Performing Counter-Hegemonic Common(s) Senses: Rearticulating Democracy, Community and Forests in Puerto Rico

ABSTRACT

Political ecologists have developed scathing analyses of capitalism’s tendency for enclosure and dispossession of the commons. In this context commons are analyzed as a force to resist neo-liberalism, a main site of conflict over dispossession, and a source of alternatives to capitalism. In this paper we elaborate a view of the commons as the material and symbolic terrain where performative re-articulation of common(s) senses can potentially enact counter-hegemonic socio-ecological configurations. Expressly drawing on the concepts of hegemony, “common-senses” (inspired by Antonio Gramsci) and “performativity” (developed by Judith Butler), we argue that counter-hegemony is performed through everyday practices that rearticulate existing common senses about commons. Commoning is a set of processes/relations enacted to challenge capitalist hegemony and build more just/sustainable societies insofar as it transforms and rearranges common senses in/through praxis. The paper draws on the experience of an anti-mining movement of Casa Pueblo in Puerto Rico, which for the last 35+ years has been developing a project self-described as autogestion. The discussion pays special attention to Casa Pueblo’s praxis and discourses to investigate how they rearticulate common senses with regard to nature, community and democracy, as well as their implications for counter-hegemonic politics.

KEYWORDS:

• Commons
• commoning
• political ecology
• counter-hegemony
• common senses
• performativity
• Casa Pueblo

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Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank two anonymous reviewers and CNS editor Salvatore Engel-di-Mauro for their extremely helpful critical comments, as well as all of the members of the European Network of Political Ecology (ENTITLE) collective who contributed to and inspired us in writing this paper in different but crucial ways. They also thank Adi Forkasiewicz from CNS for his very careful copy-editing.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Some could consider a dialogue between Gramsci and Butler untenable, yet we avow the search in the blurred space of these approaches. There is an increasing number of works comparing Gramsci and Foucault (a main inspiration for Butler) which are relevant for this proposal (see, e.g. Kreps 2015; Sevilla-Buitrago 2017).

2 See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGy15DoEHFQ.

3 Puerto Rico was a colony of Spain for 400 years and a US colony since 1898.

4 Non-English sources translated by the authors unless otherwise stated.

5 http://casapueblo.org/index.php/proyectos/escuela-de-musica-icbc/.

6 See http://www.bosquesmodelo.net.

7 http://bosqueescuela.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=113&Itemid=292. Emphasis added.

Additional information

Funding

The work on this article was made possible with generous funding for all three authors from the European Network of Political Ecology (ENTITLE) project, financed by the Marie Curie Initial Training Network Programme, Seventh Framework Programme [grant no. PITN-GA-2011-289374-ENTITLE]; and additional funding for I. Velicu from the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) Post-Doctoral Grants in the Centre for Social Studies at University of Coimbra [grant no. SFRH-BPD-94680-2013].