Please Fill In This Form In Triplicate Before You Read 'Utopia Of Rules'
Utopia of Rules, then, sets about convincing readers that the world is quite different from how they normally see it, and that there's an urgent need for change. If the first venture sounds academic and the second suffused with radical politics, you're getting a sense of the book: Graeber, the author of Debt: The First 5000 Years, is an anthropologist at the London School of Economics. And while Utopia of Rules stays accessible to the general public, it's still a book where Baudrillard and bell hooks make appearances; a book that discusses things like "the very grounds of political being" and the need for "general theory of interpretative labor."
Graeber is also an anarchist and one of the leading forces behind Occupy Wall Street (he's been credited with coining the phrase "we are the 99%"). That ideological stance underlies Utopia of Rules's political project: To wake the left from its slumber and remind it of its anti-bureaucratic origins, and to explore how (or if) people can upend governments without erecting more labyrinthine structures in their place.
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That project is itself serpentine. Graeber takes us on tours through the history of philosophy, meditations on etymology and linguistics, and digressions into topics like fantasy novels and science fiction films, all of which are extended enough to make you wonder whether he's packed enough bread crumbs to get us back to the trail.
Full credit to Graeber, though: When he eventually gets to a point, it's almost always insightful, thought-provoking, and, as befits the roundabout way he got there, unexpected. The section on science fiction eventually gives way to Graeber's denunciation of an academic and scientific environment mired in bureaucracy — he quotes a physicist who notes mournfully that "original ideas are the kiss of death for a proposal; because they have not yet been proved to work." That, Graeber writes, "pretty much answers the question of why we don't have teleportation devices or anti-gravity shoes."
It's not entirely clear to me how serious Graber intends to be with that conclusion, but the compelling general idea behind it is part of what keeps Utopia of Rules engaging. The book makes a great companion to Cubed, Nikil Saval's recent look at the evolution of offices, which tracked what Graeber describes as the "tension of the free play of human creativity against the rules it is constantly generating" through its expression in office design and management practices.
Utopia of Rules focuses more on the political implications and, of course, Graeber's own political prescriptions. But agreeing with those prescriptions is by no means a requirement for entry. On the contrary, Graeber wants us to unshackle ourselves from the limits imposed by bureaucracy, precisely so we can actually get down to openly and creatively arguing about our collective future. In other words, yelling at the book is not just part of the pleasure of reading it. It's part of the point.
Tomas Hachard is an assistant editor at Guernica Magazine and a film and book critic for NPR and The LA Review of Books.
Read an excerpt of The Utopia of Rules