The Enclosure of the Human Psyche

Metadata

Author: The Convivial Society
Full Title: The Enclosure of the Human Psyche
Category: #articles

Highlights

“In the course of enclosure, as written law superseded customary law, commoners lost those rights. Parliament made property rights absolute, and the traditional practice of living off the land was redefined as theft. Gleaning became trespassing, and fishing became poaching.”
- Tags: #favorite
The enclosure of the commons subjected the land to more efficient and persistent means of extraction, time was money. Improvement meant activity. So, too, with the psyche. The mind at rest, the psyche in a moment of silence, is like the land lying unused and unproductive. From this vantage point, what we might feel as the problem of distraction is just the logic of enclosure at work. The unceasing stream of notifications and pings, the persistent way even the built environment beyond the screen hails us—all of this is just the necessary operation of the engines of value extraction efficiently at work on the raw material that is the human psyche. When the enclosure of the psyche is complete, we lose the right to wander and roam and loaf about in thought, just as the enclosure of the commons restricted freedom of movement and disdained economically unproductive but life-affirming forms of leisure.
Illich believed that the transformation of the commons into a resource, regardless of who profited, was itself a great loss. By accepting the logic of resources, extraction, and value, we had surrendered the ground on which an entirely different mode of life could be built.
- Tags: #favorite
There is one final dimension of enclosure that I’ll note briefly before wrapping up. Is there an even more literal form of the commons to which the analogy of enclosure points us? The individual human psyche does not seem like a thing held in common. But, in fact, that presumption may itself be a symptom of the enclosure of the psyche, although there are certainly many other forces leading toward that same conclusion. What if the psyche were a thing held in common? That is to say, what if our purchase on reality and the emergence of the self depended on human relationships and communities? From this perspective, the enclosure of the human psyche deprives us of a common world, which yields an experience of solidarity and belonging.
5Ivan Illich: “I would like to get … people to think about what tools do to our perception rather than what we can do with them … how their use shapes our perception of reality, rather than how we shape reality by applying or using them.”
- Tags: #favorite