David Graeber - ARTIST TAXI DRIVER Curates. - CULTURE IS NOT YOUR FRIEND - Reloaded

but last week heads coming out David Graeber and David's anthropologist where you teaching there David at a London School of Economics he used to teacher and was it Yale yeah he taught Yale but what happened at Yale he got kicked out he got kicked out kicked out yeah and kicked out of America as well okay and David's part of a Occupy maybe knew the vote a little bit he's gone a bit weird all right I'm gonna let David talk he's going to talk about culture oh my god um hello yeah actually I find it this is tall is there some way to put ah there we go all right yeah um actually is very funny that you started a story about Alexander Brenner because I felt I was in a similar it reminded me of a situation I was in in Goldsmith's when I was asked to be the commentator on a talk by a French philosopher named Stigler um I don't know people know about this person stickler he's he's kind of a Haida garyun former bank robber um he was actually in prison for having robbed a bank and was started reading Heidegger which apparently they they leave around in French prisons as a form of rehabilitation and it worked on him he became inspired and wrote to Derry done one thing led to another and now he's a philosopher and they asked me to head of cultural studies where will not name it Goldsman so I was teaching her Goldsmith's at the time asked me to give a comment on a talk he gave and I said well do you have the tap and I first I said no come on I don't know anything about Heidegger I don't know technology neither stuff I thought oh come on it'll be it'll be fun to just make something up um so is it okay do you have it you have a copy of his text and he said no yeah um so I went online and I studied the guy's stuff and I kind of figured about I thought I figure out some of it and so I came there he started talking two-thirds of the way through I'm saying okay I can follow this I have read up and then he starts going into this new theory he's just developed and you know the guy might as well have been speaking urdu I had absolutely no idea what a single word he was saying man what the point of the paper was and then they were all again now David Graeber will begin his response I know is there like Shh well maybe we should put this in a larger context maybe in a political and you know I was just flailing around just like completely making a fool of myself for about ten minutes and as soon as I'm done this Russian guy in the audience gets up and says everything you guys are saying it's all [ __ ] I am a student of Giorgio Agamben and he pulls down his trousers and takes a [ __ ] and it was Alexander Brenner and oh and I remember thinking like cute [ __ ] why didn't you do this ten minutes ago thanks so much um so okay so similar situation why I say um uh well culture so I actually took this literally I'm associate cultural anthropologist so I thought okay culture is it our friend when is it our friend I thought about this and actually you know the thing about culture which is a fascinating is that culture is always meant two things there's kind of a bottom-up and a top-down meaning of culture culture is always a war it's always been a battleground and it goes back the very origins of the word now if these culture was originally invented kind of as a political nationalist concept um it comes out of Germany there's a famous essay how in the 18th century French people come up with civilization and Germans come up with culture and it's partly because in France you have a single calm country where people are the certain no classes are all involved in the within the structure and they're all talking to each other so they're back then French writing was really clear and it was the Germans or like French people um and and and culture was the sort of it was an idea of creating the idea of a nation that didn't actually exist in your imagination through the way people talk the way people eat the way people think there's a sort of expressive artistic chord with people which was a form of resistance against the rulers of that time in Germany all of whom actually were French and spoke French and believed in civilization and so forth and so on um so is already an oppositional notion that but we all know where that could eventually lead right um so so the idea of culture now it's constantly that battered back and forth in these strange ways and this is all the more true for me when when as a cultural anthropologist the American anthropologist German so we talk about culture rather than society um Americans kind of basically are German this is a long story that I can't get into um but it's essentially a German country I mean like what are the national foods of America at the hamburger and the frankfurter um but I serve the unacknowledged German tradition so American a university system is German anthropologist German it's all about culture um culture is this kind of deep expressive core of a bulk of people and um and one of the things that that really fascinated me when I started studying anthropology is the way that we have this tendency to a centralized and naturalize things which are actually kind of like social movements um it took me a long time to figure this out and and and one way I figured out is is is reading an essay by the French anthropologist actually Marceau most about a cultural refusal basically you know what marks a culture is what you won't do what you refused to do because we have this idea that cultures these little isolated pockets and then they kind of and there something primordial about them but no people have been in communication with each other forever first I was back in the Paleolithic you know people just wander around hundreds and thousands of miles and now everybody's always knows all about everybody else so the question is why is that not why people borrow some things from other people but why they don't and all over the klom you know if you look at the ethnographic tradition what you see is people just basically saying [ __ ] you to their neighbors and refusing to adopt things on that that are all very practical Moses example was um up in Alaska you have Algonquians and into it and the Algonquians have snowshoes so the end would refuse to use snowshoes um which if you think about if you're living on top of snow is you know it's a lot of really good practical reasons you know to be like no we don't like those guys are stupid snowshoes and the hell calkins are like exactly the same with kayaks you know it's obviously superior type of boat but like the other guys refuse to use it um so culture is a lot to do of basically on defiance um it and if you look at the history of a lot of societies we assume to be primordial and in that context that people actually knew each other existed people are often defining their lives in relation to other social possibilities you realize a politics of the kind of cultural politics that we've been we think about as being something new has been going on for thousands and thousands of years my favorite example is actually North East woodlands Native Americans ever since the 1500s and the first Europeans kind of show up um a lot of the settlers are are you know they're very Gallic Aryan and individualistic and they're escaping their European societies they show up and they find these indigenous societies that are way more egalitarian a way more individualistic than anything they even imagine possible you know and and they kind of absorb a lot of their ideas and then wipe them out but but nonetheless um there's this idea they get stuck in European mind that it's possible to have a truly individualistic egalitarian society sort of at one with nature and and it's always assumed that these guys are just kind of like that you know that's what natural people are like we need to get back to this primordial Aboriginal indigenous and natural state but if and and more we learn about the history of north north america the more we realize actually there were large urban civilizations in the mississippi valley close enough these guys clearly knew they existed right they might have been involved with them in some way or another um and they existed for a thousand years and a lot of them seem to be based on this elaborate caste systems there's even sacrifice there was mass warfare now there's some of these were pretty nasty large states and then like maybe two or three generations before the the white settlers show up a lot of these things fall apart right um they we don't know why something happens they collapse um and that's oh alright so you get these big nasty state like urban institutions that collapse about 50 years later foreigners show up and they basically find this bunch of hippies you know guy who you know we're one with nature everybody's equal and so it doesn't seem to occur to them maybe there's a relationship between these two things you know I mean in fact what they encountered was presumably the revolutionary ideology of the guys who overthrew those cities these are people ran away from them and like to this day like people can't put two and two together but those of 500 miles away yeah people walked um alright so culture a lot of what we think of as culture then are actually social movements that one yeah and and so it shows that you know revolutions happen all the time and sometimes they win and they come in and some of them are kind of nasty and some of them are great and some of them are very gullet area and some of them are not um but it goes I mean III took me a while to figure this out for where I did my work I wasn't Madagascar you know um Madagascar they speak in an Indonesian language even though it's right next to Africa and everybody's kind of a mix and they left these little enclaves on the coast um and um they were doing trading and uh but they would only be there part of the time you know because of the winds um the only had like six months of six weeks to do your trading you got to get out of there say okay leave a colony and it seems like they left colonies that were primarily composed of slaves so you know what's going to happen when you leave a bunch of you know slaves on a giant uninhabited island saw uh you know if they run away how are you ever going to find them so essentially what you have is this population um that's made up of a partly beep slaves from Africa who ran away from their Healy like overlords and slaves from Indonesia who ran away and kind of like gathered together in the woodlands and you look at the culture and the common cultural features of Madagascar their epic hero is this guy named - hoo-hoo and it's all a story about a guy who claims he wasn't created by God and then he wants God to acknowledge this so he has all these magical battles of God to prove that God didn't really create him and he wins it was like Prometheus who wins it's like um gee what kind of people would come up with a myth like that um so you know cultures are often you know the traces of political struggles that we don't really know um about yo we can't reconstruct but often where the good guys won I thought well let's look at contemporary politics in that light well how do we think about culture um you know and I was really tempted to go in my own sort of working-class rant on this topic you know I think the denigration the work I've experienced that you should I owe a little um I'm from a working-class background myself and that's one reason I'm here in London and not in the US because I got kicked out of the u.s. Academy um and all of my life I've always felt kind of like a stranger in the institutions that I've existed in and made to feel like you know there's something wrong with me in America it's very internalized as psychologically people will say oh so you think of yourself as coming from a working-class background yeah um you know they're here yeah you know right it's you know at this point like I started complaining about this one when all my career there we say oh you are the best student in the class what money no of course not and and yet somehow the bougie students who didn't even you know weren't supposedly the best students and didn't actually need the money would get all the grants and like you know the eating them it doesn't matter how well you do you would never get poor and there's there some magic to do with like well a lot of it does this like behavior stuff right um there's like two things you never ever do if you're in an academic or professional environment one of them is trust your superior to do the right thing and the other one is get angry at them if they don't um you know what you're supposed to do is like figure out what they're supposed to do subtly make them do it by converting continual pressure and never get upset with them but of course you come from working-class back when you don't know that because you're what's up you're getting well first you first you trust them because you assume you can trust people like actually come through for you if they're friends and then if they don't you get pissed off and like both of those know those are the things you don't do um I have you know because the way things work in the professional the ruling class is now are not even like the Bush huazi anymore at least in most countries they're it's a bureaucratic class it's like different ranges of the professional managerial classes who also replaced the working class as a sort of core what's what are still supposed to be in some sense left as parties but aren't at all anymore they're they're they're bureaucratic administrative parties and in the administrative circles like there's this code of conduct that like if you come from a working-class background you just you know you can't figure it out because basically everything is a conspiracy but you can't say that this is like the secret of all bureaucracy right you're supposed to rise according to your performance and nobody rises according to the performance if you're good at something you're probably not gonna be rewarded at all on you'll be zero be embarrassing you're superior than one thing you never do in a hierarchy is embarrass your superior um yeah so you know you can't write um you don't rise according to merit but instead you rise out of your ability to pretend that people rise according to merit because if you actually admit that they don't well then [ __ ] well you know you're gone right um so so you know they have the system where to lie okay well I mean you're not supposed in a visual environment you're never allowed to say that somebody lied um oh they must have somehow convinced themselves they believed that you know and and and like the sin meetings in these kind of environments there's always the person who plays on it yeah you know that one uh-huh yeah a loose cannon is someone who might occasionally act ethically ah but he never know when so they're unpredictable uh yeah well yeah exactly I mean they always apply it they that was what I was yeah exactly um so so essentially this was my personal class experience um uh but I think that nonetheless I mean and you know I it was because I thought I was safe I thought I was finally in a position where it was okay I remember this I I had this moment I had this bluesy girlfriend and I actually I don't know I'm saying what the hell ah and and this is when I had a job at Yale a girlfriend everything's doing well and um and and actually showed her Columbo to that but my favorite show when I was a kid she'd never seen it before and you know it's about this guy's working class and he's like smarter than everybody else but he's got these mannerisms and uh and and she saw this and she said oh now I understand oh you know that's why you're always like doing that thing where you scratch your nose and um I was wondering about that it's like I see so you were like the working class kid who was like so you know too smart for your own good so you were really worried that people would notice so you did all these off-putting mannerisms so they wouldn't notice it be threatened by you oh that you don't have to do that anymore David it's okay she said you know no you're okay you've arrived your professor at Yale you know you can relax now you can say what you really think you're safe um so I did and I been man anyway the rest is history um but um but I I do want to may I say one thing about social class which i think is really important and we talked about culture um we talked culture I mean there's a there's idea of high culture and and but but there's also culture culture and there's always a tension between the culture in the sense of you know that that real sense of common expression of sent a communal feeling which expresses itself especially through certain types of creative activity that the idea that somehow working-class people don't have that is is is is part of the great lie in fact if you think about it all of the great cultural innovations of the 20th century are basically things that were made up by working-class people when they weren't working you know this is true let you think about all John Rizzo moosic yeah as any want people ever come up with anything particularly creative in terms of music um you know all genres like all types of food Street you know any kind of good cuisine like nice food you can get it all comes from working-class people from different countries I mean it's like elites don't make that stuff up you know basically all the good stuff comes into working-class people and it gets appropriated um and and there has been this move intellectually to try to like not just to denigrate working-class people but to deny them that cultural responsibility first of all by saying they don't exist you know one of there's this line Oh working-class people used to work in factories now we don't have factories there are no working-class people anymore you know you know that what the [ __ ] was they mean you know like who are these people making the houses and streets and like keeping everything running I mean they're somehow not working class because there's like because your light bulbs made somewhere else um you know and and so you know you still have a working classes first you deny it exist so you're not really working class anymore you know and then on top of that um no they deny you your cultural creativity um they make it seem as if culture is really something which it comes from first of all they real able culture as consumption so they make it seem like culture is something that actually comes from them and this was a move they did in the Academy and I think that this is this is certainly something that we need to think about because um I was there when this happened there was this kind of move um that they started saying well you know you you Marxist and the cap elitist you're all elitist you you're talking about like production as being the driving force of capitalism they're producing all this crap and trying to get people to buy it by advertising and making them feel insecure about themselves and we can try to convince them they smell bad and look ugly and they need to buy stuff right that's all elitist puritanical [ __ ] if you look at real working-class people they like their motorcycles I like their clothes they like their shoes you know I mean you know there's there's um you're the kind of people you're claiming to liberate they always assumption this is a blues Walmart sister talking to you know actually love consumerism and that's how they express themselves and create identities so all sub called basically all working-class cultures be imagined as subcultures and all subcultures are seen as subversive and oppositional um so that's move number one but then they're also seen as essentially consumerist so their forms of consumption and this idea and know there is something to that because there is a tendency for you know things that emerge is revolutionary subversive forms to then become co-opted and absorbed um and and remarketed but to some degree like that dialectic is not simply a dialectic i mean you're not actually destroying all of the subversive potential of something if they start adopting it and selling it to each other um sometimes it's it's a gesture of a victory I mean it's not like you know feminism lost because mainstream people started like having to pay lip service to it um it's there's a huge tension going on here but they wanted to rewrite the term so that anytime somebody sells something to somebody else the capitalist one and that's just form of capitalism it comes from capitalism in a way that's like the most defeatist notion we can possibly have that like you know it once they sell it to us they made it up no they didn't um you know it in fact it's all about horizons you know we have this assumption that anything we do capitalism will just take it and absorb it and throw it back at us but that's because you know so far that's what happened these capitalism hasn't collapsed yet um but you know that's what they said in the Roman Empire what's up it's on the verge that that's where I was going with this yeah oh yeah I mean you know in the ancient Roman Empire they said the same thing right it's like oh all these barbarians you know we just absorb them and turn them into Roman generals and you know teach them Roman we can absorb anything the Empire will last forever and then one day Alaric the goth and get a promotion in the Roman hierarchy and he sacks you know the rest is as I say history um and so so they always say that you know you um but and sometimes it's true and sometimes it's not we don't know but I think there's every reason to believe that we are at a very weird historical period where you know they've been concentrating everything on the culture wars I mean they've been put all of their energy into the cultural front of convincing us at any cultural creation that comes from working-class people that is who don't exist um you know is actually something they made up that you know we need capitalism they've internalized you know if you're not working hard it's something you don't like every day you're a rotten person everybody's got to pay their debts they've got a sort of moral cultural foul fabric which holds up capitalism we don't realize it's the only thing holding up capitalism and all the traditional justifications for capitalism don't work anymore they used to say well it creates inequality but even the poor their kids are gonna be better off than they were nobody's saying that anymore it's obviously not true right um they say well it creates a larger ever larger middle class which will create stability and get rid of war yeah well that worked um you know it's going to create massive technological change so we're all going to be on Mars and Venus Oh Mountain well no we that didn't happen either um so you know all the old claims for capitalism don't work all they've got left is the cultural argument so they've got us kind of wired to think that you know somehow this makes moral sense it's the only thing that could ever happens the only thing we could ever work meanwhile what you have is this crazy bureaucratization of capitalism so that um in fact these bureaucratic classes were like the most unimaginative people who ever lived right uh you know are trying to have essentially taken over the jet the engines of capital accumulation so capital accumulation even happens through bureaucratic means not only are the bureaucrats you know the minister of class has been absorbed into it all of capitalism works that way it's even utopian has occurred to me the other day you know they used to say well the Soviet Union was all those experiments are impossible this is why capitalism is necessary because anything else is utopia you're trying to force people into moulds in which they will not fit you know you you try to get people and consume some ideal of behavior that they won't live up to and then when you realize they won't live up to rules and regulations you've created um then you punish them right and say send them off to the gulag for not going along with your ideal that's why utopianism is bad actually capitalism now works almost exclusively through utopianism of this sort I'll give you a reason why I think this um JPMorgan Chase largest bank in America most prompt I think its most profitable firm anyway it's up there um 85% of their profits um in the last year that I checked came from fees and penalties think about that so basically what they do is they make up a set of rules that they know you can't follow and then they punish you for not being able to do it right that's how capitalism now works like credit card companies they set it up you know if you actually like balance your books they would make any money right then it's entirely based on creating rules that imagine an idealized perfect businessman that doesn't actually exist you know oh and and and telling you that if you don't live up to that it's your fault there's something wrong with you and they're gonna take away some of your money um that is the major driving force of capital I would say that is a decaying system if if that's all they've got in and and all that they got now is the cultural logic pinning it up you know it's based increasingly on naked force and naked extraction because you're just taking money and fees and penalties that doesn't work unless you got the army the bailiffs the police on your side it's the state and capitals of fused together into one engine of extraction held up only by cultural means and and if we can like reverse that the whole thing will come tumbling down you

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Views: 78,762

Keywords: David Graeber, anthropologist, Debt: The First 5000yrs, The Utopia of Rules: On Technology Stupidity and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy, Revolutions in Reverse: Essays on Politics, Direct Action: An Ethnography, lisa mckenzie, chunky mark, Nina Power, Liberate Tate, Dr Lisa McKenzie, JJ Bola, Mark McGowan, THE ARTIST TAXI DRIVER, anarchist activist, fragments of an anarchist anthropology, david graeber interview, peckham, letmelooktv, let me look tv, yt:quality=high

Id: Hn78MhPmbCc

Length: 25min 48sec (1548 seconds)

Published: Sun May 29 2016