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Dear Reader, here are some trans*feminist reworkings of vocabularies and imaginaries linked to 'sovereignity', 'freedom', 'independence' and 'autonomy'. This cluster of words is often used in activist tech-communities to talk about the kind of tools, networks and servers we need and want. We have learned to understand them as positive, but they implicitly and sometimes explicitly foreground separation rather than relation. They evoke techno-utopias elsewhere, instead of staying with the trouble that we are already entangled in. This bookmark proposes other ways we might speak about the desirable and desired horizons of technology. Many of the terms on this list modify existing concepts; rather than trying to replace them they introduce dynamic tension.

Antwerp, April 2019
Networks with An Attitude



Also-Spaces
Ook- Ruimtes
(Reinaart vanHoe)

Ancestral Networks
Vooroudernetwerken 
Redes A ncestrais
Réseaux A ncestraux
Rețea A ncestrală
Προγονικά Δίκτυα
"Networks that have life in the center" (Tatiana)

Ambivalent Precarity
Ambivalente Precariteit
Precaritate A mbivalent ă
Precari e dade Ambivalente
Précarité ambivalente
Διφορούμενη Αβεβαιότητα
Precariedad Ambivalente 
Precarity is ambivalent, because we are always dependent on other people, from the begining, but other people can also harm us, so we need an understanding of ethics to cope with this ambivalence. (Judith Butler)

Affirmative Technologies
Bevestigingstechnologie / Bekrachtigingstechnologie
Tehnologii Afirmative
Technologies affirmatives
Καταφατικές (ως προς το σύστημα) Τεχνολογίες 
Tecnologías Afirmativas
Tecnologias Afirmativas
Technologies that implement affirmative ethics.
"Calling for hybridized poly-lingualism and creolization on a global scale is an affirmative answer to the coercive mono-culturalism imposed by the colonial and imperial powers. The ethics of productive affirmation is a different way of handling the issue of how to deal with pain and traumas and to operate in situations which are extreme, while working to bring out the generative force of zoe – life beyond the ego-bound human" (Rosi Braidotti)

Affective Infrastructures
Gevoelige infrastructu ren
Infra e structuras A fectivas
Infrastructuri afective
Infrastructures affectives 
Υποδομές που μεριμνούν
Infraestructuras Afectivas
"What remains for our pedagogy of unlearning is to build affective infrastructures that admit the work of desire as the work of an aspirational ambivalence." (Lauren Berlant)

And-And-Networks
En-En-Netwerken
Rețele Și-Și
Y Y Redes

Archipelagic
Archipelagisch
Και-και-Δίκτυα
Archipiélago

(Edouard Glissant)

Aspirational Ambivalence
Ambitieuze Ambivalentie
Ambivalență Pretențioasă
Ambivalence ambitieuse 
Διφορούμενη Φιλοδοξία
Ambivalencia Aspiracional
See: Affective Infrastructures

Collective Individuation
Collectieve Individuatie
Individuare Colectivă
Individualisation collective
Συλλογική Εξατομίκευση
Individuación colectiva
Individuação colectiva
(Yuk Hui and Harry Halpin)

Co-transformation
Co-transformatie
Co-transformation
Συν-μεταμόρφωση
Co-transformación
Co-transformação
"... what all of these new transgressive, intersectional, and integrative movements [of techno-feminism] have in common is an attitude of care or concern. In many ways, they are caring, worrying, ready to take responsibility, anchored in the here and now, and on the lookout for new types of relations. While searching for answers to global and local problems, engaging in scientific research, and devising technological solutions, this attitude of care contributes to the establishment of a new form of knowledge, a knowledge that rejects objectivization and is interested not only in observations and representations but also in transformations – in forging relations with things, in being affected, and thus in changing itself and the world in a process of co-transformation." (Cornelia Solfrank)

Diffractive Technologies
Brekingstechnologieën
Τεχνολογίες που προκαλούν διάθλαση
Tecnologías Difractivas
Tecnologias Difractivas


Dividual Networks
Zonderlijke Netwerken
Διασπάσιμα (ως προς το κέντρο τους) Δίκτυα
Redes Individuales
Redes Dividuais
Network technologies that put dividuality at the center

Feminist Servers
Feministische Servers
Servidores Feministas
Server Feminist
Serveur féministe 
Φεμινιστικός Σέρβερ
Servidores Feministas
Choose your dependencies!

Feminist Infrastructures
Infra e structuras Feministas
Feministische Infrastructuren
Infrastructures féministes 
Φεμινιστικές Υποδομές
Infraestructuras Feministas

Federated ...
Gefedereerde ...
Fédéré
Ομοσπονδιακά
Federadas

Entangled Autonomies
Verknoopte Autonomie
Autonomies emmêlées 
Διαπλεκόμενες Αυτονομίες
Autonimías Enredadas

Indeterminate Precarity
Onbepaalde bestaansonzekerhei d
Précarité incertaine
Ακαθόριστη Επισφάλεια
Precariedad Indeterminadad
"Indeterminacy, the unplanned nature of time, is frightening, but thinking through precarity makes it evident that indeterminacy also makes life possible." (Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing)

Intra-sectionality
Intra-doorsnedigheid
Intra-sectionnalité 
Ενδό-τομεακότητα
Intra-seccionalidad
Intra-sectionalidade

Intersectional Technologies
Tussendoorsnedige technologieën
Technologies intersectionnelles 
Tehnologii Intersecționale
Διατομεακές Τεχνολογίες
Tecnologías interseccionales
Tecnologias Intersectionais


Interdependent Networks
Tussen-a fhankelijke Netwerken
Réseaux interdépendants 
Rețele Interdependente
Αλληλοεξαρτημένα Δίκτυα
Redes Interdependientes
Redes Interdependentes

Livable Interdependency
Leefbare Tussen-afhankelijkheid
Interdependență Suportabilă
Interdépendance possible
Ζωτική Αλληλοεξάρτηση
Interdependencia habitable
Interdependência habitável
(Judith Butler)

Métissage
Kruisbestuiving
Επιμιξία
Mestizaje
"If we posit métissage as, generally speaking, the meeting and synthesis of two differences, creolization seems to be a limitless métissage, it’s elements diffracted and its consequences unforeseeable. Creolization diffracts, whereas certain forms of métissage can concentrate one more time" (Edouard Glissant)
"...is proposed to the ch´ixi as a decolonizing force of the crossbreeding. Far from fusion or hybridity, it is a question of living together and inhabiting contradictions. Not to deny one part or the other, nor to seek a synthesis, but to admit the permanent fighting in our subjectivity between the indigenous and the european." (Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui)

Nepantla
Midden-innig
( ?) Μεταίχμιο 
Orizont-izare
En medio de?
"Nepantla is the point of contact y el lugar between worlds—between imagination and physical existence, between ordinary and nonordinary (spirit) realities." (Gloria Anzaldúa)

Non-sovereign relationality
Niet-onafhankelijke relationaliteit
Relaționalitate Nonsuverană
Rationalité non souveraine
Μη-κυριαρχική Σχεσιακότητα 
Relacionalidad no soberana
(Lauren Berlant

Paranodal Internet
Para-puntig Internet
Internet para-nodal
Παρακομβικό Διαδίκτυο
What is outside and beyond the form of the network?
"The paranode is the horizon, the site of futurity that contra-internet practices move toward. As contra-infrastructure and theoretical model, the paranode proposes two militancies: the practical search for antiwebs, which is not a killing or disappearing but a commons to come; and the intellectual task of making thinkable that which is not only outside the internet but also beyond the network form itself." (Zach Blas)

Possible Ongoingness
Mogelijke Verdergaandheid
Continuité possible 
Πιθανή ?
We all share this problem, and we all have very different ideas about what to do about it. That’s already hard enough. That does not mean the science is not settled on climate change, or that relativism reigns; it does mean learning to compose possible ongoingness inside relentlessly diffracting worlds. (Donna Haraway)

Queer Networks
Κουήρ Δίκτυα

Response-ability
Ver-Antwoord-elijkheid
Răspuns-abilitate
Ικανότητα να ανταποκριθώ υπεύθυνα
The ability to react to something but also taking responsability for that response.
"Blaming Capitalism, Imperialism, Neoliberalism, Modernization, or some other “not us”for ongoing destruction webbed with human numbers will not work either.  These issues demand difficult, unrelenting work; but they also demand joy, play, and response-ability to engage with unexpected others." (Donna Haraway)

Relational Agency
Relațional Arbitru
Libre arbitre relatif
Σχεσιακή ΔΔράση
"Agency is not held, it is not a property of persons or things; rather, agency is an enactment, a matter of possibili­ties for reconfiguring entanglements." (Lauren Berlant)

Selves-organised
Organizați-prin-sine


Sym-poiesis
Sympoëtisch
(Donna Haraway)

Staying With the Trouble
A Rămâne cu Neajunsul
Blijvend met problemen
(Donna Haraway)

Studied Promiscuity
(Kara Keeling - Queer OS Article)

Solidary Technology
Solidaire technologieën

Solidarity Poiesis
"I believe it is crucial to enable a poetics that generates infrastructures of their own kind, ones that can be seen as sensuous, ‘non-reproductive’ extensions of our sociality. After all, that which can be deemed crucial for imagination is the sensuousness that imagination is operating with: the resistance of the concrete to any form of abstraction or reduction." (Robin Vanbesien)

So-and-Sovereignity
Aan-en-On-Af-Hankelijkheid
"Maybe it is not about replacing one term by another, but to find ways to cut diagonally through them" (Martino)

Transitional Suspension
Overgangkelijke Opschorting
"Learning to be awkward, to be graceful, to leap, and to fall is a training in attention and also in revisceralizing one's bodily intuition. It is a training that collapses getting hurt with making a life, but that includes the welcoming of exposure alongside of a dread of it. There can be no change in life without revisceralization. This involves all kinds of loss and transitional suspension." (Lauren Berlant)

Trans-sectionality
Trans-sectionaliteit

Uneasy Alliances
Ongemakkelijke Samenwerkingsverbanden
Alianțe Încurcate

Sources:

Cornelia Solfrank, The Beautiful Warriors - Technofeminist Praxis in the Twenty-First Century. Introduction by Cornelia Sollfrank (Translated by Valentine A. Pakis)  https://transversal.at/blog/the-beautiful-warriors  
Reinaert van Hoe,  http://vanhoe.org/paginas/alsospace.html  
Gloria Anzaldúa, “Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality” (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015).
Judith Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (Cambridge, Massachussetts – London, England: Harvard University Press, 2015)
Lauren Berlant, 'The commons: Infrastructures for troubling times', in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 34.3 (2016): pp. 393–419]
Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman. Polity, 2013
Donna Haraway, Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin. In: Environmental Humanities 6(1):159-165, May 2015
Donna Haraway, Staying with the trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press, 2016
Robin Vanbesien (eds). Solidarity Poiesis: I will come and steal you, 2017
Yuk Hui and Harry Halpin


This list will continue to be updated here: https://pad.constantvzw.org/p/interdependencies (ahh great!)


























When trying to formulate alternatives to the hegemonic tools and services that we currently depend on, we often find ourselves using terminologies related to autonomy, sovereignity, freedom and independence. Especially when used together, this cluster of terms that we have learned to understand as positive, is in need of rethinking. Feminist, queer, intersectional and anti-colonial activists/thinkers have reminded us of the troubles inherent to these terms. 

The problem with the group if terms is that the y are somehow 'separatist' or 'segregational' terms (separatist/separation as an implicit core concept/value). The utopias that we imagine through independence/freedom/autonomy favor a looking away from the consequences of that separation; make it harder to acknowledge interdependency and to keep going with complications. This produces frustration and cynicism when the alternative state is not achieved, or appears to be corrupted. We are wondering if there is a way to speak about, imagine alternatives as an ongoing process, entangled in troubles, other contexts etc. instead.

While we are coming to terms with the fact that we are always already entangled, autonomy, sovereignity, liberation and independence each in their own way invoke utopias elsewhere, outside of our current context. What other words can we use for the technology we need and desire? Could we start to replace these terms by vocabularies that reflect relationality and inter/dependencies while still thinking beyond what we are already connected to? 

[Explain how entanglement does not mean There Is No Alternative. Explain how this relates to agency, potential for ongoing tech activism. And what about self-determination]


Different issues with each of them:
autonomy
sovereignity
See: Sophie Toupin - https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3107272 but more linked to digital, I re-read the paper :

freedom: liberation, issues with the discourse around Freedom, freeing from. If it is not about freeing ourselves from dependencies, is it maybe about choosing your dependency?
independence: not-depending

Maybe also: being in control and emancipation

Olivier: issues with entanglement, remembered starting to use it in the context of embodied. Is there not a problem with the 'alternatives' too?

Gerald Raunig on dividuation and his use of entanglement.

__ __

* without "we" -> Talking about techonologies needed and deserved [...]  ??
* is there a possibility of "liberation"?
* is there "untangling" or only "re-tangling"?
* is there "self-hosting" ?
* could you lessen the issue by prefixing "relative", or "... from" - like "independent [of big 5]", "liberated [from non-free software]", "autonomous [from continued human interaction]"? are these generally understood connotations, and in that case, the effort needs to be focused on other, more problematic interpretations? ........... (and: doesn't language "always" "normally" work this way?)
* ... by breaking specific ties - be more openly "against X"
* how about "embedded" <> "entangled" ? ...................... ->>> re-embedding ?
* [...]
* https://transversal.at/blog/the-beautiful-warriors Cornelia Solfranks intro to Schoene Kriegerinnen? Yes:  The  Beautiful  Warriors  -  Technofeminist Praxis in the Twenty-First Century . Introduction by  Cornelia Sollfrank (Translated by Valentine A. Pakis) 

__ __


<------------------ (now)
(Barad)
* "you make agential cuts ... you put yourself in situations where you can respond .. you are not just dependent without agency ... "

trying to avoid the modes of separation, segregation that come with patriarchal/capitalist speak.
Different problems with each of the terms.

are there any hues to those 3 terms? (and can that help to untangle them)

Independence: implies thinking in terms of individuality, atomisation. There are only different kinds of interdependencies.
in fem.servers : "choose your dependencies"

("th i s list makes a beginning with possibly helpful words /terms/concepts from feminist and queer theory" - FS)

----------------------------------
Possible ways to talk about the characteristics of the kinds of technologies we need and desire. Many of these terms modify existing terms, bring concepts together in surprising constellations. Note the frequent use of *, /, -.

Also-Spaces
"A place for also artistic activity surpassing the assignable or approvable act. This is done by coincidental meetings, bringing wishes and activity of a specific random group of people together." (Reinaart vanHoe)

Ambivalent Precarity
Precarity is ambivalent , because we are always dependent on other people, from the begining, but other people can also harm us, so we need an understanding of ethics to cope with this ambivalence .
(Judith Butler)

Affirmative Technologies
Technologies that implement affirmative ethics.
"..." (Rosi Braidotti)

Affective Infrastructures
"What remains for our pedagogy of unlearning is to build affective infrastructures that admit the work of desire as the work of an aspirational ambivalence." (Lauren Berlant)

And-And-Networks

Archipelagic xxxxx
(Edouard Glissant)

Aspirational Ambivalence
See: Affective Infrastructures

Diffractive Technologies

Dividual Networks
Network technologies that put dividuality at the center

Feminist servers
Choose your dependencies!

Feminist Infrastructures

Federated xxxxx

Entangled Autonomies

Indigenous Networks
"Networks that have life in the center" (Tatiana)

Indeterminate Precarity
"Indeterminacy, the unplanned nature of time, is frightening, but thinking through precarity makes it evident that indeterminacy also makes life possible." (Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing)

Intra-sectionality

Intersectional Technologies

Interdependent Networks

Livable Interdependency
( Judith Butler )

Métissage
"If we posit métissage as, generally speaking, the meeting and synthesis of two differences, creolization seems to be a limitless métissage, it’s elements diffracted and its consequences unforeseeable. Creolization diffracts, whereas certain forms of métissage can concentrate one more time" (Edouard Glissant)

Nepantla
"Nepantla is the point of contact y el lugar between worlds—between imagination and physical existence, between ordinary and nonordinary (spirit) realities." (Gloria Anzaldúa)

Non-sovereign relationality
( Lauren Berlant )

Paranodal Internet
"The paranode is the horizon, the site of futurity that contra-internet practices move toward. As contra-infrastructure and theoretical model, the paranode proposes two militancies: the practical search for antiwebs, which is not a killing or disappearing but a commons to come; and the intellectual task of making thinkable that which is not only outside the internet but also beyond the network form itself." (Zach Blas)

Possible Ongoingness
We all share this problem, and we all have very different ideas about what to do about it. That’s already hard enough. That does not mean the science is not settled on climate change, or that relativism reigns; it does mean learning to compose possible ongoingness inside relentlessly diffracting worlds. (Donna Haraway)

Queer Networks

Response-ability
The ability to react to something but also taking responsability for that response.
"Blaming Capitalism, Imperialism, Neoliberalism, Modernization, or some other “not us”for ongoing destruction webbed with human numbers will not work either.  These issues demand difficult, unrelenting work; but they also demand joy, play, and response-ability to engage with unexpected others." (Donna Haraway)

Relational Agency
"Agency is not held, it is not a property of persons or things; rather, agency is an enactment, a matter of possibili­ties for reconfiguring entanglements." (Lauren Berlant)

Sym-poeisis
(Donna Haraway)

Staying With the Trouble
(Donna Haraway)

Solidary Technology

Solidarity Poeisis
(Robin Vanbesien)

So-and-Sovereignity
"Maybe it is not about replacing one term by another, but to find ways to cut diagonally through them" (Martino)

Transitional Suspension
"Learning to be awkward, to be graceful, to leap, and to fall is a training in attention and also in revisceralizing one's bodily intuition. It is a training that collapses getting hurt with making a life, but that includes the welcoming of exposure alongside of a dread of it. There can be no change in life without revisceralization. This involves all kinds of loss and transitional suspension." (Lauren Berlant)

Transgressive Care
"...what all of these new transgressive, intersectional, and integrative movements [of techno-feminism] have in common is an attitude of care or concern. In many ways, they are caring, worrying, ready to take responsibility, anchored in the here and now, and on the lookout for new types of relations. While searching for answers to global and local problems, engaging in scientific research, and devising technological solutions, this attitude of care contributes to the establishment of a new form of knowledge, a knowledge that rejects objectivization and is interested not only in observations and representations but also in transformations – in forging relations with things, in being affected, and thus in changing itself and the world in a process of co-transformation. Joan C. Tronto and Berenice Fischer have defined caring as ' everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair " our " world so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, our selves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web. ' In light of technofeminist praxis, caring requires us to understand technological webs not only as objects but also as nodes of social and political interest. It also means that we have to intervene in the production of knowledge, science, and technology. " (Cornelia Solfrank)

Trans-sectionality

Uneasy Alliances



Sources:

Cornelia Solfrank, The Beautiful Warriors - Technofeminist Praxis in the Twenty-First Century. Introduction by Cornelia Sollfrank (Translated by Valentine A. Pakis)  https://transversal.at/blog/the-beautiful-warriors  
Reinaert van Hoe,  http://vanhoe.org/paginas/alsospace.html  
Gloria Anzaldúa, “Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality” (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015). 

---------------

but also?:
    * agency ?
    * infrastructure ?
    * there is no sovereignity without "dominion" or "domination" ("growing my own vegetables"):
        [...]
    * [...]




--------------------

Afternoon session:
    sticking with the terminology of 'freedom' 'autonomy' independence comes back to bite you, in the form of dissapointment. Can we find other words to speak about these things that bring to words different relations that previously have been spoken about about FAIS.
    
    'the types of technologies we want and need' 
Different words having different problems.

The word autonomy comes from a specific political lineage. Autonomy: what kinds of interpretations are there. Self determinination, autarky, autocracy in the way of a seclusion. I agree it s a failing promise since it neglets these entanglements. Feels close to the term in the relation of recognizing power relations, but also interdependencies. Process of questioning and eventually shapong the dependency relations. Autonomia, 70s italy, was a recognition that the CPI was not the only way of phrasing a different relation. Italian perspective is the process of questioning across different movements, with the common point of questioning ones life conditions and then redrawing life's interdependencies. 

Sovereignity as food sovereignity. 
Sovereignity also comes from the French revolution, getting rights over yourself. 

Freedom is co-responsible for many issues in free software environments. Specially in English. 

Geometries of words. 
..., Making the work of interdependency second.
How to work/think about all the problems that come with a word, like "freedom"

Sovereignty, so closely linked to self-determination.
How can we think radically entangled with it?
Often thought about as a discrete, bounded existence. 

Adding dimensionality by making portmanteau

sovereignty > digital infrastructures

"DECODE tools for technological sovereignty."
using these words as a strategy
to be able to talk to the state and to governments. 

technological sovereignty as internal words, but also as an interface words
sovereignty as an interface word, but not only as interface words

The group of words (autonomy, sovereigny, freedom, ) as a cluster of words, recomfirming eachother. 
At the same time, nobody is against ideas of freedom.
Slipperiness as a possible danger?
When words becoming strategy, you make them slippery on purpose.

The words are all c onnected to modes of disconnecting. Ideas of 'elsewhere'.
They put independence first, not modes of entanglement.
Alternative as a disconnected independent mode.

Graduality, freedom and no freedom ...

Autonomy as a selective process. Selecting where to take a distance from. 
Instead of autonomy, interdepency, this duality reinforces the differences. We're looking for something transversal, an infusion.

Is there a word for coloring one term with another term?
A shifter? Words can be shifters in relation to others

Mixing vocabularies of the state with mixing feminist vocabularies

Identicating power differently.
The role of the hyphen ("-"), trying to infuse the one word into another.
How to think of togetherness infused with autonomy.

How to speak to eachother about what we want or need.
The making of a library/glossary that could perhaps been used.
How do you speak about the urgency of doing that, without falling into the trap of swapping this for that.

The project? Infuse discussion with these questions.
Phrasing activism in other terms..
The technology that we want or need in terms of freedom or liberation.

Surplus meaning that a word has, further than what it immediately describes.
Perhaps that is why there is a need to rephrase words. 
Not only where words refer to, but also where they point to.

Permaculture as a third wave out of modernity. Ongoing environment of collapse, solutions are always closely related to scarcity.
But permaculture sidesteps this completely, by talking about abundance all the time. 
Using techniques that design in conjunction with tendencies of plants and physics. Applying language that speaks about yields. 
Lots of speaking about "abundance" and (multiplicity of) "yields"!
Becoming informed by an environment, being first an observer that is absorbing before putting anything back.
Side-stepping a lot of dogmas
It's a super holistic principle, what is also a bit slippery, but perhaps useful to this discussion.
Heavy connection to spirituality and personal experiences ... but there is also a very economical thread.

Another example: feminism and fermentation

Independence is more difficult to ? because it is more generic.
Can you strive for interdependence? 
You can strive to become aware of it
An interdependence day :) (like a feminist strike)

In permaculture, there is the idea that you are not a singular entity that has power over nature
certain amounts of agencies, constructing dependencies that you want 
Acknowledging that your planning doesn't always work, some things just don't grow.
observing the concequences of your actions
you're not an allmighty designer that can construct everything to your image

Agency does the work for interdependency.
Technologies that increase agenc y/ ies (for whom?)

In the feminist server manifesto: Choosing your dependencies
What about the dependencies you don't choose?

... and then there's freedom.
> Look into postcolonial theory for references? Also for independence.

Creating agencies through conditioning. 
How one word conditions the other.

Agential cut, as a way to enable looking in a certain way. 
Agential cut also having agency, making things possible again. 
Also an act of violence, cutting.
Narrating us through an understanding of autonomy for example, relating it with a specific past, as a form of an agential cut 

ongoingness
momentum
both use time as a factor

responsibility (response-ability)
connected to movement
a choice to be accountable for something
having the possibility to be accountable

so-and-so-vereignity
(also using humour to infect the one word with the other)

trajectory to take it out of English
"self-organized" in Romania n is translated as auto-organizat ("auto organized") , but the term erases the labour that is put into 'auto-organisation' .  
At the same time the "self" in self-organized is centering a singular self perspective. Selves-organised.
A system being able to run by itself.

Alternatives for the 'auto' in 'autonomy'...
interdepend-onomy
d.w.o-nomy
togetheronomy
....

What antonyms for autonomy?
nomos: 'law' 
auto: 'self'
synonyms: zelfwet, zelfbestuur, eigenwettigheid, ownlaw, selfgouvernement


VOCABULARY 

Terms like 'frame' and 'perspective' seem to produce binaries through the semantic fields they are attached to. Only particular 'insides' and an 'outsides' can emerge? What about 'situation', 'figuration' (Donna Haraway), 'phenomenon' (Karen Barad) or 'infrastructure' (Lauren Berlant)? Thinking through togetherness is not about belief or the suspension thereof. We live interdependent realities, developing (non-goodist) collective modes is urgent. 

THERE IS NO ALTERNATIVE: WE ARE ALREADY ENTANGLED 

How to live gracefully in "relentlessly diffracting worlds" (Haraway) or "messed up yet shared infrastructures of experience" (Berlant)? Reading Rosi Braidotti, Karen Barad, Donna Haraway, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing and more recently Lauren Berlant for tools. Figuring out how to imagine (and practice?) a kind of collectiveness that is not coercive (confirmation vs. affirmation). A collective life otherwise: not eclipsing, absorbing nor ignoring critique, pain, radical difference, ambivalence. 

Queerness: "... to wonder together about the potential queer analytics of microbial, animal, plant, mineral, cosmological technoscience, situating ourselves in these mundane and alluring scenes – as an invitation to consider these labours and imagine a collective life otherwise. We will ponder the possibilities and limitation of informatics; and will take seriously the affective forces of nonhuman animals and machines. We ask how might we extend queer theories that concern personal injury into more-than-human ensembles in order to consider the damages shared by humans and nonhumans? How can we generate ways that take us beyond reparative narratives or benevolent utopianism towards more-than-human life?" 
[Workshop description 'Queering damage: methodologies for partial reparations ... or not'. Helen Pritchard, Jara Rocha and Laura Benítez https://hangar.org/en/recerca/noticies/workshop-collaboratiu-amb-helen-pritchard-jara-rocha-i-laura-benitez/ ] 

Ongoingness: "We all share this problem, and we all have very different ideas about what to do about it. That’s already hard enough. That does not mean the science is not settled on climate change, or that relativism reigns; it does mean learning to compose possible ongoingness inside relentlessly diffracting worlds. And we need resolutely to keep cosmopolitical practices going here, focusing on those practices that can build a common-enough world. Bruno says this, too. Common is not capital C. "Common.” How can we build —compose— a better water policy in the state of California and its various, many parts? How can we truly learn to compose rather than decry or impose?" 
[Donna Haraway in discussion with Cary Wolfe] 

Affirmative Ethics: "Calling for hybridized poly-lingualism and creolization on a global scale is an affirmative answer to the coercive mono-culturalism imposed by the colonial and imperial powers. The ethics of productive affirmation is a different way of handling the issue of how to deal with pain and traumas and to operate in situations which are extreme, while working to bring out the generative force of zoe – life beyond the ego-bound human." 
[Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman] 

Revisceralization: "None of this feels like the preenactment of fantasies of stardom or love. It does not feel fantasmatic, or allegorical, at all: learning to be awkward, to be graceful, to leap, and to fall is a training in attention and also in revisceralizing one's bodily intuition. It is a training that collapses getting hurt with making a life, but that includes the welcoming of exposure alongside of a dread of it. There can be no change in life without revisceralization. This involves all kinds of loss and transitional suspension." 
[Lauren Berlant, The commons: Infrastructure for troubling times] 

Boundaries do not sit still: "(A)ny particular apparatus is always in the process of intra-acting with other apparatuses, and the enfolding of locally stabilized phenomena (which may be traded across laboratories, cultures, or geopolitical spaces only to find themselves differently materializing) into subsequent iterations of particular practices constitutes important shifts in the particular apparatus in question and therefore in the nature of the intra-actions that result in the production of new phenomena, and so on. Boundaries do not sit still." 
[Karen Barad, Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter] 

THE OUTSIDE WITHIN: RESPONSIBLE CUTS 

How does critique work when there is no removal or exteriorisation possible? Where is agency located? 

Agential separability I: "It is through specific agential intra-actions that the boundaries and properties of "individuals" within the phenomenon become determinate and particular material articulations of the world become meaningful. A specific intra-action enacts an "agential cut" (in contrast to the Cartesian cut — an inherent distinction— between subject and object), effecting a separation between "subject" and "object" within the phenomenon. In particular, agential cuts enact a resolution within the phenomenon of some inherent ontological indeterminacies to the exclusion of others. That is, intra-actions enact "agential separability"—the condition of exteriority-within-phenomena. So it is not that there are no separations or differentiations, but that they only exist within relations." 
[Karen Barad in an interview with Adam Kleinman] 

Agential separability II: "The intra-actively emergent "parts" of phenomena are co-constituted. Not only subjects but also objects are permeated through and through with their entangled kin; the other is not just in one's skin, but in one's bones, in one's belly, in one's heart, in one's nucleus, in one's past and future. This is as true for electrons as it is for brittlestars as it is for the differentially constituted human ... What is on the other side of the agential cut is not separate from us -- agential separability is not individuation. Ethics is therefore not about right response to a radically exterior/ized other, but about responsibility and accountability for the lively relationalities of becoming of which we are a part." 
[Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning] 

(ir)responsibility: "Irresponsible means unable to be called into account. There is a premium on establishing the capacity to see from the peripheries and the depths. But here there also lies a serious danger of romanticizing and/or appropriating the vision of the less powerful while claiming to see from their positions. To see from below is neither easily learned nor unproblematic, even if "we" "naturally" inhabit the great underground terrain of subjugated knowledges. The positionings of the subjugated are not exempt from critical reexamination, decoding, deconstruction, and interpretation; that is, from both semiological and hermeneutic modes of critical inquiry." 
[Donna Haraway, Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective] 

References :


privilege escalation

mechelse steenweg 200 mr. copy