Martin Luther King

Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct action campaign that was "well timed" in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word "Wait!" It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This "Wait" has almost always meant "Never." We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that "justice too long delayed is justice denied."

 

depression (excerpts)

"Not only is there pathophysiological correlation between anxiety disorders and depressive disorders, there is also clinical correlation. One of the first meta-analyses to be carried out looking for comorbidity between anxiety and depression5 found that 58% of depressed patients had some type of anxiety, and that concomitant depression and anxiety had occurred in 52.2% of cases in the previous year. Conversely, 56% of patients with anxiety had depression. There is evidence that depression and anxiety are associated with chronic pain and not only that they can be clinically concomitant, but also that chronic pain is considered a predictor of major depression or worsening of anxiety symptoms6–10; a relationship has been found between the magnitude of the...pain and the intensity of the depressive and anxiety symptoms.9

An analysis of a two-dimensional model of anxiety and depression found that the scores for each of the syndromes correlated significantly with the intensity and severity of the pain.11,12 An epidemiological study showed that painful physical symptoms are a common feature in patients suffering from generalised anxiety disorder and even more so in patients with comorbid depressive disorder".

"It has been suggested that fibromyalgia is related to a deficit in the internal modulation of pain, especially of the inhibitory mechanisms.100,101 The neurobiology of pain involves the regulation of endogenous processes of inhibition and excitation that include inhibitory conditioned pain modulation; it is postulated that...nociceptive stimulation cancels out other nociceptive stimulus if they occur at a body site distant from the painful surface. This system involves serotonergic, noradrenergic and opioidergic inhibitory pathways and causes a reduction in diffuse pain throughout the body with the associated emotional effect. Some experimental studies have shown that inhibitory conditioned pain modulation is deficient in fibromyalgia.101–103 Fibromyalgia is thought to be related to central and peripheral hyperexcitability of the nociceptor system that manifests as multiple painful tender points, hyperalgesia and allodynia.

In depressed patients, imaging alterations are described in the sector of the dorsal anterior insula where changes usually occur in patients with chronic pain; this may have a role in what is known as “emotional allodynia”, a concept related to the pain experienced by people with major depression in response to stimuli which would not normally be painful.104 It should be noted that people with bipolar disorder have also been found to have comorbidity with fibromyalgia105–109 and migraine.110–112 Functional imaging studies reveal structural changes in the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex and support the fact that bipolar depression [and] suffering from pain...share the same biological circuits.113,114"

Cesar A. Arango-Dávilaa,b,  Hernán G. Rincón-Hoyos (Depressive disorder, anxiety disorder and chronic pain: Multiple manifestations of a common clinical and pathophysiological core)

The notion of identity broadens the personal to the political, moves from the ‘I’ to the ‘we’.

Sally French and John Swain 

French and Swain

There are a number of different possible explanations of this personal tragedy theory of disability. It is sometimes thought to reflect a deep irrational fear of non-disabled people’s own mortality.  A second form of explanation refers to dominant social values and ideologies, particularly through the association of disability with dependence and abnormality. There is a third type of explanation, however, which 4 suggests that the personal tragedy perspective has a rational, cognitive basis constructed through experiences in disablist social contexts. Unlike within other social divisions, such as between men and women or between members of different races, nondisabled people daily experience the possibility of becoming impaired and thus disabled (the causal link being integral to the tragedy model). It can be argued that so-called ‘irrational fears’ have a rational basis in a disablist society. To become visually impaired, for instance, may be a personal tragedy for a sighted person whose life is based around being sighted, who lacks knowledge of the experiences of people with visual impairments, whose identity is founded on being sighted, and who has been subjected to a daily diet of the personal tragedy model of visual impairment. Thus, the personal tragedy view of impairment and disability is ingrained in the social identity of non-disabled people. Non-disabled identity, as other identities, has meaning in relation to and constructs the identity of others. To be non-disabled is to be ‘not one of those’. The problem for disabled people is that the tragedy model of disability and impairment is not just significant for non-disabled people in understanding themselves and their own lives. It is extrapolated to assumptions about disabled people and their lives. From this point of view, too, the adherence to a personal tragedy model by disabled people themselves also has a rational basis.

Sally French and John Swain 

"Throughout Western-colonial history, the lack of ability to reason by slaves, indigenous peoples, or nonhuman animals was often taken as a precursor to justifying their enslavement and slaughter. Likewise, whether one can walk, see, or hear serves as a precursor to justifying exclusion from certain environments and social locations. In all cases, the privilege of being able-bodied is taken as a given, while those who are labeled as dis-abled are subordinated. To challenge this cultural paradigm, we must question the ontological environments that mental and physical abilities construct. These constructions are anything but neutral".

"Inspired by eco-feminism, eco-racism, and eco-colonialism, eco-ability challenges cultural conceptions of “normalcy” as determined by dominant social groups. As part of this challenge, Nocella, Bentley, and Duncan (2012) evaluate special education and dis-ability studies as civil arenas built upon the “charity model” that attempts to make those with disabilities as mainstream as possible (p. xv). In defiance of this tradition, Eco-ability argues for the respect of difference and diversity, challenging social constructions of what is considered normal and equal. Eco-ability also challenges labels and categories that divide and separate rather than unify and collaborate. Eco-ability respects imperfection and the value of “flaws.” … Difference was, and is, the essential ingredient for human and global survival. (Nocella, Bentley, & Duncan, 2012, pp. xvi-xvii) Indeed, for nonhuman survival as well. Other-than-human animal species have traditionally been viewed as “flawed” by nature of their not being born human. As such, they are always already excluded from conventional conceptions of who gets counted in the moral community. This is seen in their use within nearly all major profit-making institutions from corporations, to education, to entertainment, and so on".

"Derrida recalls that the god Prometheus stole fire for humans to compensate for Epimetheus, who neglected to clothe clothed humans. It is “within the pit of that lack … man installs or claims in a single stroke his property.” This property, which is “the peculiarity [le propre] of a man whose property it even is not to have anything that is proper to him,” establishes a “superiority over what is called animal life” (p. 20). Philosophy is preoccupied with the attempt to fix something “proper” to human, such as reason, consciousness, or language. But because there is nothing proper to “the human” that isn’t also proper to some or other animal, the “propers” keep changing".

"We may even think of ableism as a kind of speciesism. Speciesism relentlessly asks of nonhuman animals that they be like us, that their speciescapabilities be measured against that of the Homo sapiens sapiens, a term that pings its own echo, a call and response of “the human” to “the human.” Sapiens? Sapiens. As we seek to make visible that which has been withdrawn into itself—our private suffering in pain and debilitation; the suffering inflicted on nonhumans in seclusion—we must maintain vigilance against curing through harm".

Journal for Critical Animal Studies

Arne Næss and George Sessions

The well-being and flourishing of human and nonhuman Life on Earth have value in themselves (synonyms: intrinsic value, inherent value).

Mikkel Krause Frantzen

The idea to be pursued in the following is that depression constitutes what Raymond Williams, in his influential text “Structures of feeling”, calls “a contemporary structure of feeling” (128) and “an undeniable experience of the present” (134), respectively. In that sense and through the analysis of the critical diagnoses that the aesthetic works unfold themselves this dissertation is intended as a cultural exploration into the so-called Zeitgeist – and once more it is presupposed that the phenomenon of depression lies at the core of this Zeitgeist. It is my contention, however, that such an analysis cannot be an analysis of the time or of the times only (die Zeit); the analysis must be accompanied by an analysis of spirit (der Geist). Despite all the previous conceptualizations and contextualizations, in which some lines of demarcation have been drawn, the concept of spirit and spiritual despair must now be confronted. The thoughts of Søren Kierkegaard are particularly helpful in this regard. In his seminal work Sickness unto Death from 1849, originally published under the pseudonym AntiClimacus, which deals with the notion of despair (fortvivlelse in Danish), Kierkegaard defines the human being as spirit. In a playful (anti-)Hegelian manner he goes on to explain what he means by that: “A human being is spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self. But what is the self? The self is a relation that relates itself to itself or is the relation’s relating itself to itself in the relation; the self is not the relation but is the relation’s relating itself to itself. A human being is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity, in short, a synthesis.” (21). As spirit the self is a relation that relates itself to itself, and thus despair is a disorder in this very relation, a mis-relation between necessity and possibility, between what the self is (present) and what it wants to be (future). Despair is, in other words, a sickness in spirit, a sickness unto death as it were. The only antidote to this sickness is a leap of faith, which is also a work of love (the title of one of his books, to which I shall return in the chapter on Wallace, is precisely Works of Love). A few thinkers have elaborated on the idea that existential or spiritual despair can be regarded as a central component of depression, a kind of isotope. Karl Jaspers – who found a great source of inspiration in Kierkegaard – is not the only writer to have devoted some attention to the 21 relation between depression and despair. In his book On Depression. Drugs, Diagnosis, and Despair in the Modern World, Nassir Ghaemi places quite an emphasis on this particular relation, and Ann Cvetkovich seeks “a model for thinking about depression as a spiritual problem” in her book Depression: A Public Feeling (24). The Kierkegaardian notion of despair is one such model, I would argue. Of course, this does not mean that depression can be reduced to a spiritual problem but that the notion of spiritual despair can expand and supplement existing explications of depression. The goal is thus an attempt to think about depression as a spiritual problem and to that end, numerous congenial and complementary concepts will be presented and defined along the way: Belief, despair, faith, spirit. My overall intuition is that a rehabilitation of the somewhat antiquated notion of spirit is necessary if the aim is to capture the spiritual depth of depression in its individual pain and horror. But the concept is likewise invaluable for addressing, more generally, the psychological, spiritual and even religious matrix of capitalism today. For that reason the thinking of Bernard Stiegler will supplement that of Søren Kierkegaard28, as – in a sense – the concept of spirit synthesizes phenomenology and political economy. In The Lost Spirit of Capitalism and Uncontrollable Societies of Disaffected Individuals (both from 2006), Stiegler advances the hypothesis that a spiritual misery penetrates the Western world; indeed he goes so far as to talk about the lost spirit of capitalism. By spirit, Stiegler thus does not intend some abstract factor that determines the course of history, nor a purely individual or mental capacity. In fact spirit is not to be understood in any idealistic or transcendental sense. Following the tradition of Max Weber, Stiegler considers spirit a category that belongs to political economy. But he is not so much concerned with the Protestant ethos of capitalism, as the apparatuses of production, the mechanisms of circulation and the patterns of consumption in contemporary capitalism. Phrasing it in a more technical fashion in phenomenological terms, capitalism is as a whole a protentional system, according to Stiegler. At the beginning of the book The Lost Spirit of Capitalism, he stresses that spirit is just another name for desire, and that the object of desire is an object of (potential) addiction (3; 12). The spirit of capitalism refers to the currents of desire and affect that keep the market alive from

28 It deserves notice that Kierkegaard did in fact partly develop his typology of despair as a critical diagnosis of the society at that time. The spiritual problem Kierkegaard addressed must thus be understood not only as an individual problem but also as a problem of society, a symptom of the Zeitgeist, so to speak. 22 

the outside. But capitalism and in particular financial capitalism are spiritual in another sense as well: The financial markets are based on faith, confidence and trust, and this is what keeps the system functioning from the inside. In this regard, credit is the ultimate protentional figure. 29 What is at stake is thus our very innermost being, our neuronal networks, our beliefs, affects and desires, our brain, our soul.30 Spirit in this context is shorthand for all that, but first and foremost I take spirit – as a protentional figure, a figure of futurity – to denote the exact point of convergence between the self that relates itself to itself as a future self and the capitalist economy. And depression would then come to mean a spiritual, protentional sickness unto death. In any case, in what follows we will come to see how – in the works analyzed – depression is often anatomized as a crisis of faith31 and that the personal spiritual crisis that is part of depression is brought to address a more general and historical spiritual crisis. In an essay on Dostoevsky, David Foster Wallace, for example, writes that we (the contemporaries of Wallace) seem to have lost “motive, feeling, belief” (Consider the Lobster 273). And in another essay Wallace even claimed that “philosophy is first and last about spirit” (“The Empty Plenum” 22032). By implication, the same goes for the aesthetic sphere. An admission of this sort could have far-reaching consequences for how we regard the critical function of contemporary art and literature. This raises a series of interesting, unavoidable and yet perhaps unanswerable questions about the relation between depression and 29 “The capitalist system for creating protentions is a system of credit which brings about a change in the system of belief – by turning belief into something calculable, and by therefore engendering something better than belief (at least in the eyes of negotium): trust [confiance]. Credit in general, in all its forms…is the organization of protentions. Credit is the concrete social expression of protentions which realize themselves, which perform…” (For a New Critique of Political Economy 67). 30 Clearly the concept of spirit is not too dissimilar to Berardi’s concept of soul as presented in The Soul at Work. 31 A passage from the British author Tim Lott’s memoir The Scent of Dried Roses is highly illuminating in this regard: “I have absolutely no faith, in fact, in anything. In a muddy way, I see that depression manifests itself as a crisis of faith. Not religious faith, but the almost born instinct that things are fluid, that they unfold and change, that new kinds of moment are eventually possible, that the future will arrive. I am in a time-locked place, where the moment I am in will stretch on, agonizingly for ever. There is no possibility of redemption or hope. It is a final giving up on everything. It is death.” (quoted in: Ratcliffe 68 – my emphasis). 32 This text is actually a review of David Markson’s novel Wittgenstein’s Mistress. It first appeared in Review of Contemporary Fiction (1990), from which I quote here. Strangely enough, when the essay was reprinted and included in the collection Both Flesh and Not, some changes had been made, including the replacement of the word ”spirit” with the word ”feeling” in the quoted line (see: Both Flesh and Not 78). 23 despair, spirituality and aesthetics, therapy and art. As summarized rather abstractly by Susan Sontag in “The Aesthetics of Silence” (1967): “Every era has to reinvent the project of ‘spirituality’ for itself.” (3). 33 An ongoing ambition of the rest of this dissertation is to try to flesh out what that might possibly mean and look like.

Mikkel Krause Frantzen

In his General Psychopathology, Jaspers, who was not just a philosopher but also a psychiatrist, is interested in the experience of time in mental disorders. According to the anthropology of the phenomenological tradition that has Husserl and Heidegger as its founding fathers, to be a human being is to be a temporal being with a direction, a sense of continuity, and some plan for the future (what Husserl called protention and Heidegger conceptualized as the ec-static temporality of being, the anticipation of future possibilities). But this, as Jaspers points out, is precisely what depressed patients lack: After quoting a depressive patient complaining that “it feels as if it is...always the same moment, it is like a timeless void”, Jaspers comments: “A depressed patient feels as if time did not want to go on.” (84). To Jaspers, this experience or awareness of time is intimately connected to an “emotional atmosphere” (86), in that emotional changes make themselves noticeable in the experience of time: “A depressed patient, suffering from ‘terrible emptiness’ and a feeling of ‘having lost all feeling’ reported – ‘I cannot see the future, just as if there were none. I think everything is going to stop now and tomorrow there will be nothing at all.’ Patients know there is another day tomorrow but this awareness has changed from what it was like before. Even the next five minutes do not lie ahead as they used to do. Such patients have no decisions, no worries, no hopes for the future.” (86) Jaspers even develops the fruitful idea of what could be called a metafeeling, in particular the idea of the feeling of a non-feeling (Gefühl der Gefühllosigkeit or Fühlen eines Nichtfühlen), so that in depression one feels nothing but this feeling of nothing is definitely felt. Or to put it another way: the feeling of not feeling anything is itself a feeling. This is not sheer sophistry, but rather the ultimate – affective – horror of depression, which will become clear in the case of David Foster Wallace. In any case, it becomes crucial to explore not just depression as a feeling, but how that feeling feels; what depression feels like.11 11

In fact, the DSM relies on a definition of depression as a mood or affective disorder. I agree with the wording of the definition but not with its content. Perhaps depression is indeed an affective disorder, or a mood disorder, but the question is: how does that affective or mood disorder feel? What is the affect of the affective disorder, so to speak? This is just one of the reasons I do not subscribe to the definition to be found in the DSM. A more fundamental problem is the reductive and rather old-fashioned understanding of mood and affect informing the DSM: The tendency to de-contextualize moods and affects, to rely on the ancient dualism of body and mind/brain, to pathologize certain emotional responses and so on. Theoretically this dissertation is therefore more in line not only with Jaspers, but also recent affect theory too, whose insights and attainments are overall able to nuance, supplement and complicate the definition of depression as a mood or affect disorder presented in the DSM. One of the cornerstones of affect theory, taken somewhat misleadingly as a whole, is firstly that feelings and affects must be taken seriously, and secondly that affects are as much collective, social and political phenomena as they are psychological, private and individual. Crucial reference points in this regard are Ann Cvetkovich’s Depression: A Public Feeling and Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism. Furthermore, affect theory often seeks to depathologize negative feelings of sadness and unhappiness, thereby, as Ann Cvetokovich writes, granting questions like “How do I feel?” or “How does capitalism feel?” a real legitimacy (3). 8 

To return to the experience of time in depression as it has been described in the phenomenological tradition, Ludwig Binswanger, in the aforementioned work Melancholie und Manie, states that depression is characterized by a protentional disturbance whereby the depressed person experiences a ‘futural’ vacuum or a vacuum as the future (27). That the future is or has been lost is not a supposition or a conjecture, but documented fact (43-44). The future is, so to speak, always already considered a thing of the past. Many empirical studies have been conducted in relation to the depressive experience of a slowing or stoppage of time, but the results are mixed and equivocal.12 Furthermore, such studies tend to “measure the estimation or production of defined time intervals rather than a general subjective experience of the flow of time.” (Oberfeld et al. 1). In other words, they do not really capture the phenomenological experience of time in depression, which is the primary concern here. Things appear differently if we turn to American psychiatrist Frederick T. Melges’s study of depression, Time and Inner Future. Here, Melges offers an account of depression as a spiral of hopelessness, implying first and foremost a block to the future. He writes that hopelessness is like a cloud drawing “a curtain on the future” and quotes one of his patients who describes how "the future looks cold and bleak, and I seem frozen in time." (178). Several phenomenological scholars emphasize this particular aspect of depression: the feeling of being stuck, stagnated, that the race is run and that the present – which is hell – becomes all there is and all that can ever be imagined to be.13 This is the first aspect of the formal structure of time in depression: A subjective relation to time. This relation is, however, related to what could tentatively be called a social time; the time of the environment and the surrounding world. In the words of German psychiatrist and philosopher, Thomas Fuchs a de-synchronization occurs in depression that is as social as it is subjective; the depressive desynchronization manifests, more precisely, in the very interplay between subjective and social time. In the first instance, the term describes a state of disturbance in the temporal being, within which the flow of lived experience is brought to a halt, transforming temporality from “implicit” to “explicit”, in much in the same way as Heidegger – whose thoughts on temporality and subjectivity must not be

“Depression, or alternative accounts of what gets called depression, is thus a way to describe neoliberalism and globalization, or the current state of political economy, in affective terms.” (11). 12 See for instance: Sévigny et al; Bschor et al; Gil and Droit-Volet; Ghaemi 2007. 13 See: Wyllie, 180; Rønberg, 185; Karp, 23-24. 9

undervalued here – says that we only notice the given tool – a hammer, for instance – at that moment when it does not work anymore. ‘Normally’, Fuchs says, we do not pay any attention to time, we just live in it. But in depression this is no longer the case. In this type of situation, time is suddenly noticed: It becomes perceptively and painfully out of joint, out of synch ("Implicit and Explicit Temporality" 196). The key point about this de-synchronization is that it is not merely biological, but also relational and intersubjective, in the sense that the depressed patient is out of synch with the surrounding environment and the social clock as much as she is out synch with herself and her own biological clock: “[T]he depressive suffers the loss of sympathetic resonance; he gets ‘out of synch’. While dialogues are normally accompanied by a continuous synchronization of bodily gestures and gazes, his expression sets and loses its modulation. The affect attunement with others fails.” (“Melancholia as a Desynchronization”183).

Kant

Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of another, always at the same time as an end and never simply as a means.

Immanuel Kant

'The initial shift towards the disciplinary society is marked by, among other things, the fact that “power no longer manifests itself through the violence of its ceremony, but it is exercised through normalization, habit, and discipline” (Foucault 2015, 240). Subjects move through and interact with these normalizing apparatuses, always with the goal of reintegration; however, it may not always end there. Abnormality is a form of “anarchy” from which society must be defended, it disrupts the proper flow of bodies, information, capital, and the maximization of state forces (Foucault 2003, 318). It is a threat to development itself. Madness...disability, indolence...these are categories in the human sciences that help differentiate and categorize the abnormality that constitutes the tide that crashes against the logic of production and the politics of utility. The task of biopolitics can be described as a secular continual pastoral gaze. The pastor is tasked with detecting abnormality and managing circuitries. For this reason, the sovereign right to life is not completely dissolved in this new regime – it is merely reworked and given a new assignment and rationality. Those who have gone astray, whose lives are in error, become a risk that warrants...their liquidation'.

'One of the final pieces Michel Foucault was able to complete for publication before his death was a homage to his beloved teacher, Georges Canguilhem. It was published both in a French metaphysics journal and as the introduction to the English translation of Canguilhem’s seminal text, The Normal and the Pathological. In his piece, Foucault takes note of something important to Canguilhem, error:

At the center of these problems, one finds that of error. For at the most basic level of life, the processes of coding and decoding give way to a chance occurrence that, before becoming a disease, a deficiency, or monstrosity, is something like a disturbance in the informative system, something like a “mistake.” In this sense, life—and this is its most radical feature—is that which is capable of error.

(FOUCAULT 1998, 476)

Life as being that which is capable of error bursts through Foucault’s body-of-work, illuminating so much of what can often be perceived as its darkest moments. This comment on Canguilhem at the end of his life furnishes so much of what was already present in lecture series such as Abnormal or central works like Discipline and Punish. However, it also allows readers to acquire a more immediate understanding of something crucial at stake in Foucault’s work: how we conceive of life. Giorgio Agamben uses this position of errancy and subjectivity in Foucault’s essay to oppose the conception “of the subject on the basis of a contingent encounter with the truth” (Agamben 1999, 221). But one can make a much simpler argument: if to live is fundamentally to always be at risk to err, biopolitical circuitry has had no other goal than to determine, define, and eliminate error in life'.

RevoltingBodies

Stanford (On Levinas)

'Emmanuel Levinas intellectual project was to develop a first philosophy...it takes the form of a description and interpretation of the event of encountering another person.[1] Giving rise to spontaneous acts of responsibility for others, the encounter unfolds, according to Levinas, at a precognitive level, thanks to what he called our embodied “sensibility”.[2] That is why a phenomenology of intersubjective responsibility would be ‘first’ philosophy; viz., in the sense of interpretively reconstructing a level of experience precursive to both reflective activity and practical interests'.

'The encounter with the other is an encounter with a visible thing, of course. But this other speaks to me, implores or commands me. In responding, I discover my responsibility to them. This is the ground of ethics or indeed our concern with ethics as the good of the other person'.

'As Levinas argues, when ethics goes in search of its existential ground, before any consideration of utility, virtue, or duty, it discovers the intersubjective enactment of responsibility, which resists being integrated into accounts in which the other is a universal other to whom it is my duty, for example, to act ethically or in the hope of increasing the happiness of the collectivity'.

Stanford

Levinas

I am always alone in being able to answer the call, I am irreplaceable in my assumption of responsibility. 

 Emmanuel Levinas

Olufemi

We need to develop a genuinely structural politics. The solution is clearly not as simple as putting someone who looks like you in power.  The trouble with identity politics is its focus on who’s bad and who’s good, who’s the oppressor and who’s the oppressed, who is the victim and who is the victimizer. But any sensible history of colonialism shows the contribution and complicity of African merchants, slavers and state bureaucrats. We need to understand the structural reasons for domination, racism, and forge a less predatory form of politics.

So if you look at housing insecurity or incarceration, for example, here in the US or internationally, you will see stark racial divisions. But the reasons for that are complicated and the solutions will be too. We need to structure our political world so that we defend each other’s safety rather than defend some people’s profit margins or some people’s pretensions to control or desire to perpetuate a colonial politics, as Achille has explained.

Olúfémi Táíwò

Williams

Our current political paradigm is sceptical of the commons: if nobody takes responsibility for something, it will inevitably be abused. So either it needs to be in private hands, or run by public institutions.

There are good examples of commons though – irrigation networks or pastures that have been managed by and for ordinary people for generations, and they’re still functioning. There are also examples of wrecked pastures and over-exploited fishing grounds, failed commons where a resource was mismanaged and destroyed. Elinor Ostrom studied both kinds, and drew up a list of principles for running the commons. 

1. Commons need to have clearly defined boundaries. In particular, who is entitled to access to what? Unless there’s a specified community of benefit, it becomes a free for all, and that’s not how commons work.

2. Rules should fit local circumstances. There is no one-size-fits-all approach to common resource management. Rules should be dictated by local people and local ecological needs.

3. Participatory decision-making is vital. There are all kinds of ways to make it happen, but people will be more likely to follow the rules if they had a hand in writing them. Involve as many people as possible in decision-making.

4. Commons must be monitored. Once rules have been set, communities need a way of checking that people are keeping them. Commons don’t run on good will, but on accountability.

5. Sanctions for those who abuse the commons should be graduated. Ostrom observed that the commons that worked best didn’t just ban people who broke the rules. That tended to create resentment. Instead, they had systems of warnings and fines, as well as informal reputational consequences in the community.

6. Conflict resolution should be easily accessible. When issues come up, resolving them should be informal, cheap and straightforward. That means that anyone can take their problems for mediation, and nobody is shut out. Problems are solved rather than ignoring them because nobody wants to pay legal fees.

7. Commons need the right to organise. Your commons rules won’t count for anything if a higher local authority doesn’t recognise them as legitimate.

8. Commons work best when nested within larger networks. Some things can be managed locally, but some might need wider regional cooperation – for example an irrigation network might depend on a river that others also draw on upstream.

The ‘tragedy of the commons’ is real, but it is not inevitable. It is possible to create and operate thriving commons, a third way besides private ownership and government control. In an age where we all depend on global commons such as the atmosphere or the oceans, we should be paying more attention to commons management.

JEREMY WILLIAMS

Harari excerpts (in conversation)

"People that feel good about themselves have done some of the most terrible things in human history. I mean, we shouldn’t confuse people feeling good about themselves and about their lives with people being benevolent and kind and so forth. And also, they wouldn’t say that their ideas are extreme...we have so many examples throughout human history, from the Roman Empire to the slave trade in the modern age and colonialism...they had a very good life, they had a very good family life and social life, they were nice people, I mean, I guess most Nazi voters were also nice people. If you meet them for a cup of coffee and you talk about your kids, they were nice people, and they think good things about themselves, and some of them...have very happy lives. And even the ideas that we look back, and say, “This was terrible. This was extreme,” they didn’t think so. Again, if you just think about colonialism…Let’s just think about European colonialism in the 19th century...in Britain, in the late 19th century...they thought that by going all over the world and conquering and changing societies in India, in Africa, in Australia, they were bringing lots of good to the world. And I’m just saying that so that we are more careful about not confusing the good feelings people have about their life…It’s not just miserable people suffering from poverty and economic crisis".

"I agree that more people have more of a voice than ever before, both in the US and globally. I think you’re absolutely right. My concern is, to what extent we can trust the voice of people…To what extent I can trust my voice?…We have this picture of the world that I have this voice inside me, which tells me what is right and what is wrong. And the more I’m able to express this voice in the outside world and influence what’s happening, the more people can express their voices, it’s better, it’s more democratic. But what happens if at the same time that more people can express...it’s also easier to manipulate your inner voice? To what extent you can really trust that the thought that just popped up in your mind is the result of some free will, and not the result of an extremely powerful algorithm that understands what’s happening inside you and knows how to push the buttons and press the levers, and is serving some external entity and it has planted this thought or this desire that you now express? So, it’s two different issues. Giving people voice and trusting…Again, I’m not saying, “I know everything, “but all these people that now join the conversation, “we cannot trust their voices.” I’m asking this about myself, to what extent I can trust my own inner voice? And, you know, I spend two hours meditating every day. And I go on these long meditation retreats. And my main takeaway from that is it’s craziness inside there. And it’s so complicated. And the simple, naïve belief that the thought that pops up in my mind, this is my free will, this was never the case. But, if say, a thousand years ago, the battles inside were mostly between, you know, neurons and biochemicals and childhood memories and all that, increasingly, you have external actors going under your skin, and into your brain, and into your mind. And how do I trust that my amygdala in not a Russian agent now? How do I know…The more we understand about the extremely complex world inside us, the less easy it is to simply trust what this inner voice is telling, is saying".

Yuval Noah Harari

Haraway

Think we must. If ever there has been a time for the need seri­ous­ly to think, it is now, and it has got to be the kind of think­ing that Hannah Arendt accused Eichmann of being inca­pable of...the banal­i­ty of evil in the fig­ure of Eichmann was con­densed in Hannah Arendt’s analy­sis into the inca­pac­i­ty to think the world that is actu­al­ly being lived. The inabil­i­ty to con­front the con­se­quences of the world­ing that one is in fact engaged in, and the lim­it­ing of think­ing to func­tion­al­i­ty. The lim­it­ing of think­ing to busi­ness as usu­al. Being smart, per­haps, being effi­cient, per­haps, but that Eichmann was inca­pable of think­ing, and in that con­sist­ed the banal­i­ty and ordi­nar­i­ness of evil. And I think among us, the ques­tion of whether we are Eichmanns is a very seri­ous one.

Donna Haraway

Mbembe

To be alive, or to survive, is more and more co-terminus with the capacity to move...movement, in turn, involves continual doublings, the incessant crossing of multiple lines and thresholds, multiple transitions across layers. Life itself is more and more taken as something that can be calculated and recombined rather than merely represented. Furthermore, we are witnessing a bifurcation between life on the one hand and bodies on the other hand. Nowadays, not every body is thought of as containing life. Discounted bodies are believed to contain no life as such. They are, strictly speaking, bodies at the limits of life, trapped in uninhabitable worlds and inhospitable places. The kind of life they bear or contain is not insured or is uninsurable, folded as it is in extreme and thin envelopes. Such bodies on the precipice are the most exposed to droughts, storms and famines, toxic waste and various experiences of effacement. Their livelihoods made impossible, they are the most likely to sustain the most crippling wounds and injuries. Trapped human subjects often without escape, they bear the brunt of terrestrial life on a damaged planet (Tsing et al. 2017). At the same time, they exceed all attempts to contain them. These bodies are not simply in motion. Interactive and generative, they are movements and events. The inside of such bodies is not separated from their outward environments. From the perspective of discounted bodies, to be alive is always and already to breach boundaries or to be exposed to the risk of the outside entering the inside (read Litvintseva 2019).

Achille Mbembe

Schiller

The state itself is never the purpose, it is important only as the condition under which the purpose of mankind may be fulfilled, and this purpose of mankind is none other than the development of all the powers of people, i.e., progress. If the constitution of a state hinders the progress of the mind, it is contemptible and harmful, however well thought-out it may otherwise be, and however accomplished a work of its kind. Its longevity then serves the more to reproach it than to celebrate its glory—it is then merely a prolonged evil; the longer it exists, the more harmful it is.

In general, we can establish a rule for judging political institutions, that they are only good and laudable, to the extent, that they bring all forces inherent in persons to flourish, to the extent, that they promote the progress of culture, or at least not hinder it. This rule applies to religious laws as well as to political ones: both are contemptible if they constrain a power of the human mind, if they impose upon the mind any sort of stagnation.

           Friedrich Schiller