The alt follows a legacy of struggle to effectively challenge capitalism.

Commoning and the Cultivation of Counterintimacies While the concept of counterintimacy has yet to be fully theorized within rhetorical studies, publics scholarship in the critical humanities has productively discussed the term in the context of queer worldmaking. Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner argue that queer life and politics have produced improvisational counterintimacies that contest the heteronormative forms of relation built into the family, sociality and sex, the economy, and the nation-state (202–03). Emerging through everyday practices, such as “gossip, dance clubs, softball leagues, and the phone-sex ads” that were a primary “commercial support for print-mediated left culture” when Berlant and Warner were writing, counter- intimacies generate forms of life that are typified by their own logics of affective circulation and that “are public in the sense of accessible, available to memory, and sustained through collective activ- ity” (203). Within rhetorical studies, scholars have discussed counterintimacy in the context of man-on-man public kissing, noting that public performances of queer intimacy “function as a bodily challenge to a culture of heteronormativity” and an expression of nonheteronormative bodily pleasures, while making legible the disciplinary mechanisms that strive to erase or domesticate such pleasures (Sloop and Morris 19). While not directly employing the term counterintimacy, recent rhetorical scholarship on psychoanalysis has also highlighted the importance of “spaces of truth-telling and intimacy . . . to cultivating community,” calling for a turn to communities of psychoanalytic practice that cultivate vulnerability and shared self-knowledge and address the affective impact of systemic oppression (Hallsby 57). Although they lack the institutional support afforded dominant forms of intimacy, one common thread linking these accounts is the view that the senses of felt closeness and proximity we have termed intimacy carry the potential to produce new forms of affective investment that can contest oppressive patterns of relation. Counterintimacies are a powerful frame for understanding a variety of counterpublic attempts to create ways of living that resist different forms of oppression. In this essay, we focus on how commoning practices can be a resource for generating counterintimacies opposed to capitalism. We have argued that capital relies on a process of enclosure that cannibalizes its ecological, reproductive and political outsides, in the process replacing intimacy-in-common with the naturalized intimacies of market publicity. In contrast, commoning challenges capital’s enclosures by “shap[ing] the web of affects” that constitutes collective life toward contesting these boundaries (De Angelis 125), enabling individuals to unlearn the forms of intimacy and publicity that capital has naturalized. Commoning describes “the ongoing praxis and (re)production of social relations” (98) aimed at fostering commu- nal sharing, horizontal governance, and patterns of reproductive labor that do not rely on capitalist expropriation and ecological destruction (104). Beyond creating collective modes of governance for physical or informational common wealth, if successful, commoning cultivates affects conducive to “the . . . motivation to continue, to enter further into commoning relations” (235). Thus, whether it manifests in everyday forms of counterintimacy or in more organized social movement strategy, we argue for commoning as a coalitional form of counterintimate relation that seeks to build worlds that are explicitly opposed to capitalism. At the most immediate level, the counterintimacies generated by commoning practices can be seen in spaces of stranger-relation that facilitate the multiplicity of connections theorized by critical publics scholars. In one example, speaking about a card tournament held as a fundraiser for a variety of collective projects near his home in Italy (a volunteer ambulance service, a theater festival, and a community association dedicated to local governance), Massimo de Angelis detects commoning in the interplay of rhetorical action circulating through the room. Commoning arises in the RHETORIC SOCIETY QUARTERLY 399 400 M. W. BOST AND J. S. HANAN conversations between strangers meeting for the first time and sharing food, the verbal and bodily cues exchanged as the tournament progresses, and the donated cheese and prosciutto offered as prizes in the tournament that connect participants to the cooperatives that produced them (76). This space embodies commoning in its collective orientation (money and goods are oriented away from the market and toward communal projects) and its cultivation of interdependence between bodies in the space through conviviality and investment in a collective project. De Angelis points out that the space is a meeting place for a wide variety of subjectivities and rhythms of life, from farmers and factory workers to students and teachers, who (if the evening goes well) become oriented toward the collective projects that are the object of the fundraiser (77). While De Angelis’s example is not overtly political, it shares basic patterns of communication with other invitational spaces, from peoples’ assemblies to communal, DIY concert spaces (Verbuč) to public art constructed as part of social movement coalition-building (Bruce and Homan). Such spaces “subvert . . . capitalist economic exchange” by “embracing communally (publicly) oriented reciprocal economic relations” (Verbuč 291); they can also prime bodies to be receptive to more oppositional forms of anticapitalist affect. The kinds of stranger intimacy De Angelis describes take a more politicized form in the contexts of care activism and mutual aid work. In the context of decolonial and Black liberation struggles, community service programs offered by groups like the Black Panthers and Young Lords created spaces of counterintimacy by distributing free breakfasts in their communities, creating free health- care clinics, and facilitating theatrical and musical events and political education, “creating spaces where [community members] could meet basic needs and build a shared analysis about the conditions they were facing” (Spade 9; see also Wanzer-Serrano 154). Feminist consciousness-raising frame- works, similarly, facilitated the “articulation of individual experiences” of intimate household labor, reproductive injustice, and the gendered inequities attendant on marriage in order to forge a shared political consciousness (Dubriwny). In anticapitalist contexts, this led directly to movements like Wages for Housework, which sought to organize housewives, sex workers, and underpaid domestic laborers as workers, demanding compensation as well as an end to the capitalist social relations that led to domestic spaces becoming sites of expropriated labor (Dalla Costa and James). While examples abound (from the rise in mutual aid activism in the early days of COVID-19 to the care networks established by early AIDS activists), these moments demonstrate the ways that the sharing of food, conversation, and care draw attention to the contradictions in capital’s ordering of reality, building intimacies of trust and love as well as ambivalence and anger to encourage anticapitalist forms of counterpublicity. Counterintimacies oriented toward commoning are also legible in traditions of community and labor organizing. Placing an emphasis on community organizing highlights the ways that more visible forms of protest and activism (from marches, strikes, and occupations to letter-writing campaigns and lobbying efforts) rely on commoning labor that is often invisible and that hinges on the production of counterintimacy. Organizing is “the messy work of bringing people together, from different back- grounds and experiences, to change the conditions they are living in” (Garza 57). Organizing works through door-to-door conversations, public meetings, and the sharing of experiences in a way that facilitates workers and communities identifying problems and building power to effect potential solutions. As proponents of “whole-worker” organizing in labor contexts argue, growing successful social movements requires moving beyond a specific point of political or economic contest to engage community members in terms of household and (chosen or biological) kinship relations, their neighbors and social circles, and their hobbies and other life activities. Whole-worker organizing models encompass the full breadth of lived experiences as potential sites of social change, and places where conversations about a better world might be fostered. They identify sites where commoning labor can occur (e.g., cooking food for strikers) to bolster more visible forms of activism (McAlevey 58–70). These models of organizing are useful to frame as a form of counterintimacy because they aim at creating affective investments in social change by producing a felt sense of solidarity, proximity, and desire for collective empowerment. Such organizing is a form of commoning because to build power from the lived experiences of workers highlights capital’s oppressive effects while destabilizing a monolithic vision of workers as white, male, or articulated to a particular kind of labor. In bringing together heterogeneous bodies in order to scramble capitalism’s enclosures and create solidary resistance, commoning practices exemplify what Fraser calls “boundary struggles”: a term for the ways that the “distinctive ontologies of social practice” associated with capitalism’s extraeconomic supports can be organized antagonistically to contest the division of “economy from polity, produc- tion from reproduction, human from nonhuman nature” (20–21). Framed through commoning practices that cultivate counterintimacies, the common appears (similarly to its use in Marxian feminist analyses of struggles over reproductive labor) as a useful heuristic for building anticapitalist coalitions that contest multiple forms of social inequality simultaneously (Federici, Re-Enchanting The World 96), as well as for recognizing the “shared natural [and] social wealth . . . systems of knowledge [and] capacities for care” that will be destroyed unless struggle is waged in common (93). In Deborah Gould’s terms, considering different boundary struggles through the analytic of the common can be a way of constructing a shared “political horizon,” or a sense of what is “politically (im)possible, (un) desirable, (un)necessary,” that aims at anticapitalist solidarities at increasingly global scales (443). From this vantage, the political horizon of the common would appear not as a panacea that must merely be affirmed (or a dimension of existence that is held in abeyance from political practice), but as the shared feelings and embodied relations that emerge from living, working, and struggling together against capitalism’s continual enclosure of extraeconomic life. Seen in the context of enclosures and boundary struggles, counterintimacies and commoning provide a vocabulary for theorizing the “preparatory and affective labor” that goes into social move- ment coalitions as itself a structural challenge to capital (Bruce and Homan 242). The vocabulary we have developed in this essay thus expands calls to heed the ways that coalition works through “process, not product alone” (241; see also Chávez). Moreover, considering the common as political horizon suggests anticapitalist activism as an especially important site of resistance to contemporary oppres- sion and advances commoning as a language for those who “seek to resist hegemonic dominance in its multiple forms” through anticapitalist coalition (Chávez 27; Siegfried). When conceptualized as the production of counterintimacies, commoning allows scholars working in critical idioms that center publics as well as commons to consider how plural practices of publicity cohere into resistant counterpublicity, and also how counterpublic practices can be structurally positioned to resist capitalism’s enclosures.