The Commons: Ruin and Romance

This essay takes the motif of ruin as an entry point for a foray into the subject of the commons. It engages Garrett Hardin’s nearly unknown discussions of literature and poetry to shed critical light on his famous idea of “The Tragedy of the Commons,” and on the general relation of the commons to questions of language and measure. To summon resources for thinking against enclosure, the essay follows an itinerary that constellates historian J. M. Neeson, the philosopher Gilles Deleuze, the poet and theorist Fred Moten, and the Romantic poetry of William Wordsworth.