Prompt #6 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”.
Andrea selected five texts that contribute to this shift from property to intimacy from different entry points. For the ones who don't want to spend too much time with the selected texts Andrea sent short introductions to their main ideas.
Here comes her prompt:
Text #1 Group Intimacy
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.1 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 facilitates or obscures 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,
