"Commoning and Affect
Affect theory covers a sound and rich body of knowledge that consolidated since the early ‘90s in the social science and humanities and that increasingly extended beyond those disciplines (Clough, 2010; Gregg and Seigworth, 2010; Lawler, 2001; Tomkins, 1984). In short, the ‘affect turn’ testifies the will to overcome, ontologically and epistemologically, the centrality of the human subject in relation to agency and to move beyond the nature/culture, body/emotions, social/material dichotomies (Clough and Halley, 2007). It is beyond the scope of this paper to attempt a comprehensive and detailed outline of affect and affect theory. However, it is helpful to provide clarifications on how this construct is understood and used within this paper.
Approaches to affect range from the ones reflecting a psychobiological orientation (Tomkins, 1984) to those having social (Gregg and Seigworth, 2010), cultural (Massumi, 1995), or organizational orientations (Gherardi, 2019). In continuity with these latter ones, affect is understood here in the Spinozian-Deleuzian sense of a force that is relational, moves among bodies, and enhances or diminishes their ability to act (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987). To this extent it is a non-subjective and anti-representational force: it does not resolve in emotions or other subjective states, although it links to them; it cannot be captured, described, and explained in its entirety, and therefore leaves us with a sense of wonder. In Brian Massumi’s words:
The reason to say “affect” rather than “emotion” is that affect carries a bodily connotation. Affect, coming out of Spinoza, is defined very basically as the ability to affect and be affected. But you have to think of the affect and being affected together as a complex, as two sides of the same phenomenon that cuts across subject positions. (2017: 109)
Affect spurs us to observe and capture assemblages of human and non-human bodies in becoming. It allows us to foreground how situated and embodied knowledge, emotions, expectations, needs, or desires are triggered through the ‘contact’ with other bodies, how these drive us to act (or not) in specific ways, and in turn how these actions (or lack thereof) trigger other human and non-human bodies.
Within commons studies, affect is still largely unexplored. Although a few relevant exceptions exist. These emerge from approaches based on ‘indigenous ontologies’ (Escobar, 2016; Illich, 1983) and the akin attempts to re-define commons and commoning as sites of production of subjectivities (Caffentzis and Federici, 2014; Nightingale, 2011; Singh, 2017). Here, affect is valuable in showing that the human/nature (or society/environment) relationship is not exclusively dominated by exploitation and overuse. On the contrary, and particularly for several local communities, such a relationship can fundamentally be one of co-becoming, attachment, and care. In continuity with this idea, Nightingale de-constructs the framing of commoners as ‘rational agents’ and of shared resources management as a practice driven by a traditional understanding of rationality and the pursuit of management principles. If we look at how commoners relate to policy making in practice, then the attachments, emotions, and argumentative logic which commoners bring ‘at the negotiation table’ require us to embrace alternative rationalities or, as Nightingale puts it, the irrationality of the commons/-ers (2011). Similarly, Singh uses affect to re-define the commons as affective socio-nature relations and, therefore, as sites of affective encounters. This is, once again, an effort to overcome approaches focused on property rights and design principles, based on management and rational actions, and dominated by the ‘market versus state regulated’ debate (Singh, 2017). Without explicitly mentioning it, also Caffentzis and Federici conceive affective relations – attachments and commitment towards the commons, in their terms – as integral to the pursuit of a way of being human and in harmony with nature that is antithetical to neoliberal and capitalist form of resources exploitation (Caffentzis and Federici, 2014).
Furthermore, despite not being explicitly framed under affect theory, the affective dimension that characterizes the commoners-commoning relationship, emerges more evident from studies on commons-based peer production (CBPP). For instance, a sound body of literature has focussed on the motivation for the, often voluntary, engagement and participation in CBPP. This is largely linked to emotional and affective states such as the desires to learn and improve personal skills, to socialize and acquire a renowned status, as well as experiencing a form of personal enjoyment (Crowston and Fagnot, 2008; Krishnamurthy, 2006). At the same time, this body of literature has recently started showing that prolonged engagement in some cases can also lead to burnout and alienation, due to overcommitments (Poderi and Hakken, 2014), conflictual interpersonal relationships, or to the lack of an inclusive and supportive environment (Menking and Erickson, 2015). Similarly, the search for strategies for both the engagement management at the individual, personal level and the creation of more welcoming and supportive environments at the collective level are emerging as relevant themes linked to the need for caring about the commoners and not only about the commons (Jiang et al., 2018). Overall, this body of literature shows the importance of continuing studying and representing commoners as subjects whose bodies come into play when they engage in commoning. Bodies that feel and express needs, emotions, expectations, knowledge and desires. Bodies that are affected by other bodies and, in turn, affect them while commoning in practice.
RESEARCHING COMMONERS LONG-TERM ENGAGEMENT THROUGH AFFECT
Empirically, the legitimate questions arise about how to look at affect and what to look at when investigating affect. Indeed, the conception of affect previously outlined opens to an empiricism of sensations, or an intra-empiricism (Clough, 2010). Namely, an empiricism that shifts from inter-actions among human and non-human bodies onto intra-actions: that which stands in-between actions (Barad, 2003). For this reason, some scholars see in the study of affect both a need and an opportunity for methodological experimentations that allow to study affect not as an ‘object’ or ‘content’, but rather as an entangled, relational process (Blackman, 2007). For this work, this means to identify and highlight the ways in which commoners’ embodied knowledge, emotions, expectations, needs, or desires come into play in such practice. I briefly summarize the research at the basis of this paper and exemplifies encounters with affect here.
This paper builds on the empirical work done for a two-year research project (Jan 2018 – Jan 2020) on the temporal sustainability of commoning. The research relies on semi-structured interviews conducted with 30 long-term commoners recruited from three different commoning practices. Ethnographic observations complemented these interviews by focusing on the activities and infrastructures related to those practices. In particular, these concerned: a Free and Open-Source Software (FOSS) video game project, as a case of digital commons; an international European non-governmental organization (NGO) for the promotion of FOSS and digital rights, as a case of knowledge commons; and a hackerspace located in northern Europe, as a case of urban commons. Initially, there was neither explicit intention to collect ‘empirical evidences’ of affect nor to make it part of the analysis. However, the relevance of affect in the long-term commitment to commoning started emerging already during the conduction of early interviews; and it increasingly presented itself as a meaningful dimension in the data analysis. At a practical level, interviews addressed (i) commoners’ interactions with other commoners and the tools harnessed for commoning; (ii) the boundary work existing between the commitment to commoning and other spheres of commoners’ lives; and (iii) commoners’ considerations on the challenges of sustaining a long-term involvement in commoning.
Traces of affect (Gherardi et al., 2019) emerged from their answers and the stories they told. Excerpts of those stories are introduced through three vignettes. These vignettes do not aim to be representative of the collective cultures of the commoning practices which the commoners attended to, neither they make any generalizable claim on the commoners-commoning relationship. On the contrary, the vignettes exemplify commoners’ unique, situated, subjective lived experiences and their entanglement with affect as they concern the meaning and implications of commoning in practice over the long term."
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