The Greek prefix auto- means ‘self’²; in autoarachnology the auto refers to a self entangled in and constituted through its experiences, practices, influences, interests, and concerns. Autoarachnology is not concerned with identity or a sense of consolidated self, it understands the self as intrinsically linked to its context, constructed through its relations³. As carla bergman and Nick Montgomery put it “The self-enclosed individual is a fiction of Empire⁴, just like the State. ‘I’ am already a crowd, enmeshed in others.”⁵ It is also auto- as in autotheory: an approach that mixes research and theory with narrative accounts of personal experience. Practising through experience, theorising through practice, autotheory focuses on situatedness in the world, in context. It puts emphasis on embodied experience and subjectivity and understands the dangers of pretended neutrality and objectivity.⁶

¹ Text written by me for the first iteration of autoarachnology. Information on Spider/webs from:
“Spider/webs.” Arachnophilia, https://arachnophilia.net/scanning-the-web/ . Accessed 16 May 2022.
² “Auto.” Etymonline, https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=auto-&ref=searchbar_searchhint. Accessed 16 May 2022.
³ Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Troubles: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press, 2016.
⁴ The term ‘Empire’ is used by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in their book Empire (Harvard University Press, 2000) to describe postmodern Imperialism. In Joyful Militancy (AK Press, 2017) carla bergman and Nick Montgomery specify: “We use ‘Empire’ to name the organised destruction under which we live. Through its attempt to render everything profitable and controllable, Empire administers a war with other forms of life. [...] Prisons and cops lurk alongside discourses of inclusion and tolerance. Empire works to monopolise the whole field of life, crushing autonomy and inducing dependence.”
⁵ bergman, carla, and Nick Montgomery. Joyful Militancy: Building Thriving Resistance in Toxic Times. AK Press, 2017, p.10.
⁶ Zwartjes, Arianne. “Autotheory as Rebellion: On Research, Embodiment, and Imagination in Creative Nonfiction.” Michigan Quarterly Review, July 2019, https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/mqr/2019/07/autotheory-as-rebellion-on-research-embodiment-and-imagination-in-creative-nonfiction/. Accessed 16 May 2022.

Arachnids are mostly eight-legged invertebrate animals, often the term refers to spiders, but the family also includes scorpions, ticks, and harvestmen.² The name can be traced back to Arachne, a mythological figure mentioned by the Roman poet Ovid. Arachne was famous for being extremely skilled at weaving. When the goddess Athena visits her disguised as an old woman and Arachne refuses to acknowledge she learned this skill from Athena herself, the goddess challenges her into a weaving contest. Athena’s web depicts herself as a glorious heroine and includes examples of how mortals who challenged the gods were punished, while Arachne represents scenes of mortals being sexually harassed by gods. Athena reads Arachne’s tapestry denunciating the god’s immoral behaviour as an insult and is enraged by the skillfulness and quality of Arachne’s weaving. The goddess punishes Arachne by destroying her work and beating her, which shames the mortal to the point of hanging herself. The goddess, feeling pity at this sight, decides to save Arachne’s life by transforming her into a spider. In her new shape Arachne and her offspring would continue weaving on for centuries to come.³

In antiquity, weaving was a female-connotated activity and constituted one of the few means of artistic expression available to women.⁴ It was also used as a common metaphor for writing and poetry. The word ‘text’ is derived from Latin ‘texere’ which means weaving.⁵ Thoughts were understood as threads that the writer skillfully weaves into each other.⁶ The arts of entangling strings: weaving, knitting, crocheting, and embroidering, were considered female domestic duties long into the 20th century. Like most other tasks women performed in the house, these activities were not considered labour, thus not remunerated with a wage, which resulted in dependency on male family members. Furthermore, it formed part of the ongoing process of primitive accumulation: the theft of labour and land and the resulting wealth imbalance necessary to establish capitalist relations.⁷ Along with the devaluation of women came the devaluation of their skill sets and knowledges, such as the textile crafts. But what if these strings and all the different techniques of looping and knotting them can become vehicles for thinking otherwise, for telling otherwise narratives, for weaving Donna Haraway’s net bags that contain stories without masculinist heroes, stories that focus on gathering and connecting, on allowing things to exist alongside each other, without imposing a hierarchy? Stories that are opportunistic, contingent, relational, sympoietic, and consequential?⁸

¹ Text written by me for the first iteration of autoarachnology. Information on Spider/webs from:
“Spider/webs.” Arachnophilia, https://arachnophilia.net/scanning-the-web/. Accessed 16 May 2022.
² “Arachnid.” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arachnid. Accessed 16 May 2022.
³ A.S. Kline (translator). “Ovid’s Metamorphoses: Book IV” The Ovid Collection, https://ovid.lib.virginia.edu/trans/Metamorph6.htm. Accessed 16 May 2022.
⁴ Kerill O’Neill (ed.). “Weaving and Writing: Censorship in Arachne.” The Colby College Community Web, 2022, https://web.colby.edu/ovid-censorship/censorship-in-ovids-myths/weaving-and-writing-censorship-in-arachne. Accessed 16 May 2022.
⁵ “Text (n.).” Etymonline, https://www.etymonline.com/word/text#etymonline_v_10699. Accessed 16 May 2022.
⁶ Kerill O’Neill (ed.). “Weaving and Writing: Censorship in Arachne.” The Colby College Community Web, 2022, https://web.colby.edu/ovid-censorship/censorship-in-ovids-myths/weaving-and-writing-censorship-in-arachne. Accessed 16 May 2022.
⁷ Federici, Silvia. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation. Penguin Classics, 2021.
⁸ Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Troubles: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press, 2016, p.49.

-logy is a Greek suffix that means ‘the study of’. A relative of logos ‘word, speech, statement, discourse’ it is specifically linked to spoken language. The word probably stems from PIE (Proto-Indo-European) leg-, which means ‘to gather, to collect’.² Autoarachnology is the study of the self as a spider, the study of the self as a weaver of webs, stories, texts. It is a mode of thinking, a way of situating oneself, a lens through which to look at practices, artistic or otherwise, as ambiguous, dependent on many different actors and contexts, shaped by different factors, organic, dynamic, divergent from the clearly definable practices that are easily marketable and usually expected from (young) artists.³ Autoarachnology conceptualises not only artistic or cultural practices, but also subjectivities as enmeshed, as leaking out of the boundaries of your/my/our skin, extending into an intersubjective web. Becoming a spider, following the threads, can help to understand and make explicit, while focusing on a specific aspect, and tracing its path through my experiences and influences, weaving them together into a tentative grasp.

¹ Text written by me for the first iteration of autoarachnology. Information on Spider/webs from:
“Spider/webs.” Arachnophilia, https://arachnophilia.net/scanning-the-web/. Accessed 16 May 2022.
² “-logy.” Etymonline, https://www.etymonline.com/word/-logy#etymonline_v_12399. Accessed 16 May 2022.
³ Shin-Jie Lee, Emily and reinaart vanhoe. “A Warm Welcome.” Art for (and within) a Citizen Scene: A Look at Art Primarily Active in the Context of Daily Practices, edited by Iris Ferrer, Emily Shin-Jie Lee, reinaart vanhoe, and Julia Wilhelm, Onomatopee, 2022, pp. 5-9.