The Second Common
photo courtesy cyberenviro.org
“The second notion of the common,” Hardt and Negri write, “is dynamic, involving both the product of labor and the means of future production. This common is not only the earth we share but also the language we create, the social practices we establish, the modes of sociality that define our relationships, and so forth. This form of the common does not lend itself to a logic of scarcity as does the first.” But is does suffer from a logic of debasement and banalization, which, as I shall argue, is just as significant to contemporpary life as scarcity. “The expropriation of this second form of the common—the artificial common that blurs the division between nature and culture—is,” they go on to say, “the key to understanding the new forms of exploitation of biopolitical labor.”
—David Harvey quoting Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s The Commonwealth in a debate about the book in Artforum 158:3 (Nov 2009), p. 260.
Posted on April 12, 2010
Filed Under academia, waste | Leave a Comment
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