Thus, vote negative to embrace the unsettling flow of the commons – only through the alternative can we affectively reconfigure civil society away from neoliberal modes of “productivity” and “growth” and toward sustainable and vulnerable existence

Commons Systems and Entangled Reproduction If capital is characterized by a systemic logic that tends to exhaust the deep commons, then a politics of commoning should strive to produce alternative affective-rhetorical configurations of reality that relate to the world in less destructive, more mutually responsive ways. To articulate this position, we engage the work of Massimo de Angelis, who develops a systemic perspective that attends to how ontological conceptions of the commons translate into concrete practices that dispose bodies toward existence-in-common. De Angelis thus provides conceptual tools for cultivating “rhetorical disposi-tions” (Chaput 17)—new capacities or systemic organizations of affect—that might offer a “living, embodied training” in engaging the deep commons in less destructive ways (Chaput 16).De Angelis begins his account with the insight that individual and collective existence is constituted by an ensemble of systems that a given entity “participates in to different degrees and forms” (78–79). Such systems encompass human and nonhuman scales, at their limit composing a “relational field [. . .] that comprises and bounds pretty much everything” (133). Within this larger perspective, De Angelis focuses specifically on what he calls commoning practices: individual and collective ways of configuring reality that are oriented toward (re)producing mutually empowering capacities of “resi-lience and self-organization” (213). Where capital tends to exhaust the systems that it enfolds in order to produce capacities of limitless potential growth for the subjects it privileges, commoning practices aim to produce capacities of interdependence between the systems they enfold. While such a process still involves cuts and exclusions, the boundary-drawing practices of commons systems attend to their constitutive entanglements with the goal of producing resilience and mutual vulnerability within a commons system and in relation to its provisional outsides.According to De Angelis, the resonances that render commoning practices into stable systems arise through the production of affective relations (in addition to the ambient capacities afforded by physical elements like buildings, tools, forests, and streams). The material performance of communing produces “specific communication patterns” (259) that entail “social and psychic rewards, which feed back into the system” (235). These processes of feedback or systemic resonance produce “the motiva-tion . . . to enter into further commoning relations” (235). They also provide the capacity to reframe the subjective and ecological exhaustion produced by capital as a “common material condition” of vulnerability (235), rather than a condition of precarity to be foisted on the many for the benefit of the few.De Angelis’s theory of commons systems describes a general horizon of practices that might actualize relations to the deep commons without instrumentalizing or economizing it. However, merely affirming the commons in a general sense is not enough. As Yellowknives Dene scholar and activist Glen Sean Coulthard writes, arguments for a “‘blanket return of the commons’” that avoid reckoning with the specific power dynamics constitutive of different commons systems risk “becom-ing complicit in the very structures of domination that [they] ought to oppose” (12), erasing histories of oppression within a utopian vision of the commons as panacea. In order to engage this dimension of specific practices and power dynamics, we now briefly discuss three kinds of boundary-commoning practices that De Angelis sees as crucial to effectively producing and preserving commons systems: antagonistic boundaries between commons and noncommons systems, affirmative boundaries between multiple commons systems, and boundaries between human and nonhuman affective- rhetorical systems.