I’m sitting in Pekarna centre here in Maribor. It was an old military bakery (pekarna means bakery, as I discovered when I asked directions last night! There being more than one bakery in Maribor).
The conference has been very interesting. There was a good session this morning on the struggle for space(s) in various cities around Europe - Zagreb, Ljubljana, Hamburg, and Barcelona. The issues sounded familiar to me - various forms of enclosure and the struggle for what people variously referred to as public space, common space, alternative space, relationship … It would seem that there is still a dire need for more subtle understandings about enclosure and the commons. Some remarked that this was particularly the case in post-socialist places, but my guess it that nowhere is spared.
It strikes me that the struggle for spaces is also very much a struggle for language, for ways of speaking that do not rely too heavily on the language of those we resist as we try to find alternative ways of being in the world. I keep returning to Audre Lorde’s comment that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house”. There are many ways to diminish the power of that statement, but where I still think it’s profoundly helpful is as a reminder that the language we use can disempower us, limit us, constrict our imaginations even as we speak from a place of aspiration or even resistance.
One example today was a frequent return to the notion of common property, and even at one point an explicit call at one point to look to the work of Elinor Ostrom and her (Nobel Prize-winning) work on common property and common pool resources.
The commons is a notion that carries immense emotional weight - the gravities of the notion are strong. It seems to me that the dominant language of common property studies can diminish the political possibilities of the notion of the commons in some very concrete ways:
- speaking in terms of common property leaves us little or no analysis of the process and practices of enclosure/privatization/commodification
- common property discourses allow us to use the language of enclosure and propertisation to reframe (if not monopolise) discussions about ‘the commons’. Let me explain a little.
The concept of the commons has historically had two main threads of meaning. The first was the notion of the commons as way of speaking of a particular and *uncommodifying* quality of relationship. This tended to be the way that people spoke of ‘the commons’ as a way of life that offered an alternative and a form of resistance to those who felt that enclosure was desirable.
A second meaning of ‘the commons’ seems to have been thinking of ‘the commons’ as a resource pool, commonly managed property, a form of property management. This meaning has become the dominant and almost exclusive approach to ‘the commons’ in the present time, across the world in academic, economic, and political ways of speaking, writing, talking. Importantly, this also tended to be the meaning of the commons promoted by advocates of enclosure (if the commons can be framed as a management regime, then someone who can argue the case for privatisation as a more efficient management regime has a pretty strong case against ’the commons’. This is where Elinor Ostrom’s work is helpful, but for me this and related work in common property studies remains limited in its application and political possibilities).
I think it is important to be clear about the language we use, and the implications, assumptions, gravities, and parameters of the meanings that work us as they work for us.
