LIMINAL COMMONS

1. COMMONING AGAINST THE CRISIS LIMINALCOMMONS ANGELOS VARVAROUSIS & GIORGOS KALLIS 5th International Degrowth Conference

2. MOTIVATION • Proliferation of ‘new commons’ in austerity-hit countries (Greece). ‘Plan C & D’. • How do new commons emerge, change and establish themselves or perish? • Openness vs. closure, especiallyin space commoning practices • Analytics of opening.

3. THIS PRESENTATION • Liminality and liminal commons • The liminal commons of Athens indignant squares • The spreading of liminal commons • After the rite of passage

4. THIS PRESENTATION • Liminality and liminal commons • The liminal commons of Athens indignant squares • The spreading of liminal commons • After the rite of passage

5. LIMINALITY • Liminality (Arnold van Gennep) is an anthropological concept to describe the intermediate phase of the “rites of passage”. • Two kinds of liminality in anthropological studies: “life-crisis liminality” but also “public liminality” (Victor Turner). • Public liminality is strongly related to “communitas” (Turner), the public experience of a generalized inversion of social taxonomies, inequalities and hierarchies. In communitas social structure is temporarily dissolved. • Liminality has the potential to offer a better understanding of transitional periods and of always-in-the-making processes.

6. LIMINALITY & COMMONS • Crisis ruptured identities and as such large parts of the society live “between a present yet to pass and a future still to come”; therefore in a liminal condition. • Commons cannot be based only on the reproduction of fixed communities of similar people but on the contrary should also be based on an expanding process of negotiating with every potential commoner. • A liminal period could be proved a decisive one in the expansion and popularization of the commons since people temporarily forego their established identities and as such are more open/vulnerable to personal but also collective transformations.

7. LIMINAL COMMONS • Commoners and emerging commoning practices which forego fixed identities after a shocking trauma, and who are ‘neither here, nor there’, but ‘betwixt and between’ the positions and the established taxonomies in a given society. • They happen often, though not always, in periods when a widespread loss of faith in society’s promises can trigger such an identity crisis. • They potentially take place in public spaces. • Community shines through its absence and the blurring of its borders.

8. LIMINAL COMMONS • Defined not by exclusion, but by the practical production of the common. • More than in other patterns of commoning, values are not preconsidered but they are created performatively in the field. • Fluid, non-bounding institutions, collective invention and social imitation.

9. THIS PRESENTATION • 1) Liminality and liminal commons • 2) The liminal commons of Athens indignant squares • 3) The spreading of liminal commons • 4) After the rite of passage

10. THE LIMINAL COMMONS OF THE INDIGNANT SQUARE Public squares as liminal commons because: • Public space is inherently a porous space very difficult to be enclosed by any single identarian group. • Ruptured identities and mass de-identification of the people participating in the squares. • Flourishing both of collective invention and social imitation.

11. THE LIMINAL COMMONS OF THE INDIGNANT SQUARE • Production of the common without community, mass participation and high turnover of the participants. • Performance of non-bounding, precarious and as such liminal institutions, not based on values. • Explicit mechanisms for the prevention of the accumulation of any form of power as well as discouraging of the manifestation of any political identity.

12. THIS PRESENTATION • 1) Liminality and liminal commons • 2) The liminal commons of Athens indignant squares • 3) The spreading of liminal commons • 4) After the rite of passage

13. THE SPREADING OF LIMINAL COMMONS Liminal commons of the squares movement were catalytic for the spreading for the growth of solidarity/cooperative practices following an “avalanche”-like expansion

14. THE SPREADING OF LIMINAL COMMONS • Main reasons for this explosion: • Openness and de-identification allowed the popularization of alternative practices. • Porosity and negotiation made a-politicized individuals to overcome suspicion of practices employed by radical political groups. • Political groups forced to open the borders of their own identities and experiment with new forms of political action including alternative practices. • De-stigmatization of poverty. • De-legitimation of the mainstream political system. • Social imitation created an “avalanche”-like expansion of specific kinds of practices.

15. THE SPREADING OF LIMINAL COMMONS • New projects unfold beyond the initial liminal constitution but they keep many of the attributes which they obtained in their liminal phase. Such attributes include: • no identity/ideology other than commitment to the process and production of the common. • commitment to openness. • liminal institutions.

16. THIS PRESENTATION • 1) Liminality and liminal commons • 2) The liminal commons of Athens indignant squares • 3) The spreading of liminal commons • 4) After the rite of passage

17. BEYOND LIMINALITY • Perpetual liminality is a difficult task for every society. Pre-social or even anti-social. Problems which appear in Liminal Commons and push them to forego their liminal status: • High turnover of the participants often blocks decision making processes. • Absence of strategic character of their actions.

18. BEYOND LIMINALITY • Often uneven share of work between more and less active members. • Difficulties in articulating a common discourse and create more stable institutions (general problem of up scaling). • Difficulties in regulating delicate relations with state and the markets.

19. THE CHALLENGE • If the liminal phase of commoning is characterized by its expanding, “avalanche” like qualities, the subversion of existing norms and identities and offers possibilities for a mass popularization of commons, then it constitutes a decisive period for the evolution of commoning movement. Existing commoning projects should invent ways to welcome such phases and through the performance of innovative liminal institutions should be able to re-invent themself and create more spaces for negotiation with every potential commoner in the process of sharing a world-in-the-making.

20. THANK YOU