Abstract
Urban commons have been innovating European municipal politics for more than a decade through the establishment of new institutions. Naples is a laboratory where artists, activists, and residents engage in commoning practices proposing alternative forms of self-governing the commons and the city. Providing a narrative from l’Asilo—a cultural commons based in the city center—this work highlights the emergence of a logic of commons institutionalization that challenges the usual binary division between human communities and non-human resources found in the literature on the theme. The paper addresses Ostrom's theory of commons through the lens of Barad's New Materialist thought, proposing a diffractive reading methodology and a case study analysis. Barad's Agential Realism inspires a new ecological deal in commons institutions theory, whereas governance is no more grounded on binary relationships between human subjects and non-human objects. If relationality pre-exists separation and the formation of borders among entities, commons institutions deserve to be imagined and narrated following a non-linear axis of causality and temporality. The case study focuses on three particular aspects of a-binary commons institutionalization: the arising of the practice; its condition of permanence and duration; and the entanglement between collective institutional norms and the commoners. This initial experimentation, this work argues, can guide the study and the narratives of commons institutions toward an ecological reconsideration of agency: from a human community in a binary relation with a resource aimed to its mere efficient productive management, to a non-finite and indeterminate creation of space–time.
Introduction
A way out of binarism in commons institutions
What if Elinor Ostrom's analysis on commons met Karen Barad's ontology? We argue that this encounter inspires an original methodology to understand and narrate commons institutions. What motivates us is the chance of a political ecological deal in commons theory, whereas governance gives up with being grounded on binary relationships between human subjects and non-human objects. Scholarship on commons sometimes runs the risk to enclose the creative potentialities of the practice, that is reduced to the human management of a resource.
The human/non-human binarism that grounds the main literature on commons institutions is based on a paradox: the tragedy of the commons (Hardin, 1968) converges with its effective management. Both the tragedy and commons institutions are grounded on this original separation, and imagine diverse forms of human domination. On the one hand, the tragic narrative is doubtful with the capability of users to take care of common pool resources (CPRs) due to increasing overpopulation. CPR management requires state intervention or private property to prevent its destruction. On the other, a wide field of empirically-grounded social science shows how multiple nuances exist between state and market-led solutions: a community manages a resource and designs institutional norms as an effective alternative to state and market (Caffentzis, 2012; Caffentzis and Federici, 2014; De Angelis, 2017; Linebaugh, 2014; Ostrom, 2009, 2010).
Ostrom portrays human agency as self-interested but constrained by information lacks, as well as by institutional and social structures—an idea that aligns with bounded rationality. Effective institutions arising from human/non-human binary relationships can be a way to avert the tragic recurring effects of free-riding, if collective-based norms are considered legitimate and on the table patterns of reciprocity among individuals.
We aim to explore a way out of anthropocentric categories and binarism for narratives on commons institutions. 1 We build on scholarship on commoning, which already highlighted that alternative rationalities and emotional feelings with the more-than-human are part of commoner's corporeality (Tola, 2016), underlining their importance for the purpose of commons management (Nightingale, 2011, 2019); of counter-capitalist practices (González-Hidalgo, 2021); of affective more-than-human relations among commoners (Garcia Lopez et al., 2021; Singh, 2017). Moreover, Ostrom and her studies on commons institutions have already been put in dialogue with feminist philosophy (Velicu and Garcia Lopez, 2018).
We believe that this literature deserves a reflection on the conditions of existence of a-binary commons institutions, as much as main understanding on the theme needs to encounter materialist thoughts and practice alternative to modernity (Barad, 2007; Bennett, 2010; Haraway, 1988; Morton, 2013).
Exploring an alternative logic to narrate images about commons institutions is the reason behind our desire to engage Karen Barad's 2 Agential Realism. This grounds its critique of human/non-human binary relationship on representation, framed as the language device that mediates the separation between the human subject and the non-human object. In other terms, representation is that semantic unit that permits the modern human to make sense of what surrounds them. It is the snapshot that the knower extracts from commoning.
This is why we retain that Agential Realism can provide fruitful methodological innovations in the study of commons institutions. Barad calls us to a shift from representation to performativity in main understandings on commons institutions (Barad, 2007). It is a stimulus to reimagine the human/non-human relationships, the agency behind the institution of collective norms, and the re-positioning of the human knower within commons. These aspects ground an interwoven institutional complexity that should not be sacrificed to a given end of effective problem solving and governance.
In the second section of the paper, we see diffraction as the suitable methodology to give up binary representations in commons institutions. We argue how this can be a proper methodological strategy to review texts, to relate among multiple scholars and to engage the case study itself. This logic pushes toward alternative ways to give an account of commons institutions. In the third section, we introduce Elinor Ostrom's view on commons institutions and the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) framework originated from her pivotal contribution. This is relevant to show how binary representation is instrumental to imagine human managerial dominion in commons institutions, forcing it to cause-and-effect linearity. In the fourth section, we detail on performativity and on Barad's Agential Realism. Agency regards those intra-active relations that pre-exist the formation of clear borders among entities, and between subjects and objects, humans and non-humans, communities and resources.
In the fifth section, we present our case study, l’Asilo, an urban cultural commons based in Naples. This commons and its community are a political and artistic experimentation that imagines commons institutions as performative agency, fostering the redefinition of causality and temporality as non-linear. This implies the creation of the resource, rather than its mere efficient management. The study of commons institutions, we argue, can be guided toward a reinvention of agency, and from a focus on the efficient management of a resource to the study of those practices guaranteeing the non-finite creation of commons.
Logic and method: drawing on diffraction
Our intention is to adopt a methodology to better grasp and share with a wider audience the complex reality of commons institutions. We aim to question human subject/non-human object binarism at the core of main understandings of commons institutions. We are confident that this would permit us to find alternative ways to make sense of the multiplicity that nurtures commons institutions.
Representative logic implied in main understandings on commons institutions is not suitable to this aim. 3 It defines both the language mediation between the human community and the non-human resource, and the abstraction that the knower extracts from commoning. Thus, representation is both an ontological and epistemological element in the understanding of commons institutions. On the one hand, it mediates the separate interaction between the human subject and the non-human resource; on the other, it evidences how knowledge and narratives on commons institutions are produced.
As an example, let's use a modelization to measure the efficiency of a commons institution. We will have a series of data that marks the state of the art and a given ideal end to be reached, like the success of commons. We will identify a chronological temporal line wherein analysis brings with it the succession of states placed in a linear sequence. 4 The ideal success of commons institutions is tied to a series of subsequent snapshots, each one almost repeating the same form of the previous one according to a cause–effect rationality. The fulfillment of predictions occurs on this linear structure. Possibilities and potentialities of commoning are enclosed by the means of representation.
This methodological logic produces narratives that evidence both the enclosure of commoning in a well-paved path, with little opportunity to defer, and the clear separation between the subject constructing knowledge and the practice. This implies two forms of binary human control: one involving the ontological dimension of relationships and becoming; the other concerned with the epistemological issue of the gaze, of its position and its (un)contested privilege to speak.
The methodological proposal we followed draws on diffraction. 5 Barad uses this term to identify a kind of methodology functional to a narrative logic beyond representation and its repetition: “we can understand diffraction patterns—as patterns of difference that make a difference—to be the fundamental constituents that make up the world” (Barad, 2007: 72).
Diffraction reads texts and authors belonging to seemingly incompatible traditions of thought “through one another” (Barad, 2007: 30). It encourages the emergence of obstacles that stand in the way of the given interpretation of phenomena, authors, and texts, by generating the unexpected. Diffraction does not establish dualisms with what it criticizes. Rather, it requires a crossing of delineated boundaries to open up to the creation of conceptuality, relying it on the “respectful engagements with different disciplinary practices” (Barad, 2007: 93).
This paper adopts a diffractive methodology on three levels. The first regards transdisciplinarity. The work comes from a relationship of friendship and intellectual exchange between two authors, an economist and an ecological political theorist. We adopted a diffractive logic in questioning the automatisms and certainties with which a scholar defends themselves through their discipline.
The second level of diffraction is intimately related to the first. Indeed, the paper is built on a reading of Ostrom's work diffracted through Barad's Agential Realism. Once read in a diffracted sense, these authors reveal unsuspected ties that we are going to delineate. We favor the readability of the text, by introducing both the authors in a linear modality: the reader will meet Ostrom as separated from Barad, and then they will find the original layer coming from diffraction as narrated through l’Asilo case study.
The third level of diffraction concerns the obstacles that the researcher and commoning pose to each other while encountering. Diffraction involves the reversal of the above binarism: the scholar and their methodology, on the one hand, and the process of commoning, on the other, are mutually intertwined. If representation is a language mediality between the knowing subject and commoning, diffraction implies, for the researcher, to locate their gaze within commoning itself. Diffractive research within the doing and undoing of commons institutions occurs without any divide between being directors, actors, and/or spectators. It corresponds to an a-binary moment with undefined and unclear separation between the subject and the object. 6
This methodology has relevant consequences, we argue, for political ecological practices that organize contentious and alternative ways of living in this damaged era. First of all, we consider the outputs of research on commons institutions as far from being just a matter of content. Practices of commoning are much more concerned than academic research with experimentations about activist gaze in the research (Splash, 2023). Diffraction could be a strategic way to balance the power of establishing discourse on commons institutions in favor of this gaze. As scholars-activists, we daily enter in diffraction with urban cultural commons that are already creating non-linear and a-binary institutions. We have the responsibility to grasp this logic and to design theories and narratives that adopt the same gaze.
What is even relevant is Barad's assumption on the nature of an entity as determined depending on the kind of methodological apparatus used to measure it (Barad, 2012). 7 This prompts the question: How does the commons change depending on the methodological logic adopted? Our frameworks, concepts, and methodologies correspond to an inextricable part of commoning. These will irreversibly mutate the phenomenon, adding to it a performative memory that will return and mark its evolution, and thus our instruments as well.
Methodological and epistemological issues concerning position, gaze, and research techniques directly intervene on the nature of commons institutions. As research-activists involved for years within the municipal network of commons which our case is about, our responsibility is to bring the research on the topic far from evaluating the end of a finite process: the conditions for its success, efficiency, and sustainability. Well aware of the inextricable link between methodology and the nature of commoning, our proposal concerns the use of alternative strategies to construct narratives with the aim to favor the coming to matter and meaning of institutional entanglements of commoning.
This work is part of a broader research project during which we collected data through ethnographical techniques such as participant observations over two years (2022–2024), 12 semi-structural interviews, and six life-stories. In particular, the article draws on four interviews with artists and/or activists, as well as diary notes written over the years by l’Asilo community and archived on the website. 8 The interviewed were artists and/or activists directly involved within the community, two white men and two white women. 9 The empirical material for the article was selected based on its relevance in telling the story of l’Asilo's institution as a commons. Each interview was recorded and it is still available for listening, analysis, and cross-verification of this research. The commoners interviewed declared their consensus at the starting of the interview, providing a signed declaration stating that. The empirical material was processed and organized into a narrative based on a diffractive encounter with both Barad's agential realist logic and Ostrom's institution-focused perspective. Our hypothesis concerns the possibility of narrating commons through the institutionalist perspective despite, or perhaps precisely because of, non-linear and non-deterministic causality.
The human manager of commons institutions
We draw on what is usually referred to as heterodox in the economic understanding of commons institutions. Heterodox economies take a processual sight of economics, since it “was never much concerned with predictions and is more open-ended, accepting that economic reality is complex and uncertain” (Van Staveren, 2014: 7).
Ostrom's understanding of common institutions is widely regarded as a prominent heterodox economic perspective. Besides, we see that heterodox economics has something to share with our push toward a-binary commons institutions. This scholarship questions neo-classical determination of predictable scenarios and its designing codes, norms, and institutions. If mainstream economies imagine predictive models to guarantee a secure temporality for the human, heterodox economy can be a starting point to grasp indeterminacy as out of human managerial control.
We maintain that what ties main literature on commons institutions and binary presumptions has to cope with representation. If related to commons institutions, representation is the knowledge infrastructure that connects a human community to a non-human resource. Humans construct collective institutional norms as a consequence of the representative sense they have of the resource. Once arranged in a straight causal line, representations mark what is visible and what is not, possible and impossible, real and unreal. We are going to see how main understandings on commons institutions draw on the logic founded on the cause–effect linearity of this sequence. 10 Narratives on commons require a heterodox ontological and epistemological basis too.
To grasp the binarist roots of main understandings on commons institutions we clarify on the principles from which Ostrom starts her elaboration. She reacts in front of the dualism between state and market. As she underlines, “how a group of principals—a community of citizens—can organize themselves to solve the problems of institutional supply, commitment, and monitoring is still a theoretical puzzle” (Ostrom, 1990: 29).
Ostrom expresses dissatisfaction with the instrumentation provided by the economic canon for the study of collective action, such as the self-governance of commons (Olson, 1965). Even if there is a world of nuances between the state and the market, this categorical dualism has always tried “to fit the world into simple models and to criticize institutional arrangements that did not fit” (Ostrom, 2010: 642).
As introduced above, Ostrom's contributions to the IAD framework aim to comprehend the conditions under which self-regulation from a relatively small and well-defined community could be a valid alternative in managing a natural resource, cohabiting and integrating market and state. 11 Ostrom deconstructs a monolithic theory, rather than its assumed ontological and epistemological foundation. Her postulate is the selfish, and constantly tempted to free-riding, individual: a human subject that acts for his own interest, even if this assumption could not explain every kind of behavior. This is why her major interest was the introduction of a framework to explain phenomena that would not fit into state–market dualist dimension. 12
This framework classifies complex human systems. Ostrom's studies on commons concern a clarification on the unity of analysis: CPRs. She constructs a critique of Samuelson's (1954) two-fold classification of goods, public and private goods, adding a fourth category to Buchanan's third one of club goods (Buchanan, 1965). In particular, CPRs share the feature of subtractability with private goods and the difficulty of exclusion with public goods (Ostrom, 1990).
Scholars working on the IAD framework identify diverse kinds of CPRs, since each property right corresponds to different rules for the use of the resource. A CPR can be owned and managed as public property, private property, community property, or owned by no one. Schlager and Ostrom (1992) conceptualize the property-rights system as containing bundles of rights rather than a single right. Making use of empirical data, they trace five property rights that individuals using a CPR might cumulatively have: access, withdrawal, management, exclusion, and alienation. IAD takes account of norms that can correspond to these situations, since each one acts as external variables within the framework. Both classification of goods and the identification of collective human behaviors are instrumental to imagine predictive models regarding the sustainable management of CPRs (Kiser and Ostrom, 1982; Mc Ginnis, 1999; Ostrom, 2009).
The IAD framework brings the understanding of complex realities within an analytical form based on the cross-functionality of schemes. This provides for the possibility to “enable scholars to analyze systems that are composed of a cluster of variables, each of which can then be unpacked multiple times depending on the question of immediate interest” (Ostrom, 2009: 408). The framework acts as an action-situation's multi-tier conceptual map, whereas specific models (experimentation-simulation, agent-based, game theory models) can help the scholar to infer specific predictions about the likely outcomes of highly simplified structures (Ostrom, 2011).
Commons institutions correspond to those norms to which users of a collective resource should refer. Institutions are not fixed, but dynamic. Their transformations depend on learning: people give themselves rules and can amend them if a new situation requires it. Rendering learning into norms leads to better institutions and better governance of collective resources. Instead of assuming separated prisoners incapable of communicating, Ostrom sees users as subjects able to learn from each other and to collectively transform norms regulating their actions. Moreover, the IAD framework starts from the epistemological assumption that scholars external to the doing of commons institutions are able to analyze the situation, understand why counter-productive results are being achieved and propose what changes in the rules will enable participants to improve results. In other terms, scholars are actual and responsible agents for what concerns the transformation of the nature of commoning.
IAD's core agent is the human and their need of security in front of the unmanageable. This framework is grounded on the analytical ability to discern predictive determinations in the midst of indeterminacy. Human/non-human binarism is instrumental to mend such a rupture. Human community and the non-human resource are distinct elements, whereas the former fears the indeterminacy of the latter and the limitation of rationality coming from the multiplicity of variables at play. It is from these interactions that a commons institution arises. While pre-determining the conditions for a successful governance in a tragic scenario, the IAD framework cannot imagine and thus narrate a form of commoning that experiments with an alternative logic of relationship.
This framework needs the representation of free-riding and of the tragedy in order to justify a human-led reaction and solution, which corresponds to normative commons institutions. Tragedy paradoxically pre-exists the use of land: the virtual destruction of the commons justifies the human-led solution operated by bottom-up institutions. Commons institutions are the by-product and, at the same time, the reproduction of binary interactions between a subject/community and an object/resource: it is a problem-solver response to a matter of insecurity felt by the human in front of the tragedy.
Commons institutions are the effect of causal binary interactions among subjects, and between them and a resource. Institutions are the result of interactions between well-defined individuals with well-defined interests, who come together to move beyond counter-efficient other forms of actions. What grounds commons institutions is still the individual separation among them and from the multiple and entangled ecological resonance of reality. This framework profits of the representative mediality to fill this separation, reproducing humanist presumptions “assuming [that] the individual (human) subject is separate from other people and the (non-human) world around them and thus governable at some level” (Bresnihan, 2015: 13).
The IAD framework categorizes those practices of CPR management eventually challenging individuals’ bounded rationality. It introduces the category of bottom-up institutions to meet this need. However, the framework cannot grasp the “unboundedness” inherent to commoning, due to its binary grounded methodological principle. It is a predictive model of analysis, which makes explicits that we are still in a logic of uncertainty. Main understandings on commons institutions cannot overcome the bounded rationality by following a linear and representative causality. 13 Through this framework we will have a representation, just like the character Adam narrated by Prigogine and Stengers in the last endnote, an image ready to control and manage his action. In the next sections, we are going to see how Barad's Agential Realism inspires an inverted logic to understand commons institutions and their infinite (un)doing of space, time, and matter.
On the way of Agential Realism
Barad and their Agential Realism are crucial for overcoming subject/object binarism in main understandings on commons institutions. This theoretical account provides a language unit alternative to representation: performativity. Agential Realism focuses on how matter actively participates in becoming and comes to meaning. It challenges representationalism, which separates words and things without focusing on entanglements among them. Representationalism cannot solve the problem it raises: it tries to reach something that is non-finite by the means of a finite methodology. A representation is a way to abstract multiple relations into words and separate things (Barad, 2003, 2007).
Barad designed an ontology wherein the knower, the known, and the measuring instruments emerge simultaneously in entanglements. Agential Realism understands “nature, the body, and materiality in the fullness of their becoming without resorting to the optics of transparency or opacity” (Barad, 2003: 812). Becoming does not need a subjective knower nor a human representative lens to be discovered and come to meaning.
This theoretical account is even more relevant for commons institutions considering that the phenomenon is its primary ontological unit. The latter is a relational configuration characterized by the entangled web among its entities, with no one of these pre-existing to it. As Barad puts it, the phenomenon is “the ontological inseparability of agentially intra-acting components” (Barad, 2003: 815). Barad writes of intra-action, rather than interaction. The terminological difference is subtle, but crucial. Intra-action “unsettles the belief that there are individually constituted agents or entities, as well as times and places” (Barad, 2012: 77). Becoming is not at the hands of already separated entities and of interactions among them. It occurs as a differentiation within the phenomenon implemented by intra-actions: A specific intra-action enacts an agential cut (in contrast to the Cartesian cut —an inherent distinction—between subject and object) effecting a separation between “subject” and “object.” That is, the agential cut enacts a local resolution within the phenomenon of the inherent ontological indeterminacy. […] The primary semantic units are not “words” but material-discursive practices through which boundaries are constituted. This dynamism is agency. Agency is not an attribute but the ongoing reconfigurings of the world. (Barad, 2003: 815)
Barad's thought concerns entities as materializing in intra-actions. These are performative in a material-discursive sense. Matter, individuals, and subjects become determined through agential intra-actions within relational phenomena. It is in this way that the world acquires meaning: matter is not disconnected from meaning, since their mutual entanglement.
Matter performs and comes to meaning while becoming, without any need of being represented: agency is this dynamism that performs both meaning and matter. What is agential is not a specific subject-community: agency has not to be understood in terms of a subject's property or feature. Intra-actions are an “ongoing flow of agency through which ‘part’ of the world makes itself differentially intelligible to another ‘part’ of the world” (Barad, 2003: 817). The agential mattering is the flowing out “of cuts that bind,” a responsibility that “is not conditioned by any preordained determinate distinctions, such as that between human and non-human” (Barad, 2012: 81).
Agential Realism redefines the geometries of the human as either pure cause or pure effect. It does it while “we,” as research-activists, are accountable for the role “we” play in the practices of knowing and becoming (Barad, 2003). Agency is the possibility of reconfiguring apparatuses we are entangled within: it is a way of redesigning the modalities through which entities come to matter and to meaning. We are directly responsible and accountable “for the lively relationalities of becoming, of which we are a part” (Barad, 2007: 393).
This agential response-ability draws on a non-linear causality. Ostrom's understandings on commons institutions haunt it through representative linearity. Dynamism implied by main commons institution, the learning process at its roots, is subject to the pre-determined end of effective success. Barad queers a sense of causality where one or more causal agents precede and produce an effect (Barad, 2011). The causality introduced by Agential Realism permits us to give up bounded rationality in relation to commons institutions. Lack of information and indeterminacy are not a problem. Rather, these are a constitutive part of relational phenomena. The latter become through a constant punctuation between the determination enacted by the agential cuts, and the indeterminate virtuality that is constitutive of intra-actions.
Causality cannot be represented as a line of snapshots placed in a cause-and-effect sequence. The linearity of before, now, and after comes into crisis. In Barad's terms, a non-deterministic causality is intended as an iterative intra-activity (Barad, 2007, Barad, 2010): it is the assembly path that the phenomenon inherits as its memory and that immediately reconfigures the entanglements. These are the agential elements that materialize space and time according to a non-linear causality. In the next section, we will see how this assemblage requires a speculative logic to narrate about commons, that is, the Agential Institution of Commons.
L’Asilo—the agency of commons institutions
The arising of new commons institutions in Naples, southern Italy
L’Asilo is an urban cultural commons based in the historical center of Naples, southern Italy. It started in March 2012, when a collective of artists and socio-cultural workers, La Balena (The Whale), occupied an under-utilized monumental building in the heart of Naples. This had to be used as the seat of Forum delle Culture, a big cultural event expected to be hosted in the city. The political action arose as a direct response to this cultural policy wasting public money and heritage. The occupation was supposed to take three days. However, in the wake of the huge feedback coming from the city, the collective made the decision to dissolve itself in a multitude that, still today, is self-governing and self-managing the space through weekly assemblies and round table discussions.
L’Asilo has created crucial precedents at local and trans-national policy levels over the years. It has been contributing to imagine new participatory, inclusive and open decision-making democratic institutions, daily constructed through the inhabitants’ practices of self-organization in the fulfillment of social and political rights. Indeed, assemblies—open to everyone and deciding by consensus—have collectively elaborated a “Declaration of Civic and Collective urban use,” providing that the management and fruition of that good shall be open to whomever (Capone, 2016). Subsequently, these rules were acknowledged by two Naples city Government Resolutions, that have recognized the community's self-government of the space and the distribution of the economic responsibility between the community itself and the administration, which has to ensure the accessibility of the building.
It has been recognized that the Declaration and the collective writing practice has become a source of inspiration even due to their capacity to re-articulate the role of local authorities and state institutions (Capone, 2017). The above Declaration—written by such a community—was formally recognized by the City of Naples through two Resolutions (nos. 400/2012 and 893/2015) and extended to seven additional spaces based in the city (Resolution no. 446/2016). This legal arrangement—engineered by the community itself—sets a legal and political precedent in the management of public property, consisting of a public law pattern, strengthened by grassroots participation (Micciarelli, 2017). The city recognizes—and also materially supports—the self-government of an open and informal community, without selling or entrusting the good to any physical or legal person (De Tullio, 2018). 14
Micciarelli (2014) deepens the category of “emerging commons” as the Neapolitan way of this practice, arguing how resources are governed and administered in cooperative and mutualistic forms that aim at satisfying fundamental rights. The emerging commons produced their own community-made forms, starting from the landmark case of Teatro Valle in Rome, Macao in Milan, and l’Asilo in Naples. Through these conflicting actions, emerging commons have joined the international movements occupying squares, streets, and public and private spaces in order to claim decision-making power and protest against precarity and for everyone's right to the city (Kioupkiolis, 2017).
L’Asilo experiences a way to innovate urban commons by obtaining new popular institutions as forms of dialogue with the municipal government. 15 These institutions are composed by activists and experts that are engaged in defending commons themselves, against the selling off of local public services and public property for the defense of the commons; against the touristification of the city for a fair and solidarity-based territorial economy. Since then, the experience has acquired a decent symbolic capital in certain areas of social movements and beyond, especially for its “creative use of law,” allowing collectively-shaped “new institutions.”
The reason why a juridical recognition was vindicated was not to gain a legal protection, but to “hack” legality and to use the disruptive energy of the process to carve the rules and to create a precedent to change institutions. Indeed, the juridical experimentation inspired other communities self-managing unused public heritage, in the city and all around Italy, providing an imaginary in which many other heterogeneous and shifting political experiences could recognize themselves (Velotti et al., 2025).
Commoners from Naples already contributed scientific literature on the theme. Using l’Asilo as a case-study of her research, Acosta Alvarado (2020) highlights how the governing principles can evolve in a context where the community is kept open and ever changing. With regard to Lido Pola, a commons based in Bagnoli neighborhood, the post-industrial eastern Naples waterfront, Vittoria et al. (2023) highlight how commoning builds new forms of relationality by continuously contesting and reworking the boundaries. Buonanno (2025) reflects on the position of the researcher in respect to commons, whose body is entangled in an indistinct relationality and whose individual authorship is questioned.
In the framework of urban studies, commons were connected to a broader vision of Naples urban spaces, by elaborating on non-extractivist uses of immobile property and redistribution of its revenues (Del Giudice, 2022). Urban scholars show how Neapolitan commons shape the urban space from below, by building generative (Figuera, 2023) and concrete alternatives to neoliberal urbanism (Locorotondo, forthcoming). In terms of urban policies, Neapolitan commons were seen as a form of “interstice politics” able to transform institutions and implement the right to the city (Pinto et al., 2022). From the perspective of the local administration, Pascapè (2017) elaborates on the concept of civic profitability, that is, on the civil, cultural, and social value of commons, justifying the assumption of public responsibility for urban commons. Piscopo and Buonanno (2017) highlight how commons can be an example of architectural practices that can be confronted with social and environmental problems, according to renewed and constitutionally oriented principles.
Commons are also a part of an elaboration on aesthetics and cultural policies. Sciarelli et al. (2021) described commons as spaces for independent non-commodified expression, where what really matters is the process of artistic creation within the different self-managed spaces, more than the final output. Riccio (2017) describes these cultural occupations as heterotopies capable of reconfiguring the “sensible” and transforming the status quo. Moreover, researchers, scholars, and activists from l’Asilo joined forces with allied institutions to discuss a cultural policy proposal inspired by commoning experiences (De Tullio and Cirillo, 2021).
The following sub-sections focus on three particular aspects of a-binary commons institutionalization, which we believe could open up a debate on similar alternative processes of commons institutionalization: the arising of the practice; its condition of permanence and duration; and the entanglement between collective institutional norms and the commoners.
The lightning of commons
As the reader will have noticed, the arising of new commons institutions in Naples is a theme in recent literature. During our fieldwork, it was evident how l’Asilo could contribute with an agential realist narrative. While interviewed, a then member of La Balena Collective told us the motivation behind the building to be occupied years ago: It actually came down to deciding for Ex Asilo Filangieri because the building carried a conflict that brought together the diverse composition of La Balena, which was becoming ever more heterogeneous. Forum delle Culture opened cross-cutting issues with respect to a public theater.
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The political season is that of the last Berlusconi Government (2011). The latter implemented a series of impressive cuts to artistic and cultural production. Several public bodies fundamental to the sector were abolished. Initial reactions from workers in art and culture were not slow in coming. Collectives and movements arose, and nationwide mobilizations began.
Those were also the years of an intense national debate on the commons, which peaked with a repeal referendum regarding the management of water as commons. In June 2011, more than 27 million Italians voted, giving their consent to a form of public management of water. The fledgling movement of artists and workers in the performing arts did not let the issue of commons pass them by. The day after this consultation, a group of performing arts workers, activists, and citizens occupied Teatro Valle in Rome, claiming its use as commons through a popular participatory path. La Balena Collective was born in Naples in this wake.
Ex Asilo Filangieri, and the foundation it hosted at that time, Forum delle Culture, was a building expressive of what La Balena places itself in conflict toward: a hierarchical and party-driven governance of cultural politics; the clientelistic management of funds earmarked for artistic production; and the idea of the major international event as the driving force behind the cultural development of a place. The multiplicity of this conflict was also strongly expressive of the nourished, shifting and dynamic composition of the Collective, which, born from a trigger of theater and performing arts workers, had expanded disproportionately in the months leading up to the occupation, to include a dense heterogeneity of cultural workers (hence the reference to the gigantism of the Whale).
While organizing itself as a closed and homogeneous Collective, La Balena (already starting with its name) is already a potential multitudinary community that cares for commons. At the same time, the building has in itself the potentia to accommodate such a heterogeneous community because of the multiple contradictions to which it is subjected. Barad tells of the generation of lightning as an example of non-linear causality. This is an image that also narrates how the communication between La Balena and Ex Asilo Filangieri empty building leads to the institutionalization of commons: The path that lightning takes is not only not predictable, it does not make its way in some continuous fashion between sky and ground. There is, as it were, some kind of nonlocal communication effected between the two. By some mechanism scientists have yet to fully explain, a storm cloud becomes extremely electrically polarized—electrons are stripped from the atoms they were once attached to and gather at the lower part of the cloud closest to the earth. In response, the earth's surface becomes polarized with these earth-bound electrons burrowing into the earth. A strong electric field between earth and cloud results, and all that remains to be accomplished now is a conductive path joining the two. The first inklings of a path have a modest beginning offering no indication of its explosive end. (Barad, 2012: 35)
Both a community and a commons become a recognizable element of the city only by the generation of lightning. L'Asilo is not the effect of the encounter between a human community and a non-human resource. Rather, it haunted an entanglement of La Balena with the empty building that was not yet manifested, and which only political conflict brings to light. From a complex of half-empty and dusty rooms, l'Asilo has emerged as a place pulsating with life, relationships, meetings, performances, concerts, seminars, and assemblies. It becomes within the entanglement with an open, multiple, heterogeneous, and ever-changing community.
Linear causality is not a proper logic to the study of this phenomenon. It is in fact inseparable from the datitude of separated human entities that enter into relation and, as an effect, enact a change in the essence of an object/resource. This perspective can only give a representative imitation of the interwoven complexity of commoning. The capacity for change is uniquely human, acting on the radical transformation of an entity given as inanimate, a building in this case. It is a human community that classifies the essence of the entity as a commons. Not least, the definition of commons is at the hands of a researcher or at any rate a human scholar, who has the agential power to signal the aforementioned essential transformation of the inanimate entity by a collectivity of humans.
In contrast, the generation of commons institutions corresponds to the unpredictable, lightning-fast manifestation that haunts all forms of everyday relationality, human and non-human. L'Asilo's everyday commoning questions how the institutionalization of commons can overcome the ephemeral contingency of lightning, situating itself in duration. This is something that Ostromian literature investigates as conditions for sustainability, but which we prefer to define as permanence. To look at the permanence of commons institutions is to shift perspective of inquiry: from the management of the resource to its creation.
The permanence
Speaking of permanence, it seems paradoxical to narrate how l’Asilo's occupation should have been no more than a lightning in the plans of La Balena Collective. It should have lasted three days. However, in the wake of the huge feedback coming from the city, La Balena was forced to dissolve itself in a dynamic community that, still today, is self-governing the building through weekly assemblies. A commoner gave us an eloquent picture of the atmosphere during those first three days of occupation: A process was started, except for those three days that were pre-arranged. We had to go out on Sunday and actually we were confronted with the failure of the project. An assembly took place, totally unexpected. I remember there were voices in the room breezing to stay. Then in a totally insane manner, it was ex-stasis, Dionysian, the voice went up “so we stay.” And the applause went off. We looked at each other, especially among those who had organized the weekend: “we are harnessing ourselves into a tough thing.”
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L’Asilo is the fruit of a linear project that failed. This is a crucial point in the narration of its permanence: the failure of a linear project is l’Asilo's actual political principle. As a principle, it will return to a non-linear and cyclical institutionalization over the years. As a mark of permanence, it has to be noticed that, from the day after this failure, a Monday, l’Asilo is self-governed and organized through weekly assemblies, that are still held today, on Monday.
It is the ritual of the Monday assembly that institutionalizes the return of the principle of failure in an agential form. The permanence of commons institutions feeds on the potentia of its impermanence, the potentiality of leaving that building after three days. The assembly is the space–time in which the possibility of indeterminacy manifests itself, in which the determination of a process with its own continuity coexists with the indeterminacy and discontinuity it brings. This paradox has never been dissolved, even after more than a decade. Commons institution is that infrastructure which takes care of this paradox back in time. Another interview excerpt can better clarify this passage: Instability is the assembly game. Every Monday afternoon I had anxiety. Anything could happen in the assembly: you were like a peasant in front of the storm. You could find anyone: the police, a madman, the press. Every Monday we lived very much on adrenaline. The adrenaline of the unexpected. Mondays meant “now what happens?” Then I started to be more relaxed. I love the assembly, it gives me the adrenaline of meeting people. Now I see things going on their own, like a machine.
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The adrenaline of the unexpected: we need to pin this expression down since it is key to grasp the permanence of commons institutions and the return of its principle. This commoner experienced with anxiety and fear the dissipation of a linear project by the means of assemblies, before he got used to and began to love a process he almost calls machinic. Linear causality dissipates in the cyclical and unfinished return of the principle: the unexpected is the continuous failure of the three days occupation project.
Main understandings on commons institutions frame the sustainability of the commons as linked to its successful and efficient management. In contrast, commons institutions like l’Asilo present a non-finite nature, given by the preservation of stability within instability, closure within openness, making within unmaking. Commons never moves toward a new productive function that would point to the realization of an end, and an End. Commons coexists with its impotentia, with the unexpectedness that cyclically leads it to failure. This coexistence allows us to imagine a permanent entanglement potentially open to infinite regeneration over time.
Artistic entanglement within the institution
Both chronological and linear temporality and its cause-and-effect relationship lose any foothold in looking at l’Asilo institution. The magical and ritual Monday assembly is the moment when the human subject loses its binary agential control over the management of the resource. We argue that this issue pushes commons institutions scholarship to investigate the creation of the resource, more than its mere management. As we saw, the latter occurs through the binary relationship of a human community acting and in control toward a non-human passivity. Main literature on commons institutions prepares a theoretical narrative whereby the human pretends not to belong to any phenomenon, hides its own origin and its own principle of entanglement. In this way, human subjectivity can give itself the security of management, control, and pre-determination. The unexpected and indeterminacy are conveniently hidden through problem-solving rationality.
In everyday commoning, humans are matter and meaning that separates itself from entanglement, but remaining within it. It does not seem at all coincidental that l’Asilo, that is, a community devoted to art, favors the imagination of commons institutions based on creation. We still use tales coming from commoners to render visible the creation of l’Asilo institutionalization: The theatricalists are obsessed with bringing truth into fiction. Fiction does not take away the truth: you know I am pretending but this remains a truth. To create it we have to be able to be in the present. If I get up now and do that action there, it is already dead. I have to build that action in improvisation, and once I understand it I fix it for repetition, to repeat it without ever doing it the same. There needs to be a time to rehearse, to do and to say. It is always said that the performance becomes such by the 20th repetition. It is the same dynamism as the assembly. When you acquire the ability not to control it too much, it goes without saying and it becomes interesting not to stifle that thing by control. In the first spectacles and assemblies I'm on memory, instead in the reruns the memory comes by itself and then it's more beautiful.
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L’Asilo institution follows a logic of artistic creation in its making by means of paradoxical coexistences. The above artist's account gives matter and meaning to a crucial factor of this institution: it is an iterative process of accumulation and unfolding of collective norms in the form of memory.
Memory intra-acts within commoning. It follows a logic that the commoner perceives as a repetition: a repetition that paradoxically differs. The coming to matter and meaning of l’Asilo institution corresponds to the deferring of repetition, to the paradoxical return of the new in a mode of creation. This is the moment when the iterative entanglement of commoning and the body of singularity find themselves in a condition of resonance, to a point where they are indistinguishable. The interviewed artist seems not to clearly identify the agency of this embodied process of institutionalization: “memory comes of itself.” The body separates itself from this institutional entanglement, comes to matter and meaning, yet it is serenely traversed by it. It is able to enjoy this creative flow while still remaining bound and intertwined with the crumpling of memory. In this dismissal of the illusion of human agency, blissful and light, the commoner experiences the truth that interrupts any managerial, representational, and chronological control of the process of commoning. It thus opens itself to the unpredictability of the new.
Measurement apparatuses matter! A conclusive methodological self-reflection
Our motivation behind this paper roots in the frailties felt in main understandings on commons institutions. The diffracted reading of Ostrom and Barad allowed us to explore a new narrative on commons institutions, as the permanence of contentious political principles over time. This does not arise from a binary management of a human agency over a non-human passivity. Rather, it is created by the means of an entanglement made by non-linear causality and temporality. Agential Realism calls us to a shift from a vision of polycentric governance, whose outcome is provided in terms of efficiency through self-regulation, to institutionalization understood as intra-action, that is, a zone of indistinction between the usual categories of community and resource.
We maintain that research on commons institution needs to contribute to the understanding and thus to the making of its non-finiteness, taking into account how the methodological apparatuses agentially participate within the process. It has to focus on the coming to matter and meaning of its principles. Evolutionary heterodox economic analysis of commons institutions can be a valid inspirational frame. As an example, while talking about the permanent materialization and signification of commons institution principles, we are not far from identifying the evolutionary fitness of commons. Yes, this is a category elaborated in the evolutionary study of corporations to understand their ability of keeping themselves alive. Further research could apply it to commons institutions, considering that the corporation too is an organization whose permanence is based on the return of inderogable principles, in its case the accumulation and expropriation of living (and non-living) labor.
Can we imagine evolutionary fitness tied to the permanence of the political principles of commons institutions? We propose two research paths for this purpose, one preparatory to the other. We tested the first in this paper. We need to keep telling narratives to favor the coming to matter and meaning of other institutional entanglements of commoning. At the same time, we need to elaborate economic instruments to measure the non-finite evolutive fitness of commons institutions; instruments allowing us to answer to: how to study the institutionalization of principles of care, depatriarcalization of governance, horizontality, heterogeneity, interdependence? Both narratives and the elaboration of economic instruments are part of the reproductive labor grounding the non-finiteness of a commons institution. We have stories to tell that make sense of tools, and tools that provide significant consistency to those same stories.
Concerning that, we believe it is appropriate to follow the cyclical nature expressed by the case study, returning to the methodology used. Such a self-reflective process, we maintain, appropriately mirrors the assembly logic of a community of commoners such as l'Asilo. We are well aware that, even though l’Asilo is not a canonical fieldwork, we have reproduced the automatisms typical of modern narrative, which is perfectly linear from both a causal and chronological point of view: from political context, to occupation, to institutionalization. Identifying this weakness in our work leads us to consider how a full adoption of the diffractive methodology outlined above can only lead to a method of organizing and presenting the material that is closer to fiction. Our inspiration comes from forms of literature such as Ursula Le Guin's speculative science fiction, or authors such as Borges and Thomas Pynchon, who treat their imaginative material in a cartographic manner, stretching it toward a cartography that aims, in a never-ending operation, to achieve some kind of bidimensional horizontality.
This narrative logic is not so far from what has already been extensively covered by ecological critical theory. After all, Speculative Fabulation (SF) is a “mode of attention, a theory of history and a practice of worlding” (Haraway, 2016: 230). It involves the creation of reality through the act of story-telling. SF is not an alternative to scientific writing. Rather, it defamiliarizes habitual ways of meaning and knowing. As an example, SF would imagine l’Asilo's building as a character, moving toward a focus about non-human layers of the fieldwork.
Moreover, the appropriate use of SF could lead us to clarify the validity or otherwise of a concept such as that of the Agential Institution of Commons, which in this work remains a simple note along the way. The consistency of alternative modes of expression to refer to a commoning entanglement where there is confusion between the subject-community and the object-resource, and where the aim of the practice is not productive efficiency but unfinished reproduction, this consistency is a matter of speculative narrative, we claim.
An SF about commons and commoning is a case study in itself. This logic would make the gaze and the narrative strategy adopted while constructing the text as an explorative study, as well as the content as such. Through this narrative logic, we see that commons’ economic result to be understood moves from a cause–effect linearity, with its own aim to realize, to a performative discourse based on the infinite return of the contentious principle of commoning.
This is a research agenda that originates from the case study methodological practice and pushes for the non-generalization of tools and frameworks being developed for the study of commons institutions. We can’t reach the generalization of a framework such as IAD, devoted, as seen, to the abstraction of the performative particular. However, this does not mean giving up a universal theoretical narrative, albeit a weak universalism. Our study grasps l’Asilo's incommensurable singularity, yet. At the same time, the speculative narrative and the eventual apparatuses of measurement elaborated through and within l'Asilo participate in the creation of images and memory. These favor the materialization of commons institutions that are distant only in linear time and space. L'Asilo itself is one of the iterative materialization of the memory embodied within political struggles, and seated over centuries and in every corner of the globe.
Footnotes
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.