Two, Three, Many Instituent Instances in Common

Robert F. Carley (bio)

A review of Dardot, Pierre, and Christian Laval. Common: On Revolution in the 21st Century. Translated by Matthew MacLellan, Bloomsbury, 2019.

In the “Introduction” to Common: On Revolution in the 21^st Century, Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval set up an opposition-in-relation between neoliberalism and its challengers. The challenge constitutes a feint of sorts; the opposition is between neoliberal capital and the lack of any concerted public or societal response, whether from political parties in the state, from citizen groups, through organized labor, or from the styles of mobilization favored by social movements in democratic contexts. The evacuation of social or political counter-forces seated in or facilitated by the state (including past instances of revolutionary posture toward states and valorizations of them)—especially as it concerns states’ degraded effectiveness as a lever against poverty, inequality, and environmental catastrophe—is included in Dardot and Laval’s account alongside the scant possibilities for sustained non- and sub-state collective action.

Across Dardot and Laval’s book, the common develops as more than a mere opposition to neoliberalism. At the theoretical level, the common turns out to be utterly overwhelming, absorbing and transforming extant conceptions of common spaces, goods, and properties through potential instituent practices emerging from the necessary differentiation of different struggles and the importance of those struggles on different fronts (to paraphrase Stuart Hall). Dardot and Laval’s point that there seems to be no viable alternative to neoliberalism is reminiscent of Marcuse’s frame-up of “the Great Refusal” in One-Dimensional Man (66), evoking what Common has in common with earlier theories and political projects. Though unlike One-Dimensional Man in many respects, Common also resembles it. One-Dimensional Man (like most of Marcuse’s subsequent work) addresses the problems of affluence as a social totality that stakes its “democratic” and consumerist exceptionalisms on global conflict and imperial power. Marcuse traces a broad, global range of exclusions produced by a narrow and measured U.S. affluence, theorizing both liminality and exteriority as potentially productive of novel (albeit narrow) expressions of social protest: not a common but a “great” refusal common to those cast out (the exploited and exploitable) and to outcasts (e.g., hippies). Marcuse’s text precedes the broad and varied eruptions of social protest across Europe and in the North Atlantic in the late 1960s. In One-Dimensional Man, he seeks to consolidate what had seemed like riotous, sub-state instances of revolt into an idea, a possible political horizon. Other contemporary texts, issuing largely from the Autonomisti and Operaisti in Italy, similarly recast ideas and reorient political horizons by critiquing and inverting Marxist political economy. The Operaisti, for instance, consolidate a new political subject constituted by the mass migration of Southern industrial workers northward, a new mass of workers outside of both labor and party discipline who, while participating in the postwar industrial boom, developed a repertoire of strategies and fierce tactics that shook and altered the foundations of the Italian “planner state.”

What each of these texts shares with Common is the identification of elements liminal to social totalities and the thinking of revolution otherwise: Who (other than the proletariat) makes revolution, how, and under what conditions? Marcuse, the Autonomisti, and the Operaisti wonder how and through what organizational means these revolutionary ferments can be sustained. Their responses give rise to alternative assessments of practices, subjects, and organizations. What these texts share “in common” are novel ways to reconceive revolutionary praxis in the context of interregna. Dardot and Laval’s perspective on the present-day configuration of state and civil society relations is consistent with their earlier book, The New Way of the World: On Neoliberal Society (2014), in which they define neoliberalism as the rational framework through which both markets and states operate, negating the possibilities of a “double movement” (to the state) and a “triple movement” (to “progressive” expressions of either political or market forces in civil society, an expression made popular by Nancy Fraser and Stephanie Malin). Dardot and Laval invoke Arendt’s concept of “desolation” to amplify classical sociological conceptions of consumerism, alienation, and anomie, and to emphasize that theorizing the common becomes an urgent and necessarily revolutionary act in the face of this triumvirate of anti-societal forces. These initial descriptive aspects of neoliberalism specify the roles, actors, agents, and the breadth and depth of forces that come into focus in Dardot and Laval’s theoretical framework, which is vast and populated with intellectual histories, theories, and concepts. They also specify the revolutionary dynamics that can both structure and animate the pathways towards the horizon where the common sits.

Dardot and Laval’s approach across the three sections of the book is archaeological and philologically expansive, for example when reviewing the classical renderings of the concept of the common, both prior to and after its ancient, various, and somewhat cumulative juridical codifications and institutional articulations. The archaeological approach and philological investigations of instituted, juridical, and praxiological aspects of commons make the book, in part, an interdisciplinary field statement. The purpose of these inquiries into the common, however, is to show that it was and remains co-extensive with the social imaginaries that consolidate around developments of nascent and fragile proto-states, and limited and qualified fragments of civil society. Theories and concepts resist and enjoin one another and are directed toward further elaborations of commons. Dardot and Laval draw on classical sociological theory, political philosophy (across various periods), and historical sources. Source materials are not introduced into the text so as to arrest the archeology; rather, this well-sourced and annotated text is relentless in its focus on the development of the concept of common, following it into cul-desacs and leaping across historical gaps from antiquity and into the nineteenth century. The first section of Common effectively traces these various projects as affines to the common that ultimately failed to produce an unfettered triumph of the common.

At one point, Dardot and Laval define common as a political principle that guides the practice of building, maintaining, and sustaining the commons (28). This unity of principle and practice, forged in the interest of describing a revolutionary opposition to our current post-neoliberal trajectory, finds a corollary in Wolfgang Fritz Haug’s concept of “societalization,” an intersubjective, conscious, and collective process of reproducing social relations and structures both apart from and in conflict with capitalist institutions, relations, and practices (Haug 91). Haug’s concept emerges from his work on ideology critique and shows how ideology can be understood in different organizations and political practices. Dardot and Laval’s rendering of an appositive revolutionary political principle and practice differs from Haug’s work, however, insofar as they insist on a requisite break from any and all aspects of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Marxist political projects and on the non-conflictual posture of commoning.

Common is divided into three sections. In the first part Dardot and Laval describe the historical emergence of the commons in the nineteenth century. Dardot and Laval express some hope that contemporary post-statist struggles under the aegis of commons might produce connections in place of the instrumentalization of political organizations by the state as well as fractionalizations internal to organizations engaged in these struggles. These connections, which are made through collective practices, recall Donna Haraway’s use of the term “affinity groups” to describe common struggles that are social-issue based, but more directly resemble the late-nineteenth-century Iberian-anarcho “tradition” of affinity groups (155). Marcuse is less sanguine about the possibility of affine-based struggles. In the last essay he wrote, “The Reification of the Proletariat,” he sees them as non-sustaining, voluntarist, and performative, always-already reified on the surfaces of affluent societies. Marcuse’s essay was published just prior to the neoliberal conjuncture; Haraway’s was published in the midst of Reagan’s presidency and so well into the neoliberal conjuncture.

Dardot and Laval begin their third chapter by noting that commons and variations on the term inaugurate anti-capitalist struggles after state communism. Several pages later, they acknowledge that struggles around varied significations of the commons are less pronounced in US-based alter-globalization struggles and that, though it is more strongly linked to struggles across central and south America, the common is not what Mayer Zald would describe as an ideological catchphrase. They argue instead that “a retroactive reading nevertheless reveals the presence of the category in these movements; the category can be symptomatically detected in the emergence of new organizations and movements” (68). By the end of the chapter, Dardot and Laval point out that in both scope and depth the theoretical and political projects of the commons entail a defense of a non-market exteriority to capital in the hopes that it will take root. Against market society on a global register, they point out that the historically, socially, and culturally constituted fungibility of the common (what they call its goods and contents) is prescribed.

In the second part of the book, “Law and Institution of the Common,” Dardot and Laval focus on the generative practices of commons, asking how these have been and can be durably instituted. The section culminates in their chapter on “Instituent Praxis” (277), a form of praxis that is at once materialized, made conscious, and realized through use. This chapter anchors their earlier definition of common and develops the political program of Common: the nine propositions that Dardot and Laval offer in the last section of the book. Through repetition, instituent praxis gives rise to rules that, through time and use, become customs. Customs are produced through a collective and praxiological orientation towards emancipation or against the common as fungible and appropriable. Instituent praxis fixes the common and establishes its durability over time; it is, at the same time, an organizational form that can further institute creative practices, thereby introducing novelty within a social totality. Dardot and Laval excavate the category of instituent praxis from the work of Émile Durkheim, Marcel Mauss, Paul Fauconnet, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Cornelius Castoriadis. The “ready-made” notion of the instituent as already established or instituted—or, rather, the conflation of activities that institute or produce things and fix or ossify them into a bureaucratic form—emerges in early-twentieth-century French social sciences. In this regard, Dardot and Laval’s argument positions itself against Mauss, Fauconnet, and Durkheim, who take their object of investigation to be the already instituted, supra-individualist social facts that organize the production of all activities (where the instituent is indistinct from what it produces: the institution—that is, the bureaucratic form).

Dardot and Laval see in Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason an antidote to these sociological traditions’ rendering of instituent practice. Sartre identifies the contradiction inherent in notions of instituent emergence, where instituent work is praxis and, at the same time, signifies a practice both apart from and inaugural to social institutions. Inaugural instituent acts represent the effort of singularized but common actors oriented towards a social or political goal. In other words, Sartre stresses that the instituent—always oriented towards instituted ends— becomes superordinate, and both homogenizes and domesticates the wills of others, specifying a particular form of reification. For Sartre, instituent forms of praxis give rise to institutionalization and bureaucratization. However, Dardot and Laval note that Sartre’s understanding of instituent practices also necessarily refers to a prior, creative form of practice held in common.

The work of Castoriadis provides the most important and fully developed contribution to Dardot and Laval’s discussion of pre-institutional instituent forms of praxis. Castoriadis stresses instituent production as radically new forms of praxis that emerge throughout history. For Castoriadis, instituent production makes history while also shaping and engendering what is already instituted. Whereas Sartre begins from the point of view of the instituted and sees instituent production as the foundation of and as phenomenally indistinct (though analytically distinct) from what is instituted, Castoriadis’s thought is framed by the genesis of the instituted as an always instituent act. Instituent production for Castoriadis is rooted in the imaginary that, though it consists of already instituted meanings, is also the font of images, things, and representations embedded in our capacities to see things as they are not, or as other than they are. These concepts can be made concrete and, in turn, can become instituted. The imaginary—which consists of the novel, pre-reflexive, and not-yet symbolized as well as instituted meanings, images, and things—inaugurates instituent activity. Castoriadis’s concept of praxis models instituent activity as emerging from the imaginary but raised to the level of consciousness and rendered as collective and generative activity. However, as Dardot and Laval note, the exercise of instituent praxis as power (or as politics) negotiates its position within societal and political forces and so bears the weight of its embeddedness within an historical trajectory. On the one hand, Castoriadis’s discussion of the generative and novel historical nature of instituent praxis— and its foundations within the imaginary—lightens the weight of any historical load. On the other hand, for Dardot and Laval instituent praxis is a conscious act that is conditioned within collectives or groups and that, as strategically or wittingly as possible, opposes the remnants of instituted forms of praxis that would undo the common. Dardot and Laval see the common arise from the conscious activity of instituent praxis where relations produced through collective work are not separate from its ends, and its ends need not be absorbed by extant institutions. The ends of instituent practice (via the imaginary that shapes it) is the production of the common that is persistently creative and not instituted. Dardot and Laval’s instituent praxis is, at every turn, an emancipatory praxis.

The third part of the book makes nine proposals that rise out of Dardot and Laval’s concept of instituent praxis. Praxis makes its way from a common use (“Use Rights Must Challenge Property”) to the globally-instituted (“We Must Institute a Federation of the Commons”). Castoriadis returns in the last pages to anchor the revolution of the commons as the reinstitution of society from within its neoliberal midst. They explain that, like the ancien régime, neoliberalism represents a rationality concretely anchored in a social totality that cannot merely be contested by an alternative political force. The expanded scope of instituent praxis (through Dardot and Laval’s nine proposals) and the novelty of its instituting, creative, and generative powers render already common spaces, goods, and properties inappropriable. Instituent praxis regulates (or commons) through use, and remakes what neoliberal reason designates common—space, property, and goods, among other things—as the common.

Although each section of the book has an explicit focus, the transition between the second and third sections sees the intensive discussion of praxis recede into the background as the proposals for a federated commons take center stage. It takes some effort to recall, for instance, the micro-practices within recuperated Argentinian factories that differentiate each of the examples and demonstrate the conceptual complexity and practicable variabilities of instituent praxis. Regardless, case of recuperated Argentinian factories illustrate the tensions associated with the emancipatory features of instituent praxis. They show an extraordinary collective inventiveness and collaborative organizational framework develop in the face of the legal development of new rules. The Argentinian case represents one of many substantive examples that allows Dardot and Laval to developed their concept of praxis. These examples furnish their nine proposals. However, I remain unclear as to how instituent praxis, rules, and customs necessarily develop into federations. The obscurity of that development is a weakness in the book that recalls Sartre’s leap from inaugural instituent praxiological acts to their bureaucratization inside institutions and political organizations. The principles of the common are framed as injunctions, so even if commons overwhelm, infest, and convert a neoliberal social totality—like an interminable and viral “war of position”—will this necessarily result in a federation? Although it’s clear that the concept of praxis mediates socio-organizational practices of commons and Dardot and Laval’s proposals, the mediations between praxis and principles remain unclear. Who will federate and how? Non the less, Common: On Revolution in the 21^st Century advances common studies as a field and political program and specifies the dynamics that will bring the common to fruition. Much as Marcuse, the Autonomisti, and Operaisti did in the interregnum between Keynesianism and neoliberalism, Dardot and Laval specify a common revolutionary ground for movements of the present.

Robert F. Carley is an Associate Professor of International Studies at Texas A&M University, College Station. He is the author of Cultural Studies Methodology and Political Strategy: Metaconjuncture (2021), Gramscian Critical Pedagogy (2021), Culture and Tactics: Gramsci, Race, and the Politics of Practice (2019), Autonomy, Refusal, and the Black Bloc (2019), and Collectivities (2016). His most recent article, “Intersecting Oppressions; Intersecting Struggles: Race, Class, and Subalternity” (2022) appears in the Journal of Class and Culture. He is a member of the Governing Board of the Cultural Studies Association and co-edits Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association.

Works Cited

• Haraway, Donna J. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, Routledge, 1991, pp. 149–81.
• Haug, Wolfgang Fritz. Commodity Aesthetics, Ideology, and Culture. International General, 1987.
• Marcuse, Herbert. One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. 2nd ed., Routledge, 1991.