City: Cork “In fact, there is nothing to be expected until the masses in action awaken to the conditions that are imposed on them in all domains of life, and to the practical means of changing them.” 1 On a bright winter’s day, I set out to find the commons in Cork. Commons refers to land that may be owned collectively or by one person, the resources of which are available for use by others. Commons derives from a pre-capitalistic mode of land use and resource management that evolved in Britain through the medieval period then spread as a formal practice to Ireland and the US. While the vast majority of common lands or rights of commonage have been absorbed into systems of private landuse, it is still possible to find traces in place names or even in local practices. The practice of commons also exists under different names in other societies or countries. The public library on Grand Parade houses a collection of maps of Cork dating as far back as the last millennium. Cork was once a walled city located on an island, accessed via a bridge to the north and the south, guarded by North Gate and South Gate. Commons first appears on the 17th C maps, to the north of the city, past the site of the Fairgreen, where agricultural produce would arrive from the surrounding areas to be purchased and brought back to the city. The walk from the city to the commons therefore took me along an old trade route, across the river, climbing up steeply through the present-day working class community of Fairhill and descending down Commons Road, a stretch of which is now the N20. The open area still known as Commons is the site of GAA playing fields, while Commons Road circles around some remaining open parkland areas where a few scraggly horses are grazing. To me, commons represents a mode of inhabiting the world that offers a viable alternative to the capitalist model based on the desire for private accumulation. These alternative models are important tools for imagining the possibility of a more just and equitable distribution of physical and cultural resources. Commons can also be understood as “a particular character of social relations that are constituted, at least in part, by an ethic of interdependence and cooperation between people” 2. In his study of Enclosure as a social, psychological and political process, Anthony McCann argues that the social relations associated with commons are of an uncommodifying character 3. Commodification is the process by which market values come to replace other social values. It describes a modification of relationships, formerly untainted by commerce, into commercial relationships in everyday use. A brief discussion with some members of the public about the value of culture in Cork drew numerous responses about the fabric of community being eroded by money and greed. This is in keeping with a commodification of social relations that has taken place in Ireland over the last 20 or so years. Guy Debord observed that cities are divided into zones of distinct psychic atmospheres. The northern suburbs of Cork are very different visually and materially to the city lower down. Like many well-established working class suburbs, Fairhill is neat, modest, clean. Visual statements are reduced to the colour of a house, the shape of a bush, a patch of pink flowers, occasional inscriptions onto the fabric of the city in the form of posters or graffiti. There is a visual and material orthodoxy at work up here, in contrast to the more anarchic visual landscape of Shandon just below, or the jumbled feel of Blackpool immediately to the east. This must also be read as a manifestation of a specific local culture. Do we mean this too, when we talk about culture? What is common here? Commons exsists in Cork as a place on the map, an area of open ground at the edge of the city, buffered by a zone of Retail and Business Parks. I did not discover whose interests it currentlly serves. 1 Guy Debord, Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography, Les Lèvres Nues #6 (September 1955). Translated by Ken Knabb. Situationist International Online http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/presitu/geography.html Accessed November 18th 2012 2 Anthony McCann, 'Understanding Enclousre', Beyond the Commons, http://www.beyondthecommons.com/understandingenclosure.html Accessed November 18th 2012 3 McCann, ibid.
Commons Road, Cork. Google Maps image.
(Re)searches: Uncertainty as method. Uncertainty is awkward, a vulnerable state of being-in-between. It is not possible to establish a status quo in conditions of uncertainty. Institutions are geared towards the elimination of uncertainty, which they do through a discursive and regulatory process. However, the elimination of uncertainty, as McCann asserts, can only ever be rhetorical, since life and reality are always unfolding in ways that preclude any possibility of certainty. He goes further and says that the attempt to discursively eliminate uncertainty is central to Enclosure as a political and psychological process, and that our participation in that dynamic is fundamentally alienating, since it is at odds with our life-experience, where uncertainty is a constant 4. Life-experience and embodiment are central elements of a feminist approach to research. As a feminist researcher I have to be true to my embodied experience, even when that experience is primarily one of uncertainty, because only under those conditions do I believe that there is a potential for me to engage in honest inquiry and to discover something that I didn't already know. Arising from the many questions posed in the City (Re)Searches descriptions, these are the questions that I truly don't have answers for and that I will attempt to address through an embodied research process: How is the non-institutionalised culture of communities be identified and represented? Where is public (psycho/geography)? How is cultural agency distributed? How can processes of alienation and commdification of relations be made visible? What needs changing and what are the practical means of doing so? My research will be shaped in three ways; 1.Research actions in which I interface with a public., as an embodied researcher, in all my imperfection. 2.Gathering traces and inscriptions, my own and other people's, through field research. 3.Generating artifacts that provoke or question, which can be made visible and public.
[Image on previous page: Resesarch Action #2, City (Re)Searches, Cork, 2012] 4. McCann, Anthony. 'Enclosure Without and Within the “Information Commons�', Information and Communications Technology Law 14(3):217-240 Š 2005 Taylor & Francis, p16 http://www.beyondthecommons.com/enclosurewithin.pdf
Traces, inscriptions. Research notes, Cork, 2012.
Resesarch Action #3, City (Re)Searches, English Market, Cork, 2012.
[Image overleaf; Drawing for embroidered artifact, 2012]