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Title: Beyond the Monastic Self
Author: David Graeber
Language: en
Topics: inequality, academia, Individualism
Source: Retrieved on Sept. 17th 2022 from https://davidgraeber.org/unpublished/letter/

David Graeber

Beyond the Monastic Self

One of the things I most admire about Maurice Bloch is that he’s never

forgotten what got him interested in anthropology to begin with. Most of

us do. How many after all are drawn to the discipline above all curious

about questions that only it can answer: questions like, what are

humans, in what ways are they the same, in what ways are they different?

It’s one of the peculiar perversities of graduate and professional

training that we often forget this, and one of the perversities of this

peculiarly anti-theoretical moment that there are prominent figures

telling us we should forget them. Because to reject these questions out

of hand is not only to reject the very premise of anthropological

theory, but for anthropology to be able to offer any explanation of its

own existence—to be able to ask (to adopt a phrase from Roy Bhaskar,

originally about experiments), both “what makes anthropology

possible”—why do we even have the capacity to understand someone living

in rural Madagascar, but also, simultaneously, “what makes anthropology

necessary” why that understanding is usually not transparent, and in so

many respects, extraordinarily difficult. <br/>

I want to address this by looking at what has always been the primary

anthropological method: conversation. Actually, I would argue it’s not

only our primary fieldwork method, but our primary method of coming up

with new theoretical ideas. Good ideas rarely, if ever, emerge from

isolation. True, often these theoretical dialogues are not carried out

face to face—I myself have been engaged in a series of theoretical

conversation with Maurice Bloch for decades now, even though we’ve

surprisingly rarely sat together in the same room and hashed matters out

directly. One of our peculiar fetishistic habits, as intellectuals, is

to efface the histories of most of these conversations after they’ve

happened, or at best carve up the results, so as to make it seem like

ideas emerge from isolated Great Thinkers. But in practice we’re all

aware, on some level, this is never really true: I have no idea, for

instance, the degree to which many of the ideas attributed to me are the

product of me, or some of my graduate student friends with whom I spent

long hours hashing out the meaning of the universe twenty years ago, and

ultimately I think it’s a meaningless question: the ideas emerged from

our relation.

The process of the collective, or dialogic emergence of ideas in turn

involves certain techniques, which only make sense in terms of a larger

context of exchange and answerability. One of these is the provocation.

An intellectual provocation, as we all know, usually consists of a

statement that makes sense from a certain theoretical perspective that

so clashes against received wisdom that it will inevitably spark a

debate from which new richer understandings are likely to emerge. An

example might be: poetry is an impoverished form of speech. Maurice as

we all know is a master of this and as a discipline we’ve gained much

from the results, so it seems to me the best way to honor him is to

attempt in my own small way to do the same.

So I will propose one. It might be considered an expansion on some

arguments Maurice himself made in an essay calling “Going in and Out of

Each Other’s Bodies,” on the ambiguities of “the distinctness of the

units of life,” including human beings, and which draws on the findings

of neuroscience to observe the fact that this includes “the

interpenetration of minds” which, during acts of communication, involves

a kind of mind-reading in which identical neuronal configurations are

occurring in the brains of both parties, so that, in a certain—however

limited—sense, they can be seen as part of a single configuration,

mediated by some kind of physical bridge (of sound waves, bodily

movements, images, whatever.) It strikes me almost no one has really

considered the full implications of this. Bloch makes some excellent

points about the sense of human solidarity (what I’ve myself referred to

as “baseline communism”) emerging in part from cumulative awareness of

this sort of practical mutual interpenetration, and the fact that the

very possibility of human life is built on it, but for the moment I want

to take it another way. I want to suggest that almost all existing

social theory is based on a misapprehension. We tend to veer between

looking at individuals and societies, transcendental subjects and

meaningful universes, where in fact, particularly when it comes to

questions of conscious thought, we are really speaking of something that

occurs not in one person’s head but within just these dyadic or if you

like “intersubjective” relations. To put it more starkly: thinking—or,

anyway, conscious, self-reflective thought—does not mainly happen in the

head. Neither does it mainly happen in our relations with our material

environments, as some have recently proposed, or in some great abstract

collective consciousness. Consciousness exists mainly in concrete

junctures between what have sometimes been called “embodied

personalities.”

In other words it’s not just our folk theories of how the mind works

that are wrong. It’s our folk theory about what the mind is that’s

wrong. This means

---

The usual response to such a statement is either to say “that’s insane”

or “but of course we already know that”—which as we know are both

equally modes of dismissal, since in fact the people saying this don’t

know this, they just think they know it, since this “knowledge” has no

effect on anything else they say or do. (Consider the case of the rather

similar ideas that emerged from conversations amongst the Bakhtin circle

in ‘20s Russia; how many scholars claim to agree with them that thought

is dialogic, and then act as if all the ideas that emerged from their

dialogues were the product of one individual genius, Mikhail Bakhtin.)

Let me start with the subject of consciousness. There has been a burst

of publications in the last decade by social theorists trying to come to

terms with the findings of cognitive science, which might be summed up

as, “consciousness isn’t all its cracked up to be”—that in much of our

daily existence and activities, in fact, we might as well be sleep. In

what follows I’ll take just one—but I should emphasize this is for ease

of exposition only; I could just as easily have chosen at least a dozen

others to make the same point.

In a recent essay, geographer Nigel Thrift (2006:285) argues of

intellect itself that “research over many years has shown that it is at

best a fragile and temporary coalition, a tunnel which is always close

to collapse.” He continues by quoting Mervin Donald, one of the many

contemporary philosophers to engage with the findings of cognitive

psychology on the nature of that classic philosophical object,

consciousness:

During the past forty years, in countless laboratories around the world,

human consciousness has been put under the microscope, and exposed

mercilessly for the poor thing it is: a transitory and fleeting

phenomenon. The ephemeral nature of consciousness is especially obvious

in experiments on the temporal minima of memory- that is the length of

time we can hold on to a clear sensory image of something. Even under

the best circumstances, we cannot keep more than a few seconds of

perceptual experience in short-term memory. The window of consciousness,

defined in this way, is barely ten or fifteen seconds wide. Under some

conditions, the width of our conscious window on the world may be no

more than two seconds wide (Donald 2001: 15)

The question, then, becomes: how is it that we come to the

representation of the subject typical of Western philosophy, and which

forms the basis of all social science, as a fundamentally conscious,

rational, intentional, self-aware—one which appears to bear almost no

resemblance to any actual living human being?

The answer I think goes back to the origins of philosophy itself. One of

the remarkable things about the evolution of philosophy is that just

about everywhere we first encounter it, it is characterized by two

features which are gradually lost. One is that its intellectual

arguments are typically couched in the form of dialogues and

conversations. The second is that it is not considered a mere matter of

reflection, but a form of practice: as Pierre Hadot (1995, 2002) has

long since pointed out, not only Buddhism, Confucianism, or Taoism, but

even Greco-Roman schools like the Stoics and Epicureans promulgated

forms of meditation, diet, exercise, sexual practice or continence,

essentially ways of training the mind and body so as to create a form of

fully self-conscious subject. In other words, isolated, self-sufficient,

rational, self-reflective intellect was not assumed as the

starting-point; it was, rather, a telos; the ideal end point of a long

and painful process which no ordinary mortal, really, could ever be

expected to fully achieve.

What happened? Perhaps it is best considered as an example of what I’ve

elsewhere called “liberation in the imaginary.” It is not uncommon to

observe such patterns in intellectual life. In its early days, for

instance, cultural studies was seen as a theoretical tool for

revolutionaries, a way of facilitating working class resistance against

dominant values. Gradually it became a purely academic pursuit that

started from the assumption that all working class people were already

engaged in one or another form of semiotic resistance to dominant

values. It would seem something very similar happened to our

philosophical tradition, when it moved from the monastery to the

university, and therefore ceased to conceive itself as a form of

practice—except on a much grander scale. As a result, even after they

abandoned the monastery, scholars maintained what was essentially a

monastic self.

---

What I’d really like to emphasize here is a remark that appears really

as an aside in Thrift’s argument: he notes, true, “This description [of

consciousness] is something of an exaggeration – it derives from

laboratory experiments and glosses over the richness of joint action in

which subjects do much better” (ib:285). In other words, even if the

window of consciousness is typically a few seconds long when one is by

oneself, with others, it’s much broader.

When I first read this passage I thought he was referring to primarily

to conversation. After all, while mindless conversations certainly

exist, we are all also aware that we’ve had conversations (with loved

ones, or, on exciting topics) where we were quite vividly conscious for

hours at a time. During one such vivid phone conversation with my

girlfriend a few weeks ago, she suggested, “yes—that’s why they say that

when you’re driving and afraid you’re going to fall asleep, the best

thing to do is to talk to someone else. Just listening to talk radio

won’t do it”—making her incidentally one of the effective co-authors of

this piece. If we are really talking about differences on the magnitude

of seconds versus hours, it’s clear that the vast majority of our fully

conscious life is spent discussing things with others.

On some level this too should be self-evident. One need only consider

the etymology, which is con-science, which literally means, “knowing

things together.” But nonetheless, when I then went to consult the vast

literature on consciousness, starting with grand compendia like The

Oxford Companion to Consciousness, for example, I discovered that there

was almost nothing there on conversation at all. In most works on the

subjects, words like “dialogue” and “conversation” barely appear. For

the most part, the discussion is limited to “internal speech,” imaginary

conversations one has in one’s head—the existence of this could be taken

of course as dramatic affirmation of the degree to which conscious

thought requires interlocutors, but rarely is. The great exception here

of course is that—in psychology, very much subordinate—strain of theory

that hearkens back to the Soviet Union in the 1920s: Vygotsky’s work on

egocentric speech in children, whereby he showed that abstract thinking

is made possible by internalizing verbal interaction with the outside

world, and of course the work of the Bakhtin circle. Bakhtin’s argument

that consciousness is the voices of others speaking in your heads is

perhaps the most radical statement in this respect—but it’s now

considered distinctly marginal, relegated to a small school of

Bakhtin-studies; partly because of its now-outmoded premise that the

only possible medium for thought is language, but largely, I suspect,

because of the larger political content of the argument, with the clash

between voices of authority and their carnivalesque subversion. What’s

more, for all the importance they attach to dialogue as the essence of

human thought, neither the Vygotsky or Bakhtin schools spend much time

at all discussing actual conversations, that is, dialogues between two

or more mature individuals, as opposed to virtual dialogue in the mind

or works of literature.

My suspicion is no one really wants to address the matter because the

consequences threaten to unsettle everything—including, as I say, our

very presumptions about the objects of our study. Let me give an

example. Work on “distributed cognition,” the idea that in many

circumstances, thinking takes place outside the individual head, going

back to Edwin Hutchins’ analysis of how each member of a ship’s crew

“offloads” different aspects of navigation to each other, and how they,

together with the ship’s machinery, themselves form of a kind of larger

cognitive machine. Yet with only a few exceptions (mainly by those

extending Vygotsky’s insights in the field of education), the field has

tended to concentrate increasingly on the technological aspect: in our

reliance (and therefore trust) in machines as extensions of ourselves

rather than our reliance on each other.

This becomes strikingly true when these ideas are taken up by

philosophers. Andy Clark for instance has become famous for developing

what’s often known as the “extended mind hypothesis”—asking, why is it

we assume that our minds are coincident with the physical material of

our brains. If minds are dynamic processes of thinking, this is

obviously not the case. If one person can do long division in their

heads, and another must make recourse to paper and pencil, the brain

cells, and the paper and pencil, are playing exactly the same role—it’s

simply incoherent and arbitrary to insist that there is a fundamental

distinction between them. Or to take a more ethnographic example:

traditional Malagasy houses are all organized on the same pattern, with

12 astrological positions mapped out from the northeast corner

clockwise, so that if one is sitting in the main room it’s possible to

make astrological calculations just by glancing from hearth to water-pot

to back door, etc. Clearly on such an occasion, the house is part of

one’s extended mind. This position seems largely accepted now within the

philosophical community, but the logic is applied, almost exclusively,

to technologies—especially computers, as in Clark’s own most famous

book, “Natural Born Cyborgs.” There’s something obviously missing here.

If thought, including conscious thought, is really a the interaction of

brain, body, and one’s environmental (and of course, culturally

constituted) “cognitive scaffolding”—well, what about other brains? In

his original essay on the extended mind, Clark and fellow philosopher

David Chalmers are willing to entertain the possibility, though as

always he frames it in a way that seems calculated to sidestep the most

serious implications: he notes, some people memorize names and phone

numbers, some people put them in little books, but there’s one

basketball coach notorious for always relying on his wife. Surely, her

memory is part of his cognitive scaffolding, just like a waiter who

might remember what sort of sauce I like. True, but in a purely passive

way—much as Roman senators notoriously tended to keep a favorite slave

constantly at their side, whose job was to remember the names, faces,

office, and personal or political significance of all their friends and

colleagues.

If we apply the same insight to more active forms of engagement between

what we call “minds”, we can see why the philosophical implications

might be unsettling. When we speak of the coordination of neuronal

processes between brains, are we just speaking of a kind of

“mind-reading,” as Bloch puts it, or the creation—at least at the point

of understanding—of a single mind? If minds are processes of interaction

not limited to the brain, then this pretty much has to be the case. Yet

the only philosopher I know who has fully embraced this point is the

philosopher of science, Roy Bhaskar, and it would seem he has only been

able to do so by abandoning the strictures of academic philosophy

entirely and returning to the older idea of philosophy as inseparable

for techniques for achieving freedom and self-consciousness rather than

describing it, a project which has meant active engagement with Buddhist

and Taoist and similar traditions that still operate in such terms, and,

being written off as a New Age flake or raving lunatic even by many of

his formerly most ardent disciples. The argument though is fascinating.

You will recall here that historically, that creature we now think of as

the self-conscious individual was largely created through disciplinary

techniques of isolation and reflection. Such techniques also, in a

sense, created a certain notion of the cosmos, of totality, against

which the individual was posed; and having created the difference, the

final step was often exploding it again by some mystical experience of

cosmic unity, often framed as unity with God. This entailed the

recognition of what in the Sanskrit tradition came to be known as

“non-dualism”, that atman and brahman, self and cosmos, however it was

framed in that particular tradition, were the same. All Bhaskar does is

argue that you don’t actually need to sit on a mountain and beat

yourself with thorns for twenty years in order to have a mystical

experience. In a certain sense, any time you understand what someone

else is trying to communicate to you, you are having a direct experience

of non-dualism, of a unity between minds which is a direct result of the

underlying unity of all physical processes, which make it possible for

the mirror neurons in our brains to fire in the same way, for more or

less the same reasons outlined above. Our very existence as intelligent

beings is made possibly by an endless variety of minor, everyday

mystical experiences, that occur between “embodied personalities” (his

phrase originally) rather than between some abstract, artificially

created “self” and cosmos.

---

If anyone should doubt the devastating implications if we apply the

extended mind hypothesis to dialogic consciousness, consider the

following four points, which, alas, can only be sketched out very

briefly:

one of the classic problems in Western philosophy is the so-called

“other minds problem.” Starting from the Cartesian cogito, how can we be

certain other minds exist? Actually, we can’t start from the Cartesian

cogito, because the fact that we think does not prove we exist as

autonomous minds already separate from other ones; the real problem is

the joint relational work we do constructing situations in which we can

think of ourselves as autonomous selves—a work of which the monastic

disciplines of the ancient philosophers (which did require the help of

other people: especially, again, slaves) are simply particularly extreme

examples.

Or consider hermeneutics. We are used to assuming that interpretation

is the work required on the part of an audience, the recipient of an

intentional act communication, to imaginatively identify with its

author, thus, effectively, creating the author as the imaginatively

recreated intentional agent whose will is assumed to bind all the

different elements in the message together. But if at the moment of

communication speaker and listener, author and reader, are actually the

same mind, then what we are really witnessing is the act of creating a

separation.

Similarly, while we are willing to accept that individuation in

childhood involves a shared conceptual labor of teaching children to

distinguish themselves from others and the surrounding world, we assume

that this is simply the recognition of a truth and that the process ends

when this truth is realized, it would appear this is not really the

case. It is at best a half-truth, and for this reason the process of

individuation never really ends, the illusion, one might say, must be

endlessly maintained. What’s more, there is generally a decidedly

political aspect to this, since, the very most basic form of

exploitation would seem to be the process whereby one end of such nexi

individuates itself at the expense of another, rendering the other in a

strange state somewhere between individuation, empathy, and

nonexistence.

Finally, there is the voluminous literature on the Other—you know, the

one with the capital O—that runs from Hegel’s master slave dialectic

through Kojeve, Sartre, Fanon and De Beauvoir, on through its endless

refractions in the present day. On the one hand, the dialectical

tradition from which this derives might seem to be one that actually is

aware of the ultimate identity of subject and object, and provide tools

for understanding this constant process of (often exploitative)

individuation; but here again, there is again the difference between

knowing something, and just thinking you know it—since as the

dialectical tradition itself is famous for emphasizing, knowledge is not

knowledge unless it’s put to work. A century ago now, Lukacs was already

pointing out the philosophers have to continually rediscover the fact

that persons are really relations, just as things are really processes,

because in a system where the commodity form dominates, the simple

realization is meaningless, it has no effect. What I will leave then

with is only this. The very notion of dialectics originally derives from

the Socratic method, and that, from the peculiar form of so much ancient

philosophy: to use the dialogic form to create the ideal of a

self-reflexive consciousness that might transcend dialogue. (The result,

as we all know from Plato, is a peculiar one-sided form of dialogue, one

which Hegel, drawing, interestingly, on the non-dualistic assumption

that the structure of argument and that of even natural phenomenon are

ultimately one, subsumed into the mind of a cosmic Reason attempting,

again like an ancient philosophy student, to carry out a series of

exercises designed to ultimately achieve a fully self-reflexive state.)

In other words, in its classical form at least, it ultimately aims to

liberate us from the very situation I’ve been describing into a totality

whose political implications have tended to be perilous at best.

But what would a politics, an ethics, a science, look like that did not

run away from this situation, but simply embraced it: that turned our

received understandings inside out, and then, proceeded from there? We

have hardly really begun to ask.