I’ve been wondering about what the spectrum of violence looks like further to the left, before assault, before harassment, before intimidation. What are some small acts of violence that we can detect well before there is physical contact between bodies? Maybe by noticing and changing these small injustices, I’ll be better-positioned to address the big ones.

In many radical communities, “consent” is a focal point for governing the interaction of bodies, especially sexual interactions. Before you touch my body, check what I’m up for and respect my answer. Consent is the antidote to assault.

What happens if we pay attention to consent in situations that have nothing to do with people touching? Could you seek consent before your sound system fills my airspace?

Can we push consent beyond the bounds of human interactions? What would a cow say if I asked for consent to barbecue her?

There are many cases where even the request for consent is harassment. An unwanted sexual advance can severely limit my freedom to participate in a group, especially if the advancing party has more physical or social power than me.

If consent governs physical interactions, what mechanisms can regulate other less intense interactions? When I speak: how can I express myself in a way that respects your subjectivity? What is my posture saying? How can I listen? What can I read from your body language?

How can I own my subjectivity and celebrate yours?

Are there little micro-behaviours, expressions we can practice?

“You should.” → “You could.”

“You’re attractive.” → “I’m attracted to you.”

“Life is like…” → “My experience is like…”

What happens if we extend consent to include many people simultaneously? What can we all agree on? How might we grow that island of agreement to fit more people? Can we make a map of the islands? Can we build bridges between them?

When I was a good patriarchal young man, I always tried to inflict my subjectivity on others. You might have seen the feminist placard, “Objectivity Is Male Subjectivity”.

The collective decision-making process I participated in during the Occupy Movement was a training ground where I learned how to be much more careful about owning my experience without invalidating others. Rather than saying, “People are like…” I learned to say, “My experience is like…”

In many political spaces, we attempt to argue on objective terms: here are the facts, these are the definitions, let me persuade you of their rightness. This is an excellent method for wasting hours of talk with no tangible outcome. But what happens when we stop trying to float above our messy subjectivity and embrace it?

What gets me so excited about collective decision-making is when the process shifts the participants from a purely objective/analytic mode into an affective/relational mode. Instead of competing with facts, we inquire with feelings. Of course facts are important, but it’s much easier for me to hear them when you pay attention to my feelings. When each of us owns our subjectivity without trying to collapse others’, then I can see my place in the spectrum of perspectives. My understanding has grown, without you having had to persuade me of anything.

p.s. if this little article has whet your appetite, I highly recommend this essay by Emmi Bevensee which examines consent and power in much greater detail.

p.p.s. if you want to support my writing, you can throw me a few bucks on Patreon

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Photo by criggchef

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It … proceeds from a perspective that already presumes a neoliberal subject and an economic mode of governance in the face of social and/or political problems. ‘How do we manage and incentivise individual competitive economic agents?’ In doing so, it not only codes for that subject, we might argue that it also reproduces that subject.

Excerpted from a analysis by Rachel O’Dwyer, on how the blockchain and Ethereum could support the commons. Here’s she looks at the ‘subjectivity’ issue, i.e. the anthropological model presupposed by the coders of Ethereum:

Rachel O’Dwyer:

“First of all, What Kind of Subjectivity Does the Blockchain Support? In the development of consensus algorithms and monetary incentives, there’s an assumption that we can delegate much of the messiness of human relations to algorithmic governance, anticipate the motivations of individual actors and foreclose destructive behaviours. This comes back to this question of trust, something I’ve already written about in relation to Bitcoin. The claim being made is not that we can engineer trust in friends, institutions or governments, but that we might dispense with them altogether in favour of what Bill Maurer, Taylor C. Nelms and Lana Swartz refer to as ‘trust in the code.’ As outlined in the Bitcoin whitepaper, proof-of-work is not a new form of trust, but the abdication of trust altogether as social confidence in favour of an algorithmic regulation. In other words, it doesn’t matter whether I believe in my fellow peers just so long as I believe in the technical efficiency of the blockchain protocol. What kinds of subjectivity do we want to algorithmically inscribe into our systems? Blockchain start-ups begin from the assumption that there is no trust and no community, only individual economic agents acting in self-interest. Fair enough, you might think, it’s precisely the fact that projects like Ethereum engineer confidence and provide economic incentives for contribution that may distinguish it from other services like Freenet. But it also proceeds from a perspective that already presumes a neoliberal subject and an economic mode of governance in the face of social and/or political problems. ‘How do we manage and incentivise individual competitive economic agents?’ In doing so, it not only codes for that subject, we might argue that it also reproduces that subject.”

Photo by t-miki

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