endersstocker

I am absolutely fascinated with the notion of ‘interpretive labor’. It can be applied to feminist theory, critical race theory, queer theory, decolonization, etc. Your essay ‘Beyond Power/Knowledge: an exploration of the relation of power, ignorance and stupidity’ was very informative. Do you have any plans to expand on this concept? Perhaps a book?

Might the cultural sensibility that came to be referred to as postmodernism best be seen as a prolonged meditation on all the technological changes that never happened? The question struck me as I watched one of the recent Star Wars movies. The movie was terrible, but I couldn’t help but feel impressed by the quality of the special effects. Recalling the clumsy special effects typical of fifties sci-fi films, I kept thinking how impressed a fifties audience would have been if they’d known what we could do by now—only to realize, “Actually, no. They wouldn’t be impressed at all, would they? They thought we’d be doing this kind of thing by now. Not just figuring out more sophisticated ways to simulate it.”

(Source)

I was in the same boat a couple years back. My partner and I didn’t know any other anarchists in our city, so we went looking. As it turned out, one of our neighbors shared a lot of our political commitments. We planned a ‘find each other’ anarchist/anarcho-curious convergence in a park and hung posters around town. Somewhere around 40 folks showed up. We couldn’t find any radical projects to join, so we started one, NO BORDERS: Louisville’s Radical Lending Library.

Public spaces, it seems, always become the domain of the ‘default person’ (i.e. white, hetero, cis, affluent males) in our society. The Internet is no different.

I’ve drawn a lot of influence from your work as well as that of whiteness abolition groups such as Bring the Ruckus and Race Traitor. What do you make of the BTR dual power claim that:

In the United States, the key to abolishing capitalism is to attack white supremacy. In a nation whose economic and social structure has depended on slavery, segregation, genocide, and reservation, to attack whiteness is strike a blow at the pillars of American capitalism and the state. (Source)