A series in which I muse about the inanimate objects I fuck with (not quite as literally as in the film Titane, but still).
There are certain things that feel like gateway objects to another tier of adulthood. Not just the obvious ones like mortgages or diplomas, but smaller milestones. Recently, I acquired (read: asked for and was gifted) a printer. It now sits proudly in my apartment, radiating a sense of mature capability.
I’d had enough. No more forwarding documents to friends, no more vague promises to “print it later,” no more last-minute pilgrimages to copy shops. I can now produce inked paper on demand, like a self-sufficient little state.
And it does feel rather significant, especially as someone allegedly belonging to a generation of so-called “digital natives.” A small, practical nod to the real, material world. How often does one really need a printer, you ask? Rarely. And yet, just often enough that not having one felt like a small but growing dependency on this fickle, volatile little world.
I love print
I’d been chewing on that word, dependency, or rather, what we take to be its more flattering counterpart: autonomy. The ability to meet one’s own needs. To rely on oneself. To have everything in order and to be, as it were, living by one’s own laws (autos = self and nomos = custom or law, in ancient Greek, FYI).
Philosophy has long had a soft spot for this idea (yes, here she goes again. If you can’t bear my incessant need to flirt with dead critical thinkers who, for better or for worse, shaped the way we think and act today, now’s your time to scroll down/swipe/run for dear life). The image of the autonomous individual, most famously articulated by Immanuel Kant, imagines a rational subject who governs himself by reason, rather than merely submitting to external authority or inclination. He’s a kind of moral sovereign unto his own life. Being self-governing is the name of the Kantian game (and of course this self-government must align with universal moral law and duty, yada yada yada).
It’s a very appealing fantasy. Clean, contained, and wholly self-sufficient. One imagines such a person would own a printer. Our friend Immanuel imagined such a person to be truly free.
Simone de Beauvoir: not just Sartre’s arm-candy
Since then, many have pushed back on the image of the fully self-governing individual. Simone de Beauvoir (a personal favourite, whose very bisexual life, full of lovers and clandestine entanglements, is a continuous source of inspiration) reminds us that we do not live in a vacuum. We always act within a world shaped by others, by relationships, norms, and shared meanings.
These connections don’t just limit what we can do (my freedom to act is constrained by others’ freedom to act); they also make our actions possible in the first place. Our freedom is always situated: we make choices within circumstances we have not chosen, and among other people whose freedom matters just as much as our own. When another person recognises me as a subject (‘hey, you!’), as someone capable of making choices and pursuing projects of my own, they help create the conditions in which my freedom can meaningfully unfold. My projects, decisions, and identity take shape within a shared world, one in which other people are not merely obstacles to my freedom, but participants in its possibilities.
So, in this sense, we could understand autonomy not as pure and utter self-sufficiency, nor as a synonym for absolute independence. For our dearest Simone, who is always right, the other person is both a possible limit to my freedom and someone whose own freedom gives mine its ethical significance. For autonomy to unfold, we require others. We need a shared world (sorry not sorry, Immanuel).
But what if there were no other human subjects to recognise us, or limit us? What if we were truly isolated?
I went to see a play called The Wall at the ITA in Amsterdam the other day. It follows a woman who wakes up in a hunting lodge to find herself completely cut off from the rest of the world by an invisible barrier. No matter how much she pushes and kicks and screams, there’s no way out, and no confirmation whatsoever that anything beyond it still exists. What’s left is just herself, a stretch of land, a dog, and a cow.
A play like this makes for an interesting window onto the world of human relations, precisely by imagining their absence. Who are we when nobody else is watching? How do we make meaning then?
And while a story of human isolation and survival seems to offer the perfect conditions for a plea for absolute autonomy (she works the land, survives, becomes radically self-sufficient), it actually ends up reinforcing De Beauvoir’s point. Even here, cut off from almost everything, the protagonist’s world is shaped by relationships. Her actions affect the animals and the land, and they, in turn, shape her.
What keeps this woman (and, dare I say, us) going is not independence, but attachment, care. The steady insistence that something still matters, that something still has meaning. The cow needs her. The dog waits for her. Even in moments when the will to live feels remote, it’s these small commitments that tether her to meaning.
And perhaps that is what makes the play such a compelling window onto our own relationships. It suggests that autonomy does not simply survive our attachments, but may actually depend on them.
I believe companionship, in its best form, makes visible how autonomy comes alive in relation.
For a few hours, two (or more!) people agree to enter a shared world. Companionship, at its best, enables a kind of attentiveness that is steady, responsive, and alive to what is there. In everyday life, that kind of attention is often crowded out by function, roles, and expectations, where people risk being encountered less as subjects and more as tasks to be managed.
Those I meet are often highly autonomous people in the conventional sense of the word: capable, independent, self-sufficient, sometimes even with printers of their own (yet are they fully functional? There’s only one way to find out). And yet, they seem to understand that autonomy, when boiled down to pure self-sufficiency, leaves out something essential. What they bring to the table is often a certain curiosity: a willingness to explore what lies beyond function and routine. They value mutual recognition; they seek something real. The experience of being seen, met, responded to; not in terms of utility or purpose, but as the singular human beings they are, as we all are. And I speak from experience when I say they offer the same quality of attention in return.
Contrary to what many people outside this world seem to think, most people I encounter treat me, and indeed take pleasure in treating me, as a fully fledged human subject, with a will and worth of my own. Not that I have anything against a little consensual objectification in the bedroom, but we’ll leave that particular philosophical inquiry for another time.
What emerges is a shared world, with shared meaning. A liminal space set apart from the usual pace of things, where nothing has to be reduced too quickly to usefulness, and where simply being there, alongside anything and everything meaningful, sexy, and shamelessly indulgent, takes centre stage.
TL;DR: In the words of my decidedly more tech-savvy girlfriend Elle Voss once she got her own specimen up and running: “I am a God. I am a God of the printer.”
P.S. Said tech-temptress took the above snaps of me and used a scanner, which is, of course, an entirely different ball game deserving of its very own philosophical dissection.