School of Commoning

Discussion

Mark Jagdev:

"How can the Commons contribute to re-imagining culture. Opening up spaces for the re-imagining of culture?

Yes you are spot on, the most important evolutionary contribution of the Commons is helping us re-dreaming the culture, out of the bondage of market forces and party politics that divide us, into the freedom a new civilization based on recognizing humankind’s inherent unity.

We need to start the opening up “spaces for the re-imagining of culture” with our own inner space and retraining the way we sense our world. Here is a quote, the two paragraphs of which tell about the relationship between outer re-imagining and the inner retraining:

“Through a long process of enclosures, the Earth's surface has been almost completely divided up between public and private property so that common land regimes, such as those of indigenous civilizations of the Americas or medieval Europe, have been destroyed. And yet so much of our world is common, open to access of all and developed through active participation. Language, for example, like affects and gestures, is for the most part common, and indeed if language were made either private or public that is, if large portions of our words, phrases, or parts of speech were subject to private ownership or public authority—then language would lose its powers of expression, creativity, and communication.

Such an example is meant not to calm readers, as if to say that the crises created by private and public controls are not as bad as they seem, but rather to help readers begin to retrain their vision, recognizing the common that exists and what it can do. That is the first step in a project to win back and expand the common and its powers.” — The Common Wealth, by Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt

We don’t advocate that individual transformations would automatically generate social transformation. That’s why the School of Commoning will address the systemic aspects of the cultural crisis as well. Between the individual and the social scale, the commons has a critical leverage by creating the ‘we’ space in which we can practice and develop the new skills that we will need to live our individual and collective life in a commons based society.

We say, commoning is the act of co-creation or care-taking and governance of common goods, in mutually supportive relationships." (email May 2011)