A Neolithic Anti-Oedipus: D. Graeber and D. Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything (2021) I must begin by confessing that I had lost faith in anthropology long time ago, probably after I read James Clifford’s The Predicament of Culture (1988) sometime in the 1990s, when postcolonial and decolonial critiques began to offer a different perspective. And since one cannot read everything, I chose to devote my time to other disciplines. So, I must begin my review by stating that I was very pleasantly surprised by this long book, which is a hybrid of anthropology and archaeology. Although it has many problems, I have to say without hesitation that The Dawn of Everything has restored my faith in anthropology. It is a book everybody should read, especially if they are interested in alternatives to Jameson’s ill-fated claim that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than that of capitalism.[1] A claim that was further elaborated in 2008, even though in a more critical way, by Mark Fisher in his Capitalist Realism: Is There Not Alternative? Echoing Debord and Baudrillad, Fisher still stated in the aftermath of the 2008 crisis that: “[C]apitalism is what is left when beliefs have collapsed at the level of ritual or symbolic elaboration, and all that is left is the consumer-spectator, trudging through the ruins and the relics” (2008: 11). Yet, this form of general nihilism vis-à-vis capitalism, which, in an inverted image, mirrors Francis Fukuyama’s celebration of “universal liberal capitalism” (The End of History and the Last Man, 1992), is precisely what Graeber and Wengrow’s book allow us to challenge, even if, in order to do so, we have to time-travel to a “historical period”[2] about which we know very little: the Neolithic. That is why I have labeled their book, with a grain of humorous salt, “a Neolithic Anti-Oedipus.” Mutatis mutandi, Graeber and Wengrow’s work might have the same effect Deleuze and Guattari’s The Anti-Oedipus had in the early 1970s. It is unfortunate that David Graeber’s untimely demise will not allow them to continue to produce other volumes, as they intended to do, in what would amount to Deleuze and Guattari’s second installment, A Thousand Plateaux (1980).[3] Allow me first to explain Graeber and Wengrow’s main achievement. Nowadays, we visit neomedievalist fantasy worlds, such as Game of Thrones (2011-2019) or See (2019-), to experience alternative worlds outside capitalism while, at the same time, anchoring ourselves in our very capitalist present by choosing highly hierarchical and violent worlds so similar to the one global neoliberalism has created since 1989. The goal of our contradictory visual exercise is to experience our current desires and anxieties otherwise, in an alternative way, or, as Zizek would put it, to enjoy our symptom otherwise. The Dawn of Everything has the same result of transporting us to another world: the Neolithic, a time that, for most readers, is just as unknown and fantastic as that of Lord of the Rings. Thus, the book has a similar effect to that of neomedievalist, neoliberal narratives but in reverse: we enter and explore Neolithic worlds we knew almost nothing about, but in order to rethink the present in political ways, so that all our assumptions about capitalism are torn asunder and reversed, beginning with the myth of the “Origins of Inequality,” which Rousseau and Hobbes deploy in order to justify the capitalist ontology of the modern State and private property (chapter 1). Here, and unlike in the case of neomedievalist narratives, our current desires and anxieties begin to find an object, a way out. In this respect, the book is a cognitive revolution against capitalism but in a retroactive way that takes us back to the Neolithic. The “fantastic” Neolithic places we revisit in The Dawn of Everything are as numerous and as potentially revolutionary as the most political locations and revolts of our recent history (2008-), if not more so. Let me mention few: the hunter-gatherer burial sites of Sunghir in northern Russia 34,000-26,000 years ago (technically the Paleolithic), the monumental temples and structures of Göbekli Tepe in Turkey 9,000 years ago, the city of Uruk in Iraq 3,200 years ago, and Caral in Peru 3,600 years ago. Even other more familiar places, such as Teotihuacan (active 2400 years ago), appear under a very different light, as if they were part of a world of which we thought we knew something about but we actually realize we did not. By revisiting these places and times, most of the grand narratives upon which contemporary capitalism is built (which the authors cypher on the myth of the origins of inequality), come undone. In short, the Neolithic allows us to think future possibilities in which we actually can put capitalism behind and imagine other political and economic scenarios. One could even claim that the new Communist Manifesto of the 21st century turns out to be Neolithic. Or to put it in another way, The Dawn of Everything is an archaeology of capitalism and its ideology, which allows us to peel away every layer of its ideological consolidation and, by doing so, also allows us to see the very real, material, and historical limitations of capitalism. Let me list several of those archaeological layers in a very short format, so this review remains succinct while revealing the book’s potential. After revisiting the stereotype of the Upper Paleolithic and Lower Neolithic as inhabited by “hunter-gatherer societies divided in small nomadic groups, which were egalitarian but void of technology and cultural sophistication,” Graeber and Wengrow introduce a network society that already traded “globally” across vast territories spanning Asia to Europe and developed a sophisticated culture, which nevertheless, did not serve as the foundation for the Neolithic revolution of agriculture and the centralized State. Furthermore, they present societies that were capable of erecting huge monuments, but, nevertheless, were not organized as populations living permanently on hierarchically organized agricultural settlements: “[I]nstead, over tens of thousands of years, we see monuments and magnificent burials, but little else to indicate the growth of ranked societies, let alone anything remotely resembling ‘states’. (2021: 103). What is most interesting is that the authors’ long and rich descriptions of places such as Göbekli Tepe reveal a very political reality: several societies opted to live seasonally in different places precisely in order to avoid political hierarchies and centralization (chapter 3). In short, societies that were culturally and technically advanced and expansive chose ---made a political choice--- to avoid permanent agriculture and urban settlements (and even the formation of the State) in order to live in a more egalitarian and freer political order. These societies shifted between two different seasons, two geographies, and two different social organizations, while building immense monuments, precisely in order to retain a level of freedom that to us seems unthinkable today. As the authors conclude: if human beings really have spent most of the last 40,000 or so years moving back and forth between different forms of social organization, building up hierarchies then dismantling them again, the implications are profound. For one thing, it suggests that Pierre Clastres was quite right when he proposed that, rather than being less politically self-conscious than people nowadays, people in stateless societies might actually have been considerably more so. (2021: 124) Similarly, Graeber and Wengrow present other cases that escape the Neolithic narrative that justifies capitalist progress and inequality to our days: agriculture > settlement > private property > accumulation > technical progress > hierarchical politics > the State (what they call the Origin of Inequality myth). They describe in detail a very different organization of later Neolithic societies that chose agriculture as a way to avoid political hierarchy and private property. Furthermore, they even make the case for the origins of bureaucracy as a way to develop more egalitarian agricultural societies, i.e., as a technology to avoid hierarchies and centralized forms of politics and ownership (and thus also the State). In short, they describe a retro-history whereby the 20th-century failed communist attempts to collectivize agriculture in the Soviet Union and China actually had succeeded back in the Neolithic (chapter 4). I could go on describing the hundreds of cases discussed in The Dawn of Everything, which counter our understanding of our own (Western, capitalist) origins, but just let me add two final examples. According to Graeber and Wengrow, the State, the sacred and theological foundation of all modern political thinking, did not emerge from centralized, settled, bureaucratic agricultural societies with well-defined hierarchical political structures. The two authors actually make the case for what they call “cities without kings” (chapter 8) and, moreover, show that, even in the case of what we retrospectively consider the first “clear” case of a political State (the pharaohs’ Egypt), the latter originated as a result of religious practices that had nothing to do with either agriculture or large urban enclaves. The cases of Teotihuacan and Talca (Peru) finally add a newly found “historicity” to the late Neolithic, where urban societies that began processes of centralization with a clearly defined aristocracy were demolished by active political revolts that opened their cities to more egalitarian and communal forms of living which, nevertheless, continued to have a great cultural and political influence thousands of miles away in other regions and geographical areas (chapter 9). In short, the Neolithic emerges in The Dawn of Everything as a very historical (no longer prehistoric) laboratory of political experimentation and thinking that far surpasses our own in the present and, what is more important, challenges and deconstructs every single believe in which our contemporary capitalist and global society is built upon (the myth of the Origins of Inequality: progress, centralization, urban complexity leading to hierarchical politics, agriculture as necessary revolution towards civilization, etc.). This is the great political potential of the book if we are ever to challenge Fisher’s “capitalist realism.”[4] A short list of grievances must be added though. The two authors do not avoid the anthropological trap of what used to be called “denial of coevalness” (Fabian), by which contemporary non-Western indigenous societies were denied their present historical status or ontology and, instead, were relegated to some past ladder, stage, or branch of a human evolution whose sole apex was Western society and its technological progress. In The Dawn of Everything, the denial of coevalness is perpetrated in reverse: the North American indigenous tribes and populations of the 19th and early 20th centuries are used to read the Neolithic in ways that reduce them to the living extension of that prehistoric period. In Graeber and Wengrow’s analysis, North-American indigenous people live in a sort of extended contemporary Neolithic that only serves to confirm and explain the other “non-contemporary Neolithic” that started after the last glaciation, sometime around 12.000 BC. Furthermore, their recourse to North American indigenous people to extend the old Neolithic all the way to the early 20th century makes, in retrospect, the old Neolithic very American-centric. One could even suspect some kind of unconscious American imperialism at play in the book at the epistemological level. I also believe that this “unconscious epistemological American imperialism” is what keeps bringing back up a central question that the book posits but never answers: “[I]f human beings, through most of our history, have moved back and forth fluidly between different social arrangements, assembling and dismantling hierarchies on a regular basis, maybe the real question should be ‘how did we get stuck?’ [in contemporary rigid global capitalism]” (2021: 127). Finally, this type of book tends to show the human limits of its authors, as nobody can encompass the entire world. Sub-Saharan Africa and China remain marginal to The Dawn of Everything’s entire argument; they only receive passing references in the book. Discussions of gender/sex are also present throughout the book but also in passing. In one section, there is an attempt to make sex/gender the central subject of analysis (Minoan culture; 2021: 448-454), but, I must confess, not very successfully. However, I do not present these grievances as lessening or paralyzing errors, but rather as desiderata for this kind of analysis to be extended to the missing areas and subjects (including a brief, promising but disappointing discussion on the origins of war; 2021: 519-21). Since the time Levi-Strauss, and especially on the Left, this type of ambitious and globalizing studies has not been attempted; specialization has been the ultimate sign of serious scholarship and merit (think for example of E.P. Thompson). Yet, I believe, we need more of them. Welcome to our Neolithic future! [1] “Someone once said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. We can now revise that and witness the attempt to imagine capitalism by way of imagining the end of the world.” Fredric Jameson. “Future City,” New Left Review 21 (May-June 2003): 76. [2] Although not directly, they also make a case for the use of the word “history” for a period that is not in any ideological way “pre-historic.” [3] I will not make references to Graeber’s previous Debt: The First 5000 Years (2011), because, to a certain extent, it remains within the traditional boundaries of anthropology I criticized above. [4] I do not have time to review the second chapters, which adds another critical dimension to the book.
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Herbert's Dune After reading the unfinished six-volume Dune saga written by Frank Herbert, I gave up on tackling the two concluding volumes his son, Brian Herbert, and Kevin J. Anderson wrote, following the drafts Herbert Sr. left at the time of his death. The first volume, Dune (1965), broke new ground in science fiction as an ecological reflection on human competition for natural resources, allegorized by the precious spice found in the planet Arrakis. This compound, also known as mélange, structures and supports the geopolitical organization of the universe, which is ruled by a decadent emperor and a corrupt aristocracy. The rest of the series managed to turn the great sci-fi world of Dune into a boring and pseudo-intellectual reflection on power. The second volume Dune Messiah (1969) still could be considered a successful mediation on the necessity to annihilate imperialist power institutions centered on religious messianic figures, such as count Leto Jr. Yet, the next three installments are only a testament to Herbert’s inability to offer a convincing utopian narrative that would overcome to universal messianism. The innovations brought by Dune are well known and have been widely discussed by many critics and commentators. It managed to allegorize efficiently different parts of contemporary culture, politics and history that were missing in sci-fi till that point. Herbert’s novel succeeded in turning a desertic harsh environment into the most fascinating landscape of science fiction of the time. Moreover, through its desertic representation of ecology and geopolitics, Dune managed to announce, with uncanny prescience, the oil crisis of the 1970s prompted by the OPEC and the growing global importance of the Muslim world. The psychotropic culture of the 60s was also allegorized by Herbert through the physical properties of the spice, which, in the story, was also able to give longevity to its users and, in some cases, even time prescience and travel. Herbert appears to have borrowed from Asimov a concern for advancing a utopian solution to the problem of governing the universe ---or, in a smaller scale, our galaxy--- beyond any form of imperial formation, which, in their respective narratives, always leads to civilizational corruption and decadence. Furthermore, the former’s first novel was a refreshing departure from the latter’s non-psychological and affectless narratives where scientific or technological progress still dictated humanity’s future in its expansion throughout the universe. Herbert’s novel is full of intense psychological intrigue and political struggles, which are further enhanced by the effects of the spice. The internal monologues and the descriptions of physical appearance as a means to read the characters’ political and religious agenda reaches almost the status of science (or craft). However, if in the first two novels of the Dune saga, the delicate balance between psychology, power struggles, and war strikes a very nuanced and effective equilibrium, in the last four volumes, any sense of balance disappears and is reduced to endless boring dialogues, reminiscent of Plato’s Republic, whereby long discussions about power and government ensue. Moreover, the resulting dialogic universe is narrowed down to few agents: Leto II the emperor, the Ixians, the Bene Gesserit, the Tleilaxu, the Spacing Guild, and the Honored Mothers. Rather than engaging narratives of universe-size wars and battles for power (psychological and political), the four last novels become static theater: a single stage, with few alterations, allows the characters to engage in long and complicated dialogues wherein affect becomes inflationary and, in turn, history and action are relegated to mere background. The most important historical changes are narrated at the beginning or at the end of the novel as afterthoughts or as settings for dialogic performance among few actors. The monstrous transformation of the emperor into a worm-human hybrid, which can no longer move or act without help, becomes an allegory for the narrative body of the last four installments of the saga. The novels themselves become this monstruous enlarged hybrid of endless dialogue and inaction. In the last two installments of the Dune saga, the narrative focus on the Benet Gesserit religious order and its unnarrated battles with its arch nemesis, the Honored Matres, further increases the theatrical and dialogic structure of the non-action. The reverend mothers monopolize the dialogues and bring action to a halt in what begins to sound a lot like the Jesuit order or a Jesuit baroque drama: similar rhetoric and techniques can be observed in the two novels. It remains to be analyzed why Herbert ended his powerful reflection on universal power ---a universe-size utopia that was meant to surpass Asimov’s technocratic fantasies--- with a Jesuit stage drama. My tentative hypothesis is that fame and recognition allowed Herbert to forsake his original narrative for what was all along his obsession: a religious and political discourse, which, unfortunately, had no intellectual insight or depth. |
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AuthorJoseba Gabilondo. Publications Archives
April 2023
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