Recognizing
Each Other in the Commons: The Basis for an Alternative Political
Philosophy of Systemic Change?
By Helene
Finidori
Time is running short for a paradigm shift. When it comes to our
individual and collective engagement in making the world a better
place, we often talk about uniting in diversity: uniting in harmony to
multiply outcomes and uniting in diversity for multiple focus and
resilience. But how can this concretely be achieved?
We all acknowledge
the critical need for systemic change and for collective intelligence,
but we all have different opinions about the challenges our world is
facing and the ways to address these challenges. We each try to
convince others that we hold the best solutions and methodologies,
which often prevents us from coordinating or communing in effective
ways. But is this possible? What type of unity or communion are we
talking about?
As agents of change, we gather around the social objects that our
engagement and action logics attract us to, those that resonate the
most with the way we see the world and that determine our priorities
and the pathways we envision.
These social objects are the nodes around which emerging social
movements converge and common visions and praxis are formed. That's
where meaning is created and shared through languages that help us
understand each other, where conversations and repeated interactions
are initiated, and where peer learning allows us to explore new
territories.
The action frameworks that we build or are shaped from practice to
serve our movements and communities provide a context for our
co-individuation: the processes by which our identities as individual
and collective change agents are formed, transformed and
differentiated in relation to each other and to the forces that hold
us together and fuel our capacity to act in cohesive
ways.
At the same time, however, as these frameworks create natural
boundaries around our niches of action, they become exclusive of
alternative frameworks. This hinders relational dynamics and our
capacity to collaborate across groups outside of our domains of
action. Our territory of action as a whole is actually composed of
islands.
We are facing a paradox. What seems to make us effective as agents
focusing on our respective domains of engagement is specifically what
prevents us from uniting and being effective as a whole. This is one
of the greatest challenges for systemic change-something Occupy and
other self-organized movements have worked to overcome, with some
success but also shortcomings.
In practice, attempts to organize global responses and unite 'across
islands' often result in diluted focus and the possibilities
of all parties weakened and in delusion. Alternatively, such attempts
can foster the adoption of unifying ideologies, reductionist both in
thinking and action in ways that can ultimately put systems at risk
and lead to totalitarianism. Eventually, contradictions get
crystallized and conflicts perpetuated.
Developmental approaches to systemic change that require that we
transcend our levels of consciousness and the order of complexity from
which we 'interconnectedly' or 'dialectically' develop and
apply solutions are insufficient to bring about systemic change
because they are prescriptive and not naturally generative and
interconnectable.
Agency is distributed across islands and produces independent outcomes
at various levels and scales. What needs to converge and unite or
interconnect for systemic effects are outcomes, not necessarily the
processes generative of these outcomes, or the people involved locally
in these processes and the collective will that mobilizes
them.
Think of an ecology for transformative action with a huge potential
ready to be activated, where the various logics of engagement
complement each other systemically and epistemically, interconnected
by the invisible hand of common logic that underlies
them.
There is a universal aspect to what drives social movements across the
globe, even if we cannot clearly translate it in comparable terms
across practices and languages. Much of what these movements are
currently engaged in is dedicated in one form or another to protecting
the environment, people and resources from enclosure,
over-exploitation and abuse, and to generating thrivability in its
various forms.
The commons as the timeless generative systems that humanity shares in
common is such an archetype: "a collectively inherited unconscious
idea, pattern of thought, image, etc., universally present in
individual psyches," a logic that, if discovered, has potential for
further enactment in each domain of engagement. If recognized and
manifested in each of these domains, the commons logic could act as a
transition image for systemic change or as scaffold for the new
paradigm to emerge so that disparate efforts for change can all
together generate more significant impacts in their own territories of
influence and coalesce to create greater outcomes, with no
prescriptive orchestration.
So what if, in the
end, unity is about recognizing our mutual niches of engagement and
the many streams of commons logic that underlie them as bridges
between our islands? What if unity is about acknowledging the health
of the commons as the measure against which to assess
progress?
By discovering each other in a Common World, suggests Spanish
philosopher Marina Garcés, we get the world between us to emerge,
helping us draw the coordinates for a common dimension.