The Anthropocene, Affect, and Autoethnography?

Freedom is not simply something that can be stood outside of and decided upon in terms of freedom to or freedom from. Freedom is fluid, dynamic, and ecological, existing where, in the volatility and unpredictability of the act, difference can be made. In the practice of experience making that Stewart refers to as “worlding,” there exists the processually differentiating capacity to bring to life encounters and events in which the energy of the future lies in the speculative force and living potential of the always not yet known. Autoethnographies are not to be considered epistemological groundings that assert what they mean, or to state what they are or might be in some metaphysics of the future. Working instead with “futurity,” autoethnographic doing is at the forefront, present in the possibilities of the more-than and the always new possibilities that might be just around the corner. The future is never fixed and always lives within the unexpected notyetness of each new encounter. In the constant processualism of practice, there is a need “to be willing to surprise yourself writing things you didn’t think you thought. Letting examples burgeon requires using inattention as a writing tool.” In these first processual steps there is a sensing of Haraway’s advice about “staying with the trouble.” She asks, “What must be cut and what must be tied if multispecies flourishing on earth, including human and other-than-human beings in kinship, are to have a chance?” Haraway indicates that within “the bonds of the Anthropocene and (the) Capitalocene” we live in worlds that are dominated by the ethics, values, and practices of neoliberalism. The ways of institutionally organizing economic, social, and cultural behaviors and practices constructed to support this involve highly individualized and forcibly individualizing forms of doing and making ways in the world that have become characterized predominantly by practices of self-making—what she calls “autopoiesis.” Autopoietic systems act as “self-producing autonomous units with self defined spatial and temporal boundaries that tend to be centrally controlled, homeostatic, and predictable.” Therefore, our inquiries, our ways of doing, and our ways of living in the world can also described, again through the use of Stewart’s term, as “worlding,” and need to be addressed through wholly different ways of being. The self-making, individualizing, and