Commoning Times; or on the Ethical Potential of Urgency
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.14288/acme.8wtthc-2504Parole chiave:
urgency, commons, temporalities, affect, alternativesAbstract
Urgency is a ubiquitous feeling of our contemporary epoch and its incessant crises. Based on ethnographic work with place-based alternative social projects in Paris and London inspired by ideas of the commons, I question the feeling of urgency as something that solely freezes temporal experience through speed or efficiency for instance. I do so by approaching urgency as an atmosphere and explore how it is actually practised. Through three vignettes: making manifestos, crafting campaigns and caring in the meanwhile. These depict urgent atmospheres through relational practices that include multiple temporal relations, involving embodied experiences, socio-ecological histories and future transformations. The examples allow me to untangle three temporal dimensions that reveal urgency’s ethical potential: sensing temporalities, engaging roots and thickening the “now”. This attention to affective practices in relation to collective practices contributes both to making the temporal ethos of commoning more explicit and to (re)claiming urgency’s ethical potential.
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