Can’t recall quite where I saw it mentioned, to my shame, but to whoever it was put this interview with David Wengrow in front of me, you have my very sincere thanks.
If you feel you half-recognise the name, Wengrow was David Graeber’s co-author on Dawn of Everything1. If you read Dawn of Everything but felt a bit swamped by the sheer, uh, everythingness of it—and, cards on the table, I certainly did—then you’ll get a pretty good refresher out of these two hours, plus a bunch of extra material along the way.
Wengrow is a very measured, thoughtful interviewee, and I wonder what it must have been like to be a fly on the wall when he and Graeber were kicking ideas around; it’s quite the contrast of characters, which is perhaps what made the arrangement so long-running and productive. Measured and thoughtful he may be, but he’s also quietly confident—the air of someone who has done the reading, had the arguments, and refined his position carefully. An academic of the old school, one is tempted to say.
I was amused and delighted to discover that Wengrow actually shares certain philosophical territory with none other than Alan Moore. Both men refuse teleological or deterministic accounts of “civilization” (albeit for different reasons, and in different ways), and locate the origin of all human endeavour—material, social, political—in the human imagination: nothing exists that we have made that we did not imagine first.
This connects to the ironic fate of the notion of Progress, which starts out (with Rousseau) as a thought experiment against the prevailing monarchist-feudalist hierarchy of Europe at the time, mutates through Hegel and Marx to become a teleological staircase through and beyond capitalism, but then gets truncated by assorted late liberalisms into a treadmill of escalating inequality and pervasive panoptic systems of control
Counterintuitive as it may seem, this is an oddly hopeful way of looking at things, because it disposes with—or at least stands in opposition to—the cluster of determinisms that characterise the current moment. This points in two different temporal directions: it means the bundle of stale sci-fi tropes which I call The Future is not at all inevitable, despite its manic insistence that it is; but it also means that other modes of human sociality heretofore written off as appropriate only to earlier stages of material development are, in fact, fully open to us.
I’m doing no justice here to two hours of careful thought from a brilliant mind; just go watch (or listen) yourself.
- A note for the gentleman who sent in a long comment on the last post here that mentioned Dawn of Everything: you are very welcome to your different opinion of that book, but your supposed right to free speech ends at the border of the website that I pay to run. If you want to fulminate at that sort of length and with that degree of incoherence, I recommend you start your own blog. ↩︎
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