MG: I find it interesting that in activist circles and organising, we talk about the emotional labour of activism. I feel like this is new (at least for me). Is this because we are in that moment of Capitalism in which we are not blind to it, and weve seen finally our care and emotions being monetized and capitalised on? Talking about the labour in affective infrastructure (see above) and the most recent instance of #MeToo (the one in which men in mainstream media and publishing were being named as abusers). There was a lot of annoyance / grief/ outrage on Twitter about how women lawyers, victims, survivors, Twitter heroes, friends were running around in the background, in DMs, in WhatsApp groups, helping other women file complaints, manage the press, and manage the online hate, whereas men being named (and their supporters) were not doing as much, or didnt seem particularly perturbed by women making allegations. I wanted to say but this is the work of activism! It has always been unpaid, thankless, invisible-ised work, so why are you so upset that its hard or un-recognised as work? It isnt as simple as "hey here are these tweets about this dude." The due process that they say the Law does not deliver in addressing violence (and which is why they take to social media to out people) is transposed, maybe ? yeah, transposed into affective work.

TH: This is fascinating because so much of the scholarly discussions of how we should think about invisible labor is to make it visible, to recognize it as work. What you seem to suggest is that the act of making visible may well simply entrench activism into the framework of capital: that theres an implicit demand that this work should be paid for. Have we gone too far in that direction of labelling everything as "work"? Perhaps activism / emotional labor should beto riff on its thanklessnesssimilarly useless in terms of capital?

MG: Yes! All of this is happening online and on Twitter, and Twitter has already propelled people to visibility and stardom for their work of organising (the woman who was central in creating this Media #MeToo wave already built a huge online presence/identity for herself by for raising money and organising relief efforts for the recent Kerala floods), getting book deals and TV talking-head spots. And in a weird way, they can rationalise the visibility and celebrity status of online activism as accruing visibility to the topic itself. It probably sounds uncharitable (not sure will add something later) to say this but I think a lot of it has a lot to do with making the time (after paid office jobs) to be online on social media, to be constantly online and eliciting, tending to, managing, online conversations. Its a big deal to do this publicly too, I shudder to think of how much time it takes.

TM: Im just thinking that the #metoo spreadsheets are a strangely datafied form of collating experience. Do you have any thoughts about the format? When I scroll and browse them I am struck by their endlessness (particularly in comparison to long-form narratives from #metoo) and wonder if that can provide a feeling of solidarity or if something else happens.

MG: Yeah, one of the things we (some of us, unofficially, behind closed internet doors) talked about was the sense evoked by the spreadsheet for account-ing and account-ability. The earliest iteration of the spreadsheet was literally just three columns who, what happened/what they did, when with no other annotations or legends, no discussion or preamble. It was so flat and naked and angry and was a bit like a wordless scream. And this was what I think prompted some really unfortunate responses from senior feminists [why are some women the first to come out and defend men accused of violence?] and they were all academics. They got slammed for it and so hard and so swiftly by the younger women. But I think they were trying to say why are you screaming? And that screams have to be annotated (lol). It became an unfortunately polarising conversation about old v young feminists and therefore dinosaur v internet generation thing. Im also airing these feelings in what I consider a private space here. Many of us have stopped talking about the politics of how the first #MeToo spreadsheet happened. Because we really like how it happened, I think I like the list actually, but to challenge or critique the flat form of the spreadsheet, that absolutely refused any other discussion, was seen as tantamount to not supporting the women making the accusations. Everything felt very stark and polarised. No solidarity. No conversations. You were on or off the list. But that said, I think there was solidarity for the people involved obviously.

TH: How strange that the list / the spreadsheet / the dataset has become the cultural object that testifies in todays moment.

MG: I think the comparison with the longform narrative is interesting because that actually has sort of fallen off, yes at least in India. However longform journalism is alive and well, no? its like : hey look at the tweets, we already put it on Twitter. I am wondering which Indian writer will be given that prize New Yorker slot to write about #MeToo and that will be it ;-)

TH: But I am also thinking about if it really is a strange cultural object? Aside from the obsession with big data, I guess the opposite the GIF and the meme have become as popular and huge. However both are about endless looping.

FS: The importance of unapologeticness of the spreadsheet in relation to re-configurings of we (in Spanish speaking context): #niunamenos not one (female) less, #nosotrasparamos we stop, #acuerparnos we remember, #estamosparanosotras were here for us, #cuentalo — tell your story, #yotecreo — I believe you, #nosotres, #nosotrxs. [mariebardet]

DD: also relation to boredom? idleness? right to ..

TH: For me, its important not to always convert passivity into action: contra other scholars (e.g. of radical passivity) who say that passivity is really a form of disguised agency if recognized with the proper eyes, passivity is more interesting to me as unactualized potential. Its latent (lanthanein, the same root as lethargy).

DD: It is also interesting to think how our understanding of these notions and their connections to resistance change from time to time. And how new questions arise. We can think of the Bartleby example
Some links would be good here (need to check my old notes for them)

TH: For me, Bartleby is the opposite of lethargy, because he is actively refusing to move, to do his job, etc. He is like a manspreader on the subway: he knows how to take up space. A properly lethargic subject (is that possible to say?) has to go along with the program.

MBJ: Or information overload to a point of feeling ovewhelmed thus leading to disengagement. And then we need to re-learn how to breath -> instructions for breathing

TH: Theres definitely a boredom that comes out of feeling overwhelmed with information, but it might be interesting to also think about boredoms that result from not having enough to do. In The Whistling Cobblestone (1972), a film by Gyula Gazdag about a work camp for teenage boys in Communist Hungary, the joke is that due to bad planning, theres no work for the boys to do. Two of them rebel by going to work for a neighboring farmer: a strange and hilarious form of resistance. What are the analogues to this situation today within the world of the digital?

PO: What interests me in both these artifacts/infrastructural beings is the way that they are predicated upon a "canvas" of what a body can be or become. Because whether it would be tempting to think them as "blank canvases" – and for sure they are deployed and justified to feel as such – these come already constructed for the amalgamation of a specific body. This body can be seen, for the intents and purposes of this study circle, as a series of networked relations and affect. What I mean with that is that these artifacts (the device which tests ones accent and also the combination of distinct objects that compose the so called "Kit Bandido" in Brazil) is that they simply cannot function without being coupled with *specific* bodies. They can only emerge as such – i.e. they can only be attested and granted their functionality, be they by the course of law or unwritten codes – from the moment a body attests to and confirms the motivations and reasons why these devices were created for in the first place. In other words, these devices only come into being in the process of creating a body, which in turn creates and validates them back.

For that, it might be useful if we focus on the material manifestations of these infrastructural arrangements. For the accent recognition system, and in particular the one at use by the Bundesamt für Migration und Flüchtlinge (BAMF) in Germany, the device in question is a telephone. The asylum applicant is instructed by the authorities to come into a room in which they find a table and a chair. On the table there is the telephone, and a set of instructions: the applicant must dial an internal number, plus the specific codes for their Außenstelle or Ankunftszentrum, and their personal case number, followed by the "#" key. Upon hearing a "beep", they must speak for two minutes without interruption. The instructions for this part vary; it might be formulated freely by the applican on a given topic, or, in most cases, there is a picture which must be described to the device. Upon completion, the "beep" indicates the end of the recording.

It is interesting to think of the telephone as a device for creating a sense of familiarity to the act of speaking to machines. Thinking of the affective relations made possible by the handset and the numerical keys, evoking the almost-obsolete technology of the landline (in itself a tangible infrastructure of cables, pulse encoders and decoders) but also the nostalgic feeling of long-distance relations, of longing for those who are away, and the bodily stillness that the landline usually demands (particularly for corded phones) – i.e. how one is made more-or-less immobile whenever these devices are being used. The idea of the telephone also re-connects the asylum applicant to the journey, for cellphones are oftentimes the lifeline which makes the travel possible, but also bearable. It is the encapsulation of those who had to be left behind, or those whose journeys are leading them elsewhere. Thus a body is created in that act of picking up the handset, and it is expected that this body "returns home" briefly, through the act of speaking over the phone – granting a certain degree of "legitimacy" to the act of recording ones speech and ones accent in such conditions. Granted, the picture that is often available for talking on the phone to the machine similarly evokes the sense of familiarity: family meals or gatherings are often depicted, for which the BAMF (allegedly) made sure would be "culturally appropriate" to those being recorded. There is no accent probing without evoking a sense of home. Home is that which might sound – and feel – truthful. The telephone, the picture, the dialing, they are all fundamental components of a theatrical act which seeks to stabilize a (cultural, but also affective) identity: that of the migrant longing to return "home."

(I need to expand this a bit more with the assumption that the telephone/home connection creates an "ideal" body for speaking. Because whenever we speak "to" a device we adjust our bodies accordingly – we become speakers within that closed network of the device, e.g. a "microphone speaking body", a "megaphone speaking", or a "telephone speaking body." We are affected by these devices insofar as they shape the way we sound and re-sound towards them.)

When the State cannot provide the means to stabilize ones identity – via accents, voices, fingerprints, documents, and so on – it is often the parallel powers overlooked (or ignored) by the State which perform this task. In the case of the so-called "Kit Bandido," it becomes the task of corrupt policemen to define the constraints of a body made criminal. The "Kit Bandido" exists on the borders of written law, insofar as the "Autos de Resistência" (resistance to law enforcement) creates the conditions upon which Policemen are temporarily authorized to shoot to kill. Whenever necessary, then, the "Kit Bandido" legitimizes these acts of resistance by creating the criminal body where there were either none. The "Kit" consists of a pistol (often unlicensed or sometimes even a toy gun) and a pack of drugs, usually cocaine; these items are often kept undercover in the locker rooms of Police Stations and come into being from the moment an assassination needs to be justified by the Police. The practice is of course illegal but "accepted" insofar as the Police sees the law as preventing them from properly undertaking their job. However, the "Kit Bandido" is far from the "blank canvas" as well, because the bodies it can be attached to co-constitute the individual items into the proper "kit" or "pack". The gun and the pack of drugs exist as isolated items, under the possession of different actors in different circumstances; it is only by its association with a deceased black body that the criminal is created, and its murder by the State justified. The same pack of drugs and the same gun, circulating in other hands (middle-class white men, politicians, policemen) does not immediately designate a criminal body with the same strenght and "sleekness."

Both these ideas materialize the affective character of infrastructures: they become their lived manifestation because they co-constitute the very bodies they were designed to point out in the first place. The telephone normalizes the speaker who finds themself away from home, it sediments the migrant body as that whose accent is ready to be tested, judged, measured, and assessed as indicative of identity. There cannot be other identity than that of the asylum seeker at that time, place, and space. The "Kit Bandido" authorizes the creation (and subsequent elimination) of the criminal body, thus sedimenting the structural racism that conditions the black body to be immediately criminalized. The politics of death (necropolitics? Is it useful to bring Mbembe into the room as well?) in this case cannot create any other identity than that of the young, male, black body, who exists in opposition to the threatened Policemen who is temporarily permitted, by law, to kill.

FS: Where do these two examples overlap or connect? And how are they linked to AI?

PO:Im trying to unravel that more in the sense of thinking them as these "canvases" (and in that I also think of Mayas example of the #metoo spreadsheets). On the one hand the telephone is meant to create this "body at home" where "home" is not the host country (so that their idiosyncracies can be assessed), but the kit is the canvas upon which young, male, black (dead) bodies have to be attached to in order for them to work.

PO:I am still working these connections with the Kit Bandido, to be honest, It is an idea that has been in my head for a while but I havent given it the proper attention it deserves. I was thinking of use this space for that but might not be the right time to, so it may be removed at a later edit....

-> see entry under: #metoo spreadsheets as an infrastructure
-> see entry under: The Commons

DD: I guess I had brought that in quoting Lisa Parks work and questioning if this awe that people tend to have for infrastructures can be re-engineered. But then the main question would be how to embrace/communicating desire? Because you cannot force it. [aweandwonder]

DD: probably not an entry though but something to discuss/add maybe as part of the questions.

Foraging + cruising

LC: I became very interested in Anna Tsing’s Mushroom at the End of the World even as I remain slightly mistrustful of naturalist metaphors (every nature metaphor is a metaphor for a human perception of nature). There is a radical incommensurability and interpenetration of the human and non-human. Irreducible and in relation. But perhaps this can also describe any interaction across difference, within as well as across lifeforms. The encounter of forgaing became assocuated for me with the sexual encounter. Parallel to performative speech, foraging and crusing are a performative looking.
At the same time, I have to acknowledge an ambivalence toward cruising as a fantasy of the commons Berlant describes. There is so much that structures the very ground of these encounters that cannot be taken for granted. Who cruises across a border? Mushrooms disrupt such hard and fast lines and indeed feed on disruption. I am in the park looking for mushrooms and I come across men hooking up between the trees. [tsing]

Samuel Delany writes one of the most encompassing studies of how public space, privatization and sex practices interact, in his case in the seedy theaters of Time Square where porn played on the big screen and men of many different walks got off together. It is in theorizing these spaces in Times Square Red Times Square Blue that Delany lays out the difference between Network and contact: network = institutional; contact = coming together (cross-racial, cross class) not exclusive but overlapping. I am interested in expanding the practice of cruising without sanitizing it of its necessary filth. The queerness of public sex is contained in the erotics of it all but also as these erotics allow different ways of being in public, of conceptualizing what the pulic is and what it is for. [delany]

-> see entry under: Tags as an infrastructure for cruising

MBJ: Practical sciences were originally practised for working with the self in order to serve the community. Today they expemplify an illusion of having agency over bodymind.
Appropriated to serve a neoliberal value system, self-care is packaged as wellness services and lifestyle: yoga, mindfulness, gong baths, motivational talks, positive affirmations, personal growth,… attempt to fulfil a sense of self-worth and belonging in a hyper-individualised society.

[talksatGoogle] invited Eckhart Tolle, a spiritual teacher to "pay attention to inner technology"; "Dont be evil" as a former code of conduct advising virtue to users. Companies organizing yoga and meditation classes for their employees as a gesture of care; relaxing, destressing to promote productivity. Infrastructures of care? :)

Meditation as a solitary practice and epistemic inquiry; allowing just being and feeling, observing thoughts and accessing what exceeds the constraints of language...
Hindu and buddhist traditions advise anattā or non-self, a death of the self as such. They view attachments as problemtic and propose meditation as a training method towards releasing these .. Berlant and attachments [ still to add ]

MG: Ive been an Iyengar [yoga] practitioner for 14 years this month, and Im sort of heartbroken at how the (Fascist) Hindu RIght in India has appropriated yoga as Hindu and used it as a cultural weapon. They *love* how popular it is in the West and use this as evidence of the growth of Hindu culture. They have made it mandatory in Muslim majority regions like Kashmir (heavily militarized; a place of internal displacement and colonialism) to push Hindu culture. Its disgusting. Yoga and bans on eating beef have been two of the Rights fascinating / horrific campaigns. Also: Do an image search for Yoga.

MBJ: I am curious what the yoga image search in India will output. In the global North and bigger cities worldwide, it has been reduced to a competitive sport

FS: You mean to do a localized search? Yes, it would be interesting to see the differences!

MBJ: correct, can try vpn to trick

MG: No, not really local i.e countries but about people. Everything is personalized now. And the search term is populated in a certain way. LIke I get lots of white American women doing almost militaristic power yoga. Like sometimes I want to look up a particular posture and have to make sure I go to a specific site and not just search, because a lot of it is also blended into broader routines that combine all kinds of other fitness things.

FS: It also reminds me of the Techno-Galactic Software Observatory [TGSO] when Anne Laforet was looking at the way productivist coding practice inspires itself on Yoga vocabulary. Her Agile Yoga (playing on the Agile coding manifesto) does the job on all levels :-) [agileyoga]

MG: Being calm is a stressful project
In —> Out < —- In. Why is this complicated, why do we need instructions?

FS: Queer analytics invites us to wonder together about the potential of microbial, animal, plant, mineral, cosmological technoscience, to situate ourselves in these mundane and alluring scenes, to consider these labours and imagine a collective life otherwise (...) How can we generate ways that take us beyond reparative narratives or benevolent utopianism towards more-than-human life? [qa]. I think of Queer Analytics as an affective infrastructure for operating with and within techno-culture, thinking through the issues with analytics and how it is structured as a specific optimising logic in computation. But it also is initself already an affectual infrastructural move, in that it offers a set of concepts and tools to expand the affective analysis of situations that deserve careful attention.

-> see entry under Diversity and Emoji

TH: Based on a very cursory survey of this years Venice architecture biennial, there is still an old-fashioned assumption that architecture should not fall apart. All except one brilliant pavilion about swamps (Lithuanias "Swamp School"), which points out that so much of the violence inflicted in the name of colonialism has been draining the swamp, creating the infrastructure, sometimes literally the land, to support the new city. As Ive written elsewhere, infrastructure is often a technology of stabilizing the future: of making things last over time (a levee that survives a "99 year flood"), etc. Its nice to have counterexamples, as in the spongy ground they constructed, which literally gave way as I walked on it.

PO: I would love to hear more about the stabilizing character of infrastructures you speak ok. For me that goes in a completely opposite direction of what I think of "Affective Infrastructures" precisely because these for me imply contingency.

TH: Yeah, I love the inherent paradoxes contained within the phrase "affective infrastructure". Because most of the textbook definitions of infrastructure have to do with "public good", or scale, or something else. Bridges, pipes, cables, airports, etc. And affect seems to exist on such a different time scale.

PO: Exactly. This is why I think that to think of Affective Infrastructures is to think of another order of infrastructural work completely. Maybe I am too biased (yes I am) but this entire conversation keeps reminding me of Glissants thinking because the way I visualize these Infrastructures seem to me way more archipelagic than nodal. There is so much that is dependent on contingent (and often times momentaneous or fleeting) forms of affective relationships that stabilizing it would be, to paraphrase Glissant, to render them immobile (or even, say, lethargic?).

TH: I would love to hear more about the archipelagic. What modes of encounter or relationality does Glissant suggest?

PO: My reading of his thinking as archipelagic relates mostly to how hes coming back-and-forth with ideas of identity as essentially fragments provisionally put together in a set of fleeting relations. He alludes to the rhizomatic as well but not so much as he does to his own locus of enunciation from the Caribbean – the multitude of islands, seemingly isolated from one another yet part of this relational whole that might be attained when observed in a moving (not fixed) totality. This is what I see as Affective Infrastructures, this reaching out for a totality-in-movement that still retains its fragmented nature – hence the archipelagic. [archipelagic]

-> see entry under: passivity and lethargy

FS: The feminist server ... tries hard not to apologise when she is sometimes not available! [feministserver]

DD: could this connect to the other entry on availability? and merge?

MG: In a slightly fevered, I-need-a-massage- kind of way, here are the infrastructures (delirious,delicious [there is one letter difference between delirious and delicious] imaginative, effective, and always-available) I wish we had (and are maybe not so difficult to make):
1. pretty little notepads with a pencil/pen next to them in all the places in your home (always replenished) that you stop at often, like the window looking on to the courtyard, so you can write down thoughts that will make great tweets/lines in your dissertation and not forget them. And someone to transcribe them for you.
2. Like a conch, but a number on your phone to call (for free) that plays the sound of any sea of your choosing.

DD: "In spite of substantial and at some levels decisive continuities in grammar and vocabulary, no generation speaks quite the same language as its predecessors. The difference can be defined in terms of additions, deletions, and modifications, but these do not exhaust it. What really changes is something quite general, over a wide range, and the description that often fits the change best is the literary term style. It is a general change, rather than a set of deliberate choices, yet choices can be deduced from it, as well as effects. Similar kinds of change can be observed in manners, dress, building, and other similar forms of social life." [structuresfeeling]

LC: English as the defacto academic language, the language of knowledge that circulates widely is one of the most ingrained affective infrastructures in my life and work it seems. That I cannot know if I am thinking outside of English.

PO: I am constantly reminded of that the more I try to think of my work (and explain it to others) in my native tongue. It is impossible to, there is a different set of grammar rules and vocabularies that are not immediately available to me because the order of my thoughts is already shaped by English. That for me is at the same time fascinating and disappointing, because it seems I am losing some aspects of what brings me "home" – and what makes this "home" to me. This I cannot disassociate with the story I was telling above of the telephone device – the assumption that we think, live, speak, and that our speech codes perform in a static manner – particularly when code switching becomes a matter of survival.

FM: Lost all my contributions here and I cant chat. Anyway, I love how phonetic languages (and also some of the pictoric/ideogrammatic) can work in a non-structure based way to communicate ideas and feelings, by rearranging pieces of information to evolve certain concepts into a narrative. I cant see vernacular language as playing any part on affective infrastructures, because etymology and rethoric themselves carry a lot of structured, enclosed ways to comprise ideas and feelings. This revolves on the encapsulation issue (I like that PO brings

-> see also: language as an infrastructure
-> see also: accent recognition systems + crime scene kits
-> see also: Codes/Code switching

PO: For me it becomes impossible not to bring Gloria Anzaldúa into the room here. Her entire work and thinking of care and affect is predicated on code switching as a method (for the production of knowledge but also of and for survival). Her work on the notion of Nepantla I think is useful here: this malleable space of and for contradiction which emerges from encountering and dwelling in moments of instability (of the world, but also of the self) – her own negotiation of not-belonging anywhere (white-anglo spaces as a latina but also not belonging to a more "traditional" latina space for being queer) makes her think of Nepantla as the cracks between different realities. So for that code switching is imperative because of the many shapes language assumes to convey meaning. In her earlier work on Borderland she enumerates the many languages she speaks (Chicano Spanish, Mexican Spanish, Spanglish, English, Tejano Spanish, etc) and how each code connects her to different networks of identification and care. Particularly when we think of placedness and belonging I believe that code switching is a fundamental skill or asset one must develop – but I think this holds particularly true when we think of the emotional labor of crossing borders; becoming a multiple-self across expectations based on cultural/political/social assumptions versus not exactly belonging. [borderland]

-> see also: language as an infrastructure
-> see also: Academic (and other kinds of expert) languages

DD: Should this be renamed into Caring Machines instead?

MBJ: Intelligent personal assistants as encapsulations of affect. Voice as intrinsic interface projecting affect onto inanimate consumer products...

Diversity as measured by representation by emoji

MG: I read this really fascinating article from someone who is involved with the process for how new emoij are introduced the other day [notready]
which makes the point that if we really want to see diversity (as understood as some kind of mathematical formula), we will need to develop bigger and bigger keyboards. Everyone wants to be seen, it seems. Or, new features like being able to search for emoji, because you cannot "scroll past 52000 emoji to get to the lion or baseball". If you paid US$72 or 75 a year, you can join the Unicode Consortium and become part of the process too. Its one of my projects for 2019, just to become involved in affective infrastructures ;-)

FS: The example of emojis shows exactly the urgency for rethinking infrastructure through affect. [emoji]

MG: Is this a dimension of The quantified self?

FS: In a perverse way, the emoji diversity solution that the Unicode Consortium proposed, became a contribution to The quantified self. With some companions I have been looking at the crude decision making process and implementation of skin-color in emojis and it becomes painfully clear how the Unicode Consortium, the governing body of this glyph-organising-infrastructure is not equipped to deal with more complex forms of communication. The consequence is, amongst many other ways, that people that are using skin-color emoji (need correct term) identify themselves as belonging to a certain group and hence become marketable as ethnic affinity group, a term that Facebook started to use.

DD: surely connects to affective infr. as the market understands them and also to other categories of caring machines. Maybe can be one entry mentioning several different examples?

LC: Also the unsovereign theorized in Afropessimism [afropessimism]

FS: At a lecture titled: Becoming animal [becominganimal], Rosi Braidotti explained how according to her, it was important to work on the continuous negotiation between two contemporary energies: post-humanism and post-anthropocentrism. This I thought was interesting, as a way to think about how positive and negative affects are interdependent. But then, after the talk, someone in the audience asked her: "And what about eating insects?" She first replied: "Aboriginals have been eating them for ages". And then she said: "I have eaten them myself. Insects are a bit like shrimps, arent they? They taste crunchy, actually it is like eating crisps!" I think that was altogether a bit too much taxonomical mess at the same time.

OK THIS IS FLOATING AND WOULD BE NICE TO HAVE SOME MORE. SEEMS IMPORTANT, ALSO TO CONNECT TO THE DISCUSSION ABOVE

FS: There is something about the difference between the French gestion and the anglophone management. And maybe also auto and self? How does this translate to the Kroatian samoupravljanje?

FM: Im not going much on etymology, but "autogestion" when coming from french and spanish tells me an entirely different aproach than that we have for "autonomy". In Brazil, unless we are into a more deep dive discussion among people that experienced or studied other models of autogestion from other cultures, this term doesnt usually arise, even when its used broadly in latin america. Every then and now, due to that, even intuitively I think autogestion is not related to self-management or autonomy, but regarded to the ability to provide an decentralized organization of some sort. Management, culturally, implies a certain sense of supervision, which still applies to autonomy as a whole concept since autonomy is not an auto-adquired ability (and couldnt be for affective infrastructres because it would also imply ableism), but not to autogestion as a decentralized way to organize commons.

PO: FM, could you expand a bit more on the last part you wrote? On Autonomy as not being something that we can say its "tacit," but more importantly its relation to thepossibility of ableism within affective infrastructures? I think you opened up a very important thread there, which deserves more attention!

Also, relating to your comment on autonomy as being fundamentally different from management – I couldnt agree more! When this topic was brought up in the meeting at Tier.space I also mentioned the necessity of looking at autonomy from a perspective which includes autonomy as self-government in consonance and mutual relationship with land, and for that I was thinking specifically of self-governing Indigenous communities such as the Zapatistas. Their form of "autonomy" I think touches on ideas of "management" and "government" but more in regards to their relationship with the land and to the sense of community rather than the sense of supervision you speak of. So I think that within indigenous knowledges there might be a different form of autonomy at play which is dependent on acknowledging Land as an infrastructural component of these affective relationships.It also brought to the conversation this dependency/autonomy (apparent) dichotomy which I think that when one thinks of this mode of Relation with land it ceases to be dichotomy at all because it is, in a sense, self-evident (or at least I believe it is).

LC: Thinking the commons also makes me think what might be at the moment its kind of conceptual opposite, the home. Home is the opposite when it is figured as the private domestic sphere, which takes a lot of ideological work to perserve this image of it as such. A lot of the work of making the home private is dependent on the obscuring of affective infrastructures (care work, social reproduction). Im thinking of home also because I woke up to text messages from my partner who is currently living very far away and was thinking of "unhoming" as one way to conceptualize colonialism. The possibility for the commons has been decimated by enclosure and extraction and enforcementby the unhoming of indigenous peoples and others with alternative communal relationships to land.

PO: I really like how you pose this: "A lot of the work of making the home private is dependent on the obscuring of affective infrastructures" – I often think of the subdivision of domestic space as also being informed by how sound travels, and which sounds are associated with which structural components of "home". Thinking of the concept of the "nuclear family" in the context of the European bourgeoise (I cant write that word for the life of me) and the creation of the private study for the patriarch, as separated as possible from "noisy" spaces of the kitchen (in which women and subaltern others would, in fact, provide the means for the idea of "home" to be sustained in terms of care and nurture). How the idea of "home" is constantly detached from the idea of care and community and more towards the private, "ur-space" of property and possession.
This reminds me also a lot of Édouard Glissant when he speaks of filiation – how rooting oneself into space (and for that we can think of colonialism and private property and intertwined with the settling of said space) also perpetuates the idea of a line of filiation – i.e. entangled with time/history – which in turn legimitizes a certain kind of "purity" (racial, ethnic, or otherwise) which would go precisely against the idea of a commons in the first place [filiation].

LC: Im so happy you brought up Glissant because I have been thinking through precisely this question of the root and the possibility of reconciling the root and the rhizome, of finding placedness without settlement and property. What kind of desires and feelings of belonging can we maintain that are not predicated on violent structures of nationalism and border-making?

PO: I think that could be inter-related with ideas on encapsulation and nesting we were discussing below (above? it has shifted places already) – encapsulation is a strong physical and visual gesture – just think of your hand closing in order to grab, say, a cup. This act of "enclosing" is also important for Glissant because he sees that as the act of grasping – both in the physical but also in the intellectual sense, i.e. how to comprehend something (or belong somewhere) is often associated with this act of grasping as comprehension. In that sense I found it extremely beautiful how he proposes the "donner-avec" (which was translated by Betsy Wing as "giving-on-and-with", a rather confusing yet self-explanatory terminology which dwells on the fringes of the meaning-making process that French or other Latin languages may have and do). So the donner-avec implies the web of relations one must enter to in order to belong withouth appropriating, to engage in this process of Relation with capital R that *could* potentially address the idea of placedness without property. I cannot help but think of this donner-avec as a potential for establishing an affective infrastructure predicated on ideas of listening, care (thinking-with and dissenting-within as Puig de la Bellacasa discusses), and other hidden codes which do not necessarily need to emerge as words, finished thoughts, or even semantics. The nod, the glance exchanged, the deep breathing people often exchange with one another that trancends the necessity of making-sense-of but nevertheless create the conditions for a placedness without rooting.

Now as I type this my shuffle graces me with the Tony Allen song "Kindness" – in which they repeatedly sing "dont take my kindness for weakness." Quite fitting for the subject at hand... [kindness]

FS: Yesterday a feminist friend explained me her research on tags used in on-line pornography. She calls herself a sexworker. She said: Tags are an infrastructure for cruising

LC: This is reminiscent of the hankie code right? Where those cruising in public or in a queer space index their desires and interests with a particular hankie color and a particular positioning (left back pocket or right back pocket). What strikes me as different and troubling about tags as an infrastructure of cruising is how tags can be used for ease of surveillance and are part of an archive in a way hankie code is much more contigent and ephemeral and also a way of being seen evasively. Theres a camouflage aspect to public cruising. How do we camouflage our desires and intents online?

MG: In Delhi in the 1990s for lesbians it was a rose on the table, never in a vase.

-> see entry under Diversity and Emoji

FS: Some of the Free, Libre and Open Source tools and services that bind this conversatioN: a mailinglist (Mailman) and a file-sharing service (Nextcloud) hosted by Transmediale, an online editor for collaborative editing (etherpad) installed on the server of Constant, a conferencing tool provided by Framasoft (Jitsi Meet), an event-scheduling poll (Dudle) at the Technische Universitaet Dresden plus shadow libraries (LibGen, Sci-Hub, Memory of the world) providing access to many of the books and articles we read. Each of these tools are taken care of by independent groups, that depend on different politics and economies but somehow link together into an interdependent infrastructure.