"The Utopia of Rules"

[fiefoe]

David Graeber's three plus essays are most thought-provoking, and his pop culture analysis is an eye-opener -- do all anthropologists work this way?

• The Right, at least, has a critique of bureaucracy. It’s not a very good one. But at least it exists. The Left has none.
• This right-wing critique can be disposed of fairly quickly. It has its origins in nineteenth-century liberalism.8 The story that emerged in middle-class circles in Europe in the wake of the French revolution was that the civilized world was experiencing a gradual, uneven, but inevitable transformation away from the rule of warrior elites, with their authoritarian governments, their priestly dogmas, and their caste-like stratification, to one of liberty, equality, and enlightened commercial self-interest.
• However, extending the vote to the losers of the economic game would inevitably lead to calls for government intervention, framed as high-minded schemes for trying to solve social problems through administrative means.
• historically, markets simply did not emerge as some autonomous domain of freedom independent of, and opposed to, state authorities. Exactly the opposite is the case. Historically, markets are generally either a side effect of government operations, especially military operations, or were directly created by government policy... the invention of coinage, which was first created and promulgated as a means of provisioning soldiers;... Modern central banking systems were likewise first created to finance wars.
• America’s advent as a power on the world stage at the end of the century corresponded to the rise of a distinctly American form: corporate—bureaucratic—capitalism. As Giovanni Arrighi pointed out, an analogous corporate model was emerging at the same time in Germany,
• Unlike the British Empire, which had taken its free market rhetoric seriously, eliminating its own protective tariffs with the famous Anti–Corn Law Bill of 1846, neither the German or American regimes had ever been especially interested in free trade. The Americans in particular were much more concerned with creating structures of international administration.
• British people, I’ve observed, are quite proud that they are not especially skilled at bureaucracy; Americans, in contrast, seem embarrassed by the fact that on the whole, they’re really quite good at it.
• I am equally confident that, were it possible to investigate how these regulations came about, one would find that they were composed jointly by aides to legislators on some banking committee and lobbyists and attorneys employed by the banks themselves, in a process greased by generous contributions to the coffers of those same legislators’ reelection campaigns. And the same would be true of anything from credit ratings, insurance premiums,
• In the case of airlines or telecommunications in the seventies and eighties, it meant changing the system of regulation from one that encouraged a few large firms to one that fostered carefully supervised competition between midsize firms. In the case of banking, “deregulation” has usually meant exactly the opposite: moving away from a situation of managed competition between midsized firms to one where a handful of financial conglomerates are allowed to completely dominate the market.
• What did financialization mean for the deeply bureaucratized society that was postwar America? <> I think what happened is best considered as a kind of shift in class allegiances on the part of the managerial staff of major corporations, from an uneasy, de facto alliance with their own workers, to one with investors.
• managers and workers alike—tended to see themselves as sharing a certain common interest in this regard, over and against meddling owners and investors. This kind of solidarity across class lines even had a name: it was called “corporatism.” One mustn’t romanticize it. It was among other things the philosophical basis of fascism. Indeed, one could well argue that fascism simply took the idea that workers and managers had common interests, that organizations like corporations or communities formed organic wholes, and that financiers were an alien, parasitical force, and drove them to their ultimate, murderous extreme.
• there was a double movement: corporate management became more financialized, but at the same time, the financial sector became corporatized, with investment banks, hedge funds, and the like largely replacing individual investors. As a result the investor class and the executive class became almost indistinguishable.
• The actual working class, who bore a traditional loathing for such characters, either dropped out of politics entirely, or were increasingly reduced to casting protest votes for the radical Right. <> This was not just a political realignment. It was a cultural transformation. And it set the stage for the process whereby the bureaucratic techniques (performance reviews, focus groups, time allocation surveys …) developed in financial and corporate circles came to invade the rest of society—education, science, government
• For all its celebration of markets and individual initiative, this alliance of government and finance often produces results that bear a striking resemblance to the worst excesses of bureaucratization in the former Soviet Union or former colonial backwaters of the Global South. There is a rich anthropological literature, for instance, on the cult of certificates, licenses, and diplomas in the former colonial world... official credentials are seen as a kind of material fetish—magical objects conveying power in their own right, entirely apart from the real knowledge, experience, or training they’re supposed to represent.
• Increasingly, corporate profits in America are not derived from commerce or industry at all, but from finance—which means, ultimately, from other people’s debts. These debts do not just happen by accident. To a large degree, they are engineered—and by precisely this kind of fusion of public and private power.
• a particular kind of double standard typical of bureaucratic systems everywhere. All bureaucracies are to a certain degree utopian, in the sense that they propose an abstract ideal that real human beings can never live up to.
• As whole societies have come to represent themselves as giant credentialized meritocracies, rather than systems of arbitrary extraction, everyone duly scurries about trying to curry favor by pretending they actually believe this is to be true.
• (the siege of the World Trade Meeting in Seattle in November 1999): It was a surprisingly effective strategy. Within a matter of two or three years, we had sunk pretty much every proposed new global trade pact, and institutions like the IMF had been effectively expelled from Asia, Latin America, and, indeed, most of the world’s surface.
• Whenever someone starts talking about the “free market,” it’s a good idea to look around for the man with the gun. He’s never far away. Free-market liberalism of the nineteenth century corresponded with the invention of the modern police and private detective agencies,30 and gradually, with the notion that those police had at least ultimate jurisdiction over virtually every aspect of urban life
• All rich countries now employ legions of functionaries whose primary function is to make poor people feel bad about themselves. But the culture of evaluation is if anything even more pervasive in the hypercredentialized world of the professional classes, where audit culture reigns, and nothing is real that cannot be quantified, tabulated, or entered into some interface or quarterly report.

• After all, is this not what we always say of utopians: that they have a naïve faith in the perfectibility of human nature and refuse to deal with humans as they actually are? Which is, are we not also told, what leads them to set impossible standards and then blame the individuals for not living up to them?41 But in fact all bureaucracies do this,
• Weber and Foucault: it sometimes seems that these were the only two intelligent human beings in twentieth century history who honestly believed that the power of bureaucracy lies in its effectiveness... It’s hard to avoid the suspicion that Weber and Foucault’s popularity owed much to the fact that the American university system during this period had itself increasingly become an institution dedicated to producing functionaries for an imperial administrative apparatus, operating on a global scale.
• We also have an increasing tendency to identify what’s interesting with what’s important, and to assume that places of density are also places of power. The power of bureaucracy shows just how often exactly the opposite is in fact the case.
• what is really important about violence is that it is perhaps the only form of human action that holds out even the possibility of having social effects without being communicative. To be more precise: violence may well be the only way it is possible for one human being to do something which will have relatively predictable effects on the actions of a person about whom they understand nothing.
• One never had the impression the women in question had any trouble understanding men. The reason is obvious. Women had no choice but to understand men... Women everywhere 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. So deeply internalized is this pattern of behavior that many men react to any suggestion that they might do otherwise as if it were itself an act of violence.
• Police are bureaucrats with weapons.
• structural analysis is currently considered definitively passé, and most anthropology students find Claude Lévi-Strauss’s entire corpus vaguely ridiculous. This strikes me as unfortunate... structural analysis wasn’t a theory, it was a technique
• The basic principle of structural analysis, I was explaining, is that the terms of a symbolic system do not stand in isolation—they are not to be thought of in terms of what they “stand for,” but are defined by their relations to each other. One has to first define the field, and then look for elements in that field that are systematic inversions of each other... The opposite of a vampire is a werewolf.
• It was in mapping out the field that I came to realize that everything here was organized, precisely, around the relation between information and violence—and that Sherlock Holmes and James Bond are, between them, the quintessential charismatic heroes of bureaucracy.
• For my own part, I see Lévi-Strauss as a kind of heroic figure too, a man with the sheer intellectual courage to pursue a few simple principles as far as they would go, no matter how apparently absurd or just plain wrong the results could sometimes be (the story of Oedipus is really about eyes and feet; all social organizations are simply systems for the exchange of women)
• structural violence creates lopsided structures of the imagination. Those on the bottom of the heap have to spend a great deal of imaginative energy trying to understand the social dynamics that surround them—including having to imagine the perspectives of those on top
• Bureaucracies, I’ve suggested, are not themselves forms of stupidity so much as they are ways of organizing stupidity—of managing relationships that are already characterized by extremely unequal structures of imagination, which exist because of the existence of structural violence. This is why even if a bureaucracy is created for entirely benevolent reasons, it will still produce absurdities.
• The famous slogan “All power to the imagination,”... seems to embody something fundamental, not just to the spirit of sixties rebellion, but to the very essence of what we have come to call “the Left.”
• But if you really go back to the beginnings—to the idea that emerged around the time of the French Revolution that the political spectrum can be divided into a right- and left-wing in the first place—it becomes clear that the Left, in its essence, is a critique of bureaucracy, even if it’s one that has, again and again, been forced to accommodate itself in practice to the very bureaucratic structures and mindset it originally arose to oppose.
• The DAN car caused a minor, but ongoing, crisis. We soon discovered that legally, it is impossible for a decentralized network to own a car. Cars can be owned by individuals, or they can be owned by corporations (which are fictive individuals), or by governments. But they cannot be owned by networks. Unless we were willing to incorporate ourselves as a nonprofit corporation
• It seems to me that the reality effect... comes rather from the fact that radical projects tend to founder—or at least become endlessly difficult—the moment they enter into the world of large, heavy objects:
• But sovereignty ultimately comes down to a monopoly on what is euphemistically referred to as “force”—that is, violence. Just as the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben argued that from the perspective of sovereign power, something is alive because you can kill it, so property is “real” because the state can seize or destroy it.
• The critical term here is “force,” as in “the state’s monopoly on the use of coercive force.” Whenever we hear this word invoked, we find ourselves in the presence of a political ontology in which the power to destroy, to cause others pain or to threaten to break, damage, or mangle others’ bodies (or just lock them in a tiny room for the rest of their lives) is treated as the social equivalent of the very energy that drives the cosmos. Contemplate, if you will, the metaphors and displacements that make it possible to construct the following two sentences: <> Scientists investigate the nature of physical laws so as to understand the forces that govern the universe.
• Leftist thought is founded on what I will call a “political ontology of the imagination” (though it could also, perhaps just as well, have been called an ontology of creativity or making or invention.)
• right-wing realities could be simply swept away, to leave the field open for an untrammeled outpouring of revolutionary creativity. But the truly puzzling thing is that, at certain moments of human history, that appeared to be exactly what was happening.
• the same collection of citizens is likely to come to completely different decisions on questions affecting their communities if organized into a parliamentary system, a system of computerized plebiscites, or a nested series of public assemblies. In fact the entire anarchist project of reinventing direct democracy is premised on assuming this is the case.
• Insurrectionary moments are moments when this bureaucratic apparatus is neutralized. Doing so always seems to have the effect of throwing horizons of possibility wide open, which is only to be expected if one of the main things that that apparatus normally does is to enforce extremely limited horizons. (This is probably why, as Rebecca Solnit has so beautifully observed,77 people often experience something very similar during natural disasters.)
• in most ways, most of the time, power is all about what you don’t have to worry about, don’t have to know about, and don’t have to do. Bureaucracies can democratize this sort of power, at least to an extent, but they can’t get rid of it. It becomes forms of institutionalized laziness.
• This emptying of any possibility of communication or meaning is the real essence of what violence really is and does.

• I think it would be wrong, however, to say that our culture has completely sidestepped the issue of technological disappointment. Embarrassment over this issue has ensured that we’ve been reluctant to engage with it explicitly. Instead, like so many other cultural traumas, pain has been displaced; we can only talk about it when we think we’re talking about something else. <> In retrospect, it seems to me that entire fin de siècle cultural sensibility that came to be referred to as “postmodernism” might best be seen as just such a prolonged meditation on technological changes that never happened.
• What technological progress we have seen since the seventies has largely been in information technologies—that is, technologies of simulation.
• Surely, if we were really taking our vacations in geodesic domes on Mars, or toting about pocket-sized nuclear fusion plants or telekinetic mind-reading devices, no one would ever have been talking like this. The “postmodern” moment was simply a desperate way to take what could only otherwise be felt as a bitter disappointment, and dress it up as something epochal, exciting and new.
• If it wasn’t unrealistic in 1900 to dream of men traveling to the moon, why was it unrealistic in the sixties to dream of jet-packs and robot laundry-maids?
• The phone company was willing to invest so much of its profits in research because those profits were highly taxed—given the choice between sinking the money into higher wages for its workers (which bought loyalty) and research... In other words, tax cuts and financial reforms had almost precisely the opposite effect as their proponents claimed they would.
• When historians write the epitaph for neoliberalism, they will have to conclude that it was the form of capitalism that systematically prioritized political imperatives over economic ones. That is: given a choice between a course of action that will make capitalism seem like the only possible economic system, and one that will make capitalism actually be a more viable long-term economic system, neoliberalism has meant always choosing the former.
• it’s also easy to see how, if the ultimate imperative of those running the world is choking off the possibility of any sense of an inevitable, redemptive future that will be fundamentally different than the world today must be a crucial part of the neoliberal project.
• Certainly, poetic technologies almost invariably have something terrible about them; the poetry is likely to evoke dark satanic mills as much as it does grace or liberation. But the rational, bureaucratic techniques are always in service to some fantastic end.
• the turn-of-the-century infatuation with the Postal Service was happening again. Let us summarize the story so far:
  1. A new communications technology develops out of the military.
  2. It spreads rapidly, radically reshaping everyday life.
  3. It develops a reputation for dazzling efficiency.
  4. Since it operates on non-market principles, it is quickly seized on by radicals as the first stirrings of a future, non-capitalist economic system already developing within the shell of the old.
  5. Despite this, it quickly becomes the medium, too, for government surveillance and the dissemination of endless new forms of advertising and unwanted paperwork.
• But all this also implies that bureaucracy appeals to us—that it seems at its most liberating—precisely when it disappears: when it becomes so rational and reliable that we are able to just take it for granted... bureaucracy enchants when it can be seen as a species of what I’ve called poetic technology, that is, one where mechanical forms of organization, usually military in their ultimate inspiration, can be marshaled to the realization of impossible visions:.. For most of human history this kind of power was only available to the rulers of empires or commanders of conquering armies, so we might even speak here of a democratization of despotism.
• there remains a modern incarnation of the earlier idea of rationality as moral order and therefore as an end in itself. Pretty much anyone with a utopian vision, whether Socialist, free market, or for that matter religious fundamentalist, dreams of creating a social order that will, unlike current arrangements, make some sort of coherent sense—and which will, therefore, represent the triumph of reason over chaos.
• In this sense, rationality was not just a spiritual notion, it was mystical: a technique for achieving union with the divine. <> This set of assumptions about the nature of rationality, absorbed into Christianity through Augustine, informs pretty much all Medieval philosophy as well, however difficult it was to reconcile with the notion of a transcendent willful Creator (and indeed, much Medieval philosophy was precisely concerned with arguing about different ways of reconciling them).
• This is very much a Medieval notion... If “rationality” is just the ability to assess reality more or less as it is and to draw logical conclusions, then most animals are extremely rational... Hence the anthropologist Edmund Leach once remarked that what sets humans apart from animals is not that they possess an immortal soul, but rather, that they are capable of imagining that they have one.140 But of course, if the soul is the seat of Reason, the divine element in Man, to say that humans are in possession of an immortal soul, and to say that they are rational creatures, is to say precisely the same thing.
• we have by now come to identify the soul not with reason, but with everything that makes us unique, idiosyncratic, or imaginative. But this view is a product of the Romantic era, and one that, at the time, marked a near total break from earlier conceptions.
• the rise of an equally fantastic vision of the Middle Ages, full of princes, knights, faeries, dragons, sorcerers, and unicorns; and eventually, hobbits, dwarves, and orcs. In most important ways, this world is explicitly antibureaucratic: that is, it evinces an explicit rejection of virtually all the core values of bureaucracy.
• I think, modern states are better seen as the confluence of three different elements, whose historical origins are quite distinct, have no intrinsic relation with one another, and may already be in the process of finally drifting apart. <> I will call these sovereignty, administration, and politics.
• there are only some social systems in which politics in this sense becomes a spectator sport in its own right: where powerful figures engage in constant public contests with one another as a way of rallying followers and gathering support. We now think of this as an aspect of democratic systems of government, but for most of human history, it was seen as more of an aristocratic phenomenon.
• such heroic orders did not just emerge spontaneously, alongside bureaucratic societies; they emerged in a kind of symbiotic rivalry with them; and they were remembered long after because they embodied a rejection of everything bureaucracy was supposed to be about.
• Why were stories of their exploits told and retold, in many cases, for thousands of years? <> I think part of the answer is that heroic societies are, effectively, social orders designed to generate stories.
• we are dealing with a form of ideological inoculation. Historically, one of the most effective ways for a system of authority to tout its virtues is not to speak of them directly, but to create a particularly vivid image of their absolute negation—of what it claims life would be like in the total absence of, say, patriarchal authority, or capitalism, or the state. As an ideological ploy, the trick works best when the image is on some level, profoundly appealing... Roman games provide an excellent example.
• In other words, the Empire not only justified itself largely by imposing a uniform system of law over its subjects, it also made a point of encouraging those subjects to form organized lynch mobs (the games were often sponsored by the very magistrates who presided over the courts), as if to say, “Democracy? Now you know where that will lead.” This was so effective that for the next two thousand years, warnings about the perils of democracy—and almost all educated Europeans for most of this period were staunchly opposed to democracy—insisted that “the people” in such a system would inevitably end up behaving like the mob at the Roman circus
• it’s obvious many of the common folk who were responsible for actually organizing and putting on the bulk of the celebrations did not see this prospect as nearly so horrible (indeed, carnivals often became the occasion for actual revolts).
• This is true of almost all fantasy literature: only evil people maintain systems of administration... The principle of absolute evil seems to exist to negate the bureaucratic principle of value-free rule-bound neutrality, the fact that principles such as good and evil are utterly alien to administrative orders of any kind.
• The existence in fantasy universes of demi-human species.. the absolute negation of the bureaucratic principle of indifference, that the rules are the same for everyone,
• What’s more, charismatic authority that is not constantly renewed tends to wither and become corrupt (e.g., Denethor, Gormenghast), or develop into creepy, Gothic, undead forms. Since the very possibility of real, vital, charismatic authority is always founded on war, this means legitimate authority is itself impossible without constant physical insecurity.
• if I am right that—whatever the authors’ intentions—such literature largely ends up operating in such a way as to cause readers to question the ultimate implications of their own suspicions of bureaucratic existence, this is precisely the point. <> Fantasy literature then, is largely an attempt to imagine a world utterly purged of bureaucracy, which readers enjoy both as a form of vicarious escapism and as reassurance that ultimately, a boring, administered world is probably preferable to any imaginable alternative.
• In the Harry Potter books, that’s exactly the joke: let’s take the most drab, stuffy, institutions responsible for the disenchantment of the world, and try to concoct the most wildly enchanted versions of them we can possibly imagine.
• Every Dungeon Master’s universe is different. The numbers are in a sense a platform for crazy feats of the imagination, themselves a kind of poetic technology... in a constant weaving back and forth of the imperatives of poetic and bureaucratic technology. But in doing so, these games ultimately reinforce the sense that we live in a universe where accounting procedures define the very fabric of reality,
• One reason I have seen fit to spend so much time on fantasy worlds is because the topic opens up some fundamental questions about the nature of play, games, and freedom—all of which, I believe, lie at the core of bureaucracy’s covert appeal... a bureaucracy is anything but playful. Mechanistic and impersonal, it would appear to represent the negation of any possibility of playfulness. On the other hand, being trapped in a bureaucratic runaround feels very much like being caught inside some kind of horrific game.
• Another way to put this would be to say that games are pure rule-governed action. <> It seems to me this is important, because this precisely why games are fun. In almost any other aspect of human existence, all these things are ambiguous... This—along with the fact that unlike in real life, one has submitted oneself to the rules completely voluntarily—is the source of the pleasure. <> Games, then, are a kind of utopia of rules.
• So at some point along the way, rules-as-constraining pass over into rules-as-enabling, even if it’s impossible to say exactly where. Freedom, then, really is the tension of the free play of human creativity against the rules it is constantly generating. And this is what linguists always observe. There is no language without grammar. But there is also no language in which everything, including grammar, is not constantly changing all the time.
• The single most important essay in this whole activist tradition is called “The Tyranny of Structurelessness,”170 written in the 1970s by Jo Freeman, about organizational crises that occurred in early feminist consciousness-raising circles when those groups began to attain a certain size... completely misread Freeman’s essay, and interpret it not as a plea for formal mechanisms to ensure equality, but as a plea for more transparent hierarchy.
• In such arguments, we are witnessing a direct clash between two different forms of materialized utopianism: on the one hand, an anti-authoritarianism that, in its emphasis on creative synthesis and improvisation, sees freedom basically in terms of play, and on the other, a tacit republicanism that sees freedom ultimately as the ability to reduce all forms of power to a set of clear and transparent rules.

• ("Dark Knight"): The film really is a piece of anti-Occupy propaganda. Some still deny it.
• In the same way it never seems to occur to Superman that he could easily end world hunger or carve free magic cities out of mountains. Almost never do superheroes make, create, or build anything. The villains, in contrast, are relentlessly creative.
• But in the modern state, the very status of law is a problem. This is because of a basic logical paradox: no system can generate itself. Any power capable of creating a system of laws cannot itself be bound by them. So law has to come from someplace else. In the Middle Ages the solution was simple: the legal order was created by God, a being who, as the Old Testament makes abundantly clear, is not bound by laws or even any recognizable system of morality
• Cromwell, Jefferson, or Danton were all clearly guilty of treason, according to the laws under which they grew up, just as much as they would have been had they tried to do the same thing again under the new regimes they created, say, twenty years later. <> So laws emerge from illegal activity. This creates a fundamental incoherence in the very idea of modern government, which assumes that the state has a monopoly of the legitimate use of violence
• It’s more that both fascism and superheroes were products of a similar historical predicament: What is the foundation of social order when one has exorcised the very idea of revolution? And above all, what happens to the political imagination?
• This is also what separates conservatives from fascists. Both agree that the imagination unleashed can only lead to violence and destruction. Conservatives wish to defend us against that possibility. Fascists wish to unleash it anyway. They aspire to be, as Hitler imagined himself, great artists painting with the minds, blood, and sinews of humanity.
• Nolan’s villains are always anarchists. But they’re also always very peculiar anarchists, of a sort that seem to exist only in the filmmaker’s imagination: anarchists who believe that human nature is fundamentally evil and corrupt.
• The Joker is a pure force of self-creation, a poem written by himself; and his only purpose in life appears to be an obsessive need to prove to others first, that everything is and can only be poetry—and second, that poetry is evil.