New York City Cultural Activism and the Prefiguration of a Postcapitalist World

This dissertation is an ethnography of New York cultural producers who seek to embody the world they want to see in the here and now. I explore how a loosely knit community of artists, activists, archivists, academics, and militant researchers coalesce in the production of Interference Archive (IA), a publicly accessible archive of social movement culture in Brooklyn. Through an investigation of IA’s methods and practices—open access to the collections and the project, flexible participation, horizontal organization, and voluntarism—I consider how the autonomy of the individual becomes the precondition for the autonomy of the collective. The dissertation lays out its argument in two parts. The first concerns the relationship between aesthetics and politics, and the second, the contradictions of collaboration. I argue that the enactment of the political at IA involves an aesthetic ruse: an archive that collects the aesthetics of politics—representational objects such as posters, banners, pamphlets, zines, buttons, etc.—reactivates these objects through a politics of aesthetics. That is, the image of the political that emerges at IA is not reducible to the representational objects in its collections, to the existing practices and institutions through which a more just order is proposed or demanded. Rather, the political is refashioned in the dynamic context of IA’s own aesthetic economy—the ways the objects and people in the space are configured—and the forms of sense perception, encounter, and sociality this aesthetic economy engenders. The second part describes a hitherto unexamined ethnographic refusal—not a refusal of recognition or representation—but of “col-labor-ation.” My subjects refused to contribute their labor time to the production of academic knowledge qua commodity. This refusal provides the grist for an interrogation of collaborative anthropology’s insistence that the political valence of ethnographic collaboration lies in the ethical commitment to the other enacted through forms of co-production (co- designing, researching, interpreting, writing). I argue that by emphasizing the “co-” (together, with, jointly, mutually, shared) in forms of co-production, popular theories and practices of collaborative anthropology have collapsed the political into the ethical, and obscured the dual nature of the labor that is at the center of collaboration. I suggest that collaboration, as both a method and a problem, is best approached not as a remedy for anthropology’s ongoing complicity with power, but as a potentially generative contradiction that cannot be undone with recourse to an ethics (of self and other) or the liberal logics of a ‘fair return.