https://pad.constantvzw.org/p/interdependentpractice.words

Possessive Individualism

(I)ts crucial concept is that of the human being as the individual who possesses his own person and capacities, owing nothing to society for them and being free from dependence on the will of others. Thus, possessive individualism is not primarily focused on owning land or other material goods, but on owning oneself, one’s body, capacities, creativity, labor, from which private property in goods and things follows as a result.

Individuation and becoming-with

that which the individuation makes appear is not only the individual, but also the pair individual-environment. The individual is thus relative in two senses, both because it is not all of the being, and because it is the result of a state of the being in which it existed neither as individual, nor as principle of individuation. (...)

Transindividual Self

[T]ransindividuation means relations – not between already constituted individuals, but between the processes of individuation, the individual and the collective, the processes in which ‘I’ and ‘we’ are being co-formed in the midst of their preindividual conditions and potentials. It is therefore a relation of relations, whereby individuals are individuated through the reciprocal individuation of the collective.

Interindividuation vs transindividuation

Interindividuation resembles the notion of transindividual, but our thesis is that they should be carefully distinguished 
since the selves they produce and are produced by are (onto-historically) divergent. 
Interindividuation could namely be seen as a group formation of individualist society, where already formed, autonomous and possessive individuals enter the social formation, while never becoming group individuals. 
As stated already, transindividuation firstly does not start with individuals and is part of an ongoing individuation;
secondly, it is a process of individual and collective co-individuation, where no individual can remain unaffected by the social formation and vice versa.


Entanglement vs Deep Implicancy

“Deep Implicancy is an attempt to move away from how separation informs the notion of entanglement. Quantum physicists have chosen the term entanglement precisely because their starting point is particles (that is, bodies), which are by definition separate in space.”


Intra-action / Agential cut 2

"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." 

Assemblage

[I]n the case of a complex body or mode, conatus [FS: the will to survive, Spinoza] refers to the effort required to maintain 
the specific relation of movement and rest that obtains between its parts, 
a relation that defines the mode as what it is. 
This maintenance is not a process of mere repetition of the same, for it entails continual invention: 
because each mode suffers the actions on it by other modes, actions that disrupt the relation of movement and rest characterizing each mode, 
every mode, if it is to persist, must seek new encounters to creatively compensate for the alterations or affections it suffers. 
What it means to be a mode, then, is to form alliances and enter assemblages: it is to mod(e)ify and be modified by others. The process of modification is not under the control of anyone mode - no mode is an agent in the hierarchical sense. Neither is the process without tension, for each mode vies with and against the (changing) affections of (a changing set of) other modes, all the while being subject to the element of chance or contingency intrin­sic to any encounter.


Planes of consistency

what is the purpose of critically engaged thought and practice that emerges not in a reformist mode—e.g. is trying to make the currently dominant relational infrastructures less bad for more people—but in a radical one, with the aim of providing what Deleuze would call genuinely new “planes of consistency,” modes of movement that shift the terms and therefore social and subjective potentialities.

Contingent relations

I would want it to be our critical work to make alternativity imaginable, which includes livable; to induce glitches in the reproduction of the relation of effect to event, of cause to effect, of value to labor of all kinds. I would want to aim to remediate equality as a radically alive contingent relation and not just a process of authoritarian inversion (the story of who’s on top and who’s dominated).

But the new social movements are not presuming prosperity, property, accumulation, and kinship as the grounds for making life. Reinventing work and care, they’re also attempting to change the affective resonance around dependency. In neoliberal normativity, to be dependent is to be non-sovereign: but in the era of austerity, it is the first step to solidarity.


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Disappropriation

disappropriation does not want us to take part in fair capitalist exchanges, but to question the very exchanges and the very system that justify its existence. It is not a matter of giving away work for free, but of bringing our writing in connection with practices of labor and life that interrogate the naturalization of processes that define them both: commodification, extraction, and devastation.

disappropriation exposes the plurality that precedes individuality in the creative process, opening a window onto the material layering so often concealed by appropriative texts


auto/biography

By opening out the process of writing to the contexts of authorship, such a feminist approach would not de-limit or resolve the text, but complicate it. Here, the relation between writing and auto/biography becomes constitutive: the border between work and life is unstable, an instability which points to the contextualisation of the text (the life that is not inside or outside the work) and the textualisation of the context (the work that is not inside or outside the life).


Incongruity

In assembling ideas that are seemingly disconnected and uneven (the seabird and the epilogue, the song and the soil, the punch clock and the ecosystem, the streetlight and the kick-­on-­beat), the logic of knowing-to-­prove is unsustainable because incongruity appears to be offering atypical thinking. Yet curiosity thrives.


Attachments

What were the conditions in which women lived, I asked myself; for fiction, imaginative work that is, is not dropped like a pebble upon the ground, as science may be; fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarcely perceptible; Shakespeare’s plays, for instance, seem to hang there complete by themselves. But when the web is pulled askew, hooked up at the edge, torn in the middle, one remembers that these webs are not spun in mid-air by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and are attached to grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in.

Trembling thoughts

We must adopt trembling thoughts and not think with certainty, fixity, doctrine. A trembling thought is not a frightened thinking, nor a fearful or hesitant one, it is the thought that refuses systems that are rigidly self-contained, and that believes that the world trembles, physiologically, in its becoming, in its suffering, in its oppositions, in its massacres, in its genocides, in its pleasures. And our thinking must be in tune with these tremors. We cannot impose mechanical systems onto the world, we must try to stay with this trembling of the world and perhaps we will find much more of the truth than we do today. (« Nous devons adopter des pensées de tremblements et non penser avec des pensées de certitude, de fixité, de doctrine. Une pensée de tremblement, ce n’est pas une pensée de la peur, ni de la crainte ou de l‘hésitation, c’est la pensée qui refuse les systèmes raidis sur eux-mêmes. Et qui estiment que le monde tremble, physiologiquement, dans son devenir, dans ses souffrances, oppositions, massacres, dans ses génocides, dans ses bonheurs. Et notre pensée doit s’accorder à ces tremblements. Nous ne pouvons pas imposer au monde des systèmes mécaniques, nous devons essayer de suivre ce tremblement du monde et peut-être que nous trouverons beaucoup plus de vérité que nous ne le faisons aujourd’hui ».)

Edouard Glissant, interview with Laure Adler for the broadcast Tropismes, France O, 2007. / Edouard Glissant, entretien avec Laure Adler pour l’émission Tropismes, France O, 2007.

Accessibility, determinacy

Yet, two interrelated elements of the Kantian program continue to influence contemporary epistemological and ethical projects: (a) separability, that is, the view that all that can be known about the things of the world is what is gathered by the forms (space and time) of the intuition and the categories of the Understanding (quantity, quality, relation, modality) – everything else about them remains inaccessible and irrelevant to knowledge; and consequently (b) determinacy, the view that knowledge results from the Understanding’s ability to produce formal constructs, which it can use to determine (i.e. decide) the true nature of the sense impressions gathered by the forms of intuition.


Against reduction/for opacity

In order to understand and thus accept you, I have to measure your solidity with the ideal scale providing me with grounds to make comparisons and, perhaps, judgments. I have to reduce. Accepting differences does, of course, upset the hierarchy of this scale. I understand your difference, or in other words, without creating a hierarchy, I relate it to my norm. I admit you to existence, within my system. I create you afresh. - But perhaps we need to bring an end to the very notion of a scale. Displace all reduction.

Postrelational ethics

There is something lonely, yet necessary, in this act of making relations. It allows time to become unhinged and imagination to travel beyond its immediate experience. It allows us to get over ourselves and seek out what is truly strange and wonderful in the cohabitation of worlds that we will never be at home in. What does it mean to allow oneself to inhabit that which is strange, nonintuitive, insensible—that which is remote from human comprehension or intelligibility—like phytoplankton, seeds, fungi, geological epochs, or multicelled organisms at the beginnings of time? This is not some micro/macro limit experience at the chapel of extreme environmentalism, but a way to think about how that which makes us comfortable reinforces the boundaries of the human, rather than exposing them. It is a way to think about how stretching out into the untimely, insensible spaces of many differently configured others is an experiment, a practice, and a test of our sense of ourselves.

Infrastructural analysis

As Lauren Berlant argues, “An infrastructural analysis helps us see that what we commonly call ‘structure’ is not what we usually call it, an intractable principle of continuity across time and space, but is really a convergence of force and value in patterns of movement that’s only solid when seen from a distance. Objects are always looser than they appear. Objectness is only a semblance, a seeming, a projection effect of interest in a thing we are trying to stabilize.” If infrastructures are also structures of feeling and convergences of force, then the appreciation of those affects need to reach down below the surface into the substratum to see how those forces both maintain and disrupt edifices of intention on the surface.

Entangled whole

What if, instead of the Ordered World, we imaged each existant (human and more-than-human) not as separate forms relating through the mediation of forces, but rather as singular expressions of each and every other existant as well as of the entangled whole in/as which they exist? What if, instead of looking to particle physics for models of devising more scientific or critical analysis of the social we turned to its most disturbing findings – such as nonlocality (as an epistemological principle) and virtuality (as an ontological descriptor) – as poetical descriptors, that is, as indicators of the impossibility of comprehending existence with the thinking tools that cannot but reproduce separability and its aids, namely determinacy and sequentiality?


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Intra-action / Agential cut 1

"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." 

Separability vs difference

“Without separability, sequentiality (Hegel’s ontoepistemological pillar) can no longer account for the many ways in which humans exist in the world, because self-determination has a very limited region (spacetime) for its operation. When nonlocality guides our imaging of the universe, difference is not a manifestation of an unresolvable estrangement, but the expression of an elementary entanglement.”


Techno-ecologies


Ecologies of practice


(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." 


Response-ability

“There are no solutions; there is only the ongoing practice of being open and alive to each meeting, each intra-action, so that we might use our ability to respond, our responsibility, to help awaken, to breathe life into ever new possibilities for living justly.” 


Ecologies of practice


Affirmative or relational or nomadic 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" 



Entanglement / 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."