Prompt 06: Intimacy vs Property
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:
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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-forgranted, 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 that that 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 in 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.2 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
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,
2019, p. 16)
