Graeber - Anarchy-In a Manner of Speaking

David Graeber

Anarchy
In a Manner of Speaking

Conversations with
Mehdi Belhaj Kacem, Nika Dubrovsky,
and Assia Turquier-Zauberman

DIAPHANES

DIAPHANES,

ZURICH-PARIS-BERLIN 2020

ISBN 978-3-0358-0386-0

LAYOUT: 2EDIT ZURICH

WWW.DIAPHANES.COM

)

MEHDI BELHAJ KACEM: The ANARCHIES collection aims to question the notion of anarchy in the philosophical, scientific, aesthetic, erotic spheres ... but, to question the sphere which perhaps embraces all those which I have just spelled, and which is the political sphere, it seemed to me that there was no better interlocutor in the world than you, David Graeber.

DAVID GRAEBER: Questioning the role of anarchy in the political sphere yes, I like that formulation.

The thing I try to avoid is being interviewed as some kind of authority on anarchy. This isnt just for the obvious reasons; its also because I dont actually know all that much about the history of anarchist political theory. Sure, Im broadly familiar with Kropotkin, Bakunin. Ive even read some Proudhon. But Im not a scholar of anarchism in any sense; Im a scholar who subscribes to anarchist principles and occasionally acts on them, though usually in fairly limited ways. In fact Ive largely avoided the books. So if you ask me about the difference between Alexander Berkmans vision of direct democracy and Johann Mosts, or for that matter the ethics of Leo Tolstoy versus Martin Buber, frankly, I dont know. I cant tell you.

MBK: Its the same with me, but this is an experimental book.

DG: I like to think it doesnt matter all that much. A case can certainly be made. Anarchism is very different from Marxism after all; its not driven by heroic thinkers. You never hear anyone say Im a Kropotkinist and youre a Malatestian so I hate you. If anarchists form into sects and decide they hate each other (which of course they often do), its typically over questions of organization or practice of some kind or another: Youre a platformist and Im a syndicalist or an individualist, or council communist or what-have-you. And I do know a bit about anarchist practice since I spent a good chunk of my life participating in groups organized on anarchist principles.

Since we are engaged in a dialogue, here, I thought it might be interesting to take dialogue itself as a theme. A lot of anarchist practiceat least the kind I think of as quintessentially anarchistrevolves around a certain principle of dialogue; theres a lot of attention paid to learning how to make pragmatic, cooperative decisions with people who have fundamentally different understandings of the world, without actually trying to convert them to your particular point of view.

Its always struck me as interesting that in the ancient world, whether in India, China, or Greece, philosophy was written almost exclusively in the form of dialogue (even if its often the kind of dialogue where one guy does 95% of the talking.) Thought, self-reflective consciousness, that which we tend to see as making us truly humanwas assumed to be collective (political) or dyadic, but something that almost by definition couldnt be done all by yourself. Or rather, solitary reflection was usually the ultimate goal. The aim of philosophy was, often at least, to cultivate yourself to the point where individual self-consciousness might be possibleand different philosophical schools from Buddhism to stoicism tended to employ different forms of meditation, diet, spiritual exercises as a means of ultimately attaining the status of a sage who really could be a self-conscious individual. But it was only by starting with dialogue that one had any chance of getting there.

For me, thats the most important break Descartes introduces. Christian thought had already been moving away from dialogue. But Descartes completely turns things around by starting with the self-conscious individual, and only then asking how that individual can have any kind of communicative relation with anyone else. Its the basis of all subsequent European philosophy but its also absurd, as neuroscience has shown that the ancients were right: real thought is almost entirely dialogic. Not that cognitive scientists usually say it explicitly, because for some reason they too have a strange mental block on conversation, but they do make clear that whats called the window of consciousnessthat time during which most of us actually are full self-aware, self-reflective beingsis rare and brief; it averages around maybe seven seconds. Otherwise youre generally operating on autopilot.

Unless, of course, youre talking to someone else. You can have conversations on autopilot too of course, but if youre really interested and engaged with someone else you can maintain it for hours. The implications of this are profound, even though we rarely seem to acknowledge it: most self-aware thought takes place at exactly the moment when the boundaries of the self are least clear.

ASSIA TURQUIER-ZAUBERMAN: when it isnt clear whose mind is which.

DG: Precisely.

So if theres something Id like to figure out in this particular conversation, it would be the political implications. Twentieth-century political theory tended to pose the individual versus society (society being generally a stand-in for the nation-state), and in the same way the individual mind versus some kind of collective consciousness (whether literally, as in Jung or Durkheim, or in the form of some language-like semiotic code that makes thought possible). But this is ultimately a totalitarian logic. Perhaps this isnt surprising, as the centurys politics were haunted by so many different forms of totalitarianism: fascist, Marxist, neoclassical economics The dialogic approach suggests that most of the really important action takes place somewhere in between: in conversation, or deliberation. Yet such conversations have a notorious tendency to cover up their traces. Would it be possible instead to have a conversation that itself exemplifies the very thing were trying to understand?

MBK: I like this idea of dialogue, which pushes our interview a little into abyss. And since when have you been an anarchist?

DG: Oh, I dont know. Since I was a teenager I guess.

When people ask me why I became an anarchist, I always say that most people dont think anarchism is a bad idea; they think its crazy. So youre saying everyone should just cooperate for the common good without chains of command or prisons or police? Thats lovely. Dream on. It would never work. But I was never brought up to think anarchism was crazy. My father fought with the International Brigades in Spain. He was in the ambulance corps based in Benacasim just outside Barcelona so he got to observe for himself how a city organized on anarchist principles could work. And it worked just fine. He himself never quite got to the point of calling himself an anarchistlargely because it was only towards the end of his life that he really fully rejected Marxism. But by then he was no longer politically active, so calling himself an anarchist seemed a bit pretentiousbut I grew up in a household where anarchism was definitely not seen as crazy. It was treated as a legitimate political position. And if so, what reason is there not to be one?

MBK: Theres a generic definition of anarchy in a very important book for us at diaphanes, by Reiner Schurmann, called The Principle of Anarchy