Commons, an essay by Jessie Jones

The ideas that underpin our creative programme are Sanctuary, Archive and Commons. We have invited three writers to reflect on these pillars and what those themes in relation to the library space mean to them. In this essay about ‘Commons’, Jessie Jones (writer, producer and our Head of Audiences) explores what exactly we mean by commons and how the library is one of the last free, third spaces we can share.

The word commons immediately summons a green. A small capsule of access that a community has to share. Replete in mid century council housing estates and corners of the areas within Sefton that I grew up in, these areas were access to play, community and meeting neighbours.

As we get older these ideas expand as the areas we explore do. Just as our access to nature might grow, and our understanding of green spaces comes to encapsulate new species of flora and fauna, so our human-centric perspective changes too. Commons becomes about everything we share within networks, whether established by councils and other government bodies, or the ones we create ourselves in order to sustain ourselves outside of them.

Let’s start with the official. Appropriately, this comes from The Digital Library of the Commons, which defines the word as: "a general term for shared resources in which each stakeholder has an equal interest". Picking that apart, we reach a multitudinous interpretation that captures both the personal and the public; the democratic way in which we use space, the depth with which we engage with what’s commonly owned, sharing and the meaning we imbue these spaces with meaning, in a way, we own the spaces themselves.

‘Shared resources’ and ‘equal interest’ are pretty much the pillars that hold up what we mean by a library and how we use it. Going beyond just the books borrowed, some scribbled with pencil notes from past students, containing an archive of all those who’ve read it in the past, the space itself is one of these resources. ‘Equal interest’ is a bit stickier, looser in the grasp. How do we quantify interest? How do we quantify equality? Does it even make sense to use words so adjacent to bureaucracy and finance when talking about that which resists hierarchy? The library kind of dissolves how we think of ‘equal’ and how we think of ‘interest’. They become horizontal and messy, removed of the responsibility to legitimise themselves. You don’t need to prove that your time or value in the library is ‘equal’ or just as important as anybody else’s. Your ‘interest’ is validated just by being explored within its walls. If you have it, it’s here, it’s available as a thing to share in a space which, by its very nature, is common.

Everything written and said about libraries in the past ten years, probably longer, has reinforced the idea that this is one of the last bastions of common space and community. One of the only spaces left where you can exist without having to give a reason. It is inherently against this, in fact. The library exists for want just as much as need, purposelessness as valid as any active or definable ‘purpose’. The idea of ‘right’ seems restless here, too, as when entering into a space with a tacit and implied agreement of mutual care and curiosity, this is one place where you don’t need a ‘right’ to be there if you enter with respect - everybody is welcome. Woven into the fabric of the very building is this ‘right’ to be there, a ‘right’ to engage with what’s contained within it, be with each other as well as alone, simultaneously and without any need for agenda. 

How we imagine common ownership is vital here too. Everything we do within the library has the aim of being shared. Just as no one library user owns one of its books, even if they hold on to it for months, renewing and renewing until somebody requests it, it still belongs to everyone. The same goes for everything created in the library space. Any art made on its tables or out of workshops and conversations, the archive of historical material, writing formed from conversation and interaction; everything made within the library has the unique fingerprint of something communally made.

This is what we mean specifically by ‘commons’ in the library. Not only is it a common space but it contains the very definition of what it means to have ‘shared resources’. Both the fuel for the production and the thing produced all bear the mark of connection and community. Everything we do with our programme, At The Library, sustains this commonality and commons, holding space for moments which are artist-led but co-produced. The space and those who dwell here, sleeping in the day, having conversations with the librarians, getting help with the computers to watch old episodes of Mr. Men on one screen and another getting help filling in forms on another, all have ownership and stake in what’s produced as well as being the inspiration behind everything created here. 

We can potentially adapt our utopianism by looking at libraries. Returning to the definition: a general term for shared resources in which each stakeholder has an equal interest, we can see how much the library might act as a blueprint for the best way to organise and exist together. Everyone’s interests exist here and are respected equally. Everybody gets an opportunity to explore new interests and cement old ones. Everything is shared whether a pen, a computer, a sim card full of data for free, a ball pit full of cabbage leaves in a young families workshop, or a meal everybody has cooked and eaten together. Everyone has access to everything and anything that might be considered a ‘resource’ holds whatever use you can imagine it contains and is lent, loaned and explored together. Everyone becomes a ‘stakeholder’ when this is the case; we reinvest in the stake we have in one another when we renew our stake in what we can share. 

Jessie (@divineaccidents) is a writer, producer and editor based in Liverpool. Her work is concerned with the intersection between art and activism and her writing can be found in Stat Magazine, Left Cultures, Verso Books blog and her substack.