Bryan Endersstocker
Bryan Endersstocker was born on a small island in the Mediterranean to a family of muscat grape farmers. He came from hard‑working, stained‑ankle vineyard stock, but the farming island life never appealed to him. Bryan brooded as a boy, absorbing the work of Kierkegaard, Camus, and Simmons (Gene Simmons, that is) and studiously taught himself to play the harpsichord in the abandoned church on the island.
One day he befriended a gypsy who had floated to the isolated farming village on a piece of driftwood, along with her sifaka, Florica. They were escaping the brutal repression of the Roma people in France. Bryan led them to the abandoned church to hide—where, upon seeing the harpsichord, Florica began playing the most beautiful gypsy, harpsichord music. Together, Florica and Bryan started a band called the Absurd, which produced baroque-style music with a gypsy flair and asemic lyrics which sounded like whale calls.
Bryan grew tired of always being confused with the right-wing black metal band from Germany, when they played shows. So one day, after a show in Louisville, Kentucky, he bade farewell to Florica (who was in any case beginning to trouble him with her increasingly more meaningful lyrics) and thumbed a ride from a couple of shady-looking clowns who dropped him off in front of the NO BORDERS library. And the rest, as they say, is unterseeboot.
The artist’s patriarchy says, “The creative man is exempt from interpretive labor by his efforts to endlessly interpret himself.” His privilege (and ignorance) is excused and upheld by his perceived sensitivity, no matter how shallow the affect.
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I’m coming to believe that like many other terms ‘human’ holds simultaneously liberating and oppressive definition and potential. There is a sense in which the human category is fluid, describing beings with whom your own being finds deepest resonance. Then there is the biological species category Homo sapiens sapiens. These two categories are conflated by the shared term ‘human.’ While the former is defined by its subjectivity and contingency, the latter is demarcated by its objectivity and rigid certainty.
When one argues that the human prefers the human she may think of herself as appealing to an invariable reality (or law), when in actuality she is merely expressing the existence of empathic affinity—the seeing of oneself (to varying degrees) in the other.
For some the human being is of a small subset of Homo sapiens sapiens, for others it extends well beyond the same.
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What is the role of the cashier? Surely it is not that of the helper. The cashier is, at base, the low-level security guard. The cashier is the executor of arbitrary access guidelines. Her most basic job function is to ensure that if one attempts to access a thing without “possessing” a defined number of points (USD in my context) that one will meet violence (or the threat thereof) at the hands of the appropriate person. In order to mask the arbitrary and violent nature of the relationship between customer and cashier, the cashier must convince the customer (and himself) that his role is that of the helper.
What then is the difference between the cashier and the bureaucrat of the totalitarian state dispensing rations? I’d suggest that the primary difference is in form of the categorical “gun” held to each of their heads. With the latter it is concentrated: if she does not uphold the guidelines of access, she faces the literal gun of her supervisor. With the former it is diffuse: if he does not uphold the guidelines of access, he faces the gun, not of his supervisor, but of the police officer, or, in an even more dispersed form, the metaphorical gun that is the threat of homelessness and starvation.
Beyond anti-capitalist, beyond anti-market, beyond anti-currency, I am anti-ownership. Ownership is the metaphysical abstraction that masks a particular arrangement of social relationships mediated by violence. If we wish to bring our dialogue back to dis-alienated and concrete human experience, perhaps we should be discussing access (and the coercion that limits and prevents access) in place of ownership. This isn’t a new idea. It is, however, unfortunate that most of the radical dialogue remains situated within a framework that legitimizes ownership.
![Money: because promises are best made and kept looking down the barrel of a gun [!]](http://imaginenoborders.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/money.png "Money: because promises are best made and kept looking down the barrel of a gun [!]")
What is the role of the cashier? Surely it is not that of the helper. The cashier is, at base, the low-level security guard. The cashier is the executor of arbitrary access guidelines. Her most basic job function is to ensure that if one attempts to access a thing without “possessing” a defined number of points (USD in my context) that one will meet violence (or the threat thereof) at the hands of the appropriate person. In order to mask the arbitrary and violent nature of the relationship between customer and cashier, the cashier must convince the customer (and himself) that his role is that of the helper.
Beyond anti-capitalist, beyond anti-market, beyond anti-currency, I am anti-ownership. Ownership is the metaphysical abstraction that masks a particular arrangement of social relationships mediated by violence. If we wish to bring our dialogue back to dis-alienated and concrete human experience, perhaps we should be discussing access (and the coercion that limits and prevents access) in place of ownership. This isn’t a new idea. It is, however, unfortunate that most of the radical dialogue remains situated within a framework that legitimizes ownership.
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