Alexis Shotwell > Quotes

“I argue against purism not because I want a devastated world, the Mordor of industrial capitalism emerging as from a closely aligned alternate universe through our floating islands of plastic gradually breaking down into microbeads consumed by the scant marine life left alive after generations of overfishing, bottom scraping, and coral reef–killing ocean acidification; our human-caused, place-devastating elevated sea levels; our earth-shaking, water poisoning fracking; our toxic lakes made of the externalities of rare-earth mineral production for so-called advanced electronics; our soul-and-life
destroying prisons; our oil spills; our children playing with bits of dirty bombs; our white phosphorus; our generations of trauma held in the body; our cancers; and I could go on. I argue against purism because it is one bad but common approach to devastation in all its forms. It is a common approach for anyone who attempts to meet and control a complex situation that is fundamentally outside our control. It is a bad approach because it shuts down precisely the field of possibility that might allow us to take better collective action against the destruction of the world in all its strange, delightful, impure frolic. Purism is a de-collectivizing, de-mobilizing, paradoxical politics
of despair. This world deserves better.”
― Alexis Shotwell, Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times

“One key difference between a conspiracy theorist and an activist, for lack of a better word, is that the conspiracy theorist holds that the best defense is more and better knowledge (read my website, listen to my explanation, investigate what you know) and the activist holds that the best defense is creating another world.”
― Alexis Shotwell, Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times

“If this were the problem, just giving people more and better information would correct their knowledge problem. But we don’t just have a knowledge problem—we have a habit-of-being problem; the problem of whiteness is a problem of what we expect, our ways of being, bodily-ness, and how we understand ourselves as “placed” in time. Whiteness is a problem of being shaped to think that other people are the problem. Another”
― Alexis Shotwell, Against Purity: Living Ethically in Compromised Times

“But that changed propositional knowledge is thoroughly enmeshed with other forms of understanding—feeling, somatic experience, skills and competencies, presuppositions and common sense. Thinking about the always socially situated work of striving to create the conditions for complex flourishing requires a thick understanding of these aspects of our experience.”
― Alexis Shotwell, Knowing Otherwise: Race, Gender, and Implicit Understanding