Thumbing through Ben Hewitt’s book Home Grown, which is always on the shelf in the playroom at the library:
Penny and I have not made the choices we have—around education, money, ambition, and so on—because we think we are going to heal the world. We are not that foolish, nor that virtuous. But while these choices may not immediately influence the trajectory of global affairs, they are ultimately a reflection of the world we wish to inhabit, and in that sense, they become the world we wish to inhabit. … It is a world in which it is commonly understood that all the seemingly overwhelming forces of humankind, many of which cause hardship and despair, depend on us to feel dependent on them. They depend on us not realizing that with every choice we make, with every action we take, we are shaping the world. Our world.
This is basically the constant background hum(ing question) behind everything in Chris Smaje’s book. How do we find out what else is possible?
Given that Smaje’s whole program is built on the presumed failure/never-should-have-been-ness of endless growth and out-of-sight waste and violence, it’s not surprising that David Graeber occupies some reference space in the book.
There’s a famous line from Graeber: “The ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.”
Here’s the quote as I have it in his book Utopia of Rules:
If artistic avant-gardes and social revolutionaries have felt a peculiar affinity for one another ever since, borrowing each other’s languages and ideas, it appears to have been insofar as both have remained committed to the idea that the ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently. …
From a left perspective, then, the hidden reality of human life is the fact that the world doesn’t just happen. It isn’t a natural fact, even though we tend to treat it as if it is—it exists because we all collectively produce it. We imagine things we’d like and then we bring them into being. But the moment you think about it in these terms, it’s obvious that something has gone terribly wrong.
That comes from a chapter titled “Dead Zones of the Imagination.” If I have this right, it’s a rewritten essay of his 2006 paper by the same name, which did not include the above quote.
Here’s something from the close of that chapter:
If one resists the reality effect created by pervasive structural violence — the way that bureaucratic regulations seem to disappear into the very mass and solidity of the large heavy objects around us, the buildings, vehicles, large concrete structures, making a world regulated by such principles seem natural and inevitable, and anything else a dreamy fantasy—it is possible to give power to the imagination. But it also requires an enormous amount of work.
Power makes you lazy. Insofar as our earlier theoretical discussion of structural violence revealed anything, it was this: that while those in situations of power and privilege often feel it as a terrible burden of responsibility, 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. Revolutionary change may involve the exhilaration of throwing off imaginative shackles, of suddenly realizing that impossible things are not impossible at all, but it also means most people will have to get over some of this deeply habituated laziness and start engaging in interpretive (imaginative) labor for a very long time to make those realities stick.
[…]
There are dead zones that riddle our lives, areas so devoid of any possibility of interpretive depth that they repel every attempt to give them value or meaning. These are spaces, as I discovered, where interpretive labor no longer works. It’s hardly surprising that we don’t like to talk about them. They repel the imagination. But I also believe we have a responsibility to confront them, because if we don’t, we risk becoming complicit in the very violence that creates them.
This is a very rough post and I want to revisit this, partly because I’m taking it a little out of context. Among the directions and emphases I want to take, this one stands out: Power makes you lazy. Likewise, efficiency makes you lazy; speed and control make you lazy; etc. More to the point, offloading and short-circuiting our imaginations makes us lazy. And, even more to the point — the point behind the point — we don’t actually get to choose when we are offloading. Imagination thrives on randomness, friction, and surprise. A controlled imagination is something of an oxymoron.
The circling attempts to define what I mean quite naturally invoke the Tao. But that’s also certainly because of something I read yesterday from David Walbert, who wrote about taboos vs Tao in our approach to technology. It’s a very thoughtful piece. But I don’t think he gets the Tao right. Specifically, I wonder if he smuggles in a rational approach to technology and calls it Tao. At the moment, I haven’t decided if that’s my misunderstanding or his.
To be continued…