commoning in struggles to re-appropriate public space. Footprint 9(1): 9–19. Swyngedouw, Erik (2011) Interrogating post-democratization: Reclaiming egalitarian political spaces. Political Geography 30(7): 370–380. Swyngedouw, Erik (2017) Insurgent urbanity and the political city. In: Mostafavi, Mohsen (ed.) Ethics of the Urban: The City and the Spaces of the Political. Zurich: Lars Mu¨ller Publishers. Swyngedouw, Erik and Ernstson, Henrik (forthcoming) Interrupting the Anthropo-obScene: Immuno-biopolitics and depoliticizing more-thanhuman ontologies in the Anthropocene. Theory, Culture & Society. Terranova, Tiziana (2015) Introduction to Eurocrisis, neoliberalism and the common. Theory, Culture & Society 32(7–8): 5–23. Velicu, Irina and Kaika, Maria (2017) Undoing environmental justice: Re-imagining equality in the Rosia Montana anti-mining movement. Geoforum 84: 305–315. Vercellone, Carlo (2015) From the crisis to the ‘welfare of the common’ as a new mode of production. Theory, Culture & Society 32(7–8): 85–99. Wark, Mackenzie (2016) What the performative can’t perform. Public Seminar, 8 June. Available at: http://www.publicseminar.org/2016/06/butler/ (accessed 25 June 2016). Wynne, Brian (2010) Strange weather, again: Climate science as political art. Theory, Culture & Society 27(2–3): 289–305.

Irina Velicu is a post-doctoral researcher working on socio-environmental justice and movements in post-communist countries at the Center for Social Studies, University of Coimbra, Portugal. Irina has previously worked as a Marie Curie Experienced Researcher within the European Network of Political Ecology, at ICTA-Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona. Her research interests revolve around the topics of socioenvironmental justice, equality, social transformation and aesthetic politics. She holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of Hawaii, supervised by Michael Shapiro.


19

Gustavo Garcı´ a-Lo´pez is an Assistant Professor at the University of Puerto Rico, Graduate School of Planning. His research has revolved around the institutional analysis and political ecology of the commons, with particular interest in grassroots/community-led and collaborative governance and socio-ecological movements. His work is geographically grounded in Mexico, where he worked for several years on community forestry and community agriculture, and in his native Puerto Rico. He has a PhD in environmental policy from Indiana UniversityBloomington, under the mentorship of Elinor Ostrom and Catherine Tucker.