CULTURAL COMMONS
Cultural commons emerged as a topic within the cultural policy field during the wave of academic and activist writing related to the resurrection of the commons in the mid-2000s. It has been gaining prominence ever since, especially among institutional cultural actors.
The term ‘commons’ refers to the cultural and natural resources accessible to all members of a society for individual and collective benefit. These are resources, such as air and water, and other resources of a habitable Earth, held in common even when privately or publicly owned. ‘Commons’ can also be defined as a social practice related to governing a resource not by a state or market but by a community of users, creating their own self-governing institutions.
In the cultural field, commons are defined as processes and relations aiming to re-appropriate what is seen as having been robbed by the capital, be it state or private. Consequently, cultural commons encompass a range of practices, concepts, and issues positioned against the profit-centred, neo-liberal, commodifying capitalist paradigm of culture. In their essence, cultural commons can be seen as ways of reasserting culture as a collective, shared, mutually owned field and practice – a common.
The terms frequently associated with cultural commons are commoning, community, self-organising, non-hierarchical organisational models, shared means of production and distribution of culture, and collective action. An important contribution of the cultural commons is that they bring questions of ownership, sharing, and caring for resources to the forefront of inclusive cultural policies.
One stream of literature on cultural commons defines them as intangible but collectively shared and owned resources, such as knowledge, values, traditions, images, digital contents, and conceptions. In contrast, the other group of authors insists it is crucial to link these intangible aspects with material ones. Namely, in their view, it is impossible to practice the commoning of culture without material means to do so. Consequently, according to these authors, most tools, means, and spaces for cultural production and dissemination should be treated as cultural commons.
The culture of the commons has exerted a big influence within the field of digital creation. The internet has indeed encouraged new forms of creation and distribution of knowledge and content through decentralised power relations, collaboration, and open production. However, in this context, one should be especially wary of what is known as ‘commonswashing’, i.e., the appropriation of the message of the commons for commercial purposes without endorsing its values. In the world of digital creation, cultural commons are often associated with inexhaustible cultural resources or economies of collaborative production, but without shared governance, shared ownership, and egalitarian relations.
At present, the politics of cultural commons are mostly practised by independent, non-institutional, and non-profit actors, communities, and groups aiming to find new ways and structures for practising culture. The actions of these actors include setting up independent cultural policy frameworks and mechanisms for introducing collective governance of shared resources, occupying public spaces for cultural use, and caring for common heritage and identity collectively. All of these emphasise solidarity, as practices of commoning by definition rely on establishing and nurturing social relations of care and shared stewardship for goods, spaces, ideas, and knowledge. (GT, VK)