claudio on graeber’s work
Claudio Sopranzetti on david graeber via nika dubrovsky tweet [https://x.com/nikadubrovsky/status/2042152721042583850?s=20]:
This article proposes an analysis of @davidgraeber’s work following the methods proposed by Antonio Gramsci of exploring Marx’s work [https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/14634996251328707]
on claudio via all souls college site [https://www.asc.ox.ac.uk/person/dr-claudio-sopranzetti#]: Claudio Sopranzetti is an Associate Professor in Anthropology at the Central European University. His research interests sit at the nexus of theorizations of capitalism, urbanism, ecological transition, and social movements in Southeast Asia and Southern Europe. Currently, he is conducting a new research project in southern Italy exploring the aftermath of a phytopatological epidemic that killed more than 21 million olive trees.
notes/quotes from publication:
Abstract
This article proposes an analysis of David Graeber’s work following the methods proposed by Antonio Gramsci of exploring Marx’s work in search of “the leitmotif, the rhythm of developing thought, must be more important than single random statements and detached aphorisms.” Adopting this Gramscian approach, I argue, allows us to dispel frequent critique of Graeber’s alleged idealism by recovering how Graeber’s reflection on possibility and alternatives operated by decentering the distinctions between the ideal and the material, while honing in the categories of imagination and estrangement. This move recovers Graeber’s work as a project of developing anthropology as the art of the possible, an enterprise directed at recovering, understanding, and offering social, economic, political, and conceptual alternatives.
Introduction
Approaching David Graeber’s work comprehensively, even a few years after his passing, remains a titanic undertaking, due to the sheer breadth of his output, his characteristic curiosity, his use of unexpected sources, his dedication to argumentative play and encyclopedic virtuosity, and his tendency toward provocative conversations over statements. As a result, scholars engaging his work often end up focusing on a specific concept, a particular text, or a distinct line of thought and thinking along it, selecting some aspect of this large oeuvre that resonates or clashes with their own.
david graeber ons et al.. graeber laws et al
This is evident in the two main collections that, since Graeber’s premature departure, have offered a general overview of his work . The first is a collection of essays hosted by the Focaal Blog, resulting from a series of commemorative lectures that took place in 2021 at the London School of Economics Research Seminar on Anthropological Theory The collection provides an essential, and much needed, guide to navigating Graeber’s opera but does so by sectioning his thinking along themes—lost people, value, debt, anarchist anthropology, myth, bureaucracy, and bullshit jobs—which loosely follow his main books chronologically and provide an assessment, often positive, at times critical, of his contributions to each theme. The second collection, also the result of a “slow workshop” that took place on Zoom over 2021, takes a different approach. Aiming at recovering Graeber’s project of “imagining new ways to live and not only to think”..t this text stresses the dialogical nature of his thinking, and each chapter offers a conversation between the authors’ own works and Graeber’s, punctuated with bibliographical memories, which provide a fascinating kaleidoscope of his thinking as refracted through that of others.
the thing we’ve not yet tried/seen: the unconditional part of left to own devices ness
[‘in an undisturbed ecosystem ..the individual left to its own devices.. serves the whole’ –dana meadows]
My argument here is that much of the recent critical engagement with Graeber’s work, both inside and outside anthropology, has revolved around a critique of his supposed “idealism” often voiced from inside a Marxist tradition, and a pushback against such accusations. These lines of critique, and their responses, focused on specific texts—Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value, Debt , and The Dawn of Everything above all—missing a larger leitmotif: his refusal of the division between material “infrastructure” and ideal “superstructure” in an attempt to develop what he called a “genuine materialism” in which the ideal is material in so far as it generates concrete actions. Graeber states this clearly in his Turning Modes of Production Inside Out:
theory of value.. debt (book).. dawn of everything (book).. m of care – apr 27
Adopting a Gramscian approach and directing our attention to the rhythms of Graeber’s developing thought therefore allow us to recover such “genuine materialism” and recover how Graeber’s reflection on possibility and alternatives operated by decentering the distinctions between the ideal and the material, while honing in the categories of imagination and estrangement. This move allows us to understand Graeber’s work as a project of developing anthropology as the art of the possible, an enterprise directed at recovering, understanding, and offering social, economic, political, and conceptual alternatives.
To recover this line of thought, I adopt a certain serendipity and an admission of theoretical eccentricity only fitting to address Graeber’s work, his pace, and his ability to recruit thoughts and thinkers almost anywhere.
Possibilities and imagination
In the ninth chapter of Poetics, Aristotle embarks into a brief reflection on the differences between the poet and the historian..The true difference is that one relates what has happened, the other what may happen.
Although seemingly far removed from Graeber’s work, this reflection can help us rediscover his role as a poet of anthropology not because, as Aristotle said, he wrote in verse, but rather because his attention was directed more to the possible than to what has happened, more to providing spaces for imagination than to describing and analyzing the present.
imagine if we ness
Since his earliest essays on money, theory of value, and anarchism. Graeber always saw activism and academic work as parts of a unified project aimed at opposing his sworn enemy: neoliberalism, seen not only as an economic project but as a symbolic and political one. Although solidly in the know of Marxist debate, Graeber was after all a student of Marshall Sahlins and Terence Turner, and with his masters refused to see historical materialism, or rather economistic materialism, as the basis, and its symbolic and cultural components as a superstructure, and shun such dualism by focusing rather on actions, the terrain in which meanings and concrete mediums, the ideal and the material meet. In this sense, neoliberalism was for him, even more than a specific way of organizing the relationship between markets and state forces, a symbolic apparatus, a machine for the suppression of alternatives. In the first pages of a collection of essays titled Revolutions in Reverse offers a seemingly eccentric definition of neoliberalism:
revolution in reverse et al
Neoliberal capitalism is that form that is utterly obsessed with ensuring that it seems that, as Margaret Thatcher so famously declared in the 1980s, “there is no alternative.” In other words, it has largely given up on any serious effort to argue that the current economic order is actually a good order, just, reasonable, that it will ever prove capable of creating a world in which most human beings feel prosperous, safe, and free to spend any significant portion of their life pursuing those things they consider genuinely important. Rather, it is a terrible system, in which even the very richest countries cannot guarantee access to such basic needs as health and education to the majority of their citizens, it works badly, but no other system could possibly work at all.
graeber make it diff law et al
Over time, Graeber reconstructs, the neoliberal project has been reduced to its ultimate essence, “not an economic project at all, but a political project, designed to devastate the imagination”.
Neoliberalism for Graeber therefore is configured, to put it in Aristotelian terminology, as an anti-poetic machine, whose actions aim at the systematic suppression of anything else that can happen, an apparatus aimed at the generation and preservation of what Boyer and Yurchak have called “cynical reason,” the belief that any radical change, no matter how desirable it may be, will never come to pass. *This anti-poetic machine, not only typical of neoliberal thought but also visible in contemporary academic debate, oriented toward skepticism and the radicalization of any effort to imagine alternatives, has always been Graeber’s real intellectual, academic, and political enemy, and his work is a concrete and scholarly attempt to challenge it, even at the cost of losing ethnographic specificity and historical accuracy, of sacrificing, at least in part, the function of the historian to the altar of that of the poet.
*first 1/2 is great.. but to 2nd 1/2.. only ‘losing historical accuracy’ validity.. legit ness.. of sea world.. oi
“The last thirty years,” he wrote more than a decade ago, “have seen the construction of a vast bureaucratic apparatus for the creation and maintenance of hopelessness, a kind of giant machine that is designed, first and foremost, to destroy any sense of possible alternative futures”. His work provided a twofold response to this apparatus: on the one hand, revealing its role and showing the production of forms of stupidity and hopelessness essential for its preservation; on the other, reconstructing a space for imagination, using anthropological knowledge and social movement practices as sources of inspiration. These two projects are probably the most consistent leitmotifs of Graeber’s work. We see them in his critique of wage labor and its origin in slavery, in his debate on the nexus between value and values and their constitutive power, in his analysis of direct actions , in his reflections on debt and money, in his critique of bullshit jobs, as well as in his criticism of state forces and bureaucratic machinery.
machinery of hopelessness et al
direct action an ethnography et al.. bs jobs from birth et al.. utopia of rules et al..
Through these two interpretive keys, we can organize his entire body of work. This dual task, as proposed by Graeber, includes not only an analytical and critical component, typical also of the Marxist avant-garde he consistently rejected, but also a practical and proactive one. In Graeber’s vision, this duality is anchored in the deep relationship between violence (both symbolic and material), the suppression of alternatives, and imagination.
structural violence.. spiritual violence.. dead zones of imagination.. et al
The concept of imagination, as many have noticed, is central to Graeber’s work but is often mobilized with different meanings. To attempt to disentangle them, let us start with his words in Utopia of Rules, specifically in a chapter where he offers an extended version of an argument, he had already presented in his 2006 Malinowski Lectures. Graeber proposes an analytical and historical distinction between two forms of imagination: one immanent, the other transcendent. The word “imagination” can mean so many different things.
In most modern definitions imagination is counterposed to reality; “imaginary” things are first and foremost things that aren’t really there […] )
This, for Graeber, is the “transcendent notion of imagination,” a view that opposes imagination to reality and makes it independent of both temporal and spatial dimensions. In other words, transcendent imagination is not influenced by reality, nor does it necessarily influence it in turn.
The search for alternative possibilities, so central to Graeber’s poetic project, does not, therefore, derive from this understanding of imagination. As he himself argues, this work
is much closer to the old, immanent, conception. Critically, it is in no sense static and free-floating, but entirely caught up in projects of action that aim to have real effects on the material world, and as such, always changing and adapting. This is equally true whether one is crafting a knife or a piece of jewelry, or trying to make sure one doesn’t hurt a friend’s feelings.
The imagination that neoliberalism attacks, and that Graeber’s work seeks to reclaim, thus corresponds to this second understanding: an immanent or, in other words, realist imagination that produces material realities and concretizes reason and thought into action.
To recapitulate, Graeber recovers two opposing conceptions of imagination: a transcendent one that stands in opposition to reality, and therefore idealistic, and an immanent one that directs action and therefore becomes a necessary step for creating concrete material realities—a “constituent imagination,” a term he adopted from the Italian autonomist tradition.. This second understanding is the one employed by Graeber, the one invoked by Aristotle, the one under attack by the neoliberal project, and the one that does not assume a distinction between the ideal and the material but rather see imagination as a necessary component of any material production. The replacement of this second understanding with the first, or at least the confusion between the two, is itself, according to Graeber, a historical process, a product of industrial capitalism that, like other present categories and practices, preserves traces of its previous life, offered as potential alternative paths.
Here is where Graeber’s dualistic categorization of transcendent and immanent imagination seems insufficient to contain his thoughts. As made evident by examples such as creating a knife and empathy toward a friend, two distinct senses of immanent imagination seem to emerge: on one hand, the imagination that mediates between thought and action, helping us imagine and thus create a knife or a piece of jewelry; on the other, a form of interpersonal imagination that allows us to empathize with the other and understand them, or at least not offend them. Here, a third meaning of imagination emerges, one that Graeber fails to analytically distinguish but continuously uses: an immanent but “identifying” imagination. This is the ability to imagine the other’s point of view, the foundation of all social relations of care and support. Most human relations, he says,
particularly ongoing ones, whether between longstanding friends or longstanding enemies—are extremely complicated, dense with history and meaning. Maintaining them requires a constant and often subtle work of imagination, of endlessly trying to see the world from others’ points of view. This is what I’ve already referred to as “interpretive labor.”
interpretive labor et al
This is a central point for Graeber. If constituent imagination is, so to speak, equally distributed among humans and under attack in neoliberalism, identifying imagination is unfairly demanded of those who are victims of this violence and becomes part of structural violence itself. “Women everywhere” comments, “are always expected to continually imagine what one situation or another would look like from a male point of view. Men are almost never expected to do the same for women”. Graeber calls these relationships “lopsided structures of imaginative identification”, and says they are the product of structural violence that relegates the subordinates the subjugated to perform enormous “interpretive work” and carry out “the work of understanding how the social relations in question really work”. “The situation is complicated,” Graeber reminds us in Revolution in Reverse, “by the fact that systematic inequalities backed by the threat of force—structural violence—always produce skewed and fractured structures of the imagination. It is the experience of living inside these fractured structures that we refer to as ‘alienation’”.
Here, Graeber’s work and his attention to imagination take on a deeper meaning—both from an intellectual perspective and from a political one. Not only are these forms of imagination and their connections to structural violence and alienation reconstructed, but this pat aims to open up a space for immanent imagination, both constituent—addressing possible alternatives—and identifying—combating alienation through the appreciation of interpretive work. The analytical and political project is nothing short of ambitious.
“All forms of systemic violence,” Graeber wrote in his Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, “are (among other things) assaults on the role of the imagination as a political principle, and the only way to begin to think about eliminating systematic violence is by recognizing this” and “counterpower is first and foremost rooted in the imagination”. In this sense, anthropology becomes for him not only an antidote to the suppression of alternatives perpetrated by neoliberalism but also to its resulting alienation, a poetic machine capable of addressing and mobilizing both forms of imagination, especially in conversation with concrete political action. Here is where Graeber’s utopian thinking is stronger in its faith
fragments of an anarchist anthropology
“Anthropologists,” Graeber reminds us, “are, effectively, sitting on a vast archive of human experience, of social and political experiments no one else really knows about”.
even with those.. to me.. nothing to date gets to root of problem
These spectral zones are always the fulcrum of the moral imagination, a kind of creative reservoir, too, of potential revolutionary change. It’s precisely from these invisible spaces—invisible, most of all, to power—whence the potential for insurrection, and the extraordinary social creativity that seems to emerge out of nowhere in revolutionary moments, actually comes.
and today .. we have the means for yet a nother way.. sans any form of m\a\p
Accessing these spaces and unleashing their imaginative potential is, in Graeber’s work, the result of processes of estrangement and de-familiarization that take shape in three forms, separated here for analytical clarity but often overlapping in his writings.
The first form is to learn from other societies as archives of alternatives and spaces for which to denaturalize the familiar. His work on slavery in Madagascar and The Dawn of Everything take the lead in developing this approach, but also reflections on kingship and sovereignty, as well as the theory of value, provide vivid examples of its effects. In each of these texts, the aim is to give space to constituent imagination and to use an elsewhere to provide alternative ways of imagining the present.
to me .. not deep enough.. again.. nothing to day has gotten to the root of problem.. so nothing legit diff..
madagascar et al
A poet of anthropology
Graeber opens his collection of essays, Possibilities with an explanation of why he became an anthropologist. “I was drawn to the discipline,” he writes,
because it opens windows on other possible forms of human social existence; because it served as a constant reminder that most of what we assume to be immutable has been, in other times and places, arranged quite differently, and therefore, that human possibilities are in almost every way greater than we ordinarily imagine. Anthropology also affords us new possible perspectives on familiar problems: ways of thinking about the rise of capitalism from the perspective of West Africa, European manners from the perspective of Amazonia, or, for that matter, West African or Amazonian masquerades from the perspective of Chinese festivals or Medieval European carnival.
As a way of conclusion, therefore, it seems only appropriate to return to Graeber and anthropology and briefly outline three ways in which, in Graeber’s work, the discipline contributed to the recovery of human possibilities.
Firstly, anthropology, through the first process of estrangement that I have analyzed, becomes a repository of potential alternatives. This is Graeber’s orientation toward the classical ethnographic canon. He sees it as a potentially infinite source of ideas and provocations. This is precisely the relationship that connects his doctoral research in Madagascar to his analysis of Occupy (the desire to look at those who are creating viable alternatives, try to figure out what might be the larger implications of what they are (already) doing, and then offer those ideas back, not as prescriptions, but as contributions, possibilities—as gifts.
to me.. gift\ness and contribution ness.. still cancerous distractions
The second contribution of anthropology is hinted at, in parentheses, in this last quote: to show that these alternatives are not only possible but already in existence. Influenced by Mauss and Kropotkin, David argued that we already live in a communist society and that capitalism is, at best, a misguided way of organizing communism. To become aware of it, Graeber proposes,
to me.. only thing we have in existence to date is part\ial ness.. which is a cancerous distraction now that we have the means for a global detox leap.. for (blank)’s sake
allows us to see everything we are already doing in a new light. To realize we’re all already communists when working on a common project, all already anarchists when we solve problems without recourse to lawyers or police, all revolutionaries when we make something genuinely new.
again.. to me.. has to be all of us for the dance to dance.. and nothing to date has been about all of us ness.. so to me.. nothing yet legit new/diff..
again.. the thing we’ve not yet tried/seen: the unconditional part of left to own devices ness
[‘in an undisturbed ecosystem ..the individual left to its own devices.. serves the whole’ –dana meadows]
Finally, the third contribution is more transcendental, almost metaphysical, and properly revolutionary. Here, anthropological knowledge is aimed not only at providing alternatives and recovering those already existing but also at destroying the anti-poetic mechanism of neoliberal thought, shattering “the sense of inevitability, that the system must, necessarily, be patched together in the same form”. This, for Graeber, is what revolutionaries do, “break existing frames to create new horizons of possibility, an act that then allows a radical restructuring of the social imagination”
and again.. to me.. nothing to date has legit gotten to new horizons ness
footnotes:
I am, of course, not alone in attempting to develop this approach to Graeber’s work. Here the works of Grubačić and Vodovnik, Çubukçu, and Kerr are of particular inspiration.
2. Here Graeber comes very close to Jason Moore’s analysis of the dualism between the material and the ideal as a product of capitalist abstractions \.
3. The revolutionary potential of this intellectual move has also been pointed out by Alpa Shah (2017)
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be you. 