Two Nicolas Galeazzi Quotes

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We started with an interest in the fundamental differences between exchange and sharing. Exchange demands a distribution of goods between different entities, from where they can be brought into barter. This declaration of ownership is the basic principle of the market economy. Currencies make this bartering easier; abstract it from complicated personal relations and that makes accumulation desirable. It doesn’t matter whether the currency is money, gift or reputation: the accumulative motor is immediately set in motion.

Sharing, instead, is an economy of responsibility. Here it is not the goods that are distributed, but the care-taking procedures – and as ownership is obsolete, a fair distribution has to be organized collectively. This economic form of a shared responsibility for the usage of common good is what is usually understood as the basic principle of the commons.

– Nicolas Galeazzi, Commoning the Arts?


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But this disregards that the historical struggle between the common and the private is obviously the other way round! First and foremost, things are common in the broadest sense, and any human economy has to justify its form of distribution. The claim for private enclosures, and ‘ownership’ is just one possible form of distribution – and we know the consequences of this claim. This applies also to knowledge and creativity. ‘My idea’ is never ‘my idea’, it is always a cultural product built up through a common history on the one side, and a highly renovating contemporary common process of knowledge production on the other.

But the capitalist desire-machine embeds the individual into a system that demands the clear declaration of an individual position, accountable for the effectiveness of its personal individuation. The machine is efficient. It creates desires that an individual can recognize and accept as their own. The individual creates itself along the lines of these desires and becomes exactly what the system needs – a unity that is identifiable and flexible according to the needs of the machine.

– Nicolas Galeazzi, Commoning the Arts?




[From the book Turn Turtle! Reenacting the Institute.]



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