Uncommoning Nature

Description

Marison de la Cadena:

"Confronted with the mining company’s proposal to desiccate the lagoons, its local guardians and environmentalists have joined forces against the mining corporation. Yet their shared interest—to defend nature, or the environment—is not only the same interest: ecologized nature and universal nature exceed each other; their agreement is also underpinned by uncommonalities. This condition shapes a possibility for an alternative alliance, one that, along with coincidences, may include the parties’ constitutive divergence—even if this opens up discussion of the partition of the sensible and introduces the possibility of ontological disagreement into the alliance.

An oxymoronic condition, this alliance would also house hope for a commons that does not require the division between universal nature and diversified humans: a commons constantly emerging from the uncommons as grounds for political negotiation of what the interest in common—and thus the commons—would be.

Instead of the expression of shared relations, and stewardship of nature, this commons would be the expression of a worlding of many worlds ecologically related across their constitutive divergence. As a practice of life that takes care of interests in common, yet not the same interest, the alliance between environmentalists and local guardians (of lagoons, rivers, forests) could impinge upon the required distribution of the sensible into universal nature and locally differentiated humans, thus disrupting the agreement that made the anthropo-not-seen and questioning the legitimacy of its war against those who question that distribution. The alliance would also queer the requirement of politics for sameness and provoke ontological disagreement among those who share sameness—inaugurating an altogether different practice of politics: one across divergence." (http://supercommunity.e-flux.com/texts/uncommoning-nature/)