Introduction: Empowering the Commons
Introduction
p. 7-22
Texte intégral
1It is widely assumed that social networks help to connect people the world over and create virtual communities to an extent quite unprecedented in human history. In reality, and rather paradoxically, social networks enable us to create our own self-enclosed spaces, and to remain “cloistered” – not so much in “living walls of jet” (as John Donne might have put it)1 as in “living walls” of perpetual self-promotion and -aggrandisement. In many respects, the period we live in can be analysed as one of extremely fragmented experiences and identities. In accordance with the Greek sense of the word, contemporary “individuals” tend to think of themselves as so many separate atoms, distinct and indivisible entities, never tiring of trumpeting their difference and singularity.
2What is true of individuals also goes for social groups. Although what is at stake here is no longer narcissistic individualism but legitimate concern for one’s rights, the recent controversy over cultural appropriation suggests that sharing personal histories and experiences is a far from unproblematic enterprise – especially when such histories and experiences were shaped by, and still bear the scars of, age-old structures of colonial, social, or sexual domination.
3Yet such a fragmentation of individual perspectives is paralleled by a growing awareness that we all inhabit a common world. A better eye-opener than equally pressing social or political emergencies, the ecological crisis is proving quite effective in waking most of us from our narcissistic slumber. It is also forcing us to develop new strategies and think in more collective terms. On closer inspection, these two phenomena turn out to have a lot more in common than one might suspect. For deeply engrained individualism and the destruction of ecosystems are two sides of the same capitalist coin, so to speak: in neoliberal capitalism, not only is everyone pitted against everyone else, they are also turned into “nature’s enemies”.2 Therefore, the ecological crisis cannot be easily separated from the question of politics, since both ecology and politics raise the question of “the commons” – a notion which, in the wake of the seminal work of Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, we shall define neither as a natural fact nor as a human essence, but rather as a political principle and a universal form of practical activity, i.e. as something grounded in the concrete activity of human beings.
4How, then, might we begin to rethink “the commons”? What are the practical or theoretical forms the notion can take? If the field of “commons studies” has been well ploughed in recent years by many jurists, philosophers, sociologists, and economists – including such notable thinkers as Elinor Ostrom, David Harvey, Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, Pierre Dardot, Christian Laval, Frédéric Graber, Fabien Locher, and Neil Rhodes, to cite but a few3 –, we believe that the issue should be addressed not only from a legal, philosophical, sociological or economic standpoint but also from the perspective of literature and the visual arts. More particularly, the present book aims to open up a space for the discussion and critical exploration of theoretical – in the broadest sense of the word – and aesthetic issues. It is our contention that the commons needs to be shown and represented, not just theorised or discussed in abstract terms. Do not the poet’s images, no less than the novelist’s or playwright’s fictional worlds, allow us to escape the prison of the self by temporarily depriving it of its central position, thus making it possible for all of us to share some common phenomenological ground? Is not literature also concerned (among many other things) with putting into words the endless and bewildering variety of our common experience of the world? This book thus sets out to explore a notion which has undergone many historical, theoretical and aesthetic transformations since the early modern period. By focusing on some of the foundational, textually embodied forms through which this notion was represented and disseminated, the essays brought together here aim not only to interrogate the ways in which the commons was framed and appropriated in early modern English literature, but also to highlight the enduring relevance of these forms to critical discussions of the commons today.
A brief overview of the commons, from Thomas More to Garrett Hardin (and beyond)
5Among the many reasons for taking the early sixteenth century as a starting point for reflection is Thomas More’s Utopia (1516). In it, More passed strictures against the rich landowners, be they clerics or laymen, who, “much annoying the weal public, leave no ground for tillage: they enclose all into pastures; they throw down houses; they pluck down towns, and leave nothing standing but only the church to be made a sheep-house”.4 Conversely, in the early seventeenth century, Francis Bacon devised a utopian society, the New Atlantis (1626), in which scientists became responsible for the common welfare of mankind. In Bensalem – the name of Bacon’s imaginary island – private property would seem to take a back seat to the common goal of scientific exploitation. Yet Bacon’s representation of the commons is far from unambiguous, insofar as it retains many social barriers and differences in status within the national community, while simultaneously praising its unity and extolling its virtues. Paradoxically, the commons is a notion that is just as inclusive as exclusive, as Max Weber noted in his early twentieth-century study, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1920), regarding, for instance, religious groups which see themselves as exceptional and which are quick to separate the so-called elect from the rest of the pack. The commons encapsulates at once a space of mutual belonging and a zone of exclusion, unless it is seen as encompassing all of humanity (though this is not a position commonly held, even amongst the most radical writers). In the early modern period, the commons would become, in theory as well as in practice, an increasingly hostile zone of conflict. Amidst the major upheavals of the middle of the seventeenth century, one finds Gerrard Winstanley’s trenchant critique of private property, which would, in turn, give rise to the experiment of agrarian communism in the 1650s.5
6Although far from exhausting the issue, the question of “enclosure” is of course fundamental to any investigation of the commons, running as it does through the whole of England’s social, economic and cultural history. If the problem came to prominence in the sixteenth century, forcefully felt as a social reality and as the grounds for More’s critique, it would reach radical new heights in the eighteenth century, bringing about ineluctable changes to traditional ways of life and permanently uprooting rural communities, as Edward P. Thompson demonstrated in Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act (1975). In this seminal book, Thompson analysed the social consequences of the 1723 law punishing poaching and the collection of wood or peat in the royal parks by death. Here, the desire for individual appropriation asserts itself in the glaring terms of a merciless class struggle (although, as Thompson showed, there were conflicts within, as well as between, classes, as royals, gentry and a wealthy class of traders, merchants and lawyers were fighting both against each other and against the commoners who depended on the forest’s and commons’ resources for their survival).6 As Thompson pointed out,
The forest officialdom, by enlarging and reviving feudal claims [of the royalty] to forest land use – essentially claims for the priority of the deer’s economy over that of the inhabitants – were using the deer as a screen behind which to advance their own interests.7
What this struggle also demonstrates is how the economic dimension of the commons is inseparable from a certain representation of the world – whether the word is taken in the political sense of a historically situated human community or in the broader sense of a shared ecosystem – and the desire that underlies it.
7Yet, at the same time that such communities were forced to undergo the very real, concrete consequences of the gradual disappearance of the commons, a parallel phenomenon saw the rise of new commonplaces in literary texts which would appropriate, re-imagine, and represent the commons as the grounds for both aesthetic resistance and escapism. Thus, what began as an essentially economic issue took on a variety of new shades and shapes as it became reworked on an aesthetic plane, leading to formal and generic experiments which at once distilled and distorted the commons into often ambiguous literary and visual representations. Indeed, the search for a common language or for poetic forms of shared experience belied a decidedly mixed conception of the problem in the Romantic period. As William Wordsworth famously characterised the “Poet” in his 1802 “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads:
He is a man speaking to men: a man, it is true, endued with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind [,]8
but who should choose “incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them […] in a selection of language really used by men”.9 At a time when reading publics were rapidly expanding, the implications of a “common” readership, and of catering to a “common” market, took on new proportions for poets as well as publishers. At the same time, a discourse concerning the uniqueness of individual “genius” – problematically conceived, by Wordsworth and others, in masculine terms, despite the increasing market dominance of female writers – sought to distinguish artists from the common herd, and to establish literature, and poetry in particular, as a space reserved for uncommon talent. A series of tensions can thus be seen to emerge from the Romantic-period negotiation of the commons, of commoners, and in the rough, uneasy territory between commonness and commonality.
8Thus, to ask the question of the commons is to probe into the relationship between the singular individual and the group to which one wishes to belong or from which one aspires to distance oneself. In an era that constantly extols “excellence” and “exceptionality” as highly desirable goals, promoting the benefits of mutual aid or the virtues of solidarity becomes more relevant than ever. In fact, history tends to show that the times in which the issue of the commons gains political momentum are also those in which the theoretical debates surrounding it become the liveliest. The so-called “tragedy of the commons” is a case in point. In an article written in 1968 – at the height of the Cold War – the American biologist Garrett Hardin set out to show that the pooling of a resource destroys the very thing it claims to preserve. Hardin devised the following thought experiment. Imagine an open-access pasture: all the herders are concerned with maximising their gains, so they will pursue their immediate interest by adding an animal to their herd. On the face of it, the benefit is individual (+1), while the cost is borne by the community as a whole (-1/X). However, Hardin concludes, this individual action, which would seem to benefit everyone, is in fact contrary to the survival of all. It will eventually harm the community of herders by depleting the common resource, thus leading to collective ruin:
[…] the rational herdsman concludes that the only sensible course for him to pursue is to add another animal to his herd. And another; and another… But this is the conclusion reached by each and every rational herdsman sharing a commons. Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit – in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination towards which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.10
9Hardin’s thesis became famous mostly because of the numerous criticisms it gave rise to. It is easy, in fact, to detect at least three flaws in Hardin’s reasoning. First, on the conceptual level, Hardin confuses open access with collective use and ownership. As was pointed out above, the commons implies not only the enjoyment of a shared good but also a certain collective practice. To have free access to a resource is therefore not to possess it in common, as David Harvey argues in relation to Hardin’s thesis:
If the cattle were held in common, of course, the metaphor would not work. It would then be clear that it was private property in cattle and individual utility-maximizing behavior that lay at the heart of the problem.11
10This first theoretical objection paves the way for another, albeit on a historical level this time. For it is clear that the thought experiment proposed by Hardin is hardly a universal way of presenting the problem. Hardin’s paragon of (apparently) perfect rationality is historically situated and dependent on a mode of reasoning characteristic of a capitalist society. The choices of his imaginary breeder are consistent with the behaviour of homo economicus, as conceived by classical economic theory: they reflect a type of behaviour that the commons is designed to inhibit. In other words, only a capitalist could even consider overexploiting common resources, let alone do such a thing. What Hardin fails to recognise is that subjective behaviour is always caught up in, yet also shaped and determined by, a web of historical social relations. There is no such thing as a “rational herdsman” residing in some inviolate space outside of history.
11This is also why the third critique focuses on what Hardin’s imaginary rational herdsman considers “desirable”. According to Hardin, the only reasonable attitude is to get richer by adding one animal to one’s herd, then another, and so on. To Hardin’s rational herdsman, more is naturally, necessarily good. Once again, it is easy to show that, far from universal, this desire is in fact historically constructed. A sixteenth-century peasant – such as those depicted by More in Utopia, for example – would not have been led to overexploit common resources. This is because the theoretical model imagined by Hardin is anachronistic and corresponds to a later state of Western society: the sixteenth-century English peasant would simply not have felt the requisite desire to add an animal to his herd. Thus, the desire of individuals and the economic and social structure in which they are embedded can hardly be separated from each other: if it is desire – backed by the force of law, as in the example of the “Black Act” cited by Thompson – that makes it possible to move from one economic and social organisation to another, then the desire of individuals is also produced, shaped and controlled by the structure it interacts with. In the end, it is also this desire that ensures the durability of the structure in question: thus, for example, contemporary capitalism sustains itself in no small part because of the desire it manages to arouse for itself. This is precisely why, we would like to contend, art in general, and literature in particular, has such a vital role to play in the process.
Desiring and representing the commons
12This last point, which touches on one of the central concerns of the essays gathered in the present book, is worth expanding on. As has already been said, our purpose is both historical and aesthetic. In Posséder la nature. Environnement et propriété dans l’histoire, Frédéric Graber and Fabien Locher take the example of peasants from India whose attitude to seeds is the exact opposite of that of Hardin’s imaginary breeder. Citing the work of the English anthropologist Michael Lipton and that of James C. Scott, they point out that individuals in non-capitalist societies tend to relate very differently to the seeds they need as a means of subsistence. Indian peasants “are guided by the search for security above all else and not by the constrained maximization of their profits as microeconomics once presupposed”.12 What they find desirable is not the idea of getting rich but of maintaining some form of collective security and stability. Yet how is the shift from an ostensibly “natural” (but in fact culturally determined) desire for endless enrichment to a desire for collective stability to be theorised, let alone effected?
13This book does not purport to resolve a question of such magnitude: this is clearly a question whose philosophical, psychological and political ramifications are beyond its scope. Nevertheless, each of the essays gathered here addresses this question, whether head on or obliquely, and offers ample evidence for reading the commons as predicated on desire. Indeed, any social, political or economic organisation is supported by certain representations that make them desirable in the eyes of the people. In an article published in 1960, Raymond Williams showed how advertising bolsters capitalism by promising the consumer much more than the mere satisfaction of his or her material needs. This is mostly owing to the fact that merchandise never manages to fulfil material needs in a satisfying way:
[The user] asks for the satisfaction of human needs which consumption, as such, can never really supply. […] Advertising, as we now see it, operates to preserve the consumption ideal from the criticism inexorably made of it by experience.13
Moreover, what lies at the heart of the fabrication of this desire is a certain use of language, as Williams astutely notes: by substituting the term “consumer” for the term “user”, for example, the dominant class does more than play with words. It ensures the perpetuation of a system from which it benefits and on which it depends:
It is here that the idea of the “consumer” has proved so useful. Since consumption is within its limits a satisfactory activity, it can be plausibly offered as a commanding social purpose. At the same time, its ambiguity is such that it ratifies the subjection of society to the operations of the existing economic system.14
14If words are so politically important, it follows that literature, which invests words with particular significance, should be attended to with commensurate care, and perhaps even granted a certain pre-eminence – the kind of pre-eminence George Puttenham ascribed to it when claiming, in his Arte of English Poesie (1589), that “poets were […] the first legislators and politicians in the world”:
The profession and use of Poesie is most ancient from the beginning, and not as manie erroniously suppose, after, but before any civil society was among men. For it is written, that Poesie was the originall cause and occasion of their first assemblies, when before the people remained in the woods and mountains, vagarant and dispersed like the wild beasts, lawlesse and naked, or verie ill clad, and of all good and necessarie provision for harbour or sustenance utterly unfurnished: so as they litle diffred for their maner of life, from the very brute beasts of the field.15
15Quite apart from Puttenham’s bold claim – which, rippling down through the ages, can be heard behind Percy Bysshe Shelley’s better-known assertion, in his “Defence of Poetry” (1821), that “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the World”16 – literature implies an increased and scrupulous attention to what words mean and how they are used. The sign is always overdetermined, which is not the case in the everyday use of language. To read a literary text – to really read it – is not to gloss over the words, but rather to take them seriously and pay close attention to the fine nuances that separate or bring them together, as well as to the overtones they carry. To quote Williams one last time:
[…] “impact”, like “consumer”, is now habitually used by people to whom it ought to be repugnant (what sort of person really wants to make an impact or create a “smash hit”, and what state is a society in when this can be its normal cultural language?).17
16But there is more. As has already been pointed out, one of the crucial questions has to do with the transformation of desire, or more precisely with the shift from a particular type of desire – the desire to possess individually, for example – to another type of desire – the desire to use a thing or to practice an activity in common. In other words, the question is not so much, “How can one be a Persian?” (Montesquieu’s famously ironical question in Letter 30 of The Persian Letters), but, rather, “How can one become a Utopian?” (a question More might have asked in his Utopia – but did not). This is precisely where literature may be seen as a powerful means of producing affective, no less than political, change; or, to put it differently, of facilitating the affective shift or conversion on which all political change is predicated. Men, as we know, are selfish by nature: to expect them to “show equity” or “altruism” is as chimerical as to want them “to penetrate bodies or fly in the air”.18 And yet, to read, as Frédéric Lordon so rightly points out, “is to step outside oneself”, and this even though “the relationship to the world that the conatus establishes is by construction egocentric and projective”.19 Because every reader is invited to take a perspective on the world different from his or her own, reading entails the transformation or redirection of desire. Readers cannot fail to be at least slightly touched or “affected” by their reading experience, in one way or another. They are, in fact, “moved”, in both senses of the word, that is to say, emotionally affected and forced out of their position in the world. Thus, their initially selfish desire can be redirected towards more collective and altruistic aims:
Man (like everything else) is conatus. The conatus takes power itself as an impulse of activity, as a projection in the world to produce effects. But which ones? The conatus “in itself” is pure effort, therefore generic and intransitive, i.e. not knowing what to do or where to go. Its concrete orientations, Spinoza shows us, the sense of its particular pursuits, will necessarily come to it from the outside, from encounters with external things which, exerting their own power on it, will affect it and thereby determine it as a desire to do this or that. […] Thus, there is no action without there having been a desire to act, and there is no desire if there has been no antecedent affection that has (re)determined the conatus under the species of this particular desire.20
In other words, desire is shaped by the things or people we come into contact with, whether directly or indirectly (as is the case when reading a book, for example). The “concrete orientations” of the conatus depend on its encounters with external objects. Publicity, in the sense in which Williams refers to it, is not the ultimate horizon of human existence. By arousing other affects, literature can compensate for, counterbalance, and possibly offset whatever shrinking or negative determinations we happen to be exposed to. Prose and poetry may increase, rather than decrease, “the body’s power of acting” and “at the same time the ideas of these affections”.21 Precisely because it allows one to step out of oneself, literature constitutes an “encounter” of a sort: a reader becomes exposed to ways of seeing, representing and thinking the world other than his or her own. This is not only a question of developing “an enlarged mentality”, as Hannah Arendt sees it in Between Past and Future (1961). According to Arendt, by “being and thinking in my own identity where actually I am not”22 – which, admittedly, is one of literature’s many benefits – I am given a chance to escape my own prejudices and private interests (as well as those of the group to which I belong), and thus to form an impartial opinion. The point here, however, is not impartiality but the transformation of desire. Momentarily considering an issue from different perspectives so as to form a more objective opinion is one thing; being actually transformed by the views one comes into contact with, quite another. Besides, it might be objected that the moment one puts oneself in somebody else’s shoes and adopts a different standpoint, it becomes virtually impossible to keep one’s “own identity” unchanged. In more Spinozist terms, literature has the power to orient the conatus by affecting it in a certain way. The capacity to affect simultaneously the body’s power of acting and the mind’s power of thinking – and in so doing to alter the course of the reader’s desire – is precisely what gives literature its political dimension.
17Let us turn to two Shakespearean examples, lest these considerations should seem too aridly theoretical. Shakespeare’s plays abound with momentous encounters, whether it be between Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet and the ghost, or Viola and Duke Orsino (to cite but three well-known pairings). Yet, alongside such “real”, “in-the-flesh” theatrical encounters between characters meeting on the stage and physically interacting with each other, Shakespeare also orchestrates more subtle or indirect confrontations, staged as part of a meta-theatrical or some other verbally constructed gesture. In Richard III, for example, the staging of Richard’s alleged sanctity, which constitutes an obvious mise en abyme of the theatrical performance itself, succeeds in shaping the desire of the initially indifferent citizens. Indeed, at the beginning of the scene, Richard is worried because the citizens show absolutely no interest in him: “How now, how now? What say the citizens?”23 His concern increases when Buckingham tells him that the citizens have remained doggedly silent: “Now by the holy Mother of our Lord, / The citizens are mum, say not a word” (III.vii.2-3). They are, Richard concludes, “tongueless blocks” (III.vii.42), while an equally pessimistic Buckingham sees them as “dumb statues” and “breathing stones” (III.vii.25). Acting as a true stage director, Buckingham therefore decides to put on a show so as to induce the citizens to accept Richard as their king. In the second part of the scene, Richard, who is trying to project an image of himself as a holy and virtuous man, appears with a prayer-book in his hand and two bishops at his side. Thanks to Richard’s and Buckingham’s skilful rhetoric and clever staging, the theatrical encounter of a tyrant who presents himself under the guise of a saint eventually causes the citizens to change their minds:
Mayor
God bless your Grace: we see it, and will say it.
Richard
In saying so, you shall but say the truth.
Buckingham
Then I salute you with this royal title:
Long live Richard, England’s worthy King!
All
Amen.(III.vii.236-240)
The affect created by Buckingham and Richard has hardly helped to increase the citizens’ power of acting or thinking; indeed, they have unwittingly ceded their collective power to a manipulative tyrant. Yet what this scene demonstrates is how desire can be theatrically engineered and fabricated – however ironically, or for the wrong ends.
18Our second example is taken from The Tempest. Here, desire is not so much created from scratch (as is the case with the citizens in Richard III) as it is redirected or reversed. The play’s first four acts deal with how Prospero, a former Duke of Milan now turned magician, uses his skills in “the liberal arts” to exact his revenge on his enemies – including his brother Antonio, who once contrived Prospero’s deposition and forced him into exile. And yet, Prospero’s anger suddenly turns into forgiveness by virtue of a few words spoken by his faithful servant, Ariel. At the beginning of Act V, Ariel informs his master that Gonzalo, Prospero’s former counsellor, is “brimful with sorrow and dismay”.24 In a beautiful hypotyposis, whereby Gonzalo’s beard is made to evoke a desolate wintry landscape, Ariel depicts the absent Gonzalo in so striking a way that he almost seems to materialise and become a visible presence on stage. The result is that Prospero is moved to change his point of view. His “affections” have been transformed, so that forgiveness replaces his former desire for revenge:
Ariel
The king,
His brother, and yours, abide all three distracted,
And the remainder mourning over them,
Brimful of sorrow and dismay; but chiefly
Him that you term’d, sir, “The good old lord, Gonzalo;”
His tears run down his beard, like winter’s drops
From eaves of reeds. Your charm so strongly works ’em,
That if you now beheld them, your affections
Would become tender.
Prospero
Dost thou think so, spirit?
Ariel
Mine would, sir, were I human.
Prospero
And mine shall.
Hast thou, which art but air, a touch, a feeling
Of their afflictions, and shall not myself,
One of their kind, that relish all as sharply,
Passion as they, be kindlier moved than thou art?
Though with their high wrongs I am struck to the quick,
Yet with my nobler reason ’gainst my fury
Do I take part: the rarer action is
In virtue than in vengeance: they being penitent,
The sole drift of my purpose doth extend
Not a frown further. Go release them, Ariel:
My charms I’ll break, their senses I’ll restore,
And they shall be themselves.(V.i.11-32)
19What each of these Shakespearean examples suggests is how much a word, a poetic image or a theatrical representation may influence what one feels and thinks. Words are never just words (or “words, words, words”, as Hamlet might put it, however caustically). They are loaded with affect, and as such, endowed with a degree of effectiveness. This is why literature should not be conceived of as pure entertainment. Because it allows each reader to look at the world from a perspective that is no longer his or her own, and because it invests words with a density and a weight that are absent from, or occluded by, everyday language, literature is one of the ways in which desire may be refashioned and the world gradually transformed. This is why we believe that any exploration of the commons should not only interrogate the historical and philosophical valence of the concept but also probe its aesthetic dimension – its representational, affective embodiment, as it were. As we have suggested above, and as will be seen in each of the following chapters, there is ample reason for beginning such an exploration in the early modern period – a period which (apart from perennial interest in the phenomenon of enclosure) has nevertheless received less critical attention in recent years than more contemporary forms of the commons, with the notable exception of a few scholarly works, among which Neil Rhodes’s Common: The Development of Literary Culture in Sixteenth-Century England (2018) features prominently.
20The present book aims at taking up Rhodes’s argument while extending its scope. What Rhodes shows compellingly with regard to the sixteenth century – namely, that the “discussion of the relationship between self-interest and the common good” becomes a major theoretical and literary concern25 – also holds for the seventeenth century. The views abundantly discussed in such works as More’s Utopia (1516), Thomas Starkey’s A Dialogue between Reginald Pole and Thomas Lupset (c. 1530), Thomas Elyot’s The Governor (1531), or Sir Thomas Smith’s De Republica Anglorum (1583), to cite but a few, were recast by such diverse writers as Francis Bacon, Richard Carew, William Shakespeare and Gerrard Winstanley in the considerably, albeit not altogether, different context of the seventeenth century. The other point of departure between this book and Rhodes’s lies in their respective ways of articulating the literary and the political. As Rhodes explains:
[…] it is not the principal aim of this book to uncover the social injustice that may lie beneath the literary achievements of the Tudor era. Its central theme of the common is indeed designed to provide a social dimension to the story of how literary culture developed in England over the course of the sixteenth century, but its focus is ultimately textual.26
In other words, Rhodes uses the common(s) as a lens through which to examine the development of English literature over the course of the sixteenth century. The present book aims at shifting the perspective around, so to speak, by using literature – in the broadest sense of the word, which encompasses such a political writer as Winstanley – as the lens through which to consider early modern political and social thinking. Bringing together contributions from specialists in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English history and literature, the following chapters will focus on a precise geographical field, that of the British Isles. We hope that the choice of situating our analysis in a particular place and time will reinforce the volume’s coherence without restricting its scope: for behind the concrete historical forms taken by the commons lies a more universal question about how individuals relate to and interact with the community they belong to.
21The book begins by returning focus to the profoundly original – and explosively subversive – mid-seventeenth-century work of Gerrard Winstanley, which remains one of the most fully realised examples of the wedding of the theory and praxis of reclaiming the commons in English history. Approaching Winstanley’s life and work from fresh critical angles, while paying particular attention to the crosscurrents and contradictions of his thought, the first two chapters (by Laurent Curelly and Z’hor Zizi, respectively) shed light on the new forms of discourse concerning private property and the use of common goods that emerged in the wake of the English Civil Wars. Such debates were spearheaded by a group of radical sects – particularly the Levellers, Diggers, and Ranters – which flourished at the time, and which, despite their differences, found common ground in their trenchant critique of establishment powers. In the third chapter, Jonathan Pollock offers a meticulous reading of Richard Carew’s The Survey of Cornwall (1602), a text which, predating those of such dissenting sects by several decades, might be said to have taken root in rather different soil, as Carew’s representation of the commons would seem to belie his own sympathies with the Crown and landowning class.
22As Winstanley and other radical dissenters seem to have intuitively grasped, the practical implementation of a social and political organisation within which the commons is valued and defended, rather than fenced off or fought against, presupposes that each individual sees the collectivisation of resources as something desirable. In other words, no commons is practically possible if it is not underpinned by a common desire and a positive representation of the commons itself. This is where historical enquiry can be fruitfully joined by literary study, as suggested above. The chapters in the second half of this book thus focus on the way in which early modern texts construct a certain representation of the commons, offering close-reading analyses of works taken from the then-dominant genres of theatre, poetry, and emblem literature.
23In many respects, of course, the theoretical and philosophical reflections on the commons embodied by a thinker as seemingly original as Winstanley had already been sketched out, and to some extent implanted, in the collective imagination. For, as Janet Clare shows, the Elizabethan theatre in various ways gave bodily substance to the vox populi: the voice of the people, as singular as it was complex, was brought on stage and granted a newfound reality by Shakespeare and his contemporaries. In early modern drama, common people were endowed with an identity and an “agency” which nevertheless denied them political thought. One would therefore be seriously mistaken to oppose an “apolitical” literary scene to a public arena within which such debates were carried out on a purely “rational” and disembodied level: indeed, one of the main theses of this book – a thesis which also justifies its bifocal structure – is that the political field (which is too often believed to be dominated by ideas, and therefore by reason) and the aesthetic field (which is thought to be that of sensibility alone, and therefore of the body), on the contrary, never cease to intermingle and penetrate one another.
24In the case of Winstanley, as with Shakespeare (but is this not always the case, in reality?), ideas are full of affects, and bodies are intensely politicised. Consequently, even the art of the Shakespearean sonnet lends itself to a political reading of the question of the commons. As Rémi Vuillemin points out, in an illuminating reading of sonnet 130, Shakespeare’s poetic “genius” is not merely the manifestation of the intense inner workings of an individual singularity. Against the clear-cut Romantic distinction between the uncommon Poet and the uneducated masses, or between poetic novelty and worn-out tradition, Shakespeare’s poetic art takes root within a common framework, grounded in poetic conventions already in use, which he assimilates and makes his own:
Instead of making of sonnet 130 a tool to proclaim Shakespeare’s triumphant individuality in a way that only opposes him to his context, it is possible to use it to promote a vision of Shakespeare not as a transcendent individual, but as a nodal point, the intersection of a network of relationships with other people, including authors, other works, and other cultures – an individual who still has agency but cannot fully stand on his own.
It is therefore on the basis of the “common” – and not on that of the “exceptional”, the “singular”, or the “individual” – that the Shakespearean sonnet is built: in contrast to an ideology which identifies “genius” with individual singularity and “common” with the repetitive mediocrity of the anonymous crowd, Shakespeare’s poetic art reminds us that the fragment is nothing without the whole that contains and sustains it.
25In the book’s sixth chapter, linking, more explicitly, the aesthetic question to that of religion, Jean-Jacques Chardin shows how, at a time when confessional opposition was virulent, emblem books could not but be imbued with the language and concerns of a community of practices and interests. To varying degrees, such emblem books participated in questioning the organisation and preservation of the common good, while drawing on a treasury of images and cultural resources going back to distant times.
26Finally, in a coda which takes stock of many intersecting lines of political and aesthetic entanglement which cut across history, running from the sixteenth century to our current time, the Canadian poet and critic Stephen Collis looks at the tensions underlying Wordsworth’s poetic engagement with the commons (between mobility and stasis, private property and shared, unenclosed land), and reflects on his own ambivalent engagement with Wordsworth’s work:
Wordsworth remains a productive source because of his unresolved contradictions; for Wordsworth, the commons was always at least in part conceptual – a matter of poetics, a question of one’s relationship, as a human being, to the non-human surround […].
This reading, which suggestively extends the scope of the previous chapters, serves as a springboard for rethinking “the mobile commons and the commoning involved in mobility”, as well as the role of the poet and poetry at a time when “the planetary commons is […] being enclosed and the lines of all our relations cut”. On first glance, it might be surprising to find the coda venturing so far beyond the historical boundaries of the works studied in the preceding chapters. Yet, far from constituting an incongruous temporal leap, it should be read as a suggestive means of reflecting back on, while deepening, the ideas explored in the other chapters – as an extension, even, of the central hypothesis of this book, which is that the literary cannot be separated from the political. Like each of the contributors to this volume, Collis critically brings the poetic back to its central place in society. As the book, as a whole, hopes to show, social relations are always also being fashioned linguistically, whether they are being held in place or transformed by language. Is this not, after all, what Smith affirms in De Republica Anglorum, when he states that “the learned have always had sovereignty over the unlearned”?27 In a like manner, and around the same time, Étienne de La Boétie tells us that naming one’s oppressor is the first step in fighting back. Such an assessment obtains as much for the England of Puttenham as it does for that of Wordsworth – and indeed for the society in which we live today.
27Thus, by retracing such lines of entanglement from Winstanley to Wordsworth, and by drawing out some of the salient points of overlap between the political and aesthetic discourses surrounding the commons, the essays gathered in this book might be said not only to rethink our collective cultural inheritance but also to reimagine a world not simply founded on the too readily accepted ideological premise of predatory selfishness and triumphant individualism – an alternative mode of collective experience about which early modern thinkers, poets and playwrights might still have much to teach us. For, as Harvey rightly reminds us, history is always being written, and it is never impossible for yesterday’s vanquished to become tomorrow’s victors, both ideologically and on a practical and political level: “The common is not, therefore, something extant once upon a time that has since been lost, but something that, like the urban commons, is continuously being produced”.28
Bibliographie
Arendt H. ([1961] 2006), Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought, New York, Penguin.
Dardot P., Laval C. (2014), Commun. Essai sur la révolution au XXIe siècle, Paris, La découverte.
Graber F., Locher F. (eds.) (2018), Posséder la nature. Environnement et propriété dans l’histoire, Paris, Éditions Amsterdam.
Hardin G. (1968), “The Tragedy of the Commons”, Science, vol. 162, no. 3859, p. 1243-1248.
Hardt M., Negri A. (2009), Commonwealth, Cambridge, Harvard University Press.
Harvey D. (2011), “The Future of the Commons”, Radical History Review, no. 109, p. 101-107.
La Bruyère J. de ([1688] 1995), Les caractères, E. Bury (ed.), Paris, Librairie générale française (Le livre de poche).
Lordon F. (2016), Les affects de la politique, Paris, Seuil.
More T. ([1516] 1999), Utopia, in Three Early Modern Utopias, S. Bruce (ed.), Oxford, Oxford University Press, p. 1-148.
Ostrom E. (1990), Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Peluso N. L. (2017), “Whigs and Hunters: The Origins [sic] of the Black Act, by E. P. Thompson”, The Journal of Peasant Studies, vol. 44, no. 1, p. 309-321.
Puttenham G. (1589), The Arte of English Poesie, London, Richard Field.
Rhodes N. (2018), Common: The Development of Literary Culture in Sixteenth-Century England, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Shakespeare W. (2005), The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works, S. Wells, G. Taylor, J. Jowett, W. Montgomery (eds.), 2nd ed., Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Shelley P. B. ([1821] 2002), “A Defence of Poetry”, in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, D. H. Reiman, N. Fraistat (eds.), 2nd ed., New York, W. W. Norton & Company, p. 509-535.
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Notes de bas de page
1John Donne, The Flea, l. 15.
2Dardot & Laval 2014, 12.
3See, among other possible references: Ostrom 1990; Harvey 2011; Hardt & Negri 2009; Dardot & Laval 2014; Graber & Locher 2018; and Rhodes 2018.
4More [1516] 1999, 22.
5On Winstanley, see Laurent Curelly’s and Z’hor Zizi’s contributions in this volume.
6For a recent account of Thompson’s book which sheds light on its contemporary relevance, see Peluso 2017.
7Thompson 1975, 99, quoted in Peluso 2017, 317.
8Wordsworth [1802] 2005, 300.
9Ibid., 289.
10Hardin 1968, 1244.
11Harvey 2011, 101.
12F. Graber, F. Locher, “Introduction”, in Graber & Locher 2018, 23 (translation ours).
13Williams 1960, 28-29.
14Ibid., 28.
15Puttenham 1589, 3-4. The use of Ramist letters has been systematised.
16Shelley [1821] 2002, 535.
17Williams 1960, 29.
18La Bruyère [1688] 1995, 406 (translation ours).
19Lordon 2016, 7 (translation ours).
20Ibid., 17-18 (translation ours).
21Spinoza [1677] 1996, 70.
22Arendt [1961] 2006, 237.
23W. Shakespeare, Richard III, III.vii.1, in Shakespeare 2005. Subsequent references will be given parenthetically.
24W. Shakespeare, The Tempest, V.i.14, in Shakespeare 2005. Subsequent references will be given parenthetically.
25Rhodes 2018, 9.
26Ibid., 26.
27Quoted in Rhodes 2018, 21.
28Harvey 2011, 105.
Auteurs
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Jeremy Elprin
Université de Caen Normandie
Jeremy Elprin is senior lecturer in English literature at the University of Caen Normandy. He holds graduate degrees from the University of Oxford and Paris Cité University, where he completed his doctoral research on the letters of John Keats. His research focuses on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature, with particular interest in British Romantic poetry, epistolary culture and poetics, and manuscript studies. His recent publications include articles on John Keats, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Charlotte Lennox.
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Mickaël Popelard
Université de Caen Normandie
Mickaël Popelard is professor in early modern English literature at the University of Caen Normandy. His books include Francis Bacon. L’humaniste, le magicien, l’ingénieur (Paris, Presses universitaires de France, 2009); Rêves de puissance et ruine de l’âme. La figure du savant chez Shakespeare et Marlowe (Paris, Presses universitaires de France, 2010); as well as a French translation of Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (Paris, Classiques Garnier, 2022). He is the co-editor, with Sophie Chiari, of Spectacular Science, Technology and Superstition in the Age of Shakespeare (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2017) and the author, with Laurent Curelly, of a joint translation of some of Gerrard Winstanley’s political pamphlets (Gerrard Winstanley. Pamphlets politiques, Brussels, Zones sensibles, 2023). His research focuses on early modern drama and philosophy, on which he has published many articles.

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