I Own my Skin, I Own These Clothes and I Own This Little Patch of Ground!
A tale where torn up currency leads to reflections on ownership and property.
Whilst staying near the small Scottish city of Dundee I had, you may remember, joined a group of artists called D-AiR (Dundee Artists in Residence). We had fun with this acronym being so close to ‘dare’ and dared many experiments in art along the way. The group had sort of morphed into a new group – the Dundee Commons – with many of the artists crossing over to join the new group. To give it its official title, we were ‘If the city were a commons’ – so very much about ideas around ownership, sharing and community.
Our first meeting is in a little café that forms part of a large church and associated halls. Quite a lot of folk have shown up and I am distracted looking around at the people as the meeting gets under way. So I have not really taken in the introductory blurb and before I know it our host for the evening divides us into pairs. Then he picks up some five-pound notes (this was back in the day when fivers were still paper). He tears each note into two halves and presents the halved notes to each of the pairs. There seems to be no explanation, or perhaps I have missed the explanation. Thoughts of sellotape come to mind. My partner and I could simply re-connect our two halves of the note and spend the money on something useful, like chocolate or alcohol. Maybe though, our shared wealth should be used for some ‘higher’ purpose? Should we give the money to a beggar? Perhaps we should keep the money and see how things unfold with the Commons project? Perhaps the meaning of the split notes would be made clear in future weeks. My partner is not big on conversation, so we kind of fall into that final alternative as the default option.
My five-pound partner did not return to the Commons Group, so our note never did get joined. My half languished on a shelf at home until plastic notes replaced paper ones, and its faint promise of wealth was finally extinguished.
Part of the five-pound note message was of course to question the meaning of ownership. And ownership, let’s face it, is a peculiar concept. I might claim, for instance, to own my own body. It’s not an unreasonable claim! But could we say that a tree or a plant ‘owned’ itself in the same way? Perhaps yes, perhaps not. How about a stem cell, or a virus? There comes a point on the evolutionary tree where the concept of owning ourselves loses its meaning! We need, it seems, to have a certain level of agency and consciousness before the idea of owning ourselves means anything.
We could think of clothes as the next most immediate and personal instance of ownership. But we might briefly mention the world of tattoos, body piercings, jewellery and the like that forms a strange hinterland half way between bodies and artefacts. Humans are unique in this – unless we count the weird things people do with their pet dogs! We make things very immediately part of ourselves when it is a mark on the skin or a piercing or incision that is difficult or impossible to remove. But we also say something to the world by the way that we decorate our bodies. This is the cross-over these things have with clothes – they are all statements.
This is perhaps something of a digression, this visit to tattoos and piercings, but I mention it because it shows that the notions of ownership and property are slippery and strange.
The statements we make with our clothes may be about our wealth, our status, our class, our gender – any number of things. Function plays only a small part in the story. It is culture that provides us with the social clues that give meaning to all this. The messages are often powerful – this is much more than just who can afford more durable or warmer clothes.
So clothes and the various items we carry around with us are statements of identity. Who we are as people – or who we like to think we are – is expressed through clothing. This is why uniforms can be a bit disturbing. The uniform denies a person their unique identity. Sometimes this is reassuring. The policeman, nurse or judge sets aside their personal self for a while and represents the state. And hopefully the state is doing its job of looking after us! But sometimes of course the actions of the state can feel threatening. And then the uniforms worn by its representatives become sinister. States that wish to promote some kind of equality amongst their citizens (as if that is going to be possible) try extending the use of uniforms to everyone. It is, to say the least, a very superficial way of promoting equality! We are more complex creatures than this!
So what about that ultimate claim of ownership – owning a piece of ground? Earlier we noted that it is a kind of natural thing for conscious beings with agency to claim ownership of their bodies. Could we say the same for the Earth herself? That might be a bit of a stretch! But generally, it has to be said, the idea of some person (or animal, bird, or plant) ‘owning’ a bit of the Earth is equally puzzling. As a child I was concerned with the idea of a piece of land continuing downwards, as a very long pyramid, to the centre of the Earth. Here, everyone’s piece of ground meets at a point. But it’s more puzzling above ground! Every land owner has an ever-expanding slice of sky, which, depending on the large-scale structure of the universe, would eventually reach the edge of space, or continue forever and therefore be infinitely big, or would somehow curve back on itself. Things get even more complex when you think about owners of land on the moon or other planets, whose slices of space would then intersect with Earth-bound owners! And what if you live in a flat? (Suffice to say, I was an unusual child.)
Perhaps a more pragmatic concern over land ownership however is that benefit accrues to the land owner that very often deny benefits to those who are not owners. This is a particularly entrenched and insidious consequence of land – so much so that it is almost a golden rule of economics! Apart from the unfairness involved, it can also lead to destruction. The peculiarities of land ownership are often at the root of pollution, loss of bio-diversity, and the odd (and usually negative) impacts on the design of towns and cities.
Sharing land – holding land as a commons – is then such an obvious benefit when you think about it in terms of fairness, protection of the environment and enhancing our urban spaces. Those split five-pound notes, with which we started this story, are telling us about the need for co-operation. Money is meaningless without a society to ascribe value to it. And it could also be said that money is useless unless there is a background of co-operation to make the money work for the benefit of society.
We spent some time thinking about owning our bodies and our clothes and the various gadgets we have around us and we saw how important these are to our sense of identity and status.
There is something wonderful about the quirkiness of how we decorate our bodies and the weird world of fashion. Our sense of ownership of course extends itself into the notion of real estate. Here we find oddities, obsessions and fanaticism that once again demonstrate the peculiar ways we approach questions of ownership and property. When it comes to real estate, the quirkiness of human nature can be for both good and ill. I’d suggest the challenge is to find some way to retain the good and avoid the ill.
The straight up kind of solution, in order to avoid the many pitfalls I’ve mentioned above, is to think of ourselves as custodians of land and real estate. We need to see it as a shared resource even when we own it outright. We need to see it as a commons. And a commons is not an easy thing. It takes work and commitment to achieve and sustain it. And before all that, there’s the task of convincing people it’s even a thing worth having.
In a memorable phrase, British journalist and author George Monbiot has advocated ‘private sufficiency, public luxury’, and this very neatly captures the benefits we might gain if we could only get our heads around this land ownership and commons conundrum. But well, at this point I cannot help thinking of my own local council’s efforts towards ‘public good’. It feels like we are not so subtly being lured into a care home, where the chairs are plastic and the walls are painted hearing-aid beige. That’s why I’ve stressed all the quirkiness in our behaviours around ownership and property above. Somehow, I think, if we were to make ‘public luxury’ work, we would have to capture that strange spirit that currently manifests in private eccentricities! The straight up solution of just changing the politics around land use is not going to captivate or inspire us.
I think we could have flourishing and pollution-free eco-systems, bountiful nature, beautiful cities and thriving communities if we were willing to think our way around the peculiarities of ownership with which we are currently fixated and, I’d hazard, think outside the box. Could we find a way of joining up our five-pound notes to do something both inspiring and amazing? Could we capture private eccentricity in public space? I think that would be a change worth trying for.
