Commons: land, earth, air, ground. Also: loss, memory, romance, figure. Then and there. Here and now.1 Finally: under, as in undercommons: covert, fugitive, underground.2

Depending on whom you ask, what you read, or where you are, the commons is one or more or none of the things listed above. “The commons” “commoning” and “common good” have become central to contemporary conversations grounded in left politics. And yet, there seems to be very little consensus, perhaps fittingly, about how to bring into focus a commons amidst the enormous violence of contemporary life. The “commons” is frequently invoked but seldom concretized: it is precisely its absence that feels most palpable.

Carolyn Lesjak’s The Afterlife of Enclosure: British Realism, Character; and the Commons (2021) renovates canonical realist novels of the nineteenth century, “decoupling” novels by Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy from a “predictable liberalism”3 to argue for their often-radical figuration of a commons: “the intimate and expansive connections between the common and the ordinary — the commonplace world that, in the end, we all reside in, with greater or lesser ease — and the commons, the shared resources, the work and spaces that determine our being.”4 For Lesjak, this definition of a commons is neither a recuperation of a nostalgic past nor a clear utopian future, but something far more errant: it is a “conditional aim rather than a realized achievement.”5 I would go so far as to call the commons a poetics that makes itself felt in the rhythms and repetitions of literary language (on this point it’s interesting to see John Clare’s poetry of the “unenclosed” provide a kind a preface to the book’s later readings of realist novels). This is a kind of poetics that wants to imagine, in Lesjak’s words, the communal possibilities of a “wayward, unenclosed self,”6 or as the book puts it elsewhere, the “consent not to be a single being” (quoting Fred Moten, who himself borrows the line from Caribbean theorist Édouard Glissant’s 2009 interview with Manthia Diawara).

In returning to and privileging “the language of figuration,”7 The Afterlife of Enclosure dismantles long-held notions of realism’s purely mimetic qualities. Lesjak deftly remarks that “the language of figuration is meant to distinguish between a prosaic realism that privileges the visible and the seen and a figural or ‘abstract’ realism that aims to capture an underlying or unseen reality.”8 By reading realism this way, Lesjak uncovers a history of enclosure and of the commons that is riddled with figurative trouble, making it particularly well suited to literary criticism. Indeed, one of the things I appreciate most about The Afterlife of Enclosure is the implicit case it makes for the politics of careful literary study: of the ways in which attending to figure remains crucial for reimagining our relationships to land, to ourselves, and to others. I want to briefly examine some other circuits of figuration — as well as their interruption—that run through The Afterlife of Enclosureand that bear on wider imaginative desires for a commons.

Centering the labor of figuration in Victorian novels is a reminder of the careful relay of figure and ground that structures the representational problem of capital for Marx, as well as the particular slippage of enclosure itself, this tethering between the social relations refigured by its violence and the material groundon which such a violence has enacted itself (or in the case of chattel slavery, the landlessness). Articulating this labor, Werner Hamacher untangles a “commodity-language” in Marx’s Capital, particularly in Capital’s more well-mined sections. On “The Form of Value or Exchange Value,” Hamacher invokes Marx’s familiar example of cloth becoming a coat to observe: “money is the transcendental of commodity-language, that form which vouchsafes all other forms their commensurability, appearing as a copula in all the statements and postulates of commodity-language.”9 Hamacher’s reading is additionally punctuated by the phrase “the cloth speaks.” This phrase is an uncanny refrain, bringing in to focus “one of the most powerful metaphors of the philosophical tradition: the metaphor of covering, veiling, mystification, and fetish.”10 As Hamacher shows, the cloth is both recalcitrant material and abstracted figure, just like Marx’s infamous dancing table is always wood, an object with use-value, and a mystical commodity animated by exchange-value, all at once. The tenuous lynchpin between these levels is also always figurative and rhetorical: Hamacher’s “copula,” metaphor, prosopopoeia.

We see this kind of trouble in the Afterlife of Enclosuretoo. In a section on Dickens and “Eccentric Biographies,” for instance, Lesjak refers to John Stuart Mill’s well-known arguments about liberal character from On Liberty. Here Mill argues for the need for “eccentricity” to combat the “tyranny” of custom. The paradigmatic figure for the tyranny of custom for Mill, and for innumerable other Victorians, is the “Chinese lady’s [bound] foot.”11 Lesjak observes that at this crucial juncture in Mill’s text, “Mill turns to simile” and “[i]ndividuality as a material thing comes into view, and then, as quickly, disappears.”12 While Mill’s argument testifies to a wider argument of Lesjak’s — that material character in Dickens’ fiction skirts objecthood in order to bring a different form of eccentricity into existence — the Chinese lady’s foot has been subjected to a double disappearance: forever consigned to a figure, an ornament of Mill’s text, as well as a pure vehicle of rhetoric. In other words, for eighteenth-century eccentric biographies to recuperate material objecthood, there needs to be a prior disavowal, this time of the “Chinese Lady” who remains suspended, as Jane Hu writes of other estranged Orientalist figures, “between commodity and person, aesthetic abstraction and racial embodiment.”13

Mill is not alone in this figurative and imperial bind, so to speak. Debt, the subject of Lesjak’s reading of the commons in Eliot’s novels, opens up an alternative thinking of present-day understanding of debt — everything from “Third World” debt crises, predatory finance and credit, and more philosophical conceptions of the term—that originate in the transatlantic slave trade. As Anthony Bogues has recently put it: if “the black body could be deployed and exchanged as debt, as credit, as commodity, it seems to me that in this contemporary drive of capital to make us all indebted humans, then the drive to create a saturated commodified body draws from the practices that instituted racial slavery.”14 Bogues follows Saidiya Hartman and Sylvia Wynter in arguing that “primitive accumulation” begins with the coeval seizure of land and people, with enslavement and colonial violence, with the conceptual tiering of the human beyond what a binary notion of class can accommodate. Viewed through the prism of racial capitalism, debt too interrupts the neat circuit of figure and ground, such that “forms of indebtedness”15 that symbolize the commons for Eliot and Hardy become complicated by material forms of debt bondage, and of debt as a living death for the formerly enslaved, a debt that forecloses freedom rather than opens up to it.16

There is thus a kind of figurative trouble that emerges out of the literature of the commons that invites us to read and theorize from within the anti-colonial, Black radical, and Indigenous critical traditions that are pressurizing Marx’s key terms, giving them new life as it were, by having us understand what they figure and what they literalize. A politics of the contemporary commons must necessarily follow that trouble and grapple with what is incommensurate and potentially unsettling (at every level of representation) about commoning, rather than what is merely inclusive and expansionist. Think, for example, of the now well-known essay by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization is not a Metaphor.”17 Here, Tuck and Wang argue that the domestication of decolonization into mere figure or metaphor is itself “a form of enclosure.”18 Writing about the Occupy Movement, they observe that “Claiming land for the Commons and asserting consensus as the rule of the Commons, erases existing, prior, and future Native land rights, decolonial leadership, and forms of self-government.”19 Some of the most powerful political movements of late — from NoDAPL to Free Palestine— stress the urgency of the actual return of material land, and of justice on the terms of the ground that often tends to recede from view when we reify the figures themselves.

As readers of the nineteenth-century British novel, to draw our attention to these histories of debt and dispossession is to widen the field in which they occurred, a reading practice I wonder if the term “cosmopolitanism” or “global commons” is now entirely adequate to. These terms (especially cosmopolitanism), which have circulated in British studies for quite some time, often ring out as critically downgraded versions of the overlapping yet specific geographies of dispossession that saturate nineteenth-century British literature and the novel. To engender anything like a commons requires a potential reconsideration of these terms, and an engagement with a strong ethic of incommensurability: one that acknowledges the labor of the negative, forms of refusal, and the interruption of well-trodden figurative paths. An ethics of incommensurability could also begin with the assumption that the language of the commons needs to maintain radical difference, and radical singularity: what Lesjak begins to describe in her chapter on Dickens’ novels, “in which equality does not translate into reductive sameness.”20 This is a vision of the subject — and a commons that might engender it — that I elsewhere refer to as singular, a subject who is not alone nor individuated through a liberal or Enlightenment blueprint. This is, finally, what I think Glissant meant by “consent not to be a single being:” the ground from which we can refuse and from which we can hope too.

1. I refer generally here to José Esteban Muñoz, “The Brown Commons” in The Sense of Brown (Durham. N.C: Duke U, 2020): 1-7.
2. Stefano Harvey and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study(New York: Minor Compositions, 2013).
3. Carolyn Lesjak, The Afterlife of Enclosure: British Realism, Character, and the Commons(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2021) 94.
4. Lesjak, Afterlife 171.
5. Afterlife 121.
6. Afterlife 165.
7. Afterlife 129.
8. Afterlife 129.
9. Werner Hamacher, “Lingua Amissa: The Messianism of Commodity-Language and Derrida’s Specters of Marx,” GhostlyDemarcations, ed. Michael Sprinker (New York: Verso, 1999) 174.
10. Hamacher, “Lingua Amissa” 168.
11. Afterlife 51.
12. Afterlife 51.
13. Jane Hu, “Orientalism Redux,” Victorian Studies 62.3 (Spring 2020) 463.
14. Anthony Bogues, “How Much is Your African Slave Worth?” differences51.5 (2020) 165.
15. Afterlife109.
16. Scholars like Brenna Bhandar and Glenn Coulthard have looked at this argument from different historical and geographical perspectives. I am thinking of two essays that synthesize some of this work: Paula Chakravartty and Denise Ferreira Da Silva, “Accumulation, Dispossession, and Debt: The Racial Logic of Global Capitalism—An Introduction,” American Quarterly 64.3 (2012): 361-85; and Jodi A. Byrd, Alyosha Goldstein, Jodi Melamed, Chandan Reddy, “Predatory Value: Economies of Dispossession and Disturbed Relationalities,” Social Text 36. 2 (2018): 1–18.
17. Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, “Decolonization is not a Metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education, and Society1.1 (2012): 1-40.
18. Tuck and Yang, Decolonization 3.
19. Decolonization 28.
20. Afterlife 66-67.