Graeber has a curious habit of connecting together various scraps from the soup of human culture, to make parallels between subjects that mightn’t normally seem to have anything binding them together. He claims, for instance, that a direct link can be made between the disappointments of the post-modern movement in the west, to how badly factory workers are treated in the impoverished global south today.
In an essay he wrote called “Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit” – which is included in this latest book – Graeber argues that the entire cultural sensibility that came to be referred to as ‘postmodernism’, at best can be seen as a meditation on technological changes that never happened. Bizarrely enough, he explains, this idea first occurred to him when he watched the new Star Wars movies. He began a thought experiment: contemplating how impressed people in the 1950s might be if they were transported directly to today’s world to view the movies. Would they compliment us on our ability to amalgamate graphics and technology, to produce such spell bounding effects?
Initially Graeber thought they would. But pretty quickly he changed his mind. After all, he concluded, people who wrote science fiction stories during the 1950s were convinced that we would actually be visiting other galaxies by 2015 – not creating artificial versions of these places through CGI. This initial thought then led Graeber to immerse himself in vast amounts of critical theory on the history of postmodernism. Much of this theory comes out of the Marxist tradition. In his 1991 book Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism the political theorist, Fredric Jameson, argued that if the power of technologies themselves once gave us a sense of history sweeping forward, we were now reduced to a play of screens and images. When speaking about postmodernism, Jameson was referring to a new phase of capitalism, one that Ernest Mandel, another Marxist theorist, came up with back in 1972: the idea that humanity was involved in what he called the ‘Third Wave’.
This is a concept that identifies three great technological revolutions: the neolithic agricultural revolution; the industrial revolution; and a new robotic revolution, which, by Mandel’s predictions, we are now on the cusp of. According to Graeber, both Mandel and Jameson imagined that such a revolution would create a world of nano-technology and nuclear energy, where robots would reduce the toil of industrial manual labour exponentially. Such a utopian world imagines a society where production disappears, humans have more leisure time, and energy is free for everyone. The only problem, however, says Graeber, is that it didn’t happen.
“Frederick Jameson imagined postmodernism as the emerging cultural sensibility that was going to be accompanying a transformation to this new world where things would just make themselves. One of the arguments I make in this book why this didn’t happen is because industrialists, and the people in the ruling classes, were really scared of the prospect of it. So instead of robotising the factories, they actually begin to move factories overseas, where they use even lower technologies in the impoverished global south: in places like Mexico, Guatemala, Indonesia and China”. “Postmodernism was this cultural sensibility that was supposed to accompany vast technological change. But the whole concept now seems like this great enormous fraud”.
from Stowe Boyd http://stoweboyd.com/post/134719845982
