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Theory, Culture & Society

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Thinking the Commons ! The Author(s) 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/0263276418757315

Butler: Boundedness journals.sagepub.com/home/tcs

and Vulnerability
Irina Velicu
University of Coimbra

Gustavo Garcı́a-López
University of Puerto Rico

Abstract
In this paper we propose an ‘undisciplinary’ meeting between Elinor Ostrom and
Judith Butler, with the intent to broaden the theory of the commons by discussing it
as a relational politics. We use Butler’s theory of power to problematize existing
visions of commons, shifting from Ostrom’s ‘bounded rationality’ to Butler’s concepts
of ‘bounded selves’ and mutual vulnerability. To be bounded – as opposed to autono-
mous being – implies being an (ambiguous) effect of socio-power relations and norms
that are often beyond control. Thus, to be a collective of bounded selves implies
being mutually vulnerable in power relations which are enabling, albeit injurious.
A politics of commoning is not a mere technical management of resources
(in space) but a struggle to perform common livable relations (in time). We argue
that the multiple exposures which produce us are also the conditions of possibility
for more just and equalitarian ‘re-commoning’ of democracies around the world.

Keywords
boundedness, commons, commoning, power, subjectivities, vulnerability

Introduction: Constructing and Deconstructing

the Commons
The commons has become one of the keywords for transformative pol-
itics in our times (Caffentzis and Federici, 2014; Chatterton et al., 2013),
‘central to the material struggles and imaginaries of collective well-being’
(Amin and Powell, 2016: 1). The Nobel Prize in Economics given in
2009 to Elinor Ostrom for her work on this topic (see Ostrom, 1990;

Corresponding author: Irina Velicu. Email: irinavelicu@hotmail.com

Extra material: http://theoryculturesociety.org/
2 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

Poteete et al., 2010), and the increasing use of the concept by new social
movements and critical scholars, suggest its relevance for both political
theory and practice. Different theoretical perspectives coincide in point-
ing to two key characteristics of commons: they represent an alternative
to state and market-led solutions to common problems such as environ-
mental degradation and provision of health, education, and food; and
they are based on self-organized cooperation (or solidarity). For
Ostromian scholars, the so-called ‘tragedy’ of the commons – where
commons become overused to the point of collapse – lies in the absence
of relations of trust and reciprocity, collective action (cooperation) and
rules (institutions). By contrast, critical scholars insist that the underlying
problem is not lack of institutions but commons enclosures and individu-
alist subjectivities generated by capitalism: they propose to focus on the
social practices engaged in re-claiming and sustaining the collective re-
production of commons, i.e. commoning (Bollier and Helfrich, 2014;
Caffentzis and Federici, 2014; Chatterton et al., 2013; De Angelis,
2013; Linebaugh, 2009). They further argue that commons should not
be just ‘dykes against neoliberalism’ (Caffentzis and Federici, 2014), but a
process to create a common(s) society with ‘qualitatively different social
relations’ towards more equalitarian and ecological re/production
(Federici, in Open!, 2014; also Amin and Powell, 2016; Antonio, 2013;
Dawney, 2013; Gibson-Graham, 2006; MacKenzie, 2010).
The commons has figured prominently in recent years in Theory,
Culture & Society. Terranova (2015) proposes that capitalism has been
producing a new commons’ ‘tragedy’ leading to a process of self-destruc-
tion. Drawing on Hardt and Negri (2012), Vercellone (2015) proposes
that commons cannot be mere marginal spaces between markets and
state, and argues for the ‘common’ as a mode of social production
‘based on the democratic reappropriation of the welfare state and the
re-socialization of money’ (Vercellone, 2015: 9). Similarly, Parr (2015: 77)
sees the commons as ‘modes of sociality that offer alternatives to the
production and realization of surplus value’, while Smart (2011: 132)
argues that they are a challenge to a world that ‘routinely places empha-
sis on the immediate and/or short term, on individual self-interest
and material well-being, to the detriment of medium and longer-term
communal and/or collective interests’.
As we can see, there are great expectations from commons, common-
ing and commoners. This is a welcome gesture related to how much
better ‘another world’ could be by re-creating ‘alternatives’. However,
we depart from the premise that in these arguments there is a tendency to
develop dualist assumptions about an altruistic human essence sup-
pressed by the ‘Empire’ (Pasquinelli, 2008). Some scholars caution
against idealizing or homogenizing the commons (De Angelis, 2013),
obscuring the messiness and skirting in ‘the reproduction of everyday
life’ (Federici, 2011: 4; Linebaugh, 2008: 19; Amin and Powell, 2016:
Velicu and Garcı́a-López 3

7). We build on these debates to broaden the theory of commons by

thinking about commoning as a relational politics that engages with
humans’ boundedness and mutual vulnerability as well as with the per-
formativity of such subjectivities: since subjects are performative – i.e.
they are constituted in action/doing – their constitution itself is a set of
relations. From this perspective, sustaining the earth’s commons is not a
mere technical management of resources (in space) but a struggle to
perform common livable relations (in time). In the following section,
we show that commons’ scholars – both institutionalists and critical –
tend to instrumentalize the commons as ‘pro- or against’ capital power
relations: instead, we draw on the work of Butler to analyze the impli-
cations of subject production as part of power relations, a crucial starting
point for politicizing the debate on the commons.
In the third section, we show how commoners engage in commoning
as non-autonomous (bounded) subjects, which does not imply a denial of
individual agency: individuals are effects of power (i.e. subjects), (re)pro-
ducing these power relations that both sustain and limit them. In other
words, instead of being ‘blinded’ by a ‘bounded-rationality’, subjects
(commoners) also suffer from a ‘relational opacity’, as ‘bounded
selves’. In the fourth section we discuss how boundedness of selves
makes humans not only mutually constitutive but also mutually vulner-
able. We argue that more than a fragility to be mitigated, vulnerability
could be conceived as a condition of power and agency to be performed:
who we are is in the ‘doing’ but any doing usually implies some forms of
relation and a vulnerability we can never fully avoid. Yet while the con-
cept of performativity has been widely discussed (for instance in TCS
16(2), introduced by Bell, 1999; also Bell, 2010, 2012; Rothenberg, 2006),
there is still little work discussing its implications for emerging discus-
sions on commoning (Garcı́a-López et al., 2017). In the last section, we
will clarify the political relevance of performing our-selves in relations of
commoning as ‘bounded’ and mutually vulnerable.

From Commons to Commoning

The mainstream theory of the commons, as developed by Elinor Ostrom
and others, sought to document and explain the possibilities of cooper-
ation (or ‘collective action’) between individuals to address common
problems. Ostrom (1990) directly challenged the traditional ‘rational
egoist’ model in neoclassical economics – adopted by Garret Hardin in
his famed ‘tragedy of the commons’ fable – in which individuals were not
expected to cooperate when facing a common problem. Drawing on
anthropology and economics, she argued that individuals do indeed
cooperate often to solve common problems, and identified institutions
(rules) regulating human behavior in collective organizations.
She maintained that without collective action humans could not sustain
4 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

common resources, which are always vulnerable to enclosure, overuse,

and social dilemmas.
Ostrom proposes that individuals cooperate by adopting norms of
‘trust and reciprocity’ when they can communicate through repeated
interactions and observe others’ behavior (Ostrom, 2009: 10; also
Ostrom and Walker, 1994). In her model, autonomous individuals with
relatively stable preferences (i.e. interests) and ‘bounded’ rationality1 –
limited information and ‘processing’ capabilities – decide whether to
cooperate through cost-benefit calculations striving to maximize their
personal ‘welfare’. This welfare could include social norms and the ‘wel-
fare’ of others, i.e. altruism. Ostrom believes that the vast majority of
individuals are ‘conditional cooperators’: they cooperate as a ‘test’ to see
the outcomes; if cooperation is not reciprocated, or the results are not
beneficial, then they can simply ‘exit’ the relationship (Ostrom and
Walker, 2003; Ostrom, 2009). Over time, people gain more trust
of each other and cooperate more. However, the norms and acts of
reciprocity are not enough to sustain cooperation, because one act of
non-cooperation could lead to a downward cycle of ‘retribution’.
Therefore, according to Ostrom, there need to be rules that establish
incentives for cooperation as well as clear penalties for those who
‘skirt’ their ‘duty’ to reciprocate or to use a common resource according
to the existing norms (Ostrom, 2009: 25; Saunders, 2014). This would
provide stability of expectations, reducing uncertainty and vulnerability.
Further, for Ostrom, setting clear ‘boundaries’ of the group’s member-
ship to maintain smaller sizes and homogeneous identities would increase
cooperation, since people who share certain characteristics tend to
‘know’ and trust each other more (Poteete et al., 2010). As she argued,
collective actions emerge in groups of people who ‘share a past, and
expect to share a future’ (Ostrom, 1990: 88).
Ostrom made important contributions that serve as points of depart-
ure for a critical discussion on commons. First, she recognized an inher-
ent (material) inter-dependence amongst commoners, in a double sense:
that to achieve many of our everyday needs we need others, and that
people do internalize socialized ‘norms’ and rules of behavior – including
concerns for others – into their behavior (Ostrom, 2009). Second, she
stressed the broad diversity of human behavior and preferences, pointing
to the substantial variety of observed actions which challenged predic-
tions based on a purely egoistic model of the individual (Ostrom, 2009).
This opens the door to critical scholars’ calls for recognizing that
‘rational choice’ behavior is real but contingent, as there are other dimen-
sions of human subjectivity (cf. Wynne, 2010). Third, Ostrom’s emphasis
that humans are bounded in their knowledge and fallible can be seen as
an invitation to be humble about commoners’ limitations and capabilities
and to remain open to continuous processes of deliberative learning and
Velicu and Garcı́a-López 5

experimentation; indeed, in her later years she stressed that there was no
‘panacea’ to solve commons problems.
Nevertheless, Ostrom’s theory has been questioned for her rational-
choice model, which still retains the central assumptions of individuality/
autonomy, rational calculation, and utility maximization. Critical com-
mons scholars point out that face-to-face communication is inevitably
embedded in local-global political economies and their (micro)-power
relations. Instead of acting to maximize utility or to comply with rules,
people also make decisions based on their relations of subordination to
others (Saunders, 2014). In a context of power inequalities, we cannot
assume that more (face-to-face) communication necessarily leads to
cooperation, as proposed by Ostrom; indeed, it may rather contribute
to increasing aggression (Pasquinelli, 2008, citing Virlo). Furthermore,
the institutional theory’s emphasis on sameness, cooperation, and con-
sensus, while often beneficial for commons’ preservation and self-
organization, also reproduces existing power relations and patterns of
exclusion, creating enclaves of (homogeneous) ‘community’, which
become new sites of enclosure and come with potential violence in nar-
cissistic, nationalistic, patriarchal, or racist overtones (Caffentzis and
Federici, 2014; Creed, 2006; Stavrides, 2015).
Critical scholars also emphasize the little attention paid by institution-
alists to how subjectivities are formed in commoning, e.g. how power
relations, structural conditions and past experiences influence people’s
perception of (and relation to) themselves and others. Institutionalists
take the actors and interests ‘as already present . . . as existing fully
formed’ (Agrawal, 2005: 211). A growing body of critical scholarship
shows that behaviors are not based on conscious calculation but on
relatively unconscious ‘habitus’ (see Collet, 2009), conditioned by gov-
ernment/disciplinary practices which produce/form the political subjects
(e.g. Agrawal, 2005; Li, 2007; McNay, 2009). This work tends to stress
that neoliberal capitalism privileges selfish individualism and enclosures
of commons relations: ‘individualizing social actors in their separate
automobiles and in front of separate video screens’ (Hardt and Negri,
2000, cited in Read, 2011: 120) and imparting ‘the habits of diligence,
responsibility and the careful weighing of costs and benefits that charac-
terize in liberal thinking the ideal autonomous subject of rights’ (Li, 2007:
20). Therefore, as unorthodox economists have argued, instead of taking
individuals’ preferences as assumed and stable, we should analyze where
they come from, and ‘how people interpret their situation’ to define their
goals (Hodgson, 2012: 95).
Recently, critical scholars have focused on commoning to describe an
opposite instrumentalization of the commons, based on humans who
transcend self-interest to produce a life ‘in common’. They see commons
not as resources/things but as a relational process with potentially
‘far-reaching political implications in terms of resisting neoliberal
6 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

forms of life and experience’ and the building of a convivial, communal

way of life (Dawney, 2013: 33). The commons are understood as a ‘qual-
ity of relations, a principle of cooperation and of responsibility to each
other and to the earth, the forests, the seas, the animals’ (Federici, 2012:
145), a ‘vibrant counter-culture of non-utilitarian living and associating’
(Amin and Powell, 2016: 2), which provides equality in participation and
cultivates ‘an active, civic-minded citizenry appreciative of their ties to
others’ (Antonio, 2013: 20).
At the same time, critical scholars have stressed the need to consider
the plurality, contradictions and fluid identities, ways of being, interests,
which are always evolving in commoning processes (Blomley, 2016;
Creed, 2006; Linebaugh, 2008; McDonald, 2002; Noterman, 2015;
Papadopolous, 2012; Stavrides, 2015), including those of strangers with
whom commoning often happens in urban contexts (e.g. Huron, 2015).
These approaches propose that the task is to challenge and transform
existing social boundaries/norms and allow for fluid, ‘liminal’ boundaries
in which communities and their commons are a heterogeneous multipli-
city ‘always in the making’ (Stavrides, 2015: 14). Lastly, some studies
have attended to the processes of (re)subjectivation that can take place in
commoning, partly drawing on Butler’s theory. Gibson-Graham (2006:
25) suggests that commoning against enclosures creates moments of
‘interruption in ritualized practices’ of subjection, challenges the domin-
ant ‘capitalocentric imaginary’, and activates ‘new senses of self’.
Through daily commoning practices such as taking care of degraded
forests (Garcı́a-López et al., 2017; Singh, 2013), fisheries (Nightingale,
2011), and community land trusts (Mackenzie, 2010), or struggles against
housing dispossession (cf. Garcı́a-Lamarca, 2015), citizens can transform
their individual and collective subjectivities, embracing a ‘being-in-
common’ to (re)produce and care for the commons.
In these various ways, commoning scholars have created an important
basis for attending to the relational politics of sustaining the commons by
engaging with the process of subject (trans)formation. However, we see a
potential threat in this literature to assume that commoning will neces-
sarily result in an ‘alternative’ commoner. This is related more generally
to the tendency of left scholars to assume a revolutionary subject – rather
than critically examine its production (Read, 2011; also Pasquinelli,
2008). The critique of the ‘egoistic’ capitalist subject ‘makes it appear
as if one could simply choose ‘‘individuality’’ or ‘‘collectivity’’’ (Read,
2011: 122). Here, we argue that the commoning scholarship would thus
benefit from a deeper theorization of the process of subject production in
all its performative complexities. We problematize the tendency to make
dualist distinctions between individualism and collective solidarity, and
neoliberal/capitalist and anti-capitalist commons (e.g. Caffentzis, 2009;
Caffentzis and Federici, 2014; De Angelis, 2013), or corrupted
versus non-corrupted commons (Hardt and Negri, 2009; see also
Velicu and Garcı́a-López 7

Amin and Powell, 2016: 8). As Pasquinelli (2008: 32) argues, ‘only an
acknowledgement of the dark side of the multitude [i.e. the commoners]
can establish a true ‘‘radicalism’’’. We contribute to these debates using
Butler’s theory of subjection which, we argue, suggests that resisting
capital through commoning is not the same as resisting the constitution
of our subjectivity by capital (Butler, 1997). From this perspective, com-
moning may be analyzed as an ongoing political struggle to perform the
‘within/against’ of power and agency – a relational constitution of our
collective selves – which faces us with the opacity (boundedness) of selves
rather than a fully-formed alternative/communal subjectivity (Butler and
Athanasiou, 2013: 100). More than bounded rationality, we also invite
reflection on boundedness of selves; more than social dispossession, we
also reflect on self-dispossession and mutual vulnerability. We detail
these aspects and their political relevance for commoning in the next
three sections.

From Bounded Rationality to Bounded Selves: A Butlerian

Take on Commons
The ‘I’ has no story of its own that is not also the story of a relation
– or set of relations – to a set of norms. [. . .] always to some
extent dispossessed by the social conditions of its emergence.
(Butler, 2005: 8)

We are not even conscious of all of the rules, norms, and strategies
we follow [. . .] the option of optimal design is not available to mere
mortals. (Ostrom, 2005: 5, 31)

Ostrom and Butler share the concern for the limitations we face in the
process of acting collectively. Counter-posing the two quotes above indi-
cates an important difference: in a positivist fashion, Ostrom sees the
limits at the site of individuals’ knowledge to meet specific goals collect-
ively. She recognized the unknown surfaces of our unconscious, but her
concern was how we could still be (boundedly) rational within those
confines. She was not interested in exploring the ethical-political impli-
cations of that ‘opaque’ side of the psyche. By contrast, Butler’s philoso-
phy is centrally concerned with the ‘psychic life’ of power, and sees
human limits at the site of subject production itself: it is not only know-
ledge about the outside world that is limited but also about our own ‘self’
as a relational product. What gives ‘natural’ appearance to our different
forms of identity and rationality (e.g. the selfish egoist, the ‘rule-breaker’
or the solidary commoner) is in fact a naturalized politics which denies
historicity (Butler, 2005, Bell, 2010; Foucault, 2003). Butler emphasizes
that being a ‘subject’ does not simply mean being subjugated by power
but also formed/sustained by it. This is the ‘double valence’ of power,
8 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

subjection and agency: ‘a power exerted on a subject . . . is nevertheless a

power assumed by the subject (Butler, 1997: 11, emphasis added). Indeed,
even leaders or ‘strategists’ (rulers, ‘the bourgeoisie’) had to go through a
process of formation, self-moralization and self-discipline (Foucault,
1978).
Butler problematizes teleological positions which talk about the
increased ‘utility’ of cooperation: her interest is to show the indetermin-
acy of any model based on presuppositions/expectations about ends and
essences of human nature. A crucial question in Butler’s work is how to
think about subjection and how it can become ‘a site of alteration’, that
is, of transgression of existing norms (1997: 12–14): who is the ‘I’, and
how can the ‘I’ tell the ‘truth’ about who it is, when one sees the
‘operation of norms in the very constitution of myself as a subject’
(Butler, 2005: 9)? Butler thus argues for a ‘boundedness of selves’ as
political subjectivities: because we are socially (relationally, normatively)
produced, our ‘selves’ (identity, autonomy) are bounded by conditions of
livability which we do not fully choose or even grasp. Who ‘we’ are is a
social construct (an ego, identity(ies)) which helps us survive in a world
of complex relations, norms and political-economic structures. Contrary
to the mainstream commons’ model of autonomous rational individuals,
Butler stresses that the ‘ego’ is not some clear substance we came with
into this world but an ‘array of relations and processes, implicated in the
world of primary caregivers’ (Butler, 2005: 59). It is not that, like Ostrom
would say, we know what we want and the point is ‘how to get there’: our
‘bounded selves’ indicate inability to know ‘up to what point’ we can
know (our)selves and ‘where to go’. Even our childhood influences our
political subjectivities since ‘early and primary relations are not always
available to conscious knowledge’ (Butler, 2005: 20). The ego emerges
since infancy in interdependent vulnerability to those whose emotional
bonds produce it into adult subjection (Butler, 2004; also Bondi, 2005;
Gallagher, 2011; Holt, 2013). Accepting an emotional and physical inter-
dependency which ‘we never leave behind’ (Butler, 2004: 24) helps us
broaden our views on subjectivity (Butler, 2004; also Bondi, 2005). All
these Others mark us ‘throughout life as part of a not fully articulate
sensibility’ which becomes our way of being towards another (Butler and
Athanasiou, 2013: 96). We are ‘dispossessed’ (of things and ways of
feeling/being) by our relations in the exact process that helps us survive
and live as subjects with a social identity.
In that sense, our ability to ‘common’ is also shaped by how we deal
collectively with such constitutive relations in performing our-selves,
which are also contingent, emotional and rather opaque processes of
self-formation. Self-boundedness is also about not knowing ourselves
fully, given no pure and stable self to be ‘known out there’. With both
anguish and excitement, we embody our proximities or relations – often
unchosen – both within and ‘against’ ourselves. Even when making
Velicu and Garcı́a-López 9

claims to ‘own our body’ (as gender for instance), it is relationalities of

bodies that we are aiming at. Marked by complex power practices, our
bodies themselves are constantly becoming ‘battlefields that are never
simply our own’ (Butler and Athanasiou, 2013: 18–19). In these struggles,
we do not even own ourselves, we are indeed bounded, primarily self-
dispossessed in events of ‘multiple exposures [. . .] by norms, prohibitions,
self-policing guilt, and shame, but also by love and desire’ (Butler and
Athanasiou, 2013: 32).
Butler (2005) points out that all political ideologies (such as the
rational model) are ways to create some forms of predictable patterns
in order to solve the enigma of our ‘boundedness’. By virtue of offering
intelligibility (recognizability), they become dominant regimes of truth,
which simultaneously obfuscate alternative rationalities. The subject is
fragmented by the vacillation among various forms of rationality (e.g.
egoist-altruist), and therefore, we cannot fully understand the processes
of subject-formation without understanding how the ‘other’ rationalities
come to haunt the subject. Being addressed as a fixed subject, being
demanded to show a particular behavior, and being expected to perform
in a particular way (be it solidary or rational-egoist) disavows our lack of
immunity to power-relations which produce the terms of our recognition
in the first place (Butler, 1999). Butler’s political ethics is inspired by
Simone de Beauvoir’s (1976) ideas: juggling with the opacity of who
we are, as well as with the openness that comes with that. However,
prevailing politics is based on fearing subject ambivalence and freedom:
institutions are meant to mitigate exposure to various vulnerabilities
coming from lack of trust in collective action. This is mostly visible in
totalitarianism, precisely because in such regimes subject indeterminacy
and mobility are officially unacceptable. In other words, what prevails is
‘immunitary’ biopolitics where uncertainties or risks coming from ‘dan-
gerous’ others (from refugees to hurricanes) are met with prophylactic
enclosures and securitizations or distantiation, albeit uneven and unjust
(Brossat, 2003; Esposito, 2008, 2011; Swyngedouw and Ernstson,
forthcoming).

. . . the demand for self-identity or, more particularly, for complete

coherence . . . [creates] a certain ethical violence, which demands that
we manifest and maintain self-identity at all times and require that
others do the same. (Butler, 2005: 41–2)

A commoner-subjectivity is immersed in a variety of conscious and

unconscious forms of identification, subjection and relations which
have to be addressed more seriously as the contextual base of common-
ing, a form of human interdependency which makes us into ‘bounded-
selves’ vulnerable to other socio-political forms of deprivation (Butler
and Athanasiou, 2013). Ostrom argued that without collective action
10 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

we cannot sustain the commons, which are vulnerable to enclosure, over-

use and social dilemmas. For her the problem was a lack of knowledge,
trust and rules that incentivize cooperation and dissuade overuse.
Butler’s view on subjectivity developed in this section suggests that col-
lective action and commoning are also vulnerable to the same problems:
enclosure of our relations in spaces with clear boundaries or identities and
often in axioms of profitable ‘exchange’. Overuse as abusive/exploitative
relations that may be seen as a form of social ‘commons’. Social dilem-
mas as relational traumas at micro and macro-level. Our ‘commons’
world needs a politics ‘based on our shared and partial blindness
about ourselves’ (Butler, 2005: 41), on the limits of the ‘knowing’ subject
rather than accumulation of more knowledge. It demands a non-violent
politics which considers transformation and production of norms as open
(ontologically and epistemologically) to what is foreign, unknown, uncer-
tain, or unborn yet. As Butler (2012) writes in Precarious Life, we have to
loosen the self’s boundary which is a function of relations: no immuni-
tary prophylaxis may change the fact that we are fundamentally
sustained and limited by others in a situated-ness within ongoing rela-
tional power-politics – what we call our commons boundedness. This
also creates a mutual vulnerability, which we discuss next.

Our Common(s) Vulnerability

We are in our skins, given over, in each other’s hands, at each
other’s mercy. This is a situation we do not choose. It forms
the horizon of choice, and it grounds our responsibility. (Butler,
2005: 101)

The ‘tragedy’ narrative proposed by Hardin portrays the commons as

vulnerable, in need of being reclaimed and managed. Commons scholars
have emphasized that the tragedy is not inevitable and have sought for
ways to ‘avoid’ it by reducing/mitigating vulnerability. On the one hand,
the Ostromian tradition does not really question the tragedy in its essence
– rational individuals who, if not able to communicate, will egoistically
overuse resources. They see cooperative institutions as the ways to reduce
vulnerability. On the other hand, the critical commons scholars argue
that institutions are an end-of-pipe solution and seek to address the
structural problems that produce enclosures and vulnerability. For
them, the real tragedy is of enclosures and of displaced commoners,
and the solution is to resist and build commoning alternatives. As we
discussed, these ideas help us de-naturalize the ‘tragedy’ narrative as a
taken-for-granted vision of individuals; more so, they help us shed a dif-
ferent light on the issue of vulnerability. We use Butler’s ideas to further
these arguments.
Velicu and Garcı́a-López 11

Butler does meet Ostrom in the recognition of humans’ mutual

vulnerability. However, she would add ‘without precisely eradicating’
vulnerability (2013: 158). For Butler, vulnerability is not a pathology
of our shared humanity but an inevitable exposure to others,
‘a common physicality and risk’ (2005: 100). Bounded and vulnerable
is a human condition given by the many unchosen proximities that (re)-
make us throughout our lives, challenging expectations about self-suffi-
ciency or autonomous choice-making. As discussed previously, we are
‘dispossessed of ourselves’ (losing our sense of self, lost in ambitions,
passion or grief) as a result of our encounters with the others. During
our lives, from the start, we owe ourselves to others, we are affected by
others in often unpredictable ways. All power relations include the pos-
sibility of altruism/cooperation as well as harm/exploitation. We are
always already potentially hurt and loved, sustained and damaged in
all our relations. Furthermore, Butler invokes Arendt to point to the
‘unchosen character of earthly cohabitation’ (2013: 122), a vulnerability
which can only be ignored by those engaged in genocide (or ecocide).
Crucial for thinking our planetary commons and contrary to Ostrom’s
theory where individuals choose who to cooperate with, ‘we are obliged
to cohabit with others’ (Wark, 2016).
Being ‘dispossessed’ is usually described in critical scholarship as the
politically induced deprivation of lands, rights, livelihoods, in which
certain groups become differentially exposed to poverty, debt, or death.
Butler points to the relational character of such vulnerability: the
political practices that make some ‘sovereign’ selves, reproduce others
as vulnerable, precarious or ‘let to die’. Butler places her interest in vul-
nerability in the context of neoliberal policies which obfuscate responsi-
bility in order to promote an ‘invulnerable and irresponsive self-mastery’
(2013: 105) – a striving for immunity – and to explain failures in indi-
vidual terms, further making some lives ‘unlivable’ (see also Butler, 2015;
Harvey, 2006). Part of the neoliberal efforts to ‘mitigate’ vulnerability is
precisely the universalization of (collective) disempowerment as fear and
impotence in the face of dispossession. Independent individual positions
are ‘effectively built through a denial of one’s own vulnerability’ (Butler,
2015: 145), acting as if they, themselves, cannot be subject to devastation/
damage or catastrophe. ‘Wanting’ to do something – the ‘will to improve’
(Li, 2007) – is supposedly enough for achieving it: the losers are demo-
nized. This narrative engulfs countries across the world, seeking ways of
improving their ‘competitiveness’ and security against future threats
(from climate change and resource scarcity to terrorism). The contem-
porary perpetual wars of global politics are an illustration of the ‘less
human’ the planet is becoming in the process of defending itself against
vulnerabilities (Butler, 2005).
But as Butler and Athanasiou (2013: 4) discuss, being ‘already outside
ourselves’ – or self-dispossessed, even before being dispossessed of livable
12 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

conditions – makes our survival dependent on sustaining collective and

equalitarian socio-political environments. It is this relational production
of subjection that is often neglected when discussing vulnerability of
commons. In this case, the tactical exploitation of our dependability is
the issue, rather than dependency itself. The question remains of how
to liberate ‘dependency’ from its tainted connotation: what may seem a
fragility and dependency is also an empowering relational condition of
humanity, a terrain of ‘agency’. Such agency is to be located not within
the rejection of subjection but ‘within the possibility of a variation’,
interruption and transformation in the (social) performance of environ-
ments (Butler, 1999: 185).
Mutual vulnerability is thus a condition that makes more possible a
‘response-ability’, that is, the ability (of all) to counteract violence
because it ‘already establishes a principle of equality’ (Butler and
Athanasiou, 2013: 107; also Butler et al., 1997). This vision of vulner-
ability moves our focus from commons management to engaging with a
politics of performativity as the embodied agency of those who have been
made invisible or disposable from the public reason (Swyngedouw, 2011,
Rancière, 2006). In other words, our mutual vulnerability is a constitu-
tive part of the common(s). To mobilize vulnerability is not to say that
humans (or commons) are ‘in need of protection’: taking to the streets
their disproportionately vulnerable bodies is equally a deliberate ‘risk of
exposure’ and a use of power to defend and sustain our commons (from
water or forests to relations of solidarity, justice and peace).When acting
in concert, interdependent vulnerabilities (not to be confused with ‘har-
monious’ or homogeneous) may be mobilized in ways that make ‘power’
the synonym rather than the antonym of ‘being vulnerable’. This desig-
nates a ‘form of political activism’ (Butler, 2015: 123) that is often neg-
lected in the literature on commons.
It is obvious that Butler’s vision of vulnerability is different from
Ostrom’s since the understanding of ‘the political’ is different. While
Ostrom’s politics is populated by autonomous rational citizens who
can freely engage in the cooperative design of collective norms, for
Butler, such autonomy and norms have to be continuously problema-
tized in performing the political stage with the ‘response-ability’ of all as
equal political agents. These practices are not just about technical or
participatory management of resources but also about exclusions/inclu-
sions deeply engrained in colonial, capitalist, patriarchal, heteronorma-
tive, militarist, and ethno-nationalist histories and relations of power.
In other words, one cannot expect transformation in the ‘managing’ of
eco-systems without a radical transformation of global socio-ecological
relations of inequalities (Swyngedouw and Ernstson, forthcoming). The
efforts to enact a relational politics of commons require ‘re-commoning’
of global democracy (Reid and Taylor, 2010) and the everyday of life
itself.
Velicu and Garcı́a-López 13

Concluding Remarks: Commoning as a Relational Politics

In this paper, we argued that the communal sharing of our fragile com-
mons (resources) cannot be separated from the sharing of our messy
socio-political relations (commoning). We see commons as fragile not
only because they are vulnerable to enclosure, limited, and hard to sus-
tain and regenerate: their fragility is also our own boundedness as
humans exposed to each other, self-dispossessed and mutually vulnerable
in never-ending problematic and unequal connections. We have placed
our argument within the emergent debates related to commoning, where
‘the commons’ is not just an ‘enclave’ or marginal alternative to ‘state’
and ‘market’ – as in Ostrom’s analysis – but rather the socio-political
struggle to challenge the hegemony of states and markets and expand it
from within (Vercellone, 2015). As we have shown in the first section,
critical scholars are rethinking commons as an interrelation of resources,
communities and commoning. Here we proposed to focus on commoning
as a relational politics: the re-constitution of our-selves as subjects in
relations of power. This approach suggests more attention to the internal
processes of the commoning movements as well as to the subjectivities
that are (re)produced through them. We saw as relevant Butler’s theory
of performing radical democracy and equalitarian universalism (Lloyd,
2009), for it ‘locates relationality as a central condition for new political
possibilities’ (Routledge, 2015: 1325, citing Butler and Athanasiou, 2013;
also Garcı́a-López et al., 2017; Reid and Taylor, 2010). Therefore, the
potential of commoning counter-hegemony is not related only to nurtur-
ing particular norms or subjectivities but also to performing a radical
claim for political equality (cf. Rancière, 2004, 2012; Swyngedouw, 2011).
Such a claim may be based on, as Butler argues, the human condition as
bounded and mutually vulnerable.
Building and sustaining ‘mutual livable lives’ through the politics of
commoning is not simply about universalizing different values or iden-
tities for a better moral project. We see forms of (common) subjection as
modalities of power circulating within the fabric of society, inevitably
uneven, often violent. We do not point to the will to ‘improve’: our ‘self’
is bounded by the exact continuously evolving relations we are embedded
into, which is why Butler talks about the need for ‘insurrection’ at the
ontological level. While Ostrom was more preoccupied with the (ethical
and epistemological) norms that incentivize or impose responsibility as
duty to comply, Butler’s ideas on boundedness and vulnerability invite us
‘to live with others precisely when there is no obvious mode of belonging’
(Butler, 2005: 28). Not knowing what the other will do – harm or cheat,
love, help, surprise – is for Butler more than a state of inter-dependency
or attachment: it is a state of ‘being given to the other’ (2005). Instead of
mitigating such a ‘gift’, a relational politics of commoning could be about
risking ourselves ‘precisely at moments of unknowingness’ (Butler, 2005:
14 Theory, Culture & Society 0(0)

136) towards ongoing re-making of selves and of modes of existence that

are not supported by prevailing norms. Since agency lies in the exact
terrain of the norms which determine and limit it, performance of the
political through commoning implies both the doing and continuous
undoing of norms: a way to ‘maintain fidelity to the political events
choreographed in the new insurrectional spaces . . . mobilizing a wide
range of new political subjects who are not afraid to imagine different
commons, demanding the impossible’ (Badiou quoted in Swyngedouw,
2017: 56).
There is, indeed, a risk in loosening the boundaries of ourselves; but so
is the opposite. Both Ostrom and Butler believe in the potential of learn-
ing to re-build the collective-body politic through continuous experi-
menting, learning and practicing. For Ostrom, the key was learning to
trust and cooperate, beyond the fear of compromising one’s own inter-
ests. For Butler, engaging politically means ‘undoing’ ourselves to inter-
rupt the exact norms (and relations) that constitute us. Being a collective
of bounded, vulnerable selves is not the opposite of agency: rather, this
condition enables the performance of power as a practice of all (Velicu &
Kaika, 2017). For such a relational politics of commoning to happen, we
need to abandon ‘the fear of failing, as fail we shall’ (Swyngedouw and
Ernstson, forthcoming).

Note
1. A concept she derived from Herbert Simon. For a critique of Simon, see
Collet (2009).

Acknowledgements
A special ‘thank you’ goes to Prof. Stefania and the Political Ecology group at the Center
for Social Studies, University of Coimbra for encouraging the debate and suggesting ways
to further the arguments of this paper. We recognize the support of Foundation for
Science and Technology-Portugal for the postdoctoral grant of Irina Velicu, SFRH/
BPD/94680/2013.

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Irina Velicu is a post-doctoral researcher working on socio-environmen-

tal justice and movements in post-communist countries at the Center for
Social Studies, University of Coimbra, Portugal. Irina has previously
worked as a Marie Curie Experienced Researcher within the European
Network of Political Ecology, at ICTA-Universitat Autonoma de
Barcelona. Her research interests revolve around the topics of socio-
environmental justice, equality, social transformation and aesthetic pol-
itics. She holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of Hawaii,
supervised by Michael Shapiro.
Velicu and Garcı́a-López 19

Gustavo Garcı́a-López is an Assistant Professor at the University of

Puerto Rico, Graduate School of Planning. His research has revolved
around the institutional analysis and political ecology of the commons,
with particular interest in grassroots/community-led and collaborative
governance and socio-ecological movements. His work is geographically
grounded in Mexico, where he worked for several years on community
forestry and community agriculture, and in his native Puerto Rico. He
has a PhD in environmental policy from Indiana University-
Bloomington, under the mentorship of Elinor Ostrom and Catherine
Tucker.