Autonomy as a concept has been developed in many different contexts. Designs for the Pluriverse explores it from a more theoretical perspective by attending to notions of ‘biological autonomy’ as articulated by Maturana and Varela, linked to their notion of ‘Autopoiesis’. Escobar then addresses autonomy in the social and cultural context with a focus on Latin American perspectives on autonomy, or autonomía - much of which arise from long traditions of thought and action by indigenous and place-based cultures across that land, as well as academic contributions (which maybe are less removed from social struggles than we in the West might expect).

Designs for the Pluriverse Index:

• 5, 165–66, 174, 253n11;
• biological, 168, 171;
• definitions of, 173, 175;
• development and, 167, 172–73, 184;
• forms of, 173;
• Nasa activists on, 199;
• ontonomy and, 32, 172–73, 178, 184;
• sociocultural domain of, 172–76;
• territorial, 174–75, 186–88, 187

I feel like this quote, in how it interweaves the ‘biological autonomy’ ideas of Maturana and Varela with Latin American concepts of social and cultural autonomy, pluriversality and political ontology, captures a lot of what I love so much about this book - not only is its approach radically free in how it pulls and combines ideas from so many different contexts, but it also combines them in profound ways, exemplifying that saying that ‘the part is a door to the whole’. It expresses to me a profound spiritual commitment to life itself - not just his life, not only human life, truly all life - that exceeds the boundaries of ‘political thought’, and in doing so gives us a glimpse at the fractal interconnectedness of everything we know about being.

a key feature of both biological and social or cultural autonomy [is that] systems can undergo structural changes and adopt various structures in response to interactions with the environment, but they have to maintain a basic organization in order to remain as the units they are. Historical interaction among autopoietic units (worlds, one might say) often takes on a recurrent character, establishing a pattern of mutually congruent structural changes that allows the respective units to maintain their organization (pluriversal interactions). This eventually leads to the coordination of behavior, communication, and social phenomena through co-ontogenies, resulting in all kinds of complex units (codesign); in humans, this process takes place through language.

• Autonomous Design and the Politics of Relationality and the Communal p.170

Biological Autonomy

• In fact, the key to autonomy is that a living system finds its way into the next moment by acting appropriately out of its own resources. Francisco Varela, Ethical Know-How: Action, Wisdom, and Cognition (1999, p.11).

Social and Cultural Autonomy in Latin America

Autonomous Design and the Politics of Relationality and the Communal p.166, quoting sound bites that emerged from an ‘open university’ event in Popayán, Colombia:

It is time to lose fear about designing our dreams, always with our feet on the earth. We must not renounce the right to fall in love with the territory. Autonomies are not institutions but forms of relation. We need autonomy precisely because we are different. We are building a community of communities. Decommercialize speech. The secret is being like children and like water: joyful, transparent, creative, and in movement. We cannot build our own realities with more of the same. We already accomplished the possible; let us now go for the impossible!

Autonomous Design and the Politics of Relationality and the Communal pp.172-176

The Mexican development critic Gustavo Esteva has provided the following useful distinction from the perspective of the tenacious resistance to development, modernity, and globalization by indigenous and peasant communities in southern Mexico. He distinguishes among three situations in terms of the norms that regulate the social life of a collectivity:

• Ontonomy: When norms are established through traditional cultural practices; they are endogenous and place specific and are modified historically through embedded collective processes.
• Heteronomy: When norms are established by others (via expert knowledge and institutions); they are considered universal, impersonal, and standardized and are changed through rational deliberation and political negotiation.

• Autonomy: when the conditions exist for changing the norms from within, or the ability to change traditions traditionally. It might involve the defense of some practices, the transformation of others, and the veritable invention of new practices.

• Note 7: I heard Esteva make this distinction in a lecture in the mid-2000s. A version of it is found in Esteva (2015). This entire issue of the Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies journal is devoted to indigenous autonomy in Latin America.

“Changing traditions traditionally” could be a description of Autopoiesis; its correlate, “changing the way we change,” designates the conditions required to preserve it, that is, to shift back from heteronomy to autonomy and ontonomy, from allopoiesis to autopoiesis (for instance, from heteronomous developmentalism to life projects). So understood, ==autonomía (autonomy) describes situations in which communities relate to each other and to others (say, the State) through structural coupling while preserving the community’s autopoiesis. It tends to occur in communities that continue to have a place-based (not place-bound), relational foundation to their existence, such as indigenous and peasant communities, but it could apply to many other communities worldwide, including those in cities who are struggling to organize alternative life projects.==

• Note 8: These features of autonomía emerge from discussions by and about social movements particularly in southern Mexico (Chiapas, Oaxaca), southwestern Colombia (black and indigenous movements), and parts of South America, especially Bolivia and Ecuador. There are resonances with themes in contemporary theory (e.g., Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, 1987) and with anarchist thought.

In the context of the long historical resistance of indigenous and Afrodescendant peoples in countries like Colombia, autonomía is a cultural, ecological, and political process. It involves autonomous forms of existence and decision making. Its political dimension is incontrovertibly articulated by indigenous organizations in Colombia during the past two decades: “When we fail to have our own proposals we end up negotiating those of others. When this happens we are no longer ourselves: we are them; we become part of the system of global organized crime==”. The statement also points at the continuous slippage between autonomy and heteronomy, particularly in social movements’ relations to the State. ==There is no absolute autonomy in practice; rather, autonomía functions as a theoretical and political horizon guiding political practice. Autonomía in these cases involves the ontological condition of being communal. The Zapatista put it well in their remarkable Sixth Declaration from the Lacandon Jungle in 2005: “[our] method of autonomous government was not simply invented by the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (ezln); it comes from several centuries of indigenous resistance and from the Zapatistas’ own experience. It is the self-governance of the communities” (Subcomandante Marcos and the Zapatistas 2006, 77–78). In describing the autonomous movements in Oaxaca during the same period, Esteva similarly writes, “It is a social movement that comes from afar, from very Oaxacan traditions of social strug­gle, but it is strictly con­temporary in its nature and perspectives and view of the world. It owes its radical character to its natur­al condition: it is at the level of the earth, close to the roots…It composes its own music. It invents its own paths when t­here are none…It brings to the world a fresh and joyful wind of radical change” (2006, 36-38). Autonomía is thus exercised within a long historical background, which has led some researchers to argue that, particularly in cases of indigenous-popular insurrection such as ­those that have taken place in southern Mexico, Bolivia, and Ec­ua­dor over the past two de­cades, it would be more proper to speak of socie­ties in movement rather than social movements (Zibechi 2006). We can go farther and speak of worlds in movement (Escobar 2014). These societies/worlds in movement are moments in the exercise of cultural and po­litical autonomy—­indeed, of ontological autonomy.

• Note 10: In fact, social movements can be considered autopoietic units; established theories see movements as allopoietic, that is, produced by and referring to another logic, ­whether capital, the State, nationalism, or what have you (Escobar 1992).

• • Meri note: I love this quote and would love to read the earlier text as it rings true - it resonates with what we in the reading group called the ‘posi-core’ turn in Endnotes issue 5 - the turn away from purely negative politics towards positive expressions of how the world could be.

This characterization of autonomía is a response to the current conjuncture of destruction of communal worlds by neoliberal globalization. Interestingly, the aim of autonomous movements is not so much to change the world as to create new worlds (community, region, nation) desde abajo y a la izquierda (from the bottom and to the left), as the Zapatistas like to put it. Autonomía is not achieved by “capturing the State” but by taking back from the State key areas of social life it has colonized.== Its purpose is to create spheres of action that are autonomous from the State and new institutional arrangements to this end (such as the well-­known Juntas de Buen Gobierno, or Councils of Good Government, in Zapatista territories). At its best, autonomía seeks to establish new foundations for social life. ==Zapatista autonomy, for instance, involves the transformation of the procurement of key social functions, particularly in the following domains: eating, learning, healing, dwelling, exchanging, moving, owning (collective owner­ship of land), and working (Esteva 2013; Baschet 2014). While it would be impossible to analyze ­here how the practices in each of ­these domains have been transformed along the axis heteronomy-­autonomy, making them more autonomous, in all likelihood this experience constitutes the best example of design for autonomy.

• Note 11: According to Jerôme Baschet (2014), rebellious autonomy is the general princi­ple of both Zapatista organ­izing and their actions aimed at the reconstruction of life beyond capitalism.

Autonomía often has a decided territorial and place-­based dimension. It stems from, and re/constructs, territories of re­sis­tance and difference, as the cases of black and indigenous movements in many parts of the Amer­i­cas show; however, this applies to rural, urban, forest, and other kinds of territories in dif­fer­ent ways. In the case of the well-­known movements of the unemployed in Buenos Aires ­after the crisis of 2001, the exercise of autonomy included both a critique of capitalism and the creation of new forms of life (from daycare centers and urban gardens to f­ree clinics, the restructuring of public schools, and the recovery and self-­management of abandoned factories); in other words, it involved the creation of noncapitalist spaces and other forms of territoriality. New practices began to emerge, such as workplace democracy and horizontality in the self-­managed factories, and communitarian values rather than market values in the communities. The goal of the movements was to produce in dif­fer­ent ways and to create nonexploitative ­labor relations, not so dependent on capital and the State, over an entire range of activities involving production and social reproduction. In urban movements one can see the interplay among territorial organ­izing, collective identities, and the creation of new forms of life that is often at the core of autonomy (Mason-­Deese 2015; Sitrin 2014).

The place-­based dimension of autonomía often entails the primacy of decision making by ­women, who are historically more likely than men to resist heteronomous pressures on their territories and resources and to defend collective ways of being (e.g., Harcourt and Escobar 2005; Conway 2013). ­==There is often, in autonomía-­oriented movements, the drive to re/generate ­people’s spaces, their cultures and communities, and to reclaim the commons. ­These pro­cesses involve epistemic disobedience and foster cognitive justice (Santos 2014).== Some say that autonomía is another name for ­people’s dignity and for conviviality (Esteva 2005, 2006); at its best, autonomía is a theory and practice of interexistence and interbeing, a design for the pluriverse.

It is impor­tant to remark, however, that the capacity of communities to create and maintain their autonomy depends on their transversal skillful coordination of efforts at many levels, from the local and regional to the transnational. For autonomy to take root, “­there has to obtain the conjunction of a local regime of autonomy, understood as the basis for the self-­government of social life, and a planetary network open to the collaborative interconnection of living entities” (Baschet 2014, 72). As they f­ree themselves from the State form, autonomous collectives tend to self-­organize as a plurality of worlds through intercultural planetary networks. As the salience of the Planes de Vida and life proj­ects of communities reveals, control over a basic level of production is indispensable for an effective translocal politics of articulation. For Baschet, this basic production infrastructure is a sine qua non for liberated spaces to grow and go beyond their determination by capital, the dominant economy, and the law of value.

• Meri note: cf. Forest and Factory re the importance of control over production as a liberatory horizon.

Colombian anthropologist Astrid Ulloa (2010, 2011, 2012) similarly sees territorial autonomy as a multiscalar pro­cess. We already cited her work with indigenous groups in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in the Colombian northwest. Based on the strategies of t­hese groups, she suggests the notion of indigenous relational autonomy==, stemming from the confrontation between indigenous groups and local and translocal actors. Anchored in the ontology of the circulation of life (chapter 2), indigenous groups develop strategies in their dealings with diverse actors, from the direct local intermediaries of extractive operations and regional megadevelopment proj­ects to ==transnational ­legal regimes that not infrequently act as mechanisms of symbolic appropriation, given the neoliberal understanding of nature and forms of eco-governmentality they often deploy through, say, carbon markets and Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) schemes. In so ­doing, as she proposes, the Arhuaco, Kogui, Kankuamo, and Wiwa ­peoples engage in a complex interepistemic and interontological geopolitics aimed at creating alternative territorialities that might result, to the greatest extent pos­sible, in an effective articulation of territory, culture, and identity for the defense of their lifeworlds.

• Note 13: I should make it clear that I am discussing ­here the Latin American perspectives on autonomía. ­There are many other sources for the concept, including in Anarchism and Italian autonomous Marxism. The alter-­globalization movements of the late 1990s and early 2000s did much to bring the question of autonomy into discussion. See, for instance, Conway (2013); Osterweil (2013); Grubacic and O’Hearn (2016).