Rhetoric and/of the Common(s)

The first years of the 2020s have provided reasonable doubt as to what “common” means. What is common place when accessible locations become scenes of oppressive violence, and physical and digital sites are privatized and surveilled? What is common sense when the dread and fear of so many are eclipsed by the postpandemic rhetoric of “resilience” and commercialism’s bubblegum optimism? What is common good when legal and civil rights are stripped, and the institutions originally established to serve the public are dismantled? In Richard Rorty’s assessment of the public (and privately self-created) potential for solidarity, common sense is the opposite of irony (74), and the ironist “someone sufficiently historicist and nominalist to have abandoned the idea that those central beliefs and desires refer back to something beyond the reach of time and chance” (xv). The “final vocabulary” against which “alternative” beliefs, actions, and lives are judged habituates its speakers to what may be taken for granted (although speaker is not Rorty’s word). He writes, “When common sense is challenged, its adherents respond at first by generalizing and making explicit the rules of the language game they are accustomed to play” (74). The issue at hand (in this [special] issue at hand) concerns language games, habituation, the common, and the commons.

Assessing the ethical viability of “political interlocution,” Jacques Rancière writes, “The problem is knowing whether the subjects who count in the interlocution ‘are’ or ‘are not,’ whether they are speaking or just making a noise. It is knowing whether there is a case for seeing the object they designate as the visible object of the conflict. It is knowing whether the common language in which they are exposing a wrong is indeed a common language” (50). For Rancière, a prior “logos that orders and bestows the right to order” (16) constitutes subjects as such in relation to other subjects. And this inaugurates legitimate and disruptive dispute, distinguishable from the “sundry varieties of bad regimes” (63–64) of which examples globally abound. Interlocution, including dispute, presumes the constitution of commonality, which means that it is a political matter. Rancière’s understanding of speech as political order raises questions of particularity and commonality, or the possibility of the commons, common ground, commonsense, and so on. With reference to the problem he identifies, the questions may be opened, angled, and thusly expressed: If subjects “are not,” as in the problem statement above, what exactly are they, and to whom are they that? If not one common language, then how many common languages are there, and where are they spoken? To whom are they audible and intelligible? What if the commoners’ bodies and living artifacts are themselves the objects of conflict? And, what are the rhetorics of noise?

Mainstream academic accounts of what “the commons” are often begin Anglocentrically with the story of seventeenth-century land enclosures prompting the Magna Carta, pivot to contemporary privatizations of public land and natural resources, pan outward to centuries of violent global colonization of Indigenous lands and peoples, then draw a comparison between the proprietary management of natural resources and cultural artifacts, particularly in a digitally networked era. As historian Peter Linebaugh notes, however, “From the quaint village commons to the cosmic commons of the electromagnetic spectrum, from the medieval subsistence economy to the general intellect, no term has been simultaneously so ignored and so contentious” (303). The commons are not a substance or place but a live aggregate and practice, or “evolving models of self-provisioning and stewardship that combine the economic and the social, the collective and the personal” (Bollier 4–5). The life of the commons, the “aggregate and practice,” is irreducible in its complexity; rather than a simple ideal, it comprises conflicts and alliances, compromises and persistence, joy and suffering, exclusions and inclusions.

The stewardship of the commons is what Garett Hardin famously characterized as a tragedy. Using the example of an over-grazed pasture, he concludes that “Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush. … Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all” (1244). And although Hardin’s 1968 essay has been widely, thoroughly, and convincingly critiqued by scholars, in public discourse “the rhetorical logic in which tragedy is commonsense remains ascendant,” as Allison Rowland writes in her essay (; see also Albernaz). In Hardin’s prognosis, the commons is destined for exploitation, a defenseless victim of human selfishness. Worth noting is that, as evidenced by his xenophobic protectionism regarding California immigration, Hardin may not have understood the potential and the limits of the commons as do the authors in this special issue. He may have assumed erroneously, as Carol Rose notes in her 1986 gambit for the “comedy” of the commons, that commoners see their worlds as “a mass of passive ‘things’ awaiting reduction to private property through the rule of capture” (721). Given that this is hardly the case, but that Hardin’s colonialist declaration reflects past and present enclosures, Rose stages the commons’ comedy as a “story with a happy outcome” (723), specifically “socialization and the inculcation of habits of considering others” (776). The consideration of others, the built environments of social affinities, and the gathering of commoners as “not quite a community” (Brock 81) may be possible only in the necessary coexistence of comedy and tragedy.

From a critical vantage point, the commons are the productive habits of the multitude, “an open set of social singularities that are autonomous and equal, capable together, by articulating their actions on parallel paths in a horizontal network, of transforming society” (Hardt and Negri 111).¹ Commoners, in other words, may be understood as a multitude of singularities with common agencies toward transformative ends. Their actions against the pressures of figurative and literal violence constitute horizontally coordinated (as opposed to hierarchical or institutionally sanctioned) resistant survival for the multitude’s “associative life” (Virno 21). This is the life of, among others, the “undercommons.” Those of the undercommons, as Stefano Harney and Fred Moten write, are “anti-politically romantic about actually existing social life. We aren’t responsible for politics. We are the general antagonism to politics looming outside every attempt to politicise, every imposition of self-governance, every sovereign decision and its degraded miniature, every emergent state and home sweet home” (20). Such antagonism may, although Harney and Moten’s undercommons is a theory of Blackness and “study” in Black thought specifically (see also Halberstam 11), in part be practicable by others on the “outside” and intelligible through certain rhetorical habits and traces. Thus, the rhetorical habits and traces left for scholars of the (under)commons to discover may provide astounding information about emergence, resistance, survival, and subversion (Berlant; Lorey; Muñoz; and Squires).

In rhetorical studies, that which is common has often been concretized in terms such as commonsense and commonplace. Both have an Aristotelian and therein recuperative heritage, redeeming the merit and significance of popular opinion and belief. Commonsense as a contested ideal, then, extends through modernity via Voltaire and various iterations of contemporary antiintellectualism, including the particularly American versions of conservativism and/as populism (Hofstadter; Rosenfeld). Likewise and relatedly, commonplaces, common places, or topics (or topoi) are the fertile stuff of meaning-making. In doxastic patterns, rhetorical innovation happens with(in) common assumptions and socially established truths.² Commonplaces are the living epistemes of the commons, the commoners’ resources, or “the rhetorical opportunities of the cultural commons” (Hartelius 18). But of course, the questions arise: To whom and what is commonsense common? Who is uncommon? To what places of invention do the uncommon ones turn to create discourse and culture? If the social generalities of commonsense and common knowledge imply “something passive, already given in society,” who is it given to and to whom is it denied? (Hardt and Negri 120).

This special issue is designed to illustrate the critical value and generative potential for rhetoricians of the concept of the commons. This issue explores what the history, theory, and practice of the commons might do for the history, theory, and practice of rhetoric. Several of the essays demonstrate concretely how the commons might be found and studied in its rhetorics. These essays point our eyes to lives and habits that we may not have fully seen as a discipline or as individual scholars. Others theorize more programmatically how insights about the commons might allow rhetoricians to rethink and reevaluate some of our most familiar terms—persuasion, archive, advocacy, public, audience, even humanity—and then engage actively in commoning. The essays that move toward theory do so, as readers will soon discover, in performative suspension of the constraints of time and place, experimenting creatively with what might become, beyond what is and has been. The ambition of the authors in this special issue is that the commons conceptually and practically might serve the ends of ethical scholarship. Some might even be professorial “scyborgs,” “decolonial rider[s] in the circuitry of colonizing machines” (la paperson xxv). With la paperson’s encouragement, the seizing within rhetorical studies of “structure’s agency in a nonstandard deviation” sounds like “fun” (xiv). Quite seriously, we harken to Uncertain Commons’s call to “embrace ways of living in common” and “produce futures while refusing the foreclosure of potentialities” (13, emphasis added). In doing so, we highlight that potential looks different to different members of the commons, and the foreclosure thereof can be at once unintentional and damaging; that living in common happens in more and less visible or institutionalized spaces; that in these spaces, traumas linger; and that restitution, justice, and healing are the commons’ imperative—to be realized or continually foreclosed, again.

The Interior Exterior, the Immaterial Materials, and the Future Pasts

As the wording of the subtitle indicates, and as readers will note in the essays, commons studies embrace opportunities for signification to be other than its grammar. They seek ways of writing otherways, not because wordplay is nifty or because rhetoricians like to neologize, although it is and we do, but because the commons need language that exceeds and avoids the structural authorities that impose discipline. This was true in the historical enclosures, where primeval myths and traditions befuddled the modern feudal aristocracy, and remains true as the contributors to this issue imagine what might become possible in the future. If common life can be otherwise—and indeed rhetoric itself may be the prospect that language and the world inextricably could always be otherwise—the “otherwiseness” might be the discovery or creation of new language: whispering into the nooks and crying loudly over the din of the status quo. Stacey Sowards’s essay does this by rejecting the “explanatory commas” that muffle the brown commons’ Spanish. Catherine Knight Steele and Alisa Hardy find both joyful whispers and persistent shouts on the corner, the social architecture of Black liberation spaces. Allison Rowland takes the journey into the deep, visceral commons of the human microbiome. Matthew Houdek, in the company of shackled folx rendered strange by Platonic legacy, takes it into a cavern and a speculative slipstream. Ekaterina V. Haskins goes to the contents and absences of the archives of Soviet terror to find there precarious commoning. Jonathan S. Carter and Misti Yang discern an activist “otherwiseness” in Sophie Zhang’s and others’ resistance to social media’s usurpation of the general intellect. Matthew W. Bost and Joshua S. Hanan offer an “otherwise” approach to intimacy, wresting it definitionally from bourgeois privatization. And for Diane Marie Keeling, Ariel E. Seay-Howard, and Bethany O’Shea, thinking otherwise involves the unsettling of soil, specifically the literal and figurative grounds of torment and violence perpetrated by white supremacy. In what follows, the three themes of interior exterior, immaterial materials, and future pasts will be familiar to Rhetoric Society Quarterly readers as recurring concerns for rhetorical scholars. The variations on them introduced here indicate new directions for research, teaching, and advocacy. In the paragraphs below, my intent is simply to convey something of the thrill of these variations.

The Interior Exterior

Confounding the binary of what is outside the human body and inside its guts, Allison Rowland aligns the rhetorical enclosure of individual health with late capitalism’s enclosure of the microbiome and its nonhuman microorganisms. Noting that “Consumers of the popular science around the microbiome are titillated by the notion that we aren’t who we think we are, that there may be uncharted depths within us,” she turns attention to the instability and uncertainty of interiority and exteriority (; emphasis in original). With a focus on the visceral, she moves the ambit of private health interests—the logic that what happens in your interior is yours to possess—to the side, advocating instead for a multispecies commons that resists capitalist pathologisms and impulses to own all lifeforms. This “for-the-people undercommons viscerally committed to human-microbial coflourishing” () is necessarily opposed to the inside/outside binary that has made the commons distinguishable from other sociopolitical arrangements, and have placed health in the purview of individuated, for-profit, antibiotic medicine. In a way, the ubiquitous exteriority of all of our bio-interiorities is key not only to public health but to political ethics.

Similarly destabilizing the exterior and the interior of rhetorical publics, Matthew Bost and Joshua Hanan flip the perennial questions of how publics form, what they accomplish, and whether they are different theoretically or politically from the commons. They suggest, working through Lauren Berlant, that the vulnerable relations patterned by intimacy can form commons and possibly even reimagine the concept of publics. Like several of the contributors to the issue, Bost and Hanan note that capital accumulation has a vested interest when it comes to enclosing the relations of both publics and commons, and thereby enclosing their potential for subversive activity. They argue that “the conceptual frame of intimacy can be a site of productive conversation between publicity and the common, enriching rhetorical scholarship on both topics. For rhetorical scholars of publicity, a focus on intimacy offers a longer view on critiques of neoliberalism’s destruction of public life, producing an account of the racialized and gendered dispossession of noncapitalist intimacy that informs both liberal and neoliberal versions of publicity” ().³ To wit, as counterintimacy, human experiences (including those, e.g., of post-/pandemic suffering, as Bost and Hanan demonstrate) may be found not in the private interiors of domestic space but as the resource of making the commons.

Where Rowland highlights capitalism’s subsumption of microorganisms and their lives in the human interior, Jonathan S. Carter and Misti Yang consider the potential role and impact of the insider activist, resisting through “rhetorical sabotage” capitalism’s enclosure of the general intellect. Following recent scholarly attempts to redefine Luddites not simply as opposed to technology but in favor of its ethical applications, Carter and Yang argue that the disruption of colonizing technologies, serving global capitalism under the guise of neutrality, might enhance the general intellect. This, they suggest, might shift the parasitism of digital networks, for example in social media, from the economic interests of the corporate few to the many, the commons. With the idea of intranetwork sabotage, Carter and Yang analyze the work of former Facebook employee Sophie Zhang, who publicized information about the platform’s corruption of civic discourse. They recognize Zhang’s impact and significance, but more so turn attention to the technocolonial constitution of the not-commons. They redeem a Luddite ethic for technical commons by emphasizing first how networks that pose as commons materialize collective knowledge (when in reality the collective is “fake”), and then gatekeep it, and second, how the not-commons might be subverted. Questioning the widely unquestioned assumption that enclosure is bad, they conclude that “because neo-Luddism calls for the evaluation of technology as always influencing the configuration of the general intellect (no matter how free flowing), it offers an important force to counteract the focus on enclosure in our understanding of technology and the general intellect” ().

Immaterial Materials

Stacey K. Sowards’s exploration of the installations of Columbian and Chilean artists provides access to neplantla states of conocimientos/knowledges that, as rhetoric, are irreducibly material and immaterial. She argues that the creation of space for refuge and disruption is a material strategy for literally making the commons. This strategy is, not surprisingly, complicated, and accomplished at least partially by artists who abide contradictions, and thus facilitate the brown “undercommons.” The artworks that Sowards analyzes make tangible the experiences of precarity, loss, fear, and endurance. And although these are in some sense immaterial and universal, Sowards’s approach to them insists on the historical particularities of the Americas. With Bogotá artist Antonio Caro, Cali artist Oscar Muñoz, Mapuche artist Bernardo Oyarzún, and Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña, she connects the objects of ordinary life and fragmented identities not only to meaning and meaning-making but to the potential for good. The art, its rhetorical impact in political discourses, and the bodies to which it is traceable are material and yet also more than the sculptures and photographs on display.

Ekaterina Haskins likewise seeks possibilities of meaning-making against violent disruptions in her essay on the work of the Memorial Society, Russia’s oldest nongovernmental human rights organization. This network of activists, Haskins recounts, has assembled over the course of three decades an archival commons, or what she calls “precarious cultural commoning,” of Soviet repression of its citizens. In this assemblage, the materiality of testimonies, letters, official records, and oral histories is contiguous with the immateriality of untold stories and disappeared victims. So much has been gathered and so much is absent. Furthermore, the digitalization itself and the idea of an open-access resource reflect a commitment to, or some sense of faith in, the significance of preservation. Put in the form of a question, How might immateriality be preserved in the act of precarious “commoning” in the context of “differential distribution of vulnerability and dispossession” ()? Haskins thoughtfully illustrates how the digital enclosure of materials pertaining to experiences of historical trauma—the invention of the trauma as an accessible archive—might be a way for a commons to transform fragility into participatory action.

On the subject of historical trauma and material remembrance, Diane M. Keeling, Ariel Seay-Howard, and Bethany O’Shea offer an interdisciplinary analysis of the “transformation and disruption of common grounds through erosion [that] honors the lynching victim and coalition building while also holding the memory of white racial violence” (). They hope to “unsettl[e] what is already unsettling—a history of Black death in the United States—to create radically different futures in coalition” (). Their essay on the Equal Justice Initiative’s Soil Collection Community Remembrance Project reads “meaning and minerals” () as inextricable, particularly central to public memory of antiblack violence in the United States. In their reading, the notion of a geological undercommons exposes the incommensurability of the commons as theorized in liberal humanism. The jars of soil at the center of the remembrance project constitute a material resistance, rejecting both the presumption that rhetorical commoning of memory is inherently immaterial, and the continuous violence of the idea that injured bodies of antiblack violence are somehow lost to the immateriality of the past. Keeling, Seay-Howard, and O’Shea find that the Remembrance Project “tropes the soil’s capacity for life and growth, but also gestures to the bodily fluids that were brutally dropped into the soil and may still be present” (). Thus, it troubles the distinction between past and present, organic and inorganic life.

The Future Pasts

The relevance and demands of historical timeframes are clearly present in the two themes I note above. Still, the presence of the past and the future prospects of what remains recalcitrant merit their own comment. At stake, put simply, is whether the commons can or ought to try to transcend violent histories in the same ways that some publics have; and, whether the future of the commons can be made better than the present of those publics, and, if so, how and by whom? In the essays by Haskins and Keeling, Seay-Howard, and O’Shea, these questions point to the present and presence of a traumatic past, specifically its residues and traces. The Russian Memorial Society’s efforts, gathering fragments of a past that would otherwise be lost, and the Equal Justice Initiative’s projects, “jarring” in all senses of the term, are commoning movements; they move through the records of the past, against the establishment of repressive and violent governmentality (whether the Soviet regime or the regimes of white supremacy), and toward the possibility of a future wherein those records might, in a phrase, set the record straight.

Looking to the past, specifically the cultural, social, and political life lived on “the corner,” to assess and dream of the future of Black digitality, Catherine Knight Steele and Alisa Hardy analyze three online sites: BlackPlanet, which they approach as “the segregated corner”; Twitter, “the gentrified corner”; and TikTok, “the hustler’s corner.” In their analysis, the corner offers a way and space beyond the limiting (and misleading) binary choice that rhetorical scholarship has often made, conceptually pitting “public” and “commons” against one another. The corner, Knight Steele and Hardy note, is a site of interruption, “[…] home to a robust underground for-profit economy that can employ and exploit Black folks” (). “The corner at once belongs to those who occupy it, yet it can be taken away by force from the state and other actors with competing interests. Although highly surveilled by the state, the corner provides public space for debate and deliberation, allowing users to resist the overt and covert oppression against Black individuals and communities” (). Keeping the details of historical Black commons in clear view, Knight Steele and Hardy proceed through iterations of contemporary digital platforms, demonstrating how imaginaries by users and scholars alike tend to presume a dominant white perspective, overlaying hypothetical Black experience with a result that is skewed at best, oppressive at worst. With an eye to the future of Black (digital) life and its common goods, they explain how digital corners at once (at present, with the past) resist white supremacy and “spotlight[t] the brutal realities of gentrification, commodification, and theft,” while not “turn[ing] away from the duality of personal profit and collective utility” ().

Creatively troubling the simple chronology of past, present, and future, Matthew Houdek’s essay goes space-time traveling through a rhetorical slipstream of colliding and colluding genres, temporalities, and cultures. He departs from Plato’s cave and its “strange prisoners” with a counterallegory, asking the simple yet world-changing question: What if? What if the prisoners were not stripped by philosophy, history, or politics of their capacity to think and act, but instead “located dissident languages, forgotten histories, modes of sociality, and relational ontologies, fugitive lines of flight and playful strategies for ditching work and stealing time, subversive ways of finding value, pleasure, and joy in their mutual dispossession” (). From the suppositional launchpad of “what if,” Houdek travels in the slipstream from the transatlantic slave trade, Caribbean revolutions, African uprisings, and the sixteenth-century European “witch hunts” to borderland femicides, misogynist “pedagogies of cruelty,” and transphobic legislation (). As the essay ends—and it is exciting to see how, rather than concluding, Houdek keeps moving off the page toward a “New Beginning” with a cohort of scholars and activists whom he carefully names—the words it has offered point toward a future (); because any words like “better,” “other,” or even “different” imply profoundly something other than what is now.

Rhetorical Commoning, Un(der)Common Rhetorics, and So On

The insights offered by the contributors to this issue, to state the rather evident, reflect common practices among rhetorical scholars. Thinking in common during the development of our claims, questions, and uncertainties, we find ourselves both optimistic and worried about the future, proud of our work but perhaps ashamed of our complicity in various forms of institutionalized exploitation, eagerly capable of counternormative imagination, and yet constrained by present realities.

At this moment, I propose caution of the rhetorical perils that lurk around the topics of this special issue. To name one example, I encourage readers to note the sentimental tendency of commons language, specifically the mythologizing that blurs difference in human experience and agency. Such sentimentalism creeps closer when we talk about how humans, perhaps citizens of a nation-state, have common interests; it tends not to creep closer when we talk about the reality that what we humans have in common might be that we are the scenes (rather than the agents) of the lives of nonhuman beings and the structured products of a long modernity. To name another example of what should be considered skeptically, one of the definitive tropes in theories of commons is the difference between rivalrous and nonrivalrous resources. This distinction is at best problematic as it obscures the motives of those who control resources. An apple, for example, is finite in the sense that, if I eat it, no one else can. Nonrivalrous resources, according to some theories of the commons, are not like the apple but are abundant and freely available to all. Referring to the commons’ “knowledges, languages, codes, information, affects” (viii), Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri write, “When I share an idea or image with you, my capacity to think with it is not lessened; on the contrary, our exchange of ideas and images increases my capacities” (283–84). And while the ideal of exchange is as noble now as ever, the ethics of generosity often espoused by those who would theorize the commons in terms of rivalrous and nonrivalrous affect a naivete about human cravenness that thwarts serious discussions. The naivete ignores the reality that sometimes humans restrict access to a resource not because it is rivalrous, but because limiting others’ ability to meet their needs is a way to hurt them. By contrast, the approaches that several of the contributors to this issue take speak directly to the (under)commons' resistance, persistence, and transcendence in the realities of material and ideological enclosures.

The essays in this issue propose that readers of Rhetoric Society Quarterly take a scholarly and political risk. What sort of risk? If the commons are a mess—indeterminate, perpetually under construction, injured but subversive—then betting on or even writing about their potential may be foolish, which is to say risky. With this realization, then, here is the reason to pause. Perhaps as we have long understood it “risk capitulates to demands of the state and the corporation and accepted forms of governmentality, foreclosing certain political possibilities at the very moment of their emergence” (Uncertain Commons 20). “Radical uncertainty” is as discomfiting to the practices of scholarship as to policy making. And yet something entices in the paradoxical prospect that, against the overwhelming crises of the contemporary moment, invention of the previously unknown might be made possible through the common. As if by grace, the commons are here now as a conceptual and active survivor of The Individual, the autonomous author of rhetorical materials and political hierarchies. And perhaps, then, there is hope.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ For a concise and impassioned critique of Hardt and Negri, see Bartolovich.

² Beyond the primary sources extant from Aristotle, Cicero, Vico and others, the secondary literature on topoi, or commonplaces, is too extensive to cite. As an introduction and foundation, see Leff; Miller; Nelson; and Wallace.

³ As readers of Rhetoric Society Quarterly well know, rhetorical scholars have long had disciplinary interest in publics and counterpublics (Asen and Brouwer; Brouwer and Asen; Warner), and more recently enclaves, satellites, commons, undercommons, and so on (Chávez; Squires). Some of this expansive work is intended to draw differential boundaries and functional distinctions; this is not our primary goal in this issue. The presumption of this special issue is that the commons might serve as a useful and instructive complement to other terms of art, rather than as a counterpoint or simple replacement.