rhythm of developing thought
David Graeber’s rhythm of developing thought: On poetics, imagination, and estrangement (April 10, 2025) by Claudio Sopranzetti
via simona ferlini fb share in david graeber discussion forum:
Open access: David Graeber’s rhythm of developing thought: On poetics, imagination, and estrangement
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/epub/10.1177/14634996251328707
notes/quotes from article:
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.
This is evident in the two main collections that, since Graeber’s premature departure, have offered a general overview of his work (Bowers et al., 2021; High and Reno, 2023). 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 (Bowers et al., 2021). 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” (High and Reno, 2023: iix) 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” (2023: ix), 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.
lost people, theory of value, debt (book), fragments of an anarchist anthropology, utopia of rules, bs jobs from birth
While incredibly valuable in showing the expanse and significance of Graeber’s contributions, both texts, although differently, end up favoring a selection and engagement with specific concepts, texts, and moments over a holistic approach to his production. In this article, instead, I propose to follow a different approach, one similar to that adopted by Gramsci in his readings of Marx, in which the objective was “the search for the leitmotif, for the rhythm of developing thought” (Gramsci, 1949: 77), over the focus on individual texts, statements, or concepts. But why is such an approach necessary and what do we gain by following it?
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 .., 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. .. states this clearly in his Turning Modes of Production Inside Out:
dawn of everything (book).. domestic (structure) mode of (under) production .. [read modes – i guess notes are on museum of care meetings page i read it for]
what has passed for “materialism” in traditional Marxism—the division between material “infrastructure” and ideal “superstructure”—is itself a perverse form of idealism. Granted, those who practice law, or music, or religion, or finance, or social theory, always do tend to claim that they are dealing with something higher, more abstract, than those who plant onions, blow glass or operate sewing machines. But it’s not really true. The actions involved in the production of law, poetry, etc., are just as material as any others. Once you acknowledge the simple dialectical point that what we take to be self-identical objects are really processes of action, then it becomes pretty obvious that such actions are always (a) motivated by meanings (ideas) and (b) always proceed through a concrete medium (material), and that while all systems of domination seem to propose that “No, this is not true, really there is some pure domain of law, or truth, or grace, or theory, or finance capital, that floats above it all”, such claims are, to use an appropriately earthy metaphor, bullshit. […] A genuine materialism, then, would not simply privilege a “material” sphere over an ideal one. It would begin by acknowledging that no such ideal sphere actually exists. This, in turn, would make it possible to stop focusing so obsessively on the production of material objects—discrete, self identical things that one can own—and start the more difficult work of trying to understand the (equally material) processes by which people create and shape one another.
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. As Grubačić and Vodovnik (2021: 2) have noted, “Even a cursory glance at his opus reveals a coherent and systematic analysis of something that we could bluntly call ‘possibilities’”. Beginning with their incipit, I focus on the role that the categories of imagination and estrangement played in Graeber’s proposal of anthropology as an antidote to the neoliberal project of eliminating alternatives and the TINA (there is no alternative) discipline.
possibilities.. david on possibilities.. ayça on david’s possibilities
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. The journey I propose in this article, like any journey worthy of the name, begins in unexpected places and develops through the appearance of almost magical helpers. In my case, two in particular, far removed from the corner of the academy occupied by David Graeber: the first Aristotle, and one of his reflections on the difference between historians and poets; the second Carlo Ginzburg, and one of his usual erudite disquisitions on the relationship between real, fake, and false sources in historiography and on the role of estrangement as a literary and philological technique. Each of them will set us on course to our search for the leitmotifs of Graeber’s thought beyond debates around its idealism.
Possibilities and imagination
In the ninth chapter of Poetics, Aristotle embarks into a brief reflection on the differences between the poet and the historian. “It is not the function of the poet,” the philosopher reminds us,
to relate what has happened, but what may happen […] ..The true difference is that one relates what has happened, the other what may happen. (Aristotle, 2008: 17)
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..t
huge.. ie: letting go of cancerous distractions.. and instead trying/seeing a legit nother way
.. In this sense, judging Graeber’s opera for not being the work of a historian means missing the leitmotif of his intellectual and political project.
Recovering it, on the contrary, requires not to focus on specific texts or concepts but rather begin from the role of political activism in the formation of his academic thought. 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:
david on neoliberal capitalism:
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.” ..t
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”
On the contrary,.. argues, if
we stop taking world leaders at their word and instead think of neoliberalism as a political project, it suddenly looks spectacularly effective. […] They have succeeded magnificently in convincing the world that capitalism—and not just capitalism, but exactly the financialized, semifeudal capitalism we happen to have right now—is the only viable economic system.
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 (Boyer and Yurchak, 2010). 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.
“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 …
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. This is a fundamental node of his thought, one that echoes across many of his writing, albeit often in a convoluted manner, atypical for his usual clarity. Let’s pause for a moment and try to unravel this relation, firstly by parsing out the various meanings of imagination used by Graeber and then by exploring the role of anthropological work in relation to them.
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 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.
“It was precisely in the mid- to late-eighteenth century,” .. reconstructs,
..On the one hand, the imagination was seen as the source of art, and all creativity. On the other, it was the basis of human sympathy, and hence morality.
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.
structural violence.. spiritual violence.. et al
..The analytical and political project is nothing short of ambitious.
Here is where Graeber’s .. utopian thinking is stronger in its faith, as he declares, that
we are clearly at the verge of another mass resurgence of the popular imagination. It’s just a matter of time. Certainly, the first reaction to an unforeseen crisis is usually shock and confusion; but after a bit, that passes, and new ideas emerge. It shouldn’t be that difficult. Most of the elements are already there. For the moment the problem is that, our perceptions having been twisted into knots by decades of relentless propaganda, we are no longer able to see them.
wilde not-us law et al.. need a global detox leap
Estrangement and de-familiarizatio
..Ginzburg’s analysis of estrangement, and the role of this process of familiarizing the exotic and exoticizing the familiar in anthropology begin to slot within a single landscape, where Graeber’s work, and his call to place imagination and the search for alternatives at the center of the anthropological project, also find a place.
to give the charm of novelty to things of everyday, and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural, by awakening the mind’s attention from the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us; an inexhaustible treasure, but for which, in consequence of the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude we have eyes, yet see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand. (Coleridge, 1907: II, 6)
The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects “unfamiliar,” to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged […] Art removes objects from the automatism of perception. (Shklovsky, 2017: 10–11)
art (by day/light) and sleep (by night/dark) as global re\set.. to fittingness (undisturbed ecosystem)
In this, Shklovsky (2017: 11) sees Tolstoy as a model:
Tolstoy makes the familiar seem strange by not naming the familiar object. He describes an object as if he were seeing it for the first time, an event as if it were happening for the first time […]
..“stripping the event of its self-evident, familiar, obvious quality and creating a sense of astonishment and curiosity about them” (Brooker, 1994: 191, 193)
..This observation echoes Marcus and Fisher’s (1986) words in Anthropology as Cultural Critique, in which they position de-familiarization and estrangement as essential techniques for this project. “Disruption of commonsense, doing the unexpected, placing familiar subjects in unfamiliar, or even shocking, contexts,” reconstruct the two anthropologists, “are the aims of this strategy to make the reader conscious of difference” (Marcus and Fischer, 1986: 137).
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…
Accessing these spaces and unleashing their imaginative potential is, in Graeber’s work, the result of processes of estrangement and de-familiarization..t that take shape in three forms, separated here for analytical clarity but often overlapping in his writings.
need 1st/most: means (nonjudgmental expo labeling) to undo hierarchical listening as global detox so we can org around legit needs
nothing to date has gotten to the root of problem
legit freedom will only happen if it’s all of us.. and in order to be all of us.. has to be sans any form of measuring, accounting, people telling other people what to do
how we gather in a space is huge.. need to try spaces of permission where people have nothing to prove to facil curiosity over decision making.. because the finite set of choices of decision making is unmooring us.. keeping us from us..
ie: imagine if we listen to the itch-in-8b-souls 1st thing everyday & use that data to connect us (tech as it could be.. ai as augmenting interconnectedness)
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]
there’s a legit use of tech (nonjudgmental exponential labeling) to facil the seeming chaos of a global detox leap/dance.. the unconditional part of left-to-own-devices ness.. for (blank)’s sake.. and we’re missing it
ie: whatever for a year.. a legit sabbatical ish transition
The first form is to *learn from other societies as archives of alternatives..t and spaces for which to denaturalize the familiar.
*again.. nothing to date has gotten to the root of problem.. need to try a legit nother way
the thing we’ve not yet tried: the unconditional part of left to own devices ness
The second form of estrangement in Graeber’s work, and perhaps what made him more known outside anthropology, follows a different direction and de-familiarizes the mundane by taking everyday elements and making them profoundly meaningful, and yet at the same time contextual and ephemeral. Here, we find some of Graeber’s most visionary and popular pages, often initially entrusted to magazines and newspapers and only after developed into fully fledged academic arguments. Here is where we find writings on flying machines and the decline of profit.., on crime movies and private property.., on Batman and superheroes.., on Buffy the Vampire Slayer.., on police officers’ hatred for puppets .., as well as on the proliferation of bullshit jobs… In these cases, estrangement is achieved through another type of gaze, an almost anti-identificative form of imagination that allows readers to stop empathizing with their own lives and taking them for granted but to observe them, as Voltaire said, “as if seen through the eyes of a stranger or a savage”… Through this operation, Graeber shows us the total arbitrariness of what we consider necessary and without alternatives.
Yet in Graeber, there is also a third form of estrangement, which perhaps more directly refers to Voltaire’s polemical tone: an iconoclastic estrangement that aims at making the sacred mundane. In carrying out this project, Graeber turns to the sacred cows of contemporary capitalism: money .., debt .., the gospel of work .., consumption .., and volunteer wage work … One by one, he tackles them, reconstructs alternative genealogies, shows their historical conjunctions, and, in doing so, reveals how, contrary to neoliberal thought, *these categories are not only not necessary but also not ideal. These, in my opinion, are the most illuminated pages of his work, where erudition and political significance converge, as they did in the pages of Marcel Mauss (2000). Like Mauss, in fact, Graeber does not stop at this estrangement but rather, once each of these sacred categories is decomposed, begins to recompose them in an alternative configuration. In this last form, estrangement is primarily an epistemic project, and **the challenge becomes getting rid of basic terms for political economy and creating a redefinition or, better still, a re-imagination of the present. This project was, unfortunately, halted by his premature departure, leaving us only with scattered indications … One such instance is found in the early outlines of a new labor theory of value grounded in care that he started to develop in a series of essays published in The Baffler, in it, he reconceptualized “factory labour [as] a second-order form, and education, or nursing, is part of a much broader process of mutual aid and care that supports and ultimately creates the work by which we create each other” (Grubačić and Vodovnik, 2021: 10).
*aka: cancerous distractions
**nothing to date legit diff.. the thing we’ve not yet tried: the unconditional part of left to own devices ness
In this third use of estrangement, Graeber comes closest to Gramsci and the project of creating a new common sense that places political significance and the creation of a hegemonic project above its analytical accuracy—an aspect often forgotten by those who criticize Graeber for the reductionism in some of his pages. “The question for me,” Graeber .. wrote,
is whether our theoretical work is ultimately directed at undoing or dismantling some of the effects of these lopsided structures of imagination, or whether—as can so easily happen when even our best ideas come to be backed up by bureaucratically administered violence—we end up reinforcing them.
This is where we discover how anthropology, for Graeber, can contribute to this dismantling.
A poet of anthropology
.. 1) 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..t: 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.
*and now/too.. to (virus) leap ness.. so we can’t not
**this keeps getting in the way.. familiar problems et al are cancerous distractions.. need something legit diff
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 (Graeber, 2009), 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,..t and then offer those ideas back, not as prescriptions, but as contributions, possibilities—as gifts. (Graeber D (2004) Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology).
fragments of an anarchist anthropology
huge.. this is what we keep not doing.. not going deep enough to be ‘the larger implications’
ie: 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]
there’s a legit use of tech (nonjudgmental exponential labeling) to facil the seeming chaos of a global detox leap/dance.. the unconditional part of left-to-own-devices ness.. for (blank)’s sake.. and we’re missing it
ie: whatever for a year.. a legit sabbatical ish transition
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, .. proposes,
*are they?.. i don’t think we’ve every tried/seen the unconditional part of left to own devices ness.. we always have some condition.. no matter how subtle/small/etc.. ie: a raised eyebrow et al
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.
*but to me.. nothing genuinely new to date.. all same song
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 D (2011a) Revolutions in Reverse: Essays on Politics, Violence, Art, and Imagination. New York: Minor Compositions), 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”.
*this is great.. but something we can’t seem to do.. we can’t seem to let go enough to try/see something legit diff/free..
graeber rethink law et al
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be you. 