12.18.2009

Thinking about what David Graeber says here

“In order to be able to unify the diverse strands of social thought in opposition to the hegemony of economism, it would be necessary, first of all, to overcome this pernicious history [of sectarian habits, of “reducing other positions into hostile caricatures so as to be able to plug them into some prefab set of categories, each representing a type of ideological error”] and formulate instead something like...a collection of approaches to social reality which, while necessarily constituting that reality in relation to a certain utopian social imaginary, are united not in their aspiration to impose themselves as the only legitimate approach, as if they were so many sects trying to seize power, but rather, by their shared commitment to a project and ethics which begins with the refusal to do so. It is a daunting prospect. Sectarian habits are deeply ingrained. But it is hardly impossible.”

in relation to poetry.

7 Comments:

Blogger Nada Gordon: 2 ludic 4 U said...

Right, but couldn't he have just said, "Can't we all just acknowledge we're in this together and stop hating on each other?"

Gawd.

18 December, 2009  
Blogger Alli Warren said...

He could have, sure. But it seems to me that different words make different meanings...

18 December, 2009  
Blogger Nada Gordon: 2 ludic 4 U said...

Of course they do. I don't mean to be Orwellian (not in the dystopic sense but in the "plain and simple style" sense). The excerpt you quoted, though, strikes me as truly unnecessarily syntactically & lexically tortured.It just bugs me. I don't know who he is and I don't know the context of the quotation. I'm sure there was some reason he chose to write that way, some kind of validating-to-social-group reason, perhaps. It just strikes me that he is saying something very simple there (although admittedly what he is proposing is NOT, as he points out, so simple to achieve.

18 December, 2009  
Blogger Alli Warren said...

from Wikipedia: "David Rolfe Graeber (born 12 February 1961) is an American anthropologist and anarchist." The quote is from a paper he gave at globalization conference in Paris in 2003: "Social Theory as Science and Utopia." It appears in the book _Possibilities: Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion and Desire_ (AK Press).

18 December, 2009  
Anonymous DG said...

well if it's saying something simple, can you summarize it in simple words?

18 December, 2009  
Blogger Nada Gordon: 2 ludic 4 U said...

Hi David. I think I did try to summarize it, although colloquially and inadequately, and admittedly in a moment of wage-slave/desk-alienation/ internet pique. I'm prone to those, and maybe am one of those people who just shouldn't be allowed online.

Honestly, I'm not out on a one-woman crusade against academic language and books with titles that begin with an abstract plural noun followed by a colon and a triad of grand concepts. These conventions are deeply ingrained, and they have their elegance. If they help us get a little closer to "a certain utopian social imaginary," then more power to them.

If I'm suspicious of that possibility, though, it's because it seems not to take much into account the facts of human psychology... how sects are tropes for the family, how families are tropes for individuals, and how individuals are charged with aggressions, conflicts and miseries that, while not rendering *moot* any positive changes in the socius, are not *necessarily* assuaged or transformed by those changes either. But perhaps now my style is getting tortured, too, and I shouldn't disturb the cool spaces of Species Head.

19 December, 2009  
Blogger Drew said...

I do think it's a good idea to look at poetry anthropologically. There's a lot in what poets think about each other and about poetry that is blind, naked binary opposition, even if it's dressed in tortured prose with fancy sounding appeals to authority.

What language you use depends on who you're talking to, right? If you're an academic talking to other academics - your collaborators and competitors - you naturally use a certain language. In an In These Time's article you use another. Behind a bullhorn at a demonstration you use another. Chomsky sounds different in a David Barsamian interview than in an article about linguistics.
If Graeber used this language on the Daily Show it would be a disaster. I don't think he would.

I'll say one thing: if your ideas are threatening enough to get you booted out of Yale, you've gotten my attention. :)

"reducing other positions into hostile caricatures so as to be able to plug them into some prefab set of categories, each representing a type of ideological error" does nicely describe certain poets' reaction to certain recent events in poetry, ahem. "Can't we all just acknowledge we're in this together and stop hating on each other?" is not a bad generic rewrite, but it has a lot less detail. It doesn't say, for instance, "these are behavior patterns that come out of history and that are repeated throughout different cultures and times and which make larger patterns of collaboration impossible."

"Why not hate?" you might ask? "These other poets are taking away my attention and status resources, so I need to hate them - we're not in it together because I precieve that they are stealing from me." is how some poets seem to think.

BTW: speaking of resources, Graeber has a nice, clear journalist style here:

http://www.metamute.org/en/content/debt_the_first_five_thousand_years

22 December, 2009  

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