CHARGE POST - Brief writeup on The Utopia of Rules

The above video is something I shared here before. I wanted to bring it back up for this post because in it I'm using a clip of Adam Curtis who is directly quoting David Graeber's The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy, which is also what patrons voted for me to do a writeup on for this month's charge post.

You can find this quote on page 89 of Utopia of Rules. It's from Graeber's essay (the book is a collection of essays) Dead Zones of the Imagination: An Essay on Structural Stupidity. Here it is with some more context, first bolded section what Curtis pulled to bookend his miniseries Can't Get You Out of My Head, second my own bolding:

"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. In this sense, a phrase like 'all power to the imagination' expresses the very quintessence of the Left.

From a left perspective, then, the hidden reality of human life is the fact that it 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 something has gone terribly wrong. Since who, if they could simply imagine any world that they liked and then bring it into being, would create a world like this one?"

First off, I loved Utopia of Rules. If you're a Curtis fan at all I would consider it a must-read. Graeber's writing is bitingly funny and weaves rapid-fire through a tremendous number of historical and cultural topics across thousands of years of history. Like Curtis, this makes it at times hard to follow his particular leaps in logic, but also like Curtis you're so busy being confronted with a stunningly brutal and overwhelming big picture you lose interest in concerning yourself with the minutiae of all of the little connections. It's also only around 230 pages long (excluding the appendix) and if you don't count the Max Weber etc quotes is written in an extremely accessible colloquial way that is breezy to read.

Utopia of Rules is a collection of five essays loosely centered around how bureaucracy controls our lives, our imaginations, and our collective futures. Graeber was an anarchist anthropologist and one of the organizers of the Occupy movement (a movement Curtis, to maybe over-simplify his assessment, considered ultimately useless when confronting power) but I think anyone (anarchist anthropologist or not) could find many engaging and profound ideas inside of it. It's one of those books that aggressively reframes, at least while you're reading it, your own relationship with your culture and your reality. I can't stop thinking about it.

I was considering trying to sum up each individual essay but there are so many interwoven topics I don't think that would be an effective use of my time or yours as patrons. There are a few themes that he revisits across time and space and culture and fiction, though- bureaucracy is upheld through violence that the state has a monopoly on. Bureaucracy self-perpetuates with more bureaucracy- committees to manage committees, bureaucrats being rewarded for their loyalty to the system, etc. Bureaucracy promises meritocracy and fairness (rules and violence applied to all people equally) and transparent rules (easy-to-follow, understandable), but we all know these are lies. In a particularly funny moment about the fantasy genre as a kind of anti-bureaucracy world meant to ultimately help us prefer the safety and security of our bureaucratic world, he compares real-life bureaucratic rules to fantasy puzzles (p 185)- "...protagonists are endlessly engaging with riddles in ancient languages, obscure myths and prophesies, maps with runic puzzles and the like. Bureaucratic procedures in contrast are based on a principle of transparency. The rules are supposed to be clear, uniformly expressed, and accessible to all. As we all know, this is rarely actually the case. But it is supposed to be true in principle. For most of us, administrative forms are at least as obscure as elvish riddles that only become visible at certain phases of the moon. But they are not supposed to be. In fact, one of the most infuriating bureaucratic tactics is to disguise information through a false sense of transparency ... Compared to this, there is certainly a kind of pleasure in the fantasy materials: puzzles actually are puzzles, and there is no officious person who will show up and lecture you on how this is all perfectly transparent and simple and there's obviously something wrong with you for not having immediately figured it out."

This is cobbling together ideas from a few different essays, but the way Graeber approached fiction as reflective of our imaginations being held captive by bureaucracy is fascinating to me. The essay Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit was probably the most emotionally difficult and depressing essay for me out of the five but also the most edifying. Any Venture Brothers fan can probably guess where it goes- we used to dream of flying cars and other fantastical, novel scientific advancements, only to end up secretly disappointed when none of that materialized. Graeber points out (p ~108) that science fiction screenwriters used to have so much confidence in a great future they'd include concrete dates in their movies, but now the future as popular perception "is, most often, not really a future at all, but more like an alternative dimension, a dream-time ... just another screen for the projection of moral dramas and mythic fantasies. Science fiction has now become just another set of costumes in which one can dress up a Western, a war movie, a horror flick, a spy thriller, or just a fairy tale." Our dreams of the future have been choked out.

He talks about screening a modern sci-fi movie to a 50s audience to show off the special effects to them, but-- "They wouldn't be impressed at all, would they? They thought that we'd actually be doing this kind of thing by now. Not just figuring out more sophisticated ways to simulate it." Then he goes into the why of why the future turned out this way- it's a long, complex essay with a lot of depressing, incisive ideas, mostly to do with misallocated resources and strangled imagination, about how all of our resources go to simulations and "investment technologies that [further] labor discipline and social control" (p 120).

"Imagination" is key. The ultimate conclusion is that bureaucracy has an appeal because of perceived safety and stability of rules, like a game that we can win. To improve society and break free would mean upending this stability, potentially leading to chaos, which is presented to us as frightening and dangerous by a bureaucratic culture that wants to remain intertwined and invisible, appearing as natural as breathing so we never question it. This is also something Curtis talks about constantly, both in his work and in interviews- systems of management, confronting power, etc.

Graeber also tackles the superhero genre (having taken The Dark Knight Rises very personally thanks to his involvement in the Occupy movement!!) and continues this analytical lens- superheroes were to him inherently conservative because despite their incredible abilities and resources they do nothing to change the world. They only reinforce the status quo with violence. Villains are exciting and entertaining and imaginative, and it takes violence to stop them from changing anything (of course, change is presented as evil here!).

Naturally, this made me think of One Piece (lol). There's an entire essay there on how One Piece is such a divergent narrative vs popular narratives of our time in the west. The whole story is about Luffy trying to destroy an unjust bureaucratic system that maintains itself through propaganda and violence. He is actively trying to change the world by violently attacking the unjust system that manages it.

I would have loved to try to interview Graeber for my video essay but unfortunately he passed away in 2020, seemingly from pancreatitis related to covid. He was only 59. I'd highly recommend his book. If you've read it and have any thoughts, please feel free to share them. I would love to write more but I already need to submit this to hit the charge post deadline so feel free to ask any questions about it. Man. What a cool book.