david on possibilities

adding page after ayça on david’s possibilities.. where ayça çubukçu writes about david graeber‘s possibilities in Ayça Çubukçu’s @ayca_cu “David Graeber’s Anthropology of Human Possibilities” (2022) [https://www.academia.edu/86039129/Ay%C3%A7a_%C3%87ubuk%C3%A7u_2022_David_Graebers_Anthropology_of_Human_Possibilities_forthcoming_in_boundary_2] –

some graeber quotes from ayca’s 17 page pdf (that i had to ‘freely’ register for on academia).. rest of notes from article on ayça on david’s possibilities page:

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the discipline (anthro) 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”

Fragments seeks to outline a body of radical theory that would, in Graeber’s words, “actually be of interest to those who are trying to help bring about a world in which people are free to govern their own affairs”..

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in Graeber’s words, “the basic principles of anarchism—self organization, voluntary association, mutual aid— referred to forms of human behavior they assumed to have been around about as long as humanity.

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In fact, Graeber asserts this as the first assumption that any radical social theory has to make. “To commit oneself to such a principle is almost an act of faith,” he finds, “since how can one have certain knowledge of such matters? It might possibly turn out that such a world is not possible” (10). In a move that resembles a sophisticated theological argument about the existence of God, he then declares, “it’s this very unavailability of absolute knowledge which makes a commitment to optimism a moral imperative”.

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Graeber makes the daring proposition that “the fruits of ethnography—and the techniques of ethnography—could be enormously helpful” for radical movements around the world if anthropologists could “get past their—however understandable—hesitancy, owing to their own often squalid colonial history, and come to see what they are sitting on not as some guilty secret (which is nonetheless their guilty secret, and no one else’s) but as the common property of humankind”

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Graeber and Wengrow state decisively that The Dawn of Everything “is a book mainly about freedom” (206). “What ultimately matters,” they write when introducing this tantalizing book, “is whether we can rediscover the freedoms that make us human in the first place”.

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Rhetorically, Graeber and Wengrow ask, “Is not the capacity to experiment with different forms of social organization itself a quintessential part of what makes us human?

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Graeber and Wengrow insist, “something has been lost” (2). Towards a conclusion then, the authors formulate what this loss entails: “It is clear that something about human societies really has changed here, and quite profoundly. The three basic freedoms have gradually receded, to the point where a majority of people living today can barely comprehend what it might be like to live in a social order based on them”

they explore “the convergence between systems of violence and systems of care” (517) as a critical, even a causal explanation for this loss. Graeber and Wengrow suggest things may have begun to go wrong “precisely when people started losing that freedom to imagine and enact other forms of social existence”

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Allow me to conclude then with a strikingly imaginative passage from Fragments, which we could receive as a call to think and act towards the possibility of an anarchist future:

‘[A]narchist forms of organization would not look anything like a state. … [T]hey would involve an endless variety of communities, associations, networks, projects, on every conceivable scale, overlapping and intersecting in any way we could imagine, and possibly many that we can’t. Some would be quite local, others global. Perhaps all they would have in common is that none would involve anyone showing up with weapons and telling everyone else to shut up and do what they were told. And that, since anarchists are not actually trying to seize power within any national territory, the process of one system replacing the other will not take the form of some sudden revolutionary cataclysm—the storming of a Bastille, the seizing of a Winter Palace—*but will necessarily be gradual, **the creation of alternative forms of organization on a world scale, new forms of communication, new, less alienated ways of organizing life, which will, eventually, make currently existing forms of power seem stupid and beside the point. That in turn would mean that there are endless examples of viable anarchism: pretty much any form of organization would count as one, so long as it was not imposed by some higher authority (2004: 40).’

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