Space,Subjectivity, Enclosure and the Commons
- Article: Rethinking Enclosure: Space, Subjectivity and the Commons. Alex Jeffrey, Colin McFarlane, et al.
Abstract
"While concepts of “enclosure” and the “commons” are becoming increasingly popular in critical geography, there have been few attempts to think them together. This paper sets out a dialectic of enclosure–commons as a means for thinking through contemporary processes of exclusion, violence and alterity. We examine what is at stake through a geographical reading of enclosure, that is, the processes through which neoliberalism works through—and summons into existence—certain forms of spatiality and subjectivity. In doing so we confront the spatialities of enclosure’s “other”: strategies and practices of commoning which assemble more inclusive, just and sustainable spaces. We examine the materiality of enclosure across a range of sites, from processes of walling to a more substantial assessment of the diverse assemblage of materials and subjectivities drawn into modalities of enclosure. We go on to explore the inscription of enclosure on the human body through an examination of, first, law, and second, biopolitics. In conclusion, we explore the implications of this argument for critical geographical scholarship."
Excerpts
1.
"Our project is motivated by a desire to expose and counter the materialisations of enclosure. We are interested in how the seizure of the commons is actively assembled through porous, sociomaterial and distanciated forms of enclosure—through relations of stability and flux, fixity and movement. In doing so, we are equally concerned with how we might think enclosure’s other: strategies and practices of commoning that do not necessarily avoid walling, but which assemble more inclusive, just and sustainable spaces. While recent years have seen an increase in debates on both enclosure and the commons in Geography and critical social science more generally, there have been few attempts to think them together.
...
The paper sets out three approaches to the dialectic of enclosure–commons that
draw upon our respective research projects, and which we believe are particularly
important in the current moment: materiality, law and biopolitics."
2.
"As Graham and Marvin (2001) argue in their seminal
Splintering Urbanism, global neoliberalism has served to intensify the fragmentation
of the urban landscape as new privatised, secessionary enclaves of infrastructure and
services splinter from the city and, in the process, sever any contemporary possibility
of modern, uniformly networked urbanism."
More Information
- To be published by Antipodes ?, copy via co-author alexander.vasudevan@nottingham.ac.uk
- Cited: The City and the Grassroots. Manuel Castells, 1983