Study of/as Commoning

Anette Baldauf

’Study of/as Commoning’ is one of the outcomes of a research project realized by a group of artists, architects and social theorists at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (2014–16). In times of ongoing environmental crisis, violent land grabbing and the aggressive financialisation of space, time and subjectivities, combined with global migration flows, the research group explored the debates on the commons and the different practices of commoning as potentially providing new entry points for a radical repudiation of neoliberalism. To date, the labor and conflicts involved in the process of commoning have chafed against a Western utopian understanding of the commons as a coming together free of friction. We explored commoning as a process, simultaneously made against and within, existing fields of power. As such, ‘Study as/of Commoning’ is part of a much wider endeavour to rethink and undo the methodological premises of Western sciences, arts and architecture, raising unsettling questions on (artistic) research ethics, accountability, and the entanglement of power and knowledge. In this context, ‘Study of/as Commoning’ considers commoning as a possible methodology, a modality of social relations, and the collective state of mind that framed the research group’s work together. Our research continuously encountered the limitations of Western concepts of the commons, framed as an enclosure that neglects conditions of coloniality and colonial dispossession. Is it possible to hold on to the empowering notions of commoning while acknowledging the significant absences within Western accounts on the commons and the many connections between the commons and the history of empire?

Methodology

‘Study Across Time’ and ‘Study Across Borders’, along with documentation of our fragmented conversations, illustrate the limitations of commoning as a methodology when transferred across time and space. They demonstrate the necessity to acknowledge the specificities and situatedness of the ‘commoners’ involved. While in conventional sociological research the first two studies might be referred to as case studies and the third one as self-study, we don’t consider them to be self-contained cases; rather, they document very concrete attempts to tackle the methodological challenges deriving from the manifold crises we are confronted with. As such, they illustrate an endeavour of study that was imbued with omission, projection, miscommunication, underscored by Eurocentrism and epistemicide, and marked by the violence of making and remaking of borders, exclusions and dispossion.1

In addition, our research taught us the importance of acknowledging the materiality of the commons — the contestation over, extraction from and theft of land, water and resources. The question about land and water was with us all the time, in Vienna as much as in Addis Ababa, albeit under radically different conditions. Questions of enclosure were with us when we were in the kitchen, in the condominium, on the ocean or in the woods. These sites also allowed us to explore the connection between the material and the immaterial scopes of the commons. Our various attempts to practice commoning raised questions on how to relate to and learn from each other, how to understand knowledge not as something that can be possessed or acquired but as a constant process of exchange, engagement and collectivity — a modality of dispossession, to reference Moten and Harney again.2 As such we tried to engage in a process of “learning to un/learn” and what Rauna Kuokkanen calls “multiepistemic literacy”3. Coming from a European art institution that – like most Euroepan institutions – is built on a solid history of colonial theft and a continuing legacy of the violent appropriation of bodies, resources, social relations that are rarely acknowledged and hardly ever discussed in depth, any claim to commoning necessitates both learning and unlearning. It necessitates a reflection on what is understood as knowledge exchange, engagement and collectivity.

Commons and Western Knowledge Production

Thinking of commoning as a way of un/doing social relation indicates a condition as much as an ideality that can never be fully realised. As the commons are built within and around, but also against, Western ideologies, social relations remain caught between the antagonisms of identity and difference. The commons serve as a guiding horizon, often within a Western context of liberation, composed of a cluster of imaginations on how we would like to work together, live together or be together. Our engagement with the commons illustrated that, as commoners are guided by the worldly, situated, and embodied practice of commoning, the commons in the making depend on the continuous commitment to scrutiny, so that we may challenge the reproduction of hierarchisation and exclusion. In other words, it relies, paradoxically, on our willingness to acknowledge the uncommon premises of coming together.

The commons and commoning are therefore far from all-world concepts; they are, rather, based on ideas and practices that have been circulating within Western critical theory and social justice movements. And as capitalism and imperialism operate as violent global forces, the vocabulary of resistance thrives on accounts that go far beyond those imposed and lived by the West. The lived experiences of indignation, encroachment, sovereignty and world-making articulated by different Indigenous and Black scholars, as well as many more from the so-called margins, continue to explore how to relate, organise and conceptualise living together, in and with the world. Any investigation into the commons cannot do away with the discursive context (the discursive framework that embeds debates on the commons) and the addressee (for whose liberation do the claims to the commons fight for). If the concept of the commons is the result of our ongoing negotiation, we must ask ourselves how we can intervene in the making of the commons, and, even more pressing, who are ‘we’ to intervene.

Commons and (Settler) Colonialism

The question of the commons and commoning — its aim, orientation and benefits — also arise in the course of writing of this article. Who, we ask ourselves, are we, and who is our audience, to whom do we address our writing? We are a group of researchers located at a Western university. This journal, JAR, addresses readers primarily residing in the West, as discussion on artistic research largely takes place at Western universities. It connects this particular debate to a long history of separating disciplines, the hierarchisation and colonisation of knowledge and practices that simmer beneath art, knowledge production and structures of power. Art as a discipline encloses and defines certain creative practices, adding value as it devalues. It is intimately entangled with the colonial condition of modern art academies. Humanist research divides subject and object, coloniser and colonised. The latter tends to be displayed, collected and interpreted. Following Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s powerful account that ‘research’ is one of the dirtiest words in the indigenous world’s vocabulary, what does it possibly mean to ‘do research’ about the commons in light of the troubled history of Western epistemologies, their history of speaking and acting in the name of the privileged?4

Rauna Kuokkanen suggests that to start the process, it is the (Western) academy’s responsibility to ‘do one’s homework’. She writes:

(T)he academic responsibility for doing homework on indigenous epistemes has to begin from even a more elemental level than examining one’s beliefs, biases and assumptions. It has to start from acknowledging the existence of ‘the indigenous’ whether the peoples, their epistemes or how they are configured both in the geo-political past and present. This necessarily includes recognizing how the global political economy is fuelled by accumulation of capital extracted from indigenous peoples’ territories.5

Many Marxist and Post-Marxist theorists at Western academic institutions continue to discuss the concept of the commons as a thriving alternative to aggressive enclosure. Yet scholars of indigenous studies expressed their frustration with the framing of the commons within leftist Marxist politics. Sandy Grande, Eve Tuck, K. Wayne Yang and Glen Coulthard, to name a few, argue that Marxist frameworks, and along with them, the so-called ‘return of the commons’6, continue to posit land as property, and therefore never escape the fact of dispossession. As a consequence, these scholars ask, what do claims for the commons and the practices of commoning mean on land that is stolen? Moreover, what do these claims obscure in the context of settler colonial nation-states?

According to Greg Fortier, this tension became most obvious in the commons of the Occupy Movement. For Fortier, "the problem with the idea of the commons in settler states is that it evades the question of ongoing settler complicity in the project of genocide, land theft, assimilation, and occupation."7 Critiques from indigenous scholars therefore evoke the question of how to think of the commons as it exists in the very centre of Europe, built on and sustained by dispossession, colonialism and racist violence at Europe’s outer borders.

Complementing the critique of settler colonialism put forth by indigenous scholars, postcolonial scholars have addressed the commons alongside the history of colonialism as dispossession of land, bodies and social relations. Following Franz Fanon, many postcolonial theorists insist that, in Europe, primitive accumulation initiated the devastating long-term effects of proletarisation, whereas in the colonies, it manifested itself predominantly in the dispossession of land. Peter Kulchyski argues in his study on Indigenous cultural politics, ‘what distinguishes anti-colonial struggles from the classic Marxist accounts of the working class is that oppression for the colonised is registered in the spatial dimension — as dispossession — whereas for workers, oppression is measured as exploitation, as the theft of time.’8

With a few exceptions – e.g., Silvia Federici, whose work rethinks women’s investment in the commons beyond the boundaries of Europe and the Western idea of land enclosure9 — the political claims for the commons often fail to address the continuities of the colonial condition. They rarely address questions about whose land should house the commons, whose resources commoning practices are supposed to redistribute, who conceptualises the political utopias that enter the academic field, and who profits by this entry.

Finally, indigenous accounts of land also challenge the Marxist critique of primitive accumulation and accumulation through dispossession on another level: built on relational ontologies, these accounts assert continuity, sustainability, reciprocity and care. Indigenous cosmologies rely on an understanding of land that goes far beyond the concept of property. Land cannot be owned, humans and non-humans (including animals, spirits and the land itself) share an ecological connection: ‘We are this land, and this land is us’, Tewa scholar Gregory Cajete asserts.10 This mode of thinking about place is a profound critique of both Marxists’ and capitalists’ anthropocentric notion of the commons and natural resources. Sandy Grande poignantly poses this critique when she points at the ‘commodities to be exploited, in the first instances, by capitalists for personal gain, and in the second, by Marxists for the good of all.’.11

These complex constellations leave commoners with unsettling, and ultimately unresolvable, tensions. They are left with what Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang call the necessity of ‘attending to what is irreconcilable within settler-colonial relations and what is incommensurable between decolonising projects and other social justice projects.’12. They, or in this case we, need to work on acknowledging the significant absences within Western accounts on the commons and start pushing to the forefront what connects the commons and the colonial empire.

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