Sprint4_Week8#The Common: further reading reflection
Further reading part:
In this article, the author explores the connection and disconnection between elements of movement, institutions, infrastructure, commons, rights, and more. He thought infrastructure was not the same as a system or structure, because infrastructure was defined by movements or patterns of social forms. It is the living intermediary that organizes what lives: the structure of the living world. Roads, bridges, schools, food chains, financial systems, prisons, families, regions, regulate all the systems that will continuously approach and sustain the world connection. Movement is the difference between infrastructure and institutions, although the relationship between these concepts and matter is usually a matter of perspective. Institutions enclose and condense power and interests, and represent their legitimacy in the way they represent what is reliable in society, the predictability on which society depends. Institutions regulate reciprocity. Instead, what constitutes infrastructure are the patterns, habits, norms and scenarios that are assembled and used. Collective influence is also associated with it, with its creativity and commitment to dynamic reciprocity.
At the same time, the manifesto of the “common”, with its obvious function, always political and invested in anti-sovereignty, has the power to decolonize the physical and social space inhabited by empire, capitalism and land rights.
Is society organized for prosperity of wealth or prosperity of life?
How do we see the redistribution of resource vulnerability associated with the distribution of rest, power and enjoyment?
What role should political institutions play in facilitating collective life, or do we need better structural imaginaries to organize the complexity of strangers’ intimate relationships?
In order not to be defeated by his own ambivalence, Lowell identifies with the “dark downward and vegetative kingdoms” of fish and reptiles, rather than the dinosaur machines that create visible cultures over and over again. Spar’s autobiography, Transformation, writes that they want to be the way humans are with dogs and dogs are with humans, intimately together but with a limited vocabulary. They want to be what the blood cells they like are forced to be. They mean that they are not fully autonomous, but they are not something without edges, without borderlines. (207)
This paper proposes to suggest that the concept of the commons is a powerful tool for resolving chaos. For scenes in which the concept gains strength mark a desire to live with a loss of confidence in one’s own or one’s community’s place in the world, at least when it comes to inventing and experimenting with better ways of living.
The fantasy of the commons expresses many aspirations for a social world unencumbered by structural confrontations, where the common usually refers to an orientation to life and values unencumbered by the concept of property and the division of property, and points to the world as both an exhausting finite resource and an inexhaustible fund of human consciousness or creativity.
What causes the blending of new genres? A basic beat is all that is needed if the air is common: proximity, synchrony, the intimate world of a shattered kinship, and an equally intimate beat for the ambiguous psyche.
In the words of José Muñoz, racialised and gendered identities are not the antithesis of identity. We view non-sovereign relations as crucial aspects of coexistence, for example, seeing individuality as a type carved out of relational dynamics as a type carved out of them rather than as a state that precedes or differs from them (Agamben 1998; Mbembe 2003).
Massimo de Angelis (2007) argues that the commons is always an act of decoupling from the regenerative energy of normative life’s value standards, rather than an alternative capitalism, a rhythm of return that resonates with the relative project of affective infrastructure.
According to the speaker, a thing can only be common when people, society, resources, and communities that benefit one another come together. The commons also implies a collectivist model of political governance, like collective oversight, self-rule and self-determination. In theoretical terms, the common is a radical space that does not belong to the individual or the collective, but is a world of movement.
One way of addressing the question of how to live together is through the commonalities we may or may not have. Thinking about commonalities and non-commonalities thus becomes a way of asking how we find ways to build and sustain social relationships, not through economic transactions, but through building relationships with the ownership and context of everyday life, through action, labour, and duration. In ancient Roman law, the commons belonged to the lords of the manor, and today commons still exist in England, Scotland and Wales, where commoners respect the laws of the land first and foremost, rather than those of the monarch; their rights are rooted in the particular ecosystems of local agriculture and the careful management or conservation of resources.
Forms of public or social space are not essentially nonexistent in the world of art and architecture, thus they do not need to be continually created. They are veiled, though, in order to be seized. This occurs both overtly—by enclosing spaces, erecting walls, gates, and fences, and giving them power—and covertly, in ways that are harder to notice and analyse.
My reflection:
One way of addressing the question of how to live together is through what we may or may not have in common. Thinking about the common and the in-common, hence, becomes a way of asking how we might find ways of building and sustaining social relations, not through economic transactions, but by establishing relationships to ownership and context in everyday life, through action, labor, and in duration. (Céline Condorelli)
In fact the earliest, mention of COMMON, and involving enclosure movements, capitalism and colonialism, the first theory that comes to mind is the tragedy of the commons. As a rational human being, every shepherd wants to maximise his own returns, and each additional sheep on the commons will have two outcomes, either gaining the income of an additional sheep or burdening the grass and potentially overgrazing it. On reflection, the shepherds decided to increase the number of sheep regardless of the capacity of the meadow. The tragedy occurred when a large number of shepherds saw only the increased income from sheep and ignored the overused grassland pastures, which rapidly deteriorated in condition.
An intuitive awareness of the interdependence between the individual and the other is concentrated in the picture of ‘man’s place in the world’. These paradigms determine our everyday self-understanding on the one hand, but sometimes they also provide a clear direction for all disciplines. I have in mind a picture of subjectivity that we have to imagine as a glove that can only be turned outwards to see the network structure woven between subjects. The external is expressed within the individual subject. For the subjective spirit acquires meaning and content by virtue of the inter-subjective objective spirit shared by the thoroughly socialised subject. Individuals do not face their social environment in the same way as mere organisms face their natural environment – as something internal, they are permeably distinguished from the unfamiliar external world. The abstract opposition of subject and object, inner and outer, is only a deceptive illusion, for the newly-born organism can only become a human being after it has undergone social interaction. It is only when it enters the public space of the social world that embraces it with open arms that it becomes a human being. A communality that our lifeworld shares internally, which is both internal and external. In the present social conditions, the political public sphere of the democratic republic has a particularly symptomatic significance for social integration. That is to say, complex societies can only be sustained in a normative sense through abstract and legitimate solidarity between citizens. A fragile communality can only be formed or re-formed between citizens who do not know each other, through a process of public opinion and will formation.
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