July 3, 2025

Democracy in the Twenty-first Century

Irina Velicu e Emanuele Leonardi

L'Asilo is an urban commons based in Naples, Southern Italy. This is a research on the methodological logic to investigate commons such that. What can commons theories do? What can commons do? The thesis identifies how main theories enclose the multiplicity of commoning with the veiled aim to reinforce human management of commons. I propose to bridge political ecological scholarship on Uncommoning and Gilbert Simondon's philosophy on Individuation. This makes us framing the Uncommon Sense, that logical direction through which commoning unfolds out of human control (but not without the human Presence), by the means of paradoxical and non-linear coexistence of possibilities.Once traced the Uncommon Sense, the position of the human and of commons theorists within it is still to be questioned. The limit is the key notion for answering that. Main scholarships on this theme conceive the limit as external or, in alternative, interior to human agency. In order to reimagine the position of both theory and the theorist within commoning, I construct an impossible dialogue between two incompatible thinkers, Gilbert Simondon and Giorgio Agamben, to sketch the liminal threshold of commoning, neither internal nor exterior to the human commoner. This threshold corresponds to a temporal dilatation, whe(n)rein theory can participate as a technical instrument within the imaginative limitation of commoning infinite possibilities.The liminal position needs, as a method, the Technology of the commons, that is, a discourse on the generation of images in commoning. This methodology has implications for the research-activist's body, since its being experimented from, about, and within the temporal mediality of commoning threshold. I adopted the technological method during my fieldwork within l'Asilo and in writing the last chapter, proposing a deep self-ethnographic perspective.The last chapter puts on the scene the generation of images within l'Asilo. I use paradoxical themes to narrate the Uncommon Sense of this experimentation. The narrative lets emerge how (un)commoning occurs within an alternative temporality, that disrupts the human management of the resource as designed by main commons theories. What Technology allows us to understand is that an Uncommon commons like l'Asilo needs to be investigated as an artistic creation and as an entanglement of human and non-human agency.