Project Steev

Violence vs. Imagination

A largely excellent essay by David Graeber appeared on Infoshop.org the other day. It's called "REVOLUTION IN REVERSE (OR, ON THE CONFLICT BETWEEN POLITICAL ONTOLOGIES OF VIOLENCE AND POLITICAL ONTOLOGIES OF THE IMAGINATION)" It's really worth reading, if you can pick through the typos and missing words and other copy-editing gaffs (or maybe it was never copy-edited past the rough draft? It's really quite astounding how such an academic piece of writing could have so many such errors. hmm).

The piece is mostly about the difference between those who use force and those who use imagination, to get what they want from other people. Imagination, in this case, includes communicating with other people and trying to understand them, which violence never requires, except to some extent, as Graeber points out, when the sides are relatively evenly matched.

He uses this comparison to look at how recent developments in progressive activism have proceeded. One point he makes during this is what an influence feminist thought has had on the 'movement'. Feminism is more than just demanding that women are "equal" in some abstract way, but is also about learning things from how women and other opressed groups look at things.

For much of human history, what has been taken as politics has consisted essentially of a series of dramatic performances carried out upon theatrical stages. One of the great gifts of feminism to political thought has been to continually remind us of the people is in fact making and preparing and cleaning those stages, and even more, maintaining the invisible structures that make them possible—people who have, overwhelmingly, been women. The normal process of politics of course is to make such people disappear. Indeed one of the chief functions of women’s work is to make itself disappear. One might say that the political ideal within direct action circles has become to efface the difference; or, to put it another way, that action is seen as genuinely revolutionary when the process of production of situations is experienced as just as liberating as the situations themselves.

A good personal example from my life recently has been the No Borders Camp - being involved with the process of organizing a situation called the No Borders Camp was at many times indeed quite liberating. But at some point 2 1/2 months ago it stopped feeling that way. It started feeling stifling and wrong and no one was really addressing that wrongness, so I got out. Now I'm still involved as a mediamaker, but every day I get more and more of a queasy feeling about the whole project. Discussion this week with someone who plans to attend has made it clear that I made the right decision and confirms my queasiness. I'm really quite concerned that this will be a big setback, whether or not it's an "experience of liberation, the giddy realignment of imaginative powers," as Graeber puts it.

All I can say, in general and in this case, is, while you and your hoodie-wearing friends are getting their imaginative powers giddily realigned, please keep in mind that someone else nearby might be getting their face kicked in as a result.

(The extensive comment thread following the essay is at times pretty good reading as well.)

Posted by steev at Octubre 20, 2007 12:17 PM