Being autonomous: a squatting collective’s quest to build community
Creators: name: Weldon, Timothy D.
Publisher: name: No Publisher Supplied
Year: 2023

description: This dissertation examines what it means to live autonomously within a community, and how this feels within one’s everyday life. It presents material from nearly two years of participant observation, including one year of full-time residence in, an autonomous squatting collective “Klinika” in Prague, Czechia. This dissertation describes the background of that squatting community, the types of people that were there, and their (largely anti-capitalist) motivations. It specifically focuses on the autonomous nature of the squat and how the practices that developed out of this autonomy created an unpatterned patterning of social life in the center. It describes in detail how the collectivization of individual autonomous actions shaped the space; its autonomous and decentralized personal decision-making practices and “consensus by subtraction” model for collective decisions; as well as how the community provisioned, (re)produced, and dispersed food and things. Based on thick ethnographic description, this dissertation draws three main conceptual conclusions regarding an integrated anarchist autonomy. First, I argue that the community lived off the abundance of waste from the capitalist system for food and materials, which they re- and upcycled into “autonomous goods” that were simultaneously no one’s but also everyone’s. As these autonomous goods did not fit readily into notions of property, I conceptualize the rights to these things through “usage regimes” mediated by socio-spatial understandings of what people could use, when, how, and where. These regimes of provisioning and usage required little individual input, yet took care of everyone. As such, I consider these activists urban hunter-gatherers who were created, and lived within, a contemporary version of an autonomous affluent society. Second, I demonstrate that the autonomous nature of people’s behaviors in the center created a feeling of spatio-temporal fluidity or compression as the center was constantly and rapidly changing. I liken this feeling to the incomprehensible spontaneity of the Dao, which was be both disorienting and empowering. Within this flow, individuals enacted what I call an “anarchist autonomy,” that is to say, a version of autonomy that is integrated within one’s social surroundings (akin to eastern understandings of the integrated individual), and uses anarchist principles of mutual aid, solidarity, and sharing to tie people and the community together. Third, while this autonomous collectivized individualism enhanced differentiation and empowered people on the whole, there were also frictions in the community, as some highly capable individuals became more influential within public and the community’s institutional settings. However, despite power stagnating at times and situations, influence in the community was fluid and differed across the different needs and tasks of the community. As such, I interpret the social and power dynamics within this community more akin to an “intersectional heterarchy”, than the horizontal community to which the center aspired. Ultimately, this dissertation brings together scholarly work on autonomous communities, anarchist thought, and Daoist philosophy to formulate an understanding of autonomy as a personal, proactive, and empowering feeling (which is best measured on a spectrum) that a person experiences throughout the infinite intersectional interactions of their daily life. Within this integrated anarchist autonomy, rather than being limited, people’s personal autonomy was accentuated by being a part of a collective of autonomous individuals living within an integrated anarchist autonomy.