Reassembling the Natural and Social Commons

Abstract

Since modern times, human activity has significantly altered the earth’s physical and biological composition to such an extent that scientists have now renamed our current time the Anthropocene (Lewis and Maslin, Nature 519:171–180, 2015). Such a designation exposes the arbitrary boundary between the natural and social world. Large-scale social phenomena and injustices such as deforestation, mass agriculture, slavery, and brutal conquests now permanently mark planet Earth’s living and non-living components. Such events are enacted within assemblages of material and discursive components that have a history and ‘life’ of their own. This essay argues for dissolving the boundaries between ‘natural’ and ‘social’, human and non-human, and discursive and material, so as to fuse the natural and social commons (Hardt and Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire [Penguin, 2004]; Commonwealth [Harvard University Press, 2009])—the purpose of which is to create critical, activist spaces in education, integral to the exercising of biopower via the (re)production of subjectivities. Using Deleuze and Guattari’s assemblage theory and a short series of diagrams, we attempt to provoke reconfigurations of the material and social world.

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