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Title: Another World Author: Michelle Kuo Date: Summer 2012 Language: en Topics: interview, Occupy Wall Street, postmodernism, anti-capitalism Source: Retrieved on 3rd September 2020 from https://www.artforum.com/print/201206/michelle-kuo-talks-with-david-graeber-31099
THE BIG PICTURE is David Graeber’s picture: An anthropologist,
anarchist, and activist based at Goldsmiths, University of London,
Graeber adopts a bracingly wide-angle view in our era of specialization.
His acclaimed 2011 book Debt: The First 5,000 Years poses a sweeping
rereading of obligation, exchange, and value; his numerous writings on
the alternative political models provided by direct democracy and direct
action have found a wide audience beyond the social sciences. He has
also put his voice to use, having long participated in global protest
movements such as Occupy Wall Street and its myriad national and
international offshoots (for which he has become a somewhat reluctant
icon). Here, Graeber talks to Artforum editor Michelle Kuo about the
uses and abuses of social and economic theory in the realm of
culture—and the possibilities these disciplinary crossings may still
hold for changing how we see and how we relate.
MICHELLE KUO: Many artists and critics have been reading your work on
everything from the long history of debt, to anarchism, to culture as
“creative refusal.” That interest seems to be a reflection of how the
art world, at this moment, sees itself in parallel to politics and
economics. Why does the art world want to call on economic theories of
immaterial labor, for instance, or strategies of resistance tied to such
theories and worldviews? We love to import terms from outside our
discipline and, frankly, our comprehension. The misprision can often be
productive, but it can also be very frustrating.
DAVID GRAEBER: Yes, it’s similar to the relation between anthropology
and philosophy—as seen by anyone who actually knows anything about
philosophy.
MK: In a report on a conference of social theorists at Tate Britain
[“The Sadness of Post-Workerism” (2008)], you debunked the term
immaterial labor convincingly. You argued that it’s confined to a very
small view of history because it caricatures what came before, let’s
say, 1965 or 1945 in order to argue that everything is completely
different now.
DG: Immaterial labor is a very reductive concept. It’s also a very
deceptive one: It combines the postmodern language of utter rupture, the
idea that the world is completely new due to some grandiose break in
history, in order to disguise a genuinely antiquated, 1930s version of
Marxism where everything can be categorized as either infrastructure or
superstructure. After all, what’s “immaterial” here? Not the labor. The
product. So that one form of labor that produces something I consider
material is fundamentally different from another form of labor that
produces something I consider immaterial. But the greatest strength of
Marxist theory, in my view, is that it destroys that distinction. Art is
just another form of production and, like all creative processes,
necessarily is material and involves thought and ideas.
MK: So in a way, we’re paradoxically reinforcing old binaries.
DG: Exactly, yes.
MK: What’s interesting, too, is the entire notion of rupture. As
historians or cultural critics, we’re always taught that rupture is good
and continuity is bad. It’s still a reaction against [Leopold von]
Ranke’s narrative version of history. In other words, continuity is seen
as a reactionary way of looking at history. But you’re obviously
interested in posing a more sweeping, long-range history or theory of
history. Why did you choose to do so?
DG: As an activist it strikes me that some of the most radical, most
revolutionary movements today base themselves in indigenous communities,
which are communities that see themselves as traditionalists but think
of tradition itself as a potentially radical thing. So the deeper the
roots you have, the more challenging things you can do with them.
MK: But that’s modernism, too, in a way—T. S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the
Individual Talent.”
DG: Well, to a large degree, what we call postmodernism is modernist.
What we call poststructuralism is structuralism. It’s because you have
that static notion of structure that you have to have rupture.
MK: Which also still largely determines contemporary sociology and its
foundation, however buried, in structural functionalism. In the art
world, we still seem heavily indebted to [Fredric] Jameson looking at
the long-range economic theories of [Ernest] Mandel and their relation
to cultural shifts.
DG: Which is, again, infrastructure and superstructure ... What’s so
fascinating to me is that Jameson first proposes that postmodernism is
going to be the cultural superstructure of this new technological
infrastructure that Mandel is predicting, which we forget now. It was
going to be based on robot factories and new forms of energy, and the
machines would be doing all the work—human work was supposed to
disappear. This is what everybody was anticipating in the late ’60s.
Working-class politics will disappear when there are no more workers,
and we’re going to have to think of something else on which to base
inequality. And Jameson was describing the timeless, superficial culture
that’s going to emerge when we have flying cars and nanorobots produce
everything.
You could just imagine things, and they would appear. Of course, those
technologies never did appear. Instead, industrialists produced a
similar effect by outsourcing the factories—but that was the timeless,
superficial illusion. Your sneakers look more high-tech today but were
created using even more low-tech processes than before. So in Jameson
there is this fascinating play of infrastructure and superstructure; the
play of images becomes a way of disguising the fact that the
infrastructure has barely changed at all.
MK: In general, theories of labor and culture tend to revert to
periodization, to impose a deterministic relationship between economic
shifts and cultural ones. What do you think of the impetus to find
moments of social revolution, for example, and then correlates in the
cultural sphere?
DG: Well, I’m guilty of that myself, on occasion. Take the notion of
flameout. When I first proposed it, I was drawing on Immanuel
Wallerstein’s notion that at least since 1789, all real revolutions have
been world revolutions and that the most significant thing they
accomplished was to change political common sense, which is what I like
to think is also happening right now. Wallerstein himself is already
talking about the world revolution of 2011.
It happens twice—it happens in the artistic field with the explosion of
Dada right around the world revolution of 1917, and then it happens in
the ’70s in Continental philosophy, in the wake of what Wallerstein
calls the world revolution of 1968. In each case you have a moment where
a particular grand tradition, whether the artistic or the intellectual
avant-garde, in a matter of just a few years runs through almost every
logical permutation of every radical gesture you could possibly make
within the terms of that tradition. And then suddenly everybody says,
“Oh no, what do we do now?”
As a political radical myself, coming of age intellectually in the wake
of such a moment, there was a profound sense of frustration that it was
as if we’d reverted to this almost classical notion of a dream time,
where there’s nothing for us to do but to repeat the same founding
gestures over and over again. We can return to this kind of creation in
an imaginary way, but the time of creation itself is forever lost.
MK: That’s reminiscent of artists who became involved in Occupy Wall
Street, for example—talking to some of them, it was clear that they were
searching for something. And in a way it seemed like a quintessentially
modernist search for an antidote to alienation.
DG: The idea that alienation is a bad thing is a modernist problem. Most
philosophical movements—and, by extension, social movements—actually
embrace alienation. You’re trying to achieve a state of alienation.
That’s the ideal if you’re a Buddhist or an early Christian, for
example; alienation is a sign that you understand something about the
reality of the world.
So perhaps what’s new with modernity is that people feel they shouldn’t
be alienated. Colin Campbell wrote a book called The Romantic Ethic and
the Spirit of Modern Consumerism [1987], in which he argued that
modernity has introduced a genuinely new form of hedonism. Hedonism is
no longer just getting the sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll or whatever but
it’s become a matter of selling new fantasies so that you’re always
imagining the thing you want. The object of desire is just an excuse, a
pretext, and that’s why you’re always disappointed when you get it.
Campbell’s argument makes total sense when you first read it. But in
fact, again, it’s backward. If you look at history—at, say, medieval
theories of desire—it’s utterly assumed that what you desire is—
MK: God.
DG: Or courtly love, yes. But whatever it ultimately is, the idea that
by seizing the object of your desire you would resolve the issue was
actually considered a symptom of melancholia. The fantasies themselves
are the realization of desire. So by that logic, what Campbell describes
is not a new idea. What’s actually new is the notion that you should be
able to resolve desire by attaining the object. Perhaps what’s new is
the fact that we think there’s something wrong with alienation, not that
we experience it. By most medieval perspectives, our entire civilization
is thus really a form of clinical depression. [laughter]
MK: I’m not sure all medievalists would agree with you, but the parallel
is interesting: It goes back to this caricature of a totalizing system.
We live under what we assume is a totalizing system of capital today,
and yet the medieval church was a hegemony that was in fact far more
totalizing.
DG: Indeed.
MK: Nevertheless, tremendous cultural activity and thought occurred
within those parameters. So for us the question becomes, In what ways
can we operate under hegemony and still conceive of other possible
worlds—worlds that, you’ve argued, are already present?
DG: That’s one of the things I try to drive home in all my work—that the
very notion that we exist in a totalizing system is itself the core
ideological idea we need to overcome. Because that idea makes us
willfully blind to at least half of our own activity, which could just
as easily be described as being communistic or anarchistic. These are
the other worlds already present in our daily life. But we don’t
acknowledge them. We don’t call acts of sharing, or the state-supported
industries all around us, communist, even though key aspects of them
clearly are.
MK: What’s interesting for the practice of art is that, of course, the
very notion of critique is premised to a certain degree on a totalizing
system. There has to be something to disrupt, combat, reroute. How do
you understand critique more specifically?
DG: I think about this all the time. I mean, I am suspicious of [Bruno]
Latour’s volley in “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?” [2004], which
essentially said—I’m paraphrasing—“Let us critique the idea of critique.
We must contest what’s become of relativism with a renewed type of
empiricism.”
MK: Right, although it also was a valuable intervention to have made.
DG: Yes—if you apply the logic of critique too consistently, you create
this almost gnostic notion of reality, that the one thing we can do is
to be the person who realizes the world is wrong.
It may be incredibly rewarding intellectually, but it’s also a terrible
trap. I always go back to Marx’s famous phrase from 1843, “Toward a
Ruthless Critique of Everything That Exists.” It was something he wrote
when he was twenty-five, which is appropriate for that age. When I was
younger, I felt that way, too. Now I feel that such ruthlessness has its
price.
But it strikes me that radical theory has always been caught between
that moment and the Marxian moment in which you try to understand the
rule, all the hidden structures of power and the way in which every
institution that might seem innocuous contributes to reproducing some
larger totality, which is one of domination and oppression. And so, if
you take it too seriously, critique rather loses its point because it
becomes impossible to imagine anything outside. That’s when you end up
needing, relying on, the logic of total rupture. Something will happen,
I don’t know, a really big riot, and then during the effervescence a new
world will just come into being. There are insurrectionists who say that
outright.
In the anarchist movement, in fact, there was a movement back and forth
between the emphasis on rupture and its opposite. During the
global-justice movement, the big word was prefiguration—the notion of
building the institutions of a new society in the shell of old. Then
came the frustration after 9/11. A lot of people turned back to
insurrectionism, which was posed as this radical new theory. Of course
it was really going back to one model of anarchism from the 1890s, which
incorporated the Marxist logic of fundamental rupture. They combined it
with French theory from the 1970s and thought they had something new.
It’s a moment of despair.
MK: An exquisite corpse.
DG: Yes, and because of that model, they can’t understand that communism
has always been present, which is what I would argue, that it’s the
basis of any social relations, any ontological ground of sociality.
Instead they see it as something new in the same way that they’ve
suddenly discovered immaterial labor—
MK: Or biopolitics, as you’ve pointed out.
DG: Indeed, biopolitics is nothing new. The notion that the health and
prosperity of the population are bound up in sovereignty is actually the
founding notion of sovereignty.
MK: The question then becomes, What do these everyday moments of
communism mean for a theory of the individual? How do they relate to
individuality?
DG: I developed that relation in the Debt book, and it’s been somewhat
misunderstood. One of the ideas I was trying to pursue was how one comes
up with something like the value of the individual without having to
frame it within the rather mystical notion that you have a unique
crystalline core, which is the basis of your value, irrespective of
social relations. Because it struck me, if you look at matters like
compensation for wrongful death and the ways traditional societies
resolve feuds, there is very clearly an assumption of the unique value
of the individual. But the uniqueness is predicated on the fact that the
individual is a unique nexus of social relations.
And I think that’s what we’ve lost—the notion that we’re sedimented
beings created by endless configurations of relations with others. I
think individuality is something we constantly create through relations
with others, and that, in a way, this very fact resolves [Émile]
Durkheim’s favorite problem, which is: How do I reward society for
having allowed me to become an individual? Durkheim had this idea that
we are all burdened by an infinite social debt, which he inherited from
Auguste Comte—the idea that you owe society for allowing you to be an
individual, that individuality is a kind of cosmic debt to society or to
nature. I wanted to deconstruct the entire notion that one’s existence
can be conceived as anything like debt. Since, after all, a debt is a
relation of jural equality. It’s premised on the notion that there is a
contractual relation between two equal parties. But how can the
individual and society conceivably be posed as equal partners to a
business deal? It’s absurd.
So I wanted to move instead to a notion of the individual as a nexus of
relations. But in order to do that you have to reimagine a lot of
things, including, I suspect, our very notions of mind. A lot of the
things we think of as the ultimate products of individuality are in fact
products of relationships, of dyadic or triadic relations of one kind or
another.
MK: It’s one way out of the structure-versus-agency problem.
DG: Precisely, yes.
MK: And yet the legacy of critique within the art world seems to be all
about structure and not about agency. It’s as if there is no agency. And
so many critics and artists arrive at this impasse because they’re
essentially stuck in those two categories.
DG: As is all social theory. Even though sociologists deny it.
MK: Even the most sophisticated Bourdevin perspectives.
Beyond the question of the individual, the other dimension in question
is time. Do you think that anthropology and art can still help each
other in some way to get a better picture of the longue durée?
DG: Definitely. That was one of the points of my book. I first was
putting it together in a piece for Mute in the immediate wake of 2008,
and I began by saying that when you’re in a crisis, the first thing you
have to do is to ask, What is the larger rhythmic or temporal structure
in which these events are taking place?
So I decided to cast my net as widely as possible, to say, What if this
is part of a genuinely world-historic breaking point, the sort of thing
that only happens every five hundred years or so—my idea of a long
oscillation between periods of credit—and, surprisingly, it worked.
That’s one reason I ended up writing the book. It might all seem
contradictory, since I am arguing against the notion of rupture, but I
also insist that this breaking point can only be understood by looking
at continuities in the longest possible durée.
MK: In the same way, perhaps one can only look at shifts in culture
right now in terms of a much broader time line. But those shifts,
however we conceive of them, can’t really be reduced to waves or cycles,
just as, I think, virtually no contemporary economist takes Kondratieff
waves seriously, or other comparable long-wave theories of the world
economy. Yet no one seems to be posing an alternative.
DG: I think there is a reason for that, which is that it has become the
almost obsessive priority of contemporary capitalism to make sure that
no one is. Over the course of twelve years of activism, I’ve come to
realize that whoever is running this system is obsessed with winning the
conceptual war—much more so, in fact, than with actual economic
viability. Given the choice between an option that makes capitalism seem
like the only possible system and an option that actually makes
capitalism a more viable long-term system, they always choose the
former.
Oddly enough, I first picked up on this in an activist context. It was
2002, and we went to the IMF meetings [in Washington]. And we were
scared, because it was right after 9/11. Sure enough, they overwhelmed
us with police and endless security. Considering our numbers, it was
shocking that they would devote all of these resources to containing us.
And we all went home feeling pretty depressed. It was only later that I
learned how profoundly we’d disrupted things. The IMF actually held some
of their meetings via teleconference because of the security risk we
ostensibly posed. All the parties were canceled. Basically, the police
shut down the meetings for us. I realized that the fact that three
hundred anarchists go home depressed seems much more important to them
than whether the IMF meetings actually happened. That was a revelation.
As the whole thing falls apart in front of us, the one battle they’ve
won is over the imagination.
MK: But how do you view attempts within or on behalf of art to engage in
this “battle over the imagination”?
DG: Actually, when I was thinking about what I would say about the
relation between the art world and Occupy Wall Street, I was struck by a
remarkable pattern. I started thinking of all the conversations about
the art world I’ve had in the process of Occupy Wall Street, which was
surprising to me because I don’t know that much about the art world. I
thought, Who are the people who really led me to the events of August? I
was based in England the year before, and the group I was involved with
was Arts Against Cuts. And the person I worked with most closely was
Sophie Carapetian, a sculptor. Then when I got here to New York, the
person who brought me to 16 Beaver Street, where I found out about the
Occupy Wall Street planning, was another artist, Colleen Asper. And
there I met the artist Georgia Sagri, with whom I was intensely involved
within the formation of the General Assembly. And then the first person
I got involved, who ended up playing a critical role, was Marisa Holmes,
who used to be a performance artist and is now a filmmaker. What do all
these people have in common? They’re all young women artists, every one
of them.
And almost all of them had experienced exactly that tension between
individual authorship and participation in larger activist projects.
Another artist I know, for example, made a sculpture of a giant carrot
used during a protest at Millbank; I think it was actually thrown
through the window of Tory headquarters and set on fire. She feels it
was her best work, but her collective, which is mostly women, insisted
on collective authorship, and she feels unable to attach her name to the
work. And it just brings home the tension a lot of women artists, in
particular, feel, that they’re much more likely to be involved in these
collective projects. On the one hand, such collectives aim to transcend
egoism, but to what degree are they just reproducing the same structural
suppression women artists regularly experience, because here too a woman
is not allowed to claim authorship of her best work?
How do you resolve the dilemma? Yes, it is the collective that makes you
an individual, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t become an individual.
It’s a really interesting question. But I thought I would throw it out
there because I don’t know the answer either.
MK: That leads us to the model of consensus, which is interesting to me
because I participated in consensus in a very dilettantish way, in
college. And I’ve always wondered whether or not consensus actually
promotes or risks a lapse into stasis rather than engendering action or
even active thought.
DG: Consensus is a default mode to me. There is a consensus process with
a particular form that has emerged through feminism, anarchism,
different social movements. But what I always emphasize is that if you
can’t force people to do things they don’t want to do, you’re starting
with consensus one way or another. The techniques you reach to get to
consensus are secondary.
So when people talk about anarchist forms of organization and have
assumed that either we are anti-organizational or we’re only for very
limited forms of collective, I always say, “Well, no.” Anarchism
believes in any form of organization that would not require the
existence of armed guys whom you could call up if things really went
wrong. That could include all sorts of social forms. And on the most
basic level, that’s all consensus really means.
MK: It helps to explain why the history of anarchism within the visual
arts encompasses some very unlikely suspects from very different
milieus, like Seurat, Signac, Fénéon, Barnett Newman, John Cage, who
were all distinct from histories of dissensus or of antagonism.
DG: It’s not my area, but I could read up on it. [laughter]
MK: It seems that some of the artists who were involved in Occupy were
looking for the possibilities that consensus posed with respect to ways
of relating socially or ways of forging social bonds that were
different.
DG: Precisely.
MK: But just as at any other moment in time that we’ve discussed,
artists may dip into this kind of sphere in order to feel personally
invigorated or emotionally validated in some way and then go back to
their daily lives. Nothing really changes.
DG: And I still have publishers. I think it’s all about the creation of
firewalls between vertical organizations and horizontal organizations,
individual celebrity and collective decision making; it’s all about how
to create membranes between different but simultaneous worlds.
MK: That sounds suspiciously like capitalist schizophrenia.
DG: Yeah, I realized I was moving in a certain direction there. But it’s
significant that Guattari came up with the notion of the machine when he
was trying to think of a nonvanguardist form of political organization.
And while I’m skeptical of what people have done with that legacy,
Guattari’s original formulation remains important.
MK: But to think of alternate worlds or, to a lesser extent, many of the
propositions concerning culture and the political—it’s all still a
version of defamiliarization, in a way.
DG: It’s still formalist.
MK: Maybe at its best.
DG: Not even that good. OK.
MK: Which is to say that the Russian Formalists came up with a theory of
revolution—that a revolution in perception would instigate a revolution
in society—that’s as potent as any to follow. But whether you want to
introduce frisson or cogs in the machine, or you want to slow things
down or create friction or divert the flows of capital or redistribute
the sensible, these all seem like ways of talking about
defamiliarization, a kind of revelatory practice of changing one’s
perspective or sensation, or undoing the programmed gaze, or pulling
back the curtain and demystifying some larger scheme.
I think we’ve turned to these notions as a way of seeking to articulate
the kinds of political power art might actually wield—it has to do with
debates in the art world now that evince very conflicted feelings about
whether or not our discourse ascribes completely fantastical powers to a
work of art, saying that a work somehow contests neoliberalism because
of X, Y, and Z or whatever. And the sinking feeling that altering
perception or sensation or flows of information is merely to repeat what
already happens in consumer economies. But as we grapple with these
questions, I wonder if we are condemned to rehearse this very old
problem, and whether we need to think of another approach.
DG: It takes you back to the notion of critique. It relates to the
Marxian notion in which you have the ruthless critique of everything
that exists, where everything can be seen from the perspective of its
role in reproducing some larger system of alienation or inequality or
hierarchy, whatever it may be.
Then you can also argue that every human possibility is simultaneously
present. [Marcel] Mauss thought communism and individualism were two
sides of the same coin. But democracy, monarchy, markets—everything is
always present. So in that case it’s not so much a question of
characterizing a system as of looking at which forms of relations are
currently dominant and which ones have managed to present themselves as
innate, given, the essence of human nature.
This is what I find most useful. If you take that as a starting point,
what critique is is not revealing the totality of the system. There is
no overall totality. If there’s an ideological illusion, it’s the very
idea that there could be—that we live in “capitalism,” for instance, a
total system that pervades everything, rather than one dominated by
capital. But at the same time, I think it’s deeply utopian to imagine a
world of utter plurality without any conceptual totalities at all. What
we need is one thousand totalities, just as we need one thousand
utopias. There is nothing wrong with a utopia unless you have just one.
MK: Something that has perplexed me as well, not only about critique
within the realm of artistic practice but also more generally about
certain aspects of Occupy, is the reliance on instrumental rationality
or, in other words, statistics. Even the “99 Percent” slogan—what’s
strange is that, of course, at a certain point in time those kinds of
facts and figures would in fact themselves have been seen as suspect.
Positivism or rationality itself was formerly under scrutiny. And they
don’t seem to be now in the same way. You may not buy Latour’s bid to
revisit empiricism, but it seems like protest movements today retain a
fundamental assumption of quite traditional economic metrics and laws,
when previously they would be associated with the attempt to overthrow
such basic assumptions.
DG: In terms of rationality, that’s interesting, because I think that
the rationality debate is largely misplaced. If you think about what
rationality is, it’s a remarkably minimal concept. I mean, if you say
someone is rational, all you’re saying is they’re not insane. They can
make basic logical connections.
It doesn’t take much to be rational. I think that the forms of
democratic process we’re developing, their strength lies in the fact
that they’re going beyond rationality, because any theory of society or
human action that begins from rationality ultimately ends up with
something like Hume, where reason is a slave of the passions, and
passions are something that are utterly unassimilable to rational
inquiry, prior in some way.
Which is what happens in economics when you say people are rational
actors trying to maximize some utility. If you ask, “What about people
who sacrifice themselves for a cause?” Well, they’re trying to maximize
the good feeling they get from sacrificing themselves for a cause. Why
do they get a good feeling from sacrificing? That’s psychology. They
push all the meaningful questions somewhere else.
MK: But economics itself is incorporating that now. Contemporary
economics has absorbed the nonrational actor into its models.
DG: But all economic actors are irrational—they have to be, because they
have no reason to want what they want. Take the very notion of
self-interest, which I describe in the book. Why are we using the word
interest? The word comes directly from the idea of interest payments.
It’s the transformation of what Saint Augustine called self-love, and
they decided to make it a little less theological so they called it
interest. Interest is that which endlessly accrues and grows, so that
Augustinian notion of the infinite passions and desires is still
there—but in a financialized, rationalized form.
Rationality is always the tool of something. Anarchism, for me, moves
beyond mere rationality to something else. I call it reasonableness. And
reasonableness is a much more complicated notion than rationality, but
includes it. Reasonableness for me is the ability to make compromises
between formally incommensurable values, which is exactly that which
escapes classic models of rationality. And it’s what most of what life
is actually about.