The alt is a distinct affective-rhetorical performance. Commoning is mutually exclusive with the 1AC’s starting point of methodological individualism.

The concept of the commons and its cognates (e.g., “the common” and “commoning”) have acquired wide currency in the critical social sciences and humanities as resources for thinking about social and ecological aspects of life outside the constraints of methodological individualism (Federici; Hardt and Negri; Ostrom). At the most general level, the commons describes a deep condition of ontological entanglement, a collective relationality that exists “prior to any individual’s wealth-making” or, indeed, any sense of bounded individuality whatsoever (Cintron 170). In a more concrete context, the commons refers to the diverse range of material processes on Planet Earth (from fields and forests to open-source software platforms and cooperatively managed factories) that enable the (re)produc-tion of life and that can be oriented toward a horizon of interdependence and mutual flourishing through practices of collective governance. Rhetorical scholars have taken up the commons to address questions of rhetorical agency within contemporary capitalism (Greene), the prospects of citizenship in the age of mass surveillance and “big data” (Boyle 271), the creation of resistant knowledge commons that challenge contemporary practices of surveillance (Chaput and Hanan, “Wikileaks”), the “interdependent productivity” of expertise in the digital commons (Hartelius 2), and the ethical and political tensions inherent in humanity’s responsibility toward a more-than-human world (Conley and Mullen). Despite being engaged along several important trajectories within rhetorical studies, a robust rhetorical theory of the commons has yet to fully emerge.This essay provides such a theory by developing a materialist perspective that conceptualizes the common weave of earthly existence in terms of affective-rhetorical systems: provisionally stable patterns of relation that arise, performatively, out of an ontological fabric of entanglement. From the perspective of affective-rhetorical systems, traditional binaries assumed by many scholars in rhetorical studies (e.g., nature/culture; nonhuman/human; private/public; material/symbolic) are untenable because they all emerge out of common material processes that iteratively (re)produce reality in specific, situated ways. An affective-rhetorical systems perspective, thus, calls into question the human exceptionalism of dominant forms of Euro-Western modernity (and of rhetorical studies in particular) by beginning with an ontological approach to the “deep commons” (Cintron 164) that privileges the more-than-human “rhetoricity of existence as such” (Davis 197). At the same time, by considering the ways the deep commons are provisionally stabilized through historically specific boundary-making practices that actualize certain capacities of relation to the world at the expense of others, our perspective affords new insights into the rhetorical operations of capitalism and strategies of commoning that hold the possibility of resisting capitalism. Building on rhetorical scholarship that conceptualizes capitalism as “an ecological environment to nurture particular affec-tive capacities” (Chaput 32) and that is parasitic on social relationality (Greene), an affective-rhetorical systems perspective shows how capitalism tends to exhaust the capacities of the deep commons through the deployment of frontiers that continually economize its “vulnerable complexity and diversity” (Stormer and McGreavy 19). One frontier that is particularly important to this process is a performatively enacted split between nature and society that figures “nature” as a set of exploitable raw materials for production, while treating “society” as agentic, humanized, and structured through market logics. Likewise, an affective-rhetorical systems perspective shows how the commons is never only legible through the accounting mechanisms of capital and state. Instead, it functions as a reservoir of rhetorical invention that is actualized through systemic practices of commoning capable of valuing the diversity of the deep commons.Our approach to the commons and capital contributes to important ontological as well as political conversations within rhetorical studies by showing how the collective, entangled dimensions of rhetoric’s materiality that scholars have theorized in terms of the “rhetoricity” of the deep commons (Cintron; Davis 197), and as a “politics of living labor” (Greene 203), are actualized through rhetorical practices of commoning that foster affective capacities for mutual flourishing. In part because of its ontological scope, critics of the commons have dismissed it as “mystical claptrap” (Cloud et al. 79), questioning whether it can effectively ground rhetorics of emancipation. Considering capital and commoning as distinct affective-rhetorical performances that foster and foreclose different capacities for collective life enables an account of how ontological registers of the deep commons translate into practices of resistance and solidarity with the potential to generate more ecologically and socially resilient forms of collective life.In insisting on the commons as a concept that foregrounds the entanglements between human and nonhuman scales of reality, our project also offers a way to overcome the bifurcation between theories of rhetoric’s more-than-human dimensions and various critical rhetorical orientations, largely cen-tered on the human, that aim to challenge social injustices. Much rhetorical scholarship on the nonhuman produced thus far either explicitly or implicitly identifies as “post-critical,” approaching rhetoric’s materiality in ways that are “flat and associative rather than hierarchical and reductive” (Walsh and Boyle 3), and privileging thick, local, “micro-rhetorical” description over critical evalua-tions that encompass larger, systemic scales (Pflugfelder 444). For example, in their discussion of aquaculture in Frenchman Bay, Maine, Nathan Stormer and Bridie McGreavy advocate “bypass-[ing] . . . rhetoric of and about the material,” which in their account includes discussions of “property values . . . ocean acidification . . . and unsustainable harvesting practices,” in order to engage the place- specific entanglements of “clams, harvester, hoe, water” and the other actants that compose Frenchman Bay (4). While some of these authors, including Stormer and McGreavy, leave their perspectives open to a further account of different registers of power, many accounts of rhetoric centered on nonhuman materiality actively distance themselves from more critical materialist tradi-tions, contrasting critical materialisms’ “human-centered and overwhelmingly discursive priority” with perspectives that “consider . . . material environments or objects as having . . . agency . . . in their own right” (Rickert 21–22; see also Pflugfelder 447).