Recovering the Commons: Democracy, Place, and Global Justice

by Herbert Reid, Betsy Taylor

Overview

This penetrating work culls key concepts from grassroots activism to hold critical social theory accountable to the needs, ideas, and organizational practices of the global justice movement. The resulting critique of neoliberalism hinges on place-based struggles of groups marginalized by globalization and represents a brave rethinking of politics, economy, culture, and professionalism.

Providing new practical and conceptual tools for responding to human and environmental crises in Appalachia and beyond, Recovering the Commons radically revises the framework of critical social thought regarding our stewardship of the civic and ecological commons. Herbert Reid and Betsy Taylor ally social theory, field sciences, and local knowledge in search of healthy connections among body, place, and commons that form a basis for solidarity as well as a vital infrastructure for a reliable, durable world. Drawing particularly on the work of philosophers Maurice Merleau-Ponty, John Dewey, and Hannah Arendt, the authors reconfigure social theory by ridding it of the aspects that reduce place and community to sets of interchangeable components. Instead, they reconcile complementary pairs such as mind/body and society/nature in the reclamation of public space.

With its analysis embedded in philosophical and material contexts, this penetrating work culls key concepts from grassroots activism to hold critical social theory accountable to the needs, ideas, and organizational practices of the global justice movement. The resulting critique of neoliberalism hinges on place-based struggles of groups marginalized by globalization and represents a brave rethinking of politics, economy, culture, and professionalism.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780252076817
Publisher:	University of Illinois Press
Publication date:	02/05/2010
Edition description:	1st Edition
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Herbert Reid is a professor of political science at the University of Kentucky and the editor of Up the Mainstream: A Critique of Ideology in American Politics and Everyday Life. Betsy Taylor is a cultural anthropologist and senior research scholar at the Alliance for Social, Political, Ethical, and Cultural Theory at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University.

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Recovering the Commons

Democracy, Place, and Global Justice

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By HERBERT REID BETSY TAYLOR

UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS

Copyright © 2010 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-07681-7

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Introduction

Googling for Moonscapes

Looking for allies, some community activists in New Guinea turned to cyberspace. But, what word to use to find people like themselves? Moonscape was the word they chose. This extraterrestrial word googled out for them a surreal geography of other communities, bound together in global cyberspace by common expulsion from earthly life forms and landscapes—places-of-non-place that four of them were able to visit on a recent global tour of the unearthed. This is how Grace Koa, Poin Caspar, Wina Kayonga, and Patrick Pate came to visit Larry Gibson on Kayford Mountain in West Virginia (Fout, 2003).

Once the lowest mountain along its bend of the then deeply forested Coal River, Kayford Mountain now towers above "moonscapes" that have spread to the visible horizon and beyond in one decade. Dinned out in the national mediascapes by the latest confession from Paris Hilton (or whatever), the explosions bringing down the mountains of central Appalachia are heard by few Americans. This is the largest earthmoving project in human history—as coal companies turn from mining to what even they call mountaintop removal, exploding more firepower, every week, than the bomb that leveled Hiroshima. Kayford Mountain continues to exist only because Larry Gibson refused to sell fifty acres of his family land. And so Kayford Mountain rises as a fragile green mesa above the bizarre postbiotic, post-industrial landscape hundreds of feet below and falling. By staying put, Larry has created a landform of stark aesthetic power. Kayford Mountain has become a global pilgrimage site, gathering to itself tales, feelings, and pathways of a distinctively twenty-first-century sort.

This book is about the kinds of pathways that met and parted on Kayford Mountain that day, and the kinds of conversations provoked by such crossroads. We believe that if there is hope for our species, it is in the hard thinking taking place at crossroads like this. We don't know much about the talk that day, since we only read about it in a half-page article in the newsletter of one of the always outgunned but tenacious Appalachian grassroots groups at the frontlines of the (as yet) chronically losing battle against mountaintop removal. But we can picture it only too clearly. We have made that sad journey up Kayford Mountain in various seasons with many people—activists, scholars, and students from the surrounding region as well as Nigeria, South Africa, India, Peru, and elsewhere. All over the world, at crossroads like this, something is afoot—a courageous, creative, and elusive rethinking of politics, economics, and culture. Nobody seems to know what to call this. It travels largely beneath the radar of mainstream media and academe. David Orr aptly calls it the "movement for the habitability of earth" (Orr, 2004). The Zapatistas call it the "movement of movements" (Mertes, 2004). We mostly call it the global justice movement and wish we knew of a better term.

One way to think about this movement is that it is a great diversity of spontaneous, mostly local refusals of neoliberal globalization—a myriad of small-scale push-backs against the transmutation of everything into infinite, displaced transactability in global markets. Many of these struggles arise against assaults on particular places, bodily well-being, and local commons—in fights against strip-mining, toxins, collapse of local economies and ecologies, food insecurity, privatization of water, displacement, corporate colonization of children's play, worker exploitation, predatory or corrupt flows of capital, and so on. But, this movement of movements is not simply a collation of localisms, and, it gets unity from more than what it is against. We believe that a positive political project of great significance, and potentially global scale, could be emerging in this heterogeneous movement-with-no-name. There are efforts to build multiscalar alliances between these diverse struggles. Experimentation in translocal organizational structure to scale up justice struggles has included formally incorporated voluntary associations, networks refusing formal leadership structures, alliances sheltered and aided by established social movement organizations (including labor and religious organizations), reclaimed pre-state governance structures (such as in Andean reclaiming of indigenous political structures for resistance movements) as well as attempts to reclaim nation-state governance. At the global level, the World Social Forum (and its spin-off regional forums) plays an important role by providing regular spaces for transnational networking and sharing of ideas, inspiration, and experience—although its ability to affect politics directly is limited.

These efforts to build multiscalar alliances raise daunting strategic and normative questions. Much of the burgeoning scholarly literature on the global justice movement has focused on questions of organizational structure. Are emerging organizational structures democratically representative—internally and of the people and land they claim to serve? Are they strong enough to grapple with the sources of injustice? These are important questions, but not our focus. This book attempts to clarify the basis for solidarity. We believe that if there is more clarity about this, there will be less anxiety and confusion about what collective structures, goals, and strategies are appropriate—opening up auspices for collective action and heterogeneity. Intellectuals can be particularly helpful in this clarification because they are part of the problem insofar as they are embedded in professional institutions or ideologies that have served to disembody, displace, and privatize public debate about the desirability of "moonscapes."

Social Theory on the Frontlines of Solidarity

We have written this book because we think critical social theory can be in stronger conversation with these emerging politics—theory has much to learn from, and to give to, conversations such as take place on Kayford. This is a social theoretic text for a social theoretic audience. But its key ideas have arisen from the global justice movement, from pondering on the run with activists in pitched or covert battle with princely, smooth-talking, and violent powers. We attempt, as it were, to hold critical social theory up against the needs, ideas, and organizational practices of the global justice movement. We try to put social theory into the register of emergent politics, to ask—in the context of these struggling global and local alliances, in these battles for livability of place and livelihood, at these limits to global climate—what intellectual projects are most important?

We almost always feel more hope driving toward campus than away. This is strange, because most of our engaged scholarship has been with grassroots social and environmental justice struggles in difficult, or worse, situations—in Appalachia, India, and elsewhere. Why, in the relative comforts of academic campuses, does it so often feel as if political hope is scarce and collective will is stricken? Well, we'll get to that by the end of the book. But why the stubborn upwelling of hope in tragic circumstances of social and environmental justice struggle? Something happens that is hard to name when people get together at places like Kayford Mountain. There is a kind of solidarity that, paradoxically, finds common identity and collective action through particularistic and locally grounded struggles, local and embodied knowledges, and place-based political participation. We argue that this is not simply a seizure of existing or official powers (although one hopes that can follow). Rather, it is a generative process of empowerment, of finding a new pivot of social being that renders individual being more capacious, strong, apt for solidarity, and able to make do over the long run. We argue that these nondualistic relationships—between universal and particulars, thought and body, transcendent identity and immanent poetics, self and other, ideal plan and strategic action—unsettle reigning political and intellectual verities in ways that critical social theory is not adequately helping to conceptualize.

One way to understand these emergent, fragile solidarities is that they are a rescaling and reclaiming of temporal and spatial being. On one hand, this is the negative and necessary project of throwing off the space-times of developmentalism—the false dreams of modernity based on a vitalistic notion of irreversible "progress" growing inevitably from the linear, lockstep march of technological and scientific improvement, market efficiencies, universalizing human reason, bureaucratic rationalization of government, and, the "any day now" of consumerist promises of sure-fire happiness if we just stay hitched to that gizmo-evolution train.

On the other hand, there is the positive project of building an alternative vision of the good life. This is, we argue, a rescaling and reclaiming of social being that pivots on the very complex temporalities and spatialities of re-inhabitation—rebuilding infrastructures of embodied being, in particular places, in sedimented and emergent dependencies within ecological matrices and given limits of the nonhuman surround and placed histories. Body~place~commons is the name we are giving to these chronotopic infrastructures—a theoretical notion developed to try to describe the pivot of social and ecological being that the global justice movement struggles to reclaim as durable portals of democracy.

What is social theory for?

We have written this book because we think critical social theory can help itself, and help the global justice movement, by working shoulder to shoulder on these projects. Social theory has already done much on the negative project, but more, much more, needs to be done on the positive project. Toward that sort of positive politics, we propose the notion of body~place~commons—subjectivity as intersubjectivity arising in embodied practices in concrete places within heterogeneous temporalities of the ecological commons. To be a creature—human or nonhuman—is to be hinged between one's own embodiment and the particularity of places that accrue the grounds for life from unruly and ruly cycles of interdependence, mortality, and natality of the ecological commons. Our being is not "in" us, like something poured in a bag of skin, nor is it "outside" our skin in signs, economies, machines, or powers. The stuff of our being arises as dynamic infrastructures of forms of life that we share with nonhuman creatures—generative matrices of co-constitution among particular bodies within the chaotic piling up of particular conditions of ecological relations within particular places.

Certain political and economic conclusions derive directly, we believe, from this nondualistic, generative and dynamic stuff of being. John Ruskin distinguished between wealth and illth as that which increases or decreases well-being for individuals and collectivities. He says, "To be 'valuable' ... is to 'avail towards life.' A truly valuable or availing thing is that which leads to life with its whole strength" (Ruskin, 1985, 69). Illth is not simply poverty and distress, but production and accumulation that causes "various devastation and trouble around ... in all directions" (73). Or, what current economic jargon labels externalities. Almost any statistical measures of illth and wealth suggest planetary trajectories at almost unimaginable scales of injustice and danger. These are not problems of "poverty" and "environmental externalities" that can be cleaned up through remediation, regulation, and redistribution—as if they were in tidy packages sitting, ready to hoist, next to handy work tables with just the right toolkits. Our concern is that institutionalized inattention to body~place~commons is ITL∫ITL to systemic synergisms of increasing inequality, insecurity, violence, displacement, and suffering (ecological, political economic, cultural). The crucial word in Ruskin's definition of wealth is for. Wealth understood as well-being for particular beings recenters questions of value within the embodied, emplaced, given particularities of existing beings within enabling or disabling matrices. This is thinking from within body~place~commons. It is development-from-within. Development understood etymologically—as de (un) vel (veil)—the unfolding of becoming out of the given infrastructures of being. In many ways, modernity has been a long war against this kind of thinking.

We have just lived through several centuries of structured inattention to body~place~commons—a circuitry hardwired with logics of modernity that are infrastructural to now globally dominant political, economic, and knowledge institutions. For now, let us call this circuitry mind (space) matter. Mind (space) matter constructs subjectivity and world as ontological products of epistemological tasks. The damage from Descartes' "I think, therefore I am" has not been undone by the postmodern "It writes, therefore 'I' (seem to) be." Both are in flight from the given. This book argues that both create their authority (intellectual, political, ethical) by disvaluing the givenness, particularity, and durable proportionalities of the enabling conditions of life. Foundational to mind (space) matter is the distance it constructs, and constantly must reconstruct, between itself and embodiment, place, and the commons—and their co-generativity. Modernity tends to cast itself in opposition—reducing such unruly, creaturely interdependencies to the merely given, the always prior matrix from which modernity rises up triumphant, shining in newness. For all its celebration of sensual flux as ludic radicality, postmodernity continues this nervous flight from the given, in curiously elaborate and timid new ways.

To understand social being as the nexus of body~place~commons is to mark both the simplicity of the stuff of social being and its radical, unimaginable strangeness. The simplicity of the notion of body~place~commons comes from the fact that it is happening all around us. We know it in the mode of common sense, what we take for granted. Much of critical social theory has set itself against this common sense—celebrating that which disembeds, decenters, and unfixes. But we argue that these decentering tendencies too often make social theory irrelevant to the worst dangers and best possibilities of our historical times. It has proven surprisingly weak in shaping inquiry and building solidarities for ecological citizenship and democratic reclamation of globalizing economies now escalating inequality, violence, and ecological destruction. Alliance with the margins and the centrifugal makes sense when domination is wholly centralized and emancipation is mere undoing. But how useful is iconoclasm in an epoch so terrorized by overkill, by lust to raze, and then to make the rubble bounce? There certainly are days in which one wants to agree with Nietzsche that the question for philosophy is to what ideas it needs to take a hammer. But perhaps it would be more helpful to sit down and think a bit about what a hammer is for.

Hammers are for building. They are also, as Heidegger noted, extraordinarily interesting—not least in how we think about them least when using them most. Social theory might be less enamored of iconoclasm if questions of building and habitation had not been made to seem boring. A manufactured inattentiveness has veiled these questions for some time. We argue that fear and denial of the labors of recentering are part and parcel of other crises—crises of ecology, inequality, fundamentalisms of identity and religion, gender, violence, democratic authority, knowledge, public space.

A call to recenter social theory should not set up a simpleminded opposition between the negativity of a "hermeneutics of suspicion" (Ricoeur, 1970) and something else, wholly positive that replaces deconstruction with construction. This dualism itself is false—constructed by their placement on that spectral operating table on which they are always already dissected, twinned by the scission that makes each perpetually what the other is not.

This book explores possibilities for social theory to understand itself, intellectually, as ways to attend to the world and, practically, as ways to tend to the world. We try to meet these intertwined challenges of thought and action, with intertwined images of theory as listening and care. In part, this is an effort to shake loose the self-enclaving of theory understood simply as demystifying and debunking. Listening and care transgress dualisms of subject/object and negative/positive. They are a kind of full emptiness, an open grasping—in which subjective and objective, negative and positive, co-constitute each other. Social theory's long struggle against dualism has taken many forms. But, like many other theorists, we are concerned about efforts to escape subject/object dualisms that seem to more deeply incarcerate theory away from its object and from intersubjectivity. Beyond intellectual questions, political and moral concerns are urgent. Chow describes well the "self-referentiality" that can fold theory back on itself, making it hard for it to encounter its "constitutive exteriority" and the ways in which this self-enclaving of theory is complicit with vicious inequalities of power and wealth (Chow, 2006).

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Recovering the Commons by HERBERT REID BETSY TAYLOR Copyright © 2010 by Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments xi

Introduction 1

1 Space-Times of the Nation-State and the Effacement of the Body

Editorial Reviews

"This very welcome and timely effort lays foundations for thinking our way out of the epistemological errors and related politics that have plunged us into the present ecological crisis. Recovering the Commons represents an intellectual model that is desperately needed."—Mary Hufford, author of Waging Democracy in the Kingdom of Coal: OVEC and the Struggle for Social and Environmental Justice in Central Appalachia

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