Week 19 (May 07-13)
in a certain state | wile e. coyote stranded at a security desk is an instance of murphy's law; he knows that everything can and will go wrong
It was easy enough for a coked-up Sigmund Freud to pen down a little more than a hundred pages about the discontents of our civilization. In these pages, he made several suggestions about the nature of the individual and the tensions between civilization and the individual. According to Freud, the primary tension originates in the conflict between the instinctive freedom of an individual and the civilization’s contrary demand for conformity and repression of instincts.
Though his oedipal analysis frequently falters, there are still some profound ideas that Freud develops about the nature of European civilization. Nevertheless, the details of this analysis don’t concern me much. Not today. Instead, what is particularly interesting to me about Freud’s thesis is the implicit assumption made about the nature of the individual and of civilization with respect to the individual. Specifically, it is the idea that the emergence of civilization is accompanied by the repression of instincts that would’ve otherwise existed in the individual before civilization.
How could Freud have been so confident of his faulty assumptions? Was it his masculinity? His whiteness? … Am I projecting [my ideas of the origins of biases on the origins of his]? Why am I even trying to psychoanalyze Freud…maybe it was just the coke.
It is hard enough to write about the origins of civilization now. I don’t like coke, but even with two lines of Adderall, a quarter tab of acid, and a lot of reading, I can’t see any coherent picture.1 The picture that is emerging is hardly a picture at all. It’s more like an unfinished puzzle with many missing pieces.
Much of human history is irreparably lost to us. This is the first of the many things that David Graeber and David Wengrow want to tell us about our understanding of history in the course of their book Dawn of Everything. Every new excavation that reveals a pre-historic ceremonial burial, they say, not only adds pieces to the puzzle of our history but also challenges our assumptions about what we think the picture actually looked like—much like a theory about the effects of environmental conditions on the gene adaptations of a biological cell or a new image of a supermassive black hole at the center of the Virgo constellation.
This kind of evidence would’ve provoked Freud’s own beliefs about the world. It’s fairly reasonable to think that for Freud, and many other thinkers like him, who spent their entire lives living under imperial and state structures, the idea of civilization would’ve seemed inseparable from structures of repression. They were certainly quite wrong about what civilization is and about the mechanisms of participating in it. Naturally, Freud’s picture of its discontents would’ve been skewed by his picture of civilization. By the time Freud was born in 1856, the conception of civilization as a repressive structure had already spread like an epidemic in the intellectual circles of Europe. This idea was backed for decades, even centuries, then, by works such as Discourse on Inequality by Jean Jaques Rosseau (1755) and Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes (1651).
This idea is unfortunately still present with us.
This is in fact, the most common assumption—that we once had certain primitive freedoms, and then after agriculture or the state or private property, or some other indicator of civilization, we collectively accepted a repression of our freedoms in the form of law, and that this is a marker of the progress of civilizations.
“Is it surprising that the cellular prison, with its regular chronologies, forced labour, its authorities of surveillance and registration, its experts in normality, who continue and multiply the functions of the judge, should have become the modern instrument of penality? Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?”
― Michel Foucault
However, as we are learning again, as we uncover lost cultural memories, the repression of primitive freedoms is hardly a universal characteristic of historical civilizations at all, and perhaps a very flawed way to think about the nature and role of civilizations in the first place. Perhaps most importantly, since these critiques extend to our own views of civilization, they offer promising alternatives to our current state and open several doors to new futures.
May 07
Redact your Repressive Contracts Today! (1-800-3733366)
The origin of the civilization proves to be a particularly hard thing to talk about, not just because of the lack of tenable evidence, but also because there’s a relative lack of clarity about the meaning of civilization itself and the assumptions that are being made about it. Hobbes and Rosseau both had a rather straightforward view of what civilization was and thereby of the need for things such as law and the state, which they considered to be fundamental parts of the civilization process.
For both Hobbes and Rosseau, civilization was essentially a social compromise. They believed in a state before civilization that they might call a state of nature. What exactly this state of nature looked like differs for both thinkers—Rosseau views it simply as tribal, but Hobbes thinks it would’ve even been horrific and brutal, like a war of everyone against everyone. In spite of the differences, the two arrived at roughly the same conclusion—that certain primitive freedoms had once existed in the state of nature, and in coming together as a civilization we collectively decided to give some of them away. In doing so, both think that we have essentially progressed. They argued that as societies progressed, it was only natural for them to develop hierarchical structures such as the ones we see all around us.
Since this frames the emergence of civilizations as a contractual agreement, where people decide on laws in order to come together, such theories are called social-contract theories. In Rosseau’s and Hobbes’ particular versions, non-civilized populations are often termed with names such as savages, tribes, or nomads. Returning to these ways of life is thought of as regress.
To many of us, this might seem like a familiar narrative, perhaps even a variant of one that we believe ourselves. However, there is a lot wrong with this picture. It is far from true that social organization is necessarily accompanied by a loss of freedoms and a rise in inequality. This idea, which was once taken for granted by Freud as an underlying assumption, is one worthy of a little more attention—for it is widespread and dangerous.
Went to BK Jani with my sister. The second visit to the spot only took a couple of days. I would go there again, in the near future with Nayan who exclaimed that “this is not just Indian food in US good, this is Indian food good,” which is obviously a massive compliment if you’ve ever eaten Indian food in both the US and in India. We licked our fingers clean and then got matching tattoos on them.
May 08
the origins of the origin story
In the absence of evidence and critical analysis, the pictures we get often have an unfalsifiable and mythic character to them. Wherever there is a claim of a true picture of history, we should be skeptical, for this perhaps says more about the author and their beliefs about the world than it does about history itself. These histories are more readily appropriated to justify particular aspects of how the world is, rather than contributing to a clear picture of how it actually was or should be. Social-contract theories are worthy of the same skepticism—a tinge of this mythic character is something I had sensed before.
The human-nature distinction clearly runs through the core of the social contract theorists’ ideas, as they imagine a false dichotomy of a state of nature and of a civilized human state restricted to their own. Perhaps this is just a result of trying to imagine a past self, but as we shall see later, the roots of this idea may have been a lot more sinister.
What is clear from the picture of pre-historic and even historic non-European cultures that we have now is that Hobbes’ and Rosseau’s accounts severely trivialized the individual and social lives of our human ancestors. What was a collection of cultural histories consisting of a vivid variety of political organizations, value systems, and religious traditions (even before the advent of writing systems!), are all hastily put under one category of complex hunter-gatherers by ignorant historians. This act alone can suppress evidence of well-functioning large-scale societies with wildly different characteristics from ours such as minimal hierarchies or communal ownership of property, as they are seen as ones that have progressed less. Of course, little evidence is to be found anyway, as much of it has either been lost to time or was systematically erased—
Undoubtedly, the biggest critique of such a theory is its assumption of progress, particularly so because of its repercussions in our world. The conception of civilization used by Rosseau and Hobbes is one which necessarily exists in opposition to a primitive state of nature. The way it is framed, this idea of civilization almost unfalsifiably implies that the realization of such civilization would be a step forward from the state of nature, that it would imply progress. However, it is a theory that only views their own civilization as advanced, and consequently has a very skewed notion of progress. This notion of progress, one that saw the European way of life as a model for progress over the rest of the supposedly uncivilized world, was first a tool to justify the brutalities of the colonial project, then the default historical narrative of the postcolonial world.
If myths can turn into beliefs, then from a social anthropological perspective, Graeber and Wengrow choose to investigate the origins of this myth, instead of this myth of our origins. Perhaps that is the best point to (re)start this conversation.
Made music? I forget what else I did today, but I kinda wrote a cool interlude (for an upcoming album? *googly-eyed emoji*).
May 09
Hobbes, Rosseau, and the Free Other
It is almost undeniable that there are some freedoms that have been lost to the social-economic structures of the contemporary world that we live in. This was also the case with the imperial-state systems that Rosseau or Hobbes or Freud lived under. With the conditions of Europe at the time, with the poverty, plague, and injustice of their own world, living under the state structures, perhaps it’s natural that Rosseau and Hobbes thought that civilization is necessarily linked to a repression of freedoms and took to such views about it.
But the existence of a socio-economic structure does not necessarily come with the sacrifice of our freedoms at the altar of the church of social contract. We know now of civilizations with vastly different laws, of evidence that challenges conventional assumptions about how the emergence of agriculture led to private property. We are aware of societies that (and thus of the possibility for our society to) organized themselves differently, and freely.
Freedom is only realized in relation to unfreedom. Either we notice a repressed attribute and attempt to subsequently free it, or conversely, we find this when we notice a freedom in another that we have repressed in ourselves.
This raises a question. Without even having known much of an alternative social history, as we do now, still reveling in the pre-Darwin Judeo-Christian creation story, how is it that Rosseau and Hobbes could even imagine a free society outside of their own sense of civilization? Why exactly did they prefer their civilized European world to a free world? Where do they even get their image of the free world? And how did Rosseau and Hobbes come to think this way about civilization and its origins?
To David Graeber and David Wengrow, it is clear where this European idea of the free or (or primitive or savage) world comes from. Though the European Enlightenment is predominantly painted as a revival of the Greeks, there are several ideas that entered the European cultural consciousness at the time through its initial interactions with regions that would go on to become European colonies.
The image of the free savage, as Hobbes or Rosseau see it, then, is clearly that of the colonized populations. It is one that lacks European civilization—either it had freedoms that the European society would’ve restricted, or, as they often did, the Europeans couldn’t quite comprehend the complex systems of social organization at play and labeled the systems of the others as despotism. By framing these free savage populations as inferior, and by using the idea of European civilization as a path to progress, the atrocities of the European colonial project were now backed by a well-accepted narrative of civilization, one that is still with us, if in the ever-adapting, self-renewing form of global capitalism.
Decided I needed to give some books away. This is a goodbye that hurts, but I suppose this was inevitable. I had a little more than 180 books at home. 24 random books I weighed were about 12kg. There’s no way I could’ve taken them home with me without spending an unthinkable amount of money.
May 10
social contract and the state
Unsurprisingly, Rosseau’s and Hobbes’ ideas about the origins of civilization have a strange resemblance to most defenses of capitalist organization and of inequality under capitalism that we hear today. What we get from these ideas is not necessarily an origin story for the civilization, but a narrative that advocates for the continuity of the state apparatus as the only expression of civilization.
This kind of interpretation of history, this understanding of civilization not only carries with it a narrative that couldn’t be far from the truth, but it also trivializes much of the political and self-conscious abilities of prehistoric human civilizations—in fact so much so that even contemporary authors such as Yuval Noah Harari are more inclined to compare their behavior to primates than to humans (where the latter would perhaps be a more accurate comparison). It gives us a very simplistic picture of human prehistory and does not do enough to explain the emergence of phenomena such as the state, the patriarchy, or the prison system.
In the same gesture, this ideology also reduces progress to a matter of technological progress, taking social organization out of the context of evaluations—as a result, technologies of control used by the state keep evolving, but the state never really goes away.
Very troublingly, such a view of history also hints that the nation-state system is equivalent to emancipation. This can be seen in several separatist movements around the world right now, where freedom is equated with the demand for a separate nation-state. However, there is much to suggest that this is far from a perfect form of organization and that it is not even much better than what has come before—as it is often touted to be.
Graeber and Wengrow trace back the ideas of Rosseau and Hobbes to sloppy defenses against a very rigorous critique of European society offered by Native American figures such as Kondiaronk2. For a refresher, let’s have a look at the Native American perspective of the Europeans, instead of the other way around, and hope for some honest critiques of the social-contract theory that can lead us to an exit clause.
Watched my bestie defend her thesis! Sid really served. I loved the script that they wrote, and really want to see that turned into the episodic TikToks I was promised. Got high and made music all day. This is becoming a daily activity now (who am I kidding this is pretty much all I’ve done over the last three years).
Anyway, I can play Stella by Starlight now, and I’m swooning.
May 11
the Rat be like “wha???” (or a people’s history of the social contract)
Kondiaronk’s tribe functioned quite differently from how the world did for Hobbes and Rosseau. There’s much about the Europe of the Enlightenment era, and our own society likewise, that would’ve seemed uncanny to Kondiaronk and the Wendats.
One fundamental difference between the perspective of the Wendats and of the Europeans is how they thought of the concepts of individual liberty and freedom. While in Europe, all were (supposedly) equally free before the law (or before the monarch), in the Wendat nation, everyone would be equally free to disobey the law that was proposed by the leaders, making their role nothing more than that of a play-leader.
For the Wendat philosopher, then, it would be absurd to propose, as the social-contract theorists do, that the laws of the society have been agreed upon. Given that the European societies were filled with inequality to degrees that had never before been seen in the Wendat world, perhaps it would’ve been obvious that laws in such a society were never agreed upon but enforced by those in power. And rightly so—as they're written, of course, to protect bourgeoisie institutions such as private property. (Abigail Thorn made a delightful video on the sexual contract which certainly deserves a view, a like, and more). Of course, it is also noted that framing the origin of the state and of laws as such, as something agreed upon rather than imposed, also makes it much easier to enforce them on the population of a state. How convenient it was that a small group of white European men who owned property wrote that all humans are equal but also simultaneously determined that white European men who owned property were the highest forms of human beings. Such an animal farm pig move, to be honest.
According to Graeber and Wengrow, these dialogues between the French colonizers and the Wendats are precisely where the idea of inequality first enters European discourse.
Ownership and property too looked very different in the Wendat society. While the agricultural land would be owned by matriarchs, it would be collectively worked on, and the reaps would be distributed amongst all who needed it. This image of society is truly quite egalitarian, even though I hesitate to use the word. To see someone starve when there was food to be given out was considered a symbol of the downfall of society by several Native civilizations.
Naturally, this kind of social organization could never be achieved without a significantly different mechanism of currency from money as it exists in the contemporary world. The particular details of how currencies were implemented were different for different societies, with some even not having a concept of currency at all, but where it did exist, even though there were small discrepancies in how it was distributed and concentrated, it should be noted that it was hardly possible to transform wealth into political power or would’ve even been hard to use wealth as a tool to coerce someone into doing something (in part because of a different operating definition of freedom).
The Native American critique from scholars like Kondiaronk turned the assumptions of the social contract theory on its head. Where money and accumulation of wealth were seen as a symbol of a progressing society in Europe, to the Native American viewer, it performed exactly the opposite role. The criticism so goes—if you introduce two competing processes into your society, one of the laws that try to make a person do good, and another of money that makes a person do bad, how else would you expect your society to turn out?
Even outside of money and the state, the social contract theorists’ assumption of what it means to progress as a society was repeatedly challenged by other Native American civilizations. For instance, the social contract theory view of progress as a ladder from hunter-gatherer to tribal to state was deemed an oversimplification by evidence that suggested that many tribes of the western American continent even changed their social organizations and hierarchies to suit the change of seasons.
Went to work. Today was my last day as an employee. I’m getting fired and re-hired as a consultant so they can work around visa regulations. I knew they were overreliant on me, I wrote this in the first or second week.
I printed a bunch of little copies of The L-Train Isn’t Running because my friends really wanted to see it. (if you’re reading this, hello Ferb).
There was a cute work party in the evening. We went to SoHo park, which apparently used to be a regular happy-hour destination pre-pandemic. I showed my work friends my zine, and Ben really loved it. Ben and Allie are really fun to hang out with, I could imagine this being a longer friendship if I had a longer amount of time here.
At night, I met Es and Def in Williamsburg to watch the new Ari Aster movie. And oh my god—it was horrific. Though I loved some individual components of the film, the film in its entirety was really dry and disappointing. It could’ve arguably been edited much better and cut 20-30 minutes shorter, and been an amazing film. What we got instead was a writer-director who was perhaps overly attached to what he had written. I’d be generous to say 5/10, but I suppose that the masterful way some individual scenes and progressions were filmed and presented does deserve my generosity even if the film sucked.
May 12
the Dawn of Everything
As a result of the common acceptance of the social-contract theory, even taking for granted some of its mistaken assumptions, much of our own beliefs about the history of humanity have several holes in them. For instance, agriculture, cities, etc are suggested as the origins of inequality, even though there are reasons to suggest that inequality has existed in varying degrees before them too. Besides, cities show up before empires and kingdoms and even writing systems, most of them even organized with robust egalitarian systems. Some of these more egalitarian systems even continued into the pre-colonial world.
What makes these systems egalitarian, though? It’s not like they did not have any wealth disparity, nor did they necessarily always have shared ownership. This equality is in the context of political freedom and self-determination, in the context of having equal access to the rewards of collective work, and equal standing in society.
The social-contact theory also assumes the emergence of private property and state structures to be a natural development of progressing societies as they increase scale, but as we have already seen this notion of progress fails in spectacular ways. It also deliberately ignores the role played by colonial and imperial forces in making private property a global phenomenon.
In other ways too, the social-contract theory can lead us away from the problems that exist at present. With its focus on inequality, equality seems to be the obvious social emancipatory goal for those who take for granted the tenets of such a theory. This is both notoriously hard to define and achieve and often leads to little progress, as opposed to the results seen when focusing on the abolition of class divisions or a reimagination of the state-based organization. In claiming that freedom has only grown as the state progressed, still with their faulty idea of freedom, the view of the social-contract theory simply defers important issues to a hopeful future.
This leaves a lot of work for us to be done—when a belief that is so clearly wrong about the history of civilization leads to a laughable misconception of the nature of civilization, then works based on these theories such as that of Freud and several others must be reconsidered, reworked, and reinterpreted with a fresh perspective, one that leaves behind the idea that civilization is a fundamentally repressive process—for that’s merely the state playing its role as a fundamentally repressive structure.
Hung out outside in the morning. I really do love me some sun. Went to Adi’s birthday dinner in the evening, and chilled at their place until late at night. It was very nice to see everyone after a while, and somewhat unfortunate that we only seem to have sporadic encounters now. Perhaps this is just how adulthood functions in our world—seeing our friends is a special occasion.
May 13
the last morning of everything still being the same at home
I guess I don’t need to say much more about this morning. I guess I wouldn’t really ever forget it even if I don’t write down the particular details.
Today was the last morning that my home looked as it had come to look over the course of time where it turned from an apartment into a home. All of that is gone now, and I am left with the floor as my desk and the floor as my bed.
It still feels just as much like home as it did a week before, though, and perhaps even seven days more so than that—the highest bidder on the Facebook marketplace could never buy the time that I spent here. My time is hardly mine to sell. It is only here to be lived in. To be remembered, and then slowly forgotten.
For all legal purposes, this is merely a figure of speech.
He was also known among the French as “the Rat”.