P-Prompt: Intimacy vs Property

This prompt has been contributed by Andrea Francke who proposes to revisit the “infectious concept” of property and sovereignty. She writes, “I’m annoyed by radical structures that reify the idea of property as THE way to think about our relations to each other and the world.” Rather, she calls for the courage to pay attention to the actual ways we exist with each other, what she calls “the intimacy of interdependency”.

With the help of a selection of texts, from Thi C. Nguyen and Matthew Strohl to Lauren Berlant and Mia Mingus, Andrea provides different entry points to thinking about the shift from property to intimacy. For the ones who have difficulties to engage with long texts, she prepared short introductions summarizing the texts main ideas, as well as her rationale for selecting them. She also sent audio recordings of her prompt with spoken word for ease of access.

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Intimacy vs. Property

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I’m annoyed by radical structures that reify the idea of property as THE way to think about our relations to each other and the world. Property is such an infectious concept. In my practice, from looking at motherhood to book piracy to how we evaluate social art practice, it seems that the first thing I encounter is always a taken-for-granted, a postulate: that the path to change and thence liberation is just a matter of redistributing property rights to the RIGHT people and the enabling of “our" sovereignty.
I see this as a trap. One that makes it almost impossible to imagine a different way to think about ourselves and the world. We are terrified of what would happen if we didn’t own the things we care for.

But I think that it is the ‘we care for’ that matters. That there is a different form of relationality that can only exist once we refuse to play the property and sovereignty game and pay attention to the actual ways in which we exist with each other. I call this the intimacy of interdependency.

In this prompt, I propose that the Collective Conditions for Re-Use falls into the same trap. That in its attempts to solve the ‘problem’ of intersectionality and power imbalances in systems like copy-left or creative commons, it reifies the all too well established (mis)conception that property is the only way in which we can think ourselves and the world, expanding the market into every sphere of our lives — particularly those spheres which specifically sought to separate themselves of the market. That it attempts to improve what needs to be dismantled.
This is a prompt to imagine that we already have a much more sophisticated and interesting way to relate to what we all bring into being in the world. We do. We just need to stop making frameworks that try to make it legible and accessible to systems of power.

This prompt gestures towards a series of texts and notes that offer different definitions, doubts/limitations, and ways to use intimacy to think together about what could exist in place of the idea of intellectual property. I’m fully aware that these ways require profound changes in how we organise the world. I don’t have a solution. I just want us to imagine better.

Andrea Francke
London, 4th of April 2024

Group Intimacy

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Nguyen and Strohl’s text is in itself a prompt. It proposes a framework of group intimacy as one way to dismantle the concept of cultural appropriation, intimacy re-placing the centrality of property in that debate.
Many accounts of intimacy in academia are constructed around privacy and publicness, but Nguyen and Strohl foreground those aspects of intimacy that are most interesting to me, the relational aspects.

“Her [Inness’] account is intended to explain interpersonal intimacy, but we suggest that it points to a promising way of understanding group intimacy. For Inness, what makes an act intimate is that it expresses an agent’s loving, liking or caring for another person and thereby has special meaning and value for the agent. We propose that, in the case of larger groups, what makes a practice intimate is that it functions to embody or promote a sense of common identity and group connection among participants in the practice, and thereby renders it meaningful and valuable to these participants.” (Thi Nguyen and Strohl, 2019, p. 12)

Once we move away from property and into relationality, ideas of care, affection and maintenance gain in importance. If the process of how we use stuff, including ideas and the expression of those ideas by others, is concerned with if and how we are extracting or contributing — who are we inconveniencing? how are we contributing to our communities or despoiling them? how are we inconvenienced? — and if those effects are constantly negotiated and re-considered, then how does a license facilitate or obscure our relation to those inconveniences and to others?

“But, crucially, the intimacy account does not yield objective determinations about who can participate in an intimate practice. Intimacy is flexible — relations of intimacy can be extended, outsiders can be granted temporary or long-term insider status, insiders can be exiled, and boundaries can be re-drawn. Furthermore, notice the order of operations with intimacy. It is not the case that a relationship is first established as intimate, and only then can the participants in the relationship engage in intimate acts. Engaging in intimate acts is what constitutes an intimate relationship. […] Intimate groups can sometimes self-constitute through intimate practices – they can come into existence as a result of self-identification, valuation, and mutual engagement through intimate practices.” (Thi Nguyen and Strohl, 2019, p. 16)

On Intimacy and On the Inconvenience of Other People

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A contract holds the potential for clarity (Nguyen, 2021), for stability, for a resolution. What is so seductive about sovereignty and property is the illusion that you have a firm ground to stand on.
Intimacy refuses the stability of clarity because relationality (that is interdependence) is almost never stable. Intimacy is always already negotiated between subjects, at a bodily scale. The way you related to someone’s work yesterday might no longer be quite right today, and vice-versa. When you realise someone is using your work in a way that you don’t agree with, or in a way that erases you, or when you realise you’ve used someone’s work in a way that has harmed them or annoyed them, you feel it in your body. That’s what I want to hold onto. To refuse the creation of a ‘neutral’ admin infrastructure that takes the awkwardness out.

“I didn't think it would turn out this way” is the secret epitaph of intimacy. To intimate is to communicate with the sparest of signs and gestures, and at its root intimacy has the quality of eloquence and brevity. But intimacy also involves an aspiration for a narrative about something shared, a story about both oneself and others that will turn out in a particular way.” (Berlant, 1998, p. 282)

My favourite part of Berlant’s text is the acknowledgement of how terrifying intimacy can be, how much can and will go wrong, how much needs to be constantly renegotiated.

“There, and here, the commons concept serves as a preserve for an optimistic attachment to recaptioning the potential for collective nonsovereignty and as a register for the gatekeeping and surveillance that organises still so many collective pleasures. So, if the commons claim sounds like an incontestably positive aim, I think of it more as a tool, and often a weapon, for unlearning the world, which is key to not reproducing it.“ (Berlant, 2022, p. 80)

Access Intimacy and Liberatory Access

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Mingus’ access intimacy is about the closeness that happens when someone has an immediate (or intuitive) understanding of your access needs, when certain conditions are met in a moment of relationality that means you can be vulnerable, cared for, and caring for someone else, sometimes without previously having known each other. (Mingus, 2011) Mingus uses access intimacy to imagine a different way in which abled and disabled people can imagine a different future, one that cannot be brought into being by policy, bureaucracy or design. It’s a call for a political re-organisation of the world around interdependence and away from ideas of sovereignty.

“Liberatory access gets us closer to the world we want and ache for, rather than simply reinforcing the status quo. It lives in the now and the future. There is no liberatory access without access intimacy, and in fact, access intimacy is one of the main criteria for liberatory access. Liberatory access understands addressing inaccessibility and ableism as an opportunity for building deeper relationships with each other, realigning our selves with our values and what matters most to us, and challenging oppression. Liberatory access calls upon us to create different values for accessibility than we have historically had. It demands that the responsibility for access shifts from being an individual responsibility to a collective responsibility. That access shifts from being silencing to freeing; from being isolating to connecting; from hidden and invisible to visible; from burdensome to valuable; from a resentful obligation to an opportunity; from shameful to powerful; from ridged to creative. It’s the “good” kind of access, the moments when we are pleasantly surprised and feel seen. It is a way of doing access that transforms both our “today” and our “tomorrow.” In this way, liberatory access both resists against the world we don’t want and actively builds the world we do want.”(Mingus, 2017)

I propose we think about intimacy in an abolitionist way. I know that we live in a world that is mediated by laws, contracts and infrastructures built upon and which consolidate the idea of property (and rentiers). But I propose that we should imagine and practice a different way of being that is invested in relations over property.
We are too solely invested in the idea that the way to solve issues of labour and distribution, and even equality, is to multiply access to property rights.

Other possible references to think intimacy vs. property with

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A few years ago, I started a basic Quechua course. Quechua is one of the indigenous languages spoken in Peru, where I’m from. Although I’ve never learnt it as a child, I’ve realised as I’ve grown older how much of the Quechua language and culture — sometimes called Andean Philosophy — has influenced the way I think and live the world. In one of the sessions, the teacher talked about how there are no native Quechua words for ‘please’ and ‘thank you’, only neologisms needed to adapt the language to a European framework. She explained how you don’t need the words for ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ because those are just words that allowed Europeans not to act.
On the other hand, she explained, if you are part of a Quechua community, you will keep an eye on what is needed, and then just do it. You won’t need a ‘please’, and you won’t expect a ‘thank you’. At some point, if you need help, there will be other people around you paying attention and help will happen.
That relation between attention, care, and being part of a (or many) community(ies) made so much sense to me. This is also part of an understanding of the world in which the non-human is very present. This relation of intimacy that allows one to perceive when one is needed and act, exists also in relation to mountains, animals, places, etc. It made me think about my relation to other people’s work, how I share things – including things that aren’t mine, to how I put things in the world and how accessible I construct them so people can take them apart and use them.
There is another approach that I wanted to include, but I just didn’t have the time. In The Logic of Care, Annemarie Mol looks at the relationships between the ill and their carers. Mol proposes that those relations follow a different logic that refuses the logic of choice (which either follows consumer or citizenship logics) but instead is constructed collaboratively through continued attunement.

Footnotes

Bibliography

Berlant, Lauren. ‘Intimacy: A Special Issue’. Critical Inquiry 24, no. 2 (1998): 281–88. PDF

Berlant, L.G. (2022) On the inconvenience of other people. Durham: Duke University Press (Writing matters!). PDF

Groys, B. (2014) ‘On Art Activism - Journal #56’, e-flux Journal [Preprint], (56). Available at: https://www.e-flux.com/journal/56/60343/on-art-activism/ (Accessed: 19 February 2024).

Thi Nguyen, C., and Matthew Strohl. ‘Cultural Appropriation and the Intimacy of Groups’. Philosophical Studies 176, no. 4 (1 April 2019): 981–1002, PDF

Mingus, M. (2011) ‘Access Intimacy: The Missing Link’, Leaving Evidence, 5 May. Available at: https://leavingevidence.wordpress.com/2011/05/05/access-intimacy-the-missing-link/ (Accessed: 19 February 2024).

Mingus, M. (2017) ‘Access Intimacy, Interdependence and Disability Justice’, Leaving Evidence, 12 April. Available at: https://leavingevidence.wordpress.com/2017/04/12/access-intimacy-interdependence-and-disability-justice/ (Accessed: 19 February 2024).

Mol, A. (2008) The logic of care: health and the problem of patient choice.