Graeber: ‘Dead zones of the imagination’

 I have been trying to imagine this: A taxpayer goes into a library and takes a book without checking it out. He reasons that he helped pay for the book, he’s honest, he’ll return it, and there’s no need to go through the effort and expense of the administrative process. He just takes the book.

What happens? Do the librarians eventually call the cops?

David Graeber, an anthropologist who thought about such things, said that the state enforces its rules. Graeber said the emphasis is on force. Enforcement is a euphemism for violence.

In Graeber’s view, bureaucrats are the enforcers of rules. Cops are bureaucrats with guns.

I think library rules makes sense. But, having grown up in the Navy, I am aware that sometimes rules that are enforced with draconian discipline make no sense at all.

Graeber says that when we live in a system where the rules don’t make sense, we are prone to become confused and behave foolishly as we try to persuade people who have power over us to help us solve problems. While the rules may be detached from reality, the problems are sometimes a matter of life and death. 

Graeber is one of those writers I’ve heard about but have not seriously read.

I found his essay “Dead zones of the imagination” to be an interesting introduction.

• Source: David Graeber, “Dead zones of the imagination: On violence, bureaucracy, and interpretive labor”; Journal of Ethnographic Theory 2 (2): 105–28. This was the Malinowski Memorial Lecture, 2006. It’s available here:

https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdfplus/10.14318/hau2.2.007