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1. The outcome of the working process requested is: (i) some form of image(s);

(ii) some form of performative gesture(s), action(s), event(s) or something(s) that “takes place”;

OR (iii) some form of sound(s) – according to the group.

2. The outcome can be shared in someway within the space of the glasshouse or in the nearby area

3.  While you are partly strangers to each other, we just ask that you act “as if” you are already good neighbours. By the end of Tuesday, we ask you to define something simple that you wish to do together. By group, we mean something that is not simply 1 + 1 + 1… Something that is somehow composed from a group without it being necessary that everyone in a group is involved in every aspect.

It should not be something completely “solo” in the sense of a decision-making process operated by only one member of the group.

4. It is ok to disagree. It is ok to end-up without any outcome. It is ok to have group-splits, and re-forming of groups. Please approach this as an experiment that is not with “heavy consequences”. Try not to be mean. Try not to get upset. Try not to cause upset to someone else. However, do try say what you mean, think and feel in an open direct way. If group hits a difficulty that it cannot resolve, invite one or more of the other people in the week’s process to join the group's conversation.

5. There is no necessity to say, or to make anything, about imagination or imaginary etc. These terms are just a backdrop and you don’t have to reference directly. Our working assumption is that the processes of imagining/imagination/the imaginary are already operating and unfolding in even these simple postulates of "groups", "group-membership" and "solo" work, and in those of image/performance/sound. Later, we can revisit this assumption.

This extended essay from the early 1950s provides what has become a contested argument (for some it is become a piece of dogma, for others it is a key critical source). It affirms the novelty of the categorization of the "fine arts" across 'European' societies in the 17th and 18th Centuries, arguing for example that music (earlier deemed a liberal art) and sculpture (earlier deemed a mechanical art) become aligned as proximate to each other, and of a common nature, under the new heading of "the fine arts". A further claim is that art (previously a term indicating an activity covered by rules, and capable of being learned in a progressive and systematic way, acquires a new semantic layer in a reversal where by "A"rt becomes connected to the idea of something that exceeds or operates as exception to "the rule" rule, and where the question "can Art be taught" becomes a meaningful and acceptable question. One way in which this shift is sometimes designated, is as the emergence of "autonomous" art. Another is to described the emergence of "the aesthetic regime of art". These are not simply different names for the same processes, but rather competing interpretations and accounts of the historical transformations in the practices, terminologies and ways of speaking.

The contestation of Kristeller's essay is in terms of (i) the significance of the discursive changes that Kristeller maps for both conceptualization and actual practices; (ii) the substantial claim for novelty made; and (iii) the precise relations between the new taxonomic construction of the fine arts and the elaboration of a discourse of aesthetics entailing themes of autonomy, genius, originality, imagination, disinterest and so forth.

Modern civil-law systems recognize two types of usufructs. The perfect usufruct includes only those things that a usufructuary (one who holds property under right of usufruct) can use without changing their substance, such as land, buildings, or movable objects; the substance of the property, however, may be altered naturally over time and by the elements. The quasi-, or imperfect, usufruct includes property that is consumable or expendable, such as money, agricultural products, and the like, which would be of no advantage to the usufructuary if he could not consume them, expend them, or change their substance.

The term usufruct never found its way into the English common law, although certain general similarities can be found in the common-law concept of estate.

The original meaning of the term ‘commons’ comes from the way communities managed land that was held ‘in common’ in medieval Europe. Along with this shared land a clear set of rules was developed by the community about how it was to be used. Over time, the term ‘commons’ has taken on several meanings. Most generally, it can be used to refer to a broad set of resources, natural and cultural, that are shared by many people.

Traditional examples of commons include forests, fisheries, or groundwater resources, but increasingly we see the term commons used for a broader set of domains, such as knowledge commons, digital commons, urban commons, health commons, cultural commons, etc. The study of governing shared resources is therefore not restricted to the original domain of natural resources, and the IASC brings together scholars from all those different application domains to exchange experiences and solutions. More info on types of commons can be found here; also check out our page on our regional chapters.

‘What are commons?’ 
Introduction to commons by Prof. Tine De Moor, Chair of IASC2017
Produced and copyright by Utrecht University

Governance of the commons

How to effectively govern the commons has been a long debate in academia. In 1968, biologist Garrett Hardin (1915-2003) wrote a famous essay in the journal Science titled ‘The tragedy of the commons’, arguing that when people share a resource they will over-harvest it because it is in their individual interest to take as much from the resource as possible; depletion of the commons could, according to Hardin, only be prevented via private property rights and governmental regulation. The term ‘tragedy’ referred to the argument that people are not able to self-govern common resources. Many other scholars however criticized Hardin for not describing a common, but in fact describing a situation of unregulated free-access use of resources.
 

Self-governance instead of tragedy

Since Hardin’s essay, an increasing awareness has emerged that tragedy is not the only possible outcome when people share a common resource, as there are many examples of long-lasting communities that have maintained their shared resources effectively without having to resort to market or governmental solutions. Since the early 1980s, an increasing number of anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists, ecologists, and many other scholars have been documenting examples of resources shared in common that have been managed sustainably for a long time without private property rights or governmental interventions.

‘Managing our commons’, an introduction 
Produced and copyright by CCRI

Elinor Ostrom and the IASC

Elinor Ostrom and others showed through comparative analysis of many case studies that communities can self-govern their shared resources. Elinor Ostrom (1933-2012) was a political scientist, and the first president of the IASC. She developed a theoretical framework to study the ability of communities to overcome the tragedy of the commons; one of her seminal works in the field is Governing the commons: The evolution of institutions for collective action, published in 1990.

From: Carol M. Rose "Thinking about the Commons"

Since 1994, the right of public access has been written in the Constitution. The form of government chapter on fundamental rights and freedoms states that “Everyone should have access to nature under the right of public access”. But the right of public access itself is not a law, and in no law it says what the right of public access contains. However, the right of public access is surrounded by laws that set limits on what is allowed. It is punishable to violate the laws or regulations surrounding the right of public access. You are obligated to find out what applies, but it is not always so easy. Source: https://eda.se/allemansratten

Source: https://www.bakonline.org/en/making+public/program/usufructuaries+of+earth/

The term “capitalism” points towards a system of society and production characterized by the driving role of profit (pursuing the surplus value generated by the difference between the wages paid for/to labour and the actual value produced by/from labour.) The extraction of value is made possible by paying less than the actual value produced.

Abstract / Concrete contrast

"Marx demonstrates how value is extracted from labour time to create surplus value: the premise for the accumulation of capital. This process of abstraction endows labour with both an abstract and concrete existence. Abstract labour, the premise of the mode of abstract domination, is labour measured by time and appropriated into value; concrete labour is the actual physical labour that produces things or services." (source: Rebecca Carson "Chapter 1 Fictitious Capital and the Re-emergence of Personal Forms of Domination"in Immanent Externalities)

This distinction between "abstract" and "concrete" is used in a variety of ways in discussing political economy and social relations.

"Rule by abstractions" names the condition of capitalist societies meaning that they are governed by abstract concepts like value, capital, and money. These conceptual-symbolic structures exert significant influence over social and economic relations, they exert force in shaping the world. These abstractions, according to Marx, obscure the actual material relations of production and exploitation. These abstract entities, rather than concrete human relationships, determine the course of society.

Personal / Impersonal

At the beginning of Chapter Four of Capital Volume I, ‘The General Formula for Capital’, Marx distinguishes between personal and impersonal relations of domination in a footnote:

"The antagonism between the power of landed property, based on personal relations of domination and servitude, and the power of money, which is impersonal, [unpersönlichen] is clearly expressed by the two French proverbs, ‘Nulle terre sans seigneur’ and ‘L’argent n’a pas de maitre’."

(‘Nulle terre sans seigneur’ = ‘No land without its lord’.

‘L’argent n’a pas de maitre’ = ‘Money has no master’.)

This contrast between a form of domination that is tied directly to the specifics of personal condition/position/location and a form of domination that is structurally distributed without direct linkage to the specifics of personal relations is connected also to the theme of abstraction.

"Impersonal domination is the form of domination generated by the fetish character of capitalist societies, where social relations objectified in things dominate and act on people. People relate to each other indirectly through the mediation of things, making this form of domination impersonal or determined by a ‘rule by abstractions'"

and the wage relation, or more precisely the different

forms of dependent labor upon which the extraction

of surplus labor rests. The term “cognitive”

emphasizes the changed nature of the capital-labour

relation and the forms of property upon which the

accumulation of capital depends

A component construct within the regime of accumulation is – "extraction of value" –a term describing the process of capital acquiring value. Value extraction is an element of the overall regime of accumulation. We have already identified the example of value extraction from labour – by paying less to labour than the value generated by labour.

Some have argued that in the late 20th Century:

"The heart of the accumulation process has been shifting from material to immaterial commodities and the new regime of accumulation is principally driven by information and communication technology. As Paolo Virno notes, if within the Fordist factory productive activity is mute and work is performed by a silent human chain, in the post-Fordist metropolis, the material laboring process can be empirically described as a complex group of linguistic acts, a sequence of assertions, and a symbolic interaction. This is because labor activity is now performed alongside the system of machines, with regulating, surveillance and coordinating functions, but also because the process of production uses knowledge, information, culture and social relations as its “raw materials”. Knowledge is the key variable in understanding the recent structural changes. However emancipation does not seem to be the dominant feature of what knowledge economy brings. Cognitive capitalism differs from Fordist-industrial capitalism in two main respects:

1.     The origin of productivity gains that are based on learning processes and network economies. ...Knowledge, as the key variable of the accumulation activity, is not a rival but a cumulative commodity (i.e., knowledge is not exhausted by use, the way other commodities are) with the only constraint on knowledge-use being the imposition of intellectual property rights.

2.      The capital-labor compromise, based on the connection between productivity gains and real wage dynamics, is declining with subsequent effects on polarization of income distribution. ... In this context, the balancing of the system relies simultaneously upon the growth of financial markets, the distributions of the generated surplus and a high level of growth in the new industrialized countries, at the core of outsourcing and delocalization processes. The central role, played by learning and network economies, typical of cognitive capitalism, is put in discussion with the beginning of the new millennium as a result of the explosion of the speculative bubble of “net economy” ("dot-com bomb" / "dot-com bubble" / "dot-com boom") in March 2020."

(Source: Andrea Fumagalli and Stefano Lucarelli (2011). Valorization and financialization in cognitive biocapitalism. Investment Management and Financial Innovations, 8(1))