The labour of attachment: On commoning in Naarm

Commoning describes a means of forging common value in the shared labour by which new experiences of community, of being in common, are realised. It is usually understood by way of a congeries of habits, affects and practices critical of normative models of social and economic organisation typical of late capitalism. These innovations have provided scholars and activists with productive ideas for imagining postcapitalist futures, and new ways of organising the labour required to achieve them. Yet it is arguable that two key problems remain in contemporary theorisations of commoning. First, in attending to the social and political contours of specific instances of commoning, it is rarely clear how commoning differs from other forms of social and community organisation. Second, despite longstanding identification with anticapitalist goals, the particular means by which commoning comes to express a distinctive political praxis are uncertain. The paper addresses the first of these problems by developing a novel account of the affective labour of commoning informed by Ben Anderson’s work on attachment, and Isabelle Stengers notion of “sense in common.†I address the second by way of Jacques Rancière’s account of subjectification understood as a “reconfiguration of the field of experience.†I argue that commoning evinces a mode of political praxis to the extent that it expounds a “wrong†in Rancière’s terms by which new subjects emerge as “parties†to the work of redefining a field of experience. I put these conceptual advances to work throughout my analysis by indicating how commoning may sustain new ways of “honouring country†in Naarm, reconfiguring the field of Indigenous relations in Victoria.