David Graeber

Bio

David Graeber was an Anthropologist and Activist. He authored 'Debt: The First 5000 Years'. He was active in the Occupy Movement.

He died aged 59 on September 2nd, 2020. (Obituary from Open Democracy)

Discussion

Claudio Sopranzetti:

(a Gramscian reading of Graeber's overall work)

"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. 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.1 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” (Gatenby, 2015; Huato, 2015; Kalb, 2014, 2021, 2024; Mollona, 2022; Lindisfarne and Neale, 2021; Scheidel, 2022) often voiced from inside a Marxist tradition, and a pushback against such accusations (Andueza, 2021; Kaczmarski, 2019; Rossi et al., 2024). These lines of critique, and their responses, focused on specific texts—Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value (Graeber, 2001), Debt (Graeber, 2012b), and The Dawn of Everything (Graeber and Wengrow, 2021) 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” (Graeber, 2016: 6), in which the ideal is material in so far as it generates concrete actions.

Graeber (2006: 70–71) states this clearly in his Turning Modes of Production Inside Out:

- "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.

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."

(https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/14634996251328707)

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