The Bodies of the Commons: Towards a Relational Embodied Ethics of the Commons
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ORIGINAL PAPER
The Bodies of the Commons: Towards a Relational Embodied Ethics of the Commons Emmanouela Mandalaki1 · Marianna Fotaki2 Received: 17 December 2018 / Accepted: 16 July 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract This article extends current theorizations of the ethics of the commons by drawing on feminist thought to propose a relational embodied ethics of the commons. Departing from abstract ethical principles, the proposed ethical theory reconsiders commoning as a process emerging through social actors’ embodied interactions, resulting in the development of an ethics that accounts for their shared corporeal concerns. Such theorizing allows for inclusive alternative forms of organizing, while offering the ethical and political possibility of countering forms of economic competition and addressing the issues of viability that have long bedeviled commoning practices. This, we suggest, is achieved in the context of social organizing processes whereby social actors are able to reproduce their resource systems and communities based on recognition of their actual corporeal vulnerabilities, which drives reciprocity and embodied relationality with the other. Keywords Ethics of the commons · Vulnerability · Reciprocity · Embodied relationality · Feminist embodied ethics We don’t even know what the body can do Spinoza (1677)
Introduction The idea of the commons as material resources (Ostrom 1998, 1999), and the social process of ‘commoning’ have recently attracted researchers’ and commentators’ attention (Fournier 2013; De Angelis 2007; Besson 2017; Meyer and Hudon 2018; Lopes and Tonkinwise 2019). In a global economy favoring economic rationalism and individual interests, these are seen as alternatives to profit-based appropriation of common resources (Nonini 2006; De Angelis 2007). Critical organizational accounts present commoning in terms
* Emmanouela Mandalaki [email protected]; emmanouela.mandalaki@neoma‑bs.fr Marianna Fotaki [email protected] 1
NEOMA Business School – Reims Campus, 59 rue Pierre Taittinger, BP 302, 51061 Reims Cedex, France
Warwick Business School, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK
2
of reciprocal and relational processes of social organizing (Linebaugh 2007; Pedersen 2010; De Angelis and Harvie 2013; Fournier 2013) to address such commoning problems. Specifically, Fournier’s (2013) typology of organizing in, for, and of the commons stresses communities’ collective efforts to allocate, use, and reproduce resources fairly, enabling forms of solidarity economy as alternatives to capitalistic accumulation (Federici 2004, 2019). More recently, researchers have also examined alternatives that emerged in the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis, for example in the empirical settings of reclaimed factories (Daskalaki and Kokkinidis 2017) and grassroots exchange networks in Greece (Daskalaki et al. 2018), to discuss how collectively performed values may lead to re-articulation of social relations and sustainable living in everyday practices. However, comm
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