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Alberto Corsín Jiménez CHAPTER FOUR AUTONOMIA ETHNOGRAPHICA Liberal Designs, Designs for Liberation, and the Liberation of Design Alberto Corsín Jiménez This chapter develops an argument about the relation between autonomy and ethnography—in particular, about autonomy as an experimental design in political and anthropological praxis. I am interested in what I call autonomia ethnographica: the pressures and challenges confronting the mise-en-scénes of anthropological fieldwork today and the sometimes troubled, sometimes conflictive, yet ultimately liberating arrangements in complicity and complexity through which anthropologists construct the conditions for ethnographic practice and description. The concept of autonomy I am summoning here needs a little unpacking. In some respects, autonomy is undergoing somewhat of a comeback in social and political theory (Nelson and Braun 2017; Luisetti et al. 2015). Most famously deployed by the Italian operaist (workers) movement in the 1950s in the context of accelerating and exploitative labor conditions in the automobile industry, “autonomia” was invoked at the time to describe a revolutionary impulse for the ontological self-determination of workers’ power—the power, as it was referred to at the time, to “refuse to work” (Virno 1996) and in this capacity to disengage from, and invent novel imaginative alternatives to, the spatial and temporal matrices of the state-capital nexus (Aureli 2008). Throughout the 1970s, however, “autonomia” gradually lost its attachment to workers’ power, leaving the factory floor for the street protests of students, feminists, and environmental activists. Thus, a second generation of “diffuse autonomy” was born, a new wave of insurrectional and intersectional politics (Cuninghame 2013), which, in the wake of the alter- globalization movement in the late 1990s, entered also the Anglophone academy under the 1 liberation aesthetics of networked-mediated multitudes and commons (Hardt and Negri 2005; 2009). It is not my intention in this chapter to retrace the genealogies of the autonomy complex. From Cornelius Castoriadis (1987) to Henri Lefebvre (2009), autonomy has indeed played a fundamental role in the configuration of critical thought in the second half of the twentieth century. More modestly, here I wish to essay an argument about the ethnographic purchase of autonomy, an argument born from my own fieldwork with free-culture activists in Madrid over the past fifteen years. In particular I draw on the situated history of the entanglement between autonomous collectives, squatted social centers, public art institutions, and free-culture activists to illustrate the dense interdependencies of methods, technologies, and aesthetics that these various actors have mobilized and deployed in bringing forth an autonomous framework for an urban ecology. Not just a political or ontological impulse, autonomy has been bodied forth in this context as a design and an infrastructure for the thick entanglement of complicities and complexities—not unlike, I will suggest, how ethnography itself is often choreographed and arranged. Autonomia ethnographica emerges in this context as a tactical climate of methods wherein the promises, affordances, and constrains of designs are continuously recalibrated as shared systems for grappling with. As such, it offers a lens for reinterpreting the situated entanglements of Keith Murphy’s three orientations of design: anthropology for design, design for anthropology, and the critical anthropology of design (Murphy 2016b; see also the introduction). We will see in particular how these are loosely mapped onto historically situated systems of liberation—liberal designs, designs for liberation, and the liberation of design—and how the movements and moments of autonomia ethnographica surface in the interstices and 2 “borders,” as Murphy and Wilf point out in the introduction, of their complex and overlapped trajectories. The view of autonomy as an experimental design of sorts is one that has recently been put forward by Isabelle Stengers and Arturo Escobar. For Stengers, autonomy offers one possible placeholder for the navigational skills demanded by our devastated and catastrophic times (Stengers 2017). Well aware of the concept’s distinguished anchorage in a tradition of Italian Marxist and post-Marxist thought, she prefers instead to assay a different ground for the reclamation of autonomy, one that commits to the very positionality of reclamation as a commitment to the struggle for “a life worth living in the ruins” (Stengers 2017, 388, emphasis in the original). Such a project in the reclamation of autonomy takes as its point of departure the “relaying” of modes of “sensing together” (con-sensus), modes that may meet for the first time in an exchange (a “palaver”) of embodied and situated antagonisms, but which in that very encounter signal the loss of, but also the hopes for, autonomy (Stengers 2017, 396, 391). Stengers explains, “I mean to ‘stay with the trouble’ [after Donna Haraway], characterizing autonomy not in philosophical, conceptual terms but by starting from devastation, from the humiliation, shame, and temptation of cynicism that I take as signals of its destruction” (Stengers 2017, 392). The reclamation of autonomy, then, can only proceed, not as a critical or political project, but as a project in “experimentation,” an art of “adventure” oriented toward sounding out the “artifacts” of the autonomous moment, the “fact of the art” (Stengers 2017, 394–95, 398). “Autonomy,” she concludes, “is not a flower spontaneously blooming in a devastated, depopulated desert. It needs relayed stories and experiences, the anticipation of testing, difficult choices, a sense of precariousness, the fostering of a taste for experimentation” (Stengers 2017, 399). 3 For his part, Arturo Escobar has built on the activist experiences of indigenous, peasant, and Afro-descended communities in Latin America to outline an argument for “autonomous design” as a project in the ontological reclamation of worlds (Escobar 2018b). Escobar’s approximation to autonomy is inspired not by the philosophical frameworks of post-Marxist autonomy but by the theories of autopoiesis and systemic and self-emergent organization of Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela. Defending the co-ontogenesis and interdependency of life forms, Escobar turns to the concept of design as a privileged site for understanding how grassroots communities fight for the worlds they wish to bring into existence, worlds whose devastation or disappearance shows the very real ontological menace they are subjected to. In this light, “autonomía is a theory and practice of interexistence and interbeing, a design for the pluriverse” (Escobar 2018b, 175, emphasis removed). Building on ten years of fieldwork among free-culture collectives in Spain, and following in the steps of Stengers and Escobar, in this chapter I also wish to develop an argument about the struggle for autonomy as a specific struggle for experimentation and design. In addition, I wish to draw attention to the ways such a struggle can double back on the very ecology of practices through which we, as anthropologists, inhabit and navigate our field sites. For an academic discipline whose historical project has traditionally been conceived as the study of culture, the liberation of “culture” that free-culture activists have insistently engaged in since the late 1990s presents some interesting challenges. At a minimum, it opens up inquiry into the specific legal licenses and arrangements, technical and descriptive materials, and infrastructural resources and assemblages through which anthropology is internally configured as an intellectual and practical operation. In this light, free-culture activism offers an apposite site for thinking about the autonomy of ethnography by way of an ethnography of autonomy. 4 The origins of the free-culture movement have traditionally been traced back to the networked protests against the expansion of patent and copyright protection to cultural works in the digital age that took place at the turn of the century (Postigo 2012). The story of free culture has been imagined in this context as a “modulation,” to use Chris Kelty’s term (2008), of the free and open-source software movement and philosophy—a story about the liberal values of hacktivists and their explorations of digital freedom (Coleman 2012) and, more amply, about the libertarian ethic of the Californian ideology (Barbrook and Cameron 1996). In this context, the story of free-culture devices and innovations (open-source software, urban apps, Massive Open Online Courses, MOOCs) has often been taken as a proxy for the predicament of liberal designs. In this chapter I wish to essay a somewhat different take. I develop an argument about free-culture activism in Madrid as fundamentally an urban social movement and sensibility whose origins harken back to the radical autonomist scene of squatted social centers in the 1980s and 1990s. It was at squatted social centers that the first hacklabs opened and that the first discussions about free licenses and the challenges of intellectual property rights were had. It was at squatted social centers, also, that these conversations met with the housing predicaments and economic precariousness of squatters, that artists and activists first imagined potential extrapolations of the “public domain” and “digital commons” into “public space” and “public infrastructures,” and that subtle and intriguing alliances between the institutional
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