Ontology Otherwise: Enclosure, Performativity and the Un-common-ing of AI, Data and Land

Abstract

How do we promote human capacity for caring and evolving carefully together as we face ecological shifts in habitat and social relations? Using de la Cadena and Blaser’s idea of uncommon(ing) and Judith Butler’s challenge to the common, this paper considers conceptual forms of enclosure and foreclosure that stifle responses to uncertainty. It argues that ideas and identities are being foreclosed by the semantic connections and grammars of digital interaction and AI, much as commons enclose land. Regarding the physical and virtual as parallel spaces of appropriation under capitalist-colonialist cultures, the paper suggests that, if we are to care well, the data processing that feeds computation and artificial intelligence needs reconsideration at its core, much as land use does. If machine “learning” were based on a performative model, rather than something fundamentally categorical, it might avoid the obvious foreclosures of applying static models to changing contexts. Using this analysis, the paper explores data, land, access and inclusion to consider climate care and a transition from infrastructures to world-changing. In the process, the paper examines the linguistic infrastructures that inhibit change.