The Ultimate Hidden Truth of the World . . .
Essays by David Graber
Edited by Nika Dubrovsky (Farrar, Straus, & Giroux)
Are you even reading this review if you do not know who Graeber is? If so, you have made a weird choice.
This book is a posthumous collection of Graeber’s work: mostly essays and articles with one interview. While there is some thematic grouping, the essays vary in tone, topic, and density.
The ideological consanguinity between Graeber and myself is small but non-zero. I do generally like his writing. It is often flip in order to hide the weaker struts of the argument, but it also has more internal structure to it than many of the more throbbingly sentimental arguments of the contemporary right and left: it is easy to disagree with because he is articulating a position with coherent statements rather than scoring points. He has a bad habit of begging the question, to the point it is a sort of PBS pledge drive for the question, complete with petitio principii mug and tote bag, and deserves its own drinking game or unit of measurement. It is fun. It is not without meaning that some of the articles include discussing the nature of play (“What’s the Point if We Can’t Have Fun?”) or trying to understand the volatile effect of playfulness in protest. (“Dead Zones of Imagination”).
The best article here is “Culture as a Creative Refusal,” an investigation of how societies structure themselves by looking at what they don’t choose, and how that might be reflected in the history of the Malgasy. “There Never was a West” is good, but meanders.
I do not have a least favorite, but some of the material aged poorly. The request for more political hate from 2015 feels monkey’s finger curls inward, and I was surprised to learn that inflation no longer exists. Some are, in effect, rough drafts, and precursors to later, more developed work, where he did not end up where he started.
The joke at the beginning of this review has some teeth to it. If you do not like Graeber, this book will not change your opinion. If you do not know Graeber, this is a bad introduction. Here non-chronological grouping of the articles hurts the reading. Or just read the first and last essays and skip the rest, because there is no real logic to this grouping.
I can imagine the two or one star version of this review, where I savage his pointedly off-balance logic. In writing this, review I kept wondering why it is that I like his writing, even when and especially because I disagree with so many of his conclusions. And I think that it is because he knows how to ask the right questions. He has a core philosophical stance about how much of the world operates as assumption not fact, and I think that leads him to see where the real joints are in the whole system of everything. That is useful, and has application far in excess of his political intent.
My thanks, and condolences, to Nika Dubrovsky, for this work and to the publisher, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, for making the ARC available to me.
CITATION HEEDED 