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Liminal Commons
Modern Rituals of Transition in Greece
Angelos Varvarousis
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eBook - ePub
Liminal Commons
Modern Rituals of Transition in Greece
Angelos Varvarousis
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About This Book
This book is the first attempt to rethink and appraise the role of temporary commoning experiences that develop in contexts of crisis. Activist and urban planner, Angelos Varvarousis, argues that there is a certain type of commons – the liminal commons – which despite their often short lives play a crucial function in contemporary societies; they demarcate and facilitate transitions at the individual, collective and ultimately the societal level. Through an intense exploration of grassroots projects such as occupied squares, self-organised refugee camps, solidarity food structures and social clinics in crisis-ridden Greece, the author observes that humans still invent such collectively performed rituals in order to prepare, symbolize and practically explore the possibility of transformation and transition. In a period in which traditional rites of passage have faded away but many changes are urgently needed, liminal commons can be a key element in the process of claiming awareness and control over the mechanisms of individual, collective and societal emancipation.
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Chapter 1
Introduction
In 2009, Lesvos Island – now one of the most notable epicentres of the global refugee crisis – was a practically unknown spot at the outer edge of the European Union. Refugee flows were not absent at the time but the locals, as well as the rest of the world, were still unaware of the phenomenon. Indeed, migrants were arriving in Lesvos in large numbers even before 2009, but they were kept out of the sight of the locals as well as the international press. Their journey was rather standardized: from the coast of Turkey to the coasts of Lesvos, then directly transferred to the infamous detention centre ‘Pagani’ where they often remained for many months in detention. From there they were transferred by army or police buses to vessels in order to continue their journey by sea. Pagani detention centre, an ex-warehouse for storing fertilizers and other chemicals, was completely unsuitable for hosting people. Its rooms consisted of three windowless walls whereas the fourth side was made out of steel bars, looking just like a cage completely exposed to the elements. In these rooms, more than 100 or even 200 people were stacked, deprived of minimally humane conditions such as the right to walk outside the main room they were detained. And yet, this institution was functioning in the shadow of the EU, the Greek state and, most notably, the local community.
Until 2009, just a handful of activists on Lesvos were aware of the situation and were working on making the overall phenomenon visible to the locals and the rest of the world. At the beginning of the same year, together with activists from the EU and Turkey, they started discussing the possibility of organizing a Noborder Camp, a seven-day grassroots initiative to support and empower migrants on the island. The main argument against the organization of the Noborder Camp among the local activists involved in these discussions can be summed up by the following questions: Why put so much effort and energy to organize something that will be so impermanent? What can the foreign activists involved in the camp genuinely offer to our local struggles? Why not focus on organizing locally and on a more permanent basis? No doubt, all of these are legitimate questions, especially in a world in which endurance is synonymous to success.
The voices in favour of organizing the camp prevailed in the end and the event took place in August 2009. The structure of the camp was decentralized, with activities spreading in multiple locations inside and outside Mytilene, the capital of Lesvos. The main campsite of the Noborder Camp was built a few kilometres outside the city and offered all the basic amenities for making collective living possible. The activists also constructed an info point, a solidarity kitchen and a medical centre in Mytilene’s centre.
During the week that the camp lasted, a peculiar daily ritual spontaneously emerged. A few days prior to the official opening of the event, a cohort of both local and foreign volunteers who had arrived earlier to help with the preparations decided to march towards Pagani detention centre. When they arrived in front of the ‘cages’ of the centre, they stood in front of the imprisoned migrants, but instead of following their familiar repertoire of actions (shouting slogans, clashing with the police forces, etc.), they remained frozen in front of the shocking sight. Most of them burst into tears. On the other side of the fences, the view of the frozen activists sparked an uprising inside Pagani, with migrants shouting for freedom and help. After this incident, the volunteers continued to march to Pagani almost daily. This marked the beginning of a highly impactful interaction between the activists and the migrants, an intense dialogue that continued throughout the days of the camp, leading to the escalation of the migrants’ mobilizations inside the detention centre.
The camp marked a transitional moment in the history of the island and had a tremendous impact on the society of Lesvos and the lives of the migrants of Pagani. Its consequences exceeded by far the very issue of migration, as they touched upon other aspects of the social, political and economic life of the island. In addition, this temporary experience of commoning gave birth to a series of more stable commons and to several more stable solidarity structures in its aftermath. The info point, which through the continuous presence of the 400 or more activists in the centre of Mytilene, gradually turned into a place of sharing knowledge, political ideas and most importantly stories, laughter and tears. The people of Lesvos had the opportunity to gain insights on the situation of their island, with many of them openly expressing their compassion towards migrants as well as their willingness to become part of the movement. As a result, when the camp was over the local community of activists was much larger and stronger.
The collective effervescence of the Noborder Camp quickly spread in other political arenas; the pro-refugee movement and all other local social movements were empowered and popularized in the aftermath of the camp. It is important to note that the experience of the camp was transformative for almost everyone involved since they all had to overcome their own identity boundaries. Finally, the most evident win of the camp was that Pagani centre shut down just a few months later, as a result of the steep escalation of the migrants’ continuous uprisings. For the first time during their detention, they knew that someone was witnessing their continuous struggle and transferring it to the world outside the ‘cages’. Similar to many rites of passage around the world, the Noborder Camp finished with a massive celebration in the central square of Mytilene with locals, migrants and foreign activists dancing side by side.
This book is dedicated to forms of temporary commoning such as the Noborder Camp described earlier. Refugee camps, climate camps or summer camps, occupied squares, self-organized street parties or festivals are sites that involve intense moments of commoning, in which people are pooling and sharing resources and efforts for a limited period of time. What outcomes and effects do such commons have? What attributes and processes determine the effectiveness of such temporary commons? And what can be the role of such collective performances in broader societal transformations?
Research on the commons is primarily focused on enduring, long-lived systems, from centuries-long institutions managing aquifers or forests to years-long community gardens or open software. Stability and reproduction over time are seen as the sole markers of the ‘success’ of the commons. From the older Ostrom’s rules for managing the commons to the very recent Bollier’s and Helfrich’s patterns of commoning, researchers search for fundamental attributes that contribute to the sustainability of a commons over time. What about commons, though, that are by their very nature short-lived, yet have major impacts on commoners and environments? How do we make sense of such commons?
At this point, it is important to remind ourselves that with the exception of the work of Elinor Ostrom and her colleagues, the discourse of the commons was virtually non-existent in the 1990s; radical thinkers were certainly unfamiliar with it, and the commons were absent from discussions on societal transformation. The financial crisis of 2008, which was soon transformed into a broader multidimensional crisis of legitimation of the fundamental structures of Western societies, was a milestone in attracting attention to the commons as social systems alternative to capitalism. This interest culminated with the introduction of the term ‘commoning’ by historian Peter Linebaugh as recently as 2008, as the term marked the different content that the commons would acquire in contexts of crisis. The commons were no longer treated as things or resources but as processes that are made and remade according to needs and to the social, economic and spatial relations that commoners invent and try out. Commons happen.
This shift from the commons as resources to the active verb of commoning, which prioritizes socio-spatial relations that are always in flux, offered us the opportunity to use the language of the commons to talk about a series of phenomena we either could not theorize before or had been theorizing in different terms. This shift revealed that commons, or rather, practices of commoning, can be encountered almost everywhere – in the public space, in schools, in slums, within families, in factories, in streets and in many other places. Similarly, the commons can be found in social movements and political struggles, in periods of emergency or even in contexts of remote island vacations; the (re)production of the commons has become a synonym for the collective (re)production of life itself.
In modern societies, the commons range from long-lasting social systems to precarious and temporary arrangements; thus, they can acquire different roles in social and economic life. The present book focuses mainly on the latter form of commons, which, despite their precarity, often acquire a highly symbolic function in society: to facilitate transitions and to foster transformation at the individual, collective and even societal level. I call these commons ‘liminal’ because they embody many of the qualities found in the intermediate phases of the ‘rites of passage’ that in archaic or tribal societies were performed to organize, symbolize and demarcate passages of different types: territorial, social status, time (harvest, New Year) or spatiotemporal ones such as the seasonal relocation of the entire tribe.
In contrast to the widespread belief that rituals are quickly vanishing from modern societies, repeated examples show that humans still invent and employ such collectively performed rites in order to prepare for, mark and symbolize transformation and transition – or even to explore the possibility of it. Even though they share many elements with the rituals performed in archaic societies, these new rites of passage tend to differ in many aspects, which are explored in detail in this book.
This work focuses on the transformative potential of the new commoning rituals that I call ‘the liminal commons’. Liminal commons are transitional – yet not elusive – forms of temporary commons that despite their short lifespan are capable of creating and marking new realities that were previously unthinkable. They often start as the results of a specific crisis but also can spark generative processes of more stable commoning practices in their wake. Despite their impermanence, they can have deep and enduring effects.
I am aware that writing on and theorizing transformative processes is always a risky and controversial task since, at any level, changes are often temporary and can be reversed. Moreover, the transformation process itself is a contradictory and complex ad hoc process, which is difficult to capture and theorize. My work, thus, is inevitably prone to such contradictions, and I admit that it is but a preliminary attempt to capture some of the tendencies and mechanisms that characterize the manifold processes of transformation at large.
I had the opportunity to explore transformations in the context of Greece, an environment that in the last decade epitomizes flux and transformation through crisis. Over those years, the multifaceted Greek crisis has had devastating effects for great parts of the population; it has forced many people towards desperation, has increased social inequalities and has caused irreversible damage. This has been the ‘ugly’ yet absolutely real face of the transformative process of a multidimensional crisis. However, amid the ruins of the collapsed order, a series of new social, economic, discursive and cultural elements have emerged, which point to a more optimist scenario of societal transformation. The present work focuses precisely on these micro-changes.
In highlighting and analysing change, I do not mean to disregard the fact that structures are not easily transformed and that processes of transformation are lengthy and often incomplete. Yet, scholars only have the chance to choose and develop a small part of the issues they believe are important and necessary to study. Hence, in this work, I prioritize the exploration of micro-transformations and the role liminal commons play in them, rather than focusing on transformations that fail or are quickly reversed.
I acknowledge that the present moment is rife with fear and disappointment. The pandemic of Covid-19 cannot be characterized as yet another crisis causing a partial destabilization of the existing order in a limited geography; rather, it should be understood as a milestone event of global significance that can potentially lead to a ‘post-human era’ (Zizek 2020) and which calls for a re-invention of life at large. Yet, in many parts of the world, the crisis was already so intense that Covid-19 barely registers as a game-changing factor. The continuous pressure on the remnants of the welfare state, the pervasive threat of new world wars, the enduring economic crisis, the massive refugee flows from the Middle East and Africa and the continuous irreversible damage to the environment were already leaving very little room for hope.
Yet, while crisis breeds desperation, at the same time it opens up space for the reconstitution of everything. Even more, the escalation and blending of multiple crises demand new tools and modes for theorizing and making sense of the present. We can’t afford to understand crisis only as a bad spell or an invincible impasse. Crisis should also be understood as synonymous with possibility. In this light, I propose to look into the multiple facets of the transformative potential of crisis. The pillars of this theoretical exploration are crisis, liminality and the act of commoning; their intersections and interactions are examined in the case studies included in the present book.
Chapter 2 is a theoretical one. It lays out the theoretical foundations that underpin the empirical part of this work. In other words, it is a ‘threshold chapter’. It starts by exploring in detail the role of the commons and commoning at the dawn of the twenty-first century and then goes on to pose the research questions that guide this study. It then defines how the notion of crisis is used throughout the text and offers a critical engagement with the diverse theories on commons and liminality. The chapter ends with a preliminary attempt to define the basic characteristics of liminal commons and a detailed justification of why Greece has important things to tell us about this subject.
Chapter 3 is the first of the empirical chapters. It engages with issues of subjectivity and subjectification and relates findings from the field with broader theoretical discussions on the topic. The chapter draws on empirical research that took place between 2008 and 2014, related to the social mobilizations of the 2008 revolt and the 2011 ‘movement of the squares’, both in Athens, as well as to many smaller events that took place between the two major events.
Chapter 4 delves into the issue of expansion of the liminal commons. It builds upon the observation that due to their contagious and metastatic character, liminal commons can become the expanding mode of commoning and give rise to a process of multiplication and expansion of existing ventures. This chapter draws on the unprecedented expansion of commoning projects in Greece in the wake of the 2011 movement of the squares and tries to understand why and how this expansion occurred.
Chapter 5 explores the issue of protection of the commons, which is approached here as a crucial dimension in the establishment and stabilization of the small or big differences that can be fostered within, through and because of commoning. The chapter engages with broader theoretical discussions on the topic and argues that the current debate is dominated by the polarizing dualism of openness versus closure. After deconstructing this binary opposition, the chapter develops a theoretical framework that brings to the fore strategies for the protection of the commons that go beyond the aforementioned dualism.
Chapter 6 is the last empirical chapter. It addresses issues of trust, motivation and membership turnover in the liminal commons by engaging with various theories, from classical commons studies to evolutionary theory and critical management. The chapter draws on an extreme case of liminal commons: Platanos Self-Organized Refugee Camp in Lesvos. The chapter explores the personal trajectories of participants and the transformations that took place through Platanos at the individual, collective and local levels.
The book ends with a final theoretical chapter on rituals and transformations, which offers final reflections on the issue of the transformative potential of contemporary commoning rituals, summarizes the theoretical discussion and attempts to weave the findings of the previous chapters into a robust argument. The chapter finishes by sketching out possible lines of future research for advancing and completing the theory introduced in this theoretical endeavour.
Chapter 2
Commons, crisis and liminality
Why commons?
‘Commons’ and ‘commoning’ are two words that have relatively recently entered the public debate on people’s alternative strateg...