Barbelith Underground > Head Shop > Internet Power Dynamics

real life power dynamics do not necessarily influence such structures within this virtual space that we call barbelith

I disagree: I think the realities of our lives shape us as thinkers and as writers. Although I know some people really revel in the 'fictionsuit' thing, I'm more with de Beauvoir: "It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our lives that we must draw our strength to live and our reasons for living."

I don't take for granted my right to literacy and the leisure to discuss ideas. For me, it's part of the work of continuous revolution to overturn the power structures that systematically exclude some kinds of voices. Actions to challenge racism and other forms of supremacy are the necessary outflow in my practice of the decolonising political process I'm engaged with. The political engagement is an essential building block in the mental structures I have built in order to have a voice in the world, to not just accept my role as a object of others but to insist on my own subjectivity and my right to be heard.

Here's some bell hooks that I find very relevant, in which she discusses the concrete realities of peoples' lives and how revolutionary ideas of critical thinking affect them, in relation to Paulo Freire's work such as 'Pedagogy of the oppressed':

"Because the colonising forces are so powerful in this white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, it seems that black people are always having to renew a commitment to a decolonising political process that should be fundamental to our lives and is not. And so Freire's work, in its global understanding of liberation struggles, always emphasizes that this is the important initial stage of transformation - that historical moment when one begins to think critically about the self and identity in relation to one's political circumstance. Again, this is one of the concepts in Freire's work - and in my own work - that is frequently misunderstood by readers in the United States. Many times people will say to me that I seem to be suggesting that it is enough for individuals to change how they think. And you see, even their use of the enough tells us something about the attitude they bring to this question. It has a patronizing sound, one that does not convey any heartfelt understanding of how a change in attitude (though not a completion of any transformative process) can be significant for colonized/oppressed people. Again and again Freire has had to remind readers that he never spoke of conscientization as an end in itself, but always as it is joined by meaningful praxis. In many different ways Freire articulates this. I like when he talks about the necessity of verifying in praxis what we know in consciousness:

'That means, and let us emphasize it, that human beings do not get beyond the concrete situation, the condition in which they find themselves, only by their conscisousness or their intentions - however good those intentions may be. The possibilities that I had for transcending the narrow limits of a five-by-two-foot cell in which I was locked after the April 1964 coup d'etat were not sufficient to change my condition as a prisoner. I was always in the cell, deprived of freedom, even if I could imagine the outside world. But on the other hand, the praxis is not blind action, deprived of intention or finality. It is action and reflection. Men and women are human beings because they are historically constituted as beings of praxis, and in the process they have become as capable of transforming the world - of giving it meaning.'

I think that so many progressive political movements fail to have lasting impact in the United States precisely because there is not enough understanding of praxis."

Another thing I get from your post Werwolf, is that potentially this can be a liberatory space, on Barbelith, where people are able to find voice that they have been denied elsewhere? I can see that, but I think that's not going to happen unless we are explicit about the revolutionary political process that involves. In order to come to voice, those who have been silenced have to come to terms with the pain they have been inflicted with. In order to come to voice, those who have been told their opinions are of no importance must find a sense of safety and confidence, and we can all do things which either poke vulnerable people in the eye or acknowlegde the difficulty of the enterprise of coming to voice and laud each others' efforts.

The way I see it, there isn't a level playing field or anything like one. I am interested in doing anything which recruits people into a conscious political process whereby they are able to realise the subjective conditions which have created the self they inhabit, and are able to fully engage with the abundant creative life which we all deserve. Without a conscious political process challenging the givens, how can the inequities of the systems of dominance fail to reproduce themselves? I guess I get from Marx that ideological systems continually reproduce themselves through our actions: if we are not consciously acting to dismantle unjust power systems we will be acting as we have been trained since infancy, to prop up the oppressive cultural systems.