Liminality and the Commons

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Discussion

By Angelos Varvarousis and Giorgos Kallis:

"A claim we advance and which is new in the literature is that many of these new commons are, or have passed, or have been generated through, what we define as liminal conditions , before evolving into more stable structures. The inspiration comes from anthropologi-cal studies of the “rites of passage” (Van Gennep 1960 [1908]), the ambiguous and ambivalent processes that a subject enters when it loses its established identity and before obtaining a new one.

As Victor Turner (1977) puts it “liminal entities are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial.” This condition of “in- betweeness” characterizes both the individuals who participate in commoning projects foregoing at least temporarily their fixed identities, and the institutions that govern the projects. What does the concept of liminality add to the understanding of the commons? In Ostrom’s theory, the commons are governed by fixed communities (Wade 1988; Ostrom 1990; Steins and Edwards 1999). “Define clear group boundaries” is the first principle that Ostrom proposes for a successful management of the commons. Recent literature though questions this fixity and communities are not conceived necessarily as homogeneous (Agrawal and Gibson 1999; De Angelis 2010; Stavrides 2015). In liminal commons, instead, the community of the commoners shines through its absence. Some kind of community of course is temporarily emerging for the production of the common. But this is always precarious and often dissolves. The borders of a liminal community are not only blurred. They actually do not exist as such. Liminal commons, in other words, are not defined by exclusion. Because of this they are more likely to happen in spaces where exclu-sion is not likely or desirable, such as a public square. In a liminal commons, the glue that brings the actors together is the practical production of the common. A collective identity is neither a precondition nor the purpose of the process and is discouraged when it puts obstacles in the way of common production. Sharing, solidarity, or horizontality are not introduced as indisputable a priori identity values. They emerge as their worth is experienced in practice, in solving practical problems or in organizing collective action. As the subjects enter a liminal condition where dominant social taxonomies and identities are contested, “collective inventiveness” (Stavrides 2015) flourishes. Liminal subjects are more open and more vulnerable to imitate social behaviors and practices that offer a possible way out from the uncertainty that the liminal phase is associated with. The institutions that are performed in this kind of commoning and that define what is to be shared and how are also characterized by liminality. Liminal institutions are not fixed but precarious and fluid and they emerge and perish within decentralization–recentralization dynamics. They unify, not exclude the diverse potential commoners and they promote the non-antagonistic co-existence of different perceptions. Whereas in Ostrom’s approach, the commons are regarded as “nested” institutions between the private and public typically requiring support from institutions at higher levels in order to operate (Ostrom 1990; Steins and Edwards 1999), liminal commons emerge within uncertainty and a reversion of social taxonomies and order-ing, operating as deliberative processes without linkage to “higher” institutions. Our theory of liminal commons is radically different from theo-ries of collective action that celebrate difference and claim that the contemporary collective action unfolds around the cultural capital of a “politics of selves” (Lichterman 1996; McDonald 2002). These theories too criticize the idea of collective identity, arguing that in contemporary movements this has been replaced by a personalized “public expression of the self” (Lichterman 1996). Whereas this may have some value in describing some contemporary movements, especially those dominated by a “middle class culture,” the liminal commons presented here are not the outcome of an individualism that propels a self- actualization process. They are the result of the loss of an established identity, which allows space for a precarious and fluid “we” to emerge. People do not only express publicly themselves; they propose, even incompletely and contradictorily, an alternative social organization." (http://www.academia.edu/31990005/Commoning_Against_The_Crisis)