[lbo-talk] (The 23%...)

Wojtek S wsoko52 at gmail.com
Fri Feb 24 10:09:03 PST 2012


Shag: "the political ontology of the imagination is, i think, a long explanation of what graeber means by his controversializing statement that small a anarchists operate *as if* they were already free"

[WS:] I recognize that, but I think he really goes on a limb. He should have simply reported that it is how the anarchists think, as any ethnographer would do. I do not think that his justification of it does the job - it actually has the opposite effect. I understood the anarchist pov based on his ethnographic description - not that I would do the same thing, but at least I understood how they think about it - but when I read his ontology of imagination passage, the first thing that came to my mind was "positive thinking" self-help books or twelve steps programs - try thinking positive about what you want to be, put all the positive notes on to yourself on your desk, and you will eventually achieve it. And the whole direct action mystique that his ethnographic accounts created was gone - it turned into yet another variation on the All-American self-made mythology.

Wojtek



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