The labour of attachment: On commoning in Naarm

Abstract

Commoning describes a means of forging common value in the shared labour by which new experiences of community, of being in common, are realised. It is usually understood by way of a congeries of habits, affects and practices critical of normative models of social and economic organisation typical of late capitalism. These innovations have provided scholars and activists with productive ideas for imagining postcapitalist futures, and new ways of organising the labour required to achieve them. Yet it is arguable that two key problems remain in contemporary theorisations of commoning. First, in attending to the social and political contours of specific instances of commoning, it is rarely clear how commoning differs from other forms of social and community organisation. Second, despite longstanding identification with anticapitalist goals, the particular means by which commoning comes to express a distinctive political praxis are uncertain. The paper addresses the first of these problems by developing a novel account of the affective labour of commoning informed by Ben Anderson’s work on attachment, and Isabelle Stengers notion of “sense in common.” I address the second by way of Jacques Rancière’s account of subjectification understood as a “reconfiguration of the field of experience.” I argue that commoning evinces a mode of political praxis to the extent that it expounds a “wrong” in Rancière’s terms by which new subjects emerge as “parties” to the work of redefining a field of experience. I put these conceptual advances to work throughout my analysis by indicating how commoning may sustain new ways of “honouring country” in Naarm, reconfiguring the field of Indigenous relations in Victoria.

Introduction

Living well together, in common, is the aspirational horizon of any meaningful experience of community and the necessary condition for democratic politics. Community is an enduring topic of political contention (Balibar, 2020). It is the seminal reference for discussions of the “common good” and how “a share of the common power” ought to be distributed, the “field” in which “equality” is realised or deferred (Rancière, 1999: 5–6). Community is the natural locus of much political activism, and a normative concern for much political theory, insofar as politics and justice each “begin” with an interest in what community members hold “in common,” in the shared “capacities” individuals express in this activity, and in disputes regarding the circumstances whereby these capacities are thwarted or availed (Rancière, 1999: 5). If community denotes all that individuals have, share and produce in common, then politics denotes, in its turn, “the order that determines the partition of what is common” (Rancière, 1999: 5). Politics arises in this challenge of “being in and of the world,” of living, working and sharing with others, where a democratic praxis demands “reciprocal recognition of our common vulnerability” (Mbembe, 2019: 3). In a fractious age of revanchist political agendas, crisis, war and division (Roitman, 2013), our common vulnerability may seem like uncertain ground for democratic renewal, more like a “world outside relation” (Mbembe, 2019: 40) hostile to the expressions of solidarity that are usually regarded as indispensable for social and political change. Mbembe (2019: 40) responds to this situation by imagining new “links” by which “we can declare that we are together”; a politics of the “in-common” grounded in a “relation of co-belonging and sharing [and] a demand for justice and reparation.” This paper seeks to advance this politics of the “in-common” by elaborating the practices, norms and habits required to achieve it in the shared labour of commoning.

Commoning describes a means of forging common value in the shared labour by which new experiences of community, of being in common, are realised (Fournier, 2013; Ruivenkamp and Hilton, 2017). It is usually understood by way of a congeries of habits, affects and practices opposed to normative models of social and economic organisation typical of late capitalism (De Angelis, 2017; Garcìa-López et al., 2021; Stavrides, 2024). Commoning in this respect is as much political as social, in that commoning has aroused broad interest precisely to the extent that the activities understood by this name emphasise social transformation and the transition to “postcapitalism” (De Angelis, 2017; Hardt and Negri, 2009). Commoning is an increasingly capacious term used to describe the diverse social, affective and material activity of cultivating the commons. It is meant to convey all that communities share in common as a result of the collective experience of living, working and belonging in a collective. It follows that there can be no commons without a community (Federici, 2018), such that commoning involves the diverse practices, habits and norms whereby relations of trust and solidarity are fostered in collective life (De Angelis, 2017). It encompasses both the means by which access to the social, affective and material resources generated in this solidarity is negotiated, and how the distribution of capacities, obligations and responsibilities is managed within a community (Fournier, 2013). This distributive aspect underpins the way “community” is typically framed in discussions of commoning, emphasising conditions of solidarity and the mutual relations of care and support they express (Rigkos-Zitthen and Kapitsinis, 2025). Commoning thus describes “the life activity through which common wealth is reproduced, extended and comes to serve as the basis for a new cycle of commons (re)production” (De Angelis, 2017: 201). These ideas have provided scholars and activists with new ways of imagining postcapitalist futures (Hardt and Negri, 2009), and new ways of organising the labour required to achieve them (Ruivenkamp and Hilton, 2017). Yet it is arguable that two key problems remain in contemporary theorisations of commoning.

First, in attending to the social and political contours of specific instances of commoning, it is rarely clear how commoning differs from other kinds of social and community organisation (see also Rigkos-Zitthen and Kapitsinis, 2025: 4–5). What, indeed, are the distinctive social, affective and material aspects of commoning such that it may be distinguished from other forms of social interaction, community development or civic participation? Conceptual and empirical resemblances between terms like “commoning,” “social infrastructure,” “community development,” “social capital” and the “right to the city” are routinely cited (see Brandtner et al., 2023; Fournier, 2013; Latham and Layton, 2019; Stavrides, 2024), usually in an effort to clarify the specific sense of these individual terms by way of their contrasting juxtapositions. While sharp distinctions between these terms hardly seem possible, or perhaps even desirable, the necessary definitional relationship between commoning and that which it produces, the commons, suggests the need for greater conceptual clarity precisely in order to interrogate this productivity. Commoning ostensibly differs from ideas like “social capital” or “social infrastructure” on the basis of this generative activity. Contemporary authors routinely endorse Linebaugh’s (2007: 279) contention that the commons is more “verb” than “noun,” more an “activity” than a “substantive,” typically in an effort to distance themselves from earlier iterations of the commons construed as an established and relatively stable reserve or “common-pool” (Fournier, 2013; also Ostrom, 1990). This suggests that the commons should not be understood as somehow akin to a social infrastructure, a store of social capital, or even in terms of particular urban spaces or sites, but should instead be framed in terms of the activity of commoning. Yet this risks an infinite regress, with each term (commons and commoning) simply referring to the other, without clarifying how commoning differs from other kinds of social and community organisation, or indeed from earlier iterations of the concept. For example, can the library, marketplace or community sporting club, which might otherwise be treated in terms of a “social infrastructure” (Latham and Layton, 2019), also be treated in terms of commoning and the commons? I would wager that this kind of question deserves a more careful definitional response if only to emphasise the distinctive ways interest in commoning and the commons may contribute to social and political change. Of course, it may also open up opportunities for dialogue between fields of research, for example between studies of social change, community development and social infrastructures, by clarifying the conceptual emphasis of each such orientation.

Commoning is normally differentiated from other forms of community organisation in political terms, according to a more or less coherent set of progressive ideas, goals and values (Harvey, 2013; Noterman, 2016; Rigkos-Zitthen and Kapitsinis, 2025). This suggests the second problem that the paper tackles; on what basis may commoning be shown to advance a distinctive politics? Beyond the experience of a shared ethos, or a broad consensus regarding the goals of commoning, how does commoning advance political ends such that it may be regarded as expressing a uniquely political praxis? It is striking that this question has barely arisen in the literature, deferred in favour of shared assumptions about the alignment between commoning and efforts to inaugurate postcapitalist social and political futures (Amin and Howell, 2016). Either as a meliorist alternative to capitalist modes of production and exchange (Brandtner et al., 2023), or in a more revolutionary spirit (De Angelis, 2017; Hardt and Negri, 2009), commoning is almost always presented as a progressive political ideal that describes both the current labours and aspirational goals of individuals and groups struggling to craft alternative means of living and working together (Tola and Rossi, 2019). Commoning in this respect, is as much an ethos (or a shared set of values) as a distinctive practice or activity. Yet appeals to such a consensus, or the endorsement of anticapitalist values, does not of itself suggest the basis for a coherent political programme, important as these aspects may be to the individuals and groups who identify with the goals of commoning. The point is to distinguish commoning from other kinds of progressive political activism such that its distinctive contributions may be more keenly appreciated. It is equally important to clarify the activities or processes by which commoning may be shown to advance coherent political goals (Rigkos-Zitthen, 2025: 4–6). This is to suggest the work of extracting a distinctive kind of political theory (Rancière, 1999) from recent discussions of the commons and commoning (also De Angelis, 2017; Stavrides, 2024).

In responding to these problems, the paper seeks to make two distinctive contributions to theoretical discussions of commoning and the commons. First, the paper proposes a novel account of the affective labour of commoning informed by Anderson’s (2023) work on attachment, and Isabelle Stengers (2023) notion of “sense in common.” This conceptual elaboration is intended to establish a more robust means of characterising the social, affective and material aspects of commoning such that it may be contrasted with other forms of social and community organisation. I then turn to address the second of the problems posed above by way of a discussion of Rancière’s (1999: 35) account of “subjectification” understood as a “reconfiguration of the field of experience.” I argue that commoning evinces a mode of political praxis to the extent that it expounds a “wrong” in Ranciere’s terms by which new subjects emerge as “parties” to the work of redefining a field of experience. I put these two conceptual advances to work throughout my analysis by indicating how commoning may sustain new ways of “honouring country” in Naarm (Melbourne), reconfiguring the field of Indigenous relations in Victoria.

In so doing, my goal is to demonstrate how renewed understandings of the labours and attachments by which commoning serves to cultivate and sustain a commons – the task I adopt in the first part of the paper – is a necessary condition of the task I attempt in the second of explaining how commoning may come to serve political ends, in this case transforming relations with First Peoples in Victoria (see also Harcourt, 2021). I argue that commoning may be regarded as political, as bearing a politics, to the extent that the affective labour of attachment (of making sense in common) facilitates the emergence of new subjects of politics “not previously identifiable within a given field of experience” (Rancière, 1999: 35). By sustaining this work of “subjectification” whereby novel post-colonial subjects appear in Naarm – subjects of reconciliation, subjects of “justice and reparation” (Mbembe, 2019: 40) – I will indicate how commoning evinces the means whereby “the assertion of equality takes its political shape” (Rancière, 1999: 39). This is a politics of the commons, a new political community, a new configuration of the “given field” of belonging in Naarm. I start, however, with my first problem, proposing an understanding of commoning grounded in the affective labour of fostering attachments.

The affective labour of commoning

Interest in commoning, and its ongoing conceptual elaboration, emerges in the transition from an understanding of the commons grounded in the identification of a bounded store of “common-pool resources” (Ostrom, 1990), to one that imagines a generative activity, a relational ethos or shared set of norms and habits productive of a common mutuality (see Fournier, 2013; Harvey, 2013). Talk of the commons enjoys a venerable history, denoting “all the creations of nature and society that we inherit jointly and freely” (Hodkinson, 2010: 213). These have traditionally been understood to include natural resources such as land, fisheries and forest reserves (Ostrom, 1990), alongside select “social resources” such as cultural norms, forms of shared knowledge and modes of common cultural production (Benkler, 2000). According to this view, the commons may be understood in terms of the sum total of “common-pool resources” generated or contained within a relatively bounded site, environment or medium (Ostrom, 1990). As is well known, all such commons are subject to perennial problems of “enclosure” and exploitation, giving rise to discrete governance challenges to do mainly with questions of access, justice, sustainability and fairness (Fournier, 2013; Ostrom, 1990; Ruivenkamp and Hilton, 2017). In each instance, however, there is a tendency to treat the commons as a “natural” reserve, something that pre-exists any effort to identify, access or make use of such common resources. While this arguably makes sense with respect to fisheries or wilderness reserves, and may well convey something of the manner in which language, norms and cultural habits practically exceed any individual bearer of this inheritance (Virno, 2015), in each instance the work or activity of producing this common store recedes from view. For even fisheries and wilderness reserves must be protected and organised in some way. While Elinor Ostrom and her various collaborators maintained keen awareness of this organisational aspect of the commons, the tendency remains to think of the commons as something available to common access rather than made or generated in common activity. This distinction marks the transition from Ostrom’s (1990) seminal account of the value of common-pool resources, and the problems associated with their management, cultivation and protection, to more recent accounts of the social and material co-production of common value in communal activity (Rigkos-Zitthen and Kapitsinis, 2025; Ruivenkamp and Hilton, 2017). Commoning describes this work of co-production while also attempting to capture something of the value generated therein.

Without ignoring the enduring importance of “resource based” understandings of the commons, and their ongoing relevance to empirical inquiry and theoretical elaboration (see Borch and Kornberger, 2015; Brandtner et al., 2023; Stavrides, 2024), my focus in what follows is more recent thinking about the commons and its varied modes of production, emergence, activation or creation. Encompassing diverse programmes of research, political orientations and empirical interests, this thinking has tended to emphasise urban sites of commons production, and the array of practices, techniques and organisational logics involved in this production (see De Angelis, 2017; Garcia-López et al., 2021; Stavrides, 2019). Commoning emerges as the shared focus of much of this inquiry and activism, and a convenient name for the collective activity, shared practices, affective bearings and modes of embodied attention by which the commons is cultivated and sustained (Federici, 2018; Ruivenkamp and Hilton, 2017). The activity of commoning is the subject of a rapidly growing empirical literature, including work on community gardens and urban “re-wilding” projects (Egerer and Fairbairn, 2018); the reclamation of urban sites for community development and social interaction (Feinberg et al., 2023; Iaione, 2016); in response to problems of housing insecurity and homelessness (Hodkinson, 2010; Noterman, 2016); on the transition to hybrid working arrangements such as co-working (Waters-Lynch and Duff, 2021); in support of novel forms of political organisation (Rigkos-Zitthen and Kapitsinis, 2025; Stavrides, 2024) and as means of supporting collaborative modes of creative practice (Alacovska, 2022). Equally vital has been conceptual work characterising different models of commoning as practice (De Angelis, 2017; Fournier, 2013), including discussion of the Marxist and autonomist traditions that inform much of this analysis (see Ruivenkamp and Hilton, 2017).

What is common to these discussions, either in analysis of individual instances of commoning in particular urban sites, or in more theoretically inclined reflections, is the characterisation of commoning as a distinctive kind of shared labour (De Angelis, 2017; Fournier, 2013). Harvey (2011: 107), for example, emphasises how commoning involves “creative ways to use the powers of collective labor for the common good.” Commoning thus describes the work of labouring together to produce, enhance, sustain and extend the commons, where the products of this labour are regarded as bearing a distinctively social, affective and/or material value (Hardt and Negri, 2009). More directly, recent discussions of commoning have tended to emphasise the importance of “immaterial labour” (Lazzarato, 1996) and/or “affective labour” (Hardt, 1999) to convey aspects of the intangible value generated in common efforts. The idea of affective labour is central, signalling a sensitivity to the embodied and relational aspects of commoning expressed in “human contact and interaction, which involves the production and manipulation of affects . . . relationships and emotional responses” (Oksala, 2016: 284). This affective element may be taken, in turn, to refer to the non-representational dimensions of collective life, the mix of relational and material forces that circulate between bodies as “something we do and feel” (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017: 162). Affects trace the ways feeling states, energies and embodied capacities ebb and flow in and between bodies according to their interactions (see Fotaki et al., 2017: 4–6). Affective labour may, in this regard, be understood in involve the organisation of interactions in the “constitution of communities and collective subjectivities” (Hardt, 1999: 89).

This is the “labour of the head and heart” (Hardt and Negri, 2009: 132) that “creates immaterial products such as knowledge, information, communication, a relationship, or an emotional response” (Hardt and Negri, 2009: 108). It involves collaboration, “problem solving, symbolic and analytical tasks, and linguistic expressions” that produce “ideas, symbols, codes, texts, linguistic figures, images and other such products” (Hardt and Negri, 2004: 108). Examples of this labour are common across media and communications, academic teaching and research, public administration, financial services, retail and hospitality. Affective labour dominates these “service” and “knowledge” economies, producing symbolic content, ideas, sensations, relationships and identities (Oksala, 2016). Hardt and Negri (2009: 133) add that the “object of production” in these economies is “really a subject, defined, for example, by a social relationship or a form of life.” Economic value here takes on the cast of affective life, where the object of capitalist accumulation is the very stuff of affect itself, drawing it out of bodies, out of relationships, out of common life in the production of subjectivity. Critically, however, while affective labour underpins dominant modes of capitalist production and accumulation, Hardt and Negri (2009) insist that affective labour is equally central to anticapitalist struggles, and the politics of freedom and resistance for the “multitude.” Affective labour, expressed in common effort, is the necessary condition for the “political project of instituting the common,” and the means by which individuals may struggle together to “win back and expand the common and its powers” (Hardt and Negri, 2009: ix). This latter aspect is central to my efforts in the next section to elaborate a conceptual praxis of commoning.

Whereas the idea of affective labour has been enthusiastically adopted by theorists (and practitioners) of the commons as a handy means of thinking about the work of commoning in anticapitalist struggles, Hardt and Negri’s (2009) writings are notoriously vague on the specific point of explaining how affective labour serves to expand the commons in support of a politics of liberation, equality or “self-government” (p. xiii). According to their thinking, the work of expanding the commons entails modes of affective labour that harness the forces of collective life in the ongoing production of subjectivity – somewhat uncertain grounds for an enduring theory of praxis. I argued earlier that such an expansive understanding of the work of commoning makes it difficult to distinguish this work from allied projects like community development, social innovation, the creation of social infrastructures, or efforts to expand a “right to the city.” Perhaps such distinctions are unhelpful, or of interest only to political theorists with an unfortunate taste for categories, but surely such vagueness in the characterisation of commoning does little to guide the everyday work of forging the commons in the spirit of solidarity and collective struggle. How else might the work of commoning, and the affective labour required of this work, be conceptualised? I’ll turn now to Anderson’s (2023) work on attachment, and Isabelle Stengers’ notion of “sense in common” (Anderson, 2023) in an effort to clarify these aspects of commoning. In developing this analysis, I’ll ground my discussion by indicating how the shared labour of attachment may afford new ways of “honouring country” in Naarm, reconfiguring relations with First Peoples in Victoria.

Common attachments in Naarm

Insofar as affective labour may be understood by way of the collective production of common “forms of life” (Hardt, 1999: 100), these efforts may also be regarded as evincing forms of commoning to the extent that they enable and reinforce “attachments” (Anderson, 2023) between individuals, objects, places, cultural forms, ideas or ways of living and being together. This is to treat commoning as a mode of affective labour that generates and expresses “communities and collective subjectivities” (Hardt, 1999: 89) by fostering the diverse attachments by which these communities are sustained. My wager in what follows is that this common labour of attachment exemplifies the novel means of living and being together that are slowly transforming relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in Naarm (see Carter, 2024; Pinto, 2021; Reynolds, 2021). In this respect, I’ll treat Naarm as a commons that is produced and extended in the labour of attachment by which a novel political community is realised as a common aspiration. Bound together in these attachments, in the commoning by which new communities of justice and reconciliation are emerging in Naarm, I will discern the outlines of a nascent politics of the in-common that seeks to honour country by reclaiming a common place.

Whatever may serve as the “object” of these attachments in Naarm, Anderson (2023: 394) stresses that all attachments “bring closer” something that feels “necessary to life.” For this reason, attachment may be understood as a “distinct kind of relation” by which particular objects, people or places “come to matter and assume heightened importance” (Anderson, 2023: 393). The intimate work of attachment sustains a commons insofar as attachments are the principal means by which people come to “inhabit and make liveable worlds,” where the work of “cultivating attachment” requires or demonstrates commitment to the objects, peoples or places of this attachment (Anderson, 2023: 394). This is the commitment to nurture, sustain and protect the objects of attachment precisely in terms of their value, what they give to community, how they serve to “hold up a world” (Anderson, 2023: 394). Widespread adoption of the toponym Naarm, the ancestral name for what is now central Melbourne in the languages of the Woiwurrung and Boonwurrung peoples of the Kulin nations (Carter, 2024: 71), exemplifies something of this common labour of attachment, holding out the promise of a new political community in Victoria. Naarm is as much a political, affective and social referent as an indication of respect for traditional naming conventions in Victoria. For just as it invokes a commitment to reconciliation, justice and reparation for First Peoples in Victoria (Langton et al., 2024), it also affirms the discursive, affective and performative work of cultivating attachments to the subjects of this reconciliation, Indigenous and non-indigenous alike. Carter (2024: 70) explains how growing everyday usage of the toponym has largely involved “sideways” proliferation within “progressive arts and media” communities in Victoria without any “official imprimatur.” The name has become an “object of encounter” (Carter, 2024: 71), a social, discursive and political touchstone that expresses shared aspirations for the recasting of Indigenous relations in Victoria.

To refer to Melbourne as Naarm is to contribute to the affective labour of crafting and extending attachments to Naarm as a place, an idea, a social and political community, a commons. It is to further signal one’s appreciation of the social, affective and political value of this attachment and the importance of the shared efforts by which it may be sustained. In this respect, the toponym exceeds the performativity of its utterance (Butler, 2021). It’s a productive name for a social, political and affective attachment to a place, a community and the “collective subjectivities” (Hardt, 1999: 89) that might yet populate it. Coopting Anderson’s (2023: 393–394) argument, this attachment is distinguished by the “promise” it holds out for the realisation of the “good life” in Naarm. Even though the “good life” may fail to materialise in Naarm, and hopes may be dashed, Anderson (2023) reassures us that all attachments rely on the form of the promise and are sustained for as long as this promise endures. In so doing, attachments establish a relational form to something (an object, person, place, affect or cultural form) that is “outside the subject and simultaneously constitutive of that subject and their sense of continuity of world, others and self” (Anderson, 2023: 399). Our attachments become meaningful, enduring and valuable precisely in terms of their “promissory” effect, the way they “present as offering or affording the subject something better to come” (Anderson, 2023: 399). This indeed is the promise inaugurated in the identification of Naarm as a place, a community, a commons to which one might become attached (see Carter, 2024: 70–72). Naarm is a heterotopia, a home for a “people to come” in Deleuze’s (1997: 4) terms, something that must be organised, cultivated, supported and sustained in the very labour of crafting attachments to it. Anderson (2023: 402) explains how we become attached to things, people or places in terms of these labours, to the extent that our attachments feel “satisfying,” furnishing the “resource[s] for subjects to organise living through.” Naarm expresses the topoi of and for this organisation, a means of cultivating attachments to others in a community, to ideas, values and resources for living otherwise in common.

Thinking with Anderson (2023: 397–398) some more, one could add that all life in common, in a community, may be characterised by way of this promissory dimension. Community is more or less unthinkable without those enduring attachments (“bonds” or “ties”) that link individuals both to each other in a community, but also to the shared idea of that community as a supportive, or somehow affirmative medium for living well together in. To invoke Naarm, in speech or in writing, is to cultivate a shared space for this affirmation. It is to endorse the toponym’s promissory dimension, along with one’s aspirations for a more just reconciliation with Victoria’s First Peoples (Carter, 2024; Pinto, 2021). This promise is central to any community’s common (imagined) identity (Federici, 2018). Communities are composed in and of attachments, between community members, to place and memory, to common histories and identities, and shared aspirations for the future. These are the common attachments by which Naarm is slowly emerging in “sideways” encounters between individuals and groups (Carter, 2024: 70), in the commoning whereby Naarm is expressed and sustained as a new political community.

Emphasising the promissory measure of attachment, Anderson (2023: 399–400) argues that attachments sustain the (affective) experience of “optimism” insofar as we become attached to things (people, objects, places, affects) that promise to deliver something better. To refer to Naarm is to invoke this promise of “something better” in Victoria. Naarm is expressed, embodied, realised and sustained in shared attachments to this promise, in a signal of “our” commitment to a more optimistic future despite (or perhaps because of) the horrible legacies of settler-colonial violence in Victoria (Langton et al., 2024). To refer to Naarm is hardly to ignore this history; rather, it is to gesture towards a more optimistic future, one of justice and reparation. For Anderson (2023: 402), attachments become habitual in a “recognisable arrangement of elements [and] repeated patterns.” Naarm, understood as a bundle of shared attachments to place, community, ethos and politics, evinces this kind of pattern. Naarm is the enduring “form” of this attachment, as it becomes “recognised, named and felt as a way of organising living” (Anderson, 2023: 403) otherwise in Melbourne. Attachments endure precisely because of this formal organisation, and for the commitments they elicit to a future grounded in the promise of the realisation of a quality (or value) of living well. All that “I” am attached to endures in value, in practice, in habit, according to the promise it bears, nurturing “my” optimism.

If attachments have a recognisable “form” in this way, Anderson (2023: 392) adds that they are further organised according to distinctive “scenes”; “everyday space-times of limited duration which give an affective push to forms of attachment.” In accordance with these forms and scenes, attachments are like spatio-temporal trajectories or “vectors that tether us, knitting together elsewheres and elsewhens, continuing pasts as they are brought into the present, creating already conditioned futures” (Anderson, 2023: 397). Each instantiation of our attachment, each habitual performance, crystalises a given space-time into a scene of “proximate and distant bits and piece” connected in practice, habit, memory, hope and optimism (Anderson, 2023: 397). I speak of Naarm with colleagues at work, my wife and sons talk about it at home, just as I hear others elsewhere using the toponym as a shorthand for a shared ethos, an aspirational affirmation (see also Carter, 2024; Pinto, 2021). The name “tethers” us in its very utterance to these aspirations, connecting us in an imagined political community, invoking violent and racist settler colonial histories in Victoria that we must necessarily, confront, own and acknowledge even as we dare to imagine the new attachments to people and place that might enable more just futures. This is the scene of “my” attachment to Naarm, to this place, this city, this future and this politics, just as it connects so many other “elsewheres and elsewhens” that add a distinctive affective, social and material tenor to this moment, becoming “part of the foreground of life and thought” making this vivid scene more “intensely felt” (Anderson, 2023: 404). All attachments have a bearing on social context in this regard, as my example of the growing community of Naarm indicates (Carter, 2024). Just as attachments encompass a sense of place, the scene of these attachments evinces an atmosphere, an affective pull that organises “our” attachments into habits. I would equally like to emphasise how these objects and scenes of attachment express a common form of living well, forging an “affective infrastructure” (Bosworth, 2023) that holds a commons like Naarm together. The optimism that attends all attachments organises and arranges community life in a shared scene of belonging. Attachments are held in common between people, places and ideas, galvanising community in the form of its attachments. Attachments are held in common such that commoning may be understood in terms of the affective labour of attachment, bringing the social, affective and material elements of the commons closer together, expanding their powers in the promissory appeal of community life. This is happening in Naarm, and it’s why I have elected to describe Naarm by way of these common attachments and their production in the affective labour of commoning. Commoning issues from, and is constituted by, the affective labour of cultivating and sustaining attachments in the creation of a community.

To return, then, to the broader problem that opened this section, the labour of attachment is how the idea (and practice) of commoning differs from the idea (and practice) of community development, which tends to treat community as a social infrastructure. It is also how it differs from social capital, which tends to regard sociality as a capability or shared resource that is unevenly distributed within a network according to (apparently) individual differences in this capability. It further differentiates commoning from the idea of the right to the city, which more typically has jurisprudence as its goal. Of course, these ideas complement thinking about commoning, though commoning differs from them all because of its focus on the cultivation of attachments in the affective labour of fostering community solidarity in the expression of collective subjectivities (Hardt, 1999). Commoning sustains and distributes attachments in the identification of collective subjects of the commons (see De Angelis, 2017; also Griffith and Uitermark, 2025). This makes commoning political as I will elaborate below, but it also makes commoning a means of crafting attachments in collective effort, an element that is sometimes missing from Anderson’s discussion. Even as Anderson treats attachment as a relational activity, recourse to Stengers’ (2023) recent work illuminates the more collective and social aspects of attachment, expressed in the common sense that draws in bodies (human and nonhuman), objects, ideas, affects and places in shared subjectivities. Attachment is a kind of “making sense in common” in this regard, a work of “maintenance” by which collective life is supported within a “shared environment” (Stengers, 2023: 67).

We come to our attachments together in other words, such that what is valued in a community typically derives from those attachments that sustain its ways of living and being well together. The example of Naarm illustrates this point well, providing a striking instance of the shared labours of attachment to a common goal of living well together. Our attachments give expression to our “social ways of making an environment matter,” identifying and cultivating the collective means of drawing from this environment (or this “society” in the Whiteheadian terms that Stengers adopts) the necessary means of living well together (Stengers, 2023: 108–109). Our attachments to each other, to our communities, and to the places, affects, ideas and objects that constitute them, are forever an “optimistic” way of “finding more” in a community, of “knowing what the different societies making up the world in which we live can do” (Stengers, 2023: 111). This question of “finding more” in the world is what I take Stengers (2023: 125–128) to mean by her exhortations to reclaim the notion of common sense, to reject its conventional association with ideas of inherited group prejudice and “old fashioned” ignorance, and to treat it instead as a collective “adventure,” a work undertaken in common to discover, invent, nurture and sustain all that the world and its variegated composite “societies” may offer in the forever unfinished project of attempting to live well together (Butler, 2021).

Stengers (2023: 125–128) argues that making sense in common requires a novel “social sensibility,” a new “art of composition” by which societies, worlds and communities may be “knitted together” in the construction of an “adaptive . . . milieu” that might sustain a “living society.” Anderson’s notion of attachment arguably qualifies as one of these arts of composition by which communities are knitted together in the habits, norms and practices that sustain the attachments that afford the promise of living well together. The example of Naarm further endorses the point. This is to be reminded that communities are perhaps nothing more than this “common wealth” of habits, norms, beliefs, ideas and forms of attachment that we collectively labour over, valuing them and revaluing them according to their role in sustaining a common world (Lapoujade, 2020: 65–66). Our attachments help us make sense of the world as it is made in common, as it is expressed in the things that we become attached to in the hope of sustaining something better. This is the work of commoning conceived by way of the affective labour of forging attachments that sustain a community in the production of collective subjectivities. Yet there is nothing is this work that should be taken to be innately political, or necessarily evocative of a politics, no matter how salient the theme of community is for contemporary political theory (Balibar, 2020). How then does the affective labour of our common attachments give rise to a politics? How might commoning be taken to ground political praxis? Rancière’s (1999) discussion of disagreement, “wrongs,” justice and equality suggests how praxis emerges in the common work of subjectification realised in our attachments.

Expounding a “wrong”: Equality in a commons

Rancière (1999) places subjectivity and the means of subjectification at the centre of his consideration of contemporary politics and the disagreements that define it. I wish equally to place subjectification at the centre of my discussion of the political tenor of commoning and the forging of shared attachments in a community. Rancière’s (1999: vii) work is a useful reference for this discussion given his interest in the salience of “theorizing about community and its purpose” in contemporary political thought. Rancière (1999: 5) argues that controversies in political philosophy typically hinge on conflict over “what citizens have in common [where] the main concern is with the way the forms of exercising and controlling the exercising of this common capacity are divided up.” For Rancière (1999: 5), this means that politics ought fundamentally to be regarded as “the order that determines the partition of what is common” within a given community. That which is common to a community is the mutual exposure all members experience to the “useful” and “harmful” conditions of collective life. This exposure differs among community members by orders of degree, although it may never be eliminated, either to eradicate harm or maximise utility. To live in common with others is to be subject both to the conditions of shared prosperity, the benefits of civil society for example, legal institutions, open markets, relations of trust and reciprocity; and to the conditions of shared vulnerability, an unpropitious climate, for example, or discriminatory laws and social mores, inequality more generally. Whereas for individuals, this situation calls for a principle of justice that entails “not taking more than one’s share of advantageous things or less than one’s share of disadvantageous things,” for a community it demands a concern for politics “which turns on equality as its principle” (Rancière, 1999: 5–6).

Equality thus figures as the foundational political problem for any given community (and for the maintenance of the commons, as I’ll soon venture), even though Rancière (1999) treats of equality in a highly original way. Equality may never be determined by a simple “measuring rod” (Rancière, 1999: 5), or zero-sum calculus, in which certain members of a community may be said to enjoy more or less of this or that particular benefit (or privilege) relative to others. Instead, for Rancière (1999: 6), equality concerns a radical value or quality, a “right . . . to hold a share of the common power.” To the extent that living in common with others involves living with the mutual conditions of prosperity and misfortune, the management of these conditions is an equally mutual endeavour. This is because exposure to harm may only be mitigated by collective effort, just as the promotion of prosperity necessarily entails shared labour. These efforts comprise the “common power” central to Rancière’s (1999: 6) analysis of equality, or those shared “capacities” by which members of a given community struggle together to manage sources of harm or disadvantage while seeking to promote the means of their ongoing prosperity. Problems of equality arise in disputes regarding the distribution of these capacities, or what might be counted as a reasonable share of the “common power,” relative to the contribution individuals and groups make to the community and its shared freedoms. Politics encompasses the work of “counting” and “distributing” these shares, allocating “capacities” or “common lots” within a community (Rancière, 1999: 5). Of course, these allocations are often controversial, such that Rancière (1999) treats disagreement as the fundamental feature of political life, rather than the struggle for consensus that defines much classical political theory (May, 2014: 71–73). Politics is characterised by disagreements about the “partition of what is common,” meaning the common capacities by which community members seek to manage experiences of harm and disadvantage, prosperity and freedom. These disagreements typically hinge on “miscounts” in which a particular community’s contribution to the common good is ignored or downplayed, and their rights to enjoy the value of the common power (such as freedom, prosperity or security) are denied or impinged. These miscounts give rise to what Rancière (1999: 11–13) calls the articulation of a “wrong,” the cri de coeur by which “those who have no part” demand their equality in the form of “reparation” or “justice.”

The essence of the wrong is misrecognition in which one’s contribution to the common good is ignored. More fundamentally, it involves a kind of erasure in which one’s very right to be recognised as “parties” to this common power is denied. Politics is not therefore the coming together of notionally equal parties on a “common stage” where the right to articulate interests and grievances stands as a mutual presupposition, such as one finds in the nostrums of much liberal political theory (May, 2014). Rather, politics emerges in the struggles by which “those who have no right to be counted as speaking beings make themselves of some account, setting up a community by the fact of placing in common a wrong that is nothing more than this very confrontation” (Rancière, 1999: 27). The “placing” of the wrong inaugurates a politics that challenges the misrecognition by which the governing classes fail to “see” or “hear” those parties that ostensibly have no part in the common. This contention provides an astute means of analysing the cultivation of a new commons in Naarm, as I’ll explain shortly, highlighting its explicitly political dimension. Yet this is also what Rancière (1999: 27–28) means when he talks about politics as a reconfiguration of a given “field of experience,” in that politics seeks to transform “our” ways of “being-together,” those “ways of being, ways of doing, and ways of saying” that are recognisable on the common stage of politics as fitting expressions of political issues. Those that are wronged have no access to this stage, so their “ways of being, doing and saying” are ignored as they are excluded from the common power and denied a voice.

Expounding a wrong, in this way, involves the forceful articulation of novel ways of being-together, new ways of “being, doing and saying” that challenge a given field of experience by demanding a radically new “partition of the perceptible.” This is because the demand for recognition heralded in the identification and articulation of a wrong “makes visible what had no business being seen, and makes heard a discourse where once there was only place for noise” (Rancière, 1999: 30). Disagreements reveal the contours of a wrong by calling attention to what was previously unseen, what was hitherto ignored (as “noise”), issuing a demand to be seen, to be heard, to be recognised as a party to the common. In so doing, the wrong evinces a demand for equality, for a reasonable share of the common power, for the recognition of diverse ways of being. By emphasising the absence of this recognition, the wrong becomes political as a demand for recognition and “equality is inscribed in the setting up of a dispute” (Rancière, 1999: 32). Rancière (1999: 35) insists that the most significant feature of all such disputes is the emergence of new subjects of equality as new “modes of subjectification” arise in “a series of actions of a body and a capacity for enunciation not previously identifiable within a given field of experience.” The “enunciation” of the wrong, then, is the characteristic “mode of subjectification in which the assertion of equality takes its political shape” (Rancière, 1999: 39). It follows that political subjects “do not exist prior to the declaration of wrong”; rather, the very expression of a wrong inaugurates “the constitution of specific subjects that take the wrong upon themselves, give it shape, invent new forms and names for it” (Rancière, 1999: 39). This process “connects and disconnects different areas, regions, identities, functions, and capacities existing in the configuration of a given experience,” reorganising them in a novel mode of subjectification (Rancière 1999: 40). By way of example, Rancière (1999: 39–42) highlights the experiences of “workers” and “women” who each make distinctive demands for equality in articulating the wrongs done to them, whereby novel modes of subjectification emerge: the “proletariat” and the “feminist” subject, respectively.

I’ll add the example of Naarm, and the emerging subjects of Naarm who give voice to the “wrong” of ongoing social, cultural and economic injustices inflicted on First Peoples in Victoria. These struggles are political insofar as they articulate the wrongs experienced by First Peoples in Victoria, as they express a demand for equality, for a share of the common power, issued as a form of redress (see also Pinto, 2021). All communities are defined by this common power, by the advantages and experienced utility of the diverse capacities nurtured and distributed within social life, where politics should be regarded as the collective project by which access to this common power is contested. To live in a community is necessarily to contribute to this common power, in which disagreements centre on the character, impact and value of this contribution, such that equality must be regarded as the foundational political problem for collective life. This is the principal lesson of Rancière’s (1999: 39–41) brief discussion of the struggles of workers and women, in that each group gives rise to a new social movement comprising political subjects who give voice to the struggle for equality, issuing demands “to be heard,” for a fair share of the common power. This is a politics peculiar to the struggle for equality within a community, that seeks to transform or reconfigure the very “field of experience” by expressing new subjects of equality who demand recognition for their contributions to the common power (see May, 2014). All of this concerns what is common, with the forms of “exercising and controlling” the capacities “we” share in common, with the means of “distributing common lots and evening out communal shares” (Rancière, 1999: 5).

Whereas commoning may usefully be understood by way of the work of fostering and extending the community’s common power – where it involves the affective labour of forging the attachments that sustain this common power, to return to the conceptual vocabulary introduced earlier – Rancière’s (1999) work helps us to conceive of the proper political form of this activity in the very “assertion of equality.” Commoning becomes political in those instances where it cultivates attachments to parties “who do not count,” who “have no part in anything” (Rancière, 1999: 9), whose contribution to the common power is denied, and whose access to the capacities that enable the means of living well together in a community is truncated or blocked. Commoning is political when it calls out a “wrong,” as it enables the emergence of new subjects of equality, as it forges novel means of accessing the common power, and of cultivating new attachments to it. I’d like to close by considering this argument in the context of Indigenous relations in Naarm, extending my analysis of the labour of commoning in service of a novel political praxis.

Expounding wrongs in Naarm

That First Peoples in Naarm have been denied access to the common power enjoyed by other members of the Victorian community scarcely requires elaboration (Attwood, 2009; Broome, 2024: Langton et al., 2024). What may be more useful is brief consideration of how commoning may feature in efforts to redress this wrong. Thus far, I’ve stressed how commoning can be distinguished from other forms of social and community development by way of the affective labour of forging attachments in common. I’d like now to examine how this labour may be shown to support a uniquely political praxis in those instances where the labour of attachment bears witness to a wrong, giving voice to novel political subjects, issuing a demand for equality, for a share of the common power. This is the power that defines a commons in its generative capacities. In Naarm, articulations of the wrongs done to First Peoples are often couched in terms of the struggle for recognition, for “reparations” and “justice” that resonate with Mbembe’s (2019) politics of the “in-common.” Equally typical is endorsement of the importance of “honouring country” and the forms of cultural knowledge and ceremonial practice that sustain country in Naarm (Langton et al., 2024: ix). These ideas have nurtured political alliances between First Peoples and “settler Australians” for generations, though what I’d like to emphasise is what these struggles have themselves generated in the attachments and shared labours that define them (see Harcourt, 2021).

Indigenous politics in Naarm, as elsewhere across Australia, hinges on problems of recognition and sovereignty. This includes rights to the lands, waters and skies that comprise First People’s “customary estates” (Langton et al., 2024: ix), and for self-determination to safeguard the social, political and economic arrangements that enable First Peoples to live on country in accordance with their enduring spiritual and cultural responsibilities (Moreton-Robinson, 2015: 1–7; Reynolds, 2021: 2–5). Indigenous notions of country are paramount, conveying both the sovereign right to land alongside the laws and obligations that constitute Indigenous identities in complex inter-dependencies of place, language, history, belief and practice (Poelina et al., 2023). Country is at once ontological, geographical and relational, conveying a mix of “hereditary rights and histories of custodianship of places, animals, stories and songs,” connecting individuals in shared languages, ceremonial practices and kin relations, and entailing “obligations to live with law . . . in a common sense of belonging” (Curkpatrick et al., 2023: 54–55). The notion of “honouring country” thus describes the obligations individuals have to uphold these customary laws and practices, but also the shared work of sustaining, nurturing and protecting country in a mutual spiritual expression (Langton et al., 2024). Country conveys the “nourishing and vitalising interactions of people and place,” the common ground of language, customary law, ancestral beings, kin networks, ceremonies, songs and stories that sustains a “network of living relations” (Curkpatrick et al., 2023: 50–52). Importantly for my purposes, while the work of honouring country is a spiritual and ethical obligation for Indigenous Australians, it is increasingly seen as an obligation for non-Indigenous Australians too (Attwood, 2009; Reynolds, 2021). This is typically taken to include the need for greater acknowledgement of, respect for, and understanding of Indigenous knowledges and ways of “knowing” country, alongside recognition of Indigenous sovereignty and custodial relationships to land, and a commitment to reconciliation as a personal, ethical and political practice (Carter, 2024; Langton et al., 2024; Pinto, 2021). There is something here that resonates very strongly with the idea of a “common power,” and while I’m not suggesting any simple correspondence between the ideas of country and the commons, each arguably emphasises a generative quality, something that must be nurtured, sustained and transmitted in common. Acknowledging important cultural, ontological and epistemological differences between these ideas (see Harcourt, 2021; Pinto, 2021), I’d stress how practices of commoning may yield new ways of honouring country in Naarm by supporting common attachments to place.

This promise turns on the ways Indigenous and Non-Indigenous Australians come together to honour country in Naarm, and the forms of recognition, acknowledgement, mutuality and respect that this shared labour involves. The affective labour of forging attachments in a commons, canvassed in earlier sections, arguably suggests novel means of finding this common value in the struggles by which Indigenous and Non-Indigenous Australians expound the wrongs of colonisation and dispossession in Victoria. It suggests, more directly, how the shared work of honouring country may itself be imagined in terms of the common value of fostering attachments to country as a common political project. To the extent that commoning may be shown to involve the affective labour of forging attachments in the creation of common value, these attachments necessarily evince a subjective form in that they express, as Anderson (2023), Stengers (2023), Hardt and Negri (2009) and Rancière (1999) each affirm, new subjects of the “in-common” (Mbembe, 2019). Attachments give affective, social and material form to these modes of subjectification, weaving together particular ways of “seeing, being and doing,” reconfiguring a given field of experience by giving expression to novel subjects of and for this experience. This is evident in Naarm in the forging of attachments in common, in the collective work of honouring country, and in the expression of the distinctive habits, dispositions, affective practices, values and identities by which the political project of reconciliation may be advanced in Naarm. Commoning in Naarm is expressive of collective subjectivities in these respects, as the work of commoning sustains the expression of novel political subjects (see Griffith and Uitermark, 2025: 914–916). Anderson (2023) makes much the same point in his discussion of attachment, particularly the ways attachments are constitutive of “our” subjectivity. Commoning involves the fostering of attachments between individuals and community, as “we” become attached to ideas, values, places, identities and aspirations in “our” community. In Naarm, these attachments have a subjective form in that the cultivation of attachment in common, the affective labour of commoning, necessarily generates “commoner subjectivities” (Griffith and Uitermark, 2025: 912; also De Angelis, 2017: 228–230). Once again, this aspect differentiates commoning from other modes of community development by emphasising the subjective form of common attachment to community.

The experience of cultivating a commons in Naarm further illustrates the subjective form of these attachments, in that the adoption of the toponym gives expression both to one’s aspirations for justice and reparations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities, as well as one’s identification with this political project. It is to signal one’s identification as a particular kind of political subject – a subject of the common project of reconciling with Victoria’s First Peoples – just as it is to identify as a subject of Naarm committed to the common work of fashioning a novel political community in Victoria. Naarm figures both as the “object” and the “scene” of this community attachment as Anderson (2023) would have it, even as it reveals the form of a novel subjectification, a new subject in Naarm. In these respects, Naarm may be treated as an object of attachment, as the name for a new political community and as the affirmation of a novel political subject. These processes may be regarded as political to the extent that they expound a wrong as I’ve noted, to the extent that they give expression to a demand for equality, for fairer access to the common power. By invoking the language of Naarm as the name for a new political community, one is necessarily expounding the wrongs done to First Peoples in Victoria. One is equally seeking to “reconfigure” the “field of experience” in Naarm by demanding greater recognition of these wrongs, by insisting on First People’s contributions to the common power in Victoria, and for radical change in the “order that determines the partition of what is common” (Rancière, 1999: 50). This is how new subjects are emerging in Naarm, subjects who “take the wrong upon themselves, give it shape, invent new forms and names for it” (Rancière, 1999: 39). This is a labour of attachment to Naarm, the work of commoning by which Naarm is fashioned as a commons, as a community, in a new political praxis of the in-common (Mbembe, 2019).

This is to reimagine the politics of reconciliation in Naarm as both a question of sovereign law and national policy, and in a more local, social and affective register as a work of reconfiguring a given field of experience by supporting the emergence of novel subjectivities. In Naarm, these common efforts sustain the emergence of new subjects of justice, new subjects of reconciliation, new subjects of the commons, whose shared labours give subjective form to a novel vision of Naarm as common country. This is evident in the adoption of the toponym, in widespread interest in learning more about Victoria’s colonial history, in the adoption of acknowledgements of country in meetings and events, in all the work of “honouring country” that seeks as its goal the expression of a new political settlement in Naarm (see Carter, 2024; Pinto, 2021; Reynolds, 2021). Settler Australians have never been excluded from country in Naarm, from the customary estates of the First Peoples of the Kulin nation; rather, they have been invited to understand themselves as guests, and to recognise their obligations as such (Broome, 2024; Langton et al., 2024; Reynolds, 2021). The work of commoning can contribute new ways of honouring this obligation by fostering new forms of attachment to country, and by cultivating the common value forged in the shared struggle to expound the wrong of dispossession. The common power generated in this struggle is visible in the expression of new subjects of reconciliation, justice and reparation in Naarm, in a new commons.

Conclusions: The labour of commoning

This paper has sought to advance a novel theorisation of commoning by emphasising the affective labour of attachment, and the instances in which this labour may be shown to yield a political praxis. Commoning differs from other forms of social and community development to the extent that it involves the labour of attachment conducted as a kind of making-sense in common, where these attachments serve to knit together objects, people, places and ideas in the cultivation of a world worth living in. This generative labour may, in turn, be shown to support a politics to the extent that it calls attention to a wrong, an instance of injustice, in which a particular group’s contribution to the common power is ignored, and their claim on a communal share of this power is denied. Commoning is generative of common value expressed in subjective form. We are of the commons as we make it, and this labour has a political cast to the extent that it seeks to recognise the value of those “who do not count” (Rancière, 1999: 9), revitalising the old problem of equality, seeking a new “partition” of what is common, a new communal share. Commoning is characterised by way of this generative activity – the production of a commons – what I have theorised here in terms of the affective labour of attachment. These ideas have opened up new ways of approaching the labour of cultivating and sustaining a commons in Naarm, conceived in more local terms in the language and practice of honouring country. This labour expresses a politics of the “in-common” that seeks to honour country by fostering the emergence of new subjects of reconciliation. In this way, commoning in Naarm contributes to the common power by seeking a more communal share for those who have been denied access to this power. This is to imagine a common home in Naarm for all who seek to honour country, and to live well in common.